STRAY LEAVES FROM A PASSING LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
MR. CULPEPPER MAKES A PROPOSAL—A RENCOUNTER IN A CHURCHYARD.
It was one of those golden November mornings that throw a mystic glamour over New York. A warm haze draped the great city, softening its deformities, blending its beauties. In its magic light the very street-cars took on a romantic air, as they sped along loaded with their living freight. The bales of goods on the sidewalk, huddled together in careless profusion, were no longer the danger which they are generally supposed to be by elderly gentlemen who have due regard for life and limb, but gracious droppings rather from Pandora’s box, raining down fresh and bright from the hands of the genial goddess. What in the garish sun were vulgar business houses filled with sober goods and peopled with staring and sleek-combed clerks, assumed under this gorgeous drapery the aspect of mystic temples of commerce, where silent and solemn-eyed priests stood patiently all the day long to call in the passers-by to worship. The lofty policeman, looming like a statue at the corner, was not the ferocious, peanut-chewing being that he is commonly supposed to be, but a beneficent guardian of the great temple of peace. The busy crowds of brisk business men that hurried along, untouched as yet by the toil and the soil of the day, were fresh-faced and clear-eyed, chatty and cheerful. Thompson stepped out as cheerily as though he were just beginning that strange task, on which so many ambitious mortals have gone down, of performing his thousand miles in a thousand hours; for Thompson, happy man! knew not as yet what was so calmly awaiting him on his desk—that heavy bill that he was bound to meet, but which, strange to say, had quite slipped his memory. And there is Johnson walking arm-in-arm with Jones, Johnson’s face wreathed in sunny smiles the while. Johnson’s heart is gay and his step light, and he feels the happy influence of the morning. Jones is sadly in want of a confidential clerk, and his friend is dilating on the treasure that he himself possesses—that very clerk who, he learns on reaching his office, absconded last night with a fearful amount of Johnson’s property. Nor, on the other hand, does that eager-faced youngster, the shining seams of whose garments tell of more years than his seamless face and brow, know that at last the gracious answer that he has so longed for awaits his arrival, and that the bright opening at length lies before him that is to lead him on to fortune, if not to fame, more than the five hundred and forty-six rival applicants know that their addresses have been rejected. As yet the day is marked with neither white bean nor black, and so let us hope, with this mighty stream pouring on and on and on down the great thoroughfares of the city, that the white beans may outnumber the black when the day is done, and that what is lost here may be gained there; for we are of them, brethren of theirs, and joyous hopes of this kind cost little, while, at least, they harden not the heart. And so the whole city, with its hopes and fears, its life and its death, moved out under the November haze that morning, and with it, as the central figure in the vast panorama, he whose stray leaves, it is hoped, may prove at least of passing interest to the many of whom he is one.
My special point of attraction that day was the office of The Packet, “a monthly journal of polite literature,” to quote the prospectus, which was supported by “the ablest pens of both hemispheres,” as the same prospectus modestly admitted. As at this time I was a pretty constant contributor to The Packet, I suppose that, according to the prospectus, I was fully entitled to take my stand among “the ablest pens of both hemispheres,” whether I chose to insist on my literary rank or not. And as I contributed occasionally to other journals which were respectively, according to their several prospectuses, “the leading weekly,” “the greatest daily,” “the giant monthly,” “the only quarterly,” “the great art journal,” etc., there could not possibly be any doubt as to my literary position. For all that, I confess I was still among the callow brood, and fear that, if any person had referred to me in public as “a literary man,” the literary man would have blushed very violently, and felt as small as a titmouse. Still, I had that delicious feeling of the dawning of hope and the glorious uncertainty of a great ambition that always attend and encourage the first steps of a new career, whatever be its character. It was natural enough, then, that I should step out lustily among my fellows, my head high in air, and my heart higher still, drinking in the inspiration of the morning, piercing the golden mist with the eye of hope, feeling a young life throbbing eagerly within me, feeling a mysterious brotherhood with all men, gliding as through a fairy city in a gilded dream.
As I had several places to call at, it was late in the afternoon when I arrived at The Packet office to draw my little account. On entering I found an unusual commotion; something had evidently gone very wrong. Mr. Culpepper, the experienced editor of the journal of polite literature, was, to judge by the tones of his voice, in a towering rage. I fancied that I caught expressions, too, which were not exactly in accordance with polite literature. When Mr. Culpepper’s temper did happen to fail, it was an event to be remembered, particularly as that event took place, on an average, some two or three times a week. Everything and everybody in the office was in a turmoil; for Mr. Culpepper’s temper had an infectious quality that affected all its immediate surroundings. An experienced eye could tell by the position of the dictionary, the state of the floor, the standing of the waste-basket, the precise turn of the editor’s easy-chair, how the wind blew to Mr. Culpepper. On this mild November afternoon it was clear that a terrific gale had sprung up from some unexpected quarter. It had ruffled what was left of Mr. Culpepper’s hair, it blew his cravat awry, it had disarranged his highly intellectual whiskers, it spared not even his venerable coat-tails. His private office showed the effects of a raging tornado. Pigeon-holes had been ransacked; drawers had been wrenched open and rifled of their contents; Webster and Worcester lay cheek-by-jowl in the waste-basket; the easy-chair had a dangerous crick in the back; Mr. Culpepper himself was plunged ankle-deep in manuscripts that strewed the floor in wild confusion; while Mr. Culpepper’s hands were thrust in his cavernous pockets, as he stood there on my entrance, a very monument of editorial despair.
