could feel any further sensitiveness at his fits of irritation, reading him as I did? I saw through my aunt: she was always in dread of a renewal of our conversation. I could see her ideas flutter like birds to escape me. And I penetrated the others who came in my way just as unerringly. Farmer Eckerthy would acknowledge, astonished, his mind was running on cricket when I taxed him with it.
‘Crops was the cart-load of my thoughts, Master Harry, but there was a bit o’ cricket in it, too, ne’er a doubt.’
My aunt’s maid, Davis, was shocked by my discernment of the fact that she was in love, and it was useless for her to pretend the contrary, for I had seen her granting tender liberties to Lady Ilchester’s footman.
Old Sewis said gravely, ‘You’ve been to the witches, Master Harry’; and others were sure ‘I had got it from the gipsies off the common.’
The maids were partly incredulous, but I perceived that they disbelieved as readily as they believed. With my latest tutor, the Rev. Simon Hart, I was not sufficiently familiar to offer him proofs of my extraordinary power; so I begged favours of him, and laid hot-house flowers on his table in the name of my aunt, and had the gratification of seeing him blush. His approval of my Latin exercise was verbal, and weak praise in comparison; besides I cared nothing for praises not referring to my grand natural accomplishment. ‘And my father now is thinking of me!’ That was easy to imagine, but the certainty of it confirmed me in my conceit.
‘How can you tell?—how is it possible for you to know people’s thoughts?’ said Janet Ilchester, whose head was as open to me as a hat. She pretended to be rather more frightened of me than she was.
‘And now you think you are flattering me!’ I said.
She looked nervous.
‘And now you’re asking yourself what you can do better than I can!’
She said, ‘Go on.’
I stopped.
She charged me with being pulled up short.
I denied it.
‘Guess, guess!’ said she. ‘You can’t.’
My reply petrified her. ‘You were thinking that you are a lady by birth on both sides.’
At first she refused to admit it. ‘No, it wasn’t that, Harry, it wasn’t really. I was thinking how clever you are.’
‘Yes, after, not before.’
‘No, Harry, but you are clever. I wish I was half as clever. Fancy reading people’s ideas! I can read my pony’s, but that’s different; I know by his ears. And as for my being a lady, of course I am, and so are you—I mean, a gentleman. I was thinking—now this is really what I was thinking—I wished your father lived near, that we might all be friends. I can’t bear the squire when he talks.... And you quite as good as me, and better. Don’t shake me off, Harry.’
I shook her in the gentlest manner, not suspecting that she had read my feelings fully as well as I her thoughts. Janet and I fell to talking of my father incessantly, and were constantly together. The squire caught one of my smiles rising, when he applauded himself lustily for the original idea of matching us; but the idea was no longer distasteful to me. It appeared to me that if I must some day be married, a wife who would enjoy my narratives, and travel over the four quarters of the globe, as Janet promised to do, in search of him I loved, would be the preferable person. I swore her to secresy; she was not to tell her brother Charley the subject we conversed on.
‘Oh dear, no!’ said she, and told him straightway.
Charley, home for his winter holidays, blurted out at the squire’s table: ‘So, Harry Richmond, you’re the cleverest fellow in the world, are you? There’s Janet telling everybody your father’s the cleverest next to you, and she’s never seen him!’
‘How? hulloa, what ‘s that?’ sang out the squire.
‘Charley was speaking of my father, sir,’ I said, preparing for thunder.
We all rose. The squire looked as though an apoplectic seizure were coming on.
‘Don’t sit at my table again,’ he said, after a terrible struggle to be articulate.
His hand was stretched at me. I swung round to depart. ‘No, no, not you; that fellow,’ he called, getting his arm level toward Charley.
I tried to intercede—the last who should have done it.
‘You like to hear him, eh?’ said the squire.
I was ready to say that I did, but my aunt, whose courage was up when occasion summoned it, hushed the scene by passing the decanter to the squire, and speaking to him in a low voice.
‘Biter’s bit. I’ve dished myself, that’s clear,’ said Charley; and he spoke the truth, and such was his frankness that I forgave him.
He and Janet were staying at Riversley. They left next morning, for the squire would not speak to him, nor I to Janet.
‘I ‘ll tell you what; there ‘s no doubt about one thing,’ said Charley; ‘Janet’s right—some of those girls are tremendously deep: you’re about the cleverest fellow I’ve ever met in my life. I thought of working into the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know. A cornetcy in the Dragoon Guards in a year or two. I thought the squire might do that for me without much damaging you;—perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just to reconcile me to a nose out of joint. For, upon my honour, the squire spoke of making me his heir—or words to that effect neatly conjugated—before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on Riversley—I ‘d betray my bosom friend. I’m regularly “hoist on my own petard,” as they say in the newspapers. I’m a curate and no mistake. You did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat boxing. I bear no malice when I’m floored neatly.’
Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father’s society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to covet. At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.
Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus Temple’s father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley. Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He confessed he had found me changed at first. His father, it appeared, was working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat down beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent Cicero. I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon prove himself the better scholar. ‘There’s my old Richie!’ said Temple, fondling
