Chapter XIII: Part 13

I'm very glad I've been successful, though it's not a very high achievement to make a very large fortune by buying and selling that which put into a man's mouth is said to steal away his brains!

But it does better things than this. It reconciles and solves and resolves mental discords, like music. It makes music for people who have no ear--and there are so many of these in the world that I'm a millionaire, and Franz Schubert died a pauper. So I prefer to drink beer--as _he_ did; and I never miss a Monday Pop if I can help it.

_I_ have done better things, too. I have helped to govern my country and make its laws; but it all came out of wine to begin with--all from learning how to buy and sell. We're a nation of shopkeepers, although the French keep better shops than ours, and more of them.

I'm glad I'm successful because of Barty, although success, which brings the world to our feet, does not always endear us to the friend of our bosom. If I had been a failure Barty would have stuck to me like a brick, I feel sure, instead of my sticking to him like a leech! And the sight of his success might have soured me--that eternal chorus of praise, that perpetual feast of pudding in which I should have had no part but to take my share as a mere guest, and listen and look on and applaud, and wish I'd never been born!

As it is, I listened and looked on and clapped my hands with as much pride and pleasure as if Barty had been my son--and my share of the pudding never stuck in my throat!

I should have been always on the watch to take him down a peg when he was pleased with himself--to hold him cheap and overpraise some duffer in his hearing--so that I might save my own self-esteem; to pay him bad little left-handed compliments, him and his, whenever I was out of humor; and I should have been always out of humor, having failed in life.

And then I should have gone home wretched--for I have a conscience--and woke up in the middle of the night and thought of Barty; and what a kind, genial, jolly, large-minded, and generous-hearted old chap he was and always had been--and buried my face in my pillow, and muttered:

"Ach! what a poor, mean, jealous beast I am--un fruit sec! un malheureux rate!"

With all my success, this life-long exclusive cultivation of Barty's society, and that of his artistic friends, which has somehow unfitted me for the society of my brother-merchants of wine--and most merchants of everything else--has not, I regret to say, quite fitted me to hold my own among the "leaders of intellectual modern thought," whose company I would fain seek and keep in preference to any other.

My very wealth seems to depress and disgust them, as it does me--and I'm no genius, I admit, and a poor conversationalist.

To amass wealth is an engrossing pursuit--and now that I have amassed a good deal more than I quite know what to do with, it seems to me a very ignoble one. It chokes up everything that makes life worth living; it leaves so little time for the constant and regular practice of those ingenuous arts which faithfully to have learned is said to soften the manners, and make one an agreeable person all round.

It is even more _abrutissant_ than the mere pursuit of sport or pleasure.

How many a noble lord I know who's almost as beastly rich as myself, and twice as big a fool by nature, and perhaps not a better fellow at bottom--yet who can command the society of all there is of the best in science, literature, and art!

Not but what they will come and dine with me fast enough, these shining lights of culture and intellect--my food is very good, although I say it, and I get noble lords to meet them.

But they talk their real talk to each other--not to me--and to the noble lords who sit by them at my table, and who try to understand what they say. With me they fall back on politics and bimetallism, for all the pains I've taken to get up the subjects that interest them, and keep myself posted in all they've written and done. Precious little they know about bimetallism or politics!

Is it only on account of their pretty manners that my titled friends are such favorites with these highly intellectual guests of mine--and with me? If so, then pretty manners should come before everything else in the world, and be taught instead of Latin and Greek.

But if it's only because they're noble lords, then I'm beginning to think with Mr. Labouchere that it's high time the Upper House were abolished, and its denizens wafted into space, since they make such snobs of us all--including your humble servant, of course, who at least is not quite so snobbish as to know himself for a damned snob and pretend he isn't one.

Anyhow, I'm glad my life has been such a success. But would I live it all over again? Even the best of it? The "forty year"?

Taking one consideration with another, most decidedly not.

I have only met two men of my own age who would live their lives over again. They both cared more for their meals than for anything else in the world--and they have always had four of these every day; sometimes even five! plenty of variety, and never a meal to disagree with them! affaire d'estomac! They simply want to eat all those meals once more. They lived to feed, and to refeed would re-live!

My meals have never disagreed with me either--but I have always found them monotonous; they have always been so simple and so regular when I've had the ordering of them! Fried soles, chops or steaks, and that sort of thing, and a pint of lager-beer--no wine for me, thank you; I sell it--and all this just to serve as a mere foundation for a smoke--and a chat with Barty, if possible!

Hardly ever an ache or a pain, and I wouldn't live it all over again! yet I hope to live another twenty years, if only to take Leah's unborn great-grandchildren to the dentist's, and tip them at school, and treat them to the pantomime and Madame Tussaud's, as I did their mothers and grandmothers before them--or their fathers and grandfathers.

This seems rather inconsistent! For would I care, twenty years hence, to re-live these coming twenty years? Evidently not--it's out of the question.

So why don't I give up at once? I know how to do it, without pain, without scandal, without even invalidating my life-insurance, about which I don't care a rap!

Why don't I? why don't _you_, O middle-aged reader--with all the infirmities of age before you and all the pleasures of youth behind? Anyhow, we don't, either you or I--and so there's an end on't.

