spur is cold.” Lord Ulverstone figures only in the “Court Circular,”
or “Fashionable Movements.” Lord Ulverstone entertains a royal duke at
dinner, or dines in turn with a royal duke, or has come to town, or gone
out of it. At most (faint Platonic reminiscence of the former life),
Lord Ulverstone says in the House of Lords a few words on some question,
not a party one, and on which (though affecting perhaps the interests of
some few thousands, or millions, as the case may be) men speak without
“hears,” and are inaudible in the gallery; or Lord Ulverstone takes the
chair at an agricultural meeting, or returns thanks when his health is
drunk at a dinner at Guildhall. But the daughter rises as the father
sets, though over a very different kind of world.
“First ball of the season at Castleton House,”--long description of
the rooms and the company; above all, of the hostess. Lines on the
Marchioness of Castleton’s picture in the “Book of Beauty,” by the Hon.
Fitzroy Fiddledum, beginning with “Art thou an angel from,” etc.: a
paragraph that pleased me more, on “Lady Castleton’s Infant School at
Raby Park;” then again, “Lady Castleton, the new patroness at Almack’s;”
a criticism, more rapturous than ever gladdened living poet, on Lady
Castleton’s superb diamond stomacher, just reset by Storr & Mortimer;
Westmacott’s bust of Lady Castleton; Landseer’s picture of Lady
Castleton and her children in the costume of the olden time. Not a month
in that long file of the “Morning Post” but what Lady Castleton shone
forth from the rest of womankind,--
“Velut inter ignes Luna minores.”
The blood mounted to my cheek. Was it to this splendid constellation
in the patrician heaven that my obscure, portionless youth had dared
to lift its presumptuous eyes? But what is this? “Indian Intelligence:
Skilful retreat of the Sepoys under Captain de Caxton”! A captain
already! What is the date of the newspaper!--three months ago. The
leading article quotes the name with high praise. Is there no leaven of
envy amidst the joy at my heart? How obscure has been my career,--how
laurelless my poor battle with adverse fortune! Fie, Pisistratus! I
am ashamed of thee. Has this accursed Old World, with its feverish
rivalries, diseased thee already? Get thee home, quick, to the arms of
thy mother, the embrace of thy father; hear Roland’s low blessing that
thou hast helped to minister to the very fame of that son. If thou wilt
have ambition, take it,--not soiled and foul with the mire of London.
Let it spring fresh and hardy in the calm air of wisdom, and fed, as
with dews, by the loving charities of Home.
CHAPTER III.
It was at sunset that I stole through the ruined court-yard, having left
my chaise at the foot of the hill below. Though they whom I came to seek
knew that I had arrived in England, they did not, from my letter, expect
me till the next day. I had stolen a march upon them; and now, in
spite of all the impatience which had urged me thither, I was afraid to
enter,--afraid to see the change more than ten years had made in those
forms for which, in my memory, Time had stood still. And Roland had,
even when we parted, grown old before his time. Then my father was
in the meridian of life, now he had approached to the decline. And my
mother, whom I remembered so fair, as if the freshness of her own heart
had preserved the soft bloom to the cheek,--I could not bear to
think that she was no longer young. Blanche, too, whom I had left a
child,--Blanche, my constant correspondent during those long years of
exile, in letters crossed and recrossed, with all the small details that
make the eloquence of letter-writing, so that in those epistles I had
seen her mind gradually grow up in harmony with the very characters, at
first vague and infantine, then somewhat stiff with the first graces of
running-hand, then dashing off free and facile; and for the last year
before I left, so formed yet so airy, so regular yet so unconscious of
effort, though in truth, as the calligraphy had become thus matured,
I had been half vexed and half pleased to perceive a certain reserve
creeping over the style,--wishes for my return less expressed from
herself than as messages from others, words of the old child-like
familiarity repressed, and “Dearest Sisty” abandoned for the cold form
of “Dear Cousin.” Those letters, coming to me in a spot where maiden
and love had been as myths of the bygone, phantasms and eidola only
vouchsafed to the visions of fancy, had by little and little crept into
secret corners of my heart; and out of the wrecks of a former romance,
solitude and revery had gone far to build up the fairy domes of a
romance yet to come. My mother’s letters had never omitted to make
mention of Blanche,--of her forethought and tender activity, of her warm
heart and sweet temper,--and in many a little home picture presented
her image where I would fain have placed it, not “crystal seeing,” but
joining my mother in charitable visits to the village, instructing the
young and tending on the old, or teaching herself to illuminate, from an
old missal in my father’s collection, that she might surprise my
uncle with a new genealogical table, with all shields and quarterings,
blazoned or, sable, and argent; or flitting round my father where he
sat, and watching when he looked round for some book he was too lazy to
rise for. Blanche had made a new catalogue and got it by heart, and knew
at once from what corner of the Heraclea to summon the ghost. On all
these little traits had my mother been eulogistically minute; but
somehow or other she had never said, at least for the last two years,
whether Blanche was pretty or plain. That was a sad omission. I had
longed just to ask that simple question, or to imply it delicately and
diplomatically; but, I know not why, I never dared,--for Blanche would
have been sure to have read the letter; and what business was it of
mine? And if she was ugly, what question more awkward both to put and to
answer? Now, in childhood Blanche had just one of those faces that might
become very lovely in youth, and would yet quite justify the suspicion
that it might become gryphonesque, witch-like, and grim. Yes, Blanche,
it is perfectly true! If those large, serious black eyes took a fierce
light instead of a tender; if that nose, which seemed then undecided
whether to be straight or to be aquiline, arched off in the latter
direction, and assumed the martial, Roman, and imperative character of
Roland’s manly proboscis; if that face, in childhood too thin, left
the blushes of youth to take refuge on two salient peaks by the temples
(Cumberland air, too, is famous for the growth of the cheekbone!),--if
all that should happen, and it very well might, then, O Blanche, I wish
thou hadst never written me those letters; and I might have done wiser
things than steel my heart so obdurately to pretty Ellen Bolding’s
blue eyes and silk shoes. Now, combining together all these doubts and
apprehensions, wonder not, O reader, why I stole so stealthily through
the ruined court-yard, crept round to the other side of the tower, gazed
wistfully on the sun setting slant, on the high casements of the hall
(too high, alas! to look within), and shrank yet to enter,--doing
battle, as it were, with my heart.
