building large enough to hold so many people, and, though Angélique
added a sleeping-gallery, the refectory or dining-room was so small that
the nuns had to dine in parties of four. Her father was dead, and she
does not seem to have thought of consulting any of her brothers; more
space appeared a necessity, and, much as she hated debt, in her strait
she made up her mind that she must borrow money in order to build fresh
dormitories, and, breaking her rule, accepted a rich boarder, who became
the cause of infinite trouble.
Just at this period the king's mother, who was in Paris, paid a visit to
the famous abbess, and inquired if she had nothing to ask for, as it was
her custom always to grant some favour on entering a convent for the
first time.
Angélique replied that she prayed her to implore the king's grace to
allow a fresh abbess to be chosen every three years, and leave being
granted, she and her sister Agnes, who was her coadjutor, instantly
resigned. She meant the change to be a safeguard, so that no one nun
should enjoy absolute power for long; but as regarded her own abbey it
was a great mistake, for she had a gift of ruling such as belonged to
few women, and often when a mean or spiteful sister was elected she
would wreak her ill-temper upon the late abbess, and impose all sorts of
absurd penances upon her, which Angélique always bore meekly.
* * * * *
During the years that followed Angélique not only had her four younger
sisters with her, Agnes, Anne, Marie, and Madeleine, but later her
mother and her widowed sister, madame le Maître. They were all happy to
be together, though the rule of silence laid down by Angélique to
prevent gossip must have stood in the way of much that would have been
pleasant. By-and-by her nieces almost all entered the convent, and, what
is still more surprising, her brothers and several of her nephews, most
of them brilliant and successful men, one by one quitted the bar or the
army, and formed a little band known as the 'Recluses of Port Royal,'
who afterwards did useful work in draining and repairing the abbey 'in
the fields,' so that the nuns could go back to it.
And all this was owing to the example and influence of one little girl,
who had been thrust into a position for which she had certainly shown no
liking.
* * * * *
In the last twenty-five years of Angélique's life her religious views
underwent a change, and her confessor, St. Cyran, who shared them, was
imprisoned, on a charge of heresy, at Vincennes. Even as a young girl
she had left the chapel at Port Royal bare of ornaments, and later sold
the silver candlesticks which were a gift to the altar of Port Royal de
Paris, in order to bestow the money on the poor. Everyone looked up to
her, but by-and-by it began to be whispered that she was 'a dangerous
person,' who thought that the Church needed reforming as well as the
convents, and had adopted the opinions of one Jansen, a Swiss, who
wished to go back to the faith of early times, when St. Augustine was
bishop.
In 1654 she heard through one of her nephews that in consequence of some
of the recluses having resisted a decree of the pope condemning a book
of Jansen's, a resistance supposed to have been inspired by the abbess
herself, it was reported that she was either to be sent to the Bastille
or imprisoned in some convent. She did not take any notice, and neither
threat was fulfilled; but the hatred which the order of the Jesuits bore
to the 'Jansenists,' as their opponents were called, never rested, and
later a command came for the recluses to be dispersed, and the leaders
were forced to go into hiding. Then her schoolgirls were sent to their
homes, 'la belle Hamilton,' a Scotch girl, among them; and after them
went the candidates, or those who wished to take the veil. All these
blows came thick and fast, and Angélique, with health broken from the
incessant labours of over fifty years, was attacked by dropsy.
The nuns were in despair, and hung about her night and day, hoping that
she might let fall some words which they might cherish almost as divine
commands; but Angélique, who, unlike her sister Agnes, had all her life
been very impatient of sentimentality, detected this at once, and took
care 'neither to say nor do any thing remarkable.' 'They are too fond of
me,' she once said, 'and I am afraid they will invent all sorts of silly
tales about me.' And in order to put a stop as far as she could to all
the show and parade which she knew her nuns would rejoice in, as she
felt that her end was drawing near she gave them her last order:
'Bury me in the churchyard, and do not let there be any nonsense after
my death.'
