“Oh, great Eliza! oh, world-famous crew!Which shall I hail more blest, your queen or you?While without other either falls to wrack,And light must eyes, or eyes their light must lack.She without you, a diamond sunk in mine,Its worth unprized, to self alone must shine;You without her, like hands bereft of head,Like Ajax rage, by blindfold lust misled.She light, you eyes; she head, and you the hands,In fair proportion knit by heavenly hands;Servants in queen, and queen in servants blest;Your only glory, how to serve her best;And hers how best the adventurous might to guide,Which knows no check of foemen, wind, or tide,So fair Eliza's spotless fame may flyTriumphant round the globe, and shake th' astounded sky!”
With which sufficiently bad verses Loyalty passed on, while my Lady Bath hinted to Sir Richard, not without reason, that the poet, in trying to exalt both parties, had very sufficiently snubbed both, and intimated that it was “hardly safe for country wits to attempt that euphuistic, antithetical, and delicately conceited vein, whose proper fountain was in Whitehall.” However, on went Loyalty, very well pleased with himself, and next, amid much cheering, two great tinsel fish, a salmon and a trout, symbolical of the wealth of Torridge, waddled along, by means of two human legs and a staff apiece, which protruded from the fishes' stomachs. They drew (or seemed to draw, for half the 'prentices in the town were shoving it behind, and cheering on the panting monarchs of the flood) a car wherein sate, amid reeds and river-flags, three or four pretty girls in robes of gray-blue spangled with gold, their heads wreathed one with a crown of the sweet bog-myrtle, another with hops and white convolvulus, the third with pale heather and golden fern. They stopped opposite Amyas; and she of the myrtle wreath, rising and bowing to him and the company, began with a pretty blush to say her say:—
“Hither from my moorland home,Nymph of Torridge, proud I come;Leaving fen and furzy brake,Haunt of eft and spotted snake,Where to fill mine urns I use,Daily with Atlantic dews;While beside the reedy floodWild duck leads her paddling brood.For this morn, as Phoebus gayChased through heaven the night mist gray,Close beside me, prankt in pride,Sister Tamar rose, and cried,'Sluggard, up! 'Tis holiday,In the lowlands far away.Hark! how jocund Plymouth bells,Wandering up through mazy dells,Call me down, with smiles to hail,My daring Drake's returning sail.''Thine alone?' I answer'd. 'Nay;Mine as well the joy to-day.Heroes train'd on Northern wave,To that Argo new I gave;Lent to thee, they roam'd the main;Give me, nymph, my sons again.''Go, they wait Thee,' Tamar cried,Southward bounding from my side.Glad I rose, and at my call,Came my Naiads, one and all.Nursling of the mountain sky,Leaving Dian's choir on high,Down her cataracts laughing loud,Ockment leapt from crag and cloud,Leading many a nymph, who dwellsWhere wild deer drink in ferny dells;While the Oreads as they pastPeep'd from Druid Tors aghast.By alder copses sliding slow,Knee-deep in flowers came gentler YeoAnd paused awhile her locks to twineWith musky hops and white woodbine,Then joined the silver-footed band,Which circled down my golden sand,By dappled park, and harbor shady,Haunt of love-lorn knight and lady,My thrice-renowned sons to greet,With rustic song and pageant meet.For joy! the girdled robe aroundEliza's name henceforth shall sound,Whose venturous fleets to conquest start,Where ended once the seaman's chart,While circling Sol his steps shall countHenceforth from Thule's western mount,And lead new rulers round the seasFrom furthest Cassiterides.For found is now the golden tree,Solv'd th' Atlantic mystery,Pluck'd the dragon-guarded fruit;While around the charmed root,Wailing loud, the HesperidsWatch their warder's drooping lids.Low he lies with grisly wound,While the sorceress triple-crown'dIn her scarlet robe doth shield him,Till her cunning spells have heal'd him.Ye, meanwhile, around the earthBear the prize of manful worth.Yet a nobler meed than goldWaits for Albion's children bold;Great Eliza's virgin handWelcomes you to Fairy-land,While your native Naiads bringNative wreaths as offering.Simple though their show may be,Britain's worship in them see.'Tis not price, nor outward fairness,Gives the victor's palm its rareness;Simplest tokens can impartNoble throb to noble heart:Graecia, prize thy parsley crown,Boast thy laurel, Caesar's town;Moorland myrtle still shall beBadge of Devon's Chivalry!”
And so ending, she took the wreath of fragrant gale from her own head, and stooping from the car, placed it on the head of Amyas Leigh, who made answer—
“There is no place like home, my fair mistress and no scent to my taste like this old home-scent in all the spice-islands that I ever sailed by!”
“Her song was not so bad,” said Sir Richard to Lady Bath—“but how came she to hear Plymouth bells at Tamar-head, full fifty miles away? That's too much of a poet's license, is it not?”
“The river-nymphs, as daughters of Oceanus, and thus of immortal parentage, are bound to possess organs of more than mortal keenness; but, as you say, the song was not so bad—erudite, as well as prettily conceived—and, saving for a certain rustical simplicity and monosyllabic baldness, smacks rather of the forests of Castaly than those of Torridge.”
