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The Caxtons: A Family Picture, a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
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Part 7 - Chapter 7 |
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_ PART VII CHAPTER VII "It is no use in the world," said my father, "to know all the languages expounded in grammars and splintered up into lexicons, if we don't learn the language of the world. It is a talk apart, Kitty," cried my father, warming up. "It is an Anaglyph,--a spoken anaglyph, my dear! If all the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians had been A B C to you, still, if you did not know the anaglyph, you would know nothing of the true mysteries of the priests. (1) "Neither Roland nor I knew one symbol letter of the anaglyph. Talk, talk, talk on persons we never heard of, things we never cared for. All we thought of importance, puerile or pedantic trifles; all we thought so trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life! If you found a little schoolboy on his half-holiday fishing for minnows with a crooked pin, and you began to tell him of all the wonders of the deep, the laws of the tides, and the antediluvian relies of iguanodon and ichthyosaurus; nay, if you spoke but of pearl fisheries and coral-banks, or water-kelpies and naiads,--would not the little boy cry out peevishly, 'Don't tease me with all that nonsense; let me fish in peace for my minnows!' I think the little boy is right after his own way: it was to fish for minnows that he came out, poor child, not to hear about iguanodons and water-kelpies. "So the company fished for minnows, and not a word could we say about our pearl-fisheries and coral-banks! And as for fishing for minnows ourselves, my dear boy, we should have been less bewildered if you had asked us to fish for a mermaid! Do you see, now, one reason why I have let you go thus early into the world? Well, but amongst these minnow-fishers there was one who fished with an air that made the minnows look larger than salmons. "Trevanion had been at Cambridge with me. We were even intimate. He was a young man like myself, with his way to make in the world. Poor as I, of a family upon a par with mine, old enough, but decayed. There was, however, this difference between us: he had connections in the great world; I had none. Like me, his chief pecuniary resource was a college fellowship. Now, Trevanion had established a high reputation at the University; but less as a scholar, though a pretty fair one, than as a man to rise in life. Every faculty he had was an energy. He aimed at everything: lost some things, gained others. He was a great speaker in a debating society, a member of some politico-economical club. He was an eternal talker,--brilliant, various, paradoxical, florid; different from what he is now, for, dreading fancy, his career since has been one effort to curb it. But all his mind attached itself to something that we Englishmen call solid; it was a large mind,--not, my dear Kitty, like a fine whale sailing through knowledge from the pleasure of sailing, but like a polypus, that puts forth all its feelers for the purpose of catching hold of something. Trevanion had gone at once to London from the University; his reputation and his talk dazzled his connections, not unjustly. They made an effort, they got him into Parliament; he had spoken, he had succeeded. He came to Compton in the flush of his virgin fame. I cannot convey to you who know him now--with his careworn face and abrupt, dry manner, reduced by perpetual gladiatorship to the skin and bone of his former self--what that man was when he first stepped into the arena of life. "You see, my listeners, that you have to recollect that we middle-aged folks were young then; that is to say, we were as different from what we are now as the green bough of summer is from the dry wood out of which we make a ship or a gatepost. Neither man nor wood comes to the uses of life till the green leaves are stripped and the sap gone. And then the uses of life transform us into strange things with other names: the tree is a tree no more, it is a gate or a ship; the youth is a youth no more, but a one-legged soldier, a hollow-eyed statesman, a scholar spectacled and slippered! When Micyllus"--here the hand slides into the waistcoat again--"when Micyllus," said my father, "asked the cock that had once been Pythagoras(2) if the affair of Troy was really as Homer told it, the cock replied scornfully, 'How could Homer know anything about it? At that time he was a camel in Bactria.' Pisistratus, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis you might have been a Bactrian camel when that which to my life was the siege of Troy saw Roland and Trevanion before the walls. "Handsome you can see that Trevanion has been: but the beauty of his countenance then was in its perpetual play, its intellectual eagerness; and his conversation was so discursive, so various, so animated, and above all so full of the things of the day! If he had been a priest of Serapis for fifty years he could not have known the anaglyph better. Therefore he filled up every crevice and pore of that hollow society with his broken, inquisitive, petulant light; therefore he was admired, talked of, listened to, and everybody said, 'Trevanion is a rising man.' "Yet I did not do him then the justice I have done since; for we students and abstract thinkers are apt too much, in our first youth, to look to the depth, of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to the surface it may cover. There may be more water in a flowing stream only four feet deep, and certainly more force and more health, than in a sullen pool thirty yards to the bottom. I did not do Trevanion justice; I did not see how naturally he realized Lady Ellinor's ideal. I have said that she was like many women in one. Trevanion was a thousand men in one. He had learning to please her mind, eloquence to dazzle her fancy, beauty to please her eye, reputation precisely of the kind to allure her vanity, honor and conscientious purpose to satisfy her judgment; and, above all, he was ambitious,--ambitious not as I, not as Roland was, but ambitious as Ellinor was; ambitious, not to realize some