The Story of Francis Cludde
by Stanley John Weyman · English · Gutenberg #39296 · 615,337 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of Francis Cludde
Author: Stanley John Weyman
Release date: March 29, 2012 [eBook #39296]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39296
Credits: Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the
Web Archive (University of California Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF FRANCIS CLUDDE ***
Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the
Web Archive (University of California Libraries)
Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
http://www.archive.org/details/storyoffranciscl00weymiala
(University of California Libraries)
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
THE STORY OF FRANCIS CLUDDE
BY STANLEY J. WEYMAN
* * *
THE HOUSE OF THE WOLF. A Romance. With Frontispiece and Vignette.
Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.25.
THE STORY OF FRANCIS CLUDDE. A Romance. With four Illustrations. Crown
8vo, $1.25.
A GENTLEMAN OF FRANCE. Being the Memoirs of Gaston de Bonne, Sieur de
Marsac. With Frontispiece and Vignette. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.25.
UNDER THE RED ROBE. With twelve full-page Illustrations. Crown 8vo,
cloth, $1.25.
MY LADY ROTHA. A Romance of the Thirty Years' War. With eight
Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.25.
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF A MINISTER OF FRANCE. With thirty-six
Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.25.
SHREWSBURY. A Romance. With twenty-four illustrations. Crown 8vo,
$1.50.
THE RED COCKADE. A Novel. With 48 illustrations by R. Caton Woodville.
Crown 8vo, $1.50.
* * *
New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
THE STORY
OF
FRANCIS CLUDDE
BY
STANLEY J. WEYMAN
AUTHOR OF "A GENTLEMAN OF FRANCE," "UNDER THE RED ROBE,"
"MY LADY ROTHA," ETC., ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1898
Copyright, 1891, by
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
* * *
Copyright, 1897, by
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. "He, Sire Ane, He,"
II. In the Bishop's Room,
III. "Down with Purveyors!"
IV. Two Sisters of Mercy,
V. Mistress Bertram,
VI. Master Clarence,
VII. On Board the "Framlingham,"
VIII. A House of Peace,
IX. Playing with Fire,
X. The Face in the Porch,
XI. A Foul Blow,
XII. Anne's Petition,
XIII. A Willful Man's Way,
XIV. At Bay in the Gatehouse,
XV. Before the Court,
XVI. In the Duke's Name,
XVII. A Letter that had Many Escapes,
XVIII. The Witch's Warning
XIX. Ferdinand Cludde,
XX. The Coming Queen,
XXI. My Father,
XXII. Sir Anthony's Purpose,
XXIII. The Last Mass,
XXIV. Awaiting the Blow,
XXV. In Harbor at Last,
THE STORY OF FRANCIS CLUDDE.
CHAPTER I.
"HE, SIRE ANE, HE!"
On the boundary line between the two counties of Warwick and Worcester
there is a road very famous in those parts, and called the Ridgeway.
Father Carey used to say--and no better Latinist could be found for a
score of miles round in the times of which I write--that it was made
by the Romans. It runs north and south along the narrow spine of the
country, which is spread out on either side like a map, or a picture.
As you fare southward you see on your right hand the green orchards
and pastures of Worcestershire stretching as far as the Malvern Hills.
You have in front of you Bredon Hill, which is a wonderful hill, for
if a man goes down the Avon by boat it goes with him--now before, and
now behind--a whole day's journey--and then stands in the same place.
And on the left hand you have the great Forest of Arden, and not much
besides, except oak trees, which grow well in Warwickshire.
I describe this road, firstly, because it is a notable one, and forty
years ago was the only Queen's highway, to call a highway, in that
country. The rest were mere horse-tracks. Secondly, because the chase
wall of Coton End runs along the side of it for two good miles; and
the Cluddes--I am Francis Cludde--have lived at Coton End by the
Ridgeway time out of mind, probably--for the name smacks of the
soil--before the Romans made the road. And thirdly, because forty
years ago, on a drizzling February day in 1555--second year of Mary,
old religion just reestablished--a number of people were collected on
this road, forming a group of a score or more, who stood in an ordered
kind of disorder about my uncle's gates and looked all one way, as if
expecting an arrival, and an arrival of consequence.
First, there was my uncle Sir Anthony, tall and lean. He wore his best
black velvet doublet and cloak, and had put them on with an air of
huge importance. This increased each time he turned, staff in hand,
and surveyed his following, and as regularly gave place to a "Pshaw!"
of vexation and a petulant glance when his eye rested on me. Close
beside him, looking important too, but anxious and a little frightened
as well, stood good Father Carey. The priest wore his silk cassock,
and his lips moved from time to time without sound, as though he
were trying over a Latin oration--which, indeed, was the fact. At a
more respectful distance were ranged Baldwin Moor, the steward,
and a dozen servants; while still farther away lounged as many
ragamuffins--landless men, who swarmed about every gentleman's door
in those times, and took toll of such abbey lands as the king might
have given him. Against one of the stone gate-pillars I leaned
myself--nineteen years and six months old, and none too wise, though
well grown, and as strong as one here and there. And perched on the
top of the twin post, with his chin on his knees, and his hands
clasped about them, was Martin Luther, the fool.
