The Bertrams (10 page)

It will be readily believed that George Bertram did not overstay the three months.

CHAPTER VI

JERUSALEM

B
UT
there was no quarrel between George Bertram uncle and George Bertram nephew: though in such conversations as they had about business they were not over civil to each other, still they went on together as good friends, at any rate as they ever had been. Indeed, after the last scene which has been reported, the old man became more courteous to his nephew, and before the three months were over was almost cordial.

There was that about George the younger which made the old uncle respect him, despite himself. The London merchant had a thorough contempt for his brother, the soldier of fortune: he had acted as he had done on behalf of that brother's son almost more with the view of showing his contempt, and getting thereby an opportunity for expressing it, than with any fixed idea of doing a kindness. He had counted also on despising the son as he had despised the father; but here he found himself foiled. George had taken all that he had given, as any youth would take what an uncle gave; but he
had never asked for more: he had done as well as it was possible for him to do in that line of education which had been tendered to him; and now, though he would not become an attorney or a merchant, was prepared to earn his own bread, and professed that he was able to support himself without further assistance from any one.

Before the three months were over, his uncle had more than once asked him to prolong his visit; but George had made up his mind to leave Hadley. His purpose was to spend three or four months in going out to his father, and then to settle in London. In the meantime, he employed himself with studying the law of nations, and amused his leisure hours with Coke and Blackstone.

"You'll never find your father," said Mr. Bertram.

"At any rate, I'll try; and if I miss him, I shall see something of the world."

"You'll see more in London in three months than you will there in twelve; and, moreover, you would not lose your time."

But George was inexorable, and before the three months were over he had started on his trip.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. George," said Mr. Pritchett to him the day before he went (his uncle had requested him to call on Pritchett in the city)—"I beg your pardon, Mr. George, but if I may be allowed to speak a word or so, I do hope you'll write a line now and then to the old gentleman while you are away."

Now George had never written a line to his
uncle in his life; all his communications as to his journeys and proposed arrivals had, by his uncle's special direction, been made to the housekeeper, and he had no present intention of commencing a correspondence.

"Write to him, Mr. Pritchett! No, I don't suppose I shall. I take it, my uncle does not much care for such letters as I should write."

"Ah! but he would, Mr. George. You shouldn't be too quick to take persons by their appearances. It's half a million of money, you know, Mr. George; half—a—million—of—money!" And Mr. Pritchett put great stress on the numeration of his patron's presumed wealth.

"Half a million, is it? Well, that's a great deal, no doubt; and I fully see the force of your excellent argument. But I fear there is nothing to be done in that line: I'm not born to be the heir to half a million of money; you might see that in my face."

Mr. Pritchett stared at him very hard. "Well, I can't say that I do, Mr. George; but take my word for it, the old gentleman is very fond of you."

"Very fond! That's a little too strong, isn't it?"

"That is, if he's very fond of anything. Now, he said to me yesterday, 'Pritchett,' says he, 'that boy's going to Bagdad.' 'What! Mr. George?' says I. 'Yes,' says he; 'and to Hong Kong too, I suppose, before he comes back: he's going after his father;' and then he gave one of those bitter looks, you know. 'That's a pity,' says I, for you know one must
humour him. 'He is a fool,' says your uncle, 'and always will be.'"

"I'm sure, Mr. Pritchett, I'm very much obliged for the trouble you are at in telling me."

"Oh! I think nothing of the trouble. 'And he knows no more about money,' says your uncle, 'than an ostrich. He can't go to Bagdad out of his allowance.' 'Of course he can't,' said I. 'You had better put three hundred pounds to his credit,' said the old gentleman; and so, Mr. George, I have."

"I could have done very well without it, Mr. Pritchett."

"Perhaps so; but three hundred pounds never hurt anybody—never, Mr. George; and I can tell you this: if you play your cards well, you may be the old gentleman's heir, in spite of all he says to the contrary."

"At any rate, Mr. Pritchett, I'm very much obliged to you:" and so they parted.

