Sir John Constantine
by Arthur Quiller-Couch · English · Gutenberg #15565 · 752,122 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Sir John Constantine
Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch
Release date: April 6, 2005 [eBook #15565]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15565
Credits: Produced by Lionel Sear
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE ***
Produced by Lionel Sear
SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.
MEMOIRS OF HIS ADVENTURES AT HOME AND ABROAD AND PARTICULARLY IN
THE ISLAND OF CORSICA: BEGINNING WITH THE YEAR 1756.
WRITTEN BY HIS SON PROSPER PALEOLOGUS OTHERWISE CONSTANTINE AND
EDITED BY "Q" (A. T. QUILLER-COUCH).
"For knighthood is not in the feats of warre,
As for to fight in quarrel right or wrong,
But in a cause which truth can not defarre
He ought himself for to make sure and strong
Justice to keep mixt with mercy among:
And no quarrell a knight ought to take
But for a truth, or for a woman's sake."
TO THE READER
A hundred and fifty episodes, two sermons, and a number of moral
digressions, have been omitted from this story.
The late ingenious Mr. Fett (whose acquaintance you will make in the
following pages), having been commissioned by Mr. Dodsley, the
publisher, to write a conspectus of the Present State of the Arts in
Italy at two guineas the folio--a fair price for that class of work--
had delivered close upon two hundred folios before Mr. Dodsley
interposed, professing unbounded admiration of the work, its style,
and matter, but desiring to know when he might expect the end:
"For," said he, "I have other enterprises which will soon be
demanding attention, and, as a business-man, I like to make my
arrangements in good time." To this Mr. Fett replied, that he, for
his part, being well content with the rate of remuneration, did not
propose to end the work at all!--and, the agreement, having
unaccountably failed to stipulate for any such thing as a conclusion,
Mr. Dodsley had to compound for one at a crippling price.
So this story had, in Browning's phrase, "grown old along with me,"
but for the forethought of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., in limiting
its serial flow to twelve numbers of _The Cornhill Magazine_
As it is, I have added a few chapters; but a hundred and fifty
episodes remain unwritten, with the courtships of Mr. Priske, and the
funeral oration spoken by the Rev. Mr. Grylls over the cenotaph Of
Sir John Constantine in Constantine Parish Church. These omissions,
however, may be remedied if you will ask the publishers for another
edition.
Now, if it be objected against some of the adventures of Sir John
Constantine that they are extravagant, or against some of his notions
that they are fantastic, I answer that this book attempts to describe
a man and not one of these calculable little super men who, of late,
have been taking up so much more of your attention than they deserve.
Students who engage in psychical research, as it is called, often
confess themselves puzzled by the behaviour of ghosts, it appears to
them wayward and trivial. How much more likely are ghosts to be
puzzled by the actions of real men? And we are surely ghosts if we
keep nothing of the blood which sent our fathers like schoolboys to
the crusades.
Lastly, my friend, if you would know anything of the writer who has
so often addressed you under an initial, you may find as much of him
here as in any of his books. Here is interred part, at any rate, of
the soul of the Bachelor Q, in a book which, though it tell of
adventures, I would ask you not to disdain, though you be a boy no
longer. An acquaintance of mine near the Land's End had a
remarkably fine tree of apples--to be precise, of Cox's Orange
Pippins--and one night was robbed of the whole of them. But what,
think you, had the thief left behind him, at the foot of the tree?
Why, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.
ARTHUR T. QUILLER-COUCH.
THE HAVEN, FOWEY, October 1st, 1906.
CONTENTS
Chapter.
I. OF THE LINEAGE AND CONDITION OF SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.
II. I RIDE ON A PILGRIMAGE.
III. I ACQUIRE A KINGDOM.
IV. LONG VACATION.
V. THE SILENT MEN.
VI. HOW MY FATHER OUT OF NOTHING BUILT AN ARMY, AND IN FIVE
MINUTES PLANNED AN INVASION.
VII. THE COMPANY OF THE ROSE.
VIII. TRIBULATIONS OF A MAYOR.
IX. I ENLIST AN ARMY.
X. OF THE DISCOURSE HELD ON BOARD THE "GAUNTLET".
XI. WE FALL IN WITH A SALLEE ROVER.
XII. HOW WE LANDED ON THE ISLAND.
XIII. HOW, WITHOUT FIGHTING, OUR ARMY WASTED BY ENCHANTMENT.
XIV. HOW BY MEANS OF HER WINE I CAME TO CIRCE.
XV. I BECOME HOSTAGE TO PRINCESS CAMILLA.
XVI. THE FOREST HUT.
XVII. THE FIRST CHALLENGE.
XVIII. THE TENDER MERCIES OF PRINCE CAMILLO.
XIX. HOW MARC'ANTONIO NURESD ME AND GAVE ME COUNSEL.
XX. I LEARN OF LIBERTY, AND AM RESTORED TO IT.
XXI. OF MY FATHER'S ANABASIS; AND THE DIFFERENT TEMPERS OF AN
ENGLISH GENTLEMAN AND A WILD SHEEP OF CORSICA.
XXII. THE GREAT ADVENTURE.
XXIII. ORDEAL AND CHOOSING.
XXIV. THE WOOING OF PRINCESS CAMILLA.
XXV. MY WEDDING DAY.
XXVI. THE FLAME AND THE ALTAR.
XXVII. MY MISTRESS RE-ENLISTS ME.
XXVIII. GENOA.
XXIX. VENDETTA.
XXX. THE SUMMIT AND THE STARS.
POSTSCRIPT.
SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.
CHAPTER I.
OF THE LINEAGE AND CONDITION OF SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.
"I have laboured to make a covenant with myself, that affection
may not press upon judgment: for I suppose there is no man,
that hath any apprehension of gentry or nobleness, but his
affection stands to a continuance of a noble name and house,
and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to uphold it: and
yet time hath his revolution, there must be a period and an end
of all temporal things, _finis rerum_, an end of names and
dignities and whatsoever is terrene. . . . For where is Bohun?
Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more
and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are intombed in the
urns and sepulchres of mortality."--_Lord Chief Justice Crewe_.
My father, Sir John Constantine of Constantine, in the county of
Cornwall, was a gentleman of ample but impoverished estates, who by
renouncing the world had come to be pretty generally reputed a
madman. This did not affect him one jot, since he held precisely the
same opinion of his neighbours--with whom, moreover, he continued on
excellent terms. He kept six saddle horses in a stable large enough
for a regiment of cavalry; a brace of setters and an infirm spaniel
in kennels which had sometime held twenty couples of hounds; and
himself and his household in a wing of his great mansion, locking off
the rest, with its portraits and tapestries, cases of books, and
stands of antique arms, to be a barrack for the mice. This household
consisted of his brother-in-law, Gervase (a bachelor of punctual
habits but a rambling head); a butler, Billy Priske; a cook, Mrs.
Nance, who also looked after the housekeeping; two serving-maids;
and, during his holidays, the present writer. My mother (an Arundell
of Trerice) had died within a year after giving me birth; and after a
childhood which lacked playmates, indeed, but was by no means
neglected or unhappy, my father took me to Winchester College, his
old school, to be improved in those classical studies which I had
hitherto followed desultorily under our vicar, Mr. Grylls, and there
entered me as a Commoner in the house of Dr. Burton, Head-master.
I had spent almost four years at Winchester at the date (Midsummer,
1756) when this story begins.
To return to my father. He was, as the world goes, a mass of
contrarieties. A thorough Englishman in the virtues for which
foreigners admire us, and in the extravagance at which they smile, he
had never even affected an interest in the politics over which
Englishmen grow red in the face; and this in his youth had commended
him to Walpole, who had taken him up and advanced him as well for his
abilities, address, and singularly fine presence as because his
estate then seemed adequate to maintain him in any preferment.
Again Walpole's policy abroad--which really treated warfare as the
evil it appears in other men's professions--condemned my father, a
born soldier, to seek his line in diplomacy; wherein he had no sooner
built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts
than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he
suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into
Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and practise fishing for trout.
The reason of it none knew, or how his estate had come to be
impoverished, as beyond doubt it was. Here again he showed himself
unlike the rest of men, in that he let the stress of poverty fall
first upon himself, next upon his household, last of all upon his
tenants and other dependants. After my mother's death he cut down
his own charges (the cellar only excepted) to the last penny, shut
himself off in a couple of rooms, slept in a camp bed, wore an old
velveteen coat in winter and in summer a fisherman's smock, ate
frugally, and would have drunk beer or even water had not his stomach
abhorred them both. Of wine he drank in moderation--that is to say,
for him, since his temperance would have sent nine men out of ten
under the table--and of the best. He had indeed a large and
obstinate dignity in his drinking. It betrayed, even as his carriage
betrayed beneath his old coat, a king in exile.
Yet while he pinched himself with these economies, he drew no
strings--or drew them tenderly--upon the expenses and charities of a
good landlord. The fences rotted around his own park and
pleasure-grounds, but his tenants' fences, walls, roofs stood in more
than moderate repair, nor (although my uncle Gervase groaned over the
accounts) would an abatement of rent be denied, the appeal having
been weighed and found to be reasonable. The rain--which falls alike
upon the just and the unjust--beat through his own roof, but never
through the labourer's thatch; and Mrs. Nance, the cook, who hated
beggars, might not without art and secrecy dismiss a single beggar
unfed. His religion he told to no man, but believed the practice of
worship to be good for all men, and regularly encouraged it by
attending church on Sundays and festivals. He and the vicar ruled
our parish together in amity, as fellow-Christians and rival anglers.
Now, all these apparent contrarieties in my father flowed in fact
from a very rare simplicity, and this simplicity again had its origin
in his lineage, which was something more than royal.
On the Cornish shore of the Tamar River, which divides Cornwall from
Devon, and a little above Saltash, stands the country church of
Landulph, so close by the water that the high tides wash by its
graveyard wall. Within the church you will find a mural tablet of
brass thus inscribed--
"Here lyeth the body of Theodoro Paleologvs of Pesaro in
Italye, descended from ye Imperyall lyne of ye last Christian
Emperors of Greece being the sonne of Camilio ye sonne of
Prosper the sonne of Theodoro the sonne of John ye sonne of
Thomas second brother to Constantine Paleologvs, the 8th of
that name and last of yt lyne yt raygned in Constantinople
vntill svbdewed by the Tvrks who married with Mary ye davghter
of William Balls of Hadlye in Svffolke gent & had issve 5
children Theodoro John Ferdinando Maria & Dorothy & dep'ted
this life at Clyfton ye 21th of Ianvary 1636"
Above these words the tablet bears an eagle engraved with two heads,
and its talons resting upon two gates of Rome and Constantinople,
with (for difference) a crescent between the gates, and over all an
imperial crown. In truth this exile buried by Tamar drew his blood
direct from the loins of the great Byzantine emperors, through that
Thomas of whom Mahomet II. said, "I have found many slaves in
Peloponnesus, but this man only:" and from Theodore, through his
second son John, came the Constantines of Constantine--albeit with a
bar sinister, of which my father made small account. I believe he
held privately that a Constantine, _de stirpe imperatorum_, had no
call to concern himself with petty ceremonies of this or that of the
Church's offshoots to legitimize his blood. At any rate no bar
sinister appeared on the imperial escutcheon repeated, with
quarterings of Arundel, Mohun, Grenville, Nevile, Archdeckne,
Courtney, and, again, Arundel, on the wainscots and in the windows of
Constantine, usually with the legend _Dabit Devs His Qvoqve Finem_,
but twice or thrice with a hopefuller one, _Generis revocemvs
honores_.
Knowing him to be thus descended, you could recognize in all my
father said or did a large simplicity as of the earlier gods, and a
dignity proper to a king as to a beggar, but to no third and mean
state. A child might beard him, but no man might venture a liberty
with him or abide the rare explosions of his anger. You might even,
upon long acquaintance, take him for a great, though mad, Englishman,
and trust him as an Englishman to the end; but the soil of his nature
was that which grows the vine--volcanic, breathing through its pores
a hidden heat to answer the sun's. Whether or no there be in man a
faith to remove mountains, there is in him (and it may come to the
same thing) a fire to split them, and anon to clothe the bare rock
with tendrils and soft-scented blooms.
In person my father stood six feet five inches tall, and his
shoulders filled a doorway. His head was large and shapely, and he
carried it with a very noble poise; his face a fine oval, broad
across the brow and ending in a chin at once delicate and masterful;
his nose slightly aquiline; his hair--and he wore his own, tied with
a ribbon--of a shining white. His cheeks were hollow and would have
been cadaverous but for their hue, a sanguine brown, well tanned by
out-of-door living. His eyes, of an iron-grey colour, were fierce or
gentle as you took him, but as a rule extraordinarily gentle.
He would walk you thirty miles any day without fatigue, and shoot you
a woodcock against any man; but as an angler my uncle Gervase beat
him.
He spoke Italian as readily as English; French and the modern Greek
with a little more difficulty; and could read in Greek, Latin, and
Spanish. His books were the "Meditations" of the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, and Dante's "Divine Comedy," with the "Aeneis," Ariosto,
and some old Spanish romances next in order. I do not think he cared
greatly for any English writers but Donne and Izaak Walton, of whose
"Angler" and "Life of Sir Henry Wotton" he was inordinately fond.
In particular he admired the character of this Sir Henry Wotton,
singling him out among "the famous nations of the dead" (as Sir
Thomas Browne calls them) for a kind of posthumous friendship--nay,
almost a passion of memory. To be sure, though with more than a
hundred years between them, both had been bred at Winchester, and
both had known courts and embassies and retired from them upon
private life. . . . But who can explain friendship, even after all
the essays written upon it? Certainly to be friends with a dead man
was to my father a feat neither impossible nor absurd.
Yet he possessed two dear living friends at least in my Uncle Gervase
and Mr. Grylls, and had even dedicated a temple to their friendship.
It stood about half a mile away from the house, at the foot of the
old deer-park: a small Ionic summer-house set on a turfed slope
facing down a dell upon the Helford River. A spring of water, very
cold and pure, rose bubbling a few paces from the porch and tumbled
down the dell with a pretty chatter. Tradition said that it had once
been visited and blessed by St. Swithun, for which cause my father
called his summer-house by the saint's name, and annually on his
festival (which falls on the 15th of July) caused wine and dessert to
be carried out thither, where the three drank to their common pastime
and discoursed of it in the cool of the evening within earshot of the
lapsing water. On many other evenings they met to smoke their pipes
here, my father and Mr. Grylls playing at chequers sometimes, while
my uncle wrapped and bent, till the light failed him, new trout flies
for the next day's sport; but to keep St. Swithun's feast they never
omitted, which my father commemorated with a tablet set against the
back wall and bearing these lines--
"Peace to this house within this little wood,
Named of St. Swithun and his brotherhood
That here would meet and punctual on his day
Their heads and hands and hearts together lay.
Nor may no years the mem'ries three untwine
Of Grylls W.G.
And Arundell G.A.
And Constantine J.C. Anno 1752
Flvmina amem silvasqve inglorivs."
Of these two friends of my father I shall speak in their proper
place, but have given up this first chapter to him alone. My readers
maybe will grumble that it omits to tell what they would first choose
to learn: the reason why he had exchanged fame and the world for a
Cornish exile. But as yet he only--and perhaps my uncle Gervase, who
kept the accounts--held the key to that secret.
CHAPTER II.
I RIDE ON A PILGRIMAGE.
"_Heus Rogere! fer caballos; Eja, nunc eamus!"
Domum.
At Winchester, which we boys (though we fared hardly) never doubted
to be the first school in the world, as it was the most ancient in
England, we had a song we called _Domum_: and because our common
pride in her--as the best pride will--belittled itself in speech, I
trust that our song honoured Saint Mary of Winton the more in that it
celebrated only the joys of leaving her.
The tale went, it had been composed (in Latin, too) by a boy detained
at school for a punishment during the summer holidays. Another fable
improved on this by chaining him to a tree. A third imprisoned him
in cloisters whence, through the arcades and from the ossuaries of
dead fellows and scholars, he poured out his soul to the swallows
haunting the green garth--
"Jam repetit domum
Daulias advena,
Nosque domum repetamus."
Whatever its origin, our custom was to sing it as the holidays--
especially the summer holidays--drew near, and to repeat it as they
drew nearer, until every voice was hoarse. As I remember, we kept up
this custom with no decrease of fervour through the heats of June
1756, though they were such that our _hostiarius_ Dr. Warton, then a
new broom, swept us out of school and for a fortnight heard our books
(as the old practice had been) in cloisters, where we sat upon cool
stone and in the cool airs, and between our tasks watched the
swallows at play. Nevertheless we panted, until evening released us
to wander forth along the water-meadows by Itchen and bathe, and,
having bathed, to lie naked amid the mints and grasses for a while
before returning in the twilight.
This bathing went on, not in one or two great crowds, but in groups,
and often in pairs only, scattered along the river-bank almost all
the way to Hills; it being our custom again at Winchester (and I
believe it still continues) to _socius_ or walk with one companion;
and only at one or two favoured pools would several of these couples
meet together for the sport. On the evening of which I am to tell,
my companion was a boy named Fiennes, of about my own age, and we
bathed alone, though not far away to right and left the bank teemed
with outcries and laughter and naked boys running all silvery as
their voices in the dusk.
With all this uproar the trout of Itchen, as you may suppose, had
gone into hiding; but doubtless some fine fellows lay snug under the
stones, and--the stream running shallow after the heats--as we
stretched ourselves on the grass Fiennes challenged me to tickle for
one; it may be because he had heard me boast of my angling feats at
home. There seemed a likely pool under the farther bank; convenient,
except that to take up the best position beside it I must get the
level sun full in my face. I crept across, however, Fiennes keeping
silence, laid myself flat on my belly, and peered down into the pool,
shading my eyes with one hand. For a long while I saw no fish, until
the sun-rays, striking aslant, touched the edge of a golden fin very
prettily bestowed in a hole of the bank and well within an overlap of
green weed. Now and again the fin quivered, but for the most part my
gentleman lay quiet as a stone, head to stream, and waited for relief
from these noisy Wykehamists. Experience, perhaps, had taught him to
despise them; at any rate, when gently--very gently--I lowered my
hand and began to tickle, he showed neither alarm nor resentment.
"Is it a trout?" demanded Fiennes, in an excited whisper from the
farther shore. But of course I made no answer, and presently I
supposed that he must have crept off to his clothes, for some way up
the stream I heard the Second Master's voice warning the bathers to
dress and return, and with his usual formula, _Ite domum saturae,
venit Hesperus, ite capelloe! Being short-sighted, he missed to spy
me, and I felt, rather than saw or heard, him pass on; for with one
hand I yet shaded my eyes while with the other I tickled.
Yet another two minutes went by, and then with a jerk I had my trout,
my thumb and forefinger deep under his gills; brought down my other
clutch upon him and, lifting, flung him back over me among the meadow
grass, my posture being such that I could neither hold him struggling
nor recover my own balance save by rolling sideways over on my
shoulder-pin; which I did, and, running to him where he gleamed and
doubled, flipping the grasses, caught him in both hands and held him
aloft.
But other voices than Fiennes' answered my shout over the river--
voices that I knew, though they belonged not to this hour nor to this
place; and blinking against the sun, now sinning level across
Lavender Meads, I was aware of two tall figures standing dark against
it, and of a third and shorter one between whose legs it poured in
gold as through a natural arch. Sure no second man in England wore
Billy Priske's legs!
Then, and while I stood amazed, my father's voice and my Uncle
Gervase's called to me together: and gulping down all wonder,
possessed with love only and a wild joy--but yet grasping my fish--
I splashed across the shallows and up the bank, and let my father
take me naked to his heart.
"So, lad," said he, after a moment, thrusting me a little back by the
shoulders (while I could only sob), and holding me so that the sun
fell full on me, "Dost truly love me so much?"
"Clivver boy, clivver boy!" said the voice of Billy Priske.
"Lord, now, what things they do teach here beside the Latin!"
The rogue said it, as I knew, to turn my father's suspicion, having
himself taught me the poacher's trick. But my uncle Gervase, whose
mind moved as slowly as it was easily diverted, answered with
gravity--
"It is hard knowing what may or may not be useful in after life,
seeing that God in His wisdom hides what that life is to be."
"Very true," agreed my father, with a twinkle, and took snuff.
"But--but what brings you here?" cried I, with a catch of the breath,
ignoring all this.
"Nevertheless, such comely lads as they be," my uncle continued,
"God will doubtless bring them to good. Comelier lads, brother, I
never saw, nor, I think, the sun never shined on; yet there was one,
at the bowls yonder, was swearing so it grieved me to the heart."
"Put on your clothes, boy," said my father, answering me. "We have
ridden far, but we bring no ill news; and to-morrow--I have the
Head-master's leave for it--you ride on with us to London."
"To London!" My heart gave another great leap, as every boy's must
on hearing that he is to see London for the first time. But here we
all turned at a cry from Billy Priske, between whose planted ankles
Master Fiennes had mischievously crept and was measuring the span
between with extended thumb and little finger. My father stooped,
haled him to his feet by the collar, and demanded what he did.
"Why, sir, he's a Colossus!" quoted that nimble youth;
"'and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peer about--'"
"And will find yourself a dishonourable grave," my father capped him.