Martin had chosen this elevated position partly out of curiosity, and
partly, perhaps, under a strong sense of duty. He knew that, whether
he would or no, he must needs look funny up there. His nose was red,
and his eyes were running, and his teeth chattering; and he did look
funny. But as he felt the cold most his patience failed first. The
steady, silent drizzle, the mist creeping about the stems of the oak
trees, the leaden sky proved too much for him in the end. "A watched
pot never boils!" he grumbled.
"Silence, sirrah!" commanded my uncle angrily. "This is no time for
your fooling. Have a care how you talk in the same breath of pots and
my Lord Bishop!"
"_Sanctae ecclesiae_," Father Carey broke out, turning up his eyes in a
kind of ecstasy, as though he were knee to knee with the prelate--"_te
defensorem inclytum atque ardentem----_"
"_Pottum!_" cried I, laughing loudly at my own wit.
It was an ill-mannered word, but I was cold and peevish. I had been
forced to this function against my will. I had never seen the guest
whom we were expecting, and who was no other than the Queen's
Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, but I disliked him as if I had. In
truth, he was related to us in a peculiar fashion, which my uncle and
I naturally looked at from different standpoints. Sir Anthony viewed
with complacence, if not with pride, any connection with the powerful
Bishop of Winchester, for the knight knew the world, and could
appreciate the value it sets on success, and the blind eyes it has for
spots if they do but speckle the risen sun. I could make no such
allowance, but, with the pride of youth and family, at once despised
the great Bishop for his base blood, and blushed that the shame lay on
our side. I hated this parade of doing honor to him, and would fain
have hidden at home with Petronilla, my cousin, Sir Anthony's
daughter, and awaited our guest there. The knight, however, had not
permitted this, and I had been forced out, being in the worst of
humors.
So I said "_Pottum!_" and laughed.
"Silence, boy!" cried Sir Anthony fiercely. He loved an orderly
procession, and to arrange things decently. "Silence!" he repeated,
darting an angry glance first at me and then at his followers, "or I
will warm that jacket of yours, lad! And you, Martin Luther, see to
your tongue for the next twenty-four hours, and keep it off my Lord
Bishop! And, Father Carey, hold yourself ready----"
"For here Sir Hot-Pot cometh!" cried the undaunted Martin, skipping
nimbly down from his post of vantage; "and a dozen of London saucepans
with him, or may I never lick the inside of one again!"
A jest on the sauciness of London serving-men was sure to tell with
the crowd, and there was a great laugh at this, especially among the
landless men, who were on the skirts of the party, and well sheltered
from Sir Anthony's eye. He glared about him, provoked to find at this
critical moment smiles where there should have been looks of
deference, and a ring round a fool where he had marshaled a
procession. Unluckily, he chose to visit his displeasure upon me. "You
won't behave, won't you, you puppy!" he cried. "You won't, won't you!"
and stepping forward he aimed a blow at my shoulders, which would have
made me rub myself if it had reached me. But I was too quick. I
stepped back, the stick swung idly, and the crowd laughed.
And there the matter would have ended, for the Bishop's party were now
close upon us, had not my foot slipped on the wet grass and I fallen
backward. Seeing me thus at his mercy, the temptation proved too much
for the knight. He forgot his love of seemliness and even that his
visitors were at his elbow--and, stooping a moment to plant home a
couple of shrewd cuts, cried, "Take that! Take that, my lad!" in a
voice that rang as crisply as his thwacks.
I was up in an instant; not that the pain was anything, and before our
own people I should have thought as little of shame, for if the old
may not lay hand to the young, being related, where is to be any
obedience? Now, however, my first glance met the grinning faces of
strange lackeys, and while my shoulders still smarted, the laughter of
a couple of soberly-clad pages stung a hundred times more sharply. I
glared furiously round, and my eyes fell on one face--a face long
remembered. It was that of a man who neither smiled nor laughed; a man
whom I recognized immediately, not by his sleek hackney or his purple
cassock, which a riding-coat partially concealed, or even by his
jeweled hand, but by the keen glance of power which passed over me,
took me in, and did not acknowledge me; which saw my humiliation
without interest or amusement. The look hurt me beyond smarting of
shoulders, for it conveyed to me in the twentieth part of a second how
very small a person Francis Cludde was, and how very great a personage
was Stephen Gardiner, whom in my thoughts I had presumed to belittle.
I stood irresolute a moment, shifting my feet and glowering at him, my
face on fire. But when he raised his hand to give the Benediction, and
the more devout, or those with mended hose, fell on their knees in the
mud, I turned my back abruptly, and, climbing the wall, flung away
across the chase.
"What, Sir Anthony!" I heard him say as I stalked off, his voice
ringing clear and incisive amid the reverential silence which followed
the Latin words; "have we a heretic here, cousin? How is this? So near
home too!"
"It is my nephew, my Lord Bishop," I could hear Sir Anthony answer,
apology in his tone; "and a willful boy at times. You know of him; he
has queer notions of his own, put into his head long ago."
I caught no more, my angry strides carrying me out of earshot. Fuming,
I hurried across the long damp grass, avoiding here and there the
fallen limb of an elm or a huge round of holly. I wanted to get out of
the way, and be out of the way; and made such haste that before the
slowly moving cavalcade had traversed one-half of the interval between
the road and the house I had reached the bridge which crossed the
moat, and, pushing my way impatiently through the maids and scullions
who had flocked to it to see the show, had passed into the courtyard.
