The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Complete

Ah! if I could have left him Robert Hall, instead of those execrable Typhons! But would that medicine have suited his case, or must grim Experience write sterner prescriptions with iron hand?

CHAPTER II

When I got back, just in time for dinner, Roland had not returned, nor did he return till late in the evening. All our eyes were directed towards him, as we rose with one accord to give him welcome; but his face was like a mask,—it was locked and rigid and unreadable.

Shutting the door carefully after him, he came to the hearth, stood on it, upright and calm, for a few moments, and then asked,—

“Has Blanche gone to bed?”

“Yes,” said my mother, “but not to sleep, I am sure; she made me promise to tell her when you came back.”

Roland’s brow relaxed.

“To-morrow, sister,” said he, slowly, “will you see that she has the proper mourning made for her? My son is dead.”

“Dead!” we cried with one voice, and surrounded him with one impulse.

“Dead! impossible,—you could not say it so calmly. Dead,—how do you know? You may be deceived. Who told you? why do you think so?”

“I have seen his remains,” said my uncle, with the same gloomy calm. “We will all mourn for him. Pisistratus, you are heir to my name now, as to your father’s. Good-night; excuse me, all—all you dear and kind ones; I am worn out.” Roland lighted his candle and went away, leaving us thunderstruck; but he came back again, looked round, took up his book, open in the favorite passage, nodded again, and again vanished. We looked at each other as if we had seen a ghost. Then my father rose and went out of the room, and remained in Roland’s till the night was well-nigh gone! We sat up, my mother and I, till he returned. His benign face looked profoundly sad.

“How is it, sir? Can you tell us more?” My father shook his head.

“Roland prays that you may preserve the same forbearance you have shown hitherto, and never mention his son’s name to him. Peace be to the living, as to the dead! Kitty, this changes our plans; we must all go to Cumberland,—we cannot leave Roland thus!”

“Poor, poor Roland!” said my mother, through her tears. “And to think that father and son were not reconciled! But Roland forgives him now,—oh, yes, now!”

“It is not Roland we can censure,” said my father, almost fiercely; “it is—But enough; we must hurry out of town as soon as we can: Roland will recover in the native air of his old ruins.”

We went up to bed mournfully. “And so,” thought I, “ends one grand object of my life! I had hoped to have brought those two together. But, alas, what peacemaker like the grave!”

CHAPTER III

My uncle did not leave his room for three days; but he was much closeted with a lawyer, and my father dropped some words which seemed to imply that the deceased had incurred debts, and that the poor Captain was making some charge on his small property. As Roland had said that he had seen the remains of his son, I took it at first for granted that we should attend a funeral; but no word of this was said. On the fourth day Roland, in deep mourning, entered a hackney-coach with the lawyer, and was absent about two hours. I did not doubt that he had thus quietly fulfilled the last mournful offices. On his return, he shut himself up again for the rest of the day, and would not see even my father. But the next morning he made his appearance as usual, and I even thought that he seemed more cheerful than I had yet known him,—whether he played a part, or whether the worst was now over, and the grave was less cruel than uncertainty. On the following day we all set out for Cumberland.

In the interval, Uncle Jack had been almost constantly at the house, and, to do him justice, he had seemed unaffectedly shocked at the calamity that had befallen Roland. There was, indeed, no want of heart in Uncle Jack, whenever you went straight at it; but it was hard to find if you took a circuitous route towards it through the pockets. The worthy speculator had indeed much business to transact with my father before he left town. The Anti-Publisher Society had been set up, and it was through the obstetric aid of that fraternity that the Great Book was to be ushered into the world. The new journal, the “Literary Times,” was also far advanced,—not yet out, but my father was fairly in for it. There were preparations for its debut on a vast scale, and two or three gentlemen in black—one of whom looked like a lawyer, and another like a printer, and a third uncommonly like a Jew—called twice, with papers of a very formidable aspect. All these preliminaries settled, the last thing I heard Uncle Jack say, with a slap on my father’s back, was, “Fame and fortune both made now! You may go to sleep in safety, for you leave me wide awake. Jack Tibbets never sleeps!”