"What's your name, boy?"
"Fiennes, sir; Nathaniel Fiennes." The lad saluted.
My father lifted his hat in answer. "Founder's kin?"
"I am here on that condition, sir."
"Then you are kinsman, as well as namesake, of him who saved our
Wykeham's tomb in the Parliament troubles. I felicitate you, sir,
and retract my words, for by that action of your kinsman's shall the
graves of all his race and name be honoured."
Young Fiennes bowed. "Compliments fly, sir, when gentlemen meet.
But"--and he glanced over his shoulder and rubbed the small of his
back expressively, "as a Wykehamist, you will not have me late at
names-calling."
"Go, boy, and answer to yours; they can call no better one."
My father dipped a hand in his pocket. "I may not invite you to
breakfast with us to-morrow, for we start early; and you will excuse
me if I sin against custom. . . . It was esteemed a laudable practice
in my time." A gold coin passed.
"_Et in saecula saeculo--o--rum. Amen!_" Master Fiennes spun the
coin, pocketed it, and went off whistling schoolwards over the meads.
My father linked his arm in mine and we followed, I asking, and the
three of them answering, a hundred questions of home. But why, or on
what business, we were riding to London on the morrow my father would
not tell. "Nay, lad," said he, "take your Bible and read that Isaac
asked no questions on the way to Moriah."
"My uncle, who overheard this, considered it for a while, and said--
"The difference is that you are not going to sacrifice Prosper."
The three were to lie that night at the George Inn, where they had
stabled their horses; and at the door of the Head-master's house,
where we Commoners lodged, they took leave of me, my father
commending me to God and good dreams. That they were happy ones I
need not tell.
He was up and abroad early next morning, in time to attend chapel,
where by the vigour of his responses he set the nearer boys
tittering; two of whom I afterwards fought for it, though with what
result I cannot remember. The service, which we urchins heeded
little, left him pensive as we walked together towards the inn, and
he paused once or twice, with eyes downcast on the cobbles, and
muttered to himself.
"I am striving to recollect my Morning Lines, lad," he confessed at
length, with a smile; "and thus, I think, they go. The great Sir
Henry Wotton, you have heard me tell of, in the summer before his
death made a journey hither to Winchester; and as he returned towards
Eton he said to a friend that went with him: 'How useful was that
advice of an old monk that we should perform our devotions in a
constant place, because we so meet again with the very thoughts which
possessed us at our last being there.' And, as Walton tells,
'I find it,'" he said, "'thus far experimentally true, that at my now
being in that school and seeing that very place where I sat when I
was a boy occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth
which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed--'"
Here my father paused. "Let me be careful, now. I should be perfect
in the words, having read them more than a hundred times.
'Sweet thoughts indeed,'" said he, "'that promised my growing years
numerous pleasures, without mixture of cares; and those to be enjoyed
when time--which I therefore thought slow-paced--had changed my youth
into manhood. But age and experience have taught me these were but
empty hopes, for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did
foretell, _Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof_.
Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same
recreations, and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that
then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in
their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"
"But I would not have you, lad," he went on, "to pay too much heed to
these thoughts, which will come to you in time, for as yet you are
better without 'em. Nor were they my only thoughts: for having
brought back my own sacrifice, which I had sometime hoped might be so
great, but now saw to be so little, at that moment I looked down to
your place in chapel and perceived that I had brought belike the best
offering of all. So my hope--thank God!--sprang anew as I saw you
there standing vigil by what bright armour you guessed not, nor in
preparation for what high warfare." He laid a hand on my shoulder.
"Your chapel to-day, child, has been the longer by a sermon.
There, there! forget all but the tail on't."
We rode out of Winchester with a fine clatter, all four of us upon
hired nags, the Cornish horses being left in the stables to rest;
and after crossing the Hog's Back, baited at Guildford.
A thunderstorm in the night had cleared the weather, which, though
fine, was cooler, with a brisk breeze playing on the uplands; and
still as we went my spirits sang with the larks overhead, so blithe
was I to be sitting in saddle instead of at a scob, and riding to
London between the blown scents of hedgerow and hayfield and
beanfield, all fragrant of liberty yet none of them more delicious to
a boy than the mingled smell of leather and horseflesh. Billy Priske
kept up a chatter beside me like a brook's. He had never till now
been outside of Cornwall but in a fishing-boat, and though he had
come more than two hundred miles each new prospect was a marvel to
him. My father told me that, once across the Tamar ferry, being told
that he was now in Devonshire, he had sniffed and observed the air to
be growing "fine and stuffy;" and again, near Holt Forest, where my
father announced that we were crossing the border between Hampshire
and Surrey, he drew rein and sat for a moment looking about him and
scratching his head.
"The Lord's ways be past finding out," he murmured. "Not so much as
a post!"
"Why _should_ there be a post?" demanded my uncle. "Why, sir, for
the men of Hampshire and the men of Surrey to fight over and curse
one another by on Ash Wednesdays. But where there's no landmark a
plain man can't remove it, and where he can't remove it I don't see
how he can be cursed for it."
"'Twould be a great inconvenience, as you say, Billy, if, for the
sake of argument, the men of Hampshire wanted to curse the men of
Surrey."
"They couldn't do it"--Billy shook his head--"for the sake of
argument or any other sake; and therefore I say, though not one to
dictate to the Lord, that if a river can't be managed hereabouts--
and, these two not being Devon and Cornwall, a whole river might be
overdoing things--there ought to be some little matter of a
trout-stream, or at the least a notice-board."
"The fellow's right," said my father. "Man would tire too soon of
his natural vices; so we invent new ones for him by making laws and
boundaries."
"Surely and virtues too," suggested my uncle, as we rode forward
again. "You will not deny that patriotism is a virtue?"
"Not I," said my father; "nor that it is the finest invention of
all."
I remember the Hog's Back and the breeze blowing there because on the
highest rise we came on a gibbet and rode around it to windward on
the broad turfy margin of the road; and also because the sight put my
father in mind of a story which he narrated on the way down to
Guildford.
THE STORY OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY.
"It is told," began my father, "in a sermon of the famous Vieyras--"
"For what was he famous?" asked my uncle.
"For being a priest, and yet preaching so good a sermon on love. It
is told in it that in the kingdom of Valencia there lived an hidalgo,
young and rich, who fell in love with a virtuous lady, ill treated by
her husband: and she with him, howbeit without the least thought of
evil. But, as evil suspects its like, so this husband doubted the
fidelity which was his without his deserving, and laid a plot to be
revenged. On the pretext of the summer heats he removed with his
household to a country house; and there one day he entered a room
where his wife sat alone, turned the key, and, drawing out a dagger,
ordered her to write what he should dictate. She, being innocent,
answered him that there was no need of daggers, but she would write,
as her duty was, what he commanded: which was, a letter to the young
hidalgo telling him that her husband had left home on business; that
if her lover would come, she was ready to welcome him; and that, if
he came secretly the next night, he would find the garden gate open,
and a ladder placed against the window. This she wrote and signed,
seeing no escape; and, going to her own room, commended her fears and
her weakness to the Virgin.
"The young hidalgo, on receiving the letter (very cautiously
delivered), could scarcely believe his bliss, but prepared, as you
will guess, to embrace it. Having dressed himself with care, at the
right hour he mounted his horse and rode out towards his lady's
house. Now, he was a devout youth, as youths go, and on his way he
remembered--which was no little thing on such an occasion--that since
morning he had not said over his rosary as his custom was.
So he began to tell it bead by bead, when a voice near at hand said
'Halt, Cavalier!' He drew his sword and peered around him in the
darkness, but could see no one, and was fumbling his rosary again
when again the voice spoke, saying, 'Look up, Cavalier!' and looking
up, he beheld against the night a row of wayside gibbets, and rode in
among them to discover who had called him. To his horror one of the
malefactors hanging there spoke down to him, begging to be cut loose;
'and,' said the poor wretch, 'if you will light the heap of twigs at
your feet and warm me by it, your charity shall not be wasted.'
For Christian charity then the youth, having his sword ready, cut him
down, and the gallows knave fell on his feet and warmed himself at
the lit fire. 'And now,' said he, being warmed, 'you must take me up
behind your saddle; for there is a plot laid to-night from which I
only can deliver you.' So they mounted and rode together to the
house, where, having entered the garden by stealth, they found the
ladder ready set. 'You must let me climb first,' said the knave; and
had no sooner reached the ladder's top than two or three pistol shots
were fired upon him from the window and as many hands reached out and
stabbed him through and through until he dropped into the ditch;
whence, however, he sprang on his feet, and catching our hidalgo by
the arm hurried him back through the garden to the gate where his
horse stood tethered. There they mounted and rode away into safety,
the dead behind the living. 'All this is enchantment to me,' said
the youth as they went. 'But I must thank you, my friend; for
whether dead or alive--and to my thinking you must be doubly dead--
you have rendered me a great service.' 'You may say a mass for me,
and thank you,' the dead man answered; 'but for the service you must
thank the Mother of God, who commanded me and gave me power to
deliver you, and has charged me to tell you the reason of her
kindness: which is, that every day you say her rosary.' 'I do thank
her and bless her then,' replied the youth, 'and henceforth will I
say her rosary not once daily but thrice, for that she hath preserved
my life to-night.'"
"A very proper resolution," said my uncle.
"And I hope, sir, he kept it," chimed in Billy Priske; "good
Protestant though I be."
"The story is not ended," said my father. "The dead man--they were
dismounted now and close under the gallows--looked at the young man
angrily, and said he, 'I doubt Our Lady's pains be wasted, after all.
Is it possible, sir, you think she sent me to-night to save your
life?' 'For what else?' inquired the youth. 'To save your soul,
sir, and your lady's; both of which (though you guessed not or forgot
it) stood in jeopardy just now, so that the gate open to you was
indeed the gate of Hell. Pray hang me back as you found me," he
concluded, 'and go your ways for a fool.'"
"Now see what happened. The murderers in the house, coming down to
bury the body and finding it not, understood that the young man had
not come alone; from which they reasoned that his servants had
carried him off and would publish the crime. They therefore, with
their master, hurriedly fled out of the country. The lady betook
herself to a religious house, where in solitude questioning herself
she found that in will, albeit not in act, she had been less than
faithful. As for the hidalgo, he rode home and shut himself within
doors, whence he came forth in a few hours as a man from a
sepulchre--which, indeed, to his enemies he evidently was when they
heard that he was abroad and unhurt whom they had certainly stabbed
to death; and to his friends almost as great a marvel when they
perceived the alteration of his life; yea, and to himself the
greatest of all, who alone knew what had passed, and, as by
enchantment his life had taken this turn, so spent its remainder like
a man enchanted rather than converted. I am told," my father
concluded, "though the sermon says nothing about it, that he and the
lady came in the end, and as by an accident, to be buried side by
side, at a little distance, in the Chapel of Our Lady of Succour in
the Cathedral church of Valencia, and there lie stretched--two
parallels of dust--to meet only at the Resurrection when the desires
of all dust shall be purged away."
With this story my father beguiled the road down into Guildford, and
of his three listeners I was then the least attentive.
Years afterwards, as you shall learn, I had reason to remember it.
At Guildford, where we fed ourselves and hired a relay of horses, I
took Billy aside and questioned him (forgetting the example of Isaac)
why we were going to London and on what business. He shook his head.
"Squire knows," said he. "As for me, a still tongue keeps a wise
head, and moreover I know not. Bain't it enough for 'ee to be quit
of school and drinking good ale in the kingdom o' Guildford?
Very well, then."
"Still, one cannot help wondering," said I, half to myself; but Billy
dipped his face stolidly within his pewter.
"The last friend a man should want to take up with is his Future,"
said he, sagely. "I knows naught about en but what's to his
discredit--as that I shall die sooner or later, a thing that goes
against my stomach; or that at the best I shall grow old, which runs
counter to my will. He's that uncomfortable, too, you can't please
him. Take him hopeful, and you're counting your chickens; take him
doleful, and foreboding is worse than witchcraft. There was a
Mevagissey man I sailed with as a boy--and your father's tale just
now put me in mind of him--paid half a crown to a conjurer, one time,
to have his fortune told; which was, that he would marry the ugliest
maid in the parish. Whereby it preyed on his mind till he hanged
hisself. Whereby along comes the woman in the nick o' time, cuts him
down, an' marries him out o' pity while he's too weak to resist.
That's your Future; and, as I say, I keeps en at arm's length."
With this philosophy of Billy I had to be content and find my own
guesses at the mystery. But as the afternoon wore on I kept no hold
on any speculation for more than a few minutes. I was saddle-weary,
drowsed with sunburn and the moving landscape over which the sun,
when I turned, swam in a haze of dust. The villages crowded closer,
and at the entry of each I thought London was come; but anon the
houses thinned and dwindled and we were between hedgerows again.
So it lasted, village after village, until with the shut of night,
when the long shadows of our horses before us melted into dusk, a
faint glow opened on the sky ahead and grew and brightened.
I knew it: but even as I saluted it my chin dropped forward and I
dozed. In a dream I rode through the lighted streets, and at the
door of our lodgings my father lifted me down from the saddle.
CHAPTER III.
I ACQUIRE A KINGDOM.
"_Gloucester_. The trick of that voice I do well remember:
Is't not the king?"
"_Lear_. Ay, every inch a king."
_King Lear_.
From our lodgings, which were in Bond Street, we sallied forth next
morning to view the town; my father leading us first by way of St.
James's and across the Park to the Abbey, and on the way holding
discourse to which I recalled myself with difficulty from London's
shows and wonders--his Majesty's tall guards at the palace gates, the
gorgeous promenaders in the Mall, the swans and wild fowl on the
lake.
"I wish you to remark, my dear child," said he, "that between a
capital and solitude there is no third choice; nor, I would add, can
a mind extract the best of solitude unless it bring urbanity to the
wilderness. Your rustic is no philosopher, and your provincial
townsman is the devil: if you would meditate in Arden, your company
must be the Duke, Jaques, Touchstone--courtiers all--or, again,
Rosalind, the Duke's daughter, if you would catch the very mood of
the forest. I tell you this, child, that you may not be misled by my
example (which has a reason of its own and, I trust, an excuse) into
shunning your destiny though it lead and keep you in cities and among
crowds; for we have it on the word of no less busy a man than the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius that to seek out private retiring-rooms for
the soul such as country villages, the sea-shore, mountains, is but a
mistaken simplicity, seeing that at what time soever a man will it is
in his power to retire into himself and be at rest, dwelling within
the walls of a city as in a shepherd's fold of the mountain. So also
the sainted Juan de Avila tells us that a man who trusts in God may,
if he take pains, recollect God in streets and public places better
than will a hermit in his cell; and the excellent Archbishop of
Cambrai, writing to the Countess of Gramont, counselled her to
practise recollection and give a quiet thought to God at dinner times
in a lull of the conversation, or again when she was driving or
dressing or having her hair arranged; these hindrances (said he)
profited more than any _engouement_ of devotion.
"But," he went on, "to bear yourself rightly in a crowd you must
study how one crowd differs from another, and how in one city you may
have that great orderly movement of life (whether of business or of
pleasure) which is the surrounding joy of princes in their palaces,
and an insensate mob, which is the most brutal and vilest aspect of
man. For as in a thronged street you may learn the high meaning of
citizenship, so in a mob you may unlearn all that makes a man
dignified. Yet even the mob you should study in a capital, as
Shakespeare did in his 'Julius Caesar' and 'Coriolanus;' for only so
can you know it in its quiddity. I conjure you, child, to get your
sense of men from their capital cities."
He had something to tell of almost every great house we passed.
He seemed--he that had saluted no one as we crossed the Mall, saluted
of none--to walk this quarter of London with a proprietary tread; and
by and by, coming to the river, he waved an arm and broke into
panegyric.
"Other capitals have had their turn, and others will overtake and
outstrip her; but where is one in these times to compare with London?
Where in Europe will you see streets so well ordered, squares so
spacious, houses so comfortable, yet elegant, as in this mile east
and south of Hyde Park? Where such solid, self-respecting wealth as
in our City? Where such merchant-princes and adventurers as your
Whittingtons and Greshams? Where half its commerce? and where a
commerce touched with one tithe of its imagination? Where such a
river, for trade as for pageants? On what other shore two buildings
side by side so famous, the one for just laws, civil security,
liberty with obedience, the other for heroic virtues resumed, with
their propagating dust, into the faith which sowed all and, having
reaped, renews?"
In the Abbey--where my Uncle Gervase was forced to withdraw behind a
pillar and rub Billy Priske's neck, which by this time had a crick in
it--my father's voice, as he moved from tomb to tomb, deepened to a
regal solemnity. He repeated Beaumont's great lines--
"Mortality, behold and fear!
What a change of flesh is here!"
laying a hand on my shoulder the while; and in the action I
understood that this and all his previous discourse was addressed to
me with a purpose, and that somehow our visit to London had to do
with that purpose.
"Here they lie had realms and lands
Who now want strength to stir their hands;
Where from their pulpits seal'd with dust
They preach 'In greatness is no trust' . . .
Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings. . . ."
I must have fallen a-wondering while he quoted in a low sonorous
voice, like a last echo of the great organ, rolling among the arches;
for as it ceased I came to myself with a start and found his eyes
searching me; also his hold on my shoulder had stiffened, and he held
me from him at arm's length.
"And yet," said he, as if to himself, "this dust is the strongest man
can build with; and we must build in our generation--quickly,
trusting in the young firm flesh; yes, quickly--and trusting--though
we know what its end must be."
These last words he muttered, and afterwards seemed to fall into a
meditation, which lasted until we found ourselves outside the Abbey
and in the light again.
From Westminster we took boat to Blackfriars, and, landing there,
walked up through the crowded traffic to a gateway opening into
Clement's Inn. I did not know its name at the time, nor did I regard
the place as we entered, being yet fascinated with the sight of
Temple Bar and of the heads of four traitors above it on poles,
blackening in the sun; but within the courtyard we turned to the
right and mounted a staircase to the head of the second flight and to
a closed door on which my father knocked. A clerk opened, and
presently we passed through an office into a well-sized room where,
from amid a pile of books, a grave little man rose, reached for his
wig, and, having adjusted it, bowed to us.
"Good morning! Good morning, gentlemen! Ah--er--Sir John
Constantine, I believe?"
My father bowed. "At your service, Mr. Knox. You received my
letter, then? Let me present my brother-in-law and man of affairs,
Mr. Gervase Arundel, who will discuss with you the main part of our
business; also my son here, about whom I wrote to you."
"Eh? Eh?" Mr. Knox, after bowing to my uncle, put on his
spectacles, took them off, wiped them, put them on again, and
regarded me benevolently. "Eh? so this is the boy--h'm--Jasper, I
believe?"
"Prosper," my father corrected.
"Ah, to be sure--Prosper--and I hope he will, I'm sure." Mr. Knox
chuckled at his mild little witticism and twinkled at me jocosely.
"Your letter, Sir John? Yes, to be sure, I received it. What you
propose is practicable, though irregular."
"Irregular?"
"Not legally irregular--oh no, not in the least. Legally the thing's
as simple as A B C. The man has only to take the benefit of the Act
of Insolvency, assign his estate to his creditors, and then--
supposing that they are agreed--"
"There can be no question of their agreement or disagreement.
His creditors do not exist. As I told you, I have paid them off,
bought up all their debts, and the yes or no rests with me alone."
"Quite so; I was merely putting it as the Act directs. Very well
then, supposing _you_ agree, nothing more is necessary than an
appearance--a purely formal appearance--at the Old Bailey, and your
unfortunate friend--"
"Pardon me," my father put in; "he is not my friend."
"Eh?" . . . Mr. Knox removed his spectacles, breathed on them, and
rubbed them, while he regarded my father with a bewildered air.
"You'll excuse me . . . but I must own myself entirely puzzled.
Even for a friend's sake, as I was about to protest, your conduct,
sir, would be Quixotic; yes, yes, Quixotic in the highest degree, the
amount being (as you might say) princely, and the security--"
Mr. Knox paused and expressed his opinion of the security by a
pitying smile. "But if," he resumed, "this man be not even your
friend, then, my dear sir, I can merely wonder."
For a moment my father seemed about to argue with him, but checked
himself.
"None the less the man is very far from being my friend," he answered
quietly.
"But surely--surely, sir, you cannot be doing this in any hope to
recover what he already owes you! That were indeed to throw the
helve after the hatchet. Nay, sir, it were madness--stark madness!"
My father glanced at my uncle Gervase, who stood pulling his lip;
then, with an abrupt motion, he turned on Mr. Knox again.
"You have seen him? You delivered my letter?"
"I did."
"What was his answer?"
Mr. Knox shrugged his shoulders. "He jumped at it, of course."
"And the boy, here! What did he say about the boy?"
"Well, to speak truth, Sir John, he seemed passably amused by the
whole business. The fact is, prison has broken him up. A fine
figure he must have been in his time, but a costly one to maintain
. . . as tall as yourself, Sir John, if not taller; and florid, as
one may say; the sort of man that must have exercise and space and a
crowd to admire him, not to mention wine and meats and female
society. The Fleet has broken down all that. Even with liberty I
wouldn't promise him another year of life; and, unless I'm mistaken,
he knows his case. A rare actor, too! It wouldn't surprise me if
he'd even deceived himself. But the mask's off. Your offer
overjoyed him; that goes without saying. In spite of all your past
generosity, this new offer obviously struck him for the moment as too
good to be true. But I cannot say, Sir John, that he made any
serious effort to keep up the imposture or pretend that the security
which he can offer is more than a sentimental one. Not to put too
fine a point on it, he ordered in a couple of bottles of wine at my
expense, and over the second I left him laughing."