O Pandora! I have promised myself that I would take a great-grandchild of Barty's on a flying-machine from Marsfield to London and back in half an hour--and that great-grandchild can't well be born for several years--perhaps not for another twenty!

And now, gentle reader, I've had my little say, and I'm a good deal better, thanks, and I'll try not to talk about myself any more.

Except just to mention that in the summer of 1876 I contested East Rosherville in the Conservative interest and was successful--and owed my success to the canvassing of Barty and Leah, who had no politics of their own whatever, and would have canvassed for me just as conscientiously if I'd been a Radical, probably more so! For if Barty had permitted himself any politics at all, he would have been a red-hot Radical, I fear--and his wife would have followed suit. And so, perhaps, would I!

Part Tenth

"Je suis alle de bon matin
Cueillir la violette,
Et l'aubepine, et le jasmin,
Pour celebrer ta fete.
J'ai lie de ma propre main
Bouton de rose et romarin
Pour couronner ta blonde tete.

"Mais de ta royale beaute
Sois humble, je te prie.
Ici tout meurt, la fleur, l'ete,
La jeunesse et la vie:
Bientot, bientot ce jour sera,
Ma belle, ou l'on te portera
Dans un linceul, pale et fletrie."

--A _Favorite Song of_ Mary Trevor's.

That was a pleasant summer.

First of all we went to Ste. Adresse, a suburb of Havre, where there is very good bathing--with rafts, _perissoires_, _pique-tetes_ to dive from--all those aquatic delights the French are so clever at inventing, and which make a "station balneaire" so much more amusing than a mere British watering-place.

We made a large party and bathed together every morning; and Barty and I taught the young ones to dive and do "la coupe" in the true orthodox form, with that free horizontal sweep of each alternate arm that gives it such distinction.

It was very good fun to see those rosy boys and girls taking their "hussardes" neatly without a splash from the little platform at the top of the pole, and solemnly performing "la coupe" in the wake of their papa; one on his back. Right out to sea they went, I bringing up the rear--and the faithful Jean-Baptiste in attendance with his boat, and Leah inside it--her anxious eyes on the stretch to count those curly heads again and again. She was a good mathematician, and the tale always came right in the end; and home was reached at last, and no one a bit the worse for a good long swim in those well-aired, sunlit waves.

Once we went on the top of the diligence to Etretat for the day, and there we talked of poor Bonzig and his first and last dip in the sea; and did "la coupe" in the waters that had been so fatal to him, poor fellow!

Then we went by the steamer _Jean Bart_ to Trouville and Deauville, and up the Seine in a steam-launch to Rouen.

In the afternoons and evenings we took long country walks and caught moths, or went to Havre by tramway and cleared out all the pastry-cooks in the Rue de Paris, and watched the transatlantic steamers, out or home, from that gay pier which so happily combines business with pleasure--utile dulci, as Pere Brossard would have said--and walked home by the charming Cote d'Ingouville, sacred to the memory of Modeste Mignon.

And then, a little later on, I was a good Uncle Bob, and took the whole party to Auteuil, near Paris, and hired two lordly mansions next door to each other in the Villa Montmorency, and turned their gardens into one.

Altogether, with the Scatcherds and ourselves, eight children, governesses, nurses, and other servants, and dogs and the smaller animals, we were a very large party, and a very lively one. I like this sort of thing better than anything else in the world.

I hired carriages and horses galore, and for six weeks we made ourselves thoroughly comfortable and at home in Paris and around.

That was the happiest holiday I ever had since the vacation Barty and I spent at the Lafertes' in the Gue des Aulnes when we were school-boys.

And such was our love for the sport he called "_la chasse aux souvenirs_" that one day we actually went there, travelling by train to La Tremblaye, where we spent the night.

It was a sad disenchantment!

The old Lafertes were dead, the young ones had left that part of the country; and the house and what remained of the gardens now belonged to another family, and had become formal and mean and business-like in aspect, and much reduced in size.

Much of the outskirts of the forest had been cleared and was being cleared still, and cheap little houses run up for workmen; an immense and evil-smelling factory with a tall chimney had replaced the old home-farm, and was connected by a single line of rails with the station of La Tremblaye. The clear, pellucid stream where we used to catch crayfish had been canalized--"s'est encanaille," as Barty called it--its waters fouled by barge traffic and all kinds of horrors.

We soon found the haunted pond that Barty was so fond of--but quite in the open, close to an enormous brick-field, and only half full; and with all its trees cut down, including the tree on which they had hanged the gay young Viscount who had behaved so badly to Seraphine Doucet, and on which Seraphine Doucet afterwards hanged herself in remorse.

No more friendly charcoal-burners, no more wolves or boars or cerfs--dix-cors; and as for were-wolves, the very memory of them had died out.

There seems no greater desecration to me than cutting down an old and well-remembered French forest I have loved; and solving all its mystery, and laying bare the nakedness of the land in a way so brutal and expeditious and unexpected. It reminds one of the manner in which French market-women will pluck a goose before it's quite dead; you bristle with indignation to see it, but you mustn't interfere.

La Tremblaye itself had become a flourishing manufacturing town, and to our jaundiced and disillusioned eyes everybody and everything was as ugly as could be--and I can't say we made much of a bag in the way of souvenirs.

