The Caxtons, Complete - Edward Bulwer Lytton
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"You see, my listeners, that you have to recollect that we middle-aged
folks were young then; that is to say, we were as different from what we
are now as the green bough of summer is from the dry wood out of which we
make a ship or a gatepost. Neither man nor wood comes to the uses of life
till the green leaves are stripped and the sap gone. And then the uses of
life transform us into strange things with other names: the tree is a
tree no more, it is a gate or a ship; the youth is a youth no more, but a
one-legged soldier, a hollow-eyed statesman, a scholar spectacled and
slippered! When Micyllus"--here the hand slides into the waistcoat
again--"when Micyllus," said my father, "asked the cock that had once
been Pythagoras(2) if the affair of Troy was really as Homer told it, the
cock replied scornfully, 'How could Homer know anything about it? At that
time he was a camel in Bactria.' Pisistratus, according to the doctrine
of metempsychosis you might have been a Bactrian camel when that which to
my life was the siege of Troy saw Roland and Trevanion before the walls.
"Handsome you can see that Trevanion has been: but the beauty of his
countenance then was in its perpetual play, its intellectual eagerness;
and his conversation was so discursive, so various, so animated, and
above all so full of the things of the day! If he had been a priest of
Serapis for fifty years he could not have known the anaglyph better.
Therefore he filled up every crevice and pore of that hollow society with
his broken, inquisitive, petulant light; therefore he was admired, talked
of, listened to, and everybody said, 'Trevanion is a rising man.'
"Yet I did not do him then the justice I have done since; for we students
and abstract thinkers are apt too much, in our first youth, to look to
the depth, of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to the surface it
may cover. There may be more water in a flowing stream only four feet
deep, and certainly more force and more health, than in a sullen pool
thirty yards to the bottom. I did not do Trevanion justice; I did not see
how naturally he realized Lady Ellinor's ideal. I have said that she was
like many women in one. Trevanion was a thousand men in one. He had
learning to please her mind, eloquence to dazzle her fancy, beauty to
please her eye, reputation precisely of the kind to allure her vanity,
honor and conscientious purpose to satisfy her judgment; and, above all,
he was ambitious,--ambitious not as I, not as Roland was, but ambitious
as Ellinor was; ambitious, not to realize some grand ideal in the silent
heart, but to grasp the practical, positive substances that lay without.
"Ellinor was a child of the great world, and so was he.
"I saw not all this, nor did Roland; and Trevanion seemed to pay no
particular court to Ellinor.
"But the time approached when I ought to speak. The house began to thin.
Lord Rainsforth had leisure to resume his easy conferences with me; and
one day, walking in his garden, he gave me the opportunity,--for I need
not say, Pisistratus," said my father, looking at me earnestly, "that
before any man of honor, if of inferior worldly pretensions, will open
his heart seriously to the daughter, it is his duty to speak first to the
parent, whose confidence has imposed that trust." I bowed my head and
colored.
"I know not how it was," continued my father, "but Lord Rainsforth turned
the conversation on Ellinor. After speaking of his expectations in his
son, who was returning home, he said, 'But he will of course enter public
life,--will, I trust, soon marry, have a separate establishment, and I
shall see but little of him. My Ellinor! I cannot bear the thought of
parting wholly with her. And that, to say the selfish truth, is one
reason why I have never wished her to marry a rich man, and so leave me
forever. I could hope that she will give herself to one who may be
contented to reside at least great part of the year with me, who may
bless me with another son, not steal from me a daughter. I do not mean
that he should waste his life in the country; his occupations would
probably lead him to London. I care not where my house is,--all I want is
to keep my home. You know,' he added, with a smile that I thought
meaning, 'how often I have implied to you that I have no vulgar ambition
for Ellinor. Her portion must be very small, for my estate is strictly
entailed, and I have lived too much up to my income all my life to hope
to save much now. But her tastes do not require expense, and while I
live, at least, there need be no change. She can only prefer a man whose
talents, congenial to hers, will win their own career, and ere I die that
career may be made.' Lord Rainsforth paused; and then--how, in what words
I know not, but out all burst!--my long-suppressed, timid, anxious,
doubtful, fearful love. The strange energy it had given to a nature till
then so retiring and calm! My recent devotion to the law; my confidence
that, with such a prize, I could succeed,--it was but a transfer of labor
from one study to another. Labor could conquer all things, and custom
sweeten them in the conquest. The Bar was a less brilliant career than
the senate. But the first aim of the poor man should be independence. In
short, Pisistratus, wretched egotist that I was, I forgot Roland in that
moment; and I spoke as one who felt his life was in his words.
