A CHANGE IN CONDUCT AND IN CHARACTER: OUR EVIL PASSIONS WILL SOMETIMES
PRODUCE GOOD EFFECTS; AND ON THE CONTRARY, AN ALTERATION FOR THE BETTER
IN MANNERS WILL, NOT UNFREQUENTLY, HAVE AMONGST ITS CAUSES A LITTLE
CORRUPTION OF MIND; FOR THE FEELINGS ARE SO BLENDED THAT, IN SUPPRESSING
THOSE DISAGREEABLE TO OTHERS, WE OFTEN SUPPRESS THOSE WHICH ARE AMIABLE
IN THEMSELVES.
MY twin brother, Gerald, was a tall, strong, handsome boy, blessed with
a great love for the orthodox academical studies, and extraordinary
quickness of ability. Nevertheless, he was indolent by nature in things
which were contrary to his taste; fond of pleasure; and, amidst all his
personal courage, ran a certain vein of irresolution, which rendered it
easy for a cool and determined mind to awe or to persuade him. I
cannot help thinking, too, that, clever as he was, there was something
commonplace in the cleverness; and that his talent was of that
mechanical yet quick nature which makes wonderful boys but mediocre men.
In any other family he would have been considered the beauty; in ours he
was thought the genius.
My youngest brother, Aubrey, was of a very different disposition of
mind and frame of body; thoughtful, gentle, susceptible, acute; with an
uncertain bravery, like a woman’s, and a taste for reading, that varied
with the caprice of every hour. He was the beauty of the three, and my
mother’s favourite. Never, indeed, have I seen the countenance of man
so perfect, so glowingly yet delicately handsome, as that of Aubrey
Devereux. Locks, soft, glossy, and twining into ringlets, fell in dark
profusion over a brow whiter than marble; his eyes were black and tender
as a Georgian girl’s; his lips, his teeth, the contour of his face, were
all cast in the same feminine and faultless mould; his hands would have
shamed those of Madame de la Tisseur, whose lover offered six thousand
marks to any European who could wear her glove; and his figure would
have made Titania give up her Henchman, and the King of the Fairies be
anything but pleased with the exchange.
Such were my two brothers; or, rather (so far as the internal qualities
are concerned), such they seemed to me; for it is a singular fact that
we never judge of our near kindred so well as we judge of others; and I
appeal to any one, whether, of all people by whom he has been mistaken,
he has not been most often mistaken by those with whom he was brought
up.
I had always loved Aubrey, but they had not suffered him to love me;
and we had been so little together that we had in common none of those
childish remembrances which serve, more powerfully than all else in
later life, to cement and soften affection. In fact, I was the scapegoat
of the family. What I must have been in early childhood I cannot tell;
but before I was ten years old I was the object of all the despondency
and evil forebodings of my relations. My father said I laughed at _la
gloire et le grand monarque_ the very first time he attempted to explain
to me the value of the one and the greatness of the other. The countess
said I had neither my father’s eye nor her own smile,--that I was slow
at my letters and quick with my tongue; and throughout the whole house
nothing was so favourite a topic as the extent of my rudeness and the
venom of my repartee. Montreuil, on his entrance into our family,
not only fell in with, but favoured and fostered, the reigning humour
against me; whether from that _divide et impera_ system, which was so
grateful to his temper, or from the mere love of meddling and intrigue,
which in him, as in Alberoni, attached itself equally to petty as to
large circles, was not then clearly apparent; it was only certain that
he fomented the dissensions and widened the breach between my brothers
and myself. Alas! after all, I believe my sole crime was my candour. I
had a spirit of frankness which no fear could tame, and my vengeance for
any infantine punishment was in speaking veraciously of my punishers.
Never tell me of the pang of falsehood to the slandered: nothing is
so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough
truth!
As I grew older, I saw my power and indulged it; and, being scolded
for sarcasm, I was flattered into believing I had wit; so I punned and
jested, lampooned and satirized, till I was as much a torment to
others as I was tormented myself. The secret of all this was that I
was unhappy. Nobody loved me: I felt it to my heart of hearts. I
was conscious of injustice, and the sense of it made me bitter. Our
feelings, especially in youth, resemble that leaf which, in some old
traveller, is described as expanding itself to warmth, but when chilled,
not only shrinking and closing, but presenting to the spectator thorns
which had lain concealed upon the opposite side of it before.
