Mad. A novel

Front matter

I ■ I MAD By the same Author, price 12s., GREY OF GREYBURY, 2 Vols. Pages of graphic and powerful description . . . charming portraiture of the Grey family." — Guardian. ' ' All the fresh breezy air of the Cotswolds about it. . . . A good story well told." — Wilts and Gloucester Standard. " The book throughout is pleasantly written." — Saturday Review. " An unusually strong novel." — Month. MAD. A NOVEL. BY THE MARQUIS B I D D L E-CO P Jv AUTHOR OF " GREY OF GREYBURY," ETC. LONDON : WARD & DOWNEY, 12 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1887. [All Rights reserved.] BOOK FIRST. BARBARA.

Chapter I

A GREAT expanse of yellow sand, hedged by blue coats and ■*» bayonets ; an impending facade of marble, with ponderous classic columns, burnt brown as a meerschaum pipe by the sun-fire of two centuries ; a long, yellow roadway, like an estuary of a yellow sea, flowing down and away to its vanishing point, always hedged by the same palisade of blue and steel, between precipitous cliffs of old brown and yellow houses, and beneath a flapping, floating, swelling vault of red and yellow flags and pennons, slung across in festoons from house to house. A thousand tapestries and hangings, red and yellow, on the balconies ; a thousand smiling faces thrust out of the open windows ; a hundred thousand heads coifed with a thousand sorts of hats and hoods and bonnets; and a hundred thousand tongues that laugh and sing, and prattle everywhere, behind the military hedges.

A hundred thousand black, uncovered heads, and a hundred thousand tongues that pray soon after as a murmur of bell-music rises from seven hills, ringing the noon-day Angelus. After the Angelus, a long pause, with only the troops in line, and the laughing, singing, prattling tongues, just as before, a stupendous co?iversazione in the open street ; at length, a rattle and clang of iron feet in an ancient gateway ; a horse, with red distended nostrils and foam-dappled flank, that gallops furiously up the yellow square ; and an outrider, in a red coat powdered with grey dust, who waves his hat, and disappears directly with the snorting charger, far away among the flags and bayonets, down at the vanishing point of the yellow avenue. We are on the Piazza of St. John Lateran ; the year is the fifty second of our century, the day is the twelfth day of April ; a grey MAD. canopy of fleecy cloud admits a softened light to the obelisks and fountains, marble palaces and battlemented walls, of ancient Rome, and to all the broad sweep of blooming campagna up to the white walls and ilex groves of Frascati and Albano.

The same fleecy canopy extends its grateful shade to a stately train advancing then in order and with ceremony through the city gate. The halberds of the Swiss come first, and the matchless doublets and trunk-hose designed by Buonarotti ; the burnished steel and crimson of the Noble Guards ; a golden coach appears in bright relief against the deep shade of the archway ; a rain of roses falls, as if by enchant ment, on the golden sand ; the canopy of grey cloud suddenly melts and is gone ; the joyous sun of Italy again sheds its benediction on the domes and cloisters of the Sacred City. Then the yellow piazza and the yellow street, and all the seven hills of Rome, send up a shout to heaven that drowns the very thunderings of Sant' Angelo. While Pio Nono was in exile at Gaeta there were disorder and oppression in the Roman state and city.

There was unlimited robbery of everything that could be robbed, by Armellini, and Safti, and Mazzini ; there were profanations by Garibaldi's men, nameless obscenities perpetrated by Zambianchi and his crew. Terrorism and assassination were subsidised by the Triumvirate ; there were stabbings and rapes without number, and shooting of innocent priests without even a mockery of trial. To this imper fect list of Ada Reipublicœ may be added a financial corruption, almost unparalleled, even in the annals of democracy, for mad stupidity and oppressiveness. By way of recompense for these iniquities, and many others, the restored Papal government only suffered the execution of a dozen wretches, caught red-handed in deeds of murder, and sent some of the leading rebels into banishment. Among these last was a certain Henry Count di Santa Barbara.

