Henry Halford

“ Henry Halford a boy, Edward," she replied, for now the ice was broken the impetuous tone did not daunt her. "He told me on Wednesday that he was going up for ordination on Trinity Sunday, the rector of Kilburn having given him what he called a title to orders."
"Yes, yes, I daresay; however, that is of little importance to me, but what has been told you, Sarah, about this matter?"
"Mary has told me nothing, Edward; Mrs. Armstrong certainly described the splendid offers her daughter had refused, and acknowledged that her refusals were no doubt caused by her attachment to Henry Halford;" ”

“ The kind, loving mother had found doors and wardrobe open, and the usual neatness of everything destroyed by her boy in his anxiety to discover a missing vest, which after all was found in his own bedroom.
Henry Halford has changed very little in character during the years that have elapsed since the receipt of Dr. Mason's letters. He has made great progress in his studies, and when he left Dr. Mason's care, about three years before the Christmas-time of which we write, his father, who had just parted with a classical assistant, found Henry quite capable of supplying his place. ”

“ Good-by, Kate, make the best of it till you hear from me."
And so ended at Kilburn the Sunday on which Henry Halford entered upon his duties as a clergyman.
CHAPTER XXXII. AT GUY'S HOSPITAL.
While the train is speeding on with Henry Halford to the Euston Station, we will go back to the Friday afternoon when Arthur Franklyn was carried in an apparently lifeless state to Guy's.
When dragged from the water many voices were raised in eager haste. "Send for a doctor!" "Carry him to the hotel!" "No use, the man is dead!" "Nonsense, he hasn't been five minutes in the water." ”

“ Halford; my health is much better than when I left home."
Yet the efforts of the young people to regain their accustomed ease signally failed. Mary was confused and agitated by Henry Halford's presence in that locality, and he from his eager anxiety to account for it.
He turned to cousin Sarah, and plunged at once into the object of his visit.
"When I had the pleasure of meeting you, Mrs. Armstrong, last summer," he said, "you kindly expressed a hope that I would visit you at Meadow Farm. I travelled yesterday in the train with Mr. ”

“ Sir Henry, after graduating from Oxford, secured an advantageous social position for himself by his marriage to the daughter of Lord St. John of Bletsoe. He inherited a large property on the death of Lady Denbigh, the widow of his [xiii] mother’s cousin, Sir Charles Halford, Bart., and by an act of Parliament, in 1809, changed his name from Vaughan to Halford. In the subsequent year he was made a baronet. He attended in a professional capacity George III, George IV and Queen Victoria, and after the death of Matthew Baillie, he had the largest and most fashionable practice in London. ”

“ He had lived among all manner of peoples. He had ridden everything ridable, shot everything shootable, climbed everything climbable, and satisfied himself, as he said, that the world was too small for any particular use. At the end of his travels he had a little of his fortune left, a vast amount of experience, the constitution of a red Indian, and a vocabulary so vast and so peculiar that it stunned and fascinated the stranger. Halford was a New York lawyer, gray, clean-shaven, and sharp of feature. ”

“ Halford felt would be beyond his means, and the young man's wish to enter the Church was therefore set aside, causing him great disappointment. Ultimately he was engaged as tutor to the youth already spoken of, and while with him in that capacity became acquainted with the governess of his sisters, Clara Marston, whom he afterwards married. At the death of his father a small but unexpected amount of money fell into his hands. He almost immediately relinquished his engagement with the son of Lord Rivers, and took a house at Bayswater. ”

“ There were twenty-six revivals of Part I in America in the eighteenth century, but apparently none of Part II. In the nineteenth century the American comedian, James H. Hackett, played the part of Falstaff almost annually from 1830 to 1870, in both England and America, but it was the Falstaff of Part I and of The Merry Wives. In 1895-1896 Miss Julia Marlowe played the part of Prince Hal in an abridged version of the two parts of the play; and in 1896-1897 Daly planned a revival which never got beyond rehearsal. Miss Ada Rehan was to play Prince Hal, and James Lewis, Falstaff. ”

