CHAPTER I. I AM A SUBJECT OF CONTENTION

One midnight of a winter month the sleepers in Riversley Grange were awakened by a ringing of the outer bell and blows upon the great hall-doors. Squire Beltham was master there: the other members of the household were, his daughter Dorothy Beltham; a married daughter Mrs. Richmond; Benjamin Sewis, an old half-caste butler; various domestic servants; and a little boy, christened Harry Lepel Richmond, the squire’s grandson. Riversley Grange lay in a rich watered hollow of the Hampshire heath-country; a lonely circle of enclosed brook and pasture, within view of some of its dependent farms, but out of hail of them or any dwelling except the stables and the head-gardener’s cottage. Traditions of audacious highwaymen, together with the gloomy surrounding fir-scenery, kept it alive to fears of solitude and the night; and there was that in the determined violence of the knocks and repeated bell-peals which assured all those who had ever listened in the servants’ hall to prognostications of a possible night attack, that the robbers had come at last most awfully. A crowd of maids gathered along the upper corridor of the main body of the building: two or three footmen hung lower down, bold in attitude. Suddenly the noise ended, and soon after the voice of old Sewis commanded them to scatter away to their beds; whereupon the footmen took agile leaps to the post of danger, while the women, in whose bosoms intense curiosity now supplanted terror, proceeded to a vacant room overlooking the front entrance, and spied from the window.

Meanwhile Sewis stood by his master’s bedside. The squire was a hunter, of the old sort: a hard rider, deep drinker, and heavy slumberer. Before venturing to shake his arm Sewis struck a light and flashed it over the squire’s eyelids to make the task of rousing him easier. At the first touch the squire sprang up, swearing by his Lord Harry he had just dreamed of fire, and muttering of buckets.

‘Sewis! you’re the man, are you: where has it broken out?’

‘No, sir; no fire,’ said Sewis; ‘you be cool, sir.’

‘Cool, sir! confound it, Sewis, haven’t I heard a whole town of steeples at work? I don’t sleep so thick but I can hear, you dog! Fellow comes here, gives me a start, tells me to be cool; what the deuce! nobody hurt, then? all right!’

The squire had fallen back on his pillow and was relapsing to sleep.

Sewis spoke impressively: ‘There’s a gentleman downstairs; a gentleman downstairs, sir. He has come rather late.’

‘Gentleman downstairs come rather late.’ The squire recapitulated the intelligence to possess it thoroughly. ‘Rather late, eh? Oh! Shove him into a bed, and give him hot brandy and water, and be hanged to him!’

Sewis had the office of tempering a severely distasteful announcement to the squire.

He resumed: ‘The gentleman doesn’t talk of staying. That is not his business. It ‘s rather late for him to arrive.’

‘Rather late!’ roared the squire. ‘Why, what’s it o’clock?’

Reaching a hand to the watch over his head, he caught sight of the unearthly hour. ‘A quarter to two? Gentleman downstairs? Can’t be that infernal apothecary who broke ‘s engagement to dine with me last night? By George, if it is I’ll souse him; I’ll drench him from head to heel as though the rascal ‘d been drawn through the duck-pond. Two o’clock in the morning? Why, the man’s drunk. Tell him I’m a magistrate, and I’ll commit him, deuce take him; give him fourteen days for a sot; another fourteen for impudence. I’ve given a month ‘fore now. Comes to me, a Justice of the peace!—man ‘s mad! Tell him he’s in peril of a lunatic asylum. And doesn’t talk of staying? Lift him out o’ the house on the top o’ your boot, Sewis, and say it ‘s mine; you ‘ve my leave.’

Sewis withdrew a step from the bedside. At a safe distance he fronted his master steadily; almost admonishingly. ‘It ‘s Mr. Richmond, sir,’ he said.

‘Mr....’ The squire checked his breath. That was a name never uttered at the Grange. ‘The scoundrel?’ he inquired harshly, half in a tone of one assuring himself, and his rigid dropped jaw shut.

The fact had to be denied or affirmed instantly, and Sewis was silent.

Grasping his bedclothes in a lump, the squire cried:

‘Downstairs? downstairs, Sewis? You’ve admitted him into my house?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You have!’

‘He is not in the house, sir.’

‘You have! How did you speak to him, then?’

‘Out of my window, sir.’

‘What place here is the scoundrel soiling now?’

‘He is on the doorstep outside the house.’

‘Outside, is he? and the door’s locked?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Let him rot there!’

By this time the midnight visitor’s patience had become exhausted. A renewal of his clamour for immediate attention fell on the squire’s ear, amazing him to stupefaction at such challengeing insolence.

‘Hand me my breeches,’ he called to Sewis; ‘I can’t think brisk out of my breeches.’

Sewis held the garment ready. The squire jumped from the bed, fuming speechlessly, chafing at gaiters and braces, cravat and coat, and allowed his buttons to be fitted neatly on his calves; the hammering at the hall-door and plucking at the bell going on without intermission. He wore the aspect of one who assumes a forced composure under the infliction of outrages on his character in a Court of Law, where he must of necessity listen and lock his boiling replies within his indignant bosom.

‘Now, Sewis, now my horsewhip,’ he remarked, as if it had been a simple adjunct of his equipment.

‘Your hat, sir?’

‘My horsewhip, I said.’

‘Your hat is in the hall,’ Sewis observed gravely.

