CHAPTER XVI.
On entering the old palmer’s apartment, they found him looking over some ancient papers, yellow and crabbedly written, and on one of them a large old seal, all of which he did up in a bundle and enclosed in a parchment cover, so that, before they were well in the room, the documents were removed from view.
“Those papers and parchments have a fine old yellow tint, Colcord,” said the Warden, “very satisfactory to an antiquary.”
“There is nothing in them,” said the old man, “of general interest. Some old papers they are, which came into my possession by inheritance, and some of them relating to the affairs of a friend of my youth;—a long past time, and a long past friend,” added he, sighing.
“Here is a new friend, at all events,” said the kindly Warden, wishing to cheer the old man, “who feels himself greatly indebted to you for your care.” [Endnote: 1.]
There now ensued a conversation between the three, in the course of which reference was made to America, and the Warden’s visit there.
“You are so mobile,” he said, “you change so speedily, that I suppose there are few external things now that I should recognize. The face of your country changes like one of your own sheets of water, under the influence of sun, cloud, and wind; but I suppose there is a depth below that is seldom effectually stirred. It is a great fault of the country that its sons find it impossible to feel any patriotism for it.”
“I do not by any means acknowledge that impossibility,” responded Redclyffe, with a smile. “I certainly feel that sentiment very strongly in my own breast, more especially since I have left America three thousand miles behind me.”
“Yes, it is only the feeling of self-assertion that rises against the self-complacency of the English,” said the Warden. “Nothing else; for what else have you become the subject of this noble weakness of patriotism? You cannot love anything beyond the soil of your own estate; or in your case, if your heart is very large, you may possibly take in, in a quiet sort of way, the whole of New England. What more is possible? How can you feel a heart’s love for a mere political arrangement, like your Union? How can you be loyal, where personal attachment—the lofty and noble and unselfish attachment of a subject to his prince—is out of the question? where your sovereign is felt to be a mere man like yourselves, whose petty struggles, whose ambition—mean before it grew to be audacious—you have watched, and know him to be just the same now as yesterday, and that to-morrow he will be walking unhonored amongst you again? Your system is too bare and meagre for human nature to love, or to endure it long. These stately degrees of society, that have so strong a hold upon us in England, are not to be done away with so lightly as you think. Your experiment is not yet a success by any means; and you will live to see it result otherwise than you think!”
“It is natural for you Englishmen to feel thus,” said Redclyffe; “although, ever since I set my foot on your shores,—forgive me, but you set me the example of free speech,—I have had a feeling of coming change among all that you look upon as so permanent, so everlasting; and though your thoughts dwell fondly on things as they are and have been, there is a deep destruction somewhere in this country, that is inevitably impelling it in the path of my own. But I care not for this. I do aver that I love my country, that I am proud of its institutions, that I have a feeling unknown, probably, to any but a republican, but which is the proudest thing in me, that there is no man above me,—for my ruler is only myself, in the person of another, whose office I impose upon him,—nor any below me. If you would understand me, I would tell you of the shame I felt when first, on setting foot in this country, I heard a man speaking of his birth as giving him privileges; saw him looking down on laboring men, as of an inferior race. And what I can never understand, is the pride which you positively seem to feel in having men and classes of men above you, born to privileges which you can never hope to share. It may be a thing to be endured, but surely not one to be absolutely proud of. And yet an Englishman is so.”
“Ah! I see we lack a ground to meet upon,” said the Warden. “We can never truly understand each other. What you have last mentioned is one of our inner mysteries. It is not a thing to be reasoned about, but to be felt,—to be born within one; and I uphold it to be a generous sentiment, and good for the human heart.”
“Forgive me, sir,” said Redclyffe, “but I would rather be the poorest and lowest man in America than have that sentiment.”
“But it might change your feeling, perhaps,” suggested the Warden, “if you were one of the privileged class.”
“I dare not say that it would not,” said Redclyffe, “for I know I have a thousand weaknesses, and have doubtless as many more that I never suspected myself of. But it seems to me at this moment impossible that I should ever have such an ambition, because I have a sense of meanness in not starting fair, in beginning the world with advantages that my fellows have not.”
“Really this is not wise,” said the Warden, bluntly, “How can the start in life be fair for all? Providence arranges it otherwise. Did you yourself,—a gentleman evidently by birth and education,—did you start fair in the race of life?”
Redclyffe remembered what his birth, or rather what his first recollected place had been, and reddened.
“In birth, certainly, I had no advantages,” said he, and would have explained further but was kept back by invincible reluctance; feeling that the bare fact of his origin in an almshouse would be accepted, while all the inward assurances and imaginations that had reconciled himself to the ugly fact would go for nothing. “But there were advantages, very early in life,” added he, smiling, “which perhaps I ought to have been ashamed to avail myself of.”
“An old cobwebby library,—an old dwelling by a graveyard,—an old Doctor, busied with his own fantasies, and entangled in his own cobwebs,—and a little girl for a playmate: these were things that you might lawfully avail yourself of,” said Colcord, unheard by the Warden, who, thinking the conversation had lasted long enough, had paid a slight passing courtesy to the old man, and was now leaving the room. “Do you remain here long?” he added.
“If the Warden’s hospitality holds out,” said the American, “I shall be glad; for the place interests me greatly.”
“No wonder,” replied Colcord.
“And wherefore no wonder?” said Redclyffe, impressed with the idea that there was something peculiar in the tone of the old man’s remark.
“Because,” returned the other quietly, “it must be to you especially interesting to see an institution of this kind, whereby one man’s benevolence or penitence is made to take the substance and durability of stone, and last for centuries; whereas, in America, the solemn decrees and resolutions of millions melt away like vapor, and everything shifts like the pomp of sunset clouds; though it may be as pompous as they. Heaven intended the past as a foundation for the present, to keep it from vibrating and being blown away with every breeze.”
“But,” said Redclyffe, “I would not see in my country what I see elsewhere,—the Past hanging like a mill-stone round a country’s neck, or encrusted in stony layers over the living form; so that, to all intents and purposes, it is dead.”
“Well,” said Colcord, “we are only talking of the Hospital. You will find no more interesting place anywhere. Stay amongst us; this is the very heart of England, and if you wish to know the fatherland,—the place whence you sprung,—this is the very spot!”
