Читать книгу Memoirs of Eighty Years - Thomas Gordon Hake - Страница 21

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Dr. Basham, physician to the Westminster Hospital, was another of us. I lost sight of him between the years 1824 and 1860, when I met him in the laboratory, and knew him again at a glance.

Sir Henry Cole, whom I had not seen for five and thirty years, another boy, came across me at one of Lady Ripon’s receptions; I recognized him too, though he was disguised in the broad red ribbon and star of the Bath.

These two men reached notoriety, each in his calling, Basham as a physician, Cole as an official in the office of Records. But they and their like were of the vanishing class, their names are disappearing; they filled only a little space in their own generation, which they accompany to oblivion.

My school days are a memory that I have never refreshed by visiting those ancient halls and cloisters; once only since I left them have I passed through from Newgate Street to Little Britain. I found all there was doubly dead. It was dead in its own past, and dead in mine. I saw a moral blank in which love was absent, absent as it had ever been between the pupil and his masters. During my holidays at Seaford, I experienced thirty days at a time of love and kindness; the recollection of this drew me to it again. I was seldom at Brighton without going over there with my brother and his wife, or with his children and mine, to look once more at the house on the Crouch, and to walk over that beautiful south down that ascends from the beach and the sea to Cuckmere.

When we no longer knew one living creature there, we still found pleasure in asking the oldest inhabitants if they remembered Captain and Mrs. Wallinger.

When I quitted school and gave up the mediæval costume, I was put into fine clothes, and spent a fortnight at Woolwich, taken about from sight to sight by my uncle, dining often at the artillery mess, taking a spare bed at the quarters of Colonel Wylde, and waited on by his man, when I learned, and have since often found, that a soldier makes the best valet in the world. Whatever familiarity you may show him, he never becomes familiar with you; he is always respectful. No one knew this better than my famed cousin, Charles Gordon. He, when at home, would talk to the soldier-footman of certain members of his mother’s family, who were expected as guests, and, calling them good-naturedly by opprobrious names, would ask if they were in the house; but the servant, however hard driven by the persistency of his young master, would to the last pretend not to understand to whom he made allusion.

I did not like that visit to Woolwich: my uncle was very severe, though only at the moment, on the faults of young people, though a kinder heart could not well be. The evenings were formal; we sat round a table, every one in some manner occupied. Unused to fine furniture I kicked the leg of the table. The uncle showed anger on his expressive face, while he asked, “Can’t you reconnoitre?” I was given an elegant copy of “Gil Bias” to read; unused to such editions, unused to reading in the presence of fine people, I damped my finger at my lips. “Give me the book,” shouted the good uncle; “I’ll show you how to turn over the leaves!” In this he performed the feat as any other gentleman would do, and handed the book back.

This and similar incidents so troubled me that I contemplated taking flight; but my patience under trial prevailed, and I bided the time for a visit to Seaford, which soon came about.

This was in 1824, when Charles Gordon was not yet a denizen of our world.

Colonel Wylde, my host at the barracks when the family house on the common was full, played a part which relieved him from the humdrum of military life. He spoke Spanish fluently, and, at a time when such a man was much wanted by the Government, he was employed on a mission to Spain; and afterwards, when Prince Albert became one of our royal family, he was appointed as his equerry, and became a great favourite at court. He was my uncle’s closest friend; but on the command of a brigade falling vacant, Wylde, then general, was given the appointment, though one below my uncle in seniority, on whom by custom it should have devolved, and this one incident cooled the warm friendship of a long life.

Owing to his urbanity, his knowledge of life, and his pleasant face, Wylde became a great favourite with the royal family, the queen, the princes and princesses, all of whom loaded him with presents. Prince Albert pressed on him a baronetcy, which, from a mistake in the bestowal of his early affections, he could not accept. It was an arbitrary act of the Duke of Cambridge to break through the rules of the service and give him a brigade which was due to another, to a friend; perhaps he should have refused, but doubtless the pressure on all sides was heavy, not to mention that Wylde had a family which would have been large if divided between two.

What made this brigade business more aggravating was, that the duke had contracted an intimacy with my uncle and his family, and was really his friend.