"He'll throw that three hundred pounds in my teeth the next time I see him," said George to himself.

Good as Mr. Pritchett's advice undoubtedly was, Bertram did not take it; and his uncle received no line from him during the whole period of his absence. Our hero's search after his father was not quite of so intricate a nature as was supposed by his uncle, nor so difficult as that made by Japhet under similar circumstances. His route was to be by Paris, Marseilles, Malta, Alexandria, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Damascus, and he had written to Sir Lionel, requesting him to write to either or all of those
addresses. Neither in France, nor Malta, nor Egypt did he receive any letters; but in the little town of Jaffa, where he first put his foot on Asiatic soil, a despatch from his father was awaiting him. Sir Lionel was about to leave Persia, and was proceeding to Constantinople on public service; but he would go out of his course to meet his son at Jerusalem.

The tone of Sir Lionel's letter was very unlike that of Mr. Bertram's conversation. He heartily congratulated his son on the splendid success of his degree; predicted for him a future career both brilliant and rich; declared that it was the dearest wish of his heart to embrace his son, and spoke of their spending a few weeks together at Jerusalem almost with rapture.

This letter very much delighted George. He had a natural anxiety to think well of his father, and had not altogether believed the evil that had been rather hinted than spoken of him by Mr. Bertram. The colonel had certainly not hitherto paid him very much parental attention, and had generally omitted to answer the few letters which George had written to him. But a son is not ill inclined to accept acts of new grace from a father; and there was something so delightful in the tone and manner of Sir Lionel's letter, it was so friendly as well as affectionate, so perfectly devoid of the dull, monotonous, lecture-giving asperity with which ordinary fathers too often season their ordinary epistles, that he was in raptures with his newly found correspondent.

"I would not miss seeing you for worlds," wrote Sir Lionel; "and although I have been ordered to Constantinople with all the
immediate
haste
which your civil-service grandees always use in addressing us military slaves, it shall go hard with me but I will steal a fortnight from them in order to pass it with you at Jerusalem. I suppose I shall scarce know you, or you me; but when you see an old gentleman in a military frock, with a bald head, a hook nose, and a rather short allowance of teeth, you may then be sure that you look upon your father. However, I will be at Z——'s Hotel—I believe they honour the caravansary with that name—as soon as possible after the 14th."

His uncle had at any rate been quite wrong in predicting that his father would keep out of his way. So far was this from being the case, that Sir Lionel was going to put himself to considerable inconvenience to meet him. It might be, and no doubt was the case, that Mr. Bertram the merchant had put together a great deal more money than Colonel Bertram the soldier; but the putting together of money was no virtue in George's eyes; and if Sir Lionel had not remitted a portion of his pay as regularly as he perhaps should have done, that should not now be counted as a vice. It may perhaps be surmised that had George Bertram suffered much in consequence of his father's negligence in remitting, he might have been disposed to look at the matter in a different light.

He had brought but one servant with him, a dragoman whom he had picked up at Malta, and with him he started on his ride from the city of oranges. Oranges grow plentifully enough in Spain, in Malta, in Egypt, in Jamaica, and other places, but within five miles of Jaffa
nothing else is grown—if we except the hedges of prickly pear which divide the gardens. Orange garden succeeds to orange garden till one finds oneself on the broad open desert that leads away to Jerusalem.

There is something enticing to an Englishman in the idea of riding off through the desert with a pistol girt about his waist, a portmanteau strapped on one horse before him, and an only attendant seated on another behind him. There is a
soupçon
of danger in the journey just sufficient to give it excitement; and then it is so un-English, oriental, and inconvenient; so opposed to the accustomed haste and comfort of a railway; so out of his hitherto beaten way of life, that he is delighted to get into the saddle. But it may be a question whether he is not generally more delighted to get out of it; particularly if that saddle be a Turkish one.

