Some weeks now have passed since my return to the Tower; the Castletons
are gone, and all Trevanion's gay guests. And since these departures,
visits between the two houses have been interchanged often, and the bonds
of intimacy are growing close. Twice has my father held long
conversations apart with Lady Ulverstone (my mother is not foolish enough
to feel a pang now at such confidences), and the result has become
apparent. Lady Ulverstone has ceased all talk against the world and the
public, ceased to fret the galled pride of her husband with irritating
sympathy. She has made herself the true partner of his present
occupations, as she was of those in the past; she takes interest in
farming, and gardens, and flowers, and those philosophical peaches which
come from trees academical that Sir William Temple reared in his graceful
retirement. She does more,--she sits by her husband's side in the
library, reads the books he reads, or if in Latin, coaxes him into
construing them. Insensibly she leads hire into studies farther and
farther remote from the Blue Books and Hansard; and taking my father's
hint,--
"Allures to brighter worlds, and leads the way."
They are inseparable. Darby-and-Joan-like, you see them together in the
library, the garden, or the homely little pony-phaeton for which Lord
Ulverstone has resigned the fasttrotting cob once identified with the
eager looks of the busy Trevanion. It is most touching, most beautiful!
And to think what a victory over herself the proud woman must have
obtained! Never a thought that seems to murmur, never a word to recall
the ambitious man back from the philosophy into which his active mind
flies for refuge. And with the effort her brow has become so serene!
That careworn expression which her fine features once wore, is fast
vanishing. And what affects me most, is to think that this change (which
is already settling into happiness) has been wrought by Austin's counsels
and appeals to her sense and affection. "It is to you," he said, "that
Trevanion must look for more than comfort,--for cheerfulness and
satisfaction. Your child is gone from you; the world ebbs away: you two
should be all in all to each other. Be so." Thus, after paths so
devious, meet those who have parted in youth, now on the verge of age,--
there, in the same scenes where Austin and Ellinor had first formed
acquaintance; he aiding her to soothe the wounds inflicted by the
ambition that had separated their lots, and both taking counsel to insure
the happiness of the rival she had preferred.
After all this vexed public life of toil and care and ambition, to see
Trevanion and Ellinor drawing closer and closer to each other, knowing
private life and its charms for the first time,--verily, it would have
been a theme for an elegiast like Tibullus.
But all this while a younger love, with no blurred leaves to erase from
the chronicle, has been keeping sweet account of the summer time. "Very
near are two hearts that have no guile between them," saith a proverb,
traced back to Confucius. O ye days of still sunshine, reflected back
from our selves! O ye haunts endeared evermore by a look, tone, or
smile, or rapt silence, when more and more with each hour unfolded before
me that nature, so tenderly coy, so cheerful though serious, so attuned
by simple cares to affection, yet so filled, from soft musings and
solitude, with a poetry that gave grace to duties the homeliest, setting
life's trite things to Music! Here nature and fortune concurred alike,--
equal in birth and pretensions, similar in tastes and in objects, loving
the healthful activity of purpose, but content to find it around us,
neither envying the wealthy nor vying with the great, each framed by
temper to look on the bright side of life and find founts of delight and
green spots fresh with verdure where eyes but accustomed to cities could
see but the sands and the mirage. While afar, as man's duty, I had gone
through the travail that, in wrestling with fortune, gives pause to the
heart to recover its losses and know the value of love in its graver
sense of life's earnest realities, Heaven had reared, at the thresholds
of home, the young tree that should cover the roof with its blossoms and
embalm with its fragrance the daily air of my being.
It had been the joint prayer of those kind ones I left that such might be
my reward, and each had contributed, in his or her several way, to fit
that fair life for the ornament and joy of the one that now asked to
guard and to cherish it. From Roland came that deep, earnest honor,--a
man's in its strength, and a woman's in its delicate sense of refinement.
From Roland, that quick taste for all things noble in poetry and lovely
in nature,--the eye that sparkled to read how Bayard stood alone at the
bridge and saved an army; or wept over the page that told how the dying
Sidney put the bowl from his burning lips. Is that too masculine a
spirit for some? Let each please himself. Give me the woman who can
echo all thoughts that are noblest in men! And that eye, too,--like
Roland's,--could pause to note each finer mesh in the wonderful web-work
of beauty. No landscape to her was the same yesterday and to-day: a
deeper shade from the skies could change the face of the moors; the
springing up of fresh wild-flowers, the very song of some bird unheard
before, lent variety to the broad rugged heath. Is that too simple a
source of pleasure for some to prize? Be it so to those who need the
keen stimulants that cities afford. But if we were to pass all our hours
in those scenes, it was something to have the tastes which own no
monotony in Nature.
