The Banished Man/Volume 2/Chapter 23
Ponce me pigris ubi nulla campis
Arbor æstiva receatur aura,
Quod latus mundi nebulæ, malufque
Jupiter urget.
Pone, sub curru nimium propinqui
Solis in terra domibus negata;
Dulce ridentem Lalgen amabo,
Dulce loquentera.
THE subsequent events will be explained in the following letters.
To the Chevalier D'Alonville at Verona.
"Holles-street, Cavendish-square, May 30, 1793.
"Your letter, my dear friend, informing you were got so far and so well on your journey, gave to me and Alexina infinite pleasure. This will, I trust, find you at Verona, as you then expected, and will meet you disengaged from every trouble, and free from every apprehension of the accidents that might render so long a journey hazardous or painful to the beloved Angelina and her mother. I need hardly to say, after what passed between us on that subject in our frequent conferences in England, that I am entirely of their opinion in regard to your resisting of their opinion in regard to your resisting the frequent impulses you feel to return to the emigrant army. Till your king or his representative call upon you—till you are convinced your arm is demanded for the restoration of law and order, or of some form of legal government in your country, I think as your Angelina does, that you should not leave her. The hour when you will thus be called upon does not seem to be at hand; and indeed, my dear Chevalier, the turn that affairs seem to take in France, makes it impossible to conjecture whether such a period will ever arrive. I hardly dare trust myself to write to you on this subject. We differ still as to the commencement of a revolution, which in its progress has baffled all the reasoning which we could derive from analogy, in reflecting on the past events of the world—all the speculative opinions we could from thence build on the future. You think, that even in its first germinations it threatened to become the monster we now see, desolating and devouring France. I still think, that originating from the acknowledged faults of your former government, the first design, aiming only at the correction of those faults, at a limited monarchy and a mixed government, was the most sublime and most worthy of a great people that ever was recorded in the annals of mankind. But wide as our sentiments are as to their origin, I believe we perfectly agree in our opinions of the position of affairs at this moment. You, as a Frenchman, execrate the misery and devastation it has brought on the finest kingdom of Europe. You lament as an individual the death of your dearest friends, the disposition of your family, the ruin and beggary of many to whom you were attached.—I, as an Englishman, deplore the injury done to the cause of rational liberty throughout the world. I deplore, as a citizen of that world, the general devastation, the blood that has been shed in the field or on the scaffold, and the stupendous destruction that has overwhelmed a great nation.—While I can yet contemplate the minuti to feel the distresses of many amiable individuals—from these may you, my dear friend, have now escaped; with the consoling reflection, that the heavy share you have had in them, you have so well and honourably sustained.
"You will be glad to know, perhaps, that the wretched Brymore is recovered enough to go out. I saw him in his vis-a-vis in Hyde Park yesterday.—I wish I could tell you that he was treated with the contempt he deserves; but the women who live in ton, receive him with the more kindness than ever; and the men who are of his set, seem to derive additional honour from their acquaintance with him. He is very pale and very pathetic. Lady Aberdore is said not yet to have received him into quite the same degree of favour he possessed as before, but that is believed to be less in resentment of his principles, than of his daring, while he saw her transcendent beauty every day, to discover that there were charms in an unknown rural beauty. Miss Milsington is more resplendent and more gay than usual; and when she sees me, affects a great flow of spirits, to convince me, I suppose, that she is not likely to die for love. I seem to be talking longer of these frivolous people than they merit. To escape I believe from a subject, on which I must say, what I know your friendship for me will make it uneasy to you to hear. My poor mother, notwithstanding all I have done in the hope of conciliating her favour, still remains so displeased at my having given her name "to a foreign woman," that she sees me only to reproach me, and cannot yet be prevailed upon to receive Alexina; which I should lament the more, if I had any hope that the mingled dignity and sweetness of my wife, her strong understanding, or her gentle heart, could conquer the inveterate prejudice of the dowager Lady Ellesmere; but, unless I had that hope, I will not expose Alexina to the repulse and disdain even of my mother.