Again Redclyffe was struck with the impression that there was something marked, something individually addressed to himself, in the old man’s words; at any rate, it appealed to that primal imaginative vein in him which had so often, in his own country, allowed itself to dream over the possibilities of his birth. He knew that the feeling was a vague and idle one; but yet, just at this time, a convalescent, with a little play moment in what had heretofore been a turbulent life, he felt an inclination to follow out this dream, and let it sport with him, and by and by to awake to realities, refreshed by a season of unreality. At a firmer and stronger period of his life, though Redclyffe might have indulged his imagination with these dreams, yet he would not have let them interfere with his course of action; but having come hither in utter weariness of active life, it seemed just the thing for him to do,—just the fool’s paradise for him to be in.
“Yes,” repeated the old man, looking keenly in his face, “you will not leave us yet.”
Redclyffe returned through the quadrangle to the Warden’s house; and there were the brethren, sitting on benches, loitering in the sun, which, though warm for England, seemed scarcely enough to keep these old people warm, even with their cloth robes. They did not seem unhappy; nor yet happy; if they were so, it must be with the mere bliss of existence, a sleepy sense of comfort, and quiet dreaminess about things past, leaving out the things to come,—of which there was nothing, indeed, in their future, save one day after another, just like this, with loaf and ale, and such substantial comforts, and prayers, and idle days again, gathering by the great kitchen fire, and at last a day when they should not be there, but some other old men in their stead. And Redclyffe wondered whether, in the extremity of age, he himself would like to be one of the brethren of the Leopard’s Head. The old men, he was sorry to see, did not seem very genial towards one another; in fact, there appeared to be a secret enjoyment of one another’s infirmities, wherefore it was hard to tell, unless that each individual might fancy himself to possess an advantage over his fellow, which he mistook for a positive strength; and so there was sometimes a sardonic smile, when, on rising from his seat, the rheumatism was a little evident in an old fellow’s joints; or when the palsy shook another’s fingers so that he could barely fill his pipe; or when a cough, the gathered spasmodic trouble of thirty years, fairly convulsed another. Then, any two that happened to be sitting near one another looked into each other’s cold eyes, and whispered, or suggested merely by a look (for they were bright to such perceptions), “The old fellow will not outlast another winter.”
Methinks it is not good for old men to be much together. An old man is a beautiful object in his own place, in the midst of a circle of young people, going down in various gradations to infancy, and all looking up to the patriarch with filial reverence, keeping him warm by their own burning youth; giving him the freshness of their thought and feeling, with such natural influx that it seems as if it grew within his heart; while on them he reacts with an influence that sobers, tempers, keeps them down. His wisdom, very probably, is of no great account,—he cannot fit to any new state of things; but, nevertheless, it works its effect. In such a situation, the old man is kind and genial, mellow, more gentle and generous, and wider-minded than ever before. But if left to himself, or wholly to the society of his contemporaries, the ice gathers about his heart, his hope grows torpid, his love—having nothing of his own blood to develop it—grows cold; he becomes selfish, when he has nothing in the present or the future worth caring about in himself; so that, instead of a beautiful object, he is an ugly one, little, mean, and torpid. I suppose one chief reason to be, that unless he has his own race about him he doubts of anybody’s love, he feels himself a stranger in the world, and so becomes unamiable.
A very few days in the Warden’s hospitable mansion produced an excellent effect on Redclyffe’s frame; his constitution being naturally excellent, and a flow of cheerful spirits contributing much to restore him to health, especially as the abode in this old place, which would probably have been intolerably dull to most young Englishmen, had for this young American a charm like the freshness of Paradise. In truth it had that charm, and besides it another intangible, evanescent, perplexing charm, full of an airy enjoyment, as if he had been here before. What could it be? It could be only the old, very deepest, inherent nature, which the Englishman, his progenitor, carried over the sea with him, nearly two hundred years before, and which had lain buried all that time under heaps of new things, new customs, new institutions, new snows of winter, new layers of forest leaves, until it seemed dead, and was altogether forgotten as if it had never been; but, now, his return had seemed to dissolve or dig away all this incrustation, and the old English nature awoke all fresh, so that he saw the green grass, the hedgerows, the old structures and old manners, the old clouds, the old raindrops, with a recognition, and yet a newness. Redclyffe had never been so quietly happy as now. He had, as it were, the quietude of the old man about him, and the freshness of his own still youthful years.
The Warden was evidently very favorably impressed with his Transatlantic guest, and he seemed to be in a constant state of surprise to find an American so agreeable a kind of person.
“You are just like an Englishman,” he sometimes said. “Are you quite sure that you were not born on this side of the water?”
This is said to be the highest compliment that an Englishman can pay to an American; and doubtless he intends it as such. All the praise and good will that an Englishman ever awards to an American is so far gratifying to the recipient, that it is meant for him individually, and is not to be put down in the slightest degree to the score of any regard to his countrymen generally. So far from this, if an Englishman were to meet the whole thirty millions of Americans, and find each individual of them a pleasant, amiable, well-meaning, and well-mannered sort of fellow, he would acknowledge this honestly in each individual case, but still would speak of the whole nation as a disagreeable people.
As regards Redclyffe being precisely like an Englishman, we cannot but think that the good Warden was mistaken. No doubt, there was a common ground; the old progenitor (whose blood, moreover, was mixed with a hundred other streams equally English) was still there, under this young man’s shape, but with a vast difference. Climate, sun, cold, heat, soil, institutions, had made a change in him before he was born, and all the life that he had lived since (so unlike any that he could have lived in England) had developed it more strikingly. In manners, I cannot but think that he was better than the generality of Englishmen, and different from the highest-mannered men, though most resembling them. His natural sensitiveness, a tincture of reserve, had been counteracted by the frank mixture with men which his political course had made necessary; he was quicker to feel what was right at the moment, than the Englishman; more alive; he had a finer grain; his look was more aristocratic than that of a thousand Englishmen of good birth and breeding; he had a faculty of assimilating himself to new manners, which, being his most un-English trait, was what perhaps chiefly made the Warden think him so like an Englishman. When an Englishman is a gentleman, to be sure, it is as deep in him as the marrow of his bones, and the deeper you know him, the more you are aware of it, and that generation after generation has contributed to develop and perfect these unpretending manners, which, at first, may have failed to impress you, under his plain, almost homely exterior. An American often gets as good a surface of manners, in his own progress from youth, through the wear and attrition of a successful life, to some high station in middle age; whereas a plebeian Englishman, who rises to eminent station, never does credit to it by his manners. Often you would not know the American ambassador from a duke. This is often merely external; but in Redclyffe, having delicate original traits in his character, it was something more; and, we are bold to say, when our countrymen are developed, or any one class of them, as they ought to be, they will show finer traits than have yet been seen. We have more delicate and quicker sensibilities; nerves more easily impressed; and these are surely requisites for perfect manners; and, moreover, the courtesy that proceeds on the ground of perfect equality is better than that which is a gracious and benignant condescension,—as is the case with the manners of the aristocracy of England.