So spake my Lady Bath; whom Sir Richard wisely answered not; for she was a terribly learned member of the college of critics, and disputed even with Sidney's sister the chieftaincy of the Euphuists; so Sir Richard answered not, but answer was made for him.
“Since the whole choir of Muses, madam, have migrated to the Court of Whitehall, no wonder if some dews of Parnassus should fertilize at times even our Devon moors.”
The speaker was a tall and slim young man, some five-and-twenty years old, of so rare and delicate a beauty, that it seemed that some Greek statue, or rather one of those pensive and pious knights whom the old German artists took delight to paint, had condescended to tread awhile this work-day earth in living flesh and blood. The forehead was very lofty and smooth, the eyebrows thin and greatly arched (the envious gallants whispered that something at least of their curve was due to art, as was also the exceeding smoothness of those delicate cheeks). The face was somewhat long and thin; the nose aquiline; and the languid mouth showed, perhaps, too much of the ivory upper teeth; but the most striking point of the speaker's appearance was the extraordinary brilliancy of his complexion, which shamed with its whiteness that of all fair ladies round, save where open on each cheek a bright red spot gave warning, as did the long thin neck and the taper hands, of sad possibilities, perhaps not far off; possibilities which all saw with an inward sigh, except she whose doting glances, as well as her resemblance to the fair youth, proclaimed her at once his mother, Mrs. Leigh herself.
Master Frank, for he it was, was dressed in the very extravagance of the fashion,—not so much from vanity, as from that delicate instinct of self-respect which would keep some men spruce and spotless from one year's end to another upon a desert island; “for,” as Frank used to say in his sententious way, “Mr. Frank Leigh at least beholds me, though none else be by; and why should I be more discourteous to him than I permit others to be? Be sure that he who is a Grobian in his own company, will, sooner or later, become a Grobian in that of his friends.”
So Mr. Frank was arrayed spotlessly; but after the latest fashion of Milan, not in trunk hose and slashed sleeves, nor in “French standing collar, treble quadruple daedalian ruff, or stiff-necked rabato, that had more arches for pride, propped up with wire and timber, than five London Bridges;” but in a close-fitting and perfectly plain suit of dove-color, which set off cunningly the delicate proportions of his figure, and the delicate hue of his complexion, which was shaded from the sun by a broad dove-colored Spanish hat, with feather to match, looped up over the right ear with a pearl brooch, and therein a crowned E, supposed by the damsels of Bideford to stand for Elizabeth, which was whispered to be the gift of some most illustrious hand. This same looping up was not without good reason and purpose prepense; thereby all the world had full view of a beautiful little ear, which looked as if it had been cut of cameo, and made, as my Lady Rich once told him, “to hearken only to the music of the spheres, or to the chants of cherubim.” Behind the said ear was stuck a fresh rose; and the golden hair was all drawn smoothly back and round to the left temple, whence, tied with a pink ribbon in a great true lover's knot, a mighty love-lock, “curled as it had been laid in press,” rolled down low upon his bosom. Oh, Frank! Frank! have you come out on purpose to break the hearts of all Bideford burghers' daughters? And if so, did you expect to further that triumph by dyeing that pretty little pointed beard (with shame I report it) of a bright vermilion? But we know you better, Frank, and so does your mother; and you are but a masquerading angel after all, in spite of your knots and your perfumes, and the gold chain round your neck which a German princess gave you; and the emerald ring on your right fore-finger which Hatton gave you; and the pair of perfumed gloves in your left which Sidney's sister gave you; and the silver-hilted Toledo which an Italian marquis gave you on a certain occasion of which you never choose to talk, like a prudent and modest gentleman as you are; but of which the gossips talk, of course, all the more, and whisper that you saved his life from bravoes—a dozen, at the least; and had that sword for your reward, and might have had his beautiful sister's hand beside, and I know not what else; but that you had so many lady-loves already that you were loath to burden yourself with a fresh one. That, at least, we know to be a lie, fair Frank; for your heart is as pure this day as when you knelt in your little crib at Burrough, and said—
“Four corners to my bedFour angels round my head;Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,Bless the bed that I lie on.”
And who could doubt it (if being pure themselves, they have instinctive sympathy with what is pure), who ever looked into those great deep blue eyes of yours, “the black fringed curtains of whose azure lids,” usually down-dropt as if in deepest thought, you raise slowly, almost wonderingly each time you speak, as if awakening from some fair dream whose home is rather in your platonical “eternal world of supra-sensible forms,” than on that work-day earth wherein you nevertheless acquit yourself so well? There—I must stop describing you, or I shall catch the infection of your own euphuism, and talk of you as you would have talked of Sidney or of Spenser, or of that Swan of Avon, whose song had just begun when yours—but I will not anticipate; my Lady Bath is waiting to give you her rejoinder.
“Ah, my silver-tongued scholar! and are you, then, the poet? or have you been drawing on the inexhaustible bank of your friend Raleigh, or my cousin Sidney? or has our new Cygnet Immerito lent you a few unpublished leaves from some fresh Shepherd's Calendar?”
“Had either, madam, of that cynosural triad been within call of my most humble importunities, your ears had been delectate with far nobler melody.”
