The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Complete

“Gentlemen,” re-commenced my Uncle Roland, “thumbs and hands are given to an Esquimaux, as well as to scholars and surgeons,—and what the deuce are they the wiser for them? Sirs, you cannot reduce us thus into mechanism. Look within. Man, I say, re-creates himself. How? By The Principle Of Honor. His first desire is to excel some one else; his first impulse is distinction above his fellows. Heaven places in his soul, as if it were a compass, a needle that always points to one end; namely, to honor in that which those around him consider honorable. Therefore, as man at first is exposed to all dangers from wild beasts, and from men as savage as himself, Courage becomes the first quality mankind must honor: therefore the savage is courageous; therefore he covets the praise for courage; therefore he decorates himself with the skins of the beasts he has subdued, or the the scalps of the foes he has slain. Sirs, don’t tell me that the skins and the scalps are only hide and leather: they are trophies of honor. Don’t tell me that they are ridiculous and disgusting: they become glorious as proofs that the savage has emerged out of the first brute-like egotism, and attached price to the praise which men never give except for works that secure or advance their welfare. By and by, sirs, our savages discover that they cannot live in safety amongst themselves unless they agree to speak the truth to each other: therefore Truth becomes valued, and grows into a principle of honor; so brother Austin will tell us that in the primitive times truth was always the attribute of a hero.”

“Right,” said my father; “Homer emphatically assigns it to Achilles.”

“Out of truth comes the necessity for some kind of rude justice and law. Therefore men, after courage in the warrior, and truth in all, begin to attach honor to the elder, whom they intrust with preserving justice amongst them. So, sirs, Law is born—”

“But the first lawgivers were priests,” quoth my father.

“Sirs, I am coming to that. Whence arises the desire of honor, but from man’s necessity of excelling,—in other words, of improving his faculties for the benefit of others; though, unconscious of that consequence, man only strives for their praise? But that desire for honor is unextinguishable, and man is naturally anxious to carry its rewards beyond the grave. Therefore he who has slain most lions or enemies, is naturally prone to believe that he shall have the best hunting fields in the country beyond, and take the best place at the banquet. Nature, in all its operations, impresses man with the idea of an invisible Power; and the principle of honor that is, the desire of praise and reward—makes him anxious for the approval which that Power can bestow. Thence comes the first rude idea of Religion; and in the death-hymn at the stake, the savage chants songs prophetic of the distinctions he is about to receive. Society goes on; hamlets are built; property is established. He who has more than another has more power than another. Power is honored. Man covets the honor attached to the power which is attached to possession. Thus the soil is cultivated; thus the rafts are constructed; thus tribe trades with tribe; thus Commerce is founded, and Civilization commenced. Sirs, all that seems least connected with honor, as we approach the vulgar days of the present, has its origin in honor, and is but an abuse of its principles. If men nowadays are hucksters and traders, if even military honors are purchased, and a rogue buys his way to a peerage, still all arises from the desire for honor, which society, as it grows old, gives to the outward signs of titles and gold, instead of, as once, to its inward essentials,—courage, truth, justice, enterprise. Therefore I say, sirs, that honor is the foundation of all improvement in mankind.”

“You have argued like a schoolman, brother,” said Mr. Caxton, admiringly; “but still, as to this round piece of silver, don’t we go back to the most barbarous ages in estimating so highly such things as have no real value in themselves,—as could not give us one opportunity for instructing our minds?”

“Could not pay for a pair of boots,” added Uncle Jack.

“Or,” said Mr. Squills, “save you one twinge of the cursed rheumatism you have got for life from that night’s bivouac in the Portuguese marshes,—to say nothing of the bullet in your cranium, and that cork-leg, which must much diminish the salutary effects of your constitutional walk.”