My father frowned. "And yet this man, Mr. Knox, is an anointed
king."
"Of Corsica!" Mr. Knox shrugged his shoulders. "You may take my
word for it, he's an anointed actor."
"One can visit him, I suppose?"
"At the most the turnkey will expect five shillings. Oh dear me yes!
For a crowned head he's accessible."
My father took me by the arm. "Come along, then, child. And you,
Gervase, get your business through with Mr. Knox and follow us, if
you can, in half an hour. You"--he turned to Billy Priske--"had best
come with us. 'Tis possible I may need you all for witnesses."
He walked me out and downstairs and through the lodge gateway; and so
under Temple Bar again and down Fleet Street through the throng; till
near the foot of it, turning up a side street out of the noise, we
found ourselves in face of a gateway which could only belong to a
prison. The gate itself stood open, but the passage led to an
iron-barred door, and in the passage--which was cool but
indescribably noisome--a couple of children were playing marbles,
with half a dozen turnkeys looking on and (I believe) betting on the
game.
My father sniffed the air in the passage and turned to me.
"Gaol-fever," he announced. "Please God, child, we won't be in it
long."
He rescued Billy from the two urchins who had dropped their game to
pinch his calves, and addressed a word to one of the turnkeys, at the
same time passing a coin. The fellow looked at it and touched his
hat.
"Second court, first floor, number thirty-seven." He opened a wicket
in the gate. "This way, please, and sharp to the left."
The narrow court into which we descended by a short flight of steps
was, as I remember, empty; but passing under an archway and through a
kind of tunnel we entered a larger one crowded with men, some
gathered in groups, others pacing singly and dejectedly, the most of
them slowly too, with bowed heads, but three or four with fierce
strides as if in haste to keep an appointment. One of them, coming
abreast of us as the turnkey led us off to a staircase on the left,
halted, drew himself up, stared at us for a moment with vacant eyes,
and hurried by; yet before we mounted the stairs I saw him reach the
farther wall, wheel, and come as hastily striding back.
The stairway led to a filthy corridor, pierced on the left with a row
of tiny windows looking on the first and empty courtyard; and on the
right with a close row of doors, the most of which stood open and
gave glimpses of foul disordered beds, broken meats, and barred
windows crusted with London grime. The smell was pestilential.
Our turnkey rapped on one of the closed doors, and half-flung,
half-kicked it open; for a box had been set against it on the inside.
"Visitors for the Baron!" he announced, and stood aside to let us
enter. My father had ordered Billy to wait below. We two passed in
together.
Now, my father, as I have said, was tall; yet it seemed to me that
the man who greeted us was taller, as he rose from the bed and stood
between us and the barred dirty window. By little and little I made
out that he wore an orange-coloured dressing-gown, and on his head a
Turk's fez; that he had pushed back a table at which, seated on the
bed, he had been writing; and that on the sill of the closed window
behind him stood a geranium-plant, dry with dust and withering in the
stagnant air of the room. But as yet, since he rose with his back to
the little light, I could not make out his features. I marked,
however, that he shook from head to foot.
My father bowed--a very reverent and stately bow it was too--regarded
him for a moment, and, taking a pace backward to the door, called
after the retreating turnkey, to whom he addressed some order in a
tone to me inaudible.
"You are welcome, Sir John," said the prisoner, as my father faced
him again; "though to my shame I cannot offer you hospitality."
He said it in English, with a thick and almost guttural foreign
accent, and his voice shook over the words.
"I have made bold, sire, to order the remedy."
"'Sire!'" the prisoner took him up with a flash of spirit.
"You have many rights over me, Sir John, but none to mock me, I
think."
"As you have no right to hold me capable of it, in such a place as
this," answered my father. "I addressed you in terms which my errand
proves to be sincere. This is my son Prosper, of whom I wrote."
"To be sure--to be sure." The prisoner turned to me and looked me
over--I am bound to say with no very great curiosity, and sideways,
in the half light, I had a better glimpse of his features, which were
bold and handsome, but dreadfully emaciated. He seemed to lose the
thread of his speech, and his hands strayed towards the table as if
in search of something. "Ah yes, the boy," said he, vaguely.
The turnkey entering just then with two bottles of wine, my father
took one from him and filled an empty glass that stood on the table.
The prisoner's fingers closed over it.
"I have much to drown," he explained, as, having gulped down the
wine, he refilled his glass at once, knocking the bottle-neck on its
rim in his clattering haste. "Excuse me; you'll find another glass
in the cupboard behind you. . . . Yes, yes, we were talking of the
boy. . . . Are you filled? . . . We'll drink to his health!"
"To your health, Prosper," said my father, gravely, and drank.
"But, see here--I received your letter right enough, and it sounds
too good to be true. Only "--and into the man's eyes there crept a
sudden cunning--"I don't understand what you want of me."
"You may think it much or little; but all we want--or, rather, all my
boy wants--is your blessing."
"So I gathered; and that's funny, by God! _My_ blessing--mine--and
here!" He flung out a hand. "I've had some strange requests in my
time; but, damn me, if I reckoned that any man any longer wanted my
blessing."
"My son does, though; and even such a blessing as your own son would
need, if you had one. You understand?"--for the prisoner's eyes had
wandered to the barred window--"I mean the blessing of Theodore the
First."
"You are a strange fellow, John Constantine," was the answer, in a
weary, almost pettish tone. "God knows I have more reason to be
grateful to you than to any man alive--"
"But you find it hard? Then give it over. You may do it with the
lighter heart since gratitude from you would be offensive to me."
"If you played for this--worthless prize as it is--from the
beginning--"
Again my father took him up; and, this time, sternly. "You know
perfectly well that I never played for this from the beginning; nor
had ever dreamed of it while there was a chance that you--or _she_--
might leave a child. I will trouble you--" My father checked
himself. "Your pardon, I am speaking roughly. I will beg you, sire,
to remember first, that you claimed and received my poor help while
there was yet a likelihood of your having children, before your wife
left you, and a good year before I myself married or dreamed of
marrying. I will beg you further to remember that no payment of what
you owed to me was ever enforced, and that the creditors who sent you
and have kept you here are commercial persons with whom I had nothing
to do; whose names until the other day were strange to me. _Now_ I
will admit that I play for a kingdom."
"You really think it worth while?" The prisoner, who had stood all
this time blinking at the window, his hands in the pockets of his
dirty dressing-gown, turned again to question him.
"I do."
"But listen a moment. I have had too many favours from you, and I
don't want another under false pretences. You may call it a too-late
repentance, but the fact remains that I don't. Liberty?"--he
stretched out both gaunt arms, far beyond the sleeves of his gown,
till they seemed to measure the room and to thrust its walls wide.
"Even with a week to live I would buy it dear--you don't know, John
Constantine, how you tempt me--but not at that price."
"Your title is good. I will take the risk."
"How good or how bad my title is, you know. 'Tis the inheritance
against which I warn you."
"I take the risk," my father repeated, "if you will sign."
The prisoner shrugged his shoulders and helped himself to another
glassful.
"We must have witnesses," said my father, "Have you a clergyman in
this den?"
"To be sure we have. The chaplain, we call him Figg--Jonathan Figg's
his name; the Reverend Jonathan Figg, B.A., of Sydney Sussex College,
Cambridge; a good fellow and a moderately hard drinker. He spends
the best part of his morning marrying up thieves and sailors to
trulls; but he's usually leaving church about this time, if a
messenger can catch him before he's off to breakfast with 'em.
Half an hour hence he'll be too drunk to sign his name."
"Prosper"--my father swung round on me--"run you down to Billy and
take him off to search for this clergyman. If on your way you meet
with your uncle and Mr. Knox, say that we shall require them, too, as
witnesses."
I ran down to the courtyard, but no Billy could I see; only the
dejected groups of prisoners, and among them the one I had marked
before, still fiercely striding, and still, at the wall, returning
upon his track. I hurried out to the gate, and there, to my
amazement, found Billy in the clutches of a strapping impudent wench
and surrounded by a ring of turnkeys, who were splitting their sides
with laughter.
"I won't!" he was crying. "I'm a married man, I tell 'ee, and the
father of twelve!"
"Oh, Billy!" I cried, aghast at the lie.
"There was no other way, lad. For the Lord's sake fetch Squire to
deliver me?"
Before I could answer or ask what was happening, the damsel rounded
on me.
"Boy," she demanded, "is this man deceiving me?"
"As for that, ma'am," I answered, "I cannot say. But that he's a
bachelor I believe; and that he hates women I have his word over and
over."
"Then he shall marry me or fight me," she answered very coolly, and
began to strip off her short bodice.
"There's twelve o'clock," announced one of the turnkeys, as the first
stroke sounded from the clock above us over the prison gateway. "Too
late to be married to-day; so a fight it is."
"A ring! a ring!" cried the others.
I looked in Billy's face, and in all my life (as I have since often
reminded him) I never saw a man worse scared. The woman had actually
thrown off her jacket and stood up in a loose under-bodice that left
her arms free--and exceedingly red and brawny arms they were.
How he had come into this plight I could guess as little as what the
issue was like to be, when in the gateway there appeared my uncle and
Mr. Knox, and close at their heels a rabble of men and women
arm-in-arm, headed by a red-nosed clergyman with an immense white
favour pinned to his breast.
"Hey? What's to do--what's to do!" inquired Mr. Knox.
The clergyman thrust past him with a "Pardon me, sir," and addressed
the woman. "What's the matter, Nan? Is the bridegroom fighting
shy?"
"Please your reverence, he tells me he's the father of twelve."
"H'm." The priest cocked his head on one side. "You find that an
impediment?"
"_And_ a married man, your reverence."
"Then he has the laughing side of you, this time," said his
reverence, promptly, and took snuff. "Tut, tut, woman--down with
your fists, button up your bodice, and take disappointment with a
better grace. Come, no nonsense, or you'll start me asking what's
become of the last man I married ye to."
"Sir," interposed my uncle, "I know not the head or tail of this
quarrel. But this man Priske is my brother's servant, and if he told
the lady what she alleges, for the credit of the family I must
correct him. In sober truth he's a bachelor, and no more the father
of twelve than I am."
This address, delivered with entire simplicity, set the whole company
gasping. Most of all it seemed to astonish the woman, who could not
be expected to know that my uncle's chivalry accepted all her sex,
the lowest with the highest, in the image in which God made it and
without defacement.
The priest was the first to recover himself. "My good sir," said he,
"your man may be the father of twelve or the father of lies; but I'll
not marry him after stroke of noon, for that's my rule. Moreover"--
he swept a hand towards the bridal party behind him--"these turtles
have invited me to eat roast duck and green peas with 'em, and I hate
my gravy cold."
"Ay, sir?" asked my uncle. "Do you tell me that folks marry and give
in marriage within this dreadful place?"
"Now and then, sir; and in the liberties and purlieus thereof with a
proclivity that would astonish you; which, since I cannot hinder it,
I sanctify. My name is Figg, sir--Jonathan Figg; and my office,
Chaplain of the Fleet."
"And if it please you, sir," I put in, "my father has sent me in
search of you, to beg that you will come to him at once."
"And you have heard me say, young sir, that I marry no man after
stroke of noon; no, nor will visit him sick unless he be in _articulo
mortis_."
"But my father neither wants to be married, sir, nor is he sick at
all. I believe it is some matter of witnessing an oath."
"Hath he better than roast duck and green peas to offer, hey? No?
Then tell him he may come and witness _my_ oath, that I'll see him
first to Jericho."
"Whereby, if I mistake not," said Mr. Knox, quietly, "your pocket
will continue light of two guineas; and I may add, from what I know
of Sir John Constantine, that he is quite capable, if he receive such
an answer, of having your blood in a bottle."
"'Sir John Constantine?' did I hear you say. _Sir_ John
Constantine?'" queried the Reverend Mr. Figg, with a complete change
of manner. "That's _quite_ another thing! Anything to oblige Sir
John Constantine, I'm sure--"
"Do you know him?" asked my uncle.
"Well--er--no; I can't honestly declare that I _know_ him; but, of
course, one knows _of_ him--that is to say, I understand him to be a
gentleman of title; a knight at least."
"Yes," my uncle answered, "he is at least that. What a very
extraordinary person!" he added in a wondering aside.
Oddly enough, as we were leaving, I heard the woman Nan say pretty
much the same of my uncle. She added that she had a great mind to
kiss him.
We found my father and the prisoner seated with the bottle between
them on the rickety liquor-stained table. Yet--as I remember the
scene now--not all the squalor of the room could efface or diminish
the majesty of their two figures. They sat like two tall old kings,
eye to eye, not friends, or reconciled only in this last and lonely
hour by meditation on man's common fate. If I cannot make you
understand this, what follows will seem to you absurd, though indeed
at the time it was not so.
My father rose as we entered. "Here is the boy returned," said he;
"and here are the witnesses."
The prisoner rose also. "I did not catch his name, or else I have
forgotten it," he said, fixing his eyes on me and motioning me to
step forward; which I did. His eyes--which before had seemed to me
shifty--were straight now and commanding, yet benevolent.
"His name is Prosper; in full, John Prosper Camilio Paleologus.
Never more than one of us wears the surname of Constantine, and he
not until he succeeds as head of our house."
"One name is enough for a king." The prisoner motioned again with
his hand. "Kneel, boy," my father commanded, and I knelt.
"I ask you, gentlemen," said the prisoner, facing them and lifting
his voice, "to hear and remember what I shall say; to witness and
remember what I shall do; and by signature to attest what I shall
presently write. I say, then, that I, Theodore, was on the fifteenth
of April, twenty years ago, by the united voice of the people of
Corsica, made King of that island and placed in possession of its
revenues and chief dignities. I declare, as God may punish me if I
lie, that by no act of mine or of my people of Corsica has that
election been annulled, forfeited, or invalidated; that its revenues
are to-day rightfully mine to receive and bequeath, as its dignities
are to-day rightfully mine to enjoy or abdicate to an heir of my own
choosing. I declare further that, failing male issue of my own body,
I resign herewith and abdicate both rank and revenue in favour of
this boy, Prosper Paleologus, son of Constantine, and heir in descent
of Constantine last Emperor of Constantinople. I lay my hands on him
in your presence and bless him. In your presence I raise him and
salute him on both cheeks, naming him my son of choice and my
successor, Prosper I., King of the Commonwealth of Corsica. I call
on you all to attest this act with your names, and all necessary
writings confirming it; and I beseech you all to pray with me that he
may come to the full inheritance of his kingdom, and thrive therein
as he shall justly and righteously administer it. God save King
Prosper!"
At the conclusion of this speech, admirably delivered, I--standing
with bent head as he had raised me, and with both cheeks tingling
from his salutation--heard my father's voice say sonorously, "Amen!"
and another--I think the parson's--break into something like a
chuckle. But my uncle must have put out a hand threatening his
weasand, for the sound very suddenly gave place to silence; and the
next voice I heard was Mr. Knox's.
"May I suggest that we seat ourselves and examine the papers?" said
Mr. Knox.
"One moment." King Theodore stepped to the cupboard and drew out a
bundle in a blue-and-white checked kerchief, and a smaller one in
brown paper. The kerchief, having been laid on the table and
unwrapped, disclosed a fantastic piece of ironwork in the shape of a
crown, set with stones of which the preciousness was concealed by a
plentiful layer of dust. He lifted this, set it on my head for a
moment, and, replacing it on the table, took up the brown-paper
parcel.
"This," said he, "contains the Great Seal. To whose keeping "--he
turned to my father--"am I to entrust them, Sir John?"
My father nodded towards Billy Priske, who stepped forward and tucked
both parcels under his arm, while Mr. Knox spread his papers on the
table.
We walked back to our lodgings that afternoon, with Billy Priske
behind us bearing in his pocket the Great Seal and under his arm, in
a checked kerchief, the Iron Crown of Corsica.
Two mornings later we took horse and set our faces westward again;
and thus ended my brief first visit to London. Billy Priske carried
the sacred parcel on the saddle before him; and my uncle, riding
beside him, spent no small part of the way in an exhortation against
lying in general, and particularly against the sin of laying false
claim to the paternity of twelve children.
Now, so shaken was Billy by his one adventure in London that until we
had passed the tenth milestone he seemed content enough to be rated.
I believe that as, for the remainder of his stay in London, he had
never strayed beyond sight, so even yet he took comfort and security
from my uncle's voice; "since," said he, quoting a Cornish proverb,
"'tis better be rated by your own than mated with a stranger."
But, by-and-by, taking courage to protest that a lie might on
occasion be pardonable and even necessary, he drew my father into the
discussion.
"This difficulty of Billy's," interposed my father, "was in some sort
anticipated by Plato, who instanced that a madman with a knife in his
hand might inquire of you to direct him which way had been taken by
the victim he proposed to murder. He posits it as a nice point.
Should one answer truthfully, or deceive?"
"For my part," answered my uncle, "I should knock him down."
CHAPTER IV.
LONG VACATION.
"In a harbour grene aslope whereas I lay,
The byrdes sang swete in the middes of the day,
I dreamed fast of mirth and play:
In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure."
Robert Wever.
A history (you will say) which finds a schoolboy tickling trout, and
by the end of another chapter has clapped a crown on his head and
hailed him sovereign over a people of whom he has scarcely heard and
knows nothing save that they are warlike and extremely hot-tempered,
should be in a fair way to move ahead briskly. Nevertheless I shall
pass over the first two years of the reign of King Prosper, during
which he stayed at school and performed nothing worthy of mention:
and shall come to a summer's afternoon at Oxford, close upon the end
of term, when Nat Fiennes and I sat together in my rooms in New
College--he curled on the window-seat with a book, and I stretched in
an easy-chair by the fireplace, and deep in a news-sheet.
"By the way, Nat," said I, looking up as I turned the page,
"where will you spend your vacation?"
A groan answered me.
"Hullo!" I went on, making a hasty guess at his case. "Has the
little cordwainer's tall daughter jilted you, as I promised she
would?"
"A curse on this age!" swore Nat, who ever carried his heart on his
sleeve.
I began to hum--
"I loved a lass, a fair one,
As fair as e'er was seen;
She was indeed a rare one,
Another Sheba queen.
Her waist exceeding small,
The fives did fit her shoe;
But now alas! sh' 'as left me,
Falero, lero, loo!"
"Curse the age!" repeated Nat, viciously. "If these were Lancelot's
days now, a man could run mad in the forest and lie naked and chew
sticks; and then she'd be sorry."
"In summer time to Medley
My love and I would go;
The boatmen there stood read'ly
My love and me to row,"
sang I, and ducked my head to avoid the cushion he hurled.
"Well then, there's very pretty forest land around my home in
Cornwall, with undergrowth and dropped twigs to last you till
Michaelmas term. So why not ride down with me and spend at least the
fore-part of your madness there?"
"I hate your Cornwall."
"'Tis a poor rugged land," said I; "but hath this convenience above
your own home, that it contains no nymphs to whom you have yet sworn
passion. You may meet ours with a straight brow; and they are fair,
too, and unembarrassed, though I won't warrant them if you run bare."
"'Tis never I that am inconstant."
"Never, Nat; 'tis she, always and only--" she, she, and only she"--
and there have been six of her to my knowledge."
"If I were a king, now--"
"T'cht!" said I (for as my best friend, and almost my sole one, he
knew my story).
"If a fellow were a king now--instead of being doomed to the law--
oh, good Lord!"
"You are incoherent, dear lad," said I; "and yet you tell me one
thing plainly enough; which is that in place of loving this one or
that one, or the cordwainer's strapping daughter, you are in love
with being in love."
"Well, and why not?" he demanded. "Were I a king, now, that is even
what I would be--in love with being in love. Were I a king, now, so
deep in love were I with being in love, that my messengers should
compass earth to fetch me the right princess. Yes, and could they
not reach to her, if I but heard of one hidden and afar that was
worth my loving, I would build ships and launch them, enlist crews
and armies, sail all seas and challenge all wars, to win her.
If I were king, now, my love should dwell in the fastnesses of the
mountains, and I would reach her; she should drive me to turn again
and gather the bones of the seamen I had dropped overboard, and I
would turn and dredge the seas for them; for a whim she should demand
to watch me at the task, and gangs of slaves should level mountains
to open a prospect from her window; nay, all this while she should
deny me sight of her, and I would embrace that last hardship that in
the end she might be the dearer prize, a queen worthy to seat beside
me. Man, heave your great lubberly bones out of that chair and
salute a poor devil whom, as you put it, a cordwainer's daughter has
jilted."
"Hullo!" cried I, who had turned from his rhapsody to con the news
again, and on the instant had been caught by a familiar name at the
foot of the page.
"What is it?"
"Why," said I, reading, "it seems that you are not the only such
madman as you have just proclaimed yourself. Listen to this: it is
headed "'Falmouth.'