All this came from Roland; and to this, with thoughtful wisdom, my father
had added enough knowledge from books to make those tastes more
attractive, and to lend to impulsive perception of beauty and goodness
the culture that draws finer essence from beauty, and expands the Good
into the Better by heightening the sight of the survey: hers knowledge
enough to sympathize with intellectual pursuits, not enough to dispute on
man's province,--Opinion. Still, whether in nature or in lore, still--
"The fairest garden in her looks,
And in her mind the choicest books!"
And yet, thou wise Austin,--and thou, Roland, poet that never wrote a
verse,--yet your work had been incomplete; but then Woman stepped in, and
the mother gave to her she designed for a daughter the last finish of
meek, every-day charities,--the mild household virtues; "the soft word
that turneth away wrath;" the angelic pity for man's rougher faults; the
patience that bideth its time, and, exacting no "rights of woman,"
subjugates us, delighted, to the invisible thrall.
Dost thou remember, my Blanche, that soft summer evening when the vows
our eyes had long interchanged stole at last from the lip? Wife mine,
come to my side; look over me while I write: there, thy tears (happy
tears are they not, Blanche?) have blotted the page! Shall we tell the
world more? Right, my Blanche; no words should profane the place where
those tears have fallen!
And here I would fain conclude; but alas and alas! that I cannot
associate with our hopes, on this side the grave, him who, we fondly
hoped (even on the bridal-day that gave his sister to my arms), would
come to the hearth where his place now stood vacant, contented with
glory, and fitted at last for the tranquil happiness which long years of
repentance and trial had deserved.
Within the first year of my marriage, and shortly after a gallant share
in a desperate action which had covered his name with new honors, just
when we were most elated, in the blinded vanity of human pride, came the
fatal news! The brief career was run. He died, as I knew he would have
prayed to die, at the close of a day ever memorable in the annals of that
marvellous empire which valor without parallel has annexed to the Throne
of the Isles. He died in the arms of Victory, and his last smile met the
eyes of the noble chief who, even in that hour, could pause from the tide
of triumph by the victim it had cast on its bloody shore. "One favor,"
faltered the dying man; "I have a father at home,--he, too, is a soldier.
In my tent is my will: it gives all I have to him,--he can take it
without shame. That is not enough! Write to him--you, with your own
hand--and tell him how his son fell! "And the hero fulfilled the prayer;
and that letter is dearer to Roland than all the long roll of the
ancestral dead! Nature has reclaimed her rights, and the forefathers
recede before the son.
In a side chapel of the old Gothic church, amidst the mouldering tombs of
those who fought at Acre and Agincourt, a fresh tablet records the death
of Herbert De Caxton, with the simple inscription,--
He Fell on the Field
His Country Mourned Him,
And His Father Is Resigned.
Years have rolled away since that tablet was placed there, and changes
have passed on that nook of earth which bounds our little world: fair
chambers have sprung up amidst the desolate ruins; far and near, smiling
corn-fields replace the bleak, dreary moors. The land supports more
retainers than ever thronged to the pennon of its barons of old, and
Roland can look from his Tower over domains that are reclaimed, year by
year, from the waste, till the ploughshare shall win a lordship more
opulent than those feudal chiefs ever held by the tenure of the sword.
And the hospitable mirth that had fled from the ruin has been renewed in
the Hall, and rich and poor, great and lowly, have welcomed the rise of
an ancient house from the dust of decay. All those dreams of Roland's
youth are fulfilled; but they do not gladden his heart like the thought
that his son, at the last, was worthy of his line, and the hope that no
gulf shall yawn between the two when the Grand Circle is rounded, and
man's past and man's future meet where Time disappears. Never was that
lost one forgotten; never was his name breathed but tears rushed to the
eyes; and each morning the peasant going to his labor might see Roland
steal down the dell to the deep-set door of the chapel. None presume
there to follow his steps or intrude on his solemn thoughts; for there,
in sight of that tablet, are his orisons made, and the remembrance of the
dead forms a part of the commune with heaven. But the old man's step is
still firm and his brow still erect; and you may see in his face that it
was no hollow boast which proclaimed that the "father was resigned." And
ye who doubt if too Roman a hardness might not be found in that Christian
resignation, think what it is to have feared for a son the life of shame,
and ask then if the sharpest grief to a father is in a son's death of
honor!
Years have passed, and two fair daughters play at the knees of Blanche,
or creep round the footstool of Austin, waiting patiently for the
expected kiss when he looks up from the Great Book, now drawing fast to
its close; or if Roland enter the room, forget all their sober
demureness, and unawed by the terrible Papoe! run clamorous for the
promised swing in the orchard, or the fiftieth recital of "Chevy Chase."
