The Caxtons, Part 13

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THE CAXTONS

A FAMILY PICTURE

BY

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON (LORD LYTTON)

THE CAXTONS.

PART XIII,

CHAPTER I.

Saint Chrysostom, in his work on "The Priesthood," defends deceit, if
for a good purpose, by many Scriptural examples; ends his first book by
asserting that it is often necessary, and that much benefit may arise
from it; and begins his second book by saying that it ought not to be
called "deceit," but "good management." (1)

"Good management," then, let me call the innocent arts by which I now
sought to insinuate my project into favor and assent with my
unsuspecting family. At first I began with Roland. I easily induced
him to read some of the books, full of the charm of Australian life,
which Trevanion had sent me; and so happily did those descriptions suit
his own erratic tastes, and the free, half-savage man that lay rough and
large within that soldierly nature, that he himself, as it were, seemed
to suggest my own ardent desire, sighed, as the careworn Trevanion had
done, that "he was not my age," and blew the flame that consumed me,
with his own willing breath. So that when at last--wandering one day
over the wild moors--I said, knowing his hatred of law and lawyers:
"Alas, uncle, that nothing should be left for me but the Bar!" Captain
Roland struck his cane into the peat and exclaimed, "Zounds,
sir! the Bar and lying, with truth and a world fresh from God before
you!"

"Your hand, uncle,--we understand each other. Now help me with those
two quiet hearts at home!"

"Plague on my tongue! what have I done?" said the Captain, looking
aghast. Then, after musing a little time, he turned his dark eye on me
and growled out, "I suspect, young sir, you have been laying a trap for
me; and I have fallen into it, like an old fool as I am."

"Oh, sir, I? you prefer the Bar!--"

"Rogue!"

"Or, indeed, I might perhaps get a clerkship in a merchant's office?"

"If you do, I will scratch you out of the pedigree!"

"Huzza, then, for Australasia!"

"Well, well, well!" said my uncle,--

"With a smile on his lip, and a tear in his eye,"--

"the old sea-king's blood will force its way,--a soldier or a rover,
there is no other choice for you. We shall mourn and miss you; but who
can chain the young eagles to the eyrie?"

I had a harder task with my father, who at first seemed to listen to me
as if I had been talking of an excursion to the moon. But I threw in a
dexterous dose of the old Greek Cleruchioe cited by Trevanion, which set
him off full trot on his hobby, till after a short excursion to Euboea
and the Chersonese, he was fairly lost amidst the Ionian colonies of
Asia Minor. I then gradually and artfully decoyed him into his favorite
science of Ethnology; and while he was speculating on the origin of the
American savages, and considering the rival claims of Cimmerians,
Israelites, and Scandinavians, I said quietly: "And you, sir, who think
that all human improvement depends on the mixture of races; you, whose
whole theory is an absolute sermon upon emigration, and the
transplanting and interpolity of our species,--you, sir, should be the
last man to chain your son, your elder son, to the soil, while your
younger is the very missionary of rovers."

"Pisistratus," said my father, "you reason by synecdoche,--ornamental,
but illogical;" and therewith, resolved to hear no more, my father rose
and retreated into his study.

But his observation, now quickened, began from that day to follow my
moods and humors; then he himself grew silent and thoughtful, and
finally he took to long conferences with Roland. The result was that
one evening in spring, as I lay listless amidst the weeds and fern that
sprang up through the melancholy ruins, I felt a hand on my shoulder;
and my father, seating himself beside me on a fragment of stone, said
earnestly; "Pisistratus, let us talk. I had hoped better things from
your study of Robert Hall."

"Nay, dear father, the medicine did me great good: I have not repined
since, and I look steadfastly and cheerfully on life. But Robert Hall
fulfilled his mission, and I would fulfil mine."

"Is there no mission in thy native land, O planeticose and exallotriote
spirit?" (2) asked my father, with compassionate rebuke.

"Alas, yes! But what the impulse of genius is to the great, the
instinct of vocation is to the mediocre. In every man there is a
magnet; in that thing which the man can do best there is a loadstone."

"Papoe!" said my father, opening his eyes; "and are no loadstones to be
found for you nearer than the Great Australasian Bight?"

"Ah,--sir, if you resort to irony I can say no more!" My father looked
down on me tenderly as I hung my head, moody and abashed.

