The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Complete

“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?”

“Yes,” said the youth, resettling himself, “you see I have found it!”

“By the Lord Harry!” muttered the policeman, “if he ben’t going to sleep again. Come, come, walk on; or I must walk you off.”

My old acquaintance turned round. “Policeman,” said he, with a strange sort of smile, “what do you think this lodging is worth,—I don’t say for the night, for you see that is over, but for the next two hours? The lodging is primitive, but it suits me; I should think a shilling would be a fair price for it, eh?”

“You love your joke, sir,” said the policeman, with a brow much relaxed, and opening his hand mechanically.

“Say a shilling, then; it is a bargain! I hire it of you upon credit. Good night, and call me at six o’clock.”

With that the young man settled himself so resolutely, and the policeman’s face exhibited such bewilderment, that I burst out laughing, and came from my hiding-place.

The policeman looked at me. “Do you know this—this—”

“This gentleman?” said I, gravely. “Yes, you may leave him to me;” and I slipped the price of the lodging into the policeman’s hand. He looked at the shilling, he looked at me, he looked up the street and down the street, shook his head, and walked off. I then approached the youth, touched him, and said: “Can you remember me, sir; and what have you done with Mr. Peacock?”

Stranger (after a pause).—“I remember you; your name is Caxton.”

Pisistratus.—“And yours?”

Stranger.—“Poor devil, if you ask my pockets,—pockets, which are the symbols of man; Dare-devil, if you ask my heart. [Surveying me from head to foot.] The world seems to have smiled on you, Mr. Caxton! Are you not ashamed to speak to a wretch lying on the stones? but, to be sure, no one sees you.”

Pisistratus (sententiously).—“Had I lived in the last century, I might have found Samuel Johnson lying on the stones.”

Stranger (rising).—“You have spoilt my sleep: you had a right, since you paid for the lodging. Let me walk with you a few paces; you need not fear, I do not pick pockets—yet!”

Pisistratus.—“You say the world has smiled on me; I fear it has frowned on you. I don’t say ‘courage,’ for you seem to have enough of that; but I say ‘patience,’ which is the rarer quality of the two.”

Stranger.—“Hem! [again looking at me keenly.] Why is it that you stop to speak to me,—one of whom you know nothing, or worse than nothing?”

Pisistratus.—“Because I have often thought of you; because you interest me; because—pardon me—I would help you if I can,—that is, if you want help.”

Stranger.—“Want? I am one want! I want sleep, I want food; I want the patience you recommend,—patience to starve and rot. I have travelled from Paris to Boulogne on foot, with twelve sous in my pocket. Out of those twelve sous in my pocket I saved four; with the four I went to a billiard-room at Boulogne: I won just enough to pay my passage and buy three rolls. You see I only require capital in order to make a fortune. If with four sous I can win ten francs in a night, what could I win with a capital of four sovereigns, and in the course of a year? That is an application of the Rule of Three which my head aches too much to calculate just at present. Well, those three rolls have lasted me three days; the last crumb went for supper last night. Therefore, take care how you offer me money (for that is what men mean by help). You see I have no option but to take it. But I warn you, don’t expect gratitude; I have none in me!”