An American, be it said, seldom turns his best side outermost abroad; and an observer, who has had much opportunity of seeing the figure which they make, in a foreign country, does not so much wonder that there should be severe criticism on their manners as a people. I know not exactly why, but all our imputed peculiarities—our nasal pronunciation, our ungraceful idioms, our forthputtingness, our uncouth lack of courtesy—do really seem to exist on a foreign shore; and even, perhaps, to be heightened of malice prepense. The cold, unbelieving eye of Englishmen, expectant of solecisms in manners, contributes to produce the result which it looks for. Then the feeling of hostility and defiance in the American must be allowed for; and partly, too, the real existence of a different code of manners, founded on, and arising from, different institutions; and also certain national peculiarities, which may be intrinsically as good as English peculiarities; but being different, and yet the whole result being just too nearly alike, and, moreover, the English manners having the prestige of long establishment, and furthermore our own manners being in a transition state between those of old monarchies and what is proper to a new republic,—it necessarily followed that the American, though really a man of refinement and delicacy, is not just the kind of gentleman that the English can fully appreciate. In cases where they do so, their standard being different from ours, they do not always select for their approbation the kind of man or manners whom we should judge the best; we are perhaps apt to be a little too fine, a little too sedulously polished, and of course too conscious of it,—a deadly social crime, certainly.
CHAPTER XVII.
To return from this long discussion, the Warden took kindly, as we have said, to Redclyffe, and thought him a miraculously good fellow, to have come from the rude American republic. Hitherto, in the little time that he had been in England, Redclyffe had received civil and even kind treatment from the English with whom he had come casually in contact; but still—perhaps partly from our Yankee narrowness and reserve—he had felt, in the closest coming together, as if there were a naked sword between the Englishman and him, as between the Arabian prince in the tale and the princess whom he wedded; he felt as if that would be the case even if he should love an Englishwoman; to such a distance, into such an attitude of self-defence, does English self-complacency and belief in England’s superiority throw the stranger. In fact, in a good-natured way, John Bull is always doubling his fist in a stranger’s face, and though it be good-natured, it does not always produce the most amiable feeling.
The worthy Warden, being an Englishman, had doubtless the same kind of feeling; doubtless, too, he thought ours a poor, distracted country, perhaps prosperous for the moment, but as likely as not to be the scene of anarchy five minutes hence; but being of so genial a nature, when he came to see the amiableness of his young guest, and how deeply he was impressed with England, all prejudice died away, and he loved him like a treasure that he had found for himself, and valued him as if there were something of his own in him. And so the old Warden’s residence had never before been so cheery as it was now; his bachelor life passed the more pleasantly with this quiet, vivacious, yet not troublesomely restless spirit beside him,—this eager, almost childish interest in everything English, and yet this capacity to take independent views of things, and sometimes, it might be, to throw a gleam of light even on things appertaining to England. And so, the better they came to know one another, the greater was their mutual liking.
“I fear I am getting too strong to burden you much longer,” said Redclyffe, this morning. “I have no pretence to be a patient now.”
“Pooh! nonsense!” ejaculated the Warden. “It will not be safe to leave you to yourself for at least a month to come. And I have half a dozen excursions in a neighborhood of twenty miles, in which I mean to show you what old England is, in a way that you would never find out for yourself. Do not speak of going. This day, if you find yourself strong enough, you shall go and look at an old village church.”
“With all my heart,” said Redclyffe.
They went, accordingly, walking slowly, in consequence of Redclyffe’s yet imperfect strength, along the highroad, which was overshadowed with elms, that grew in beautiful shape and luxuriance in that part of England, not with the slender, drooping, picturesque grace of a New England elm, but more luxuriant, fuller of leaves, sturdier in limb. It was a day which the Warden called fine, and which Redclyffe, at home, would have thought to bode rain; though here he had learned that such weather might continue for weeks together, with only a few raindrops all the time. The road was in the finest condition, hard and dry.
They had not long emerged from the gateway of the Hospital,—at the venerable front and gables of which Redclyffe turned to look with a feeling as if it were his home,—when they heard the clatter of hoofs behind them, and a gentleman on horseback rode by, paying a courteous salute to the Warden as he passed. A groom in livery followed at a little distance, and both rode roundly towards the village, whither the Warden and his friend were going.
“Did you observe that man?” asked the Warden.
“Yes,” said Redclyffe. “Is he an Englishman?”
“That is a pertinent question,” replied the Warden, “but I scarcely know how to answer it.”
In truth, Redclyffe’s question had been suggested by the appearance of the mounted gentleman, who was a dark, thin man, with black hair, and a black moustache and pointed beard setting off his sallow face, in which the eyes had a certain pointed steeliness, which did not look English,—whose eyes, methinks, are usually not so hard as those of Americans or foreigners. Redclyffe, somehow or other, had fancied that these not very pleasant eyes had been fixed in a marked way on himself, a stranger, while at the same time his salute was evidently directed towards the Warden.
“An Englishman,—why, no,” continued the latter. “If you observe, he does not even sit his horse like an Englishman, but in that absurd, stiff continental way, as if a poker should get on horseback. Neither has he an English face, English manners, nor English religion, nor an English heart; nor, to sum up the whole, had he English birth. Nevertheless, as fate would have it, he is the inheritor of a good old English name, a fine patrimonial estate, and a very probable claim to an old English title. This is Lord Braithwaite of Braithwaite Hall, who if he can make his case good (and they say there is good prospect of it) will soon be Lord Hinchbrooke.”
“I hardly know why, but I should be sorry for it,” said Redclyffe. “He certainly is not English; and I have an odd sort of sympathy, which makes me unwilling that English honors should be enjoyed by foreigners. This, then, is the gentleman of Italian birth whom you have mentioned to me, and of whom there is a slight mention in the County History.”
“Yes,” said the Warden. “There have been three descents of this man’s branch in Italy, and only one English mother in all that time. Positively, I do not see an English trait in his face, and as little in his manner. His civility is Italian, such as oftentimes, among his countrymen, has offered a cup of poison to a guest, or insinuated the stab of a stiletto into his heart.”
“You are particularly bitter against this poor man,” said Redclyffe, laughing at the Warden’s vehemence. “His appearance—and yet he is a handsome man—is certainly not prepossessing; but unless it be countersigned by something in his actual life, I should hardly think it worth while to condemn him utterly.”