With my brother Gerald, I had a deadly and irreconcilable feud. He was
much stouter, taller, and stronger than myself; and, far from conceding
to me that respect which I imagined my priority of birth entitled me
to claim, he took every opportunity to deride my pretensions, and
to vindicate the cause of the superior strength and vigour which
constituted his own. It would have done your heart good to have seen us
cuff one another, we did it with such zeal. There is nothing in human
passion like a good brotherly hatred! My mother said, with the most
feeling earnestness, that she used to feel us fighting even before our
birth: we certainly lost no time directly after it. Both my parents were
secretly vexed that I had come into the world an hour sooner than my
brother; and Gerald himself looked upon it as a sort of juggle,--a kind
of jockeyship by which he had lost the prerogative of birthright. This
very early rankled in his heart, and he was so much a greater favourite
than myself that, instead of rooting out so unfortunate a feeling on his
part, my good parents made no scruple of openly lamenting my seniority.
I believe the real cause of our being taken from the domestic
instructions of the Abbe (who was an admirable teacher) and sent to
school, was solely to prevent my uncle deciding everything in my favour.
Montreuil, however, accompanied us to our academy, and remained with
us during the three years in which we were perfecting ourselves in the
blessings of education.
At the end of the second year, a prize was instituted for the best
proficient at a very severe examination; two months before it took place
we went home for a few days. After dinner my uncle asked me to walk with
him in the park. I did so: we strolled along to the margin of a rivulet
which ornamented the grounds. There my uncle, for the first time, broke
silence.
“Morton,” said he, looking down at his left leg, “Morton, let me see;
thou art now of a reasonable age,--fourteen at the least.”
“Fifteen, if it please you, sir,” said I, elevating my stature as much
as I was able.
“Humph! my boy; and a pretty time of life it is, too. Your brother
Gerald is taller than you by two inches.”
“But I can beat him for all that, uncle,” said I, colouring, and
clenching my fist.
My uncle pulled down his right ruffle. “‘Gad so, Morton, you’re a brave
fellow,” said he; “but I wish you were less of a hero and more of a
scholar. I wish you could beat him in Greek as well as in boxing. I will
tell you what Old Rowley said,” and my uncle occupied the next quarter
of an hour with a story. The story opened the good old gentleman’s
heart; my laughter opened it still more. “Hark ye, sirrah!” said he,
pausing abruptly, and grasping my hand with a vigorous effort of love
and muscle, “hark ye, sirrah,--I love you,--‘Sdeath, I do. I love you
better than both your brothers, and that crab of a priest into the
bargain; but I am grieved to the heart to hear what I do of you. They
tell me you are the idlest boy in the school; that you are always
beating your brother Gerald, and making a scurrilous jest of your mother
or myself.”
“Who says so? who dares say so?” said I, with an emphasis that would
have startled a less hearty man than Sir William Devereux. “They lie,
Uncle; by my soul they do. Idle I am; quarrelsome with my brother I
confess myself; but jesting at you or my mother--never--never. No, no;
_you_, too, who have been so kind to me,--the only one who ever was. No,
no; do not think I could be such a wretch:” and as I said this the tears
gushed from my eyes.
My good uncle was exceedingly affected. “Look ye, child,” said he, “I do
not believe them. ‘Sdeath, not a word; I would repeat to you a good jest
now of Sedley’s, ‘Gad, I would, but I am really too much moved just at
present. I tell you what, my boy, I tell you what you shall do: there
is a trial coming on at school--eh?--well, the Abbe tells me Gerald is
certain of being first, and you of being last. Now, Morton, you shall
beat your brother, and shame the Jesuit. There; my mind’s spoken; dry
your tears, my boy, and I’ll tell you the jest Sedley made: it was in
the Mulberry Garden one day--” And the knight told his story.
I dried my tears, pressed my uncle’s hand, escaped from him as soon as I
was able, hastened to my room, and surrendered myself to reflection.
When my uncle so good-naturedly proposed that I should conquer Gerald
at the examination, nothing appeared to him more easy; he was pleased
to think I had more talent than my brother, and talent, according to
his creed, was the only master-key to unlock every science. A problem in
Euclid or a phrase in Pindar, a secret in astronomy or a knotty passage
in the Fathers, were all riddles, with the solution of which application
had nothing to do. One’s mother-wit was a precious sort of necromancy,
which could pierce every mystery at first sight; and all the gifts of
knowledge, in his opinion, like reading and writing in that of the sage
Dogberry, “came by nature.” Alas! I was not under the same pleasurable
delusion; I rather exaggerated than diminished the difficulty of my
task, and thought, at the first glance, that nothing short of a miracle
would enable me to excel my brother. Gerald, a boy of natural
talent, and, as I said before, of great assiduity in the orthodox
studies,--especially favoured too by the instruction of Montreuil,--had
long been esteemed the first scholar of our little world; and though
I knew that with some branches of learning I was more conversant than
himself, yet, as my emulation had been hitherto solely directed
to bodily contention, I had never thought of contesting with him a
reputation for which I cared little, and on a point in which I had been
early taught that I could never hope to enter into any advantageous
comparison with the “genius” of the Devereuxs.