For my part, I take the goods the gods provide me, and am contented with
girls that have the eyes of their mother; but Roland, ungrateful man,
begins to grumble that we are so neglectful of the rights of heirs--male.
He is in doubt whether to lay the fault on Mr. Squills or on us,--I am
not sure that he does not think it a conspiracy of all three to settle
the representation of the martial De Caxtons on the "spindle side."
Whosoever be the right person to blame, an omission so fatal to the
straight line in the pedigree is rectified at last, and Mrs. Primmins
again rushes, or rather rolls--in the movement natural to forms globular
and spheral--into my father's room with--
"Sir, sir, it is a boy!"
Whether my father asked also this time that question so puzzling to
metaphysical inquirers, "What is a boy?" I know not: I rather suspect he
had not leisure for so abstract a question; for the whole household burst
on him, and my mother, in that storm peculiar to the elements of the Mind
Feminine--a sort of sunshiny storm between laughter and crying--whirled
him off to behold the Neogilos.
Now, some months after that date, on a winter's evening, we were all
assembled in the hall, which was still our usual apartment, since its
size permitted to each his own segregated and peculiar employment. A
large screen fenced off from interruption my father's erudite settlement;
and quite out of sight, behind that impermeable barrier, he was now
calmly winding up that eloquent peroration which will astonish the world
whenever, by Heaven's special mercy, the printer's devils have done with
"The History of Human Error." In another nook my uncle had ensconced
himself, stirring his coffee (in the cup my mother had presented to him
so many years ago, and which had miraculously escaped all the ills the
race of crockery is heir to), a volume of "Ivanhoe" in the other hand,
and, despite the charm of the Northern Wizard, his eye not on the page.
On the wall behind him hangs the picture of Sir Herbert de Caxton, the
soldier-comrade of Sidney and Drake, and at the foot of the picture
Roland has slung his son's sword beside the letter that spoke of his
death, which is framed and glazed,--sword and letter had become as the
last, nor least honored, Penates of the hall; the son was grown an
ancestor.
Not far from my uncle sat Mr. Squills, employed in mapping out
phrenological divisions on a cast he had made from the skull of one of
the Australian aborigines,--a ghastly present, which (in compliance with
a yearly letter to that effect) I had brought him over, together with a
stuffed "wombat" and a large bundle of sarsaparilla. (For the
satisfaction of his patients, I may observe, parenthetically, that the
skull and the "wombat"--that last is a creature between a miniature pig
and a very small badger--were not precisely packed up with the
sarsaparilla!) Farther on stood open, but idle, the new pianoforte, at
which, before my father had given his preparatory hem, and sat down to
the Great Book, Blanche and my mother had been trying hard to teach me to
bear the third in the glee of "The Chough and the Crow to roost have
gone,"--vain task, in spite of all flattering assurances that I have a
very fine "bass" if I could but manage to humor it. Fortunately for the
ears of the audience, that attempt is now abandoned. My mother is hard
at work on her tapestry,--the last pattern in fashion, to wit, a rosy-
cheeked young troubadour playing the lute under a salmon-colored balcony;
the two little girls look gravely on, prematurely in love, I suspect,
with the troubadour; and Blanche and I have stolen away into a corner,
which, by some strange delusion, we consider out of sight, and in that
corner is the cradle of the Neogilos. Indeed, it is not our fault that
it is there,--Roland would have it so; and the baby is so good, too, he
never cries,--at least so say Blanche and my mother; at all events, he
does not cry tonight. And, indeed, that child is a wonder! He seems to
know and respond to what was uppermost at our hearts when he was born;
and yet more when Roland (contrary, I dare say, to all custom) permitted
neither mother nor nurse nor creature of womankind to hold him at the
baptismal font, but bent over the new Christian his own dark, high-
featured face; reminding one of the eagle that hid the infant in its nest
and watched over it with wings that had battled with the storm: and from
that moment the child, who took the name of Herbert, seemed to recognize
Roland better than his nurse or even mother,--seemed to know that in
giving him that name we sought to give Roland his son once more! Never
did the old man come near the infant but it smiled and crowed and
stretched out its little arms; and then the mother and I would press each
other's hand secretly, and were not jealous. Well, then, Blanche and
Pisistratus were seated near the cradle and talking in low whispers, when
my father pushed aside the screen and said,--
"There, the work is done! And now it may go to press as soon as you
will."
