Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846

Chapter II

Fifteen years passed on most happily. I established myself, or rather old Morgan established me, in my present house; he paid £25,000 for the estate; and I have gone on, as I told you at the beginning of this letter, cultivating my farm and my talents with the utmost care. The little girl grew and grew till I thought she would never stop; and by the time she was sixteen she was at least an inch taller than I was. Many people like those prodigious women of five feet six – I'm only five feet five myself, which I believe was the exact measurement of Napoleon; and I must confess that when I looked on Martha Brown – that was her name – a sort of compliment I always thought to the complexion of her Hindoo mother – I could not imagine how she could be the child of such a curious old-fashioned looking individual as I had heard my uncle Sneezum was. Well, she grew tall – and grew stout – and grew clever; and if old Morgan had been her father himself, he could not have taken more care of her. He was always down at Goslingbury, (that's the name of my place – I sometimes put "Park" after it; but the lawn is now in turnips, and not the least like Blenheim,) and his wife, and his two daughters, and his little boy – in fact, the whole family; and though, I confess, they were always most friendly and attentive to me, their principal cares were bestowed on Martha Brown. I never push myself where I perceive my company is not greatly desired; so I went out to see the planting, or thin the copses, or make new fences, or superintend the ploughing, or betook myself to my study, and gave full way to the wildest flights of fancy in my everlasting first chapters of a novel or romance.

Sir, – It was at that time – now nearly four years ago – that I began a work which I don't believe the most hostile criticism – but I will not boast; it will be enough to say that I consider it equal to any two introductory chapters I ever read. The whole of the first consists in a description of my own house – the name of course changed, and the locality removed to another county. I give the number of the rooms, the width of the passages, the height of ceilings, and a description of the new lifting-hinges to the dining-room door, that raise it over the turkey carpet, without sacrificing, as is usual, an inch of the lower part, and leaving a great interval at the sill. The fields are also very particularly described, and in some instances the exact measurement given; it gives such an appearance of reality, as may be seen in Ainsworth and others; and the second chapter is devoted, or meant to be devoted, to the living interests of the story – the dramatis personæ, as it were – with hopes, fears, griefs, and the other passions alluded to in Collins's ode.

Mystery has an indescribable charm, which is the thing that makes me so fond of riddles; and so I determined to have a hero or a heroine, I did not care which, of a most unexampled kind. But how to invent an unexampled hero, I could not imagine. Some disgusting fellow had always done it before: even a blackamoor had been taken up – for there was that horrid Othello; a Jew – there was Sheva; a puppy – there was Pelham; a pickpocket – there was Jack Sheppard; and at last, as the sweet source of mystery, and the pleasantest one to unravel, I thought I would take myself. Yes, I would be the hero of my own book; and as to a heroine, why, one of the Misses Morgan, or Martha Brown, or old Mrs Morgan, or the Indian nurse, (whose name was Ayah, which is Sanscrit or Cherokee for her situation,) any body would do. I was not at all particular; so I began my own description.