"Son," said he, "do you think that there is any real jest at my heart
when the matter discussed is whether you are to put wide seas and long
years between us?" I pressed nearer to his side, and made no answer.

"But I have noted you of late," continued my father, "and I have
observed that your old studies are grown distasteful to you; and I have
talked with Roland, and I see that your desire is deeper than a boy's
mere whim. And then I have asked myself what prospect I can hold out at
home to induce you to be contented here, and I see none; and therefore I
should say to you, 'Go thy ways, and God shield thee,'--but,
Pisistratus, your mother!"

"Ah, sir, that is indeed the question; and there indeed I shrink! But,
after all, whatever I were,--whether toiling at the Bar or in some
public office,--I should be still so much from home and her. And then
you, sir, she loves you so entirely that--"

"No," interrupted my father; "you can advance no arguments like these to
touch a mother's heart. There is but one argument that comes home
there: is it for your good to leave her? If so, there will be no need
of further words. But let us not decide that question hastily; let you
and I be together the next two months. Bring your books and sit with
me; when you want to go out, tap me on the shoulder, and say 'Come.' At
the end of those two months I will say to you 'Go' or 'Stay.' And you
will trust me; and if I say the last, you will submit?"

"Oh yes, sir, yes!"

(1) Hohler's translation.

(2) Words coined by Mr. Caxton from (Greek word), "disposed to roaming,"
and (Greek word), "to export, to alienate."

Chapter II.

This compact made, my father roused himself from all his studies,
devoted his whole thoughts to me, sought with all his gentle wisdom to
wean me imperceptibly from my one fixed, tyrannical idea, ranged through
his wide pharmacy of books for such medicaments as might alter the
system of my thoughts. And little thought he that his very tenderness
and wisdom worked against him, for at each new instance of either my
heart called aloud, "Is it not that thy tenderness may be repaid, and
thy wisdom be known abroad, that I go from thee into the strange land, O
my father?"

And the two months expired, and my father saw that the magnet had turned
unalterably to the loadstone in the Great Australasian Bight; and he
said to me, "Go, and comfort your mother. I have told her your wish,
and authorized it by my consent, for I believe now that it is for your
good."

I found my mother in the little room she had appropriated to herself
next my father's study. And in that room there was a pathos which I
have no words to express; for my mother's meek, gentle, womanly soul
spoke there, so that it was the Home of Home. The care with which she
had transplanted from the brick house, and lovingly arranged, all the
humble memorials of old times dear to her affections,--the black
silhouette of my father's profile cut in paper, in the full pomp of
academics, cap and gown (how had he ever consented to sit for it?),
framed and glazed in the place of honor over the little hearth; and
boyish sketches of mine at the Hellenic Institute, first essays in sepia
and Indian ink, to animate the walls, and bring her back, when she sat
there in the twilight, musing alone, to sunny hours, when Sisty and the
young mother threw daisies at each other; and covered with a great
glass: shade, and dusted each day with her own hand, the flower-pot
Sisty had bought with the proceeds of the domino-box on that memorable
occasion on which he had learned "how bad deeds are repaired with good."
There, in one corner, stood the little cottage piano which I remembered
all my life,--old-fashioned, and with the jingling voice of approaching
decrepitude, but still associated with such melodies as, after
childhood, we hear never more! And in the modest hanging shelves, which
looked so gay with ribbons and tassels and silken cords, my mother's own
library, saying more to the heart than all the cold wise poets whose
souls my father invoked in his grand Heraclea. The Bible over which,
with eyes yet untaught to read, I had hung in vague awe and love as it
lay open on my mother's lap, while her sweet voice, then only serious,
was made the oracle of its truths. And my first lesson-books were
there, all hoarded. And bound in blue and gold, but elaborately papered
up, Cowper's Poems,--a gift from my father in the days of courtship:
sacred treasure; which not even I had the privilege to touch, and which
my mother took out only in the great crosses and trials of conjugal
life, whenever some words less kind than usual had dropped unawares from
her scholar's absent lips. Ah! all these poor household gods, all
seemed to look on me with mild anger; and from all came a voice to my
soul, "Cruel, dost thou forsake us?" And amongst them sat my mother,
desolate as Rachel, and weeping silently.

"Mother! mother!" I cried, falling on her neck, "forgive me,--it is
past; I cannot leave you!"

