Books: My Young Alcides

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MY YOUNG ALCIDES

A FADED PHOTOGRAPH

by

Charlotte M Yonge

PREFACE

Ideas have a tyrannous power of insisting on being worked out, even
when one fears they may be leading in a track already worthily
preoccupied.

But the Hercules myth did not seem to me to be like one of the fairy
tales that we have seen so gracefully and quaintly modernised; and at
the risk of seeming to travestie the Farnese statue in a shooting-
coat and wide-awake, I could not help going on, as the notion grew
deeper and more engrossing.

For, whether the origin of the myth be, or be not, founded on solar
phenomena, the yearning Greek mind formed on it an unconscious
allegory of the course of the Victor, of whom the Sun, rejoicing as a
giant to run his course, is another type, like Samson of old, since
the facts of nature and of history are Divine parables.

And as each one's conquest is, in the track of his Leader, the only
true Conqueror, so Hercules, in spite of all the grotesque adjuncts
that the lower inventions of the heathen hung round him, is a far
closer likeness of manhood--as, indeed, the proverbial use of some of
his tasks testifies--and of repentant man conquering himself. The
great crime, after which his life was a bondage of expiation; the
choice between Virtue and Vice; the slain passion; the hundred-headed
sin for ever cropping up again; the winning of the sacred emblem of
purity;--then the subduing of greed; the cleansing of long-neglected
uncleanness; the silencing of foul tongues; the remarkable contest
with the creature which had become a foe, because, after being
devoted for sacrifice, it was spared; the obtaining the girdle of
strength; the recovery of the spoil from the three-fold enemy; the
gaining of the fruit of life; immediately followed by the victory
over the hell-hound of death; and lastly, the attainment of
immortality--all seem no fortuitous imagination, but one of those
when "thoughts beyond their thoughts to those old bards were given."

I have not followed all these meanings, for this is not an allegory,
but a mere distant following rather of the spirit than the letter of
the old Greek tale of the Twelve Tasks. Neither have I adhered to
every incident of Hercules' life; and the most touching and beautiful
of all--the rescue of Alcestis, would hardly bear to come in merely
as an episode, in this weak and presumptuous endeavour to show that
the half-divine, patient conqueror is not merely a classic invention,
but that he and his labours belong in some form or other to all times
and all surroundings.

C. M. YONGE.
Nov. 8, 1875.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE ARGHOUSE INHERITANCE

CHAPTER II. THE LION OF NEME HEATH

CHAPTER III. THE "DRAGON'S HEAD"

CHAPTER IV. THE WRATH OF DIANA

CHAPTER V. THE CAPTURE IN THE SNOW

CHAPTER VI. OGDEN'S BUILDINGS

CHAPTER VII. THE BIRDS OF ILL OMEN

CHAPTER VIII. BULLOCK'S CHASTISEMENT

CHAPTER IX. THE CHAMPION'S BELT

CHAPTER X. DERMOT'S MARK

CHAPTER XI. THE RED VALLEY CATTLE STEALERS

CHAPTER XII. THE GOLDEN FRUIT

CHAPTER XIII. THE BLOODHOUND

CHAPTER XIV. SUNSET GOLD AND PURPLE

CHAPTER XV. THE FATAL TOKEN

CHAPTER XVI. CONCLUSION

MY YOUNG ALCIDES

A FADED PHOTOGRAPH

CHAPTER I. THE ARGHOUSE INHERITANCE.

One of the children brought me a photograph album, long ago finished
and closed, and showed me a faded and blurred figure over which there
had been a little dispute. Was it Hercules with club and lion-skin,
or was it a gentleman I had known?

Ah me! how soon a man's place knoweth him no more! What fresh
recollections that majestic form awoke in me--the massive features,
with the steadfast eye, and low, square brow, curled over with short
rings of hair; the mouth, that, through the thick, short beard, still
invited trust and reliance, even while there was a look of fire and
determination that inspired dread.

The thing seemed to us hideous and absurd when it was taken by Miss
Horsman. I hated it, and hid it away as a caricature. But now those
pale, vanishing tints bring the very presence before me; and before
the remembrance can become equally obscure in my own mind, let me
record for others the years that I spent with my young Alcides as he
now stands before me in memory.

