My Life as an Author Part 27

Beyond and after this, I might add, but for its too great length, the indisputable testimony of certain friends of mine as to inexplicable writings on locked slates and paper, the revelation of secrets, nay visible apparitions, and both records of the secret past and revelations of the still more secret future afterwards fulfilled,--to all which I cannot, as an honest man and a believer in human evidence, refuse to give a distinct testimony, even though conjurors perpetually baffle our confused judgment.

In this connection I will extract from one of my Archive-books the curious story of a mysterious key in which my family are still interested: for the secret is not yet solved. In the fourteenth volume, then, of my Archives occurs this long note, accompanied by the drawing which I made years ago of the weird-looking key: with a loose ring handle, a threefold staircase body, and a strangely ringed column.

"My father died in his sleep, December 8, 1844, at Southwick House, in Windsor Park, on the same night after its owner, Lord Limerick, had also died there in his arms, my father having been his medical friend for thirty years. My father used to carry in his pocket a strange key, whereof the figure was very unusual, as it folded up, and though large he carried it in his pocket habitually: and he used to say in his quietly humorous and reserved manner, 'under that key lies a fortune;'

my mother and I and others remember this well. When I came to be executor, there was nearly nothing to guide me as to the amount of my father's property,--and I certainly did not succeed in realising all that he was supposed to have acquired. It was wonderful that with his large income he left so little. So, we all thought that some h.o.a.rd locked by this key contained the missing treasure; my father's habitual taciturnity, and secretiveness favouring this idea. But, nowhere could the lock to fit it be found; nowhere either at banks or lawyers or anywhere about our old house in Burlington Street or at Albury, appeared the chest or cupboard containing the fancied acc.u.mulations; and to this hour, June 12, 1873, nearly thirty years after my father's sudden death, has the mystery not been cleared up. Once, on an occasion of a spiritualistic _seance_ at Mr. Carter Hall's, I handed the said key to Mr. Home when entranced, and he shuddered at it, and uttered the name 'Elizabeth Henderson,'--which I thought at the time a bad guess, as one utterly unknown to me: but oddly enough it proved to be the name of the Queen's housekeeper at Windsor. However, on inquiry nothing further came of this, for she was not in office when my father died at the Park.

To-day I have taken the key to a Miss Hudson, a clairvoyante, who never saw me before, nor was told my name, nor my errand, except that I laid that key silently before her. She can tell me very little, except that the mystery is soon to be cleared up, and that certain spirits (from description possibly my mother and brother William) much wish it. I gave no sort of clues, but the medium guessed at my father's character, and at the long lapse of time since the loss of the chest, and at the hiding of it in some 'bank,'--whether underground or at a banker's did not appear. The medium's 'attendant spirit'--one 'Daisy, an Indian papoose'--says it is 'in a dark place, like a vault, and mouldy.' I am urged to inquire further. Miss Hudson, a common-looking but respectable woman of about thirty,--living in a lodging near Bloomsbury Square,--utterly ignorant who I was and all about me,--said (in her spirit voice) that I was a writer of books, and did great good, and was inspired by two spirits, one of the fair and lively sort all in white, and the other an old philosopher--a strange guess at my mixed medley of writings. Miss Hudson promised me that I should soon know the secret of the key, because the spirits wished it, and because there was a blue magnetic circle round the key."

_P.S._--It is only proper to state that up to this present writing, January 13, 1886, I have heard nothing at all from the spirits aforesaid, and that the family key is as mysterious as ever. My own reasonable explanation of the medium's half true guesses is that she might have read my own dim thoughts about the matter: naturally I would think of my dead mother and brother and myself; and thought-reading is a form of animal magnetism which some people possess more than others.

Of late, as we all know, Mr. c.u.mberland and others have exhibited their mysterious powers of perceiving and expounding the secret thoughts of those who chose to be thus mentally vivisected: and I myself have this small experience to record. Asked in a drawing-room to think of something, the hostess answered my thought by "I don't know what it means, but there's a great deal of green with a white star going round and round in it." "Quite true," was my reply, "I was thinking of Ewhurst windmill."