It is amazing how little difference there is between man and man. A very few touches judiciously applied, would make Roebuck into Wellington, especially if Roebuck held the brush himself. Involuntarily I found my height increasing, my embonpoint diminishing, my eyes brightening, my hair disporting in wavy ringlets over a majestic brow, till at the end of the second page I was Theodore Fitzhedingham, twenty-five years of age, with several grandfathers and grandmothers distinguished in history before the Norman conquest, and a clear rent-roll of forty thousand a-year. And yet, after all, it was my own individual self, Thomas Smith Sneezum – not, perhaps, exactly as I was at that moment – but as I had often and often fancied myself when I had gone through a course of Thaddeus of Warsaws, and other chronicles of the brave and beautiful. For, I confess, I was no wiser than other people, and it is well known they have an amazing tendency to identify themselves with the characters of the books they read, which perhaps accounts for the contempt that Doctors' or Clergymen's wives in country villages entertain for any body of the name of Snookes; and gives them so prodigious an opinion of their own importance, that they wouldn't visit a stockbroker or flannel manufacturer for the world. But there I was, stuck in the third page of the second chapter – Theodore Fitzhedingham – blessed with all that handsomeness, and rolling in all that money, and not able to move hand or foot, or in short make the least progress towards the dénouement of the story. For, with all my study, I could not manufacture a heroine out of any of the girls around me. Miss Letitia Morgan had false teeth – I found it quite impossible to make a heroine of her; and besides, I was not even sure of the genuineness of the long curls at the side of her face. For, you will observe, that the beautifying process I have mentioned above; seems strictly confined to one's own particular case. No lying and swopping, and altering and amending, would make those long brown artificial incisors – you saw a roll of the gold wire every time she laughed – into a row of pearls encased in a casket of ruby. That is my description of white teeth in red lips, and I think it is far from bad. Then Miss Sophia was immensely tall, and immensely thin; and in the mornings when she appeared en negligée, as they say in the Morning Post, her clothes hung straight down in perpendicular descent, so that she looked exactly like the canvass air funnels that you see in a steam-boat: and there were no outs and ins, or ups and downs, about her figure from top to toe; and I found it impossible, for a particular reason, to supply these deficiencies by the exercise of my ingenuity in description And that particular reason was this, – that she did it herself. Lord! what a change took place on Miss Sophia as you saw her gliding about the room like a half emptied pillow-case in the morning, and the grand and distinguée (Morning Post again) individual that choked up all the doorways, and occupied whole sofas, when you met her at a party at night. Then there were such flounces and tucks, and furbelows, – she sailed through the room enveloped in such awful circumgyrations of muslin – so pulled in at the waist, and so inflated every where else, that she looked – as you saw only her neck and shoulders emerging from the enormous circle in which the rest of her was buried – like an intrepid æronaut who has fallen by some accident through a hole in the balloon, and you were lost in calculations of the length of darning-needle that would be needed to reach to the vera superficies. Now if I invent, I like to have the honour of the invention entirely to myself; and I found it impracticable to extract a heroine from seven or eight spring gauze petticoats, and a roll of millinery below the waist, that looked like a military cloak rolled up on the crupper of a life-guardsman's saddle. Then poor Martha Brown was too young, and at that time too bashful, for a heroine; and besides, there was no getting over the blot on her birth. Theodore Fitzhedingham could never think of paying attention to the daughter of a Hindoo woman and old Sneezum, the bullock contractor of Bunderjumm. One day I had been at work in one of the plantations, and just as I was marking with my hand-axe a birch tree to be felled, a thought came into my head. I left the cross half executed, and threw the axe on the bank, hurried home, and locked myself in the study. Pen and paper were lying before me, and in a moment I had got deep into the introduction of my heroine. She was an orphan thrown on Fitzhedingham's care – young, beautiful, accomplished, but of unknown mysterious parentage – and the dénouement to consist in the discovery that her father was – but I won't mention it just now, for half the value of these things consists in the surprise. I will give you a page or two of it, only begging you to remark how entirely a man's style alters when he gets into a serious work. Here I go gabbling on and on to you, without much regard to style, or perhaps to grammar – (if there are any slips in it, have the kindness to correct them before you show this to any one) – but the instant I take up my pen to write a portion of my novel, I get dignified and heroic, perhaps you will say a little stiff, but I assure you I have formed myself on the best models. The passage I alluded to was this: —

"To all the graces of external beauty Maria Valentine de Courcy united all the captivations of the intellect – all the attractions of the understanding, – all the enchantments of the soul. Cast in the finest mould of earthly loveliness – radiant in all the charms of youth, of innocence, and of integrity – she was the loved of all approachers – the idol of all observers – the appropriator of all affections. A little more ethereal, she would have been a goddess – a little less celestial, she would have been a more ordinary woman than she was. For her nature was of too lofty a kind – her spirit of too sublimated a character – her disposition of too beatified a placidity, to allow her to be classed with the other individuals constituting the female sex. A period of many years had elapsed since she first took up her residence among the proud halls – the baronial corridors – the heraldic passages of Fitzhedingham Castle. Winter had found her wandering in the snowy lanes – Spring had noticed her careering in the budding meadows – Summer had beheld her perambulating through the flowery grove – and Autumn had kept his eye on her as she galloped her managed palfrey through the umbrageous orchard, or skimmed in her light bark over the pellucid bosom of the silver lake. For many years such had been her unvarying course; and if loveliness has a charm – if innocence has an attraction – if youth has a witchery – all – all – were concentrated in the noble figure and exquisitely-chiselled countenance of the subject of our sketch. The colouring of a Titian, the elasticity of a Rubens, the magnificence of a Michael Angelo Buonaparte." —