Our family history is a strange one. I, Lucy Alison, never even saw
my twin brothers--nor, indeed, knew of their existence--during my
childhood. I had one brother a year younger than myself, and as long
as he lived he was treated as the eldest son, and neither he nor I
ever dreamed that my father had had a first wife and two sons. He
was a feeble, broken man, who seemed to my young fancy so old that in
after times it was always a shock to me to read on his tablet, "Percy
Alison, aged fifty-seven;" and I was but seven years old when he died
under the final blow of the loss of my little brother Percy from
measles.

The dear old place--house with five gables on the garden front, black
timbered, and with white plaster between, and oh! such flowers in the
garden--was left to my mother for her life; and she was a great deal
younger than my father, so we went on living there, and it was only
when I was almost a woman that I came to the knowledge that the
property would never be mine, but would go in the male line to the
son of one of my disinherited convict brothers.

The story, as my mother knew it, was this: Their names were Ambrose
and Eustace: there was very little interval between their births, and
there had been some confusion between them during the first few hours
of their lives, so that the question of seniority was never entirely
clear, though Ambrose was so completely the leader and master that he
was always looked upon as the elder.

In their early youth they were led away by a man of Polish
extraction, though a British subject, one Count Prometesky, who had
thrown himself into every revolutionary movement on the Continent,
had fought under Kosciusko in Poland, joined the Carbonari in Italy,
and at last escaped, with health damaged by a wound, to teach
languages and military drawing in England, and, unhappily, to spread
his principles among his pupils, during the excitement connected with
the Reform Bill. Under his teaching my poor brothers became such
democrats that they actually married the two daughters of a man from
Cumberland named Lewthwayte, whom Lord Erymanth had turned out of one
of his farms for his insolence and radicalism; and not long after
they were engaged in the agricultural riots, drilling the peasants,
making inflammatory speeches, and doing all they could to bring on a
revolution. Dreadful harm was done on the Erymanth estate, and the
farm from which Lewthwayte had been expelled suffered especially, the
whole of the ricks and buildings being burnt down, though the family
of the occupant was saved, partly by Prometesky's exertions.

When the troops came, both he and my brothers were taken with arms in
their hands; they were tried by the special commission and sentenced
to death. Lewthwayte and his son were actually hung; but there was
great interest made for Ambrose and Eustace, and in consideration of
their early youth (they were not twenty-two) their sentence was
commuted to transportation for life, and so was Prometesky's, because
he was half a foreigner, and because he was proved to have saved
life.

My father would not see them again, but he offered their wives a
passage out to join them, and wanted to have had their two babies
left with him, but the two young women refused to part with them; and
it was after that that he married again, meaning to cast them off for
ever, though, as long as their time of servitude lasted, he sent the
wives an allowance, and as soon as his sons could hold property, he
gave them a handsome sum with which to set themselves up in a large
farm in the Bush.

And when little Percy died, he wanted again to have his eldest
grandson sent home to him, and was very much wounded by the refusal
which came only just before his death. His will had left the estate
to the grandson, as the right heir. Everyone looked on it as a bad
prospect, but no one thought of the "convict boy" as in the immediate
future, as my mother was still quite a young woman.

But when I was just three-and-twenty, an attack of diphtheria broke
out; my mother and I both caught it; and, alas! I alone recovered.
The illness was very long with me, partly from my desolateness and
grief, for, tender as my kind old servants were, and good as were my
friends and neighbours, they could only make me feel what they were
_not_.

Our old lawyer, Mr. Prosser, had written to my nephew, for we knew
that both the poor brothers were dead; but he assured me that I might
safely stay on at the old place, for it would be eight months before
his letter could be answered, and the heir could not come for a long
time after.

I was very glad to linger on, for I clung to the home, and looked at
every bush and flower, blossoming for the last time, almost as if I
were dying, and leaving them to a sort of fiend. My mother's old
friends, Lady Diana Tracy and Lord Erymanth, her brother, used to
bemoan with me the coming of this lad, born of a plebeian mother,
bred up in a penal colony, and, no doubt, uneducated except in its
coarsest vices. Lord Erymanth told at endless length all the advice
he had given my father in vain, and bewailed the sense of justice
that had bequeathed the property to such a male heir as could not
fail to be a scourge to the country. Everyone had some story to tell
of Ambrose's fiery speeches and insubordinate actions, viewing
Eustace as not so bad because his mere satellite--and what must not
their sons be?