"Lord Rainsforth looked at me, when I had done, with a countenance full
of affection, but it was not cheerful.
"'My dear Caxton,' said he, tremulously, 'I own that I once wished
this,--wished it from the hour I knew you; but why did you so long--I
never suspected that--nor, I am sure, did Ellinor.' He stopped short, and
added quickly: 'However, go and speak, as you have spoken to me, to
Ellinor. Go; it may not yet be too late. And yet--but go.'
"'Too late!'--what meant those words? Lord Rainsforth had turned hastily
down another walk, and left me alone, to ponder over an answer which
concealed a riddle. Slowly I took my way towards the house and sought
Lady Ellinor, half hoping, half dreading to find her alone. There was a
little room communicating with a conservatory, where she usually sat in
the morning. Thither I took my course. That room,--I see it still!--the
walls covered with pictures from her own hand, many were sketches of the
haunts we had visited together; the simple ornaments, womanly but not
effeminate; the very books on the table, that had been made familiar by
dear associations. Yes, there the Tasso, in which we had read together
the episode of Clorinda; there the Aeschylus in which I translated to her
the 'Prometheus.' Pedantries these might seem to some, pedantries,
perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which had
knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room, it was the
home of my heart.
"Such, in my vanity of spirit, methought would be the air round a home to
come. I looked about me, troubled and confused, and, halting timidly, I
saw Ellinor before me, leaning her face on her hand, her cheek more
flushed than usual, and tears in her eyes. I approached in silence, and
as I drew my chair to the table, my eye fell on a glove on the floor. It
was a man's glove. Do you know," said my father, "that once, when I was
very young, I saw a Dutch picture called 'The Glove,' and the subject was
of murder? There was a weed-grown, marshy pool, a desolate, dismal
landscape, that of itself inspired thoughts of ill deeds and terror. And
two men, as if walking by chance, came to this pool; the finger of one
pointed to a blood-stained glove, and the eyes of both were fixed on each
other, as if there were no need of words. That glove told its tale. The
picture had long haunted me in my boyhood, but it never gave me so uneasy
and fearful a feeling as did that real glove upon the floor. Why? My dear
Pisistratus, the theory of forebodings involves one of those questions on
which we may ask 'why' forever. More chilled than I had been in speaking
to her father, I took heart at last, and spoke to Ellinor."
My father stopped short; the moon had risen, and was shining full into
the room and on his face. And by that light the face was changed; young
emotions had brought back youth,--my father looked a young man. But what
pain was there! If the memory alone could raise what, after all, was but
the ghost of suffering, what had been its living reality! Involuntarily I
seized his hand; my father pressed it convulsively, and said with a deep
breath: "It was too late; Trevanion was Lady Ellinor's accepted,
plighted, happy lover. My dear Katherine, I do not envy him now; look up,
sweet wife, look up!"
(1). The anaglyph was peculiar to the Egyptian priests; the hieroglyph
generally known to the well educated.
(2). Lucian, The Dream of Micyllus.
CHAPTER VIII.
