"And yet my Fanny says she doth not regret Madam's unkindness, as without it I possibly never should have been what I am to her. Oh, dear brother! when I remember how great your goodness hath been, how, in my own want, you paid my debts, and rescued me out of prison; how you have been living in poverty which never need have occurred but for my fault; how you might have paid yourself back my just debt to you and would not, preferring my advantage to your own comfort, indeed I am lost at the thought of such goodness; and ought I not to be thankful to Heaven that hath given me such a wife and such a brother?

"When I writ to you requesting you to send me my aunt's legacy money, for which indeed I had the most profitable and urgent occasion, I had no idea that you were yourself suffering poverty. That you, the head of our family, should condescend to be governor to a brewer's son!—that you should have to write for booksellers (except in so far as your own genius might prompt you), never once entered my mind, until Mr. Foker's letter came to us, and this would never have been shown—for Madam kept it secret—had it not been for the difference which sprang up between us.

"Poor Tom Diggle's estate and negroes being for sale, owing to Tom's losses and extravagance at play, and his father's debts before him—Madam Esmond saw here was a great opportunity of making a provision for me, and that with six thousand pounds for the farm and stock, I should be put in possession of as pretty a property as falls to most younger sons in this country. It lies handy enough to Richmond, between Kent and Hanover Court House—the mansion nothing for elegance compared to ours at Castlewood, but the land excellent and the people extraordinary healthy.

"Here was a second opportunity, Madam Esmond said, such as never might again befall. By the sale of my commissions and her own savings I might pay more than half of the price of the property, and get the rest of the money on mortgage; though here, where money is scarce to procure, it would have been difficult and dear. At this juncture, with our new relative, Mr. Van den Bosch, bidding against us (his agent is wild that we should have bought the property over him), my aunt's legacy most opportunely fell in. And now I am owner of a good house and negroes in my native country, shall be called, no doubt, to our House of Burgesses, and hope to see my dearest brother and family under my own roof-tree. To sit at my own fireside, to ride my own horses to my own hounds, is better than going a-soldiering, now war is over, and there are no French. to fight. Indeed, Madam Esmond made a condition that I should leave the army, and live at home, when she brought me her 1750 pounds of savings. She had lost one son, she said, who chose to write play-books, and live in England—let the other stay with her at home.

"But, after the purchase of the estate was made, and my papers for selling out were sent home, my mother would have had me marry a person of her choosing, but by no means of mine. You remember Miss Betsy Pitts at Williamsburgh? She is in no wise improved by having had her face dreadfully scarred with small-pock, and though Madam Esmond saith the young lady hath every virtue, I own her virtues did not suit me. Her eyes do not look straight; she hath one leg shorter than another; and oh, brother! didst thou never remark Fanny's ankles when we were boys? Neater I never saw at the Opera.

"Now, when 'twas agreed that I should leave the army, a certain dear girl (canst thou guess her name?) one day, when we were private, burst into tears of such happiness, that I could not but feel immensely touched by her sympathy.

"'Ah!' says she, 'do you think, sir, that the idea of the son of my revered benefactress going to battle doth not inspire me with terror? Ah, Mr. Henry! do you imagine I have no heart? When Mr. George was with Braddock, do you fancy we did not pray for him? And when you were with Mr. Wolfe—oh!'

"Here the dear creature hid her eyes in her handkerchief, and had hard work to prevent her mama, who came in, from seeing that she was crying. But my dear Mountain declares that, though she might have fancied, might have prayed in secret for such a thing (she owns to that now), she never imagined it for one moment. Nor, indeed, did my good mother, who supposed that Sam Lintot, the apothecary's lad at Richmond, was Fanny's flame—an absurd fellow that I near kicked into James River.

"But when the commission was sold, and the estate bought, what does Fanny do but fall into a deep melancholy? I found her crying one day, in her mother's room, where the two ladies had been at work trimming hats for my negroes.

"'What! crying, miss?' says I. 'Has my mother been scolding you?'

"'No,' says the dear creature. 'Madam Esmond has been kind to-day.'

"And her tears drop down on a cockade which she is sewing on to a hat for Sady, who is to be head-groom.

"'Then, why, miss, are those dear eyes so red?' say I.

"'Because I have the toothache,' she says, 'or because—because I am a fool.' Here she fairly bursts out. 'Oh, Mr. Harry! oh, Mr. Warrington! You are going to leave us, and 'tis as well. You will take your place in your country, as becomes you. You will leave us poor women in our solitude and dependence. You will come to visit us from time to time. And when you are happy and honoured, and among your gay companions, you will remember your——'

"Here she could say no more, and hid her face with one hand as I, I confess, seized the other.

"'Dearest, sweetest Miss Mountain!' says I. 'Oh, could I think that the parting from me has brought tears to those lovely eyes! Indeed, I fear, I should be almost happy! Let them look upon your——'

"'Oh, sir!' cries my charmer. 'Oh, Mr. Warrington! consider who I am, sir, and who you are! Remember the difference between us! Release my hand, sir! What would Madam Esmond say if—if——'

"If what, I don't know, for here our mother was in the room.

"'What would Madam Esmond say?' she cries out. 'She would say that you are an ungrateful, artful, false, little——'

"'Madam!' says I.

"'Yes, an ungrateful, artful, false, little wretch!' cries out my mother. 'For shame, miss! What would Mr. Lintot say if he saw you making eyes at the Captain? And for you, Harry, I will have you bring none of your garrison manners hither. This is a Christian family, sir, and you will please to know that my house is not intended for captains and their misses!'

"'Misses, mother!' says I. 'Gracious powers, do you ever venture for to call Miss Mountain by such a name? Miss Mountain, the purest of her sex!'

"'The purest of her sex! Can I trust my own ears?' asks Madam, turning very pale.

"'I mean that if a man would question her honour, I would fling him out of window,' says I.

"'You mean that you—your mother's son—are actually paying honourable attention to this young person?'

"'He would never dare to offer any other,' cries my Fanny; 'nor any woman but you, madam, to think so!'

"'Oh, I didn't know, miss!' says mother, dropping her a fine curtsey, 'I didn't know the honour you were doing our family! You propose to marry with us, do you? Do I understand Captain Warrington aright, that he intends to offer me Miss Mountain as a daughter-in-law?'

"''Tis to be seen, madam, that I have no protector, or you would not insult me so!' cries my poor victim.

"'I should think the apothecary protection sufficient!' says our mother.

"'I don't, mother!' I bawl out, for I was very angry; 'and if Lintot offers her any liberty, I'll brain him with his own pestle!'

"'Oh! if Lintot has withdrawn, sir, I suppose I must be silent. But I did not know of the circumstance. He came hither, as I supposed, to pay court to Miss: and we all thought the match equal, and I encouraged it.'

"'He came because I had the toothache!' cries my darling (and indeed she had a dreadful bad tooth. And he took it out for her, and there is no end to the suspicions and calumnies of women).

"'What more natural than that he should marry my housekeeper's daughter—'twas a very suitable match!' continues Madam, taking snuff. 'But I confess,' she adds, going on, 'I was not aware that you intended to jilt the apothecary for my son!'

"'Peace, for Heaven's sake, peace, Mr. Warrington!' cries my angel.

"'Pray, sir, before you fully make up your mind, had you not better look round the rest of my family?' says Madam. 'Dinah is a fine tall girl, and not very black; Cleopatra is promised to Ajax the blacksmith, to be sure; but then we could break the marriage, you know. If with an apothecary, why not with a blacksmith? Martha's husband has run away, and——'

"Here, dear brother, I own I broke out a-swearing. I can't help it; but at times, when a man is angry, it do relieve him immensely. I'm blest, but I should have gone wild, if it hadn't been for them oaths.

"'Curses, blasphemy, ingratitude, disobedience,' says mother, leaning now on her tortoiseshell stick, and then waving it—something like a queen in a play. 'These are my rewards!' says she. 'O Heaven, what have I done, that I should merit this awful punishment? and does it please you to visit the sins of my fathers upon me? Where do my children inherit their pride? When I was young, had I any? When my papa bade me marry, did I refuse? Did I ever think of disobeying? No, sir. My fault hath been, and I own it, that my love was centred upon you, perhaps to the neglect of your elder brother.' (Indeed, brother, there was some truth in what Madam said.) 'I turned from Esau, and I clung to Jacob. And now I have my reward, I have my reward! I fixed my vain thoughts on this world, and its distinctions. To see my son advanced in worldly rank was my ambition. I toiled, and spared, that I might bring him worldly wealth. I took unjustly from my eldest son's portion, that my younger might profit. And oh! that I should see him seducing the daughter of my own housekeeper under my own roof, and replying to my just anger with oaths and blasphemies!'