Mr. Culpepper, like most men, was preferable when good-tempered. Indeed, though his opinions at times, particularly on the merits or demerits of my own compositions, were apt to be more emphatic than polished, Mr. Culpepper, when good-tempered, was by no means an unpleasant companion. In his stormy periods I always coasted as clear of him as I could; but it was now too late to sheer off. So, making the best of a bad bargain, I advanced boldly to meet the enemy, when to my surprise he greeted me with the exclamation,
“Oh! you are just the man I wanted. Can you tell a story—a good, lively Christmas story, with a spice of fun, a dash of love, a slice of plum-pudding, a sprinkling of holly and ivy, with a bunch of mistletoe thrown in? And, by the bye, if you have genius enough, a good ghost. Yes, a good, old-fashioned ghost would be capital. They are dying out now, more’s the pity. Yes, I must have a ghost and a country churchyard, with a bowl of punch, if you want it. There are your materials. Now, I want them fixed up into a first-class Christmas story, to fill exactly eight pages, by four o’clock to-morrow afternoon at the latest. Must have it to fit this illustration. Clepston was to have done it, but he has failed me at the last hour. Just like him—he must go and get married just when I want my story. He did it on purpose, because I refused to advance his pay—married out of revenge, just to spite me. Well, what do you say?”
I said nothing; for Mr. Culpepper’s rapidity and the novelty of his proposal fairly took my breath away. I had never yet attempted fiction, but there was a certain raciness in Mr. Culpepper’s manner of putting it that urged me to seize my present opportunity. A good ghost-story within just twenty-four hours! A pleasant winter tale that should be read to happy families by happy firesides; by boys at school, their hair standing on end with wild excitement, and their laughter ringing out as only boys’ laughter does; by sweet-faced girls—by everybody, in fact, with a vast amount of pleasure and not a twinge of pain. Thousands whom I should never know would say, “What a dear fellow this story-teller is!” “What a pleasant way he has of putting things!” “What—”
“Well, what do you say?” broke in Mr. Culpepper rudely; and I remembered that the story which was to win me such golden opinions from all sorts of people was yet to be written.
“I hardly know. Four o’clock to-morrow afternoon? The time is so very short. Could you not extend it?”
“Not a moment. Printers waiting now. If I can’t have yours by that time, I must use something else; and I have not a thing to suit. Just look here,” he said pointing to the floor, and glancing ruefully around; “I have spent the day wading through all these things, and there is nothing among the pile. A mass of rubbish, all of it!”
My resolution was made; I started up.
“Mr. Culpepper, I will try. I will stay up all night; and if there be a ghost yet unlaid, a pudding yet unmade, a piece of holly yet ungathered, or a bunch of mistletoe that has not yet done duty, you shall have them all by four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”
“Now, I rely on you, mind. Four o’clock sharp. Let it be brisk and frosty, bright as the holly-berries, and soothing as a glass of punch! We owe you a little account, I believe. Here it is, and now good-by till to-morrow afternoon.”
Who has not experienced that half-fearful and yet wholly pleasant feeling of setting foot for the first time in a new and strange land? It was with some such feeling that my heart fluttered as I left the office of The Packet that afternoon. Yet what was I to achieve within the next four-and-twenty hours? An eight-page Christmas story of the approved pattern, with the conventional sauces and seasonings—nothing more. The thing had been done a thousand times before, and would be done a thousand times again, as often as Christmases came round, and thought nothing of. Why should I be so fluttered at the task? Was this to be the great beginning at last of my new career? Was this trumpery eight-page story to be the true keynote to what was to make music of all the rest of my life? Nonsense! I said to myself; and yet why nonsense? Did not all great enterprises spring from small and insignificant beginnings? Were not all great men at some time or another babies in arms, rocked in cradles, fed on soothing syrups, and carried about in long clothes? Did not a falling apple lead Newton on to the great discovery of gravitation? Was it not a simmering kettle that opened Watt’s eyes to steam, and introduced the railway and the packet? Did not a handful of sand reveal the mines of California? Must not Euclid have started with a right reading of axioms as old as the world? Who shall fix the starting-point of genius? And why should not my first fictitious Christmas pudding contain the germ of wonders that were to be?