Mrs. Melton and Mrs. Darnly have paid her formal visits since she has been in town, which she has returned in the same manner they were made, by leaving her name at their doors. I have so great a dislike to both my brothers-in-law; the manners of Melton, and the ostentation of Darnly, are so disgusting to me, that I see very little of either Mary of Theodora; and it is wonderful how, in common minds like theirs, distance and other connections eradicate the affections, that, having grown up with us, towards the children of the same parents, one would believe much more deeply fixed than to depend on local circumstances.—Elizabeth is gone with her husband into Yorkshire; and my mothers present companions at Eddisbury are two misses from the neighbouring town—women without education, or knowledge of the world, who encourage her unfortunate prepossessions, and lament with her the apostate taste of her son.
"Lady Sophia and her daughter are in Scotland visiting an uncle; but she has declared against introducing to her circles, as her connection, a foreigner of whom she knows nothing. I shall not I believe put her complaisance to so severe a proof, for it is my intention to quit England; and, as soon as you have found a residence to suit you, I shall take up my abode in your neighbourhood.
"Let me therefore hear of you, my dear D'Alonville, as soon as possible, and tell me where you and your household determine to fix. My accounts from Carlowitz are satisfactory: he entertains hopes of the affairs of his country, which I greatly fear will be found too sanguine; but the favourable view he gives Alexina of the projects in agitation, amuses and animates her mind, and of course contributes to my happiness, of which, notwithstanding the perverse circumstance I have related, I really think I enjoy a greater portion than falls to the usual lot of man. The narrowness of my fortune, in proportion to my situation in life, which would with any other woman be a source of discontent, only serves to endear me to the heart of Alexina, because she believes that to my affection for her, I sacrificed superior fortune. She has no taste for those expences which to one of my fair compatriots of my own rank would have appeared absolutely necessary; nor has she any other ambition than to constitute the happiness of the man she loves.
"When I compare therefore my lot with that of half my married acquaintance, I find that I ought to be happy. Ah, D'Alonville, with such a wife, how lightly the little disappointments and vexations of life may be passed over! As to our pecuniary circumstances, I now think it a weakness that I ever suffered reflections on them to depress me: we are above indigence; we are independent, though not rich; and well as I love England, I can be content to quit it, if the luxuries, that are here accounted among the necessaries of a man of family, cannot be enjoyed but at the expence of that independence.
"Farewell, my dear friend. With a thousand kind remembrances from Alexina, I am most faithfully yours,
EDWARD ELLESMERE."
To this letter, a shorter space of time than he expected brought Sir Edward the following answer:
"St. Isidore, near Roveredo, July 16, 1793.
"At length, my dear English friends, I write to you from our small but pleasant home—I write from amidst the whole circle of your wandering acquaintance, except De Touranges, who is gone to rejoin the army in Flanders, and whose absence alone, by rendering his mother and his wife unhappy, detracts from the pleasure of our little society.
"My last letters gave you the outline of our journey, within four days of our reaching Verona. Among many agreeable circumstances that occurred on our arrival there, the most so to be was, that of our very unexpectedly finding, at a temporary residence, my dear and respectable friends, Madame de Rosenheim, and Madame D'Alberg. I was gratified more than I have words to express, by observing that they saw me with pleasure, and were charmed with Angelina and her mother. Count D'Alberg, who is retired in disgust from his command, appears to have forgotten the prejudice he formerly had taken up against me: he was even so polite to apologize for it, and joined with the ladies of his family in the excretions they liberally made against Heurthofen, who will probably suffer in his turn for his apostacy and hypocrisy, and meet even from his colleagues in iniquity the reward of his crimes.
"The Baron de Rosenheim has been dead some time, but before his death he had the satisfaction of seeing the law-suit decided, which secures his paternal estate to the heirs of his daughter; a satisfaction which that amiable woman, weeping as she spoke of it, declared he owed to me; for had the deeds I was fortunate enough to recover been lost, Madame d'Alberg's claims to those estates could never have been established.
"The pecuniary circumstances of the family are brilliant, but the count appears dejected and out of his element; and is too acutely sensible, I believe, of the mortifications which compelled him to resign. Madame D'Alberg, however, owned to me, that she is quite as well pleased with being at Verona as at Vienna, and much more anxious for the safety than the glory of her husband. We hope to live much with them when winter obliges us to return to Verona; but at this moment we are too much delighted with the beauty and novelty of the objects around us, to think even of Verona with any wish to be there.