The light was failing, and the place looked dark and gloomy in spite
of the warm glow of burning logs which poured from the lower windows,
and some show of green boughs which had been placed over the doorways
in honor of the occasion. I glanced up at a lattice in one of the
gables--the window of Petronilla's little parlor. There was no face at
it, and I turned fretfully into the hall--and yes, there she was,
perched up in one of the high window-seats. She was looking out on the
chase, as the maids were doing.
Yes, as the maids were doing. She too was watching for his High
Mightiness, I muttered, and that angered me afresh. I crossed the
rushes in silence, and climbed up beside her.
"Well," I said ungraciously, as she started, hearing me at her
shoulder, "well, have you seen enough of him yet, cousin? You will, I
warrant you, before he leaves. A little of him goes far."
"A little of whom, Francis?" she asked simply.
Though her voice betrayed some wonder at my rough tone, she was so
much engaged with the show that she did not look at me immediately.
This of course kept my anger warm, and I began to feel that she was in
the conspiracy against me.
"Of my Lord of Winchester, of course," I answered, laughing rudely;
"of Sir Hot-Pot!"
"Why do you call him that?" she remonstrated in gentle wonder. And
then she did turn her soft dark eyes upon me. She was a slender,
willowy girl in those days, with a complexion clear yet pale--a maiden
all bending and gracefulness, yet with a great store of secret
firmness, as I was to learn. "He seems as handsome an old man," she
continued, "as I have ever met, and stately and benevolent, too, as I
see him at this distance. What is the matter with you, Francis? What
has put you out?"
"Put me out!" I retorted angrily. "Who said anything had put me out?"
But I reddened under her eyes; I was longing to tell her all, and be
comforted, while at the same time I shrank with a man's shame from
saying to her that I had been beaten.
"I can see that something is the matter," she said sagely, with her
head on one side, and that air of being the elder which she often
assumed with me, though she was really the younger by two years. "Why
did you not wait for the others? Why have you come home alone?
Francis," [with sudden conviction] "you have vexed my father! That is
it!"
"He has beaten me like a dog!" I blurted out passionately; "and before
them all! Before those strangers he flogged me!"
She had her back to the window, and some faint gleam of wintry
sunshine, passing through the gules of the shield blazoned behind her,
cast a red stain on her dark hair and shapely head. She was silent,
probably through pity or consternation; but I could not see her face,
and misread her. I thought her hard, and, resenting this, bragged on
with a lad's empty violence.
"He did; but I will not stand it! I give you warning, I won't stand
it, Petronilla!" and I stamped, young bully that I was, until the dust
sprang out of the boards, and the hounds by the distant hearth jumped
up and whined. "No! not for all the base bishops in England!" I
continued, taking a step this way and that. "He had better not do it
again! If he does, I tell you it will be the worse for some one!"
"Francis," she exclaimed abruptly, "you must not speak in that way!"
But I was too angry to be silenced, though instinctively I changed my
ground.
"Stephen Gardiner!" I cried furiously. "Who is Stephen Gardiner, I
should like to know? He has no right to call himself Gardiner at all!
Dr. Stephens he used to call himself, I have heard. A child with no
name but his godfather's; that is what he is, for all his airs and his
bishopric! Who is he to look on and see a Cludde beaten? If my uncle
does not take care----"
"Francis!" she cried again, cutting me short ruthlessly. "Be silent,
sir!" [and this time I was silent], "You unmanly boy," she continued,
her face glowing with indignation, "to threaten my father before my
face! How dare you, sir? How dare you? And who are you, you poor
child," she exclaimed, with a startling change from invective to
sarcasm--"who are you to talk of bishops, I should like to know?"
"One," I said sullenly, "who thinks less of cardinals and bishops than
some folk, Mistress Petronilla!"
"Ay, I know," she retorted scathingly--"I know that you are a kind of
half-hearted Protestant--neither fish, flesh, nor fowl!"
"I am what my father made me!" I muttered.
"At any rate," she replied, "you do not see how small you are, or you
would not talk of bishops. Heaven help us! That a boy who has done
nothing and seen nothing, should talk of the Queen's Chancellor! Go!
Go on, you foolish boy, and rule a country, or cut off heads, and then
you may talk of such men--men who could unmake you and yours with a
stroke of the pen! You, to talk so of Stephen Gardiner! Fie, fie, I
say! For shame!"
I looked at her, dazed and bewildered, and had long afterward in my
mind a picture of her as she stood above me, in the window bay, her
back to the light, her slender figure drawn to its full height, her
hand extended toward me. I could scarcely understand or believe that
this was my gentle cousin. I turned without a word and stole away, not
looking behind me. I was cowed.
It happened that the servants came hurrying in at the moment with a
clatter of dishes and knives, and the noise covered my retreat. I had
a fancy afterward that, as I moved away, Petronilla called to me. But
at the time, what with the confusion and my own disorder, I paid no
heed to her, but got myself blindly out of the hall, and away to my
own attic.
It was a sharp lesson. But my feelings when, being alone, I had time
to feel, need not be set down. After events made them of no moment,
for I was even then on the verge of a change so great that all the
threats and misgivings, the fevers and agues, of that afternoon, real
as they seemed at the time, became in a few hours as immaterial as the
dew which fell before yesterday's thunderstorm.