"Sneezum, Sneezum!" cried old Morgan, kicking with all his might at the study-door; and interrupting me before I could exactly settle how the sentence was to be properly ended – "Come and bid poor Billy good-bye."

"Billy? who's Billy?" I thought – a little perplexed, perhaps, with the labours of composition.

"Come; he's off this minute for Dublin, where he joins the Trigonometrical Survey – a great honour for a fellow not six months in the Engineers."

The old fool was talking about his son William Morgan, who had been at Goslingbury (Park, when I get the turnips up and the grass sown) for a month – a nice merry young man; and so clever at mathematics, and hydraulics, and other scientific pursuits, that he had won all the prizes at Addiscombe; and, though only a second lieutenant, was chosen to conduct a great survey of Ireland.

"I'm coming," I said; and bundled away my description of Maria Valentine de Courcy; and away old Morgan and I went to the lawn, where we expected to find the soldier. But no soldier, nor any body else, was to be seen.

"His mother and sisters are making fools of themselves, I daresay," said I, "blubbering and crying over the boy, as if he was going out to settle in New Zealand."

"I suspect there's a good deal of crying going on," replied old Morgan; "let us look into the summer-house at the top of the garden." So we hurried up the grass walk; and just as we got to the door, I was in the very act of stepping into the bower, and old Morgan close on my heels, when a man, with a handkerchief held to his eyes, rushed distractedly upon us, and rolled us both down the steps, as if we had been pushed by a bull; and in a minute or so, when I came to myself; I found my heels in a gooseberry bush, and my head tight-jammed into a flower-pot; old Morgan had rolled over into the next bed, which was prepared for celery, and he lay in one of the long troughs, with his hands folded across his breast, and evidently persuaded that he was his own effigy on the top of his own tomb. And this was all the leave-taking we had with the engineer; for, in an agony of grief at parting from his mother, and perhaps to hide his crying, he had hurried out blindfolded, and took no more notice of his host and his father than if we had been a couple of old cabbage-stalks. However, I got up as soon as I was able, and assisted Morgan once more upon his feet. This time we proceeded more cautiously into the summer-house; and on the bench we saw Martha Brown sitting and sobbing with all her might, with her head on Mrs Morgan's shoulder, and Miss Sophia holding a bottle of salts to her nose; while a tear, every now and then, rolled slowly over the tip of her own; and Miss Letitia chafing the sufferer's hands, and occasionally giving them a thump, as if to guard against a fit of hysterics.

Those Hindoos are certainly beautifully made. I never saw any thing more graceful than the recumbent figure of Martha Brown; and I think that was the first time I remarked that she was no longer a child. Up to that moment I had scarcely observed her size; but there she was – a regular full-grown woman – though, I must say, she was behaving rather like an infant, to keep whimpering and sobbing in such a ridiculous way, merely because I had fallen down-stairs.

"What is all this?" I said; "has any body hurt the child?"

"No, no, Mr Sneezum!" exclaimed Mrs Morgan, without looking at me; "leave her alone for a minute or two; it will soon be over."

"How do feel, dear?" enquired Miss Letitia.

"Are you any better, love?" asked Miss Sophia.

And it was very evident they gave themselves no concern about the nearly fatal accident we had met with, which had affected poor Martha so deeply; so I became a little warm.

"Very pretty – very pretty this – upon my word! What in heaven's name is the matter with you all? Here has been that blundering booby William, pushed his father and me down-stairs, and Martha seems the only one that would care a farthing if we had both been killed."

Upon this the girl made a great effort, and lifted up her head; but the moment her eyes rested on me she gave a great scream – wild laughter mixed with the most dreadful sobs; and she was fairly off in an hysterical attack.