"Where shall I find terms to describe the charms of the country that we passed through in coming to this place? Our road (of which I forbear to give you a detail of posts) was for some miles elevated, above the narrow but richly cultivated valley through which the river Adice takes its serpentine course. On an eminence hanging over its current is the fort called La Chuisa, which we passed through, and immediately entered the Tirole.
The mountains which bound the lovely vallies we passed, are so majestic, so sublime, that the pencil might give some idea of them, but the pen dares not undertake it. On the summits of many, are level platforms; among the cliffs of others, are convents, churches, hermitages, or houses of the inhabitants of singular forms; and these look down upon a variety of scarred rocks, starting in some places from amidst copses of the brightest verdure, in others extending their broken and rugged masses, tinted only with the plants that love a shallow soil. I was going to name them as Mrs. Denzil dictated, but she says no native of my country, educated as I have been, has the least taste for the unadorned beauty of nature: that she knows it will only puzzle me, perhaps punish me, and that therefore she will go on with the description herself.
"Yes, dear sir, I take the pen from the Chevalier, that he may not undertake to tell you in French the names of plants which I cannot in that language find for him. Figure to yourself these undescribable mountains, so various in their forms, and so magnificent in their effect; robed, if I may use a woman's word, in many places with that assemblage of vegetable beauty, which in England is collected in the most ornamented gardens with difficulty. Imagine that the rough features of these rocky acclivities are softened by the hand of Flora, who has often dressed them with the cistus, the variety of antirhinums, cedums, and saxagpagar; while the deep glen-like recesses, formed by these bold promontories, are shaded with every tree of the forest, festooned with honeysuckles, sweet and various as those of our gardens; and lower, towards the foot of the mountains, are natural shrubberies. There the acacia hangs its pearly tassels amidst its light and vivid leaves, and the robinia* more humbly puts forth its purplish-pink blossoms, among viburnams, dogwood, shumach, and many other shrubs; while, of hardly less humble growth, the caronilla, with its golden circlets, the Mediterranean heaths*, myricas, and fenna, are contrasted with the juniper, the laurustinus, and the bay: these, indeed, are the most minute beauties, and calculated rather to attract the botanist, than the landscape painter; but they surely lend graces to the great features of nature, without detracting from their sublimity. D'Alonville should now take the pen again; but he is idle, and sends me for a close of our joint landscape painting, to an author whose mountain scenery, it is true, we cannot with our united endeavours equal. He bids me then quote*—thus: "Ajouter à tout cela les illusions de l'optique les pointes des monts diferemment éclairé le clair obseur du doleil et des ombres, et tous les acidents de lumière qui en résultoient le matin et le soir; vous aurez idée de scènes continuelles qui ne cefferent d'attirer mon admiration, et qui sembloient m'être offerts en un vrai théatre: car la perspective des monts êtant verticale, frappe les yeax tout a la fois, et bien plus puissamment que celle des plaines qui ne se voit qu'obliquement en fuyant et dont chaque objet vous en chache un autre." I cannot describe the house we inhabit; for if it deserved to be described, which it does not, what are the most magnificent and laboured works of art, when we are contemplating the great compositions of Nature, "with all her great works about her?" How poor are the utmost efforts of man, (though they survive for centuries his fragile and wretched existence) when we compare them with the glorious objects which we every day see? I have lately passed so near the seat of war, my dear Sir, that I could indulge my spleen, in describing the talents of mankind to waste and to destroy; but that it is ungrateful to pollute the lovely scenes before me with such images of horror: and I recall my pen from a digression which you will think very little to the purpose, to tell you that we inhabit a house that once contained a small religious society now dissolved. Like the "peasant's nest" of Cowper,
"'Tis perch'd upon the green hill top;
for it stands on one of those shrubby knolls I have been trying to describe; but above us, greatly above us, on a projection of rock, is an eyrie of a Tyrolese peasant, with its broad projecting roof, and other singularities, such as mark the cottages in this country: and yet this elevated little mansion is not half way up the stupendous mountain to which it clings.
