Vivian.
At The Entrance of Life Sits--The Mother.
It was during the war in Spain that a severe wound, and the fever which
ensued, detained Roland at the house of a Spanish widow. His hostess
had once been rich; but her fortune had been ruined in the general
calamities of the country. She had an only daughter, who assisted to
nurse and tend the wounded Englishman; and when the time approached for
Roland’s departure, the frank grief of the young Ramouna betrayed
the impression that the guest had made upon her affections. Much of
gratitude, and something, it might be, of an exquisite sense of honor,
aided, in Roland’s breast, the charm naturally produced by the beauty
of his young nurse, and the knightly compassion he felt for her ruined
fortunes and desolate condition.
In one of those hasty impulses common to a generous nature--and which
too often fatally vindicate the rank of Prudence amidst the tutelary
Powers of Life--Roland committed the error of marriage with a girl of
whose connections he knew nothing, and of whose nature little more than
its warm, spontaneous susceptibility. In a few days subsequent to these
rash nuptials, Roland rejoined the march of the army; nor was he able to
return to Spain till after the crowning victory of Waterloo.
Maimed by the loss of a limb, and with the scars of many a noble wound
still fresh, Roland then hastened to a home, the dreams of which had
soothed the bed of pain, and now replaced the earlier visions of renown.
During his absence a son had been born to him,--a son whom he might rear
to take the place he had left in his country’s service; to renew, in
some future fields, a career that had failed the romance of his own
antique and chivalrous ambition. As soon as that news had reached him
his care had been to provide an English nurse for the infant, so that
with the first sounds of the mother’s endearments, the child might
yet hear a voice from the father’s land. A female relation of Bolt had
settled in Spain, and was induced to undertake this duty. Natural as
this appointment was to a man so devotedly English, it displeased his
wild and passionate Ramouna. She had that mother’s jealousy, strongest
in minds uneducated; she had also that peculiar pride which belongs to
her country-people of every rank and condition: the jealousy and the
pride were both wounded by the sight of the English nurse at the child’s
cradle.
That Roland on regaining his Spanish hearth should be disappointed in
his expectations of the happiness awaiting him there, was the inevitable
condition of such a marriage, since, not the less for his
military bluntness, Roland had that refinement of feeling, perhaps
over-fastidious, which belongs to all natures essentially poetic; and
as the first illusions of love died away, there could have been little
indeed congenial to his stately temper in one divided from him by an
utter absence of education and by the strong, but nameless, distinctions
of national views and manners. The disappointment probably, however,
went deeper than that which usually attends an ill-assorted union; for
instead of bringing his wife to his old Tower (an expatriation which she
would doubtless have resisted to the utmost), he accepted, maimed as he
was, not very long after his return to Spain, the offer of a military
post under Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense loyalty of
Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of a throne
which the English arms had contributed to establish; while the extreme
unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and the stigma of
irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster Roland’s belief
that he was supporting a beloved king against the professors of those
revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines which to him were the very
atheism of politics. The experience of a few years in the service of a
bigot so contemptible as Ferdinand, whose highest object of patriotism
was the restoration of the Inquisition, added another disappointment to
those which had already embittered the life of a man who had seen in
the grand hero of Cervantes no follies to satirize, but high virtues to
imitate. Poor Quixote himself,--he came mournfully back to his La Mancha
with no other reward for his knight-errantry than a decoration, which
he disdained to place beside his simple Waterloo medal, and a grade
for which he would have blushed to resign his more modest, but more
honorable, English dignity.
But still weaving hopes, the sanguine man returned to his Penates. His
child now had grown from infancy into boyhood,--the child would pass
naturally into his care. Delightful occupation! At the thought, home
smiled again.
Now behold the most pernicious circumstance in this ill-omened
connection.
The father of Ramouna had been one of that strange and mysterious
race which presents in Spain so many features distinct from the
characteristics of its kindred tribes in more civilized lands. The
Gitano, or gypsy of Spain, is not the mere vagrant we see on our commons
and road-sides. Retaining, indeed, much of his lawless principles and
predatory inclinations, he lives often in towns, exercises various
callings, and not unfrequently becomes rich. A wealthy Gitano had
married a Spanish woman; (1) Roland’s wife had been the offspring of
this marriage. The Gitano had died while Ramouna was yet extremely
young, and her childhood had been free from the influences of her
paternal kindred. But though her mother, retaining her own religion, had
brought up Ramouna in the same faith, pure from the godless creed of the
Gitano, and at her husband’s death had separated herself wholly from his
tribe, still she had lost caste with her own kin and people. And while
struggling to regain it, the fortune, which made her sole chance of
success in that attempt, was swept away, so that she had remained
apart and solitary, and could bring no friends to cheer the solitude
of Ramouna during Roland’s absence. But while my uncle was still in the
service of Ferdinand, the widow died; and then the only relatives who
came round Ramouna were her father’s kindred. They had not ventured to
claim affinity while her mother lived, and they did so now by attentions
and caresses to her son. This opened to them at once Ramouna’s heart
and doors. Meanwhile the English nurse--who, in spite of all that could
render her abode odious to her, had, from strong love to her charge,
stoutly maintained her post--died, a few weeks after Ramouna’s mother;
and no healthful influence remained to counteract those baneful ones
to which the heir of the honest old Caxtons was subject. But Roland
returned home in a humor to be pleased with all things. Joyously he
clasped his wife to his breast, and thought, with self-reproach, that
he had forborne too little and exacted too much,--he would be wiser
now. Delightedly he acknowledged the beauty, the intelligence, and manly
bearing of the boy, who played with his sword-knot and ran off with his
pistols as a prize.