“Well, well; you can forgive a little English prejudice,” said the Warden, a little ashamed. “But, in good earnest, the man has few or no good traits, takes no interest in the country, dislikes our sky, our earth, our people, is close and inhospitable, a hard landlord, and whatever may be his good qualities, they are not such as flourish in this soil and climate, or can be appreciated here.” [Endnote: 1.]
“Has he children?” asked Redclyffe.
“They say so,—a family by an Italian wife, whom some, on the other hand, pronounce to be no wife at all. His son is at a Catholic college in France; his daughter in a convent there.”
In talk like this they were drawing near the little rustic village of Braithwaite, and saw, above a cloud of foliage, the small, low, battlemented tower, the gray stones of which had probably been laid a little after the Norman conquest. Approaching nearer, they passed a thatched cottage or two, very plain and simple edifices, though interesting to Redclyffe from their antique aspect, which denoted that they were probably older than the settlement of his own country, and might very likely have nursed children who had gone, more than two centuries ago, to found the commonwealth of which he was a citizen. If you considered them in one way, prosaically, they were ugly enough; but then there were the old latticed windows, and there the thatch, which was verdant with leek, and strange weeds, possessing a whole botanical growth. And birds flew in and out, as if they had their homes there. Then came a row of similar cottages, all joined on together, and each with a little garden before it divided from its neighbors by a hedge, now in full verdure. Redclyffe was glad to see some symptoms of natural love of beauty here, for there were plants of box, cut into queer shapes of birds, peacocks, etc., as if year after year had been spent in bringing these vegetable sculptures to perfection. In one of the gardens, moreover, the ingenious inhabitant had spent his leisure in building grotto-work, of which the English are rather ludicrously fond, on their little bits of lawn, and in building a miniature castle of oyster-shells, where were seen turrets, ramparts, a frowning arched gateway, and miniature cannon looking from the embrasures. A pleasanter and better adornment were the homely household flowers, and a pleasant sound, too, was the hum of bees, who had their home in several beehives, and were making their honey among the flowers of the garden, or come from afar, buzzing dreamily through the air, laden with honey that they had found elsewhere. Fruit trees stood erect, or, in some instances, were flattened out against the walls of cottages, looking somewhat like hawks nailed in terrorem against a barn door. The male members of this little community were probably afield, with the exception of one or two half-torpid great-grandsires, who [were] moving rheumatically about the gardens, and some children not yet in breeches, who stared with stolid eyes at the passers-by; but the good dames were busy within doors, where Redclyffe had glimpses of their interior with its pavement of stone flags. Altogether it seemed a comfortable settlement enough.
“Do you see that child yonder,” observed the Warden, “creeping away from the door, and displaying a vista of his petticoats as he does so? That sturdy boy is the lineal heir of one of the oldest families in this part of England,—though now decayed and fallen, as you may judge. So, you see, with all our contrivances to keep up an aristocracy, there still is change forever going on.”
“There is something not agreeable, and something otherwise, in the thought,” replied Redclyffe. “What is the name of the old family, whose representative is in such a case?”
“Moseby,” said the Warden. “Their family residence stood within three miles of Braithwaite Hall, but was taken down in the last century, and its place supplied by a grand show-place, built by a Birmingham manufacturer, who also originated here.”
They kept onward from this outskirt of the village, and soon, passing over a little rising ground, and descending now into a hollow came to the new portion of it, clustered around its gray Norman church, one side of the tower of which was covered with ivy, that was carefully kept, the Warden said, from climbing to the battlements, on account of some old prophecy that foretold that the tower would fall, if ever the ivy mantled over its top. Certainly, however, there seemed little likelihood that the square, low mass would fall, unless by external violence, in less than as many ages as it had already stood.
Redclyffe looked at the old tower and little adjoining edifice with an interest that attached itself to every separate, moss-grown stone; but the Warden, like most Englishmen, was at once amazed and wearied with the American’s enthusiasm for this spot, which to him was uninteresting for the very reason that made it most interesting to Redclyffe, because it had stood there such a weary while. It was too common an object to excite in his mind, as it did in Redclyffe’s, visions of the long ago time when it was founded, when mass was first said there, and the glimmer of torches at the altar was seen through the vista of that broad-browed porch; and of all the procession of villagers that had since gone in and come out during nine hundred years, in their varying costume and fashion, but yet—and this was the strongest and most thrilling part of the idea—all, the very oldest of them, bearing a resemblance of feature, the kindred, the family likeness, to those who died yesterday,—to those who still went thither to worship; and that all the grassy and half-obliterated graves around had held those who bore the same traits.
In front of the church was a little green, on which stood a very ancient yew tree, [Endnote: 2] all the heart of which seemed to have been eaten away by time, so that a man could now creep into the trunk, through a wide opening, and, looking upward, see another opening to the sky.
“That tree,” observed the Warden, “is well worth the notice of such an enthusiastic lover of old things; though I suppose aged trees may be the one antiquity that you do not value, having them by myriads in your primeval forests. But then the interest of this tree consists greatly in what your trees have not,—in its long connection with men and the goings of men. Some of its companions were made into bows for Harold’s archers. This tree is of unreckonable antiquity; so old, that in a record of the time of Edward IV. it is styled the yew tree of Braithwaite Green. That carries it back to Norman times, truly. It was in comparatively modern times when it served as a gallows for one of James II.‘s bloodthirsty judges to hang his victims on after Monmouth’s rebellion.”
On one side of this yew was a certain structure which Redclyffe did not recognize as anything that he had before seen, but soon guessed its purpose; though, from appearances, it seemed to have been very long since it had served that purpose. It was a ponderous old oaken framework, six or seven feet high, so contrived that a heavy cross-piece shut down over another, leaving two round holes; in short, it was a pair of stocks, in which, I suppose, hundreds of vagrants and petty criminals had sat of old, but which now appeared to be merely a matter of curiosity.
“This excellent old machine,” said the Warden, “had been lying in a rubbish chamber of the church tower for at least a century; when the clerk, who is a little of an antiquarian, unearthed it, and I advised him to set it here, where it used to stand;—not with any idea of its being used (though there is as much need of it now as ever), but that the present age may see what comforts it has lost.”
They sat down a few moments on the circular seat, and looked at the pretty scene of this quiet little village, clustered round the old church as a centre; a collection of houses, mostly thatched, though there were one or two, with rather more pretension, that had roofs of red tiles. Some of them were stone cottages, whitewashed, but the larger edifices had timber frames, filled in with brick and plaster, which seemed to have been renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less durable material than the old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled, with lattice windows, and picturesquely set off with projecting stones, and many little patchwork additions, such as, in the course of generations, the inhabitants had found themselves to need. There was not much commerce, apparently, in this little village, there seeming to be only one shop, with some gingerbread, penny whistles, ballads, and such matters, displayed in the window; and there, too, across the little green, opposite the church, was the village alehouse, with its bench under the low projecting eaves, with a Teniers scene of two wayfaring yeomen drinking a pot of beer and smoking their pipes.