Count Henry was a man of wealth, of position, and of patrician birth, but endowed with a peculiarly restless activity and bitter hatred of all discipline. The formation of an early intimacy with Charles Bonaparte of Canino crowned these natural misfortunes, and led Count Henry down the shelving cliffs of social democracy, to his ruin. He saw all this when it was too late ; and, unlike many of his brother exiles, abandoned politics for ever, retiring into private life. He sold all his Roman possessions ; and, on that very day when Pio Nono descended from the Alban Mountains amid the accla mations of his people, Count di Santa Barbara set out for Civita Vecchia, under escort, on his way to London. BARBARA. 3

Chapter II

/^OUNT HENRY DI SANTA BARBARA did not go alone to London ; his young wife went with him, and set up his household gods for him in Mayfair, where she was infinitely better pleased with her smoky, domestic happiness than with all the perilous excitements and warm sunshine of the past. She presented him with one child there, a black-eyed, handsome boy, who received the name of Hugo, and, before many years, gave promise of some strength of character. Count di Santa Barbara could not inure himself to the darkness of the English winter, he could not bear the fog, he pined for sun shine and blue sky, and would not be comforted in London. His summers were usually spent there with his family, and in course of time he contracted friendships with several officers of a line regi ment stationed at Chatham in those years, particularly with a certain Major Black, and a young man named Shotwell, who had just been promoted to his company.

The rest of the year he was a rover, passing his winters in the South, visiting Egypt, Asia Minor, Spain, passing a few weeks now and then in Florence, going everywhere, in fact, except to Rome. Then, growing tired of the rather too familiar charm of all those Mediterranean countries, he began to look elsewhere for novelty. He went at last to Pennsylvania, with Major Black, where they shot bear and deer in the " backwoods " in autumn, and repaired to Philadelphia for the winter balls and parties, when snow got too deep and frost too sharp among the mountains. Major Black had reasons of his own, beside an ardent love of sport, for going out to Pennsylvania : he had pledged his heart and hand to a very pretty Philadelphian girl, Miss Gates by name, in the romantic scenery of Switzerland, a year before, under the usual romantic circumstances.

The •world of fashion was preparing for a great assembly, a subscription-ball, when he and Henry di Santa Barbara arrived in Philadelphia, and Miss Gales was making strenuous efforts to secure herself an invitation. But the assembly was a rigorously select ball ; Miss Gates's birth and antecedents were not up to the required standard, which was not low certainly, and she was courteously refused admission ; the ball-committee were inexorable. In this embarrassing position she opened her heart to a certain Dr. Charlton, her mother's family physician. She explained the circumstances, told him of her betrothal, loudly bewailed the possible effect on Major Black, if he MAD. 4 made the discovery, as he surely would, that she could not obtain admission to a subscription-ball in her own city. Dr. Charlton was a man of social influence in Philadelphia ; he was himself a member of the ball-committee ; he was not insensible to the charm and power of beauty in distress ; he was anxious to make friends in England; Miss Gates's father, whose defects of manner and position might have been an insuperable obstacle, had departed, fortunately, some ten years before.

The doctor argued her case zealously before his colleagues ; he pleaded her engagement to an English officer and friendship with Count di Santa Barbara as extenuating circumstances ; he over ruled the opposition, Miss Gates received her invitation-ticket, and she and Major Black rewarded him with their eternal friendship. The marriage came soon after ; Count di Santa Barbara was best man ; Dr. Charlton was there with his family ; the event could not have been more fashionable. Count Henry went South then, to New Orleans, in search of warmer weather, but found it damp and draughty. He found it dull, he was a total stranger there; not that he wanted social pleasures ; he was tired of silk hats and frock-coats, dress coats and kid gloves, for the present, and looked now for the excitement that he liked to live on, in great change and contrast.

