Apart altogether from the Readings of Charles Dickens, has the reader of this book any remembrance of the original story of “The Poor Traveller”? If he has, he will recognise upon the instant the truth of the words in which we would here speak of it, as of one of those, it may be, slight but exquisite sketches, which are sometimes, in a happy moment, thrown off by the hand of a great master. Comparatively trivial in itself carelessly dashed off, apparently hap-hazard having no pretension about it in the least, it is anything, in short, but a finished masterpiece. Yet, for all that, it is marked, here and there, by touches so felicitous and inimitable in their way, that we hardly find the like in the artist’s more highly elaborated and ambitious productions. Not that one would speak of it, however, as of a drawing upon toned paper in neutral tint, or as of a picture pencilled in sepia or with crayons; one would rather liken it to a radiant water-colour, chequered with mingled storm and sunshine, sparkling with lifelike effects, and glowing with brilliancy. And yet the little work is one, when you come to look into it, that is but the product of a seemingly artless abandon, in which without an effort the most charming results have been arrived at, obviously upon the instant, and quite unerringly.

Trudging down to Chatham, footsore and without a farthing in his pocket, it is in this humble guise first of all that he comes before us, this Poor Traveller. Christian name, Eichard, better known as Dick, his own surname dropped upon the road, he assumes that of Doubledick being thenceforth spoken of all through the tale, even to the very end of it, by his new name, as Eichard Doubledick. A scapegrace, a ne’er-do-well, an incorrigible, hopeless of himself, despaired of by others, he has “gone wrong and run wild.” His heart, still in the right place, has been sealed up. “Betrothed to a good and beautiful girl whom he had loved better than she or perhaps even he believed,” he had given her cause, in an evil hour, to tell him solemnly that she would never marry any other man; that she would live single for his sake, but that her lips, “that Mary Marshall’s lips,” would never address another word to him on earth, bidding him in the end Go! and Heaven forgive him! Hence, in point of fact, this journey of his on foot down to Chatham, for the purpose of enlisting, if possible, in a cavalry regiment, his object being to get shot, though he himself thinks in his devil-may-care indifference, that “he might as well ride to death as be at the trouble of walking.” Premising simply that his hero’s age is at this time twenty-two, and his height five foot ten, and that, there being no cavalry at the moment in Chatham, he enlists into a regiment of the line, where he is glad to get drunk and forget all about it, the Author readily made the path clear for the opening up of his narrative.

Whenever Charles Dickens introduced this tale among his Readings, how beautifully he related it! After recounting how Private Doubledick was clearly going to the dogs, associating himself with the dregs of every regiment, seldom being sober and constantly under punishment, until it became plain at last to the whole barracks that very soon indeed he would come to be flogged, when the Reader came at this point to the words “Now the captain of Doubledick’s company was a young gentleman not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them which affected Private Doubledick in a very remarkable way” the effect was singularly striking. Out of the Reader’s own eyes would look the eyes of that Captain, as the Author himself describes them: “They were bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe.” But, he immediately went on to say, they were the only eyes then left in his narrowed world that could not be met without a sense of shame by Private Doubledick. Insomuch that if he observed Captain Taunton coming towards him, even when he himself was most callous and unabashed, “he would rather turn back and go any distance out of the way, than encounter those two handsome, dark, bright eyes.” Here it was that came, what many will still vividly remember, as one of the most exquisitely portrayed incidents in the whole of this Reading the interview between Captain Taunton and Private Doubledick!

The latter, having passed forty-eight hours in the Black Hole, has been just summoned, to his great dismay, to the Captain’s quarters. Having about him all the squalor of his incarceration, he shrinks from making his appearance before one whose silent gaze even was a reproach. However, not being so mad yet as to disobey orders, he goes up to the officers’ quarters immediately upon his release from the Black Hole, twisting and breaking in his hands as he goes along a bit of the straw that had formed its decorative furniture.

“‘Come in!’

“Private Doubledick pulled off his cap, took a stride forward and stood in the light of the dark bright eyes.”

From that moment until the end of the interview, the two men alternately were standing there distinctly before the audience upon the platform.

“Doubledick! do you know where you are going to?”

“To the devil, sir!”

“Yes, and very fast.”