"'A Gentleman, having read that the Methodist Preachers are to
pay a visit to Falmouth, Cornwall, on the 16th, 17th, and 18th
of next month; and that on the occasion of their last visit
certain women, their sympathizers, were set upon and brutally
handled by the mob; hereby announces that he will be present on
the Market Strand, Falmouth, on these dates, with intent to put
a stop to such behaviour, and invites any who share his
indignation to meet him there and help to see fair play.
The badge to be a Red Rose pinned in the hat.'"
"'EUGENIO.'"
"What think you of that?" I asked, without turning my head.
"The newspaper comes from Cornwall?" he asked.
"From Falmouth itself. My father sent it. . . . Jove!" I cried after
a moment, "I wonder if he's answerable for this? 'Twould be like his
extravagance."
"A pity but what you inherited some of it, then," said Nat, crossly.
"Tell you what, Nat"--I slewed about in my chair--"Come you down to
Cornwall and we'll stick each a rose in our hats and help this Master
Engenio, whoever he is. I've a curiosity to discover him: and if he
be my father--he has not marked the passage, by the way--we'll have
rare fun in smoking him and tracking him unbeknown to the
_rendezvous_. Come, lad; and if I know the Falmouth mob, you shall
have a pretty little turn-up well worth the journey."
But Nat, still staring out of window, shook his head. He was in one
of his perverse moods--and they had been growing frequent of late--
in which nothing I could say or do seemed to content him; and for
this I chiefly accused the cordwainer's daughter, who in fact was a
decent merry girl, fond of strawberries, with no more notion of
falling in love with Nat than of running off with her father's
apprentice. Whatever the cause of it, a cloud had been creeping over
our friendship of late. He sought companions--some of them serious
men--with whom I could not be easy. We kept up the pretence, but
talked no longer with entirely open hearts. Yet I loved him; and now
in a sudden urgent desire to carry him off to Cornwall with me and
clear up all misunderstandings, I caught his arm and haled him down
to our college garden, which lies close within the city wall; and
there, pacing the broken military terrace, plied him with a dozen
reasons why he should come. Still he shook his head to all of them;
and presently, hearing four o'clock strike, pulled up in his walk and
announced that he must be going--he had an engagement.
"And where?" I asked.
He confessed that it was to visit the poor prisoners shut up for debt
in Bocardo.
I pulled a wry mouth, remembering the dismal crew in the Fleet
Prison. But though, the confession being forced from him, he ended
wistfully and as if upon a question, I did not offer to come.
It seemed a mighty dull way to finish a summer's afternoon.
Moreover I was nettled. So I let him go and watched him through the
gate, thinking bitterly that our friendship was sick and drooping by
no fault of mine.
The truth was--or so I tried to excuse him--that beside his plaguey
trick of falling in and out of love he had an overhanging quarrel
with his father, a worthy man, tyrannous when crossed, who meant him
for the law. Nat abhorred the law, and, foreseeing that the tussel
must come, vexed his honest conscience with the thought that while
delaying to declare war he was eating his father's bread.
This thought, working upon the ferment of youth, kept him like a colt
in a fretful lather. He scribbled verses, but never finished so much
as a sonnet; he flung himself into religion, but chiefly, I thought,
to challenge and irritate his undevout friends; and he would drop any
occupation to rail at me and what he was pleased to call my phlegm.
He had some reason too, though at the time I could not discover it.
Now, looking back, I can see into what a stagnant calm I had run.
My boyhood should have been over; in body I had shot up to a great
awkward height; but for the while the man within me drowsed and hung
fire. I lived in the passing day and was content with it.
Nat's gusts of passion amused me, and why a man should want to write
verses or fall in love was a mystery at which I arrived no nearer
than to laugh. For this (strange as it may sound) I believe the
visit to London was partly to blame. Nothing had come of it, except
that the unhappy King Theodore had gained his release and improved
upon it by dying, a few weeks later, in wretched lodgings in Soho;
where, at my father's expense, the church of St. Anne's now bore a
mural tablet to his memory with an epitaph obligingly contributed by
the Hon. Horace Walpole, since Earl of Orford.
Near this place is interred
THEODORE KING OF CORSICA
who died in this parish
Dec. 11, 1756
immediately after leaving
The King's Bench Prison by
the benefit of the Act of Insolvency
in consequence of which
he registered his kingdom of Corsica
for the use of his creditors.
The grave, great teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley slaves and kings;
But Theodore this moral learned ere dead:
Fate poured his lesson on his living head,
Bestow'd a kingdom, and denied him bread.
My father, who copied this out for me, had announced in few words
poor Theodore's fate, but without particular allusion to our
adventure, which, as he made no movement to follow it up, or none
that he confided, I came in time to regard humorously as an escapade
of his, a holiday frolic, a piece of midsummer madness. The serious
part was that he had undoubtedly paid away large sums of money, and
for two years my Uncle Gervase had worn a distracted air which I set
down to the family accounts. By degrees I came to conclude, with the
rest of the world, that my father's brain was more than a little
cracked, and sounded my uncle privately about this--delicately as I
thought; but he met me with a fierce unexpected heat. "Your father,"
said he, "is the best man in the world, and I bid you wait to
understand him better, taking my word that he has great designs for
you." Sure enough, too, my father seemed to hint at this in the
tenor of his conversation with me, which was ever of high politics
and the government of states, or on some point which could be
stretched to bear on these; but of any immediate design he forbore--
as it seemed, carefully--to speak. Thus I found myself at pause and
let my youth wait upon his decision.
Yet I had sense enough to feel less than satisfied with myself,
albeit sorer with Nat as I watched the dear lad go from me across
the turf and out at the garden gate. Nor will I swear that my eyes
did not smart a little. I was but a boy, and had set my heart on our
travelling down to Cornwall together.
To Cornwall I rode down alone, a week later, and fell to work to idle
my vacation away; fishing a little, but oftener sailing my boat;
sometimes alone, sometimes with Billy Priske for company.
Billy--whose duties as butler were what he called a _sine qua non_,
pronounced as "shiny Canaan" and meaning a sinecure--had spent some
part of term time in netting me a trammel, of which he was
inordinately proud, and with this we amused ourselves, sailing or
rowing down to the river's mouth every evening at nightfall to set
it, and, again, soon after daybreak, to haul it, and usually
returning with good store of fish for breakfast--soles, dories,
plaice, and the red mullet for which Helford is famous above all
streams.
Now, during these lazy weeks I had not forgotten Eugenio's
advertisement, which, on returning to my rooms that evening after
Nat's rebuff, I had clipped from the newspaper and since kept in my
pocket. For the fun of it, and to find out who this Eugenio might
be--I had given over suspecting my father--my mind was made up to
ride over to Falmouth on the 16th of July; but whether with or
without a rose in my hat I had not determined. Therefore on the
morning of the 15th, when Billy, after hauling the trammel, began to
lay our plans for the morrow, I cut him short, telling him that
to-morrow I should not fish.
"What's matter with 'ee to-all?" he asked, smashing a spider-crab and
picking it out piecemeal from the net. "Pretty fair catch to-day,
id'n-a? spite of all the weed; an' no harm done by these varmints
that a man can't put to rights afore evenin'."
I took the paddles without answering and pulled towards the river's
mouth, while he sat and smoked his pipe over the business of clearing
the net of weed. Around his feet on the bottom boards lay our
morning's catch--half a dozen soles and twice the number of plaice, a
brace of edible crabs, six or seven red mullet, besides a number of
gurnard and wrass worth no man's eating, an ugly-looking monkfish and
a bream of wonderful rainbow hues. A fog lay over the sea, so dense
that in places we could see but a few yards; but over it the tops of
the tall cliffs stood out clear, and the sun was mounting. A faint
breeze blew from the southward. All promised a hot still day.
The tide was making, too, and with wind and tide to help I pulled
over the river bar and towards the creek where daily, after hauling
the trammel, I bathed from the boat; a delectable corner in the eye
of the morning sunshine, paved fathoms deep with round, white
pebbles, one of which, from the gunwale, I selected to dive for.
The sun broke through the sea-fog around us while I stripped; it
shone, as I balanced myself for the plunge, on the broad wings of a
heron flapping out from the wood's blue shadow; it shone on the
scales of the fish struggling and gasping under the thwarts.
Divine the river was, divine the morning, divine the moment--the last
of my boyhood.
Souse I plunged and deep, with wide-open eyes, chose out and grasped
my pebble, and rose to the surface holding it high as though it had
been a gem. The sound of the splash was in my ears and the echo of
my own laugh, but with it there mingled a cry from Billy Priske, and
shaking the water out of my eyes I saw him erect in the stern-sheets
and astare at a vision parting the fog--the vision of a tall
fore-and-aft sail, golden-grey against the sunlight, and above the
sail a foot or two of a stout pole-mast, and above the mast a gilded
truck and weather-vane with a tail of scarlet bunting. So closely
the fog hung about her that for a second I took her to be a cutter;
and then a second sail crept through the curtain, and I recognized
her for the _Gauntlet_ ketch, Port of Falmouth, Captain Jo Pomery,
returned from six months' foreign. I announced her to Billy with a
shout.
"As if a man couldn' tell that!" answered Billy, removing his cap and
rubbing the back of his head. "What brings her in here, that's what
I'm askin'."
"Belike," said I, scrambling over the gunwale, "the man has lost his
bearings in this fog, and mistakes Helford for Falmouth entrance."
"Lost his bearin's! Jo Pomery lost his bearin's!" Billy regarded me
between pity and reproach. "And him sailing her in from Blackhead
close round the Manacles, in half a capful o' wind an' the tides
lookin' fifty ways for Sunday! That's what he've a-done, for the
weather lifted while we was hauling trammel--anyways east of south a
man could see clear for three mile and more, an' not a vessel in
sight there. There's maybe three men in the world besides Jo Pomery
could ha' done it--the Lord knows how, unless 'tis by sense o' smell.
And he've a-lost his bearin's, says you!"
"Well then," I ventured, "perhaps he has a fancy to land part of his
cargo duty-free."
"That's likelier," Billy assented. "I don't say 'tis the truth, mind
you: for if 'tis truth, why should the man choose to fetch land by
daylight? Fog? A man like Jo Pomery isn' one to mistake a little
pride-o'-the-mornin' for proper thick weather--the more by token it's
been liftin' this hour and more. But 'tis a likelier guess anyway,
the _Gauntlet_ being from foreign. 'Lost his bearin's,' says you,
and come, as you might say, slap through the Manacles; an' by
accident, as you might say! Luck has a broad back, my son, but be
careful how you dance 'pon it."
"Where does she come from?" I asked.
"Mediterranean; that's all I know. Four months and more she must ha'
took on this trip. Iss; sailed out o' Falmouth back-along in the
tail-end o' February, and her cargo muskets and other combustibles."
"Muskets?"
"Muskets; and you may leave askin' me who wants muskets out there,
for in the first place I don't know, an' a still tongue makes a wise
head."
I had slipped on shirt and breeches. "We'll give him a hail,
anyway," said I, "and if there's sport on hand he may happen to let
us join it."
The ketch by this time was pushing her nose past the spit of rock
hiding our creek from seaward. As she came by with both large sails
boomed out to starboard and sheets alternately sagging loose and
tautening with a jerk, I caught sight of two of her crew in the bows,
the one looking on while the other very deliberately unlashed the
anchor, and aft by the wheel a third man, whom I made out to be
Captain Pomery himself.
"_Gauntlet_ ahoy!" I shouted, standing on the thwart and making a
trumpet of my hands.
Captain Pomery turned, cast a glance towards us over his left
shoulder and lifted a hand. A moment later he called an order
forward, and the two men left the anchor and ran to haul in sheets.
Here was a plain invitation to pull alongside. I seized a paddle,
and was working the boat's nose round, to pursue, when another figure
showed above the _Gauntlet's_ bulwarks: a tall figure in an
orange-russet garment like a dressing-gown; a monk, to all
appearance, for the sun played on his tonsured scalp as he leaned
forward and watched our approach.
CHAPTER V.
THE SILENT MEN.
"Seamen, seamen, whence come ye?
_Pardonnez moy, je vous en prie_."
_Old Song_.
A monk he was too. A second and third look over my shoulder left me
no doubt of it. He gravely handed us a rope as we overtook the ketch
and ran alongside, and as gravely bowed when I leapt upon deck; but
he gave us no other welcome.
His russet gown reached almost to his feet, which were bare; and he
stood amid the strangest litter of a deck-cargo, consisting mainly--
or so at first glance it seemed to me--of pot-plants and rude
agricultural implements: spades, flails, forks, mattocks, picks,
hoes, dibbles, rakes, lashed in bundles; sieves, buckets, kegs, bins,
milk-pails, seed-hods, troughs, mangers, a wired dovecote, and a
score of hen-coops filled with poultry. Forward of the mainmast
stood a cart with shafts, upright and lashed to the mast, that the
headsails might work clear. The space between the masts was occupied
by enormous open hatchways through which came the lowing of oxen, and
through these, peering down into the hold, I saw the backs of cattle
and horses moving in its gloom, and the bodies of men stretched in
the straw at their feet.
So much of the _Gauntlet's_ hugger-mugger I managed to discern before
Captain Pomery left the helm and hurried forward to give us welcome
on board.
"Mornin', Squire Prosper! Mornin', Billy! You know _me_, sir--Cap'n
Jo Pomery--which is short for Job, and 'tis the luckiest chance, sir,
you hailed me, for you'm nearabouts the first man I wanted to see.
Faith, now, and I wonder how your father (God bless him) will take
it?"
"Why, what's the matter?" asked I, with a glance at the monk, who had
drawn back a pace and stood, still silent, fingering his rosary.
"The matter? Good Lord! isn't _this_ matter enough?" Captain Jo waved
an arm to include all the deck-cargo. "See them pot-plants, there,
and what they'm teeled [1] in?"
"Drinking-troughs?" said I. "Or . . . is it coffins?"
"Coffins it is. I'd feel easier in mind if you could tell me what
your father (God bless him) will say to it."
"But what has all this to do with my father?" I demanded, and,
seeking Billy's eyes, found them as frankly full of amaze as my own.
"Not but what," continued Captain Jo, "they've behaved well, though
dog-sick to a man from the time we left port. Look at 'em!"--he
caught me by the arm and, drawing me to the hatchway, pointed down to
the hold. "A round score and eight, and all well paid for as
passengers; but for the return journey I won't answer. It depends on
your father, and that"--with a jerk of his thumb towards the tall
monk--"I stippilated when I shipped 'em. 'Never you mind,' was the
answer I got; 'take 'em to England to Sir John Constantine.'
And here they be!"
"But who on earth are they?" I cried, staring down into the gloom,
where presently I made out that the men stretched in the straw at the
horses' feet were monks all, and habited like the monk on the deck
behind me. To him next I turned, to find his eyes, which were dark
and quick, searching me curiously; and as I turned he made a step
forward, put out a hand as if to touch me on the shirt-sleeve, and
anon drew it back, yet still continued to regard me.
"You are a son, signor, of Sir John Constantine?" he asked, in soft
Italian.
"I am his only son, sir," I answered him in the same language.
"Ah! You speak my tongue?" A gleam of joy passed over his grave
features. "And you are his son? So! I should have guessed it at
once, for you bear great likeness to him."
"You know my father, sir?"
"Years ago." His hands, which he used expressively, seemed to grope
in a far past. "I come to him also from one who knew him years ago."
"Upon what business, sir!--if I am allowed to ask."
"I bring a message."
"You bring a tolerably full one, then," said I, glancing first at the
disorder on deck and from that down to the recumbent figures in the
hold.
"I speak for them," he went on, having followed the glance.
"It is most necessary that they keep silence; but I speak for all."
"Then, sir, as it seems to me, you have much to say."
"No," he answered slowly; "very little, I think; very little, as you
will see."
Here Captain Jo interrupted us. He had stepped back to steady the
wheel, but I fancy that the word _silenzio_ must have reached him,
and that, small Italian though he knew, with this particular word the
voyage had made him bitterly acquainted.
"Dumb!" he shouted. "Dumb as gutted haddocks!"
"Dumb!" I echoed, while the two seamen forward heard and laughed.
"It is their vow," said the monk, gravely, and seemed on the point to
say more.
But at this moment Captain Pomery sang out "Gybe-O!" At the warning
we ducked our heads together as the boom swung over and the
_Gauntlet_, heeling gently for a moment, rounded the river-bend in
view of the great house of Constantine, set high and gazing over the
folded woods. A house more magnificently placed, with forest, park,
and great stone terraces rising in successive tiers from the water's
edge, I do not believe our England in those days could show; and it
deserved its site, being amply classical in design, with a facade
that, discarding mere ornament, expressed its proportion and symmetry
in bold straight lines, prolonged by the terraces on which tall rows
of pointed yews stood sentinel. Right English though it was, it bore
(as my father used to say of our best English poetry) the stamp of
great Italian descent, and I saw the monk give a start as he lifted
his eyes to it.
"We have not these river-creeks in Italy," said he, "nor these woods,
nor these green lawns; and yet, if those trees, aloft there, were but
cypresses--" He broke off. "Our voyage has a good ending," he
added, half to himself.
The _Gauntlet_ being in ballast, and the tide high, Captain Pomery
found plenty of Water in the winding channel, every curve of which he
knew to a hair, and steered for at its due moment, winking cheerfully
at Billy and me, who stood ready to correct his pilotage. He had
taken in his mainsail, and carried steerage way with mizzen and jib
only; and thus, for close upon a mile, we rode up on the tide,
scaring the herons and curlews before us, until drawing within sight
of a grass-grown quay he let run down his remaining canvas and laid
the ketch alongside, so gently that one of the seamen, who had cast a
stout fender overside, stepped ashore, and with a slow pull on her
main rigging checked and brought her to a standstill.
"_Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum_," said the monk at my shoulder quietly;
and, as I stared at him, "Ah, to be sure, this is your Tarentum, is
it not? Yet the words came to me for the sound's sake only and their
so gentle close. Our voyage has even such an ending."
"I had best run on," I suggested, "and warn my father of your
coming."
"It is not necessary."
"Nevertheless," I urged, "they can be preparing breakfast for you,
up at the house, while you and your friends are making ready to come
ashore."
"We have broken our fast," he answered; "and we are quite ready, if
you will be so good as to guide us."
He stepped to the hatchways and called down, announcing simply that
the voyage was ended: and in the dusk there I saw monk after monk
upheave himself from the straw and come clambering up the ladder;
tall monks and short, old monks and young and middle-aged, lean monks
and thickset--but the most of them cadaverous, and all of them yellow
with sea-sickness; twenty-eight monks, all barefoot, all tolerably
dirty, and all blinking in the fresh sunshine. When they were
gathered, at a sign from one of them--by dress not distinguishable
from his fellows--all knelt and gave silent thanks for the voyage
accomplished.
I could see that Billy Priske was frightened: for, arising, they
rolled their eyes about them like wild animals turned loose in an
unfamiliar country, and the whites of their eyes were yellow (so to
speak) with seafaring, and their pupils glassy with fever and from
the sea's glare. But the monk their spokesman touched my arm and
motioned me to lead; and, when I obeyed, one by one the whole troop
fell into line and followed at his heels.
Thus we went--I leading, with him and the rest in single file after
me--up by the footpath through the woods, and forth into sunshine
again upon the green dewy bracken of the deer-park. Here my
companion spoke for the first time since disembarking.
"Your father, sir," said he, looking about him and seeming to sniff
the morning air, "must be a very rich signor."
"On the contrary," I answered, "I have some reason to believe him a
poor man."
He stared down for a moment at his bare feet, and the skirts of his
gown wet to the knees with the grasses.
"Ah? Well, it will make no difference," he said; and we resumed our
way.
As we climbed the last slope under the terraces of the house, I
caught sight of my father leaning by a balustrade high above us, at
the head of a double flight of broad stone steps, and splicing the
top joint of a trout-rod he had broken the day before. He must have
caught sight of us almost at the moment when we emerged from the
woods.
He showed no surprise at all. Only as I led my guests up the steps
he set down his work and, raising a hand, bent to them in a very
courteous welcome.
"Good morning, lad! And good morning to those you bring,
whencesoever they come."
"They come, sir," I answered "in Jo Pomery's ketch _Gauntlet_, I
believe from Italy; and with a message for you."
"My father turned his gaze from me to the spokesman at my elbow.
His eyebrows lifted with surprise and sudden pleasure.
"Hey?" he exclaimed. "Is it my old friend--"
But the other, before his name could be uttered, lifted a hand.
"My name is the Brother Basilio now, Sir John: no other am I
permitted to remember. The peace of God be with you, and upon your
house!"
"And with you, Brother Basilio, since you will have it so: and with
all your company! You bear a message for me? But first you must
break your fast." He turned to lead the way to the house.
"We have eaten already, Sir John. As soon as your leisure serves, we
would deliver our message."
My father called to Billy Priske--who hung in the rear of the monks--
bidding him fetch my uncle Gervase in from the stables to the State
Room, and so, without another word, motioned to his visitors to
follow. To this day I can hear the shuffle of their bare feet on the
steps and slabs of the terrace as they hurried after him to keep up
with his long strides.