"Ellinor (let me do her justice) was shocked at my silent emotion. No
human lip could utter more tender sympathy, more noble self-reproach; but
that was no balm to my wound. So I left the house; so I never returned to
the law; so all impetus, all motive for exertion, seemed taken from my
being; so I went back into books. And so a moping, despondent, worthless
mourner might I have been to the end of my days, but that Heaven, in its
mercy, sent thy mother, Pisistratus, across my path; and day and night I
bless God and her, for I have been, and am--oh, indeed, I am a happy
man!"
My mother threw herself on my father's breast, sobbing violently, and
then turned from the room without a word; my father's eye, swimming in
tears, followed her; and then, after pacing the room for some moments in
silence, he came up to me, and leaning his arm on my shoulder, whispered,
"Can you guess why I have now told you all this, my son?"
"Yes, partly: thank you, father," I faltered, and sat down, for I felt
faint.
"Some sons," said my father, seating himself beside me, "would find in
their father's follies and errors an excuse for their own; not so will
you, Pisistratus."
"I see no folly, no error, sir; only nature and sorrow."
"Pause ere you thus think," said my father. "Great was the folly and
great the error of indulging imagination that has no basis, of linking
the whole usefulness of my life to the will of a human creature like
myself. Heaven did not design the passion of love to be this tyrant; nor
is it so with the mass and multitude of human life. We dreamers, solitary
students like me, or half-poets like poor Roland, make our own disease.
How many years, even after I had regained serenity, as your mother gave
me a home long not appreciated, have I wasted! The mainstring of my
existence was snapped; I took no note of time. And therefore now, you
see, late in life, Nemesis wakes. I look back with regret at powers
neglected, opportunities gone. Galvanically I brace up energies
half-palsied by disuse; and you see me, rather than rest quiet and good
for nothing, talked into what, I dare say, are sad follies, by an Uncle
Jack! And now I behold Ellinor again; and I say in wonder: 'All this--all
this--all this agony, all this torpor, for that, haggard face, that
worldly spirit!' So is it ever in life: mortal things fade; immortal
things spring more freshly with every step to the tomb.
"Ah!" continued my father, with a sigh, "it would not have been so if at
your age I had found out the secret of the saffron bag!"
CHAPTER IX.
"And Roland, sir," said I, "how did he take it?"
"With all the indignation of a proud, unreasonable man; more indignant,
poor fellow, for me than himself. And so did he wound and gall me by what
he said of Ellinor, and so did he rage against me because I would not
share his rage, that again we quarrelled. We parted, and did not meet for
many years. We came into sudden possession of our little fortunes. His he
devoted (as you may know) to the purchase of the old ruins and the
commission in the army, which had always been his dream; and so went his
way, wrathful. My share gave me an excuse for indolence,--it satisfied
all my wants; and when my old tutor died, and his young child became my
ward, and, somehow or other, from my ward my wife, it allowed me to
resign my fellowship and live amongst my books, still as a book myself.
One comfort, somewhat before my marriage, I had conceived; and that, too,
Roland has since said was comfort to him,--Ellinor became an heiress. Her
poor brother died, and all of the estate that did not pass in the male
line devolved on her. That fortune made a gulf between us almost as wide
as her marriage. For Ellinor poor and portionless, in spite of her rank,
I could have worked, striven, slaved; but Ellinor Rich! it would have
crushed me. This was a comfort. But still, still the past,--that
perpetual aching sense of something that had seemed the essential of life
withdrawn from life evermore, evermore! What was left was not sorrow,--it
was a void. Had I lived more with men, and less with dreams and books, I
should have made my nature large enough to bear the loss of a single
passion. But in solitude we shrink up. No plant so much as man needs the
sun and the air. I comprehend now why most of our best and wisest men
have lived in capitals; and therefore again I say, that one scholar in a
family is enough. Confiding in your sound heart and strong honor, I turn
you thus betimes on the world. Have I done wrong? Prove that I have not,
my child. Do you know what a very good man has said? Listen and follow my
precept, not example.