Since he could play no more with secret clubs, and gunpowder, and daggers, it amused him most to travel fast, to see new coasts and countries hurrying up from their monotonous horizon-ring to meet him, and slip out of sight again behind, like the motion of an endless, natural panorama ; he amused himself so very tolerably. From New Orleans he took ship to Havana, where he smoked perfumed cigars ; he went to Mexico, and made the ascent of Popocatepetel, to Panama, and bought stravv hats ; he met the approach of autumn, in the month of April, on the Pampas. He wrote occasionally to his wife, the Countess Isabel. His last letter, posted in the Sandwich Islands, told her that he was starting on a cruise through Polynesia, and would have no chance to write again for many weeks. After that he was never heard of ; he may have made a revolution in some kingdom of New Guinea, and founded a republic or a rival dynasty.

He may have died, or, faithless, may have mated himself to some copper-coloured beauty of the Carolines ; he may have been served roast, with bread-fruit sauce, at the banquet of some chieftain of Fiji ; he may still be toiling after change and contrast, powerless to stop the weary quest, like Van der Decken and his sailors, roving on for ever, in the flesh or disembodied, visited thus by dreadful Nemesis, for his BARBARA. 5 bloody hour of triumph in rebellion and conspiracy ; but his wanderings never carried him again to London.

Chapter III

TT\R. JOHN CHARLTON, whose influence and interest had *-< obtained Miss Gates her wish, and obtained him her friendship and the Major's, was the only son of a colonial family, with ancient blazon and rigid principles, and had an only sister, Edith, trained like himself in their young days, in all the ugliness of holi ness, as Quakers teach it. The victims of an odious tyranny, now happily more and more discredited in that sect, they were forced to wear the outlandish costume which exposed them to derision and insult every time they set foot in the street. For of all the curious and ungraceful costumes in the world, used as the badge of an opinion, or the uniform of a society, the Quaker garb ap pears to be the only one that has nowhere conciliated public sympathy, but has everywhere been treated with derision.

It is the only one that has been pitilessly forced upon young children, to their shame and misery. Edith's malleable conscience having been successfully crammed into the parental model, she held tight ever after to the old tradition, and wore her " sugar-scoop " with zeal, to John's immense disgust and mortification. For no sooner was old Friend Charlton dead and buried, than John made haste to change his clothes from drab to black, and turn his collar down. Having taken his degree at college, he rose soon afterwards to some distinction in the medical profession ; and, finally, by marrying one Miss Everett of Everettville, in the old French Catholic colony of Louisiana, he exposed himself to the extreme pain of " disownment," or expul sion from the company of the elect, the severest censure of the Quaker discipline.

He was receiving the official visits of a committee of two Friends, told off by the Monthly Meeting for that purpose, when inadmissible Miss Gates became the charming Mrs. Black. He shrank then from disownment ; he had a lingering impression that it was bad luck, that he would come to no good end if he were "turned out of meeting". His offence was " disownable," but the Book of Discipline had left one loophole of escape ; if the culprit showed true marks of penitence, and expressed unquali fied regret at having made the marriage, it was in the power of the meeting to forgive him, but not otherwise. John Charlton MAD. was forgiven — a circumstance from which the common inference was drawn, that he had not found all the joy hoped for in wedlock. John's sister, Edith, whose "plain" dress put him to such shame-faced blushing, was virtually cast off and denied, after a useless struggle to convert her to a hat and feathers, a struggle in which she displayed great firmness.

It was a fiery ordeal for her, poor soul ! for she was proud and sensitive, and loved her brother ; it was hard enough to be obliged to wear the hideous Quaker dress for conscience' sake ; her life became a misery ; but relief came to her, as it could not come to Mary Charlton. A prosperous young Friend, who rejoiced — as much as a Quaker may rejoice — in the name of Mordecai Hazard, paid his court and married her ; he was proud of her, and, in his opinion, the drab habiliments en hanced her merit. His father built them a roomy country-house near Quakertown ; Mordecai named it Charlton for her family, and that was the end of Edith's burning ploughshares. This drab and lavender marriage carried her out of John's reach, and relieved him of an agonising consciousness of responsibility towards her ; his rare visits to Charlton gradually grew less frequent, until at last he only went there twice a year, in spring and autumn.

