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Thus it is observed, that men sometimes, upon the hour of their departure, doe speak and reason above themselves.

--Religio Medici.

I

It is a pity to have to confess that life missed a dramatic opportunity here. It would have been so easy to allow this upheaval to coincide with my grandfather's birth, to let him make his first appearance on earth scandalously in a church, like that most inapropos child of Pope Joan; but occasionally life, which has so many other opportunities at command, disdains these theatrical strokes. My grandfather arrived six months later, in the normal way, and was christened Gustave-Félicité-George. This last name, such an abrupt resolution of the previous harmonies, was due to an outburst of Englishness on the part of his mother, who thought Gustave bad and Félicité worse, and was determined that her boy should have something solid in the way of a name. Auguste-Anne, who was not difficult on minor points, gave way readily enough, and continued to refer to his son by his title of Morhange. "Is M. de Morhange at liberty?" he would enquire. A servant would go to see, and on returning would answer gravely:

"M. de Morhange is having his binder adjusted. He will be at his Excellency's disposal in a few minutes." Bella, however, for the rest of her life never spoke of the boy except as George, nor could she acquire habits of ceremony with him. She loved him passionately in the most middle-class way, and when she died two years later of fever, though her delirium called and thirsted for him, she had the strength, in her lucid moments, to forbid him to be brought within range of the infection.

She died crying his name, and thrusting his imaginary presence away with her hands.

II

It would be possible to make a complete and not uninteresting book about Bella. Not many women in the course of their lives pass from milliner's apprentice to queen, with an interlude of goddess by the way. Emma Hamilton, of the same period, had something the same story, but the course of her fortune followed more everyday lines; men took her beauty, like a box of bricks, and built memorials with it to their own infatuation. Bella had beauty too--must have had, though there is no record of it, no portrait; but she had backbone, which Emma Hamilton never possessed, from the days when she wandered about Hove, her stockings mended with pins, to her zenith in the Queen of Naples' drawing-room. Bella was frightened of her husband, and stood up to him; awed by the Bishop, who still could get nothing out of her more Popish than the word Amen; and she had heard a tidal wave grind ships to powder within fifty yards of her with no audible or visible yielding to terror. It is strange to think that the mainspring of all this good behaviour was not courage, nor religion, nor duty, but simply an honest, healthy British contempt for foreigners and their ways. God bless this great-grandmother! I think--I hope--that I have a lot of her in me.

III

Things went on unchanged after her death. The boy grew, his father read Corneille to him, the Bishop conducted him here and there among the classics, as an able courier shows a traveller the sights of Rome; not too many stupendousnesses in one day, and ample intervals left for refreshment. He grew fair like his mother, beaky and lean like his father, and seemed to have no troubles in the world, and no ambitions beyond those of his years; to extend his body, and do better at sports than his fellows.

But greatness, as everyone knows, is thrust upon an unlucky few. In the year 1816 a ship came into the harbour, rebuilt by this time, and untroubled for a full ten years by storms. The ship was a French one, flying the old white flag, and named the Bon Souvenir, the Happy Memory; enough to show that she was an emissary of the Good Old Days, which somehow or another seemed to have come back to France. Her commander confirmed this impression; he came to inform Auguste-Anne of the accession, thanks to the goodness of God, Prince Metternich, and the higher powers generally, of Louis XVIII, brother to the late sainted king. As luck would have it, all the flags of the various political systems had been engulfed in the island's disaster, and the easiest to replace being the white, this was now flying over the fort and the palace. It did not need the brevet, signed by the lamented saint, to convince the commander of M. de Mortemar's persistent loyalty. He acknowledged it with tears of emotion, and begged the favour of doing so gallant a loyalist any service in his power. Auguste-Anne considered for a whole morning upon his verandah shaded by wistaria, and at length sent for M. de Morhange.

"My dear son," said Auguste-Anne when the boy presented himself, "there is once more a King Louis; and this being so, I propose, with your approval, to render him this island. God forbid that a Mortemar should strive with a Bourbon for a few square miles which may at any moment sink into the sea. You know the deathless motto, which our cousins Rohan stole from us centuries ago and changed--Crown he wears not, honour shares not, Mortemar cares not. There have been in Europe of late years, and still persist there, too many adventurers aping kings; a name such as ours does not enlist in such a shabby company. Better King's lieutenant, and hold our heads high, than a petty cringing equality. And so I have decided--always with your approval, monsieur--to send you to France in our good friend's charge to give His Majesty an account of our stewardship. If King Louis should offer you a place about the court, you may accept, that is only polite; but you are not to solicit any such thing, like a footman that renders a service for hire. This, I believe--with a recommendation against taking a mistress from your own class--is all the advice I have to give you. The first is a matter of dignity; as to the second, it is not to your interest to encourage lightness in a society which you hope may provide you with a wife."