The way the change began to come about was this. I crept in late to
supper, facing the din and lights, the rows of guests and the hurrying
servants, with a mixture of shame and sullenness. I was sitting down
with a scowl next the Bishop's pages--my place was beside them,
half-way down the table, and I was not too careful to keep my feet
clear of their clothing--when my uncle's voice, raised in a harsher
tone than was usual with him, even when he was displeased, summoned
me.
"Come here, sirrah!" he cried roundly. "Come here, Master Francis! I
have a word to speak to you!"
I went slowly, dragging my feet, while all looked up, and there was a
partial silence. I was conscious of this, and it nerved me. For a
moment indeed, as I stepped on to the dais I had a vision of scores of
candles and rushlights floating in mist, and of innumerable bodiless
faces all turned up to me. But the vision and the mistiness passed
away, and left only my uncle's long, thin face inflamed with anger,
and beside it, in the same ring of light, the watchful eyes and stern,
impassive features of Stephen Gardiner. The Bishop's face and his eyes
were all I saw then; the same face, the same eyes, I remembered, which
had looked unyielding into those of the relentless Cromwell and had
scarce dropped before the frown of a Tudor. His purple cap and
cassock, the lace and rich fur, the chain of office, I remembered
afterward.
"Now, boy," thundered Sir Anthony, pointing out the place where I
should stand, "what have you to say for yourself? why have you so
misbehaved this afternoon? Let your tongue speak quickly, do you hear,
or you will smart for it. And let it be to the purpose, boy!"
I was about to answer something--whether it was likely to make things
worse or better, I cannot remember--when Gardiner stayed me. He laid
his hand gently on Sir Anthony's sleeve, and interposed. "One moment,"
he said mildly, "your nephew did not stay for the Church's blessing, I
remember. Perhaps he has scruples. There are people nowadays who have.
Let us hear if it be so."
This time it was Sir Anthony who did not let me answer.
"No, no," he cried hastily; "no, no; it is not so. He conforms, my
lord, he conforms. You conform, sir," he continued, turning fiercely
upon me, "do you not? Answer, sir."
"Ah!" the Bishop put in with a sneer, "you conform, do you?"
"I attend mass--to please my uncle," I replied boldly.
"He was ill brought up as a child," Sir Anthony said hastily, speaking
in a tone which those below could not hear. "But you know all that, my
lord--you know all that. It is an old story to you. So I make, and I
pray you to make for the sake of the house, some allowance. He
conforms; he undoubtedly conforms."
"Enough!" Gardiner assented. "The rest is for the good priest here,
whose ministrations will no doubt in time avail. But a word with this
young gentleman, Sir Anthony, on another subject. If it was not to the
holy office he objected, perhaps it was to the Queen's Chancellor, or
to the Queen?" He raised his voice with the last words and bent his
brows, so that I could scarcely believe it was the same man speaking.
"Eh, sir, was that so?" he continued severely, putting aside Sir
Anthony's remonstrance and glowering at me. "It may be that we have a
rebel here instead of a heretic."
"God forbid!" cried the knight, unable to contain himself. It was
clear that he repented already of his ill-timed discipline. "I will
answer for it that we have no Wyatts here, my lord."
"That is well!" the Chancellor replied. "That is well!" he repeated,
his eyes leaving me and roving the hall with so proud a menace in
their glance that all quailed, even the fool. "That is very well," he
said, drumming on the table with his fingers; "but let Master Francis
speak for himself."
"I never heard," said I boldly--I had had a moment for thought--"that
Sir Thomas Wyatt had any following in this country. None to my
knowledge. As for the Queen's marriage with the Prince of Spain, which
was the ground, as we gathered here, of Wyatt's rising with the
Kentish folk, it seems a matter rather for the Queen's grace than her
subjects. But if that be not so, I, for my part, would rather have
seen her married to a stout Englishman--ay, or to a Frenchman."
"And why, young gentleman?"
"Because I would we kept at peace with France. We have more to gain by
fighting Spain than fighting France," I answered bluntly.
My uncle held up his hands. "The boy is clean mad!" he groaned. "Who
ever heard of such a thing? With all France, the rightful estate of
her Majesty, waiting to be won back, he talks of fighting Spain! And
his own grandmother was a Spaniard!"
"I am none the less an Englishman for that!" I said; whereon there was
a slight murmur of applause in the hall below. "And for France," I
continued, carried away by this, "we have been fighting it, off and
on, as long as men remember; and what are we the better? We have only
lost what we had to begin. Besides, I am told that France is five
times stronger than it was in Henry the Fifth's time, and we should
only spend our strength in winning what we could not hold. While as to
Spain----"
"Ay, as to Spain?" grumbled Sir Anthony, forgetting his formidable
neighbor, and staring at me with eyes of wonder. "Why, my father
fought the French at Guinegate, and my grandfather at Cherbourg, and
his father at Agincourt! But there! As to Spain, you popinjay?"
"Why, she is conquering here," I answered warmly, "and colonizing
there among the newly-discovered countries of the world, and getting
all the trade and all the seaports and all the gold and silver; and
Spain after all is a nation with no greater strength of men than
England. Ay, and I hear," I cried, growing more excited and raising my
voice, "that now is our time or never! The Spaniards and the
Portuguese have discovered a new world over seas.