In my anonymous prophetic ode, "Things to Come" (Bosworth, 1852, long out of print), at its eleventh section, thought-reading and other like metaphysicals are strangely antic.i.p.ated, ending with--

"Into some other wicked man's mind His foolish brother is peeping to find, Caught in foul excitement's snare, The Lying Future there!"

CHAPTER XLV.

FICKLE FORTUNE.

Ever since Schiller wrote his famous song about a poet's heritage (ay, and long before that, as it will be long years hence), authors.h.i.+p has been noted for anything rather than wealth; albeit, nowadays, we have had such fortunate scribes as d.i.c.kens and Thackeray and Trollope, who severally have left piles of well-earned money behind them; though they all had encountered previous mischances before. Accordingly, in this true record of my life, I must not omit its reverses, for, though born with a silver spoon in my mouth (perhaps a bis.m.u.th one, such as in my chemical days I melted in hot tea), and always having had plentiful surroundings, there has been often much also of financial embarra.s.sment, though not always nor usually from the author's fault. I am not going to accuse others any more than myself, only hinting that it has been costly to be a sleeping-partner, especially when the chief fails; that it is discouraging to economic thrift when the investments wherein you place your savings come to an untimely end; that in particular the Albert Life Insurance was a notorious swindle, wherein more than twenty years' of banked-up prudent earnings, besides the original policy, vanished in an hour; that my early efforts to win fortune were stumped from impediment of speech; and that some of those on whom I depended, as well as others dependent on me, met with misfortunes, deserved or undeserved. Anyhow, I have just now no reason to complain of bursting barns or inflated money-bags. Everybody knows (so I need not blink it) that some time ago a few friends kindly got up a so-called testimonial for my benefit; but that sort of thing had been overdone in other instances; and it is small wonder that (although certainly not quite such a fiasco as with Ginx's Baby) the trouble and care and humiliation are scarcely compensated where the costs and defaults are considerable: however, I desire heartily to thank its promoters and contributors, one and all; even those who promised but never paid.

With reference to other efforts, my two Transatlantic visits, and divers reading tours at home, show that self-help never was neglected, as, indeed, former pages will have proved. Accordingly, as Providence helps those who help themselves, or at all events endeavour to do so, I still lean on the heraldic motto, given to General Volkmar von Tophere by Henri Quatre, "L'espoir est ma force." I will here add two American anecdotes whereby it might seem that heretofore I have unwittingly jilted Fortune when she would have blest me with her favour.

I had just landed in New York after a stormy fortnight in the _Asia_ (it was A.D. 1851) and taken up my quarters at the Astor House, to rest before friends found me out. But my arrival had been published, and before, in private, I had taken my first refreshment, the host, a colonel of course, came and asked if I would allow a few of my admirers to greet me. Doubtless, natural vanity was willing, and through my room, having doors right and left, forthwith came a stream of well-wishers all shaking hands and saying kind words for an hour and more; at last they departed, all but one, who had come first and boldly had taken a chair beside me: when the crowd were gone, he bluntly (or let it be frankly) said, "I'm one of the richest men in New York, sir, and I know authors must be poor; I like your books, and have told my bankers (naming them) to honour any cheques on me you may like to draw."