We were told that young Laferte was a barrister at Angers, prosperous and married. We deliberated whether we would hunt him up and talk of old times. Then we reflected how curiously cold and inhospitable Frenchmen can sometimes be to old English friends in circumstances like these--and how little they care to talk of old times and all that, unless it's the Englishman who plays the host.

Ask a quite ordinary Frenchman to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be--what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth of your British welcome.

Then go and call on him when you find yourself in Paris--and you will soon learn to leave quite ordinary Frenchmen alone, on their own side of the Channel.

Happily, there are exceptions to this rule!

Thus the sweet Laferte remembrance, which had so often come back to me in my dreams, was forever spoiled by this unlucky trip.

It had turned that leaf from the tablets of my memory into a kind of palimpsest, so that I could no longer quite make out the old handwriting for the new, which would not be obliterated, and these were confused lines it was hard to read between--with all my skill!

Altogether we were uncommonly glad to get back to the Villa Montmorency--from the distorted shadows of a nightmare to happy reality.

There, all was fresh and delightful; as boys we had often seen the outside walls of that fine property which had come to the speculative builder at last, but never a glimpse within; so that there was no desecration for us in the modern laying out of that beautiful double garden of ours, whatever there might have been for such ghosts of Montmorencys as chose to revisit the glimpses of the moon.

We haunted Auteuil, Passy, Point du Jour, Suresnes, Courbevoie, Neuilly, Meudon--all the familiar places. Especially we often haunted the neighborhood of the rond point de l'Avenue du Bois de Boulogne.

One afternoon, as he and I and Leah and Ida were driving round what once was our old school, we stopped in the lane not far from the porte-cochere, and Barty stood up on the box and tried to look over the wall.

Presently, from the grand stone loge which had replaced Jaurion's den, a nice old concierge came out and asked if we desired anything. We told him how once we had been at school on that very spot, and were trying to make out the old trees that had served as bases in "la balle au camp," and that if we really desired anything just then it was that we might become school-boys once more!

"Ah, ma foi! je comprends ca, messieurs--moi aussi, j'ai ete ecolier, et j'aimais bien la balle au camp," said the good old man, who had been a soldier.

He informed us the family were away, but that if we liked to come inside and see the garden he was sure his master would have no objection. We jumped at this kind offer and spent quite an hour there, and if I were Barty I could so describe the emotions of that hour that the reader would feel quite as tearfully grateful to me as to Barty Josselin for Chapters III. and IV. in _Le Fil de la Vierge_, which are really founded, _mutatis mutandis_, on this self-same little adventure of ours.

Nothing remained of our old school--not even the outer walls; nothing but the big trees and the absolute ground they grew out of. Beautiful lawns, flower-beds, conservatories, summer-houses, ferns, and evergreen shrubs made the place seem even larger than it had once been--the very reverse of what usually happens--and softened for us the disenchantment of the change.

Here, at least, was no desecration of a hallowed spot. When the past has been dead and buried a long while ago there is no sweeter decking for its grave than a rich autumn tangle, all yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, with glossy evergreens and soft, damp moss to keep up the illusion of spring and summer all the year round.

Much to the amusement of the old concierge and his wife, Barty insisted on climbing into a huge horse-chestnut tree, in which was a natural seat, very high up, where, well hidden by the dense foliage, he and I used to color pipes for boys who couldn't smoke without feeling sick.

Nothing would suit him now but that he must smoke a pipe there while we talked to the good old couple below.

"Moi aussi, je fumais quand c'etait defendu; que voulez-vous? Il faut bien que jeunesse se passe, n'est ce pas?" said the old soldier.

"Ah, dame!" said his old wife, and sighed.

Every tree in this enchanted place had its history--every corner, every square yard of soil. I will not inflict these histories on the reader; I will restrain myself with all my might, and merely state that just as the old school had been replaced by this noble dwelling the noble dwelling itself has now been replaced, trees and garden and all, by a stately palace many stories high, which rears itself among so many other stately palaces that I can't even identify the spot where once stood the Institution F. Brossard!

Later, Barty made me solemnly pledge my word that if he and Leah should pre-decease me I would see to their due cremating and the final mingling of their ashes; that a portion of these--say half--should be set apart to be scattered on French soil, in places he would indicate in his will, and that the lion's share of that half should be sprinkled over the ground that once was our play-ground, with--or without--the legitimate owner's permission.

(Alas! and ah me! These instructions would have been carried out to the letter but that the place itself is no more; and, with a conviction that I should be merely acting just as they would have wished, I took it on myself to mingle with their ashes those of a very sweet and darling child of theirs, dearer to them and to me and to us all than any creature ever born into this cruel universe; and I scattered a portion of these precious remains to the four winds, close by the old spot we so loved.)

* * * * *

Yes, that was a memorable holiday; the charming fete de St. Cloud was in full swing--it was delightful to haunt it once more with those dear young people so little dreamt of when Barty and I first got into scrapes there, and were duly punished by Latin verbs to conjugate in our best handwriting for Bonzig or Dumollard.

Then he and I would explore the so changed Bois de Boulogne for the little "Mare aux Biches," where his father had fallen under the sword of Lieutenant Rondelys; but we never managed to find it: perhaps it had evaporated; perhaps the does had drunk it all up, before they, too, had been made to vanish, before the German invader--or inside him; for he was fond of French venison, as well as of French clocks! He was a most omnivorous person.