A new spirit now passed into me: I examined myself with a jealous
and impartial scrutiny; I weighed my acquisitions against those of my
brother; I called forth, from their secret recesses, the unexercised
and almost unknown stores I had from time to time laid up in my mental
armoury to moulder and to rust. I surveyed them with a feeling that they
might yet be polished into use; and, excited alike by the stimulus of
affection on one side and hatred on the other, my mind worked itself
from despondency into doubt, and from doubt into the sanguineness of
hope. I told none of my design; I exacted from my uncle a promise not to
betray it; I shut myself in my room; I gave out that I was ill; I saw no
one, not even the Abbe; I rejected his instructions, for I looked upon
him as an enemy; and, for the two months before my trial, I spent night
and day in an unrelaxing application, of which, till then, I had not
imagined myself capable.
Though inattentive to the school exercises, I had never been wholly
idle. I was a lover of abstruser researches than the hackneyed subjects
of the school, and we had really received such extensive and judicious
instructions from the Abbe during our early years that it would have
been scarcely possible for any of us to have fallen into a thorough
distaste for intellectual pursuits. In the examination I foresaw
that much which I had previously acquired might be profitably
displayed,--much secret and recondite knowledge of the customs and
manners of the ancients, as well as their literature, which curiosity
had led me to obtain, and which I knew had never entered into the
heads of those who, contented with their reputation in the customary
academical routine, had rarely dreamed of wandering into less beaten
paths of learning. Fortunately too for me, Gerald was so certain of
success that latterly he omitted all precaution to obtain it; and as
none of our schoolfellows had the vanity to think of contesting with
him, even the Abbe seemed to imagine him justified in his supineness.
The day arrived. Sir William, my mother, the whole aristocracy of the
neighbourhood, were present at the trial. The Abbe came to my room a few
hours before it commenced: he found the door locked.
“Ungracious boy,” said he, “admit me; I come at the earnest request
of your brother Aubrey to give you some hints preparatory to the
examination.”
“He has indeed come at my wish,” said the soft and silver voice of
Aubrey, in a supplicating tone: “do admit him, dear Morton, for my
sake!”
“Go,” said I, bitterly, from within, “go: ye are both my foes and
slanderers; you come to insult my disgrace beforehand; but perhaps you
will yet be disappointed.”
“You will not open the door?” said the priest.
“I will not; begone.”
“He will indeed disgrace his family,” said Montreuil, moving away.
“He will disgrace himself,” said Aubrey, dejectedly.
I laughed scornfully. If ever the consciousness of strength is pleasant,
it is when we are thought most weak.
The greater part of our examination consisted in the answering of
certain questions in writing, given to us in the three days immediately
previous to the grand and final one; for this last day was reserved
the paper of composition (as it was termed) in verse and prose, and the
personal examination in a few showy, but generally understood, subjects.
When Gerald gave in his paper, and answered the verbal questions, a
buzz of admiration and anxiety went round the room. His person was so
handsome, his address so graceful, his voice so assured and clear,
that a strong and universal sympathy was excited in his favour. The
head-master publicly complimented him. He regretted only the deficiency
of his pupil in certain minor but important matters. I came next, for I
stood next to Gerald in our class. As I walked up the hall, I raised my
eyes to the gallery in which my uncle and his party sat. I saw that
my mother was listening to the Abbe, whose eye, severe, cold, and
contemptuous, was bent upon me. But my uncle leaned over the railing of
the gallery, with his plumed hat in his hand, which, when he caught my
look, he waved gently,--as if in token of encouragement, and with an air
so kind and cheering, that I felt my step grow prouder as I approached
the conclave of the masters.
“Morton Devereux,” said the president of the school, in a calm, loud,
austere voice, that filled the whole hall, “we have looked over your
papers on the three previous days, and they have given us no less
surprise than pleasure. Take heed and time how you answer us now.”
At this speech a loud murmur was heard in my uncle’s party, which
gradually spread round the hall. I again looked up: my mother’s face was
averted; that of the Abbe was impenetrable; but I saw my uncle wiping
his eyes, and felt a strange emotion creeping into my own, I turned
hastily away, and presented my paper; the head master received it, and,
putting it aside, proceeded to the verbal examination. Conscious of the
parts in which Gerald was likely to fail, I had paid especial attention
to the minutiae of scholarship, and my forethought stood me in good
stead at the present moment. My trial ceased; my last paper was read. I
bowed, and retired to the other end of the hall. I was not so popular as
Gerald; a crowd was assembled round him, but I stood alone. As I leaned
against a column, with folded arms, and a countenance which I felt
betrayed little of my internal emotions, my eye caught Gerald’s. He
was very pale, and I could see that his hand trembled. Despite of our
enmity, I felt for him. The worst passions are softened by triumph, and
I foresaw that mine was at hand.
