Paul Clifford Part 13

When the slow coach paused, and the gemmen stormed, I bore the brunt; And the only sound which my grave lips formed Was "blunt,"--still "blunt"!

Oh, those jovial days are ne'er forgot!

But the tape lags-- When I be's dead, you'll drink one pot To poor old Bags!

CHORUS. To poor old Bags!

"Ay, that we will, my dear Bagshot," cried Gentleman George, affectionately; but observing a tear in the fine old fellow's eye, he added: "Cheer up! What, ho! cheer up! Times will improve, and Providence may yet send us one good year, when you shall be as well off as ever.

You shakes your poll. Well, don't be humdurgeoned, but knock down a gemman."

Das.h.i.+ng away the drop of sensibility, the veteran knocked down Gentleman George himself.

"Oh, dang it!" said George, with an air of dignity, "I ought to skip, since I finds the lush; but howsomever here goes."

GENTLEMAN GEORGE'S SONG.

Air: "Old King Cole."

I be's the cove, the merry old cove, Of whose max all the rufflers sing; And a lus.h.i.+ng cove, I thinks, by Jove, Is as great as a sober king!

CHORUS. Is as great as a sober king!

Whatever the noise as is made by the boys At the bar as they lush away, The devil a noise my peace alloys As long as the rascals pay!

CHORUS. As long as the rascals pay!

What if I sticks my stones and my bricks With mortar I takes from the sn.o.bbish?

All who can feel for the public weal Likes the public-house to be bobbish.

CHORUS. Likes the public-house to be bobbish.

"There, gemmen!" said the publican, stopping short, "that's the pith of the matter, and split my wig but I'm short of breath now. So send round the brandy, Augustus; you sly dog, you keeps it all to yourself."

By this time the whole conclave were more than half-seas over, or, as Augustus Tomlinson expressed it, "their more austere qualities were relaxed by a pleasing and innocent indulgence." Paul's eyes reeled, and his tongue ran loose. By degrees the room swam round, the faces of his comrades altered, the countenance of Old Bags a.s.sumed an awful and menacing air. He thought Long Ned insulted him, and that Old Bags took the part of the a.s.sailant, doubled his fist, and threatened to put the plaintiff's n.o.b into chancery if he disturbed the peace of the meeting.

Various other imaginary evils beset him. He thought he had robbed a mail-coach in company with Pepper; that Tomlinson informed against him, and that Gentleman George ordered him to be hanged; in short, he laboured under a temporary delirium, occasioned by a sudden reverse of fortune,--from water to brandy; and the last thing of which he retained any recollection, before he sank under the table, in company with Long Ned, Scarlet Jem, and Old Bags, was the bearing his part in the burden of what appeared to him a chorus of last dying speeches and confessions, but what in reality was a song made in honour of Gentleman George, and sung by his grateful guests as a finale of the festivities. It ran thus:--

THE ROBBER'S GRAND TOAST.

A tumbler of blue ruin, fill, fill for me!

Red tape those as likes it may drain; But whatever the lush, it a b.u.mper must be, If we ne'er drinks a b.u.mper again!

Now--now in the crib, where a ruffler may lie, Without fear that the traps should distress him, With a drop in the mouth, and a drop in the eye, Here's to Gentleman George,--G.o.d bless him!

G.o.d bless him, G.o.d bless him!

Here's to Gentleman George,--G.o.d bless him!

'Mong the pals of the prince I have heard it's the go, Before they have tippled enough, To smarten their punch with the best curagoa, More conish to render the stuff.

I boast not such lush; but whoever his gla.s.s Does not like, I'll be hanged if I press him!

Upstanding, my kiddies,--round, round let it pa.s.s!

Here's to Gentleman George,--G.o.d bless him!

G.o.d bless him, G.o.d bless him!

Here's to Gentleman George,-G.o.d bless him!

See, see, the fine fellow grows weak on his stumps; a.s.sist him, ye rascals, to stand!

Why, ye stir not a peg! Are you all in the dumps?

Fighting Attie, go, lend him a hand!

(The robbers crowd around Gentleman George, each, under pretence of supporting him, pulling him first one way and then another.)

Come, lean upon me,--at your service I am!