"'I try to seduce no one, madam,' I cried out. 'If I utter oaths and blasphemies, I beg your pardon; but you are enough to provoke a saint to speak 'em. I won't have this young lady's character assailed—no, not by own mother nor any mortal alive. No, dear Miss Mountain! If Madam Esmond chooses to say that my designs on you are dishonourable,—let this undeceive her!' And, as I spoke, I went down on my knees, seizing my adorable Fanny's hand. 'And if you will accept this heart and hand, miss,' says I, 'they are yours for ever.'

"'You, at least, I knew, sir,' says Fanny, with a noble curtsey, 'never said a word that was disrespectful to me, or entertained any doubt of my honour. And I trust it is only Madam Esmond, in the world, who can have such an opinion of me. After what your ladyship hath said of me, of course I can stay no longer in your house.'

"'Of course, madam, I never intended you should; and the sooner you leave it the better,' cries our mother.

"'If you are driven from my mother's house, mine, miss, is at your service,' says I, making her a low bow. 'It is nearly ready now. If you will take it and stay in it for ever, it is yours! And as Madam Esmond insulted your honour, at least let me do all in my power to make a reparation!' I don't know what more I exactly said, for you may fancy I was not a little flustered and excited by the scene. But here Mountain came in, and my dearest Fanny, flinging herself into her mother's arms, wept upon her shoulder; whilst Madam Esmond, sitting down in her chair, looked at us as pale as a stone. Whilst I was telling my story to Mountain (who, poor thing, had not the least idea, not she, that Miss Fanny and I had the slightest inclination for one another), I could hear our mother once or twice still saying, 'I am punished for my crime!'

"Now, what our mother meant by her crime I did not know at first, or indeed take much heed of what she said; for you know her way, and how, when she is angry, she always talks sermons. But Mountain told me afterwards, when we had some talk together, as we did at the tavern, whither the ladies presently removed with their bag and baggage—for not only would they not stay at Madam's house after the language she used, but my mother determined to go away likewise. She called her servants together, and announced her intention of going home instantly to Castlewood; and I own to you 'twas with a horrible pain I saw the family coach roll by, with six horses, and ever so many of the servants on mules and on horseback, as I and Fanny looked through the blinds of the Tavern.

"After the words Madam used to my spotless Fanny, 'twas impossible that the poor child or her mother should remain in our house: and indeed M. said that she would go back to her relations in England: and a ship bound homewards lying in James River, she went and bargained with the captain about a passage, so bent was she upon quitting the country, and so little did she think of making a match between me and my angel. But the cabin was mercifully engaged by a North Carolina gentleman and his family, and before the next ship sailed (which bears this letter to my dearest George) they have agreed to stop with me. Almost all the ladies in this neighbourhood have waited on them. When the marriage takes place, I hope Madam Esmond will be reconciled. My Fanny's father was a British officer; and sure, ours was no more. Some day, please Heaven, we shall visit Europe, and the places where my wild oats were sown, and where I committed so many extravagances from which my dear brother rescued me.

"The ladies send you their affection and duty, and to my sister. We hear his Excellency General Lambert is much beloved in Jamaica: and I shall write to our dear friends there announcing my happiness. My dearest brother will participate in it, and I am ever his grateful and affectionate H. E. W.

"P.S.—Till Mountain told me, I had no more notion than the ded that Madam E. had actially stopt your allowances; besides making you pay for ever so much—near upon 1000 pounds Mountain says—for goods, etc., provided for the Virginian proparty. Then there was all the charges of me out of prison, which I. O. U. with all my hart. Draw upon me, please, dearest brother—to any amount—adressing me to care of Messrs. Horn and Sandon, Williamsburg, privit; who remitt by present occasion a bill for 225 pounds, payable by their London agents on demand. Please don't acknolledge this in answering; as there's no good in bothering women with accounts—and with the extra 5 pounds by a capp or what she likes for my dear sister, and a toy for my nephew from Uncle Hal."

The conclusion to which we came on the perusal of this document was, that the ladies had superintended the style and spelling of my poor Hal's letter, but that the postscript was added without their knowledge. And I am afraid we argued that the Virginian Squire was under female domination—as Hercules, Samson, and fortes multi had been before him.



CHAPTER LXXXV. Inveni Portum

When my mother heard of my acceptance of a place at home, I think she was scarcely well pleased. She may have withdrawn her supplies, in order to starve me into a surrender, and force me to return with my family to Virginia, and to dependence under her. We never, up to her dying day, had any explanation on the pecuniary dispute between us. She cut off my allowances: I uttered not a word; but managed to live without her aid. I never heard that she repented of her injustice, or acknowledged it, except from Harry's private communication to me. In after days, when we met, by a great gentleness in her behaviour, and an uncommon respect and affection shown to my wife, Madam Esmond may have intended I should understand her tacit admission that she had been wrong; but she made no apology, nor did I ask one. Harry being provided for (whose welfare I could not grudge), all my mother's savings and economical schemes went to my advantage, who was her heir. Time was when a few guineas would have been more useful to me than hundreds which might come to me when I had no need; but when Madam Esmond and I met, the period of necessity was long passed away; I had no need to scheme ignoble savings, or to grudge the doctor his fee: I had plenty, and she could but bring me more. No doubt she suffered in her own mind to think that my children had been hungry, and she had offered them no food; and that strangers had relieved the necessity from which her proud heart had caused her to turn aside. Proud? Was she prouder than I? A soft word of explanation between us might have brought about a reconciliation years before it came but I would never speak, nor did she. When I commit a wrong, and know it subsequently, I love to ask pardon; but 'tis as a satisfaction to my own pride, and to myself I am apologising for having been wanting to myself. And hence, I think (out of regard to that personage of ego), I scarce ever could degrade myself to do a meanness. How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow wear a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience? If I choose to pass over an injury, I fear 'tis not from a Christian and forgiving spirit: 'tis because I can afford to remit the debt, and disdain to ask a settlement of it. One or two sweet souls I have known in my life (and perhaps tried) to whom forgiveness is no trouble—a plant that grows naturally, as it were, in the soil. I know how to remit, I say, not forgive. I wonder are we proud men proud of being proud?

So I showed not the least sign of submission towards my parent in Virginia yonder, and we continued for years to live in estrangement, with occasionally a brief word or two (such as the announcement of the birth of a child, or what not) passing between my wife and her. After our first troubles in America about the Stamp Act, troubles fell on me in London likewise. Though I have been on the Tory side in our quarrel (as indeed upon the losing side in most controversies), having no doubt that the Imperial Government had a full right to levy taxes in the colonies, yet at the time of the dispute I must publish a pert letter to a member of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, in which the question of the habitual insolence of the mother country to the colonies was so freely handled, and sentiments were uttered so disagreeable to persons in power, that I was deprived of my place as hackney-coach licenser, to the terror and horror of my uncle, who never could be brought to love people in disgrace. He had grown to have an extreme affection for my wife as well as my little boy; but towards myself, personally, entertained a kind of pitying contempt which always infinitely amused me. He had a natural scorn and dislike for poverty, and a corresponding love for success and good fortune. Any opinion departing at all from the regular track shocked and frightened him, and all truth-telling made him turn pale. He must have had originally some warmth of heart and genuine love of kindred: for, spite of the dreadful shocks I gave him, he continued to see Theo and the child (and me too, giving me a mournful recognition when we met); and though broken-hearted by my free-spokenness, he did not refuse to speak to me as he had done at the time of our first differences, but looked upon me as a melancholy lost creature, who was past all worldly help or hope. Never mind, I must cast about for some new scheme of life; and the repayment of Harry's debt to me at this juncture enabled me to live at least for some months even, or years to come. O strange fatuity of youth! I often say. How was it that we dared to be so poor and so little cast down?

At this time his Majesty's royal uncle of Cumberland fell down and perished in a fit; and, strange to say, his death occasioned a remarkable change in my fortune. My poor Sir Miles Warrington never missed any court ceremony to which he could introduce himself. He was at all the drawing-rooms, christenings, balls, funerals of the court. If ever a prince or princess was ailing, his coach was at their door: Leicester Fields, Carlton House, Gunnersbury, were all the same to him, and nothing must satisfy him now but going to the stout duke's funeral. He caught a great cold and an inflammation of the throat from standing bareheaded at this funeral in the rain; and one morning, before almost I had heard of his illness, a lawyer waits upon me at my lodgings in Bloomsbury, and salutes me by the name of Sir George Warrington.

Party and fear of the future were over now. We laid the poor gentleman by the side of his little son, in the family churchyard where so many of his race repose. Little Miles and I were the chief mourners. An obsequious tenantry bowed and curtseyed before us, and did their utmost to conciliate my honour and my worship. The dowager and her daughter withdrew to Bath presently; and I and my family took possession of the house, of which I have been master for thirty years. Be not too eager, O my son! Have but a little patience, and I too shall sleep under yonder yew-trees, and the people will be tossing up their caps for Sir Miles.