I had thought it strange that, since my abrupt exodus from Trevanion’s house, no notice had been taken of any of us by himself or Lady Ellinor. But on the very eve of our departure came a kind note from Trevanion to me, dated from his favorite country seat (accompanied by a present of some rare books to my father), in which he said, briefly, that there had been illness in his family which had obliged him to leave town for a change of air, but that Lady Ellinor expected to call on my mother the next week. He had found amongst his books some curious works of the Middle Ages, amongst others a complete set of Cardan, which he knew my father would like to have, and so sent them. There was no allusion to what had passed between us. In reply to this note, after due thanks on my father’s part, who seized upon the Cardan (Lyons edition, 1663, ten volumes folio) as a silk-worm does upon a mulberry-leaf, I expressed our joint regrets that there was no hope of our seeing Lady Ellinor, as we were just leaving town. I should have added something on the loss my uncle had sustained, but my father thought that since Roland shrank from any mention of his son, even by his nearest kindred, it would be his obvious wish not to parade his affliction beyond that circle.

And there had been illness in Trevanion’s family! On whom had it fallen? I could not rest satisfied with that general expression, and I took my answer myself to Trevanion’s house, instead of sending it by the post. In reply to my inquiries, the porter said that all the family were expected at the end of the week; that he had heard both Lady Ellinor and Miss Trevanion had been rather poorly, but that they were now better. I left my note with orders to forward it; and my wounds bled afresh as I came away.

We had the whole coach to ourselves in our journey, and a silent journey it was, till we arrived at a little town about eight miles from my uncle’s residence, to which we could only get through a cross-road. My uncle insisted on preceding us that night; and though he had written before we started, to announce our coming, he was fidgety lest the poor tower should not make the best figure it could, so he went alone, and we took our ease at our inn.

Betimes the next day we hired a fly-coach—for a chaise could never have held us and my father’s books—and jogged through a labyrinth of villanous lanes which no Marshal Wade had ever reformed from their primal chaos. But poor Mrs. Primmins and the canary-bird alone seemed sensible of the jolts; the former, who sat opposite to us wedged amidst a medley of packages, all marked “Care, to be kept top uppermost” (why I know not, for they were but books, and whether they lay top or bottom it could not materially affect their value),—the former, I say, contrived to extend her arms over those disjecta membra, and griping a window-sill with the right hand, and a window-sill with the left, kept her seat rampant, like the split eagle of the Austrian Empire: in fact, it would be well nowadays if the split eagle were as firm as Mrs. Primmins! As for the canary, it never failed to respond, by an astonished chirp, to every “Gracious me!” and “Lord save us!” which the delve into a rut, or the bump out of it, sent forth from Mrs. Primmins’s lips, with all the emphatic dolor of the “Ai, ai!” in a Greek chorus.

But my father, with his broad hat over his brows, was in deep thought. The scenes of his youth were rising before him, and his memory went, smooth as a spirit’s wing, over delve and bump. And my mother, who sat next him, had her arm on his shoulder, and was watching his face jealously. Did she think that in that thoughtful face there was regret for the old love? Blanche, who had been very sad, and had wept much and quietly since they put on her the mourning, and told her that she had no brother (though she had no remembrance of the lost), began now to evince infantine curiosity and eagerness to catch the first peep of her father’s beloved tower. And Blanche sat on my knee, and I shared her impatience. At last there came in view a church-spire, a church, a plain square building near it, the parsonage (my father’s old home), a long, straggling street of cottages and rude shops, with a better kind of house here and there, and in the hinder ground a gray, deformed mass of wall and ruin, placed on one of those eminences on which the Danes loved to pitch camp or build fort, with one high, rude, Anglo-Norman tower rising from the midst. Few trees were round it, and those either poplars or firs, save, as we approached, one mighty oak,—integral and unscathed. The road now wound behind the parsonage and up a steep ascent. Such a road,—the whole parish ought to have been flogged for it! If I had sent up a road like that, even on a map, to Dr. Herman, I should not have sat down in comfort for a week to come!