The whole examination was over. Every boy had passed it. The masters
retired for a moment; they reappeared and reseated themselves. The first
sound I heard was that of my own name. I was the victor of the day: I
was more; I was one hundred marks before my brother. My head swam round;
my breath forsook me. Since then I have been placed in many trials of
life, and had many triumphs; but never was I so overcome as at that
moment. I left the hall; I scarcely listened to the applauses with which
it rang. I hurried to my own chamber, and threw myself on the bed in a
delirium of intoxicated feeling, which had in it more of rapture than
anything but the gratification of first love or first vanity can bestow.
Ah! it would be worth stimulating our passions if it were only for the
pleasure of remembering their effect; and all violent excitement should
be indulged less for present joy than for future retrospection.
My uncle’s step was the first thing which intruded on my solitude.
“Od’s fish, my boy,” said he, crying like a child, “this is fine
work,--‘Gad, so it is. I almost wish I were a boy myself to have a match
with you,--faith I do,--see what it is to learn a little of life! If
you had never read my play, do you think you would have done half so
well?--no, my boy, I sharpened your wits for you. Honest George Etherege
and I,--we were the making of you! and when you come to be a great man,
and are asked what made you so, you shall say, ‘My uncle’s play;’ ‘Gad,
you shall. Faith, boy, never smile! Od’s fish, I’ll tell you a story as
_a propos_ to the present occasion as if it had been made on
purpose. Rochester and I and Sedley were walking one day, and--_entre
nous_--awaiting certain appointments--hem!--for my part I was a little
melancholy or so, thinking of my catastrophe,--that is, of my play’s
catastrophe; and so, said Sedley, winking at Rochester, ‘Our friend is
sorrowful.’ ‘Truly,’ said I, seeing they were about to banter me,--for
you know they were arch fellows,--‘truly, little Sid’ (we called Sedley
Sid), ‘you are greatly mistaken;’--you see, Morton, I was thus sharp
upon him because when you go to court you will discover that it does not
do to take without giving. And then Rochester said, looking roguishly
towards me, the wittiest thing against Sedley that ever I heard; it was
the most celebrated _bon mot_ at court for three weeks; he said--no,
boy, od’s fish, it was so stinging I can’t tell it thee; faith, I can’t.
Poor Sid; he was a good fellow, though malicious,--and he’s dead now.
I’m sorry I said a word about it. Nay, never look so disappointed, boy.
You have all the cream of the story as it is. And now put on your hat,
and come with me. I’ve got leave for you to take a walk with your old
uncle.”
That night, as I was undressing, I heard a gentle rap at the door, and
Aubrey entered. He approached me timidly, and then, throwing his arms
round my neck, kissed me in silence. I had not for years experienced
such tenderness from him; and I sat now mute and surprised. At last
I said, with the sneer which I must confess I usually assumed towards
those persons whom I imagined I had a right to think ill of:--
“Pardon me, my gentle brother, there is something portentous in this
sudden change. Look well round the room, and tell me at your earliest
leisure what treasure it is that you are desirous should pass from my
possession into your own.”
“Your love, Morton,” said Aubrey, drawing back, but apparently in pride,
not anger; “your love: I ask nothing more.”
“Of a surety, kind Aubrey,” said I, “the favour seems somewhat slight to
have caused your modesty such delay in requesting it. I think you have
been now some years nerving your mind to the exertion.”
“Listen to me, Morton,” said Aubrey, suppressing his emotion; “you have
always been my favourite brother. From our first childhood my heart
yearned to you. Do you remember the time when an enraged bull pursued
me, and you, then only ten years old, placed yourself before it and
defended me at the risk of your own life? Do you think I could ever
forget that,--child as I was?--never, Morton, never!”
Before I could answer the door was thrown open, and the Abbe entered.
“Children,” said he, and the single light of the room shone full
upon his unmoved, rigid, commanding features--“children, be as Heaven
intended you,--friends and brothers. Morton, I have wronged you, I own
it; here is my hand: Aubrey, let all but early love, and the present
promise of excellence which your brother displays, be forgotten.”
With these words the priest joined our hands. I looked on my brother,
and my heart melted. I flung myself into his arms and wept.
“This is well,” said Montreuil, surveying us with a kind of grim
complacency, and, taking my brother’s arm, he blest us both, and led
Aubrey away.
That day was a new era in my boyish life. I grew henceforth both better
and worse. Application and I having once shaken hands became very good
acquaintance. I had hitherto valued myself upon supplying the frailties
of a delicate frame by an uncommon agility in all bodily exercises. I
now strove rather to improve the deficiencies of my mind, and became
orderly, industrious, and devoted to study. So far so well; but as I
grew wiser, I grew also more wary. Candour no longer seemed to me
the finest of virtues. I thought before I spoke: and second thought
sometimes quite changed the nature of the intended speech; in short,
gentlemen of the next century, to tell you the exact truth, the little
Count Devereux became somewhat of a hypocrite!