In the great entrance-hall he paused to lift a bunch of rusty keys
off their hook, and, choosing the largest, unlocked the door of the
State Room. The lock had been kept well oiled, for Billy Priske
entered it twice daily; in the morning, to open a window or two, and
at sunset, to close them. But it is a fact that I had not crossed
its threshold a score of times in my life, though I ran by it, maybe,
as many times a day; nor (as I believe) had my father entered it for
years. Yet it was the noblest room in the house, in length
seventy-five feet, panelled high in dark oak and cedar and adorned
around each panel with carvings of Grinling Gibbons--festoons and
crowns and cherub-faces and intricate baskets of flowers. Each panel
held a portrait, and over every panel, in faded gilt against the
morning sun, shone an imperial crown. The windows were draped with
hangings of rotten velvet. At the far end on a dais stood a porphyry
table, and behind it, facing down the room, a single chair, or
throne, also of porphyry and rudely carved. For the rest the room
held nothing but dust--dust so thick that our visitors' naked feet
left imprints upon it as they huddled after their leader to the dais,
where my father took his seat, after beckoning me forward to stand on
his right.
But of all bewildered faces there was never a blanker, I believe,
since the world began than my uncle Gervase's; who now appeared in
the doorway, a bucket in his hand, straight from the stables where he
had been giving my father's roan horse a drench. Billy's summons
must have hurried him, for he had not even waited to turn down his
shirt-sleeves: but as plainly it had given him no sort of notion why
he was wanted and in the State Room. I guessed indeed that on his
way he had caught up the bucket supposing that the house was afire.
At sight of the monks he set it down slowly, gently, staring at them
the while, and seemed in act of inverting it to sit upon, when my
father addressed him from the dais over the shaven heads of the
audience.
"Brother, I am sorry to have disturbed you: but here is a business in
which I may need your counsel. Will it please you to step this way?
These guests of ours, I should first explain, have arrived from over
seas."
My uncle came forward, still like a man in a dream, mounted the dais
on my father's left, and, turning, surveyed the visitors in front.
"Eh? To be sure, to be sure," he murmured. "Broomsticks!"
"Their spokesman here, who gives his name as the Brother Basilio,
bears a message for me; and since he presents it in form with a whole
legation at his back, I think it due to treat him with equal
ceremony. Do you agree?"
"If you ask me," my uncle answered, after a pause full of thought,
"they would prefer to start, maybe, with a wash and a breakfast.
By good luck, Billy tells me, the trammel has made a good haul.
As for basins, brother, our stock will not serve all these gentlemen;
but if the rest will take the will for the deed and use the pump,
I'll go round meanwhile and see how the hens have been laying."
"You are the most practical of men, brother: but my offer of
breakfast has already been declined. Shall we hear what Dom Basilio
has to say?"
"I have nothing to say, Sir John," put in Brother Basilio, advancing,
"but to give you this letter and await your answer."
He drew a folded paper from his tunic and handed it to my father, who
rose to receive it, turned it over, and glanced at the
superscription. I saw a red flush creep slowly up to his temples and
fade, leaving his face extraordinarily pale. A moment later, in face
of his audience, he lifted the paper to his lips, kissed it
reverently, and broke the seal.
Again I saw the flush mount to his temples as he read the letter
through slowly and in silence. Then after a long pause he handed it
to me; and I took it wondering, for his eyes were dim and yet bright
with a noble joy.
The letter (turned into English) ran thus--
"_To Sir John Constantine, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the
Star, at his house of Constantine in Cornwall, England_.
"MY FRIEND,
"The bearer of this and his company have been driven by the
Genoese from their monastery of San Giorgio on my estate of
Casalabriva above the Taravo valley, the same where you will
remember our treading the vintage together to the freedom of
Corsica. But the Genoese have cut down my vines long since,
and now they have fired the roof over these my tenants and
driven them into the _macchia_, whence they send message to me
to deliver them. Indeed, friend, I have much ado to protect
myself in these days: but by good fortune I have heard of an
English vessel homeward bound which will serve them if they can
reach the coast, whence numbers of the faithful will send them
off with good provision. Afterwards, what will happen?
To England the ship is bound, and in England I know you only.
Remembering your great heart, I call on it for what help you
can render to these holy men. _Addio_, friend. You are
remembered in my constant prayers to Christ, the Virgin, and
all the Saints.
"EMILIA."
At a sign from my father--who had sunk back in his chair and sat
gripping its arms--I passed on this epistle to my uncle Gervase, who
read it and ran his hand through his hair.
"Dear me!" said he, running his eye over the attentive monks, "this
lady, whoever she may be--"
"She is a crowned queen, brother Gervase," my father interrupted;
"and moreover she is the noblest woman in the world."
"As to that, brother," returned my uncle, "I am saying nothing.
But speaking of what I know, I say she can be but poorly conversant
with your worldly affairs."
My father half-lifted himself from his seat. "And is that how you
take it?" he demanded sharply. "Is that all you read in the letter?
Brother, I tell you again, this lady is a queen. What should a queen
know of my degree of poverty?"
"Nevertheless--" began my uncle.
But my father cut him short again. "I had hoped," said he,
reproachfully, "you would have been prompt to recognize her noble
confidence. Mark you how, no question put, she honours me.
'Do this, for my sake'--Who but the greatest in the world can appeal
thus simply?"
"None, maybe," my uncle replied; "as none but the well-to-do can
answer with a like ease."
"You come near to anger me, brother; but I remember that you never
knew her. Is not this house large? Are not four-fifths of my rooms
lying at this moment un-tenanted? Very well; for so long as it
pleases them, since she claims it, these holy men shall be our
guests. No more of this," my father commanded peremptorily, and
added, with all the gravity in the world, "You should thank her
consideration rather, that she sends us visitors so frugal, since
poverty degrades us to these economies. But there is one thing
puzzles me." He took the letter again from my uncle and fastened his
gaze on the Brother Basilio. "She says she has much ado to protect
herself."
"Indeed, Sir John," answered Brother Basilio, "I fear the queen, our
late liege-lady, speaks somewhat less than the truth. She wrote to
you from a poor lodging hard by Bastia, having ventured back to
Corsica out of Tuscany on business of her own; and on the eve of
sailing we heard that she had been taken prisoner by the Genoese."
"What!" My father rose, clutching the arms of his chair. Of stone
they were, like the chair itself, and well mortised: but his great
grip wrenched them out of their mortises and they crashed on the
dais. "What! You left her a prisoner of the Genoese!" He gazed
around them in a wrath that slowly grew cold, freezing into contempt.
"Go, sirs; since she commands it, room shall be found for you all.
My house for the while is yours. But go from me now."
[1] Tilled, planted.
CHAPTER VI.
HOW MY FATHER OUT OF NOTHING BUILT AN ARMY, AND IN FIVE MINUTES
PLANNED AN INVASION.
Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, Goodly Races of
Horse, Chariots of Warre, Elephants, Ordnance, Artillery, and
the like: All this is but a Sheep in a Lion's Skin, except the
Breed and disposition be stout and warlike. Nay, Number it
selfe in Armies importeth not much where the People is of weake
courage: For (as _Virgil_ saith) It never troubles a Wolfe, how
many the sheepe be."--BACON.
For the rest of the day my father shut himself in his room, while my
uncle spent the most of it seated on the brewhouse steps in a shaded
corner of the back court, through which the monks brought in their
furniture and returned to the ship for more. The bundles they
carried were prodigious, and all the morning they worked without halt
or rest, ascending and descending the hill in single file and always
at equal distances one behind another. Watching from the terrace
down the slope of the park as they came and went, you might have
taken them for a company of ants moving camp. But my uncle never
wholly recovered from the shock of their first freight, to see man by
man cross the court with a stout coffin on his back and above each
coffin a pack of straw: nor was he content with Fra Basilio's
explanation that the brethren slept in these coffins by rule and
saved the expense of beds.
"For my part," said my uncle, "considering the numbers that manage
it, I should have thought death no such dexterity as to need
practice."
"Yet bethink you, sir, of St. Paul's words. 'I protest,' said he,
'I die daily.'"
"Why, yes, sir, and so do we all," agreed my uncle, and fell silent,
though on the very point, as it seemed, of continuing the argument.
"I did not choose to be discourteous, lad," he explained to me later:
"but I had a mind to tell him that we do daily a score of things we
don't brag about--of which I might have added that washing is one:
and I believe 'twould have been news to him."
I had never known my uncle in so rough a temper. Poor man!
I believe that all the time he sat there on the brewhouse steps, he
was calculating woefully the cost of these visitors; and it hurt him
the worse because he had a native disposition to be hospitable.
"But who is this lady that signs herself Emilia?" I asked.
"A crowned queen, lad, and the noblest lady in the world--you heard
your father say it. This evening he may choose to tell us some
further particulars."
"Why this evening?" I asked, and then suddenly remembered that to-day
was the 15th of July and St. Swithun's feast; that my father would
not fail to drink wine after dinner in the little temple below the
deer-park; and that he had promised to admit me to-night to make the
fourth in St. Swithun's brotherhood.
He appeared at dinner-time, punctual and dressed with more than his
usual care (I noted that he wore his finest lace ruffles); and before
going in to dinner we were joined by the Vicar, much perturbed--as
his manner showed--by the news of a sudden descent of papists upon
his parish. Indeed the good man so bubbled with it that we had
scarcely taken our seats before the stream of questions overflowed.
"Who were these men?" "How many!" "Whence had they come, and why?"
etc.
I glanced at my father in some anxiety for his temper. But he
laughed and carved the salmon composedly. He had a deep and tolerant
affection for Mr. Grylls.
"Where shall I begin!" said he. "They are, I believe, between twenty
and thirty in number, though I took no care to count; and they belong
to the Trappistine Order, to which I have ever been attracted; first,
because I count it admirable to renounce all for a faith, however
frantic, and secondly for the memory of Bouthillier de Rance, who a
hundred years ago revived the order after five hundred years of
desuetude."
"And who was he?" inquired the Vicar.
"He was a young rake in Paris, tonsured for the sake of the family
benefices, who had for mistress no less a lady than the Duchess de
Rohan-Montbazon. One day, returning from the country after a week's
absence and letting himself into the house by a private key, he
rushed upstairs in a lover's haste, burst open the door, and found
himself in a chamber hung with black and lit with many candles.
His mistress had died, the day before, of a putrid fever.
But--worse than this and most horrible--the servants had ordered the
coffin in haste; and, when delivered, it was found to be too short.
Upon which, to have done with her, in their terror of infection, they
had lopped off the head, which lay pitiably dissevered from the
trunk. For three years after the young man travelled as one mad, but
at length found solace in his neglected abbacy of Soligny-la-Trappe,
and in reviving its extreme Cistercian rigours."
"I had supposed the Trappists to be a French order in origin, and
confined to France," said the Vicar.
"They have offshoots: of which I knew but one in Italy, that settled
some fifty years back in a monastery they call Buon-Solazzo, outside
Florence, at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. But I have
been making question of our guests through Dom Basilio, their
guest-master and abbot _de facto_ (since their late abbot, an old man
whom he calls Dom Polifilo, died of exposure on the mountains some
three days before they embarked); and it appears that they belong to
a second colony, which has made its home for these ten years at
Casalabriva in Corsica, having arrived by invitation of the Queen
Emilia of that island, and there abiding until the Genoese burned the
roof over their heads."
The Vicar sipped his wine.
"You have considered," he asked, "the peril of introducing so many
papists into our quiet parish?"
"I have not considered it for a moment," answered my father,
cheerfully. "Nor have I introduced them. But if you fear they'll
convert--pervert--subvert--invert your parishioners and turn 'em into
papists, I can reassure you. For in the first place thirty men, or
thirty thousand, of whom only one can open his mouth, are, for
proselytizing, equal to one man and no more."
"They can teach by their example if not by their precept," urged the
Vicar.
"Their example is to sleep in their coffins. My good sir, if you
will not trust your English doctrine to its own truth, you might at
least rely on the persuasiveness of its comforts. Nay, pardon me, my
friend," he went on, as the Vicar's either cheekbone showed a red
flush, "I did not mean to speak offensively; but, Englishman though I
am, in matters of religion my countrymen are ever a puzzle to me.
At a great price you won your freedom from the Bishop of Rome and his
dictation. I admire the price and I love liberty; yet liberty has
its drawbacks, as you have for a long while been discovering; of
which the first is that every man with a maggot in his head can claim
a like liberty with yourselves, quoting your own words in support of
it. Let me remind you of that passage in which Rabelais--borrowing,
I believe, from Lucian--brings the good Pantagruel and his
fellow-voyagers to a port which he calls the Port of Lanterns.
'There (says he) upon a tall tower Pantagruel recognized the Lantern
of La Rochelle, which gave us an excellent clear light. Also we saw
the Lanterns of Pharos, of Nauplia, and of the Acropolis of Athens,
sacred to Pallas,' and so on; whence I draw the moral that
coast-lights are good, yet, multiplied, they complicate navigation."
"And apply your moral by erecting yet another!"
"Fairly retorted. Yet how can you object without turning the sword
of Liberty against herself? Have you never heard tell, by the way,
of Captain Byng's midshipman?"
"Who was he?"
"I forget his name, but he started his first night aboard ship by
kneeling down and saying his prayers, as his mother had taught him."
"I commend the boy," said my uncle.
"I also commend him: but the crowd of his fellow-midshipmen found it
against the custom of the service and gave him the strap for it.
This, however, raised him up a champion in one of the taller lads,
who protested that their conduct was tyrannous: 'and,' said he, very
generously, 'to-morrow night I too propose to say my prayers.
If any one object, he may fight me." Thus, being a handy lad with
his fists, he established the right of religious liberty on board.
By-and-by one or two of the better disposed midshipmen followed his
example: by degrees the custom spread along the lower deck, where the
dispute had happened in full view of the whole ship's company, seamen
and marines; and by the time she reached her port of Halifax she
hadn't a man on board (outside the ward-room) but said his prayers
regularly."
"A notable Christian triumph," was the Vicar's comment.
"Quite so. At Halifax," pursued my father, "Captain Byng took aboard
out of hospital another small midshipman, who on his first night no
sooner climbed into his hammock than the entire mess bundled him out
of it. 'We would have you to know, young man,' said they, 'that
private devotion is the rule on board our ship. It's down on your
knees this minute or you get the strap.'
"I leave you," my father concluded, "to draw the moral. For my part
the tale teaches me that in any struggle for freedom the real danger
begins with the moment of victory."
Said my uncle Gervase after a pause, "Then these Corsicans of yours,
brother, stand as yet in no real danger, since the Genoese are yet
harrying their island with fire and sword."
"In no danger at all as regards their liberty," answered my father,
poising his knife for a first cut into the saddle of mutton, "though
in some danger, I fear me, as regards their queen. They have,
however, taken the first and most important step by getting the news
carried to me. The next is to raise an army; and the next after
that, to suit the plan of invasion to our forces. Indeed," wound up
my father with another flourish of his carving-knife, "I am in
considerable doubt where to make a start."
"I hold," said my uncle, eyeing the saddle of mutton, "that you save
the gravy by beginning close alongside the chine."
"I was thinking for my part that either Porto or Sagone would serve
us best," said my father, meditatively.
Dinner over, the four of us strolled out abreast into the cool
evening and down through the deer-park to the small Ionic temple,
where Billy Priske had laid out fruit, wine, and glasses; and there,
with no more ceremony than standing to drink my health, the three
initiated me into the brotherhood of St. Swithun. It gave me a
sudden sense of being grown a man, and this sense my father very
promptly proceeded to strengthen.
"I had hoped," said he, putting down his glass and seating himself,
"to delay Prosper's novitiate. I had designed, indeed, that after
staying his full time at Oxford he should make the Grand Tour with me
and prepare himself for his destiny by a leisured study of cities and
men. But this morning's news has forced me to reshape my plans.
Listen--
"In the early autumn of 1735, being then at the Court of Tuscany, I
received sudden and secret orders to repair to Corte, the capital of
Corsica, an island of which I knew nothing beyond what I had learnt
in casual talk from the Count Domenico Rivarola, who then acted as
its plenipotentiary at Florence. He was a man with whom I would
willingly have taken counsel, but my orders from England expressly
forbade it. Rivarola in fact was suspected--and justly as my story
will show--of designs of his own for the future of the island; and
although, as it will also show, we had done better to consult him,
Walpole's injunctions were precise that I should by every means keep
him in the dark.
"The situation--to put it as briefly as I can--was this. For two
hundred years or so the island had been ruled by the Republic of
Genoa; and, by common consent, atrociously. For generations the
islanders had lived in chronic revolt, under chiefs against whom the
Genoese--or, to speak more correctly, the Bank of Genoa--had not
scrupled to apply every device, down to secret assassination.
_Uno avolso non deficit alter_: the Corsicans never lacked a leader
to replace the fallen: and in 1735 the succession was shared by two
noble patriots, Giafferi and Hyacinth Paoli.
"Under their attacks the Genoese were slowly but none the less
certainly losing their hold on the island. Their plight was such
that, although no one knew precisely what they would do, every one
foresaw that, failing some heroic remedy, they must be driven into
the sea, garrison after garrison, and lose Corsica altogether; and of
all speculations the most probable seemed that they would sell the
island, with all its troubles, to France. Now, for France to acquire
so capital a _point d'appui_ in the Mediterranean would obviously be
no small inconvenience to England: and therefore our Ministers--who
had hitherto regarded the struggles of the islanders with
indifference--woke up to a sudden interest in Corsican affairs.
"They had no pretext for interfering openly. But if the Corsicans
would but take heart and choose themselves a king, that king could at
a ripe moment be diplomatically acknowledged; and any interference by
France would at once become an act of violent usurpation. (For let
me tell you, my friends--the sufferings of a people count as nothing
in diplomacy against the least trivial act against a crown.)
The nuisance was, the two Paolis, Giafferi and Hyacinth, had no
notion whatever of making themselves kings; nor would their devoted
followers have tolerated it. Yet--as sometimes happens--there was a
third man, of greater descent than they, to whom at a pinch the crown
might be offered, and with a far more likely chance of the Corsicans'
acquiescence. This was a Count Ugo Colonna, a middle-aged man,
descended from the oldest nobility of the island, and head of his
family, which might more properly be called a clan; a patriot, in his
way, too, though lacking the fire of the Paolis, to whom he had
surrendered the leadership while remaining something of a
figure-head. In short my business was to confer with him at Corte,
persuade the Corsican chiefs to offer him the crown, and persuade him
to accept it.
"I arrived then at the capital and found Count Ugo willing enough,
though by no means eager, for the honour. He was, in fact, a
mild-mannered gentleman of no great force of character, and
frequently interrupted our conference to talk of a bowel-complaint
which obviously meant more to him than all the internal complications
of Europe: and next to his bowel-complaint--but some way after--he
prized his popularity, which ever seemed more important than his
country's welfare: or belike he confused the two. He was at great
pains to impress me with the sacrifices he had made for Corsica--
which in the past had been real enough: but he had come to regard
them chiefly as matter for public speaking, or excuse for public
bowing and lifting of the hat. You know the sort of man, I dare say.
To pass that view of life, at his age, is the last test of greatness.
"Still, the notion of being crowned King of Corsica tickled his
vanity, and would have tickled it more had he begotten a son to
succeed him. It opened new prospects of driving through crowds and
bowing and lifting his hat: and he turned pardonably sulky when the
two Paolis treated my proposals with suspicion. They had an immense
respect for England as the leader of the free peoples: but they
wanted to know why in Tuscany I had not taken their Count Rivarola
into my confidence. In fact they were in communication with their
plenipotentiary already, and half way towards another plan, of which
very excusably they allowed me to guess nothing.
"The upshot was that my interference threw Count Ugo into a pet with
them. He only wanted them to press him; was angry at not being
pressed; yet believed that they would repent in time. Meanwhile he
persuaded me to ride back with him to one of his estates, a palace
above the valley of the Taravo.
"I know not why, but ever the vow of Jephthah comes to my mind as I
remember how we rode up the valley to Count Ugo's house in the hour
before sunset. 'And behold, his daughter came out to meet him with
timbrels and with dances, and she was his only child.' He had made
no vow and was incapable, poor man, of keeping any so heroic; and she
came out with no timbrel or dance, but soberly enough in her
sad-coloured dress of the people. Yet she came out while we rode a
good mile off, and waited for us as we climbed the last slope, and
she was his only child.
"How shall I tell you of her? She helped my purpose nothing, for at
first she was vehemently opposed to her father's consenting to be
king. Her politics she derived in part from the reading of
Plutarch's Lives and in part from her own simplicity. They were
childish, utterly: yet they put me to shame, for they glowed with the
purest love of her country. She has walked on fiery ploughshares
since then; she has trodden the furnace, and her beautiful bare feet
are seared since they trod the cool vintage with me on the slopes
above the Taravo. . . . Priske, open the first of those bottles,
yonder, with the purple seal! Here is that very wine, my friends.
Pour and hold it up to the sunset before you taste. Had ever wine
such a royal heart? I will tell you how to grow it. Choose first of
all a vineyard facing south, between mountains and the sea. Let it
lie so that it drinks the sun the day through; but let the protecting
mountains carry perpetual snow to cool the land breeze all the night.