The fly-coach came to a full stop.

“Let us get out,” cried I, opening the door, and springing to the ground to set the example.

Blanche followed, and my respected parents came next. But when Mrs. Primmins was about to heave herself into movement—

“Papae!” said my father. “I think, Mrs. Primmins, you must remain in, to keep the books steady.”

“Lord love you!” cried Mrs. Primmins, aghast.

“The subtraction of such a mass, or moles,—supple and elastic as all flesh is, and fitting into the hard corners of the inert matter,—such a subtraction, Mrs. Primmins, would leave a vacuum which no natural system, certainly no artificial organization, could sustain. There would be a regular dance of atoms, Mrs. Primmins; my books would fly here, there, on the floor, out of the window!

“‘Corporis officium est quoniam omnia deorsum.’

“The business of a body like yours, Mrs. Primmins, is to press all things down, to keep them tight, as you will know one of these days,—that is, if you will do me the favor to read Lucretius, and master that material philosophy of which I may say, without flattery, my dear Mrs. Primmins, that you are a living illustration.”

These, the first words my father had spoken since we set out from the inn, seemed to assure my mother that she need have no apprehension as to the character of his thoughts, for her brow cleared, and she said, laughing,—

“Only look at poor Primmins, and then at that hill!”

“You may subtract Primmins, if you will be answerable for the remnant, Kitty. Only I warn you that it is against all the laws of physics.”

So saying, he sprang lightly forward, and, taking hold of my arm, paused and looked round, and drew the loud free breath with which we draw native air.

“And yet,” said my father, after that grateful and affectionate inspiration,—“and yet, it must be owned that a more ugly country one cannot see out of Cambridgeshire.”[7 - This certainly cannot be said of Cumberland generally, one of the most beautiful counties in Great Britain. But the immediate district to which Mr. Caxton’s exclamation refers, if not ugly, is at least savage, bare, and rude.]

“Nay,” said I, “it is bold and large, it has a beauty of its own. Those immense, undulating, uncultivated, treeless tracts have surely their charm of wildness and solitude. And how they suit the character of the ruin! All is feudal there! I understand Roland better now.”

“I hope to Heaven Cardan will come to no harm!” cried my father; “he is very handsomely bound, and he fitted beautifully just into the fleshiest part of that fidgety Primmins.”

Blanche, meanwhile, had run far before us, and I followed fast. There were still the remains of that deep trench (surrounding the ruins on three sides, leaving a ragged hill-top at the fourth) which made the favorite fortification of all the Teutonic tribes. A causeway, raised on brick arches, now, however, supplied the place of the drawbridge, and the outer gate was but a mass of picturesque ruin. Entering into the courtyard or bailey, the old castle mound, from which justice had been dispensed, was in full view, rising higher than the broken walls around it, and partially over grown with brambles. And there stood, comparatively whole, the Tower or Keep, and from its portals emerged the veteran owner.