The records of a prosperous country life are easily and briefly told. The steward's books show what rents were paid and forgiven, what crops were raised, and in what rotation. What visitors came to us, and how long they stayed: what pensioners my wife had, and how they were doctored and relieved, and how they died: what year I was sheriff, and how often the hounds met near us; all these are narrated in our house journals, which any of my heirs may read who choose to take the trouble. We could not afford the fine mansion in Hill Street, which my predecessor had occupied; but we took a smaller house, in which, however, we spent more money. We made not half the show (with liveries, equipages, and plate) for which my uncle had been famous; but our beer was stronger, and my wife's charities were perhaps more costly than those of the Dowager Lady Warrington. No doubt she thought there was no harm in spoiling the Philistines; for she made us pay unconscionably for the goods she left behind her in our country-house, and I submitted to most of her extortions with unutterable good-humour. What a value she imagined the potted plants in her greenhouses bore! What a price she set upon that horrible old spinet she left in her drawing-room! and the framed pieces of worsted-work, performed by the accomplished Dora and the lovely Flora, had they been masterpieces of Titian or Vandyck, to be sure my lady dowager could hardly have valued them at a higher price. But though we paid so generously, though we were, I may say without boast, far kinder to our poor than ever she had been, for a while we had the very worst reputation in the county, where all sorts of stories had been told to my discredit. I thought I might perhaps succeed to my uncle's seat in Parliament, as well as to his landed property; but I found, I knew not how, that I was voted to be a person of very dangerous opinions. I would not bribe: I would not coerce my own tenants to vote for me in the election of '68. A gentleman came down from Whitehall with a pocket-book full of bank-notes; and I found that I had no chance against my competitor.

Bon Dieu! Now that we were at ease in respect of worldly means,—now that obedient tenants bowed and curtseyed as we went to church; that we drove to visit our friends, or to the neighbouring towns, in the great family coach with the four fat horses; did we not often regret poverty, and the dear little cottage at Lambeth, where Want was ever prowling at the door? Did I not long to be bear-leading again, and vow that translating for booksellers was not such very hard drudgery? When we went to London, we made sentimental pilgrimages to all our old haunts. I dare say my wife embraced all her landladies. You may be sure we asked all the friends of those old times to share the comforts of our new home with us. The Reverend Mr. Hagan and his lady visited us more than once. His appearance in the pulpit at B———(where he preached very finely, as we thought) caused an awful scandal there. Sampson came too, another unlucky Levite, and was welcome as long as he would stay among us. Mr. Johnson talked of coming, but he put us off once or twice. I suppose our house was dull. I know that I myself would be silent for days, and fear that my moodiness must often have tried the sweetest-tempered woman in the world who lived with me. I did not care for field sports. The killing one partridge was so like killing another, that I wondered how men could pass days after days in the pursuit of that kind of slaughter. Their fox-hunting stories would begin at four o'clock, when the tablecloth was removed, and last till supper-time. I sate silent, and listened: day after day I fell asleep: no wonder I was not popular with my company.

What admission is this I am making? Here was the storm over, the rocks avoided, the ship in port and the sailor not overcontented? Was Susan I had been sighing for during the voyage, not the beauty I expected to find her? In the first place, Susan and all the family can look in her William's logbook, and so, madam, I am not going to put my secrets down there. No, Susan, I never had secrets from thee. I never cared for another woman. I have seen more beautiful, but none that suited me as well as your ladyship. I have met Mrs. Carter and Miss Mulso, and Mrs. Thrale and Madam Kaufmann, and the angelical Gunnings, and her Grace of Devonshire, and a host of beauties who were not angelic, by any means: and I was not dazzled by them. Nay, young folks, I may have led your mother a weary life, and been a very Bluebeard over her, but then I had no other heads in the closet. Only, the first pleasure of taking possession of our kingdom over, I own I began to be quickly tired of the crown. When the captain wears it his Majesty will be a very different Prince. He can ride a-hunting five days in the week, and find the sport amusing. I believe he would hear the same sermon at church fifty times, and not yawn more than I do at the first delivery. But sweet Joan, beloved Baucis! being thy faithful husband and true lover always, thy Darby is rather ashamed of having been testy so often! and, being arrived at the consummation of happiness, Philemon asks pardon for falling asleep so frequently after dinner. There came a period of my life, when having reached the summit of felicity I was quite tired of the prospect I had there: I yawned in Eden, and said, "Is this all? What, no lions to bite? no rain to fall? no thorns to prick you in the rose-bush when you sit down?—only Eve, for ever sweet and tender, and figs for breakfast, dinner, supper, from week's end to week's end!" Shall I make my confessions? Hearken! Well, then, if I must make a clean breast of it.

* * * * * *

Here three pages are torn out of Sir George Warrington's MS. book, for which the editor is sincerely sorry.

I know the theory and practice of the Roman Church; but, being bred of another persuasion (and sceptical and heterodox regarding that), I can't help doubting the other, too, and wondering whether Catholics, in their confessions, confess all? Do we Protestants ever do so; and has education rendered those other fellow-men so different from us? At least, amongst us, we are not accustomed to suppose Catholic priests or laymen more frank and open than ourselves. Which brings me back to my question,—does any man confess all? Does yonder dear creature know all my life, who has been the partner of it for thirty years; who, whenever I have told her a sorrow, has been ready with the best of her gentle power to soothe it; who has watched when I did not speak, and when I was silent has been silent herself, or with the charming hypocrisy of woman has worn smiles and an easy appearance so as to make me imagine she felt no care, or would not even ask to disturb her lord's secret when he seemed to indicate a desire to keep it private? Oh, the dear hypocrite! Have I not watched her hiding the boys' peccadilloes from papa's anger? Have I not known her cheat out of her housekeeping to pay off their little extravagances; and talk to me with an artless face, as if she did not know that our revered captain had had dealings with the gentlemen of Duke's Place, and our learned collegian, at the end of his terms, had very pressing reasons for sporting his oak (as the phrase is) against some of the University tradesmen? Why, from the very earliest days, thou wise woman, thou wert for ever concealing something from me,—this one stealing jam from the cupboard; that one getting into disgrace at school; that naughty rebel (put on the caps, young folks, according to the fit) flinging an inkstand at mamma in a rage, whilst I was told the gown and the carpet were spoiled by accident. We all hide from one another. We have all secrets. We are all alone. We sin by ourselves, and, let us trust, repent too. Yonder dear woman would give her foot to spare mine a twinge of the gout; but, when I have the fit, the pain is in my slipper. At the end of the novel or the play, the hero and heroine marry or die, and so there is an end of them as far as the poet is concerned, who huzzas for his young couple till the postchaise turns the corner; or fetches the hearse and plumes, and shovels them underground. But when Mr. Random and Mr. Thomas Jones are married, is all over? Are there no quarrels at home? Are there no Lady Bellastons abroad? are there no constables to be outrun? no temptations to conquer us, or be conquered by us? The Sirens sang after Ulysses long after his marriage, and the suitors whispered in Penelope's ear, and he and she had many a weary day of doubt and care, and so have we all. As regards money I was put out of trouble by the inheritance I made: but does not Atra Cura sit behind baronets as well as equites? My friends in London used to congratulate me on my happiness. Who would not like to be master of a good house and a good estate? But can Gumbo shut the hall-door upon blue devils, or lay them always in a red sea of claret? Does a man sleep the better who has four-and-twenty hours to doze in? Do his intellects brighten after a sermon from the dull old vicar; a ten minutes' cackle and flattery from the village apothecary; or the conversation of Sir John and Sir Thomas with their ladies, who come ten moonlight muddy miles to eat a haunch, and play a rubber? 'Tis all very well to have tradesmen bowing to your carriage-door, room made for you at quarter-sessions, and my lady wife taken down the second or the third to dinner: but these pleasures fade—nay, have their inconveniences. In our part of the country, for seven years after we came to Warrington Manor, our two what they called best neighbours were my Lord Tutbury and Sir John Mudbrook. We are of an older date than the Mudbrooks; consequently, my Lady Tutbury always fell to my lot, when we dined together, who was deaf and fell asleep after dinner; or if I had Lady Mudbrook, she chattered with a folly so incessant and intense, that even my wife could hardly keep her complacency (consummate hypocrite as her ladyship is), knowing the rage with which I was fuming at the other's clatter. I come to London. I show my tongue to Dr. Heberden. I pour out my catalogue of complaints. "Psha, my dear Sir George!" says the unfeeling physician. "Headaches, languor, bad sleep, bad temper—" ("Not bad temper: Sir George has the sweetest temper in the world, only he is sometimes a little melancholy," says my wife.) "—Bad sleep, bad temper," continues the implacable doctor. "My dear lady, his inheritance has been his ruin, and a little poverty and a great deal of occupation would do him all the good in life."

