In the meanwhile the other son, though keeping his health, was incurring debts. There is a note from Bessy, copied into the Diary, surely as heartbroken a cry as could come from a wife and mother. Enclosing a bill for £120 drawn by Tom upon his father, she writes that she can hardly bring herself to send it:—
"It has caused me tears and sad thoughts, but to you it will bring these and hard hard work. Why do people sigh for children? They know not what sorrow will come with them. How can you arrange for the payment? and what could have caused him to require such a sum? Take care of yourself; and if you write to him, for God's sake, let him know that it is the very last sum you will or can pay for him. My heart is sick when I think of you, and the fatigue of mind and body you are always kept in. Let me know how you think you can arrange this."
A second draft for £100 followed quick on it, and early in the next year, still worse news. The young man had sold his commission and was on his way home. £1500 in all had been spent in fitting him out and purchasing, first an ensigncy, then a lieutenancy; and this was the upshot of so much anxiety and outlay. And the second boy, who had done all that could be hoped of him, was on his way home too, to a sad meeting. "It seemed all but death," Moore writes, "when he stepped out of the carriage exhausted with the journey, and wasted with lung disease." There was a rally for a few months, during which Moore was busy trying to shape some new future for the prodigal Tom, who was remaining in France. Four hundred pounds would have preserved his lieutenancy (being the money actually paid down out of the price of his commission), but Moore refused to find it. He was already reduced to borrowing from a friend, Mr. Boyse, his Wexford host; and though Rogers, Lord Lansdowne, and probably many others would, as Lord John Russell regretfully comments, have willingly advanced the larger sum, they heard nothing of the need. Moore's own object was to secure his son a commission in the Austrian service, but Tom himself wrote from France suggesting the Légion Étrangère. Interest was quickly made with Soult through Madame Adelaide, who received the prodigal and made much of him for his father's sake—"a continuation of that spoiling process," Moore writes sadly, "to which poor Tom (as my son) has been from his childhood subjected." The thing was settled accordingly, not without another draft for a hundred and odd pounds to enable the son to leave for Algiers. A few days before he set out for the new dangers and hardships of Africa, his brother had died peacefully at home. It was only the last straw in a load of trouble that the one remaining child could not even get leave for a farewell visit home, before he launched, under no good omens, into a new career and clime.
The record of the nest year (1843) is short and uninteresting—notes of engagements for the most part. One is characteristic enough to quote:—
"March 23. Breakfasted at Rogers's to meet Jeffrey and Lord John—two of the men I like best among my numerous friends. Jeffrey's volubility (which was always superabundant) becomes even more copious, I think, as he grows older. But I am ashamed of myself for finding any fault with him."
"Lenior et melior fit accedente senecta" is a phrase that has full application to this veteran of letters. The year closed with a cruel hoax (the crueller as it coincided with fresh demands from Tom). Some one in Ireland wrote to inform Moore that £300 had been left him as a testimony of regard. Moore had suspicions, but he adds:—
"There was an air of truth and reality which half lured my poor Bess and myself into hailing it as a providential God-send. Already, indeed, her generous heart was apportioning out the different presents it would enable her to make to my sister, to the poor H——s, etc. Alas! alas! I wish no worse to the ingenious gentleman who penned the letter than an exactly similar disappointment."
I shall add the next entry in the Diary, Moore's farewell to the year 1843:—
"A strange life mine; but the best as well as pleasantest part of it lies at home. I told my dear Bessy, this morning, that while I stood at my study window, looking out at her, as she crossed the field, I sent a blessing after her. 'Thank you, bird,' she replied, 'that's better than money'; and so it is. Bird is a pet name she gave me in our younger days, and was suggested by Hamlet's words, 'Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come'; being the call, it seems, which falconers use to their hawk in the air, when they would have him come down to them."
What one feels on reading these passages, and contrasting them with many earlier ones, is perhaps best expressed by assenting to the view of Miss Berry, recorded in the Diary. Moore had taken the liberty of an old friend in going unasked to one of her famous soirées, and on his saying something of this:—