ill again, so that the friends who succoured me might once more come to my
rescue.
To poor little wounded Charlotte in her bed, our friend the mistress of the
boarding-house brought back inexpressible comfort. Whatever might betide, Philip
would never desert her! "Think you I would ever have gone on such an embassy for
a French girl, or interfered between her and her parents?" madame asked, "Never,
never! But you and Monsieur Philippe are already betrothed before heaven; and I
should despise you, Charlotte, I should despise him, were either to draw back."
This little point being settled in Miss Charlotte's mind, I can fancy she is
immensely soothed and comforted; that hope and courage settle in her heart; that
the colour comes back to her young cheeks; that she can come and join her family
as she did yesterday. "I told you she never cared about him," says Mrs. Baynes
to her husband. "Faith, no: she can't have cared for him much," says Baynes,
with something of a sorrow that his girl should be so lightminded. But you and
I, who have been behind the scenes, who have peeped into Philip's bed-room, and
behind poor Charlotte's modest curtains, know that the girl had revolted from
her parents; and so children will if the authority exercised over them is too
tyrannical or unjust. Gentle Charlotte, who scarce ever resisted, was aroused
and in rebellion: honest Charlotte, who used to speak all her thoughts, now hid
them, and deceived father and mother; yes, deceived:?? what a confession to make
regarding a young lady, the prima donna of our opera! Mrs. Baynes is, as usual,
writing her lengthy scrawls to sister Mac Whirter at Tours, and informs the
major's lady that she has very great satisfaction in at last being able to
announce "that that most imprudent and in all respects ineligible engagement
between her Charlotte and a certain young man, son of a bankrupt London
physician, is come to an end. Mr. F.'s conduct has been so wild, so gross, so
disorderly and ungentlemanlike, that the general (and you know, Maria, how soft
and sweet a tempered man Baynes is) has told Mr. Firmin his opinion in
unmistakable words, and forbidden him to continue his visits. After seeing him
every day for six months, during which time she has accustomed herself to his
peculiarities, and his often coarse and odious expressions and conduct, no
wonder the separation has been a shock to dear Char, though I believe the young
man feels nothing who has been the cause of all this grief. That he cares but
little for her, has been my opinion all along, though she, artless child, gave
him her whole affection. He has been accustomed to throw over women; and the
brother of a young lady whom Mr. F. had courted and left (and who has made a
most excellent match since,) showed his indignation at Mr. F.'s conduct at the
embassy ball the other night, on which the young man took advantage of his
greatly superior size and strength to begin a vulgar boxing-match, in which both
parties were severely wounded. Of course you saw the paragraph in Galignani
about the whole affair. I sent our dresses, but it did not print them, though
our names appeared as amongst the company. Anything more singular than the
appearance of Mr. F. you cannot well imagine. I wore my garnets; Charlotte (who
attracted universal admiration) was in, Of course, the separation has occasioned
her a good deal of pain; for Mr. F. certainly behaved with much kindness and
forbearance on a previous occasion. But the general will not hear of the
continuance of the connection. He says the young man's conduct has been too
gross and shameful; and when once roused, you know, I might as well attempt to
chain a tiger as Baynes. Our poor Char will suffer no doubt in consequence of
the behaviour of this brute, but she has ever been an obedient child, who knows
how to honour her father and mother. She bears up wonderfully, though, of
course, the dear child suffers at the parting. I think if she were to go to you
and Mac Whirter at Tours for a month or two, she would be all the better for
change of air, too, dear Mac. Come and fetch her, and we will pay the dawk. She
would go to certain poverty and wretchedness did she marry this most violent and
disreputable young man. The general sends regards to Mac, and I am,"
That these were the actual words of Mrs. Baynes's letter I cannot, as a
veracious biographer, take upon myself to say. I never saw the document, though
I have had the good fortune to peruse others from the same hand. Charlotte saw
the letter some time after, upon one of those not unfrequent occasions, when a
quarrel occurred between the two sisters??Mrs. Major and Mrs. General??and
Charlotte mentioned the contents of the letter to a friend of mine who has
talked to me about his affairs, and especially his love affairs, for many and
many a long hour. And shrewd old woman as Mrs. Baynes may be, you may see how
utterly she was mistaken in fancying that her daughter's obedience was still
secure. The little maid had left father and mother, at first with their eager
sanction; her love had been given to Firmin; and an inmate??a prisoner if you
will??under her father's roof, her heart remained with Philip, however time or
distance might separate them.
And now, as we have the command of Philip's desk, and are free to open and read
the private letters which relate to his history, I take leave to put in a
document which was penned in his place of exile by his worthy father, upon
receiving the news of the quarrel described in the last chapter of these
memoirs:??
"Astor House, New York, September 27.
"Dear Philip,??I received the news in your last kind and affectionate letter
with not unmingled pleasure; but ah, what pleasure in life does not carry its
amari aliquid along with it! That you are hearty, cheerful, and industrious,
earning a small competence, I am pleased indeed to think: that you talk about
being married to a penniless girl I can't say gives me a very sincere pleasure.