"My dear sir," I replied, "you are most considerate, and all I can say is, if I have the misfortune to lose this packet (it was a roll of Herries's circular notes) I shall gladly accept your offer; but just now I have more than I want--300." "Well then, sir, come and stay at my house, Fifth Avenue." "This is very kind, but several friends here have specially invited me, so I am compelled to decline." "Then, sir, my yacht in the harbour is at your service." "Pardon me, but I would rather forget all memories of the sea at present,--with due thanks." "Then, sir, my carriage has been waiting at the hotel all this time, let me have the honour of taking you to see Mrs. So-and-so, who is anxious to meet you." Of course I could not refuse this, nor the occasional loan of his handsome turn-out whenever other friends let me go. Who knows how nearly I then missed smiles from the blind G.o.ddess, by my st.u.r.dy refusal of her favours, for I heard afterwards that the wealthy Mr.---- was childless! Again, at Baltimore, after my Historical dinner (see a former page), comes up to me a very shabby-looking man, as I thought to beg. He sidled up and whispered that he wanted me to go home with him. I'm afraid I rather snubbed him; but was sorry for it afterwards, when told that he was the rich old miser So-and-so, who had never taken a fancy to any one before. What a dolt I must have been to snub away the possible codicil of a millionaire!

On page 3 of this book I proposed no mention of private domesticities or of personal religious experiences--the one being of interest merely to my family, the other a matter between G.o.d and the soul. However, the recent sudden death of one for fifty years my faithful friend and companion in marriage, urges me to record here simply her many excellent qualities, which must not be pa.s.sed by without a regretful word as if I were a Stoic, or as if my dear good wife of half a century could be silently forgotten by her bereaved husband and children. I began this biography when she was in her usual health and spirits, but soon after its commencement a fit of apoplexy took her unconsciously from our happy circle,--and we are made to feel by this affliction, as also by another over leaf, how truly "in the midst of life we are in death." Her body awaits the Resurrection in Albury Churchyard, and her spirit lives with us in affectionate remembrance.

CHAPTER XLVI.

DE BEAUVOIR CHANCERY SUIT: AND BELGRAVIA.

My lamented son, Henry de Beauvoir, active and athletic, was killed in South Africa by the most unlikely accident of being jolted off the front seat in a rutty road and crushed to death under the wheel of an ox-waggon creeping at two miles an hour! This sad event occurred on May 31, 1871: and the newspapers at the time, both British and South African, fully recorded not only the accident but the heroism of the brave youth, the kind but unavailing a.s.siduities of friends, and the munic.i.p.al honours accorded to him at his funeral, when the mayor and council, the volunteers and chief inhabitants of King William's Town (every window shuttered) followed him to the grave, where Archdeacon Kitton read the solemn service; and some months after, a marble headstone was placed over his remains. His two brothers have written some touching stanzas to his memory: but they are private.

I mention all this sadness now by way of publicly acknowledging the kindness of Archdeacon Kitton and, other friends at King William's Town, not forgetting a most friendly officer of the American navy, from whom we have received many excellent letters and presents from all round the world, ever since he was among the first to break to us the death of my son, now fifteen years ago: I desire, then, cordially to thank T.G. for these kindnesses: as also Mr. Robertson, of Brechin, N.B., whose son was Henry's African comrade, with him at the time of the catastrophe, and following him to the grave.

Henry having been for good ancestral reasons christened de Beauvoir, reminds me of a memorable matter of our family history which, as it is on record, I will here relate. In the days of King James I. (to quote with pedantic omissions from a pedigree), one Peter de Beauvoir, descended from a younger branch of the ducal house of Rutland, had an eldest son, James, whose daughter Rachel married Pierre Martin (my spiritual sponsor after Martin Luther), and her daughter married a Carey of Guernsey, whose descendant married my grandfather. Peter's second son, Richard, married a Priaulx, also related to us, and her daughter married a Benyon, in Charles II.'s time, whose descendant is now the millionaire, Sir Richard Benyon de Beauvoir of Reading, &c. &c. Now, this is the strange fact which has always puzzled me as well as others.

The old De Beauvoir was a very thrifty miser, and died two hundred years ago possessed of great wealth, which has increased enormously up to our day, seeing he had landed property in the north of London, now including De Beauvoir Town.

