The Father and the Son.
I Will have nothing to do with antecedents. The reader must find them out if he can, as the book must explain what precedes the book.
The past is a tomb. There let events, as well as men, sleep in peace. Fate befal him who disturbs them; and indeed were there not even a sort of profanation in raking up things done as well as in troubling the ashes of the dead, what does man obtain by breaking into the grave of the past? Nothing but dry bones, denuded of all that made the living act interesting. History is but a great museum of osteology, where the skeletons of great deeds are preserved without the muscles--here a tall fact and there a short one; some sadly dismembered, and all crumbling with age, and covered with dust and cobwebs. Take up a skull, chapfallen as Yorick's. See how it grins at you with its lank jaws and gumless teeth. See how the vacant sockets of the eyes glare meaningless, and the brow, where high intelligence sat throned, commanding veneration, looks little wiser than a dried pumpkin. And thus--even thus, as insignificant of the living deeds that have been, are the dry bones of history, needing the inductive imagination of a Cuvier to clothe them again with the forms that once they wore.
No, no, I will have nothing to do with antecedents. They were past before the Tale began, and let them rest.
Nevertheless, it is always well worth while, in order to avoid any long journeys back, to keep every part of the story going at once, and manfully to resist both our own inclination and the reader's, to follow any particular character, or class of characters, or series of events. Rather let us, going from scene to scene, and person to person, as often as it may be necessary, bring them up from the rear. It is likewise well worth while to pursue the career of such new character that may be introduced, till those who are newly made acquainted with him, have discovered a sufficient portion of his peculiarities.
I shall therefore beg leave to follow Mr. Wittingham on his way homeward; but first I will ask the reader to remark him as he pauses for a moment at the inn-door, with worthy Mr. Groomber a step behind. See how the excellent magistrate rubs the little vacant spot between the ear and the wig with the fore-finger of the right-hand, as if he were a man amazingly puzzled, and then turns his head over his shoulder to inquire of the landlord if he knows who the two guests are, without obtaining any further information than that one of them had been for some weeks in the house--which Mr. Wittingham well knew before, he having the organ of Observation strongly developed--and that the other had just arrived; a fact which was also within the worthy magistrate's previous cognizance.
Mr. Wittingham rubs the organ above the ear again, gets the finger up to Ideality, and rubs that, then round to Cautiousness, and having slightly excited it with the extreme point of the index of the right-hand, pauses there, as if afraid of stimulating it too strongly, and unmanning his greater purposes. But it is a ticklish organ, soon called into action, in some men, and see how easily Mr. Wittingham has brought its functions into operation. He buttons his coat up to the chin as if it were winter, and yet it is as mild an evening as one could wish to take a walk in by the side of a clear stream, with the fair moon for a companion, or something fairer still. It is evident that Cautiousness is at work at a terrible rate, otherwise he would never think of buttoning up his coat on such a night as that; and now without another word to the landlord, he crosses the street, and bends his steps homeward with a slow, thoughtful, vacillating step, murmuring to himself two or three words which our friend Ned Hayward had pronounced, as if they contained some spell which forced his tongue to their repetition.
"Very like me," he said, "very like me? Hang the fellow! Very like me! Why, what the devil--he can't mean to accuse me of robbing the carriage. Very like me! Then, as the mischief must have it, that it should be Mrs. Clifford too! I shall have roystering Sir John upon my back--'pon my life, I do not know what to do. Perhaps it would be better to be civil to these two young fellows, and ask them to dinner; though I do not half like that Beauchamp--I always thought there was something suspicious about him with his grave look, and his long solitary walks, nobody knowing him, and he knowing nobody. Yet this Captain Hayward seems a great friend of his, and he is a friend of Sir John's--so he must be somebody--I wonder who the devil he is? Beauchamp?--Beauchamp? I shouldn't wonder if he were some man rusticated from Oxford. I'll write and ask Henry. He can most likely tell."
The distance which Mr. Wittingham had to go was by no means great, for the little town contained only three streets--one long one, and two others leading out of it. In one of the latter, or rather at the end of one of the latter, for it verged upon the open country beyond the town, was a large house, his own particular dwelling, built upon the rise of the hill, with large gardens and pleasure-grounds surrounding it, a new, well-constructed, neatly pointed, brick wall, two green gates, and sundry conservatories. It had altogether an air of freshness and comfort about it which was certainly pleasant to look upon; but it had nothing venerable. It spoke of fortunes lately made, and riches fully enjoyed, because they had not always been possessed. It was too neat to be picturesque, too smart to be in good taste. I was a bit of Clapham or Tooting transported a hundred or two miles into the country--very suburban indeed!
And yet it is possible that Mr. Wittingham had never seen Clapham in his life, or Tooting either; for he had been born in the town where he now lived, had accumulated wealth, as a merchant on a small scale, in a sea-port town about fifty miles distant; had improved considerably, by perseverance, a very limited stock of abilities; and, having done all this in a short time, had returned at the age of fifty, to enact the country gentleman in his native place. With the ordinary ambition of low minds, however, he wished much that his origin, and the means of his rise should be forgotten by those who knew them, concealed from those who did not; and therefore he dressed like a country gentleman, spoke like a country gentleman, hunted with the fox-hounds, and added "J. P." to his "Esquire."