Get away from his elbow, you whelp! him You'll only upset,--them 'ere fellows but sham!

Here's to Gentleman George,--G.o.d help him!

G.o.d help him, G.o.d help him!

Here's to Gentleman George, G.o.d help him!

CHAPTER XI.

I boast no song in magic wonders rife; But yet, O Nature! is there nought to prize, Familiar in thy bosom scenes of life?

And dwells in daylight truth's salubrious skies No form with which the soul may sympathize?

Young, innocent, on whose sweet forehead mild The parted ringlet shone in simplest guise, An inmate in the home of Albert smiled, Or blessed his noonday walk,--she was his only child.

Gertrude of Wyoming.

O time, thou hast played strange tricks with us; and we bless the stars that made us a novelist, and permit us now to retaliate. Leaving Paul to the instructions of Augustus Tomlinson and the festivities of the Jolly Angler, and suffering him, by slow but sure degrees, to acquire the graces and the reputation of the accomplished and perfect appropriator of other men's possessions, we shall pa.s.s over the lapse of years with the same heedless rapidity with which they have glided over us, and summon our reader to a very different scene from those which would be likely to greet his eyes, were he following the adventures of our new Telemachus. Nor wilt thou, dear reader, whom we make the umpire between ourself and those who never read,--the critics; thou who hast, in the true spirit of gentle breeding, gone with us among places where the novelty of the scene has, we fear, scarcely atoned for the coa.r.s.eness, not giving thyself the airs of a dainty abigail,--not prating, lacquey-like, on the low company thou has met,--nor wilt thou, dear and friendly reader, have cause to dread that we shall weary thy patience by a "d.a.m.nable iteration" of the same localities. Pausing for a moment to glance over the divisions of our story, which lies before us like a map, we feel that we may promise in future to conduct thee among aspects of society more familiar to thy habits; where events flow to their allotted gulf through landscapes of more pleasing variety and among tribes of a more luxurious civilization.

Upon the banks of one of fair England's fairest rivers, and about fifty miles distant from London, still stands an old-fas.h.i.+oned abode, which we shall here term Warlock Manorhouse. It is a building of brick, varied by stone copings, and covered in great part with ivy and jasmine. Around it lie the ruins of the elder part of the fabric; and these are sufficiently numerous in extent and important in appearance to testify that the mansion was once not without pretensions to the magnificent.

These remains of power, some of which bear date as far back as the reign of Henry the Third, are sanctioned by the character of the country immediately in the vicinity of the old manor-house. A vast tract of waste land, interspersed with groves of antique pollards, and here and there irregular and sinuous ridges of green mound, betoken to the experienced eye the evidence of a dismantled chase or park, which must originally have been of no common dimensions. On one side of the house the lawn slopes towards the river, divided from a terrace, which forms the most important embellishment of the pleasure-grounds, by that fence to which has been given the ingenious and significant name of "ha-ha!"

A few scattered trees of giant growth are the sole obstacles that break the view of the river, which has often seemed to us, at that particular pa.s.sage of its course, to glide with unusual calmness and serenity.

On the opposite side of the stream there is a range of steep hills, celebrated for nothing more romantic than their property of imparting to the flocks that browse upon that short and seemingly stinted herbage a flavour peculiarly grateful to the lovers of that pastoral animal which changes its name into mutton after its decease. Upon these hills the vestige of human habitation is not visible; and at times, when no boat defaces the lonely smoothness of the river, and the evening has stilled the sounds of labour and of life, we know few scenes so utterly tranquil, so steeped in quiet, as that which is presented by the old, quaint-fas.h.i.+oned house and its antique grounds,--the smooth lawn, the silent, and (to speak truly, though disparagingly) the somewhat sluggish river, together with the large hills (to which we know, from simple though metaphysical causes, how entire an idea of quiet and immovability peculiarly attaches itself), and the white flocks,--those most peaceful of G.o.d's creatures,--that in fleecy cl.u.s.ters stud the ascent.