Then Paris had endless charms for us both, and we relieved ourselves at last of that long homesickness of years, and could almost believe we were boys again, as we dived into such old and well-remembered streets as yet remained.

There were still some slums we had loved; one or two of them exist even now. Only the other day I saw the Rue de Clery, the Rue de la Lune, the Rue de la Montagne--all three on the south side of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle: they are still terrible to look at from the genial Boulevard, even by broad daylight--the houses so tall, so irregular, the streets so narrow and winding and black. They seemed to us boys terrible, indeed, between eight and nine on a winter's evening, with just a lamp here and there to make their darkness visible. Whither they led I can't say; we never dared explore their obscure and mysterious recesses. They may have ended in the _cour des miracles_ for all we knew--it was nearly fifty years ago--and they may be quite virtuous abodes of poverty to-day; but they seemed to us then strange, labyrinthine abysses of crime and secret dens of infamy, where dreadful deeds were done in the dead of long winter nights. Evidently, to us in those days, whoever should lose himself there would never see daylight again; so we loved to visit them after dark, with our hearts in our mouths, before going back to school.

We would sit on posts within call of the cheerful Boulevard, and watch mysterious women hurry up and down in the cold, out of darkness into light and back again, poor creatures--dingy moths, silent but ominous night-jars, forlorn women of the town--ill-favored and ill-dressed, some of them all but middle-aged, in common caps and aprons, with cotton umbrellas, like cooks looking for a situation.

They never spoke to us, and seemed to be often brutally repulsed by whatever men they did speak to--mostly men in blouses.

"O dis-donc, _Hor_tense! qu'y _fait_ froid! quand donc qu'y s'ra _onze_ heures, q'nous allions nous _cou_cher?"

So said one of them to another one cold, drizzly night, in a raucous voice, with low intonations of the gutter. The dimly felt horror and despair and pathos of it sent us away shivering to our Passy omnibus as fast as our legs could carry us.

That phrase has stuck in my memory ever since. Thank Heaven! the eleventh hour must have struck long ago, and Hortense and her friend must be fast asleep and well out of the cold by now--they need walk those evil streets no more....

When we had exhausted it all, and we felt homesick for England again, it was good to get back to Marsfield, high up over the Thames--so beautiful in its rich October colors which the river reflected--with its old trees that grew down to the water's edge, and brooded by the boat-house there in the mellow sunshine.

And then again when it became cold and dreary, at Christmas-time there was my big house at Lancaster Gate, where Josselins were fond of spending some of the winter months, and where I managed to find room for them all--with a little squeezing during the Christmas holidays when the boys came home from school. What good times they were!

* * * * *

"On May 24th, at Marsfield, Berks, the wife of Bartholomew Josselin, of a daughter"--or, as Leah put it in her diary, "our seventh daughter and ninth child--to be called Martia, or Marty for short."

It seems that Marty, prepared by her first ablution for this life, and as she lay being powdered on Mrs. Jones's motherly lap, was of a different type to her predecessors--much whiter, and lighter, and slighter; and she made no exhibition of that lusty lung-power which had so characterized the other little Barties on their introduction to this vale of tears.

Her face was more regularly formed and more highly finished, and in a few weeks grew of a beauty so solemn and pathetic that it would sometimes make Mrs. Jones, who had lost babies of her own, shed motherly tears merely to look at her.

Even _I_ felt sentimental about the child; and as for Barty, he could talk of nothing else, and made those rough and hasty silver-point studies of her head and face--mere sketches--which, being full of obvious faults, became so quickly famous among aesthetic and exclusive people who had long given up Barty as a writer on account of his scandalous popularity.

Alas! even those silver-points have become popular now, and their photogravures are in the shop-windows of sea-side resorts and in the back parlors of the lower middle-class; so that the aesthetic exclusives who are up to date have had to give up Barty altogether. No one is sacred in those days--not even Shakespeare and Michael Angelo.

We shall be hearing Schumann and Wagner on the piano-organ, and "_nous autres_" of the cultured classes will have to fall back on Balfe and Byron and Landseer.

In a few months little Marty became famous for this extra beauty all over Henley and Maidenhead.

She soon grew to be the idol of her father's heart, and her mother's, and Ida's. But I really think that if there was one person who idolized her more than all the rest, it was I, Bob Maurice.

She was extremely delicate, and gave us much anxiety and many alarms, and Dr. Knight was a very constant visitor at Marsfield Lodge. It was fortunate, for her sake, that the Josselins had left Campden Hill and made their home in Marsfield.

Nine of these children--including one not yet born then--developed there into the finest and completest human beings, take them for all in all, that I have ever known; nine--a good number!

"Numero Deus impare gaudet."

Or, as poor Rapaud translated this (and was pinched black and blue by Pere Brossard in consequence):

"Le numero deux se rejouit d'etre impair!" (Number two takes a pleasure in being odd!)

The three sons--one of them now in the army, as becomes a Rohan; and one a sailor, as becomes a Josselin; and one a famous actor, the true Josselin of all--are the very types of what I should like for the fathers of my grandchildren, if I had marriageable daughters of my own.