He could hardly have named the real cause of his neglect ; he wished her not to make too many visits at his house, for fear of some encounter with his friends or patients ; if they had smiled or stared, and asked her name, he could not have endured the shame of owning her ; he would have sold his house and fled the city. Friend Hazard's family was also very plain, and less distinguished than his own ; he did not like Friend Hazard per sonally ; then he was rather overworked and not quite well, and Charlton was a long way out of town. This last was the reason that he used to give with much apparent distress at the necessity. John Charlton's fondest wish was to hand down his name and his position to posterity; for, with his fashionable profession, — the medical profession is fashionable there, — and with good birth and distinguished aspirations in his favour, he had secured himself a social place of eminence in Philadelphia.

He was not a little vexed when Mrs. Charlton bore a daughter in her first confinement ; but he made the best of his bad luck of course, called the child Ethel, and hoped for better things another day. He had two years to wait, and then, when Mrs. Charlton was delivered of a second girl, he was aghast ; he called the second daughter Lelia, but hardly made the best of his bad luck that time. As years passed by, and the hope of other issue gradually grew more hopeless, his BARBARA. 7 affection for his wife gave place to something more marked than indifference. Dr. Charlton lived a good deal at his club after Lelia's birth, and she and Ethel began life in a home atmosphere surcharged with the father's discontent, and where authority was broken by division. It became a matter of course that Dr. Charlton, when his wife expressed a wish or an opinion, should immediately make a show of opposition ; he had no desire to agree with her ; he was too sore and irritable to feign agreement in the children's presence.

It followed from this state of things that there was not much government ; the children chose their sides as their own nature prompted, and as there was a striking difference in them from the outset, Dr. Charlton's family was separated into two camps, one of which was almost hostile to the other. Ethel and Lelia were very winning children ; and Lelia's beauty, from the first, was of a striking type, a face as fair as pearl, pale, golden hair, and large, intense, blue eyes. Mrs. Charlton's lady friends used to say, in lady language, that she was certainly a baby seraph gone astray in this unseraphic world of ours. Perhaps her character was not quite so seraphic ; perhaps she thought too much of her own amusement for an angel, and not enough of other people's pleasures. When she was four or five years old, and Dr. Charlton had got well of his disgust at her arrival, he fell in love all at once with her unusual beanty and her frequent bursts of fierce affection ; he grew accustomed to her fits of rage and jealousy, found them amusing, they diverted him, made him forget his disappointment ; he completed the easy work of spoiling her soon after that.

As time passed, Dr. Charlton grew indifferent to the censure of the Quaker elders ; he stayed away from meeting altogether. Lelia was always with him, always ministering to his pride ; there might have been some question whether love or pride were stronger in his bosom ; and it might have been another question whether Lelia liked the love or pride the better. She liked to be indulged and petted, and it did not take her long to learn that Dr. Charlton held the purse-strings and dispensed the bon-bons. When Ethel was seven and Lelia was five years old, their mother died, and Dr. Charlton, who was really a man of much good feeling, was distressed by this bereavement ; he seemed to love his wife more in her coffin than he had loved her since the honey moon ; but Lelia consoled him with her fierce embraces, and brought his smiles back with her passionate caprice. MAD. 8

Chapter IV. In

spite of smoke and fog and rain, Hugo di Santa Barbara grew tall and strong, and in due course was sent to Eton and to Christ Church. His father's old friend, Captain, and then Major, Shotwell, continued to frequent the house in Queen Matilda Street, transferring his friendship and attentions from the vanished Count to the forsaken Countess. Shotwell had great luck in the matter of promotion ; he was no longer Major, but Lieutenant-Colonel Shotwell, commanding the Castleshire Light Infantry, when Hugo went up to Oxford, while Count Henry's old friend, Joseph Black, Major when Colonel Shotwell was Lieutenant, had got his G.C.B., K.C.M.G., and was in command of the whole division at Aldershot, where his old regiment was stationed. At that time the Countess di Santa Barbara, advised by Colonel Shotwell, and with Hugo's full consent, devoted him to the pro fession of arms.

