Grave And My Own Cradle There
Being one day in the Church of St. Gudule, at Brussels, admiring the
antique splendour of the architecture (and always entertaining a great
tenderness and reverence for the Mother Church, that hath been as wickedly
persecuted in England as ever she herself persecuted in the days of her
prosperity), Esmond saw kneeling at a side altar, an officer in a green
uniform coat, very deeply engaged in devotion. Something familiar in the
figure and posture of the kneeling man struck Captain Esmond, even before
he saw the officer’s face. As he rose up, putting away into his pocket a
little black breviary, such as priests use, Esmond beheld a countenance so
like that of his friend and tutor of early days, Father Holt, that he
broke out into an exclamation of astonishment and advanced a step towards
the gentleman, who was making his way out of church. The German officer
too looked surprised when he saw Esmond, and his face from being pale grew
suddenly red. By this mark of recognition, the Englishman knew that he
could not be mistaken; and though the other did not stop, but on the
contrary rather hastily walked away towards the door, Esmond pursued him
and faced him once more, as the officer helping himself to holy water,
turned mechanically towards the altar to bow to it ere he quitted the
sacred edifice.
“My father!” says Esmond in English.
“Silence! I do not understand. I do not speak English,” says the other in
Latin.
Esmond smiled at this sign of confusion, and replied in the same language.
“I should know my father in any garment, black or white, shaven or
bearded,” for the Austrian officer was habited quite in the military
manner, and had as warlike a moustachio as any Pandour.
He laughed—we were on the church steps by this time, passing through the
crowd of beggars that usually is there holding up little trinkets for sale
and whining for alms. “You speak Latin,” says he, “in the English way,
Harry Esmond; you have forsaken the old true Roman tongue you once knew.”
His tone was very frank, and friendly quite; the kind voice of fifteen
years back; he gave Esmond his hand as he spoke.
“Others have changed their coats too, my father,” says Esmond, glancing at
his friend’s military decoration.
“Hush! I am Mr. or Captain von Holtz, in the Bavarian Elector’s service,
and on a mission to his highness the Prince of Savoy. You can keep a
secret I know from old times.”
“Captain von Holtz,” says Esmond, “I am your very humble servant.”
“And you, too, have changed your coat,” continues the other, in his
laughing way; “I have heard of you at Cambridge and afterwards: we have
friends everywhere; and I am told that Mr. Esmond at Cambridge was as good
a fencer as he was a bad theologian.” (So, thinks Esmond, my old _maitre
d’armes_ was a Jesuit as they said.)
“Perhaps you are right,” says the other, reading his thoughts quite as he
used to do in old days: “you were all but killed at Hochstedt of a wound
in the left side. You were before that at Vigo, aide de camp to the Duke
of Ormonde. You got your company the other day after Ramillies; your
general and the prince-duke are not friends; he is of the Webbs of Lydiard
Tregoze, in the county of York, a relation of my Lord St. John. Your
cousin, Monsieur de Castlewood, served his first campaign this year in the
Guard; yes, I do know a few things as you see.”
Captain Esmond laughed in his turn. “You have indeed a curious knowledge,”
he says. A foible of Mr. Holt’s, who did know more about books and men
than, perhaps, almost any person Esmond had ever met, was omniscience;
thus in every point he here professed to know, he was nearly right, but
not quite. Esmond’s wound was in the right side, not the left, his first
general was General Lumley; Mr. Webb came out of Wiltshire, not out of
Yorkshire; and so forth. Esmond did not think fit to correct his old
master in these trifling blunders, but they served to give him a knowledge
of the other’s character, and he smiled to think that this was his oracle
of early days; only now no longer infallible or divine.
“Yes,” continues Father Holt, or Captain von Holtz, “for a man who has not
been in England these eight years, I know what goes on in London very
well. The old dean is dead, my Lady Castlewood’s father. Do you know that
your recusant bishops wanted to consecrate him Bishop of Southampton, and
that Collier is Bishop of Thetford by the same imposition? The Princess
Anne has the gout and eats too much; when the king returns, Collier will
be an archbishop.”