CHAPTER III.

"No, no! it is for your good,--Austin says so. Go,--it is but the first
shock."

Then to my mother I opened the sluices of that deep I had concealed from
scholar and soldier. To her I poured all the wild, restless thoughts
which wandered through the ruins of love destroyed; to her I confessed
what to myself I had scarcely before avowed. And when the picture of
that, the darker, side of my mind was shown, it was with a prouder face
and less broken voice that I spoke of the manlier hopes and nobler aims
that gleamed across the wrecks and the desert and showed me my escape.

"Did you not once say, mother, that you had felt it like a remorse that
my father's genius passed so noiselessly away,--half accusing the
happiness you gave him for the death of his ambition in the content of
his mind? Did you not feel a new object in life when the ambition
revived at last, and you thought you heard the applause of the world
murmuring round your scholar's cell? Did you not share in the day
dreams your brother conjured up, and exclaim, 'If my brother could be
the means of raising him in the world!' And when you thought we had
found the way to fame and fortune, did you not sob out from your full
heart, 'And it is my brother who will pay back to his son all--all he
gave up for me'?"

"I cannot bear this, Sisty! Cease, cease!"

"No; for do you not yet understand me? Will it not be better still if
your son--yours--restore to your Austin all that he lost, no matter how?
If through your son, mother, you do indeed make the world hear of your
husband's genius, restore the spring to his mind, the glory to his
pursuits; if you rebuild even that vaunted ancestral name which is glory
to our poor sonless Roland; if your son can restore the decay of
generations, and reconstruct from the dust the whole house into which
you have entered, its meek, presiding angel,--all, mother! if this can
be done, it will be your work; for unless you can share my ambition,
unless you can dry those eyes, and smile in my face, and bid me go, with
a cheerful voice, all my courage melts from my heart, and again I say, I
cannot leave you!"

Then my mother folded her arms round me, and we both wept, and could not
speak; but we were both happy.

CHAPTER IV.

Now the worst was over, and my mother was the most heroic of us all. So
I began to prepare myself in good earnest, and I followed Trevanion's
instructions with a perseverance which I could never, at that young day,
have thrown into the dead life of books. I was in a good school,
amongst our Cumberland sheep-walks, to learn those simple elements of
rural art which belong to the pastoral state. Mr. Sidney, in his
admirable "Australian Hand-Book," recommends young gentlemen who think
of becoming settlers in the Bush to bivouac for three months on
Salisbury Plain. That book was not then written, or I might have taken
the advice; meanwhile I think, with due respect to such authority, that
I went through a preparatory training quite as useful in seasoning the
future emigrant. I associated readily with the kindly peasants and
craftsmen, who became my teachers. With what pride I presented my
father with a desk, and my mother with a work-box, fashioned by my own
hands! I made Bolt a lock for his plate-chest, and (that last was my
magnum opus, my great masterpiece) I repaired and absolutely set going
an old turret-clock in the tower that had stood at 2 p.m. since the
memory of man. I loved to think, each time the hour sounded, that those
who heard its deep chime would remember me. But the flocks were my main
care. The sheep that I tended and helped to shear, and the lamb that I
hooked out of the great marsh, and the three venerable ewes that I
nursed through a mysterious sort of murrain which puzzled all the
neighborhood,--are they not written in thy loving chronicles, O House of
Caxton?

And now, since much of the success of my experiment must depend on the
friendly terms I could establish with my intended partner, I wrote to
Trevanion, begging him to get the young gentleman who was to join me,
and whose capital I was to administer, to come and visit us. Trevanion
complied; and there arrived a tall fellow, somewhat more than six feet
high, answering to the name of Guy Bolding, in a cut-away sporting-coat,
with a dog whistle tied to the button-hole, drab shorts and gaiters, and
a waistcoat with all manner of strange furtive pockets. Guy Bolding had
lived a year and a half at Oxford as a "fast man,"--so "fast" had he
lived that there was scarcely a tradesman at Oxford into whose books he
had not contrived to run.

His father was compelled to withdraw him from the University, at which
he had already had the honor of being plucked for "the little-go;" and
the young gentleman, on being asked for what profession he was fit, had
replied, with conscious pride, that he could "tool a coach!" In
despair, the sire, who owed his living to Trevanion, had asked the
states man's advice; and the advice had fixed me with a partner in
expatriation.