The only person who had any feeling of pity or affection for them was
old Miss Woolmer. She was the daughter of a former clergyman of
Mycening, the little town which is almost at our park-gates. She was
always confined to the house by rheumatic-gout. She had grown up
with my brothers. I sometimes wondered if she had not had a little
tenderness for one of them, but I believe it was almost elder-
sisterly. She told me much in their excuse. My father had never
been the fond, indulgent father to them that I remembered him, but a
strict, stern authority when he was at home, and when he was absent
leaving them far too much to their own devices; while Prometesky was
a very attractive person, brilliant, accomplished, full of fire and
of faith in his theories of universal benevolence and emancipation.

She thought, if the times had not been such as to bring them into
action, Ambrose would have outgrown and modified all that was
dangerous in his theories, and that they would have remained mere
talk, the ebullition of his form of knight-errantry; for it was
generous indignation and ardour that chiefly led him astray, and
Eustace was always his double: but there were some incidents at the
time which roused him to fury. Lewthwayte was a Cumberland man, who
had inherited the stock and the last years of a lease of a farm on
Lord Erymanth's property; he had done a good deal for it, and
expended money on the understanding that he should have the lease
renewed, but he was a man of bold, independent northern tongue, and
gave great offence to his lordship, who was used to be listened to
with a sort of feudal deference. He was of the fierce old Norse
blood, and his daughters were tall, fair, magnificent young women,
not at all uneducated nor vulgar, and it was the finding that my
brothers were becoming intimate at his farm that made Lord Erymanth
refuse to renew the lease and turn the family out so harshly, and
with as little notice as possible.

The cruelty, as they thought it, was, Miss Woolmer said, most ill-
judged, and precipitated the very thing that was dreaded. The youths
rushed into the marriage with the daughters, and cast in their lot
with all that could overturn the existing order of things, but Miss
Woolmer did not believe they had had anything to do with the rick-
burning or machine-breaking. All that was taken out of their hands
by more brutal, ignorant demagogues. They were mere visionaries and
enthusiasts according to her, and she said the two wives were very
noble-looking, high-spirited young women. She had gone to see them
several times when their husbands were in prison, and had been much
struck with Alice, Ambrose's wife, who held up most bravely; though
Dorothy, poor thing, was prostrated, and indeed her child was born in
the height of the distress, when his father had just been tried for
his life, and sentenced to death.

It was their birth and education that caused them to be treated so
severely; besides, there was no doubt of their having harangued the
people, and stirred them up, and they were seen, as well as
Prometesky, at the fire at what had been Lewthwayte's farm; at least,
so it was declared by men who turned King's evidence, and the proof
to the contrary broke down, because it depended on the wives, whose
evidence was not admissible; indeed that--as the law then stood--was
not the question. Those who had raised the storm were responsible
for all that was done in it, and it was very barely that their lives
were spared.

That was the comfort Miss Woolmer gave. No one else could see any at
all, except a few old women in the parish, who spoke tenderly of poor
Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Eustace; but then they had sons or brothers who
had been out with the rioters, and after these twenty-six years no
one remembered the outrages and terrors of the time with anything but
horror; and the coming of the wild lad from the Bush was looked on as
the end of all comfort.

I meant, as soon as I heard he was on the way, to leave Arghouse,
make visits among friends, and decide on my future home, for, alas!
there was no one who wanted me. I was quite alone in the world; my
mother's cousins were not near, and I hardly knew them; and my only
relations were the bushrangers, as Lady Diana Tracy called them.

She was sister to Lord Erymanth, and widow to an Irish gentleman, and
had settled in the next parish to us, with her children, on the death
of her husband.

Her little daughter, Viola, had been spending the day with me, and it
was a lovely spring evening, when we sat on the lawn, wondering
whether I should ever care for anything so much as for those long
shadows from the fir woods upon the sloping field, with the long
grass rippling in the wind, and the border of primroses round the
edge of the wood.

We heard wheels and thought it was the carriage come for Viola, much
too soon, when out ran one of the maids, crying, "Oh! Miss Alison, he
is come. There's ever so many of them!"