"Would I could convey to you an adequate idea of the scene I behold from my windows! I was unwilling to believe that there was many prospects finer than I saw from my temporary abode at Aberlynth; but here I am convinced that is comparatively tame and poor. I am also cured of another error which was the persuasion that there is no verdure after the earliest months of spring, but in England.
"It is here, my friend, that I hope to forget, at least to cease feeling so acutely, the calamities which made, for many years, my country insupportable, and that have at length driven me from it.—It is here I hope still to enjoy at least that species of happiness which arises from seeing those we love happy.
"I shall not here, I trust, be too near any great or rich cousin. I shall not be continual reproach to the persons who have impoverished me; and who have verified the observation of a man* who, knowing much of the wrong side of human nature, says, that
"Nothing is so apt to break the bravest spirit, as a continual chain of oppression.—One injury is best descended by a second, and a second by a third."
"Oh, for a cup of oblivion!—but unless it were partial, and that I could remember what I wish not to forget—friends, who, though lost to me, are honourable to human nature, I will be content not to desire it; but to recollect that I should never have known them, if I had not been the victim of others, and if I had not borne with some fortitude the evils those others inflicted. Farewell, dear Sir Edward!"
"Mrs. Denzil makes me resume the pen, my dear friend. Let me then, (while I lament that any prejudice on the part of Lady Ellesmere should make England uneasy to you), let me express my hope, that you will remain firm in your purpose of joining us here. The pleasure of select and friendly society will then be most complete; or it will at least have no other drawback than the defection of Madame de Touranges, and Gabrielle, who cannot taste even conditional happiness, while the son, the husband they love, is exposed to such dangers as now inevitably surround him: nor does the inquietude of her friend fail to affect Angelina, who not only generously sympathies with her, but looks forward (with that fatal prevoyance which seems to be given us only to embitter our short moments of felicity) to the hour, not very distant perhaps, when her D'Alonville must tear himself from her. The Abbé de St. Remi, however, (who has been received in a convent about three miles from hence,) is the consolation of all, as well as the confessor of the catholic part of our little community. The purity of his heart, and the strength of his mind; his chearful piety and dignified resignation, renders his conversation beneficial to every one of us;—while, for myself, I am conscious that, possessed of present competence and tranquillity, living with friends I esteem, with a wife I absolutely idolize, and amid scenes which are as beautiful as nature any where offers to the contemplation of man, I should be ungrateful to Heaven were I not to enjoy the passing good. With Angelina I should find charms in a desert. Here she appears like the goddess-nymph of this delicious country. Frequently as I look at her, I enquire, whether it is possible I can deserve her? and tremble lest the portion of happiness I enjoy, mixed and dashed as it is, (while so many of my countrymen are every way wretched), should not be more than should fall to my lot. But these reflections weaken rather than fortify the mind. Oh! hasten hither with your Alexina!—and while your friendship adds to my felicity, let your example sustain my philosophy; for what I now possess, is less the effect of reflection and reason, than of the harsh lessons I have received in the school of adversity. I fear that from disposition and education, I am as volatile, as inconsiderate, as impetuous, as the generality of young men of my rank and country, who, born in the lap of prosperity, were educated only to appear in those scenes of life, here solidity of character would have impeded rather than have assisted their progress towards those objects to which the ambition of the French nobility was directed.
"But adversity, which has made me an exile, banished me from my country, robbed me of my friends and my fortune, and thrown me in some measure destitute on the world, has taught me, I trust, many useful lessons, and has in one or two instances converted its curses into blessings; for it has given me fortitude and resolution; instructed me to conquer prejudice, and to feel for the sufferings of others. In losing every thing but my honour and my integrity, I have learned, that he who retains those qualities can never be degraded, however humble may be his fortune. If my calamities have deprived me of my natural friends, they have been the means of creating for me others, who in the unruffled bosom of prosperity I should never have found. To adversity I owe your invaluable attachment, my beloved Ellesmere—to adversity I am indebted for the dearest of all earthly blessings—the tender affection of my adored Angelina."
THE END.