CHAPTER IV
Our host regaled us with a hospitality that notably contrasted his economical thrifty habits in London. To be sure, Bolt had caught the great pike which headed the feast; and Bolt, no doubt, had helped to rear those fine chickens ab ovo; Bolt, I have no doubt, made that excellent Spanish omelette; and, for the rest, the products of the sheepwalk and the garden came in as volunteer auxiliaries,—very different from the mercenary recruits by which those metropolitan Condottieri, the butcher and greengrocer, hasten the ruin of that melancholy commonwealth called “genteel poverty.”
Our evening passed cheerfully; and Roland, contrary to his custom, was talker in chief. It was eleven o’clock before Bolt appeared with a lantern to conduct me through the courtyard to my dormitory among the ruins,—a ceremony which, every night, shine or dark, he insisted upon punctiliously performing.
It was long before I could sleep; before I could believe that but so few days had elapsed since Roland heard of his son’s death,—that son whose fate had so long tortured him; and yet, never had Roland appeared so free from sorrow! Was it natural, was it effort? Several days passed before I could answer that question, and then not wholly to my satisfaction. Effort there was, or rather resolute, systematic determination. At moments Roland’s head drooped, his brows met, and the whole man seemed to sink. Yet these were only moments; he would rouse himself up, like a dozing charger at the sound of the trumpet, and shake off the creeping weight. But whether from the vigor of his determination, or from some aid in other trains of reflection, I could not but perceive that Roland’s sadness really was less grave and bitter than it had been, or than it was natural to suppose. He seemed to transfer, daily, more and more, his affections from the dead to those around him, especially to Blanche and myself. He let it be seen that he looked on me now as his lawful successor,—as the future supporter of his name; he was fond of confiding to me all his little plans, and consulting me on them. He would walk with me around his domains (of which I shall say more hereafter),—point out, from every eminence we climbed, where the broad lands which his forefathers had owned stretched away to the horizon: unfold with tender hand the mouldering pedigree, and rest lingeringly on those of his ancestors who had held martial post or had died on the field. There was a crusader who had followed Richard to Ascalon; there was a knight who had fought at Agincourt: there was a cavalier (whose picture was still extant), with fair love-locks, who had fallen at Worcester,—no doubt the same who had cooled his son in that well which the son devoted to more agreeable associations. But of all these worthies there was none whom my uncle, perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, valued like that apocryphal Sir William. And why? Because when the apostate Stanley turned the fortunes of the field at Bosworth, and when that cry of despair, “Treason! treason!” burst from the lips of the last Plantagenet, “amongst the faithless,” this true soldier, “faithful found,” had fallen in that lion rush which Richard made at his foe. “Your father tells me that Richard was a murderer and usurper,” quoth my uncle. “Sir, that might be true or not; but it was not on the field of battle that his followers were to reason on the character of the master who trusted them, especially when a legion of foreign hirelings stood opposed to them. I would not have descended from that turncoat Stanley to be lord of all the lands the earls of Derby can boast of. Sir, in loyalty, men fight and die for a grand principle and a lofty passion; and this brave Sir William was paying back to the last Plantagenet the benefits he had received from the first!”
“And yet it may be doubted,” said I, maliciously, “whether William Caxton the printer did not—”
“Plague, pestilence, and fire seize William Caxton the printer, and his invention too!” cried my uncle, barbarously.
“When there were only a few books, at least they were good ones; and now they are so plentiful, all they do is to confound the judgment, unsettle the reason, drive the good books out of cultivation, and draw a ploughshare of innovation over every ancient landmark; seduce the women, womanize the men, upset states, thrones, and churches; rear a race of chattering, conceited coxcombs who can always find books in plenty to excuse them from doing their duty; make the poor discontented, the rich crotchety and whimsical, refine away the stout old virtues into quibbles and sentiments! All imagination formerly was expended in noble action, adventure, enterprise, high deeds, and aspirations; now a man can but be imaginative by feeding on the false excitement of passions he never felt, dangers he never shared, and he fritters away all there is of life to spare in him upon the fictitious love—sorrows of Bond Street and St. James’s. Sir, chivalry ceased when the Press rose! And to fasten upon me, as a forefather, out of all men who ever lived and sinned, the very man who has most destroyed what I most valued,—who, by the Lord! with his cursed invention has well-nigh got rid of respect for forefathers altogether,—is a cruelty of which my brother had never been capable if that printer’s devil had not got hold of him!”