I believe we caught hold of one another in our fright, and were
almost surprised when, outstripping lame old Richardson, as he
announced "Mr. Alison!" there came only three persons. They were the
two tallest men I had ever seen, and a little girl of eight years
old. I found my hand in a very large one, and with the words "Are
you my aunt Lucy?" I was, as it were, gathered up and kissed. The
voice, somehow, carried a comfortable feeling in the kindness of its
power and depth; and though it was a mouth bristly with yellow
bristles, such as had never touched me before, the honest friendly
eyes gave me an indescribable feeling of belonging to somebody, and
of having ceased to be alone in the world.

"Here is Eustace," he said, "and little Dora," putting the child
forward as she backed against him, most unwilling to let me kiss her.
"And, I did not know I had another aunt."

"No," I said, starting between, for what would Lady Diana's feelings
have been if Viola had carried home an Australian kiss? "This is
Miss Tracy."

Viola's carriage was now actually coming, and as I went into the
house with her, she held me, whispering to me to come home at once
with her, but I told her I could not leave them in that way, and they
were really my nephews.

"You are not afraid?" she said.

"What do you think he could do to me?" I asked, laughing.

"He is so big," said Viola. "I never saw any one so big, but I think
he is like Coeur de Lion. Ah!" We both shrieked, for a most uncanny
monster was rearing up in front of us, hopping about the hall, as far
as was allowed by the chain that fastened it to the leg of a table.

"Mr. Alison brought it, ma'am," said Richardson, in a tone of disgust
and horror. "Will you have the carriage out, Miss Alison, and go
down to the Wyvern? Shuh! you brute! He shan't hurt you, my dear
ladies. I'll stand between."

We had recovered our senses, however, enough to see that it was only
a harmless kangaroo; and Dora came running out, followed by Harold,
caressing the beast, calling it poor Nanny, and asking where he
should shut it up for the night

I suggested an outhouse, and we conducted the creature thither in
procession, hearing by the way that the kangaroo's mother had been
shot, and that the animal itself, then very young, and no bigger than
a cat, had taken Harold's open shirt front for her pouch and leaped
into his bosom, and that it had been brought up to its present
stature tame at Boola Boola. Viola went with us, fed the kangaroo,
and was so much interested and delighted, that she could hardly go
away, Eustace making her a most elaborate and rather absurd bow,
being evidently much impressed by the carriage and liveried servants
who were waiting for her.

"Like the Governor's lady!" he said. "And I know, for I've been to a
ball at Government House."

He plainly cared much more for appearances than did Harold. He was
not so tall, much slighter, with darker hair, rather too shiny, and a
neatly turned up moustache, a gorgeous tie and watch chain, a
brilliant breast pin, a more brilliant ring, and a general air that
made me conclude that he regarded himself as a Sydney beau. But
Harold, in his loose, rough grey suit, was very different. His
height was extraordinary, his breadth of chest and shoulder equally
gigantic, though well proportioned, and with a look of easy strength,
and, as Viola had said, his head was very much what one knows as the
Lion Heart's, not Marochetti's trim carpet knight, but Vertue's
rugged portrait from the monument at Fontevrand. There was the same
massive breadth of feature, large yet not heavy, being relieved by
the exceeding keenness and quickness of the light but very blue eyes,
which ssemed to see everywhere round in a moment, as men do in wild
countries. The short thick yellow curly beard and moustache veiled
the lower part of the face; but the general expression, when still,
was decidedly a sad one, though a word or a trick of Dora's would
call up a smile all over the browned cheeks and bright eyes. His
form and colouring must have come from the Cumberland statesman, but
people said his voice and expression had much of his father in them;
and no one could think him ungentlemanly, though he was not like any
English gentleman. He wore no gaieties like Eustace, the
handkerchief loosely knotted round his neck sailor fashion was plain
black, and he had a gold ring on his little finger.

Dora had the same yellow curly hair, in tight, frizzly rings all over
her head, like a boy's, a light complexion, and blue eyes, in a
round, pug-nosed face; and she hung so entirely on Harold that I
never doubted that she was his sister till, as we were sitting down
to eat, I said, "Can't you come a little way from your brother?"

Eustace gave his odd little giggle, and said, "There, Dora!"

"I'm not his sister--I'm his wife!"

