PENRUDDOCKE. CHAPTER I. AFTER a long interval, and much deliberation, I am resolved to write a record of my very early life. This memoir will stop at my twenty-fourth year, after which there has occurred nothing in my monotonous existence (as some would call it) which the world would care to hear. But will it care to hear that which I am minded to tell? Has it not had a surfeit of autobiographies, with all their maudlin introspection, their insufferable egotism and self-analysis? Can it be edified by learning aught of my career? I, who am neither scholar nor deep thinker? not in any sense, I fear, as these pages will show, a wise or very good man? Yes: I may be deceiving myself; but I believe the confession of folly and error may be useful to some, perhaps not wholly uninteresting to any; and this is one reason why I write. But there is another. my closest friends, are now, for the first time, laid bare. But these memoirs will not be published until one who plays a prominent part in them is no more. I will not wound the living; but why should the dead fear the truth? What reck they who are gone to their last account, that the world knows and judges their misdeeds? I am well aware that I shall be blamed: the step I am taking will be regarded as unnecessary by some, as reprehensible by others; but such considerations as these have never influenced me. When I have once decided that a certain course is justifiable, the opinion of no man living would turn me from it. I was born on the last day of June, 1835, at Beaumanoir, my father, Mr. Penruddocke's, house in Dorsetshire. He and my mother, Lady Rachel, had been married four years at that time; and their only other child, Raymond, was three years my senior. No two boys were ever more dissimilar. My brother was pale, weakly, and beautiful; I was no beauty, but ruddy and robust. All his tastes were sedentary; all mine active. He had a remarkable capacity for learning; I was incorrigibly idle, and could hardly read at nine years old. But I knew every fox-covert and every Do you know the game of "Russian Scandal?" where ever-increasing inexactitude transforms a story which is passed from mouth to mouth into something which bears but the faintest resemblance to the original statement? I defy the rollingstone of gossip to gather more mud in St. Petersburg than it does in London; and Irabbit-hole on the estate; while Raymond have suffered as much as any man thereby. Certain passages in my life, grossly distorted, were bruited abroad long ago. Upon a substratum of fact, stories affecting the character of one person in particular were built up. To clear these away is one of my objects in the narrative I now undertake. The secret springs that set in motion much that seemed inexplicable, even to could never be persuaded to mount a pony, and shrank from the report of a gun. My mother loved her first-born better than any thing in this world: but her affections were supposed to be chiefly ab * I have been careful to alter the names of peo ple and places, so that only the actors themselves will recognize the scenes in which they have played parts.-ED. |