That a man in this blessed nineteenth century should be such a Vandal, and that my Uncle Roland should talk in a strain that Totila would have been ashamed of, within so short a time after my father’s scientific and erudite oration on the Hygeiana of Books,—was enough to make one despair of the progress of intellect and the perfectibility of our species. And I have no manner of doubt that, all the while, my uncle had a brace of books in his pockets, Robert Hall one of them! In truth, he had talked himself into a passion, and did not know what nonsense he was saying. But this explosion of Captain Roland’s has shattered the thread of my matter. Pouff! I must take breath and begin again.
Yes, in spite of my sauciness, the old soldier evidently took to me more and more. And besides our critical examination of the property and the pedigree, he carried me with him on long excursions to distant villages where some memorial of a defunct Caxton, a coat of arms, or an epitaph on a tombstone, might be still seen. And he made me pore over topographical works and county histories (forgetful, Goth that he was, that for those very authorities he was indebted to the repudiated printer!) to find some anecdote of his beloved dead! In truth, the county for miles round bore the vestigia of those old Caxtons; their handwriting was on many a broken wall. And obscure as they all were, compared to that great operative of the Sanctuary at Westminster whom my father clung to, still, that the yesterdays that had lighted them the way to dusty death had cast no glare on dishonored scutcheons seemed clear, from the popular respect and traditional affection in which I found that the name was still held in hamlet and homestead. It was pleasant to see the veneration with which this small hidalgo of some three hundred a-year was held, and the patriarchal affection with which he returned it. Roland was a man who would walk into a cottage, rest his cork leg on the hearth, and talk for the hour together upon all that lay nearest to the hearts of the owners. There is a peculiar spirit of aristocracy amongst agricultural peasants: they like old names and families; they identify themselves with the honors of a house, as if of its clan. They do not care so much for wealth as townsfolk and the middle class do; they have a pity, but a respectful one, for well-born poverty. And then this Roland, too,—who would go and dine in a cookshop, and receive change for a shilling, and shun the ruinous luxury of a hack cabriolet,—could be positively extravagant in his liberalities to those around him. He was altogether another being in his paternal acres. The shabby-genteel, half-pay captain, lost in the whirl of London, here luxuriated into a dignified ease of manner that Chesterfield might have admired. And if to please is the true sign of politeness, I wish you could have seen the faces that smiled upon Captain Roland as he walked down the village, nodding from side to side.
One day a frank, hearty old woman, who had known Roland as a boy, seeing him lean on my arm, stopped us, as she said bluffly, to take a “geud luik” at me.
Fortunately I was stalwart enough to pass muster, even in the eyes of a Cumberland matron; and after a compliment at which Roland seemed much pleased, she said to me, but pointing to the Captain,—
“Hegh, sir, now you ha’ the bra’ time before you, you maun e’en try and be as geud as he. And if life last, ye wull too; for there never waur a bad ane of that stock. Wi’ heads kindly stup’d to the least, and lifted manfu’ oop to the heighest,—that ye all war’ sin ye came from the Ark. Blessin’s on the ould name! though little pelf goes with it, it sounds on the peur man’s ear like a bit of gould!”
“Do you not see now,” said Roland, as we turned away, “what we owe to a name, and what to our forefathers? Do you not see why the remotest ancestor has a right to our respect and consideration,—for he was a parent? ‘Honor your parents’: the law does not say, ‘Honor your children!’ If a child disgrace us, and the dead, and the sanctity of this great heritage of their virtues,—the name; if he does—” Roland stopped short, and added fervently, “But you are my heir now,—I have no fear! What matter one foolish old man’s sorrows? The name, that property of generations, is saved, thank Heaven,—the name!”
