One of Clive's Heroes: A Story of the Fight for India — A Reader’s Guide

ntment and the passionate longing for release. His life had not been very happy. He barely remembered his father--a big, keen-eyed, loud-voiced old man--who died when his younger son was four years old. Richard Burke had run away from his Irish home to sea. He served on Admiral Rooke’s flagship at the battle of La Hogue, and, rising in the navy to the rank of warrant-officer, bought a ship with the savings of twenty years and fitted it out for unauthorized trade with the East Indies. His daring, skill, and success attracted the attention of the officers of the Company. He was invited to enter the Company’s service. As captain of an Indiaman he sailed backwards and forwards for ten years; then at the age of fifty retired with a considerable fortune and married the daughter of a Shropshire farmer. The death of his wife’s relatives led him to settle on the farm their family had tenanted for generations, and it was at Wilcote Grange that his three children were born.

Fifteen years separated the elder son from the younger; between them came a daughter, who married early and left the neighbourhood. Four years after Desmond’s birth the old man died, leaving the boy to the guardianship of his brother.

There lay the seed of trouble. No brothers could have been more unlike than the two sons of Captain Burke. Richard was made on a large and powerful scale; he was hard-working, methodical, grasping, wholly unimaginative, and in temper violent and domineering. Slighter and less robust, though not less healthy, Desmond was a boy of vivid imagination, high-strung, high-spirited, his feelings easily moved, his pride easily wounded. His brother was too dull and stolid to understand him, taking for deliberate malice what was but boyish mischief, and regarding him as sullen when he was only dreamily thoughtful.

As a young boy Desmond kept as much as possible out of his brother’s way. But as he grew older he came more directly under Richard’s control, with the result that they were now in a constant state of feud. Their mother, a woman of sweet temper but weak will, favoured her younger son in secret; she learnt by experience that open intervention on his behalf did more harm than good.

Desmond had two habits which especially moved his brother to anger. He was fond of roaming the country alone for hours together; he was fond of reading. To Richard each was a waste of time. He never opened a book, save a manual of husbandry, or a ready reckoner; he could conceive of no reason for walking, unless it were the business of the farm. Nothing irritated him more than to see Desmond stretched at length with his nose in Mr. Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe_, or a volume of Hakluyt’s _Voyages_, or perhaps Mr. Oldys’s _Life of Sir Walter Raleigh_. And as he himself never dreamed by day or by night, there was no chance of his divining the fact that Desmond, on those long solitary walks of his, was engaged chiefly in dreaming, not idly, for in his dreams he was always the centre of activity, greedy for doing.

These day-dreams constituted almost the sole joy of Desmond’s life. When he was quite a little fellow he would sprawl on the bank near Tyrley Castle and weave romances about the Norman barons whose home it had been--romances in which he bore a strenuous part. He knew every interesting spot in the neighbourhood: Salisbury Hill, where the Yorkist leader pitched his camp before the battle of Blore Heath; Audley Brow, where Audley the Lancastrian lay watching his foe; above all Styche Hall, whence a former Clive had ridden forth to battle against the king, and where his namesake, the present Robert Clive, had been born. He imagined himself each of those bold warriors in turn, and saw himself, now a knight in mail, now a gay cavalier of Rupert’s, now a bewigged Georgian gentleman in frock and pantaloons, but always with sword in hand.