"A Castilla y a Leon
Nuevo mundo dio Coton!
say they; but depend upon it, every country that is to be rich and
strong in the time that is coming must have part in it. We cannot
conquer either Spain or France; we have not men enough. But we have
docks and sailors, and ships in London and Fowey, and Bristol and the
Cinque Ports, enough to fight Spain over the great seas, and I say,
'Have at her!'"
"What next?" groaned Sir Anthony piteously. "Did man ever hear such
crackbrained nonsense?"
But I think it was not nonsense, for his words were almost lost in the
cry which ran through the hall as I ceased speaking--a cry of English
voices. One moment my heart beat high and proudly with a new sense of
power; the next, as a shadow of a cloud falls on a sunny hillside, the
cold sneer on the statesman's face fell on me and chilled me. His set
look had neither thawed nor altered, his color had neither come nor
gone. "You speak your lesson well, lad," he said. "Who taught you
statecraft?"
I grew smaller, shrinking with each word he uttered; and faltered, and
was dumb.
"Come," he said, "you see but a little way; yet country lads do not
talk of Fowey and Bristol! Who primed you?"
"I met a Master Sebastian Cabot," I said reluctantly at last, when he
had pressed me more than once, "who stayed a while at a house not far
from here, and had been Inspector of the Navy to King Edward. He had
been a seaman seventy years, and he talked----"
"Too fast!" said Gardiner, with a curt nod. "But enough, I understand.
I know the man. He is dead."
He was silent then, and seemed to have fallen suddenly into thought,
as a man well might who had the governing of a kingdom on his
shoulders.
Seemingly he had done with me. I looked at Sir Anthony. "Ay, go!" he
said irritably, waving me off. "Go!"
And I went. The ordeal was over, and over so successfully that I felt
the humiliation of the afternoon cheap at the price of this triumph;
for, as I stepped down, there was a buzz around me, a murmur of
congratulation and pride and excitement. On every Coton face I marked
a flush, in every Coton eye I read a sparkle, and every flush and
every sparkle was for me. Even the Chancellor's secretaries, grave,
down-looking men, all secrecy and caution, cast curious glances at me,
as though I were something out of the common; and the Chancellor's
pages made way for me with new-born deference. "There is for country
wits!" I heard Baldwin Moor cry gleefully, while the man who put food
before me murmured of "the Cludde bull-pup!" If I read in Father
Carey's face, as indeed I did, solicitude as well as relief and
gladness, I marked the latter only, and hugged a natural pride to my
breast. When Martin Luther said boldly that it was not only Bishop
could fill a bowl, it was by an effort I refrained from joining in the
laugh which followed.
For an hour I enjoyed this triumph, and did all but brag of it.
Especially I wished Petronilla had witnessed it. At the end of that
time--_Finis_, as the book says. I was crossing the courtyard,
one-half of which was bathed in a cold splendor of moonlight, and was
feeling the first sobering touch of the night air on my brow, when I
heard some one call out my name. I turned, to find one of the
Chancellor's servants, a sleek, substantial fellow, with a smug mouth,
at my elbow.
"What is it?" I said.
"I am bidden to fetch you at once, Master Cludde," he answered, a
gleam of sly malice peeping through the gravity of his demeanor. "The
Chancellor would see you in his room, young sir."
CHAPTER II.
IN THE BISHOP'S ROOM.
Chancellor was lodged in the great chamber on the southern side of the
courtyard, a room which we called the Tapestried Chamber, and in which
tradition said that King Henry the Sixth had once slept. It was on the
upper floor, and for this reason free from the damp air which in
autumn and winter rose from the moat and hung about the lower range of
rooms. It was besides, of easy access from the hall, a door in the
gallery of the latter leading into an anteroom, which again opened
into the Tapestried Chamber; while a winding staircase, starting from
a dark nook in the main passage of the house, also led to this state
apartment, but by another and more private door.
I reached the antechamber with a stout heart in my breast, though a
little sobered by my summons, and feeling such a reaction from the
heat of a few minutes before as follows a plunge into cold water. In
the anteroom I was bidden to wait while the great man's will was
taken, which seemed strange to me, then unused to the mummery of Court
folk. But before I had time to feel much surprise, the inner door was
opened, and I was told to enter.
The great room, which I had seldom seen in use, had now an appearance
quite new to me. A dull red fire was glowing comfortably on the
hearthstone, before which a posset stool was standing. Near this,
seated at a table strewn with a profusion of papers and documents, was
a secretary writing busily. The great oaken bedstead, with its nodding
tester, lay in a background of shadows, which played about the figures
broidered on the hangings, or were lost in the darkness of the
corners; while near the fire, in the light cast by the sconces fixed
above the hearth, lay part of the Chancellor's equipment. The fur rugs
and cloak of sable, the saddle-bags, the dispatch-boxes, and the
silver chafing-dish, gave an air of comfort to this part of the room.
Walking up and down in the midst of these, dictating a sentence at
every other turn, was Stephen Gardiner.
As I entered the clerk looked up, holding his pen suspended. His
master, by a quick nod, ordered him to proceed. Then, signaling to me
in a like silent fashion his command that I should stand by the
hearth, the Bishop resumed his task of composition.
For some minutes my interest in the man, whom I had now an opportunity
of scrutinizing unmarked and at my leisure, took up all my attention.