Now the riddle was solved, and I understood why, amidst all his natural grief for a son’s loss, that proud father was consoled. For he was less himself a father than a son,—son to the long dead. From every grave where a progenitor slept, he had heard a parent’s voice. He could bear to be bereaved, if the forefathers were not dishonored. Roland was more than half a Roman; the son might still cling to his household affections, but the Lares were a part of his religion.
CHAPTER V
But I ought to be hard at work preparing myself for Cambridge. The deuce! how can I? The point in academical education on which I require most preparation is Greek composition. I come to my father, who, one might think, was at home enough in this. But rare indeed it is to find a great scholar who is a good teacher.
My dear father, if one is content to take you in your own way, there never was a more admirable instructor for the heart, the head, the principles, or the taste,—when you have discovered that there is some one sore to be healed, one defect to be repaired; and you have rubbed your spectacles, and got your hand fairly into that recess between your frill and your waistcoat. But to go to you cut and dry, monotonously, regularly, book and exercise in hand; to see the mournful patience with which you tear yourself from that great volume of Cardan in the very honeymoon of possession; and then to note those mild eyebrows gradually distend themselves into perplexed diagonals over some false quantity or some barbarous collocation, till there steal forth that horrible Papae! which means more on your lips than I am sure it ever did when Latin was a live language, and Papae a natural and unpedantic ejaculation!—no, I would sooner blunder through the dark by myself a thousand times than light my rushlight at the lamp of that Phlegethonian Papae!
And then my father would wisely and kindly, but wondrous slowly, erase three fourths of one’s pet verses, and intercalate others that one saw were exquisite, but could not exactly see why. And then one asked why; and my father shook his head in despair, and said, “But you ought to feel why!”
In short, scholarship to him was like poetry; he could no more teach it you than Pindar could have taught you how to make an ode. You breathed the aroma, but you could no more seize and analyze it than, with the opening of your naked hand, you could carry off the scent of a rose. I soon left my father in peace to Cardan and to the Great Book,—which last, by the way, advanced but slowly; for Uncle Jack had now insisted on its being published in quarto, with illustrative plates, and those plates took an immense time, and were to cost an immense sum,—but that cost was the affair of the Anti-Publisher Society. But how can I settle to work by myself? No sooner have I got into my room—penitus ab orbe divisus, as I rashly think—than there is a tap at the door. Now it is my mother, who is benevolently engaged upon making curtains to all the windows (a trifling superfluity that Bolt had forgotten or disdained), and who wants to know how the draperies are fashioned at Mr. Trevanion’s,—a pretence to have me near her, and see with her own eyes that I am not fretting; the moment she hears I have shut myself up in my room, she is sure that it is for sorrow. Now it is Bolt, who is making bookshelves for my father, and desires to consult me at every turn, especially as I have given him a Gothic design, which pleases him hugely. Now it is Blanche, whom, in an evil hour, I undertook to teach to draw, and who comes in on tiptoe, vowing she’ll not disturb me, and sits so quiet that she fidgets me out of all patience. Now, and much more often, it is the Captain, who wants me to walk, to ride, to fish. And, by St. Hubert (saint of the chase) bright August comes, and there is moorgame on those barren wolds; and my uncle has given me the gun he shot with at my age,—single-barrelled, flint lock; but you would not have laughed at it if you had seen the strange feats it did in Roland’s hands,—while in mine, I could always lay the blame on the flint lock! Time, in short, passed rapidly; and if Roland and I had our dark hours, we chased them away before they could settle,—shot them on the wing as they got up.
Then, too, though the immediate scenery around my uncle’s was so bleak and desolate, the country within a few miles was so full of objects of interest,—of landscapes so poetically grand or lovely; and occasionally we coaxed my father from the Cardan, and spent whole days by the margin of some glorious lake.
Amongst these excursions I made one by myself to that house in which my father had known the bliss and the pangs of that stern first-love which still left its scars fresh on my own memory. The house, large and imposing, was shut up,—the Trevanions had not been there for years,—the pleasure-grounds had been contracted into the smallest possible space. There was no positive decay or ruin,—that Trevanion would never have allowed; but there was the dreary look of absenteeship everywhere. I penetrated into the house with the help of my card and half-a-crown. I saw that memorable boudoir,—I could fancy the very spot in which my father had heard the sentence that had changed the current of his life. And when I returned home, I looked with new tenderness on my father’s placid brow, and blessed anew that tender helpmate who in her patient love had chased from it every shadow.