His perfect health, his powerful frame, his elegant, and yet somewhat martial, bearing, seemed to mark him as espe cially formed by nature for a soldier. As for young Hugo, he knew nothing of military life beyond the historic records of cam paigns and sieges ; he liked the brass-band, and the red coat, and the gay mess-dinner; he consented readily. The Countess was assisted in her choice of his career by the reputation he had made himself at school and college. He had not passed with the masters for a very clever boy, although the other " men " of his form at Eton discovered in him a sort of latent power which they respected, but which he rarely used. He generally did three things fairly well, and all the rest indifferently or badly ; history, logic, and philosophy were his favourite studies.

Sometimes he threw his whole energy into an essay on some dis puted point of history or problem of philosophy, and surprised the masters ; but a continuous succession of slipshod, bungling recita tions soon effaced the good impression. Now, as Hugo's cupboards and drawers at home were full of boyish histories and still more boyish poetry, it seems strange that so fond a mother as Isabel di Santa Barbara did not remark his taste for literature, and give that its due weight in choosing his profession. Mothers are too quick usually to discover genius in their little ones. As a matter of fact she had often read his verses, but they did not make a deep impression on her mind. The career of arms was her ideal of what was fittest for a nobleman ; and then, if Hugo BARBARA. 9 did not follow it very far, no great harm would be done, she thought ; he was not poor, and had no need of the miserable army pay ; she hardly expected that to meet his tailor's bill ; what she did want for him was a clearly-defined place in English society ; and she saw nothing better to secure this end than a commission in a favourite line regiment.

Once only, before his fate was quite decided, she felt a little hesitation. She was looking over some of his old papers one day while he was away at Oxford, and came upon a scrap of boy-poetry that she had not seen before, and rather better than the average of his verses. There were ten or twelve rather graceful stanzas about Venice, written after a little tour in northern Italy the year before ; and where he described, in fanciful language, his impres sions of the fallen Bride of Adria, and of a sunset and moonrise seen from the narrow island of the Lido. " Far on the crimson hills of Lombardy, Died the day's amber light ; Uprose, like Aphrodite, from the sea, The star-crowned Queen of Night." Then evening fell, shadows descended on the domes and towers of the distant city, only gilded here and there by the growing moonlight ; the mystic enchantment of the place was on him ; Venice was more lovely then in her decay and widowhood, he thought, than she could have been ever in the ancient time of all her glory and authority7.

" There rests a halo o'er the sea-girt tomb Where her old pomp lies dead ; Pale moon-beams, falling through enchanted gloom, A chaster radiance shed Than golden beams on Adria's amorous sea, Flashing, with ten-fold ray, From Bucentoro's sun-bright canopy, On Venice' bridal day." There was a certain smoothness in the metre that could not fail to attract her notice, and the theme touched her Italian heart. She paused and read the lines a second time, and asked herself whether really they did not seem to point to something different from soldiering for Hugo ; whether boys who wrote pretty, sentimental verses in their studies at home, and poked them away out of sight in cupboards, were really fitted for the soldier-life. But talent of that sort is common in Italy, showing itself, if we may use the figure, on every rough bush by the wayside, like the grapes and roses ; dozens of young lads there write better verses than those of Hugo's, and take none the less kindly to their MAD. 10 soldiering afterwards.

In fine, there was nothing very striking in the poetry — no deep thought, not an atom of what is called origi nality — only a certain ease and grace, and something that bespoke a literary taste. That ease and taste were precisely what the Countess di Santa Barbara could not appreciate at their full value, her knowledge of English having been acquired rather late in life, and lacking depth and finish ; so she soon put the lines away again, and thought no more about them ; and Hugo, backed by Colonel Shotwell's influence, got his red coat and his com mission in a " crack " line regiment — to wit, the Castleshire Light Infantry. The Countess Isabel di Santa Barbara, his mother, to whom he was chiefly indebted for his moral education, was an excellent woman, punctual in her chief religious duties, and devoted to her boy ; but yet his training in those matters may be said to have been rather negative than positive.