Steps--one’s sense of hearing grows so quick in the Bushland!--steps,
though as light as ever brushed the dew from the harebell! I crept under
the shadow of the huge buttress mantled with ivy. A form comes from the
little door at an angle in the ruins,--a woman’s form. Is it my mother?
It is too tall, and the step is more bounding. It winds round the
building, it turns to look back, and a sweet voice--a voice strange, yet
familiar--calls, tender but chiding, to a truant that lags behind. Poor
Juba! he is trailing his long ears on the ground; he is evidently much
disturbed in his mind: now he stands still, his nose in the air. Poor
Juba! I left thee so slim and so nimble,--
“Thy form, that was fashioned as light as a fay’s,
Has assumed a proportion more round;”
years have sobered thee strangely, and made thee obese and
Primmins-like. They have taken too good care of thy creature-comforts, O
sensual Mauritanian! Still, in that mystic intelligence we call instinct
thou art chasing something that years have not swept from thy memory.
Thou art deaf to thy lady’s voice, however tender and chiding. That’s
right! Come near,--nearer,--my cousin Blanche; let me have a fair look
at thee. Plague take the dog! he flies off from her; he has found the
scent; he is making up to the buttress! Now--pounce--he is caught,
whining ungallant discontent! Shall I not yet see the face? It is buried
in Juba’s black curls! Kisses too! Wicked Blanche, to waste on a dumb
animal what, I heartily hope, many a good Christian would be exceedingly
glad of! Juba struggles in vain, and is borne off! I don’t think that
those eyes can have taken the fierce turn, and Roland’s eagle nose can
never go with that voice, which has the coo of the dove.
I leave my hiding-place and steal after the Voice and its owner. Where
can she be going? Not far. She springs up the hill whereon the lords of
the castle once administered justice,--that hill which commands the
land far and wide, and from which can be last caught the glimpse of the
westering sun. How gracefully still is that attitude of wistful repose!
Into what delicate curves do form and drapery harmoniously flow! How
softly distinct stands the lithe image against the purple hues of
the sky! Then again comes the sweet voice, gay and carolling as a
bird’s,--now in snatches of song, now in playful appeals to that dull
four-footed friend. She is telling him something that must make the
black ears stand on end, for I just catch the words, “He is coming,” and
“home.”
I cannot see the sun set where I lurk in my ambush amidst the brake and
the ruins, but I feel that the orb has passed from the landscape, in the
fresher air of the twilight, in the deeper silence of eve. Lo! Hesper
comes forth; at his signal, star after star, come the hosts,--
“Ch’ eran con lui, quando l’ amor divino,
Mosse da prima quelle cose belle!”
And the sweet voice is hushed.
Then slowly the watcher descends the hill on the opposite side; the form
escapes from my view. What charm has gone from the twilight? See, again,
where the step steals through the ruins and along the desolate court.
Ah! deep and true heart, do I divine the remembrance that leads thee?
I pass through the wicket, down the dell, skirt the laurels, and behold
the face looking up to the stars,--the face which had nestled to my
breast in the sorrow of parting years, long years ago; on the grave
where we had sat,--I the boy, thou the infant,--there, O Blanche, is thy
fair face, fairer than the fondest dream that had gladdened my exile,
vouchsafed to my gaze!
“Blanche, my cousin! again, again,--soul with soul, amidst the dead!
Look up, Blanche; it is I.”
CHAPTER IV.
“Go in first and prepare them, dear Blanche; I will wait by the door.
Leave it ajar, that I may see them.”
Roland is leaning against the wall, old armor suspended over the gray
head of the soldier. It is but a glance that I give to the dark cheek
and high brow: no change there for the worse,--no new sign of decay.