With this inconsiderable amount of mental ballast the child--then aged twelve--set sail with Saint Louis XVI's brevet in his pocket for credentials, and the abbé and two or three old steady servants in attendance.

It may be said at once that he never set foot in Corazon again, never again saw his father, or trod, hand in hand with the Bishop, the maze of Latin prosody. For the next tidal wave was final. Earthquakes under the sea set it in motion, deep tremors affecting in their first onset only the bones of a few wrecks. But the subsidence meant the sudden shifting of a great mass of water, which tilted up in a wave five hundred feet high, and travelled solemnly, like a mountain walking, half-way across the Mexican Gulf before it struck land, curled, and broke. A few look-outs in the masts of distant vessels saw the slow-rolling horror go across their horizon; but there were no witnesses of the submerging of Corazon, and no survivors. Ships setting their course for the island months later found only water gently wrinkling and sank their lead many fathoms before they could discover where had been the town.

IV

Which event left Gustave-Félicité-George an orphan and dependent upon that very chancy factor, the gratitude of a Bourbon, for the means of continuing his existence. It may be wondered how he managed to survive; for Bourbon memories, though tenacious of such matters as court etiquette, old injuries, and a contempt for the third and fourth estates, were not otherwise reliable. Besides, there were many young men, of as good family, with better claims to gratitude than this latest sprig of the Mortemars, who could only proffer the submission and loyalty of an island, now, by a caprice of the earth's surface, entirely unpeopled. The Bourbons, however, could be capricious too; and the head of the family chose to exercise the family right in favour of this boy who asked nothing, to the annoyance of the other worthy young persons who had been assiduous, and were for the most part left kicking their heels. Gustave-Félicité became page of honour to the old king, whose brother, Charles X, when he succeeded found him similar employment. The family estates in Artois had been sequestrated; and so, although most of the pious and scandalized relatives who had hustled his father out of the country were conveniently dead and he was heir, it would have meant much money and long waiting to oust the tough Napoleonic general who was in possession. Gustave-Félicité had in his bones some of the indolent quality of the island which had bred him, where enough was enough and no man with ample leisure cared to waste any of his time looking forward. "Mortemar cares not." The motto lent authority for his disdain, the court gave him a sufficient background. He had not grown up like the other youths of his day, amid thrones toppling to the gutter and dominations rising out of it. A kingdom, to him, was something established and sure, in which people went about their business, and if now and then they loosed off guns, did it only in the sovereign's honour, and with the best intentions. (He had been told the story of the witch-doctor's rebellion often enough, but always at the end came in that convulsion of nature in support of the monarchic principle.) He witnessed, therefore, without any dismay the various experiments in government made by the witty and foolish old king. He saw the press being muzzled, the priests creeping back into their old places of power behind the throne, and being unaware that the citizens' attitude towards presses and priests had changed since 1790, thought his majesty well advised. Ministers came and went rather rapidly between 1825 and 1830; a certain restlessness invaded the court. Gustave-Félicité was touched by it; in a spasm of energy he volunteered for the expedition to Algiers, and at once got some inkling of the way democratic principles had invaded even the services. For the generals and admirals concerned in this venture actually consulted, before drawing up their plan of campaign, a little captain, of no importance, whose sole recommendation was that he knew the ground to be fought over, besides depths, and channels, and possible landings. His advice, though mauled about a good deal in the interests of discipline by his superiors in rank, was taken on the whole, with the result that the expedition met with quick and complete success. The force was limited, and even young gentlemen of the King's Household, in uniforms like the most elegant and gleaming strait-jackets, had to do their share of fighting. Gustave-Félicité did not resent this. He had something of the practical turn of mind of his grandmother, the lodging-house keeper in Bristol, to whom any situation, even disagreeable, was something to be grasped and looked at all round, and if possible used to advantage. He galloped, and went thirsty, and did his general's unintelligent errands with complete good temper, until the town of Algiers ceased to struggle, and the triumphant despatches began to speed home. He was one of the envoys chosen to bring the news to Paris, and astounded his general almost to apoplexy by respectfully applying for permission to remain with the troops in occupation.