"The state of the world is such, and so much depends on action, that
everything seems to say aloud to every man, 'Do something--do it--do
it!'"
I was profoundly touched, and I rose refreshed and hopeful, when suddenly
the door opened, and who or what in the world should come in--But
certainly he, she, it, or they shall not come into this chapter! On that
point I am resolved. No, my dear young lady, I am extremely flattered, I
feel for your curiosity; but really not a peep,--not one! And yet--Well,
then, if you will have it, and look so coaxingly--Who or what, I say,
should come in abrupt, unexpected--taking away one's breath, not giving
one time to say, "By your leave, or with your leave," but making one's
mouth stand open with surprise, and one's eyes fix in a big round stupid
stare--but--
PART VIII.
CHAPTER I.
There entered, in the front drawing-room of my father's house in Russell
Street, an Elf! clad in white,--small, delicate, with curls of jet over
her shoulders; with eyes so large and so lustrous that they shone through
the room as no eyes merely human could possibly shine. The Elf
approached, and stood facing us. The sight was so unexpected and the
apparition so strange that we remained for some moments in startled
silence. At length my father, as the bolder and wiser man of the two, and
the more fitted to deal with the eerie things of another world, had the
audacity to step close up to the little creature, and, bending down to
examine its face, said, "What do you want, my pretty child?"
Pretty child! Was it only a pretty child after all? Alas! it would be
well if all we mistake for fairies at the first glance could resolve
themselves only into pretty children.
"Come," answered the child, with a foreign accent, and taking my father
by the lappet of his coat, "come, poor papa is so ill! I am frightened!
come, and save him."
"Certainly," exclaimed my father, quickly. "Where's my hat, Sisty?
Certainly, my child; we will go and save papa."
"But who is papa?" asked Pisistratus,--a question that would never have
occurred to my father. He never asked who or what the sick papas of poor
children were when the children pulled him by the lappet of his coat.
"Who is papa?"
The child looked hard at me, and the big tears rolled from those large,
luminous eyes, but quite silently. At this moment a full-grown figure
filled up the threshold, and emerging from the shadow, presented to us
the aspect of a stout, well-favored young woman. She dropped a courtesy,
and then said, mincingly,--
"Oh, miss, you ought to have waited for me, and not alarmed the
gentlefolks by running upstairs in that way! If you please, sir, I was
settling with the cabman, and he was so imperent,--them low fellows
always are, when they have only us poor women to deal with, sir, and--"
"But what is the matter?" cried I, for my father had taken the child in
his arms soothingly, and she was now weeping on his breast.
"Why, you see, sir [another courtesy], the gent only arrived last night
at our hotel, sir,--the Lamb, close by Lunnun Bridge,--and he was taken
ill, and he's not quite in his right mind like; so we sent for the
doctor, and the doctor looked at the brass plate on the gent's
carpet-bag, sir, and then he looked into the 'Court Guide,' and he said,
'There is a Mr. Caxton in Great Russell Street,--is he any relation?' and
this young lady said, 'That's my papa's brother, and we were going
there.' And so, sir, as the Boots was out, I got into a cab, and miss
would come with me, and--"
"Roland--Roland ill! Quick, quick, quick!" cried my father, and with the
child still in his arms he ran down the stairs. I followed with his hat,
which of course he had forgotten. A cab, by good luck, was passing our
very door; but the chambermaid would not let us enter it till she had
satisfied herself that it was not the same she had dismissed. This
preliminary investigation completed, we entered and drove to the Lamb.
The chambermaid, who sat opposite, passed the time in ineffectual
overtures to relieve my father of the little girl,--who still clung
nestling to his breast,--in a long epic, much broken into episodes, of
the causes which had led to her dismissal of the late cabman, who, to
swell his fare, had thought proper to take a "circumbendibus!"--and with
occasional tugs at her cap, and smoothings down of her gown, and
apologies for being such a figure, especially when her eyes rested on my
satin cravat, or drooped on my shining boots.