“ I would that we were at Soria Moria Castle.’
When Halvor awoke he knew that he had lost the Princesses, and began to weep and lament, and was so unhappy that he could not be comforted. In spite of all his father’s and mother’s entreaties, he would not stay, but bade them farewell, saying that he would never see them more, for if he did not find the Princess again he did not think it worth while to live.
He again had three hundred dollars, which he put into his pocket and went on his way. When he had walked some distance he met a man with a tolerably good horse. ”

“ FALSTAFF.
Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal, ’tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.
Enter Poins.
Poins!—Now shall we know if Gadshill have set a match. O, if men were to be saved by merit, what hole in hell were hot enough for him? This is the most omnipotent villain that ever cried “Stand!” to a true man.
PRINCE.
Good morrow, Ned.
POINS.
Good morrow, sweet Hal.—What says Monsieur Remorse? What says Sir John Sack-and-sugar? Jack, how agrees the devil and thee about thy soul, that thou soldest him on Good Friday last for a cup of Madeira and a cold capon’s leg? ”

“ But this is a mere idle tale of the heathen people.
And Halfred grew, and was strong and beautiful. He sat often alone on the cliffs, and listened how the wind played in rifts in the crags, and he would fain have tuned his harp to the same strain, and because he could not do it he was filled with fury.
And when this fury swept over his forehead the veins in his temples swelled, and there came a red darkness before his eyes. And then his arm sometimes did that whereof his head knew nothing. ”

“ Halvor wouldn't hear of it—he wanted to stop; but the old couple stuck to their own, that he had better go to the farmer's; there he would get both meat and drink; as for them, they hadn't even a chair to offer him to sit down on.
"No," said Halvor, "I won't go up there till to-morrow early, but let me just stay here to-night; worst come to the worst, I can sit in the chimney corner."
Well, they couldn't say anything against that; so Halvor sat down by the ingle, and began to poke about in the ashes, just as he used to do when he lay at home in old days, and stretched his lazy bones. ”

“ There was an excellent division on Terceira about 2-1/2 to 1. Hardinge was not wanted.
April 30.
Cabinet. The King very ill yesterday. The least exertion brings on an attack. Halford thinks he has water in the abdomen and chest. He had some sleep, and was better in the morning when they issued the bulletin, which says his symptoms were alleviated. However, the bulletin so little corresponds with his real state that they think he saw it. It seems to be now more an affair of days than of weeks. It may happen at any moment. ”

“ Halfred dreaded that he might terrify the gentle harper if he stepped suddenly out of the thicket before him.
Therefore he called to him first, from a distance, in a soft voice, slowly drawing nearer.
"Hail, gentle boy! If thou art mortal, may the Gods be gracious to thee. If thou art thyself a God, or as I surmise one of the light elves, then be not ungracious to me, a mortal man." ”

“ Harold would be a respectable production for a writer who had spent his career in producing the same sort of thing, but it is a somewhat graceless anomaly in the record of a poet whose verse has, in a large degree, become part of the civilisation of his day.
Queen Mary was not, on the whole, pronounced a success, and Harold, roughly speaking, is to Queen Mary what that work is to the author's earlier masterpieces. Harold is not in the least bad: it contains nothing ridiculous, unreasonable, or disagreeable; it is only decidedly weak, decidedly colourless, and tame. ”

“ If there had been anything less than the happiness of a lifetime at stake, I think I should have felt that I owed Harold a sort of reparation for thinking him too great a man, and should still have offered him an affection none the less genuine for being transposed into a minor key. ”

“ All of which is very uncomfortable, and I daresay will be worse at Hyères. There, however, fortunately, we shall have our own people.
There are some very odd Americans here who keep throwing Harold into fits of laughter. One’s a dreadful little man whom indeed he also wants to kick and who’s always sitting over the fire and talking about the colour of the sky. I don’t believe he ever saw the sky except through the window-pane. The other day he took hold of my frock—that green one you thought so nice at Homburg—and told me that it reminded him of the texture of the Devonshire turf. ”

