Читать книгу Dariel - R. D. Blackmore - Страница 10

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Whenever my brother Harold deigned to visit us from London, we had not much time to do anything more than try to understand his last idea. If he had only been fond of society, or philosophy, or even ladies, we could have got on with him ever so much better; for he really never meant any harm at all. Pity for the pressure he was putting on his brain saddened to some extent the pride which he inspired; and when he came down to announce his last eureka, the first thing my mother did was to make him show his tongue. My mother did think mighty things of this the first-born child she had; and him a son—endowed beyond all sister-babies with everything. Nevertheless she did her utmost to be fair to all of us; and sometimes when her eyes went round us, at Christmastime, or birthdays, any stranger would have thought that we all were gifted equally.

I am happy to say that this was not the case. Never has it been my gift to invent anything whatever; not even a single incident in this tale which I am telling you. Everything is exactly as it happened; and according to some great authorities, we too are exactly as we happened.

But my brother Harold can never have happened. He must have been designed with a definite purpose, and a spirit to work his way throughout, although it turned to Proteus. He had been through every craze and fad—I beg his pardon—Liberation of the Age, Enlightenment, Amelioration of Humanity, &c. &c., and now in indignation at the Pump Court drains, he was gone upon what he called Hygiene.

"What the devil do you mean, by this blessed Hygiene?" Though by no means strong at poetry, I turned out this very neat couplet one day, with the indignation that makes verses, when I saw that he had a big trunk in the passage, which certain of us still called the hall.

"George, will you never have any large ideas?" he replied with equal rudeness, such as brothers always use. "This time, even you will find it hard to be indifferent to my new discovery. The ardour of truth has triumphed."

"Go ahead," I said, for he had had his dinner, though that made very little difference to him, his ardour of truth being toast and water now. "But if you won't have a pipe, I will. Is the smell anti-hygienic?"

"Undoubtedly it is. About that there cannot be two sane opinions. Puff away; but be well assured that at every pull you are inhaling, and at every expiration spreading—"

"All right. Tell us something new, and you are never far to seek in that—Pennyroyal, fenugreek, ruta nigra, tin-tacks hydrised, hyoscyamus, colocasia, geopordon carbonised—what is the next panacea?"

"Tabacum Nicotianum." Nothing pleased my brother more than the charge of inconsistency and self-contradiction. Seeing that he lay in wait for this, I would not let him have it, but answered with indifference—

"That is right, old fellow. I am glad that you have come to a sensible view of Tobacco. Any very choice cigars in your trunk, old chap? But I should fear that you had invented them."

No one could help liking Harold at first sight. He was simply the most amiable fellow ever seen. Amiable chiefly in a passive way, although he was ready for any kind action, when the claims of discovery permitted. And now as we were strolling in the park, and the fine Surrey air had brightened his handsome face with more "hygiene" than he ever would produce, I was not surprised at the amount of money he extracted even from our groans.

"Would you like to know what is in my trunk?" he asked with that simple smile, which was at once the effect and the cause of his magnetism. "I have done it for the sake of the family first, and then of the neighbourhood, and then of the county. I shall offer the advantages to Surrey first. As an old County family, that is our duty. There is some low typhoid in the valleys still. Run and fetch my trunk, George. It is heavy for me, but nothing for your great shoulders. Bring it to the bower here; I don't want to open it in the house, because, because—well, you'll soon know why, when you follow my course of reasoning."

I brought him his trunk, and he put it on a table, where people had tea in the park sometimes, to watch a game of cricket from a sheltered place. "Come quite close," he said very kindly, throwing open the trunk, and then making for the door, while I rashly stooped over his property. In another minute I was lying down, actually sneezed off my legs, and unable to open my eyes from some spasmodic affection or affliction.

"That's right," said Harold, in a tone of satisfaction; "don't be uneasy, my dear brother. For at least a fortnight you are immune from the biggest enterprises of the most active Local Board. You may sit upon the manholes of the best sanitated town; you may sleep in the House of Commons; you may pay a medical fee, and survive it. It is my own discovery. See those boxes?"

"Not yet. But I shall as soon as my eyes get right!" I was able now to leave off sneezing, almost for a second. And when I had chewed a bit of leaf he gave me, there seemed to be something great in this new idea.

"You are concluding with your usual slur"—my brother began again, as soon as I was fit to receive reason instead of sympathy—"that this is nothing more than an adaptation of Lundy Foote, Irish blackguard, or Welsh Harp. George, you are wrong, as usual. You need not be capable of speech for that. Your gifts of error can express themselves in silence."

"Cowardly reasoner," I began, but the movement of larynx, or whatever it might be, threw me out of "ratiocination." He had me at his mercy, and he kept me so. To attempt to repeat what he said would convict me of crankiness equal to his own, and worse—because he could do it, and I cannot. But the point he insisted on most of all, and which after my experience I could not but concede, was that no known preparation of snuff without his special chemistry could have achieved this excellence.

"Pteroxylon, euphorbium, and another irritant unknown as yet to Chemists, have brought this to the power needful. But this is not a merely speculative thing. You feel a true interest in it now, George."

"As men praise mustard, with tears in their eyes. But let me never hear of it, think of it, most of all never smell the like again. My nose will be red, and my eyes sore for a fortnight."

