Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 243
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
The fresh-water sailors of whom the party consisted, felt appalled at so sudden an assault. Having spent the day in careless jollity and mirth, they were the less prepared for this reverse, and savoured it in all its bitterness. The hand that managed the sail was an unskilful one; and, there being no concert between him and the man at the rudder, the boat was overset in a moment, and every soul it contained was thrown overboard.
Julian, as I have already mentioned, was a consummate swimmer. He was confounded for a few moments. But he speedily recovered his presence of mind; and then his first thought was of the poor Giuseppe, who was the most disqualified for such an encounter of the whole party, who could never swim in his life, and in reality had been pressed into the amusement against his will, by the well meant importunity of his former pupil. It fortunately happened that the boat had been driven near to the eastern bank of the lake, before the disaster happened. Julian and his preceptor had been next each other in the boat; and they were tumbled together into the lake. The ward of Cloudesley had been aware of this; and, after having made one or two strokes as a swimmer, turned round that he might find his partner. Giuseppe was kept for a brief interval from sinking, by the buoyancy and force of the wave that caught him in his fall, and bore him considerably above the level of the boat. Julian by the most fortunate accident met him as the wave subsided, and threw his left arm round the object of his solicitude. He then strenuously, and with the utmost application of his skill, made for the shore. He seemed in a manner to have reached it; he felt the ground; when the retiring of the wave carried him back to no inconsiderable distance from the point he sought. He renewed his effort, and was again baffled; the third time he accomplished his purpose, and placed Giuseppe, nearly in a state of insensibility, on the dry land.
Presently Julian became collected, and as fresh as ever. He saw his companions tumbling this way and that, and contending with the waves. In an instant Francesco came into his mind, the youth who had so assiduously watched over him in his grief, and between whom and himself there had passed a vow of everlasting friendship. He thought he saw him; he could not be mistaken. He called to him; he shouted. It seemed to him that he was heard; it seemed that he was not. He fixed his gaze intently on his object, as if his whole soul went out in that one effort. Francesco was fast approaching. Suddenly the body of the swimmer was wheeled round as by some external force. Julian could see that his friend was struggling in uncertain efforts, and no longer possessed the command of his course. The moment was critical. Julian instantly dashed into the water with a resolution that appeared more than human; in vain did the wave seem to exert an almighty force to tear Francesco from his aid; he pushed on with undoubting mind and a swelling soul. Fortune favours the strenuous, and deserts the coward. However it was, the effort of Julian was crowned with success. He reached the very side of Francesco, as if some god had guided his exertions. The Italian was at his last gasp; his limbs were powerless; he could act no more. Julian saw that he was lost; he caught hold of him by one hand. It was enough. The weight of the body of his friend was nothing; the waters of the lake sustained him. Julian had no more to do than to retain his hold, and exert his muscular powers to reach the land. Francesco followed, as if it had been a thread merely that Julian drew along, and there had been no weight attached to the other end. Francesco came ashore in a state of insensibility. With great care, and by placing the body so as was best calculated to free the stomach from the load of water it had engulphed, Julian at length brought him to himself. The remainder of the scene was frightful. Two of the party were irretrievably lost.
CHAPTER XVIII
CLOUDESLEY, AS HAS sufficiently been seen, had no other attachment on earth than to his ward. The more he had confirmed himself now for a course of years in resolute misanthropy, the more vehement was his partiality where his affections had become fixed. It was thus that he had loved the father of Julian; it was thus that he loved the child. That child had been rendered dear to him by a thousand circumstances. He was the sole relic of his illustrious benefactor. He was the instrument that had procured for him income and independence. Cloudesley felt that he had committed a great crime towards the youth, a defenceless orphan, a being that had every claim upon his worship and support. The contract between Cloudesley and myself by which Julian was despoiled of his all, had been sealed before the child was born, when he was a creature of the understanding only, respecting which something might be affirmed or denied. The case was altered, when he had become an object of the senses. The cherished idea of Cloudesley had ever been that he had himself been the mark against which others had directed their villainy, having never committed offence against any. This had been the source of his internal bitterness. He could least of all therefore bear the idea that he also had contaminated his soul with an act of baseness.
