But Blanche will not think so for many a long day yet. Though the minims and crotchets and flats and sharps were mixed up in sadly puzzling confusion, not a frown of impatience crossed that pure, open brow. Blanche’s own thoughts were a panacea for all the provocations that the stiffest piece of musico-mechanism, or mechanical music, could inflict. It is a task beyond our powers to detail the vague ideas and shadowy dreams that chased each other through that glossy little head; nor have we any business to try. A young girl’s brain is a page of poetry, without rhyme certainly, probably without much reason, but poetry notwithstanding. Before the world has lost its gloss of novelty, that gloss which is like the charm that dazzled the eyes of their mortal visitors, and made the fairies’ straws and withered leaves and cobwebs look like purple hangings, and tapestry, and ivory, and gold—before life has borne away much to regret, and sin brought much to repent of—before the fruit has been plucked which still hangs from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, there is a positive pleasure in the mere act of thinking; and that intellectual luxury Blanche enjoyed to the utmost, whilst her fingers were tripping over the pianoforte keys, and Mrs. Kettering was snoring comfortably on the sofa.
Now, Frank Hardingstone was prime favourite and beau idéal with “Cousin Charlie,” who, like all boys, had selected an idol a few years older than himself, and clothed him with those imaginary attributes which youth considers essential to constitute a hero. Frank was a country gentleman, in possession of his property at the early age of five-and-twenty, and, truth to tell, somewhat bored with his position. If we were to describe him, we should say he was “a man of action” rather than “a man of feeling,” or “a man of business,” or “a man of refinement,” or “a man of pleasure,” or a man of anything else. He looked energetic too, and vigorous, with his brown healthy complexion, his open forehead, clear penetrating eye, and short clustering hair and whiskers. Had he been the least thing of a coxcomb in dress or manner, the ladies would have voted him very handsome; but he was plain to simplicity in his attire, and rather abrupt in his address, so they abused him amongst themselves, but were very civil to him notwithstanding. The men, particularly the sporting ones, who are always ready with their judgments and opinions, pronounced that he “looked a good one all over,” alluding, as we understand the phrase, not so much to his virtue as his corporeal powers, and capability of resisting fatigue. We are not so far removed from a state of barbarism in the present day as we are prone to flatter ourselves. When young King James called the grim old Douglas “his Graysteil,” that royal heart was attached to Earl Angus for his magnificent frame, skill in feats of arms and efforts of strength, not for the giant’s wisdom, which was doubtful, or his honesty, which was entirely negative; and so amongst any assemblage of young gentlemen now in the nineteenth century, the quality which excites most admiration seems to be a certain combination of activity and recklessness, which they call hardness. “Was Rakes in time for parade?”—“Oh yes, he drank four bottles of claret, and never went to bed—he’s a deuced hard fellow, Rakes” (applause). “Was Captain Cropper hurt when he tumbled over that gate and broke his horse’s neck?”—“Hurt? not he; you won’t often see him hurt—there are not many fellows so hard as Cropper” (great applause); and thus it seems that the brain is chiefly honoured according to its capacity, not of reasoning, but of cellarage—and the head only becomes the noblest portion of the human frame when it may be fallen on with impunity. Tell these “physical force” gentlemen of a “clever horse,” and every ear is erect in motionless attention—talk to them of a clever man, their shoulders are elevated in pity—of a clever woman, their mouths are drawn down in disgust. But Frank Hardingstone was, to use their favourite word, “a great card” amongst all the associates of his age and standing. Square and muscular, with temper, courage, and address, he could walk, run, leap, ride, fence, play cricket, box, and swim with the best of them, and they never suspected that this powerful frame contained a mind capable and energetic as the casket in which it was concealed.
Frank was a well-informed, well-judging man—loved mathematics, logic, and such strong intellectual food—enjoyed working out a sum or problem, or otherwise exercising his powerful mind, and would go to an iron foundry, or to see a ship built, or even to the Polytechnic, for sheer amusement. Had he been born to work for his livelihood, he would have made a capital engineer; as it was, he ought to have been in the navy, or the artillery, or anything but an idle man, living at his own place in the country. He had no relations, consequently nothing to keep him at home; people said that when alone he had no established dinner-hour—a grievous sin in our gastronomic age: he was too energetic to care very much for farming, although he did occupy certain acres of his own land; and too practical to be enthusiastic about field-sports, though he was a good shot, and rode right well to hounds. Altogether, Frank was out of his place in the world; and, not having arrived at that age when, if a man don’t fit his destiny, he makes his destiny fit him, was in danger of becoming bored and careless, and a useless member of society. Luckily, Cousin Charlie’s private tutor, Mr. Nobottle, held his cure close to Hardingstone Hall, and leave to course over certain grounds thereunto belonging being applied for and granted, an introduction took place between the squire and the clergyman’s volatile pupil, which struck up an immediate alliance of obliger and obliged.
