"Indeed, my dear, you must take it. You certainly _have_ caught cold:
you sneezed three times together."
"Yes, ma'am, because I would take a pinch of Uncle Roland's snuff,
just to say that I _had_ taken a pinch out of his box--the honour of
the thing, you know."
"Ah, my dear! what was that very clever remark you made at the same
time which so pleased your father--something about Jews and the
college?"
"Jews and--oh! '_pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat_,' my dear
mother--which means, that it is a pleasure to take a pinch out of a
brave man's snuff-box. I say, mother, put down the posset. Yes, I'll
take it; I will, indeed. Now, then, sit here--that's right--and tell
me all you know about this famous old Captain. Imprimis, he is older
than my father?"
"To be sure!" exclaimed my mother indignantly; "he looks twenty years
older; but there is only five years' real difference. Your father must
always look young."
"And why does Uncle Roland put that absurd French _de_ before his
name--and why were my father and he not good friends--and is he
married--and has he any children?"
Scene of this conference--my own little room, new papered on purpose
for my return _for good_--trellis-work paper, flowers and birds--all
so fresh, and so new, and so clean, and so gay--with my books ranged
in neat shelves, and a writing-table by the window; and, without the
window, shines the still summer moon. The window is a little open; you
scent the flowers and new-mown hay. Past eleven; and the boy and his
dear mother are all alone.
"My dear, my dear! you ask so many questions at once."
"Don't answer them then. Begin at the beginning, as Nurse Primmins
does with her fairy tales--'Once on a time.'"
"Once on a time, then," said my mother--kissing me between the
eyes--"once on a time, my love, there was a certain clergyman in
Cumberland, who had two sons; he had but a small living, and the boys
were to make their own way in the world. But close to the parsonage,
on the brow of a hill, rose an old ruin, with one tower left, and
this, with half the county round it, had once belonged to the
clergyman's family; but all had been sold--all gone piece by piece,
you see, my dear, except the presentation to the living, (what they
call the advowson was sold too,) which had been secured to the last of
the family. The elder of these sons was your Uncle Roland, the younger
was your father. Now I believe the first quarrel arose from the
absurdest thing possible, as your father says; but Roland was
exceedingly touchy on all things connected with his ancestors. He was
always poring over the old pedigree, or wandering amongst the ruins,
or reading books of knight-errantry. Well, where this pedigree began I
know not, but it seems that King Henry II. gave some lands in
Cumberland to one Sir Adam de Caxton; and from that time, you see, the
pedigree went regularly from father to son till Henry V.; then,
apparently from the disorders, produced, as your father says, by the
wars of the Roses, there was a sad blank left--only one or two names,
without dates or marriages, till the time of Henry VII., except that
in the reign of Edward IV. there was one insertion of a William Caxton
(named in a deed.) Now in the village church there was a beautiful
brass monument to one Sir William de Caxton, who had been killed at
the battle of Bosworth, fighting for that wicked King Richard III. And
about the same time there lived, as you know, the great printer,
William Caxton. Well, your father, happening to be in town on a visit
to his aunt, took great trouble in hunting up all the old papers he
could find at the Heralds' College; and sure enough he was overjoyed
to satisfy himself that he was descended, not from that poor Sir
William, who had been killed in so bad a cause, but from the great
printer, who was from a younger branch of the same family, and to
whose descendants the estate came, in the reign of Henry VIII. It was
upon this that your Uncle Roland quarrelled with him; and, indeed, I
tremble to think that they may touch on that matter again."
"Then, my dear mother, I must say my uncle is wrong there, so far as
common-sense is concerned; but still, somehow or other, I can
understand it--surely this was not the only cause of estrangement!"
My mother looked down, and moved one hand gently over the other, which
was her way when embarrassed. "What was it, my own mother?" said I,
coaxingly.
"I believe--that is, I--I think that they were both attached to the
same young lady."
"How! you don't mean to say that my father was ever in love with any
one but you?"
"Yes, Sisty--yes, and deeply! and," added my mother after a slight
pause, and with a very low sigh, "he never was in love with me; and
what is more, he had the frankness to tell me so!"
"And yet you--"
"Married him--yes!" said my mother, raising the softest and purest
eyes that ever lover could have wished to read his fate in;--
"Yes, for the old love was hopeless. I knew that I could make him
happy. I knew that he would love me at last, and he does so! My son,
your father loves me!"
As she spoke, there came a blush as innocent as virgin ever knew, to
my mother's smooth cheek; and she looked so fair, so good, and still
so young, all the while, that you would have said that either Dusius,
the Teuton fiend, or Nock, the Scandinavian sea-imp, from whom the
learned assure us we derive our modern Daimones, "The Deuce" and Old
Nick, had indeed possessed my father, if he had not learned to love
such a creature.
I pressed her hand to my lips, but my heart was too full to speak for
a moment or so; and then I partially changed the subject.
"Well, and this rivalry estranged them more? And who was the lady?"
"Your father never told me, and I never asked," said my mother simply.