Congratulations poured in; my father bore them with his usual equanimity;
and standing on the hearth, his hand in his waistcoat, he said, musingly,
"Among the last delusions of Human Error I have had to notice Rousseau's
phantasy of Perpetual Peace, and all the like pastoral dreams, which
preceded the bloodiest wars that have convulsed the earth for more than a
thousand years!"
"And to judge by the newspapers," said I, "the same delusions are renewed
again. Benevolent theorists go about prophesying peace as a positive
certainty, deduced from that sibyl-book the ledger; and we are never
again to buy cannons, provided only we can exchange cotton for corn."
Mr. Squills (who, having almost wholly retired from general business,
has, from want of something better to do, attended sundry "Demonstrations
in the North," since which he has talked much about the march of
improvement, the spirit of the age, and "Us of the nineteenth century
").--"I heartily hope that those benevolent theorists are true prophets.
I have found, in the course of my professional practice, that men go out
of the world quite fast enough, without hacking them into pieces or
blowing them up into the air. War is a great evil."
Blanche (passing by Squills, and glancing towards Roland).--"Hush!"
Roland remains silent.
Mr. Caxton.--"War is a great evil; but evil is admitted by Providence
into the agency of creation, physical and moral. The existence of evil
has puzzled wiser heads than ours, Squills. But, no doubt, there is One
above who has his reasons for it. The combative bump seems as common to
the human skull as the philoprogenitive,--if it is in our organization,
be sure it is not there without cause. Neither is it just to man, nor
wisely submissive to the Disposer of all events, to suppose that war is
wholly and wantonly produced by human crimes and follies,--that it
conduces only to ill, and does not as often arise from the necessities
interwoven in the framework of society, and speed the great ends of the
human race, conformably with the designs of the Omniscient. Not one
great war has ever desolated the earth, but has left behind it seeds that
have ripened into blessings incalculable!"
Mr. Squills (with the groan of a dissentient at a "Demonstration").--"Oh!
oh! oh!"
Luckless Squills! Little could he have foreseen the shower-bath, or
rather douche, of erudition that fell splash on his head as he pulled the
string with that impertinent Oh! oh! Down first came the Persian war,
with Median myriads disgorging all the rivers they had drunk up in their
march through the East; all the arts, all the letters, all the sciences,
all the notions of liberty that we inherit from Greece,--my father rushed
on with them all, sousing Squills with his proofs that without the
Persian war Greece would never have risen to be the teacher of the world.
Before the gasping victim could take breath, down came Hun, Goth, and
Vandal on Italy and Squills.
"What, sir!" cried my father, "don't you see that from those irruptions
on demoralized Rome came the regeneration of manhood, the re-baptism of
earth from the last soils of paganism, and the remote origin of whatever
of Christianity yet exists free from the idolatries with which Rome
contaminated the faith?"
Squills held up his hands and made a splutter. Down came Charlemagne,
paladins and all! There my father was grand! What a picture he made of
the broken, jarring, savage elements of barbaric society. And the iron
hand of the great Frank,--settling the nations and founding existent
Europe. Squills was now fast sinking into coma or stupefaction; but
catching at a straw as he heard the word "Crusades," he stuttered forth,
"Ah! there I defy you."
"Defy me there!" cries my father; and one would think the ocean was in
the shower-bath, it came down with such a rattle. My father scarcely
touched on the smaller points in excuse for the Crusades, though he
recited very volubly all the humaner arts introduced into Europe by that
invasion of the East, and showed how it had served civilization by the
vent it afforded for the rude energies of chivalry, by the element of
destruction to feudal tyranny that it introduced, by its use in the
emancipation of burghs and the disrupture of serfdom. But he painted, in
colors vivid as if caught from the skies of the East, the great spread of
Mahometanism and the danger it menaced to Christian Europe, and drew up
the Godfreys and Tancreds and Richards as a league of the Age and
Necessity against the terrible progress of the sword and the Koran. "You
call them madmen," cried my father; "but the frenzy of nations is the
statemanship of fate! How know you that--but for the terror inspired by
the hosts who marched to Jerusalem--how know you that the Crescent had
not waved over other realms than those which Roderic lost to the Moor?
If Christianity had been less a passion, and the passion had less stirred
up all Europe, how know you that the creed of the Arab (which was then,
too, a passion) might not have planted its mosques in the forum of Rome
and on the site of Notre Dame? For in the war between creeds,--when the
creeds are embraced by vast races,--think you that the reason of sages
can cope with the passion of millions? Enthusiasm must oppose
enthusiasm. The crusader fought for the tomb of Christ, but he saved the
life of Christendom."
My father paused. Squills was quite passive; he struggled no more,--he
was drowned.