With Redclyffe’s Yankee feelings, there was something sad to think how the generations had succeeded one another, over and over, in innumerable succession, in this little spot, being born here, living, dying, lying down among their fathers’ dust, and forthwith getting up again, as it were, and recommencing the same meaningless round, and really bringing nothing to pass; for probably the generation of to-day, in so secluded and motionless a place as this, had few or no ideas in advance of their ancestors of five centuries ago. It seems not worth while that more than one generation of them should have existed. Even in dress, with their smock frocks and breeches, they were just like their fathers. The stirring blood of the new land,—where no man dwells in his father’s house,—where no man thinks of dying in his birthplace,—awoke within him, and revolted at the thought; and, as connected with it, revolted at all the hereditary pretensions which, since his stay here, had exercised such an influence over the fanciful part of his nature. In another mood, the village might have seemed a picture of rural peace, which it would have been worth while to give up ambition to enjoy; now, as his warmer impulse stirred, it was a weariness to think of. The new American was stronger in him than the hereditary Englishman.
“I should go mad of it!” exclaimed he aloud.
He started up impulsively, to the amazement of his companion, who of course could not comprehend what seemed so to have stung his American friend. As they passed the tree, on the other side of its huge trunk, they saw a young woman, sitting on that side of it, and sketching, apparently, the church tower, with the old Elizabethan vicarage that stood near it, with a gate opening into the churchyard, and much embowered and ivy-hung.
“Ah, Miss Cheltenham,” said the Warden. “I am glad to see that you have taken the old church in hand, for it is one of the prettiest rustic churches in England, and as well worthy as any to be engraved on a sheet of note-paper or put into a portfolio. Will you let my friend and me see your sketch?”
The Warden had made his request with rather more freedom than perhaps he would to a lady whom he considered on a level with himself, though with perfect respect, that being considered; and Redclyffe, looking at the person, saw that it was the same of whose face he had had a glimpse in the looking-glass, in the old palmer’s chamber.
“No, Doctor Hammond,” said the young lady, with a respectful sort of frankness, “you must excuse me. I am no good artist, and am but jotting down the old church because I like it.”
“Well, well, as you please,” said the Warden; and whispered aside to Redclyffe, “A girl’s sketchbook is seldom worth looking at. But now, Miss Cheltenham, I am about to give my American friend here a lecture on gargoyles, and other peculiarities of sacred Gothic architecture; and if you will honor me with your attention, I should be glad to find my audience increased by one.”
So the young lady arose, and Redclyffe, considering the Warden’s allusion to him as a sort of partial introduction, bowed to her, and she responded with a cold, reserved, yet not unpleasant sort of courtesy. They went towards the church porch, and, looking in at the old stone bench on each side of the interior, the Warden showed them the hacks of the swords of the Roundheads, when they took it by storm. Redclyffe, mindful of the old graveyard on the edge of which he had spent his childhood, began to look at this far more antique receptacle, expecting to find there many ancient tombstones, perhaps of contemporaries or predecessors of the founders of his country. In this, however, he was disappointed, at least in a great measure; for the persons buried in the churchyard were probably, for the most part, of a humble rank in life, such as were not so ambitious as to desire a monument of any kind, but were content to let their low earth-mounds subside into the level, where their memory had waxed so faint that none among the survivors could point out the spot, or cared any longer about knowing it; while in other cases, where a monument of red freestone, or even of hewn granite, had been erected, the English climate had forthwith set to work to gnaw away the inscriptions; so that in fifty years—in a time that would have left an American tombstone as fresh as if just cut—it was quite impossible to make out the record. Their superiors, meanwhile, were sleeping less enviably in dismal mouldy and dusty vaults, instead of under the daisies. Thus Redclyffe really found less antiquity here, than in the graveyard which might almost be called his natal spot.
When he said something to this effect, the Warden nodded.
“Yes,” said he, “and, in truth, we have not much need of inscriptions for these poor people. All good families—every one almost, with any pretensions to respectable station, has his family or individual recognition within the church, or upon its walls; or some of them you see on tombs on the outside. As for our poorer friends here, they are content, as they may well be, to swell and subside, like little billows of mortality, here on the outside.”
“And for my part,” said Redclyffe, “if there were anything particularly desirable on either side, I should like best to sleep under this lovely green turf, with the daisies strewn over me by Nature herself, and whatever other homely flowers any friend might choose to add.”
“And, Doctor Hammond,” said the young woman, “we see by this gravestone that sometimes a person of humble rank may happen to be commemorated, and that Nature—in this instance at least—seems to take especial pains and pleasure to preserve the record.”
She indicated a flat gravestone, near the porch, which time had indeed beautified in a singular way, for there was cut deep into it a name and date, in old English characters, very deep it must originally have been; and as if in despair of obliterating it, Time had taken the kindlier method of filling up the letters with moss; so that now, high embossed in loveliest green, was seen the name “Richard Oglethorpe 1613”;—green, and flourishing, and beautiful, like the memory of a good man. The inscription originally seemed to have contained some twenty lines, which might have been poetry, or perhaps a prose eulogy, or perhaps the simple record of the buried person’s life; but all this, having been done in fainter and smaller letters, was now so far worn away as to be illegible; nor had they ever been deep enough to be made living in moss, like the rest of the inscription.
“How tantalizing,” remarked Redclyffe, “to see the verdant shine of this name, impressed upon us as something remarkable—and nothing else. I cannot but think that there must be something worth remembering about a man thus distinguished. When two hundred years have taken all these natural pains to illustrate and emblazon ‘Richard Oglethorpe 1613.’ Ha! I surely recollect that name. It haunts me somehow, as if it had been familiar of old.”
“And me,” said the young lady.
“It was an old name, hereabouts,” observed the Warden, “but has been long extinct,—a cottage name, not a gentleman’s. I doubt not that Oglethorpes sleep in many of these undistinguished graves.”
