The Caxtons, Part 3

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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.

"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 honorthat is, the desire of
praise and reward-snakes 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. Alan 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 sclioolman, 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 Olgmpicum 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 VIL, 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!"

"You frighten me out of my wits, mother! You are not in earnest?"

"And if my brother could be the means of raising him in the world--"

"Your brother would be enough to sink all the ships in the Channel,
ma'am," said I, quite irreverently. I was shocked before the words were
well out of my mouth; and throwing my arms round my mother's neck, I
kissed away the pain I had inflicted.

When I was left alone and in my own little crib, in which my slumber had
ever been so soft and easy, I might as well have been lying upon cut
straw. I tossed to and fro; I could not sleep. I rose, threw on my
dressing-gown, lighted my candle, and sat down by the table near the
window. First I thought of the unfinished outline of my father's youth,
so suddenly sketched before me. I filled up the missing colors, and
fancied the picture explained all that had often perplexed my
conjectures. I comprehended, I suppose by some secret sympathy in my
own nature (for experience in mankind could have taught me little
enough), how an ardent, serious, inquiring mind, struggling into passion
under the load of knowledge, had, with that stimulus sadly and abruptly
withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of passive, aimless study. I
comprehended how, in the indolence of a happy but unimpassioned
marriage, with a companion so gentle, so provident and watchful, yet so
little formed to rouse and task and fire an intellect naturally calm and
meditative, years upon years had crept away in the learned idleness of a
solitary scholar. I comprehended, too, how gradually and slowly, as my
father entered that stage of middle life when all men are most prone to
ambition, the long-silenced whispers were heard again, and the mind, at
last escaping from the listless weight which a baffled and disappointed
heart had laid upon it, saw once more, fair as in youth, the only true
mistress of Genius,--Fame.

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