No two people could well be more different in disposition and appearance than were Frank and Charlie. The man—strong, sedate, practical, acute, and penetrating; the boy—light, active, hot-headed, and romantic, jumping to conclusions, averse to reasoning and reflection, acting on the impulse of the moment, and continually getting into scrapes, which his friend as continually had to get him out of. Yet after they had known each other a few months they became inseparable. Charlie went regularly, after his studies at the rectory, to pass the rest of the day at the hall; and Frank found a renewed pleasure in boating, cricket, hunting, shooting, and even fishing, from the keen enjoyment with which the “young one” entered upon these diversions. As for the “young one” himself, he thought there was nothing in the world equal to Hardingstone—so strong, so plucky, so well-read, so sagacious, with such faultless coats, and such a good seat upon a horse, he was the boy’s hero (we have all had such in our day), and he worshipped him accordingly. So ill could he bear to lose sight of his Mentor, even during the sunshiny hours of the vacation, that he had begged Hardingstone to come over to St. Swithin’s, no very great distance from his own place, and had promised to introduce him to the “Aunt Kettering,” and “Blanche,” of whom he had heard so much in the intervals of their amusements “by thicket and by stream.” The promise was made and kept—and Frank was living at the Royal Hotel, disgusting the landlord by the simplicity of his habits, and the waiter by his carelessness as regarded dinner, whilst he was growing day by day in the good graces even of Mrs. Kettering, and finding, as he himself thought with great penetration, a vast deal of sound merit in the fresh, inexperienced mind of Blanche. “Your cousin looks all the better for sea-bathing, Charlie,” said Hardingstone to his young companion, as they toiled slowly along the broiling parade, where every sunbeam was refracted with tenfold power from glaring houses and a scorching pavement. “It braces the system just as good head-work braces the intellect. People don’t train half enough, I think—even women ought to have sound minds in sound bodies; and look what indolent, unmeaning, insipid wretches half of them are—not like your aunt. Now that’s what I call a vigorous woman, Charlie; she’d do in the colonies or anywhere—she’s fit to be a queen, my boy, because she’s got some energy about her. As for you, young gentleman, you work hard enough out-of-doors, but you neglect your brains altogether—I don’t believe now that you have opened a book since you left Nobottle’s.”
“Wrong again, Frank, as usual,” replied Charlie; “I read for an hour this very morning, whilst I was dressing; I am very fond of reading when it’s not dry.”
“And may I ask what your early studies were, my industrious young philosopher?”
“‘Parisina’ and ‘The Bride of Abydos’—by Jove, old fellow, it’s beautiful.”
Frank made a face as if he had swallowed a pill. “‘Parisina’ and ‘The Bride of Abydos,’” he repeated, with intense disgust; “a boy of sixteen—I beg your pardon—a young man of your age reading Byron; why, you’ll arrive at a state of mental delirium tremens before you are twenty, particularly if you smoke much at the same time. I daresay you are ‘up’ in ‘Don Juan’ as well—not that I think he is half so bad for you; but no man should read sentiment in such an alluring garb as Byron dressed it, till his heart is hardened and his whiskers grown. All poetry, to my mind, has a tendency to make you more or less imbecile. You should read Bacon, my boy, and Locke, and good sound reasoning Butler; but if you must have works of imagination, take to Milton.”
“Hate blank verse,” remarked Charlie, who opined—in which prejudice we cannot help coinciding a little—that poetry is nothing without jingle; “I can’t read three pages of ‘Paradise Lost.’”
“Because your brain is softening for want of proper training,” interrupted Hardingstone; “if you go on like this you’ll very soon be fit for Jean Jacques Rousseau, and I shall give you up altogether. No, when you go back to Nobottle’s, I shall give him a hint to put you into a stiffish course of mathematics, with a few logarithms for plums, and when you are man enough to grapple with a real intellectual difficulty you will read Milton for pleasure, and like him more and more every day, for you will find——”