I can feel the astute and experienced reader who has been gracious enough to accompany me thus far already falter at the very outset of the short excursion we purposed taking together. I can feel the pages close over me like a tomb, while a weary yawn sings my death-dirge. But allow me, my dear sir, or my dear madam, or my much-esteemed young lady, to stay your hands just one moment, until I explain matters a little, until I introduce myself properly; and I promise to be very candid in all I have to say. You see—indeed, you will have seen already—that the gentleman who has just left Mr. Culpepper’s presence was at this period of his life very young indeed, and proportionately ambitious. These two facts will explain the fluttering of his heart at the cold-blooded proposal of spending an entire night at his writing-desk, delving his brain for the materials of a silly little story, while you, dear sir, have drawn over your ears, and over that head that has been rubbed into reverent smoothness by the gentle hand of time, the sleep-compelling night-cap; and while you, dear madam, while you have—done nothing of the kind. I plead guilty, then, at this time, to the twofold and terrible charge of outrageous youth and still more outrageous ambition. But I have long since contrived to overcome the disgrace of excessive youth; while, as regards ambition, what once happened to a literary friend of mine has never happened to me: that morning I have been waiting for so long, so long, when I was to wake up and find myself famous, has not yet arrived—looks even as though it never meant to dawn. Literature was to me an unknown sea, upon which I had not fairly embarked. I had paddled a little in a little cockleshell of my own in sunny weather around friendly coasts, but as yet had not ventured to launch out into the great deep. The storm and the darkness and the night, the glory and the dread of the tempest, the awful conflicts of the elements, were as yet unknown to and unbraved by me. Indeed, as I promised to be candid, I may as well whisper in your ear that the main efforts of my pen at this precise period of my life were devoted to meeting with a calm front and easy conscience the weekly eye of Mrs. Jinks. Mrs. Jinks was my boarding-house keeper, a remarkable woman in her way, and one for whom I entertained an unbounded respect; but she was scarcely a Mme. de Staël, unless in looks, still less a Mme. de Sévigné. Mme. Jinks’ encouragement to aspiring genius was singularly small when aspiring genius could not pay its weekly board—a contingency that has been known to occur. Mrs. Jinks never fell into the fatal mistake of tempting the man to eat unless the man was prepared to pay. But even Mrs. Jinks could not crush out all ambition, so that I hugged Mr. Culpepper’s proposal, as I went home that evening, with a fervor and enthusiasm that I had never before experienced; for it seemed to open up to me a new vista of bright and beautiful imaginings.
For all that, I could not strike the clew. It seems a very easy thing, does it not, to concoct a passable enough Christmas story out of the ample materials with which Mr. Culpepper had so lavishly supplied me? Just try; sit down and write a good, short, brisk Christmas story, out of all the time-honored materials, and judge for yourself what an easy task it is, O sapient critic! a line from whose practised pen stabs to death a year of hopes, and projects, and labor. Strange to say, my immediate project dissolved and faded out of my mind, as I plodded homewards along the great thoroughfare I had trodden so serenely in the morning. The little Christmas story gave place to something new, something larger, something vague, indefinable, and mighty. A great realm of fiction unfolded itself before me—a realm all my own, a fairy island in a summer sea, peopled with Calibans and dainty Ariels, Mirandas and Ferdinands, and a thousand unseen creatures, waiting only for the wave of my magic wand to be summoned into the beauty of life, to bring sweet songs down from the clouds of heaven, and whisperings of spirits far away that the earth had never yet heard. A mist sprang up around me as I walked, and through it peered a thousand eyes, and from it came and went a thousand shapeless forms, whose outlines I could half discern, but hold not. I could not bid them stay until I grasped them. Something was wanting, a touch only, a magic word, but I could not find it. A charm was on me, and more potent than I. It was there, working, working, working, but I could not master it. I walked along in a dream. Men in throngs passed me by in what seemed a strange and awful silence. If they spoke, never a word heard I. Carriages and vehicles of every description I felt rolling, rolling past; but their wheels were strangely muffled, for never a sound fell on my ear. The fair, bright city of the morning was filled now with silent shadows, moving like ghosts in a troubled dream. Lights sprang up out of the mist as I passed along, but they seemed to shine upon me alone. Intensely conscious of my own existence, I had only a numb feeling of other life around me. At last I found myself at Mrs. Jinks’ door. I took a letter from her hand, and seated at length in my own room, with familiar objects around me, the shadows seemed to lift, and I was brought back to the subject of my proposed night’s work.
Still, I could not collect my thoughts sufficiently to bring them to bear, in a practical way, on the central idea around which my fiction was to take body and shape. The sudden strain on my imagination had been too severe; a kind of numbness pervaded my whole being, and the moments, every one of which was precious as a grain of gold, were slipping idly away. The feeling that all the power to achieve what you desire lies there torpid within you, but too sullen to be either coaxed or bullied into action, laughing sluggishly at the most violent effort of the will to move it, is, perhaps, one of the most exasperating that a man can experience. It is like one in a nightmare, who sees impending over him a nameless terror that it only needs a wag of a little tongue to divert, and yet the little tongue cleaves with such monstrous persistency to the roof of the parched mouth that not all the leverage of Archimedes himself could move it from its place. That fine power of man’s intellect, that clear perception and keen precision which can search the memory, and at a glance find the clew that it is seeking; that can throw out those far-reaching fibres over the garden of knowledge, gathering in from all sides the necessary stores, was as far away from me as from a madman’s dream. I could fasten upon nothing; my brain was in disorder, while the moments were lengthening into hours, and the hours slipping silently away.