“But not our eyes with fairer faces, eh? Well, you have chosen your nymphs, and had good store from whence to pick, I doubt not. Few young Dulcineas round but must have been glad to take service under so renowned a captain?”
“The only difficulty, gracious countess, has been to know where to fix the wandering choice of my bewildered eyes, where all alike are fair, and all alike facund.”
“We understand,” said she, smiling;—
“Dan Cupid, choosing 'midst his mother's graces,Himself more fair, made scorn of fairest faces.”
The young scholar capped her distich forthwith, and bowing to her with a meaning look,
“'Then, Goddess, turn,' he cried, 'and veil thy light; Blinded by thine, what eyes can choose aright?'”
“Go, saucy sir,” said my lady, in high glee: “the pageant stays your supreme pleasure.”
And away went Mr. Frank as master of the revels, to bring up the 'prentices' pageant; while, for his sake, the nymph of Torridge was forgotten for awhile by all young dames, and most young gentlemen: and his mother heaved a deep sigh, which Lady Bath overhearing—
“What? in the dumps, good madam, while all are rejoicing in your joy? Are you afraid that we court-dames shall turn your Adonis's brain for him?”
“I do, indeed, fear lest your condescension should make him forget that he is only a poor squire's orphan.”
“I will warrant him never to forget aught that he should recollect,” said my Lady Bath.
And she spoke truly. But soon Frank's silver voice was heard calling out—
“Room there, good people, for the gallant 'prentice lads!”
And on they came, headed by a giant of buckram and pasteboard armor, forth of whose stomach looked, like a clock-face in a steeple, a human visage, to be greeted, as was the fashion then, by a volley of quips and puns from high and low.
Young Mr. William Cary, of Clovelly, who was the wit of those parts, opened the fire by asking him whether he were Goliath, Gogmagog, or Grantorto in the romance; for giants' names always began with a G. To which the giant's stomach answered pretty surlily—
“Mine don't; I begin with an O.”
“Then thou criest out before thou art hurt, O cowardly giant!”
“Let me out, lads,” quoth the irascible visage, struggling in his buckram prison, “and I soon show him whether I be a coward.”
“Nay, if thou gettest out of thyself, thou wouldst be beside thyself, and so wert but a mad giant.”
“And that were pity,” said Lady Bath; “for by the romances, giants have never overmuch wit to spare.”
“Mercy, dear lady!” said Frank, “and let the giant begin with an O.”
“A ——”
“A false start, giant! you were to begin with an O.”
“I'll make you end with an O, Mr. William Cary!” roared the testy tower of buckram.
“And so I do, for I end with 'Fico!'”
“Be mollified, sweet giant,” said Frank, “and spare the rash youth of yon foolish knight. Shall elephants catch flies, or Hurlo-Thrumbo stain his club with brains of Dagonet the jester? Be mollified; leave thy caverned grumblings, like Etna when its windy wrath is past, and discourse eloquence from thy central omphalos, like Pythoness ventriloquizing.”
“If you do begin laughing at me too, Mr. Leigh ——” said the giant's clock-face, in a piteous tone.
“I laugh not. Art thou not Ordulf the earl, and I thy humblest squire? Speak up, my lord; your cousin, my Lady Bath, commands you.”
And at last the giant began:—
“A giant I, Earl Ordulf men me call,—'Gainst Paynim foes Devonia's champion tall;In single fight six thousand Turks I slew;Pull'd off a lion's head, and ate it too:With one shrewd blow, to let St. Edward in,I smote the gates of Exeter in twain;Till aged grown, by angels warn'd in dream,I built an abbey fair by Tavy stream.But treacherous time hath tripped my glories up,The stanch old hound must yield to stancher pup;Here's one so tall as I, and twice so bold,Where I took only cuffs, takes good red gold.From pole to pole resound his wondrous works,Who slew more Spaniards than I e'er slew Turks;I strode across the Tavy stream: but heStrode round the world and back; and here 'a be!”
“Oh, bathos!” said Lady Bath, while the 'prentices shouted applause. “Is this hedge-bantling to be fathered on you, Mr. Frank?”
“It is necessary, by all laws of the drama, madam,” said Frank, with a sly smile, “that the speech and the speaker shall fit each other. Pass on, Earl Ordulf; a more learned worthy waits.”
Whereon, up came a fresh member of the procession; namely, no less a person than Vindex Brimblecombe, the ancient schoolmaster, with five-and-forty boys at his heels, who halting, pulled out his spectacles, and thus signified his forgiveness of his whilom broken head:—
“That the world should have been circumnavigated, ladies and gentles, were matter enough of jubilation to the student of Herodotus and Plato, Plinius and —— ahem! much more when the circumnavigators are Britons; more, again, when Damnonians.”
“Don't swear, master,” said young Will Cary.
“Gulielme Cary, Gulielme Cary, hast thou forgotten thy—”
“Whippings? Never, old lad! Go on; but let not the license of the scholar overtop the modesty of the Christian.”
“More again, as I said, when, incolae, inhabitants of Devon; but, most of all, men of Bideford school. Oh renowned school! Oh schoolboys ennobled by fellowship with him! Oh most happy pedagogue, to whom it has befallen to have chastised a circumnavigator, and, like another Chiron, trained another Hercules: yet more than Hercules, for he placed his pillars on the ocean shore, and then returned; but my scholar's voyage—”
“Hark how the old fox is praising himself all along on the sly,” said Cary.
