For six years after this all went smoothly with George Bowring and
myself. We met almost daily, although we did not lodge together (as once
we had done) nor spend the evening hours together, because, of course,
he had now his home and family rising around him. By the summer of 1832
he had three children, and was expecting a fourth at no very distant
time. His eldest son was named after me, “Robert Bistre,” for such is
my name, which I have often thought of changing. Not that the name is
at all a bad one, as among friends and relations, but that, when I am
addressed by strangers, “Mr. Bistre” has a jingling sound, suggestive
of childish levity. “Sir Robert Bistre,” however, would sound uncommonly
well; and (as some people say) less eminent artists--but perhaps, after
all, I am not so very old as to be in a hurry.
In the summer of 1832--as elderly people will call to mind, and the
younger sort will have heard or read--the cholera broke over London like
a bursting meteor. Such panic had not been known, I believe, since the
time of the plague, in the reign of Charles II., as painted (beyond any
skill of the brush) by the simple and wonderful pen of Defoe. There
had been in the interval many seasons--or at least I am informed so--of
sickness more widely spread, and of death more frequent, if not so
sudden. But now this new plague, attacking so harshly a man's most
perceptive and valued part, drove rich people out of London faster than
horses (not being attacked) could fly. Well, used as I was to a good
deal of poison in dealing with my colours, I felt no alarm on my own
account, but was anxious about my landlady. This was an excellently
honest woman of fifty-five summers at the utmost, but weakly confessing
to as much as forty. She had made a point of insisting upon a brisket of
beef and a flat-polled cabbage for dinner every Saturday; and the same,
with a “cowcumber,” cold on Sunday; and for supper a soft-roed herring,
ever since her widowhood.
“Mrs. Whitehead,” said I--for that was her name, though she said she did
not deserve it; and her hair confirmed her in that position by growing
darker from year to year--“Madam, allow me to beg you to vary your diet
a little at this sad time.”
“I varies it every day, Mr. Bistre,” she answered somewhat snappishly.
“The days of the week is not so many but what they all come round
again.”
For the moment I did not quite perceive the precision of her argument;
but after her death I was able to do more justice to her intellect. And,
unhappily, she was removed to a better world on the following Sunday.
To a man in London of quiet habits and regular ways and periods there
scarcely can be a more desperate blow than the loss of his landlady.
It is not only that his conscience pricks him for all his narrow,
plagiaristic, and even irrational suspicions about the low level of his
tea caddy, or a neap tide in his brandy bottle, or any false evidence of
the eyes (which ever go spying to lock up the heart), or the ears, which
are also wicked organs--these memories truly are grievous to him, and
make him yearn now to be robbed again; but what he feels most sadly is
the desolation of having nobody who understands his locks. One of the
best men I ever knew was so plagued with his sideboard every
day for two years, after dinner, that he married a little new
maid-of-all-work--because she was a blacksmith's daughter.
Nothing of that sort, however, occurred in my case, I am proud to say.
But finding myself in a helpless state, without anyone to be afraid
of, I had only two courses before me: either to go back to my former
landlady (who was almost too much of a Tartar, perhaps), or else to run
away from my rooms till Providence provided a new landlady.
Now, in this dilemma I met George Bowring, who saw my distress, and most
kindly pressed me to stay at his house till some female arose to manage
my affairs for me. This, of course, I declined to do, especially under
present circumstances; and, with mutual pity, we parted. But the very
next day he sought me out, in a quiet nook where a few good artists were
accustomed to meet and think; and there he told me that really now he
saw his way to cut short my troubles as well as his own, and to earn a
piece of enjoyment and profit for both of us. And I happen to remember
his very words.
“You are cramped in your hand, my dear fellow,” said he (for in those
days youths did not call each other “old man”--with sad sense of their
own decrepitude). “Bob, you are losing your freedom of touch. You must
come out of these stony holes, and look at a rocky mountain.”
My heart gave a jump at these words; and yet I had been too much laid
flat by facts--“sat upon,” is the slang of these last twenty years, and
in the present dearth of invention must serve, no doubt, for another
twenty--I say that I had been used as a cushion by so many landladies
and maids-of-all-work (who take not an hour to find out where they need
do no work), that I could not fetch my breath to think of ever going up
a mountain.
