The Adventures of Harry Richmond | Page 9

for what he is, the rightful claimant of a place among the
proudest in the land; and mark me, Mr. Beltham, obstinate sensual old
man that you are! I take the boy, and I consecrate my life to the duty of
establishing him in his proper rank and station, and there, if you live

and I live, you shall behold him and bow your grovelling pig's head to
the earth, and bemoan the day, by heaven! when you,--a common
country squire, a man of no origin, a creature with whose blood we
have mixed ours--and he is stone-blind to the honour conferred on
him--when you in your besotted stupidity threatened to disinherit Harry
Richmond.'
The door slammed violently on such further speech as he had in him to
utter. He seemed at first astonished; but finding the terrified boy about
to sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and thrust a
delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering lips. Then, after some
moments of irresolution, during which he struck his chest soundingly
and gazed down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and cast his
eyes along the windows of the house, he at last dropped on one knee
and swaddled the boy in the folds of the shawl. Raising him in a
business- like way, he settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across
gravel-walk and lawn, like a horse to whose neck a smart touch of the
whip has been applied.
The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere; and here and
there a light-blue space of sky showed small rayless stars; the breeze
smelt fresh of roots and heath. It was more a May-night than one of
February. So strange an aspect had all these quiet hill-lines and larch
and fir- tree tops in the half-dark stillness, that the boy's terrors were
overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had never before
been out in the night, and he must have feared to cry in it, for his sobs
were not loud. On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation began,
he heard his name called faintly from the house by a woman's voice
that he knew to be his aunt Dorothy's. It came after him only once:
'Harry Richmond'; but he was soon out of hearing, beyond the park,
among the hollows that run dipping for miles beside the great highroad
toward London. Sometimes his father whistled to him, or held him high
and nodded a salutation to him, as though they had just discovered one
another; and his perpetual accessibility to the influences of spicy
sugarplums, notwithstanding his grief, caused his father to
prognosticate hopefully of his future wisdom. So, when obedient to
command he had given his father a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his

shoulder, ceasing to know that he was a wandering infant: and, if I
remember rightly, he dreamed he was in a ship of cinnamon-wood
upon a sea that rolled mighty, but smooth immense broad waves, and
tore thing from thing without a sound or a hurt.
CHAPTER II
AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT
That night stands up without any clear traces about it or near it, like the
brazen castle of romance round which the sea-tide flows. My father
must have borne me miles along the road; he must have procured food
for me; I have an idea of feeling a damp forehead and drinking new
milk, and by-and-by hearing a roar of voices or vehicles, and seeing a
dog that went alone through crowded streets without a master, doing as
he pleased, and stopping every other dog he met. He took his turning,
and my father and I took ours. We were in a house that, to my senses,
had the smell of dark corners, in a street where all the house-doors were
painted black, and shut with a bang. Italian organ-men and milk-men
paraded the street regularly, and made it sound hollow to their music.
Milk, and no cows anywhere; numbers of people, and no acquaintances
among them; my thoughts were occupied by the singularity of such
things.
My father could soon make me forget that I was transplanted; he could
act dog, tame rabbit, fox, pony, and a whole nursery collection alive,
but he was sometimes absent for days, and I was not of a temper to be
on friendly terms with those who were unable to captivate my
imagination as he had done. When he was at home I rode him all round
the room and upstairs to bed, I lashed him with a whip till he frightened
me, so real was his barking; if I said 'Menagerie' he became a caravan
of wild beasts; I undid a button of his waistcoat, and it was a lion that