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