"But the captain, the Englishman, what became of him?" I asked, slightly glancing at the countenance of the narrator.
"Oh, very well off indeed! Foreign Governments are showy to the soldier, and Joseph the Second, though an economist in civil matters, was liberal to his successful officers. The captain received a pension; a couple of orders; was made a colonel on the first opportunity; and, besides, had his share of the plunderno slight addition to his finances, for the military chest had been taken in the baggage of the Seraskier."
"And by this time," said I, with an unenquiring air, "he is doubtless a field-marshal?"
"Nothing of the kind," replied my reverend friend, "for his victory cured him of soldiership. He was wounded in the engagement, and if he had been ever fool enough to think of fame, the solitary hours of his invalidism put an end to the folly. Other and dearer thoughts recurred to his mind. He had now obtained something approaching to a competence, if rightly managed; he asked permission to retire, returned to England, married the woman he loved; and never for a moment regretted that he was listening to larks and linnets instead of trumpets and cannon, and settling the concerns of rustics instead of manœuvring squadrons and battalions."
"But what was the ghost, after all?"
"Oh, the mere trick of a juggler! a figure projected on the wall by some ingenious contrivance of glasses. The instrument was found on the body of the performer, who turned out to be the colonel's valetof course in the enemy's pay, and who furnished them with daily intelligence of all our proceedings. As for the loss of the sabre, which actually startled the ghost-seer most, he found it next morning hanging up in the hut, where he himself had placed it, and forgotten that he had done so."
"And the captain, or rather the colonel, brought with him to England, a cimeter-cut on his arm, and another on his forehead?" I asked, fixing my eyes on him. A crimson flush passed over his countenance, he bit his lip and turned away. I feared that I had offended irreparably. But his natural kindliness of heart prevailed, he turned to me gently, laughed, and pressing my hand in his, said, "You have my secret. It has escaped me for the first time these thirty years. Keep it like a man of honour."
I have always held that the life of man's mind, where man has a mindwhich is not always the caseis a thing of fits and starts. I even doubt whether any one who will take the trouble to recollect, will not be able to put his finger on the precise periods at which new views of every thing suddenly opened before him, and he emerged at once, if not into new powers, at least into a new use of them. The frame may grow like a tree; the faculties may grow as imperceptibly as the frame; but the mind acquires that knowledge of life which forms its exercise, its use, and perhaps its essence, by bounds and flights. This moonlight walk with my old and honoured Mentor, was the beginning of my mental adolescence. My manhood was still to come, and with a more severe instructor.
As we were passing slowly through the plantations which encircled the Castle with all the noble and profuse shelter and ornament which our ancestors loved, a distant sound of music came on the wind. I then remembered, for the first time, that my brother had, on that evening, given a ball to the county, and a sudden sense of the difference of our lots in life, came painfully over me;the course of secure wealth and English enjoyment, contrasted with the dependence and wandering which must form the existence of myself, and so many thousands of younger brothers.
I was awakened from my reverie by the voice of my companion. His face was upturned to the cloudless sky, and he was murmuring the fine passage in the Merchant of Venice.
"Look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:
Such harmony is in immortal souls."
"Do you know, Charles," said he, "what changed the whole current of my life? what, in fact, brought me back to England?" and there was a slight pause. "What made me a Christian? It was such a night as this. As you now know the chief part of my story, I need have no further concealment on the subject. I had recovered from my wounds, and was preparing to set out for Vienna, when one night a tempest blew down our tents, and left us to trust to the open air for the hours till morning. Tempests in the south are violent, but they are generally brief, and this gale cleared the sky of every cloud. As I lay on the ground, and gazed on the unusual splendour of the stars, the thought occurred to me, Why should doubts of a future state ever come into the mind of man? Why should he hesitate about its reality? Was it not there, before his eyes? Were not the very regions of future existence already within the reach of one of his senses? Why might they not yet be within the reach of all? Of course I do not give you all the vague thoughts which passed through my mind; but the permanence, power, and astonishing multitude of those bright worlds, impressed themselves on me with a new force. I had known all those matters before, but on this night I felt them. My next thoughts were of the power, the wisdom, and the majesty of the mighty Being by whom all this had been formed, moved, and sustained through thousands of years. I need not follow the history of my conversionfor a conversion it was. When I looked round me on the sleeping troops, I saw nothing but clods of the valleygallant beings, but as insensible to their high inheritance as the chargers they rode. My heart moved me towards them; and perhaps, in some instances, I succeeded in giving them my own ideas. But Austria defies, at least, all human change. I was not a fanatic, and I had no wish to strive with impossibilities. I sent in my resignation; abandoned the 'pride, pomp, and circumstance' of the most tempting of all human pursuits, and returned to England to be, what you see me now."