“Mr. William, Mr. William, peace;—silentium, my graceless pupil. Urge the foaming steed, and strike terror into the rapid stag, but meddle not with matters too high for thee.”
“He has given you the dor now, sir,” said Lady Bath; “let the old man say his say.”
“I bring, therefore, as my small contribution to this day's feast; first a Latin epigram, as thus—”
“Latin? Let us hear it forthwith,” cried my lady.
And the old pedant mouthed out—
“Torriguiam Tamaris ne spernat; Leighius addetMox terras terris, inclyte Drake, tuis.”
“Neat, i' faith, la!” Whereon all the rest, as in duty bound, approved also.
“This for the erudite: for vulgar ears the vernacular is more consonant, sympathetic, instructive; as thus:—
“Famed Argo ship, that noble chip, by doughty Jason's steering,Brought back to Greece the golden fleece, from Colchis homecareering;But now her fame is put to shame, while new Devonian Argo,Round earth doth run in wake of sun, and brings wealthier cargo.”
“Runs with a right fa-lal-la,” observed Cary; “and would go nobly to a fiddle and a big drum.”
“Ye Spaniards, quake! our doughty Drake a royal swan is tested,On wing and oar, from shore to shore, the raging main whobreasted:—But never needs to chant his deeds, like swan that lies a-dying,So far his name, by trump of fame, around the sphere is flying.”
“Hillo ho! schoolmaster!” shouted a voice from behind; “move on, and make way for Father Neptune!” Whereon a whole storm of raillery fell upon the hapless pedagogue.
“We waited for the parson's alligator, but we wain't for yourn.”
“Allegory! my children, allegory!” shrieked the man of letters.
“What do ye call he an alligator for? He is but a poor little starved evat!”
“Out of the road, old Custis! March on, Don Palmado!”
These allusions to the usual instrument of torture in West-country schools made the old gentleman wince; especially when they were followed home by—
“Who stole Admiral Grenville's brooms, because birch rods were dear?”
But proudly he shook his bald head, as a bull shakes off the flies, and returned to the charge once more.
“Great Alexander, famed commander, wept and made a pother, At conquering only half the world, but Drake had conquer'd t'other; And Hercules to brink of seas!—”
“Oh—!”
And clapping both hands to the back of his neck, the schoolmaster began dancing frantically about, while his boys broke out tittering, “O! the ochidore! look to the blue ochidore! Who've put ochidore to maister's poll!”
It was too true: neatly inserted, as he stooped forward, between his neck and his collar, was a large live shore-crab, holding on tight with both hands.
“Gentles! good Christians! save me! I am mare-rode! Incubo, vel ab incubo, opprimor! Satanas has me by the poll! Help! he tears my jugular; he wrings my neck, as he does to Dr. Faustus in the play. Confiteor!—I confess! Satan, I defy thee! Good people, I confess! [Greek text]! The truth will out. Mr. Francis Leigh wrote the epigram!” And diving through the crowd, the pedagogue vanished howling, while Father Neptune, crowned with sea-weeds, a trident in one hand, and a live dog-fish in the other, swaggered up the street surrounded by a tall bodyguard of mariners, and followed by a great banner, on which was depicted a globe, with Drake's ship sailing thereon upside down, and overwritten—
“See every man the Pelican,Which round the world did go,While her stern-post was uppermost,And topmasts down below.And by the way she lost a day,Out of her log was stole:But Neptune kind, with favoring wind,Hath brought her safe and whole.”
“Now, lads!” cried Neptune; “hand me my parable that's writ for me, and here goeth!”
And at the top of his bull-voice, he began roaring—
“I am King Neptune bold,The ruler of the seasI don't understand much singing upon land,But I hope what I say will please.“Here be five Bideford men,Which have sail'd the world around,And I watch'd them well, as they all can tell,And brought them home safe and sound.“For it is the men of Devon.To see them I take delight,Both to tack and to hull, and to heave and to pull,And to prove themselves in fight.“Where be those Spaniards proud,That make their valiant boasts;And think for to keep the poor Indians for their sheep,And to farm my golden coasts?“'Twas the devil and the Pope gave themMy kingdom for their own:But my nephew Francis Drake, he caused them to quake,And he pick'd them to the bone.“For the sea my realm it is,As good Queen Bess's is the land;So freely come again, all merry Devon men,And there's old Neptune's hand.”
“Holla, boys! holla! Blow up, Triton, and bring forward the freedom of the seas.”
Triton, roaring through a conch, brought forward a cockle-shell full of salt-water, and delivered it solemnly to Amyas, who, of course, put a noble into it, and returned it after Grenville had done the same.
“Holla, Dick Admiral!” cried neptune, who was pretty far gone in liquor; “we knew thou hadst a right English heart in thee, for all thou standest there as taut as a Don who has swallowed his rapier.”
“Grammercy, stop thy bellowing, fellow, and on; for thou smellest vilely of fish.”
“Everything smells sweet in its right place. I'm going home.”
“I thought thou wert there all along, being already half-seas over,” said Cary.
