The Caxtons: A Family Picture Part 64

Speck's meerschaum, and perceive, with respectful admiration, that Mr.

Bullion acts uniformly on one grand system. Ten minutes afterwards, Mr.

Bullion observes, in a tone equally confidential, that Mr. Speck, though so smiling and civil, is as sharp as a needle, and that if I want any shares in the new speculation, or indeed in any other, I had better come at once to Bullion, who would not deceive me for my weight in gold.

"Not," added Bullion, "that I have anything to say against Speck. He is well enough to do in the world,--a warm man, sir; and when a man is really warm, I am the last person to think of his little faults and turn on him the cold shoulder."

"Adieu!" said Uncle Jack, pulling out once more his pocket-handkerchief; "my love to all at home." And sinking his voice into a whisper: "If ever you think better of the Grog and Store Depot, nephew, you'll find an uncle's heart in this bosom!"

(1) A damper is a cake of flour baked without yeast, in the ashes

CHAPTER II.

It was night as Vivian and myself rode slowly home. Night in Australia!

How impossible to describe its beauty Heaven seems, in that new world, so much nearer to earth! Every star stands out so bright and particular as if fresh from the time when the Maker willed it. And the moon like a large silvery sun,--the least object on which it shines so distinct and so still. (1) Now and then a sound breaks the silence, but a sound so much in harmony with the solitude that it only deepens its charms. Hark!

the low cry of the night-bird from yonder glen amidst the small gray gleaming rocks. Hark! as night deepens, the bark of the distant watch-dog, or the low, strange howl of his more savage species, from which he de fends the fold. Hark! the echo catches the sound, and flings it sportively from hill to hill,--farther and farther and farther down, till all again is hushed, and the flowers hang noiseless over your head as you ride through a grove of the giant gum-trees. Now the air is literally charged with the odors, and the sense of fragrance grows almost painful in its pleasure. You quicken your pace, and escape again into the open plains and the full moonlight, and through the slender tea-trees catch the gleam of the river, and in the exquisite fineness of the atmosphere hear the soothing sound of its murmur.

Pisistratus.--"And this land has become the heritage of our people!

Methinks I see, as I gaze around, the scheme of the All-beneficent Father disentangling itself clear through the troubled history of mankind. How mysteriously, while Europe rears its populations and fulfils its civilizing mission, these realms have been concealed from its eyes,--divulged to us just as civilization needs the solution to its problems; a vent for feverish energies, baffled in the crowd; offering bread to the famished, hope to the desperate; in very truth enabling the 'New World to redress the balance of the Old.' Here, what a Latium for the wandering spirits,--

"'On various seas by various tempests tossed.'

"Here, the actual AEneid pa.s.ses before our eyes. From the huts of the exiles scattered over this hardier Italy, who cannot see in the future

"'A race from whence new Alban sires shall come, And the long glories of a future Rome'?"

Vivian (mournfully).--"Is it from the outcasts of the work-house, the prison, and the transport-ship that a second Rome is to arise?"

Pisistratus.--"There is something in this new soil--in the labor it calls forth, in the hope it inspires, in the sense of property, which I take to be the core of social morals--that expedites the work of redemption with marvellous rapidity. Take them altogether, whatever their origin, or whatever brought them hither, they are a fine, manly, frank-hearted race, these colonists now!--rude, not mean, especially in the Bush; and, I suspect, will ultimately become as gallant and honest a population as that now springing up in South Australia, from which convicts are excluded,--and happily excluded,--for the distinction will sharpen emulation. As to the rest, and in direct answer to your question, I fancy even the emancipist part of our population every whit as respectable as the mongrel robbers under Romulus."

Vivian.--"But were they not soldiers,--I mean the first Romans?"

Pisistratus.--"My dear cousin, we are in advance of those grim outcasts if we can get lands, houses, and wives (though the last is difficult, and it is well that we have no white Sabines in the neighborhood) without that same soldiering which was the necessity of their existence."

Vivian (after a pause).--"I have written to my father, and to yours more fully,--stating in the one letter my wish, in the other trying to explain the feelings from which it springs."

Pisistratus.--"Are the letters gone?"

Vivian.--"Yes."

Pisistratus.--"And you would not show them to me!"

Vivian.--"Do not speak so reproachfully. I promised your father to pour out my whole heart to him, whenever it was troubled and at strife. I promise you now that I will go by his advice."

Pisistratus (disconsolately).--"What is there in this military life for which you yearn that can yield you more food for healthful excitement and stirring adventure than your present pursuits afford?"

Vivian.--"Distinction! You do not see the difference between us. You have but a fortune to make,--I have a name to redeem; you look calmly on to the future,--I have a dark blot to erase from the past."

