VIVIAN.
AT THE ENTRANCE OF LIFE SITS--THE MOTHER.
It was during the war in Spain that a severe wound, and the fever which
ensued, detained Roland at the house of a Spanish widow. His hostess
had once been rich; but her fortune had been ruined in the general
calamities of the country. She had an only daughter, who assisted to
nurse and tend the wounded Englishman; and when the time approached
for Roland's departure, the frank grief of the young Ramouna betrayed
the impression that the guest had made upon her affections. Much of
gratitude, and something, it might be, of an exquisite sense of honour,
aided, in Roland's breast, the charm naturally produced by the beauty
of his young nurse, and the knightly compassion he felt for her ruined
fortunes and desolate condition.
In one of those hasty impulses common to a generous nature--and which
too often fatally vindicate the rank of Prudence amidst the tutelary
Powers of Life--Roland committed the error of marriage with a girl of
whose connexions he knew nothing, and of whose nature little more than
its warm spontaneous susceptibility. In a few days subsequent to these
rash nuptials, Roland rejoined the march of the army; nor was he able
to return to Spain till after the crowning victory of Waterloo.
Maimed by the loss of a limb, and with the scars of many a noble wound
still fresh, Roland then hastened to a home the dreams of which had
soothed the bed of pain, and now replaced the earlier visions of
renown. During his absence a son had been born to him--a son whom he
might rear to take the place he had left in his country's service; to
renew, in some future fields, a career that had failed the romance
of his own antique and chivalrous ambition. As soon as that news had
reached him, his care had been to provide an English nurse for the
infant--so that, with the first sounds of the mother's endearments, the
child might yet hear a voice from the father's land. A female relation
of Bolt's had settled in Spain, and was induced to undertake this
duty. Natural as this appointment was to a man so devotedly English,
it displeased his wild and passionate Ramouna. She had that mother's
jealousy, strongest in minds uneducated; she had also that peculiar
pride which belongs to her country-people, of every rank and condition;
the jealousy and the pride were both wounded by the sight of the
English nurse at the child's cradle.
That Roland, on regaining his Spanish hearth, should be disappointed
in his expectations of the happiness awaiting him there, was the
inevitable condition of such a marriage; since, not the less for his
military bluntness, Roland had that refinement of feeling, perhaps
over-fastidious, which belongs to all natures essentially poetic; and
as the first illusions of love died away, there could have been little
indeed congenial to his stately temper in one divided from him by an
utter absence of education, and by the strong but nameless distinctions
of national views and manners. The disappointment probably, however,
went deeper than that which usually attends an ill-assorted union;
for, instead of bringing his wife to his old tower, (an expatriation
which she would doubtless have resisted to the utmost,) he accepted,
maimed as he was, not very long after his return to Spain, the offer
of a military post under Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense
loyalty of Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of
a throne which the English arms had contributed to establish; while
the extreme unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and
the stigma of irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster
Roland's belief that he was supporting a beloved king against the
professors of those revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines, which
to him were the very atheism of politics. The experience of a few
years in the service of a bigot so contemptible as Ferdinand, whose
highest object of patriotism was the restoration of the Inquisition,
added another disappointment to those which had already embittered the
life of a man who had seen in the grand hero of Cervantes no follies
to satirise, but high virtues to imitate. Poor Quixote himself--he
came mournfully back to his La Mancha, with no other reward for his
knight-errantry than a decoration which he disdained to place beside
his simple Waterloo medal, and a grade for which he would have blushed
to resign his more modest, but more honourable English dignity.
But, still weaving hopes, the sanguine man returned to his Penates. His
child now had grown from infancy into boyhood--the child would pass
naturally into his care. Delightful occupation!--At the thought, Home
smiled again.
Now, behold the most pernicious circumstance in this ill-omened
connexion.
The father of Ramouna had been one of that strange and mysterious
race which presents in Spain so many features distinct from the
characteristics of its kindred tribes in more civilised lands.
The Gitáno, or gipsy of Spain, is not the mere vagrant we see on
our commons and roadsides. Retaining, indeed, much of his lawless
principles and predatory inclinations, he lives often in towns,
exercises various callings, and not unfrequently becomes rich. A
wealthy Gitáno had married a Spanish woman;[5] Roland's wife had been
the offspring of this marriage. The Gitáno had died while Ramouna
was yet extremely young, and her childhood had been free from the
influences of her paternal kindred. But, though her mother, retaining
her own religion, had brought up Ramouna in the same faith, pure from
the godless creed of the Gitáno--and, at her husband's death, had
separated herself wholly from his tribe--still she had lost caste with
her own kin and people. And while struggling to regain it, the fortune,
which made her sole chance of success in that attempt, was swept away,
so that she had remained apart and solitary, and could bring no friends
to cheer the solitude of Ramouna during Roland's absence. But, while my
uncle was still in the service of Ferdinand, the widow died; and then
the only relatives who came round Ramouna were her father's kindred.