It was thus that he had been prepared to receive Julian under his charge. The child was no doubt a beautiful child, with every attribute that should prepossess a well disposed mind. But to Cloudesley he was like a god, that had descended to dwell under his roof. He always felt that his ward was not in his •place, and that much of his original and native ‘brightness was obscured.’ For this reason he viewed every thing about him with prepossession, and a heart attuned to admire.
He regarded Julian as a prodigy of intellect. He had observed him from the first dawnings of his infant apprehension. He had remarked his searching and inquisitive mind, the clearness of his views, the decisiveness of his elections, the truth of his movements, of the eye, of the hand, of every corresponding gesture and limb. All that Julian learned had seemed to come to him as if by inspiration; and he had an intuitive faculty for mastering languages. His progress in literature was inconceivably rapid; nothing was a toil to him. His memory was accurate; his questions apt; his observations full of acuteness. But he had also to an extraordinary degree the creative faculty. His sports for the most part had been studies. ‘He cut his roots in characters, and sauced’ his play, as if Mercury, the author of all inventions, had dwelt within him. He savoured every thing with unerring truth; and, when he recited the verses of the English or Italian poets, they flowed with an eloquence that no other tongue could have given them, and found their way irresistibly to the heart. When too he essayed his own vein, he was, at least in Cloudesley’s apprehension, in no way inferior to the masters who had pointed out his path to the Temple of the Muses. He considered him as born for all times, and never to be forgotten as long as the memory of man should endure.
But what Cloudesley valued most in Julian, what led away his soul in captivity, was his heart. He had never known a father or a mother. Yet he had ever been filial to their counterfeit representatives. He had never failed in any attentions to them. He had never mutinied or murmured against their commands. He had regarded them with the most deferential duty. He had never given them a moment’s pain, but had always been to them the source of inestimable gratification. Cloudesley remembered the exemplary behaviour of Julian, when he lay, as he believed, on his own death-bed, and his pious attendance on the illness of Cloudesley himself. He had on all occasions, and towards all with whom he had intercourse, shewn himself the soul of generosity. He had never betrayed any mean passions, selfishness or envy. He gave away all he had, as if he had been the inheritor of exhaustless wealth. He forgave all that offended, as from a soul incapable of harbouring any of the malignant passions. He was ever ready with heart and hand to assist such as were in suffering or distress. He could not sleep, if he were away that any one he knew was unhappy.
Cloudesley remembered the several instances in which Julian had manifested these dispositions. He recollected how he had conducted himself at Verona, when Giuseppe had imputed to him a palpable falshood, and had treated him harshly in consequence. He called to mind the generous fervour with which, when Cloudesley expressed a fierce indignation at this treatment, Julian had interceded in behalf of his preceptor. It was but a short time ago that Eudocia had died, and the exemplary youth had appeared as drooping, and ready to sink into the grave with sorrow for his supposed mother.
But the two recent examples of the nobility of the nature of Julian, had by their lustre entirely eclipsed all the virtues and excellencies he had displayed in his former years.
First came his mourning for the death of Eudocia. How many a youth, at the presumptuous and arrogant age of eighteen, looks with disdain upon the care, the advices, the forewarnings of a being of the frailer sex, and will treat his own mother, however accomplished, however sagacious, however intellectual, with contumely! Proud with opinion of manly and superior wisdom, he thrusts aside the suggestions of female solicitude and tenderness, as unworthy of his notice. He forgets all the maternal yearnings of soul with which that mother watched over his helpless infancy, how she composed his limbs, and supplied his wants, and relieved his speechless griefs, and smoothed his pillow, and sat for weary days and nights beside his cradle, and brought him safely through a thousand perils. But Julian forgot nothing. He recollected all the loving-kindness of Eudocia, her innumerable and indescribable exertions for his benefit. It was all to him as if it had been yesterday, so living, so perfect in his soul was the image of those scenes and those actions, over which long years of oblivion might be thought to have rolled.
