My dear Bob,—This must be a very brief epistle, since, amongst other reasons, the sheet of letter-paper costs me a florin, and I shall have to pay three more for a messenger to convey it to the post-town, a distance of as many miles off. To explain these scarce credible facts, I must tell you that we are at a little village called Orsaro, in the midst of a wild mountain country, whither we have come to perform penances, say prayers, and enact other devotions at the shrine of a certain St. Agatha, who, some time last autumn, took to working miracles down here, and consequently attracting all the faithful who had nothing to do with themselves before Carnival.
My excellent mother it was who, in an access of devotion, devised the excursion; and the governor, hearing that the locality was a barbarous one, and the regimen a strict fast, fancied, of course, it would be a most economical dodge, at once agreed; but, by Jove! the saving is a delusion and a snare. Two miserable rooms, dirty and ill furnished, cost forty francs a day; bad coffee and black bread, for breakfast, are supplied at four francs a head; dinner—if by such a name one would designate a starved kid stewed in garlic, or a boiled hedgehog with chiccory sauce,—ten francs each; sour wine at the price of Château Lafitte; and a seat in the sanctuary, to see the Virgin, four times as dear as a stall at the Italian Opera. Exorbitant as all these charges are, we are gravely assured that they will be doubled whenever the Virgin sneezes again, that being the manifestation, as they call it, by which she displays her satisfaction at our presence here. I do not fancy talking irreverently of these things, Bob, but I own to you I am ineffably shocked at the gross impositions innkeepers, postmasters, donkey-owners, and others practise by trading on the devotional feelings and pious aspirations of weak but worthy people. I say nothing of the priests themselves; they may or may not believe all these miraculous occurrences. One thing, however, is clear: they make every opportunity of judging of them so costly that only a rich man can afford himself the luxury, so that you and I, and a hundred others like us, may either succumb or scoff, as we please, without any means of correcting our convictions. One inevitable result ensues from this. There are two camps: the Faithful, who believe everything, and are cheated by every imaginable device of mock relics and made-up miracles; and the Unbelieving, who actually rush into ostentatious vice, to show their dislike to hypocrisy! Thus, this little dirty village, swarming with priests, and resounding with the tramp of processions, is a den of every kind of dissipation. The rattle of the dice-box mingles with the nasal chantings of the tonsured monks, and the wild orgies of a drinking party blend with the strains of the organ! If men be not religiously minded, the contact with the Church seems to make demons of them. How otherwise interpret the scoff and mockery that unceasingly go forward against priests and priestcraft in a little community, as it were, separated for acts of piety and devotion?
That we live in a most believing age is palpable, by the fact that this place swarms with men distinguished in every court and camp in Europe. Crafty ministers, artful diplomatists, keen old generals, versed in every wile and stratagem, come here as it were to divest themselves of all their long-practised acuteness, and give in their adhesion to the most astounding and incoherent revelations. I cannot bring myself to suppose these men rogues and hypocrites, and yet I have nearly as much difficulty to believe them dupes! What have become of those sharp perceptive powers, that clever insight into motives, and the almost unerring judgment they could exhibit in any question of politics or war? It cannot surely be that they who have measured themselves with the first capacities of the world dread to enter the lists against some half-informed and narrow-minded village curate; or is it that there lurks in every human heart some one spot, a refuge as it were for credulity, which even the craftiest cannot exclude? You are far better suited than I to canvass such a question, my dear Bob. I only throw it out for your consideration, without any pretension to solve it myself.
My father, you are well aware, is too good a Churchman to suffer a syllable to escape his lips which might be construed into discredit of the faith; but I can plainly see that he skulks his penances, and shifts off any observance that does not harmonize with his comfort. At the same time he strongly insists that the fastings and other privations enjoined are an admirable system to counteract the effect of that voluptuous life practised in almost every capital of Europe. As he shrewdly remarked, "This place was like Groeffenberg,—you might not be restored by the water-cure, but you were sure to be benefited by early hours, healthful exercise, and a light diet." This, you may perceive, is a very modified approval of the miracles.
I have dwelt so long on this theme that I have only left myself what Mary Anne calls the selvage of my paper, for anything else. Nor is it pleasant to me, Bob, to tell you that I am low-spirited and down-hearted. A month ago, life was opening before me with every prospect of happiness and enjoyment. A lovely creature, gifted and graceful, of the very highest rank and fortune, was to have been mine. She was actually domesticated with us, and only waiting for the day which should unite our destinies forever, when one night—I can scarcely go on—I know not how either to convey to you what is half shrouded in mystery, and should be perhaps all concealed in shame; but somehow my father contrived to talk so of our family affairs—our debts, our difficulties, and what not—that Josephine overheard everything, and shocked possibly more at our duplicity than at our narrow fortune, she hurried away at midnight, leaving a few cold lines of farewell behind her, and has never been seen or heard of since.
I set out after her to Milan; thence to Bologna, where I thought I had traces of her. From that I went to Rimini, and on a false scent down to Ancona. I got into a slight row there with the police, and was obliged to retrace my steps, and arrived at Parma, after three weeks' incessant travelling, heart-broken and defeated.
That I shall ever rally,—that I shall ever take any real interest in life again, is totally out of the question. Such an opportunity of fortune as this rarely occurs to any one once in life; none are lucky enough to meet it a second time. The governor, too, instead of feeling, as he ought, that he has been the cause of my ruin, continues to pester me about the indolent way I spend my life, and inveighs against even the little dissipations that I endeavor to drown my sorrows by indulging in. It 's all very well to talk about active employment, useful pursuits, and so forth; but a man ought to have his mind at ease, and his heart free from care, for all these, as I told the governor yesterday. When a fellow has got such a "stunner" as I have had lately, London porter and a weed are his only solace. Even Tiverton's society is distasteful, he has such a confoundedly flippant way of treating one.
I 'm thinking seriously of emigrating, and wish you could give me any useful hints on the subject. Tiverton knows a fellow out there, who was in the same regiment with himself,—a baronet, I believe,—and he's doing a capital stroke of work with a light four-in-hand team that he drives, I think, between San Francisco and Geelong, but don't trust me too far in the geography; he takes the diggers at eight pounds a head, and extra for the "swag." Now that is precisely the thing to suit me; I can tool a coach as well as most fellows: and as long as one keeps on the box they don't feel it like coming down in the world!
I half suspect Tiverton would come out too. At least, he seems very sick of England, as everybody must be that has n't ten thousand a year and a good house in Belgravia.
I don't know whither we go from this, and, except in the hope of hearing from you, I could almost add, care as little. The governor has got so much better from the good air and the regimen, that he is now anxious to be off; while my mother, attributing his recovery to the saint's interference, wants another "Novena." Mary Anne likes the place too; and Cary, who sketches all day long, seems to enjoy it.