“Amen!” says Esmond, laughing; “and I hope to see your eminence no longer
in jack-boots, but red stockings, at Whitehall.”
“You are always with us—I know that—I heard of that when you were at
Cambridge; so was the late lord; so is the young viscount.”
“And so was my father before me,” said Mr. Esmond, looking calmly at the
other, who did not, however, show the least sign of intelligence in his
impenetrable grey eyes—how well Harry remembered them and their look! only
crows’ feet were wrinkled round them—marks of black old Time had settled
there.
Esmond’s face chose to show no more sign of meaning than the father’s.
There may have been on the one side and the other just the faintest
glitter of recognition, as you see a bayonet shining out of an ambush; but
each party fell back, when everything was again dark.
“And you, _mon capitaine_, where have you been?” says Esmond, turning away
the conversation from this dangerous ground, where neither chose to
engage.
“I may have been in Pekin,” says he, “or I may have been in Paraguay—who
knows where? I am now Captain von Holtz, in the service of his electoral
highness, come to negotiate exchange of prisoners with his highness of
Savoy.”
’Twas well known that very many officers in our army were well-affected
towards the young king at St. Germains, whose right to the throne was
undeniable, and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far
the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having
a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity,
boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current.
It wounded our English pride to think, that a shabby High-Dutch duke,
whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes
of our ancient English nobility, who could not speak a word of our
language, and whom we chose to represent as a sort of German boor, feeding
on train-oil and sauerkraut, with a bevy of mistresses in a barn, should
come to reign over the proudest and most polished people in the world.
Were we, the conquerors of the Grand Monarch, to submit to that ignoble
domination? What did the Hanoverian’s Protestantism matter to us? Was it
not notorious (we were told and led to believe so) that one of the
daughters of this Protestant hero was being bred up with no religion at
all, as yet, and ready to be made Lutheran or Roman, according as the
husband might be, whom her parents should find for her? This talk, very
idle and abusive much of it was, went on at a hundred mess-tables in the
army; there was scarce an ensign that did not hear it, or join in it, and
everybody knew, or affected to know, that the commander-in-chief himself
had relations with his nephew, the Duke of Berwick (’twas by an
Englishman, thank God, that we were beaten at Almanza), and that his grace
was most anxious to restore the royal race of his benefactors, and to
repair his former treason.
This is certain, that for a considerable period no officer in the duke’s
army lost favour with the commander-in-chief for entertaining or
proclaiming his loyalty towards the exiled family. When the Chevalier de
St. George, as the King of England called himself, came with the dukes of
the French blood royal, to join the French army under Vendosme, hundreds
of ours saw him and cheered him, and we all said he was like his father in
this, who, seeing the action of La Hogue fought between the French ships
and ours, was on the side of his native country during the battle. But
this, at least the chevalier knew, and every one knew, that, however well
our troops and their general might be inclined towards the prince
personally, in the face of the enemy there was no question at all.
Wherever my lord duke found a French army, he would fight and beat it, as
he did at Oudenarde, two years after Ramillies, where his grace achieved
another of his transcendent victories; and the noble young prince, who
charged gallantly along with the magnificent Maison-du-Roy, sent to
compliment his conquerors after the action.