grand ideal in the silent heart, but to grasp the practical, positive substances that lay without. "Ellinor was a child of the great world, and so was he. "I saw not all this, nor did Roland; and Trevanion seemed to pay no particular court to Ellinor. "But the time approached when I ought to speak. The house began to thin. Lord Rainsforth had leisure to resume his easy conferences with me; and one day, walking in his garden, he gave me the opportunity,--for I need not say, Pisistratus," said my father, looking at me earnestly, "that before any man of honor, if of inferior worldly pretensions, will open his heart seriously to the daughter, it is his duty to speak first to the parent, whose confidence has imposed that trust." I bowed my head and colored. "I know not how it was," continued my father, "but Lord Rainsforth turned the conversation on Ellinor. After speaking of his expectations in his son, who was returning home, he said, 'But he will of course enter public life,--will, I trust, soon marry, have a separate establishment, and I shall see but little of him. My Ellinor! I cannot bear the thought of parting wholly with her. And that, to say the selfish truth, is one reason why I have never wished her to marry a rich man, and so leave me forever. I could hope that she will give herself to one who may be contented to reside at least great part of the year with me, who may bless me with another son, not steal from me a daughter. I do not mean that he should waste his life in the country; his occupations would probably lead him to London. I care not where my house is,--all I want is to keep my home. You know,' he added, with a smile that I thought meaning, 'how often I have implied to you that I have no vulgar ambition for Ellinor. Her portion must be very small, for my estate is strictly entailed, and I have lived too much up to my income all my life to hope to save much now. But her tastes do not require expense, and while I live, at least, there need be no change. She can only prefer a man whose talents, congenial to hers, will win their own career, and ere I die that career may be made.' Lord Rainsforth paused; and then--how, in what words I know not, but out all burst!--my long-suppressed, timid, anxious, doubtful, fearful love. The strange energy it had given to a nature till then so retiring and calm! My recent devotion to the law; my confidence that, with such a prize, I could succeed,--it was but a transfer of labor from one study to another. Labor could conquer all things, and custom sweeten them in the conquest. The Bar was a less brilliant career than the senate. But the first aim of the poor man should be independence. In short, Pisistratus, wretched egotist that I was, I forgot Roland in that moment; and I spoke as one who felt his life was in his words. "Lord Rainsforth looked at me, when I had done, with a countenance full of affection, but it was not cheerful. "'My dear Caxton,' said he, tremulously, 'I own that I once wished this,--wished it from the hour I knew you; but why did you so long--I never suspected that--nor, I am sure, did Ellinor.' He stopped short, and added quickly: 'However, go and speak, as you have spoken to me, to Ellinor. Go; it may not yet be too late. And yet--but go.' "'Too late!'--what meant those words? Lord Rainsforth had turned hastily down another walk, and left me alone, to ponder over an answer which concealed a riddle. Slowly I took my way towards the house and sought Lady Ellinor, half hoping, half dreading to find her alone. There was a little room communicating with a conservatory, where she usually sat in the morning. Thither I took my course. That room,--I see it still!--the walls covered with pictures from her own hand, many were sketches of the haunts we had visited together; the simple ornaments, womanly but not effeminate; the very books on the table, that had been made familiar by dear associations. Yes, there the Tasso, in which we had read together the episode of Clorinda; there the Aeschylus in which I translated to her the 'Prometheus.' Pedantries these might seem to some, pedantries, perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which had knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room, it was the home of my heart. "Such, in my vanity of spirit, methought would be the air round a home to come. I looked about me, troubled and confused, and, halting timidly, I saw Ellinor before me, leaning her face on her hand, her cheek more flushed than usual, and tears in her eyes. I approached in silence, and as I drew my chair to the table, my eye fell on a glove on the floor. It was a man's glove. Do you know," said my father, "that once, when I was very young, I saw a Dutch picture called 'The Glove,' and the subject was of murder? There was a weed-grown, marshy pool, a desolate, dismal landscape, that of itself inspired thoughts of ill deeds and terror. And two men, as if walking by chance, came to this pool; the finger of one pointed to a blood-stained glove, and the eyes of both were fixed on each other, as if there were no need of words. That glove told its tale. The picture had long haunted me in my boyhood, but it never gave me so uneasy and fearful a feeling as did that real glove upon the floor. Why? My dear Pisistratus, the theory of forebodings involves one of those questions on which we may ask 'why' forever. More chilled than I had been in speaking to her father, I took heart at last, and spoke to Ellinor." My father stopped short; the moon had risen, and was shining full into the room and on his face. And by that light the face was changed; young emotions had brought back youth,--my father looked a young man. But what pain was there! If the memory alone could raise what, after all, was but the ghost of suffering, what had been its living reality! Involuntarily I seized his hand; my father pressed it convulsively, and said with a deep breath: "It was too late; Trevanion was Lady Ellinor's accepted, plighted, happy lover. My dear Katherine, I do not envy him now; look up, sweet wife, look up!" (1). The anaglyph was peculiar to the Egyptian priests; the hieroglyph generally known to the well educated. (2). Lucian, The Dream of Micyllus. _ |
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