My first feeling in greeting the "fast" man was certainly that of deep
disappointment and strong repugnance. But I was determined not to be
too fastidious; and, having a lucky knack of suiting myself pretty well
to all tempers (without which a man had better not think of loadstones
in the Great Australasian Bight), I contrived before the first week was
out to establish so many points of connection between us that we became
the best friends in the world. Indeed, it would have been my fault if
we had not; for Guy Bolding, with all his faults, was one of those
excellent creatures who are nobody's enemies but their own. His good-
humor was inexhaustible. Not a hardship or privation came amiss to him.
He had a phrase, "Such fun!" that always rushed laughingly to his lips
when another man would have cursed and groaned. If we lost our way in
the great trackless moors, missed our dinner, and were half-famished,
Guy rubbed hands that would have felled an ox, and chuckled out, "Such
fun!" If we stuck in a bog, if we were caught in a thunder-storm, if we
were pitched head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break in,
Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of
philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think
that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This
hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder heart never beat,--
but, to be sure, it beat to a strange, restless, tarantula sort of
measure, which kept it in a perpetual dance. It made him one of those
officiously good fellows who are never quiet themselves, and never let
any one else be quiet if they can help it. But Guy's great fault, in
this prudent world, was his absolute incontinence of money. If you had
turned a Euphrates of gold into his pockets at morning, it would have
been as dry as the Great Sahara by twelve at noon. What he did with the
money was a mystery as much to himself as to every one else. His father
said, in a letter to me, that "he had seen him shying at sparrows with
half-crowns!" That such a young man could come to no good in England,
seemed perfectly clear.

Still, it is recorded of many great men, who did not end their days in a
workhouse, that they were equally non-retentive of money. Schiller,
when he had nothing else to give away, gave the clothes from his back,
and Goldsmith the blankets from his bed. Tender hands found it
necessary to pick Beethoven's pockets at home before he walked out.
Great heroes, who have made no scruple of robbing the whole world, have
been just as lavish as poor poets and musicians. Alexander, in
parcelling out his spoils, left himself "hope"! And as for Julius
Caesar, he was two millions in debt when he shied his last half-crown at
the sparrows in Gaul. Encouraged by these illustrious examples, I had
hopes of Guy Bolding; and the more as he was so aware of his own
infirmity that he was perfectly contented with the arrangement which
made me treasurer of his capital, and even besought me, on no account,
let him beg ever so hard, to permit his own money to come in his own
way. In fact, I contrived to gain a great ascendency over his simple,
generous, thoughtless nature; and by artful appeals to his affections,--
to all he owed to his father for many bootless sacrifices, and to the
duty of providing a little dower for his infant sister, whose meditated
portion had half gone to pay his college debts,--I at last succeeded in
fixing into his mind an object to save for.

Three other companions did I select for our Cleruchia. The first was
the son of our old shepherd, who had lately married, but was not yet
encumbered with children,--a good shepherd, and an intelligent, steady
fellow. The second was a very different character. He had been the
dread of the whole squirearchy. A more bold and dexterous poacher did
not exist. Now my acquaintance with this latter person, named Will
Peterson, and more popularly "Will o' the Wisp," had commenced thus:
Bolt had managed to rear, in a small copse about a mile from the house,
--and which was the only bit of ground in my uncle's domains that might
by courtesy be called "a wood,"--a young colony of pheasants, that he
dignified by the title of a "preserve." This colony was audaciously
despoiled and grievously depopulated, in spite of two watchers, who,
with Bolt, guarded for seven nights successively the slumbers of the
infant settlement. So insolent was the assault that bang, bang! went
the felonious gun,--behind, before, within but a few yards of the
sentinels,--and the gunner was off and the prey seized, before they
could rush to the spot. The boldness and skill of the enemy soon
proclaimed him, to the experienced watchers, to be Will o' the Wisp; and
so great was their dread of this fellow's strength and courage, and so
complete their despair of being a match for his swiftness and cunning,
that after the seventh night the watchers refused to go out any longer;
and poor Bolt himself was confined to his bed by an attack of what a
doctor would have called rheumatism, and a moralist, rage. My
indignation and sympathy were greatly excited by this mortifying
failure, and my interest romantically aroused by the anecdotes I had
heard of Will o' the Wisp; accordingly, armed with a thick bludgeon, I
stole out at night, and took my way to the copse. The leaves were not
off the trees, and how the poacher contrived to see his victims I know
not; but five shots did he fire, and not in vain, without allowing me to
catch a glimpse of him. I then retreated to the outskirt of the copse,
and waited patiently by an angle which commanded two sides of the wood.
Just as the dawn began to peep, I saw my roan emerge within twenty yards
of me. I held my breath, suffered him to get a few steps from the wood,
crept on so as to intercept his retreat, and then pounce--such a bound!
My hand was on his shoulder,--prr, prr; no eel was ever more lubricate.
He slid from me like a thing immaterial, and was off over the moors with
a swiftness which might well have baffled any clodhopper,--a race whose
calves are generally absorbed in the soles of their hobnail shoes. But
the Hellenic Institute, with its classical gymnasia, had trained its
pupils in all bodily exercises; and though the Will o' the Wisp was
swift for a clodhopper, he was no match at running for any youth who has
spent his boyhood in the discipline of cricket, prisoner's bar, and
hunt-the-hare. I reached him at length, and brought him to bay.