"But she was very different from me, I know. Very accomplished, very
beautiful, very high-born."
"For all that, my father was a lucky man to escape her. Pass on. What
did the Captain do?"
"Why, about that time your grandfather died, and shortly after an
aunt, on the mother's side, who was rich and saving, and unexpectedly
left them each sixteen thousand pounds. Your uncle, with his share,
bought back, at an enormous price, the old castle and some land round
it, which they say does not bring him in three hundred a-year. With
the little that remained, he purchased a commission in the army; and
the brothers met no more, till last week, when Roland suddenly
arrived."
"He did not marry this accomplished young lady?"
"No! but he married another, and is a widower."
"Why, he was as inconstant as my father; and I am sure without so good
an excuse. How was that?"
"I don't know. He says nothing about it."
"Has he any children?"
"Two; a son--by the bye, you must never speak about _him_. Your uncle
briefly said, when I asked him what was his family, 'a girl, ma'am. I
had a son, but,--'
'He is dead,' cried your father, in his kind pitying voice.
'Dead to me, brother,--and you will never mention his name!' You
should have seen how stern your uncle looked. I was terrified."
"But the girl,--why did not he bring her here?"
"She is still in France, but he talks of going over for her; and we
have half promised to visit them both in Cumberland.--But, bless me!
is that twelve? and the posset quite cold!"
"One word more, dearest mother--one word. My father's book--is he
still going on with it?"
"Oh yes, indeed!" cried my mother, clasping her hands; "and he must
read it to you, as he does to me--_you_ will understand it so well. I
have always been so anxious that the world should know him, and be
proud of him as we are,--so--so anxious!--for perhaps, Sisty, if he
had married that great lady, he would have roused himself, been more
ambitious--and I could only make him happy, I could not make him
great!"
"So he has listened to you at last?"
"To me!" said my mother, shaking her head and smiling gently: "No,
rather to your Uncle Jack,--who, I am happy to say, has at length got
a proper hold over him."
"A proper hold, my dear mother! Pray beware of Uncle Jack, or we shall
be all swept into a coal-mine, or explode with a grand national
company for making gunpowder out of tea-leaves!"
"Wicked child!" said my mother laughing; and then, as she took up her
candle and lingered a moment while I wound my watch, she said
musingly,--"Yet Jack is very, very clever,--and if for your sake we
_could_ make a fortune, Sisty!"
"You frighten me out of my wits, mother! You are not in earnest?"
"And if _my_ brother could be the means of raising _him_ in the
world"--
"Your brother would be enough to sink all the ships in the Channel,
ma'am," said I, quite irreverently. I was shocked, before the words
were well out of my mouth; and throwing my arms round my mother's
neck, I kissed away the pain I had inflicted.
When I was left alone and in my own little crib, in which my slumber
had ever been so soft and easy,--I might as well have been lying upon
cut straw. I tossed to and fro--I could not sleep. I rose, threw on my
dressing-gown, lighted my candle, and sat down by the table near the
window. First, I thought of the unfinished outline of my father's
youth, so suddenly sketched before me. I filled up the missing
colours, and fancied the picture explained all that had often
perplexed my conjectures. I comprehended, I suppose by some secret
sympathy in my own nature, (for experience in mankind could have
taught me little enough,) how an ardent, serious, inquiring
mind--struggling into passion under the load of knowledge, had, with
that stimulus sadly and abruptly withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of
passive, aimless study. I comprehended how, in the indolence of a
happy but unimpassioned marriage, with a companion so gentle, so
provident and watchful, yet so little formed to rouse, and task, and
fire an intellect naturally calm and meditative,--years upon years had
crept away in the learned idleness of a solitary scholar. I
comprehended, too, how gradually and slowly, as my father entered that
stage of middle life, when all men are most prone to ambition--the
long silenced whispers were heard again; and the mind at last escaping
from the listless weight which a baffled and disappointed heart had
laid upon it, saw once more, fair as in youth, the only true mistress
of Genius--Fame!
Oh! how I sympathised, too, in my mother's gentle triumph. How now,
looking over the past, I could see, year after year, how she had
stolen more and more into my father's heart of hearts,--how what had
been kindness had grown into love,--how custom and habit, and the
countless links in the sweet charities of home, had supplied that
sympathy with the genial man, which had been missed at first by the
lonely scholar.
Next I thought of the gray, eagle-eyed old soldier, with his ruined
tower and barren acres,--and saw before me his proud, prejudiced,
chivalrous boyhood, gliding through the ruins or poring over his
mouldy pedigree. And this son, so disowned,--for what dark
offence?--an awe crept over me. And this girl,--his ewe-lamb--his
all,--was she fair? had she blue eyes like my mother, or a high Roman
nose and beetle-brows like Captain Roland? I mused, and mused, and
mused,--and the candle went out--and the moonlight grew broader and
stiller; till at last I was sailing in a balloon with Uncle Jack, and
had just tumbled into the Red Sea--when the well-known voice of nurse
Primmins restored me to life, with a "God bless my heart! the boy has
not been in bed all this 'varsal night!"