In this battle, where the young Electoral Prince of Hanover behaved
himself very gallantly, fighting on our side, Esmond’s dear General Webb
distinguished himself prodigiously, exhibiting consummate skill and
coolness as a general, and fighting with the personal bravery of a common
soldier. Esmond’s good luck again attended him; he escaped without a hurt,
although more than a third of his regiment was killed, had again the
honour to be favourably mentioned in his commander’s report, and was
advanced to the rank of major. But of this action there is little need to
speak, as it hath been related in every _Gazette_, and talked of in every
hamlet in this country. To return from it to the writer’s private affairs,
which here, in his old age, and at a distance, he narrates for his
children who come after him. Before Oudenarde, and after that chance
rencontre with Captain von Holtz at Brussels, a space of more than a year
elapsed, during which the captain of Jesuits and the captain of Webb’s
Fusiliers were thrown very much together. Esmond had no difficulty in
finding out (indeed, the other made no secret of it to him, being assured
from old times of his pupil’s fidelity), that the negotiator of prisoners
was an agent from St. Germains, and that he carried intelligence between
great personages in our camp and that of the French. “My business,” said
he, “and I tell you, both because I can trust you, and your keen eyes have
already discovered it, is between the King of England and his subjects,
here engaged in fighting the French king. As between you and them, all the
Jesuits in the world will not prevent your quarrelling: fight it out,
gentlemen. St. George for England, I say—and you know who says so,
wherever he may be.”
I think Holt loved to make a parade of mystery, as it were, and would
appear and disappear at our quarters as suddenly as he used to return and
vanish in the old days at Castlewood. He had passes between both armies,
and seemed to know (but with that inaccuracy which belonged to the good
father’s omniscience) equally well what passed in the French camp and in
ours. One day he would give Esmond news of a great _feste_ that took place
in the French quarters, of a supper of Monsieur de Rohan’s, where there
was play and violins, and then dancing and masques: the king drove thither
in Marshal Villar’s own guinguette. Another day he had the news of his
Majesty’s ague, the king had not had a fit these ten days, and might be
said to be well. Captain Holtz made a visit to England during this time,
so eager was he about negotiating prisoners; and ’twas on returning from
this voyage that he began to open himself more to Esmond, and to make him,
as occasion served, at their various meetings, several of those
confidences which are here set down all together.
The reason of his increased confidence was this: upon going to London, the
old director of Esmond’s aunt, the dowager, paid her ladyship a visit at
Chelsey, and there learnt from her that Captain Esmond was acquainted with
the secret of his family, and was determined never to divulge it. The
knowledge of this fact raised Esmond in his old tutor’s eyes, so Holt was
pleased to say, and he admired Harry very much for his abnegation.
“The family at Castlewood have done far more for me than my own ever did,”
Esmond said. “I would give my life for them. Why should I grudge the only
benefit that ’tis in my power to confer on them?” The good father’s eyes
filled with tears at this speech, which to the other seemed very simple:
he embraced Esmond, and broke out into many admiring expressions; he said
he was a _noble cœur_, that he was proud of him, and fond of him as his
pupil and friend—regretted more than ever that he had lost him, and been
forced to leave him in those early times, when he might have had an
influence over him, have brought him into that only true Church to which
the father belonged, and enlisted him in the noblest army in which a man
ever engaged—meaning his own Society of Jesus, which numbers (says he) in
its troops the greatest heroes the world ever knew;—warriors, brave enough
to dare or endure anything, to encounter any odds, to die any
death;—soldiers that have won triumphs a thousand times more brilliant
than those of the greatest general; that have brought nations on their
knees to their sacred banner, the Cross; that have achieved glories and
palms incomparably brighter than those awarded to the most splendid
earthly conquerors—crowns of immortal light, and seats in the high places
of Heaven.
Esmond was thankful for his old friend’s good opinion, however little he
might share the Jesuit father’s enthusiasm. “I have thought of that
question, too,” says he, “dear father,” and he took the other’s
hand—“thought it out for myself, as all men must, and contrive to do the
right, and trust to Heaven as devoutly in my way as you in yours. Another
six months of you as a child, and I had desired no better. I used to weep
upon my pillow at Castlewood as I thought of you, and I might have been a
brother of your order; and who knows,” Esmond added, with a smile, “a
priest in full orders, and with a pair of moustachios, and a Bavarian
uniform.”
“My son,” says Father Holt, turning red, “in the cause of religion and
loyalty all disguises are fair.”