They had not ventured to claim affinity while her mother lived; and
they did so now, by attentions and caresses to her son. This opened
to them at once Ramouna's heart and doors. Meanwhile, the English
nurse--who, in spite of all that could render her abode odious to her,
had, from strong love to her charge, stoutly maintained her post--died,
a few weeks after Ramouna's mother, and no healthful influence remained
to counteract those baneful ones to which the heir of the honest old
Caxtons was subjected. But Roland returned home in a humour to be
pleased with all things. Joyously he clasped his wife to his breast,
and thought, with self-reproach, that he had forborne too little, and
exacted too much--he would be wiser now. Delightedly he acknowledged
the beauty, the intelligence, and manly bearing of the boy, who played
with his sword-knot, and ran off with his pistols as a prize.
[5] A Spaniard very rarely indeed marries a Gitána or female gipsy. But
occasionally (observes Mr Borrow) a wealthy Gitáno marries a Spanish
female.
The news of the Englishman's arrival at first kept the lawless kinsfolk
from the house; but they were fond of the boy, and the boy of them, and
interviews between him and these wild comrades, if stolen, were not
less frequent. Gradually Roland's eyes became opened. As, in habitual
intercourse, the boy abandoned the reserve which awe and cunning at
first imposed, Roland was inexpressibly shocked at the bold principles
his son affected, and at his utter incapacity even to comprehend that
plain honesty and that frank honour which, to the English soldier,
seemed ideas innate and heaven-planted. Soon afterwards, Roland found
that a system of plunder was carried on in his household, and tracked
it to the connivance of the wife and the agency of the son, for the
benefit of lazy bravos and dissolute vagrants. A more patient man than
Roland might well have been exasperated--a more wary man confounded,
by this discovery. He took the natural step--perhaps insisting on it
too summarily--perhaps not allowing enough for the uncultured mind and
lively passions of his wife: he ordered her instantly to prepare to
accompany him from the place, and to give up all communication with her
kindred.
A vehement refusal ensued; but Roland was not a man to give up such
a point, and at length a false submission, and a feigned repentance
soothed his resentment and obtained his pardon. They moved several
miles from the place; but where they moved, there, some at least, and
those the worst, of the baleful brood, stealthily followed. Whatever
Ramouna's earlier love for Roland had been, it had evidently long
ceased in the thorough want of sympathy between them, and in that
absence which, if it renews a strong affection, destroys an affection
already weakened. But the mother and son adored each other with all
the strength of their strong, wild natures. Even under ordinary
circumstances, the father's influence over a boy yet in childhood is
exerted in vain, if the mother lend herself to baffle it. And in this
miserable position, what chance had the blunt, stern, honest Roland
(separated from his son during the most ductile years of infancy)
against the ascendency of a mother who humoured all the faults, and
gratified all the wishes, of her darling?
In his despair, Roland let fall the threat that, if thus thwarted, it
would become his duty to withdraw his son from the mother. This threat
instantly hardened both hearts against him. The wife represented Roland
to the boy as a tyrant, as an enemy--as one who had destroyed all the
happiness they had before enjoyed in each other--as one whose severity
showed that he hated his own child; and the boy believed her. In his
own house a firm union was formed against Roland, and protected by the
cunning which is the force of the weak against the strong.
In spite of all, Roland could never forget the tenderness with which
the young nurse had watched over the wounded man, nor the love--genuine
for the hour, though not drawn from the feelings which withstand the
wear and tear of life--that lips so beautiful had pledged him in the
bygone days. These thoughts must have come perpetually between his
feelings and his judgment, to embitter still more his position--to
harass still more his heart. And if, by the strength of that sense
of duty which made the force of his character, he could have strung
himself to the fulfilment of the threat, humanity, at all events,
compelled him to delay it--his wife promised to be again a mother.
Blanche was born. How could he take the infant from the mother's
breast, or abandon the daughter to the fatal influences from which
only, by so violent an effort, he could free the son?
No wonder, poor Roland! that those deep furrows contracted thy bold
front, and thy hair grew gray before its time!
Fortunately, perhaps, for all parties, Roland's wife died while Blanche
was still an infant. She was taken ill of a fever--she died delirious,
clasping her boy to her breast, and praying the saints to protect him
from his cruel father. How often that deathbed haunted the son, and
justified his belief that there was no parent's love in the heart
which was now his sole shelter from the world, and the "pelting of its
pitiless rain." Again I say, poor Roland!--for I know that, in that
harsh, unloving disrupture of such solemn ties, thy large generous
heart forgot its wrongs; again didst thou see tender eyes bending over
the wounded stranger--again hear low murmurs breathe the warm weakness
which the women of the south deem it no shame to own. And now did it
all end in those ravings of hate, and in that glazing gaze of terror!