The fact was, Gustave-Félicité liked all those things which set the general and most of the rank and file panting for home; he liked the heat and the glare and odd odours, and best of all he liked the blacks. He had, as a child, been used to all these things, and in his heart of hearts had missed them while he trotted obediently about vast chilly palaces, and laughed with the gaiety which springs cold from the mind. These Algerians were more solemn than his own native blacks; their religion stalked perpetually by them, instead of being resorted to only when they felt in a good mood; a wifely religion. Still, he liked them well enough to stay with them, if the general would allow it.

But the general had, after the manner of generals, his own ideas on the subject. "Lieutenant of Chasseurs the Marquis Boissy de Mortemar," wrote the general, cursing the flies and dripping sweat, "will make his report to the Minister of War according to orders." Then, with a growl to his aide-de-camp, "All this zeal makes me tired. Bah! I hate a careerist!"

The aide-de-camp might have rejoined that he hoped this lack of charity did not begin at home; but being a careerist himself--as was every man in the army with the exception of the unfortunate conscripts--refrained, and agreed with a nod. Thus Gustave-Félicité was despatched with the story of Hussein Dey's capitulation, and had the novel experience of sending it on twenty-four hours ahead of himself by means of the new telegraph station at Toulon. He arrived in Paris in time to put on his most superb uniform and attend the Te Deum in Notre Dame. That was on July 11th, a time of year when the temperature was trying pretty highly the ambition of careerists left behind in Algiers. But they could say, as they unhooked their stiff collars and cast down their bearskins--the expedition was fought throughout in parade uniform--"Our troubles are over." Gustave-Félicité, riding home through Paris streets after the King's carriage, seeing the lowering faces, hearing no cheers but only a threatening murmur, said to himself, "Our troubles begin."

What had happened to these Parisians, who so short a time back could get drunk on glory? They let the old King go by without a cheer; the flags on public buildings only showed how bare and unenthusiastic were private windows. The fact was, glory at second-hand no longer touched them. If old Charles X, that puppet of Jesuits, that muzzier of journalists, were to get all the credit, then down with glory, and spit on it! Napoleon--passe encore. He used to ride out and direct his own battles, and risk his own life. But an old Bourbon, with a face like the handsomest imaginable sheep, and the kind of wit that goes clean over people's heads--why should he take the cheering? Ah, that, no! said the Paris populace, swapping stories of the kind of thing Jesuits did, and being flicked to the point of madness by a popular press fighting for its life.

V

The tidal wave of revolution gathered during that fortnight, and sucked back in its withdrawal all the surface prosperity and gaiety and charm of Paris, until an ugly city showed, as sinister as that under-sea landscape which the watcher in the cathedral tower of Corazon had seen for a short time exposed to the moon. On the twenty-sixth of July the Ordonnances appeared, pat on the prophecies of the press. It was as though the poor king moved at the bidding of a malevolent hypnotist. Whatever enormity the journalists suggested he might do, that, after hesitation and fumbling, he at last triumphantly did. Their malicious wills goaded him ceaselessly; he was unaware of them, there was a crowd of defenders between them and him; yet somehow their commands reached him, somehow he always obeyed. The Ordonnances were the fine flower of their spite and his stupidity; a rigid censorship, a dissolution, and the disfranchising of a whole class of his own supporters. Trouble was bound to come, and it came. On the twenty-eighth there were barricades building in Paris streets, and a marshal, Marmont, who had once notoriously played the traitor, was given the task of restoring order. Delegates from the people approached him.

"Marshal, the Ordonnances must go."

"Gentlemen, I deplore the Ordonnances; but"--a shrug--"I am a soldier."

An answer equivalent to saying:

"Gentlemen, go ahead with your barricades."

The citizens translated it so, and proceeded tranquilly all night with their preparations, Marmont having withdrawn his troops to barracks after their day's work. The barracks, unluckily, were found to be ill-provided with necessaries, and the martial spirit of the soldiery was considerably lowered by the very circumstances which had been calculated to maintain it--tight uniforms, heavy shakos. To fight thus encumbered, and light of belly--is it any wonder that the following day saw traffic rather than bloodshed round the barricades? Cartridges were swapped for bread and wine with the barricade holders, comfortable in shirt sleeves. There were desertions; two whole regiments, the fifth and fifty-third of the line, went over to the mob. And always the heat increased.

