Читать книгу That Boy Of Norcott's - Lever Charles James - Страница 8

I had but reached my room when Eccles followed me to say my father wished to see me at once.

“Come, come, Digby,” said Eccles, good-naturedly, “don’t be frightened. Even if he should be angry with you, his passion passes soon over; and, if uncontradicted, he is never disposed to bear a grudge long. Go immediately, however, and don’t keep him waiting.”

I cannot tell with what a sense of abasement I entered my father’s dressing-room; for, after all, it was the abject condition of my own mind that weighed me down.

“So, sir,” said he, as I closed the door, “this is something I was not prepared for. You might be forty things, but I certainly did not suspect that a son of mine should be a coward.”

Had my father ransacked his whole vocabulary for a term of insult, he could pot have found one to pain me like this.

“I am not a coward, sir,” said I, reddening till I felt my face in a perfect glow.

“What!” cried he, passionately; “are you going to give me a proof of courage by daring to outrage me? Is it by sending back my words in my teeth you assume to be brave?”

“I ask pardon, sir,” said I, humbly, “if I have replied rudely; but you called me by a name that made me forget myself. I hope you will forgive me.”

“Sit down, there, sir; no, there.” And he pointed to a more distant chair. “There are various sorts and shades of cowardice, and I would not have you tarnished with any one of them. The creature whose first thought, and indeed only one, in an emergency is his personal safety, and who, till that condition is secured, abstains from all action, is below contempt; him I will not even consider. But next to him – of course with a long interval – comes the fellow who is so afraid of a responsibility that the very thought of it unmans him. How did the fact of my wager come to influence you at all, sir? Why should you have had any thought but for the game you were playing, and how it behoved you to play it? How came I and these gentlemen to stand between you and your real object, if it were not that a craven dread of consequences had got the ascendancy in your mind? If men were to be beset by these calculations, if every fellow carried about him an armor of sophistry like this, he ‘d have no hand free to wield a weapon, and the world would see neither men who storm a breach nor board an enemy. Till a man can so isolate and concentrate his faculties on what he has to do that all extraneous conditions cease to affect him, he will never be well served by his own powers; and he who is but half served is only half brave. There are times when the unreasoners are worth all the men of logic, remember that. And now go and sleep over it.”

He motioned me to withdraw, but I could not bear to go till he had withdrawn the slur he had cast on me in the word coward. He looked at me steadfastly, but not harshly, for a moment or two, and then said, —

“You are not to think that it is out of regret for a lost sum of money I have read you this lecture. As to the wager itself, I am as well pleased that it ended as it did. These gentlemen are not rich, either of them. I can afford the loss. What I cannot afford is the way I lost it.”

“But will you not say, sir, that I am no coward?” said I, faltering.

“I will withdraw the word,” said he, slowly, “the very first time I shall see you deal with a difficulty without a thought for what it may cost you. There; good-night; leave me now. I mean to have a ride with you in the morning.”

And he nodded twice, and smiled, and dismissed me.

There was nothing, certainly, very flattering to me in this reception. It cost me dearly while it lasted, and yet – I cannot explain why – I came away with a feeling of affection for my father, and a desire to stand well in his esteem, such as I had not experienced till that moment. It was his utter indifference up to this that had chilled and repelled me. Any show of interest, anything that might evidence that he cared what I was or what I might become, was so much better than this apathy that I welcomed the change with delight. Accustomed to the tender solicitude of a loving mother, no niggard of her praise, and more given to sympathize than blame, the stern reserve of my father’s manner had been a terrible reverse, and over and over had I asked myself why he took me from where I was loved and cherished, to live this life of ceremonious observance and cold deference.

To know that he felt even such interest in me as this, was to restore me to self-esteem at once. He would not have his son a coward, he said; and as I felt in my heart that I was not a coward, as I knew I was ready then and there to confront any peril he could propose to me, all that the speech left in my memory was a sense of self-satisfaction.

In each of the letters I had received from my mother she impressed on me how important it was that I should win my father’s affection, and now a hope flashed across me that I might do this. I sat down to tell her all that had passed between us; but somehow, in recounting the incident of the billiard-room, I wandered away into a description of the house, its splendors and luxury, and of the life of costly pleasure that we were living. “You will ask, dearest mamma,” I wrote, “how and when I find time to study amidst all these dissipations? and I grieve to own that I do very little. Mr. Eccles says he is satisfied with me; but I fear it is more because I obtrude little on his notice than that I am making any progress. We are still in the same scene of the Adrian that I began with you; and as to the Greek, we leave it over for Saturdays, and the Saturdays get skipped. I have become a good shot with the rifle; and George says I have the finest, lightest hand he knows on a horse, and that he ‘ll make me yet a regular steeple-chase horseman. I have a passion for riding, and sometimes get four mounts on a day. Indeed, papa takes no interest in the stable, and I give all the orders, and can have a team harnessed for me – which I do – when I am tired with the saddle. They have not quite given up calling me ‘that boy of Norcott’s;’ only now, when they do so, it is to say how well he rides, and what a taste he shows for driving and shooting.

“Don’t be afraid that I am neglecting my music. I play every day, and take singing lessons with an Italian: they call him the Count Guastalla; but I believe he is the tenor of the opera here, and only teaches me out of compliment to papa. He dines here nearly every day, and plays piquet with papa all the evening.