“I will leave you to think of it, Bob,” said George, putting his hat
on carefully; “I am bound for time, and you seem to be nervous. Consult
your pillow, my dear fellow; and peep into your old stocking: and see
whether you can afford it.”
That last hit settled me. People said, in spite of all my generous
acts--and nobody knows, except myself, the frequency and the extent of
these--without understanding the merits of the case--perfect (or rather
imperfect) strangers said that I was stingy! To prove the contrary, I
resolved to launch into great expenditure, and to pay coach fare all the
way from London toward the nearest mountain.
Half the inhabitants now were rushing helter-skelter out of London, and
very often to seaside towns where the smell of fish destroyed them. And
those who could not get away were shuddering at the blinds drawn down,
and huddling away from the mutes at the doors, and turning pale at the
funeral bells. And some, who had never thought twice before of their
latter end, now began to dwell with so much unction upon it, that
Providence graciously spared them the waste of perpetual preparation.
Among the rest, George Bowring had been scared, far more than he liked
to own, by the sudden death of his butcher, between half a dozen chops
for cutlets and the trimming of a wing-bone. George's own cook had gone
down with the order, and meant to bring it all back herself, because
she knew what butchers do when left to consider their subject. And Mrs.
Tompkins was so alarmed that she gave only six hours' notice to leave,
though her husband was far on the salt-sea wave, according to her own
account, and she had none to make her welcome except her father's second
wife. This broke up the household; and hence it was that George tempted
me so with the mountains.
For he took his wife and children to an old manor-house in Berkshire,
belonging to two maiden aunts of the lady, who promised to see to all
that might happen, but wanted no gentleman in the house at a period of
such delicacy. George Bowring, therefore, agreed to meet me on the 12th
day of September, at the inn in Reading--I forget its name--where the
Regulator coach (belonging to the old company, and leaving White Horse
Cellars at half-past nine in the morning) allowed an hour to dine, from
one o'clock onward, as the roads might be. And here I found him, and
we supped at Oxford, and did very well at the Mitre. On the following
morning we took coach for Shrewsbury, as we had agreed, and, reaching
the town before dark, put up at the Talbot Inn, and sauntered into the
dear old school, to see what the lads had been at since our time; for
their names and their exploits, at Oxford and Cambridge, are scored in
large letters upon the panels, from the year 1806 and onward, so that
soon there will be no place to register any more of them; and we found
that though we ourselves had done nothing, many fine fellows had been
instituted in letters of higher humanity, and were holding up the old
standard, so that we longed to invite them to dinner. But discipline
must be maintained; and that word means, more than anything else, the
difference of men's ages.
Now, at Shrewsbury, we had resolved to cast off all further heed of
coaches; and knowing the country pretty well, or recalling it from our
childhood, to strike away on foot for some of the mountain wildernesses.
Of these, in those days, nobody knew much more than that they were high
and steep, and slippery and dangerous, and much to be shunned by all
sensible people who liked a nice fire and the right side of the window.
So that when we shouldered staves with knapsacks flapping heavily, all
the wiser sort looked on us as marching off to Bedlam.
In the morning, as we were starting, we set our watches by the old
school dial, as I have cause to remember well. And we staked half a
crown, in a sporting manner, each on his own watch to be the truer by
sun upon our way back again. And thus; we left those ancient walls and
the glancing of the river, and stoutly took the Welshpool road, dreading
nought except starvation.
Although in those days I was not by any means a cripple, George was far
stronger of arm and leg, having always been famous, though we made
no fuss about such things then, for running and jumping, and lifting
weights, and using the boxing-gloves and the foils. A fine, brave fellow
as ever lived, with a short, straight nose and a resolute chin, he
touched the measuring-bar quite fairly at seventy-four inches, and
turned the scales at fourteen stone and a quarter. And so, as my
chattels weighed more than his (by means of a rough old easel and
material for rude sketches), he did me a good turn now and then by
changing packs for a mile or two. And thus we came in four days' march
to Aber-Aydyr, a village lying under Cader Idris.