Redclyffe did not much attend to what his friend said, his attention being attracted to the tone—to something in the tone of the young lady, and also to her coincidence in his remark that the name appealed to some early recollection. He had been taxing his memory, to tell him when and how the name had become familiar to him; and he now remembered that it had occurred in the old Doctor’s story of the Bloody Footstep, told to him and Elsie, so long ago. [Endnote: 3] To him and Elsie! It struck him—what if it were possible?—but he knew it was not—that the young lady had a remembrance also of the fact, and that she, after so many years, were mingling her thoughts with his. As this fancy recurred to him, he endeavored to get a glimpse of her face, and while he did so she turned it upon him. It was a quick, sensitive face, that did not seem altogether English; he would rather have imagined it American; but at all events he could not recognize it as one that he had seen before, and a thousand fantasies died within him as, in his momentary glance, he took in the volume of its contour.
CHAPTER XVIII.
After the two friends had parted from the young lady, they passed through the village, and entered the park gate of Braithwaite Hall, pursuing a winding road through its beautiful scenery, which realized all that Redclyffe had read or dreamed about the perfect beauty of these sylvan creations, with the clumps of trees, or sylvan oaks, picturesquely disposed. To heighten the charm, they saw a herd of deer reposing, who, on their appearance, rose from their recumbent position, and began to gaze warily at the strangers; then, tossing their horns, they set off on a stampede, but only swept round, and settled down not far from where they were. Redclyffe looked with great interest at these deer, who were at once wild and civilized; retaining a kind of free forest citizenship, while yet they were in some sense subject to man. It seemed as if they were a link between wild nature and tame; as if they could look back, in their long recollections, through a vista, into the times when England’s forests were as wild as those of America, though now they were but a degree more removed from domesticity than cattle, and took their food in winter from the hand of man, and in summer reposed upon his lawns. This seemed the last touch of that delightful conquered and regulated wildness, which English art has laid upon the whole growth of English nature, animal or vegetable.
“There is nothing really wild in your whole island,” he observed to the Warden. “I have a sensation as if somebody knew, and had cultivated and fostered, and set out in its proper place, every tree that grows; as if somebody had patted the heads of your wildest animals and played with them. It is very delightful to me, for the present; and yet, I think, in the course of time, I should feel the need for something genuine, as it were,—something that had not the touch and breath of man upon it. I suppose even your skies are modified by the modes of human life that are going on beneath it. London skies, of course, are so; but the breath of a great people, to say nothing of its furnace vapors and hearth-smokes, make the sky other than it was a thousand years ago.”
“I believe we English have a feeling like this occasionally,” replied the Warden, “and it is from that, partly, that we must account for our adventurousness into other regions, especially for our interest in what is wild and new. In your own forests, now, and prairies, I fancy we find a charm that Americans do not. In the sea, too, and therefore we are yachters. For my part, however, I have grown to like Nature a little smoothed down, and enriched; less gaunt and wolfish than she would be if left to herself.”
“Yes; I feel that charm too,” said Redclyffe. “But yet life would be slow and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks.”
Continuing their course through the noble clumps of oaks, they by and by had a vista of the distant hall itself. It was one of the old English timber and plaster houses, many of which are of unknown antiquity; as was the case with a portion of this house, although other portions had been renewed, repaired, or added, within a century. It had, originally, the Warden said, stood all round an enclosed courtyard, like the great houses of the Continent; but now one side of the quadrangle had long been removed, and there was only a front, with two wings; the beams of old oak being picked out with black, and three or four gables in a line forming the front, while the wings seemed to be stone. It was the timber portion that was most ancient. A clock was on the midmost gable, and pointed now towards one o’clock. The whole scene impressed Redclyffe, not as striking, but as an abode of ancient peace, where generation after generation of the same family had lived, each making the most of life, because the life of each successive dweller there was eked out with the lives of all who had hitherto lived there, and had in it equally those lives which were to come afterwards; so that there was a rare and successful contrivance for giving length, fulness, body, substance, to this thin and frail matter of human life. And, as life was so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there made the most of it for the present and future, each generation contriving what it could to add to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave, solid respectability, the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they seemed to be connected both before and after death. The family had its home there; not merely the individual. Ancient shapes, that had apparently gone to the family tomb, had yet a right by family hearth and in family hall; nor did they come thither cold and shivering, and diffusing dim ghostly terrors, and repulsive shrinkings, and death in life; but in warm, genial attributes, making this life now passing more dense as it were, by adding all the substance of their own to it. Redclyffe could not compare this abode, and the feelings that it aroused, to the houses of his own country; poor tents of a day, inns of a night, where nothing was certain, save that the family of him who built it would not dwell here, even if he himself should have the bliss to die under the roof, which, with absurdest anticipations, he had built for his posterity. Posterity! An American can have none.
“All this sort of thing is beautiful; the family institution was beautiful in its day,” ejaculated he, aloud, to himself, not to his companion; “but it is a thing of the past. It is dying out in England; and as for ourselves, we never had it. Something better will come up; but as for this, it is past.”
“That is a sad thing to say,” observed the Warden, by no means comprehending what was passing in his friend’s mind. “But if you wish to view the interior of the Hall, we will go thither; for, harshly as I have spoken of the owner, I suppose he has English feeling enough to give us lunch and show us the old house of his forefathers.”
“Not at present, if you please,” replied Redclyffe. “I am afraid of destroying my delightful visionary idea of the house by coming too near it. Before I leave this part of the country, I should be glad to ramble over the whole of it, but not just now.”
While Redclyffe was still enjoying the frank hospitality of his new friend, a rather marked event occurred in his life; yet not so important in reality as it seemed to his English friend.
A large letter was delivered to him, bearing the official seal of the United States, and the indorsement of the State Department; a very important-looking document, which could not but add to the importance of the recipient in the eyes of any Englishman, accustomed as they are to bow down before any seal of government. Redclyffe opened it rather coolly, being rather loath to renew any of his political remembrances, now that he was in peace; or to think of the turmoil of modern and democratic politics, here in this quietude of gone-by ages and customs. The contents, however, took him by surprise; nor did he know whether to be pleased or not.
The official package, in short, contained an announcement that he had been appointed by the President, by and with the advice of the Senate, to one of the Continental missions, usually esteemed an object of considerable ambition to any young man in politics; so that, if consistent with his own pleasure, he was now one of the Diplomatic Corps, a Minister, and representative of his country. On first considering the matter, Redclyffe was inclined to doubt whether this honor had been obtained for him altogether by friendly aid, though it did happen to have much in it that might suit his half-formed purpose of remaining long abroad; but with an eye already rendered somewhat oblique by political practice, he suspected that a political rival—a rival, though of his own party—had been exerting himself to provide an inducement for Redclyffe to leave the local field to him; while he himself should take advantage of the vacant field, and his rival be thus insidiously, though honorably, laid on the shelf, whence if he should try to remove himself a few years hence the shifting influences of American politics would be likely enough to thwart him; so that, for the sake of being a few years nominally somebody, he might in fine come back to his own country and find himself permanently nobody. But Redclyffe had already sufficiently begun to suspect that he lacked some qualities that a politician ought to have, and without which a political life, whether successful or otherwise, is sure to be a most irksome one: some qualities he lacked, others he had, both almost equally an obstacle. When he communicated the offer, therefore, to his friend, the Warden, it was with the remark that he believed he should accept it.