Story has recorded a variety of instances, in which a friend could not survive the loss of a friend, and a lover has pined himself into mortal sickness and death for the expiring of his mistress. But what occurred in this instance in Julian was more memorable. The most fervent affection of which a human being is susceptible is for his like, his equal, one with whom he has walked in the paths of adolescence, while their youthful hearts have simultaneously poured out their feelings and conceptions into each other’s bosoms, and in the course of nature they may expect to sink into old age and the grave together. It is the order of human things that the old should yield to the empire of mortality before the young, the parent before the child. Our minds are constituted accordingly. We commit the mother that bore us to the silent earth, and return to the functions and duties of a mortal being towards his fellows. But Julian seemed to break through these adamantine boundaries. He mourned over the hearse of Eudocia, and refused to be comforted. He withdrew into solitary places and silence, and found his best consolation in his tears. It was only the persevering affection and the unwearied attentions of Francesco, that could restore him to himself. He undoubtedly exceeded all discreet and reasonable measure in the excess of his grief. But, if in this he departed from the precepts of sobriety, his weakness was at least amiable; and a generous observer would love him the more, for what the philosophy of the stoics might denominate his vice.
But what crowned the triumph of Julian in the heart of his imagined father was the scene that immediately followed. No sooner had Julian roused himself, and been prevailed on to engage in this little excursion to Verona, than his first act had been to plunge himself in the tempestuous waves, and risk his life for the recovery of those he loved. The presence of mind, the gallantry, the sound judgment, the entire contempt of self, which he had shewn in the misadventure of the boat, was above all praise. The first person he ventured his life to save, was the only one that perhaps in the course of his existence he had known to treat him with flagrant injustice. But Julian thought only of the danger, greater than that of any one else, to which this person was exposed, and recollected that he was himself the immediate cause of that danger. Exhausted with his former exertions, with contending against the angry waters, and saving the life of Giuseppe, nothing could prevent him, when he saw that of Francesco, the brother of his soul, in peril, from dashing again into the foaming flood, and dragging to shore the senseless body of his friend.
It was the generous and disinterested behaviour of Julian eleven years before, that had decided Cloudesley to make a strenuous effort to restore him to his rank and his title, and no longer to suffer, if he could by any means put an end to it, the miserable delusion to go on, to which in one dishonourable moment he had subscribed. On that occasion he had written me a letter, which had wrung me to my inmost soul, and which, for many months after, had entailed on me paroxysms and anguish so great, that the wonder was that any compound of mortal elements could outlive them. I resisted his expostulations and importunity; and on further consideration he determined at that time to proceed no further.
But now he resolved to put an end to the juggle that had been carried on. For this purpose the scheme he chalked out to himself was, instantly to set out for Ireland, and to present himself before me unexpected. He did not believe that I should be able to resist what he would have the power to urge upon me. A letter is a dead and powerless pleader. All that it says is already put down; and the man that answers it pronounces a decision where there is no one near to dispute or to remonstrate. A personal conference between the guilty individual and the confident of his guilt, is a very different thing. He has then before him an eye under which his eye shrinks, and a voice that can speak in all tones from the most melting persuasion to the terrors of earthly thunder. The hearer knows not what shall be said next, nor of consequence how sudden may be the rebound, or how unavailing the resistance. A letter, once answered, leaves to the receiver an interval of days, perhaps months, during which he has nothing more to apprehend. But the man who addresses another in person, sees at once the adversary’s weak side, observes where he shrinks back and distrusts his ability, discovers all this by the fearful eye, the faltering voice, and the trembling nerve, and pursues his advantage by adding blow upon blow, without giving him breathing time, or the intermission of a moment.
