A YOUNG viscount with income and person cannot lie _perdu_ three miles
from Edinburgh.
First one discovers him, then another, then twenty, then all the world,
as the whole clique is modestly called.
Before, however, Lord Ipsden was caught, he had acquired a browner tint,
a more elastic step, and a stouter heart.
The Aberford prescription had done wonders for him.
He caught himself passing one whole day without thinking of Lady Barbara
Sinclair.
But even Aberford had misled him; there were no adventures to be found
in the Firth of Forth; most of the days there was no wind to speak of;
twice it blew great guns, and the men were surprised at his lordship
going out, but nobody was in any danger except himself; the fishermen
had all slipped into port before matters were serious.
He found the merchantmen that could sail creeping on with three reefs in
their mainsail; and the Dutchmen lying to and breasting it, like ducks
in a pond, and with no more chance of harm.
On one of these occasions he did observe a little steam-tug, going about
a knot an hour, and rolling like a washing-tub. He ran down to her,
and asked if he could assist her; she answered, through the medium of
a sooty animal at her helm, that she was (like our universities)
“satisfied with her own progress”; she added, being under intoxication,
“that, if any danger existed, her scheme was to drown it in the
bo-o-owl;” and two days afterward he saw her puffing and panting, and
fiercely dragging a gigantic three-decker out into deep water, like an
industrious flea pulling his phaeton.
And now it is my office to relate how Mr. Flucker Johnstone comported
himself on one occasion.
As the yacht worked alongside Granton Pier, before running out, the said
Flucker calmly and scientifically drew his lordship's attention to three
points:
The direction of the wind--the force of the wind--and his opinion, as a
person experienced in the Firth, that it was going to be worse instead
of better; in reply, he received an order to step forward to his place
in the cutter--the immediate vicinity of the jib-boom. On this, Mr.
Flucker instantly burst into tears.
His lordship, or, as Flucker called him ever since the yacht came down,
“the skipper,” deeming that the higher appellation, inquired, with some
surprise, what was the matter with the boy.
One of the crew, who, by the by, squinted, suggested, “It was a slight
illustration of the passion of fear.”
Flucker confirmed the theory by gulping out: “We'll never see Newhaven
again.”
On this the skipper smiled, and ordered him ashore, somewhat
peremptorily.
Straightway he began to howl, and, saying, “It was better to be drowned
than be the laughing-stock of the place,” went forward to his place; on
his safe return to port, this young gentleman was very severe on
open boats, which, he said “bred womanish notions in hearts naturally
dauntless. Give me a lid to the pot,” added he, “and I'll sail with Old
Nick, let the wind blow high or low.”
The Aberford was wrong when he called love a cutaneous disorder.
There are cutaneous disorders that take that name, but they are no more
love than verse is poetry;
Than patriotism is love of country;
Than theology is religion;
Than science is philosophy;
Than paintings are pictures;
Than reciting on the boards is acting;
Than physic is medicine
Than bread is bread, or gold gold--in shops.
Love is a state of being; the beloved object is our center; and our
thoughts, affections, schemes and selves move but round it.
We may diverge hither or thither, but the golden thread still holds us.
Is fair or dark beauty the fairest? The world cannot decide; but love
shall decide in a moment.
A halo surrounds her we love, and makes beautiful to us her movements,
her looks, her virtues, her faults, her nonsense, her affectation and
herself; and that's love, doctor!
Lord Ipsden was capable of loving like this; but, to do Lady Barbara
justice, she had done much to freeze the germ of noble passion; she had
not killed, but she had benumbed it.
“Saunders,” said Lord Ipsden, one morning after breakfast, “have you
entered everything in your diary?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“All these good people's misfortunes?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Do you think you have spelled their names right?”
“Where it was impossible, my lord, I substituted an English appellation,
hidentical in meaning.”
“Have you entered and described my first interview with Christie
Johnstone, and somebody something?”
“Most minutely, my lord.”
“How I turned Mr. Burke into poetry--how she listened with her eyes all
glistening--how they made me talk--how she dropped a tear, he! he!
he! at the death of the first baron--how shocked she was at the king
striking him when he was dying, to make a knight-banneret of the poor
old fellow?”
“Your lordship will find all the particulars exactly related,” said
Saunders, with dry pomp.
“How she found out that titles are but breath--how I answered--some
nonsense?”
“Your lordship will find all the topics included.”
“How she took me for a madman? And you for a prig?”
“The latter circumstance eluded my memory, my lord.”
“But when I told her I must relieve only one poor person by day, she
took my hand.”
“Your lordship will find all the items realized in this book, my lord.”
“What a beautiful book!”
“Alba are considerably ameliorated, my lord.”
“Alba?”
“Plural of album, my lord,” explained the refined factotum, “more
delicate, I conceive, than the vulgar reading.”
Viscount Ipsden read from
“MR. SAUNDERS'S ALBUM.
