‘I know not what you mean by a golden Dolly,’ said Ali.
‘Why, a marriageable woman with two or three thousand a year,’ said Lord Sane. ‘I do not deceive myself that you shall have the easiest shooting in that field, for no doubt all but the least eligible of the golden race will, at a minimum, prefer an Englishman for a husband, or at least a man of some more familiar nation than yours. Nevertheless there is game there that the nimble and the clever may garner. When I am returned, I shall set before you a List, and you may begin to consider where first to make your strike.’
With that his Lordship took his horse’s bridle, and from the stone at the church-door he mounted at a leap—he was away without farewell, and without waiting upon his son—who took no
particular
offence at it—as he had expected no more.
Ali had not spoken, upon that occasion, nor contradicted his parent, though he had no intention of going fortune-hunting. Insofar as he was capable of considering such a step as marriage—and to him it rather resembled in likelihood a voyage to the Moon, or an exchange of heads—he would consider but one object only, and that was Susanna. Yet he did not picture himself standing before an Altar—or negotiating for a dowry—or securing one—tho’ he knew well enough that all these things are commonly done. He knew that Nations strike Treaties, too, and Kings abdicate, and Navies engage—and these had as little to do with him, or his beloved friends. He did not know—could not have supposed!—that the gentle girl he thought upon so often could easily contemplate what
he
could not—though she did not presume to advance the business by any word or act. She knew as certainly as did Lord Sane what price her self and parts might command in the market, and she knew how little a bond with her might advance Ali’s fortunes, whose state she knew too (for they
can
make such calculations, even the purest of those souls, as well as they may play a sonata of Scarlatti’s or sing a song of Moore’s—it is very commonly among their
attainments
). Her brother might make a joke of their inseparability, and talk of an
exchange of rings
imminent, and a long married life—breakfast taken every morn amid the clamour of their
graduated
offspring, &c., but Ali and Susanna dismissed his drolleries, and together walk’d on, ‘in maiden meditation’, though perhaps not ‘fancy free’. Ali did not wish for time to stop, that this Eden might endure, as no Eden may: for he did not yet truly know, in his soul, that Time rolls on, and
over
our most precious possessions. He had no reason to suppose his state would change, for he did not desire it to change. In this is Youth eternal, the still garden from which all streams spring—and thus we remember it to be, when we are far
down river
of it.
So his sands ran—to alter the figure, from water to earth—and he did not count them. He grew tall—slim as a wand—forgetting his supper, when it was not put before him, or he led to it. At Ida he learned games that his fellows had played since infancy, and excelled too, in one or another. He learned to
swim,
and thought that he was perhaps the first of the Ochridan race to do so, and in the cold waters of the stream that flows past Ida’s base he outdid even Corydon, who was the fleetest formerly of them all. One by one he completed his school terms, and on a certain 6th of June he performed for the last time before his fellows and the Masters and Guests foregathered—his choice a speech of Edmund the Bastard’s out of
King Lear,
done in the best manner of the Young Roscius, who was then triumphing on the boards in London. ‘Now Gods, Stand up for bastards!’ sang he, and all the rest of that ringing declaration—the planned undoing of his
legitimate
double, the taking of his brother’s lands, and the capturing of the exclusive
love of his Father
.
It happened that, upon that very day, Ali’s own real, or
physical,
Father was in retreat from London, in consequence of a scheme gone wrong.
It has been noted that there was little, or nothing, that ‘Satan’ Porteus would stop at in pursuit of the objects of his desires—and yet his soul was such that, had he spent however long on the evolving of some scheme of crime or extortion, he was well able in a moment of rage or pride to spoil it. The tale was told in the City (Ali would later hear it, and not once only, or from one informant) how he had once raised up an impecunious adventurer to impersonate the lost heir to a fortune—drilled and schooled the fellow in his part for months—busied himself in the laying down of the necessary forgeries and evidences—then, just as the scheme is about to succeed—he falls into a passion with his creature over some trivial matter—an impertinence perceiv’d—the turn of a card, or of a
drab
—and, forthwith, they draw, and Sane slays the fellow where he stands, knowing full well the fortune’s lost to him: and yet those who were present marked the horrid delight that rose then in his eyes to do this deed—it chilled their blood so that it would not warm thereafter—as though he delighted as much in the wreckage of his
own
prospects as in the wreckage of others’—as though nothing delighted him so much as wreckage itself. Here, said his henchmen to one another—even as they laboured, at his command, to conceal the crime—here was Satan himself, Nay-sayer absolute!