GORDON
Many years hence, when the children of to-day are growing old men and
women, they will perhaps look back over their lives, as I am doing now,
and ask themselves questions about the people they have known or have
heard of. 'Who,' they will say, 'was the person I should have gone to at
once if I needed help?' 'Who was the man whose talk made me forget
everything, till I felt as if I could listen to him for ever?' 'What
woman was the most beautiful, or the most charming?' and they will turn
over the chapters in the Book of Long Ago and give the answers to
themselves, or to the boys and girls who are listening for their reply.
Well, if the question were put throughout England at this moment, 'What
man has kindled the greatest and most undying enthusiasm during your
life?' the answer would be given with one voice:
'Gordon.'
* * * * *
It seemed as if from the very first Nature had intended him for a
soldier. His father came of a clan that has a fighting record even in
Scotch history, and he was living on Woolwich Common, within hearing of
the Arsenal guns, when his fourth son, Charles George, was born on
January 28, 1833. Yet, strange to say, though fearless in many ways, and
accustomed to rough games with his numerous brothers and sisters,
Charles as a small boy hated the roar of cannon. Unlike queen Christina
of Sweden, who at four years old used to clap her hands when a gun was
discharged near her, and cry 'Again!' Charles shrank away and put his
fingers in his ears to shut out the noise. It was not lack of courage,
for he showed plenty of that about other things, but simply that the
sudden sound made him jump, and was unpleasant to him.
His life was from the first full of change, as the lives of soldiers'
children often are, for the Gordons were stationed in Dublin and near
Edinburgh before they went out to the island of Corfu when Charles was
seven. During the three years he spent there Charles grew big and strong
and full of daring; guns might fire all day long without his moving a
muscle, and he was always trying to imitate the deeds of boys bigger
than himself. When he saw them diving and swimming about in the
beautiful clear water, he would throw himself from a rock into their
midst, feeling quite sure that somebody would help him to float. And as
courage and confidence are the two chief qualities necessary to make a
good swimmer, by the time he left Corfu he was as much at home in the
sea as any of his friends.
* * * * *
After his tenth birthday his life at Corfu came to an end, and Charles
was brought home by his mother and sent to school at Taunton, where he
stayed for five years. He is sure to have been liked by his
schoolfellows, for he was a very lively, mischievous boy, constantly
inventing some fresh prank, but never shirking the punishment it
frequently brought. At Woolwich, which he entered as a cadet at fifteen,
it was just the same. He was continually defying, in a good-humoured
way, those who were set over him, and more than once he had a very
narrow escape of having his career cut short by dismissal.
At this period his father held the appointment of director of the
carriage department of the Arsenal, and his whole family suffered
greatly from the plague of mice which overran the house they lived in.
After putting up with it for some time, Charles and his brother Henry,
also a cadet, laid traps and caught vast numbers of the mice, and during
the night they carried them stealthily across the road in baskets to the
commandant's house, exactly opposite. Opening a door which they felt
pretty sure of finding unlocked, they emptied the baskets one by one,
and let the mice run where they would. Then the boys crept back softly
to their own room, shaking with laughter at the thought of the
commandant's face when he came down in the morning.
The two youths were great favourites with the workmen in the Arsenal,
who used often to leave off the work they should have been doing to make
squirts, crossbows, and other weapons for Charles and Henry. They must
have trembled sometimes when they heard that the windows of the
storehouse had been mysteriously broken, or that an officer who was
known to be disliked by the cadets had received a deluge of water down
his neck from a hedge bordering the road. But the culprits never
betrayed each other, and the young Gordons soon grew so bold that they
thought they might venture on a piece of mischief which very nearly
ended their military career.
Some earthworks had been newly thrown up near a room where the senior
cadets, known as 'Pussies,' attended lectures on certain evenings in the
week. One night the two Gordons hid themselves behind this rampart, and
while listening to remarks upon fortification and strategy the cadets
were startled by a crash of glass and a shower of small shot falling
about their ears. In an instant they were all up and out of the house,
dashing about in the direction from which the shots had come; and so
quick were they that if Charles and Henry had not known every inch of
the ground and dodged their pursuers, they would certainly have been
caught and expelled, as they richly deserved.
