Paul Clifford — Complete
flavour peculiarly grateful to the lovers of that pastoral animal which
changes its name into mutton after its decease. Upon these hills the
vestige of human habitation is not visible; and at times, when no boat
defaces the lonely smoothness of the river, and the evening has
stilled the sounds of labour and of life, we know few scenes so utterly
tranquil, so steeped in quiet, as that which is presented by the old,
quaint-fashioned house and its antique grounds,--the smooth lawn, the
silent, and (to speak truly, though disparagingly) the somewhat sluggish
river, together with the large hills (to which we know, from simple
though metaphysical causes, how entire an idea of quiet and immovability
peculiarly attaches itself), and the white flocks,--those most peaceful
of God's creatures,--that in fleecy clusters stud the ascent.
In Warlock House, at the time we refer to, lived a gentleman of the name
of Brandon. He was a widower, and had attained his fiftieth year without
casting much regret on the past or feeling much anxiety for the
future. In a word, Joseph Brandon was one of those careless, quiescent,
indifferent men, by whom a thought upon any subject is never recurred to
without a very urgent necessity. He was good-natured, inoffensive, and
weak; and if he was not an incomparable citizen, he was at least an
excellent vegetable. He was of a family of high antiquity, and formerly
of considerable note. For the last four or five generations, however,
the proprietors of Warlock House, gradually losing something alike from
their acres and their consequence, had left to their descendants
no higher rank than that of a small country squire. One had been a
Jacobite, and had drunk out half-a-dozen farms in honour of Charley
over the water; Charley over the water was no very dangerous person, but
Charley over the wine was rather more ruinous. The next Brandon had been
a fox-hunter, and fox-hunters live as largely as patriotic politicians.
Pausanias tells us that the same people; who were the most notorious for
their love of wine were also the most notorious for their negligence
of affairs. Times are not much altered since Pausanias wrote, and the
remark holds as good with the English as it did with the Phigalei. After
this Brandon came one who, though he did not scorn the sportsman,
rather assumed the fine gentleman. He married an heiress, who of
course assisted to ruin him; wishing no assistance in so pleasing an
occupation, he overturned her (perhaps not on purpose), in a new sort of
carriage which he was learning to drive, and the good lady was killed
on the spot. She left the fine gentleman two sons,--Joseph Brandon, the
present thane,--and a brother some years younger. The elder, being of a
fitting age, was sent to school, and somewhat escaped the contagion of
the paternal mansion. But the younger Brandon, having only reached his
fifth year at the time of his mother's decease, was retained at home.
Whether he was handsome or clever or impertinent, or like his father
about the eyes (that greatest of all merits), we know not; but the
widower became so fond of him that it was at a late period and with
great reluctance that he finally intrusted him to the providence of a
school.
Among harlots and gamblers and lords and sharpers, and gentlemen of
the guards, together with their frequent accompaniments,--guards of the
gentlemen, namely, bailiffs,--William Brandon passed the first stage of
his boyhood. He was about thirteen when he was sent to school; and being
a boy of remarkable talents, he recovered lost time so well that when
at the age of nineteen he adjourned to the University, he had scarcely
resided there a single term before he had borne off two of the highest
prizes awarded to academical merit. From the University he departed
on the “grand tour,” at that time thought so necessary to complete the
gentleman; he went in company with a young nobleman, whose friendship he
had won at the University, stayed abroad more than two years, and on his
return he settled down to the profession of the law.
Meanwhile his father died, and his fortune, as a younger brother, being
literally next to nothing, and the family estate (for his brother was
not unwilling to assist him) being terribly involved, it was believed
that he struggled for some years with very embarrassed and penurious
circumstances. During this interval of his life, however, he was
absent from London, and by his brother supposed to have returned to
the Continent; at length, it seems, he profited by a renewal of his
friendship with the young nobleman who had accompanied him abroad,
reappeared in town, and obtained through his noble friend one or two
legal appointments of reputable emolument. Soon afterwards he got
a brief on some cause where a major had been raising a corps to his
brother officer, with the better consent of the brother-officer's wife
than of the brother officer himself. Brandon's abilities here, for the
first time in his profession, found an adequate vent; his reputation
seemed made at once, he rose rapidly in his profession, and, at the time
we now speak of, he was sailing down the full tide of fame and wealth,
the envy and the oracle of all young Templars and barristers, who,
having been starved themselves for ten years, began now to calculate
on the possibility of starving their clients. At an early period in
his career he had, through the good offices of the nobleman we have
mentioned, obtained a seat in the House of Commons; and though his
eloquence was of an order much better suited to the bar than the senate,
he had nevertheless acquired a very considerable reputation in the
latter, and was looked upon by many as likely to win to the same
brilliant fortunes as the courtly Mansfield,--a great man, whose
political principles and urbane address Brandon was supposed especially
to affect as his own model. Of unblemished integrity in public
life,--for, as he supported all things that exist with the most
unbending rigidity, he could not be accused of inconsistency,--William
Brandon was (as we have said in a former place of unhappy memory to our
hero) esteemed in private life the most honourable, the most moral, even
the most austere of men; and his grave and stern repute on this score,
joined to the dazzle of his eloquence and forensic powers, had baffled
in great measure the rancour of party hostility, and obtained for him
a character for virtues almost as high and as enviable as that which he
had acquired for abilities.
