The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Complete

Mr. Speck (in an affected tone).—“I respond to the sentiment in a flowing cup. Glasses are not forthcoming.”

Uncle Jack.—“A bumper-toast to the health of the future millionnaire whom I present to you in my nephew and sole heir,—Pisistratus Caxton, Esq. Yes, gentlemen, I here publicly announce to you that this gentleman will be the inheritor of all my wealth,—freehold, leasehold, agricultural, and mineral; and when I am in the cold grave [takes out his pocket-handkerchief], and nothing remains of poor John Tibbets, look upon that gentleman and say, ‘John Tibbets lives again!’”

Mr. Speck (chantingly),—

“‘Let the bumper-toast go round.’”

Guy Bolding.—“Hip, hip, hurrah!—three times three! What fun!”

Order is restored; dinner-things are cleared; each gentleman lights his pipe.

Vivian.—“What news from England?”

Mr. Bullion.—“As to the Funds, sir?”

Mr. Speck.—“I suppose you mean rather as to the railways. Great fortunes will be made there, sir; but still I think that our speculations here will—”

Vivian.—“I beg pardon for interrupting you, sir, but I thought, in the last papers, that there seemed something hostile in the temper of the French. No chance of a war?”

Major MacBlarney.—“Is it the wars you’d be after, young gentleman? If me interest at the Horse Guards can avail you, bedad! you’d make a proud man of Major MacBlarney.”

Mr. Bullion (authoritatively).—“No, sir, we won’t have a war; the capitalists of Europe and Australia won’t have it. The Rothschilds and a few others that shall be nameless have only got to do this, sir [Mr. Bullion buttons up his pockets],—and we’ll do it, too; and then what becomes of your war, Sir?” (Mr. Bullion snaps his pipe in the vehemence with which he brings his hand on the table, turns round the green spectacles, and takes up Mr. Speck’s pipe, which that gentleman had laid aside in an unguarded moment.)

Vivian.—“But the campaign in India?”

Major MacBlarney.—“Oh! and if it’s the Ingees you’d—”

Mr. Bullion (refilling Speck’s pipe from Guy Bolding’s exclusive tobacco-pouch, and interrupting the Major).—“India,—that’s another matter; I don’t object to that. War there,—rather good for the money market than otherwise.”

Vivian.—“What news there, then?”

Mr. Bullion.—“Don’t know; have n’t got India stock.”

Mr. Speck.—“Nor I either. The day for India is over, this is our India now.” (Misses his tobacco-pipe; sees it in Bullion’s mouth, and stares aghast. N. B. The pipe is not a clay dudeen, but a small meerschaum.—irreplaceable in Bushland.)

Pisistratus.—“Well, uncle, but I am at a loss to understand what new scheme you have in hand. Something benevolent, I am sure; something for your fellow-creatures,—for philanthropy and mankind?”

Mr. Bullion (starting).—“Why, young man, are you as green as all that?”

Pisistratus.—“I, sir? No; Heaven forbid! But my—” (Uncle Jack holds up his forefinger imploringly, and spills his tea over the pantaloons of his nephew!)

Pisistratus, wroth at the effect of the tea, and therefore obdurate to the sign of the forefinger, continues rapidly, “But my uncle is! Some Grand National-Imperial-Colonial-Anti-Monopoly—”

Uncle Jack.—“Pooh! pooh! What a droll boy it is!”

Mr. Bullion (solemnly).—“With these notions, which not even in jest should be fathered on my respectable and intelligent friend here [Uncle Jack bows], I am afraid you will never get on in the world, Mr. Caxton. I don’t think our speculations will suit you! It is growing late, gentlemen; we must push on.”

Uncle Jack (jumping up).—“And I have so much to say to the dear boy. Excuse us,—you know the feelings of an uncle.” (Takes my arm and leads me out of the hut.)

