CHAPTER III.

_Varenna, Lake of Como_.

Italy at last! I have crossed the Alps and reached my goal, and now I turn and look at that winding road which, for above two thousand feet, traverses the steep mountain-side, and involuntarily a sadness steals over me--that I am never to re-cross it! These same “last-times” are very sorrowful things, all emblems as they are of that one great “last-time” when the curtain falls for ever! Nor am I sorry when this feeling impresses me deeply; nay, I am pleased that indifference--apathy--have no more hold upon me. I am more afraid of that careless, passionless temperament, than of aught else, and the more as hour by hour it steals over me. Yesterday a letter, which once would have interested me deeply, lay half read till evening; to-day, a very old friend of my guardian’s, Sir Gordon Howard, has left his card: he is ill the inn, perhaps in the next room, and I have not energy to return his visit and chat with him over friends I am never to see again. And yet he is a gallant old officer,--one of that noble class of Englishmen whose loyalty made the boldest feats of daring, the longest years of servitude, seem only as a duty they owed their sovereign. The race is dying out fast.

What can have brought him to Italy? Let me see. Here is the Traveller’s Book; perhaps it may tell something.

“Sir Gordon Howard, Officier Anglais,”--simple enough for a Major-general and K.C.B. and G.C.H.--“de Zurich à Como.” Not much to be learned from that. But stay! he is not alone. “Mademoiselle Howard.” And who can she be? He never had a daughter, and his only son is in India. Perhaps she is a grandaughter; but what care I? It is but another reason to avoid seeing him. I cannot make new acquaintances now. He wants no companions who must travel the road I am going! Antoine must tell me when Sir Gordon Howard goes out, and I’ll leave my card then. I feel I must remain here to-day, and I am well content to do so. This calm lake, these bold mountains, the wooded promontory of Bellagio, and its bright villas, seen amid the trees, are pleasant sights; while from the ever-passing boats, with their white arched awnings, I hear laughter and voices of happy people, whose hearts are lighter than my own.

If I could only find resolution for the task, too, there are a host of letters lying by me unanswered. How little do some of those “dear friends” who invite one to shoot grouse in the Highlands, or hunt in Leicestershire, think of the real condition of those they ask to be their guests! It is enough that you have been seen in certain houses of a certain repute. You have visited at B------, and spent a Christmas at G------; you are known as a tolerable shot and a fair average talker; you are sufficiently recognised in the world as to be known to all men of a very general acceptance, and no more is wanted. But, test this kind of position by absence! Try, if you will, what a few years out of England effect! You are as totally forgotten as though you belonged to a past generation. You expect--naturally enough, perhaps--to resume your old place and among your old associates; but where are they? and what have they become? You left them young men about town, you find them now among the “middle ages;” when you parted they were slim, lank, agile fellows, that could spring into a saddle and fly their horse over a five-bar rail, or pull an oar with any one. Now, they are of the portly order, wear wider-skirted coats, trousers without straps, and cloth boots; their hats, too, have widened in the leaf, so as to throw a more liberal shade over broader cheeks; the whiskers are more bushy, and less accurate in curl. If they ride, the horse has more bone and timber under him; and when they bow to some fair face in a passing carriage there is no brightening of the eye, but in its place a look of easier intimacy than heretofore. These are not the men you left?--alas they are! A new generation of young men about town has sprung up, who “know not Joseph,” and with whom you have few, if any, sympathies.

So I find it myself. I left England at a time when pleasure was the mad pursuit of every young fellow; and under that designation came every species of extravagance and all kind of wild excess. Men of five thousand a-year were spending twelve! Men of twelve, thirty! Every season saw some half-dozen cross the Channel, “cleared out”--some, never more to be heard of. Others, lingering in Paris or Brussels to confer with their lawyer, who was busily engaged in compromising, contesting, disputing, and bullying a host of creditors, whose very rogueries had accomplished the catastrophe they grumbled at. Lords, living on ten or twelve hundred pounds a-year were to be met with everywhere; Countesses, lodged in every little town in Germany. The Dons of dragoon regiments were seen a-foot in the most obscure of watering-places; and men who had loomed large at Doncaster, and booked thousands, were now fain to risk francs and florins among the flats of Brussels and Aix-la-Chapelle. The pace was tremendous; few who came of age with a good estate held out above two or three years. And if any listener should take his place beside a group of fashionable-looking young Englishmen in the Boulevard de Grand, or the Graben at Vienna, the chances were greatly in favour of his hearing such broken phrases as, “Caught it heavily!”--“All wrong at Ascot!”--“Scott’s fault!”--“Cleared out at Crocky’s!”--“No standing two hundred per cent!”--“Infernal scoundrel, Ford!”--“That villain Columbine!”--“Rascal Bevan!” and so on, with various allusions to the Quorn hounds, the Clarendon, and Houlditch the coach-maker.