* * * * *
In June 1852 Charles Gordon was given a commission as second lieutenant
in the Engineers, and was sent to Chatham for two years. In spite of the
mice and the crossbows and the earthworks and many other things, he had
gained several good conduct badges, for he had worked hard, and was
noted for being clever both at fortifications and at surveying.
Mathematics he never could learn. So Charles said good-bye to his
father, who was thankful to see him put to man's work--for during the
four years his son had passed at Woolwich he had, as he expressed it,
'felt himself sitting on a powder barrel'--and set out on the career in
which he was to earn a name for justice and truth throughout three
continents.
It was while Gordon was learning in Pembroke Dock something of what
fortifications really were that the Crimean war broke out, and in
December he was ordered to Balaclava, in charge of the materials for
erecting wooden huts for the troops. He went down to Portsmouth and put
the planks and fittings on board some collier boats, but not wishing to
share their voyage, he started for Marseilles, and there took a steamer
to Constantinople. He arrived in the harbour of Balaclava on January 1,
1855, and heard the guns of Sebastopol booming six miles away. The cold
was bitter, men were daily frozen to death in the trenches, food was
very scarce, and the streets of Balaclava were full of 'swell English
cavalry and horse-artillery carrying rations, and officers in every
conceivable costume foraging for eatables.'
Soon the young engineer was sent down to the trenches before Sebastopol,
where he and his comrades were always under fire and scarcely ever off
duty. It was here that his friendship began with a young captain in the
90th Foot, now lord Wolseley, who has many stories to tell of what life
in the trenches was like. Notwithstanding all the suffering and sadness
around them, these young men, full of fun and high spirits, managed to
laugh in the midst of their work. At Christmas-time captain Wolseley and
two of his friends determined to have a plum-pudding, so that they might
feel as if they were eating their Christmas dinner in England. It is
true that they only had dim ideas how a plum-pudding was to be made, and
nothing whatever to make it with, but when one is young that makes no
difference at all. One of the three consulted a sergeant, who told him
he thought it would need some flour and some raisins, as well as some
suet; but as none of these things could be got, they used instead butter
which had gone bad, dry biscuits which they pounded very fine, and a
handful of raisins somebody gave them. Stirring this mixture carefully
by turns, they calculated how long it would have to boil--in one of
captain Wolseley's three towels which he sacrificed for the purpose--so
that they might be able to enjoy it at a moment when they would all be
off duty. Five hours, they fancied, it must be on the fire, but it had
scarcely been boiling one when the summons came to go back to their
work. Resolved not to lose the fruits of so much labour and care, they
snatched the plum-pudding from the pot and ate a few spoonfuls before
running out to their posts. But Wolseley had hardly reached his place
before he was seized with such frightful pains that he felt as if he
would die. His commanding officer, who happened to pass, seeing his face
looking positively green, ordered him back to his hut. But a little rest
soon cured him, and, like the others, he spent the night in the
trenches.
* * * * *
You will have read in the story of the 'Lady in Chief' something about
the hardships which the allied army of English, French, and Turks went
through during the war with the Russians, so I will not repeat it here.
Gordon, whose quick eye saw everything, was greatly struck with the way
the French soldiers bore their sufferings. 'They had nothing to cover
them,' he says, 'and in spite of the wet and cold they kept their health
and their high spirits also.' Our men worked hard and with dogged
determination, but, as a rule, they could not be called lively. True,
till Miss Nightingale and her nurses came out they were left when
wounded to the care of rough and ignorant, however kindly, comrades,
while the French had always their own Sisters of Charity to turn to for
help. But it is pleasant to think that the sons of the men who had
fallen in the awful passage of the Berezina forty years before were
worthy of their fathers, and could face death with a smile and a jest as
well as they.
* * * * *
As the war went on and the assaults on the town of Sebastopol became
more frequent, the English generals learned to know of what stuff their
young officers were made, and what special duties they were fit for.