In despair I tried a cigar—a favorite refuge of mine in difficulties; and soon light clouds, pervaded with a subtle aroma, were added to those thinner clouds of undefined and indefinable images that floated around me, volatile, shadowy, intangible; mysterious, nebulous. Mr. Culpepper’s “materials” had quite evaporated, and I began to think dreamily of old days, of anything, everything, save what was to the point. I remember how poor old Wetherhead, of all people in the world—“Leatherhead” we used facetiously to style him at college—came up before me, and I laughed over the fun we had with him. What a plodder he was! When preparing for his degree, he took ferociously to wet towels. He had the firmest faith in wet towels. He had tried them for the matriculation, and found them “capital,” he assured us. “Try a towel, Leathers,” we would say to him whenever we saw him in difficulties. Poor fellow! He was naturally dull and heavy, dense and persistent as a clod. It would take digging and hoeing and trenching to plant anything in that too solid brain; and yet he was the most hopeful fellow alive. He was possessed with the very passion of study, without a streak of brightness or imagination to soften and loosen the hopeless mass of clay whereof his mind seemed composed; and so he depended on wet towels to moisten it. He almost wore his head out while preparing for the matriculation examen. But by slow and constant effort he succeeded in forcing a sufficient quantity of knowledge into his pores, and retaining it there, to enable him to pass the very best-deserved first class that ever was won. The passage of the Alps to a Hannibal or a Napoleon was a puny feat compared with the passing of an examination by a Wetherhead. We took him on our shoulders, and bore him aloft in triumph, a banner-bearer, with a towel for banner, marching at the head of the procession. “You may laugh, but it was the towels pulled me through, old fellow,” he said to me, smiling, his great face expanding with delight. “Stay there, and don’t go any farther, Leathers,” I advised, when he proclaimed his intention of going up for the degrees. “Nonsense!” said he, and, in spite of everybody’s warnings, Wetherhead “went in” for the B.A. It was a sight to see him in the agonies of study; his eyes almost starting out of his head as the day wore on, and around that head, arranged in turban fashion, an enormous towel reeking with moisture. “How many towels to-day, Leathers?” “How’s the reservoir, Leatherhead?” those impudent youngsters would cry out. As time went on and the examination drew near the whole college became interested in Wetherhead and his prospects of success. Bets were made on him, and bets were made on his towels. The wit of our class wrote an essay—which, it was whispered aloud, had reached the professors’ room, and been read aloud there to their intense amusement—on “Towels vs. Degrees; or, The probabilities of success, measured by the quantity of water on the brain.” He bore it all good-humoredly, even the threat to crown him with towels instead of laurel if he passed and went up for his degree. A dark whisper reached me, away in the country at the time, that he had failed, that the failure had touched his brain, and that he was cut down half-strangled one morning from his own door-key, to which he had suspended himself by means of a wet towel; which, instead of its usual position around his brow, had fastened itself around his throat. Of course that was a malicious libel; for I met the poor fellow soon after, looking the ghost of himself. “How was it, Wetherhead?” I asked. “I don’t know, old fellow,” he responded mournfully. “I got through splendidly the first few days; but after that things began to get muddled and mixed up somehow, so that I could hardly tell one from another. It was all there, but something had got out of order. I felt that it was all there, but there was too much to hold together. The fact is, I missed my towel. A towel or two would have set it all right again. The machine had got too hot, and wanted a little cooling off; but I couldn’t march in there, you know, with a big towel round my head; so I failed.”
The clock striking twelve woke me from my dream of school-days. I had just sixteen hours and a half left to complete the story that was not yet begun. Whew! I might as well engage to write a history of science within the appointed time. It was useless. My cigar had gone out, and I gave up the idea of writing a story at all. And yet surely it was so easy, and I had promised Culpepper, and both he and The Packet and the public were awaiting my decision. And this was to be the end of what I had deemed the dawn of my hope and the firstling of my true genius!
“Roger Herbert, you are an ass,” spake a voice I knew well—a voice that compelled my attention at the most unseasonable hours. “Excuse me for my plainness of speech, but you are emphatically an ass. Now, now, no bluster, no anger. If you and I cannot honestly avow the plain truth to each other, there is no hope for manhood. Mr. Culpepper and the public waiting for you! Ho! ho! Ha! ha! It’s a capital joke. Mr. Culpepper is at this moment in the peaceful enjoyment of his first slumbers; and the public would not even know your name if it were told them. Upon my word, Roger, you are even a greater ass than I took you to be. Well, well, we live and learn. For the last half-a-dozen hours or more where have you been? Floating in the clouds; full of the elixir of life; dreaming great dreams, your spirit within you fanned with the movement of the divinus afflatus, eh? Is not that it? Nonsense, my dear lad. You have only once again mounted those two-foot stilts, against which I am always warning you, and which any little mountebank can manage better than you. They may show some skill, but you only tumble. So come down at once, my fine fellow, and tread on terra firma again, where alone you are safe. You a genius! Ho! ho! Ho! ho! ho! And all apropos of a Christmas pudding. The genius of a Christmas pudding! It is too good. Your proper business, when Mr. Culpepper made his proposal to you this afternoon, was to tell him honestly that the task he set you was one quite beyond your strength—altogether out of your reach, in fact. But no; you must mount your stilts, and, once on them, of course you are a head and shoulders above honest folk. O Roger, Roger! why not remember your true stature? What is the use of a man of five foot four trying to palm himself off and give himself the airs of one of six foot four? He is only laughed at for his pains, as Mr. Culpepper will assuredly laugh at you to-morrow. Take my advice, dear boy, acknowledge your fault, and then go to bed. You are no genius, Roger. In what, pray, are you better, in what are you so good, as fifty of your acquaintances, whom I could name right off for you, but who never dream that they are geniuses? The divinus afflatus, forsooth! For shame, for shame, little man! Stick to your last, my friend, and be thankful even that you have a last whereto to stick. Let Apelles alone, or let the other little cobblers carp at him, if they will. The world will think more of his blunders than of all your handicraft put together, and your little cobbler criticisms into the bargain. And now, having said my say, I wish you a very good-night, Roger, or good-morning rather.”