With your good looks, good manners, attainments, you might have hoped for a
better match than a half-pay officer's daughter. But 'tis useless speculating on
what might have been. We are puppets in the hands of fate, most of us. We are
carried along by a power stronger than ourselves. It has driven me, at sixty
years of age, from competence, general respect, high position, to poverty and
exile. So be it! laudo manentem, as my delightful old friend and philosopher
teaches me??si celeres quatit pennas??you know the rest. Whatever our fortune
may be, I hope that my Philip and his father will bear it with the courage of
gentlemen.
"Our papers have announced the death of your poor mother's uncle, Lord Ringwood,
and I had a fond lingering hope that he might have left some token of
remembrance to his brother's grandson. He has not. You have probam pauperiem
sine dote. You have courage, health, strength, and talent. I was in greater
straits than you are at your age. My father was not as indulgent as yours, I
hope and trust, has been. From debt and dependence I worked myself up to a proud
position by m
y own efforts. That the storm overtook me and engulphed me
afterwards, is true. But I am like the merchant of my favourite poet: I still
hope?? ay, at 63!??to mend my shattered ships, indocilis pauperiem pati. I still
hope to pay back to my dear boy that fortune which ought to have been his, and
which went down in my own shipwreck. Something tells me I must??I will!
"I agree with you that your escape from Agnes Twysden has been a piece of good
fortune for you, and am much diverted by your account of her dusky innamorato!
Between ourselves, the fondness of the Twysdens for money amounted to meanness.
And though I always received Twysden in dear Old Parr Street, as I trust a
gentleman should, his company was insufferably tedious to me, and his vulgar
loquacity odious. His son also was little to my taste. Indeed I was heartily
relieved when I found your connection with that family was over, knowing their
rapacity about money, and that it was your fortune, not you, they were anxious
to secure for Agnes.
"You will be glad to hear that I am in not inconsiderable practice already. My
reputation as a physician had preceded me to this country. My work on Gout was
favourably noticed here, and in Philadelphia, and in Boston, by the scientific
journals of those great cities. People are more generous and compassionate
towards misfortune here than in our cold-hearted island. I could mention several
gentlemen of New York who have suffered shipwreck like myself, and are now
prosperous and respected. I had the good fortune to be of considerable
professional service to Colonel J. B. Fogle, of New York, on our voyage out; and
the colonel, who is a leading personage here, has shown himself not at all
ungrateful. Those who fancy that at New York people cannot appreciate and
understand the manners of a gentleman, are not a little mistaken; and a man who,
like myself, has lived with the best society in London, has, I flatter myself,
not lived in that society quite in vain. The colonel is proprietor and editor of
one of the most brilliant and influential journals of the city. You know that
arms and the toga are often worn here by the same individual, and??
"I had actually written thus far when I read in the colonel's paper??the New
York Emerald??an account of your battle with your cousin at the Embassy ball!
Oh, you pugnacious Philip! Well, young Twysden was very vulgar, very rude and
overbearing, and, I have no doubt, deserved the chastisement you gave him. By
the way, the correspondent of the Emerald makes some droll blunders regarding
you in his letter. We are all fair game for publicity in this country, where the
press is free with a vengeance; and your private affairs, or mine, or the
President's, or our gracious Queen's, for the matter of that, are discussed with
a freedom which certainly amounts to licence. The colonel's lady is passing the
winter in Paris, where I should wish you to pay your respects to her. Her
husband has been most kind to me. I am told that Mrs. F. lives in the very
choicest French society, and the friendship of this family may be useful to you
as to your affectionate father,
"G. B. F.
"Address as usual, until you hear further from me, as Dr. Brandon, New York. I
wonder whether Lord Estridge has asked you after his old college friend? When he
was Headbury and at Trinity, he and a certain pensioner whom men used to
nickname Brummell Firmin were said to be the best dressed men in the university.
Estridge has advanced to rank, to honours! You may rely on it, that he will have
one of the very next vacant garters. What a different, what an unfortunate
career, has been his quondam friend's!??an exile, an inhabitant of a small room
in a great hotel, where I sit at a scrambling public table with all sorts of
coarse people! The way in which they bolt their dinner, often with a knife,
shocks me. Your remittance was most welcome, small as it was. It shows my Philip
has a kind heart. Ah! why, why are you thinking of marriage, who are so poor? By
the way, your encouraging account of your circumstances has induced me to draw
upon you for 100 dollars. The bill will go to Europe by the packet which carries
this letter, and has kindly been cashed for me by my friends, Messrs. Plaster
and Shinman, of Wall Street, respected bankers of this city. Leave your card
with Mrs. Fogle. Her husband himself may be useful to you and your ever attached
"Father."
We take the New York Emerald at Bays's, and in it I had read a very amusing
account of our friend Philip, in an ingenious correspondence entitled "Letters
from an Attach?," which appeared in that journal. I even copied the paragraph to
show to my wife, and perhaps to forward to our friend.
"I promise you," wrote the attach?, "the new country did not disgrace the old at
the British Embassy ball on Queen Vic's birthday. Colonel Z. B. Hoggins's lady,
of Albany, and the peerless bride of Elijah J. Dibbs, of Twenty-ninth Street in
your city, were the observed of all observers for splendour, for elegance, for
refined native beauty. The Royal Dukes danced with nobody else; and at the
attention of one of the Princes to the lovely Miss Dibbs, I observed his Royal
Duchess looked as black as thunder. Supper handsome. Back Delmonico to beat it.