Rather, if anything, Roland seems younger than when I left. Calm is the
brow,--no shame on it now, Roland; and the lips, once so compressed,
smile with ease,--no struggle now, Roland, “not to complain.” A glance
shows me all this.
“Papae!” says my father, and I hear the fall of a book, “I can’t read
a line. He is coming to-morrow,--to-morrow! If we lived to the age of
Methuselah, Kitty, we could never reconcile philosophy and man; that is,
if the poor man’s to be plagued with a good, affectionate son!”
And my father gets up and walks to and fro. One minute more, father, one
minute more, and I am on thy breast! Time, too, has dealt gently with
thee, as he doth with those for whom the wild passions and keen cares
of the world never sharpen his scythe. The broad front looks more broad,
for the locks are more scanty and thin, but still not a furrow. Whence
comes that short sigh?
“What is really the time, Blanche? Did you look at the turret-clock?
Well, just go and look again.”
“Kitty,” quoth my father, “you have not only asked what time it is
thrice within the last ten minutes, but you have got my watch, and
Roland’s great chronometer, and the Dutch clock out of the kitchen,
all before you, and they all concur in the same tale,--to-day is not
to-morrow.”
“They are all wrong, I know,” said my mother, with mild firmness; “and
they’ve never gone right since he left.” Now out comes a letter, for I
hear the rustle, and then a step glides towards the lamp, and the dear,
gentle, womanly face--fair still, fair ever for me, fair as when it bent
over my pillow in childhood’s first sickness, or when we threw flowers
at each other on the lawn at sunny noon! And now Blanche is whispering;
and now the flutter, the start, the cry,--“It is true! it is true! Your
arms, mother. Close, close round my necks as in the old time. Father!
Roland too! Oh, joy! joy! joy! home again,--home till death!”
CHAPTER V.
From a dream of the Bushland, howling dingoes,(1) and the war-whoop of
the wild men, I wake and see the sun shining in through the jasmine
that Blanche herself has had trained round the window; old school-books
neatly ranged round the wall; fishing-rods, cricket-bats, foils, and
the old-fashioned gun; and my mother seated by the bed-side; and Juba
whining and scratching to get up. Had I taken thy murmured blessing, my
mother, for the whoop of the blacks, and Juba’s low whine for the howl
of the dingoes?
Then what days of calm, exquisite delight,--the interchange of heart
with heart; what walks with Roland, and tales of him once our shame,
now our pride; and the art with which the old man would lead those walks
round by the village, that some favorite gossips might stop and ask,
“What news of his brave young honor?”
I strive to engage my uncle in my projects for the repair of the ruins,
for the culture of those wide bogs and moorlands: why is it that he turns
away and looks down embarrassed? Ah! I guess,--his true heir now is
restored to him. He cannot consent that I should invest this dross, for
which (the Great Book once published) I have no other use, in the house
and the lands that will pass to his son. Neither would he suffer me
so to invest even his son’s fortune, the bulk of which I still hold in
trust for that son. True, in his career my cousin may require to have
his money always forthcoming. But I, who have no career,--pooh! these
scruples will rob me of half the pleasure my years of toil were to
purchase. I must contrive it somehow or other: what if he would let me
house and moorland on a long improving lease? Then, for the rest, there
is a pretty little property to be sold close by, on which I can retire,
when my cousin, as heir of the family, comes, perhaps with a wife, to
reside at the Tower. I must consider of all this, and talk it over with
Bolt, when my mind is at leisure from happiness to turn to such matters;
meanwhile I fall back on my favorite proverb,--“Where there’s a will
there’s a way.”
What smiles and tears, and laughter and careless prattle with my mother,
and roundabout questions from her to know if I had never lost my heart
in the Bush; and evasive answers from me, to punish her for not letting
out that Blanche was so charming. “I fancied Blanche had grown the image
of her father, who has a fine martial head certainly, but not seen to
advantage in petticoats! How could you be so silent with a theme so
attractive?”
“Blanche made me promise.”
Why, I wonder. Therewith I fell musing.
What quiet, delicious hours are spent with my father in his study, or
by the pond, where he still feeds the carps, that have grown into
Cyprinidian leviathans. The duck, alas! has departed this life,--the
only victim that the Grim King has carried off; so I mourn, but am
resigned to that lenient composition of the great tribute to Nature. I
am sorry to say the Great Book has advanced but slowly,--by no means yet
fit for publication; for it is resolved that it shall not come out as
first proposed, a part at a time, but, totus, teres, atque rotundus.
The matter has spread beyond its original compass; no less than five
volumes--and those of the amplest--will contain the History of Human
Error. However, we are far in the fourth, and one must not hurry
Minerva.
My father is enchanted with Uncle Jack’s “noble conduct,” as he
calls it; but he scolds me for taking the money, and doubts as to
the propriety of returning it. In these matters my father is quite as
Quixotical as Roland. I am forced to call in my mother as umpire between
us, and she settles the matter at once by an appeal to feeling. “Ah,
Austin! do you not humble me if you are too proud to accept what is due
to you from my brother?”