No, my brother Harry ought to have been the squire, with remainder to my son Miles, of course. Harry's letters were full of gaiety and good spirits. His estate prospered: his negroes multiplied; his crops were large; he was a member of our House of Burgesses; he adored his wife; could he but have a child his happiness would be complete. Had Hal been master of Warrington Manor-house, in my place, he would have been beloved through the whole country; he would have been steward at all the races, the gayest of all the jolly huntsmen, the bien venu at all the mansions round about, where people scarce cared to perform the ceremony of welcome at sight of my glum face. As for my wife, all the world liked her, and agreed in pitying her. I don't know how the report got abroad, but 'twas generally agreed that I treated her with awful cruelty, and that for jealousy I was a perfect Bluebeard. Ah me! And so it is true that I have had many dark hours; that I pass days in long silence; that the conversation of fools and whipper-snappers makes me rebellious and peevish, and that, when I feel contempt, I sometimes don't know how to conceal it, or I should say did not. I hope as I grow older I grow more charitable. Because I do not love bawling and galloping after a fox, like the captain yonder, I am not his superior; but, in this respect, humbly own that he is mine. He has perceptions which are denied me; enjoyments which I cannot understand. Because I am blind the world is not dark. I try now and listen with respect when Squire Codgers talks of the day's run. I do my best to laugh when Captain Rattleton tells his garrison stories. I step up to the harpsichord with old Miss Humby (our neighbour from Beccles) and try and listen as she warbles her ancient ditties. I play whist laboriously. Am I not trying to do the duties of life? and I have a right to be garrulous and egotistical, because I have been reading Montaigne all the morning.

I was not surprised, knowing by what influences my brother was led, to find his name in the list of Virginia burgesses who declared that the sole right of imposing taxes on the inhabitants of this colony is now, and ever hath been, legally and constitutionally vested in the House of Burgesses, and called upon the other colonies to pray for the Royal interposition in favour of the violated rights of America. And it was now, after we had been some three years settled in our English home, that a correspondence between us and Madam Esmond began to take place. It was my wife who (upon some pretext such as women always know how to find) re-established the relations between us. Mr. Miles must need have the small-pox, from which he miraculously recovered without losing any portion of his beauty; and on his recovery the mother writes her prettiest little wheedling letter to the grandmother of the fortunate babe. She coaxes her with all sorts of modest phrases and humble offerings of respect and goodwill. She narrates anecdotes of the precocious genius of the lad (what hath subsequently happened, I wonder, to stop the growth of that gallant young officer's brains?), and she must have sent over to his grandmother a lock of the darling boy's hair, for the old lady, in her reply, acknowledged the receipt of some such present. I wonder, as it came from England, they allowed it to pass our custom-house at Williamsburg. In return for these peace-offerings and smuggled tokens of submission, comes a tolerably gracious letter from my Lady of Castlewood. She inveighs against the dangerous spirit pervading the colony: she laments to think that her unhappy son is consorting with people who, she fears, will be no better than rebels and traitors. She does not wonder, considering who his friends and advisers are. How can a wife taken from an almost menial situation be expected to sympathise with persons of rank and dignity who have the honour of the Crown at heart? If evil times were coming for the monarchy (for the folks in America appeared to be disinclined to pay taxes, and required that everything should be done for them without cost), she remembered how to monarchs in misfortune, the Esmonds—her father the Marquis especially—had ever been faithful. She knew not what opinions (though she might judge from my newfangled Lord Chatham) were in fashion in England. She prayed, at least, she might hear that one of her sons was not on the side of rebellion. When we came, in after days, to look over old family papers in Virginia, we found "Letters from my daughter Lady Warrington," neatly tied up with a ribbon. My Lady Theo insisted I should not open them; and the truth, I believe, is, that they were so full of praises of her husband that she thought my vanity would suffer from reading them.

When Madam began to write, she gave us brief notices of Harry and his wife. "The two women," she wrote, "still govern everything with my poor boy at Fannystown (as he chooses to call his house). They must save money there, for I hear but a shabby account of their manner of entertaining. The Mount Vernon gentleman continues to be his great friend, and he votes in the House of Burgesses very much as his guide advises him. Why he should be so sparing of his money I cannot understand: I heard, of five negroes who went with his equipages to my Lord Bottetourt's, only two had shoes to their feet. I had reasons to save, having sons for whom I wished to provide, but he hath no children, wherein he certainly is spared from much grief, though, no doubt, Heaven in its wisdom means our good by the trials which, through our children, it causes us to endure. His mother-in-law," she added in one of her letters, "has been ailing. Ever since his marriage, my poor Henry has been the creature of these two artful women, and they rule him entirely. Nothing, my dear daughter, is more contrary to common sense and to Holy Scripture than this. Are we not told, Wives, be obedient to your husbands? Had Mr. Warrington lived, I should have endeavoured to follow up that sacred precept, holding that nothing so becomes a woman as humility and obedience."

Presently we had a letter sealed with black, and announcing the death of our dear good Mountain, for whom I had a hearty regret and affection, remembering her sincere love for us as children. Harry deplored the event in his honest way, and with tears which actually blotted his paper. And Madam Esmond, alluding to the circumstance, said: "My late housekeeper, Mrs. Mountain, as soon as she found her illness was fatal, sent to me requesting a last interview on her deathbed, intending, doubtless, to pray my forgiveness for her treachery towards me. I sent her word that I could forgive her as a Christian, and heartily hope (though I confess I doubt it) that she had a due sense of her crime towards me. But our meeting, I considered, was of no use, and could only occasion unpleasantness between us. If she repented, though at the eleventh hour, it was not too late, and I sincerely trusted that she was now doing so. And, would you believe her lamentable and hardened condition? she sent me word through Dinah, my woman, whom I dispatched to her with medicines for her soul's and her body's health, that she had nothing to repent of as far as regarded her conduct to me, and she wanted to be left alone! Poor Dinah distributed the medicine to my negroes, and our people took it eagerly—whilst Mrs. Mountain, left to herself, succumbed to the fever. Oh, the perversity of human kind! This poor creature was too proud to take my remedies, and is now beyond the reach of cure and physicians. You tell me your little Miles is subject to fits of cholic. My remedy, and I will beg you to let me know if effectual, is," etc. etc.—and here followed the prescription, which thou didst not take, O my son, my heir, and my pride! because thy fond mother had her mother's favourite powder, on which in his infantine troubles our firstborn was dutifully nurtured. Did words not exactly consonant with truth pass between the ladies in their correspondence? I fear my Lady Theo was not altogether candid: else how to account for a phrase in one of Madam Esmond's letters, who said: "I am glad to hear the powders have done the dear child good. They are, if not on a first, on a second or third application, almost infallible, and have been the blessed means of relieving many persons round me, both infants and adults, white and coloured. I send my grandson an Indian bow and arrows. Shall these old eyes never behold him at Castlewood, I wonder, and is Sir George so busy with his books and his politics that he can't afford a few months to his mother in Virginia? I am much alone now. My son's chamber is just as he left it: the same books are in the presses: his little hanger and fowling-piece over the bed, and my father's picture over the mantelpiece. I never allow anything to be altered in his room or his brother's. I fancy the children playing near me sometimes, and that I can see my dear father's head as he dozes in his chair. Mine is growing almost as white as my father's. Am I never to behold my children ere I go hence? The Lord's will be done."



CHAPTER LXXXVI. At Home

Such an appeal as this of our mother would have softened hearts much less obdurate than ours; and we talked of a speedy visit to Virginia, and of hiring all the Young Rachel's cabin accommodation. But our child must fall ill, for whom the voyage would be dangerous, and from whom the mother of course could not part; and the Young Rachel made her voyage without us that year. Another year there was another difficulty, in my worship's first attack of the gout (which occupied me a good deal, and afterwards certainly cleared my wits and enlivened my spirits); and now came another much sadder cause for delay in the sad news we received from Jamaica. Some two years after our establishment at the Manor, our dear General returned from his government, a little richer in the world's goods than when he went away, but having undergone a loss for which no wealth could console him, and after which, indeed, he did not care to remain in the West Indies. My Theo's poor mother—the most tender and affectionate friend (save one) I have ever had—died abroad of the fever. Her last regret was that she should not be allowed to live to see our children and ourselves in prosperity.

"She sees us, though we do not see her; and she thanks you, George, for having been good to her children," her husband said.

He, we thought, would not be long ere he joined her. His love for her had been the happiness and business of his whole life. To be away from her seemed living no more. It was pitiable to watch the good man as he sate with us. My wife, in her air and in many tones and gestures, constantly recalled her mother to the bereaved widower's heart. What cheer we could give him in his calamity we offered; but, especially, little Hetty was now, under Heaven, his chief support and consolation. She had refused more than one advantageous match in the Island, the General told us; and on her return to England, my Lord Wrotham's heir laid himself at her feet. But she loved best to stay with her father, Hetty said. As long as he was not tired of her she cared for no husband.

"Nay," said we, when this last great match was proposed, "let the General stay six months with us at the Manor here, and you can have him at Oakhurst for the other six."