“To illustrate the inelegance of the inferior classes, two juvenile
venders of the piscatory tribe were this day ushered in, and
instantaneously, without the accustomed preliminaries, plunged into a
familiar conversation with Lord Viscount Ipsden.
“Their vulgarity, shocking and repulsive to myself, appeared to afford
his lordship a satisfaction greater than he derives from the graceful
amenities of fashionable association--”
“Saunders, I suspect you of something.”
“Me, my lord!”
“Yes. Writing in an annual.”
“I do, my lord,” said he, with benignant _hauteur._ “It appears every
month--_The Polytechnic.”_
“I thought so! you are polysyllabic, Saunders; _en route!”_
“In this hallucination I find it difficult to participate; associated
from infancy with the aristocracy, I shrink, like the sensitive plant,
from contact with anything vulgar.”
“I see! I begin to understand you, Saunders. Order the dog-cart, and
Wordsworth's mare for leader; we'll give her a trial. You are an ass,
Saunders.”
“Yes, my lord; I will order Robert to tell James to come for your
lordship's commands about your lordship's vehicles. (What could he
intend by a recent observation of a discourteous character?)”
His lordship soliloquized.
“I never observed it before, but Saunders is an ass! La Johnstone is one
of Nature's duchesses, and she has made me know some poor people that
will be richer than the rich one day; and she has taught me that honey
is to be got from bank-notes--by merely giving them away.”
Among the objects of charity Lord Ipsden discovered was one Thomas
Harvey, a maker and player of the violin. This man was a person of
great intellect; he mastered every subject he attacked. By a careful
examination of all the points that various fine-toned instruments had
in common, he had arrived at a theory of sound; he made violins to
correspond, and was remarkably successful in insuring that which had
been too hastily ascribed to accident--a fine tone.
This man, who was in needy circumstances, demonstrated to his lordship
that ten pounds would make his fortune; because with ten pounds he could
set up a shop, instead of working out of the world's sight in a room.
Lord Ipsden gave him ten pounds!
A week after, he met Harvey, more ragged and dirty than before.
Harvey had been robbed by a friend whom he had assisted. Poor Harvey!
Lord Ipsden gave him ten pounds more!
Next week, Saunders, entering Harvey's house, found him in bed at noon,
because he had no clothes to wear.
Saunders suggested that it would be better to give his wife the next
money, with strict orders to apply it usefully.
This was done!
The next day, Harvey, finding his clothes upon a chair, his tools
redeemed from pawn, and a beefsteak ready for his dinner, accused his
wife of having money, and meanly refusing him the benefit of it. She
acknowledged she had a little, and appealed to the improved state of
things as a proof that she knew better than he the use of money. He
demanded the said money. She refused--he leathered her--she put him in
prison.
This was the best place for him. The man was a drunkard, and all the
riches of Egypt would never have made him better off.
And here, gentlemen of the lower classes, a word with you. How can
you, with your small incomes, hope to be well off, if you are more
extravagant than those who have large ones?
“Us extravagant?” you reply.
Yes! your income is ten shillings a week; out of that you spend three
shillings in drink; ay! you, the sober ones. You can't afford it, my
boys. Find me a man whose income is a thousand a year; well, if he
imitates you, and spends three hundred upon sensuality, I bet you the
odd seven hundred he does not make both ends meet; the proportion is too
great. And _two-thirds of the distress of the lower orders is owing to
this--that they are more madly prodigal than the rich; in the worst,
lowest and most dangerous item of all human prodigality!_
Lord Ipsden went to see Mrs. Harvey; it cost him much to go; she lived
in the Old Town, and he hated disagreeable smells; he also knew from
Saunders that she had two black eyes, and he hated women with black eyes
of that sort. But this good creature did go; did relieve Mrs. Harvey;
and, bare-headed, suffered himself to be bedewed ten minutes by her
tearful twaddle.
For once Virtue was rewarded. Returning over the North Bridge, he met
somebody whom but for his charity he would not have met.
He came in one bright moment plump upon--Lady Barbara Sinclair. She
flushed, he trembled, and in two minutes he had forgotten every human
event that had passed since he was by her side.
She seemed pleased to see him, too; she ignored entirely his obnoxious
proposal; he wisely took her cue, and so, on this secret understanding,
they were friends. He made his arrangements, and dined with her family.
It was a family party. In the evening Lady Barbara allowed it to
transpire that she had made inquiries about him.
(He was highly flattered.) And she had discovered he was lying hid
somewhere in the neighborhood.
“Studying the guitar?” inquired she.
“No,” said he, “studying a new class of the community. Do you know any
of what they call the 'lower classes'?”
“Yes.”
“Monstrous agreeable people, are they not?”
“No, very stupid! I only know two old women--except the servants, who
have no characters. They imitate us, I suspect, which does not say much
for their taste.”