"There!" and Eustace giggled again and ordered her away; but I saw
Harold's brow knit with pain, and as she began to reiterate her
assertion and resist Eustace, he gently sat her down on the chair
near at hand, and silently made her understand that she was to stay
there; but Eustace rather teasingly said:

"Aunt Lucy will teach you manners, Dora. She is my sister, and we
have brought her home to send her to school."

"I won't go to school," said Dora; "Harold would not."

"You won't get away like him," returned Eustace, in the same tone.

"Yes, I shall. I'll lick all the girls," she returned, clenching a
pair of red mottled fists that looked very capable.

"For shame, Dora!" said the low voice.

"Harold did," said she, looking up at me triumphantly; "he beat all
the boys, and had to come back again to Boola Boola."

I longed to understand more, but I was ashamed to betray my ignorance
of my near relations, for I did not even know whether their mothers
were alive; but I saw that if I only listened, Eustace would soon
tell everything. He had a runaway chin, and his mouth had a look at
times that made me doubt whether there were not some slight want in
his intellect, or at least weakness of character. However, I was
relieved from the fear of the vice with which the neighbourhood had
threatened us, for neither of them would touch wine or beer, but
begged for tea, and drank oceans of it.

We had not long finished, when Richardson brought me a note from Lady
Diana Tracy, saying she had sent the carriage for me that I might at
once take refuge from this unforeseen invasion.

I felt it out of all possibility that I should thus run away, and yet
I knew I owed an apology for Harold's finding me and the old servants
in possession, so I began to say that my old friend had sent the
carriage for me.--I had been taken by surprise, their journey (one of
the first across the Isthmus) had been so much quicker than I had
expected, or I should have left the house free for them.

"Why?" asked Harold. And when I answered that the place was his and
I had no business there, he did not seem to see it. "It is your
home," he said; "you have always lived here."

I began explaining that this was no reason at all; but he would not
hear of my going away, and declared that it was I who belonged to the
place, so that I confessed that I should be very thankful to stay a
little while.

"Not only a little while," he said; "it is your home as much as ever,
and the best thing in the world for us."

"Yes, yes," responded Eustace; "we kept on wondering what Aunt Lucy
would be like, and never thought she could be such a nice _young_
lady."

"Not realising that your aunt is younger than yourselves," I said.

"No," said Eustace, "the old folk never would talk of home--my father
did not like it, you see--and Aunt Alice had moved off to New
Zealand, so that we could not go and talk about it to her. Mr. Smith
has got a school in Auckland, you know."

I did not know, but I found that a year or two after the death of my
brother Ambrose, his widow had become the second wife of the master
of a boarding-school at Sydney, and that it was there that Harold, at
ten years old, had fought all the boys, including the step-children,
and had been so audacious and uncontrollable, that she had been
forced to return him to his uncle and aunt in the "Bush." Eustace
had been with the Smiths at Sydney until her move to Auckland, he had
even been presented, and had been to a ball at Government House, and
thus was viewed as the polished member of the family, though, if he
had come as master, I should never have been drawn, as I was by
Harold's free, kindly simplicity, into writing my thanks to Lady
Diana, and saying that I could not leave my nephews so abruptly,
especially as they had brought a little sister.

It was gratifying to see that Harold was uneasy till the note was
sent off and the carriage dismissed. "You are not going?" he said, as
persuasively as if he were speaking to Dora, and I strove to make a
wise and prudent answer, about remaining for the next few days, and
settling the rest when he had made his plans.

Then I proposed to take Dora up to bed, but though manifestly very
weary, the child refused, and when her brother tried to order her,
she ran between Harold's knees, and there tossed her head and glared
at me. He lifted her on his lap, and she drew his arm round her in
defence. Eustace said he spoilt her, but he still held her, and, as
she dropped asleep against his breast, Eustace related, almost in a
tone of complaint, that she had cared for no one else ever since the
time she had been lost in the Bush, and Harold had found her, after
three days, in the last stage of exhaustion, since which time she had
had neither eyes, ears, nor allegiance for any other creature, but
that she must be taught something, and made into a lady.

Harold gazed down on her with his strange, soft, melancholy smile,
somehow seeming to vex Eustace, who accused him of not caring how
rough and uncultivated she was, nor himself either.

"We leave the polish to you," said Harold.

"Why, yes," said Eustace, simpering, "my uncle Smith gave me the
first advantages in Sydney, and everyone knew my father was 'a
gentleman.'"

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