“Velit, nolit, quod amica,” answered my father, taking off and rubbing
his spectacles,--“which means, Kitty, that when a man’s married he has
no will of his own. To think,” added Mr. Caxton, musingly, “that in this
world one cannot be sure of the simplest mathematical definition. You
see, Pisistratus, that the angles of a triangle so decidedly scalene as
your Uncle Jack’s may be equal to the angles of a right-angled triangle
after all!” (2)
The long privation of books has quite restored all my appetite for them.
How much I have to pick up; what a compendious scheme of reading I and
my father chalk out! I see enough to fill up all the leisure of life.
But, somehow or other, Greek and Latin stand still; nothing charms
me like Italian. Blanche and I are reading Metastasio, to the great
indignation of my father, who calls it “rubbish,” and wants to
substitute Dante. I have no associations at present with the souls
“Che son contenti
Nel fuoco;”
I am already one of the “beate gente.” Yet, in spite of Metastasio,
Blanche and I are not so intimate as cousins ought to be. If we are by
accident alone, I become as silent as a Turk, as formal as Sir Charles
Grandison. I caught myself calling her Miss Blanche the other day.
I must not forget thee, honest Squills, nor thy delight at my health
and success, nor thy exclamation of pride (one hand on my pulse and the
other griping hard the “ball” of my arm)! “It all comes of my citrate
of iron: nothing like it for children; it has an effect on the cerebral
developments of hope and combativeness.” Nor can I wholly omit mention
of poor Mrs. Primmins, who still calls me “Master Sisty,” and is
breaking her heart that I will not wear the new flannel waistcoats she
had such pleasure in making: “Young gentlemen just growing up are so
apt to go off in a galloping ‘sumption! She knew just such another as
Master Sisty, when she lived at Torquay, who wasted away and went
out like a snuff, all because he would not wear flannel waistcoats.”
Therewith my mother looks grave, and says, “One can’t take too much
precaution.” Suddenly the whole neighborhood is thrown into commotion.
Trevanion--I beg his pardon, Lord Ulverstone--is coming to settle for
good at Compton. Fifty hands are employed daily in putting the grounds
into hasty order. Fourgons and wagons and vans have disgorged all
the necessaries a great man requires where he means to eat, drink, and
sleep,--books, wines, pictures, furniture. I recognize my old patron
still. He is in earnest, whatever he does. I meet my friend, his
steward, who tells me that Lord Ulverstone finds his favorite seat, near
London, too exposed to interruption; and moreover that, as he has there
completed all improvements that wealth and energy can effect, he has
less occupation for agricultural pursuits, to which he has grown
more and more partial, than on the wide and princely domain which has
hitherto wanted the master’s eye. “He is a bra’ farmer, I know,” quoth
the steward, “so far as the theory goes; but I don’t think we in the
North want great lords to teach us how to follow the pleugh.” The
steward’s sense of dignity is hurt; but he is an honest fellow, and
really glad to see the family come to settle in the old place.
They have arrived, and--with them the Castletons and a whole posse
comitatus of guests. The county paper is full of fine names.
“What on earth did Lord Ulverstone mean by pretending to get out of the
way of troublesome visitors?”
“My dear Pisistratus,” answered my father to that exclamation, “it is
not the visitors who come, but the visitors who stay away that most
trouble the repose of a retired minister. In all the procession he sees
but the images of Brutus and Cassius that are not there! And depend on
it also, a retirement so near London did not make noise enough. You see,
a retiring statesman is like that fine carp,--the farther he leaps from
the water, the greater splash he makes in falling into the weeds! But,”
added Mr. Caxton, in a repentant tone, “this jesting does not become
us; and if I indulged it, it is only because I am heartily glad that
Trevanion is likely now to find out his true vocation. And as soon as
the fine people he brings with him have left him alone in his library,
I trust he will settle to that vocation, and be happier than he has been
yet.”
“And that vocation, sir, is--”
“Metaphysics,” said my father. “He will be quite at home in puzzling
over Berkeley, and considering whether the Speaker’s chair and the
official red boxes were really things whose ideas of figure, extension,
and hardness were all in the mind. It will be a great consolation to
him to agree with Berkeley, and to find that he has only been baffled by
immaterial phantasma!”
My father was quite right. The repining, subtle, truth-weighing
Trevanion, plagued by his conscience into seeing all sides of a question
(for the least question has more than two sides, and is hexagonal at
least), was much more fitted to discover the origin of ideas than to
convince Cabinets and Nations that two and two make four,--a proposition
on which he himself would have agreed with Abraham Tucker where that
most ingenious and suggestive of all English metaphysicians observes,
“Well, persuaded as I am that two and two make four, if I were to meet
with a person of credit, candor, and understanding who should sincerely
call it in question, I would give him a hearing; for I am not more
certain of that than of the whole being greater than a part. And yet I
could myself suggest some considerations that might seem to controvert
this point.” (3) I can so well imagine Trevanion listening to “some
person of credit, candor, and understanding” in disproof of that vulgar
proposition that twice two make four! But the news of this arrival,
including that of Lady Castleton, disturbed me greatly, and I took to
long wanderings alone. In one of these rambles they all called at the
Tower,--Lord and Lady Ulverstone, the Castletons, and their children.