An exalted code of honour, absence of those irregularities so common among young men, and a remarkable abhorrence of untruth were the chief salient points in his character when he began camp-life. His mother having assisted at his growth and education, and having established him at length in his profession, died two months after he had joined his regiment. Apart from the wrench and laceration of his feelings — for he was a devoted son — this death was an inestimable loss. It left him alone in the world, as people say ; that is, without home or rela tions. Friends, as friends go, he had in plenty; but no more alter ego, no one to fill the void made by that loss ; and his warm Roman nature longed and cried for mental intercourse and sympathy. The military character is apt to rise superior to very delicate developments of sentiment, or else — which happens oftener, perhaps — to fall a little short of them.

The military training and military habits tend to their extinction, to the formation of a stoic temperament. There were depths of feeling in Hugo's mind, refinements of sensibility, capabilities of devotion to a pure ideal, to which the gentlemen who sat at mess with him were perfect strangers. Of course, they never dreamt of such a thing, and would have hooted at the barest mention of it ; and, of course, Huco saw it plainly ; yet it never occurred to him to think of them as his inferiors in those points. Their stoicism seemed to him an enviable quality to be acquired and cultivated : Colonel Shotwell and the Countess di Santa Barbara had accus tomed him to think of the ideal British officer as the supreme development of our humanity, ne plus ultra, and this ideal was BARBARA. 11 supposed to be entirely realised and personified in the officers of the Castleshire Light Infantry.

Moreover, there is something imposing, if not sublime, per se, in the impassibility of the aristocratic Englishman, and the officers of the Castleshire Light Infantry were particularly aristocratic and sublime : there was a loftiness in the eye, a more than military straightness in the back, that no drill-sergeant ever taught them. Hugo was educated to adore them, to adore the stoical insensibility that hurt him, and he tried to copy it. The imitation was perfect in appearance, but the acquired stoicism no more quenched the burning depths of his Roman soul than the impending dome of snow above the lemon groves of Aci tempers the subterranean furnaces of Etna. The Countess Isabel had been his close and confidential friend, and when she died he became conscious suddenly, for the first time, of his unusual isolation.

He felt very painfully the coldness — that is, the relative coldness — of the rest who called themselves his friends. In spite of all his theoretical admiration of his brother officers, and his successful imitation of their impassive bearing, he could not help showing his unhappiness ; and the admired said among themselves, in consequence, that he evidently missed his maccaroni, and would have been a wiser man if he had taken service farther south. There was only one of them, an impulsive Irishman, who guessed that the icy British surface chilled him, and tried, as far as he could, without betraying too much sentiment, to supply the warmth that lacked elsewhere. Hugo and O'Hara became good friends, but the congeniality was not perfect. Hugo, although he liked to choose his authors and objected to severe work, was a reading man.

O'Hara was a votary of sport, hunted four days a week, and rode his own horse at the Aldershot steeplechases. Books nearly drove O'Hara mad. It was his favourite boast that he never read anything but Bell's Life and the Morning Post. He had certain dissolute habits of life, too, which tended to loosen rather than cement the intimacy. But being of a very loyal disposition, he respected Hugo's stronger virtue, and re mained true to the friendship. To be left without kinsfolk— the last of his name — as Hugo was, is an evil certainly, but not the worst of evils : it is a situation not altogether without advantages. How many unhappy boys there are who, for some childish fault, or someone else's fault, or some old grudge, are made to suffer the eternal disapproval of selfish kinsfolk, upon whose favour their success in life depends ?

They know the cause of their misfortune perfectly, and either MAD. cannot help themselves at all, or only by the sacrifice of conscience and of manhood, and the sale of what they hold most noble and most true, to buy the kindness that was theirs by birthright. How many brave hearts that spurn such vileness have to prove their nobility in a life-long struggle with adversity ! Hugo was spared that misery; he was only left alone; his nearest tie was to his brother officers — a tie that did not bind very closely on either part, as we have seen. He was perfectly independent, then, and young, and rich ; and youth, wealth, and independence all help to make life pleasant. But Hugo's family was not known in England ; his name conveyed no idea to the people that he met. He remained, as it were, on the outside of society ; he had no real place within it, notwithstanding his com mission in the Castleshire Light Infantry7.