Thereupon one did not hear the words simply, one saw it done precisely as it is described in the original narrative: “Private Richard Doubledick turned the straw of the Black Hole in his mouth and made a miserable salute of acquiescence.” Captain Taunton then remonstrates with him thus earnestly: “Doubledick, since I entered his Majesty’s service, a boy of seventeen, I have been pained to see many men of promise going that road; but I have never been so pained to see a man determined to make the shameful journey, as I have been, ever since you joined the regiment, to see you. At this point in the printed story, as it was originally penned, one reads that Private Richard Doubledick began to find a film stealing over the floor at which he looked; also to find the legs of the Captains breakfast-table turning crooked as if he saw them through water. Although those words are erased in the reading copy, and were not uttered, pretty nearly the effect of them was visible when, after a momentary pause, the disheartened utterance was faltered out

“I am only a common soldier, sir. It signifies very little what such a poor brute comes to.”

In answer to the next remonstrance from his officer, Doubledicks words are blurted out yet more despairingly

“I hope to get shot soon, sir, and then the regiment, and the world together, will be rid of me!”

What are the descriptive words immediately following this in the printed narrative? They also were visibly expressed upon the platform. “Looking up he met the eyes that had so strong an influence over him. He put his hand before his own eyes, and the breast of his disgrace-jacket swelled as if it would fly asunder.” His observant adviser thereupon quietly but very earnestly remarks, that he “would rather see this in him (Doubledick) than he would see five thousand guineas counted out upon the table between them for a gift to his (the Captain’s) good mother,” adding suddenly, “Have you a mother?” Doubledick is thankful to say she is dead. Reminded by the Captain that if his praises were sounded from mouth to mouth through the whole regiment, through the whole army, through the whole country, he would wish she had lived to say with pride and joy, “He is my son!” Doubledick cries out, “Spare me, sir! She would never have heard any good of me. She would never have had any pride or joy in owning herself my mother. Love and compassion she might have had, and would always have had, I know; but not spare me, sir! I am a broken wretch quite at your mercy.” By this time, according to the words of the writing, according only to the eloquent action of the Reading, “He had turned his face to the wall and stretched out his imploring hand. How eloquently that imploring hand spoke in the agonised, dumb supplication of its movement, coupled as it was with the shaken frame and the averted countenance, those who witnessed this Reading will readily recall to their recollection. As also the emotion expressed in the next broken utterances exchanged by the interlocutors:

“My friend”

“God bless you, sir!”

Captain Taunton, interrupted for the moment, adding

“You are at the crisis of your fate, my friend. Hold your course unchanged a little longer, and you know what must happen, I know better than ever you can imagine, that after that has happened you are a lost man. No man who could shed such tears could bear such marks.”

Doubledick, replying in a low shivering voice, I fully believe it, sir, the young Captain adds

“But a man in any station can do his duty, and in doing it can earn his own respect, even if his case should be so very unfortunate and so very rare, that he can earn no other man’s. A common soldier, poor brute though you called him just now, has this advantage in the stormy times we live in, that he always does his duty before a host of sympathising witnesses. Do you doubt that he may so do it as to be extolled through a whole regiment, through a whole army, through a whole country? Turn while you may yet retrieve the past and try.”

With a nearly bursting heart Richard cries out, “I will! I ask but one witness, sir!” The reply is instant and significant, “I understand you. I will be a watchful and a faithful one.” It is a compact between them, a compact sealed and ratified. “I have heard from Private Doubledick’s own lips,” said the narrator, and in tones how manly and yet how tender in their vibration, “that he dropped down upon his knee, kissed that officer’s hand, arose, and went out of the light of the dark bright eyes, an altered man.” From the date to them both of this memorable interview he followed the two hither and thither among the battle-fields of the great war between England in coalition with the other nations of Europe and Napoleon.

Wherever Captain Taunton led, there, “close to him, ever at his side, firm as a rock, true as the sun, brave as Mars,” would for certain be found that famous soldier Sergeant Doubledick. As Sergeant-Major the latter is shown, later on, upon one desperate occasion cutting his way single-handed through a mass of men, recovering the colours of his regiment, and rescuing his wounded Captain from the very jaws of death “in a jungle of horses’ hoofs and sabres” for which deed of gallantry and all but desperation, he is forthwith raised from the ranks, appearing no longer as a non-commissioned officer, but as Ensign Doubledick. At last, one fatal day in the trenches, during the siege of Badajos, Major Taunton and Ensign Doubledick find themselves hurrying forward against a party of French infantry. At this juncture, at the very moment when Doubledick sees the officer at the head of the enemy’s soldiery “a courageous, handsome, gallant officer of five-and-thirty” waving his sword, and with an eager and excited cry rallying his men, they fire, and Major Taunton has dropped. The encounter closing within ten minutes afterwards on the arrival of assistance to the two Englishmen, “the best friend man ever had” is laid upon a coat spread out upon the wet clay by the heart-riven subaltern, whom years before his generous counsel had rescued from ignominious destruction. Three little spots of blood are visible on the shirt of Major Taunton as he lies there with the breast of his uniform opened.