I escaped the visit; and on my return home there was a certain delicacy
respecting old associations that restrained much talk, before me, on so
momentous an event. Roland, like me, had kept out of the way. Blanche,
poor child, ignorant of the antecedents, was the most communicative.
And the especial theme she selected was the grace and beauty of Lady
Castleton!
A pressing invitation to spend some days at the castle had been
cordially given to all. It was accepted only by myself: I wrote word
that I would come.
Yes, I longed to prove the strength of my own self-conquest, and
accurately test the nature of the feelings that had disturbed me. That
any sentiment which could be called “love” remained for Lady Castleton,
the wife of another, and that other a man with so many claims on my
affection as her lord, I held as a moral impossibility. But with
all those lively impressions of early youth still engraved on my
heart,--impressions of the image of Fanny Trevanion as the fairest and
brightest of human beings,--could I feel free to love again? Could
I seek to woo, and rivet to myself forever, the entire and virgin
affections of another while there was a possibility that I might compare
and regret? No; either I must feel that if Fanny were again single,
could be mine without obstacle, human or divine, she had ceased to be
the one I would single out of the world; or, though regarding love as
the dead, I would be faithful to its memory and its ashes. My mother
sighed, and looked fluttered and uneasy all the morning of the day on
which I was to repair to Compton. She even seemed cross, for about the
third time in her life, and paid no compliment to Mr. Stultz when my
shooting-jacket was exchanged for a black frock which that artist had
pronounced to be “splendid;” neither did she honor me with any of those
little attentions to the contents of my portmanteau, and the perfect
“getting up” of my white waistcoats and cravats, which made her
natural instincts on such memorable occasions. There was also a sort of
querulous, pitying tenderness in her tone, when she spoke to Blanche,
which was quite pathetic; though, fortunately, its cause remained dark
and impenetrable to the innocent comprehension of one who could not see
where the past filled the urns of the future at the fountain of life.
My father understood me better, shook me by the hand as I got into the
chaise, and muttered, out of Seneca: “Non tanquam transfuga, sed tanquam
explorator” (“Not to desert, but examine”).
Quite right.
(1) “Dingoes “--the name given by Australian natives to the wild dogs.
(2) Not having again to advert to Uncle Jack, I may be pardoned for
informing the reader, by way of annotation, that he continues to prosper
surprisingly in Australia, though the Tibbets’ Wheal stands still for
want of workmen. Despite of a few ups and downs, I have had no fear of
his success until this year (1849), when I tremble to think what effect
the discovery of the gold mines in California may have on his lively
imagination. If thou escapest that snare, Uncle Jack, res age, tutus
eris--thou art safe for life!
(3) “Light of Nature,”--chapter on Judgment.--See the very ingenious
illustration of doubt, “whether the part is always greater than the
whole,”--taken from time, or rather eternity.
CHAPTER VI.
Agreeably to the usual custom in great houses, as soon as I arrived at
Compton I was conducted to my room to adjust my toilet or compose my
spirits by solitude,--it wanted an hour to dinner. I had not, however,
been thus left ten minutes before the door opened and Trevanion himself
(as I would fain still call him) stood before me. Most cordial were his
greeting and welcome; and seating himself by my side, he continued
to converse in his peculiar way--bluntly eloquent and carelessly
learned--till the half-hour bell rang. He talked on Australia, the
Wakefield system, cattle, books, his trouble in arranging his library,
his schemes for improving his property and embellishing his grounds, his
delight to find my father look so well, his determination to see a great
deal of him, whether his old college friend would or not; he talked, in
short, of everything except politics and his own past career,--showing
only his soreness in that silence. But--independently of the mere work
of time--he looked yet more worn and jaded in his leisure than he had
done in the full tide of business; and his former abrupt quickness of
manner now seemed to partake of feverish excitement. I hoped that my
father would see much of him, for I felt that the weary mind wanted
soothing.
Just as the second bell rang I entered the drawing-room. There were
at least twenty guests present,--each guest, no doubt, some planet of
fashion or fame, with satellites of its own. But I saw only two
forms distinctly: first, Lord Castleton, conspicuous with star and
garter,--somewhat ampler and portlier in proportions, and with a frank
dash of gray in the silky waves of his hair, but still as pre-eminent
as ever for that beauty, the charm of which depends less than any
other upon youth, arising, as it does, from a felicitous combination
of bearing and manner, and that exquisite suavity of expression
which steals into the heart and pleases so much that it be comes a
satisfaction to admire! Of Lord Castleton, indeed, it might be said, as
of Alcibiades, “that he was beautiful at every age.” I felt my breath
come thick, and a mist passed before my eyes as Lord Castleton led
me through the crowd, and the radiant vision of Fanny Trevanion--how
altered, and how dazzling!--burst upon me.
