The Meaning of Night

I stood in the hall looking blankly at all the old familiar things – the brass clock by the door, ticking away as I had always remembered it; the silhouette portrait of my grandfather, Mr John More of Church Langton; the tall cylindrical pot, decorated with dragons and chrysanthemums, containing my mother’s umbrella and summer parasol – and breathing in the comfortable smell of beeswax polish (my mother had been a tyrant for cleanliness). The parlour door was open, revealing her work-table piled high with paper. The curtains were drawn, though it was broad day outside. A burned-out candle, in its pewter holder, stood precariously on a little stack of books nearby, a mute witness to the final night hours of drudgery.

I ascended the stairs, oppressed by the insidious presence of death, and opened the door to her room.

Her last book, Petrus, had only recently been published, and she was preparing to embark on yet another romance for Mr Colburn — the first few pages still lay on the floor by her bed, where they had fallen from her hand. The years of unremitting toil had finally taken their toll, and I could not help feeling glad that her labours were over. Her once beautiful heart-shaped face was lined and sunken, and her hair – of which she had been so proud in her youth – was now thin and grey, though she was but forty years old. Thin, too, were her careworn fingers, stained still with the ink she had expended on meeting her obligations to her publisher. I placed a parting kiss on her cold forehead, and then sat by her side until morning, wrapped in the suffocating silence of death and despair.

She had been my only parent, and my sole provider until the generosity of my benefactress brought some relief to our circumstances; yet even then she had continued to write, with the same determination, day after day. What had driven her, if not love? What had sustained her, if not love? My dearest mother – no, more than a mother: the best of friends and the wisest of counsellors.

I would see her no more, bent over her work-table; nor sit with her, excitedly unwrapping her latest production before we placed it proudly on the shelf – made by Billick from the timbers of a French man-of-war shattered at Trafalgar – with all the others. She would tell me no more stories, and would never listen again, with that sweet half-smile, as I read to her from my translation of Les mille et une nuits. She had gone, and the world seemed as cold and dark as the room in which she now lay.

We buried her in the church-yard overlooking the sea at Sandchurch, next to her errant husband, the little- lamented Captain. Tom was by my side; and I was never more glad to have him there. At my request, to the sound of gulls and the distant pounding of the waves, Mr March, the incumbent of Sandchurch, read out a passage from John Donne; and then she was gone for ever, beyond sight and touch and hearing, a withered flower in her shroud of flinty earth.

My mother’s death provided a reason for my returning home from school that no one questioned; and the same excuse was conveyed by letter to Le Grice and my other friends at Eton. Only Tom knew the truth, and to him I now turned.

Mr Byam More, my sole surviving relative, offered to become my guardian; but, as I was firmly disinclined to remove to Somerset, it was agreed that Tom would temporarily stand in loco parentis, and that I would be placed under his educational care once again, whilst remaining – alone but for Beth and old Billick – in the house at Sandchurch, which had been left to me by my mother. The fifty sovereigns that I had insisted that she should keep as her own had been laid out on a number of unavoidable expenses; and so it became necessary to apply to Mr More, as my trustee, to release some of my remaining capital in order to maintain the household oeconomy.

In the meantime, I sought to accustom myself to the unexpected sensation of being master in my own house, at the age of sixteen. To be there alone, without my mother, gave me the most curious sensation at first, as if I half expected to meet her on the stairs, or see her walking down the garden path when I looked out from my bedroom window. Sometimes, at night, I became certain that I could hear her moving around in the parlour. I would hold my breath, heart beating fast, straining to make out what I had heard – whether it was, indeed, the sound of her poor ghost, unable to find rest from pressing pen to paper, pulling up her chair to the great work-table to take up some eternally unfinished work, or simply the timbers of the old house, creaking and straining as the wind howled in from the sea.

I lived at Sandchurch, tutored by Tom, and under his informal guardianship, until the autumn of 1838. My former school-fellows, including Phoebus Daunt, were preparing to leave Eton for the Varsity, and I too wished to continue my studies at some suitable seat of learning. Thus it was that, at Tom’s suggestion, I went to Heidelberg, where I enrolled at the University to take a number of classes, and indulged myself to the full in the pursuit of my many interests. My intellectual ambitions had been frustrated by having had to leave school prematurely, thus forfeiting the chance of proceeding to Cambridge and a Fellowship there; and so, though I did not intend to take a degree, I determined to use the time as well as I could.

I attended lectures and read like a perfect fiend, by day and by night: philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, rhetoric, logic, cosmology – I fairly guzzled them down, like a man dying of thirst. Then I would run furiously back to the favourite subjects of my early youth – the old alchemical texts, the Rosicrucian teachings, and the ancient Greek Mysteries – and, through one of the Professors at the University, I imbibed a new passion for the archaeology of the ancient seats of civilization, Assyria, Babylonia, and Chaldea. Then I would be eager to search out paintings by the old German Masters in lonely forest-wrapped castles, or would travel on a whim all over the region to hear some local virtuoso play Buxtehude on an early eighteenth-century organ, or a village choir singing old German hymns in a white-painted country church. I would haunt the bookshops of the old German towns, unearthing glowing rarities – prayer-books, missals, illuminated manuscripts from the court of Burgundy, and other bibliographical treasures of which I had knowledge but, until now, had never seen. For I was mad to see, to hear, to know!

That was my golden time (Phoebus Daunt is welcome to his): in particular, the bliss of tracing the track of the Philosophenweg^* with an armful of books on a bright summer’s morning; to find my private spot high above the Neckar, from where I could gaze down on the Heiliggeist Church and the Old Bridge through the clear new air; and then to lie back on soft grass, the sun seeping through the branches, with my books and my dreams, with swallows wheeling against clouds that might have been painted by Poussin, an infinity of blue above me.

^*[‘Dust and shadow’. Ed.]

^†[Edward Craven Hawtrey (1789–1862), who had succeeded the infamous flogger Dr Keate as Head Master only two years earlier. He was, as Glyver notes, a great bibliophile himself and was a member of the premier association for bibliographical scholars, the Roxburghe Club. Ed.]

^*[The Roxburghe Club. Ed.]

^*[Meaning one huge event piled on another, alluding to the giants, the Aloadae, in Greek mythology who attempted to reach the abode of the gods by placing Mount Pelion upon Mount Ossa, two peaks in Thessaly (Odyssey, XI, 315). The narrator is doubtless alluding to Laertes’ words on the death of Ophelia: ‘Now pile your dust upon the quick and the dead / Till of this flat a mountain you have made / To o’ertop old Pelion’ (Hamlet, V.i.247). Ed.]