“Ay, right Upsee-Dutch; and that's more than thou ever wilt be, thou 'long-shore stay-at-home. Why wast making sheep's eyes at Mistress Salterne here, while my pretty little chuck of Burrough there was playing at shove-groat with Spanish doubloons?”
“Go to the devil, sirrah!” said Cary. Neptune had touched on a sore subject; and more cheeks than Amyas Leigh's reddened at the hint.
“Amen, if Heaven so please!” and on rolled the monarch of the seas; and so the pageant ended.
The moment Amyas had an opportunity, he asked his brother Frank, somewhat peevishly, where Rose Salterne was.
“What! the mayor's daughter? With her uncle by Kilkhampton, I believe.”
Now cunning Master Frank, whose daily wish was to “seek peace and ensue it,” told Amyas this, because he must needs speak the truth: but he was purposed at the same time to speak as little truth as he could, for fear of accidents; and, therefore, omitted to tell his brother how that he, two days before, had entreated Rose Salterne herself to appear as the nymph of Torridge; which honor she, who had no objection either to exhibit her pretty face, to recite pretty poetry, or to be trained thereto by the cynosure of North Devon, would have assented willingly, but that her father stopped the pretty project by a peremptory countermove, and packed her off, in spite of her tears, to the said uncle on the Atlantic cliffs; after which he went up to Burrough, and laughed over the whole matter with Mrs. Leigh.
“I am but a burgher, Mrs. Leigh, and you a lady of blood; but I am too proud to let any man say that Simon Salterne threw his daughter at your son's head;—no; not if you were an empress!”
“And to speak truth, Mr. Salterne, there are young gallants enough in the country quarrelling about her pretty face every day, without making her a tourney-queen to tilt about.”
Which was very true; for during the three years of Amyas's absence, Rose Salterne had grown into so beautiful a girl of eighteen, that half North Devon was mad about the “Rose of Torridge,” as she was called; and there was not a young gallant for ten miles round (not to speak of her father's clerks and 'prentices, who moped about after her like so many Malvolios, and treasured up the very parings of her nails) who would not have gone to Jerusalem to win her. So that all along the vales of Torridge and of Taw, and even away to Clovelly (for young Mr. Cary was one of the sick), not a gay bachelor but was frowning on his fellows, and vying with them in the fashion of his clothes, the set of his ruffs, the harness of his horse, the carriage of his hawks, the pattern of his sword-hilt; and those were golden days for all tailors and armorers, from Exmoor to Okehampton town. But of all those foolish young lads not one would speak to the other, either out hunting, or at the archery butts, or in the tilt-yard; and my Lady Bath (who confessed that there was no use in bringing out her daughters where Rose Salterne was in the way) prophesied in her classical fashion that Rose's wedding bid fair to be a very bridal of Atalanta, and feast of the Lapithae; and poor Mr. Will Cary (who always blurted out the truth), when old Salterne once asked him angrily in Bideford Market, “What a plague business had he making sheep's eyes at his daughter?” broke out before all bystanders, “And what a plague business had you, old boy, to throw such an apple of discord into our merry meetings hereabouts? If you choose to have such a daughter, you must take the consequences, and be hanged to you.” To which Mr. Salterne answered with some truth, “That she was none of his choosing, nor of Mr. Cary's neither.” And so the dor being given, the belligerents parted laughing, but the war remained in statu quo; and not a week passed but, by mysterious hands, some nosegay, or languishing sonnet, was conveyed into The Rose's chamber, all which she stowed away, with the simplicity of a country girl, finding it mighty pleasant; and took all compliments quietly enough, probably because, on the authority of her mirror, she considered them no more than her due.
And now, to add to the general confusion, home was come young Amyas Leigh, more desperately in love with her than ever. For, as is the way with sailors (who after all are the truest lovers, as they are the finest fellows, God bless them, upon earth), his lonely ship-watches had been spent in imprinting on his imagination, month after month, year after year, every feature and gesture and tone of the fair lass whom he had left behind him; and that all the more intensely, because, beside his mother, he had no one else to think of, and was as pure as the day he was born, having been trained as many a brave young man was then, to look upon profligacy not as a proof of manhood, but as what the old Germans, and those Gortyneans who crowned the offender with wool, knew it to be, a cowardly and effeminate sin.
OF TWO GENTLEMEN OF WALES, AND HOW THEY HUNTED WITH THE HOUNDS, AND YET RAN WITH THE DEER
“I know that Deformed; he has been a vile thief this seven years;he goes up and down like a gentleman: I remember his name.”—MuchAdo About Nothing.
Amyas slept that night a tired and yet a troubled sleep; and his mother and Frank, as they bent over his pillow, could see that his brain was busy with many dreams.