In the second generation, his grand-daughters Rachel Martin of the elder branch and Marie Priaulx of the younger, contended at law for the inheritance after some intestacy: and a terrible lawsuit raged in Chancery for 150 years, between the Tuppers and the Benyons,--and was carried even to the House of Lords, being finally decided in my memory for the Benyons. I remember my uncle saying he would not take thirty thousand pounds for his individual chance,--but my less sanguine father cared not to join in the lawsuit,--saying he would not "throw good money after bad." For my own judgment, and I can speak as an old conveyancing barrister (though without business or experience) of nearly fifty years' standing, our side as the elder had the best right, though the two sisters might well and wisely have shared in a compromise. But somehow it came to be decided that the younger claimant of that vast property must have _all_,--and the elder be strangely left out in the cold. After the conclusion of the Lords, further litigation was hopeless: so those whom I now represent (as almost the "last of the Abruzzi") must acquiesce in getting nothing, while the opponent side has the good luck to possess, as Dr. Johnson has it, "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." Such is life,--and law: the most obstinate and the richest win: the less pertinacious and the poorer are allowed to fail: it is a process of Darwin's survival of the fittest. All this is now "too late to mend:" but I do hope that if ever I go to Engelfield Castle, Sir Richard will be kindly and genial to his far-off cousin, who (but for some legal quibble unknown) might have dispossessed him.

My father numbered among his patients the Duke of Rutland, and I have heard him say that they half-humorously called each other cousins.

A Lost Chance in Belgravia.

In this connection of possible good luck that never happened, let me record this.

Another of my father's patients was the long deceased Earl Grosvenor, grandfather of the present Duke of Westminster; and about him I have a tale to tell, which shows how nearly we might have been possessed of another vast property--but we missed it. One day in my boyhood, I remember my father coming home after his round and telling my mother that he had a great mind to buy "the five fields" of Lord Grosvenor's, because he thought London might extend that way. Those five fields are now covered with the palatial streets of Belgravia,--but were then a dismal marshy flat intersected by black ditches, and notorious for highway robbery, as a district dimly lit with an oil lamp here and there, and protected by nothing but the useless old watchman in his box: it is the tract of land between Grosvenor Place and Sloane Street. His lords.h.i.+p had a reputation for parsimony, and he fancied it a bargain if he could sell to my father those squalid fields for 2000,--so he offered them to him at that price. When my mother heard of this, she was dead against so extravagant an outlay for that desolate region; so much dreaded by her whenever her aunt's black horses in the old family coach ploughed their way through the slush (MacAdam had not then arisen to give us granite roads) to call on an ancient relative, Mr. Hall, who possessed a priceless cupboard of old Chelsea china, and lived near the hospital. A tradition existed that the said family waggon had once been "stopped" thereabouts by some vizored knight of the road, and this memory confirmed my mother's disapproval of the purchase. So my father was dissuaded, and declined the Earl's offer. I don't suppose that if he had accepted it the property would long have been his, but must have changed hands directly he had doubled his investment: otherwise, imagine what a bargain was there!--However, n.o.body can foresee anything beyond an inch or a minute, and so this other chance of "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice" long ago faded away.

CHAPTER XLVII.

FLYING.

A lecture which I gave at the Royal Aquarium on September 28, 1883, on the Art of Human Flight, attracted at the time a good deal of newspaper notice; my friend Colonel Fred. Burnaby being in the chair, supported by several other aeronautical notables. From a rough copy by me I have thought fit to preserve the exordium here, just as spoken.

"'Tis sixty years since,"--as the t.i.tle-page to Waverley has it,--'tis sixty years since a little Charterhouse schoolboy of thirteen called on one Sat.u.r.day afternoon (his half-holiday) at a shabby office up a court in Fleet Street, with a few saved-up s.h.i.+llings of pocket-money in his hand. His object was secretly to bribe a balloon agent to give him a seat in the basket on the next flight from Vauxhall: however as, either from prudential humanity or commercial greed, the clerk stated that five pounds was the fixed price for a place, and as the aforesaid little gentleman could only produce ten s.h.i.+llings, the negotiation came to nothing,--and I, who had coveted from my cradle the privilege that a bird enjoys from his nest, was fortunately refused that juvenile voyage in the clouds: whereof when I told my excellent mother, her tearful joy that I had _not_ made the perilous ascent affectionately consoled my disappointment.