Pisistratus (soothingly).--"It is erased. Five years of no weak bewailings, but of manly reform, steadfast industry, conduct so blameless that even Guy (whom I look upon as the incarnation of blunt English honesty) half doubts whether you are 'cute enough for 'a station;' a character already so high that I long for the hour when you will again take your father's spotless name, and give me the pride to own our kinship to the world,--all this surely redeems the errors arising from an uneducated childhood and a wandering youth."

Vivian (leaning over his horse, and putting his hand on my shoulder).--"My dear friend, what do I owe you!" Then recovering his emotion, and pushing on at a quicker pace, while he continues to speak, "But can you not see that, just in proportion as my comprehension of right would become clear and strong, so my conscience would become also more sensitive and reproachful; and the better I understand my gallant father, the more I must desire to be as he would have had his son. Do you think it would content him, could he see me branding cattle and bargaining with bullock drivers? Was it not the strongest wish of his heart that I should adopt his own career? Have I not heard you say that he would have had you too a soldier, but for your mother? I have no mother! If I made thousands, and tens of thousands, by this ign.o.ble calling, would they give my father half the pleasure that he would feel at seeing my name honorably mentioned in a despatch? No, no! You have banished the gypsy blood, and now the soldier's breaks out! Oh, for one glorious day in which I may clear my way into fair repute, as our fathers before us!--when tears of proud joy may flow from those eyes that have wept such hot drops at my shame; when she, too, in her high station beside that sleek lord, may say, 'His heart was not so vile, after all!' Don't argue with me,--it is in vain! Pray, rather, that I may have leave to work out my own way; for I tell you that if condemned to stay here, I may not murmur aloud,--I may go through this round of low duties as the brute turns the wheel of a mill; but my heart will prey on itself, and you shall soon write on my gravestone the epitaph of the poor poet you told us of whose true disease was the thirst of glory,--'Here lies one whose name was writ in water."'

I had no answer; that contagious ambition made my own veins run more warmly, and my own heart beat with a louder tumult. Amidst the pastoral scenes, and under the tranquil moonlight of the New, the Old World, even in me, rude Bushman, claimed for a while its son. But as we rode on, the air, so inexpressibly buoyant, yet soothing as an anodyne, restored me to peaceful Nature. Now the flocks, in their snowy cl.u.s.ters, were seen sleeping under the stars; hark! the welcome of the watch-dogs; see the light gleaming far from the c.h.i.n.k of the door! And, pausing, I said aloud: "No, there is more glory in laying these rough foundations of a mighty state, though no trumpets resound with your victory, though no laurels shall shadow your tomb, than in forcing the onward progress of your race over burning cities and hecatombs of men!" I looked round for Vivian's answer; but ere I spoke he had spurred from my side, and I saw the wild dogs slinking back from the hoofs of his horse as he rode at speed on the sward through the moonlight.

(1) "I have frequently," says Mr. Wilkinson, in his invaluable work upon South Australia, at once so graphic and so practical, "been out on a journey in such a night, and whilst allowing the horse his own time to walk along the road, have solaced myself by reading in the still moonlight."

CHAPTER III.

The weeks and the months rolled on, and the replies to Vivian's letters came at last; I foreboded too well their purport. I knew that my father could not set himself in opposition to the deliberate and cherished desire of a man who had now arrived at the full strength of his understanding, and must be left at liberty to make his own election of the paths of life. Long after that date I saw Vivian's letter to my father; and even his conversation had scarcely prepared me for the pathos of that confession of a mind remarkable alike for its strength and its weakness. If born in the age, or submitted to the influences, of religious enthusiasm, here was a nature that, awaking from sin, could not have been contented with the sober duties of mediocre goodness; that would have plunged into the fiery depths of monkish fanaticism, wrestled with the fiend in the hermitage, or marched barefoot on the infidel with a sackcloth for armor,--the cross for a sword. Now, the impatient desire for redemption took a more mundane direction, but with something that seemed almost spiritual in its fervor. And this enthusiasm flowed through strata of such profound melancholy! Deny it a vent, and it might sicken into lethargy or fret itself into madness,--give it the vent, and it might vivify and fertilize as it swept along.