“Accept it?” cried the Warden, opening his eyes. “I should think so, indeed! Why, it puts you above the level of the highest nobility of the Court to which you are accredited; simple republican as you are, it gives you rank with the old blood and birth of Europe. Accept it? By all means; and I will come and see you at your court.”
“Nothing is more different between England and America,” said Redclyffe, “than the different way in which the citizen of either country looks at official station. To an Englishman, a commission, of whatever kind, emanating from his sovereign, brings apparently a gratifying sense of honor; to an American, on the contrary, it offers really nothing of the kind. He ceases to be a sovereign,—an atom of sovereignty, at all events,—and stoops to be a servant. If I accept this mission, honorable as you think it, I assure you I shall not feel myself quite the man I have hitherto been; although there is no obstacle in the way of party obligations or connections to my taking it, if I please.”
“I do not well understand this,” quoth the good Warden. “It is one of the promises of Scripture to the wise man, that he shall stand before kings, and that this embassy will enable you to do. No man—no man of your country surely—is more worthy to do so; so pray accept.”
“I think I shall,” said Redclyffe.
Much as the Warden had seemed to affectionize Redclyffe hitherto, the latter could not but be sensible, thereafter, of a certain deference in his friend towards him, which he would fain have got rid of, had it been in his power. However, there was still the same heartiness under it all; and after a little he seemed, in some degree, to take Redclyffe’s own view of the matter;—namely, that, being so temporary as these republican distinctions are, they really do not go skin deep, have no reality in them, and that the sterling quality of the man, be it higher or lower, is nowise altered by it;—an apothegm that is true even of an hereditary nobility, and still more so of our own Honorables and Excellencies. However, the good Warden was glad of his friend’s dignity, and perhaps, too, a little glad that this high fortune had befallen one whom he chanced to be entertaining under his roof. As it happened, there was an opportunity which might be taken advantage of to celebrate the occasion; at least, to make it known to the English world so far as the extent of the county. [Endnote: 1.]
It was an hereditary custom for the warden of Braithwaite Hospital, once a year, to give a grand dinner to the nobility and gentry of the neighborhood; and to this end a bequest had been made by one of the former squires or lords of Braithwaite which would of itself suffice to feed forty or fifty Englishmen with reasonable sumptuousness. The present Warden, being a gentleman of private fortune, was accustomed to eke the limited income, devoted for this purpose, with such additions from his own resources as brought the rude and hearty hospitality contemplated by the first founder on a par with modern refinements of gourmandism. The banquet was annually given in the fine old hall where James II. had feasted; and on some of these occasions the Warden’s table had been honored with illustrious guests; especially when any of them happened to be wanting an opportunity to come before the public in an after-dinner speech. Just at present there was no occasion of that sort; and the good Warden fancied that he might give considerable éclat to his hereditary feast by bringing forward the young American envoy, a distinguished and eloquent man, to speak on the well-worn topic of the necessity of friendly relations between England and America.
“You are eloquent, I doubt not, my young friend?” inquired he.
“Why, no,” answered Redclyffe, modestly.
“Ah, yes, I know it,” returned the Warden. “If one have all the natural prerequisites of eloquence; a quick sensibility, ready thought, apt expression, a good voice—and not making its way into the world through your nose either, as they say most of your countrymen’s voices do. You shall make the crack speech at my dinner; and so strengthen the bonds of good fellowship between our two countries, that there shall be no question of war for at least six months to come.”
Accordingly, the preparations for this stately banquet went on with great spirit; and the Warden exhorted Redclyffe to be thinking of some good topics for his international speech; but the young man laughed it off, and told his friend that he thought the inspiration of the moment, aided by the good old wine which the Warden had told him of, as among the treasures of the Hospital, would perhaps serve him better than any elaborate preparation.
Redclyffe, being not even yet strong, used to spend much time, when the day chanced to be pleasant, (which was oftener than his preconceptions of English weather led him to expect,) in the garden behind the Warden’s house. It was an extensive one, and apparently as antique as the foundation of the establishment; and during all these years it had probably been growing richer and richer. Here were flowers of ancient race, and some that had been merely field or wayside flowers when first they came into the garden; but by long cultivation and hereditary care, instead of dying out, they had acquired a new richness and beauty, so that you would scarcely recognize the daisy or the violet. Roses too, there were, which Doctor Hammond said had been taken from those white and red rose-trees in the Temple Gardens, whence the partisans of York and Lancaster had plucked their fatal badges. With these, there were all the modern and far-fetched flowers from America, the East, and elsewhere; even the prairie flowers and the California blossoms were represented here; for one of the brethren had horticultural tastes, and was permitted freely to exercise them there. The antique character of the garden was preserved, likewise, by the alleys of box, a part of which had been suffered to remain, and was now grown to a great height and density, so as to make impervious green walls. There were also yew trees clipped into strange shapes of bird and beast, and uncouth heraldic figures, among which of course the leopard’s head grinned triumphant; and as for fruit, the high garden wall was lined with pear trees, spread out flat against it, where they managed to produce a cold, flavorless fruit, a good deal akin to cucumbers.
Here, in these genial old arbors, Redclyffe used to recline in the sweet, mild summer weather, basking in the sun, which was seldom too warm to make its full embrace uncomfortable; and it seemed to him, with its fertility, with its marks everywhere of the quiet long-bestowed care of man, the sweetest and cosiest seclusion he had ever known; and two or three times a day, when he heard the screech of the railway train, rushing on towards distant London, it impressed him still more with a sense of safe repose here.
