Charles James Lever

“ I will not say that Donna Maria may not have passed across the picture of my mind-drawn regrets; but if her form did indeed flit past, it was to breathe a hope of some future meeting, some bright time to come, the recompense of all our separation. And I thought with pride how much more worthy of her would I be as the prairie-hunter,—the fearless follower of the bear and buffalo, accustomed to the life of the wild woods,—than as the mere adventurer, whose sole stock in trade was the subterfuge and deceit he could practise on the unwary. ”

“ Thus was I launched into a career, of all others the most amusing, the most exciting, and, I must also add, the most dissipated. Living apart from all mankind in a little circle of our own, where we only recognized the world as we ourselves were pleased to paint it, our whole lives were one long scoff and sneer at everybody and everything. Friendship meant the habit of meeting at dinner; the highest nobility of soul was his who paid the reckoning.
If there was little actual happiness among us, there was certainly no care nor any touch of sorrow. ”

“ To be sure, in all the accessory advantages of such, Halkett was most lamentably deficient, and it would have been labor in vain to endeavor to conform him to any one of the usages of the polite world; and yet, I thought, might it not be possible that this rude, unlettered man might have within him, in the recesses of his own heart, all those finer instincts, all those refinements of high feeling and honor that make up a gentleman,—like a lump of pure virgin gold encased in a mass of pudding-stone. ”

“ To have any one inordinate passion is to betray a weak spot in one's armor of which the cunning will soon take advantage. Such were among my meditations as I rolled along towards Paris; and so long as I journeyed alone, with no other companionship than my own thoughts, these opinions appeared sage and well reasoned; but how soon were they routed as I drove into that gorgeous capital, and saw the full tide of its pleasure-loving inhabitants as it rolled proudly past! How vain to reason farther upon the regulation of a life to which wealth set no limits! ”

“ I do not mean this in any invidious or unworthy sense; not for the sake of depreciating others, but purely for the sake of one's own self-esteem. I would but convey that the secret conviction of superiority is amazingly exhilarating. To “hold your stride” beside an intellect that you can pass when you like, and yet merely accompany to what is called “make a race,” is rare fun; to see the other using every effort of whip and spur, bustling, shaking, and lifting, while you, well down in your saddle, never put the rowel to the flank of your fancy,—this is indeed glorious sport! ”

“ Every one ate of it; none seemed to have enough of it. There was a perpetual cry, “Mustard! I say, waiter, bring me the mustard;” while one very choleric old gentleman, in a drab surtout and a red nose, absolutely seemed bursting with indignation as he said, “You don't expect me to eat a steak without mustard, sir?”—a rebuke at which the waiter grew actually purple.
Now, this was the very thing I had myself been doing,—actually eating “a steak without mustard!” What a mistake, and for one who believed himself to be in every respect conforming to the choicest usages of high life! ”

“ By the aid of this discovery,—for it is mine, and mine only,—I am enabled to draw tears in the 'Débats,' and convulse with laughter in the 'Constitutionnel;' and while writing of the torrid zone in one journal, I have an Icelander as my hero in another. Men stare at the range of my knowledge of life under aspects so various and discordant; and well may they wonder, were I to draw upon my own unassisted faculties. But it is men like you, Cregan, I want,—shrewd, sharp, ready-witted dogs; quick to remark, and quicker to report. ”

“ I am a prisoner in a Spanish fortress: is not even that better than a peasant in an Irish hovel? The very cares with which I am surrounded bespeak a certain consequence pertaining to me; I am one whom ministers of State think and speak about, whose name is often on their lips, whose memory haunts them in their half-waking moments. Is not this something? Is it not a great deal to one whose whole ideal was to avoid the bypaths of life, and take his course in its very widest and busiest thoroughfares? ”

“ Even castle-building—the last resource of imprisonment—ceased to interest. Life had also resolved itself into a successsion of dreary images, of which the voiceless prairie, the monotonous water-wheel, the darkened path of my midnight patrol, were the chief; and I felt myself sinking day by day, hour by hour, into that resistless apathy through which no ray of hope ever pierces.
At last I ceased even to pluck the flowers for the Señhora's window. I deemed any exertion which might be avoided, needless, and taxed my ingenuity to find out contrivances to escape my daily toil. ”