July 29th saw events still more alarming, regiments bowling each other over, like a disaster among ninepins. The Swiss were fired upon in the Louvre by a few sharpshooters. Small blame to them if they remembered August 10th, 1789, when a previous company was massacred to a man in that very place. Attacked by a handful, and that memory, they ran. They ran in a mob towards the Tuileries, carrying panic with them. The picked gendarmes by the Arc de Triomphe were caught up in their rout; the gendarmes in turn swept away two battalions of the guard camped in the Tuileries gardens; and the end of it all was, a general riding like a madman to St. Cloud, stumbling into the King's presence blind with dust, standing painfully at attention and making a report in brief phrases, cut short by tears.

The old king had dignity. He did not interrupt, but when the general--Coetlosquet was his name, a Breton--at last hung his head, he asked with resignation:

"All's lost, then?"

"Not all, sire; but Paris."

VI

After that, excitements of all kinds. Marching and countermarching of citizens, pistol in one hand, the other arm about a female patriot's waist. Two hundred loyalists burned to death in the barracks of the rue de Babylone. Poets scribbling in rooms through whose windows spent bullets came flying. M. Hector Berlioz singing and conducting the "Marseillaise" from the balcony above a mercer's shop:

"First verse: silence complete. Second verse: same effect. This was rot to my mind--I, who had scored the national hymn for 'every man with a voice, and bowels, and blood in his veins.' I could stand it no longer, and when after the fourth verse they still were mute:

"'Sing!' I bawled at them, 'God damn you, can't you sing?'"

At that five thousand voices tore the refrain away from M. Berlioz, with an effect so exactly like a clap of thunder that, stunned by it, he fell backwards in the accommodating mercer's bedroom.

No doubt of it, the Three Days were glorious for the young. Not too much danger, just enough to spice the adventure of living; magnificent weather, when it was no hardship to sleep in the open upon some looted sofa at the summit of a barricade; the songs of Béranger to sing, and posterity to astonish. It was well to be M. Berlioz, aged twenty-seven and an artist, or the Marquis Boissy de Mortemar, aged twenty-five and with a range of becoming uniforms to choose from. As a careerist, however, this latter young gentleman was proving a failure. How easy to have approached Louis-Philippe with offers of sympathy! How easy to have gone to old Lafayette, that stormy petrel, with offers of service in the National Guard, now re-forming! How easy to put the country's good and one's own advancement together, and emerge as a patriot, conscience at rest! M. de Mortemar, however, did none of these things. He galloped about a good deal, true, but on the losing side, bearing messages of delay, unreasoning withdrawal, or equally inopportune defiance. This by day; at night he would stand by the green-clothed table while the old king, with voluntary tranquillity, enjoyed his habitual rubber of whist. Nothing of Paris, sweaty, loud, and merry, intruded upon that quiet room at St. Cloud. It was decorous, the wide windows admitted no sound nor ruffle of wind, only the scent of lime-trees in bloom; the old king with a firm thin hand added his tricks, laughed kindly, and pushed counters across the green baize to his victorious opponents. Not one sentinel more than ordinary, nor one less, guarded him during the three momentous days, and what apprehension or whispering there may have been confined itself to rooms outside the King's hearing.

Wilful blindness, or the disciplined calm of the gamester? Charles X had two essentials of a gentleman: he always picked up a challenge, and he was a good loser.

On July 31st, 1830, he lost with a shrug to Louis-Philippe, who came out of the Three Days as First Citizen of France, a title which immediately ranged him among the unconsidered personages of drama; First Citizen, First Murderer, and so on, necessary rôles but not star ones. However, there he was, wearing the crown which his father had helped to vote down into the guillotine basket, and out of France went Charles X, with no reproaches and no lament, save one ironic word. The young Duchess of Berry, flaunting in a riding habit, pointing with her crop to the provinces north and west which she would raise to save him, was gently snubbed:

"Dear child, you've been reading Walter Scott. Pray let us slip out of history with dignity--"

And his berlin rolled on along the Calais road.

VII

Gustave-Félicité, orphaned by a tidal wave, beggared by a revolution, now found himself exiled in perpetuity, and penalized here and there as well under various articles and sections of the Code Napoléon. His property was confiscated, there were penalties of the gravest kind attached to his presence in France, "or any of her dependencies"; an ironic reward for one of the victors of Algiers. But since he had never possessed the confiscated property, and was young enough not to find exile a burden, he went cheerfully into the northern mists, and served Charles X with affection until the King died at Holyrood six years later. Not till then did questions of occupation and domicile come within the scope of his plans for continuing to exist. But if he was penniless and proscribed, he was also free. The world was his oyster, and if he could no longer depend on family influence or royal patronage to provide the Chablis to go with it, he had energy and youth, together with curiosity. An atlas picked up and opened at random showed a clean and distant territory called Australia, half of it well within a comfortable Tropic. (The Scottish mists and draughts had been his severest test of loyalty.) He pulled a string or two, all that was left in the way of influence, and there fluttered down into his pocket a grant of five thousand acres in New South Wales. With this, and the famous original brevet of Auguste-Anne, the one rich with past pride, the other with hopes for the future, he set sail.