So spake the voice of the Daimon within me; a very bitter voice it has often proved to me—as bitter, but as healthy, as a tonic. And at its whisper down tumbled all “the cloud-capt towers and gorgeous palaces” that my imagination had so swiftly conjured up. It was somewhat humiliating to confess, but, after all, Roger Herbert, Senior, as I called that inner voice, was right. I resolved to go to bed. Full of that practical purpose, I went to my desk to close it up for the night, and all dreams of a momentary ambition with it, when my eyes fell upon a letter bearing the address:
Roger Herbert, Esq.,
Care of Mrs. Jinks,
—— Street,
New York,
United States,
America.
What a quantity of writing for so small an envelope! One needed no curious peep within, nor scarcely a second glance at the neat-pointed hand, with the up-and-down strokes of equal thickness, to guess at the sex of the writer. I remembered now; it was the letter Mrs. Jinks gave me at the door, and, good heavens! it had been lying there disregarded all these hours, while I was inflated with my absurd and bombastic thoughts. The writing I knew well, for my hand had been the first to guide the writer through the mazes and the mysteries of chirography. One sentence from the letter is sufficient to give here. “Dear, dear Roger: Papa is sick—is dying. Come home at once.” It was signed “Fairy.”
“Home at once!” The post-marks said London and Leighstone. London, it may be necessary to inform the reader, is the capital of a county called Middlesex, in a country called England, while Leighstone is a small country town some thirty miles out of London. From Leighstone writes “Fairy” to “Dear, dear Roger” some thousand—it seems fifty thousand—odd miles away. The father reported dying is my father; Fairy is my sister. It is now nearly two in the morning, and by four in the afternoon Mr. Culpepper and the printers expect that brisk, pleasant, old-fashioned Christmas story that is to make everybody happy, and not a hint at pain in it! And I have been puzzling my brains these long hours past trying to compose it, with that silent letter staring me in the face all the time. A pleasant Christmas story, a cheery Christmas story! How bitterly that voice began to laugh within me again! Oh! the folly, the crime, of which I had been guilty. It was such vain and idle dreams as these that had lured me away from that father’s side; that had brought me almost to forget him; that, great God! perhaps had dealt the blow that struck him down. Merciful heavens! what a Christmas story will it be mine to tell?
At four in the afternoon a steamer sailed for Liverpool, and I was one of the passengers. Years have passed since then, and I can write all this calmly enough now; but only those—and God grant that they may be few!—who at a moment’s warning, or at any warning, have had to cross more than a thousand miles of ocean in the hope of catching a dying parent’s last breath, can tell how the days pall and the sleepless nights drag on; how the sky expands into a mighty shroud covering one dear object, of which the sad eyes never lose the sight; how the winds, roar they loud or sing they softly, breathe ever the same low, monotonous dirge.
It was scarcely a year since I had parted from my father, and our parting had not been of the friendliest. He was a magnate in Leighstone, as all the Herberts before him had been since Leighstone had a history. They were a tradition in the place; and though to be great there in these days did not mean what it once meant, and to the world outside signified very little indeed, yet what is so exacting or punctilious as the etiquette of a petty court, what so precise and well preserved as its narrow traditions and customs? Time did not exist for Leighstone when a Herbert was not the foremost man there. The tomb of the Herberts was the oldest and grandest in the churchyard that held the ashes of whole generations of the Leighstone folk. There had been Crusading Herberts, and Bishops Herbert, Catholic and Protestant, Abbots Herbert, Justices Herbert, Herberts that had shared in councils of state, and Herberts that had been hanged, drawn, and quartered by order of the state. Old townsfolk would bring visitors to the churchyard and give in their own way the history of “that ere Harbert astretched out atop o’ the twomb, wi’ a swoord by his soide, and gluvs on his hands, the two on ’em folded one aginst t’other a-prayin’ loike, and a cross on his buzzum, and a coople o’ angels wi’ stone wings a-watchin’ each side o’ ’im. A had fowt in the waars long ago, that ere Harbert had, when gentle-folk used to wear steel coats, a used, and iron breeches, and go ever so fur over the seas to foight. Queer toimes them was. Whoi, the Harberts, folks did say, was the oldest fam’ly i’ the country. Leastwoise, there was few ’uns older.”