But Hetty declared her father never could bear Oakhurst again now that her mother was gone; and she would marry no man for his coronet and money—not she! The General, when we talked this matter over, said gravely that the child had no desire for marrying, owing possibly to some disappointment in early life, of which she never spoke; and we, respecting her feelings, were for our parts equally silent. My brother Lambert had by this time a college living near to Winchester, and a wife of course to adorn his parsonage. We professed but a moderate degree of liking for this lady, though we made her welcome when she came to us. Her idea regarding our poor Hetty's determined celibacy was different to that which I had. This Mrs. Jack was a chatterbox of a woman, in the habit of speaking her mind very freely, and of priding herself excessively on her skill in giving pain to her friends.

"My dear Sir George," she was pleased to say, "I have often and often told our dear Theo that I wouldn't have a pretty sister in my house to make tea for Jack when I was upstairs, and always to be at hand when I was wanted in the kitchen or nursery, and always to be dressed neat and in her best when I was very likely making pies or puddings or looking to the children. I have every confidence in Jack, of course. I should like to see him look at another woman, indeed! And so I have in Jemima but they don't come together in my house when I'm upstairs—that I promise you! And so I told my sister Warrington."

"Am I to understand," says the General, "that you have done my Lady Warrington the favour to warn her against her sister, my daughter Miss Hester?"

"Yes, pa, of course I have. A duty is a duty, and a woman is a woman, and a man's a man, as I know very well. Don't tell me! He is a man. Every man is a man, with all his sanctified airs!"

"You yourself have a married sister, with whom you were staying when my son Jack first had the happiness of making your acquaintance?" remarks the General.

"Yes, of course I have a married sister; every one knows that and I have been as good as a mother to her children, that I have!"

"And am I to gather from your conversation that your attractions proved a powerful temptation for your sister's husband?"

"Law, General! I don't know how you can go for to say I ever said any such a thing!" cries Mrs. Jack, red and voluble.

"Don't you perceive, my dear madam, that it is you who have insinuated as much, not only regarding yourself, but regarding my own two daughters?"

"Never, never, never, as I'm a Christian woman! And it's most cruel of you to say so, sir. And I do say a sister is best out of the house, that I do! And as Theo's time is coming, I warn her, that's all."

"Have you discovered, my good madam, whether my poor Hetty has stolen any of the spoons? When I came to breakfast this morning, my daughter was alone, and there must have been a score of pieces of silver on the table."

"Law, sir! who ever said a word about spoons? Did I ever accuse the poor dear? If I did, may I drop down dead at this moment on this hearth-rug! And I ain't used to be spoke to in this way. And me and Jack have both remarked it; and I've done my duty, that I have." And here Mrs. Jack flounces out of the room, in tears.

"And has the woman had the impudence to tell you this, my child?" asks the General, when Theo (who is a little delicate) comes to the tea-table.

"She has told me every day since she has been here. She comes into my dressing-room to tell me. She comes to my nursery, and says, 'Ah, I wouldn't have a sister prowling about my nursery, that I wouldn't.' Ah, how pleasant it is to have amiable and well-bred relatives, say I."

"Thy poor mother has been spared this woman," groans the General.

"Our mother would have made her better, papa," says Theo, kissing him.

"Yes, dear." And I see that both of them are at their prayers.

But this must be owned, that to love one's relatives is not always an easy task; to live with one's neighbours is sometimes not amusing. From Jack Lambert's demeanour next day, I could see that his wife had given him her version of the conversation. Jack was sulky, but not dignified. He was angry, but his anger did not prevent his appetite. He preached a sermon for us which was entirely stupid. And little Miles, once more in sables, sate at his grandfather's side, his little hand placed in that of the kind old man.

Would he stay and keep house for us during our Virginian trip? The housekeeper should be put under the full domination of Hetty. The butler's keys should be handed over to him; for Gumbo, not I thought with an over good grace, was to come with us to Virginia: having, it must be premised, united himself with Mrs. Molly in the bonds of matrimony, and peopled a cottage in my park with sundry tawny Gumbos. Under the care of our good General and his daughter we left our house, then; we travelled to London, and thence to Bristol, and our obsequious agent there had the opportunity of declaring that he should offer up prayers for our prosperity, and of vowing that children so beautiful as ours (we had an infant by this time to accompany Miles) were never seen on any ship before. We made a voyage without accident. How strange the feeling was as we landed from our boat at Richmond! A coach and a host of negroes were there in waiting to receive us; and hard by a gentleman on horseback, with negroes in our livery, too, who sprang from his horse and rushed up to embrace us. Not a little charmed were both of us to see our dearest Hal. He rode with us to our mother's door. Yonder she stood on the steps to welcome us; and Theo knelt down to ask her blessing.

Harry rode in the coach with us as far as our mother's house; but would not, as he said, spoil sport by entering with us. "She sees me," he owned, "and we are pretty good friends; but Fanny and she are best apart; and there is no love lost between 'em, I can promise you. Come over to me at the Tavern, George, when thou art free. And to-morrow I shall have the honour to present her sister to Theo. 'Twas only from happening to be in town yesterday that I heard the ship was signalled, and waited to see you. I have sent a negro boy home to my wife, and she'll be here to pay her respects to my Lady Warrington." And Harry, after this brief greeting, jumped out of the carriage, and left us to meet our mother alone.

Since I parted from her I had seen a great deal of fine company, and Theo and I had paid our respects to the King and Queen at St. James's; but we had seen no more stately person than this who welcomed us, and raising my wife from her knee, embraced her and led her into the house. 'Twas a plain, wood-built place, with a gallery round, as our Virginian houses are; but if it had been a palace, with a little empress inside, our reception could not have been more courteous. There was old Nathan, still the major-domo, a score of kind black faces of blacks, grinning welcome. Some whose names I remembered as children were grown out of remembrance, to be sure, to be buxom lads and lasses; and some I had left with black pates were grizzling now with snowy polls: and some who were born since my time were peering at doorways with their great eyes and little naked feet. It was, "I'm little Sip, Master George!" and "I'm Dinah, Sir George!" and "I'm Master Miles's boy!" says a little chap in a new livery and boots of nature's blacking. Ere the day was over the whole household had found a pretext for passing before us, and grinning and bowing and making us welcome. I don't know how many repasts were served to us. In the evening my Lady Warrington had to receive all the gentry of the little town, which she did with perfect grace and good-humour, and I had to shake hands with a few old acquaintances—old enemies I was going to say; but I had come into a fortune and was no longer a naughty prodigal. Why, a drove of fatted calves was killed in my honour! My poor Hal was of the entertainment, but gloomy and crestfallen. His mother spoke to him, but it was as a queen to a rebellious prince, her son who was not yet forgiven. We two slipped away from the company, and went up to the rooms assigned to me: but there, as we began a free conversation, our mother, taper in hand, appeared with her pale face. Did I want anything? Was everything quite as I wished it? She had peeped in at the dearest children, who were sleeping like cherubs. How she did caress them, and delight over them! How she was charmed with Miles's dominating airs, and the little Theo's smiles and dimples! "Supper is just coming on the table, Sir George. If you like our cookery better than the tavern, Henry, I beg you to stay." What a different welcome there was in the words and tone addressed to each of us! Hal hung down his head, and followed to the lower room. A clergyman begged a blessing on the meal. He touched with not a little art and eloquence upon our arrival at home, upon our safe passage across the stormy waters, upon the love and forgiveness which awaited us in the mansions of the Heavenly Parent when the storms of life were over.

Here was a new clergyman, quite unlike some whom I remembered about us in earlier days, and I praised him, but Madam Esmond shook her head. She was afraid his principles were very dangerous: she was afraid others had adopted those dangerous principles. Had I not seen the paper signed by the burgesses and merchants at Williamsburg the year before—the Lees, Randolphs, Bassets, Washingtons, and the like, and oh, my dear, that I should have to say it, our name, that is, your brother's (by what influence I do not like to say), and this unhappy Mr. Belman's who begged a blessing last night?