“Gentlemen,” resumed the Captain, nothing abashed, “in going back to those barbarous ages, I go back to the true principles of honor. It is precisely because this round piece of silver has no value in the market that it is priceless, for thus it is only a proof of desert. Where would be the sense of service in this medal, if it could buy back my leg, or if I could bargain it away for forty thousand a year? No, sirs, its value is this,—that when I wear it on my breast, men shall say, ‘That formal old fellow is not so useless as he seems. He was one of those who saved England and freed Europe.’ And even when I conceal it here,” and, devoutly kissing the medal, Uncle Roland restored it to its ribbon and its resting-place, “and no eye sees it, its value is yet greater in the thought that my country has not degraded the old and true principles of honor, by paying the soldier who fought for her in the same coin as that in which you, Mr. Jack, sir, pay your bootmaker’s bill. No, no, gentlemen. As courage was the first virtue that honor called forth, the first virtue from which all safety and civilization proceed, so we do right to keep that one virtue at least clear and unsullied from all the money-making, mercenary, pay-me-in-cash abominations which are the vices, not the virtues, of the civilization it has produced.”

My Uncle Roland here came to a full stop; and, filling his glass, rose and said solemnly: “A last bumper, gentlemen,—‘To the dead who died for England!’”

CHAPTER III

“Indeed, my dear, you must take it. You certainly have caught cold; you sneezed three times together.”

“Yes, ma’am, because I would take a pinch of Uncle Roland’s snuff, just to say that I had taken a pinch out of his box,—the honor of the thing, you know.”

“Ah, my dear! what was that very clever remark you made at the same time, which so pleased your father,—something about Jews and the college?”

“Jews and—oh! pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat, my dear mother,—which means that it is a pleasure to take a pinch out of a brave man’s snuff-box. I say, mother, put down the posset. Yes, I’ll take it; I will, indeed. Now, then, sit here,—that’s right,—and tell me all you know about this famous old Captain. Imprimis, he is older than my father?”

“To be sure!” exclaimed my mother, indignantly. “He looks twenty years older; but there is only five years’ real difference. Your father must always look young.”

“And why does Uncle Roland put that absurd French de before his name; and why were my father and he not good friends; and is he married; and has he any children?”

Scene of this conference: my own little room, new papered on purpose for my return for good,—trellis-work paper, flowers and birds, all so fresh and so new and so clean and so gay, with my books ranged in neat shelves, and a writing-table by the window; and, without the window, shines the still summer moon. The window is a little open: you scent the flowers and the new-mown hay. Past eleven; and the boy and his dear mother are all alone.

“My dear, my dear, you ask so many questions at once!”

“Don’t answer them, then. Begin at the beginning, as Nurse Primmins does with her fairy tales, ‘Once on a time.’

“Once on a time, then,” said my mother, kissing me between the eyes,—“once on a time, my love, there was a certain clergyman in Cumberland who had two sons; he had but a small living, and the boys were to make their own way in the world. But close to the parsonage, on the brow of a hill, rose an old ruin with one tower left, and this, with half the country round it, had once belonged to the clergyman’s family; but all had been sold,—all gone piece by piece, you see, my dear, except the presentation to the living (what they call the advowson was sold too), which had been secured to the last of the family. The elder of these sons was your Uncle Roland; the younger was your father. Now I believe the first quarrel arose from the absurdist thing possible, as your father says; but Roland was exceedingly touchy on all things connected with his ancestors. He was always poring over the old pedigree, or wandering amongst the ruins, or reading books of knight-errantry. Well, where this pedigree began, I know not, but it seems that King Henry II. gave some lands in Cumberland to one Sir Adam de Caxton; and from that time, you see, the pedigree went regularly from father to son till Henry V. Then, apparently from the disorders produced, as your father says, by the Wars of the Roses, there was a sad blank left,—only one or two names, without dates or marriages, till the time of Henry VII, except that in the reign of Edward IV. there was one insertion of a William Caxton (named in a deed). Now in the village church there was a beautiful brass monument to one Sir William de Caxton, who had been killed at the battle of Bosworth, fighting for that wicked king Richard III. And about the same time there lived, as you know, the great printer, William Caxton. Well, your father, happening to be in town on a visit to his aunt, took great trouble in hunting up all the old papers he could find at the Heralds’ College; and, sure enough, he was overjoyed to satisfy himself that he was descended, not from that poor Sir William who had been killed in so bad a cause, but from the great printer, who was from a younger branch of the same family, and to whose descendants the estate came in the reign of Henry VIII. It was upon this that your Uncle Roland quarrelled with him,—and, indeed, I tremble to think that they may touch on that matter again.”

