第25章
I had confessed; I had been a prodigal; I had been taken back to my parents' arms again.It was not a very great crime as yet, or a very long career of prodigality; but don't we know that a boy who takes a pin which is not his own, will take a thousand pounds when occasion serves, bring his parents' gray heads with sorrow to the grave, and carry his own to the gallows? Witness the career of Dick Idle, upon whom our friend Mr.Sala has been discoursing.Dick only began by playing pitch-and-toss on a tombstone: playing fair, for what we know: and even for that sin he was promptly caned by the beadle.The bamboo was ineffectual to cane that reprobate's bad courses out of him.From pitch-and-toss he proceeded to manslaughter if necessary: to highway robbery; to Tyburn and the rope there.Ah!
heaven be thanked, my parents' heads are still above the grass, and mine still out of the noose.
As I look up from my desk, I see Tunbridge Wells Common and the rocks, the strange familiar place which I remember forty years ago.
Boys saunter over the green with stumps and cricket-bats.Other boys gallop by on the riding-master's hacks.I protest it is Cramp, Riding master, as it used to be in the reign of George IV., and that Centaur Cramp must be at least a hundred years old.Yonder comes a footman with a bundle of novels from the library.Are they as good as OUR novels? Oh! how delightful they were! Shades of Valancour, awful ghost of Manfroni, how I shudder at your appearance! Sweet image of Thaddeus of Warsaw, how often has this almost infantile hand tried to depict you in a Polish cap and richly embroidered tights! And as for Corinthian Tom in light blue pantaloons and Hessians, and Jerry Hawthorn from the country, can all the fashion, can all the splendor of real life which these eyes have subsequently beheld, can all the wit I have heard or read in later times, compare with your fashion, with your brilliancy, with your delightful grace, and sparkling vivacious rattle?
Who knows? They MAY have kept those very books at the library still--at the well-remembered library on the Pantiles, where they sell that delightful, useful Tunbridge ware.I will go and see.Iwent my way to the Pantiles, the queer little old-world Pantiles, where, a hundred years since, so much good company came to take its pleasure.Is it possible, that in the past century, gentlefolks of the first rank (as I read lately in a lecture on George II.in the Cornhill Magazine) assembled here and entertained each other with gaming, dancing, fiddling, and tea? There are fiddlers, harpers, and trumpeters performing at this moment in a weak little old balcony, but where is the fine company? Where are the earls, duchesses, bishops, and magnificent embroidered gamesters? A half-dozen of children and their nurses are listening to the musicians;an old lady or two in a poke bonnet passes, and for the rest, I see but an uninteresting population of native tradesmen.As for the library, its window is full of pictures of burly theologians, and their works, sermons, apologues, and so forth.Can I go in and ask the young ladies at the counters for "Manfroni, or the One-Handed Monk," and "Life in London, or the Adventures of Corinthian Tom, Jeremiah Hawthorn, Esq., and their friend Bob Logic?"--absurd.Iturn away abashed from the casement--from the Pantiles--no longer Pantiles, but Parade.I stroll over the Common and survey the beautiful purple hills around, twinkling with a thousand bright villas, which have sprung up over this charming ground since first Isaw it.What an admirable scene of peace and plenty! What a delicious air breathes over the heath, blows the cloud shadows across it, and murmurs through the full-clad trees! Can the world show a land fairer, richer, more cheerful? I see a portion of it when I look up from the window at which I write.But fair scene, green woods, bright terraces gleaming in sunshine, and purple clouds swollen with summer rain--nay, the very pages over which my head bends--disappear from before my eyes.They are looking backwards, back into forty years off, into a dark room, into a little house hard by on the Common here, in the Bartlemy-tide holidays.The parents have gone to town for two days: the house is all his own, his own and a grim old maid-servant's, and a little boy is seated at night in the lonely drawing-room, poring over "Manfroni, or the One-Handed Monk," so frightened that he scarcely dares to turn round.