The Hearts Without Trust, and The World Without a Guide.
And then, vainly grasping at every argument his blunt sense could
suggest, then talked Roland much and grandly of the duties men
owed,--even if they threw off all love to their father, still to their
father’s name; and then his pride, always so lively, grew irritable and
harsh, and seemed, no doubt, to the perverted ears of the son, unlovely
and unloving. And that pride, without serving one purpose of good, did
yet more mischief; for the youth caught the disease, but in a wrong way.
And he said to himself,--
“Ho, then, my father is a great man, with all these ancestors and big
words! And he has lands and a castle; and yet how miserably we live, and
how he stints me! But if he has cause for pride in all these dead men,
why, so have I. And are these lodgings, these appurtenances, fit for the
‘gentleman’ he says I am?”
Even in England the gypsy blood broke out as before, and the youth found
vagrant associates,--Heaven knows how or where; strange-looking forms,
gaudily shabby and disreputably smart, were seen lurking in the corner
of the street, or peering in at the window, slinking off if they saw
Roland: and Roland could not stoop to be a spy. And the son’s heart grew
harder and harder against his father, and his father’s face now never
smiled on him. Then bills came in, and duns knocked at the door,--bills
and duns to a man who shrank from the thought of a debt as an ermine
from a spot on its fur! And the son’s short answer to remonstrance was:
“Am I not a gentleman? These are the things gentlemen require.” Then
perhaps Roland remembered the experiment of his French friend, and left
his bureau unlocked, and said, “Ruin me if you will, but no debts. There
is money in those drawers,--they are unlocked.” That trust would forever
have cured of extravagance a youth with a high and delicate sense of
honor: the pupil of the Gitanos did not understand the trust; he thought
it conveyed a natural, though ungracious, permission to take out what he
wanted,--and he took! To Roland this seemed a theft; and a theft of the
coarsest kind; but when he so said, the son started indignant, and saw
in that which had been so touching an appeal to his honor but a trap to
decoy him into disgrace. In short, neither could understand the other.
Roland forbade his son to stir from the house; and the young man the
same night let himself out, and stole forth into the wide world, to
enjoy or defy it in his own wild way.
It would be tedious to follow him through his various adventures and
experiments on fortune (even if I knew them all, which I do not). And
now putting altogether aside his right name, which he had voluntarily
abandoned, and not embarrassing the reader with the earlier aliases
assumed, I shall give to my unfortunate kinsman the name by which I
first knew him, and continue to do so until,--Heaven grant the time may
come!--having first redeemed, he may reclaim his own. It was in joining
a set of strolling players that Vivian became acquainted with Peacock;
and that worthy, who had many strings to his bow, soon grew aware of
Vivian’s extraordinary skill with the cue, and saw therein a better mode
of making their joint fortunes than the boards of an itinerant Thespis
furnished to either. Vivian listened to him, and it was while their
intimacy was most fresh that I met them on the highroad. That chance
meeting produced (if I may be allowed to believe his assurance)
a strong, and for the moment a salutary, effect upon Vivian. The
comparative innocence and freshness of a boy’s mind were new to him;
the elastic, healthful spirits with which those gifts were accompanied
startled him, by the contrast to his own forced gayety and secret gloom.
And this boy was his own cousin!
Coming afterwards to London, he adventured inquiry at the hotel in
the Strand at which I had given my address; learned where we were;
and passing one night in the street, saw my uncle at the window,--to
recognize and to fly from him. Having then some money at his disposal,
he broke off abruptly from the set in which he had been thrown. He had
resolved to return to France,--he would try for a more respectable mode
of existence. He had not found happiness in that liberty he had won,
nor room for the ambition that began to gnaw him, in those pursuits from
which his father had vainly warned him. His most reputable friend
was his old tutor; he would go to him. He went; but the tutor was now
married, and was himself a father,--and that made a wonderful alteration
in his practical ethics. It was no longer moral to aid the son in
rebellion to his father. Vivian evinced his usual sarcastic haughtiness
at the reception he met, and was requested civilly to leave the house.
Then again he flung himself on his wits at Paris. But there were plenty
of wits there sharper than his own. He got into some quarrel with the
police,--not, indeed, for any dishonest practices of his own, but from
an unwary acquaintance with others less scrupulous,--and deemed it
prudent to quit France. Thus had I met him again, forlorn and ragged, in
the streets of London.
Meanwhile Roland, after the first vain search, had yielded to the
indignation and disgust that had long rankled within him. His son had
thrown off his authority because it preserved him from dishonor. His
ideas of discipline were stern, and patience had been well-nigh crushed
out of his heart. He thought he could bear to resign his son to his
fate,--to disown him, and to say, “I have no more a son.” It was in this
mood that he had first visited our house. But when, on that memorable
night in which he had narrated to his thrilling listeners the dark tale
of a fellow-sufferer’s woe and crime,--betraying in the tale, to my
father’s quick sympathy, his own sorrow and passion,--it did not need
much of his gentler brother’s subtle art to learn or guess the whole,
nor much of Austin’s mild persuasion to convince Roland that he had not
yet exhausted all efforts to track the wanderer and reclaim the erring
child. Then he had gone to London; then he had sought every spot which
the outcast would probably haunt; then had he saved and pinched from his
own necessities to have wherewithal to enter theatres and gaming-houses,
and fee the agencies of police; then had he seen the form for which he
had watched and pined, in the street below his window, and cried, in
a joyous delusion, “He repents!” One day a letter reached my uncle,
through his bankers, from the French tutor (who knew of no other means
of tracing Roland but through the house by which his salary had been
paid), informing him of his son’s visit. Roland started instantly
for Paris. Arriving there, he could only learn of his son through the
police, and from them only learn that he had been seen in the company
of accomplished swindlers, who were already in the hands of justice, but
that the youth himself, whom there was nothing to criminate, had been
suffered to quit Paris, and had taken, it was supposed, the road to
England. Then at last the poor Captain’s stout heart gave way. His
son the companion of swindlers! Could he be sure that he was not their
accomplice? If not yet, how small the step between companionship and
participation! He took the child left him still from the convent,
returned to England, and arrived there to be seized with fever and
delirium,--apparently on the same day or a day before that on which the
son had dropped, shelterless and penniless, on the stones of London.