Uncle Jack (as soon as we are in the air).—“You’ll ruin us—you, me, and your father and mother. Yes! What do you think I work and slave myself for but for you and yours? Ruin us all. I say, if you talk in that way before Bullion! His heart is as hard as the Bank of England’s,—and quite right he is too. Fellow-creatures,—stuff! I have renounced that delusion,—the generous follies of my youth! I begin at last to live for myself,—that is, for self and relatives. I shall succeed this time, you’ll see!”

Pisistratus.—“Indeed, uncle, I hope so sincerely; and, to do you justice, there is always something very clever in your ideas, only they don’t—”

Uncle Jack (interrupting me with a groan). “The fortunes that other men have gained by my ideas,—shocking to think of! What! and shall I be reproached if I live no longer for such a set of thieving, greedy, ungrateful knaves? No, no! Number One shall be my maxim; and I’ll make you a Croesus, my boy, I will.”

Pisistratus, after grateful acknowledgments for all prospective benefits, inquires how long Jack has been in Australia; what brought him into the colony; and what are his present views. Learns, to his astonishment, that Uncle Jack has been four years in the colony; that he sailed the year after Pisistratus,—induced, he says, by that illustrious example and by some mysterious agency or commission, which he will not explain, emanating either from the Colonial Office or an Emigration Company. Uncle Jack has been thriving wonderfully since he abandoned his fellow-creatures. His first speculation, on arriving at the colony, was in buying some houses in Sydney, which (by those fluctuations in prices common to the extremes of the colonial mind, which is one while skipping up the rainbow with Hope, and at another plunging into Acherontian abysses with Despair) he bought excessively cheap, and sold excessively dear. But his grand experiment has been in connection with the infant settlement of Adelaide, of which he considers himself one of the first founders; and as, in the rush of emigration which poured to that favored establishment in the earlier years of its existence,—rolling on its tide all manner of credulous and inexperienced adventurers, vast sums were lost, so of those sums certain fragments and pickings were easily gripped and gathered up by a man of Uncle Jack’s readiness and dexterity. Uncle Jack had contrived to procure excellent letters of introduction to the colonial grandees; he got into close connection with some of the principal parties seeking to establish a monopoly of land (which has since been in great measure effected, by raising the price, and excluding the small fry of petty capitalists); and effectually imposed on them as a man with a vast knowledge of public business, in the confidence of great men at home, considerable influence with the English press, etc. And no discredit to their discernment; for Jack, when he pleased, had a way with him that was almost irresistible. In this manner he contrived to associate himself and his earnings with men really of large capital and long practical experience in the best mode by which that capital might be employed. He was thus admitted into partnership (so far as his means went) with Mr. Bullion, who was one of the largest sheep-owners and land-holders in the colony,—though, having many other nests to feather, that gentleman resided in state at Sydney, and left his runs and stations to the care of overseers and superintendents. But land-jobbing was Jack’s special delight; and an ingenious German having lately declared that the neighborhood of Adelaide betrayed the existence of those mineral treasures which have since been brought to day, Mr. Tibbets had persuaded Bullion and the other gentlemen now accompanying him to undertake the land journey from Sydney to Adelaide, privily and quietly, to ascertain the truth of the German’s report, which was at present very little believed. If the ground failed of mines, Uncle Jack’s account convinced his associates that mines quite as profitable might be found in the pockets of the raw adventurers who were ready to buy one year at the dearest market, and driven to sell the next at the cheapest.

“But,” concluded Uncle Jack, with a sly look, and giving me a poke in the ribs, “I’ve had to do with mines before now, and know what they are. I’ll let nobody but you into my pet scheme; you shall go shares if you like. The scheme is as plain as a problem in Euclid: if the German is right, and there are mines, why, the mines will be worked. Then miners must be employed; but miners must eat, drink, and spend their money. The thing is to get that money. Do you take?”

Pisistratus.—“Not at all!”

Uncle Jack (majestically).—“A Great Grog and Store Depot! The miners want grog and stores; come to your depot; you take their money; Q. E. D.! Shares,—eh, you dog? Cribs, as we said at school. Put in a paltry thousand or two, and you shall go halves.”

