William Farquhar

“ A vivid flush overspread the fair face. “It is quite true, I love somebody else.”
“The man you were dining with, Guy Rossett?” replied Farquhar quietly.
“Ah, you have guessed! But it is quite a secret. My father knows. His sister knows. His father is obstinate and prejudiced; he wants him to marry a woman in his own world. We are waiting for his consent.”
“I quite understand,” said Farquhar gloomily. “I am too late, I can see. Honestly, Isobel, had I asked you, say, a year ago, would your answer have been different?”
Her frank and candid gaze met his steadfast glance. ”

“ The telltale pink stained her cheeks. "You take that for granted, do you?"
"It's true, I believe. How can I make love to you as other men do? Lady Farquhar won't let me see you alone—even if you were willing to give me a chance. In two days you are going out of my life. I must speak the truth ... bluntly. I love you. It has been that way with me ever since you came into my life again, little Moya. ”

“ She pointed at the slumbering figure of Lord Saxham. “My father has plenty of brains; if he had worked, he might have been Prime Minister, or very near it. In the Rossett family, there is a certain amount of grit, but not quite enough to bring them to the foremost place.”
Farquhar leaned across the table. This was certainly one of the most charming women he had ever met.
“I say, Lady Mary, what a pity you are not a man. If you had been, I am sure you would have put the Rossett family in their right place.” He cast a cautious glance at the still slumbering host. ”

“ Almost rudely she rejected his gratitude.
"The man does not owe me anything. Can't he see that honors are easy?" she said impatiently to Lady Farquhar.
Jack Kilmeny was no quitter. He set that lean jaw of his and would not accept repulse. In four days now the Farquhar party was going to leave Goldbanks and he made the most of his time.
Moya never saw him coming toward her without having her pulses stirred, but her look met his always quietly and steadily. Not once did she give him a chance to see her alone. ”

“ Frank Farquhar isn’t a fool, and I admire him for that. I’m to blame for the whole thing,” he added with a bitter imprecation, “because I’m a coward and fear nowadays to face the music. Yes,” he went on, “Red Mullet is in fear of his enemies! It’s no good denying it. Hitherto he’s always defied them, even at the muzzle of a gun! ”

“ Frank Farquhar was a rising man, the adopted candidate for a Yorkshire borough, while from his interest in Sir George Gavin’s successful publications he derived a very handsome income for a man of his years. ”

“ Surely you could have helped yourself?” said Farquhar.
“Never care to drink alone, old man. By the way, I see you are in evening togs. Have you been dining with the aristocracy?”
“You’ve just hit it,” replied Farquhar, as he went to the sideboard and fetched out a decanter of whiskey. “I have been dining in Belgrave Square with the Earl of Saxham and his daughter. Lady Mary Rossett.”
“Good heavens, this might be called a coincidence,” cried Moreno, as he drained the refreshing draught offered to him.
Farquhar was rather impatient at any exhibition of humour. He frowned a little. ”

“ India wondered how Lady Jim would dispose of the party. Jack Kilmeny might be a criminal, but he happened to be their cousin. It would hardly do to send him to the servants' quarters to eat. And where he ate the sheriff and his posse would likewise have to dine.
The young woman need not have concerned herself. Lady Farquhar knew enough of the West and its ways not to make a mistake. ”

“ I shall see my man in the morning, and I feel sure that if I put the problem before him he’ll be able, before long, to give us some tangible solution,” was Frank’s reply. “When I act, I act promptly, you know.”
The Doctor was undecided. He knew quite well that young Farquhar was acquainted with all sorts of writers and scholars, and that possibly among them were men who were experts in Hebrew, and in the history of the House of Israel.
He reflected. If the young man were content with fifteen per cent, what had he further to fear? ”

“ It's the child's one great chance for happiness. But I wish to the deuce he wasn't a highgrader."
"She shan't sacrifice herself if I can prevent it," Lady Farquhar insisted stanchly.
"I 'member a girl who sacrificed herself for a line lieutenant without a shilling to call his own," he soliloquized aloud. "Would have him, and did, by Jove! Three deaths made him Lord Farquhar later, but she married the penniless subaltern."
"I've always been glad I did." She squeezed his arm fondly. "But this is different, James."
Kilmeny and Moya stopped. The young man doffed his gray felt hat and bowed. ”