Having chosen your site, drench it for two hundred years with the
blood of freemen; drench it so deep that no tap-root can reach down
below its fertilizing virtue. Plant it in defeat, and harvest it in
hope, grape by grape, fearfully, as though the bloom on each were a
state's ransom. Next treat it after the recipe of the wine of Cos;
dropping the grapes singly into vats of sea water, drawn in stone
jars from full fifteen fathoms in a spell of halcyon weather and left
to stand for the space of one moon. Drop them in, one by one, until
the water scarcely cover the mass. Let stand again for two days, and
then call for your maidens to tread them, with hymns, under the new
moon. Ah, and yet you may miss! For your maidens must be clean, and
yet fierce as though they trod out the hearts of men, as indeed they
do. A king's daughter should lead them, and they must trample with
innocence, and yet with such fury as the prophet's who said 'their
blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my
raiment: for the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my
redeemed is come.' . . ."
My father lifted his glass. "To thee, Emilia, child and queen!"
He drank, and, setting down his glass, rested silent for a while, his
eyes full of a solemn rapture.
"My friends," he went on at length, with lowered voice, "know you
that old song?
"'Methought I walked still to and fro,
And from her company could not go--
But when I waked it was not so:
In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.'
"All that autumn I spent under her father's roof, and--my leave
having been extended--all the winter following. The old Count had
convinced himself by this time that by accepting the crown he would
confer a signal service on Corsica, and had opened a lengthy
correspondence with the two Paolis, whose hesitation to accept this
view at once puzzled and annoyed him. For me, I wished the
correspondence might be prolonged for ever, for meanwhile I lived my
days in company with Emilia, and we loved.
"I was a fool. Yet I cannot tax myself that I played false to duty,
though by helping to crown her father I was destroying my own hopes,
since as heiress to his throne Emilia must be far removed from me.
We scarcely thought of this, but lived in our love, we two.
So the winter passed and the spring came and the _macchia_ burst into
flower.
"Prosper, you have never set eyes on the _macchia_, the glory of your
kingdom. But you shall behold it soon, lad, and smell it--for its
fragrance spreads around the island and far out to sea. It belts
Corsica with verdure and a million million flowers--cistus and myrtle
and broom and juniper; clematis and vetch and wild roses run mad.
Deeper than the tall forests behind it the _macchia_ will hide two
lovers, and under the open sky hedge off all the world but their
passion . . . In the _macchia_ we roamed together, day after day, and
forgot the world; forgot all but honour; for she, my lady, was a
child of sixteen, and as her knight I worshipped her. Ah, those
days! those scented days!
"But while we loved and Count Ugo wrote letters, the two Paolis were
doing; and by-and-by they played the strangest stroke in all
Corsica's history. That spring, at Aleria on the east coast, there
landed a man of whom the Corsican's had never heard. He came out of
nowhere with a single ship and less than a score of attendants--to be
precise, two officers, a priest, a secretary, a major-domo, an
under-steward, a cook, three Tunisian slaves, and six lackeys.
He had sailed from Algiers, with a brief rest in the port of Leghorn,
and he stepped ashore in Turkish dress, with scarlet-lined cloak,
turban, and scimetar. He called himself Theodore, a baron of
Westphalia, and he brought with him a ship-load of arms and
ammunition, a thousand zechins of Tunis, and letters from half a
dozen of the Great Powers promising assistance. Whether these were
genuine or not, I cannot tell you.
"Led by the two Paolis--this is no fairy tale, my friends--the
Corsicans welcomed and proclaimed him king, without even waiting for
despatches from Count Rivarola (who had negotiated) to inform them of
the terms agreed upon. They led him in triumph to Corte, and there,
in their ancient capital, crowned and anointed him. He gave laws,
issued edicts, struck money, distributed rewards. He put himself in
person at the head of the militia, and blocked up the Genoese in
their fortified towns. For a few months he swept the island like a
conqueror.
"All this, as you may suppose, utterly disconcerted the Count Ugo
Colonna, who saw his dreams topple at one stroke into the dust.
But the chiefs found a way to reconcile him. Their new King Theodore
must marry and found a dynasty. Let a bride be found for him in
Colonna's daughter, and let children be born to him of the best blood
in Corsica.
"The Count recovered his good temper: his spirits rose at a bound: he
embraced the offer. His grandsons should be kings of Corsica.
And she--my Emilia--
"We met once only after her father had broken the news to her.
He had not asked her consent; he had told her, in a flutter of pride,
that this thing must be, and for her country's sake. She came to me,
in the short dusk, upon the terrace overlooking the Taravo.
She was of heart too heroic to linger out our agony. In the dusk she
stretched out both hands--ah, God, the child she looked! so helpless,
so brave!--and I caught them and kissed them. Then she was gone.
"A week later they married her to King Theodore in the Cathedral of
Corte, and crowned her beside him. Before the winter he left the
island and sailed to Holland to raise moneys! for the promises of the
Great Powers had come to nothing, even if they were genuinely given.
For myself, I had bidden good-bye to Corsica and sailed for Tuscany
on the same day that Emilia was married.
"Now I must tell you that on the eve of sailing I wrote a letter to
the queen--as queen she would be by the time it reached her--wishing
her all happiness, and adding that if, in the time to come, fate
should bring her into poverty or danger, my estate and my life would
ever be at her service. To this I received, as I had expected, no
answer: nor did she, if ever she received it, impart its contents to
her husband. He--the rascal--had a genius for borrowing, and yet
'twas I that had to begin by seeking him out to feed him with money.
"News came to me that he was in straits in Holland, and had for a
year been drumming the banks in vain: also that the Genoese, whom his
incursion had merely confounded, were beginning to lift their heads
and take the offensive again. At first he had terrified them like a
mad dog; the one expedient they could hit on was to set a price upon
his head. Certainly he had gifts. He contrived--and by sheer
audacity, mark you, backed by a fine presence--to drive them into
such a panic that, months after he had sailed, they were petitioning
France to send over troops to help them. The Corsicans sent a
counter-embassy. 'If,' said they to King Louis, 'your Majesty force
us to yield to Genoa, then let us drink this bitter cup to the health
of the Most Christian King, and die.' King Louis admired the speech
but nibbled at the opportunity. Our own Government meanwhile had
either lost heart or suffered itself to be persuaded by the Genoese
Minister in London. In the July after my Emilia's marriage, our late
Queen Caroline, as regent for the time of Great Britain, issued a
proclamation forbidding any subject of King George to furnish arms or
provisions to the Corsican malcontents.
"And now you know, my dear Prosper, why I cast away the career on
which I had started with some ambition. My lady lacked help, which
as a British subject I was prohibited from offering. My conscience
allowed me to disobey: but not to disobey and eat His Majesty's
bread. I flung up my post, and as a private man hunted across Europe
for King Theodore."
I ran him to earth in Amsterdam. He was in handsome lodgings, but
penniless. It was the first time I had conversed with him; and he, I
believe, had never seen my face. I found him affable, specious,
sanguine, but hollow as a drum. For _her_ sake I took up and renewed
the campaign among the Jew bankers.
"To be short, he sailed back for Corsica in a well-found ship, with
cannon and ammunition on board, and some specie--the whole cargo
worth between twenty and thirty thousand pounds. He made a landing
at Tavagna and threw in almost all his warlike stores. His wife
hurried to meet him: but after a week, finding that the French were
pouring troops into the island, and becoming (they tell me) suddenly
nervous of the price on his head, he sailed away almost without
warning. They say also that on the passage he murdered the man whom
his creditors had forced him to take as supercargo, sold the vessel
at Leghorn, and made off with the specie--no penny of which had
reached his queen or his poor subjects. She--sad childless soul--
driven with her chiefs and counsellors into the mountains before the
combined French and Genoese, escaped a year later to Tuscany, and hid
herself with her sorrows in a religious house ten miles from
Florence.
"So ended this brief reign: and you, Prosper, have met the chief
actor in it. A very few words will tell the rest. The French
overran the island until '41, when the business of the Austrian
succession forced them to withdraw their troops and leave the Genoese
once more face to face with the islanders. Promptly these rose
again. Giafferi and Hyacinth Paoli had fled to Naples; Hyacinth with
two sons, Pascal and Clement, whom he trained there (as I am told) in
all the liberal arts and in undying hatred of the Genoese.
These two lads, returning to the island, took up their father's fight
and have maintained it, with fair success as I learn. From parts of
the island they must have completely extruded the enemy for a while;
since my lady made bold, four years ago, to settle these visitors of
ours in her palace above the Taravo. It would appear, however, that
the Genoese have gathered head again, and his business with them may
explain why Pascal Paoli has not answered the letter I addressed to
him, these eight months since, notifying my son's claim upon the
succession. Or he may have reckoned it indecent of me to address him
in lieu of his Queen, who had returned to the island. I had not
heard of her return. I heard of it to-day for the first time, and of
her peril, which shall hurry us ten times faster than our
pretensions. Prosper," my father concluded, "we must invade Corsica,
and at once."
"Good Lord!" exclaimed my uncle. "How!"
"In a ship," my father answered him as simply. "How otherwise?"
Said my uncle, "But where is your ship?"
Answered my father, "If you will but step outside and pick up one of
these fir-cones in the grass, you can almost toss it on to her deck.
She is called the _Gauntlet_, and her skipper is Captain Jo Pomery.
I might have racked my brain for a month to find such a skipper or a
ship so well found and happily named as this which Providence has
brought to my door. I attach particular importance to the name of a
ship."
My uncle ran his hands through his hair. "But to invade a kingdom,"
he protested, "you will need also an army!"
"Certainly. I must find one."
"But where?"
"It must be somewhere in the neighbourhood, and within twenty-four
hours," replied my father imperturbably. "Time presses."
"But an army must be paid. You have not only to raise one, but to
find the money to support it."
"You put me in mind of an old German tale," said my father, helping
himself to wine. "Once upon a time there were three brothers--but
since, my dear Gervase, you show signs of impatience, I will confine
myself to the last and luckiest one. On his travels, which I will
not pause to describe in detail, he acquired three gifts--a knapsack
which, when opened, discharged a regiment of grenadiers; a cloth
which, when spread, was covered with a meal; and a purse which, when
shaken, filled itself with money."
"Will you be serious, brother?" cried my uncle.
"I am entirely serious!" answered my father. "The problem of an army
and its pay I propose to solve by enlisting volunteers; and the
difficulty of feeding my troops (I had forgotten it and thank you for
reminding me) will be minimized by enlisting as few as possible.
Myself and Prosper make two; Priske, here, three; I would fain have
you accompany us, Gervase, but the estate cannot spare you.
Let me see--" He drummed for a moment on the table with his fingers.
"We ought to have four more at least, to make a show: and seven is a
lucky number."
"You seriously design," my uncle demanded, "to invade the island of
Corsica with an army of seven persons?"
"Most seriously I do. For consider. To begin with, this Theodore--
a vain hollow man--brought but sixteen, including many
non-combatants, and yet succeeded in winning a crown. You will allow
that to win a crown is a harder feat than to succeed to one.
On what reckoning then, or by what Rule-of-Three sum, should Prosper,
who goes to claim what already belongs to him, need more than seven?
"Further," my father continued, "it may well be argued that the fewer
he takes the better; since we sail not against the Corsicans but
against their foes, and therefore should count on finding in every
Corsican a soldier for our standard.
"Thirdly, the Corsicans are a touchy race, whom it would be impolitic
to offend with a show of foreign strength.
"Fourthly, we must look a little beyond the immediate enterprise, and
not (if we can help it) saddle Prosper's kingdom with a standing
army. For, as Bacon advises, that state stands in danger whose
warriors remain in a body and are used to donatives; whereof we see
examples in the turk's Janissaries and the Pretorian Bands of Rome.
"And fifthly, we have neither the time nor the money to collect a
stronger force. The occasion presses: and _fronte capillata est,
post haec Occasio calva_. Time turns a bald head to us if we miss
our moment to catch him by the forelock."
"The Abantes," put in Mr. Grylls, "practised the direct contrary: of
whom Homer tells us that they shaved the forepart of their heads, the
reason being that their enemies might not grip them by the hair in
close fighting. I regret, my dear Sir John, you never warned me that
you designed Prosper for a military career. We might have bestowed
more attention on the warlike customs and operations of the
ancients."
My father sipped his wine and regarded the Vicar benevolently.
For closest friends he had two of the most irrelevant thinkers on
earth and he delighted to distinguish between their irrelevancies.
"But I would not," he continued, "have you doubt that the prime cause
of our expedition is to deliver my lady from the Genoese; or believe
that Prosper will press his claims unless she acknowledge them."
"I am wondering," said my uncle, "where you will find your other four
men."
"Prosper and I will provide them to-morrow," my father answered, with
a careless glance at me. "And now, my friends, we have talked
over-long of Corsica and nothing as yet of that companionship which
brings us here--it may be for the last time. Priske, you may open
another four bottles and leave us. Gervase, take down the book from
the cupboard and let the Vicar read to us while the light allows."
"The marker tells me," said the Vicar, taking the book and opening
it, "that we left in the midst of Chapter 8--_On the Luce or Pike_.
"Ay, and so I remember," my uncle agreed.
The Vicar began to read--
"'And for your dead bait for a pike, for that you may be taught
by one day's going a-fishing with me or any other body that
fishes for him; for the baiting of your hook with a dead
gudgeon or a roach and moving it up and down the water is too
easy a thing to take up any time to direct you to do it.
And yet, because I cut you short in that, I will commute for it
by telling you that that was told me for a secret. It is this:
Dissolve gum of ivy in oil of spike, and therewith anoint your
dead bait for a pike, and then cast it into a likely place, and
when it has lain a short time at the bottom, draw it towards
the top of the water and so up the stream, and it is more than
likely that you have a pike follow with more than common
eagerness. And some affirm that any bait anointed with the
marrow of the thigh-bone of a heron is a great temptation to
any fish.
"'These have not been tried by me, but told me by a friend of
mine, that pretended to do me a courtesy. But if this
direction to catch a pike thus do you no good, yet I am certain
this direction how to roast him when he is caught is choicely
good--'"
"Upon my soul, brother," interrupted my uncle Gervase, removing the
pipe from his mouth, "this reads like a direction for the taking of
Corsica."
CHAPTER VII.
THE COMPANY OF THE ROSE.
"Alway be merry if thou may,
But waste not thy good alway:
Have hat of floures fresh as May,
Chapelet of roses of Whitsonday
For sich array ne costneth but lyte."
_Romaunt of the Rose_.
_Somerset_. "Let him that is no coward
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me."
_First Part of King Henry VI_.
Early next morning I was returning, a rosebud in my hand, from the
neglected garden to the east of the house, when I spied my father
coming towards me along the terraces, and at once felt my ears
redden.
"Good morning, lad!" he hailed. "But where is mine?"
I turned back in silence and picked a bud for him. "So," said I,
"'twas you, sir, after all, that wrote the advertisement?"
"Hey?" he answered. "I? Certainly not. I noted it and sent you the
news-sheet in half a hope that you had been the advertiser."
"You were mistaken, sir."
He halted and rubbed his chin. "Then who the devil can he be, I
wonder? Well, we shall discover."
"You ride to Falmouth this morning?"
"We have an army to collect," he answered, gripping me not unkindly
by the shoulder.
We rode into Falmouth side by side in silence, Billy Priske following
by my father's command, and each with a red rose pinned to the flap
of his hat. Upon the way we talked, mainly of the Trappist Brothers,
and of Dom Basilio, who (it seemed) had at one time been an agent of
the British legation at Florence, and in particular had carried my
father's reports and instructions to and fro between Corsica and that
city, avoiding the vigilance of the Genoese.
"A subtle fellow," was my father's judgment, "and, as I gave him
credit, in the matter of conscience as null as Cellini himself: the
last man in the world to turn religious. But the longer you live the
more cause will you find to wonder at the divine spirit which bloweth
where it listeth. Take these Methodists, who are to preach in
Falmouth to-day. I have seen Wesley, and stood once for an hour
listening to him. For aught I could discover he had no great
eloquence. He said little that his audience might not have heard any
Sunday in their own churches. His voice was hoarse from overwork,
and his manner by no means winning. Yet I saw many notorious
ruffians sobbing about him like children: some even throwing
themselves on the ground and writhing, like the demoniacs of
Scripture. The secret was, he spoke with authority: and the secret
again was a certain kingly neglect of trifles--he appeared not to see
those signs by which other men judge their neighbours or themselves
to be past help. Or take these Trappists: Dom Basilio tells me that
more than half of them are ex-soldiers and rough at that. To be sure
I can understand why, having once turned religious, an old soldier
runs to the Trappist rule. He has been bred under discipline, and
has to rely on discipline. 'Tis what he understands, and the harder
he gets it the more good he feels himself getting--"
We were nearing the town by the way of Arwennack, and just here a
turn of the road brought us in sight of a whitewashed cottage and put
a period to my father's discourse, as a garden gate flew open and out
into the highway ran a lean young man with an angry woman in pursuit.
His shoulders were bent and he put up both hands to ward off her
clutch. But in the middle of the road she gripped him by the collar
and caught him two sound cuffs on the nape of the neck.
She turned as we rode up. "The villain!" she cried, still keeping
her grip. "Oh, protect me from such villains!"
"But, my good woman," remonstrated my father, reining up,
"it scarcely appears that you need protecting. Who is this man?"
"A thief, your honour! Didn't I catch him prowling into my garden?
And isn't it for him to say what his business was? I put it to your
honour"--here she caught the poor wretch another cuff--"what honest
business took him into my garden, and me left a widow-woman these
sixteen years?"
"Ai-ee!" cried the accused, still shielding his neck and cowering in
the dust--a thin ragged windlestraw of a youth, flaxen-headed,
hatchet-faced, with eyes set like a hare's. "Have pity on me sirs,
and take her off!"
"Let him stand up," my father commanded. "And you sir, tell me--
What were you seeking in this good woman's garden?"
"A rose, sir--hear my defence!--a rose only, a small rose!"
His voice was high and cracked, and he flung his hands out
extravagantly. "Oh, York and Lancaster--if you will excuse me,
gentlemen--that I should suffer this for a mere rose? The day only
just begun too! And why, sirs, was I seeking a rose? Ay, there's
the rub." He folded his arms dramatically and nodded at the woman.
"There's the gall and bitterness, the worm in the fruit, the peculiar
irony--if you'll allow me to say so--of this distressing affair.
Listen, madam! If I wanted a rose of you, 'twas for your whole sex's
sake: your sex's, madam--every one of whom was, up to five or six
months ago, the object with me of something very nearly allied to
worship."
"Lord help the creature!" cried the woman. "What's he telling
about? And what have you to do with my sex, young man? which is what
the Lord made it."
"It is _not_, madam. Make no mistake about it: 'twere blasphemy to
think so. But speaking generally, what I--as a man--have to do with
your sex is to protect it."
"A nice sort of protector you'd make!" she retorted, planting her
knuckles on her hips and eyeing him contemptuously.
"I am a beginner, madam, and have much to learn. But you shall not
discourage me from protecting you, though you deny me the rose which
was to have been my emblem. Every woman is a rose, madam, as says
the poet Dunbar--
"'Sweet rose of vertew and of gentilness,
Richest in bonty and in bewty clear
And every vertew that is werrit dear,
Except only that ye are merciless--"
"You take me? 'Merciless,' madam?"
"I don't understand a word," said she, puzzled and angry.
"He was a Scotsman: and you find it a far cry to Loch Awe.
Well, well--to resume--
"'Into your garth this day I did pursue--'"
"by 'garth' meaning 'garden': a good word, and why the devil it
should be obsolescent is more than I can tell you--"
But here my father cut him short. "My good Mrs. Ede," said he,
turning to the woman, "I believe this young man intended no harm to
you and very little to your garden. You are quits with him at any
rate. Take this shilling, step inside, and choose him a fair red
rose for the price and also in token of your forgiveness, while he
picks up his hat which is lying yonder in the dust."
"Hey?" The youth started back, for the first time perceiving the
badges in our hats. "Are you too, sirs, of this company of the
rose?" His face fell, but with an effort he recovered himself and
smiled.
"You are not disappointed, I hope?" inquired my father.
"Why--to tell you the truth, sir--I had looked for a rendezvous of
careless jolly fellows. For cavaliers of your quality it never
occurred to me to bargain." He held up a flap of his ragged coat and
shook it ruefully.
My father frowned. "And I, sir, am disappointed. A moment since I
took you for an original; but it appears you share our common English
vice of looking at the world like a lackey."
"I, sir?" The young man waved a hand. "I am original? Give me
leave to assure you that this island contains no more servile
tradesman. Why, my lord--for I take it I speak to a gentleman of
title?--"
"Of the very humblest, sir. I am a plain knight bachelor."
The original cringed elaborately, rubbing his hands. "A title is a
title. Well, sir, as I was about to say, I worship a lord, but my
whole soul is bound up in a ledger: and hence (so to speak) these
tears: hence the disreputable garb in which you behold me. If I may
walk beside you, sir, after this good woman has fetched me the rose--
thank you, madam--and provided me with a pin from the _chevaux de
frise_ in her bodice--and again, madam, I thank you: you wear the
very cuirass of matronly virtue--I should enjoy, sir, to tell you my
history. It is a somewhat curious one."
"I feel sure, sir"--my father bowed to him from the saddle--"it will
lose nothing in the telling."