If there had been quarrels in our little colonial society when I left home, what were these to the feuds I found raging on my return? We had sent the Stamp Act to America, and been forced to repeal it. Then we must try a new set of duties on glass, paper, and what not, and repeal that Act too, with the exception of a duty on tea. From Boston to Charleston the tea was confiscated. Even my mother, loyal as she was, gave up her favourite drink; and my poor wife would have had to forgo hers, but we had brought a quantity for our private drinking on board ship, which had paid four times as much duty at home. Not that I for my part would have hesitated about paying duty. The home Government must have some means of revenue, or its pretensions to authority were idle. They say the colonies were tried and tyrannised over; I say the home Government was tried and tyrannised over. ('Tis but an affair of argument and history, now; we tried the question, and were beat; and the matter is settled as completely as the conquest of Britain by the Normans.) And all along, from conviction I trust, I own to have taken the British side of the quarrel. In that brief and unfortunate experience of war which I had had in my early life, the universal cry of the army and well-affected persons was, that Mr. Braddock's expedition had failed, and defeat and disaster had fallen upon us in consequence of the remissness, the selfishness, and the rapacity of many of the very people for whose defence against the French arms had been taken up. The colonists were for having all done for them, and for doing nothing, They made extortionate bargains with the champions who came to defend them; they failed in contracts; they furnished niggardly supplies; they multiplied delays until the hour for beneficial action was past, and until the catastrophe came which never need have occurred but for their ill-will. What shouts of joy were there, and what ovations for the great British Minister who had devised and effected the conquest of Canada! Monsieur de Vaudreuil said justly that that conquest was the signal for the defection of the North American colonies from their allegiance to Great Britain; and my Lord Chatham, having done his best to achieve the first part of the scheme, contributed more than any man in England towards the completion of it. The colonies were insurgent, and he applauded their rebellion. What scores of thousands of waverers must he have encouraged into resistance! It was a general who says to an army in revolt, "God save the king! My men, you have a right to mutiny!" No wonder they set up his statue in this town, and his picture in t'other; whilst here and there they hanged Ministers and Governors in effigy. To our Virginian town of Williamsburg, some wiseacres must subscribe to bring over a portrait of my lord, in the habit of a Roman orator speaking in the Forum, to be sure, and pointing to the palace of Whitehall, and the special window out of which Charles I. was beheaded! Here was a neat allegory, and a pretty compliment to a British statesman! I hear, however, that my lord's head was painted from a bust, and so was taken off without his knowledge.

Now my country is England, not America or Virginia; and I take, or rather took, the English side of the dispute. My sympathies had always been with home, where I was now a squire and a citizen: but had my lot been to plant tobacco, and live on the banks of James River or Potomac, no doubt my opinions had been altered. When, for instance, I visited my brother at his new house and plantation, I found him and his wife as staunch Americans as we were British. We had some words upon the matter in dispute,—who had not in those troublesome times?—but our argument was carried on without rancour; even my new sister could not bring us to that, though she did her best when we were together, and in the curtain lectures which I have no doubt she inflicted on her spouse, like a notable housewife as she was. But we trusted in each other so entirely that even Harry's duty towards his wife would not make him quarrel with his brother. He loved me from old times, when my word was law with him; he still protested that he and every Virginian gentleman of his side was loyal to the Crown. War was not declared as yet, and gentlemen of different opinions were courteous enough to one another. Nay, at our public dinners and festivals, the health of the King was still ostentatiously drunk; and the assembly of every colony, though preparing for Congress, though resisting all attempts at taxation on the part of the home authorities, was loud in its expressions of regard for the King our Father, and pathetic in its appeals to that paternal sovereign to put away evil counsellors from him, and listen to the voice of moderation and reason. Up to the last, our Virginian gentry were a grave, orderly, aristocratic folk, with the strongest sense of their own dignity and station. In later days, and nearer home, we have heard of fraternisation and equality. Amongst the great folks of our Old World I have never seen a gentleman standing more on his dignity and maintaining it better than Mr. Washington: no—not the King against whom he took arms. In the eyes of all the gentry of the French court, who gaily joined in the crusade against us, and so took their revenge for Canada, the great American chief always appeared as anax andron, and they allowed that his better could not be seen in Versailles itself. Though they were quarrelling with the Governor, the gentlemen of the House of Burgesses still maintained amicable relations with him, and exchanged dignified courtesies. When my Lord Bottetourt arrived, and held his court at Williamsburg in no small splendour and state, all the gentry waited upon him, Madam Esmond included. And at his death, Lord Dunmore, who succeeded him, and brought a fine family with him, was treated with the utmost respect by our gentry privately, though publicly the House of Assembly and the Governor were at war.

Their quarrels are a matter of history, and concern me personally only so far as this, that our burgesses being convened for the 1st of March in the year after my arrival in Virginia, it was agreed that we should all pay a visit to our capital, and our duty to the Governor. Since Harry's unfortunate marriage Madam Esmond had not performed this duty, though always previously accustomed to pay it; but now that her eldest son was arrived in the colony, my mother opined that we must certainly wait upon his Excellency the Governor, nor were we sorry, perhaps, to get away from our little Richmond to enjoy the gaieties of the provincial capital. Madam engaged, and at a great price, the best house to be had at Richmond for herself and her family. Now I was rich, her generosity was curious. I had more than once to interpose (her old servants likewise wondering at her new way of life), and beg her not to be so lavish. But she gently said, in former days she had occasion to save, which now existed no more. Harry had enough, sure, with such a wife as he had taken out of the housekeeper's room. If she chose to be a little extravagant now, why should she hesitate? She had not her dearest daughter and grandchildren with her every day (she fell in love with all three of them, and spoiled them as much as they were capable of being spoiled). Besides, in former days I could not accuse her of too much extravagance, and this I think was almost the only allusion she made to the pecuniary differences between us. So she had her people dressed in their best, and her best wines, plate, and furniture from Castlewood by sea at no small charge, and her dress in which she had been married in George II.'s reign, and we all flattered ourselves that our coach made the greatest figure of any except his Excellency's, and we engaged Signor Formicalo, his Excellency's major-domo, to superintend the series of feasts that were given in my honour; and more fleshpots were set a-stewing in our kitchens in one month, our servants said, than had been known in the family since the young gentlemen went away. So great was Theo's influence over my mother, that she actually persuaded her, that year, to receive our sister Fanny, Hal's wife, who would have stayed upon the plantation rather than face Madam Esmond. But, trusting to Theo's promise of amnesty, Fanny (to whose house we had paid more than one visit) came up to town, and made her curtsey to Madam Esmond, and was forgiven. And rather than be forgiven in that way, I own, for my part, that I would prefer perdition or utter persecution.

"You know these, my dear?" says Madam Esmond, pointing to her fine silver sconces. "Fanny hath often cleaned them when she was with me at Castlewood. And this dress, too, Fanny knows, I dare say? Her poor mother had the care of it. I always had the greatest confidence in her."

Here there is wrath flashing from Fanny's eyes, which our mother, who has forgiven her, does not perceive—not she!

"Oh, she was a treasure to me!" Madam resumes. "I never should have nursed my boys through their illnesses but for your mother's admirable care of them. Colonel Lee, permit me to present you to my daughter, my Lady Warrington. Her ladyship is a neighbour of your relatives the Bunburys at home. Here comes his Excellency. Welcome, my lord!"

And our princess performs before his lordship one of those curtseys of which she was not a little proud; and I fancy I see some of the company venturing to smile.

"By George! madam," says Mr. Lee, "since Count Borulawski, I have not seen a bow so elegant as your ladyship's."

"And pray, sir, who was Count Borulawski?" asks Madam.

"He was a nobleman high in favour with his Polish Majesty," replies Mr. Lee. "May I ask you, madam, to present me to your distinguished son?"

"This is Sir George Warrington," says my mother, pointing to me.

"Pardon me, madam. I meant Captain Warrington, who was by Mr. Wolfe's side when he died. I had been contented to share his fate, so I had been near him."

And the ardent Lee swaggers up to Harry, and takes his hand with respect, and pays him a compliment or two, which makes me, at least, pardon him for his late impertinence; for my dearest Hal walks gloomily through his mother's rooms in his old uniform of the famous corps which he has quitted.

We had had many meetings, which the stern mother could not interrupt, and in which that instinctive love which bound us to one another, and which nothing could destroy, had opportunity to speak. Entirely unlike each other in our pursuits, our tastes, our opinions—his life being one of eager exercise, active sport, and all the amusements of the field, while mine is to dawdle over books and spend my time in languid self-contemplation—we have, nevertheless, had such a sympathy as almost passes the love of women. My poor Hal confessed as much to me, for his part, in his artless manner, when we went away without wives or womankind, except a few negroes left in the place, and passed a week at Castlewood together.