Arrived at the Lamb, the chambermaid, with conscious dignity, led us up a
large staircase, which seemed interminable. As she mounted the region
above the third story, she paused to take breath and inform us,
apologetically, that the house was full, but that if the "gent" stayed
over Friday, he would be moved into No. 54, "with a look-out and a
chimbly." My little cousin now slipped from my father's arms, and,
running up the stairs, beckoned to us to follow. We did so, and were led
to a door, at which the child stopped and listened; then, taking off her
shoes, she stole in on tiptoe. We entered after her.
By the light of a single candle we saw my poor uncle's face; it was
flushed with fever, and the eyes had that bright, vacant stare which it
is so terrible to meet. Less terrible is it to find the body wasted, the
features sharp with the great life-struggle, than to look on the face
from which the mind is gone,--the eyes in which there is no recognition.
Such a sight is a startling shock to that unconscious habitual
materialism with which we are apt familiarly to regard those we love; for
in thus missing the mind, the heart, the affection that sprang to ours,
we are suddenly made aware that it was the something within the form, and
not the form itself, that was so dear to us. The form itself is still,
perhaps, little altered; but that lip which smiles no welcome, that eye
which wanders over us as strangers, that ear which distinguishes no more
our voices,--the friend we sought is not there! Even our own love is
chilled back; grows a kind of vague, superstitious terror. Yes, it was
not the matter, still present to us, which had conciliated all those
subtle, nameless sentiments which are classed and fused in the word
"affection;" it was the airy, intangible, electric something, the absence
of which now appals us.
I stood speechless; my father crept on, and took the hand that returned
no pressure. The child only did not seem to share our emotions, but,
clambering on the bed, laid her cheek on the breast, and was still.
"Pisistratus," whispered my father at last, and I stole near, hushing my
breath,--"Pisistratus, if your mother were here!"
I nodded; the same thought had struck us both. His deep wisdom, my active
youth, both felt their nothingness then and there. In the sick chamber
both turned helplessly to miss the woman.
So I stole out, descended the stairs, and stood in the open air in a sort
of stunned amaze. Then the tramp of feet, and the roll of wheels, and the
great London roar, revived me. That contagion of practical life which
lulls the heart and stimulates the brain,--what an intellectual mystery
there is in its common atmosphere! In another moment I had singled out,
like an inspiration, from a long file of those ministrants of our Trivia,
the cab of the lightest shape and with the strongest horse, and was on my
way, not to my mother's, but to Dr. M--H--, Manchester Square, whom I
knew as the medical adviser to the Trevanions. Fortunately, that kind and
able physician was at home, and he promised to be with the sufferer
before I myself could join him. I then drove to Russell Street, and broke
to my mother, as cautiously as I could, the intelligence with which I was
charged.
When we arrived at the Lamb, we found the doctor already writing his
prescription and injunctions: the activity of the treatment announced the
clanger. I flew for the surgeon who had been before called in. Happy
those who are strange to that indescribable silent bustle which the
sick-room at times presents,--that conflict which seems almost hand to
hand between life and death,--when all the poor, unresisting, unconscious
frame is given up to the war against its terrible enemy the dark blood
flowing, flowing; the hand on the pulse, the hushed suspense, every look
on the physician's bended brow; then the sinapisms to the feet, and the
ice to the head; and now and then, through the lull of the low whispers,
the incoherent voice of the sufferer,--babbling, perhaps, of green fields
and fairyland, while your hearts are breaking! Then, at length, the
sleep,--in that sleep, perhaps, the crisis,--the breathless watch, the
slow waking, the first sane words, the old smile again, only fainter,
your gushing tears, your low "Thank God thank God!"
Picture all this! It is past; Roland has spoken, his sense has returned;
my mother is leaning over him; his child's small hands are clasped round
his neck; the surgeon, who has been there six hours, has taken up his
hat, and smiles gayly as he nods farewell; and my father is leaning
against the wall, his face covered with his hands.