Champagne so-so. By the way, the young fellow who writes here for the Pall Mall
Gazette got too much of the champagne on board??as usual, I am told. The
Honourable R. Twysden, of London, was rude to my young chap's partner, or winked
at him offensively, or trod on his toe, or I don't know what??but young F.
followed him into the garden; hit out at him; sent him flying, like a spread
eagle into the midst of an illumination, and left him there sprawling. Wild,
rampageous fellow this young F.; has already spent his own fortune, and ruined
his poor old father, who has been forced to cross the water. Old Louis Philippe
went away early. He talked long with our minister about his travels in our
country. I was standing by, but in course ain't so ill-bred as to say what
passed between them."
In this way history is written. I daresay about others besides Philip, in
English papers as well as American, have fables been narrated.
CHAPTER X. CONTAINS A TUG OF WAR.
Who was the first to spread the report that Philip was a prodigal, and had
ruined his poor confiding father? I thought I knew a person who might be
interested in getting under any shelter, and sacrificing even his own son for
his own advantage. I thought I knew a man who had done as much already, and
surely might do so again; but my wife flew into one of her tempests of
indignation, when I hinted something of this, clutched her own children to her
heart, according to her maternal wont, asked me was there any power would cause
me to belie them? and sternly rebuked me for daring to be so wicked, heartless,
and cynical. My dear creature, wrath is no answer. You call me heartless and
cynic, for saying men are false and wicked. Have you never heard to what lengths
some bankrupts will go? To appease the wolves who chase them in the winter
forest,
have you not read how some travellers will cast all their provisions out
of the sledge? then, when all the provisions are gone, don't you know that they
will fling out perhaps the sister, perhaps the mother, perhaps the baby, the
little, dear, tender innocent? Don't you see him tumbling among the howling
pack, and the wolves gnashing, gnawing, crashing, gobbling him up in the snow?
Oh, horror??horror! My wife draws all the young ones to her breast as I utter
these fiendish remarks. She hugs them in her embrace, and says, "For shame!" and
that I am a monster, and so on. Go to! Go down on your knees, woman, and
acknowledge the sinfulness of our humankind. How long had our race existed ere
murder and violence began? and how old was the world ere brother slew brother?
Well, my wife and I came to a compromise. I might have my opinion, but was there
any need to communicate it to poor Philip? No, surely. So I never sent him the
extract from the New York Emerald; though, of course, some other good-natured
friend did, and I don't think my magnanimous friend cared much. As for supposing
that his own father, to cover his own character, would lie away his son's??such
a piece of artifice was quite beyond Philip's comprehension, who has been all
his life slow in appreciating roguery, or recognizing that there is meanness and
double-dealing in the world. When he once comes to understand the fact; when he
once comprehends that Tartuffe is a humbug and swelling Bufo is a toady; then my
friend becomes as absurdly indignant and mistrustful as before he was admiring
and confiding. Ah, Philip! Tartuffe has a number of good, respectable qualities;
and Bufo, though an underground odious animal, may have a precious jewel in his
head. 'Tis you are cynical. I see the good qualities in these rascals whom you
spurn. I see. I shrug my shoulders. I smile: and you call me cynic. It was long
before Philip could comprehend why Charlotte's mother turned upon him, and tried
to force her daughter to forsake him. "I have offended the old woman in a
hundred ways," he would say. "My tobacco annoys her; my old clothes offend her;
the very English I speak is often Greek to her, and she can no more construe my
sentences than I can the Hindostanee jargon she talks to her husband at dinner."
"My dear fellow, if you had ten thousand a year she would try and construe your
sentences, or accept them even if not understood," I would reply. And some men,
whom you and I know to be mean, and to be false, and to be flatterers and
parasites, and to be inexorably hard and cruel in their own private circles,
will surely pull a long face to-morrow, and say, "Oh! the man's so cynical!"
I acquit Baynes of what ensued. I hold Mrs. B. to have been the criminal??the
stupid criminal. The husband, like many other men extremely brave in active
life, was at home timid and irresolute. Of two heads that lie side by side on
the same pillow for thirty years, one must contain the stronger power, the more
enduring resolution. Baynes, away from his wife, was shrewd, courageous, gay at
times; when with her he was fascinated, torpid under the power of this baleful
superior creature. "Ah, when we were subs together in camp in 1803, what a
lively fellow Charley Baynes was!" his comrade, Colonel Bunch, would say. "That
was before he ever saw his wife's yellow face; and what a slave she has made of
him!"
After that fatal conversation which ensued after the ball, Philip did not come
to dinner at madame's according to his custom. Mrs. Baynes told no family
stories, and Colonel Bunch, who had no special liking for the young gentleman,
did not trouble himself to make any inquiries about him. One, two, three days
passed, and no Philip. At last the colonel says to the general, with a sly look
at Charlotte, "Baynes, where is our young friend with the mustachios? We have