Whatever well- or ill-laid plans had, in the present instance, failed to mature, Lord Sane was now on progress to the distant North, to his lair. But first his coach arrived at Ida, there to bring away his son. He found him among the Scholars, who were still attired as the characters whom they had portrayed in the day’s festivities, and distributed about the green lawns like immortals in Elysium—a strange sight, which yet seemed entirely unseen by the Lord. There stood his son, in his costume as Edmund, and with him Lord Corydon, who had taken no part that day, and Susanna—and upon them in the bright day fell the long shadow of Lord Sane. To him Ali with strange reluctance introduced his friends, who made response without any sign of the darkness Ali felt had come upon them—and Sane in turn took their hands with a merry interest that Ali felt to be all the more chilling. ‘Let us be gone,’ said he then to his son. ‘Doff these mummeries, and put on clothes for a journey. We have much to discuss along the way.’
T
HOUGH HE HAD
evinced but slight interest in Ali’s companions when introduced to them, it was not long after his coach was upon the North-ward road that Sane inquired musingly about the family.
‘Lord Corydon has not yet reached his majority,’ said Ali. ‘His sister Susanna is but seventeen.’ Susanna! To speak her name, here beside his father, seemed to Ali to risk much, though
what
he could not say.
‘Corydon,’ said Sane then, with an air of one drawing from a deep well. ‘His father was the fifth Lord.’
‘I know not his number,’ said Ali.
‘I partly knew the man. He had money in the Funds, and in Irish mortgages, quite safely; but he took bad advice, and put his fortune—nearly the whole of it—in West Indian shares, and was quickly ruined. He died by mischance not long since. Is this he?’
‘I am ignorant of his business dealings,’ said Ali, ‘but yes, this was he.’
‘Why, the house is declined almost to nothing,’ said Sane. ‘They are poor as church-mice; the girl will have not a shilling. No, it is absurd. I have expressed to you plainly that she upon whom you turn your attention must bring in some considerable Fortune, or else you must look elsewhere. I need not repeat myself upon the subject.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Ali in a low tone. ‘But there is no point in pursuing these considerations. I will have none of them. I will make no choice from your
List
.’
Lord Sane inquired, in as low a tone as his son’s, ‘Why he should be so certain of this, and had he a choice of his own?’ Ali professed that he did not, and turned his gaze upon the passing scene. He could not dispute the plain truth his father stated—Susanna would bring no fortune to his house—but she would bring what was worth more—she would bring light, and gaiety, and goodness, enough even to sweep away the heaviness that brooded over the Abbey and its grounds and messuages—to shake out, as from a dusty rug, the gloom that the centuries had there accumulated.
Sane now wished to know what the young Corydon, whom he termed, with an air of cold amusement,
the present Lord,
intended now to do. Would he go up to University? Ali thought he would not—that his ambitions had turned to the Army, where several of his family had made their careers, and where his prospects were good. Sane thereupon said nothing more, until Ali thought him fallen asleep where he sat—and was startled then to hear him ask, ‘Whether Ali had himself had made a choice of University, between the two?’ Ali said he had given it no thought, for he had not supposed it to be his father’s wish that he go up—indeed, it seemed to him quite otherwise, and that he too would be sent to the Army, as his father had been, and his father’s father too, who had earned credit by his service that his son had not entirely squandered away.
‘Ah no,’ said the Lord. ‘When the expected profit is great, we do not spare expense. A sound education is an Investment. A better one than shares upon ’Change. Take a Degree, and it will improve your prospects in many ways.’ With this it seemed he smiled upon his son, though in the case of ‘Satan’ Porteus that commonest of all human expressions had a cast
unlike
the common, and had not the common effect upon those toward whom it was directed. Nevertheless he said no more, and closed his great hands upon his waistcoat, and slept indeed.
NOTES FOR THE 4TH CHAPTER