My father was possessed with the greatness of his ancestry, and resented the new-fangled notions that professed to see nothing in blood or history. Nurtured on tradition of a past that would never reappear, he speedily retired from a world where he was too eager to see that a Herbert was no more than a Jones or a Smith, and, though gifted with powers that, rightly used, might have proved, even in these days, that there was more in his race than tradition of a faded past, he preferred withdrawing into that past to reproducing it in a manner accommodated to the new order of things. In all other respects he was a very amiable English gentleman, who, abjuring politics, which he held had degenerated into a trade unbecoming a gentleman’s following, divided his time between antiquarian and agricultural pursuits, for neither of which did I exhibit so ardent an admiration as he had hoped. As soon as I could read, and think, and reason in my own way, I ran counter to my father in many things, and was pronounced by him to be a radical, infected with the dangerous doctrines of the day, which threatened the overthrow of all things good, and the advent of all things evil. He only read in history the records of a few great families. For me the families were of far less interest than the peoples, historically at least. The families had already passed or were passing away; the peoples always remained. To the families I attributed most of the evils that had afflicted humanity; in the peoples I found the stuff that from time to time helped to regenerate humanity. I do not say that all this came to me at once; but this manner of looking at things grew upon me, and made my father anxious about my future, though he was too kind to place any great restrictions in the way of my pursuits, and our disputes would generally end by the injunction: “Roger, whatever you do or think, always remember that you represent a noble race, and are by your very birth an English gentleman, so long as such a being is permitted to exist.”
As I grew older problems thickened around me, and I often envied the passive resignation with which so spirited a temperament as my father’s could find refuge from the exciting questions of the day in the quiet of his books and favorite pursuits. Coming home from college or from an occasional excursion into the great world without, Leighstone would seem to me a hermitage, where life was extinct, and there was room for nothing save meditation. And there I meditated much, and pondered and read, as I then thought, deeply. The quaint, old churchyard was my favorite ground for colloquy with myself, and admirably adapted, with its generations of silent dead, was it for the purpose. In that very tomb lay bones, once clothed with flesh, through which coursed lustily blood that had filtered down through the ages into my veins. In my thoughts I would question that quiet old Herbert stretched out there on his tomb centuries ago, and lying so still, with his calm, stony face upturned immovably and confidently to heaven. The face was not unlike my father’s; Leighstone folk said it was still more like mine. That Herbert was a Catholic, and believed earnestly in all that I and my father as earnestly disbelieved. Was he the worse or the better man for his faith? To what had his faith led him, and to what had ours led us? What was his faith, and what was ours? To us he was a superstitious creature, born in dark ages, and the victim of a cunning priestcraft, that, in the name of heaven, darkened the minds and hearts of men; while, had he dreamed that a degenerate child of his would ever, even in after-ages, turn heretic, as he would say, the probabilities were that in his great-hearted earnestness, had it rested solely with him, he would rather have ended the line in his own person than that such disgrace should ever come upon it. The man who in his day had dared tell him that flesh of his would ever revile the church in which he believed, and the Sacrament which he adored, would likely enough have been piously knocked on the head for his pains. What a puzzle it all was! Could a century or two make all this difference in the manner of regarding the truths on which men professed to bind their hopes of an eternal hereafter?
One afternoon of one of those real English summer days that when they come are so balmy and bright and joyous, while sauntering through the churchyard, I lighted upon a figure half buried in the long grass, so deeply intent on deciphering the inscription around the tomb of my ancestor that he did not notice my approach. There he lay, his hat by his side, and an open sketch-book near it, peering into the dim, old, half-effaced characters as curiously as ever did alchemist of eld into an old black-letter volume. His years could not be many more than mine. His form would equally attract the admiration of a lady or a prize-fighter. The sign of ruddy health burned on the bronzed cheek. The dress had nothing particular in it to stamp the character of the wearer. The sketch-book and his absorbing interest in the grim old characters around a tomb might denote the enthusiasm of an artist, or of an antiquarian like my father, though he looked too full of the robust life of careless youth for the one, and too evidently in the enjoyment of life as it was for the other. Altogether a man that, encountered thus in a country churchyard on a warm July afternoon, would at once excite the interest and attract the attention of a passer-by.
While I was mentally noting down, running up, and calculating to a nicety the sum of his qualities, the expression of his face indicated that he was engaged in a hopeless task. “I can make all out about the old Crusader except the date, and that is an all-important point. The date—the date—the date,” he repeated to himself aloud. “I wonder what Crusade he fought in?”
“Perhaps I could assist you,” I broke in. “Sir Roger Herbert followed the good King Edward to the Holy Land, and for the sake of Christ’s dear rood made many a proud painim to bite the dust. So saith the old chronicle of the Abbey of S. Wilfrid which you see still standing—the modernized version of it, at least—on yonder hill. The present abbot of S. Wilfrid is the florid gentleman who has just saluted me. That handsome lady beside him is the abbot’s wife. The two pretty girls seated opposite are the abbot’s daughters. The good and gentle Abbot Jones is taking the fair abbess, Mrs. Jones, out for her afternoon airing. She is a very amiable lady; he is a very genial gentleman, and the author of the pamphlet in reply to Maitland’s Dark Ages. Mr. Jones is very severe on the laziness and general good-for-nothingness of the poor monks.”
My companion, who still remained stretched on the grass, scanned my face curiously and with an amused glance while I spoke. He seemed lost in a half-revery, from which he did not recover until a few moments after I had ceased speaking. With sudden recollection, he said:
“I beg your pardon, I was thinking of something else. Many thanks for your information about this old hero, whom the new train of ideas, called up by your mention of the Abbot Jones and his family, drove out of my mind a moment. The Abbot Jones!” he laughed. “It is very funny. Yet why do the two words seem so little in keeping?”