And as for Barty's daughters, they are all--but one--so well known in society and the world--so famous, I may say--that I need hardly mention them here; all but Marty, my sweet little "maid of Dove."

When Barty took Marsfield he and I had entered what I have ever since considered the happiest decade of a successful and healthy man's life--the forties.

"Wait till you get to _forty year_!"

So sang Thackeray, but with a very different experience to mine. He seemed to look upon the fifth decade as the grave of all tender illusions and emotions, and exult!

My tender illusions and emotions became realties--things to live by and for. As Barty and I "dipped our noses in the Gascon wine"--Vougeot-Conti & Co.--I blessed my stars for being free of Marsfield, which was, and is still, my real home, and for the warm friendship of its inhabitants who have been my real family, and for several years of unclouded happiness all round.

Even in winter what a joy it was, after a long solitary walk, or ride, or drive, or railway journey, to suddenly find myself at dusk in the midst of all that warmth and light and gayety; what a contrast to the House of Commons; what a relief after Barge Yard or Downing Street; what tea that was, what crumpets and buttered toast, what a cigarette; what romps and jokes, and really jolly good fun; and all that delightful untaught music that afterwards became so cultivated! Music was a special inherited gift of the entire family, and no trouble or expense was ever spared to make the best and the most of it.

Roberta became the most finished and charming amateur pianist I ever heard, and as for Mary _la rossignolle_--Mrs. Trevor--she's almost as famous as if she had made singing her profession, as she once so wished to do. She married happily instead, a better profession still; and though her songs are as highly paid for as any--except, perhaps, Madame Patti's--every penny goes to the poor.

She can make a nigger melody sound worthy of Schubert and a song of Schumann go down with the common herd as if it were a nigger melody, and obtain a genuine encore for it from quite simple people.

Why, only the other night she and her husband dined with me at the Bristol, and we went to Baron Schwartzkind's in Piccadilly to meet Royal Highnesses.

Up comes the Baron with:

"Ach, Mrs. Drefor! vill you not zing zomzing? ze Brincess vould be so jarmt."

"I'll sing as much as you like, Baron, if you promise me you'll send a checque for L50 to the Foundling Hospital to-morrow morning," says Mary.

"_I_'ll send _another_ fifty, Baron," says Bob Maurice. And the Baron had to comply, and Mary sang again and again, and the Princess was more than charmed.

She declared herself enchanted, and yet it was Brahms and Schumann that Mary sang; no pretty little English ballad, no French, no Italian.

"Aus meinen Thraenen spriessen
Viel' bluehende Blumen hervor;
Und meine Seufze werden
Ein Nachtigallen Chor...."

So sang Mary, and I declare some of the royal eyes were moist.

They all sang and played, these Josselins; and tumbled and acted, and were droll and original and fetching, as their father had been and was still; and, like him, amiable and full of exuberant life; and, like their mother, kind and appreciative and sympathetic and ever thoughtful of others, without a grain of selfishness or conceit.

They were also great athletes, boys and girls alike; good swimmers and riders, and first-rate oars. And though not as good at books and lessons as they might have been, they did not absolutely disgrace themselves, being so quick and intelligent.

Amid all this geniality and liveliness at home and this beauty of surrounding nature abroad, little Marty seemed to outgrow in a measure her constitutional delicacy.

It was her ambition to become as athletic as a boy, and she was persevering in all physical exercises--and throw stones very straight and far, with a quite easy masculine sweep of the arm; I taught her myself.

It was also her ambition to draw, and she would sit for an hour or more on a high stool by her father, or on the arm of his chair, and watch him at his work in silence. Then she would get herself paper and pencil, and try and do likewise; but discouragement would overtake her, and she would have to give it up in despair, with a heavy sigh and a clouded look on her lovely little pale face; and yet they were surprisingly clever, these attempts of hers.

Then she took to dictating a novel to her sisters and to me: it was all about an immense dog and three naughty boys, who were awful dunces at school and ran away to sea, dog and all; and performed heroic deeds in Central Africa, and grew up there, "booted and bearded, and burnt to a brick!" and never married or fell in love, or stooped to any nonsense of that kind.

This novel, begun in the handwriting of all of us, and continued in her own, remained unfinished; and the precious MS. is now in my possession. I have read it oftener than any other novel, French or English, except, perhaps, _Vanity Fair_!

I may say that I had something to do with the development of her literary faculty, as I read many good books to her before she could read quite comfortably for herself: _Evenings at Home_, _The Swiss Family Robinson_, _Gulliver_, _Robinson Crusoe_, books by Ballantyne, Marryat, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne, etc., and _Treasure Island_, _Tom Sawyer_, _Huckleberry Finn_, _The Wreck of the Grosvenor_, and then her father's books, or some of them.

But even better than her famous novel were the stories she improvised to me in a small boat which I often rowed up-stream while she steered--one story, in particular, that had no end; she would take it up at any time.

She had imagined a world where all trees and flowers and vegetation (and some birds) were the size they are now; but men and beasts no bigger than Lilliputians, with houses and churches and buildings to match--and a family called Josselin living in a beautiful house called Marsfield, as big as a piano organ.