“ We are very anxious about Guy. Greatorex will tell us nothing, my father has been to him this morning, and he keeps his mouth shut. We hear nothing from Guy, of course, he does not wish to alarm us. Isobel writes short, chatty letters; naturally Guy does not tell her anything; she knows no more than we do. The question is, Mr Farquhar, do you know anything? You can easily understand how anxious we are.”
Farquhar smoked on steadily. It was some time before he spoke. Lord Saxham was now slumbering peacefully after his heavy dinner and his third glass of port. ”

“ Without warning, a line of steel corselets and morions, flashing in the radiance, started forward from the Madre de Dios, started, rolled on, and rose to the bulwark as a silver wave rises in the moonlight, superb, brilliant, invincible, vaunting itself before the sable shore. ”

“ Guy clasped her in his arms. “You darling! And where is Mr Farquhar? I would like to thank him.”
Isobel beckoned to a man standing a little way in the shadow. He advanced.
“Maurice, Guy wishes to thank you for all your share in this night’s work.”
The two men exchanged a cordial handshake. Guy muttered his thanks.
“I would like to tell you to drive off straight away,” said Farquhar. “But you must wait a minute or two. There will be a third occupant of this vehicle—our friend Moreno, who is going to pass the night at the house of the Chief of Police. To-morrow he will go to England.” ”

“ Occasionally a gleam of distant lightning shot through chinks in the hovel wall, straight across Vytal’s face, as, deep in thought, he sat beside the table. A tempestuous wind, shrieking like a shrew in heated brawl, seemed bent on extinguishing a cresset which had been thrust between the logs, but succeeded only in causing the light to flare uncertainly, as though the torch were being brandished aloft by an unseen hand. ”

“ Tall and erect as a naked fir-tree the man stood on the top deck in the stern—still stood when night came and there was not even a melting horizon to hold his gaze—still stood as though to turn would be to wake forever from a vision beside which all things actual must seem unreal. ”

“ For many minutes after he had gone, Marlowe stood looking into the shrouds, but at last, as though their shadows palled on his buoyant spirit, he wandered along the deck, singing to himself a song of genuine good cheer. And soon, to his delight, the notes of a musical instrument, coming from somewhere amidships, half accompanied his tune. Eagerly he sought the player, and came on a scene that pleased him. For there against the bulwark sat a stout vagabond cross-legged on the deck, strumming merrily on a cittern, as though rapidity of movement were the sole desire of his heart. ”

“ In the evening one of these soldiers stood alone on the Admiral’s high stern, a motionless figure, clean-cut against the sky. His eyes, blue like the deep sea, looked back toward the receding coastline, fixed on the dissolving land with a resigned fatality and regret.
With the sun, westward, the two ships went down slowly over the horizon, leaving England a memory behind—a memory, yet very real, while the haven, far ahead, somewhere beneath the crimson sky, seemed but a dream that could not shape itself—a dream, a picture, bright, alluring, undetailed, like the golden painting of the sun. ”

“ His brow, lofty but not massive, was surmounted by silken hair so black as to appear almost purple in the sunlight. He wore no beard, a small mustache adding to the refinement of his features, save for the fulness of his lips, which it could not hide. Taken as a whole, his face was the face of a man who had no common destiny; of a man who would drain the cup and leave no dregs, be the draught life-elixir or poison; of a man, in short, who might all but transcend his humanity by the fulness of life within him, or be suffocated and overwhelmed by the very superabundance of that life. ”

“ Farquhar describes himself in the ‘Miscellanies,’ insisting chiefly upon his easy-going and diffident temperament, and asserting that he is habitually melancholy, ‘very splenetic, and yet very amorous.’ Such self-portraiture is not very trustworthy. As he appears in his work he is the most attractive, as he is the last, of the school generally associated with Congreve: full of real gaiety, and a gentleman in spite of recklessness and an affectation of the fashionable tone of morals. Without the keen wit or the sardonic force of his rivals, he has more genuine high spirits and good nature. ”