“ It matters little in what spirit you give a man a peculiar designation: the world take it up in their own fashion, and he himself conforms to it, whether for good or evil.
As the “Condé,” I doubtless displayed many a laughable affectation, and did many things in open caricature of the title; but, on the other hand, the name spurred me on to actions of most perilous daring, and made me confront danger for the very sake of the hazard; till, by degrees, I saw that the designation conferred upon me—at first in mockery—became a mark of honorable esteem among my comrades. ”

“ Yes, gentle reader, under the shade of a dwarf fig-tree, in the Leper Hospital of Bexar, I sat, attired in a whole suit of flannel, of a pale, brown tint, looking like a faded flea, all my gay spirits fled, and my very identity merged into the simple fact that I was known as “Convalescent, No. 303,”—an announcement which, for memory's sake, perhaps, was stamped upon the front of my nightcap.
Few people are fortunate enough not to remember the strange jumble of true and false, the incoherent tissue of fact and fancy, which assails the first moments of recovery from illness. ”

“ I assented, like a good patriot, but not without misgivings that he might have been just as happy in another selection of our good gifts.
“I have known many of your countrymen,” resumed he, “and they all impressed me with the same esteem. All alike frugal, temperate, and tranquilly disposed.”
“Just so, sir; and the cruelty is, nobody gives them credit for it!”
“Ah, my son, there you are in error. The Old World may be, and indeed I have heard that it is, ungenerous; but its prejudices cannot cross the ocean. Here we estimate men, not by our prejudices, but by their merits. ”

“ I arose and sat up, listening with eager ear to the low long breathings of the Friar, who, with his round bullet-head pillowed on a pine-log, slept soundly; the gentle hum of the leaves, scarcely moved by the night wind, and the distant sound of the falling water, were lullabies to his slumber. It was a gorgeous night of stars; the sky was studded with bright orbs in all the brilliant lustre of a southern latitude. The fireflies, too, danced and glittered on every side, leaving traces of the phosphoric light on the leaves as they passed. ”

“ Now, the Chevalier was not in himself a very prepossessing personage, while his dress was of the very shabbiest, being a worn-out suit of black, covered by a coarse brown Mexican mantle; and yet his fluency, his quiet assurance, his seeming self-satisfaction, gained an ascendancy over me at once. I saw that he was a master in a walk in which I myself had so long been a student, and that he was a consummate adept in the “art of impudence.”
And how mistaken is the world at large in the meaning of that art! How prone to call the unblushing effrontery of every underbred man impudence! ”

“ It was to no purpose that I appeared in all the vigor of health and strength. I might outrun the wildest bull of the buffalo herd; I might spring upon the half-trained “mustang,” and outstrip the antelope in her flight; I might climb the wall-like surface of a cliff, and rob the eagle of her young: but when I came back, the cry of welcome that met me was, “Bravo, Lépero!” And thus did I bear about with me the horrid badge of that dreary time when I dwelt within the Lazaretto of Bexar. ”

“ To feel the full enchantment of such a scene, one should have been a prairie traveller for weeks, long-wearied and heart-sore with the dull monotony of a tiresome journey, with fevered tongue and scorching feet, with eyeballs red from the glaring sun, and temples throbbing from the unshaded lustre. Then, indeed, the change was like one of those wondrous transformations of a fairy tale, rather than mere actual life. In the transports of our delight we threw ourselves down among the flowering shrubs, and covered ourselves with blossoms and buds ”

“ CHAPTER XXVII. GUAJUAQUALLA
There are few things in this world gold cannot buy: but one among their number assuredly is—“a happy dream.” Now, although I went to sleep in a great bed with damask hangings and a gilt crown upon it, my pillow fringed with deep lace, my coverlet of satin edged with gold, I dreamed the whole night through of strifes, combats, and encounters. At one time my enemy would be an Indian; at another, a half-breed; now, a negro; now, a jaguar or a rattlesnake: but with whom, or whatever the struggle, it was always for money! ”

“ Paul alone showed any real feeling: he liked me probably because he had served me,—a stronger bond of affection than many people are aware of. “Tell me one thing, Creganne,” cried he, as he shook my hand for the last time,—“we are perhaps never to meet again, life has so many vicissitudes,—tell me frankly, then, if your Mexican history, your riches and gems and gold, your diamonds, your rubies, your doubloons, and your moidores, are not all a humbug, together with your imprisonment in Malaga, and all its consequences?” ”

