“You know there would be nobody ready for you at Raynham. It is unfair to disturb the maids.”
Richard overrode every objection.
“Well, then, my son,” said the baronet, preserving his half-jocular air, “I must tell you that it is my wish to have you in town.”
“Then you have not been ill at all, sir!” cried Richard, as in his despair he seized the whole plot.
“I have been as well as you could have desired me to be,” said his father.
“Why did they lie to me?” the young man wrathfully exclaimed.
“I think, Richard, you can best answer that,” rejoined Sir Austin, kindly severe.
Dread of being signalized as the Foolish Young Fellow prevented Richard from expostulating further. Sir Austin saw him grinding his passion into powder for future explosion, and thought it best to leave him for awhile.
CHAPTER XXII
For three weeks Richard had to remain in town and endure the teachings of the System in a new atmosphere. He had to sit and listen to men of science who came to renew their intimacy with his father, and whom of all men his father wished him to respect and study; practically scientific men being, in the baronet’s estimation, the only minds thoroughly mated and enviable. He had to endure an introduction to the Grandisons, and meet the eyes of his kind, haunted as he was by the Foolish Young Fellow. The idea that he might by any chance be identified with him held the poor youth in silent subjection. And it was horrible. For it was a continued outrage on the fair image he had in his heart. The notion of the world laughing at him because he loved sweet Lucy stung him to momentary frenzies, and developed premature misanthropy in his spirit. Also the System desired to show him whither young women of the parish lead us, and he was dragged about at nighttime to see the sons and daughters of darkness, after the fashion prescribed to Mr. Thompson; how they danced and ogled down the high road to perdition. But from this sight possibly the teacher learnt more than his pupil, since we find him seriously asking his meditative hours, in the Note-book: “Wherefore Wild Oats are only of one gender?” a question certainly not suggested to him at Raynham; and again—“Whether men might not be attaching too rigid an importance?”...to a subject with a dotted tail apparently, for he gives it no other in the Note-book. But, as I apprehend, he had come to plead in behalf of women here, and had deduced something from positive observation. To Richard the scenes he witnessed were strange wild pictures, likely if anything to have increased his misanthropy, but for his love.