Pisistratus (vehemently).—“Not for all the mines of Potosi.”

Uncle Jack (good-humoredly).—“Well, it sha’n’t be the worse for you. I sha’n’t alter my will, in spite of your want of confidence. Your young friend,—that Mr. Vivian, I think you call him: intelligent-looking fellow; sharper than the other, I guess,—would he like a share?”

Pisistratus.—“In the grog depot? You had better ask him!”

Uncle Jack.—“What! you pretend to be aristocratic in the Bush? Too good. Ha, ha—they’re calling to me; we must be off.”

Pisistratus.—“I will ride with you a few miles. What say you, Vivian? and you, Guy?” (As the whole party now joined us.)

Guy prefers basking in the sun and reading the “Lives of the Poets.” Vivian assents; we accompany the party till sunset. Major MacBlarney prodigalizes his offers of service in every conceivable department of life, and winds up with an assurance that if we want anything in those departments connected with engineering,—such as mining, mapping, surveying, etc.,—he will serve us, bedad, for nothing, or next to it. We suspect Major MacBlarney to be a civil engineer suffering under the innocent hallucination that he has been in the army.

Mr. Speck lets out to me, in a confidential whisper, that Mr. Bullion is monstrous rich, and has made his fortune from small beginnings, by never letting a good thing go. I think of Uncle Jack’s pickled onion and Mr. Speck’s meerschaum, and perceive, with respectful admiration, that Mr. Bullion acts uniformly on one grand system. Ten minutes afterwards, Mr. Bullion observes, in a tone equally confidential, that Mr. Speck, though so smiling and civil, is as sharp as a needle, and that if I want any shares in the new speculation, or indeed in any other, I had better come at once to Bullion, who would not deceive me for my weight in gold. “Not,” added Bullion, “that I have anything to say against Speck. He is well enough to do in the world,—a warm man, sir; and when a man is really warm, I am the last person to think of his little faults and turn on him the cold shoulder.”

“Adieu!” said Uncle Jack, pulling out once more his pocket-handkerchief; “my love to all at home.” And sinking his voice into a whisper: “If ever you think better of the Grog and Store Depot, nephew, you’ll find an uncle’s heart in this bosom!”

CHAPTER II

It was night as Vivian and myself rode slowly home. Night in Australia! How impossible to describe its beauty! Heaven seems, in that new world, so much nearer to earth! Every star stands out so bright and particular as if fresh from the time when the Maker willed it. And the moon like a large silvery sun,—the least object on which it shines so distinct and so still.15 Now and then a sound breaks the silence, but a sound so much in harmony with the solitude that it only deepens its charms. Hark! the low cry of the night-bird from yonder glen amidst the small gray gleaming rocks. Hark! as night deepens, the bark of the distant watch-dog, or the low, strange howl of his more savage species, from which he defends the fold. Hark! the echo catches the sound, and flings it sportively from hill to hill,—farther and farther and farther down, till all again is hushed, and the flowers hang noiseless over your head as you ride through a grove of the giant gum-trees. Now the air is literally charged with the odors, and the sense of fragrance grows almost painful in its pleasure. You quicken your pace, and escape again into the open plains and the full moonlight, and through the slender tea-trees catch the gleam of the river, and in the exquisite fineness of the atmosphere hear the soothing sound of its murmur.

Pisistratus.—“And this land has become the heritage of our people! Methinks I see, as I gaze around, the scheme of the All-beneficent Father disentangling itself clear through the troubled history of mankind. How mysteriously, while Europe rears its populations and fulfils its civilizing mission, these realms have been concealed from its eyes,—divulged to us just as civilization needs the solution to its problems; a vent for feverish energies, baffled in the crowd; offering bread to the famished, hope to the desperate; in very truth enabling the ‘New World to redress the balance of the Old.’ Here, what a Latium for the wandering spirits,—

“‘On various seas by various tempests tossed.’