"Stand back!" said he, panting, and taking aim with his gun: "it is
loaded."

"Yes," said I; "but though you're a brave poacher, you dare not fire at
your fellow-man. Give up the gun this instant."

My address took him by surprise; he did not fire. I struck up the
barrel, and closed on him. We grappled pretty tightly, and in the
wrestle the gun went off. The man loosened his hold. "Lord ha' mercy!
I have not hurt you?" he said falteringly.

"My good fellow,--no," said I; "and now let us throw aside gun and
bludgeon, and fight it out like Englishmen, or else let us sit down and
talk it over like friends."

The Will o' the Wisp scratched its head and laughed.

"Well, you're a queer one!" quoth it. And the poacher dropped the gun
and sat down.

We did talk it over, and I obtained Peterson's promise to respect the
preserve henceforth; and we thereon grew so cordial that he walked home
with me, and even presented me, shyly and apologetically, with the five
pheasants he had shot. From that time I sought him out. He was a young
fellow not four and twenty, who had taken to poaching from the wild
sport of the thing, and from some confused notions that he had a license
from Nature to poach. I soon found out that he was meant for better
things than to spend six months of the twelve in prison, and finish his
life on the gallows after killing a gamekeeper. That seemed to me his
most probable destiny in the Old World, so I talked him into a burning
desire for the New one; and a most valuable aid in the Bush he proved
too.

My third selection was in a personage who could bring little physical
strength to help us, but who had more mind (though with a wrong twist in
it) than both the others put together.

A worthy couple in the village had a son, who, being slight and puny,
compared to the Cumberland breed, was shouldered out of the market of
agricultural labor, and went off, yet a boy, to a manufacturing town.
Now about the age of thirty, this mechanic, disabled for his work by a
long illness, came home to recover; and in a short time we heard of
nothing but the pestilential doctrines with which he was either shocking
or infecting our primitive villagers. According to report, Corcyra
itself never engendered a democrat more awful. The poor man was really
very ill, and his parents very poor; but his unfortunate doctrines dried
up all the streams of charity that usually flowed through our kindly
hamlet. The clergyman (an excellent man, but of the old school) walked
by the house as if it were tabooed. The apothecary said, "Miles Square
ought to have wine;" but he did not send him any. The farmers held his
name in execration, for he had incited all their laborers to strike for
another shilling a week. And but for the old Tower, Miles Square would
soon have found his way to the only republic in which he could obtain
that democratic fraternization for which he sighed; the grave being, I
suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social
equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.

My uncle went to see Miles Square, and came back the color of purple.
Miles Square had preached him a long sermon on the unholiness of war.
"Even in defence of your king and country!" had roared the Captain; and
Miles Square had replied with a remark upon kings in general that the
Captain could not have repeated without expecting to see the old Tower
fall about his ears, and with an observation about the country in
particular, to the effect that "the country would be much better off if
it were conquered!" On hearing the report of these loyal and patriotic
replies, my father said "Papoe!" and roused out of his usual
philosophical indifference, went himself to visit Miles Square. My
father returned as pale as my uncle had been purple. "And to think,"
said he mournfully, "that in the town whence this man comes there are,
he tells me, ten thousand other of God's creatures who speed the work of
civilization while execrating its laws!"

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