The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Complete

My Dearest Sisty,—You are coming home! My heart is so full of that thought that it seems to me as if I could not write anything else. Dear child, you are coming home; you have done with school, you have done with strangers,—you are our own, all our own son again! You are mine again, as you were in the cradle, the nursery, and the garden, Sisty, when we used to throw daisies at each other!

You will laugh at me so when I tell you that as soon as I heard you were coming home for good, I crept away from the room, and went to my drawer where I keep, you know, all my treasures. There was your little cap that I worked myself, and your poor little nankeen jacket that you were so proud to throw off—oh! and many other relies of you when you were little Sisty, and I was not the cold, formal “Mother” you call me now, but dear “Mamma.” I kissed them, Sisty, and said, “My little child is coming back to me again!” So foolish was I, I forgot all the long years that have passed, and fancied I could carry you again in my arms, and that I should again coax you to say “God bless papa.” Well, well! I write now between laughing and crying. You cannot be what you were, but you are still my own dear son,—your father’s son; dearer to me than all the world,—except that father. I am so glad, too, that you will come so soon,—come while your father is really warm with his book, and while you can encourage and keep him to it. For why should he not be great and famous?

Why should not all admire him as we do? You know how proud of him I always was; but I do so long to let the world know why I was so proud. And yet, after all, it is not only because he is so wise and learned, but because he is so good, and has such a large, noble heart. But the heart must appear in the book too, as well as the learning. For though it is full of things I don’t understand, every now and then there is something I do understand,—that seems as if that heart spoke out to all the world.

Your uncle has undertaken to get it published, and your father is going up to town with him about it, as soon as the first volume is finished.

All are quite well except poor Mrs. Jones, who has the ague very bad indeed; Primmins has made her wear a charm for it, and Mrs. Jones actually declares she is already much better. One can’t deny that there may be a great deal in such things, though it seems quite against the reason. Indeed your father says, “Why not? A charm must be accompanied by a strong wish on the part of the charmer that it may succeed,—and what is magnetism but a wish?” I don’t quite comprehend this; but, like all your father says, it has more than meets the eye, I am quite sure.

Only three weeks to the holidays, and then no more school, Sisty,— no more school! I shall have your room all done, freshly, and made so pretty; they are coming about it to-morrow.

The duck is quite well, and I really don’t think it is quite as lame as it was.

God bless you, dear, dear child. Your affectionate happy mother.

    K.C.

The interval between these letters and the morning on which I was to return home seemed to me like one of those long, restless, yet half-dreamy days which in some infant malady I had passed in a sick-bed. I went through my task-work mechanically, composed a Greek ode in farewell to the Philhellenic, which Dr. Herman pronounced a chef d’oeuvre, and my father, to whom I sent it in triumph, returned a letter of false English with it, that parodied all my Hellenic barbarisms by imitating them in my mother-tongue. However, I swallowed the leek, and consoled myself with the pleasing recollection that, after spending six years in learning to write bad Greek, I should never have any further occasion to avail myself of so precious an accomplishment.

And so came the last day. Then alone, and in a kind of delighted melancholy, I revisited each of the old haunts,—the robbers’ cave we had dug one winter, and maintained, six of us, against all the police of the little kingdom; the place near the pales where I had fought my first battle; the old beech-stump on which I sat to read letters from home! With my knife, rich in six blades (besides a cork-screw, a pen-picker, and a button-hook), I carved my name in large capitals over my desk. Then night came, and the bell rang, and we went to our rooms. And I opened the window and looked out. I saw all the stars, and wondered which was mine,—which should light to fame and fortune the manhood about to commence. Hope and Ambition were high within me; and yet, behind them stood Melancholy. Ah! who amongst you, readers, can now summon back all those thoughts, sweet and sad,—all that untold, half-conscious regret for the past,—all those vague longings for the future, which made a poet of the dullest on the last night before leaving boyhood and school forever?

PART III

CHAPTER I

It was a beautiful summer afternoon when the coach set me down at my father’s gate. Mrs. Primmins herself ran out to welcome me; and I had scarcely escaped from the warm clasp of her friendly hand before I was in the arms of my mother.

