To the young lady herself he wrote on his return: “I have continued writing a journal, and you will be astonished to hear that your name is not once mentioned in it. It is, however, written in invisible ink across every page. It may be absurd, but I consider my feelings towards you so sacred, that I should not like to parade them even to my nearest relations.”
CHAPTER IX.
MIDDLE LIFE.
On his return from his Italian tour my brother at once commenced practice in the Ecclesiastical Courts, and took a small house in Bell Yard, Doctors’ Commons, where he went to reside, and which he describes to his mother as follows:—
“April 1851.—I am in excellent health and spirits. I have a funny little house here: there are three floors and two rooms on each: then there is a ground-floor, the front room of which I use as an office, and the back room as a bath room, for I stick diligently to the cold-water system. A kitchen below completes my establishment. I have a housekeeper, who sits downstairs in the kitchen and sleeps in the top story; she is miraculously clean and tidy, and cooks very well, although I never dine at home. She is also a wonderful gossip.”
Here he practised for a few years regularly, and with very fair success, but his professional career was destined to be short and broken, and need not detain us. It is his home life with which we are concerned, and it was the pressure of what he looked upon as a higher home duty which decided him, after a struggle, to abandon his profession. He was married in the autumn of 1852, and, in the course of a few years, the health of his wife’s mother by adoption made it desirable that they should be always with her, and that she should spend the winter months abroad. When it became clear that this was necessary, he accepted it, and made the best of it; though I find abundant traces in his correspondence of the effort which it required to do so. Thus he writes from Pau, the place fixed upon for their foreign winter residence, “I always found that changing one’s residence and plans gave one a fit of the blues for a time, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.” And again; “The business of life is to be bored in all directions. You must not imagine, however, that I am ill, or out of spirits. I have no right to be either, and won’t be, please God.” But the necessary want of regular employment, the sinking into what is called “an idle man,” and abandoning all active part in “the struggle for existence,” was no small trial to one who held that the “full employment of all powers, physical, mental, and spiritual, is the true secret of happiness, so that no time may be left for morbid self-analysis.” You are all perhaps too young to understand this, and probably, when you think about such matters at all, imagine that the happiest life must be one in which you would only have to amuse yourselves. It may, I hope, shake any such belief to find that the period in my brother’s life in which he was thus thrown on his own resources, and had the most complete liberty to follow his own fancies, was just that in which you may find traces of ennui, and a tendency to be dissatisfied with the daily task of getting through time.
He took the best course of getting rid of the blues, however, by throwing himself heartily into such occupations as were to be had at Pau. The chief of these was a Pen and Pencil Club, to which most of the English and American residents belonged, and of which he became the secretary. Besides the ordinary meetings, for which he wrote a number of vers de société, on the current topics and doings of the place, the Club indulged in private theatricals. On these occasions he was stage manager, and frequently author; most of the charades and short pieces, which you have seen, and acted in, at Offley, were originally written by him for the Pen and Pencil Club at Pau. “It was a mild literary society,” an old friend writes to me, “which he carried almost entirely on his own shoulders, and made a success.” Then he set to work for the first time to cultivate in earnest his talent for music, and took to playing the violoncello, communicating intelligence of his own progress, and of musical doings at Pau generally, to his sister, whom he looked upon as his guide and instructress. These were not always devoid of incident, as for instance the following:—