‘Oh, I thank you!’ I heard the garlanded victim lowing as I left him to the squire’s mercy.

Janet followed me out.  ’It was my fault, Harry.  You won’t blame him, I know.  But will he fib?  I don’t think he’s capable of it, and I’m sure he can’t run and double.  Grandada will have him fast before a minute is over.’

I told her to lose no time in going and extracting the squire’s promise that Peterborough should have his living,—­so much it seemed possible to save.

She flew back, and in Peterborough’s momentary absence, did her work.  Nothing could save the unhappy gentleman from a distracting scene and much archaic English.  The squire’s power of vituperation was notorious:  he could be more than a match for roadside navvies and predatory tramps in cogency of epithet.  Peterborough came to me drenched, and wailing that he had never heard such language,—­never dreamed of it.  And to find himself the object of it!—­and, worse, to be unable to conscientiously defend himself!  The pain to him was in the conscience,—­which is, like the spleen, a function whose uses are only to be understood in its derangement.  He had eased his conscience to every question right out, and he rejoiced to me at the immense relief it gave him.  Conscientiously, he could not deny that he knew the squire’s objection to my being in my father’s society; and he had connived at it ’for reasons, my dearest Harry, I can justify to God and man, but not—­I had to confess as much—­not, I grieve to say, to your grandfather.  I attempted to do justice to the amiable qualities of the absent.  In a moment I was assailed with epithets that . . . and not a word is to be got in when he is so violent.  One has to make up one’s mind to act Andromeda, and let him be the sea-monster, as somebody has said; I forget the exact origin of the remark.’

The squire certainly had a whole ocean at command.  I strung myself to pass through the same performance.  To my astonishment I went unchallenged.  Janet vehemently asserted that she had mollified the angry old man, who, however, was dark of visage, though his tongue kept silence.  He was gruff over his wine-glass the blandishments of his favourite did not brighten him.  From his point of view he had been treated vilely, and he was apparently inclined to nurse his rancour and keep my fortunes trembling in the balance.  Under these circumstances it was impossible for me to despatch a letter to Ottilia, though I found that I could write one now, and I sat in my room writing all day,—­most eloquent stuff it was.  The shadow of misfortune restored the sense of my heroical situation, which my father had extinguished, and this unlocked the powers of speech.  I wrote so admirably that my wretchedness could enjoy the fine millinery I decorated it in.  Then to tear the noble composition to pieces was a bitter gratification.  Ottilia’s station repelled and attracted me mysteriously.  I could not separate her from it, nor keep my love of her from the contentions into which it threw me.  In vain I raved, ‘What is rank?’ There was a magnet in it that could at least set me quivering and twisting, behaving like a man spellbound, as madly as any hero of the ballads under a wizard’s charm.