George had heard of Arab horses, and the clouds of dust which rise from their winged feet. When first he got beyond the hedges of the orange gardens, he expected to gallop forth till he found himself beneath the walls of Jerusalem. But he had before him many an hour of tedious labour ere those walls were seen. His pace was about four miles an hour. During the early day he strove frequently to mend it; but as the sun became hot in the heavens, his efforts after speed were gradually reduced, and long before evening he had begun to think that Jerusalem was a myth, his dragoman an impostor, and his Arab steed the sorriest of jades.

"It is the longest journey I ever took in my life," said George.

"Longest; yes. A top of two mountain more, and two go-down, and then there; yes," said the dragoman, among whose various accomplishments that of speaking English could hardly be reckoned as the most prominent.

At last the two mountains more and the two go-downs were performed, and George was informed that the wall he saw rising sharp from the rocky ground was Jerusalem. There is something very peculiar in the first appearance of a walled city that has no suburbs or extramural adjuncts. It is like that of a fortress of cards built craftily on a table. With us in England it is always difficult to say where the country ends and where the town begins; and even with the walled towns of the Continent, one rarely comes upon them so as to see the sharp angles of a grey stone wall shining in the sun, as they do in the old pictures of the cities in "Pilgrim's Progress."

But so it is with Jerusalem. One rides up to the gate feeling that one is still in the desert; and yet a moment more, with the permission of those very dirty-looking Turkish soldiers at the gate, will place one in the city. One rides up to the gate, and as every one now has a matured opinion as to the taking of casemated batteries and the inefficiency of granite bastions, one's first idea is how delightfully easy it would be to take Jerusalem. It is at any rate easy enough to enter it, for the dirty Turkish soldiers do not even look at you, and you soon become pleasantly aware that you are beyond the region of passports.

George Bertram had promised himself that the moment in which he first saw Jerusalem should be one of intense mental interest; and when, riding away from the orange gardens at Jaffa, he had endeavoured to urge his Arab steed into that enduring gallop which was to carry him up to the city of the sepulchre, his heart was ready to melt into ecstatic pathos as soon as that gallop should have been achieved. But the time for ecstatic pathos had altogether passed away before he rode in at that portal. He was then swearing vehemently at his floundering jade, and giving up to all the fiends of Tartarus the accursed saddle which had been specially contrived with the view of lacerating the nether Christian man.

"Where on earth is that d——hotel?" said he, when he and his dragoman and portmanteau had been floundering for about five minutes down a steep, narrow, ill-paved lane, with a half-formed gully in the middle, very slippery with orange-peel and old vegetables, and crowded with the turbans of all the Eastern races. "Do you call this a street?" After all his sentiment, all his emotions, all his pious resolves, it was thus that our hero entered Jerusalem! But what piety can withstand the wear and tear of twelve hours in a Turkish saddle?

"Is this a street?" said he. It was the main street in Jerusalem. The first, or among the first in grandeur of those sacred ways which he had intended hardly to venture to pass with shoes on his feet. His horse turning a corner as he followed the dragoman again slipped and
almost fell. Whereupon Bertram again cursed. But then he was not only tired and sore, but very hungry also. Our finer emotions should always be encouraged with a stomach moderately full.

At last they stopped at a door in a wall, which the dragoman pronounced to be the entrance of Z——'s Hotel. In fact they had not yet been full ten minutes within the town; but the streets certainly were not well paved. In five minutes more George was in his room, strewing sofas and chairs with the contents of his portmanteau, and inquiring with much energy what was the hour fixed for the table d'hôte. He found, with much inward satisfaction, that he had just twenty minutes to prepare himself. At Jerusalem, as elsewhere, these after all are the traveller's first main questions. When is the table d'hôte? Where is the cathedral? At what hour does the train start tomorrow morning? It will be some years yet, but not very many, before the latter question is asked at Jerusalem.

Bertram had arrived about a fortnight before Easter, and the town was already full of pilgrims, congregated for that ceremony, and of English and Americans who had come to look at the pilgrims.

The inn was nearly full, and George, when he entered the public room, heard such a Babel of English voices, and such a clatter of English spoons, that he might have fancied himself at the top of the
Righi
or in a Rhine steamboat. But the subjects under discussion all savoured of the Holy Land.