"Indeed, my dear, you must take it. You certainly have caught cold; you
sneezed three times together."
"Yes, ma'am, because I would take a pinch of Uncle Roland's snuff, just
to say that I had taken a pinch out of his box,--the honor of the thing,
you know."
"Ah, my dear! what was that very clever remark you made at the same
time, which so pleased your father,--something about Jews and the
college?"
"Jews and--oh! pulverem Olgmpicum collegisse juvat, my dear mother,--
which means that it is a pleasure to take a pinch out of a brave man's
snuff-box. I say, mother, put down the posset. Yes, I'll take it; I
will, indeed. Now, then, sit here,--that's right,--and tell me all you
know about this famous old Captain. Imprimis, he is older than my
father?"
"To be sure!" exclaimed my mother, indignantly. "He looks twenty years
older; but there is only five years' real difference. Your father must
always look young."
"And why does Uncle Roland put that absurd French de before his name;
and why were my father and he not good friends; and is he married; and
has he any children?"
Scene of this conference: my own little room, new papered on purpose for
my return for good,--trellis-work paper, flowers and birds, all so fresh
and so new and so clean and so gay, with my books ranged in neat
shelves, and a writing-table by the window; and, without the window,
shines the still summer moon. The window is a little open: you scent
the flowers and the new-mown hay. Past eleven; and the boy and his dear
mother are all alone.
"My dear, my dear, you ask so many questions at once!"
"Don't answer them, then. Begin at the beginning, as Nurse Primmins
does with her fairy tales, 'Once on a time.'
"Once on a time, then," said my mother, kissing me between the eyes,--
"once on a time, my love, there was a certain clergyman in Cumberland
who had two sons; he had but a small living, and the boys were to make
their own way in the world. But close to the parsonage, on the brow of
a hill, rose an old ruin with one tower left, and this, with half the
country round it, had once belonged to the clergyman's family; but all
had been sold,--all gone piece by piece, you see, my dear, except the
presentation to the living (what they call the advowson was sold too),
which had been secured to the last of the family. The elder of these
sons was your Uncle Roland; the younger was your father. Now I believe
the first quarrel arose from the absurdist thing possible, as your
father says; but Roland was exceedingly touchy on all things connected
with his ancestors. He was always poring over the old pedigree, or
wandering amongst the ruins, or reading books of knight-errantry. Well,
where this pedigree began, I know not, but it seems that King Henry II.
gave some lands in Cumberland to one Sir Adam de Caxton; and from that
time, you see, the pedigree went regularly from father to son till Henry
V. Then, apparently from the disorders produced, as your father says,
by the Wars of the Roses, there was a sad blank left,--only one or two
names, without dates or marriages, till the time of Henry VIL, except
that in the reign of Edward IV. there was one insertion of a William
Caxton (named in a deed). Now in the village church there was a
beautiful brass monument to one Sir William de Caxton, who had been
killed at the battle of Bosworth, fighting for that wicked king Richard
III. And about the same time there lived, as you know, the great
printer, William Caxton. Well, your father, happening to be in town on
a visit to his aunt, took great trouble in hunting up all the old papers
he could find at the Heralds' College; and, sure enough, he was
overjoyed to satisfy himself that he was descended, not from that poor
Sir William who had been killed in so bad a cause, but from the great
printer, who was from a younger branch of the same family, and to whose
descendants the estate came in the reign of Henry VIII. It was upon
this that your Uncle Roland quarrelled with him,--and, indeed, I tremble
to think that they may touch on that matter again."
"Then, my dear mother, I must say my uncle was wrong there so far as
common-sense is concerned; but still, somehow or other, I can understand
it. Surely, this was not the only cause of estrangement?"
My mother looked down, and moved one hand gently over the other, which
was her way when embarrassed. "What was it, my own mother?" said I,
coaxingly.
"I believe--that is, I--I think that they were both attached to the same
young lady."
"How! you don't mean to say that my father was ever in love with any one
but you?"
"Yes, Sisty,--yes, and deeply! And," added my mother, after a slight
pause, and with a very low sigh, "he never was in love with me; and what
is more, he had the frankness to tell me so!"
"And yet you--"
"Married him--yes!" said my mother, raising the softest and purest eyes
that ever lover could have wished to read his fate in; "yes, for the old
love was hopeless. I knew that I could make him happy. I knew that he
would love me at last, and he does so! My son, your father loves me!"
As she spoke, there came a blush, as innocent as virgin ever knew, to my
mother's smooth cheek; and she looked so fair, so good, and still so
young all the while that you would have said that either Dusius, the
Teuton fiend, or Nock, the Scandinavian sea-imp, from whom the learned
assure us we derive our modern Daimones, "The Deuce," and Old Nick, had
possessed my father, if he had not learned to love such a creature.
I pressed her hand to my lips; but my heart was too full tot speak for a
moment or so, and then I partially changed the subject.
"Well, and this rivalry estranged them more? And who was the lady?"
"Your father never told me, and I never asked," said my mother, simply.