‘I asked you for my horsewhip.’

‘That is not to be found anywhere,’ said Sewis.

The squire was diverted from his objurgations against this piece of servitorial defiance by his daughter Dorothy’s timid appeal for permission to come in. Sewis left the room. Presently the squire descended, fully clad, and breathing sharply from his nostrils. Servants were warned off out of hearing; none but Sewis stood by.

The squire himself unbolted the door, and threw it open to the limit of the chain.

‘Who’s there?’ he demanded.

A response followed promptly from outside: ‘I take you to be Mr. Harry Lepel Beltham. Correct me if I err. Accept my apologies for disturbing you at a late hour of the night, I pray.’

‘Your name?’

‘Is plain Augustus Fitz-George Roy Richmond at this moment, Mr. Beltham. You will recognize me better by opening your door entirely: voices are deceptive. You were born a gentleman, Mr. Beltham, and will not reduce me to request you to behave like one. I am now in the position, as it were, of addressing a badger in his den. It is on both sides unsatisfactory. It reflects egregious discredit upon you, the householder.’

The squire hastily bade Sewis see that the passages to the sleeping apartments were barred, and flung the great chain loose. He was acting under strong control of his temper.

It was a quiet grey night, and as the doors flew open, a largely-built man, dressed in a high-collared great-coat and fashionable hat of the time, stood clearly defined to view. He carried a light cane, with the point of the silver handle against his under lip. There was nothing formidable in his appearance, and his manner was affectedly affable. He lifted his hat as soon as he found himself face to face with the squire, disclosing a partially bald head, though his whiskering was luxuriant, and a robust condition of manhood was indicated by his erect attitude and the immense swell of his furred great-coat at the chest. His features were exceedingly frank and cheerful. From his superior height, he was enabled to look down quite royally on the man whose repose he had disturbed.

The following conversation passed between them.

‘You now behold who it is, Mr. Beltham, that acknowledges to the misfortune of arousing you at an unseemly hour—unbetimes, as our gossips in mother Saxon might say—and with profound regret, sir, though my habit is to take it lightly.’

‘Have you any accomplices lurking about here?’

‘I am alone.’

‘What ‘s your business?’

‘I have no business.’

‘You have no business to be here, no. I ask you what ‘s the object of your visit?’

‘Permit me first to speak of the cause of my protracted arrival, sir. The ridicule of casting it on the post-boys will strike you, Mr. Beltham, as it does me. Nevertheless, I must do it; I have no resource. Owing to a rascal of the genus, incontinent in liquor, I have this night walked seven miles from Ewling. My complaint against him is not on my own account.’

‘What brought you here at all?’

‘Can you ask me?’

‘I ask you what brought you to my house at all?’

‘True, I might have slept at Ewling.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘For the reason, Mr. Beltham, which brought me here originally. I could not wait-not a single minute. So far advanced to the neighbourhood, I would not be retarded, and I came on. I crave your excuses for the hour of my arrival. The grounds for my coming at all you will very well understand, and you will applaud me when I declare to you that I come to her penitent; to exculpate myself, certainly, but despising self-justification. I love my wife, Mr. Beltham. Yes; hear me out, sir. I can point to my unhappy star, and say, blame that more than me. That star of my birth and most disastrous fortunes should plead on my behalf to you; to my wife at least it will.’

‘You’ve come to see my daughter Marian, have you?’

‘My wife, sir.’

‘You don’t cross my threshold while I live.’

‘You compel her to come out to me?’

‘She stays where she is, poor wretch, till the grave takes her. You’ve done your worst; be off.’

‘Mr. Beltham, I am not to be restrained from the sight of my wife.’

‘Scamp!’

‘By no scurrilous epithets from a man I am bound to respect will I be deterred or exasperated.’

‘Damned scamp, I say!’ The squire having exploded his wrath gave it free way. ‘I’ve stopped my tongue all this while before a scoundrel ‘d corkscrew the best-bottled temper right or left, go where you will one end o’ the world to the other, by God! And here ‘s a scoundrel stinks of villany, and I’ve proclaimed him ‘ware my gates as a common trespasser, and deserves hanging if ever rook did nailed hard and fast to my barn doors! comes here for my daughter, when he got her by stealing her, scenting his carcase, and talking ‘bout his birth, singing what not sort o’ foreign mewin’ stuff, and she found him out a liar and a beast, by God! And she turned home. My doors are open to my flesh and blood. And here she halts, I say, ‘gainst the law, if the law’s against me. She’s crazed: you’ve made her mad; she knows none of us, not even her boy. Be off; you’ve done your worst; the light’s gone clean out in her; and hear me, you Richmond, or Roy, or whatever you call yourself, I tell you I thank the Lord she has lost her senses. See her or not, you ‘ve no hold on her, and see her you shan’t while I go by the name of a man.’

Mr. Richmond succeeded in preserving an air of serious deliberation under the torrent of this tremendous outburst, which was marked by scarce a pause in the delivery.

He said, ‘My wife deranged! I might presume it too truly an inherited disease. Do you trifle with me, sir? Her reason unseated! and can you pretend to the right of dividing us? If this be as you say—Oh! ten thousand times the stronger my claim, my absolute claim, to cherish her. Make way for me, Mr. Beltham. I solicit humbly the holiest privilege sorrow can crave of humanity. My wife! my wife! Make way for me, sir.’