With this man I could have no reserves, and I freely asked his advice on the plunge which I was about to make into that fathomless tide of good and ill, the world. I mentioned the Church as the profession which my mother had suggested, but for which I did not conceive either my temper or my habits suitable.
"You are right, then, in abandoning the idea altogether," was the answer; "and yet I know no profession more capable of fulfilling all the objects of a vigorous mind. I am not now talking of mitres; they can fall to but few. I speak of the prospects which it opens to all; the power of exerting the largest influence for the highest purposes; the possession of fame without its emptiness, and the indulgence of knowledge without its vanity; energy turned to the most practical and lofty uses of man; and the full feast of an ambition superior to the tinsel of the world, and alike pure in its motives, and immeasurable in its rewards."
"And, yet," said I, naming one or two of our clerical slumberers, "the profession seems not to be a very disturbing one."
"Those men, was the answer, would have been slumberers at the bar, in senates, or in the field. I may be prejudiced in favour of the choice which I made so long since, and which I have never found reason to repent. But I have not the slightest wish to prejudice any one in its favour. There is no profession which more requires a peculiar mind; contentment, with whatever consciousness of being overlooked; patience, with whatever hopelessness of success; labour, for its own sake; and learning, with few to share, few to admire, and fewer still to understand."
"If my father had lived," said I, "it was his intention to have tried my chance in diplomacy."
"If my father had lived," said I, "it was his intention to have tried my chance in diplomacy."
"Probably enough; for he had figured in that line himself. I remember him secretary of embassy at Vienna. Perhaps you will scarcely believe, that I, too, have had my experience on the subject? Accident once made me an attaché to our envoy at Naples. The life is an easy one. Idleness was never more perfectly reduced to a system, than among the half dozen functionaries to whom the interests of the British empire were entrusted in the capital of the Lazzaroni. As the Frenchman said of the Academy, 'We had nothing to do, and we did it.'"
"Italy," said I, "is the land of pleasure, and the Lazzaroni are its philosophers, but one cannot sleep like them in the face of day, and all day long. Let what will come, I have no desire to be a weed on the shore."
"No; we had our occupations; for we had the attendance on the court daysa business of as much formality, as if the fate of mankind depended on it. Then we had the attendance on the opera at night, a matter nearly as tiresome. The post from England reached Naples but once a-week, and scarcely once a month conveyed any intelligence that was worth the postage. But, if politics were out of the question, we had negotiation in abundance; for we carried on the whole diplomacy of the opera-house in London, engaged primo tenores, and settled the rival claims of prima donnas; gave our critical opinions on the merits of dancers worthy of appearing before the British cognoscenti; and dispatched poets, ballet-masters, and scene-painters, to our managers, with an activity worthy of the purest patriotism. What think you of the bar?"
"I have no head for its study; and no heart for its employment."
"It leads more rapidly to rank than any other profession under the sun; profit beyond counting, and a peerage. Those are no bad things."
"Both capital, if one could be secure of them. But they take too much time for me. I never was born to sit on the woolsack. No; if I were to follow my own inclination, I should be a soldier."
I have already said that I have been, throughout life, a kind of believer in omens. I have seen such a multitude of things decided by some curious coincidence, some passing occurrence, some of those odd trifles for which it is impossible to account, but which occur at the instant when the mind is wavering on the balance; that I feel no wonder at the old superstitions of guessing our destiny from the shooting of a star, or the flight of birds. While we were rambling onward, discussing the merits and demerits of the profession of arms, we heard the winding of the mail-guard's horn. I sprang the fence, and waited in the road to enquire the last news from the metropolis. It was momentousthe Revolution had effectually broken out. Paris was in an uproar. The king's guards had taken up arms for the people. The Bastile was stormed!