“It is because, as my father would tell you, this is the century of the Joneses. Centuries ago Abbot Jones would have sounded just as well and as naturally as did Queen Joan. But, in common with many another good thing, the name has become vulgarized by a vulgar age.”
My companion glanced at me curiously again, and seemed more inwardly amused than before, whether with me or at me, or both, it was impossible to judge from his countenance, though that was open enough. He turned from the abbot to the tomb again.
“And so this old hero,” said he, patting affectionately the peaked toe of the figure of Sir Roger, “drew his sword long ago for Christ’s dear rood, and probably scaled the walls of Damietta at the head of a lusty band. What a doughty old fellow he must have been! I should have been proud to have shaken hands with him.”
“Should you, indeed? Then perhaps you will allow a remote relative of that doughty old fellow to act as his unworthy representative in his absence?” said I, offering my hand.
“Why, you don’t mean to say that you are a descendant of the old knight whose ashes consecrate this spot!” he exclaimed, rising and grasping me by the hand. “Sir, I am happy to lay my hand in that of a son of a Crusader!”
“I fear I may not claim so high a character. There are no Crusaders left. Myself, and Sir Roger here, move in different circles. You forget that a few centuries roll between us.”
“Centuries change the fashion of men’s garments,” he responded quickly, “not the fashion of their hearts. Truth is truth, and faith faith, and honor honor, now as when this warrior fought for faith, and truth, and honor. The crusades end only with the cross and faith in Christ.”
So spake with fervent accent and kindling glance the gentleman whom a few moments before I had set down as one eminently fitted to attract the admiration alike of lady or prize-fighter. The words struck me as so strange, spoken in such a place and by such a person, that I was silent a little, and he also. At length I said:
“You are like my father. You seem to prefer the old to the new.”
“Not so; I am particularly grateful that I was born in this and in no other century. But I object to the enthusiasm that would leave all the dead past to bury its dead. There were certain things, certain qualities in the centuries gone by, a larger faith, a more general fervor, a loyalty to what was really good and great, more universal than prevails to-day, that we might have preserved with benefit to ourselves and to generations to come. But pardon me. You have unfortunately hit upon one of my hobbies, and I could talk for hours on the subject.”
“On the contrary, I ought to feel flattered at finding one interested even in so remote a relative of mine as Sir Roger. As I look at him this moment the thought comes to me, could he bend those stiff old knees of his, hardened by the centuries into triple stone, rise up and walk through Leighstone, live a week among us, question us, know our thoughts, feelings, aspirations, religions, ascertain all that we have profited by the centuries that have rolled over this tomb, he would, after one week of it all, gather his old joints together and go back to his quiet rest until that
‘Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum
Coget omnes ante thronum.’
“I can’t help laughing at the conceit. Imagine me escorting this stiff and stony old Sir Roger through the streets of Leighstone, and introducing him to my relations and friends as my grandfather some six centuries removed. But the fancy sounds irreverent to one whom I doubt not was as loyal-hearted a gentleman as ever clove a Turk to the chine. Poor old Sir Roger! I must prevent Mattock making such constant use of his elbow. It is getting quite out of repair.”
“Who is Mattock, may I ask?”
“Mattock is a character in his way. He is the Leighstone grave-digger, and has been as long as I can remember. He claims a kind of fellowship with those he buries, and he has buried a whole generation of Leighstonites, till a contagious hump has risen on his back from the number of mounds he has raised. He is a cynic in his way, and can be as philosophic over a skull as Hamlet in the play. He has a wonderful respect, almost a superstitious regard, for Sir Roger. Whenever he strips for a burial, he commends his goods to the care of my ancestor, accompanied always by the same remark: ‘I wonder who laid thee i’ the airth? A weighty corpse thou, a warrant. A deep grave thine, old stone-beard. Well, lend’s your elbow, and here’s to ye, wherever ye may be.’ Mattock takes special care to fortify himself against possible contingencies with a dram. ‘Cold corpses,’ he says, ‘is unhealthy. They are apt to lie heavy on the stomick, if ye doant guard agin ’em; corpses doos. So doos oysters. A dram afore burial and another dram after keeps off the miasmys.’ Such is Mattock’s opinion, backed up by an experience of a quarter of a century. You are evidently a stranger in this neighborhood?”
“Yes, I was merely passing through. I am enjoying a walking tour, being a great walker. It is by far the best method of seeing a country. When in the course of my wanderings I come across an old tomb such as this, an old inscription, or anything at all that was wrought or writ by reverent hands centuries ago, and has survived through the changes of time, I am amply repaid for a day’s march. Doubly so in this instance, since it has been the fortunate means of bringing me in contact with one whose opinions I am happy to think run in many things parallel with my own. And now to step out of the past into the very vulgar present, I am staying at the ‘Black Bull.’ The ‘Black Bull,’ I am assured, is famous for his larder, so that, if you feel inclined to ripen the acquaintance begun by the grave of your ancestor, in the interior of the ‘Black Bull,’ Kenneth Goodal will consider that he has fallen on an exceptionally happy day.”
“Kenneth Goodal?” The name struck me as familiar; but I could not recollect at the moment where I had heard it before. I repeated it aloud.