"At least there'll be blacks in Australia," thought Gustave-Félicité-George.

VIII

Somewhere about the same year, 1837, Grandfather Geraldine took ship for the same destination. I can give no biography of him, except to say that he had all the scoundrelly qualities of the best type of Irishman. He set out with the notion that Australia would provide none of the luxuries of life at all, and equipped himself accordingly with a wife, a wooden house numbered in parts, a great many hogsheads of claret, and several tons of Irish earth, which served during the voyage as ballast, and afterwards as a foundation for the wooden house and a protection against snakes.

He set up the wooden house facing Sydney Harbour on the pleasant heights which overlook Rushcutter's Bay. Perhaps in that year people still were cutting rushes there, or purses for a change when any plutocrat was mad enough to take a stroll by its shores. It was rustic, with the arid yet exotic charm of Australian scenes before they become professional beauty-spots. The wooden house, too, was rustic, and must have looked paltry among the stone palaces which other pioneers had built with the help of convict labour, and which were staffed with a nice assortment of forgers, poachers, and even duellists who had been assigned as servants. It rotted away fairly soon, however, having been contrived in a country which knew nothing of white ant, and was replaced, inevitably, by stone. This, the second house, was still there ten years ago. There were broad arrow marks chipped into many of the blocks, and as a child I remember one with initials, perhaps those of a convict who laid it: Y. R. What Christian name begins with Y? Or was it only meant as a tribute, from a subject distant and obscure, to little Queen Victoria; and the chisel slipped? I used to finger that inscription often as a child, with some idea that any writing on stone signified treasure if only one had the clue. Now I shall never know, for the house is pulled down.

But to go back ninety years, there is no need to describe the existence of Grandfather Geraldine in his new surroundings. The shock that decided him to leave Ireland had evidently spent its impetus, for he was respected, despite a temper. A copy of Burke's "Irish Landed Gentry" which he kept on his desk was apt to fall open of itself at "Geraldine: Fitzgerald Michael, Esq., of Corpus, Co. Sligo"; his father. Apparently nobody minded this touch; the distinction between "currency," the Australian born, and sterling, the English immigrant, was of importance, and made all the difference to a man's credit. Grandfather Geraldine had other eccentricities, but they were confined to his home, and did not affect the public estimate of him as a solid citizen to be esteemed. He threw out of the window, for instance, any dish which happened to displease his palate. He danced in all solemnity upon such of his wife's bonnets as did not, in his opinion, suit her. He insisted that their cook--a baby-farmer with the best of characters--should attempt to compound a dish of the locusts which trilled all summer in the pepper-trees by the stone house. These oddities were accepted by everyone as the kind of caprices to which overfed middle-aged gentlemen were liable. I cannot discover that anyone ever tried to protest, or that he was thought, as a paterfamilias, to be anything out of the way.

But for all this, he remains to me rather a shadowy figure. His children, my mother and uncles, never spoke of him. He loomed like the God of Israel; they could never manage to view him as a man, who suffered from indigestion, and might now and then be over-reached in business. Grandfather Boissy is different. He, too, loomed; but much more in the manner of Satan in the old Miracle plays, terrifying but rather comic, and carrying most of the sympathy since his was the losing side. Moreover, there is this difference. Grandfather Geraldine was a country man--Corpus, Co. Sligo, was extremely remote, a few hundred bare acres of tussocky grass, useless except for snipe shooting; while Grandfather Boissy was a man of the town, and of the creamiest life of that most pulsating town in the world, Paris. Yet it was he who went inland, over the ranges, to a new settlement so small that when he arrived it possessed no other traveller's accommodation than a thriving gaol. And he went with no capital, no knowledge of what one did with land when there were no peasants to hire and work it; no acquaintance, save a very nodding one, with the English language; no clothes save those suitable to the Place Vendôme or Princes Street. He went, in short, unbelievably ill-equipped, and ought soon to have gone to the bad and died without reputable posterity. That he did not is a tribute to his character; and it is also the reason why I choose to follow his fortune. Character makes happenings wherever it goes.