And no wonder; for over and above all the excitement of the day, the recollection of John Oxenham had taken strange possession of his mind; and all that evening, as he sat in the bay-windowed room where he had seen him last, Amyas was recalling to himself every look and gesture of the lost adventurer, and wondering at himself for so doing, till he retired to sleep, only to renew the fancy in his dreams. At last he found himself, he knew not how, sailing westward ever, up the wake of the setting sun, in chase of a tiny sail which was John Oxenham's. Upon him was a painful sense that, unless he came up with her in time, something fearful would come to pass; but the ship would not sail. All around floated the sargasso beds, clogging her bows with their long snaky coils of weed; and still he tried to sail, and tried to fancy that he was sailing, till the sun went down and all was utter dark. And then the moon arose, and in a moment John Oxenham's ship was close aboard; her sails were torn and fluttering; the pitch was streaming from her sides; her bulwarks were rotting to decay. And what was that line of dark objects dangling along the mainyard?—A line of hanged men! And, horror of horrors, from the yard-arm close above him, John Oxenham's corpse looked down with grave-light eyes, and beckoned and pointed, as if to show him his way, and strove to speak, and could not, and pointed still, not forward, but back along their course. And when Amyas looked back, behold, behind him was the snow range of the Andes glittering in the moon, and he knew that he was in the South Seas once more, and that all America was between him and home. And still the corpse kept pointing back, and back, and looking at him with yearning eyes of agony, and lips which longed to tell some awful secret; till he sprang up, and woke with a shout of terror, and found himself lying in the little coved chamber in dear old Burrough, with the gray autumn morning already stealing in.
Feverish and excited, he tried in vain to sleep again; and after an hour's tossing, rose and dressed, and started for a bathe on his beloved old pebble ridge. As he passed his mother's door, he could not help looking in. The dim light of morning showed him the bed; but its pillow had not been pressed that night. His mother, in her long white night-dress, was kneeling at the other end of the chamber at her prie-dieu, absorbed in devotion. Gently he slipped in without a word, and knelt down at her side. She turned, smiled, passed her arm around him, and went on silently with her prayers. Why not? They were for him, and he knew it, and prayed also; and his prayers were for her, and for poor lost John Oxenham, and all his vanished crew.
At last she rose, and standing above him, parted the yellow locks from off his brow, and looked long and lovingly into his face. There was nothing to be spoken, for there was nothing to be concealed between these two souls as clear as glass. Each knew all which the other meant; each knew that its own thoughts were known. At last the mutual gaze was over; she stooped and kissed him on the brow, and was in the act to turn away, as a tear dropped on his forehead. Her little bare feet were peeping out from under her dress. He bent down and kissed them again and again; and then looking up, as if to excuse himself,—
“You have such pretty feet, mother!”
Instantly, with a woman's instinct, she had hidden them. She had been a beauty once, as I said; and though her hair was gray, and her roses had faded long ago, she was beautiful still, in all eyes which saw deeper than the mere outward red and white.
“Your dear father used to say so thirty years ago.”
“And I say so still: you always were beautiful; you are beautiful now.”
“What is that to you, silly boy? Will you play the lover with an old mother? Go and take your walk, and think of younger ladies, if you can find any worthy of you.”
And so the son went forth, and the mother returned to her prayers.
He walked down to the pebble ridge, where the surges of the bay have defeated their own fury, by rolling up in the course of ages a rampart of gray boulder-stones, some two miles long, as cunningly curved, and smoothed, and fitted, as if the work had been done by human hands, which protects from the high tides of spring and autumn a fertile sheet of smooth, alluvial turf. Sniffing the keen salt air like a young sea-dog, he stripped and plunged into the breakers, and dived, and rolled, and tossed about the foam with stalwart arms, till he heard himself hailed from off the shore, and looking up, saw standing on the top of the rampart the tall figure of his cousin Eustace.
Amyas was half-disappointed at his coming; for, love-lorn rascal, he had been dreaming all the way thither of Rose Salterne, and had no wish for a companion who would prevent his dreaming of her all the way back. Nevertheless, not having seen Eustace for three years, it was but civil to scramble out and dress, while his cousin walked up and down upon the turf inside.
Eustace Leigh was the son of a younger brother of Leigh of Burrough, who had more or less cut himself off from his family, and indeed from his countrymen, by remaining a Papist. True, though born a Papist, he had not always been one; for, like many of the gentry, he had become a Protestant under Edward the Sixth, and then a Papist again under Mary. But, to his honor be it said, at that point he had stopped, having too much honesty to turn Protestant a second time, as hundreds did, at Elizabeth's accession. So a Papist he remained, living out of the way of the world in a great, rambling, dark house, still called “Chapel,” on the Atlantic cliffs, in Moorwinstow parish, not far from Sir Richard Grenville's house of Stow. The penal laws never troubled him; for, in the first place, they never troubled any one who did not make conspiracy and rebellion an integral doctrine of his religious creed; and next, they seldom troubled even them, unless, fired with the glory of martyrdom, they bullied the long-suffering of Elizabeth and her council into giving them their deserts, and, like poor Father Southwell in after years, insisted on being hanged, whether Burleigh liked or not. Moreover, in such a no-man's-land and end-of-all-the-earth was that old house at Moorwinstow, that a dozen conspiracies might have been hatched there without any one hearing of it; and Jesuits and seminary priests skulked in and out all the year round, unquestioned though unblest; and found a sort of piquant pleasure, like naughty boys who have crept into the store-closet, in living in mysterious little dens in a lonely turret, and going up through a trap-door to celebrate mass in a secret chamber in the roof, where they were allowed by the powers that were to play as much as they chose at persecuted saints, and preach about hiding in dens and caves of the earth. For once, when the zealous parson of Moorwinstow, having discovered (what everybody knew already) the existence of “mass priests and their idolatry” at Chapel House, made formal complaint thereof to Sir Richard, and called on him, as the nearest justice of the peace, to put in force the act of the fourteenth of Elizabeth, that worthy knight only rated him soundly for a fantastical Puritan, and bade him mind his own business, if he wished not to make the place too hot for him; whereon (for the temporal authorities, happily for the peace of England, kept in those days a somewhat tight hand upon the spiritual ones) the worthy parson subsided,—for, after all, Mr. Thomas Leigh paid his tithes regularly enough,—and was content, as he expressed it, to bow his head in the house of Rimmon like Naaman of old, by eating Mr. Leigh's dinners as often as he was invited, and ignoring the vocation of old Father Francis, who sat opposite to him, dressed as a layman, and calling himself the young gentleman's pedagogue.