“ I have never been especially fond of my own possessions, and I have learned that if I wish to admire a thing in peace, I must remain at a respectful distance. My happiness in Harold's affection reached its climax too suddenly, and before I knew it I found myself wondering, questioning, and doubting. It was no fault of his, certainly, and he had promised me nothing that he was not ready to bestow. ”

“ Prince Hal never made such sport of Falstaff’s person as he himself did. It is he who says that his skin hangs about him like an old lady’s loose gown, and that he walks before his page like a sow that hath o’erwhelmed all her litter but one. And he jests at himself when he is alone just as much as when others are by. ”

“ And although Halfred was very weary, and had many followers with him, he sent them all nevertheless alone to the hall, took the child himself upon his shoulder, and travelled many stages further, always tracking the tiny footprints of the little maiden, who had fallen fast asleep, until he found her mother's cottage. ”

“ And Halfred landed upon the small rocky island; he found a fitting bay, and drew his boat high up upon the white sand of the shore.
And then there came floating to him on the air something which was strange and yet well known to him. Only under the golden stars of Greece and Rome had he ever heretofore enjoyed the intoxication of such fragrance.
There is, that is to say, a flower of the delicate hue of a maiden's cheek, "Rosa" the Latins call it, and its fragrance is as the kiss of pure maiden lips. ”

“ But, Hal, I prithee trouble me no more with vanity. I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought. An old lord of the Council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir, but I mark'd him not; and yet he talked very wisely, but I regarded him not; and yet he talk'd wisely, and in the street too. Prince. Thou didst well; for wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it. Fal. O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal- God forgive thee for it! ”

“ In his early days at Houghton, Halford went to John Hammond's shop in Winchester just before the opening of the 1879 fishing season to buy flies, and there met, and was introduced by the rubicund John to, a tall, not to say gaunt, gentleman, who was the most famous of the Hampshire trout fishers, none other than Marryat himself. This was the beginning of a close, life-long friendship between the two men. Halford was at all times most grateful to any helper, and never failed freely to acknowledge assistance received. ”

“ It occurred to me more than once, with a kind of dull dismay, in the midst of my placid expectancy, that Harold's grave notes were the beginning and the end of his character. If the human heart were a less incurable skeptic, I might have been divinely happy. I sat by my lover's side while he worked, gazing at the loveliest landscape in the world, and admiring the imperturbable audacity with which he attacked it. Sooner than I expected, these rather silent interviews, as romantic certainly as scenery could make them, received Mrs. Staines's sanction. ”

“ He journeyed on and journeyed on, and after a while he came to a deep, dark forest. There was no house in sight, and as it was almost night Halvor began to be afraid he would have to sleep on the ground, with only the trees overhead for a shelter.
Presently, however, he heard the sound of a woodcutter’s axe. He followed the sound, and soon he came to an opening in the forest. There, sure enough, was a man hard at work cutting down trees. “And wherever there’s a man,” thought Halvor to himself, “there must be a house for him to live in.” ”

“ You know Harold came here six weeks ago, to get up his French for those dreadful examinations that he has to pass so soon. He came to live with some French people that take in young men (and others) for this purpose; it’s a kind of coaching place, only kept by women. Mamma had heard it was very nice; so she wrote to me that I was to come and stop here with Harold. The Desmonds brought me and made the arrangement, or the bargain, or whatever you call it. Poor Harold was naturally not at all pleased ”

“ And then, since not a breeze was stirring, they lay there, and Halvor begged the master mariner for permission to go ashore, and look around, for he would rather do that than lie down and sleep. “Do you think you are fit to appear before people?” asked [280] the master mariner. “The only clothes you have are the rags in which you stand and walk!” Yet Halvor insisted, and finally he was given permission. But he was to come back when the wind blew up. Halvor went, and it was a fair land. No matter where he came, there were great plains, with fields and pastures; but he saw no people at all. ”