“It sounds quite a romantic name, does it not? It was my absurd mother who insisted on the Kenneth, after a Scotch uncle of mine. For that matter I suppose it was she who also insisted on the Goodal. At least my father says so. But she is the sweetest of women to have her own way, Heaven bless her! Of course I had no voice in the matter at all, beyond the generic squeal of babyhood. Had I been consulted, I should have selected Jack, a jolly, rough-and-ready title. It carries a sort of slap-me-on-the-back sound with it. One is never surprised at a Jack getting into scrapes or getting out of them. But it would cause very considerable surprise to hear that a Kenneth had been caught in any wild enterprise. However, Kenneth I am, and Kenneth I must remain, as staid and respectable as a policeman on duty by very force of title.”
“Now I remember where I heard the name. There were traditions at Dr. Porteous’, at Kingsclere, of a Kenneth Goodal who had just left before I went there. But he can’t have been you.”
“No? Why not?”
“He was an awful scape-grace, they told me. He used to play all kinds of tricks on the masters, though as great a favorite with them as with the boys. He was a great mimic, and Dr. Porteous, who is as solemn as an undertaker at a rich man’s funeral, and as pompous as a parish beadle, surprised Kenneth Goodal one day, surrounded by a delighted crowd, listening with such rapt attention to a highly wrought discourse, after the doctor’s best manner, on the history and philosophy of Resurrection Pie, that it required the unmistakable ‘ahem!’ of the doctor at the close to announce to actor and audience the presence of the original. The doctor in the grand old-school manner congratulated the youthful Roscius on talents of whose existence he had been hitherto unaware, and hinted that a repetition of so successful a performance might encourage him to seek a wider field for so promising a pupil. And when the same Kenneth thrashed the Kingsclere Champion for beating one of the youngsters, bribing the policeman not to interfere until he had finished him, the doctor, who was a model of decorum, had him up before the whole college, and delivered an address that is not quite forgotten to this day; acknowledging the credit to the establishment of such a champion in their midst; a young gentleman who could mimic his superiors until his identity was lost, and pummel his inferiors until their identity was lost, was wasting his great natural gifts in so narrow an arena; and so on—all delivered in the doctor’s best Ciceronian style. It took a deputation of all the masters and all the boys together to beg the delinquent off a rustication or worse. In fact, the stories of him and his deeds are endless. How odd that you should have the same name!”
My new acquaintance laughed outright.
“I fear I must lay claim to more than the name; that historical personage stands before you. I was with Dr. Porteous for a couple of years, and had no idea that I left such fame behind me. The doctor and I became the best of friends after my departure. And so you and I are, in a manner, old school-fellows? How happy I am to have fallen across you. But, come; the ‘Black Bull’ is waiting.”
“By the elbow of mine ancestor, nay. Such dishonor may not come upon the Herberts. Why, Sir Roger here would rise from his tomb at the thought and denounce me in the market-place. You must come with me. Dinner is ready by this time. Come as you are. My father will like you. He likes any one who is interested in his ancestors. And my sister, who, since my mother’s death, is mistress of the house and mistress of us all, shall answer for herself.”
“So be it,” he said, and we passed under the yews, their sad branches flushed in the sun, out through the gate, under the old archway with its mouldering statues, up the pretty straggling road that formed the High Street of Leighstone, arm in arm together, fast friends we each of us felt, though but acquaintances of an hour. The instinct that out of a multitude selects one, though you may scarcely know his name, and tells you that one is your friend, is as strange as unerring. It was this unconscious necromancy that had woven a mesh of golden threads caught from the summer sunlight around us as we moved along. Its influence was upon us, breathing in the perfumed air. I had never had a real friend of my own age before, and I hailed this one as the discovery of a life-time. We should strike out together, tread the same path, be it rough or smooth, arm in arm until the end come. Damon and Pythias would be nothing to us. The same loves, the same hates, the same hopes, were to guide, animate, and sustain us. Castles in the air! Castles in the air! Who has not built them? Who among the sons of men in the neighborhood of twenty summers has not chosen one man out of thousands, leant upon him, cherished him, made him his idol, loved him above all? And so it goes on, until some day comes a laughing eye peeping from under a bonnet, and with one dart the bosom friendship is smitten through and through, and Damon is ready to sacrifice a hecatomb of his Pythiases on the altar of the ox-eyed goddess.
TO BE CONTINUED.
IN MEMORIAM.
E. T.
OBIIT ANNOS NATA XV.
Who says she has wither’d, that little White Rose?
She has been but remov’d from the valley of tears
To a garden afar, where her loveliness glows
Begemm’d with the grace-dew of virginal years,
I knew we should lose her. The dear Sacred Heart
Has a nook in earth’s desert for flowerets so rare;
And keeps them awhile in safe shelter, apart
From the wind and the rain, from the dust and the glare;
But all to transplant them when fairest they bloom,
When most we shall miss them. And this, that our love
May be haunted the more by the fadeless perfume
They have left us to breathe of the Eden above.
Farewell, happy maiden! Our weariest hours
May gather a share of thy perfect repose.
And fragrantly still with the Lord of the flowers
Thou wilt plead for thy lov’d ones—our little Saint Rose.[14]
February 27, 1875.[15]