But the said birds of ill-omen had a very considerable lien on the conscience of poor Mr. Thomas Leigh, the father of Eustace, in the form of certain lands once belonging to the Abbey of Hartland. He more than half believed that he should be lost for holding those lands; but he did not believe it wholly, and, therefore, he did not give them up; which was the case, as poor Mary Tudor found to her sorrow, with most of her “Catholic” subjects, whose consciences, while they compelled them to return to the only safe fold of Mother Church (extra quam nulla salus), by no means compelled them to disgorge the wealth of which they had plundered that only hope of their salvation. Most of them, however, like poor Tom Leigh, felt the abbey rents burn in their purses; and, as John Bull generally does in a difficulty, compromised the matter by a second folly (as if two wrong things made one right one), and petted foreign priests, and listened, or pretended not to listen, to their plottings and their practisings; and gave up a son here, and a son there, as a sort of a sin-offering and scapegoat, to be carried off to Douay, or Rheims, or Rome, and trained as a seminary priest; in plain English, to be taught the science of villainy, on the motive of superstition. One of such hapless scapegoats, and children who had been cast into the fire to Moloch, was Eustace Leigh, whom his father had sent, giving the fruit of his body for the sin of his soul, to be made a liar of at Rheims.
And a very fair liar he had become. Not that the lad was a bad fellow at heart; but he had been chosen by the harpies at home, on account of his “peculiar vocation;” in plain English, because the wily priests had seen in him certain capacities of vague hysterical fear of the unseen (the religious sentiment, we call it now-a-days), and with them that tendency to be a rogue, which superstitious men always have. He was now a tall, handsome, light-complexioned man, with a huge upright forehead, a very small mouth, and a dry and set expression of face, which was always trying to get free, or rather to seem free, and indulge in smiles and dimples which were proper; for one ought to have Christian love, and if one had love one ought to be cheerful, and when people were cheerful they smiled; and therefore he would smile, and tried to do so; but his charity prepense looked no more alluring than malice prepense would have done; and, had he not been really a handsome fellow, many a woman who raved about his sweetness would have likened his frankness to that of a skeleton dancing in fetters, and his smiles to the grins thereof.
He had returned to England about a month before, in obedience to the proclamation which had been set forth for that purpose (and certainly not before it was needed), that, “whosoever had children, wards, etc., in the parts beyond the seas, should send in their names to the ordinary, and within four months call them home again.” So Eustace was now staying with his father at Chapel, having, nevertheless, his private matters to transact on behalf of the virtuous society by whom he had been brought up; one of which private matters had brought him to Bideford the night before.
So he sat down beside Amyas on the pebbles, and looked at him all over out of the corners of his eyes very gently, as if he did not wish to hurt him, or even the flies on his back; and Amyas faced right round, and looked him full in the face with the heartiest of smiles, and held out a lion's paw, which Eustace took rapturously, and a great shaking of hands ensued; Amyas gripping with a great round fist, and a quiet quiver thereof, as much as to say, “I AM glad to see you;” and Eustace pinching hard with white, straight fingers, and sawing the air violently up and down, as much as to say, “DON'T YOU SEE how glad I am to see you?” A very different greeting from the former.
“Hold hard, old lad,” said Amyas, “before you break my elbow. And where do you come from?”
“From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,” said he, with a little smile and nod of mysterious self-importance.
“Like the devil, eh? Well, every man has his pattern. How is my uncle?”
Now, if there was one man on earth above another, of whom Eustace Leigh stood in dread, it was his cousin Amyas. In the first place, he knew Amyas could have killed him with a blow; and there are natures, who, instead of rejoicing in the strength of men of greater prowess than themselves, look at such with irritation, dread, at last, spite; expecting, perhaps, that the stronger will do to them what they feel they might have done in his place. Every one, perhaps, has the same envious, cowardly devil haunting about his heart; but the brave men, though they be very sparrows, kick him out; the cowards keep him, and foster him; and so did poor Eustace Leigh.