They marked that Gordon had some of Hannibal's power of guessing, almost
by instinct, what the enemy was doing--a quality that rendered him
extremely useful to his superiors. With all his untiring energy and
eagerness--forty times he was in the trenches for twenty hours--he never
overlooked the details that were necessary to ensure the success of any
work he was entrusted with, and he never relaxed his watchfulness till
the post to be won was actually taken. In his leisure moments he seems
to have been fond of walking as far as he could without running into
danger, and writes home in February of the grass that was springing and
the crocuses that were flowering outside the camp. Sometimes he would go
with a friend down to the great harbour on the north side of which the
Russians were entrenched, and listen to them singing the sad boating
songs of the Volga, or watch them trying to catch fish, chattering
merrily all the while.
At last the forts of the Mamelon and the Malakoff were stormed, and the
Russians abandoned Sebastopol. Gordon, who had often narrowly escaped
death, was mentioned by the generals in despatches; but he did not
receive promotion, and, except a scar, the only token he carried away of
those long months of toil and strain was the cross of the Legion of
Honour bestowed on him by the French. But he was a marked man for all
that, and was sent straight from the Crimea, after peace was made, to
join a mission for fixing fresh frontiers for Russia south-west along
the river Pruth and on the shores of the Black Sea.
* * * * *
Wherever he went, whether he was on the borders of Turkey, in Armenia,
or in the Caucasus, where he proceeded after a winter in England, he
made the best of his opportunities and saw all he could of the country
and the people. He was as fond as ever of expeditions and adventures,
and climbed Ararat till a blinding snowstorm came on and the guides
refused to proceed. In the Caucasus he dined out whenever he was asked,
and was equally surprised at the beauty of the smart ladies (who wore
bracelets made of coal) and at the ingrained dirt of their clothes and
their houses. On the whole, though he thoroughly enjoyed the good
dinners they gave him, he preferred going on shooting expeditions into
the mountains with their husbands and sons.
At the end of 1858 he was ordered home again, and a few months later
obtained his captaincy, and was made adjutant and field-work instructor
at Chatham. But this did not last long, for in a year's time he was
destined to undertake one of the two great missions of his life.
Early in 1860 a war with China broke out, and in this also the French
were our allies. More soldiers were needed, and volunteers were asked
for. Gordon was one of the first to send in his name, but before he
reached Pekin the Taku forts, at the mouth of the Tientsin River--forts
of which in the year 1900 we were to hear so much--had been taken.
However, the famous Summer Palace was still to be captured, and this,
which indeed might be called the eighth wonder of the world, lay out in
the country, eight miles away from Pekin. The grounds, covering more
than twelve miles, were laid out with lakes, fountains, tea-houses,
waterfalls, banks of trees, and beds of flowers, while scattered about
were palaces belonging to different members of the royal family, all
filled with beautiful things--china of the oldest and rarest sorts,
silks, lacquer, cabinets, and an immense variety of clocks and watches.
By order of the English envoy this gorgeous place was given over to
pillage, in revenge for the ill-treatment of some French and British
prisoners. One can form a little idea of the vast amount of treasures it
contained from constantly seeing scattered in houses a watch or a
lacquer box or a china bowl that, we are told, had once decorated the
Summer Palace; they really seem to be endless. Lord Wolseley tells how
he happened to be standing by the French general in the gardens while
the looting was going on, and as a French soldier came out he handed to
his chief something that he had brought expressly for him. Then, turning
to the young English officer, he held out a beautiful miniature of a man
wearing a dress of the time of Louis XIV.
'That is for you, my comrade,' he said, smiling, and Wolseley, heartily
thanking him, examined the gift.
'How,' he thought, 'could a miniature of a French poet living two
hundred years ago have got to Pekin?' Then he remembered that an embassy
from China had arrived in France, bearing presents to the French court.
Louis received them graciously, and showed them the splendours of
Versailles and all the curious and artistic ornaments it contained. When
the envoys left, the king gave them gifts of French manufacture as
valuable as their own to take to their emperor, and among them was this
miniature of Boileau, by Petitot, the greatest of French miniaturists.