“ Every one of us—the least imaginative, even—will associate the strangeness of a foreign scene with something of that adventure of which he has read in his childhood; and we people vacancy, as we go, with images to suit the spot in our own country. The little pathway along the river side suggests the lovers' walk at sunset as surely as the dark grove speaks of a woodman's hut or a gypsy camp. But abroad, the scene evokes different dwellers: the Sierra suggests the brigand; the thick jungle, the jaguar or the rattlesnake; the heavy plash in the muddy river is the sound of the cayman ”

“ To me was intrusted the arm of the Marchesa as we descended to the pier; to me was accorded the seat of honor beside her in the boat. All the pleasant flatteries that are reserved for rich men were heaped upon me, and I felt that life had but one prize more with which to fill up the most ambitious of my cravings. That, alas! could never be,—Donna Maria was the wife of another; and thus should I learn that complete happiness is never to be the lot of any mere mortal! ”

“ Several of the sailors came near enough to strike her with their cutlasses; but these wounds only increased her rage, and I cried to them to desist.
“Shoot her! put a bullet through her!” cried Halkett. “Let none dare to shoot her!” cried Sir Dudley, loudly. I just heard these words, as, after a fierce struggle, in which she had seized me by the shoulder, I fell against the bulwark. With a last effort I staggered to my knees, flung open the gangway, and then, with an exertion that to myself seemed my very last on earth, I seized her by the throat and hurled her backwards into the sea. ”

“ When I said I was struck with New Orleans, it was then with the air of its population. Never did I behold such a mass of bold, daring, reckless fellows as swaggered on every side. The fiery Frenchman, the determined-looking Yankee, the dark-browed Spaniard, the Camanche and the half-caste, the Mulatto, the Texan, the Negro, the Cuban, and the Creole, were all here, and all seemed picked specimens of their race.
The least acute of observers could not fail to see that it was a land where a quick eye, a steady foot, and a strong hand were requisites of every-day life. ”

“ So long as daylight lasts, the stir of the busy world and the business of life ward off these thoughts,—the novelty of the scene even combats them; but when night has closed in, and we see above us the stars that we have known in other lands, the self-same moon by whose light we wandered years ago, and then look around and mark the features of a new world, with objects which tell of another hemisphere; and then think that we are there alone, without tie or link to all around us, the sensation is thrilling in its intensity. ”

“ Yes, Cullinane, I fled with shame and disgust from that fickle public, who applaud with ecstasy today that they may condemn with infamy to-morrow. Nor was I deceived by the vain egotism of supposing that I was the object of their ungenerous anger. Alas! my friend, the evil lay deeper,—it was my Irish name and family they sought to insult! The old grudge that they bear us at home, they carry over the seas with them. How plain it is: they never can forgive our superiority. It is this they seek revenge upon wherever they find us. ”

“ Not that I was weary of life; were the world but open to me, I felt I should resume all my former zest in its sayings and doings,—nay, I even fancied that the season of privation would give a higher color to my enjoyment of it; and I know that the teachings of adversity are not the least useful accessories of him whose wits must point the road to fortune. True is it, the emergencies of life evoke the faculties and develop the resources, as the storm and the shipwreck display the hardy mariner. ”

“ Curious anomaly! the half-insolent glances of the lacqueys sank deeper into my spirit than the flattering smile of the Prince's adieu. How much more alive is our nature to the pang of scorn than to the balm of kindness! These were my reflections as I entered my humble chamber, every portion of which seemed doubly miserable to me now. “Is it possible,” thought I, “that I have endured this hitherto? Have I really sat in that crazy old chair, and stretched my limbs upon that wretched pallet? Can it be real? or which is the delusion,—my recent splendor, or my present squalor?” ”

“ Ah, Peter, Peter, you watered the drink!”
“No, indeed, father; but it's the taste is leavin' you,” says Peter; and again a low chorus of compassionate pity murmured through the cabin.
“Well, I'm nearly done now,” says my father; “there's only one little plot of ground remaining; and I put it on you, Peter,—as ye wish to live a good man, and die with the same easy heart I do now,—that ye mind my last words to ye here. Are ye listening? Are the neighbors listening? Is Billy Scanlan listening?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, father. We're all minding,” chorused the audience. ”