As soon as that tenderest of parents was convinced that I was not famished, seeing that I had dined two hours ago at Dr. Herman’s, she led me gently across the garden towards the arbor. “You will find your father so cheerful,” said she, wiping away a tear. “His brother is with him.”

I stopped. His brother! Will the reader believe it? I had never heard that he had a brother, so little were family affairs ever discussed in my hearing.

“His brother!” said I. “Have I then an Uncle Caxton as well as an Uncle Jack?”

“Yes, my love,” said my mother. And then she added, “Your father and he were not such good friends as they ought to have been, and the Captain has been abroad. However, thank Heaven! they are now quite reconciled.”

We had time for no more,—we were in the arbor. There, a table was spread with wine and fruit,—the gentlemen were at their dessert; and those gentlemen were my father, Uncle Jack, Mr. Squills, and—tall, lean, buttoned-to-the-chin—an erect, martial, majestic, and imposing personage, who seemed worthy of a place in my great ancestor’s “Boke of Chivalrie.”

All rose as I entered; but my poor father, who was always slow in his movements, had the last of me. Uncle Jack had left the very powerful impression of his great seal-ring on my fingers; Mr. Squills had patted me on the shoulder and pronounced me “wonderfully grown;” my new-found relative had with great dignity said, “Nephew, your hand, sir,—I am Captain de Caxton;” and even the tame duck had taken her beak from her wing and rubbed it gently between my legs, which was her usual mode of salutation, before my father placed his pale hand on my forehead, and looking at me for a moment with unutterable sweetness, said, “More and more like your mother,—God bless you!”

A chair had been kept vacant for me between my father and his brother. I sat down in haste, and with a tingling color on my cheeks and a rising at my throat, so much had the unusual kindness of my father’s greeting affected me; and then there came over me a sense of my new position. I was no longer a schoolboy at home for his brief holiday: I had returned to the shelter of the roof-tree to become myself one of its supports. I was at last a man, privileged to aid or solace those dear ones who had ministered, as yet without return, to me. That is a very strange crisis in our life when we come home for good. Home seems a different thing; before, one has been but a sort of guest after all, only welcomed and indulged, and little festivities held in honor of the released and happy child. But to come home for good,—to have done with school and boyhood,—is to be a guest, a child no more. It is to share the everyday life of cares and duties; it is to enter into the confidences of home. Is it not so? I could have buried my face in my hands and wept!

My father, with all his abstraction and all his simplicity, had a knack now and then of penetrating at once to the heart. I verily believe he read all that was passing in mine as easily as if it had been Greek. He stole his arm gently round my waist and whispered, “Hush!” Then, lifting his voice, he cried aloud, “Brother Roland, you must not let Jack have the best of the argument.”

“Brother Austin,” replied the Captain, very formally, “Mr. Jack, if I may take the liberty so to call him—”

“You may indeed,” cried Uncle Jack.

“Sir,” said the Captain, bowing, “it is a familiarity that does me honor. I was about to say that Mr. Jack has retired from the field.”

“Far from it,” said Squills, dropping an effervescing powder into a chemical mixture which he had been preparing with great attention, composed of sherry and lemon-juice—“far from it. Mr. Tibbets—whose organ of combativeness is finely developed, by the by—was saying—”

“That it is a rank sin and shame in the nineteenth century,” quoth Uncle Jack, “that a man like my friend Captain Caxton—”

“De Caxton, sir—Mr. Jack.”

“De Caxton,—of the highest military talents, of the most illustrious descent,—a hero sprung from heroes,—should have served so many years, and with such distinction, in his Majesty’s service, and should now be only a captain on half-pay. This, I say, comes of the infamous system of purchase, which sets up the highest honors for sale, as they did in the Roman empire—”

My father pricked up his ears; but Uncle jack pushed on before my father could get ready the forces of his meditated interruption.

