“Mr. Evelyn’s coach was waiting at the landing-stage; and that good gentleman received us at his hall door. He is not young, and has gone through much affliction in the loss of his dear children—one, who died of a fever during that wicked reign of the Usurper Cromwell, was a boy of gifts and capacities that seemed almost miraculous, and had more scholarship at five years old than my poor woman’s mind could compass were I to live till fifty. Mr. Evelyn took a kind of sad delight in talking to Henriette and me of this gifted child, asking her what she knew of this and that subject, and comparing her extensive ignorance at eleven with his lamented son’s vast knowledge at five. I was more sorry for him than I dared to say; for I could but think this dear overtaught child might have died from a perpetual fever of the brain as likely as from a four days’ fever of the body; and afterwards when Mr. Evelyn talked to us of a manner of forcing fruits to grow in strange shapes—a process in which he was greatly interested—I thought that this dear infant’s mind had been constrained and directed, like the fruits, into a form unnatural to childhood. Picture to yourself, Léonie, at an age when he should have been chasing butterflies or making himself a garden of cut-flowers stuck in the ground, this child was labouring over Greek and Latin, and all his dreams must have been filled with the toilsome perplexities of his daily tasks. It is happy for the bereaved father that he takes a different view, and that his pride in the child’s learning is even greater than his grief at having lost him.
“At dinner the conversation was chiefly of public affairs—the navy, the war, the King, the Duke, and the General. Mr. Evelyn told Fareham much of his embarrassments last year, when he had the Dutch prisoners, and the sick and wounded from the fleet, in his charge; and when there was so terrible a scarcity of provision for these poor wretches that he was constrained to draw largely on his own private means in order to keep them from starving.
“Later, during the long dinner, Mr. Pepys made allusions to an unhappy passion of his master and patron, Lord Sandwich, that had diverted his mind from public business, and was likely to bring him to disgrace. Nothing was said plainly about this matter, but rather in hints and innuendoes, and my brother’s brow darkened as the conversation went on; and then, at last, after sitting silent for some time while Mr. Evelyn and Mr. Pepys conversed, he broke up their discourse in a rough, abrupt way he has when greatly moved.
“‘He is a wretch—a guilty wretch—to love where he should not, to hazard the world’s esteem, to grieve his wife, and to dishonour his name! And yet, I wonder, is he happier in his sinful indulgence than if he had played a Roman part, or, like the Spartan lad we read of, had let the wild-beast passion gnaw his heart out, and yet made no sign? To suffer and die, that is virtue, I take it, Mr. Evelyn; and you Christian sages assure us that virtue is happiness. A strange kind of happiness!’
“‘The Christian’s law is a law of sacrifice,’ Mr. Evelyn said, in his melancholic way. ‘The harvest of surrender here is to be garnered in a better world.’
“‘But if Sandwich does not believe in the everlasting joys of the heavenly Jerusalem—and prefers to anticipate his harvest of joy!’ said Fareham.
“‘Then he is the more to be pitied,’ interrupted Mr. Evelyn.
“‘He is as God made him. Nothing can come out of a man but what his Maker put in him. Your gold vase there will not turn vicious and produce copper—nor can all your alchemy turn copper to gold. There are some of us who believe that a man can live only once, and love only once, and be happy only once in that pitiful span of infirmities which we call life; and that he is wisest who gathers his roses while he may—as Mr. Pepys sang to us this morning.’
“Mr. Evelyn sighed, and looked at my brother with mild reproof.
“‘If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable,’ he said. ‘My lord, when those you love people the Heavenly City, you will begin to believe and hope as I do.’