“Here, the actual AEneid passes before our eyes. From the huts of the exiles scattered over this hardier Italy, who cannot see in the future

“‘A race from whence new Alban sires shall come, And the long glories of a future Rome’?”

Vivian (mournfully).—“Is it from the outcasts of the work-house, the prison, and the transport-ship that a second Rome is to arise?”

Pisistratus.—“There is something in this new soil—in the labor it calls forth, in the hope it inspires, in the sense of property, which I take to be the core of social morals—that expedites the work of redemption with marvellous rapidity. Take them altogether, whatever their origin, or whatever brought them hither, they are a fine, manly, frank-hearted race, these colonists now!—rude, not mean, especially in the Bush; and, I suspect, will ultimately become as gallant and honest a population as that now springing up in South Australia, from which convicts are excluded,—and happily excluded,—for the distinction will sharpen emulation. As to the rest, and in direct answer to your question, I fancy even the emancipist part of our population every whit as respectable as the mongrel robbers under Romulus.”

Vivian.—“But were they not soldiers,—I mean the first Romans?”

Pisistratus.—“My dear cousin, we are in advance of those grim outcasts if we can get lands, houses, and wives (though the last is difficult, and it is well that we have no white Sabines in the neighborhood) without that same soldiering which was the necessity of their existence.”

Vivian (after a pause).—“I have written to my father, and to yours more fully,—stating in the one letter my wish, in the other trying to explain the feelings from which it springs.”

Pisistratus.—“Are the letters gone?”

Vivian.—“Yes.”

Pisistratus.—“And you would not show them to me!”

Vivian.—“Do not speak so reproachfully. I promised your father to pour out my whole heart to him, whenever it was troubled and at strife. I promise you now that I will go by his advice.”

Pisistratus (disconsolately).—“What is there in this military life for which you yearn that can yield you more food for healthful excitement and stirring adventure than your present pursuits afford?”

Vivian.—“Distinction! You do not see the difference between us. You have but a fortune to make,—I have a name to redeem; you look calmly on to the future,—I have a dark blot to erase from the past.”

Pisistratus (soothingly).—“It is erased. Five years of no weak bewailings, but of manly reform, steadfast industry, conduct so blameless that even Guy (whom I look upon as the incarnation of blunt English honesty) half doubts whether you are cute enough for ‘a station;’ a character already so high that I long for the hour when you will again take your father’s spotless name, and give me the pride to own our kinship to the world,—all this surely redeems the errors arising from an uneducated childhood and a wandering youth.”

Vivian (leaning over his horse, and putting his hand on my shoulder).—“My dear friend, what do I owe you!” Then recovering his emotion, and pushing on at a quicker pace, while he continues to speak, “But can you not see that, just in proportion as my comprehension of right would become clear and strong, so my conscience would become also more sensitive and reproachful; and the better I understand my gallant father, the more I must desire to be as he would have had his son. Do you think it would content him, could he see me branding cattle and bargaining with bullock drivers? Was it not the strongest wish of his heart that I should adopt his own career? Have I not heard you say that he would have had you too a soldier, but for your mother? I have no mother! If I made thousands, and tens of thousands, by this ignoble calling, would they give my father half the pleasure that he would feel at seeing my name honorably mentioned in a despatch? No, no! You have banished the gypsy blood, and now the soldier’s breaks out! Oh, for one glorious day in which I may clear my way into fair repute, as our fathers before us!—when tears of proud joy may flow from those eyes that have wept such hot drops at my shame; when she, too, in her high station beside that sleek lord, may say, ‘His heart was not so vile, after all!’ Don’t argue with me,—it is in vain! Pray, rather, that I may have leave to work out my own way; for I tell you that if condemned to stay here, I may not murmur aloud,—I may go through this round of low duties as the brute turns the wheel of a mill; but my heart will prey on itself, and you shall soon write on my gravestone the epitaph of the poor poet you told us of whose true disease was the thirst of glory,—‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”’

