"Why, yes, I'm very happy here." And then the old man sighed.
I understood that sigh, and in my heart echoed it. No, "it is not good for man to be alone;" and this law, which the Father of all life pronounced himself at man's creation, was never yet violated with impunity. Never yet was the human being withdrawn from, or elevated above, the social wants and sympathies of his human nature, without paying a tremendous price for such isolated independence.
With all my admiration for what this extraordinary man has achieved, and the means, the powers, through which he has achieved it, there mingles a feeling of commiseration which has more than once brought the tears to my eyes while listening to him. He has passed his life in worse than solitude. He will admit no equal in his vicinity. His only intercourse has been with inferiors and dependents, whose servility he despised, and whose resistance enraged him—men whose interests rested on his favour—on his will, from which there was no appeal. Hence despotic habits, and contempt even for those whom he benefited; hence, with much natural benevolence and generosity, a total disregard, or rather total ignorance, of the feelings of others—all the disadvantages, in short, of royalty, only on a smaller scale. Now, in his old age, where is to him the solace of age? He has honour, power, obedience; but where are the love, the troops of friends, which also should accompany old age? He is alone—a lonely man. His constitution has suffered by the dreadful toils and privations of his earlier life. His sympathies have had no natural outlet; his affections have wanted their natural food. He suffers, I think; and not being given to general or philosophical reasoning, causes and effects are felt, not known. But he is a great man who has done great things; and the good which he has done will live after him. He has planted, at a terrible sacrifice, an enduring name and fame, and will be commemorated in this "brave new world," this land of hope, as Triptolemus among the Greeks.
For his indifference or dislike to female society, and his determination to have no settler within a certain distance of his own residence, I could easily account when I knew the man; both seemed to me the natural result of certain habits of life acting upon a certain organisation. He has a favourite servant, Jeffrey by name, who has served him faithfully for more than five-and-twenty years, ever since he left off cleaning his own shoes and mending his own coat. This honest fellow, not having forsworn female companionship, began to sigh after a wife—
"A wife! ah! Saint Marie Benedicité, How might a man have any adversité That hath a wife?"
And, like the good knight in Chaucer, he did
"Upon his bare knees pray God him to send A wife to last unto his life's end."
So one morning he went and took unto himself the woman nearest at hand—one, of whom we must needs suppose that he chose her for her virtues, for most certainly it was not for her attractions. The Colonel swore at him for a fool; but, after a while, Jeffrey, who is a favourite, smuggled his wife into the house; and the Colonel, whose increasing age renders him rather more dependent on household help, seems to endure very patiently this addition to his family, and even the presence of a white-headed chubby little thing, which I found running about without let or hindrance.
The room into which I first introduced you, with its rough log-walls, is Colonel Talbot's library and hall of audience. On leaving my apartment in the morning, I used to find groups of strange figures lounging round the door, ragged, black-bearded, gaunt, travel-worn and toil-worn emigrants, Irish, Scotch, and American, come to offer themselves as settlers. These he used to call his land-pirates; and curious, and characteristic, and dramatic beyond description, were the scenes which used to take place between this grand bashaw of the wilderness and his hungry, importunate clients and petitioners.
Another thing which gave a singular interest to my conversations with Colonel Talbot was, the sort of indifference with which he regarded all the stirring events of the last thirty years. Dynasties rose and disappeared; kingdoms were passed from hand to hand like wine decanters; battles were lost and won;—he neither knew, nor heard, nor cared. No post, no newspaper brought to his forest-hut the tidings of victory and defeat, of revolutions of empires, "or rumours of unsuccessful and successful war."