The ladies did not love each other. I know enough of my Lady Theo, to see after a very few glances whether or not she takes a liking to another of her amiable sex. All my powers of persuasion or command fail to change the stubborn creature's opinion. Had she ever said a word against Mrs. This or Miss That? Not she! Has she been otherwise than civil? No, assuredly! My Lady Theo is polite to a beggar-woman, treats her kitchenmaids like duchesses, and murmurs a compliment to the dentist for his elegant manner of pulling her tooth out. She would black my boots, or clean the grate, if I ordained it (always looking like a duchess the while); but as soon as I say to her, "My dear creature, be fond of this lady, or t'other!" all obedience ceases; she executes the most refined curtseys; smiles and kisses even to order; but performs that mysterious undefinable freemasonic signal, which passes between women, by which each knows that the other hates her. So, with regard to Fanny, we had met at her house, and at others. I remembered her affectionately from old days, I fully credited poor Hal's violent protests and tearful oaths, that, by George, it was our mother's persecution which made him marry her. He couldn't stand by and see a poor thing tortured as she was, without coming to her rescue; no, by heavens, he couldn't! I say I believed all this; and had for my sister-in-law a genuine compassion, as well as an early regard; and yet I had no love to give her; and, in reply to Hal's passionate outbreaks in praise of her beauty and worth, and eager queries to me whether I did not think her a perfect paragon? I could only answer with faint compliments or vague approval, feeling all the while that I was disappointing my poor ardent fellow, and cursing inwardly that revolt against flattery and falsehood into which I sometimes frantically rush. Why should I not say, "Yes dear Hal, thy wife is a paragon; her singing is delightful, her hair and shape are beautiful;" as I might have said by a little common stretch of politeness? Why could I not cajole this or that stupid neighbour or relative, as I have heard Theo do a thousand times, finding all sorts of lively prattle to amuse them, whilst I sit before them dumb and gloomy? I say it was a sin not to have more words to say in praise of Fanny. We ought to have praised her, we ought to have liked her. My Lady Warrington certainly ought to have liked her, for she can play the hypocrite, and I cannot. And there was this young creature—pretty, graceful, shaped like a nymph, with beautiful black eyes—and we cared for them no more than for two gooseberries! At Warrington my wife and I, when we pretended to compare notes, elaborately complimented each other on our new sister's beauty. What lovely eyes!—Oh yes! What a sweet little dimple on her chin!—Ah oui! What wonderful little feet!—Perfectly Chinese! where should we in London get slippers small enough for her? And, these compliments exhausted, we knew that we did not like Fanny the value of one penny-piece; we knew that we disliked her; we knew that we ha... Well, what hypocrites women are! We heard from many quarters how eagerly my brother had taken up the new anti-English opinion, and what a champion he was of so-called American rights and freedom. "It is her doing, my dear," says I to my wife. "If I had said so much, I am sure you would have scolded me," says my Lady Warrington, laughing: and I did straightway begin to scold her, and say it was most cruel of her to suspect our new sister; and what earthly right had we to do so? But I say again, I know Madam Theo so well, that when once she has got a prejudice against a person in her little head, not all the king's horses nor all the king's men will get it out again. I vow nothing would induce her to believe that Harry was not henpecked—nothing.

Well, we went to Castlewood together without the women, and stayed at the dreary, dear old place, where we had been so happy, and I, at least, so gloomy. It was winter, and duck-time, and Harry went away to the river, and shot dozens and scores and bushels of canvasbacks, whilst I remained in my grandfather's library amongst the old mouldering books which I loved in my childhood—which I see in a dim vision still resting on a little boy's lap, as he sits by an old white-headed gentleman's knee. I read my books; I slept in my own bed and room—religiously kept, as my mother told me, and left as on the day when I went to Europe. Hal's cheery voice would wake me, as of old. Like all men who love to go a-field, he was an early riser: he would come and wake me, and sit on the foot of the bed and perfume the air with his morning pipe, as the house negroes laid great logs on the fire. It was a happy time! Old Nathan had told me of cunning crypts where ancestral rum and claret were deposited. We had had cares, struggles, battles, bitter griefs, and disappointments; we were boys again as we sat there together. I am a boy now even as I think of the time.

That unlucky tea-tax, which alone of the taxes lately imposed upon the colonies, the home Government was determined to retain, was met with defiance throughout America. 'Tis true we paid a shilling in the pound at home, and asked only threepence from Boston or Charleston; but as a question of principle, the impost was refused by the provinces, which indeed ever showed a most spirited determination to pay as little as they could help. In Charleston the tea-ships were unloaded, and the cargoes stored in cellars. From New York and Philadelphia, the vessels were turned back to London. In Boston (where there was an armed force, whom the inhabitants were perpetually mobbing), certain patriots, painted and disguised as Indians, boarded the ships, and flung the obnoxious cargoes into the water. The wrath of our white Father was kindled against this city of Mohocks in masquerade. The notable Boston Port Bill was brought forward in the British House of Commons; the port was closed, and the Custom House removed to Salem. The Massachusetts Charter was annulled; and,—in just apprehension that riots might ensue, in dealing with the perpetrators of which the colonial courts might be led to act partially,—Parliament decreed that persons indicted for acts of violence and armed resistance, might be sent home, or to another colony, for trial. If such acts set all America in a flame, they certainly drove all wellwisbers of our country into a fury. I might have sentenced Master Miles Warrington, at five years old, to a whipping, and he would have cried, taken down his little small-clothes and submitted: but suppose I offered (and he richly deserving it) to chastise Captain Miles of the Prince's Dragoons? He would whirl my paternal cane out of my hand, box my hair-powder out of my ears. Lord a-mercy! I tremble at the very idea of the controversy? He would assert his independence in a word; and if, I say, I think the home Parliament had a right to levy taxes in the colonies, I own that we took means most captious, most insolent, most irritating, and, above all, most impotent, to assert our claim.

My Lord Dunmore, our Governor of Virginia, upon Lord Bottetourt's death, received me into some intimacy soon after my arrival in the colony, being willing to live on good terms with all our gentry. My mother's severe loyalty was no secret to him; indeed, she waved the king's banner in all companies, and talked so loudly and resolutely, that Randolph and Patrick Henry himself were struck dumb before her. It was Madam Esmond's celebrated reputation for loyalty (his Excellency laughingly told me) which induced him to receive her eldest son to grace.

"I have had the worst character of you from home," his lordship said. "Little birds whisper to me, Sir George, that you are a man of the most dangerous principles. You are a friend of Mr. Wilkes and Alderman Beckford. I am not sure you have not been at Medmenham Abbey. You have lived with players, poets, and all sorts of wild people. I have been warned against you, sir, and I find you——"

"Not so black as I have been painted," I interrupted his lordship, with a smile.

"Faith," says my lord, "if I tell Sir George Warrington that he seems to me a very harmless, quiet gentleman, and that 'tis a great relief to me to talk to him amidst these loud politicians; these lawyers with their perpetual noise about Greece and Rome; these Virginian squires who are for ever professing their loyalty and respect, whilst they are shaking their fists in my face—I hope nobody overhears us," says my lord, with an arch smile, "and nobody will carry my opinions home."

His lordship's ill opinion having been removed by a better knowledge of me, our acquaintance daily grew more intimate; and, especially between the ladies of his family and my own, a close friendship arose—between them and my wife at least. Hal's wife, received kindly at the little provincial court, as all ladies were, made herself by no means popular there by the hot and eager political tone which she adopted. She assailed all the Government measures with indiscriminating acrimony. Were they lenient? She said the perfidious British Government was only preparing a snare, and biding its time until it could forge heavier chains for unhappy America. Were they angry? Why did not every American citizen rise, assert his rights as a freeman, and serve every British governor, officer, soldier, as they had treated the East India Company's tea? My mother, on the other hand, was pleased to express her opinions with equal frankness, and, indeed, to press her advice upon his Excellency with a volubility which may have fatigued that representative of the Sovereign. Call out the militia; send for fresh troops from New York, from home, from anywhere; lock up the Capitol! (this advice was followed, it must be owned) and send every one of the ringleaders amongst those wicked burgesses to prison! was Madam Esmond's daily counsel to the Governor by word and letter. And if not only the burgesses, but the burgesses' wives could have been led off to punishment and captivity, I think this Brutus of a woman would scarce have appealed against the sentence.



CHAPTER LXXXVII. The Last of God Save the King

What perverse law of Fate is it that ever places me in a minority? Should a law be proposed to hand over this realm to the Pretender of Rome, or the Grand Turk, and submit it to the new sovereign's religion, it might pass, as I should certainly be voting against it. At home in Virginia, I found myself disagreeing with everybody as usual. By the Patriots I was voted (as indeed I professed myself to be) a Tory; by the Tories I was presently declared to be a dangerous Republican. The time was utterly out of joint. O cursed spite! Ere I had been a year in Virginia, how I wished myself back by the banks of the Waveney! But the aspect of affairs was so troublous, that I could not leave my mother, a lone lady, to face possible war and disaster, nor would she quit the country at such a juncture, nor should a man of spirit leave it. At his Excellency's table, and over his Excellency's plentiful claret, that point was agreed on by numbers of the well-affected, that vow was vowed over countless brimming bumpers. No: it was statue signum, signifer! We Cavaliers would all rally round it; and at these times, our Governor talked like the bravest of the brave.

Now, I will say, of all my Virginian acquaintance, Madam Esmond was the most consistent. Our gentlefolks had come in numbers to Williamsburg; and a great number of them proposed to treat her Excellency, the Governor's lady, to a ball, when the news reached us of the Boston Port Bill. Straightway the House of Burgesses adopts an indignant protest against this measure of the British Parliament, and decrees a solemn day of fast and humiliation throughout the country, and of solemn prayer to Heaven to avert the calamity of Civil War. Meanwhile, the invitation to my Lady Dunmore having been already given and accepted, the gentlemen agreed that their ball should take place on the appointed evening, and then sackcloth and ashes should be assumed some days afterwards.