Cloudesley saw all this, and resolved to put all his strength into the enterprise, and stake his existence on the undertaking. He was like what is related of the bee, when its anger is stirred up within, that seizes desperately upon the aggressor, fixes its sting deep in the living vein, and is entirely content to leave its own life in the wound it inflicts. Even thus Cloudesley cared not for the issue to himself. He had a purpose to execute, an object to effect, and his whole soul was in that. He left Julian behind him at Florence. He resolved to be unshackled and at large in his motions, not to be reduced to consult the sentiments and the preferences of his ward, or to be in any way restrained by considerations for the safety of the youth he loved.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I
ELEVEN YEARS HAD now elapsed since I first received the letter from Cloudesley, which threatened me with what I regarded as the consummation of mortal evils. That comsummation did not arrive. But in what respect was I the better? The expectation of what is tremendous is perhaps more dreadful than the event. He who is cast prostrate to the earth can fall no lower. If I had been driven from the society of my fellow men, if I had inhabited a wretched hovel on a barren heath, if I had had nothing to subsist on but the roots that my own hand had cultivated, if I had known that, wherever my name was repeated among the inhabitants of the earth, I was regarded as a monster, betraying the most sacred trust, and perpetrating the most cold-hearted villainy, I should then have known the worst. There is a principle in human nature, by which the sufferer in almost all cases reconciles himself to what is inevitable, is complete, and cannot be reversed. He looks round, and considers rather what he has left, than what he has lost. He gathers up the fragments of the wreck; he arranges them along the walls of his cell; he says to himself, This is my dowry and inheritance for the remainder of my existence; he desperately adapts himself to the hardness of his fortune, and considers how he shall make the best of it.
But the man who, every morning that he wakes, wakes with a dull, aching pain, with a mighty depression of spirits, with an indescribable load weighing at his heart, and who after a few moments recollects what all this means, and what he has to expect, he is truly a wretch. Expectation, fearful expectation, is to him the vulture of Prometheus, preying on his liver, which still grows again, as fast as it is devoured. His wound is ever fresh; no time cures it; no balm has the virtue to skin it over. I knew not on what day the final mischief would arrive; but I had an assured conviction that arrive it must.
Yet my days and my hours were not all of sorrow. I had a wife, the most exemplary of her sex; I had children that improved every day in towardliness and beauty. I looked upon them, and was joyful: I looked a second time, and my agonies grew a thousand times the fiercer, because I had such relations and holds on my affection. Fool that I was! Why had I not had the courage to take the hard lot which I had brought upon myself, alone, and without involving others in the miseries that awaited me? Villain and poltroon that I was! What right had I to embark all these innocents among the storms that were engendered by my crime?
My wife had borne me a son and a daughter, before the time in which I received Cloudesley’s letter; she brought me two more children, one of either sex, afterwards. They were as beautiful as the day, and not less affectionate and docile than they were beautiful. You have seen the youngest. What was there wanting, to make me the happiest of men? Yet I was miserable. I have lost the whole of this family, one by one, except this last.
My children were exactly similar in constitution the one to the other, cast, as I may say, in one mould. They came into the world with every promise of health, of vigour, and of living to the farthest period of human existence. They knew no sickness, were for ever joyous and happy from morning till night. Their limbs were formed in the most exquisite proportion, and their cheeks were marked with the roses of health. Intelligence and sweetness rivalled each other in their infant countenances. They grew from month to month, and from year to year, ‘in stature’, and, as it should seem, ‘in favour with God and man.’ Every added season appeared to be productive of a new tendril, twining itself round the heart of their father and mother. Their first essays to walk, to hurry with doubtful, eager steps from the arms of parent to parent sitting at a little distance from each other, their unassured lispings of articulate sound, and attempts to give to each of us an appropriate, endearing name, were delicious beyond the power of words to describe. Their learning to read, and all the little lessons we excited them to commit to memory and repeat, were an inexhaustible source of entertainment to us. Their gambols on the turf, their races after one another, their wrestling in sport, their struggles for mastery, their tumbling and rising, and the cheerful laughter that crowed in their little throats, and ran over from their eyes, we could sit for hours to observe. To these wild and lawless amusements, the jargon of the babe, succeeded, in due course of years, the song and the dance, the musical instrument and the pencil. In all they gave us satisfaction.