My father's reply to this letter was what might be expected. It gently reinforced the old lessons in the distinctions between aspirations towards the perfecting ourselves,--aspirations that are never in vain,--and the morbid pa.s.sion for applause from others, which shifts conscience from our own bosoms to the confused Babel of the crowd and calls it "fame." But my father in his counsels did not seek to oppose a mind so obstinately bent upon a single course,--he sought rather to guide and strengthen it in the way it should go. The seas of human life are wide. Wisdom may suggest the voyage, but it must first look to the condition of the ship and the nature of the merchandise to exchange. Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish can bring back the gold of Ophir; but shall it therefore rot in the harbor? No; give its sails to the wind! But I had expected that Roland's letter to his son would have been full of joy and exultation,--joy there was none in it, yet exultation there might be, though serious, grave, and subdued. In the proud a.s.sent that the old soldier gave to his son's wish, in his entire comprehension of motives so akin to his own nature, there was yet a visible sorrow; it seemed even as if he constrained himself to the a.s.sent he gave. Not till I had read it again and again could I divine Roland's feelings while he wrote. At this distance of time I comprehend them well. Had he sent from his side, into n.o.ble warfare, some boy fresh to life, new to sin, with an enthusiasm pure and single-hearted as his own young chivalrous ardor, then, with all a soldier's joy, he had yielded a cheerful tribute to the hosts of England. But here he recognized, though perhaps dimly, not the frank, military fervor, but the stern desire of expiation; and in that thought he admitted forebodings that would have been otherwise rejected, so that at the close of the letter it seemed, not the fiery, war-seasoned Roland that wrote, but rather some timid, anxious mother.

Warnings and entreaties and cautions not to be rash, and a.s.surances that the best soldiers were ever the most prudent,--were these the counsels of the fierce veteran who at the head of the forlorn hope had mounted the wall at--, his sword between his teeth?

But whatever his presentiments, Roland had yielded at once to his son's prayer, hastened to London at the receipt of his letter, obtained a commission in a regiment now in active service in India; and that commission was made out in his son's name. The commission, with an order to join the regiment as soon as possible, accompanied the letter.

And Vivian, pointing to the name addressed to him, said, "Now indeed I may resume this name, and next to Heaven will I hold it sacred! It shall guide me to glory in life, or my father shall read it, without shame, on my tomb!" I see him before me as he stood then,--his form erect, his dark eyes solemn in their light, a serenity in his smile, a grandeur on his brow, that I had never marked till then! Was that the same man I had recoiled from as the sneering cynic, shuddered at as the audacious traitor, or wept over as the cowering outcast? How little the n.o.bleness of aspect depends on symmetry of feature, or the mere proportions of form! What dignity robes the man who is filled with a lofty thought!

CHAPTER IV.

He is gone; he has left a void in my existence. I had grown to love him so well; I had been so proud when men praised him. My love was a sort of self-love,--I had looked upon him in part as the work of my own hands.

I am a long time ere I can settle back, with good heart, to my pastoral life. Before my cousin went, we cast up our gains and settled our shares. When he resigned the allowance which Roland had made him, his father secretly gave to me, for his use, a sum equal to that which I and Guy Bolding brought into the common stock. Roland had raised a sum upon mortgage; and while the interest was a trivial deduction from his income, compared to the former allowance, the capital was much more useful to his son than a mere yearly payment could have been. Thus, between us, we had a considerable sum for Australian settlers,--L4,500.

For the first two years we made nothing,--indeed, great part of the first year was spent in learning our art, at the station of an old settler. But at the end of the third year, our flocks having then become very considerable, we cleared a return beyond my most sanguine expectations. And when my cousin left, just in the sixth year of exile, our shares amounted to L4,000 each, exclusive of the value of the two stations. My cousin had at first wished that I should forward his share to his father; but he soon saw that Roland would never take it, and it was finally agreed that it should rest in my hands, for me to manage for him, send him out an interest at five per cent, and devote the surplus profits to the increase of his capital. I had now, therefore, the control of L12,000, and we might consider ourselves very respectable capitalists. I kept on the cattle station, by the aid of the Will-o'-the-Wisp, for about two years after Vivian's departure (we had then had it altogether for five). At the end of that time, I sold it and the stock to great advantage. And the sheep--for the "brand" of which I had a high reputation--having wonderfully prospered in the mean while, I thought we might safely extend our speculations into new ventures. Glad, too, of a change of scene, I left Bolding in charge of the flocks and bent my course to Adelaide, for the fame of that new settlement had already disturbed the peace of the Bush. I found Uncle Jack residing near Adelaide in a very handsome villa, with all the signs and appurtenances of colonial opulence; and report, perhaps, did not exaggerate the gains he had made,--so many strings to his bow, and each arrow, this time, seemed to have gone straight to the white of the b.u.t.ts. I now thought I had acquired knowledge and caution sufficient to avail myself of Uncle Jack's ideas, without ruining myself by following them out in his company; and I saw a kind of retributive justice in making his brain minister to the fortunes which his ideality and constructiveness, according to Squills, had served so notably to impoverish. I must here gratefully acknowledge that I owed much to this irregular genius. The investigation of the supposed mines had proved unsatisfactory to Mr. Bullion, and they were not fairly discovered till a few years after. But Jack had convinced himself of their existence, and purchased, on his own account, "for an old song," some barren land which he was persuaded would prove to him a Golconda, one day or other, under the euphonious t.i.tle (which, indeed, it ultimately established) of the "Tibbets' Wheal." The suspension of the mines, however, fortunately suspended the existence of the Grog and Store Depot, and Uncle Jack was now a.s.sisting in the foundation of Port Philip. Profiting by his advice, I adventured in that new settlement some timid and wary purchases, which I resold to considerable advantage. Meanwhile I must not omit to state briefly what, since my departure from England, had been the ministerial career of Trevanion.