I felt the light touch of that hand of snow; but no guilty thrill shot
through my veins. I heard the voice, musical as ever,--lower than it was
once, and more subdued in its key, but steadfast and untremulous: it was
no longer the voice that made “my soul plant itself in the ears.” (1)
The event was over, and I knew that the dream had fled from the waking
world forever.
“Another old friend!” as Lady Ulverstone came forth from a little group
of children, leading one fine boy of nine years old, while one, two or
three years younger, clung to her gown. “Another old friend! and,” added
Lady Ulverstone, after the first kind greetings, “two new ones when the
old are gone.” The slight melancholy left the voice as, after presenting
to me the little viscount, she drew forward the more bashful Lord
Albert, who indeed had something of his grandsire and namesake’s look of
refined intelligence in his brow and eyes.
The watchful tact of Lord Castleton was quick in terminating whatever
embarrassment might belong to these introductions, as, leaning lightly
on my arm, he drew me forward and presented me to the guests more
immediately in our neighborhood, who seemed by their earnest cordiality
to have been already prepared for the introduction.
Dinner was now announced, and I welcomed that sense of relief and
segregation with which one settles into one’s own “particular” chair at
your large miscellaneous entertainment.
I stayed three days at that house. How truly had Trevanion said that
Fanny would make “an excellent great lady.” What perfect harmony between
her manners and her position! just retaining enough of the girl’s
seductive gayety and bewitching desire to please, to soften the new
dignity of bearing she had unconsciously assumed,--less, after all, as
great lady, than as wife and mother; with a fine breeding, perhaps
a little languid and artificial as compared with her lord’s,--which
sprang, fresh and healthful, wholly from nature,--but still so void of
all the chill of condescension or the subtle impertinence that belongs
to that order of the inferior noblesse which boasts the name of
“exclusives;” with what grace, void of prudery, she took the adulation
of the flatterers, turning from them to her children, or escaping
lightly to Lord Castleton, with an ease that drew round her at once the
protection of hearth and home!
And certainly Lady Castleton was more incontestably beautiful than Fanny
Trevanion had been.
All this I acknowledged, not with a sigh and a pang, but with a
pure feeling of pride and delight. I might have loved madly and
presumptuously; as boys will do; but I had loved worthily,--the love
left no blush on my manhood; and Fanny’s very happiness was my perfect
and total cure of every wound in my heart not quite scarred over before.
Had she been discontented, sorrowful, without joy in the ties she had
formed, there might have been more danger that I should brood over the
past and regret the loss of its idol. Here there was none. And the very
improvement in her beauty had so altered its character--so altered--that
Fanny Trevanion and Lady Castleton seemed two persons. And thus
observing and listening to her, I could now dispassionately perceive
such differences in our natures as seemed to justify Trevanion’s
assertion, which once struck me as so monstrous, “that we should not
have been happy had fate permitted our union.” Pure-hearted and simple
though she remained in the artificial world, still that world was her
element; its interests occupied her; its talk, though just chastened
from scandal, flowed from her lips. To borrow the words of a man who
was himself a courtier, and one so distinguished that he could afford
to sneer at Chesterfield, (2) “She had the routine of that style of
conversation which is a sort of gold leaf, that is a great embellishment
where it is joined to anything else.” I will not add, “but makes a
very poor figure by itself,”--for that Lady Castleton’s conversation
certainly did not do,--perhaps, indeed, because it was not “by
itself,”--and the gold leaf was all the better for being thin, since it
could not cover even the surface of the sweet and amiable nature over
which it was spread. Still, this was not the mind in which now, in
maturer experience, I would seek to find sympathy with manly action, or
companionship in the charms of intellectual leisure.
There was about this same beautiful favorite of nature and fortune a
certain helplessness, which had even its grace in that high station, and
which, perhaps, tended to insure her domestic peace, for it served
to attach her to those who had won influence over her, and was happily
accompanied by a most affectionate disposition. But still, if less
favored by circumstances, less sheltered from every wind that could
visit her too roughly; if, as the wife of a man of inferior rank, she
had failed of that high seat and silken canopy reserved for the spoiled
darlings of fortune,--that helplessness might have become querulous.
I thought of poor Ellen Bolding and her silken shoes. Fanny Trevanion
seemed to have come into the world with silk shoes,--not to walk where
there was a stone or a brier. I heard something, in the gossip of those
around, that confirmed this view of Lady Castleton’s character, while it
deepened my admiration of her lord, and showed me how wise had been her
choice, and how resolutely he had prepared himself to vindicate his own.