He was at this time close on seventy, but looked, being still tall and
stout, full ten years younger. His face, square and sallow, was indeed
wrinkled and lined; his eyes lay deep in his head, his shoulders were
beginning to bend, the nape of his neck to become prominent. He had
lost an inch of his full height. But his eyes still shone brightly,
nor did any trace of weakness mar the stern character of his mouth, or
the crafty wisdom of his brow. The face was the face of a man austere,
determined, perhaps cruel; of a man who could both think and act.
My curiosity somewhat satisfied, I had leisure, first to wonder why I
had been sent for, and then to admire the prodigious number of books
and papers which lay about, more, indeed, than I had ever seen
together in my life. From this I passed to listening, idly at first,
and with interest afterward, to the letter which the Chancellor was
dictating. It seemed from its tenor to be a letter to some person in
authority, and presently one passage attracted my attention, so that I
could afterward recall it word for word.
"I do not think"--the Chancellor pronounced, speaking in a sonorous
voice, and the measured tone of one whose thoughts lie perfectly
arranged in his head--"that the Duchess Katherine will venture to take
the step suggested as possible. Yet Clarence's report may be of
moment. Let the house, therefore, be watched if anything savoring of
flight be marked, and take notice whether there be a vessel in the
Pool adapted to her purpose. A vessel trading to Dunquerque would be
most likely. Leave her husband till I return, when I will deal with
him roundly."
I missed what followed. It was upon another subject, and my thoughts
lagged behind, being wholly taken up with the Duchess Katherine and
her fortunes. I wondered who she was, young or old, and what this step
could be she was said to meditate, and what the jargon about the Pool
and Dunquerque meant. I was still thinking of this when I was aroused
by an abrupt silence, and looking up found that the Chancellor was
bending over the papers on the table. The secretary was leaving the
room.
As the door closed behind him, Gardiner rose from his stooping posture
and came slowly toward me, a roll of papers in his hand. "Now," he
said tranquilly, seating himself in an elbow-chair which stood in
front of the hearth, "I will dispose of your business, Master Cludde."
He paused, looking at me in a shrewd, masterful way, much as if--I
thought at the time, little knowing how near the truth my fancy
went--I were a beast he was about to buy; and then he went on. "I have
sent for you, Master Francis," he said dryly, fixing his piercing eyes
on mine, "because I think that this country does not suit your health.
You conform, but you conform with a bad grace, and England is no
longer the place for such. You incite the commonalty against the
Queen's allies, and England is not the place for such. Do not
contradict me; I have heard you myself. Then," he continued, grimly
thrusting out his jaw in a sour smile, "you misname those whom the
Queen honors; and were Dr. Stephens--you take me, Master Malapert?
such a man as his predecessors, you would rue the word. For a trifle
scarce weightier Wolsey threw a man to rot six years in a dungeon,
boy!"
I changed color, yet not so much in fear--though it were vain to say I
did not tremble--as in confusion. I had called him Dr. Stephens
indeed, but it had been to Petronilla only. I stood, not knowing what
to say, until he, after lingering on his last words to enjoy my
misery, resumed his subject. "That is one good and sufficient
reason--mind you, sufficient, boy--why England is no place for you.
For another, the Cluddes have always been soldiers; and you--though
readier-witted than some, which comes of your Spanish grandmother--are
quicker with a word than a thought, and a blow than either. Of which
afterward. Well, England is going to be no place for soldiers. Please
God, we have finished with wars at home. A woman's reign should be a
reign of peace."
I hardened my heart at that. A reign of peace, forsooth, when the week
before we had heard of a bishop burned at Gloucester! I hardened my
heart. I would not be frightened, though I knew his power, and knew
how men in those days misused power. I would put a bold face on the
matter.
He had not done with me yet, however. "One more reason I have," he
continued, stopping me as I was about to speak, "for saying that
England will not suit your health, Master Cludde. It is that I do not
want you here. Abroad, you may be of use to me, and at the same time
carve out your own fortune. You have courage and can use a sword, I
hear. You understand--and it is a rare gift with Englishmen--some
Spanish, which I suppose your father or your uncle taught you. You
can--so Father Carey says--construe a Latin sentence if it be not too
difficult. You are scarcely twenty, and you will have me for your
patron. Why, were I you, boy, with your age and your chances, I would
die Prince or Pope! Ay, I would!" He stopped speaking, his eyes on
fire. Nay, a ring of such real feeling flashed out in his last words
that, though I distrusted him, though old prejudices warned me against
him, and, at heart a Protestant, I shuddered at things I had heard of
him, the longing to see the world and have adventures seized upon me.
Yet I did not speak at once. He had told me that my tongue outran my
thoughts, and I stood silent until he asked me curtly, "Well, sirrah,
what do you say?"
"I say, my Lord Bishop," I replied respectfully, "that the prospect
you hold out to me would tempt me were I a younger son, or without
those ties of gratitude which hold me to my uncle. But, my father
excepted, I am Sir Anthony's only heir."
"Ah, your father!" he said contemptuously. "You do well to remind me
of him, for I see you are forgetting the first part of my speech in
thinking of the last! Should I have promised first and threatened
later? You would fain, I expect, stay here and woo Mistress
Petronilla? Do I touch you there? You think to marry the maid and be
master of Coton End in God's good time, do you? Then listen, Francis
Cludde. Neither one nor the other, neither maid nor meadow will be
yours should you stay here till Doomsday!"