“Yes,” broke in Esmond, “all disguises are fair, you say; and all
uniforms, say I, black or red,—a black cockade or a white one—or a laced
hat, or a sombrero, with a tonsure under it. I cannot believe that St.
Francis Xavier sailed over the sea in a cloak, or raised the dead—I tried;
and very nearly did once, but cannot. Suffer me to do the right, and to
hope for the best in my own way.”
Esmond wished to cut short the good father’s theology, and succeeded; and
the other, sighing over his pupil’s invincible ignorance, did not withdraw
his affection from him, but gave him his utmost confidence—as much, that
is to say, as a priest can give: more than most do; for he was naturally
garrulous, and too eager to speak.
Holt’s friendship encouraged Captain Esmond to ask, what he long wished to
know, and none could tell him, some history of the poor mother whom he had
often imagined in his dreams, and whom he never knew. He described to Holt
those circumstances which are already put down in the first part of this
story—the promise he had made to his dear lord, and that dying friend’s
confession; and he besought Mr. Holt to tell him what he knew regarding
the poor woman from whom he had been taken.
“She was of this very town,” Holt said, and took Esmond to see the street
where her father lived, and where, as he believed, she was born. “In 1676,
when your father came hither in the retinue of the late king, then Duke of
York, and banished hither in disgrace, Captain Thomas Esmond became
acquainted with your mother, pursued her, and made a victim of her; he
hath told me in many subsequent conversations, which I felt bound to keep
private then, that she was a woman of great virtue and tenderness, and in
all respects a most fond, faithful creature. He called himself Captain
Thomas, having good reason to be ashamed of his conduct towards her, and
hath spoken to me many times with sincere remorse for that, as with fond
love for her many amiable qualities. He owned to having treated her very
ill; and that at this time his life was one of profligacy, gambling, and
poverty. She became with child of you; was cursed by her own parents at
that discovery; though she never upbraided, except by her involuntary
tears, and the misery depicted on her countenance, the author of her
wretchedness and ruin.
“Thomas Esmond—Captain Thomas, as he was called—became engaged in a
gaming-house brawl, of which the consequence was a duel, and a wound so
severe that he never—his surgeon said—could outlive it. Thinking his death
certain, and touched with remorse, he sent for a priest of the very Church
of St. Gudule where I met you; and on the same day, after his making
submission to our Church, was married to your mother a few weeks before
you were born. My Lord Viscount Castlewood, Marquis of Esmond, by King
James’s patent, which I myself took to your father, your lordship was
christened at St. Gudule by the same curé who married your parents, and by
the name of Henry Thomas, son of E. Thomas, officier Anglais, and Gertrude
Maes. You see you belong to us from your birth, and why I did not christen
you when you became my dear little pupil at Castlewood.
“Your father’s wound took a favourable turn—perhaps his conscience was
eased by the right he had done—and to the surprise of the doctors he
recovered. But as his health came back, his wicked nature, too, returned.
He was tired of the poor girl, whom he had ruined; and receiving some
remittance from his uncle, my lord the old viscount then in England, he
pretended business, promised return, and never saw your poor mother more.
“He owned to me, in confession first, but afterwards in talk before your
aunt, his wife, else I never could have disclosed what I now tell you,
that on coming to London he writ a pretended confession to poor Gertrude
Maes—Gertrude Esmond—of his having been married in England previously,
before uniting himself with her; said that his name was not Thomas; that
he was about to quit Europe for the Virginia plantations, where, indeed,
your family had a grant of land from King Charles the First; sent her a
supply of money, the half of the last hundred guineas he had, entreated
her pardon, and bade her farewell.
“Poor Gertrude never thought that the news in this letter might be untrue
as the rest of your father’s conduct to her. But though a young man of her
own degree, who knew her history, and whom she liked before she saw the
English gentleman who was the cause of all her misery, offered to marry
her, and to adopt you as his own child, and give you his name, she refused
him. This refusal only angered her father, who had taken her home; she
never held up her head there, being the subject of constant unkindness
after her fall; and some devout ladies of her acquaintance offering to pay
a little pension for her, she went into a convent, and you were put out to
nurse.