One evening, as I was sitting, a little apart from the rest, with two
men of the London world, to whose talk--for it ran upon the on-dits
and anecdotes of a region long strange to me--I was a silent but amused
listener, one of the two said: “Well, I don’t know anywhere a more
excellent creature than Lady Castleton: so fond of her children, and her
tone to Castleton so exactly what it ought to be,--so affectionate, and
yet, as it were, respectful. And the more credit to her if, as they say,
she was not in love with him when she married (to be sure, handsome as
he is, he is twice her age)! And no woman could have been more flattered
and courted by Lotharios and lady-killers than Lady Castleton has been.
I confess, to my shame, that Castleton’s luck puzzles me, for it is
rather an exception to my general experience.”
“My dear--,” said the other, who was one of those wise men of pleasure
who occasionally startle us into wondering how they come to be so
clever, and yet rest contented with mere drawing-room celebrity,--men
who seem always idle, yet appear to have read everything; always
indifferent to what passes before them, yet who know the character and
divine the secrets of everybody, “my dear,” said the gentleman, “you
would not be puzzled if you had studied Lord Castleton, instead of her
ladyship. Of all the conquests ever made by Sedley Beaudesert,--when the
two fairest dames of the Faubourg are said to have fought for his smiles
in the Bois de Boulogne,--no conquest ever cost him such pains, or so
tasked his knowledge of women, as that of his wife after marriage.
He was not satisfied with her hand, he was resolved to have her whole
heart,--‘one entire and perfect chrysolite;’ and he has succeeded! Never
was husband so watchful and so little jealous, never one who confided
so generously in all that was best in his wife, yet was so alert in
protecting and guarding her wherever she was weakest. When in the second
year of marriage that dangerous German Prince Von Leibenfels attached
himself so perseveringly to Lady Castleton, and the scandal-mongers
pricked up their ears, in hopes of a victim, I watched Castleton with
as much interest as if I had been looking over Deschappelles playing at
chess. You never saw anything so masterly; he pitted himself against
his highness with the cool confidence, not of a blind spouse, but a
fortunate rival. He surpassed him in the delicacy of his attentions,
he outshone him by his careless magnificence. Leibenfels had the
impertinence to send Lady Castleton a bouquet of some rare flowers just
in fashion. Castleton, an hour before, had filled her whole balcony with
the same costly exotics, as if they were too common for nosegays, and
only just worthy to bloom for her a day. Young and really accomplished
as Leibenfels is, Castleton eclipsed him by his grace, and fooled him
with his wit; he laid little plots to turn his mustache and guitar
into ridicule; he seduced him into a hunt with the buckhounds (though
Castleton himself had not hunted before since he was thirty), and drew
him, spluttering German oaths, out of the slough of a ditch; he made him
the laughter of the clubs; he put him fairly out of fashion,--and all
with such suavity, and politeness, and bland sense of superiority, that
it was the finest piece of high comedy you ever beheld. The poor prince,
who had been coxcomb enough to lay a bet with a Frenchman as to his
success with the English in general, and Lady Castleton in particular,
went away with a face as long as Don Quixote’s. If you had but seen
him at S--House, the night before he took leave of the island, and his
comical grimace when Castleton offered him a pinch of the Beaudesert
mixture! No; the fact is that Castleton made it the object of his
existence, the masterpiece of his art, to secure to himself a happy home
and the entire possession of his wife’s heart. The first two or three
years, I fear, cost him more trouble than any other man ever took,--with
his own wife, at least; but he may now rest in peace,--Lady Castleton is
won, and forever.”
As my gentleman ceased, Lord Castleton’s noble head rose above the
group standing round him; and I saw Lady Castleton turn with a look of
well-bred fatigue from a handsome young fop who had affected to lower
his voice while he spoke to her, and, encountering the eyes of her
husband, the look changed at once into one of such sweet, smiling
affection, such frank, unmistakable wife-like pride, that it seemed a
response to the assertion,--“Lady Castleton is won, and forever.”
Yes, that story increased my admiration for Lord Castleton; it showed
me with what forethought and earnest sense of responsibility he had
undertaken the charge of a life, the guidance of a character yet
undeveloped; it lastingly acquitted him of the levity that had been
attributed to Sedley Beaudesert. But I felt more than ever contented
that the task had devolved on one whose temper and experience had so
fitted him to discharge it. That German prince made me tremble from
sympathy with the husband, and in a sort of relative shudder for myself!
Had that episode happened to me, I could never have drawn “high comedy”
from it; I could never have so happily closed the fifth act with a pinch
of the Beaudesert mixture! No, no; to my homely sense of man’s life and
employment there was nothing alluring in the prospect of watching over
the golden tree in the garden, with a “woe to the Argus if Mercury
once lull him to sleep!” Wife of mine shall need no watching, save in
sickness and sorrow! Thank Heaven that my way of life does not lead
through the roseate thoroughfares, beset with German princes laying bets
for my perdition, and fine gentlemen admiring the skill with which I
play at chess for so terrible a stake! To each rank and each temper, its
own laws. I acknowledge that Fanny is an excellent marchioness, and Lord
Castleton an incomparable marquis. But, Blanche! if I can win thy true,
simple heart, I trust I shall begin at the fifth act of high comedy, and
say at the altar,--
“Once won, won forever.”