Endless were the adventures by flood and field of these little people: in the huge forest and on the gigantic river which it took them nearly an hour to cross in a steam-launch when the wind was high, or riding trained carrier-pigeons to distant counties, and the coasts of Normandy, Brittany, and Picardy, where everything was on a similar scale.

It would astonish me to find how vivid and real she could make these imaginations of hers, and to me how fascinating--oddly enough she reserved them for me only, and told no one else.

There was always an immensely big strong man, one Bobby Maurice, a good-natured giant, nearly three inches high and over two ounces in weight, who among other feats would eat a whole pea at a sitting, and hold out an acorn at arm's-length, and throw a pepper-corn over two yards--which has remained the record.

Then, coming back down-stream, she would take the sculls and I the tiller, and I would tell her (in French) all about our school adventures at Brossard's and Bonzig, and the Lafertes, and the Revolution of February; and in that way she picked up a lot of useful and idiomatic Parisian which considerably astonished Fraeulein Werner, the German governess, who yet knew French almost as well as her own language--almost as well as Mr. Ollendorff himself.

She also changed one of the heroes in her famous novel, _Tommy Holt_, into a French boy, and called him _Rapaud_!

She was even more devoted to animals than the rest of the family: the beautiful Angora, Kitty, died when Marty was five, from an abscess in her cheek, where she'd been bitten by a strange bull-terrier; and Marty tearfully wrote her epitaph in a beautiful round hand--

"Here lies Kitty, full of grace;
Died of an _abbess_ in her face!"

This was her first attempt at verse-making, and here's her last, from the French of Sully-Prudhomme:

"If you but knew what tears, alas!
One weeps for kinship unbestowed,
In pity you would sometimes pass
My poor abode!

"If you but knew what balm, for all
Despond, lies in an angel's glance,
Your looks would on my window fall
As though by chance!

"If you but knew the heart's delight
To feel its fellow-heart is by,
You'd linger, as a sister might,
These gates anigh!

"If you but knew how oft I yearn
For one sweet voice, one presence dear,
Perhaps you'd even simply turn
And enter here!"

She was only just seventeen when she wrote them, and, upon my word, I think they're almost as good as the original!

Her intimate friendship with Chucker-out, the huge St. Bernard, lasted for nearly both their lives, alas! It began when they both weighed exactly the same, and I could carry both in one arm. When he died he turned the scale at sixteen stone, like me.

It has lately become the fashion to paint big dogs and little girls, and engravings of these pictures are to be seen in all the print-sellers' shops. It always touches me very much to look at these works of art, although--and I hope it is not libellous to say so--the big dog is always hopelessly inferior in beauty and dignity and charm to Chucker-out, who was champion of his day. And as for the little girls--_Ah, mon Dieu!_

Such pictures are not high art of course, and that is why I don't possess one, as I've got an aesthetic character to keep up; but why they shouldn't be I can't guess. Is it because no high artist--except Briton Riviere--will stoop to so easily understood a subject?

A great master would not be above painting a small child or a big dog separately--why should he be above putting them both in the same picture? It would be too obvious, I suppose--like a melody by Mozart, or Handel's "Harmonious Blacksmith," or Schubert's Serenade, and other catchpenny tunes of the same description.

_I_ was also very intimate with Chucker-out, who made more of me than he even did of his master.

One night I got very late to Marsfield by the last train, and, letting myself in with my key, I found Chucker-out waiting for me in the hall, and apparently in a very anxious frame of mind, and extremely demonstrative, wanting to say something more than usual--to confide a trouble, to confess!

We went up into the big music-room, which was still lighted, and lay on a couch together; he, with his head on my knees, whimpering softly as I smoked and read a paper.

Presently Leah came in and said:

"Such an unfortunate thing happened; Marty and Chucker-out were playing on the slope, and he knocked her down and sprained her knee."

As soon as Chucker-out heard Marty's name he sat up and whined piteously, and pawed me down with great violence; pawed three buttons off my waistcoat and broke my watch-chain--couldn't be comforted; the misadventure had been preying on his mind for hours.

I give this subject to Mr. Briton Riviere, who can paint both dogs and children, and everything else he likes. I will sit for him myself, if he wishes, and as a Catholic priest! He might call it a confession--and an absolution! or, "The Secrets of the Confessional."

The good dog became more careful in future, and restrained his exuberance even going down-stairs with Marty on the way to a ramble in the woods, which excited him more than anything; if he came down-stairs with anybody else, the violence of his joy was such that one had to hold on by the banisters. He was a dear, good beast, and a splendid body-guard for Marty in her solitary woodland rambles--never left her side for a second. I have often watched him from a distance, unbeknown to both; he was proud of his responsibility--almost fussy about it.

I have been fond of many dogs, but never yet loved a dog as I loved big Chucker-out--or _Choucroute_, as Coralie, the French maid, called him, to Fraeulein Werner's annoyance (Choucroute is French for sauerkraut); and I like to remember him in his splendid prime, guarding his sweet little mistress, whom I loved better than anything else on earth. She was to me a kind of pet Marjorie, and said such droll and touching things that I could almost fill a book with them. I kept a diary on purpose, and called it Martiana.