Not unfrequently he here met the white-bearded palmer in whose chamber he had found himself, as if conveyed thither by enchantment, when he first came to the Hospital. The old man was not by any means of the garrulous order; and yet he seemed full of thoughts, full of reminiscences, and not disinclined to the company of Redclyffe. In fact, the latter sometimes flattered himself that a tendency for his society was one of the motives that brought him to the garden; though the amount of their intercourse, after all, was not so great as to warrant the idea of any settled purpose in so doing. Nevertheless, they talked considerably; and Redclyffe could easily see that the old man had been an extensive traveller, and had perhaps occupied situations far different from his present one, and had perhaps been a struggler in troubled waters before he was drifted into the retirement where Redclyffe found him. He was fond of talking about the unsuspected relationship that must now be existing between many families in England and unknown consanguinity in the new world, where, perhaps, really the main stock of the family tree was now existing, and with a new spirit and life, which the representative growth here in England had lost by too long continuance in one air and one mode of life. For history and observation proved that all people—and the English people by no means less than others—needed to be transplanted, or somehow renewed, every few generations; so that, according to this ancient philosopher’s theory, it would be good for the whole people of England now, if it could at once be transported to America, where its fatness, its sleepiness, its too great beefiness, its preponderant animal character, would be rectified by a different air and soil; and equally good, on the other hand, for the whole American people to be transplanted back to the original island, where their nervousness might be weighted with heavier influences, where their little women might grow bigger, where their thin, dry men might get a burden of flesh and good stomachs, where their children might, with the air, draw in a reverence for age, forms, and usage.
Redclyffe listened with complacency to these speculations, smiling at the thought of such an exodus as would take place, and the reciprocal dissatisfaction which would probably be the result. But he had greater pleasure in drawing out some of the old gentleman’s legendary lore, some of which, whether true or not, was very curious. [Endnote: 2.]
As Redclyffe sat one day watching the old man in the garden, he could not help being struck by the scrupulous care with which he attended to the plants; it seemed to him that there was a sense of justice,—of desiring to do exactly what was right in the matter, not favoring one plant more than another, and doing all he could for each. His progress, in consequence, was so slow, that in an hour, while Redclyffe was off and on looking at him, he had scarcely done anything perceptible. Then he was so minute; and often, when he was on the point of leaving one thing to take up another, some small neglect that he saw or fancied called him back again, to spend other minutes on the same task. He was so full of scruples. It struck Redclyffe that this was conscience, morbid, sick, a despot in trifles, looking so closely into life that it permitted nothing to be done. The man might once have been strong and able, but by some unhealthy process of his life he had ceased to be so now. Nor did any happy or satisfactory result appear to come from these painfully wrought efforts; he still seemed to know that he had left something undone in doing too much in another direction. Here was a lily that had been neglected, while he paid too much attention to a rose; he had set his foot on a violet; he had grubbed up, in his haste, a little plant that he mistook for a weed, but that he now suspected was an herb of grace. Grieved by such reflections as these, he heaved a deep sigh, almost amounting to a groan, and sat down on the little stool that he carried with him in his weeding, resting his face in his hands.
Redclyffe deemed that he might be doing the old man a good service by interrupting his melancholy labors; so he emerged from the opposite door of the summer-house, and came along the adjoining walk with somewhat heavy footsteps, in order that the palmer might have warning of his approach without any grounds to suppose that he had been watched hitherto. Accordingly, when he turned into the other alley, he found the old man sitting erect on his stool, looking composed, but still sad, as was his general custom.
“After all your wanderings and experience,” said he, “I observe that you come back to the original occupation of cultivating a garden,—the innocentest of all.”
“Yes, so it would seem,” said the old man; “but somehow or other I do not find peace in this.”
“These plants and shrubs,” returned Redclyffe, “seem at all events to recognize the goodness of your rule, so far as it has extended over them. See how joyfully they take the sun; how clear [they are] from all these vices that lie scattered round, in the shape of weeds. It is a lovely sight, and I could almost fancy a quiet enjoyment in the plants themselves, which they have no way of making us aware of, except by giving out a fragrance.”
“Ah! how infinitely would that idea increase man’s responsibility,” said the old palmer, “if, besides man and beast, we should find it necessary to believe that there is also another set of beings dependent for their happiness on our doing, or leaving undone, what might have effect on them!”
“I question,” said Redclyffe, smiling, “whether their pleasurable or painful experiences can be so keen, that we need trouble our consciences much with regard to what we do, merely as it affects them. So highly cultivated a conscience as that would be a nuisance to one’s self and one’s fellows.”
“You say a terrible thing,” rejoined the old man. “Can conscience be too much alive in us? is not everything however trifling it seems, an item in the great account, which it is of infinite importance therefore to have right? A terrible thing is that you have said.”
“That may be,” said Redclyffe; “but it is none the less certain to me, that the efficient actors—those who mould the world—are the persons in whom something else is developed more strongly than conscience. There must be an invincible determination to effect something; it may be set to work in the right direction, but after that it must go onward, trampling down small obstacles—small considerations of right and wrong—as a great rock, thundering down a hillside, crushes a thousand sweet flowers, and ploughs deep furrows in the innocent hillside.”
As Redclyffe gave vent to this doctrine, which was not naturally his, but which had been the inculcation of a life, hitherto devoted to politics, he was surprised to find how strongly sensible he became of the ugliness and indefensibleness of what he said. He felt as if he were speaking under the eye of Omniscience, and as if every word he said were weighed, and its emptiness detected, by an unfailing intelligence. He had thought that he had volumes to say about the necessity of consenting not to do right in all matters minutely, for the sake of getting out an available and valuable right as the whole; but there was something that seemed to tie his tongue. Could it be the quiet gaze of this old man, so unpretending, so humble, so simple in aspect? He could not tell, only that he faltered, and finally left his speech in the midst.
But he was surprised to find how he had to struggle against a certain repulsion within himself to the old man. He seemed so nonsensical, interfering with everybody’s right in the world; so mischievous, standing there and shutting out the possibility of action. It seemed well to trample him down; to put him out of the way—no matter how—somehow. It gave him, he thought, an inkling of the way in which this poor old man had made himself odious to his kind, by opposing himself, inevitably, to what was bad in man, chiding it by his very presence, accepting nothing false. You must either love him utterly, or hate him utterly; for he could not let you alone. Redclyffe, being a susceptible man, felt this influence in the strongest way; for it was as if there was a battle within him, one party pulling, wrenching him towards the old man, another wrenching him away, so that, by the agony of the contest, he felt disposed to end it by taking flight, and never seeing the strange individual again. He could well enough conceive how a brutal nature, if capable of receiving his influence at all, might find it so intolerable that it must needs get rid of him by violence,—by taking his blood if necessary.
All these feelings were but transitory, however; they swept across him like a wind, and then he looked again at the old man and saw only his simplicity, his unworldliness,—saw little more than the worn and feeble individual in the Hospital garb, leaning on his staff; and then turning again with a gentle sigh to weed in the garden. And then Redclyffe went away, in a state of disturbance for which he could not account to himself.