(1) Sir Philip Sidney.
(2) Lord Hervey’s Memoirs of George II.
CHAPTER VII.
I rode home on a horse my host lent me; and Lord Castleton rode part
of the way with me, accompanied by his two boys, who bestrode manfully
their Shetland ponies and cantered on before us. I paid some compliment
to the spirit and intelligence of these children,--a compliment they
well deserved.
“Why, yes,” said the marquis, with a father’s becoming pride, “I hope
neither of them will shame his grandsire, Trevanion. Albert (though not
quite the wonder poor Lady Ulverstone declares him to be) is rather
too precocious, and it is all I can do to prevent his being spoilt by
flattery to his cleverness, which, I think, is much worse than even
flattery to rank,--a danger to which, despite Albert’s destined
inheritance, the elder brother is more exposed. Eton soon takes out the
conceit of the latter and more vulgar kind. I remember Lord--(you know
what an unpretending, good-natured fellow he is now) strutting into
the play-ground, a raw boy, with his chin up in the air, and burly Dick
Johnson (rather a tuft-hunter now, I’m afraid) coming up and saying,
‘Well, sir, and who the deuce are you?’ ‘Lord ----,’ says the poor devil
unconsciously, ‘eldest son of the Marquis of ----.’
“‘Oh, indeed!’ cries Johnson; ‘then there’s one kick for my lord, and
two for the marquis!’ I am not fond of kicking, but I doubt if anything
ever did--more good than those three kicks. But,” continued Lord
Castleton, “when one flatters a boy for his cleverness, even Eton itself
cannot kick the conceit out of him. Let him be last in the form, and the
greatest dunce ever flogged, there are always people to say that your
public schools don’t do for your great geniuses. And it is ten to one
but what the father is plagued into taking the boy home and giving him
a private tutor, who fixes him into a prig forever. A coxcomb in dress,”
said the marquis, smiling, “is a trifler it would ill become me to
condemn, and I own that I would rather see a youth a fop than a sloven;
but a coxcomb in ideas--why, the younger he is, the more unnatural and
disagreeable. Now, Albert, over that hedge, sir.”
“That hedge, papa? The pony will never do it.”
“Then,” said Lord Castleton, taking off his hat with politeness. “I fear
you will deprive us of the pleasure of your company.”
The boy laughed, and made gallantly for the hedge, though I saw by his
change of color that it a little alarmed him. The pony could not clear
the hedge, but it was a pony of tact and resources, and it scrambled
through like a cat, inflicting sundry rents and tears on a jacket of
Raphael blue.
Lord Castleton said, smiling, “You see, I teach them to get through
a difficulty one way or the other. Between you and me,” he added
seriously, “I perceive a very different world rising round the next
generation from that in which I first went forth and took my pleasure.
I shall rear my boys accordingly. Rich noblemen must nowadays be useful
men; and if they can’t leap over briers, they must scramble through
them. Don’t you agree with me?”
“Yes, heartily.”
“Marriage makes a man much wiser,” said the marquis, after a pause. “I
smile now to think how often I sighed at the thought of growing old. Now
I reconcile myself to the gray hairs without dreams of a wig, and enjoy
youth still; for,” pointing to his sons, “it is there!”
“He has very nearly found out the secret of the saffron bag now,” said
my father, pleased and rubbing his hands, when I repeated this talk
with Lord Castleton. “But I fear poor Trevanion,” he added, with a
compassionate change of countenance, “is still far away from the sense
of Lord Bacon’s receipt. And his wife, you say, out of very love for
him, keeps always drawing discord from the one jarring wire.”
“You must talk to her, sir.”
“I will,” said my father, angrily, “and scold her too, foolish woman! I
shall tell her Luther’s advice to the Prince of Anhalt.”
“What was that, sir?”
“Only to throw a baby into the River Maldon because it had sucked dry
five wet-nurses besides the mother, and must therefore be a changeling.
Why, that ambition of hers would suck dry all the mother’s milk in the
genus mammalian. And such a withered, rickety, malign little changeling
too! She shall fling it into the river, by all that is holy!” cried my
father; and, suiting the action to the word, away into the pond went the
spectacles he had been rubbing indignantly for the last three minutes.
“Papae!” faltered my father, aghast, while the Cyprinidae, mistaking the
dip of the spectacles for an invitation to dinner, came scudding up to
the bank. “It is all your fault,” said Mr. Caxton, recovering himself.
“Get me the new tortoise-shell spectacles and a large slice of
bread. You see that when fish are reduced to a pond they recognize a
benefactor, which they never do when rising at flies or groping for
worms in the waste world of a river. Hem!--a hint for the Ulverstones.
Besides the bread and the spectacles, just look out and bring me the old
black-letter copy of Saint Anthony’s ‘Sermon to Fishes.’”
CHAPTER VIII.
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 him 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 fast-trotting 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 ourselves! 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 Papae! 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 _Io paeans_ 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.
End of Project Gutenberg’s The Caxtons, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton