CHAPTER XXXVII.
Mervyn's auditors allowed no pause in their attention to this story.Having ended, a deep silence took place. The clock which stood upon themantel had sounded twice the customary _larum_, but had not been heardby us. It was now struck a third time. It was _one_. Our guest appearedsomewhat startled at this signal, and looked, with a mournful sort ofearnestness, at the clock. There was an air of inquietude about himwhich I had never observed in an equal degree before.
I was not without much curiosity respecting other incidents than thosewhich had just been related by him; but, after so much fatigue as he hadundergone, I thought it improper to prolong the conversation.
"Come," said I, "my friend, let us to bed. This is a drowsy time, and,after so much exercise of mind and body, you cannot but need somerepose. Much has happened in your absence, which is proper to be knownto you; but our discourse will be best deferred till to-morrow. I willcome into your chamber by day-dawn, and unfold to you particulars."
"Nay," said he, "withdraw not on my account. If I go to my chamber, itwill not be to sleep, but to meditate, especially after your assurancethat something of moment has occurred in my absence. My thoughts,independently of any cause of sorrow or fear, have received an impulsewhich solitude and darkness will not stop. It is impossible to know toomuch for our safety and integrity, or to know it too soon. What hashappened?"
I did not hesitate to comply with his request, for it was not difficultto conceive that, however tired the limbs might be, the adventures ofthis day would not be easily expelled from the memory at night. I toldhim the substance of the conversation with Mrs. Althorpe. He smiled atthose parts of the narrative which related to himself; but when hisfather's depravity and poverty were mentioned, he melted into tears.
"Poor wretch! I, that knew thee in thy better days, might have easilydivined this consequence. I foresaw thy poverty and degradation in thesame hour that I left thy roof. My soul drooped at the prospect, but Isaid, It cannot be prevented, and this reflection was an antidote togrief; but, now that thy ruin is complete, it seems as if some of itwere imputable to me, who forsook thee when the succour and counsel of ason were most needed. Thou art ignorant and vicious, but thou art myfather still. I see that the sufferings of a better man than thou artwould less afflict me than thine. Perhaps it is still in my power torestore thy liberty and good name, and yet--that is a fond wish. Thouart past the age when the ignorance and grovelling habits of a humanbeing are susceptible of cure." There he stopped, and, after a gloomypause, continued:--
* * * * *
I am not surprised or afflicted at the misconceptions of my neighbourswith relation to my own character. Men must judge from what they see;they must build their conclusions on their knowledge. I never saw in therebukes of my neighbours any thing but laudable abhorrence of vice. Theywere too eager to blame, to collect materials of censure rather than ofpraise. It was not me whom they hated and despised. It was the phantomthat passed under my name, which existed only in their imagination, andwhich was worthy of all their scorn and all their enmity.
What I appeared to be in their eyes was as much the object of my owndisapprobation as of theirs. Their reproaches only evinced the rectitudeof their decisions, as well as of my own. I drew from them new motivesto complacency. They fortified my perseverance in the path which I hadchosen as best; they raised me higher in my own esteem; they heightenedthe claims of the reproachers themselves to my respect and mygratitude.
They thought me slothful, incurious, destitute of knowledge and of allthirst of knowledge, insolent, and profligate. They say that in thetreatment of my father I have been ungrateful and inhuman. I have stolenhis property, and deserted him in his calamity. Therefore they hate andrevile me. It is well; I love them for these proofs of their discernmentand integrity. Their indignation at wrong is the truest test of theirvirtue.
It is true that they mistake me, but that arises from the circumstancesof our mutual situation. They examined what was exposed to their view,they grasped at what was placed within their reach. To decide contraryto appearances, to judge from what they knew not, would prove them to bebrutish and not rational, would make their decision of no worth, andrender them, in their turn, objects of neglect and contempt.
It is true that I hated school; that I sought occasions of absence, andfinally, on being struck by the master, determined to enter his presenceno more. I loved to leap, to run, to swim, to climb trees and to clamberup rocks, to shroud myself in thickets and stroll among woods, to obeythe impulse of the moment, and to prate or be silent, just as my humourprompted me. All this I loved more than to go to and fro in the samepath, and at stated hours to look off and on a book, to read just asmuch and of such a kind, to stand up and be seated, just as anotherthought proper to direct. I hated to be classed, cribbed, rebuked, andferuled at the pleasure of one who, as it seemed to me, knew no guide inhis rewards but caprice, and no prompter in his punishments but passion.
It is true that I took up the spade and the hoe as rarely, and for asshort a time, as possible. I preferred to ramble in the forest andloiter on the hill; perpetually to change the scene; to scrutinize theendless variety of objects; to compare one leaf and pebble with another;to pursue those trains of thought which their resemblances anddifferences suggested; to inquire what it was that gave them this place,structure, and form, were more agreeable employments than ploughing andthreshing.
My father could well afford to hire labour. What my age and myconstitution enabled me to do could be done by a sturdy boy, in half thetime, with half the toil, and with none of the reluctance. The boy was abond-servant, and the cost of his clothing and food was next to nothing.True it is, that my service would have saved him even this expense, butmy motives for declining the effort were not hastily weighed orsuperficially examined. These were my motives.
My frame was delicate and feeble. Exposure to wet blasts and verticalsuns was sure to make me sick. My father was insensible to thisconsequence; and no degree of diligence would please him but that whichwould destroy my health. My health was dearer to my mother than to me.She was more anxious to exempt me from possible injuries than reasonjustified; but anxious she was, and I could not save her from anxietybut by almost wholly abstaining from labour. I thought her peace of mindwas of some value, and that, if the inclination of either of my parentsmust be gratified at the expense of the other, the preference was due tothe woman who bore me; who nursed me in disease; who watched over mysafety with incessant tenderness; whose life and whose peace wereinvolved in mine. I should have deemed myself brutish and obduratelywicked to have loaded her with fears and cares merely to smooth the browof a froward old man, whose avarice called on me to sacrifice my easeand my health, and who shifted to other shoulders the province ofsustaining me when sick, and of mourning for me when dead.
I likewise believed that it became me to reflect upon the influence ofmy decision on my own happiness; and to weigh the profits flowing to myfather from my labour, against the benefits of mental exercise, thepleasures of the woods and streams, healthful sensations, and the luxuryof musing. The pecuniary profit was petty and contemptible. It obviatedno necessity. It purchased no rational enjoyment. It merely provoked, byfurnishing the means of indulgence, an appetite from which my father wasnot exempt. It cherished the seeds of depravity in him, and lessened thelittle stock of happiness belonging to my mother.
I did not detain you long, my friends, in portraying my parents, andrecounting domestic incidents, when I first told you my story. What hadno connection with the history of Welbeck and with the part that I haveacted upon this stage I thought it proper to omit. My omission waslikewise prompted by other reasons. My mind is enervated and feeble,like my body. I cannot look upon the sufferings of those I love withoutexquisite pain. I cannot steel my heart by the force of reason, and bysubmission to necessity; and, therefore, too frequently employ thecowardly expedient of endeavouring to forget what I cannot rememberwithout agony.
I told you that my father was sober and industrious by habit; but habitis not uniform. There were intervals when his plodding and tame spiritgave place to the malice and fury of a demon. Liquors were not sought byhim; but he could not withstand entreaty, and a potion that produced noeffect upon others changed him into a maniac.
I told you that I had a sister, whom the arts of a villain destroyed.Alas! the work of her destruction was left unfinished by him. The blowsand contumelies of a misjudging and implacable parent, who scrupled notto thrust her, with her new-born infant, out of doors; the curses andtaunts of unnatural brothers, left her no alternative but death.----ButI must not think of this; I must not think of the wrongs which my motherendured in the person of her only and darling daughter.
My brothers were the copyists of the father, whom they resembled intemper and person. My mother doted on her own image in her daughter andin me. This daughter was ravished from her by self-violence, and herother children by disease. I only remained to appropriate her affectionsand fulfil her hopes. This alone had furnished a sufficient reason why Ishould be careful of my health and my life, but my father's charactersupplied me with a motive infinitely more cogent.
It is almost incredible, but nevertheless true, that the only beingwhose presence and remonstrances had any influence on my father, atmoments when his reason was extinct, was myself. As to my personalstrength, it was nothing; yet my mother's person was rescued frombrutal violence; he was checked, in the midst of his ferocious career,by a single look or exclamation from me. The fear of my rebukes had evensome influence in enabling him to resist temptation. If I entered thetavern at the moment when he was lifting the glass to his lips, I neverweighed the injunctions of decorum, but, snatching the vessel from hishand, I threw it on the ground. I was not deterred by the presence ofothers; and their censures on my want of filial respect and duty werelistened to with unconcern. I chose not to justify myself by expatiatingon domestic miseries, and by calling down that pity on my mother which Iknew would only have increased her distress.
The world regarded my deportment as insolent and perverse to a degree ofinsanity. To deny my father an indulgence which they thought harmless,and which, indeed, was harmless in its influence on other men; tointerfere thus publicly with his social enjoyments, and expose him tomortification and shame, was loudly condemned; but my duty to my motherdebarred me from eluding this censure on the only terms on which itcould have been eluded. Now it has ceased to be necessary to concealwhat passed in domestic retirements, and I should willingly confess thetruth before any audience.
At first my father imagined that threats and blows would intimidate hismonitor. In this he was mistaken, and the detection of this mistakeimpressed him with an involuntary reverence for me, which set bounds tothose excesses which disdained any other control. Hence I derived newmotives for cherishing a life which was useful, in so many ways, to mymother.
My condition is now changed. I am no longer on that field to which thelaw, as well as reason, must acknowledge that I had some right, whilethere was any in my father. I must hazard my life, if need be, in thepursuit of the means of honest subsistence. I never spared myself whilein the service of Mr. Hadwin; and, at a more inclement season, shouldprobably have incurred some hazard by my diligence.
These were the motives of my _idleness_,--for my abstaining from thecommon toils of the farm passed by that name among my neighbours;though, in truth, my time was far from being wholly unoccupied by manualemployments, but these required less exertion of body or mind, or weremore connected with intellectual efforts. They were pursued in theseclusion of my chamber or the recesses of a wood. I did not labour toconceal them, but neither was I anxious to attract notice. It wassufficient that the censure of my neighbours was unmerited, to make meregard it with indifference.
I sought not the society of persons of my own age, not from sullen orunsociable habits, but merely because those around me were totallyunlike myself. Their tastes and occupations were incompatible with mine.In my few books, in my pen, in the vegetable and animal existencesaround me, I found companions who adapted their visits and intercourseto my convenience and caprice, and with whom I was never tired ofcommuning.
I was not unaware of the opinion which my neighbours had formed of mybeing improperly connected with Betty Lawrence. I am not sorry that Ifell into company with that girl. Her intercourse has instructed me inwhat some would think impossible to be attained by one who had neverhaunted the impure recesses of licentiousness in a city. The knowledgewhich a residence in this town for ten years gave her audacious andinquisitive spirit she imparted to me. Her character, profligate andartful, libidinous and impudent, and made up of the impressions which acity life had produced on her coarse but active mind, was open to mystudy, and I studied it.
I scarcely know how to repel the charge of illicit conduct, and todepict the exact species of intercourse subsisting between us. I alwaystreated her with freedom, and sometimes with gayety. I had no motives toreserve. I was so formed that a creature like her had no power over mysenses. That species of temptation adapted to entice me from the truepath was widely different from the artifices of Betty. There was nopoint at which it was possible for her to get possession of my fancy. Iwatched her while she practised all her tricks and blandishments, as Iregarded a similar deportment in the _animal salax ignavumque_ whoinhabits the sty. I made efforts to pursue my observationsunembarrassed; but my efforts were made, not to restrain desire, but tosuppress disgust. The difficulty lay, not in withholding my caresses,but in forbearing to repulse her with rage.
Decorum, indeed, was not outraged, and all limits were not oversteppedat once. Dubious advances were employed; but, when found unavailing,were displaced by more shameless and direct proceedings. She was toolittle versed in human nature to see that her last expedient was alwaysworse than the preceding; and that, in proportion as she lost sight ofdecency, she multiplied the obstacles to her success.
Betty had many enticements in person and air. She was ruddy, smooth, andplump. To these she added--I must not say what, for it is strange towhat lengths a woman destitute of modesty will sometimes go. But, allher artifices availing her not at all in the contest with myinsensibilities, she resorted to extremes which it would serve no goodpurpose to describe in this audience. They produced not the consequencesshe wished, but they produced another which was by no means displeasingto her. An incident one night occurred, from which a sagacious observerdeduced the existence of an intrigue. It was useless to attempt torectify his mistake by explaining appearances in a manner consistentwith my innocence. This mode of explication implied a _continence_ in mewhich he denied to be possible. The standard of possibilities,especially in vice and virtue, is fashioned by most men after their owncharacter. A temptation which this judge of human nature knew that _he_was unable to resist, he sagely concluded to be irresistible by anyother man, and quickly established the belief among my neighbours, thatthe woman who married the father had been prostituted to the son. ThoughI never admitted the truth of this aspersion, I believed it useless todeny, because no one would credit my denial, and because I had no powerto disprove it.