“A system which a little effort, a little union, can so easily terminate. Yes, sir,” and Uncle Jack thumped the table, and two cherries bobbed up and smote Captain de Caxton on the nose, “yes, sir, I will undertake to say that I could put the army upon a very different footing. If the poorer and more meritorious gentlemen, like Captain de Caxton, would, as I was just observing, but unite in a grand anti-aristocratic association, each paying a small sum quarterly, we could realize a capital sufficient to out-purchase all these undeserving individuals, and every man of merit should have his fair chance of promotion.”

“Egad! sir,” said Squills, “there is something grand in that, eh, Captain?”

“No, sir,” replied the Captain, quite seriously; “there is in monarchies but one fountain of honor. It would be an interference with a soldier’s first duty,—his respect for his sovereign.”

“On the contrary,” said Mr. Squills, “it would still be to the sovereigns that one would owe the promotion.”

“Honor,” pursued the Captain, coloring up, and unheeding this witty interruption, “is the reward of a soldier. What do I care that a young jackanapes buys his colonelcy over my head? Sir, he does not buy from me my wounds and my services. Sir, he does not buy from me the medal I won at Waterloo. He is a rich man, and I am a poor man; he is called—colonel, because he paid money for the name. That pleases him; well and good. It would not please me; I had rather remain a captain, and feel my dignity, not in my title, but in the services by which it has been won. A beggarly, rascally association of stock-brokers, for aught I know, buy me a company! I don’t want to be uncivil, or I would say damn ‘em—Mr.—sir—Jack!”

A sort of thrill ran through the Captain’s audience; even Uncle Jack seemed touched, for he stared very hard at the grim veteran, and said nothing. The pause was awkward; Mr. Squills broke it. “I should like,” quoth he, “to see your Waterloo medal,—you have it not about you?”

“Mr. Squills,” answered the Captain, “it lies next to my heart while I live. It shall be buried in my coffin, and I shall rise with it, at the word of command, on the day of the Grand Review!” So saying, the Captain leisurely unbuttoned his coat, and detaching from a piece of striped ribbon as ugly a specimen of the art of the silversmith (begging its pardon) as ever rewarded merit at the expense of taste, placed the medal on the table.

The medal passed round, without a word, from hand to hand.

“It is strange,” at last said my father, “how such trifles can be made of such value,—how in one age a man sells his life for what in the next age he would not give a button! A Greek esteemed beyond price a few leaves of olive twisted into a circular shape and set upon his head,—a very ridiculous head-gear we should now call it. An American Indian prefers a decoration of human scalps, which, I apprehend, we should all agree (save and except Mr. Squills, who is accustomed to such things) to be a very disgusting addition to one’s personal attractions; and my brother values this piece of silver, which may be worth about five shillings, more than Jack does a gold mine, or I do the library of the London Museum. A time will come when people will think that as idle a decoration as leaves and scalps.”

“Brother,” said the Captain, “there is nothing strange in the matter. It is as plain as a pike-staff to a man who understands the principles of honor.”

“Possibly,” said my father, mildly. “I should like to hear what you have to say upon honor. I am sure it would very much edify us all.”

CHAPTER II

“Gentlemen,” began the Captain, at the distinct appeal thus made to him,—“Gentlemen, God made the earth, but man made the garden. God made man, but man re-creates himself.”

“True, by knowledge,” said my father.

“By industry,” said Uncle Jack.

“By the physical conditions of his body,” said Mr. Squills. “He could not have made himself other than he was at first in the woods and wilds if he had fins like a fish, or could only chatter gibberish like a monkey. Hands and a tongue, sir,—these are the instruments of progress.”

“Mr. Squills,” said my father, nodding, “Anaxagoras said very much the same thing before you, touching the hands.”

“I cannot help that,” answered Mr. Squills; “one could not open one’s lips, if one were bound to say what nobody else had said. But after all, our superiority is less in our hands than the greatness, of our thumbs.”

“Albinus, ‘De Sceleto,’ and our own learned William Lawrence, have made a similar remark,” again put in my father. “Hang it, sir!” exclaimed Squills, “what business have you to know everything?”

“Everything! No; but thumbs furnish subjects of investigation to the simplest understanding,” said my father, modestly.