"A ball!" says Madam Esmond. "I go to a ball which is given by a set of rebels who are going publicly to insult his Majesty a week afterwards! I will die sooner!" And she wrote to the gentlemen who were stewards for the occasion to say, that viewing the dangerous state of the country, she, for her part, could not think of attending a ball.

What was her surprise then, the next time she went abroad in her chair, to be cheered by a hundred persons, white and black, and shouts of "Huzzah, Madam!" "Heaven bless your ladyship!" They evidently thought her patriotism had caused her determination not to go to the ball.

Madam, that there should be no mistake, puts her head out of the chair, and cries out "God save the King" as loud as she can. The people cried "God save the King," too. Everybody cried "God save the King" in those days. On the night of that entertainment, my poor Harry, as a Burgess of the House, and one of the givers of the feast, donned his uniform red coat of Wolfe's (which he so soon was to exchange for another colour), and went off with Madam Fanny to the ball. My Lady Warrington and her humble servant, as being strangers in the country, and English people as it were, were permitted by Madam to attend the assembly from which she of course absented herself. I had the honour to dance a country-dance with the lady of Mount Vernon, whom I found a most lively, pretty, and amiable partner; but am bound to say that my wife's praises of her were received with a very grim acceptance by my mother, when Lady Warrington came to recount the events of the evening. Could not Sir George Warrington have danced with my Lady Dunmore or her daughters, or with anybody but Mrs. Washington; to be sure the Colonel thought so well of himself and his wife, that no doubt he considered her the grandest lady in the room; and she who remembered him a road-surveyor at a guinea a day! Well, indeed! there was no measuring the pride of these provincial upstarts, and as for this gentleman, my Lord Dunmore's partiality for him had evidently turned his head. I do not know about Mr. Washington's pride, I know that my good mother never could be got to love him or anything that was his.

She was no better pleased with him for going to the ball, than with his conduct three days afterwards, when the day of fast and humiliation was appointed, and when he attended the service which our new clergyman performed. She invited Mr. Belman to dinner that day, and sundry colonial authorities. The clergyman excused himself. Madam Esmond tossed up her head, and said he might do as he liked. She made a parade of a dinner; she lighted her house up at night, when all the rest of the city was in darkness and gloom; she begged Mr. Hardy, one of his Excellency's aides-de-camp, to sing "God save the King," to which the people in the street outside listened, thinking that it might be a part of some religious service which Madam was celebrating; but then she called for "Britons, strike home!" which the simple young gentleman just from Europe began to perform, when a great yell arose in the street, and a large stone, flung from some rebellious hand, plumped into the punch-bowl before me, and scattered it and its contents about our dining-room.

My mother went to the window nothing daunted. I can see her rigid little figure now, as she stands with a tossed-up head, outstretched frilled arms, and the twinkling stars for a background, and sings in chorus, "Britons, strike home! strike home!" The crowd in front of the palings shout and roar, "Silence! for shame! go back!" but she will not go back, not she. "Fling more stones, if you dare!" says the brave little lady; and more might have come, but some gentlemen issuing out of the Raley Tavern interpose with the crowd. "You mustn't insult a lady," says a voice I think I know. "Huzza, Colonel! Hurrah, Captain! God bless your honour!" say the people in the street. And thus the enemies are pacified.

My mother, protesting that the whole disturbance was over, would have had Mr. Hardy sing another song, but he gave a sickly grin, and said, "he really did not like to sing to such accompaniments," and the concert for that evening was ended; though I am bound to say that some scoundrels returned at night, frightened my poor wife almost out of wits, and broke every single window in the front of our tenement. "Britons, strike home!" was a little too much; Madam should have contented herself with "God save the King." Militia was drilled, bullets were cast, supplies of ammunition got ready, cunning plans for disappointing the royal ordinances devised and carried out; but, to be sure, "God save the King" was the cry everywhere, and in reply to my objections to the gentlemen-patriots, "Why, you are scheming for a separation; you are bringing down upon you the inevitable wrath of the greatest power in the world!"—the answer to me always was, "We mean no separation at all; we yield to no men in loyalty; we glory in the name of Britons," and so forth, and so forth. The powder-barrels were heaped in the cellar, the train was laid, but Mr. Fawkes was persistent in his dutiful petitions to King and Parliament and meant no harm, not he! 'Tis true when I spoke of the power of our country, I imagined she would exert it; that she would not expect to overcome three millions of fellow-Britons on their own soil with a few battalions, a half-dozen generals from Bond Street, and a few thousand bravos hired out of Germany. As if we wanted to insult the thirteen colonies as well as to subdue them, we must set upon them these hordes of Hessians, and the murderers out of the Indian wigwams. Was our great quarrel not to be fought without tali auxilio and istis defensoribus? Ah! 'tis easy, now we are worsted, to look over the map of the great empire wrested from us, and show how we ought not to have lost it. Long Island ought to have exterminated Washington's army; he ought never to have come out of Valley Forge except as a prisoner. The South was ours after the battle of Camden, but for the inconceivable meddling of the Commander-in-Chief at New York, who paralysed the exertions of the only capable British General who appeared during the war, and sent him into that miserable cul-de-sac at York Town, whence he could only issue defeated and a prisoner. Oh, for a week more! a day more, an hour more of darkness or light! In reading over our American campaigns from their unhappy commencement to their inglorious end, now that we are able to see the enemy's movements and conditions as well as our own, I fancy we can see how an advance, a march, might have put enemies into our power who had no means to withstand it, and changed the entire issue of the struggle. But it was ordained by Heaven, and for the good, as we can now have no doubt, of both empires, that the great Western Republic should separate from us: and the gallant soldiers who fought on her side, their indomitable and heroic Chief above all, had the glory of facing and overcoming, not only veteran soldiers amply provided and inured to war, but wretchedness, cold, hunger, dissensions, treason within their own camp, where all must have gone to rack, but for the pure unquenchable flame of patriotism that was for ever burning in the bosom of the heroic leader. What a constancy, what a magnanimity, what a surprising persistence against fortune! Washington before the enemy was no better nor braver than hundreds that fought with him or against him (who has not heard the repeated sneers against "Fabius" in which his factious captains were accustomed to indulge?), but Washington the Chief of a nation in arms, doing battle with distracted parties; calm in the midst of conspiracy; serene against the open foe before him and the darker enemies at his back; Washington inspiring order and spirit into troops hungry and in rags; stung by ingratitude, but betraying no anger, and ever ready to forgive; in defeat invincible, magnanimous in conquest, and never so sublime as on that day when he laid down his victorious sword and sought his noble retirement:—here indeed is a character to admire and revere; a life without a stain, a fame without a flaw. Quando invenies parem? In that more extensive work, which I have planned and partly written on the subject of this great war, I hope I have done justice to the character of its greatest leader. [And I trust that in the opinions I have recorded regarding him, I have shown that I also can be just and magnanimous towards those who view me personally with no favour. For my brother Hal being at Mount Vernon, and always eager to bring me and his beloved Chief on good terms, showed his Excellency some of the early sheets of my History. General Washington (who read but few books, and had not the slightest pretensions to literary taste) remarked, "If you will have my opinion, my dear General, I think Sir George's projected work, from the specimen I have of it, is certain to offend both parties."—G. E. W.]. And this from the sheer force of respect which his eminent virtues extorted. With the young Mr. Washington of my own early days I had not the honour to enjoy much sympathy: though my brother, whose character is much more frank and affectionate than mine, was always his fast friend in early times, when they were equals, as in latter days when the General, as I do own and think, was all mankind's superior.

I have mentioned that contrariety in my disposition, and, perhaps, in my brother's, which somehow placed us on wrong sides in the quarrel which ensued, and which from this time forth raged for five years, until the mother country was fain to acknowledge her defeat. Harry should have been the Tory, and I the Whig. Theoretically my opinions were very much more liberal than those of my brother, who, especially after his marriage, became what our Indian nabobs call a Bahadoor—a person ceremonious, stately, and exacting respect. When my Lord Dunmore, for instance, talked about liberating the negroes, so as to induce them to join the King's standard, Hal was for hanging the Governor and the Black Guards (as he called them) whom his Excellency had crimped. "If you, gentlemen are fighting for freedom," says I, "sure the negroes may fight, too." On which Harry roars out, shaking his fist, "Infernal villains, if I meet any of 'em, they shall die by this hand!" And my mother agreed that this idea of a negro insurrection was the most abominable and parricidal notion which had ever sprung up in her unhappy country. She at least was more consistent than brother Hal. She would have black and white obedient to the powers that be: whereas Hal only could admit that freedom was the right of the latter colour.