Next, he could not help feeling that Amyas despised him. They had not met for three years; but before Amyas went, Eustace never could argue with him, simply because Amyas treated him as beneath argument. No doubt he was often rude and unfair enough; but the whole mass of questions concerning the unseen world, which the priests had stimulated in his cousin's mind into an unhealthy fungus crop, were to Amyas simply, as he expressed it, “wind and moonshine;” and he treated his cousin as a sort of harmless lunatic, and, as they say in Devon, “half-baked.” And Eustace knew it; and knew, too, that his cousin did him an injustice. “He used to undervalue me,” said he to himself; “let us see whether he does not find me a match for him now.” And then went off into an agony of secret contrition for his self-seeking and his forgetting that “the glory of God, and not his own exaltation,” was the object of his existence.
There, dear readers, Ex pede Herculem; I cannot tire myself or you (especially in this book) with any wire-drawn soul-dissections. I have tried to hint to you two opposite sorts of men,—the one trying to be good with all his might and main, according to certain approved methods and rules, which he has got by heart, and like a weak oarsman, feeling and fingering his spiritual muscles over all day, to see if they are growing; the other not even knowing whether he is good or not, but just doing the right thing without thinking about it, as simply as a little child, because the Spirit of God is with him. If you cannot see the great gulf fixed between the two, I trust that you will discover it some day.
But in justice be it said, all this came upon Eustace, not because he was a Romanist, but because he was educated by the Jesuits. Had he been saved from them, he might have lived and died as simple and honest a gentleman as his brothers, who turned out like true Englishmen (as did all the Romish laity) to face the great Armada, and one of whom was fighting at that very minute under St. Leger in Ireland, and as brave and loyal a soldier as those Roman Catholics whose noble blood has stained every Crimean battlefield; but his fate was appointed otherwise; and the Upas-shadow which has blighted the whole Romish Church, blighted him also.
“Ah, my dearest cousin!” said Eustace, “how disappointed I was this morning at finding I had arrived just a day too late to witness your triumph! But I hastened to your home as soon as I could, and learning from your mother that I should find you here, hurried down to bid you welcome again to Devon.”
“Well, old lad, it does look very natural to see you. I often used to think of you walking the deck o' nights. Uncle and the girls are all right, then? But is the old pony dead yet? And how's Dick the smith, and Nancy? Grown a fine maid by now, I warrant. 'Slid, it seems half a life that I've been away.
“And you really thought of your poor cousin? Be sure that he, too, thought of you, and offered up nightly his weak prayers for your safety (doubtless, not without avail) to those saints, to whom would that you—”
“Halt there, coz. If they are half as good fellows as you and I take them for, they'll help me without asking.”
“They have helped you, Amyas.”
“Maybe; I'd have done as much, I'm sure, for them, if I 'd been in their place.”
“And do you not feel, then, that you owe a debt of gratitude to them; and, above all, to her, whose intercessions have, I doubt not, availed for your preservation? Her, the star of the sea, the all-compassionate guide of the mariner?”
“Humph!” said Amyas. “Here's Frank; let him answer.”
And, as he spoke, up came Frank, and after due greetings, sat down beside them on the ridge.
“I say, brother, here's Eustace trying already to convert me; and telling me that I owe all my luck to the Blessed Virgin's prayers for me.
“It may be so,” said Frank; “at least you owe it to the prayers of that most pure and peerless virgin by whose commands you sailed; the sweet incense of whose orisons has gone up for you daily, and for whose sake you were preserved from flood and foe, that you might spread the fame and advance the power of the spotless championess of truth, and right, and freedom,—Elizabeth, your queen.”
Amyas answered this rhapsody, which would have been then both fashionable and sincere, by a loyal chuckle. Eustace smiled meekly, but answered somewhat venomously nevertheless—
“I, at least, am certain that I speak the truth, when I call my patroness a virgin undefiled.”
Both the brothers' brows clouded at once. Amyas, as he lay on his back on the pebbles, said quietly to the gulls over his head—“I wonder what the Frenchman whose head I cut off at the Azores, thinks by now about all that.”
“Cut off a Frenchman's head?” said Frank.
“Yes, faith; and so fleshed my maiden sword. I'll tell you. It was in some tavern; I and George Drake had gone in, and there sat this Frenchman, with his sword on the table, ready for a quarrel (I found afterwards he was a noted bully), and begins with us loudly enough about this and that; but, after awhile, by the instigation of the devil, what does he vent but a dozen slanders against her majesty's honor, one atop of the other? I was ashamed to hear them, and I should be more ashamed to repeat them.”
“I have heard enough of such,” said Frank. “They come mostly through lewd rascals about the French ambassador, who have been bred (God help them) among the filthy vices of that Medicean Court in which the Queen of Scots had her schooling; and can only perceive in a virtuous freedom a cloak for licentiousness like their own. Let the curs bark; Honi soit qui mal y pense is our motto, and shall be forever.”
“But I didn't let the cur bark; for I took him by the ears, to show him out into the street. Whereon he got to his sword, and I to mine; and a very near chance I had of never bathing on the pebble ridge more; for the fellow did not fight with edge and buckler, like a Christian, but had some newfangled French devil's device of scryming and foining with his point, ha'ing and stamping, and tracing at me, that I expected to be full of eyelet holes ere I could close with him.”
“Thank God that you are safe, then!” said Frank. “I know that play well enough, and dangerous enough it is.”
“Of course you know it; but I didn't, more's the pity.”
“Well, I'll teach it thee, lad, as well as Rowland Yorke himself,