“But some of my friends are young women; that makes all the difference.”
“It does! and you ought to be ashamed. If you want a low order of mind,
why desert our own circle?”
“My friends are only low in station; they have rather lofty minds, some
of them.”
“Well, amuse yourself with these lofty minds. Amusement is the end of
being, you know, and the aim of all the men of this day.”
“We imitate the ladies,” said he, slyly.
“You do,” answered she, very dryly; and so the dialogue went on, and
Lord Ipsden found the pleasure of being with his cousin compensate him
fully for the difference of their opinions; in fact, he found it simply
amusing that so keen a wit as his cousins s could be entrapped into
the humor of decrying the time one happens to live in, and admiring any
epoch one knows next to nothing about, and entrapped by the notion of
its originality, above all things; the idea being the stale commonplace
of asses in every age, and the manner of conveying the idea being a mere
imitation of the German writers, not the good ones, _bien entendu,_ but
the quill-drivers, the snobs of the Teutonic pen.
But he was to learn that follies are not always laughable, that _eadem
sentire_ is a bond, and that, when a clever and pretty woman chooses to
be a fool, her lover, if he is wise, will be a greater--if he can.
The next time they met, Lord Ipsden found Lady Barbara occupied with
a gentleman whose first sentence proclaimed him a pupil of Mr. Thomas
Carlyle, and he had the mortification to find that she had neither an
ear nor an eye for him.
Human opinion has so many shades that it is rare to find two people
agree.
But two people may agree wonderfully, if they will but let a third think
for them both.
Thus it was that these two ran so smoothly in couples.
Antiquity, they agreed, was the time when the world was old, its hair
gray, its head wise. Every one that said, “Lord, Lord!” two hundred
years ago was a Christian. There were no earnest men now; Williams,
the missionary, who lived and died for the Gospel, was not earnest
in religion; but Cromwell, who packed a jury, and so murdered his
prisoner--Cromwell, in whose mouth was heaven, and in his heart temporal
sovereignty--was the pattern of earnest religion, or, at all events,
second in sincerity to Mahomet alone, in the absence of details
respecting Satan, of whom we know only that his mouth is a Scripture
concordance, and his hands the hands of Mr. Carlyle's saints.
Then they went back a century or two, and were eloquent about the great
antique heart, and the beauty of an age whose samples were Abbot Sampson
and Joan of Arc.
Lord Ipsden hated argument; but jealousy is a brass spur, it made even
this man fluent for once.
He suggested “that five hundred years added to a world's life made it
just five hundred years older, not younger--and if older, grayer--and if
grayer, wiser.
“Of Abbot Sampson,” said he, “whom I confess both a great and a
good man, his author, who with all his talent belongs to the class
muddle-head, tells us that when he had been two years in authority his
red hair had turned gray, fighting against the spirit of his age; how
the deuce, then, could he be a sample of the spirit of his age?
“Joan of Arc was burned by acclamation of her age, and is admired by our
age. Which fact identifies an age most with a heroine, to give her your
heart, or to give her a blazing fagot and death?”
“Abbot Sampson and Joan of Arc,” concluded he, “prove no more in favor
of their age, and no less against it, than Lot does for or against
Sodom. Lot was in Sodom, but not of it; and so were Sampson and Joan in,
but not of, the villainous times they lived in.
“The very best text-book of true religion is the New Testament, and I
gather from it, that the man who forgives his enemies while their
ax descends on his head, however poor a creature he may be in other
respects, is a better Christian than the man who has the God of Mercy
forever on his lips, and whose hands are swift to shed blood.
“The earnest men of former ages are not extinct in this,” added he.
“Whenever a scaffold is erected outside a prison-door, if you are
earnest in pursuit of truth, and can put up with disgusting objects, you
shall see a relic of ancient manners hanged.
“There still exist, in parts of America, rivers on whose banks are
earnest men who shall take your scalp, the wife's of your bosom, and the
innocent child's of her bosom.
“In England we are as earnest as ever in pursuit of heaven, and of
innocent worldly advantages. If, when the consideration of life and
death interposes, we appear less earnest in pursuit of comparative
trifles such as kingdoms or dogmas, it is because cooler in action we
are more earnest in thought--because reason, experience, and conscience
are things that check the unscrupulousness or beastly earnestness of
man.
“Moreover, he who has the sense to see that questions have three sides
is no longer so intellectually as well as morally degraded as to be able
to cut every throat that utters an opinion contrary to his own.
“If the phrase 'earnest man' means man imitating the beasts that are
deaf to reason, it is to be hoped that civilization and Christianity
will really extinguish the whole race for the benefit of the earth.”
Lord Ipsden succeeded in annoying the fair theorist, but not in
convincing her.
The mediaeval enthusiasts looked on him as some rough animal that had
burst into sacred grounds unconsciously, and gradually edged away from
him.