“There is a very beautiful lady comes here, – Madame Cleremont. She is the wife of the Secretary to the Legation. She is French, and has such pleasing ways, and is so gay, and so good-natured, and so fond of gratifying me in every way, that I delight in being with her; and we ride out together constantly, and I am now teaching her to drive the ponies, and she enjoys it just as I used myself. I don’t think papa likes her, for he seldom speaks to her, and never takes her in to dinner if there is another lady in the room; and I suspect she feels this, for she is often very sad. I dislike Mr. Cleremont; he is always saying snappish things, and is never happy, no matter how merry we are. But papa seems to like him best of all the people here. Old Captain Hotham and I are great friends, though he’s always saying, ‘You ought to be at sea, youngster. This sort of life will only make a blackleg of you.’ But I can’t make out why, because I am very happy and have so much to interest and amuse me, I must become a scamp. Mdme. Cleremont says, too, it is not true; that papa is bringing me up exactly as he ought, that I will enter life as a gentleman, and not be passing the best years of my existence in learning the habits of the well-bred world. They fight bitterly over this every day; but she always gets the victory, and then kisses me, and says, ‘Mon cher petit Digby, I ‘ll not have you spoiled, to please any vulgar prejudice of a tiresome old sea-captain,’ This she whispers, for she would not offend him for anything. Dear mamma, how you would love her if you knew her! I believe I ‘m to go to Rugby to school; but I hope not, for how I shall live like a schoolboy after all this happiness I don’t know; and Mdme. Cleremont says she will never permit it; but she has no influence over papa, and how could she prevent it? Captain Hotham is always saying, ‘If Norcott does not send that boy to Harrow or Rugby, or some of these places, he ‘ll graduate in the Marshalsea – that’s a prison – before he’s twenty.’ I am so glad when a day passes without my being brought up for the subject of a discussion, which papa always ends with, ‘After all I was neither an Etonian nor Rugbeian, and I suspect I can hold my own with most men; and if that boy doesn’t belie his breeding, perhaps he may do so too.’

“Nobody likes contradicting papa, especially when he says anything in a certain tone of voice, and whenever he uses this, the conversation turns away to something else.

“I forgot to say in my last, that your letters always come regularly. They arrive with papa’s, and he sends them up to me at once, by his valet, Mons. Durand, who is always so nicely dressed, and has a handsomer watch-chain than papa.

“Mdme. Cleremont said yesterday: ‘I’m so sorry not to know your dear mamma, Digby: but if I dared, I’d send her so many caresses, de ma part.’ I said nothing at the time, but I send them now, and am your loving son,

“Digby Norcott.”

This letter was much longer than it appears here. It filled several sides of note-paper, and occupied me till daybreak. Indeed, I heard the bell ringing for the workmen as I closed it, and shortly after a gentle tap came to my door, and George Spunner, our head groom, entered.

“I saw you at the window, Master Digby,” said he, “and I thought I’d step up and tell you not to ride in spurs this morning. Sir Roger wants to see you on May Blossom, and you know she’s a hot ‘un, sir, and don’t want the steel. Indeed, if she feels the boot, she’s as much as a man can do to sit.”

“You ‘re a good fellow, George, to think of this,” said I. “Do you know where we ‘re going?”

“That’s what I was going to tell you, sir. We are going to the Bois de Cambre, and there’s two of our men gone on with hurdles, to set them up in the cross alleys of the wood, and we ‘re to come on ‘em unawares, you see.”

“Then why don’t you give me Father Tom or Hunger-ford?”

“The master would n’t have either. He said, ‘A child of five years old could ride the Irish horse;’ and as for Hungerford, he calls him a circus horse.”

“But who knows if Blossom will take a fence?”

“I’ll warrant she’ll go high enough; how she’ll come down, and where, is another matter. Only don’t you go a-pullin’ at her, ride her in the snaffle, and as light as you can. Face her straight at what she’s got to go over, and let her choose her own pace.”

“I declare I don’t see how this is a fair trial of my riding, George. Do you?”

“Well, it is, and it isn’t,” said he, scratching his head. “You might have a very tidy hand and a nice seat, and not be able to ride the mare; but then, sir, you see, if you have the judgment to manage her coolly, and not rouse her temper too far, if you can bring her to a fence, and make her take off at a proper distance, and fly it, never changing her stride nor balk, why then he’ll see you can ride.”

“And if she rushes, or comes with her chest to a bank, or if – as I think she will – she refuses her fence, rears, and falls back, what then?”

“Then I think the mornin’s sport will be pretty nigh over,” growled he; as though I had suggested something personally offensive to him.

“What time do we go, George?”

“Sir Roger said seven, sir, but that will be eight or half-past. He’s to drive over to the wood, and the horses are to meet him there.”

“All right. I’ll take a short sleep and be sharp to time.”

As he left the room, I tore open my letter, to add a few words. I thought I’d say something that, if mischance befell me, might be a comfort to my dear mother to read over and dwell on, but for the life of me I did not know how to do it, without exciting alarm or awakening her to the dread of some impending calamity. Were I to say, I ‘m off for a ride with papa, it meant nothing; and if I said, I ‘m going to show him how I can manage a very hot horse, it might keep her in an agony of suspense till I wrote again.

So I merely added, “I intend to write to you very soon again, and hope I may do so within the week.” These few commonplace words had a great meaning to my mind, however little they might convey to her I wrote them to; and as I read them over, I stored them with details supplied by imagination, – details so full of incident and catastrophe that they made a perfect story. After this I lay down and slept heavily.