She was tall, but lamentably thin and slight, poor dear, with her mother's piercing black eyes and the very fair curly locks of her papa--a curious and most effective contrast--and features and a complexion of such extraordinary delicacy and loveliness that it almost gave one pain in the midst of the keen pleasure one had in the mere looking at her.

Heavens! how that face would light up suddenly at catching the unexpected sight of some one she was fond of! How often it has lighted up at the unexpected sight of "Uncle Bob"! The mere remembrance of that sweet illumination brightens my old age for me now; and I could almost wish her back again, in my senile selfishness and inconsistency. Pazienza!

Sometimes she was quite embarrassing in her simplicity, and reminded me of her father.

Once in Dieppe--when she was about eight--she and I had gone through the Etablissement to bathe, and people had stared at her even more than usual and whispered to each other.

"I bet you don't know why they all stare so, Uncle Bob?"

"I give it up," said I.

"It's because I'm so _handsome_--we're _all_ handsome, you know, and I'm the handsomest of the lot, it seems! _You_'re _not_ handsome, Uncle Bob. But oh! aren't you _strong_! Why, you could tuck a piou-piou under one arm and a postman under the other and walk up to the castle with them and pitch them into the sea, _couldn't_ you? And that's better than being handsome, _isn't_ it? I wish _I_ was like that."

And here she cuddled and kissed my hand.

When Mary began to sing (under Signor R.) it was her custom of an afternoon to lock herself up alone with a tuning-fork in a large garret and practise, as she was shy of singing exercises before any one else.

Her voice, even practising scales, would give Marty extraordinary pleasure, and me, too. Marty and I have often sat outside and listened to Mary's rich and fluent vocalizings; and I hoped that Marty would develop a great voice also, as she was so like Mary in face and disposition, except that Mary's eyes were blue and her hair very black, and her health unexceptionable.

Marty did not develop a real voice, although she sang very prettily and confidentially to me, and worked hard at the piano with Roberta; she learned harmony and composed little songs, and wrote words to them, and Mary or her father would sing them to her and make her happy beyond description.

Happy! she was always happy during the first few years of her life--from five or six to twelve.

I like to think her happiness was so great for this brief period, that she had her full share of human felicity just as if she had lived to the age of the Psalmist.

It seemed everybody's business at Marsfield to see that Marty had a good time. This was an easy task, as she was so easy to amuse; and when amused, herself so amusing to others.

As for me, it is hardly too much to say that every hour I could spare from business and the cares of state was spent in organizing the amusement of little Marty Josselin, and I was foolish enough to be almost jealous of her own father and mother's devotion to the same object.

Unlike her brothers and sisters, she was a studious little person, and fond of books--too much so indeed, for all she was such a tomboy; and all this amusement was designed by us with the purpose of winning her away from the too sedulous pursuit of knowledge. I may add that in temper and sweetness of disposition the child was simply angelic, and could not be spoiled by any spoiling.

It was during these happy years at Marsfield that Barty, although bereft of his Martia ever since that farewell letter, managed, nevertheless, to do his best work, on lines previously laid down for him by her.

For the first year or two he missed the feeling of the north most painfully--it was like the loss of a sense--but he grew in time accustomed to the privation, and quite resigned; and Marty, whom he worshipped--as did her mother--compensated him for the loss of his demon.

_Inaccessible Heights_, _Floreal et Fructidor_, _The Infinitely Little_, _The Northern Pactolus_, _Pandore et sa Boite_, _Cancer and Capricorn_, _Phoebus et Selene_ followed each other in leisurely succession. And he also found time for those controversies that so moved and amused the world; among others, his famous and triumphant confutation of Canon ----, on one hand, and Professor ----, the famous scientist, on the other, which has been compared to the classic litigation about the oyster, since the oyster itself fell to Barty's share, and a shell to each of the two disputants.

Orthodox and agnostic are as the poles asunder, yet they could not but both agree with Barty Josselin, who so cleverly extended a hand to each, and acted as a conductor between them.

That irresistible optimism which so forces itself upon all Josselin's readers, who number by now half the world, and will probably one day include the whole of it--when the whole of it is civilized--belonged to him by nature, by virtue of his health and his magnificent physique and his happy circumstances, and an admirably balanced mind, which was better fitted for his particular work and for the world's good than any special gift of genius in one direction.

His literary and artistic work never cost him the slightest effort. It amused him to draw and write more than did anything else in the world, and he always took great pains, and delighted in taking them; but himself he never took seriously for one moment--never realized what happiness he gave, and was quite unconscious of the true value of all he thought and wrought and taught!

He laughed good-humoredly at the passionate praise that for thirty years was poured upon him from all quarters of the globe, and shrugged his shoulders at the coarse invective of those whose religious susceptibilities he had so innocently wounded; left all published insults unanswered; never noticed any lie printed about himself--never wrote a paragraph in explanation or self-defence, but smoked many pipes and mildly wondered.

Indeed he was mildly wondering all his life: at his luck--at all the ease and success and warm domestic bliss that had so compensated him for the loss of his left eye and would almost have compensated him for the loss of both.

"It's all because I'm so deuced good-looking!" says Barty--"and so's Leah!"

And all his life he sorrowed for those who were less fortunate than himself. His charities and those of his wife were immense--he gave all the money, and she took all the trouble.

