I slunk about the old court-yard of the house, or lay behind stacks in the farm-yard, or sat whole days in a deserted attic, and never went willingly near my father—the only other inhabitant of the mansion—and was never enquired after by him. If I saw him, I trembled—if I heard his voice, I felt inclined to fly to the other end of the house; and at last, if I heard any one else speak a little louder than ordinary, I was fain to betake me to some distant room, or even hide in a tangled plantation called the Wilderness, at the other end of the park. The house was immensely large, or rather the property was immensely small; farm after farm had been sold by great-grandfathers and grandfathers; but as they had not the sense to pull down a side of the mansion for every estate they parted with, it had at last grown an encumbrance. There was a residence fit for a man of ten thousand a-year, and a rental of about eight hundred—the helmet of Otranto on the head of Sir Geoffrey Hudson.
If I could have been a bishop, or even a dean, and laid by four or five thousand a-year—such were my father's views of me, and of ecclesiastical preferment—I might buy back some of the ancient land and repair the house, and that was the reason he determined I should go into the church; for it is to be observed, that fathers have extraordinary eyes when directed to the future fortunes of their sons. They seem to have no power of seeing small curacy-houses filled with twelve children, and butchers and bakers walking down the avenue in a melancholy and despairing manner at Christmas time; but have pertinaciously before their sight a superb mansion in James's Square, with a steady old coach and two fat horses at the door; or a fine old turreted palace at Lambeth, with five or six chaplains contesting the honour of the last lick of the plate. Not a glimpse can they discover of the cold rides—miserable scenes among the dying, the idle, the dissolute—hope deferred—strength decaying—the proud man's contumely, the rich vulgarian's scorn—struggle, struggle! toil and trouble! Blessings, say I, on the outspoken head of St John's, and the impenetrability of Euclid, that kept a blue coat on my back, and disappointed my father's expectation of seeing me Lord Bishop of Durham. I should have been chaplain to a poor-house to a certainty, and have envied my parishioners; but I doubt very much, in the mean time, if the chaplain of a poor-house would have envied me, imprisoned and pauperized in Rayleigh Court.
Luckily there were books—whole shelves of them—loaded with rich morocco bindings, and pecks enough of dust (if distributed through the month of March) to have ransomed all the Pharaohs. I passed over the Dugdales, and even the Gwyllins, in despair; and lay whole days on the floor, surrounded by Faery Queens and other anti-utilitarian publications, sometimes fancying myself a Red-Cross knight—though considerably at a loss to devise a substitute for the heavenly Una. But by some strange caprice of fortune, a hoard was opened to me in one of the lower shelves, beside the oriel window, which was more valuable than Potosi and Golconda—a complete set of the Waverley Novels: there they were—all included—from the great original to Castle Dangerous. As my father's retiring habits prevented me from knowing a human being in the neighbourhood, I made up to my heart's content for the want of living friends, by forming the most enthusiastic attachments to Dandie Dinmont, and Henry Morton, and Jonathan Oldbuck; not forgetting the excessive love I entertained for Rose Bradwardine, Di Vernon, and a few others; so that altogether, I think I may say, that no young man of my age was ever blessed with such a large and enchanting circle of "friends and sweethearts." In the mean time the external world was moving on, troubling itself, in all likelihood, as little about me as I did about it. We had a newspaper once a-week; but I never saw it. I knew that our gracious sovereign lady, Queen Victoria, had just succeeded to our gracious sovereign lord, King William—but to that great and important fact in constitutional history my knowledge of temporary politics was limited. What did I care about Peels or Melbournes, when I could enter the council-chamber of Louis the Eleventh, or pass a pleasant morning with Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle? My father lay—like a snake surrounded by fire—in the centre of what had once been his family estate; with purchasers gathering closer and closer round, till, like the snake of the above similitude, he was inclined to sting himself to death to avoid the increasing horror of his situation. From strange muttered growls and deep imprecations when we met, I gathered that the last fagot had been lighted, in the shape of a proposition by some Eastern nabob, that he should sell the remaining portion of the land. He, Rayleigh of Rayleigh Court—to sell to a stranger the park, the fields, the house! He would have died first. And the reason for wishing to buy, which was assigned by the intending purchaser, was worst of all; that he had already made himself owner of every other farm which had once belonged to the Rayleigh manors, and desired the family mansion to make the estate complete—and his name was Jeeks—Jeeks of Rayleigh Court! My father would have shot him if he had come within his reach; but as Mr Jeeks kept at a respectable distance, the over-charge of indignation was poured forth upon me; and the opinion, so obligingly given of my abilities and probable success in life by the Master of St John's, was never for an hour forgotten. It was very evident that there was no hope of family restoration to be founded on so profound a blockhead—an ass that could not get into the church—that moped and wandered about the woods—that trembled when he was spoken to; and so far from pushing his way in the world, and acquiring a fortune by running off with an heiress, had not courage enough to look a milkmaid in the face. I kept out of his sight more than ever, and read Ivanhoe for the fifteenth time. Oh, Friar Tuck! Oh, Brian de Bois Guilbert! What did I care for Mr Jeeks and his offers for Rayleigh Court?