I started, and stood glowering on him, speechless with anger and
astonishment.
"You do not know who you are," he continued, leaning forward with a
sudden movement, and speaking with one claw-like finger extended, and
a malevolent gleam in his eyes. "You called me a nameless child a
while ago, and so I was; yet have I risen to be ruler of England,
Master Cludde! But you--I will tell you which of us is base-born. I
will tell you who and what your father, Ferdinand Cludde, was. He was,
nay, he is, my tool, spy, jackal! Do you understand, boy? Your father
is one of the band of foul creatures to whom such as I, base-born
though I be, fling the scraps from their table! He is the vilest of
the vile men who do my dirty work, my lad."
He had raised his voice and hand in passion, real or assumed. He
dropped them as I sprang forward. "You lie!" I cried, trembling all
over.
"Easy! easy!" he said. He stopped me where I was by a gesture of stern
command. "Think!" he continued, calmly and weightily. "Has any one
ever spoken to you of your father since the day seven years ago, when
you came here, a child, brought by a servant? Has Sir Anthony talked
of him? Has any servant named his name to you. Think, boy. If
Ferdinand Cludde be a father to be proud of, why does his brother make
naught of him?"
"He is a Protestant," I said faintly. Faintly, because I had asked
myself this very question not once but often. Sir Anthony so seldom
mentioned my father that I had thought it strange myself. I had
thought it strange, too, that the servants, who must well remember
Ferdinand Cludde, never talked to me about him. Hitherto I had always
been satisfied to answer, "He is a Protestant"; but face to face with
this terrible old man and his pitiless charge, the words came but
faintly from my lips.
"A Protestant," he replied solemnly. "Yes, this comes of schism, that
villains cloak themselves in it, and parade for true men. A Protestant
you call him, boy? He has been that, ay, and all things to all men;
and he has betrayed all things and all men. He was in the great
Cardinal's confidence, and forsook him, when he fell, for Cromwell.
Thomas Cromwell, although they were of the same persuasion, he
betrayed to me. I have here, here"--and he struck the letters in his
hand a scornful blow--"the offer he made to me, and his terms. Then
eight years back, when the late King Edward came to the throne, I too
fell on evil days, and Master Cludde abandoned me for my Lord
Hertford, but did me no great harm. But he did something which blasted
him--blasted him at last."
He paused. Had the fire died down, or was it only my imagination
that the shadows thickened round the bed behind him, and closed in
more nearly on us, leaving his pale grim face to confront me--his
face, which seemed the paler and grimmer, the more saturnine and
all-mastering, for the dark frame which set it off?
"He did this," he continued slowly, "which came to light and blasted
him. He asked, as the price of his service in betraying me, his
brother's estate."
"Impossible!" I stammered. "Why, Sir Anthony----"
"What of Sir Anthony, you would ask?" the Chancellor replied,
interrupting me with savage irony. "Oh, he was a Papist! an obstinate
Papist! He might go hang--or to Warwick Jail!"
"Nay, but this at least, my lord, is false!" I cried. "Palpably false!
If my father had so betrayed his own flesh and blood, should I be
here? Should I be at Coton End? You say this happened eight years ago.
Seven years ago I came here. Would Sir Anthony----"
"There are fools everywhere," the old man sneered. "When my Lord
Hertford refused your father's suit, Ferdinand began--it is his
nature--to plot against him. He was found out, and execrated by
all--for he had been false to all--he fled for his life. He left you
behind, and a servant brought you to Coton End, where Sir Anthony took
you in."
I covered my face. Alas! I believed him; I, who had always been so
proud of my lineage, so proud of the brave traditions of the house and
its honor, so proud of Coton End and all that belonged to it! Now, if
this were true, I could never again take pleasure in one or the other.
I was the son of a man branded as a turncoat and an informer, of one
who was the worst of traitors! I sank down on the settle behind me and
hid my face. Another might have thought less of the blow, or, with
greater knowledge of the world, might have made light of it as a thing
not touching himself. But on me, young as I was, and proud, and as yet
tender, and having done nothing myself, it fell with crushing force.
It was years since I had seen my father, and I could not stand forth
loyally and fight his battle, as a son his father's friend and
familiar for years might have fought it. On the contrary, there was so
much which seemed mysterious in my past life, so much that bore out
the Chancellor's accusation, that I felt a dread of its truth even
before I had proof. Yet I would have proof. "Show me the letters!" I
said harshly; "show me the letters, my lord!"
"You know your father's handwriting?"
"I do."
I knew it, not from any correspondence my father had held with me, but
because I had more than once examined with natural curiosity the
wrappers of the dispatches which at intervals of many months,
sometimes of a year, came from him to Sir Anthony. I had never known
anything of the contents of the letters, all that fell to my share
being certain formal messages, which Sir Anthony would give me,
generally with a clouded brow and a testy manner that grew genial
again only with the lapse of time.
Gardiner handed me the letters, and I took them and read one. One was
enough. That my father! Alas! alas! No wonder that I turned my face to
the wall, shivering as with the ague, and that all about me--except
the red glow of the fire, which burned into my brain--seemed darkness!
I had lost the thing I valued most. I had lost at a blow everything of
which I was proud. The treachery that could flush that worn face
opposite to me, lined as it was with statecraft, and betray the wily
tongue into passion, seemed to me, young and impulsive, a thing so
vile as to brand a man's children through generations.