His ancestors might have received us in more state, but certainly they could not have given us a warmer greeting. In fact, in his own domain Roland appeared another man. His stiffness, which was a little repulsive to those who did not understand it, was all gone. He seemed less proud, precisely because he and his pride, on that ground, were on good terms with each other. How gallantly he extended,—not his arm, in our modern Jack-and-Jill sort of fashion, but his right hand to my mother; how carefully he led her over “brake, bush, and scaur,” through the low vaulted door, where a tall servant, who, it was easy to see, had been a soldier,—in the precise livery, no doubt, warranted by the heraldic colors (his stockings were red!),—stood upright as a sentry. And coming into the hall, it looked absolutely cheerful,—it took us by surprise. There was a great fireplace, and, though it was still summer, a great fire! It did not seem a bit too much, for the walls were stone, the lofty roof open to the rafters, while the windows were small and narrow, and so high and so deep sunk that one seemed in a vault. Nevertheless, I say the room looked sociable and cheerful,—thanks principally to the fire, and partly to a very ingenious medley of old tapestry at one end, and matting at the other, fastened to the lower part of the walls, seconded by an arrangement of furniture which did credit to my uncle’s taste for the picturesque. After we had looked about and admired to our heart’s content, Roland took us, not up one of those noble staircases you see in the later manorial residences, but a little winding stone stair, into the rooms he had appropriated to his guests. There was first a small chamber, which he called my father’s study,—in truth, it would have done for any philosopher or saint who wished to shut out the world, and might have passed for the interior of such a column as the Stylites inhabited; for you must have climbed a ladder to have looked out of the window, and then the vision of no short-sighted man could have got over the interval in the wall made by the narrow casement, which, after all, gave no other prospect than a Cumberland sky, with an occasional rook in it. But my father, I think I have said before, did not much care for scenery, and he looked round with great satisfaction upon the retreat assigned him.

“We can knock up shelves for your books in no time,” said my uncle, rubbing his hands.

“It would be a charity,” quoth my father, “for they have been very long in a recumbent position, and would like to stretch themselves, poor things. My dear Roland, this room is made for books,—so round and so deep! I shall sit here, like Truth in a well.”

“And there is a room for you, sister, just out of it,” said my uncle, opening a little, low, prison-like door into a charming room, for its window was low and it had an iron balcony; “and out of that is the bedroom. For you, Pisistratus, my boy, I am afraid that it is soldier’s quarters, indeed, with which you will have to put up. But never mind; in a day or two we shall make all worthy a general of your illustrious name,—for he was a great general, Pisistratus the First, was he not, brother?”

“All tyrants are,” said my father; “the knack of soldiering is indispensable to them.”

“Oh! you may say what you please here,” said Roland, in high good humor, as he drew me downstairs, still apologizing for my quarters, and so earnestly that I made up my mind that I was to be put into an oubliette. Nor were my suspicions much dispelled on seeing that we had to leave the keep, and pick our way into what seemed to me a mere heap of rubbish on the dexter side of the court. But I was agreeably surprised to find, amidst these wrecks, a room with a noble casement, commanding the whole country, and placed immediately over a plot of ground cultivated as a garden. The furniture was ample, though homely; the floors and walls well matted; and, altogether, despite the inconvenience of having to cross the courtyard to get to the rest of the house, and being wholly without the modern luxury of a bell, I thought that I could not be better lodged.

“But this is a perfect bower, my dear uncle! Depend on it, it was the bower-chamber of the Dames de Caxton,—Heaven rest them!”

“No,” said my uncle, gravely, “I suspect it must have been the chaplain’s room, for the chapel was to the right of you. An earlier chapel, indeed, formerly existed in the keep tower; for, indeed, it is scarcely a true keep without a chapel, well, and hall. I can show you part of the roof of the first, and the two last are entire; the well is very curious, formed in the substance of the wall at one angle of the hall. In Charles the First’s time our ancestor lowered his only son down in a bucket, and kept him there six hours, while a malignant mob was storming the tower. I need not say that our ancestor himself scorned to hide from such a rabble, for he was a grown man. The boy lived to be a sad spendthrift, and used the well for cooling his wine. He drank up a great many good acres.”

“I should scratch him out of the pedigree, if I were you. But pray, have you not discovered the proper chamber of that great Sir William about whom my father is so shamefully sceptical?”

“To tell you a secret,” answered the Captain, giving me a sly poke in the ribs, “I have put your father into it! There are the initial letters W. C. let into the cusp of the York rose, and the date, three years before the battle of Bosworth, over the chimney-piece.”