I was now twenty years of age, with the figure of a grenadier and the courage of a boarding-school girl; and every day my father's indignation seemed to increase, when he saw such a fund of marketable qualities lying useless—my quietness and decorum would have done for the church; my height and broad shoulders would have qualified me for Gretna Green. But such a chicken-hearted fellow, he well knew, would sooner die than mention a postchaise; and so the old gentleman, having ceased for some years to express his contempt for me with the aid of his walking stick, and a profusion of epithets unheard of in Johnson's Dictionary, took now to the easier method of a dignified and unbroken silence. It was a charming change, and I was as happy as Robinson Crusoe in the desert island before Friday made his appearance. One day in June—"it was the poet's leafy month of June"—I took my way, as was my Wont, through the park to the Wilderness. The shadows of the broad thick-foliaged oaks lay in gigantic masses on the smooth turf, (of which the gardeners were a few relics of the former herds of deer, in the shape of wide-antlered stags and dappled roes;) all the sights and sounds of summer beauty were united in that solitary greensward; and for the first time in my life I felt a regret pass over me that the grandeur of my family had decayed, and a faint fluttering became perceptible to me, round my heart, of a wish to restore our fortunes. But the intense appreciation of my own deficiencies in which I had been educated, soon dispelled any pleasing illusions that the self-love of twenty years of age might have excited; and I fell into the opposite extreme, and rejoiced to think that in me the family tree would lose its last branch, and that the old house would crumble into actual ruins, instead of holding forth the false appearances of solidity and strength which led to the expectation that it was still capable of repair. I felt like Wilfred of Ivanhoe, when he resolved to leave his home for ever; and if there had been any crusade going on in 1838, and an Isaac of York willing to furnish me with horse and harness, I should have been very glad to try my chance against the Saracens, and prove myself a true Red Cross knight; for even at that time, I felt assured that against any body but my father I could hold up my head like a man; or on any subject but my stupidity—(which I was willing to concede, as it came guaranteed under the hand and seal of the master of a college)—I could have maintained my ground with the courage of a Front-de-Boeuf. I took a bolder step and manlier bearing as I passed along in the sunshine, and saw defined on the grass before me the shadow of a gigantic being, elongated in the slanting rays to about twelve feet high, with limbs and shoulders certainly a little attenuated by the same solar deception, but still not quite such thread-papers as I have since seen do duty in ball-rooms, to the evident satisfaction of then possessors. The Wilderness was reached at last: and here I must premise that the aristocratic appearances of bucks and roes entirely ceased; for the said Wilderness was appropriated to the feeding of certain animals of unpoetic figures, and even prosaic names, but which, when well cooked and duly supplied with a condiment of beans, furnish by no means a contemptible dinner to a hungry sportsman. The man who despises beans and bacon is uniformly a puppy. I will, therefore, now venture on the vulgar word, and say the Wilderness was used for feeding swine, and all the long days the frisky quadrupeds went wiggling their curly tails, and snorting among the oak-trees, with enormous satisfaction. On reaching the centre of this umbrageous feeding-ground, I was surprised to see my usual place of meditation occupied by a stranger. It was a young girl, exhausted apparently by the heat of the day, resting on the mossy turf and leaning against the trunk of a fine old tree. Her bonnet was on the ground beside her; her hair was gently moved to and fro by the wandering breeze; and on her lap lay a work-basket, which she had evidently laid down to give herself more entirely to repose. She was sound asleep, and I need scarcely say, as my experience of the fair sex was extremely limited, that she was the most captivating specimen I had ever seen; but shyness and awkwardness overcame my desire to make her acquaintance. I looked at her for a moment, saw the finely cut features, the beautifully complexioned cheeks, the smiling lips and graceful figure, and turned away angry at myself, at the same time that I could not summon courage to address her. Before I had gone far I heard a dreadful scream a little to my right, and in an agony of terror a fair-haired young child, of six or seven years old, rushed towards the sleeper, pursued apparently by one of the largest of the grunting flock. It was evidently only in the excessive buoyancy of its porcine spirits that it caracolled, and snuffed, and galloped in such an imposing manner; but the terror of the little flyer was as sincere as if it had been a royal Bengal tiger. In a moment I sprang forward, gave the huge animal a kick with all my might, in a spot which must have materially improved the tenderness of the ham—and took the almost fainting child in my arms. The sleeper started up, and was no little astonished to behold the feat I performed. I muttered a few confused words, and tried in vain to still the terrors of my young charge; but in a few minutes our united efforts had the desired effect, and the elder sister thanked me for my chivalrous interference, and said she would never forget my kindness.
"It's nothing at all," I said—"I almost wish it had been a bonassus, and I had had a rifle."
"Oh! a pig, I assure you, is quite enough for us: isn't it, Amy?" Amy seemed to consider a pig a great deal too much, and looked round in alarm every time she heard a rustle among the branches.
"It would have enabled me," I said, "to be really useful—like the master of Ravenswood, I added, when he shot the wild bull."
"But you wouldn't surely wish to see Amy and me in real danger, merely to have the glory of delivering us from it. That would be too selfish."
"Not selfish if I was certain of saving you; and, besides, it would be such an excellent introduction."
"But we have already told you, that we are as much indebted for your interference as if you had put a whole herd of furious cattle to death. For my part, I am perfectly satisfied with the introduction as it is."