Such was the one song you heard every where.

Now the mode--a better one I willingly own it--is “Young Englandism.” Not that superb folly of white neckcloth and vest, that swears by Disraeli and the “Morning Post,” but that healthier stamp, whose steps of travel have turned eastward, towards the land of old-world wonders, and who, instead of enervating mind and body at Ems or Baden, seek higher and nobler sources of pleasure among the cities and tombs of ancient Egypt. Lord Lindsay, for instance, what a creditable specimen is he of his age and class! and Warburton’s book, the “Crescent and the Cross,” how redeeming is such a production among the mass of frivolity and flippancy the magazines teem with! These are the men who, returning to England more intensely national than they left it, cannot be reproached with ignorance in this preference of their native land above every other. Their nationality, not built up of the leaders of the daily newspapers, is a conviction resulting from reflection and comparison.

They are proud of England; not alone as the most powerful of nations, but as that where personal integrity and truth are held in highest repute--where character and reputation stand far above genius--and where, whatever the eminence of a gifted man, he cannot stand above his fellows, save on the condition that he is not inferior in more sterling qualities. The young man setting out to travel can scarcely be sustained by a better feeling than his strong nationality. He who sets a high store by the character of his country will be slow to do aught that will disgrace it. Of course I speak of nationality in its true sense; not the affectation of John Bullism in dress, manner, and bearing--not the insolent assumption of superiority to the French and Germans, that some very young men deem English; but, a deep conviction that, as the requirements of England are higher in all that regards fidelity to his word, consistency of conduct, and more honourable employment of time and talents than prevail abroad, he should be guardedly careful not to surrender these convictions to all the seductions of foreign life and manners.

I do not believe our country is superior to any foreign land in any one particular so strikingly as in the capabilities and habits of our higher orders. Such a class as the titled order of Great Britain, taking them collectively, never existed elsewhere.

A German, with any thing like independence, lives a life of tobacco-smoking and snipe-shooting. An Italian, is content to eke out life with a _café_ and a theatre--lemonade and a “_liaison_” are enough for him. The government of foreign states, in shutting out the men of rank and fortune from political influence, have taken the very shortest road to their degradation. What is to become of a man who has a Bureaucracy for a government and Popery for a religion?

But what is the tumult in the little court-yard beneath my window? Ha! an English equipage! How neatly elegant that low-hung phaeton! and how superb in figure and style that pair of powerful dark-brown thoroughbreds!--for so it is easy to see they are, even to the smart groom, who stands so still before the pole, with each hand upon the bars of the bits. All smack of London. There is an air of almost simplicity in the whole turn-out, because it is in such perfect keeping. And here come its owners. What a pretty foot!--I might almost say, and ankle, too! How gracefully she draws her shawl around her! What! my friend Sir Gordon himself? So, this is Mdlle. Howard! I wish I could see her face. She will not turn this way. And now they are gone. How distinctive is the proud tramp of their feet above the shuffling shamble of the posters!

So, it is only a “_piccolo giro_” they are gone to make along the lake, and come back again, to dinner. I thought I heard him say my name to his valet, as he stepped into the carriage. Who knocks at the door? I was right; Sir Gordon has sent to invite me to dine at six o’clock. Shall I go? Why should I think of it? I am sick, low, weak, heart and body. Nay, it is better to refuse.

Well, I have written my apology, not without a kind of secret regret, for somehow I have a longing--a strange wish, once more, to feel the pleasant excitement of even so much of society; but, like the hero of the Peau de Chagrin, I dread to indulge a wish, for it may lead me more rapidly down to my doom. I actually tremble lest a love of life, that all-absorbing desire to live, should lie in wait for me yet. I have heard that it ever accompanies the last stage of my malady. It is better, then, to guard against whatever might suggest it. Pleasure could not--friendship, solicitude, kindness might do so.