But she was very different from me, I know. Very accomplished, very
beautiful, very highborn."
"For all that, my father was a lucky man to escape her. Pass on. What
did the Captain do?"
"Why, about that time your grandfather died; and shortly after an aunt,
on the mother's side, who was rich and saving, died, and unexpectedly
left each sixteen thousand pounds. Your uncle, with his share, bought
back, at an enormous price, the old castle and some land round it, which
they say does not bring him in three hundred a year. With the little
that remained, he purchased a commission in the army; and the brothers
met no more till last week, when Roland suddenly arrived."
"He did not marry this accomplished young lady?" "No! but he married
another, and is a widower."
"Why, he was as inconstant as my father, and I am sure without so good
an excuse. How was that?"
"I don't know. He says nothing about it."
"Has he any children?"
"Two, a son--By the by, you must never speak about him. Your uncle
briefly said, when I asked him what was his family, 'A girl, ma'am. I
had a son, but--'
"'He is dead,' cried your father, in his kind, pitying voice."
"'Dead to me, brother; and you will never mention his name!' You should
have seen how stern your uncle looked. I was terrified."
"But the girl,--why did not he bring her here?"
"She is still in France, but he talks of going over for her; and we have
half promised to visit them both in Cumberland. But, bless me! is that
twelve? and the posset quite cold!"
"One word more, dearest mother,--one word. My father's book,--is he
still going on with it?"
"Oh yes, indeed!" cried my mother, clasping her hands; "and he must read
it to you, as he does to me,--you will understand it so well. I have
always been so anxious that the world should know him, and be proud of
him as we are,--so--so anxious! For perhaps, Sisty, if he had married
that great lady, he would have roused himself, been more ambitious,--and
I could only make him happy, I could not make him great!"
"So he has listened to you at last?"
"To me?" said my mother, shaking her head and smiling gently. "No,
rather to your Uncle Jack, who, I am happy to say, has at length got a
proper hold over him."
"A proper hold, my dear mother! Pray beware of Uncle Jack, or we shall
all be swept into a coal-mine, or explode with a grand national company
for making gunpowder out of tea-leaves!"
"Wicked child!" said my mother, laughing; and then, as she took up her
candle and lingered a moment while I wound my watch, she said, musingly:
"Yet Jack is very, very clever; and if for your sake we could make a
fortune, Sisty!"
"You frighten me out of my wits, mother! You are not in earnest?"
"And if my brother could be the means of raising him in the world--"
"Your brother would be enough to sink all the ships in the Channel,
ma'am," said I, quite irreverently. I was shocked before the words were
well out of my mouth; and throwing my arms round my mother's neck, I
kissed away the pain I had inflicted.
When I was left alone and in my own little crib, in which my slumber had
ever been so soft and easy, I might as well have been lying upon cut
straw. I tossed to and fro; I could not sleep. I rose, threw on my
dressing-gown, lighted my candle, and sat down by the table near the
window. First I thought of the unfinished outline of my father's youth,
so suddenly sketched before me. I filled up the missing colors, and
fancied the picture explained all that had often perplexed my
conjectures. I comprehended, I suppose by some secret sympathy in my
own nature (for experience in mankind could have taught me little
enough), how an ardent, serious, inquiring mind, struggling into passion
under the load of knowledge, had, with that stimulus sadly and abruptly
withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of passive, aimless study. I
comprehended how, in the indolence of a happy but unimpassioned
marriage, with a companion so gentle, so provident and watchful, yet so
little formed to rouse and task and fire an intellect naturally calm and
meditative, years upon years had crept away in the learned idleness of a
solitary scholar. I comprehended, too, how gradually and slowly, as my
father entered that stage of middle life when all men are most prone to
ambition, the long-silenced whispers were heard again, and the mind, at
last escaping from the listless weight which a baffled and disappointed
heart had laid upon it, saw once more, fair as in youth, the only true
mistress of Genius,--Fame.
Oh! how I sympathized, too, in my mother's gentle triumph. Looking over
the past, I could see, year after year, how she had stolen more and more
into my father's heart of hearts; how what had been kindness had grown
into love; how custom and habit, and the countless links in the sweet
charities of home, had supplied that sympathy with the genial man which
had been missed at first by the lonely scholar.
Next I thought of the gray, eagle-eyed old soldier, with his ruined
tower and barren acres, and saw before me his proud, prejudiced,
chivalrous boyhood, gliding through the ruins or poring over the mouldy
pedigree. And this son, so disowned,--for what dark offence? An awe
crept over me. And this girl,--his ewe-lamb, his all,--was she fair?
had she blue eyes like my mother, or a high Roman nose and beetle brows
like Captain Roland? I mused and mused and mused; and the candle went
out, and the moonlight grew broader and stiller; till at last I was
sailing in a balloon with Uncle Jack, and had just tumbled into the Red
Sea, when the well-known voice of Nurse Primmins restored me to life
with a "God bless my heart! the boy has not been in bed all this 'varsal
night!"