The young man, having fastened the rose in his hat, bade adieu to his
late assailant with a bow; waved a hand to her; lifted his hat a
second time; turned after us and, falling into stride by my father's
stirrup, forthwith plunged into his story.
THE TRAVELS OF PHINEAS FETT.
"My name, sir, is Phineas Fett--"
He paused. "I don't know how it may strike you: but in my infant
ears it ever seemed to forebode something in the Admiralty--a
comfortable post, carrying no fame with it, but moderately lucrative.
In wilder flights my fancy has hovered over the Pipe Office (Addison,
sir, was a fine writer; though a bit of a prig, between you and me)."
"There was a Phineas Pett, a great shipbuilder for the Navy in King
Charles the Second's time. I believe, too, he had a son christened
after him, who became a commissioner of the Navy."
"You don't say so! The mere accident of a letter . . . but it proves
the accuracy of our childish instincts. A commissionership--whatever
the duties it may carry--would be the very thing, or a
storekeepership, with a number of ledgers: it being understood that
shipping formed my background, in what I believe is nautically termed
the offing. I know not what exact distance constitutes an offing.
My imagination ever placed it within sight and sufficiently near the
scene of my occupation to pervade it with an odour of hemp and tar."
He paused again, glanced up at my father, and--on a nod of
encouragement--continued--
"The nuisance is, I was born in the Midlands--to be precise, at West
Bromicheham--the son of a well-to-do manufacturer of artificial
jewellery. The only whiff of the brine that ever penetrated my
father's office came wafted through an off-channel of his trade.
He did an intermittent business in the gilding of small idols, to be
shipped overseas and traded as objects of worship among the negroes
of the American plantations. Jewellery, however, was his stand-by.
In the manufacture of meretricious ware he had a plausibility
amounting to genius, in the disposing of it a talent for hard
bargains; and the two together had landed him in affluence.
Well, sir, being headed off my boyhood's dream by the geographical
inconvenience of Warwickshire--for a lad may run away to be a sailor,
sir, but the devil take me if ever I heard of one running off to be a
supercargo, and even this lay a bit beyond my ambition--I recoiled
upon a passion to enter my father's business and increase the already
tidy patrimonial pile.
"But here comes in the cross of my destiny. My father, sir, had
secretly cherished dreams of raising me above his own station.
To him a gentleman--and he ridiculously hoped to make me one--was a
fellow above working for his living. He scoffed at my enthusiasm for
trade, and at length he sent for me and in tones that brooked no
denial commanded me to learn the violin.
"Never shall I forget the chill of heart with which I received that
fatal mandate. I have no ear for music, sir. In tenderer years
indeed I had made essay upon the Jew's harp, but had relinquished it
without a sigh.
"'The violin!' I cried, though the words choked me. 'Father,
anything but that! If it were the violoncello, now--'
"But he cut me short in cold incisive accents. 'The violin, or you
are no son of mine.'
"I fled from the house, my home no longer. On the way to the front
door I had sufficient presence of mind, and no more, to make a
_detour_ to the larder and possess myself of the longest joint; which
my heated judgment, confusing temporal with linear measurement,
commended to me as the most lasting. It proved to be a shin of beef:
unnutritious except for soup (and I carried no tureen), useless as an
object of barter. With this and two half-crowns in my pocket I
slammed the front-door behind me and faced the future."
Mr. Fett paused impressively.
"And you call me an original, sir!" he went on in accents of
reproach; "me, who started in life with two half-crowns in my pocket,
the conventional outfit for a career of commercial success!"
"They have carried you all the way to Falmouth!"
"The one of them carried me so far as to Coventry, sir: where,
finding a fair in progress as I passed through the town, and falling
in with three bridesmaids who had missed their wedding-party in the
crowd, I spent the other in treating them to the hobby-horses at one
halfpenny a ride. Four halfpennies--there were four of us--make
twopence, and two's into thirty are fifteen rides; a bold investment
of capital, and undertaken (I will confess it) not only to solace the
fair ones but to ingratiate myself with the fellow who turned the
handle of the machine. To him I applied for a job. He had none to
offer, but introduced me to a company of strolling players who (as
fortune would have it) were on the point of presenting _Hamlet_ with
a _dramatis_ personae decimated by Coventry ale. They cast me for
'Polonius' and some other odds and ends. You may remember, sir, that
at one point the Prince of Denmark is instructed to 'enter reading.'
That stage direction I caught at, and by a happy 'improvisation'
spread it over the entire play. Not as 'Polonius' only, but as
`Bernardo' upon the midnight platform, as 'Osric,' as 'Fortinbras,'
as the 'Second Gravedigger,' as one of the odd Players--always I
entered reading. In my great scene with the Prince we entered
reading together. They killed me, still reading, behind the arras;
and at a late hour I supped with the company on Irish stew; for,
incensed by these novelties, the audience had raided a greengrocer's
shop between the third and fourth acts and thereafter rained their
criticism upon me in the form of cabbages and various esculent roots
which we collected each time the curtain fell.
"Every cloud, sir, has a silver lining. I continued long enough with
this company to learn that in our country an actor need never die of
scurvy. But I weary you with my adventures, of which indeed I am yet
in the first chapter."
"You shall rehearse them on another occasion. But will you at least
tell us how you came to Falmouth?"
"Why, in the simplest manner in the world. A fortnight since I
happened to be sitting in the stocks, in the absurd but accursed town
of Bovey Tracey in Devonshire. My companion--for the machine
discommodated two--was a fiddler, convicted (like myself) of
vagrancy; a bottle-nosed man, who took the situation with such phlegm
as only experience can breed, and munched a sausage under the
commonalty's gaze. 'Good Lord,' said I to myself, eyeing him,
'and to think that he with my chances, or I with his taste for music,
might be driving at this moment in a coach and pair!'
"'Sir,' said I, 'are you attached to that instrument of yours?'
'So deeply,' he answered, 'that, like Nero, I could fiddle if Bovey
Tracey were burning at this moment.' 'You can perform on it
creditably?' I asked. 'In a fashion to bring tears to your eyes,' he
answered me, and offered to prove his words. 'Not for worlds,' said
I; 'but it grieves me to think how Fortune distributes her favours.'
I told him of my father. 'I should like to make the acquaintance of
such a man,' said he. 'You shall,' said I; and fetching a pencil and
a scrap of paper out of my pocket, I wrote as follows:--
"_To Mr. Jonathan Fett, Manufacturer of Flams,
W. Bromicheham_."
"The Public Stocks, Bovey Tracey, Devon.
June 21st (longest day)."
"DEAR FATHER,
Adopt bearer, in lieu of
Your affectionate son,
PHINEAS."
"The fiddler at first suspected a jest: but on my repeated assurances
took the letter thankfully, and at parting, on our release, pressed
on me the end of his sausage wrapped in a piece of newspaper.
I ate the sausage moodily and was about to throw the paper away when
my eye caught sight of an advertisement in the torn left-hand corner.
I read it, and my mind was made up. I am here, and (thanks to you,
sir) with a rose in my hat."
By the time Mr. Fett concluded his narrative we had reached the
outskirts of the town, and found ourselves in a traffic which,
converging upon the Market Strand from every side-street and alley,
at once carried us along with it and constrained us to a walking
pace. My father, finding the throng on the Market Strand too dense
for our horses, turned aside to the Three Cups Inn across the street,
gave them over to the ostler, and led us upstairs to a window which
overlooked the gathering.
The Market Strand at Falmouth is an open oblong space, not very wide,
leading off the main street to the water's edge, and terminating in
steps where as a rule the watermen wait to take off passengers to the
Packets. A lamp-post stands in the middle of it, and by the base of
this the preachers--a grey-headed man and two women in ugly bonnets--
were already assembled, with but a foot or two dividing them from the
crowd. Close behind the lamp-post stood a knot of men conversing
together one of whom stepped forward for a word with the grey-headed
preacher. He wore a rose in his hat, and at sight of him my heart
gave a wild incredulous leap. It was Nat Fiennes!
I pushed past my father and flung the open window still wider.
The grey-haired preacher had opened the Bible in his hand and was
climbing the stone base of the lamp-post when a handful of filth
struck the back of the book and bespattered his face. I saw Nat whip
out his sword and swing about angrily in the direction of the shot,
while the two women laid hands on either arm to check him; and at the
same moment my father spoke up sharply in my ear.
"Tumble out, lad," he commanded. "We are in bare time."
I vaulted over the window-ledge and dropped into the street; my
father after me, and Mr. Fett and Billy close behind. Indeed, that
first shot had but given the signal for a general engagement; and as
we picked ourselves up and thrust our way into the crowd, a whole
volley of filth bespattered the group of Methodists. In particular I
noted the man with whom Nat Fiennes, a minute since, had been
conversing--a little bald-headed fellow of about fifty-five or sixty,
in a suit of black which, even at thirty paces distant, showed rusty
in the sunshine. An egg had broken against his forehead, and the
yellow of it trickled down over his eyes; yet he stood, hat in hand,
neither yielding pace nor offering to resist. Nat, less patient, had
made a rush upon the crowd, which had closed around and swallowed him
from sight. By its violent swaying he was giving it something to
digest. One of the two women shrank terrified by the base of the
lamp-post. The other--a virago to look at, with eyes that glared
from under the pent of her black bonnet--had pulled the grey-headed
preacher down by his coat-tails, and, mounting in his room, clung
with an arm around the lamp-post and defied the persecutors.
"Why am I here, friends?" she challenged them. "O generation of
vipers, why am I here? Answer me, you men of Belial--you, whose
fathers slew the prophets! Because I glory to suffer for the right;
because to turn the other cheek is a Christian's duty, and as a
Christian woman I'll turn it though you were twice the number, and
not be afraid what man can do unto me."
Now, my father was well known in Falmouth and pretty generally held
in awe. At sight of him advancing, the throng fell back and gave us
passage in a sudden lull which reached even to where Nat Fiennes
struggled in the grasp of a dozen longshoremen who were hailing him
to the quay's edge, to fling him over. He broke loose, and before
they could seize him again came staggering back, panting and
dishevelled.
"Prosper!" he cried, catching sight of me, and grinning delightedly
all over his muddied face. "I knew you would come! And your father,
too? Splendid, lad, splendid?"
"Ye men of Falmouth"--the woman by the lamp-post lifted her voice
more shrilly--"what shall I testify of the hardness of your hearts?
Shall I testify that your Mayor sending his crier round, has
threatened to whip us through Falmouth streets at the cart-tail?
Shall I testify--"
But here my father lifted a hand. "Gently, madam; gently, I am not
defending his Worship if he issued any such proclamation; but 'tis an
ancient punishment for scolds, and I advise you to lend him no colour
of excuse."
"And who may _you_ be, sir?" she demanded, looking down, angry, but
checked in spite of herself by my father's air of authority.
"One," he answered, "who has come to see fair play, and who has--as
you may see--for the moment some little influence with this rabble.
I will continue to exert it while I can, if you on your part will
forbear to provoke; for the tongue, madam, has its missiles as well
as the hands."
"I thank you, sir," said the grey-headed preacher, stepping forward
and thrusting a book into my father's hands. "We had best begin with
a hymn, I think. I have some experience of the softening power of
music on these occasions."
"We will sing," announced the woman, "that beautiful hymn beginning,
'Into a world of ruffians sent.' Common metre, my friends, and
Sister Tresize will give the pitch:
"Into a world of ruffians sent,
I walk on hostile ground--"
My father bared his head and opened the hymn-book; the rest of us,
bareheaded too, ranged ourselves beside him; and so we stood facing
the mob while the verses were sung in comparative quiet. The words
might be provocative, but few heard them. The tune commanded an
audience, as in Cornwall a tune usually will. The true secret of the
spell, however, lay in my father's presence and bearing. A British
crowd does not easily attack one whom it knows as a neighbour and
born superior; and it paid homage now to one who, having earned it
all his life, carelessly took it for granted.
"Begad, sir," said Mr. Fett in my ear, "and the books say that the
feudal system is dead in England! Why, here's the very flower of it!
Damme, though, the old gentleman is splendid; superlative, sir;
it's ten to one against Coriolanus, and no takers. Between
ourselves, Coriolanus was a pretty fellow, but talked too much.
Phocion, sir? Did I hear you mention Phocion?"
"You did not," I answered.
"And quite right," said he; "with your father running, I wouldn't
back Phocion for a place. All the same," Mr. Fett admitted, "this is
what Mr. Gray of Peterhouse, Cambridge, would call a fearful joy, and
I'd be thankful for a distant prospect of the way out of it."
"Indeed, sir"--my father, overhearing this, turned to him affably--
"you touch the weak spot. For the moment I see no way out of the
situation, nor any chance but to prolong it; and even this," he
added, "will not be easy unless the lady on the lamp-post sensibly
alters the tone of her discourse."
Indeed, at the conclusion of the singing she had started again to
address the crowd, albeit--acting on my father's hint--in more
moderate tones, and even, as I thought, somewhat tepidly. Her theme
was what she called convictions of sin, of which by her own account
she had wrestled with a surprising quantity; but in the rehearsal of
them, though fluent, she seemed to lose heart as her hearers relaxed
their attention.
"Confound the woman!" grumbled my father. "She had done better,
after all, to continue frantic. The crowd came to be amused, and is
growing restive again."
"Sir," interposed Mr. Fett, "give me leave to assure you that an
audience may be amused and yet throw things. Were this the time and
place for reminiscences, I could tell you a tale of Stony Stratford
(appropriately so-called, sir), where, as 'Juba' in Mr. Addison's
tragedy of _Cato_, for two hours I piled the Pelion of passion upon
the Ossa of elocutionary correctness, still without surmounting the
zone of plant life; which in the Arts, sir, must extend higher than
geographers concede. And yet I evoked laughter; from which I may
conclude that my efforts amused. The great Demosthenes, sir,
practised declamation with his mouth full of pebbles--for retaliatory
purposes, I have sometimes thought."
Here my father, who had been paying no attention to Mr. Fett's
discourse, interrupted it with a sharp but joyful exclamation; and
glancing towards him I saw his face clear of anxiety.
"We are safe," he announced quietly, nodding in the direction of the
Three Cups. "What we wanted was a fool, and we have found him."
CHAPTER VIII.
TRIBULATIONS OF A MAYOR
"Like the Mayor of Falmouth, who thanked God when the Town Jail
was enlarged."--_Old Byword_.
His nod was levelled at a horseman who had ridden down the street and
was pressing upon the outskirts of the crowd: and this was no less a
dignitary than the Mayor of Falmouth, preceded on foot by a beadle
and two mace-bearers, all three of them shouting "Way! Make way for
the Mayor!" with such effect that in less than half a minute the
crowd had divided itself to form a lane for them.
"Eh? eh? What is this? What is the meaning of all this?" demanded
his Worship, magisterially, as, having drawn rein, he fumbled in his
tail pocket, drew forth a pair of horn spectacles, adjusted them on
his nose, and glared round upon the throng.
"That, sir," answered my father, stepping forward, "is what we are
waiting to learn."
"Sir John Constantine?" The Mayor bowed from his saddle. "You will
pardon me, Sir John, that for the moment I missed to recognize you.
The fact is, I suffer, Sir John, from some--er--shortness of sight: a
grave inconvenience, at times, to one in my position."
"Indeed?" said my father, gravely. "And yet, as I have heard, 'tis a
malady most incident to borough magistrates."
"You don't say so?" The Mayor considered this for a moment.
"The visitations of Providence are indeed inscrutable, Sir John.
It would give me pleasure to discuss them with you, on some--er--more
suitable occasion, if I might have the honour. But as I was about to
say, I am delighted to see you, Sir John: your presence here will
strengthen my hands in dealing with this--er--unlawful assembly."
"_Is_ this an unlawful assembly?" my father asked.
"It is worse, Sir John; it is far worse. I have been studying the
law, and the law admits of no dubiety. It is unlawful assembly where
three or more persons meet together to carry out some private
enterprise in circumstances calculated to excite alarm. Mark those
words, Sir John--" some private enterprise. "When the enterprise is
not private but meant to redress a public grievance, or to reform
religion, the offence becomes high treason."
"Does the law indeed say so?"
"It does, Sir John. The law, let me tell you, is very fierce against
any reforming of religion. Nay more, Sir John, under the first of
King George the First, statute two--I forget what chapter--by the Act
commonly called the Riot Act, it is enacted that if a dozen or more
go about reforming of religion or otherwise upsetting the public
peace and refuse to go about their business within the space of one
hour after I tell 'em to, the same becomes felony without benefit of
clergy."
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Billy Priske, pulling off his hat and eyeing
the rose in its band.
"And further," his Worship continued, "any man wearing the badge or
ensign of the rioters shall himself be considered a rioter without
benefit of clergy."
All this while the crowd had been pressing closer and closer upon us,
under compulsion (as it seemed) of reinforcements from the waterside,
the purlieus of the Market Strand being, by now, so crowded that men
and women were crying out for room. At this moment, glancing across
the square, I was puzzled to see a woman leaning forth from a
first-floor window and dropping handfuls of artificial flowers upon
the heads of the throng. While I watched, she retired--her hands
being empty--came back with a band-box, and scattered its contents
broadcast, pausing to blow a kiss towards the Mayor.
I plucked my father's sleeve to call his attention to this; but he
and the Mayor were engaged in argument, his Worship maintaining that
the Methodists--and my father that their assailants--were the prime
disturbers of the peace.
"And how, pray," asked my father, "are these poor women to disperse,
if your ruffians won't let 'em?"
"As to that, sir, you shall see," promised the Mayor, and turned to
the town crier. "John Sprott, call silence. Make as much noise
about it as you can, John Sprott. And you, Nandy Daddo, catch hold
of my horse's bridle here."
He rose in his stirrups and, searching again in his tail-pocket, drew
forth a roll of paper.
"Silence!" bawled the crier.
"Louder, if you please, John Sprott: louder, if you can manage it!
And say 'In the name of King George,' John Sprott; and wind up with
'God save the King.' For without 'God save the King' 'tis no riot,
and a man cannot be hanged for it. So be very particular to say
'God save the King,' John Sprott, and put 'em all in the wrong."
John Sprott bawled again, and this time achieved the whole formula.
"That's better, John Sprott. And you--" his Worship turned upon the
Methodists, "you just listen to this, now--"
"_Our sovereign Lord the King--_"
Here, as the Methodists stood before him with folded hands, a lump of
filth flew past the Mayor's ear and bespattered the lamp-post.
"Damme, who did that?" his Worship demanded. "John Sprott, who threw
that muck?"
"I don't know the man's name, your Worship: but he's yonder, there,
in a striped shirt open at the neck, with a little round hat on the
back of his head; and, what's more, I see'd him do it."
"Then take down his description, John Sprott, and write that at the
words 'Our sovereign Lord' he shied a lump of muck."
John Sprott pulled out a note-book and entered the offence.
"And after 'muck,' John Sprott, write 'God save the King.' I don't
know that 'tis necessary, but you'll be on the safe side."
His Worship unfolded the proclamation again, cleared his throat, and
resumed:
"_Our sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons,
being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves and peacefully to
depart to their habitations or to their lawful business, upon the
pains contained in the Act made in the first year of George the First
for preventing--_"
A handful of more or less liquid mud here took him on the nape of the
neck and splashed over the paper which he held in both hands.
"Arrest that man!" he shouted, bouncing about in a fury. At the same
moment my father gripped my elbow as a volley of missiles darkened
the air, and we fell back--all the Company of the Rose--shoulder to
shoulder, to protect the Methodists, as a small but solid phalanx of
men came driving through the crowd with mischief in their faces.
"But wait awhile! wait awhile!" called out Billy Priske, as my
father plucked out his sword. "These be no enemies, master, to us or
the Methodists, but honest sea-fardingers--packet-men all--and, look
you, with roses in their hats!"
"Roses? Faith, and so they have!" cried my father, lowering his
guard. "But what the devil, then, is the meaning of it?"
He was answered on the moment. The official whom his Worship called
Nandy Daddo had made a rush into the crowd, charging it with his mace
as with a battering-ram, and was in the act of clutching the man who
had thrown the filth, when the phalanx of packet-men broke through
and bore him down. A moment later I saw his gold-laced hat fly
skimming over the heads of the throng, and his mace wrenched from him
and held aloft in the hands of a red-faced man, who flourished it
twice and rushed upon the Mayor, shouting at the same time with all
his lungs: "Townshends! This way, Townshends!" whereat the
packet-men cheered and pressed after him, driving the crowd of
Falmouth to right and left.
Clearly what mischief they meant was intended for the Mayor: and the
Mayor, for a short-sighted man, detected this very promptly. Also he
showed surprising agility in tumbling out of his saddle; which he had
scarcely done before the crupper resounded with a whack, of which one
of the borough maces bears an eloquent dent to this day.
The Mayor, catching his toe in the stirrup as he slipped off,
staggered and fell at our feet. But the body of his horse,
interposed between him and the rioters, protected him for an instant,
and in that instant my father and Nat Fiennes dragged him up and
thrust him to the rear while we faced the assault. For now, and
without a word said, the Methodists were forgotten, and we of the
Rose were standing for law and order against this other company of
the Rose, of whose quarrel we knew nothing at all.