CHAPTER II.
All this had been so sudden that, to use the trite phrase,--for no other
is so expressive,--it was like a dream. I felt an absolute, an imperious
want of solitude, of the open air. The swell of gratitude almost stifled
me; the room did not seem large enough for my big heart. In early youth,
if we find it difficult to control our feelings, so we find it difficult
to vent them in the presence of others. On the spring side of twenty, if
anything affects us, we rush to lock ourselves up in our room, or get
away into the streets or the fields; in our earlier years we are still
the savages of Nature, and we do as the poor brute does: the wounded stag
leaves the herd, and if there is anything on a dog's faithful heart, he
slinks away into a corner.
Accordingly, I stole out of the hotel and wandered through the streets,
which were quite deserted. It was about the first hour of dawn,--the most
comfortless hour there is, especially in London! But I only felt
freshness in the raw air, and soothing in the desolate stillness. The
love my uncle inspired was very remarkable in its nature; it was not like
that quiet affection with which those advanced in life must usually
content themselves, but connected with the more vivid interest that youth
awakens. There was in him still so much of viva, city and fire, in his
errors and crotchets so much of the self-delusion of youth, that one
could scarce fancy him other than young. Those Quixotic, exaggerated
notions of honor, that romance of sentiment which no hardship, care,
grief, disappointment, could wear away (singular in a period when, at two
and twenty, young men declare themselves blases!), seemed to leave him
all the charm of boyhood. A season in London had made me more a man of
the world, older in heart than he was. Then, the sorrow that gnawed him
with such silent sternness. No, Captain Roland was one of those men who
seize hold of your thoughts, who mix themselves up with your lives. The
idea that Roland should die,--die with the load at his heart
unlightened,--was one that seemed to take a spring out of the wheels of
nature, all object out of the aims of life,--of my life at least. For I
had made it one of the ends of my existence to bring back the son to the
father, and restore the smile, that must have been gay once, to the
downward curve of that iron lip. But Roland was now out of danger; and
yet, like one who has escaped shipwreck, I trembled to look back on the
danger past: the voice of the devouring deep still boomed in my ears.
While rapt in my reveries, I stopped mechanically to hear a clock
strike--four; and, looking round, I perceived that I had wandered from
the heart of the City, and was in one of the streets that lead out of the
Strand. Immediately before me, on the doorsteps of a large shop whose
closed shutters were as obstinate a stillness as if they had guarded the
secrets of seventeen centuries in a street in Pompeii, reclined a form
fast asleep, the arm propped on the hard stone supporting the head, and
the limbs uneasily strewn over the stairs. The dress of the slumberer was
travel-stained, tattered, yet with the remains of a certain pretence; an
air of faded, shabby, penniless gentility made poverty more painful,
because it seemed to indicate unfitness to grapple with it. The face of
this person was hollow and pale, but its expression, even in sleep, was
fierce and hard. I drew near and nearer; I recognized the countenance,
the regular features, the raven hair, even a peculiar gracefulness of
posture: the young man whom I had met at the inn by the way-side, and who
had left me alone with the Savoyard and his mice in the churchyard, was
before me. I remained behind the shadow of one of the columns of the
porch, leaning against the area rails, and irresolute whether or not so
slight an acquaintance justified me in waking the sleeper, when a
policeman, suddenly emerging from an angle in the street, terminated my
deliberations with the decision of his practical profession; for he laid
hold of the young man's arm and shook it roughly: "You must not lie here;
get up and go home!" The sleeper woke with a quick start, rubbed his
eyes, looked round, and fixed them upon the policeman so haughtily that
that discriminating functionary probably thought that it was not from
sheer necessity that so improper a couch had been selected, and with an
air of greater respect he said, "You have been drinking, young man,--can
you find your way home?"