In Warlock House, at the time we refer to, lived a gentleman of the name of Brandon. He was a widower, and had attained his fiftieth year without casting much regret on the past or feeling much anxiety for the future. In a word, Joseph Brandon was one of those careless, quiescent, indifferent men, by whom a thought upon any subject is never recurred to without a very urgent necessity. He was good-natured, inoffensive, and weak; and if he was not an incomparable citizen, he was at least an excellent vegetable. He was of a family of high antiquity, and formerly of considerable note. For the last four or five generations, however, the proprietors of Warlock House, gradually losing something alike from their acres and their consequence, had left to their descendants no higher rank than that of a small country squire. One had been a Jacobite, and had drunk out half-a-dozen farms in honour of Charley over the water; Charley over the water was no very dangerous person, but Charley over the wine was rather more ruinous. The next Brandon had been a fox-hunter, and fox-hunters live as largely as patriotic politicians.

Pausanias tells us that the same people; who were the most notorious for their love of wine were also the most notorious for their negligence of affairs. Times are not much altered since Pausanias wrote, and the remark holds as good with the English as it did with the Phigalei. After this Brandon came one who, though he did not scorn the sportsman, rather a.s.sumed the fine gentleman. He married an heiress, who of course a.s.sisted to ruin him; wis.h.i.+ng no a.s.sistance in so pleasing an occupation, he overturned her (perhaps not on purpose), in a new sort of carriage which he was learning to drive, and the good lady was killed on the spot. She left the fine gentleman two sons,--Joseph Brandon, the present thane,--and a brother some years younger. The elder, being of a fitting age, was sent to school, and somewhat escaped the contagion of the paternal mansion. But the younger Brandon, having only reached his fifth year at the time of his mother's decease, was retained at home.

Whether he was handsome or clever or impertinent, or like his father about the eyes (that greatest of all merits), we know not; but the widower became so fond of him that it was at a late period and with great reluctance that he finally intrusted him to the providence of a school.

Among harlots and gamblers and lords and sharpers, and gentlemen of the guards, together with their frequent accompaniments,--guards of the gentlemen, namely, bailiffs,--William Brandon pa.s.sed the first stage of his boyhood. He was about thirteen when he was sent to school; and being a boy of remarkable talents, he recovered lost time so well that when at the age of nineteen he adjourned to the University, he had scarcely resided there a single term before he had borne off two of the highest prizes awarded to academical merit. From the University he departed on the "grand tour," at that time thought so necessary to complete the gentleman; he went in company with a young n.o.bleman, whose friends.h.i.+p he had won at the University, stayed abroad more than two years, and on his return he settled down to the profession of the law.

Meanwhile his father died, and his fortune, as a younger brother, being literally next to nothing, and the family estate (for his brother was not unwilling to a.s.sist him) being terribly involved, it was believed that he struggled for some years with very embarra.s.sed and penurious circ.u.mstances. During this interval of his life, however, he was absent from London, and by his brother supposed to have returned to the Continent; at length, it seems, he profited by a renewal of his friends.h.i.+p with the young n.o.bleman who had accompanied him abroad, reappeared in town, and obtained through his n.o.ble friend one or two legal appointments of reputable emolument. Soon afterwards he got a brief on some cause where a major had been raising a corps to his brother officer, with the better consent of the brother-officer's wife than of the brother officer himself. Brandon's abilities here, for the first time in his profession, found an adequate vent; his reputation seemed made at once, he rose rapidly in his profession, and, at the time we now speak of, he was sailing down the full tide of fame and wealth, the envy and the oracle of all young Templars and barristers, who, having been starved themselves for ten years, began now to calculate on the possibility of starving their clients. At an early period in his career he had, through the good offices of the n.o.bleman we have mentioned, obtained a seat in the House of Commons; and though his eloquence was of an order much better suited to the bar than the senate, he had nevertheless acquired a very considerable reputation in the latter, and was looked upon by many as likely to win to the same brilliant fortunes as the courtly Mansfield,--a great man, whose political principles and urbane address Brandon was supposed especially to affect as his own model. Of unblemished integrity in public life,--for, as he supported all things that exist with the most unbending rigidity, he could not be accused of inconsistency,--William Brandon was (as we have said in a former place of unhappy memory to our hero) esteemed in private life the most honourable, the most moral, even the most austere of men; and his grave and stern repute on this score, joined to the dazzle of his eloquence and forensic powers, had baffled in great measure the rancour of party hostility, and obtained for him a character for virtues almost as high and as enviable as that which he had acquired for abilities.