If I had hesitated before, this news decided me; not that I pretend to have even dreamed of the tremendous changes which were to be produced in the world by that convulsion. But it struck me as the beginning of a time, when the lazy quietude of years was about to be broken up, and room made for all who were inclined to exert themselves. Before we had reached the level lawns and trim parterres which showed us the lights of the family festivity, I had settled all the difficulties which might impede the career of less fortunate individuals; time and chance were managed with the adroitness of a projector; and if Bellona had been one of the Nine Muses, my speculations could not have been more poetical. Somewhat to my surprise, they received no check from my venerable tutor; quite the contrary. The singular sympathy with which he listened to my most daring and dashing conceptions, would have betrayed his early history if I had still the knowledge to acquire. His very looks, as he listened to my rodomontades, recurred to me, when I read, many years after, Scott's fine description of his soldier-monk in the Lay of the Last Minstrel:
"Again on the knight look'd the churchman old,
And again he sigh'd heavily,
For he had himself been a warrior bold,
And fought in Spain and Italy.
And he thought on the days that were long gone by,
When his limbs were strong, and his courage was high."
The news from France produced a sensation throughout England totally indescribable at the present day. Every tongue and every heart was full of it. It offered something for every mind of the million to seize on. Like a waterspout, such as I have seen sweeping over the bosom of the Atlantic, half-descending from the skies, and half-ascending from the deep; every second man whom one met gave it credit for a different origin, some looking at the upper portion and some at the lower; while, in the mean time, the huge phenomenon was blackening, gathering, and rushing onward, threatening to turn all above into darkness and all below into storm. It made the grand subject of parliamentary eloquence, and parliament was never more eloquent; it filled the speeches of the factious, it was hailed by the shouts of the multitude, and it disturbed the fireside with fear and hope, with wishing and wonder. It must be acknowledged that a vast quantity of this excitement was absolute folly; but, at the same time, there was a sincerity in the folly which redeemed it from ridicule. Nothing could be more evident than that this French patriotism was as theatrical, in the countless majority of instances, as the loves and sorrows of its stage. Yet, however the speeches might be got by heart, or the frippery and actors hired, the drame was powerfully performed; and all Europe sat by, giving it the tribute of its tears and its terrors. Even we of England, with all our more sober recollections that the heroes were ragamuffins, and the heroism imaginary, gave ourselves up to the illusion. I shall not say that I was wiser than the rest of mankind. I liked excitement, wherever it was to be found. The barriers to distinction were still too firmly closed against the youngest son of an embarrassed family, not to suggest many a wish for whatever chance might burst the gate, or blow up the rampart; and my first effort in political life was a harangue to the rabble of the next borough, conceived in the most Gallic style. Yet this act of absurdity had the effect of forwarding my views more rapidly than if I had become an aristocratic Demosthenes. My speech was so much applauded by the mob, that they began to put its theories in practice, though with rather more vigour than I had dreamed of. There were riots, and even some attempts at the seizure of arms; and the noble duke, our neighbour, had received a threatening letter, which sent him at full gallop to the Home Secretary. A note, by no means too gentle in its tone, was instantly despatched to my noble brother, enquiring why he did not contrive to keep the minor branches of his family in better order, and threatening him with the withdrawal of the county patronage. My demand of a commission in the Guards was no longer answered by the head of our house with astonishment at the loftiness of my expectations, and statements of the utter emptiness of the family exchequer. The result of his brief correspondence with Downing Street was a letter, notifying that his majesty was pleased to accept my services in the Coldstream.
I was enraptured, and my brother was enraptured, for we had both gained our objects. I had got rid of him and ennui. He had got rid of me, and the displeasure of the grand dispensers of place and pension. No time was lost in forwarding me to make my bow at the Horse Guards; and my noble brother lost as little time in making me put my hand to a paper, in which, for prompt payment, I relinquished one half of my legacy. But what cared I for money? I had obtained a profession in which money was contemptible, the only purse the military chest, and the only prize, like Nelson's, a peerage or Westminster Abbey. The ferment did not cool within the week, and within that period I had taken leave of half the county, been wished laurels and aiguillettes by a hundred or a thousand of the fairest of our country belles; and been wished a thousand miles off by the wise matrons, to whom the sight of a "younger son without house or land" is a nuisance, a kite among their family pigeons.