“ In this laughing affectionate apprehension [135] of the local and the temporal lies Farquhar’s whole strength or weakness. From the poets of the Restoration there escapes, most incongruously, now and then, something which betokens a sense of natural beauty, or even a recognition of the divine law; but Farquhar is not a poet, and this spray from the deeps is not in him. He perceives nothing that is not, and opens no crack or chink where the fancy can air itself for a moment and
—“step grandly out into the infinite.” ”

“ If he was not a man of the highest genius, he seems to have had excellent moral qualities, of which his behaviour to his wife and tenderness to his children are proofs, and deserved a better fate than to die oppressed with want, and under the calamitous apprehensions of leaving his family destitute: While Farquhar will ever be remembered with pleasure by people of taste, the name of the courtier who thus inhumanly ruined him, will be for ever dedicated to infamy. ”

“ In love, and marriage, his enterprises were still more unhappily terminated.—And merely as an author, and a soldier, can any events of his life be accounted prosperous.
As a dramatic writer, Farquhar was eminently successful; and in his military capacity, he was ever honoured and beloved—whether fighting with a great army in Flanders, or recruiting with a small party in Shropshire. ”

“ There is no idealism about him. He is very fit for repentance next morning. "The searching Wine has sprung the Rheumatism in my Right Hand, my Head aches, my Stomach pukes." Our poor, good-humoured beau has no constitution for this mode of life, and we know, though happily he dreams not of it, that he is to die before he reaches thirty.
This picture of Farquhar's life is nowhere given in the form just related, but not one touch in the portrait but is to be found somewhere in the frank and easy pages of Love and Business. The poems are of their age and kind. ”

“ Arch. Ha! ha! ha! now comes my turn to be ravished. —You see now, madam, you must use men one way or other; but take this by the way; good madam, that none but a fool will give you the benefit of his courage, unless you'll take his love along with it. —How are they armed, friend?
Scrub. With sword and pistol, sir.
Arch. Hush!—I see a dark lantern coming through the gallery—Madam, be assured I will protect you, or lose my life.
Mrs. Sul. Your life! no, sir, they can rob me of nothing that I value half so much; therefore now, sir, let me entreat you to be gone. ”

“ About 1703 Farquhar married. The story is that a lady fell in love with him, and won him for her husband by professing to be an heiress. It is further stated that upon discovering the trick he never upbraided her, and always treated her with the utmost kindness. In 1704 he visited Dublin and appeared as Sir Harry Wildair at his own benefit. He failed as an actor, but cleared 100l. He continued to produce plays, the most successful being the ‘Recruiting Officer,’ which was performed in 1706, and his ‘last and best,’ ‘The Beaux' Stratagem,’ in 1707. ”

“ One day Farquhar walked up and down before king's house (N'daol dubh, vis a' chnaumh gheal) . "The black beetle to the white bone," he cried out. The people looked at him, and said that the strange man of the Reay country was through other (mad) . The next day Farquhar stood at the gate, and cried, "The black beetle to the white bone." And the king sent to know who it was that cried outside, and what was his business. "The man," they said, "was a stranger, and men called him the physician." So the king, who was wild with pain, said to call him in, and Farquhar stood before the king and aye. ”

“ The pathos of his early death has given him a fame of its own. He wrote seven plays, the best of which are the last two, viz., The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) .
Farquhar comes late among the Restoration dramatists, and by this time the cynical immorality of the age seems [206] to have worn thin. His temper is certainly more genial, and his wit, though it has lapses, is more decorous. The Beaux’ Stratagem (see pp. 225–6) is a lively and ingenious comedy with a cleverly engineered plot. ”

“ Captain George Farquhar, in 1702, was four-and-twenty years of age. He was a smart, soldier-like Irishman, of "a splenetic and amorous complexion," half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a very honest and gallant gentleman. He had taken to the stage kindly enough, and at twenty-one had written Love and a Bottle. Since then, two other plays, The Constant Couple and Sir Harry Wildair, had proved that he had wit and fancy, and knew how to knit them together into a rattling comedy. ”