"C'est papa qui paie et maman qui regale," as Marty would say; and never were funds distributed more wisely.

But often at odd moments the Weltschmerz, the sorrow of the world, would pierce this man who no longer felt sorrows of his own--stab him through and through--bring the sweat to his temples--fill his eyes with that strange pity and trouble that moved you so deeply when you caught the look; and soon the complicated anguish of that dim regard would resolve itself into gleams of a quite celestial sweetness--and a heavenly message would go forth to mankind in such simple words that all might read who ran....

All these endowments of the heart and brain, which in him were masculine and active, were possessed in a passive form by his wife; instead of the buoyant energy and boisterous high spirits, she had patience and persistency that one felt to be indomitable, and a silent sympathy that never failed, and a fund of cheerfulness and good sense on which any call might be made by life without fear of bankruptcy; she was of those who could play a losing game and help others to play it--and she never had a losing game to play!

These gifts were inherited by their children, who, more-over, were so fed on their father's books--so imbued with them--that one felt sure of their courage, endurance, and virtue, whatever misfortunes or temptations might assail them in this life.

One felt this especially with the youngest but one, Marty, who, with even more than her due share of those gifts of the head and heart they had all inherited from their two parents, had not inherited their splendid frames and invincible health.

Roderick, _alias_ Mark Tapley, _alias_ Chips, who is now the sailor, was, oddly enough, the strongest and the hardiest of the whole family, and yet he was born two years after Marty. She always declared she brought him up and made a man of him, and taught him how to throw stones, and how to row and ride and swim; and that it was entirely to her he owed it that he was worthy to be a sailor--her ideal profession for a man.

He was devoted to her, and a splendid little chap, and in the holidays he and she and I were inseparable, and of course Chucker-out, who went with us wherever it was--Havre, Dieppe, Dinard, the Highlands, Whitby, etc.

Once we were privileged to settle ourselves for two months in Castle Rohan, through the kindness of Lord Whitby; and that was the best holiday of all--for the young people especially. And more especially for Barty himself, who had such delightful boyish recollections of that delightful place, and found many old friends among the sailors and fisher people--who remembered him as a boy.

Chips and Marty and I and the faithful Chucker-out were never happier than on those staiths where there is always such an ancient and fishlike smell; we never tired of watching the miraculous draughts of silver herring being disentangled from the nets and counted into baskets, which were carried on the heads of the stalwart, scaly fishwomen, and packed with salt and ice in innumerable barrels for Billingsgate and other great markets; or else the sales by auction of huge cod and dark-gray dog-fish as they lay helpless all of a row on the wet flags amid a crowd of sturdy mariners looking on, with their hands in their pockets and their pipes in their mouths.

Then over that restless little bridge to the picturesque old town, and through its long, narrow street, and up the many stone steps to the ruined abbey and the old church on the East Cliff; and the old churchyard, where there are so many stones in memory of those who were lost at sea.

It was good to be there, in such good company, on a sunny August morning, and look around and about and down below: the miles and miles of purple moor, the woods of Castle Rohan, the wide North Sea, which turns such a heavenly blue beneath a cloudless sky; the two stone piers, with each its lighthouse, and little people patiently looking across the waves for Heaven knows what! the busy harbor full of life and animation; under our feet the red roofs of the old town and the little clock tower of the market-place; across the stream the long quay with its ale-houses and emporiums and jet shops and lively traffic; its old gabled dwellings and their rotting wooden balconies. And rising out of all this, tier upon tier, up the opposite cliff, the Whitby of the visitors, dominated by a gigantic windmill that is--or was--almost as important a landmark as the old abbey itself.

To the south the shining river ebbs and flows, between its big ship-building yards and the railway to York, under endless moving craft and a forest of masts, now straight on end, now slanting helplessly on one side when there's not water enough to float their keels; and the long row of Cornish fishing-smacks, two or three deep.

How the blue smoke of their cooking wreathes upward in savory whiffs and whirls! They are good cooks, these rovers from Penzance, and do themselves well, and remind us that it is time to go and get lunch at the hotel.

We do, and do ourselves uncommonly well also; and afterwards we take a boat, we four (if the tide serves), and row up for a mile or so to a certain dam at Ruswarp, and there we take another boat on a lovely little secluded river, which is quite independent of tides, and where for a mile or more the trees bend over us from either side as we leisurely paddle along and watch the leaping salmon-trout, pulling now and then under a drooping ash or weeping-willow to gaze and dream or chat, or read out loud from _Sylvia's Lovers_; Sylvia Robson once lived in a little farm-house near Upgang, which we know well, and at Whitby every one reads about Sylvia Robson; or else we tell stories, or inform each other what a jolly time we're having, and tease old Chucker-out, who gets quite excited, and we admire the discretion with which he disposes of his huge body as ballast to trim the boat, and remains perfectly still in spite of his excitement for fear he should upset us. Indeed, he has been learning all his life how to behave in boats, and how to get in and out of them.

And so on till tea-time at five, and we remember there's a little inn at Sleights, where the scones are good; or, better still, a leafy garden full of raspberry-bushes at Cock Mill, where they give excellent jam with your tea, and from which there are three ways of walking back to Whitby when there's not enough water to row--and which is the most delightful of those three ways has never been decided yet.