I had no answer; that contagious ambition made my own veins run more warmly, and my own heart beat with a louder tumult. Amidst the pastoral scenes, and under the tranquil moonlight of the New, the Old World, even in me, rude Bushman, claimed for a while its son. But as we rode on, the air, so inexpressibly buoyant, yet soothing as an anodyne, restored me to peaceful Nature. Now the flocks, in their snowy clusters, were seen sleeping under the stars; hark! the welcome of the watch-dogs; see the light gleaming far from the chink of the door! And, pausing, I said aloud: “No, there is more glory in laying these rough foundations of a mighty state, though no trumpets resound with your victory, though no laurels shall shadow your tomb, than in forcing the onward progress of your race over burning cities and hecatombs of men!” I looked round for Vivian’s answer; but ere I spoke he had spurred from my side, and I saw the wild dogs slinking back from the hoofs of his horse as he rode at speed on the sward through the moonlight.

CHAPTER III

The weeks and the months rolled on, and the replies to Vivian’s letters came at last; I foreboded too well their purport. I knew that my father could not set himself in opposition to the deliberate and cherished desire of a man who had now arrived at the full strength of his understanding, and must be left at liberty to make his own election of the paths of life. Long after that date I saw Vivian’s letter to my father; and even his conversation had scarcely prepared me for the pathos of that confession of a mind remarkable alike for its strength and its weakness. If born in the age, or submitted to the influences, of religious enthusiasm, here was a nature that, awaking from sin, could not have been contented with the sober duties of mediocre goodness; that would have plunged into the fiery depths of monkish fanaticism, wrestled with the fiend in the hermitage, or marched barefoot on the infidel with a sackcloth for armor,—the cross for a sword. Now, the impatient desire for redemption took a more mundane direction, but with something that seemed almost spiritual in its fervor. And this enthusiasm flowed through strata of such profound melancholy! Deny it a vent, and it might sicken into lethargy or fret itself into madness,—give it the vent, and it might vivify and fertilize as it swept along.

My father’s reply to this letter was what might be expected. It gently reinforced the old lessons in the distinctions between aspirations towards the perfecting ourselves,—aspirations that are never in vain,—and the morbid passion for applause from others, which shifts conscience from our own bosoms to the confused Babel of the crowd and calls it “fame.” But my father in his counsels did not seek to oppose a mind so obstinately bent upon a single course,—he sought rather to guide and strengthen it in the way it should go. The seas of human life are wide. Wisdom may suggest the voyage, but it must first look to the condition of the ship and the nature of the merchandise to exchange. Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish can bring back the gold of Ophir; but shall it therefore rot in the harbor? No; give its sails to the wind! But I had expected that Roland’s letter to his son would have been full of joy and exultation,—joy there was none in it, yet exultation there might be, though serious, grave, and subdued. In the proud assent that the old soldier gave to his son’s wish, in his entire comprehension of motives so akin to his own nature, there was yet a visible sorrow; it seemed even as if he constrained himself to the assent he gave. Not till I had read it again and again could I divine Roland’s feelings while he wrote. At this distance of time I comprehend them well. Had he sent from his side, into noble warfare, some boy fresh to life, new to sin, with an enthusiasm pure and single-hearted as his own young chivalrous ardor, then, with all a soldier’s joy, he had yielded a cheerful tribute to the hosts of England. But here he recognized, though perhaps dimly, not the frank, military fervor, but the stern desire of expiation; and in that thought he admitted forebodings that would have been otherwise rejected, so that at the close of the letter it seemed, not the fiery, war-seasoned Roland that wrote, but rather some timid, anxious mother. Warnings and entreaties and cautions not to be rash, and assurances that the best soldiers were ever the most prudent,—were these the counsels of the fierce veteran who at the head of the forlorn hope had mounted the wall at—, his sword between his teeth?