While William was thus treading a noted and an honourable career, his
elder brother, who had married into a clergyman's family, and soon lost
his consort, had with his only child, a daughter named Lucy, resided
in his paternal mansion in undisturbed obscurity. The discreditable
character and habits of the preceding lords of Warlock, which had sunk
their respectability in the county as well as curtailed their property,
had rendered the surrounding gentry little anxious to cultivate the
intimacy of the present proprietor; and the heavy mind and retired
manners of Joseph Brandon were not calculated to counterbalance the
faults of his forefathers, nor to reinstate the name of Brandon in its
ancient popularity and esteem. Though dull and little cultivated, the
squire was not without his “proper pride;” he attempted not to intrude
himself where he was unwelcome, avoided county meetings and county
balls, smoked his pipe with the parson, and not unoften with the surgeon
and the solicitor, and suffered his daughter Lucy to educate herself
with the help of the parson's wife, and to ripen (for Nature was more
favourable to her than Art) into the very prettiest girl that the whole
county--we long to say the whole country--at that time could boast of.
Never did glass give back a more lovely image than that of Lucy Brandon
at the age of nineteen. Her auburn hair fell in the richest luxuriance
over a brow never ruffled, and a cheek where the blood never slept; with
every instant the colour varied, and at every variation that smooth,
pure; virgin cheek seemed still more lovely than before. She had the
most beautiful laugh that one who loved music could imagine,--silvery,
low, and yet so full of joy! All her movements, as the old parson said,
seemed to keep time to that laugh, for mirth made a great part of her
innocent and childish temper; and yet the mirth was feminine, never
loud, nor like that of young ladies who had received the last finish at
Highgate seminaries. Everything joyous affected her, and at once,--air,
flowers, sunshine, butterflies. Unlike heroines in general, she very
seldom cried, and she saw nothing charming in having the vapours. But
she never looked so beautiful as in sleep; and as the light breath came
from her parted lips, and the ivory lids closed over those eyes which
only in sleep were silent,--and her attitude in her sleep took that
ineffable grace belonging solely to childhood, or the fresh youth into
which childhood merges,--she was just what you might imagine a sleeping
Margaret, before that most simple and gentle of all a poet's visions of
womanhood had met with Faust, or her slumbers been ruffled with a dream
of love.
We cannot say much for Lucy's intellectual acquirements; she could,
thanks to the parson's wife, spell indifferently well, and write a
tolerable hand; she made preserves, and sometimes riddles,--it was more
difficult to question the excellence of the former than to answer the
queries of the latter. She worked to the admiration of all who knew her,
and we beg leave to say that we deem that “an excellent thing in woman.”
She made caps for herself and gowns for the poor, and now and then she
accomplished the more literary labour of a stray novel that had wandered
down to the Manorhouse, or an abridgment of ancient history, in which
was omitted everything but the proper names. To these attainments she
added a certain modicum of skill upon the spinet, and the power of
singing old songs with the richest and sweetest voice that ever made
one's eyes moisten or one's heart beat.
Her moral qualities were more fully developed than her mental. She was
the kindest of human beings; the very dog that had never seen her before
knew that truth at the first glance, and lost no time in making her
acquaintance. The goodness of her heart reposed upon her face like
sunshine, and the old wife at the lodge said poetically and truly of the
effect it produced, that “one felt warm when one looked on her.” If we
could abstract from the description a certain chilling transparency, the
following exquisite verses of a forgotten poet might express the purity
and lustre of her countenance:--
“Her face was like the milky way i' the sky,
A meeting of gentle lights without a name.”
She was surrounded by pets of all kinds, ugly and handsome,--from Ralph
the raven to Beauty the pheasant, and from Bob, the sheep-dog without a
tail, to Beau, the Blenheim with blue ribbons round his neck; all things
loved her, and she loved all things. It seemed doubtful at that time
whether she would ever have sufficient steadiness and strength of
character. Her beauty and her character appeared so essentially
womanlike--soft yet lively, buoyant yet caressing--that you could
scarcely place in her that moral dependence that you might in a
character less amiable but less yieldingly feminine. Time, however, and
circumstance, which alter and harden, were to decide whether the inward
nature did not possess some latent and yet undiscovered properties.
Such was Lucy Brandon in the year ----; and in that year, on a beautiful
autumnal evening, we first introduce her personally to our readers.
She was sitting on a garden-seat by the river side, with her father, who