“Then, my dear mother, I must say my uncle was wrong there so far as common-sense is concerned; but still, somehow or other, I can understand it. Surely, this was not the only cause of estrangement?”

My mother looked down, and moved one hand gently over the other, which was her way when embarrassed. “What was it, my own mother?” said I, coaxingly.

“I believe—that is, I—I think that they were both attached to the same young lady.”

“How! you don’t mean to say that my father was ever in love with any one but you?”

“Yes, Sisty,—yes, and deeply! And,” added my mother, after a slight pause, and with a very low sigh, “he never was in love with me; and what is more, he had the frankness to tell me so!”

“And yet you—”

“Married him—yes!” said my mother, raising the softest and purest eyes that ever lover could have wished to read his fate in; “yes, for the old love was hopeless. I knew that I could make him happy. I knew that he would love me at last, and he does so! My son, your father loves me!”

As she spoke, there came a blush, as innocent as virgin ever knew, to my mother’s smooth cheek; and she looked so fair, so good, and still so young all the while that you would have said that either Dusius, the Teuton fiend, or Nock, the Scandinavian sea-imp, from whom the learned assure us we derive our modern Daimones, “The Deuce,” and Old Nick, had possessed my father, if he had not learned to love such a creature.

I pressed her hand to my lips; but my heart was too full tot speak for a moment or so, and then I partially changed the subject.

“Well, and this rivalry estranged them more? And who was the lady?”

“Your father never told me, and I never asked,” said my mother, simply. “But she was very different from me, I know. Very accomplished, very beautiful, very highborn.”

“For all that, my father was a lucky man to escape her. Pass on. What did the Captain do?”

“Why, about that time your grandfather died; and shortly after an aunt, on the mother’s side, who was rich and saving, died, and unexpectedly left each sixteen thousand pounds. Your uncle, with his share, bought back, at an enormous price, the old castle and some land round it, which they say does not bring him in three hundred a year. With the little that remained, he purchased a commission in the army; and the brothers met no more till last week, when Roland suddenly arrived.”

“He did not marry this accomplished young lady?”

“No! but he married another, and is a widower.”

“Why, he was as inconstant as my father, and I am sure without so good an excuse. How was that?”

“I don’t know. He says nothing about it.”

“Has he any children?”

“Two, a son—By the by, you must never speak about him. Your uncle briefly said, when I asked him what was his family, ‘A girl, ma’am. I had a son, but—’

“‘He is dead,’ cried your father, in his kind, pitying voice.”

“‘Dead to me, brother; and you will never mention his name!’ You should have seen how stern your uncle looked. I was terrified.”

“But the girl,—why did not he bring her here?”

“She is still in France, but he talks of going over for her; and we have half promised to visit them both in Cumberland. But, bless me! is that twelve? and the posset quite cold!”

“One word more, dearest mother,—one word. My father’s book,—is he still going on with it?”

“Oh yes, indeed!” cried my mother, clasping her hands; “and he must read it to you, as he does to me,—you will understand it so well. I have always been so anxious that the world should know him, and be proud of him as we are,—so—so anxious! For perhaps, Sisty, if he had married that great lady, he would have roused himself, been more ambitious,—and I could only make him happy, I could not make him great!”

“So he has listened to you at last?”

“To me?” said my mother, shaking her head and smiling gently. “No, rather to your Uncle Jack, who, I am happy to say, has at length got a proper hold over him.”

“A proper hold, my dear mother! Pray beware of Uncle Jack, or we shall all be swept into a coal-mine, or explode with a grand national company for making gunpowder out of tea-leaves!”

“Wicked child!” said my mother, laughing; and then, as she took up her candle and lingered a moment while I wound my watch, she said, musingly: “Yet Jack is very, very clever; and if for your sake we could make a fortune, Sisty!”