That refining fastidiousness, that scrupulosity of political conscience, which had characterized him as an independent member, and often served, in the opinion both of friend and of foe, to give the attribute of general impracticability to a mind that, in all details, was so essentially and laboriously practical, might perhaps have founded Trevanion's reputation as a minister if he could have been a minister without colleagues,--if, standing alone, and from the necessary height, he could have placed, clear and single, before the--world, his exquisite honesty of purpose and the width of a statesmanship marvellously accomplished and comprehensive. But Trevanion could not amalgamate with others, nor subscribe to the discipline of a cabinet in which he was not the chief, especially in a policy which must have been thoroughly abhorrent to such a nature,--a policy that, of late years, has distinguished not one faction alone, but has seemed so forced upon the more eminent political leaders on either side that they who take the more charitable view of things may perhaps hold it to arise from the necessity of the age, fostered by the temper of the public: I mean the policy of Expediency. Certainly not in this book will I introduce the angry elements of party politics; and how should I know much about them?

All that I have to say is that, right or wrong, such a policy must have been at war, every moment, with each principle of Trevanion's statesmanship, and fretted each fibre of his moral const.i.tution. The aristocratic combinations which his alliance with the Castleton interest had brought to his aid served perhaps to fortify his position in the Cabinet; yet aristocratic combinations were of small avail against what seemed the atmospherical epidemic of the age. I could see how his situation had preyed on his mind when I read a paragraph in the newspapers, "that it was reported, on good authority, that Mr. Trevanion had tendered his resignation, but had been prevailed upon to withdraw it, as his retirement at that moment would break up the government."

Some months afterwards came another paragraph, to the effect "that Mr.

Trevanion was taken suddenly ill, and that it was feared his illness was of a nature to preclude his resuming his official labors." Then Parliament broke up. Before it met again, Mr. Trevanion was gazetted as Earl of Ulverstone,--a t.i.tle that had been once in his family,--and had left the Administration, unable to encounter the fatigues of office.

To an ordinary man the elevation to an earldom, pa.s.sing over the lesser honors in the peerage, would have seemed no mean close to a political career; but I felt what profound despair of striving against circ.u.mstance for utility--what entanglements with his colleagues, whom he could neither conscientiously support, nor, according to his high old-fashioned notions of party honor and etiquette, energetically oppose--had driven him to abandon that stormy scene in which his existence had been pa.s.sed. The House of Lords, to that active intellect, was as the retirement of some warrior of old into the cloisters of a convent. The gazette that chronicled the earldom of Ulverstone was the proclamation that Albert Trevanion lived no more for the world of public men. And, indeed, from that date his career vanished out of sight.

Trevanion died,--the Earl of Ulverstone made no sign.

I had hitherto written but twice to Lady Ellinor during my exile,--once upon the marriage of f.a.n.n.y with Lord Castleton, which took place about six months after I sailed from England, and again when thanking her husband for some rare animals, equine, pastoral, and bovine, which he had sent as presents to Bolding and myself. I wrote again after Trevanion's elevation to the peerage, and received, in due time, a reply confirming all my impressions; for it was full of bitterness and gall, accusations of the world, fears for the country,--Richelieu himself could not have taken a gloomier view of things when his levees were deserted and his power seemed annihilated before the "Day of Dupes."

Only one gleam of comfort appeared to visit Lady Ulverstone's breast, and thence to settle prospectively over the future of the world,--a second son had been born to Lord Castleton; to that son would descend the estates of Ulverstone and the representation of that line distinguished by Trevanion and enriched by Trevanion's wife. Never was there a child of such promise! Not Virgil himself, when he called on the Sicilian Muses to celebrate the advent of a son to Pollio, ever sounded a loftier strain. Here was one, now, perchance, engaged on words of two syllables, called:

"By laboring Nature to sustain The nodding frame of heaven and earth and main, See to their base restored, earth, sea, and air, And joyful ages from behind in crowding ranks appear!"

Happy dream which Heaven sends to grandparents,--rebaptism of Hope in the font whose drops sprinkle the grandchild!

Time flies on; affairs continue to prosper. I am just leaving the bank at Adelaide with a satisfied air when I am stopped in the street by bowing acquaintances who never shook me by the hand before. They shake me by the hand now, and cry, "I wish you joy, sir. That brave fellow, your namesake, is of course your near relation."

"What do you mean?"

"Have you not seen the papers? Here they are."