While William was thus treading a noted and an honourable career, his elder brother, who had married into a clergyman's family, and soon lost his consort, had with his only child, a daughter named Lucy, resided in his paternal mansion in undisturbed obscurity. The discreditable character and habits of the preceding lords of Warlock, which had sunk their respectability in the county as well as curtailed their property, had rendered the surrounding gentry little anxious to cultivate the intimacy of the present proprietor; and the heavy mind and retired manners of Joseph Brandon were not calculated to counterbalance the faults of his forefathers, nor to reinstate the name of Brandon in its ancient popularity and esteem. Though dull and little cultivated, the squire was not without his "proper pride;" he attempted not to intrude himself where he was unwelcome, avoided county meetings and county b.a.l.l.s, smoked his pipe with the parson, and not unoften with the surgeon and the solicitor, and suffered his daughter Lucy to educate herself with the help of the parson's wife, and to ripen (for Nature was more favourable to her than Art) into the very prettiest girl that the whole county--we long to say the whole country--at that time could boast of.

Never did gla.s.s give back a more lovely image than that of Lucy Brandon at the age of nineteen. Her auburn hair fell in the richest luxuriance over a brow never ruffled, and a cheek where the blood never slept; with every instant the colour varied, and at every variation that smooth, pure; virgin cheek seemed still more lovely than before. She had the most beautiful laugh that one who loved music could imagine,--silvery, low, and yet so full of joy! All her movements, as the old parson said, seemed to keep time to that laugh, for mirth made a great part of her innocent and childish temper; and yet the mirth was feminine, never loud, nor like that of young ladies who had received the last finish at Highgate seminaries. Everything joyous affected her, and at once,--air, flowers, suns.h.i.+ne, b.u.t.terflies. Unlike heroines in general, she very seldom cried, and she saw nothing charming in having the vapours. But she never looked so beautiful as in sleep; and as the light breath came from her parted lips, and the ivory lids closed over those eyes which only in sleep were silent,--and her att.i.tude in her sleep took that ineffable grace belonging solely to childhood, or the fresh youth into which childhood merges,--she was just what you might imagine a sleeping Margaret, before that most simple and gentle of all a poet's visions of womanhood had met with Faust, or her slumbers been ruffled with a dream of love.

We cannot say much for Lucy's intellectual acquirements; she could, thanks to the parson's wife, spell indifferently well, and write a tolerable hand; she made preserves, and sometimes riddles,--it was more difficult to question the excellence of the former than to answer the queries of the latter. She worked to the admiration of all who knew her, and we beg leave to say that we deem that "an excellent thing in woman."

She made caps for herself and gowns for the poor, and now and then she accomplished the more literary labour of a stray novel that had wandered down to the Manorhouse, or an abridgment of ancient history, in which was omitted everything but the proper names. To these attainments she added a certain modic.u.m of skill upon the spinet, and the power of singing old songs with the richest and sweetest voice that ever made one's eyes moisten or one's heart beat.

Her moral qualities were more fully developed than her mental. She was the kindest of human beings; the very dog that had never seen her before knew that truth at the first glance, and lost no time in making her acquaintance. The goodness of her heart reposed upon her face like suns.h.i.+ne, and the old wife at the lodge said poetically and truly of the effect it produced, that "one felt warm when one looked on her." If we could abstract from the description a certain chilling transparency, the following exquisite verses of a forgotten poet might express the purity and l.u.s.tre of her countenance:--

"Her face was like the milky way i' the sky, A meeting of gentle lights without a name."

She was surrounded by pets of all kinds, ugly and handsome,--from Ralph the raven to Beauty the pheasant, and from Bob, the sheep-dog without a tail, to Beau, the Blenheim with blue ribbons round his neck; all things loved her, and she loved all things. It seemed doubtful at that time whether she would ever have sufficient steadiness and strength of character. Her beauty and her character appeared so essentially womanlike--soft yet lively, buoyant yet caressing--that you could scarcely place in her that moral dependence that you might in a character less amiable but less yieldingly feminine. Time, however, and circ.u.mstance, which alter and harden, were to decide whether the inward nature did not possess some latent and yet undiscovered properties.