“A sister of the young fellow, who would have adopted you as his son, was
the person who took charge of you. Your mother and this person were
cousins. She had just lost a child of her own, which you replaced, your
own mother being too sick and feeble to feed you; and presently your nurse
grew so fond of you, that she even grudged letting you visit the convent
where your mother was, and where the nuns petted the little infant, as
they pitied and loved its unhappy parent. Her vocation became stronger
every day, and at the end of two years she was received as a sister of the
house.
“Your nurse’s family were silk-weavers out of France, whither they
returned to Arras in French Flanders, shortly before your mother took her
vows, carrying you with them, then a child of three years old. ’Twas a
town, before the late vigorous measures of the French king, full of
Protestants, and here your nurse’s father, old Pastoureau, he with whom
you afterwards lived at Ealing, adopted the reformed doctrines, perverting
all his house with him. They were expelled thence by the edict of his most
Christian Majesty, and came to London, and set up their looms in
Spittlefields. The old man brought a little money with him, and carried on
his trade, but in a poor way. He was a widower; by this time his daughter,
a widow too, kept house for him, and his son and he laboured together at
their vocation. Meanwhile your father had publicly owned his conversion
just before King Charles’s death (in whom our Church had much such another
convert), was reconciled to my Lord Viscount Castlewood, and married, as
you know, to his daughter.
“It chanced that the younger Pastoureau, going with a piece of brocade to
the mercer, who employed him, on Ludgate Hill, met his old rival coming
out of an ordinary there. Pastoureau knew your father at once, seized him
by the collar, and upbraided him as a villain, who had seduced his
mistress, and afterwards deserted her and her son. Mr. Thomas Esmond also
recognized Pastoureau at once, besought him to calm his indignation, and
not to bring a crowd round about them; and bade him to enter into the
tavern, out of which he had just stepped, when he would give him any
explanation. Pastoureau entered, and heard the landlord order the drawer
to show Captain Thomas to a room; it was by his Christian name that your
father was familiarly called at his tavern haunts, which, to say the
truth, were none of the most reputable.
“I must tell you that Captain Thomas, or my lord viscount afterwards, was
never at a loss for a story, and could cajole a woman or a dun with a
volubility, and an air of simplicity at the same time, of which many a
creditor of his has been the dupe. His tales used to gather verisimilitude
as he went on with them. He strung together fact after fact with a
wonderful rapidity and coherence. It required, saving your presence, a
very long habit of acquaintance with your father to know when his lordship
was l——,—telling the truth or no.
“He told me with rueful remorse when he was ill—for the fear of death set
him instantly repenting, and with shrieks of laughter when he was well,
his lordship having a very great sense of humour—how in half an hour’s
time, and before a bottle was drunk, he had completely succeeded in biting
poor Pastoureau. The seduction he owned too: that he could not help: he
was quite ready with tears at a moment’s warning, and shed them profusely
to melt his credulous listener. He wept for your mother even more than
Pastoureau did, who cried very heartily, poor fellow, as my lord informed
me; he swore upon his honour that he had twice sent money to Brussels, and
mentioned the name of the merchant with whom it was lying for poor
Gertrude’s use. He did not even know whether she had a child or no, or
whether she was alive or dead; but got these facts easily out of honest
Pastoureau’s answers to him. When he heard that she was in a convent, he
said he hoped to end his days in one himself, should he survive his wife,
whom he hated, and had been forced by a cruel father to marry; and when he
was told that Gertrude’s son was alive, and actually in London, ‘I
started,’ says he; ‘for then, damme, my wife was expecting to lie-in, and
I thought should this old Put, my father-in-law, run rusty, here would be
a good chance to frighten him.’