The news of the Englishman’s arrival at first kept the lawless kinsfolk
from the house; but they were fond of the boy, and the boy of them, and
interviews between him and these wild comrades, if stolen, were not
less frequent. Gradually Roland’s eyes became opened. As in habitual
intercourse the boy abandoned the reserve which awe and cunning at first
imposed, Roland was inexpressibly shocked at the bold principles his
son affected, and at his utter incapacity even to comprehend that plain
honesty and that frank honor which to the English soldier, seemed ideas
innate and heaven-planted. Soon afterwards, Roland found that a system
of plunder was carried on in his household, and tracked it to the
connivance of the wife and the agency of his son for the benefit of lazy
bravos and dissolute vagrants. A more patient man than Roland might well
have been exasperated, a more wary man confounded, by this discovery. He
took the natural step,--perhaps insisting on it too summarily; perhaps
not allowing enough for the uncultured mind and lively passions of his
wife,--he ordered her instantly to prepare to accompany him from the
place, and to abandon all communication with her kindred.
A vehement refusal ensued; but Roland was not a man to give up such a
point, and at length a false submission and a feigned repentance soothed
his resentment and obtained his pardon. They moved several miles from
the place; but where they moved, there some at least, and those the
worst, of the baleful brood stealthily followed. Whatever Ramouna’s
earlier love for Roland had been, it had evidently long ceased, in the
thorough want of sympathy between them, and in that absence which, if it
renews a strong affection, destroys an affection already weakened. But
the mother and son adored each other with all the strength of their
strong, wild natures. Even under ordinary circumstances the father’s
influence over a boy yet in childhood is exerted in vain if the mother
lend herself to baffle it. And in this miserable position, what chance
had the blunt, stern, honest Poland (separated from his son during the
most ductile years of infancy) against the ascendancy of a mother who
humored all the faults and gratified all the wishes of her darling?
In his despair, Roland let fall the threat that if thus thwarted, it
would become his duty to withdraw his son from the mother. This threat
instantly hardened both hearts against him. The wife represented Roland
to the boy as a tyrant, as an enemy, as one who had destroyed all the
happiness they had before enjoyed in each other, as one whose severity
showed that he hated his own child; and the boy believed her. In his
own house a firm union was formed against Roland, and protected by the
cunning which is the force of the weak against the strong.
In spite of all, Roland could never forget the tenderness with which the
young nurse had watched over the wounded man, nor the love--genuine for
the hour, though not drawn from the feelings which withstand the wear
and tear of life--that lips so beautiful had pledged him in the bygone
days. These thoughts must have come perpetually between his feelings and
his judgment, to embitter still more his position, to harass still more
his heart. And if, by the strength of that sense of duty which made the
force of his character, he could have strung himself to the fulfilment
of the threat, humanity, at all events, compelled him to delay it,--his
wife promised to be again a mother. Blanche was born. How could he take
the infant from the mother’s breast, or abandon the daughter to the
fatal influences from which only, by so violent an effort, he could free
the son?
No wonder, poor Roland, that those deep furrows contracted thy bold
front, and thy hair grew gray before its time!
Fortunately, perhaps, for all parties, Roland’s wife died while Blanche
was still an infant. She was taken ill of a fever; she died delirious,
clasping her boy to her breast, and praying the saints to protect him
from his cruel father. How often that death-bed haunted the son, and
justified his belief that there was no parent’s love in the heart which
was now his sole shelter from the world and the “pelting of its pitiless
rain!” Again I say “poor Roland;” for I know that in that harsh,
unloving disrupture of such solemn ties thy large, generous heart forgot
its wrongs,--again didst thou see tender eyes bending over the wounded
stranger, again hear low murmurs breathe the warm weakness which the
women of the South deem it no shame to own. And now did it all end in
those ravings of hate, and in that glazing gaze of terror?
(1) A Spaniard very rarely indeed marries a Gitana, or female gypsy. But
occasionally (observes Mr. Borrow) a wealthy Gitano marries a Spanish
female.