Our attitude indeed, and the sight of drawn swords (to oppose which
they had no weapons but short cudgels), appeared to take them aback
for the moment. The press, however, closing on us, as we backed to
cover the Mayor's retreat, offered less and less occasion for sword
play; and, the seamen still advancing and outnumbering us by about
three to one, the whole affair began to wear an ugly look.
At this juncture relief came to us in the strangest fashion. I had
clean forgotten the little Methodist man in black; whom, to be sure,
I had no occasion to remember but for the quiet resolution of his
carriage as he had stood with the burst egg trickling over his face.
But now, to the surprise of us all, he sprang forward upon the second
mace-bearer, snatched the mace from his hand and laid about him in a
sudden frenzy; at the first blow, delivered at unawares, catching the
ringleader on the crown and felling him like an ox. For a second,
perhaps, he stared, amazed at his own prowess, and with that the lust
of battle seized him.
He rained blows; yet with cunning, running forth and back into our
ranks as each was delivered; and between the blows he capered,
uttering shrill inarticulate cries. This diversion indeed saved us.
For the rabble, pressing up to see the fun, left a space more or less
clear on the far side of the Market Strand, and for this space we
stampeded, dragging the Mayor along with us.
The next thing I remember was fighting side by side with Nat before a
door beneath the window where I had seen the woman throwing down her
handfuls of artificial flowers. The lower windows were barred, but
the door stood open; and we fought to defend it whilst my father
lifted the Mayor of Falmouth by his coat-collar and the seat of his
breeches and flung him inside. Then we too backed and, ducking
indoors under the arms of the little man in black--who stood on the
step swinging the borough mace as though to scythe off the head of
any one who approached within five feet of it--seized him by the
coat-tails, dragged him inside and, slamming to the door (which shut
with two flaps), locked and bolted it and leant against it with all
our weight.
Yet a common house-door is but a flimsy barricade against a mob,
especially if that mob be led by five-and-twenty stout-bodied seaman.
We had shut it merely to gain time, and when the cudgels outside
began to play tattoo upon its upper panels I looked for no more than
a minute's respite at the best.
It puzzled me therefore when--and immediately upon two ugly blows
that had well-nigh shaken the lock from its fastenings--the shouting
suddenly subsided into a confused hubbub of voices, followed by a
clang and rattle of arms upon the cobblestones. This last sound
appeared to hush the others into silence. I stood listening, with my
hip pressed against the lock to hold it firm against the next
concussion. None came: but presently some one rapped with his
knuckles on the upper panel and a voice, authoritative but civil
enough, challenged us in the name of King George to open.
To this I had almost answered bidding him go to the devil, when a
damsel put her head over the stair-rail of the landing above and
called down to us to obey and open at once: and looking up in the dim
light of the passage I recognized her for the one who had scattered
the flowers, just now, to the rioters.
"Pardon me," said I, "but how shall I know you are not playing us a
trick?"
"My good child," she replied, "open the door and don't stand arguing.
The riot is over and the square full of military. The person who
knocks is Captain Bright of the Pendennis Garrison. If you don't
believe me, step upstairs here and look out of window."
"My father--" I began.
"Your father is right enough, and so is that fool of a Mayor--or will
be when he has drunk down a glass of cordial."
Nevertheless I would not obey her until I had sent Nat Fiennes
upstairs to look; who within a minute called over the stair-head that
the woman told the truth and I had my father's leave to open.
Thereupon I pulled open the upper flap of the door, and stood
blinking at a tall officer in gorgeous regimentals.
"Hullo!" said he. "Good morning!"
"Good morning!" said I. "And forgive me that I kept you waiting."
"Don't mention it," said he very affably. "My fault entirely, for
coming late; or rather the Mayor's, who sent word that we weren't
needed. I took the liberty to doubt this as soon as my sentries
reported that a couple of boats' crews were putting ashore from the
_Townshend_ packet: and here we are in consequence. Got him safe?"
"The Mayor?" said I. "Yes, I believe he is upstairs at this moment,
drinking brandy-and-water and pulling himself together."
The Captain grinned amiably. "Sorry to disturb him," said he;
"but the mob is threatening to burn his house, and I'd best take him
along to read the Riot Act and put things ship-shape."
"He has read it already, or some part of it."
"Some part of it won't do. He must read the whole proclamation, not
forgetting 'God save the King.'"
"If you can find the paper," said I, "there's a lump of mud on it,
marking the place where he left off."
The Captain grinned again. "I doubt he'll have to begin afresh after
breaking off to drink brandy-and-water with Moll Whiteaway. For a
chief magistrate that will need some explaining. And yet," mused the
Captain, as he stepped into the passage, "you may have done him a
better turn than ever you guessed; for, when the mob sees the humour
of it, belike it'll be more for laughing than setting fire to his
house."
"But who is Moll Whiteaway?" I asked.
He stared at me. "You mean to say you didn't know?" he asked slowly.
"You didn't bring him here for a joke?"
"A joke?" I echoed. "A mighty queer joke, sir, you'd have thought
it, if your men had been five minutes earlier."
He leaned back against the wall of the passage. "And you brought him
here _by accident?_ Well, if this don't beat cock-fighting!"
"But who is this Moll Whiteaway?" I repeated.
The question again seemed to take his breath away. For answer he
could only point to a small brass plate in the lower flap of the
door; and, stooping, I read: _Miss Whiteaway, Milliner, Modes and
Robes_.
"Oh!" said I. "That accounts for the band-box of flowers."
"Does it?" he asked.
"She flung them out of window to the packet-men."
"Which, doubtless, seemed to you an everyday proceeding--just a
milliner's usual way of getting rid of her summer stock. My good
young sir, did you ever hear tell of a 'troacher'? Nay, spare that
ingenuous blush: Moll is a loose fish, but I mean less than your
modesty suspects. A 'troacher' is a kind of female smuggler that
disposes of the goods the packet-men bring home in their bunks; and
Moll Whiteaway is the head of the profession in Falmouth. Now, our
worthy Mayor took oath the other day to put down this smuggling on
board the packets; and he began yesterday with the _Townshend_.
He and the Port Searcher swept the ship, sir. They dug Portuguese
brandy in kegs out of the seamen's beds and parcels of silk out of
the very beams. They shook two case-bottles out of the chaplain's
breeches, which must have galled him sorely in his devotions.
They netted close on two hundred pounds' worth of contraband in the
fo'c's'le alone--"
"Good Heavens!" I interjected. "And as the riot began he was calling
himself short-sighted!"
Captain Bright laughed, clapped me on the shoulder and led the way
upstairs, where (strange to say) we found the Mayor again deploring
his defective vision. He lay in an easy-chair amid an army of
band-boxes, bonnet stands, and dummies representing the female
figure; and sipped Miss Whiteaway's brandy while he discoursed in
broken sentences to an audience consisting of that lady, my father,
Nat Fiennes, Mr. Fett, and the little man in black (who, by the way,
did not appear to be listening, but stood and pondered the borough
mace, which he held in his hands, turning it over and examining the
dents).
"It is a great drawback, Sir John--a great drawback," his Worship
lamented. "A man in my position, sir, should have the eye of an
eagle; instead of which on all public occasions I have to rely on
John Sprott. My good woman"--he turned to Miss Whiteaway--"would you
mind taking a glance out of window and telling me what has become of
John Sprott?"
"He's down below under protection of the soldiers," announced Miss
Whiteaway; "and no harm done but his hat lost and his gown split up
the back."
"I shall never have the same confidence in John Sprott. He takes
altogether too sanguine a view of human nature. Why, only last
November--you remember the great gale of November the 1st, Sir John?
I was very active in burying the poor bodies brought ashore next day
and for several days after; for, as you remember, a couple of
Indymen dragged their anchors and broke up under Pendennis Battery:
and John Sprott said to me in the most assured way, 'The town'll
never forget your kindness, sir. You mark my words,' he said,
'this here action will stand you upon the pinnacles of honour till
you and me, if I may respectfully say it, sit down together in the
land of marrow and fatness.' After that you'd have thought a man
might count on some popularity. But what happened? A day or two
later--that is to say, on November the 5th--I was sitting in my shop
with a magnifying glass in my eye, cleaning out a customer's watch,
when in walked half a dozen boys carrying a man's body between 'em.
You could tell that life was extinct by the way his head hung back
and his legs trailed limp on the floor as they brought him in, and
his face looked to me terribly swollen and discoloured.
'Dear, dear!' said I. 'What? Another poor soul? Take him up to the
mortewary, that's good boys,' I said; 'and you shall have twopence
apiece out of the poor-box.' How d'ye think they answered me?
They bust out a-laughing, and cries one: 'If you please, sir, 'tis
meant for _you!_ 'Tis the fifth of November, and we'm goin' to burn
you in effigy.' I chased 'em out of the shop, and later on in the
day I spoke to John Sprott about it. 'Well now,' said John Sprott,'
I passed a lot of boys just now, burning a guy at the top of the
Moor, and I had my suspicions; but the thing hadn't a feature of
yours to take hold on, barrin' the size of its feet.' And that's
what you call popularity!" wound up the Mayor with bitterness.
"That's what a man gets for rising early and lying down late to serve
his country!"
"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor," put in Captain Bright, "but they are
threatening to burn worse than your effigy fact I heard some talk of
setting fire to your house and shop. Nay," he went on as the Mayor
bounced up to his feet, "there's no real cause for alarm. I have
sent on my lieutenant with fifty men to keep the mob on the move, and
have stationed a dozen outside here to escort you home."
"The Riot Act--where's my Riot Act?" cried his Worship, searching his
pockets. "I never read out 'God save the King,' and without
'God save the King' a man may burn all my valybles and make turbulent
gestures and show of arms, and harry and murder to the detriment of
the public peace, and refuse to move on when requested, and all the
time in the eyes of the law be a babe unborn. Where's the Riot Act,
I say? for without it I'm a lost man and good-bye to Falmouth!"
"Then 'tis lucky that I came provided with a copy." Captain Bright
produced a paper from the breast of his tunic.
The Mayor took it with trembling hands. "Why, 'tis a duplicity!" he
cried. "A very duplicity! and, what's more, printed in the same
language word for word." He caught the mace from the little man in
black. "Lead the way, Captain!"
CHAPTER IX.
I ENLIST AN ARMY.
"If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet."
_Sir John Falstaff_.
My father turned to me as they descended the stair. "This is all
very well, lad," said he, "but we have yet to find our army.
After the murder of Julius Caesar, now--"
"I did enact Julius Caesar once," quoted Mr. Fett, in parenthesis.
"I was killed i' the capitol; Brutus killed me."
My father frowned. "After the murder of Julius Caesar, when the mob
for two days had Rome at their mercy, I have read somewhere that two
men appeared out of nowhere, and put themselves at the head of the
rioters. None knew them; but so boldly they comported themselves,
heading the charges, marshalling the ranks, here throwing up
barricades, there plucking down doors and gates, breaking open the
prisons and setting fire to private houses, that presently the
whisper spread they were Castor and Pollux; till, at length, falling
into the hands of the aediles, these _dioscuri_ were found to be two
poor lunatics escaped from a house of detention. If we could
discover another such pair among the mob, now!"
"We are wasting time here for certain," said I. "And where, by the
way, is Billy Priske?"
"If you waste your time upstairs here, gentlemen," said Miss
Whiteaway, "belike you may do better in the parlour, where I had
prepared for some friends of mine with two-three chickens and a ham."
"Ah, to be sure," said I; "the packet-men!"
"Never you worry, young sir," she answered tartly, "so long as they
don't mind eating after their betters. And as for your man Priske, I
saw him twenty minutes ago escape towards Church Street with the
Methodists."
"Hang it!" put in Nat Fiennes, "if I hadn't clean forgotten the
Methodists!"
"We left them scurvily," said I; "every Jack and Jill of them but our
friend here." I nodded toward the little man in black. "And he not
only saved himself, but was half the battle."
The little man seemed to come out of himself with a start, and gazed
from one to another of us perplexedly.
"Excuse me, gentlemen." He drew himself up with dignity.
"Do my ears deceive me, or are you mistaking me for a Methodist?"
"Indeed, and are you not, sir?" asked my father. "Why, good God,
gentlemen!--if you'll excuse me--but I'm the parish clerk of
Axminster!"
My father recovered himself with a bow. "In Devon?" he asked
gravely, after a pause in which our silence paid tribute to the
announcement.
"In Devon, sir; a county remarkable for its attachment to the
principles of the Church of England. And that I should have lived to
be mistaken for a Methodist!"
"But, surely, John Wesley himself is a Clerk in Holy Orders? and, I
have heard, a great stickler for the Church's authority."
"He may say so, sir," answered the little man, darkly. "He may say
so. But, if he means it, why does he go about encouraging such a
low class of people? A man, sir, is known by the company he keeps."
"Is that in the Bible?" my father inquired. "I seem to remember, on
the contrary, that in the matter of consorting with publicans and
sinners--"
"It won't work, sir. It has been tried in Axminster before now, and
you may take my word for it that it won't work. You mustn't suppose,
gentlemen," he went on, including us all in the argument, "you
mustn't take me for one of those parrot-Christians who just echo what
they hear in the pulpits on Sundays. I _think_ about these things;
and I find that your extreme doctrines may do all very well for the
East and for hot countries where you can go about half-naked and
nobody takes any notice; but the Church of England, as its name
implies, is the only Church for England. A truly Christian Church,
gentlemen, because it selects its doctrines from the Gospels; and
English, sir, to the core, because it selects 'em with a special view
to the needs of our beloved country. And what (if I may so put it)
is the basis of that selection? The same, sirs, which we all admit
to be the basis of England's welfare and the foundation of her
society; in other words, the land. The land, gentlemen, is solid;
and our reformed religion (say what you will, I am not denying that
it has, and will ever have, its detractors) is the religion for solid
Englishmen."
My father put out a hand and arrested Mr. Fett, who had been
regarding the speaker with joyful admiration, and at this point made
a movement to embrace him.
"I must have his name!" murmured Mr. Fett. "He shall at least tell
us his name!"
"Badcock, sir; Ebenezer Badcock," answered the little man, producing
a black-edged visiting-card.
"But," urged my father, "you must forgive us, Mr. Badcock, if we find
it hard to reconcile your conduct this morning with these sentiments,
on which, for the moment, I offer no comment except that they are
admirably expressed. What song the Sirens sang, Mr. Badcock, or what
name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, are questions
(as Sir Thomas Browne observes) not beyond conjecture, albeit the
Emperor Tiberius posed his grammarians with 'em. But when a man
openly champions street-preaching, and goes on to lay about him with
a mace--"
"Ah!" exclaimed Mr. Badcock, with sudden eagerness. "And what--by
the way, sir--did you think of that performance?"
"Why, to be sure, you behaved valiantly."
The little man blushed with pleasure. "You really think so?
It struck you in that light, did it? Well, now I am glad--yes, sir,
and proud--to hear that opinion; because, to tell you the truth, I
thought it pretty fair myself. The fact is, gentlemen, I wasn't
altogether sure what my behaviour would be at the critical moment.
You may deem it strange that a man should arrive at my time of life
without being sure whether he's a coward or a brave man; but
Axminster--if you knew the place--affords few opportunities for that
sort of thing."
"Allow us to reassure you, then," said my father. "But there remains
the question, why you did it?"
Mr. Badcock rubbed his hands. "Appearances were against me, I'll
allow," he answered, with a bashful chuckle; "but you may set it down
to tchivalry. We all have our weaknesses, I hope, sir; and tchivalry
is mine."
"Chivalry?" echoed my father.
"You spell it with an 's'? Excuse me; whatever schooling I have
picked up has been at odd times; but I am always open to correction,
I thank the Lord."
"But why call it a weakness, Mr. Badcock?"
"Call it a hobby; call it what you like. _I_ look upon it as a debt,
sir, due to the memory of my late wife. An admirable woman, sir, and
by name Artemisia; which, I have sometimes thought, may partially
account for it. Allow me, gentlemen." He drew a small shagreen case
from his breast-pocket, opened it, and displayed a miniature.
"Her portrait?"
"In a sense. As a matter of fact, I will not conceal from you,
gentlemen, that it came to me in the form of a pledge--that being my
late profession--and I have never been able to trace the original.
But, as I said when first I showed it to the late Mrs. B., 'My dear,
you might have sat for it.' A well-developed woman, gentlemen,
though in the end she went out like the snuff of a candle, that being
the way sometimes with people who have never known an hour's
sickness. 'Am I really like that, Ebenezer?' she asked. 'In your
prime, my dear,' said I--she having married me late in life owing to
her romantic nature--'in your prime, my dear, I'll defy any one to
tell you and this party from two peas.' 'I wish I knew who she was,'
said my wife. 'Hadn't you best leave well alone?' said I; 'for I
declare till this moment I hadn't dreamed that another such woman as
yourself existed in the world, and it gives me a kind of bigamous
feeling which I can't say I find altogether unpleasant.' 'Then I'll
keep the thing,' says she, very positively, 'until the owner turns up
and redeems it;' which he never did, being, as I discovered, a
strolling portrait painter very much down on his luck. So there the
mystery remained. But (as I was telling you), though a first-rate
manager, my poor dear wife had a number of romantic notions; and
often she has said to me after I'd shut up shop, 'If wishes grew on
brambles, Ebenezer, it's not a pawnbroker's wife I'd be at this
moment.' 'Well, my dear,' I'd say to soothe her, 'there _is_ a
little bit of that about the profession, now you come to mention it.'
'And them there was a time,' she'd go on, 'when I dreamed of marryin'
a red-cross knight!' 'I have my higher moments, Artemisia,' I'd say,
half in joke; 'Why not try shutting your eyes?' But afterwards, when
that splendid woman was gone for ever, and my daughter Heeb (which is
a classical name given her by her mother) comfortably married to a
wholesale glover, and me left at home a solitary grandfather--which,
proud as you may be of it, is a slight occupation--I began to think
things over and find there was more in my poor wife's notions than
I'd ever allowed. And the upshot was that seeing this advertisement
by chance in a copy of the _Sherborne Messenger_, I determined to
shut up shop and let Axminster think I was gone on a holiday, while I
gave it a trial; for, you see, I was not altogether sure of myself."
"Excuse me, Badcock," interrupted Mr. Fett, advancing towards him
with outstretched arms; "but have you perused the books of chivalry,
or is this the pure light of nature?"
"Books, sir?" answered Mr. Badcock, seriously. "I never knew there
were any books about it. I never heard of tchivalry except from my
late wife; and you'll excuse the force of habit, but she pronounced
it the same as in chibbles."
"You never read of the meeting of Amadis and Sir Galaor?"
Mr. Badcock shook his head.
"Nor of Percival and Galahad, nor of Sir Balin and Sir Balan? No?
Then embrace me!"
"Sir?"
"Embrace me!"
"Sit down, the pair of you," my father commanded. "I have a proposal
to make, which, if I mistake not, will interest you both.
Mr. Badcock, I have heard your aspirations, and can fulfil them in a
degree that will surprise you. I like you, Mr. Badcock."
"The feeling, sir, is mutchual." Mr. Badcock bowed with much
amiability.
"Is time an object with you?"
"None whatever, sir. I am on a holiday."
"Will you be my guest to-night?"
"With the more pleasure, sir, after my experience of the inns in
these parts. Though I may have presented her to you in a somewhat
romantic light, my Artemisia _did_ know how to make a bed; and
twenty-two years of her ministrations, not to mention her
companionship, have coddled me in this particular."
"And you, sir"--my father turned to Mr. Fett--"will you accompany
us?"
"With what ulterior object?" demanded Mr. Fett. "You will excuse my
speaking as a business man, and overlook the damned bad manners of
the question for the sake of its pertinence."
My father smiled. "Why, sir, I was proposing to invite you to a sea
voyage with me."
"There was a time, before commerce claimed me, when the mere hint of
a nautical expedition had evoked an emotion which, if it survive at
all, lingers but as in a sea-shell the whisper of the parent ocean."
"As a supercargo, at four shillings _per diem_," suggested my father.
"Say no more, sir; I am yours."
"As for Mr. Fiennes--nay, lad, I remember you well." My father
turned to him with that sweet courtesy which few ever resisted.
"And blush not, lad, if I guess that to you we all owe this meeting;
'twere a bravery well beseeming your blood. As for Mr. Fiennes, he
will accompany us in heart if he cannot in presence--being, as I
understand, destined for the law?"
"Why, sir, as for that," stammered Nat, "I have had the devil's own
dispute with my father."
"You treated him with all respect, I hope?"
"With all the respect in the world, sir. But it scarcely matters,
since he has cast me off, and without a penny."
"Why, then, you can come too!" cried my father, gripping him by the
hand. "Bravo, Prosper! that makes five; and with Billy Priske, when
we can find him, six; and that leaves but one to find before
dinner-time." He pulled out his watch. "Lord!" he cried, "and 'tis
high time to feel hungry, too. If this lady now will repeat her
hospitable offer--"
I thought at the moment, and I thought once or twice during the meal
downstairs, that my father was taxing this poor woman's hospitality.
I doubted that he, himself so carelessly hospitable, might forget to
offer her payment; and lingered after the others had trooped into the
passage, with purpose to remind him privately.
"Come," said he, and made a notion to leave, still without offering
to pay. On the threshold I had almost turned to whisper to him when
the woman came after a
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