Home › Tom Brown's School Days › Tom Brown's School Days: Talbot
Tom Brown's School Days: Talbot
The insurgents win the battle and Waverley captures a brave English officer who remains alone beside his cannon after the others have fled. The officer turns out to be a certain Colonel Talbot, and old friend of the house of Waverley whom Edward has never met before. Colonel Talbot has left an invalid wife in order to find Waverley and to induce him to return home, since his conduct has put the entire Waverley family into danger. When Edward learns that Colonel Talbot's imprisonment is likely to cost the life of his sick wife, he obtains the colonel's release In return for this kindness Colonel Talbot promises to intercede with the English king in Waverley's behalf. The way for such a plea has fortunately been paved by the revelation of some of the mysteries attending the arrest of Waverley for desertion and treason. By means of a packet of letters, which Donald Bean Lean's daughter has slipped into Edward's baggage, he learns that her father, the Highland robber, being in the service of Prince Charles Edward, and wishing to gain favor in his eyes, has concocted a plot whereby the British government was led to believe that Waverley was a traitor, thereby forcing him into the army of the insurgent prince. Only one question now remains unexplained. Who was the girl that nursed him during his fever in the peasant's hut?
Before the solution is found to this question the insurgent army is totally defeated, Fergus MacIvor is captured, the prince escapes, and Waverley, who is now also a fugitive, pays a secret visit to the mansion of the Baron of Bradwardine, for he is anxious to learn about the fate of some of his friends. He finds the baron in hiding in that selfsame hut where he had been nursed during his fever. Here he learns that it was Rose Bradwardine who nursed him. It was Rose, also, who had paid Donald Bean Lean with her mother's jewelry in order to induce him to rescue Waverley after his arrest for treason. Overcome with gratitude for such devotion, Edward asks the Baron of Bradwardine for his daughter's hand. He can now marry her in security; for, thanks to the kindness of Colonel Talbot and other influential Englishmen, both he and the baron have been pardoned.
It takes the loquacious baron an hour to tell Rose of Edward's love for her. It takes Edward just five minutes to convince her of it. Their happiness would now be complete but for the sad fate of Fergus MacIvor, who has been condemned to death. He faces the executioner unflinchingly, expressing no regret for his fate, but only the hope that "they will set my head on the Scotch gate, that I may look, even after death, to the blue hills of my own country, which I love so dearly."
With this shadow to mar the sunshine of their happiness, Edward and Rose are married.
Thus we come to the end of the romantic tale, and we must again return to the drab reality of our every-day existence. But before so doing, let us, together with Flora MacIvor, who has joined the Scottish Benedictine nuns in Paris, bid the happy couple good luck and adieu!
DICKENS "THE child is father of the man" was never better illustrated than in the case of Charles Dickens. His first friends were books, good books. He read books of travel and the "Arabian Nights," Cervantes, Fielding, and Smollett. And as a child he learned to know and to love England--the England of pleasant country lanes, hedge-bordered, that ran to the sea or to quiet green open spaces before stately cathedrals.
And he knew, too, the horror of mean London streets and numbing drudgery. For two years of his childhood he pasted labels upon blacking bottles, lived in an attic with two ragamuffins, and when he saw his parents once a week, he had to go to prison, where his father was confined for debt. Some of this London that he knew is in "Oliver Twist," and it crops out in other tales. Most of it, however, is in "David Copperfield," where his father is depicted as the immortal Micawber.
The joy of life and the bitterness, the kindliness of men and the cruelty. These things were burned into the mind and soul of the sensitive boy. They are in the books of the man.