CHAPTER V.
I had not been in haste to conclude my arrangements, for, independently
of my wish to render myself acquainted with the small useful crafts that
might be necessary to me in a life that makes the individual man a state
in himself, I naturally desired to habituate my kindred to the idea of
our separation, and to plan and provide for them all such substitutes or
distractions, in compensation for my loss, as my fertile imagination
could suggest. At first, for the sake of Blanche, Roland, and my
mother, I talked the Captain into reluctant sanction of his sister-in-
law's proposal to unite their incomes and share alike, without
considering which party brought the larger proportion into the firm. I
represented to him that unless he made that sacrifice of his pride, my
mother would be wholly without those little notable uses and objects,
those small household pleasures, so dear to woman; that all society in
the neighborhood would be impossible, and that my mother's time would
hang so heavily on her hands that her only resource would be to muse on
the absent one and fret. Nay, if he persisted in so false a pride, I
told him, fairly, that I should urge my father to leave the Tower.
These representations succeeded; and hospitality had commenced in the
old hall, and a knot of gossips had centred round my mother, groups of
laughing children had relaxed the still brow of Blanche, and the Captain
himself was a more cheerful and social man. My next point was to engage
my father in the completion of the Great Book. "Ah! sir," said I, "give
me an inducement to toil,--a reward for my industry. Let me think, in
each tempting pleasure, each costly vice,--No, no; I will save for the
Great Book! And the memory of the father shall still keep the son from
error. Ah, look you, sir! Mr. Trevanion offered me the loan of L1,500
necessary to commence with; but you generously and at once said 'No; you
must not begin life under the load of debt.' And I knew you were right
and yielded,--yielded the more gratefully that I could not but forfeit
something of the just pride of manhood in incurring such an obligation
to the father of--Miss Trevanion. Therefore I have taken that sum from
you,--a sum that would almost have sufficed to establish your younger
and worthier child in the world forever. To that child let me repay it,
otherwise I will not take it. Let me hold it as a trust for the Great
Book; and promise me that the Great Book shall be ready when your
wanderer returns and accounts for the missing talent."
And my father pished a little, and rubbed off the dew that bad gathered
on his spectacles. But I would not leave him in peace till he had given
me his word that the Great Book should go on a pas de great,--nay, till
I had seen him sit down to it with good heart, and the wheel went round
again in the quiet mechanism of that gentle life.
Finally, and as the culminating acme of my diplomacy, I effected the
purchase of the neighboring apothecary's practice and good-will for
Squills, upon terms which he willingly subscribed to; for the poor man
had pined at the loss of his favorite patients,--though Heaven knows
they did not add much to his income. And as for my father, there was no
man who diverted him more than Squills, though he accused him of being a
materialist, and set his whole spiritual pack of sages to worry and bark
at him, from Plato and Zeno to Reid and Abraham Tucker.
Thus, although I have very loosely intimated the flight of time, more
than a whole year elapsed from the date of our settlement at the Tower
and that fixed for my departure.
In the mean while, despite the rarity amongst us of that phenomenon, a
newspaper, we were not so utterly cut off from the sounds of the far-
booming world beyond, but what the intelligence of a change in the
Administration and the appointment of Mr. Trevanion to one of the great
offices of state reached our ears. I had kept up no correspondence with
Trevanion subsequent to the letter that occasioned Guy Belding's visit;
I wrote now to congratulate him: his reply was short and hurried.
An intelligence that startled me more, and more deeply moved my heart,
was conveyed to me, some three months or so before my departure, by
Trevanion's steward. The ill health of Lord Castleton had deferred his
marriage, intended originally to be celebrated as soon as he arrived of
age. He left the University with the honors of "a double-first class;"
and his constitution appeared to rally from the effects of studies more
severe to him than they might have been to a man of quicker and more
brilliant capacities, when a feverish cold, caught at a county meeting
in which his first public appearance was so creditable as fully to
justify the warmest hopes of his party, produced inflammation of the
lungs and ended fatally. The startling contrast forced on my mind,--
here, sudden death and cold clay; there, youth in its first flower,
princely rank, boundless wealth, the sanguine expectation of an
illustrious career, and the prospect of that happiness which smiled from
the eyes of Fanny,--that contrast impressed me with a strange awe: death
seems so near to us when it strikes those whom life most flatters and
caresses. Whence is that curious sympathy that we all have with the
possessors of worldly greatness when the hour-glass is shaken and the
scythe descends? If the famous meeting between Diogenes and Alexander
had taken place, not before, but after the achievements which gave to
Alexander the name of Great, the Cynic would not, perhaps, have envied
the hero his pleasures nor his splendors,--neither the charms of Statira
nor the tiara of the Mede; but if, the day after, a cry had gone forth,
"Alexander the Great is dead!" verily I believe that Diogenes would have
coiled himself up in his tub and felt that with the shadow of the
stately hero something of glory and of warmth had gone from that sun
which it should darken never more. In the nature of man, the humblest
or the hardest, there is a something that lives in all of the Beautiful
or the Fortunate, which hope and desire have appropriated, even in the
vanities of a childish dream.
