Melmoth the Wanderer

I

Alive again? Then show me where he is;
I’ll give a thousand pounds to look upon him.

In the autumn of 1816, John Melmoth, a student in Trinity College, Dublin, quitted it to attend a dying uncle on whom his hopes for independence chiefly rested. John was the orphan son of a younger brother, whose small property scarce could pay John’s college expenses; but the uncle was rich, unmarried, and old; and John, from his infancy, had been brought up to look on him with that mingled sensation of awe, and of the wish, without the means to conciliate (that sensation at once attractive and repulsive), with which we regard a being who (as nurse, domestic, and parent have tutored us to believe) holds the very threads of our existence in his hands, and may prolong or snap them when he pleases.

On receiving this summons, John set immediately out to attend his uncle.

The beauty of the country through which he travelled (it was the county Wicklow) could not prevent his mind from dwelling on many painful thoughts, some borrowed from the past, and more from the future. His uncle’s caprice and moroseness—the strange reports concerning the cause of the secluded life he had led for many years—his own dependent state—fell like blows fast and heavy on his mind. He roused himself to repel them—sat up in the mail, in which he was a solitary passenger—looked out on the prospect—consulted his watch;—then he thought they receded for a moment—but there was nothing to fill their place, and he was forced to invite them back for company. When the mind is thus active in calling over invaders, no wonder the conquest is soon completed. As the carriage drew near the Lodge (the name of old Melmoth’s seat), John’s heart grew heavier every moment.

The recollection of this awful uncle from infancy—when he was never permitted to approach him without innumerable lectures—not to be troublesome—not to go too near his uncle—not to ask him any questions—on no account to disturb the inviolable arrangement of his snuffbox, hand-bell, and spectacles, nor to suffer the glittering of the gold-headed cane to tempt him to the mortal sin of handling it—and, finally, to pilot himself aright through his perilous course in and out of the apartment without striking against the piles of books, globes, old newspapers, wig-blocks, tobacco-pipes, and snuff-canisters, not to mention certain hidden rocks of rattraps and mouldy books beneath the chairs—together with the final reverential bow at the door, which was to be closed with cautious gentleness, and the stairs to be descended as if he were “shod with felt.”—This recollection was carried on to his schoolboy years, when at Christmas and Easter, the ragged pony, the jest of the school, was dispatched to bring the reluctant visitor to the Lodge—where his pastime was to sit vis-à-vis to his uncle, without speaking or moving, till the pair resembled Don Raymond and the ghost of Beatrice in The Monk—then watching him as he picked the bones of lean mutton out of his mess of weak broth, the latter of which he handed to his nephew with a needless caution not to “take more than he liked,”—then hurried to bed by daylight, even in winter, to save the expense of an inch of candle, where he lay awake and restless from hunger, till his uncle’s retiring at eight o’clock gave signal to the governante of the meagre household to steal up to him with some fragments of her own scanty meal, administering between every mouthful a whispered caution not to tell his uncle. Then his college life, passed in an attic in the second square, uncheered by an invitation to the country; the gloomy summer wasted in walking up and down the deserted streets, as his uncle would not defray the expenses of his journey;—the only intimation of his existence, received in quarterly epistles, containing, with the scanty but punctual remittance, complaints of the expenses of his education, cautions against extravagance, and lamentations for the failure of tenants and the fall of the value of lands. All these recollections came over him, and along with them the remembrance of that last scene, where his dependence on his uncle was impressed on him by the dying lips of his father.