“Do you remember,” said Sir Sedley Beaudesert, “an anecdote of the first Duke of Portland? He had a gallery in the great stable of his villa in Holland, where a concert was given once a-week, to cheer and amuse his horses! I have no doubt the horses thrived all the better for it. What Trevanion wants is a concert once a-week. With him it is always saddle and spur. Yet, after all, who would not envy him? If life be a drama, his name stands high in the playbill, and is printed in capitals on the walls.”
“Envy ME!” cried Trevanion—“ME!—no, you are the enviable man—you who have only one grief in the world, and that so absurd a one, that I will make you blush by disclosing it. Hear, O sage Austin!—O sturdy Roland!—Olivares was haunted by a spectre, and Sedley Beaudesert by the dread of old age!”
“Well,” said my mother seriously, “I do think it requires a great sense of religion, or, at all events, children of one’s own, in whom one is young again, to reconcile one’s-self to becoming old.”
“My dear ma’am,” said Sir Sedley, who had slightly coloured at Trevanion’s charge, but had now recovered his easy self-possession, “you have spoken so admirably that you give me courage to confess my weakness. I do dread to be old. All the joys of my life have been the joys of youth. I have had so exquisite a pleasure in the mere sense of living, that old age, as it comes near, terrifies me by its dull eyes and gray hairs. I have lived the life of the butterfly. Summer is over, and I see my flowers withering; and my wings are chilled by the first airs of winter. Yes, I envy Trevanion; for, in public life, no man is ever young; and while he can work he is never old.”
“My dear Beaudesert,” said my father, “when St Amable, patron saint of Riom, in Auvergne, went to Rome, the sun waited upon him as a servant, carried his cloak and gloves for him in the heat, and kept off the rain, if the weather changed, like an umbrella. You want to put the sun to the same use; you are quite right; but then, you see, you must first be a saint before you can be sure of the sun as a servant.”
Sir Sedley smiled charmingly; but the smile changed to a sigh as he added, “I don’t think I should much mind being a saint if the sun would be my sentinel instead of my courier. I want nothing of him but to stand still. You see he moved even for St Amable. My dear madam, you and I understand each other; and it is a very hard thing to grow old, do what one will to keep young.”
“What say you, Roland, of these two malcontents?” asked my father. The Captain turned uneasily in his chair, for the rheumatism was gnawing his shoulder, and sharp pains were shooting through his mutilated limb.
“I say,” answered Roland, “that these men are wearied with marching from Brentford to Windsor—that they have never known the bivouac and the battle.”
Both the grumblers turned their eyes to the veteran: the eyes rested first on the furrowed, care-worn lines on his eagle face—then they fell on the stiff, outstretched cork limb—and then they turned away.
Meanwhile my mother had softly risen, and, under pretence of looking for her work on the table near him, bent over the old soldier, and pressed his hand.