I had not been in haste to conclude my arrangements, for, independently
of my wish to render myself acquainted with the small useful crafts
that might be necessary to me in a life that makes the individual
man a state in himself, I naturally desired to habituate my kindred
to the idea of our separation, and to plan and provide for them all
such substitutes or distractions, in compensation for my loss, as my
fertile imagination could suggest. And first, for the sake of Blanche,
Roland, and my mother, I talked the Captain into reluctant sanction of
his sister-in-law's proposal, to unite their incomes and share alike,
without considering which party brought the larger proportion into
the firm. I represented to him that, unless he made that sacrifice
of his pride, my mother would be wholly without those little notable
uses and objects--those small household pleasures--so dear to woman;
that all society in the neighbourhood would be impossible, and that my
mother's time would hang so heavily on her hands that her only resource
would be to muse on the absent one and fret. Nay, if he persisted in
so false a pride, I told him, fairly, that I should urge my father to
leave the tower. These representations succeeded; and hospitality had
commenced in the old hall, and a knot of gossips had centred round
my mother--groups of laughing children had relaxed the still brow of
Blanche--and the Captain himself was a more cheerful and social man.
My next point was to engage my father in the completion of the Great
Book. "Ah, sir," said I, "give me an inducement to toil, a reward for
my industry. Let me think, in each tempting pleasure, each costly
vice--No, no; I will save for the Great Book! and the memory of the
father shall still keep the son from error. Ah, look you, sir! Mr
Trevanion offered me the loan of the £1500 necessary to commence with;
but you generously and at once said--'No; you must not begin life under
the load of debt.' And I knew you were right, and yielded--yielded the
more gratefully, that I could not but forfeit something of the just
pride of manhood in incurring such an obligation to the father of--Miss
Trevanion. Therefore I have taken that sum from you--a sum that would
almost have sufficed to establish your younger and worthier child in
the world for ever. To that child let me repay it, otherwise I will
not take it. Let me hold it as a trust for the Great Book; and promise
me that the Great Book shall be ready when your wanderer returns, and
accounts for the missing talent."
And my father pished a little, and rubbed off the dew that had gathered
on his spectacles. But I would not leave him in peace till he had given
me his word that the Great Book should go on _à pas du géant_--nay,
till I had seen him sit down to it with good heart, and the wheel went
round again in the quiet mechanism of that gentle life.
Finally, and as the culminating acme of my diplomacy, I effected the
purchase of the neighbouring apothecary's practice and good-will for
Squills, upon terms which he willingly subscribed to; for the poor man
had pined at the loss of his favourite patients, though, Heaven knows,
they did not add much to his income. And as for my father, there was no
man who diverted him more than Squills, though he accused him of being
a materialist, and set his whole spiritual pack of sages to worry and
bark at him, from Plato and Zeno to Reid and Abraham Tucker.
Thus, although I have very loosely intimated the flight of time, more
than a whole year elapsed from the date of our settlement at the tower
and that affixed for my departure.
In the meanwhile, despite the rarity amongst us of that phenomenon
a newspaper, we were not so utterly cut off from the sounds of the
far-booming world beyond, but what the intelligence of a change in the
administration, and the appointment of Mr Trevanion to one of the great
offices of state, reached our ears. I had kept up no correspondence
with Trevanion subsequent to the letter that occasioned Guy Bolding's
visit; I wrote now to congratulate him: his reply was short and hurried.
Intelligence that startled me more, and more deeply moved my heart,
was conveyed to me some three months or so before my departure, by
Trevanion's steward. The ill health of Lord Castleton had deferred his
marriage, intended originally to be celebrated as soon as he came of
age. He left the university with the honours of "a double-first class;"
and his constitution appeared to rally from the effects of studies
more severe to him, than they might have been to a man of quicker and
more brilliant capacities--when a feverish cold, caught at a county
meeting, in which his first public appearance was so creditable as
fully to justify the warmest hopes of his party, produced inflammation
of the lungs, and ended fatally. The startling contrast forced on
my mind--here sudden death, and cold clay--there youth in its first
flower, princely rank, boundless wealth, the sanguine expectation of
an illustrious career, and the prospect of that happiness which smiled
from the eyes of Fanny--that contrast impressed me with a strange awe:
death seems so near to us when it strikes those whom life most flatters
and caresses. Whence is that curious sympathy that we all have with the
possessors of worldly greatness, when the hour-glass is shaken and the
scythe descends? If the famous meeting between Diogenes and Alexander
had taken place not before, but after, the achievements which gave to
Alexander the name of Great, the cynic would not, perhaps, have envied
the hero his pleasures or his splendours, the charms of Statira, or
the tiara of the Mede; but if, the day after, a cry had gone forth,
"Alexander the Great is dead!" verily I believe that Diogenes would
have coiled himself up in his tub, and felt that, with the shadow of
the stately hero, something of glory and of warmth had gone from that
sun, which it should darken never more. In the nature of man, the
humblest or the hardest, there is a something that lives in all of the
Beautiful or the Fortunate, which hope and desire have appropriated,
even in the vanities of a childish dream.