CHAPTER III.
I was, I think, about eight years old when my parents removed from Keppel Street to Harrow-on-the-Hill. My father’s practice, I take it, was becoming less and less satisfactory, and his health equally so. And the move to Harrow was intended as a remedy or palliation for both these evils. My father was a very especially industrious and laborious man. And I have the authority of more than one very competent judge among his professional contemporaries for believing that he was as learned a Chancery lawyer as was to be found among them. How then was his want of success to be accounted for? One of the competent authorities above alluded to accounted for it thus: “Your father,” he said to me many years afterwards, when his troubles and failures had at last ceased to afflict him, “never came into contact with a blockhead without insisting on irrefutably demonstrating to him that he was such. And the blockhead did not like it! He was a disputatious man; and he was almost in variably—at least on a point of law—right. But the world differed from him in the opinion that being so gave him the right of rolling his antagonist in the dust and executing an intellectual dance of triumph on his prostrate form.” He was very fond of whist, and was I believe a good player. But people did not like to play with him. “Many men,” said an old friend once, “will scold their partners occasionally. But Trollope invariably scolds us all round with the utmost impartiality; and that every deal!”
He was, in a word, a highly respected, but not a popular or well-beloved man. Worst of all, alas! he was not popular in his own home. No one of all the family circle was happy in his presence. Assuredly he was as affectionate and anxiously solicitous a father as any children ever had. I never remember his caning, whipping, beating or striking any one of us. But he used during the detested Latin lessons to sit with his arm over the back of the pupil’s chair, so that his hand might be ready to inflict an instantaneous pull of the hair as the pœna (by no means pede claudo) for every blundered concord or false quantity; the result being to the scholar a nervous state of expectancy, not judiciously calculated to increase intellectual receptivity. There was also a strange sort of asceticism about him, which seemed to make enjoyment or any employment of the hours save work, distasteful and offensive to him. Lessons for us boys were never over and done with. It was sufficient for my father to see any one of us “idling,” i.e. not occupied with book work, to set us to work quite irrespectively of the previously assigned task of the day having been accomplished. And this we considered to be unjust and unfair.
I have said that the move to Harrow was in some degree caused by a hope that the change might be beneficial to my father’s health. He had suffered very distressingly for many years from bilious headache, which gradually increased upon him during the whole of his life. I may say parenthetically that from about fifteen to forty I suffered occasionally, about once a fortnight perhaps, from the same malady, though in a much less intense form. But at about forty years old I seemed to have grown out of it, and since that time have never been troubled by it. But in my father’s day the common practice was to treat such complaints with calomel. He was constantly having recourse to that drug. And I believe that it had the effect of shattering his nervous system in a deplorable manner. He became increasingly irritable; never with the effect of causing him to raise a hand against any one of us, but with the effect of making intercourse with him so sure to issue in something unpleasant, that unconsciously we sought to avoid his presence, and to consider as hours of enjoyment only those that could be passed away from it.
My mother’s disposition on the other hand was of the most genial, cheerful, happy, enjoué nature imaginable. All our happiest hours were spent with her; and to any one of us a tête-à-tête with her was preferable to any other disposal of a holiday hour. But even this under all the circumstances did not tend to the general harmony and happiness of the family circle. For of course the facts and the results of them must have been visible to my father; and though wholly inoperative to produce the smallest change in his ways, must, I cannot doubt, have been painful to him. It was all very sad. My father was essentially a good man. But he was, I fear, a very unhappy one.
He was extremely fond of reading aloud to the assembled family in the evening; and there was not one individual of those who heard him who would not have escaped from doing so, at almost any cost. Of course it was our duty to conceal this extreme reluctance to endure what was to him a pleasure—a duty which I much fear was very imperfectly performed. I remember—oh, how well!—the nightly readings during one winter of Sir Charles Grandison, and the loathing disgust for that production which they occasioned.
But I do not think that I and my brothers were bad boys. We were, I take it, always obedient. And one incident remains in my mind from a day now nearly seventy years ago, which seems to prove that the practice of that virtue was habitual to me. An old friend of my mother’s, Mrs. Gibbon, with her daughter Kate, mentioned on a former page as the companion of my lessons in the alphabet, were staying with us at Harrow. Mrs. Gibbon and Kate, and my mother and I were returning from a long country ramble, across some fields in a part of the country my mother was not acquainted with. There was a steep grassy declivity, down which I and the little girl, my contemporary, hand in hand were running headlong in front of our respective parents, when my mother suddenly called out, “Stop, Tom!” I stopped forthwith, and came to heel as obediently as a well-trained pointer. And about five minutes later, my mother and Mrs. Gibbon, following exactly in the line in which we had been running, discovered a long disused but perfectly open and unfenced well!
If I had not obeyed so promptly as I did, I should not now be writing “reminiscences,” and poor “Katy ’Bon,” as I used to call her, would have gone to her rest some ten years earlier than she found it. My mother always said that she could in no wise account for the impulse which prompted her to call to me to stop!
The move to Harrow was as infelicitous a step in the economic point of view as it was inefficacious as a measure of health. My father took a farm, of some three or four hundred acres, to the best of my recollection, from Lord Northwick. It was a wholly disastrous speculation. It certainly was the case that he paid a rent for it far in excess of its fair value; and he always maintained that he had been led to undertake to do so by inaccurate and false representations. I have no knowledge of these representations, but I am absolutely certain that my father was entirely convinced that they were such as he characterised them. But he was educated to be a lawyer, and was a good one. He had never been educated to be a farmer; and was, I take it, despite unwearied activity, and rising up early and late taking rest, a bad one.
To make matters worse moreover he built on that land, of which he held only a long lease, a large and very good house. The position was excellently chosen, the house was well conceived and well built, and the extensive gardens and grounds were well designed and laid out; but the unwisdom of doing all that on land the property of another is but too obvious.