I had received one letter from Vivian a few days after our arrival. It had been re-directed from my father’s house, at which I had given him my address. It was short, but seemed cheerful. He said that he believed he had at last hit on the right way, and should keep to it; that he and the world were better friends than they had been; that the only way to keep friends with the world was to treat it as a tamed tiger, and have one hand on a crowbar while one fondled the beast with the other. He enclosed me a bank-note, which somewhat more than covered his debt to me, and bade me pay him the surplus when he should claim it as a millionnaire. He gave me no address in his letter, but it bore the postmark of Godalming. I had the impertinent curiosity to look into an old topographical work upon Surrey, and in a supplemental itinerary I found this passage: “To the left of the beech wood, three miles from Godalming, you catch a glimpse of the elegant seat of Francis Vivian, Esq.” To judge by the date of the work, the said Francis Vivian might be the grandfather of my friend, his namesake. There could no longer be any doubt as to the parentage of this prodigal son.
The long vacation was now nearly over, and all his guests were to leave the poor Captain. In fact, we had made a considerable trespass on his hospitality. It was settled that I was to accompany my father and mother to their long-neglected Penates, and start thence for Cambridge.
Our parting was sorrowful,—even Mrs. Primmins wept as she shook hands with Bolt. But Bolt, an old soldier, was of course a lady’s man. The brothers did not shake hands only,—they fondly embraced, as brothers of that time of life rarely do nowadays, except on the stage. And Blanche, with one arm round my mother’s neck and one round mine, sobbed in my ear: “But I will be your little wife, I will.” Finally, the fly-coach once more received us all,—all but poor Blanche, and we looked round and missed her.
CHAPTER VI
Alma Mater! Alma Mater! New-fashioned folks, with their large theories of education, may find fault with thee. But a true Spartan mother thou art: hard and stern as the old matron who bricked up her son Pausanius, bringing the first stone to immure him,—hard and stern, I say, to the worthless, but full of majestic tenderness to the worthy.
For a young man to go up to Cambridge (I say nothing of Oxford, knowing nothing thereof) merely as routine work, to lounge through three years to a degree among the (Greek word),—for such an one Oxford Street herself, whom the immortal Opium-Eater hath so direly apostrophized, is not a more careless and stony-hearted mother. But for him who will read, who will work, who will seize the rare advantages proffered, who will select his friends judiciously,—yea, out of that vast ferment of young idea in its lusty vigor choose the good and reject the bad,—there is plenty to make those three years rich with fruit imperishable, three years nobly spent, even though one must pass over the Ass’s Bridge to get into the Temple of Honor.
Important changes in the Academical system have been recently announced, and honors are henceforth to be accorded to the successful disciples in moral and natural sciences. By the side of the old throne of Mathesis they have placed two very useful fauteuils a la Voltaire. I have no objection; but in those three years of life it is not so much the thing learned as the steady perseverance in learning something that is excellent.
It was fortunate, in one respect, for me that I had seen a little of the real world,—the metropolitan,—before I came to that mimic one,—the cloistral. For what were called pleasures in the last, and which might have allured me, had I come fresh from school, had no charm for me now. Hard drinking and high play, a certain mixture of coarseness and extravagance, made the fashion among the idle when I was at the University, consule Planco,—when Wordsworth was master of Trinity; it may be altered now.
But I had already outlived such temptations, and so, naturally, I was thrown out of the society of the idle, and somewhat into that of the laborious.