“Dear Doubledick, I am dying.”

“For the love of Heaven, no! Taunton! My preserver, my guardian angel, my witness! Dearest, truest, kindest of human beings! Taunton! For God’s sake!”

To listen to that agonised entreaty as it started from the trembling and one could almost have fancied whitened lips of the Reader, was to be with him there upon the instant on the far-off battle-field. Taunton dies “with his hand upon the breast in which he had revived a soul.” Doubledick, prostrated and inconsolable in his bereavement, has but two cares seemingly for the rest of his existence one to preserve a packet of hair to be given to the mother of the friend lost to him; the other, to encounter that French officer who had rallied the men under whose fire that friend had fallen. “A new legend,” quoth the narrator, “now began to incubate among our troops; and it was, that when he and the French officer came face to face once more, there would be weeping in France.” Failing to meet him, however, through all the closing scenes of the great war, Doubledick, by this time promoted to his lieutenancy, follows the old regimental colours, ragged, scarred, and riddled with shot, through the fierce conflicts of Quatre Bras and Ligny, falling at last desperately wounded all but dead upon the field of Waterloo.

How, having been tenderly nursed during the total eclipse of an appallingly lengthened period of unconsciousness, he wakes up at last in Brussels to find that during a little more than momentary and at first an utterly forgotten interval of his stupor, he has been married to the gentle-handed nurse who has been all the while in attendance upon him, and who is no other, of coarse, than his faithful first love, Mary Marshall! How, returning homewards, an invalided hero, Captain Doubledick becomes, in a manner, soon afterwards, the adopted son of Major Taunton’s mother! How the latter, having gone, some time later, on a visit to a French family near Aix, is followed by her other son, her other self, he has almost come to be, “now a hardy, handsome man in the full vigour of life,” on his receiving from the head of the house a gracious and courtly invitation for “the honour of the company of cet homme si justement célèbre, Monsieur lé Capitaine Richard Double-dick!” These were among the incidents in due sequence immediately afterwards recounted!

Arriving at the old chateau upon a fête-day, when the household are scattered abroad in the gardens and shrubberies at their rejoicings, Captain Double-dick passes through the open porch into the lofty stone hall. There, being a total stranger, he is almost scared by the intrusive clanking of his boots. Suddenly he starts back, feeling his face turn white! For, in the gallery looking down at him, is the French officer whose picture he has carried in his mind so long and so far. The latter, disappearing in another instant for the staircase, enters directly afterwards with a bright sudden look upon his countenance, “Such a look as it had worn in that fatal moment,” so well and so terribly remembered! All this was portrayed with startling vividness by the Author of the little sketch in his capacity as the sympathetic realizer of the dreams of his own imagination.

Exquisite was the last glimpse of the delineation, when the Captain after many internal révulsions of feeling, while he gazes through the window of the bed-chamber allotted to him in the old chateau, “whence he could see the smiling prospect and the peaceful vineyards “ thinks musingly to himself, “Spirit of my departed friend, is it through thee these better thoughts are rising in my mind! Is it thou who hast shown me, all the way I have been drawn to meet this man, the blessings of the altered time! Is it thou who hast sent thy stricken mother to me, to stay my angry hand! Is it from thee the whisper comes, that this man only did his duty as thou didst and as I did through thy guidance, which saved me, here on earth and that he did no more!” Then it was, we were told, there came to him the second and crowning resolution of his life: “That neither to the French officer, nor to the mother of his departed friend, nor to any soul while either of the two was living, would he breathe what only he knew.” Then it was that the author perfected his Reading by the simple utterance of its closing words “And when he touched that French officer’s glass with his own that day at dinner, he secretly forgave him forgave him in the name of the Divine Forgiver.” With a moral no less noble and affecting, no less grand and elevating than this, the lovely idyll closed. The final glimpse of the scene at the old Aix chateau was like the view of a sequestered orchard through the ivied porchway of a village church. The concluding words of the prelection were like the sound of the organ voluntary at twilight, when the worshippers are dispersing.