But whatever his presentiments, Roland had yielded at once to his son’s prayer, hastened to London at the receipt of his letter, obtained a commission in a regiment now in active service in India; and that commission was made out in his son’s name. The commission, with an order to join the regiment as soon as possible, accompanied the letter.

And Vivian, pointing to the name addressed to him, said, “Now indeed I may resume this name, and next to Heaven will I hold it sacred! It shall guide me to glory in life, or my father shall read it, without shame, on my tomb!” I see him before me as he stood then,—his form erect, his dark eyes solemn in their light, a serenity in his smile, a grandeur on his brow, that I had never marked till then! Was that the same man I had recoiled from as the sneering cynic, shuddered at as the audacious traitor, or wept over as the cowering outcast? How little the nobleness of aspect depends on symmetry of feature, or the mere proportions of form! What dignity robes the man who is filled with a lofty thought!

CHAPTER IV

He is gone; he has left a void in my existence. I had grown to love him so well; I had been so proud when men praised him. My love was a sort of self-love,—I had looked upon him in part as the work of my own hands. I am a long time ere I can settle back, with good heart, to my pastoral life. Before my cousin went, we cast up our gains and settled our shares. When he resigned the allowance which Roland had made him, his father secretly gave to me, for his use, a sum equal to that which I and Guy Bolding brought into the common stock. Roland had raised a sum upon mortgage; and while the interest was a trivial deduction from his income, compared to the former allowance, the capital was much more useful to his son than a mere yearly payment could have been. Thus, between us, we had a considerable sum for Australian settlers,—L4,500. For the first two years we made nothing,—indeed, great part of the first year was spent in learning our art, at the station of an old settler. But at the end of the third year, our flocks having then become very considerable, we cleared a return beyond my most sanguine expectations. And when my cousin left, just in the sixth year of exile, our shares amounted to L4,000 each, exclusive of the value of the two stations. My cousin had at first wished that I should forward his share to his father; but he soon saw that Roland would never take it, and it was finally agreed that it should rest in my hands, for me to manage for him, send him out an interest at five per cent, and devote the surplus profits to the increase of his capital. I had now, therefore, the control of L12,000, and we might consider ourselves very respectable capitalists. I kept on the cattle station, by the aid of the Will-o’-the-Wisp, for about two years after Vivian’s departure (we had then had it altogether for five). At the end of that time, I sold it and the stock to great advantage. And the sheep—for the “brand” of which I had a high reputation—having wonderfully prospered in the mean while, I thought we might safely extend our speculations into new ventures. Glad, too, of a change of scene, I left Bolding in charge of the flocks and bent my course to Adelaide, for the fame of that new settlement had already disturbed the peace of the Bush. I found Uncle Jack residing near Adelaide in a very handsome villa, with all the signs and appurtenances of colonial opulence; and report, perhaps, did not exaggerate the gains he had made,—so many strings to his bow, and each arrow, this time, seemed to have gone straight to the white of the butts. I now thought I had acquired knowledge and caution sufficient to avail myself of Uncle Jack’s ideas, without ruining myself by following them out in his company; and I saw a kind of retributive justice in making his brain minister to the fortunes which his ideality and constructiveness, according to Squills, had served so notably to impoverish. I must here gratefully acknowledge that I owed much to this irregular genius. The investigation of the supposed mines had proved unsatisfactory to Mr. Bullion, and they were not fairly discovered till a few years after. But Jack had convinced himself of their existence, and purchased, on his own account, “for an old song,” some barren land which he was persuaded would prove to him a Golconda, one day or other, under the euphonious title (which, indeed, it ultimately established) of the “Tibbets’ Wheal.” The suspension of the mines, however, fortunately suspended the existence of the Grog and Store Depot, and Uncle Jack was now assisting in the foundation of Port Philip. Profiting by his advice, I adventured in that new settlement some timid and wary purchases, which I resold to considerable advantage. Meanwhile I must not omit to state briefly what, since my departure from England, had been the ministerial career of Trevanion.