The imperial throne, which stands on dragon's claws, and is covered with
cushions of yellow silk, the imperial colour, was bought by Gordon
himself, and presented by him to Chatham, where it may still be seen.
* * * * *
Till the large sum fixed for the expenses of the war was paid General
Staveley was left with three thousand men in command at Tientsin, and
Gordon remained with him. Tientsin is a dreary place in a salt plain,
and the climate is very cold, as it is throughout North China. But
Gordon minded cold far less than heat and mosquitoes, and besides his
days were full from morning till night, building huts for the soldiers
and stables for the horses, and in managing a fund which he had
collected to help some Chinese in the neighbourhood who had been ruined
by the war. Though very careless of his own money, and ready to give it
away without inquiry to any beggar who asked for it, he was most
particular about other people's, and the attention which he paid to
small things enabled him to spend the fund in the manner that would best
aid the poor creatures who had lost everything. Now and then he gave
himself a day's holiday, and explored the country, as he was fond of
doing; and once he rode out to the Great Wall, twenty-two feet high and
sixteen wide, which runs along the north-west of China, over mountains
and across plains, for fifteen hundred miles, and was built two thousand
years ago by an emperor to keep out the invading hosts of the Tartars.
At certain distances strong forts were placed, and these were garrisoned
by Chinese soldiers. As he passed through the more remote villages the
inhabitants would come out of their houses and stare. A white man! They
had heard that there were such, though they had never really believed
it. Well, he was a strange creature truly, with his hair cropped close
and pink in his cheeks, and they did not much admire him!
Nearer Pekin he met long strings, or caravans, of camels laden with tea,
making their way to Russia. Everywhere in the neighbourhood of the
mountains it was frightfully cold, and raw eggs were frozen so hard that
no one could eat them; but Gordon could do with as little food as any
man, and did not suffer from the climate. He came back strengthened and
interested, and it was as well he had the short rest to brace him, for
now there lay before him a very difficult task.
* * * * *
For quite thirty years great discontent with government had been felt by
the peasants and lower classes in some of the central provinces of the
empire, and a long while before the war with England broke out a peasant
emperor had been proclaimed. The insurrection--or the Taeping rebellion,
as it is called--could have been easily put down in the beginning, but
ministers in China are slow to move, and it soon became a real danger to
the empire. The great object of the rebels was to gain possession of
Shanghai, the centre of European trade, built in the midst of canals and
rivers, with the great Yang-tse-kiang at hand to carry into the interior
of China the goods of foreign merchants of all countries that come to
its harbour across the Pacific. Pirate vessels, too, haunted its shores,
ready to pounce upon the rich traders, and when their prizes were
captured, they went swiftly away, and hid themselves among the islands
and bogs that stretched themselves a hundred miles to the north and
south of the city.
Thus Shanghai was a very important place both to Chinese, French, and
English; yet for twelve years the rebellion had been allowed to go on
unchecked, burning, pillaging, and murdering, till in 1853 the rebels
had reached a point only a hundred miles distant from Pekin itself. Then
soldiers were hastily collected, and the Taepings forced back; quarrels
broke out among their leaders, and most likely the rebellion would have
melted away altogether had it not been for the appearance four years
later of young Chung Wang, who assumed the command, and proved himself a
most skilful general. As long as he led the Taepings in battle victory
was on their side; if he was needed elsewhere, they were invariably
defeated.
Inspired by his successes, Chung Wang attacked and took several rich and
important towns in the Shanghai district, and held Nankin, the ancient
capital of China. Shanghai trembled when the flames of burning villages
became visible from her towers and pagodas, and even the Chinese felt
that, if they were to be saved at all, measures must be quickly taken.
Volunteers of all nations living in the town, Chinese as well as
Europeans and Americans, put themselves under the command of an American
named Ward, who drilled them, trained them, and fought with them, and,
it is said, gave battle to the rebels on seventy different occasions
without once being beaten. Well had his troops earned the title
afterwards given them at Pekin, of the Ever-Victorious Army.
* * * * *