Harold tucked my arm under his, with a very affectionate manner of his own, which he knew that I never could resist. "Four pockets always in your waistcoat," he observed, "and a flap over every one to keep it dry. Now I very seldom ask a favour, do I, George, of you? Here are three hundred little boxes here, as well as the bulk of my preparation. The boxes are perfectly air-tight, made from my own design, very little larger and not much thicker than an old crown-piece. You touch a spring here, and the box flies open. Without that you never would know that it was there. Promise me that you will always carry this, and open it whenever you come to a place where the Local Boards have got the roads up. One of my best friends, and I have not many, has lost his only little girl—such a darling, she used to sit upon my knee and promise to marry me the moment she was big enough—but now she has gone to a better world, through the new parish authorities. Diphtheria in the worst form, my dear boy!"

His eyes filled with tears, for he was very tender-hearted, and in the warmth of the moment, I promised to carry that little box of his, as a safeguard against sanitation.

"My dear George, you will never regret it. You will find it most useful, I can assure you." He spoke with some gratitude, for he knew how much I hated all such chemistry. Little did I think how true his words would prove.

"Why, there goes that extraordinary fellow Stoneman!" I exclaimed suddenly, to change the subject. "What a first-rate horse he always rides! But there is something I ought to tell you about that great Stockbroker. I have not told the Governor yet, because I was not meant to do so, and must not, without the man's consent. But you ought to know it, and he would not object to that."

"What has he discovered? I have often thought that men, who fall into the thick of humanity, ought to get their minds into an extremely active state; like mariners straining their eyes to discover—"

"The Gold Coast. There is nothing else they care for. But there I am wronging Jackson Stoneman. He is a man of the world, if there ever was one; and yet he is taken above the world, by love."

"Love of what?" asked my brother, who was sometimes hard upon people who despised all the things he cared for. "Love of gold? Love of rank? Love of dainty feeding? Love of his own fat self perhaps?"

"He is not fat. He is scarcely round enough. He is one of the most active men in the kingdom. There are very few things that he cannot do. And now he is deeply and permanently in love—"

"With filthy lucre. If there is anything I hate, it is the scorn of humanity that goes with that." Harold, in a lofty mood, began to strap up the trunk that was to save mankind.

"If filthy lucre means our Grace," I said with much emphasis, for it was good to floor him, "you have hit the mark. But our Grace has not a farthing." I very nearly added—"thanks to you." But it would have been cruel, and too far beyond the truth.

"Ridiculous!" he answered, trying not to look surprised, though I knew that I had got him there. "Why, his grandfather kept a shoe-shop."

"That is a vile bit of lying gossip. But even if it were so, the love of humanity should not stop short of their shoes. I am afraid you are a snob, Harold, with all your vast ideas."

"I am a little inclined to that opinion myself," he answered very cordially. "But come, this is very strange news about Grace. Has she any idea of the honour done her?"

"Not the smallest. So far as I know at least. And I think it is better that she should not know. Just at present, I mean, until he has had time."

"But surely, George, you would not encourage such a thing. Putting aside the man's occupation, which may be very honourable if he is so himself, what do we know of his character, except that he gives himself airs, and is rather ostentatious?"

"He gives himself no airs. What you call ostentation is simply his generosity. You forget that in right of his wealth he stands in the place we have lost through our poverty. That makes it a delicate position for him, especially in his behaviour to us. And do what he will, we should scarcely do our duty to ourselves, unless we made the worst of it."

"How long have you turned Cynic? Why, you put that rather neatly; I did not think it was in you, George." It should be explained that my brother Harold could never be brought to see that it was possible for me to do anything even fairly well; unless it were in manual labour, or sporting, or something else that he despised. And this was all I got for my admiration of his powers!

"Never mind about me," I replied; "I am not a Cynic, and I never shall be one. And when I spoke thus, I had not the least intention of including my father, who is above all such stuff. But mother, and you and I, and no doubt Grace herself, although she thinks so well of everybody—it would be against all human nature for us to take a kind or even candid view of our successor's doings. And as for his station in life, as you might call it, you must live entirely out of the world, even in the heart of London, not to know that he is placed far above us now. Everywhere, except among the old-fashioned people who call themselves the County families, a man of his wealth would be thought much more of, than we should have a chance of being. What good could we do to anybody now? you must learn to look up to him, Harold my boy."

"Very well. I'll study him, whenever I get the chance. I can't look up to any man for his luck alone; though I may for the way he employs it. But he must not suppose that his money will buy Grace. If ever there was a girl who tried to think for herself and sometimes succeeded, probably it is our Grace. She cannot do much. What woman has ever yet made any real discovery, although they are so inquisitive? But she has a right to her own opinion."

"At any rate as to the disposal of herself." Here I was on strong ground; though I never could argue with Harold upon scientific questions. But I knew my dear Grace much better than he did; and she always said that she liked me best, whenever I put that question to her; not only to make up for mother's preferences in the wrong direction, but also because she could understand me—which did not require much intelligence—not to mention that I was much bigger and stronger than Harold, though nothing like so good-looking, as anybody could see with half an eye.

"Leave it so," said Harold; for he liked sometimes to assert himself, as he had the right to do, when he cast away scientific weaknesses. "Let such things take their course, old fellow. If Grace takes a liking to him, that will prove that he is worthy of it. For she is uncommonly hard to please. And she never seems to care about understanding me; perhaps because she knows it would be hopeless. I want to go on to Godalming to-morrow. There will be a meeting of Sanitary Engineers—the largest minds of the period. I speak of them with deference; though as yet I am unable to make out what the dickens they are up to. Can you get me the one-horse trap from The Bell?"