"So," resumed Mr. Caxton, more quietly, "so, if later wars yet perplex us
as to the good that the All-wise One draws from their evils, our
posterity may read their uses as clearly as we now read the finger of
Providence resting on the barrows of Marathon, or guiding Peter the
Hermit to the battlefields of Palestine. Nor, while we admit the evil to
the passing generation, can we deny that many of the virtues that make
the ornament and vitality of peace sprang up first in the convulsion of
war!" Here Squills began to evince faint signs of resuscitation, when my
father let fly at him one of those numberless waterworks which his
prodigious memory kept in constant supply. "Hence," said he, "hence, not
unjustly has it been remarked by a philosopher, shrewd at least in
worldly experience [Squills again closed his eyes, and became exanimate]:
'It is strange to imagine that war, which of all things appears the most
savage, should be the passion of the most heroic spirits. But 't is in
war that the knot of fellowship is closest drawn; 't is in war that
mutual succor is most given, mutual danger run, and common affection most
exerted and employed: for heroism and philanthropy are almost one and the
same!'" (1)
My father ceased, and mused a little. Squills, if still living, thought
it prudent to feign continued extinction.
"Not," said Mr. Caxton, resuming, "not but what I hold it our duty never
to foster into a passion what we must rather submit to as an awful
necessity. You say truly, Mr. Squills,--war is an evil; and woe to those
who, on slight pretences, open the gates of Janus,--
"'The dire abode,
And the fierce issues of the furious god.'"
Mr. Squills, after a long pause,--employed in some of the more handy
means for the reanimation of submerged bodies, supporting himself close
to the fire in a semi-erect posture, with gentle friction, self-applied,
to each several limb, and copious recourse to certain steaming stimulants
which my compassionate hands prepared for him,--stretches himself and
says feebly, "In short, then, not to provoke further discussion, you
would go to war in defence of your country. Stop, sir, stop, for
Heaven's sake! I agree with you, I agree with you! But, fortunately,
there is little chance now that any new Boney will build boats at
Boulogne to invade us."
Mr. Caxton.--"I am not so sure of that, Mr. Squills. [Squills falls back
with a glassy stare of deprecating horror.] I don't read the newspapers
very often, but the past helps me to judge of the present."
Therewith my father earnestly recommended to Mr. Squills the careful
perusal of certain passages in Thucydides, just previous to the outbreak
of the Peloponnesian war (Squills hastily nodded the most servile
acquiescence), and drew an ingenious parallel between the signs and
symptoms foreboding that outbreak and the very apprehension of coming war
which was evinced by the recent lo pawns to peace. (2) And after sundry
notable and shrewd remarks, tending to show where elements for war were
already ripening, amidst clashing opinions and disorganized states, he
wound up with saying: "So that, all things considered, I think we had
better just keep up enough of the bellicose spirit not to think it a sin
if we are called upon to fight for our pestles and mortars, our three-
percents, goods, chattels, and liberties. Such a time must come, sooner
or later, even though the whole world were spinning cotton and printing
sprigged calicoes. We may not see it, Squills, but that young gentleman
in the cradle whom you have lately brought into light, may."
"And if so," said my uncle, abruptly, speaking for the first time,--"if
indeed it be for altar and hearth!" My father suddenly drew in and
pished a little, for he saw that he was caught in the web of his own
eloquence.
Then Roland took down from the wall his son's sword. Stealing to the
cradle, he laid it in its sheath by the infant's side, and glanced from
my father to us with a beseeching eye. Instinctively Blanche bent over
the cradle, as if to protect the Neogilos; but the child, waking, turned
from her, and attracted by the glitter of the hilt, laid one hand lustily
thereon, and pointed with the other, laughingly, to Roland.
"Only on my uncle's proviso," said I, hesitatingly. "For hearth and
altar,--nothing less!"
"And even in that case," said my father, "add the shield to the sword!"
and on the other side of the infant he placed Roland's well-worn Bible,
blistered in many a page with secret tears.
There we all stood, grouping round the young centre of so many hopes and
fears, in peace or in war, born alike for the Battle of Life. And he,
unconscious of all that made our lips silent and our eyes dim, had
already left that bright bauble of the sword and thrown both arms round
Roland's bended neck.
"Herbert!" murmured Roland; and Blanche gently drew away the sword--and
left the Bible.
(1) Shaftesbury.
(2) When this work was first published, Mr. Caxton was generally deemed a
very false prophet in these anticipations, and sundry critics were
pleased to consider his apology for war neither seasonable nor
philosophical. That Mr. Caxton was right, and the politicians opposed to
him have been somewhat ludicrously wrong, may be briefly accounted for,--
Mr. Caxton had read history.