So it is that, as often happens throughout life, and I am a living proof of it, our Failures prove to be the best Successes: for certainly if my boyish whim had been granted, and I had thereafter taken habitually to such aeronautical flights, at once perilous and unsettling, that young Carthusian would scarcely have stood before you this day as an ancient Proverbial Philosopher.

However, let that pa.s.s: I only acted--as oftentimes I since have longed to act--on the desire we all feel to have "the wings of a dove, and fly away and be at rest,"--floating afar from the dross and dust of earth into the blue expanse of the heavenly ether:--a thing yet to be accomplished!--or I will confess to be no prophet: in these days of electricity, concentrated and acc.u.mulative after the fas.h.i.+on of M.

Faure, aided perhaps by some lighter gas, some condensed form of tamed dynamite,--these elevating and motive powers being helped by exquisite mechanism either as attached to the human form (if the flier be an athlete) or quickening a vehicle with flapping wings impelled by electricity, in which he might sit (if said flier is as burdened with "too solid flesh" as some of us)--these mixed potencies, I say, of electricity and gas, ought at this time of the day to be so manipulated by our chemists and mechanicians as to issue--very soon too--in the grand invention than would supersede every other sort of locomotion,--human flight.

I once met at Baltimore, and since elsewhere, a clever young American mathematician and engineer, Henry Middleton by name, who showed me, at his father's place in South Carolina, parts of a model energised by the motive-powers of gas and electricity, which he hoped would successfully solve the problem of flying; but the Patent Office at Was.h.i.+ngton was burnt down soon after, and in it I fear was his machine. At all events I have heard nothing of his project since.

I may mention, too, that I believe I have among my audience this evening Mr. De Lisle Hay, the author not only of that recent very graphic book "Brighter Britain," but also of another, more cognate to our present topic, ent.i.tled "Three Hundred Years Hence," now out of print, though published only three years ago. In this latter work he has a chapter on "Our Conquest of the Air," and imagines a lighter gas called by him "lucegene," as also a bird-like human flight very much as I had conceived it forty-one years ago. He tells me also that the best vehicle for flying might be an imitation of the sidelong action of a flat fish in water; but how far he has worked upon this idea I know not. Possibly, if in the room, he may tell us after I release you.

It is most worthy of notice, that in the almost solitary Biblical instance of winged angels (see Isaiah vi. 2, and a corresponding pa.s.sage in Ezekiel--all other angelic ministers being represented as etherealised men) these are somewhat like birds in outline, though having more wings,--with twain covering the head so as to cleave the air, with twain to cover the feet so as to be a sort of tail or rudder, while with twain they did fly: even as Blake, and Raffaelle, and some other painters have depicted them. I mentioned this once to Professor Owen, our great natural philosopher, in a talk I had with him on human flight, and he thought such seraphim very remarkable in the light of a.n.a.logous comparative anatomy.

Ovid also in a pa.s.sage before me advocates our imitation of birds if we would fly bodily: in his "De Icari Casu," he says (with omissions)--

"Naturamque novat: nam ponit in ordine pennas A minima coeptas, longam breviore sequenti: ...

Sic imitentur aves: geminas libravit in alas Ipse suum corpus, motaque pependit in aura."

Which, being interpreted, means this,--

"Nature he reproduces, ranging fine From least to longest feathery plumes aline, Thus imitating birds, that on the air With balanced wings are poised in lightness there."

Whilst our n.o.ble Laureate in "Locksley Hall" goes in for aerial machines, "Argosies of magic sails," and "airy navies grappling in the central blue."