“He expressed the deepest gratitude to the Pastoureau family for their
care of the infant; you were now near six years old; and on Pastoureau
bluntly telling him, when he proposed to go that instant and see the
darling child, that they never wished to see his ill-omened face again
within their doors; that he might have the boy, though they should all be
very sorry to lose him; and that they would take his money, they being
poor, if he gave it; or bring him up, by God’s help, as they had hitherto
done, without: he acquiesced in this at once, with a sigh, said, ‘Well,
’twas better that the dear child should remain with friends who had been
so admirably kind to him’; and in his talk to me afterwards, honestly
praised and admired the weaver’s conduct and spirit; owned that the
Frenchman was a right fellow, and he, the Lord have mercy upon him, a sad
villain.
“Your father,” Mr. Holt went on to say, “was good-natured with his money
when he had it; and having that day received a supply from his uncle, gave
the weaver ten pieces with perfect freedom, and promised him further
remittances. He took down eagerly Pastoureau’s name and place of abode in
his table-book, and when the other asked him for his own, gave, with the
utmost readiness, his name as Captain Thomas, New Lodge, Penzance,
Cornwall; he said he was in London for a few days only on business
connected with his wife’s property; described her as a shrew, though a
woman of kind disposition; and depicted his father as a Cornish squire, in
an infirm state of health, at whose death he hoped for something handsome,
when he promised richly to reward the admirable protector of his child,
and to provide for the boy. ‘And by Gad, sir,’ he said to me in his
strange laughing way, ‘I ordered a piece of brocade of the very same
pattern as that which the fellow was carrying, and presented it to my wife
for a morning wrapper, to receive company after she lay-in of our little
boy.’
“Your little pension was paid regularly enough; and when your father
became Viscount Castlewood on his uncle’s demise, I was employed to keep a
watch over you, and ’twas at my instance that you were brought home. Your
foster-mother was dead; her father made acquaintance with a woman whom he
married, who quarrelled with his son. The faithful creature came back to
Brussels to be near the woman he loved, and died, too, a few months before
her. Will you see her cross in the convent cemetery? The superior is an
old penitent of mine, and remembers Sœur Marie Madeleine fondly still.”
-------------------------------------
Esmond came to this spot in one sunny evening of spring, and saw, amidst a
thousand black crosses, casting their shadows across the grassy mounds,
that particular one which marked his mother’s resting-place. Many more of
those poor creatures that lay there had adopted that same name, with which
sorrow had rebaptized her, and which fondly seemed to hint their
individual story of love and grief. He fancied her in tears and darkness,
kneeling at the foot of her cross, under which her cares were buried.
Surely he knelt down, and said his own prayer there, not in sorrow so much
as in awe (for even his memory had no recollection of her), and in pity
for the pangs which the gentle soul in life had been made to suffer. To
this cross she brought them; for this heavenly bridegroom she exchanged
the husband who had wooed her, the traitor who had left her. A thousand
such hillocks lay round about, the gentle daisies springing out of the
grass over them, and each bearing its cross and requiescat. A nun, veiled
in black, was kneeling hard by, at a sleeping sister’s bedside (so fresh
made, that the spring had scarce had time to spin a coverlid for it);
beyond the cemetery walls you had glimpses of life and the world, and the
spires and gables of the city. A bird came down from a roof opposite, and
lit first on a cross, and then on the grass below it, whence it flew away
presently with a leaf in its mouth: then came a sound as of chanting, from
the chapel of the sisters hard by; others had long since filled the place,
which poor Mary Magdalene once had there, were kneeling at the same stall,
and hearing the same hymns and prayers in which her stricken heart had
found consolation. Might she sleep in peace—might she sleep in peace; and
we, too, when our struggles and pains are over! But the earth is the
Lord’s as the heaven is; we are alike His creatures here and yonder. I
took a little flower off the hillock, and kissed it, and went my way, like
the bird that had just lighted on the cross by me, back into the world
again. Silent receptacle of death! tranquil depth of calm, out of reach of
tempest and trouble! I felt as one who had been walking below the sea, and
treading amidst the bones of shipwrecks.