Still, to speak frankly, I had no longer the old pleasure in books. If my acquaintance with the great world had destroyed the temptation to puerile excesses, it had also increased my constitutional tendency to practical action. And, alas! in spite of all the benefit I had derived from Robert Hall, there were times when memory was so poignant that I had no choice but to rush from the lonely room haunted by tempting phantoms too dangerously fair, and sober down the fever of the heart by some violent bodily fatigue. The ardor which belongs to early youth, and which it best dedicates to knowledge, had been charmed prematurely to shrines less severely sacred. Therefore, though I labored, it was with that full sense of labor which (as I found at a much later period of life) the truly triumphant student never knows. Learning—that marble image—warms into life, not at the toil of the chisel, but the worship of the sculptor. The mechanical workman finds but the voiceless stone.
At my uncle’s, such a thing as a newspaper rarely made its appearance. At Cambridge, even among reading men, the newspapers had their due importance. Politics ran high; and I had not been three days at Cambridge before I heard Trevanion’s name. Newspapers, therefore, had their charms for me. Trevanion’s prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion’s name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held firm. Not a word in the “Morning Post,” under the head of “fashionable intelligence,” as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the rise and fall of governments; no hint of “the speedy nuptials of the daughter and sole heiress of a distinguished and wealthy commoner:” only now and then, in enumerating the circle of brilliant guests at the house of some party chief, I gulped back the heart that rushed to my lips when I saw the names of Lady Ellinor and Miss Trevanion.
But amongst all that prolific progeny of the periodical Press, remote offspring of my great namesake and ancestor (for I hold the faith of my father), where was the “Literary Times”? What had so long retarded its promised blossoms? Not a leaf in the shape of advertisements had yet emerged from its mother earth. I hoped from my heart that the whole thing was abandoned, and would not mention it in my letters home, lest I should revive the mere idea of it. But in default of the “Literary Times” there did appear a new journal, a daily journal too,—a tall, slender, and meagre stripling, with a vast head, by way of prospectus, which protruded itself for three weeks successively at the top of the leading article, with a fine and subtle body of paragraphs, and the smallest legs, in the way of advertisements, that any poor newspaper ever stood upon! And yet this attenuated journal had a plump and plethoric title,—a title that smacked of turtle and venison; an aldermanic, portly, grandiose, Falstaflian title: it was called The Capitalist. And all those fine, subtle paragraphs were larded out with recipes how to make money. There was an El Dorado in every sentence. To believe that paper, you would think no man had ever yet found a proper return for his pounds, shillings, and pence; you would turn up your nose at twenty per cent. There was a great deal about Ireland,—not her wrongs, thank Heaven! but her fisheries; a long inquiry what had become of the pearls for which Britain was once so famous; a learned disquisition upon certain lost gold mines now happily re-discovered; a very ingenious proposition to turn London smoke into manure, by a new chemical process; recommendations to the poor to hatch chickens in ovens like the ancient Egyptians; agricultural schemes for sowing the waste lands in England with onions, upon the system adopted near Bedford,—net produce one hundred pounds an acre. In short, according to that paper, every rood of ground might well maintain its man, and every shilling be, like Hobson’s money-bag, “the fruitful parent of a hundred more.” For three days, at the newspaper room of the Union Club, men talked of this journal: some pished, some sneered, some wondered; till an ill-natured mathematician, who had just taken his degree, and had spare time on his hands, sent a long letter to the “Morning Chronicle,” showing up more blunders, in some article to which the editor of “The Capitalist” had specially invited attention, than would have paved the whole island of Laputa. After that time, not a soul read “The Capitalist.” How long it dragged on its existence I know not; but it certainly did not die of a maladie de langueur.
Little thought I, when I joined in the laugh against “The Capitalist,” that I ought rather to have followed it to its grave, in black crape and weepers,—unfeeling wretch that I was! But, like a poet, O “Capitalist”! thou wert not discovered and appreciated and prized and mourned till thou wert dead and buried, and the bill came in for thy monument.
The first term of my college life was just expiring when I received a letter from my mother, so agitated, so alarming,—at first reading so unintelligible,—that I could only see that some great misfortune had befallen us; and I stopped short and dropped on my knees to pray for the life and health of those whom that misfortune more specially seemed to menace; and then, towards the end of the last blurred sentence, read twice, thrice, over,—I could cry, “Thank Heaven, thank Heaven! it is only, then, money after all!”