Therefore I hid my face in the corner of the settle, while the
Chancellor gazed at me a while in silence, as one who had made an
experiment might watch the result.
"You see now, my friend," he said at last, almost gently, "that you
may be base-born in more ways than one. But be of good cheer; you are
young, and what I have done you may do. Think of Thomas Cromwell--his
father was naught. Think of the old Cardinal--my master. Think of the
Duke of Suffolk--Charles Brandon, I mean. He was a plain gentleman,
yet he married a queen. More, the door which they had to open for
themselves I will open for you--only, when you are inside, play the
man, and be faithful."
"What would you have me do?" I whispered hoarsely.
"I would have you do this," he answered. "There are great things
brewing in the Netherlands, boy--great changes, unless I am mistaken.
I have need of an agent there, a man, stout, trusty, and, in
particular, unknown, who will keep me informed of events. If you will
be that agent, I can procure for you--and not appear in the matter
myself--a post of pay and honor in the Regent's Guards. What say you
to that, Master Cludde? A few weeks and you will be making history,
and Coton End will seem a mean place to you. Now, what do you say?"
I was longing to be away and alone with my misery, but I forced myself
to reply patiently.
"With your leave I will give you my answer to-morrow, my lord," I
said, as steadily as I could; and I rose, still keeping my face turned
from him.
"Very well," he replied, with apparent confidence. But he watched me
keenly, as I fancied. "I know already what your answer will be. Yet
before you go I will give you a piece of advice which in the new
life you begin to-night will avail you more than silver, more than
gold--ay, more than steel, Master Francis. It is this: Be prompt to
think, be prompt to strike, be slow to speak! Mark it well! It is a
simple recipe, yet it has made me what I am, and may make you greater.
Now go!"
He pointed to the little door opening on the staircase, and I bowed
and went out, closing it carefully behind me. On the stairs, moving
blindly in the dark, I fell over some one who lay sleeping there, and
who clutched at my leg. I shook him off, however, with an exclamation
of rage, and, stumbling down the rest of the steps, gained the open
air. Excited and feverish, I shrank with aversion from the confinement
of my room, and, hurrying over the drawbridge, sought at random the
long terrace by the fish-pools, on which the moonlight fell, a sheet
of silver, broken only by the sundial and the shadows of the rose
bushes. The night air, weeping chill from the forest, fanned my cheeks
as I paced up and down. One way I had before me the manor-house--the
steep gable-ends, the gateway tower, the low outbuildings and
cornstacks and stables--and flanking these the squat tower and nave of
the church. I turned. Now I saw only the water and the dark line of
trees which fringed the further bank. But above these the stars were
shining.
Yet in my mind there was no starlight. There all was a blur of wild
passions and resolves. Shame and an angry resentment against those who
had kept me so long in ignorance--even against Sir Anthony--were my
uppermost feelings. I smarted under the thought that I had been living
on his charity. I remembered many a time when I had taken much on
myself, and he had smiled, and the remembrance stung me. I longed to
assert myself and do something to wipe off the stain.
But should I accept the Bishop's offer? It never crossed my mind to do
so. He had humiliated me, and I hated him for it. Longing to cut
myself off from my old life, I could not support a patron who would
know, and might cast in my teeth the old shame. A third reason, too,
worked powerfully with me as I became cooler. This was the conviction
that, apart from the glitter which the old man's craft had cast about
it, the part he would have me play was that of a spy--an informer! A
creature like--I dared not say like my father, yet I had him in my
mind. And from this, from the barest suspicion of this, I shrank as
the burned puppy from the fire--shrank with fierce twitching of nerve
and sinew.
Yet if I would not accept his offer it was clear I must fend for
myself. His threats meant as much as that, and I smiled sternly as I
found necessity at one with inclination. I would leave Coton End at
once, and henceforth I would fight for my own hand. I would have no
name until I had made for myself a new one.
This resolve formed, I turned and went back to the house, and felt my
way to my own chamber. The moonlight poured through the lattice and
fell white on my pallet. I crossed the room and stood still. Down the
middle of the coverlet--or my eyes deceived me--lay a dark line.
I stooped mechanically to see what this was and found my own sword
lying there; the sword which Sir Anthony had given me on my last
birthday. But how had it come there? As I took it up something soft
and light brushed my hand and drooped from the hilt. Then I
remembered. A week before I had begged Petronilla to make me a
sword-knot of blue velvet for use on state occasions. No doubt she had
done it, and had brought the sword back this evening, and laid it
there in token of peace.
I sat down on my bed, and softer and kindlier thoughts came to me;
thoughts of love and gratitude, in which the old man who had been a
second father to me had part. I would go as I had resolved, but I
would return to them when I had done a thing worth doing; something
which should efface the brand that lay on me now.
With gentle fingers I disengaged the velvet knot and thrust it into my
bosom. Then I tied about the hilt the old leather thong, and began to
make my preparations; considering this or that route while I hunted
for my dagger and changed my doublet and hose for stouter raiment and
long, untanned boots. I was yet in the midst of this, when a knock at
the door startled me.
"Who is there?" I asked, standing erect.
For answer Martin Luther slid in, closing the door behind him. The
fool did not speak, but turning his eyes first on one thing and then
on another nodded sagely.
"Well?" I growled.
"You are off, master," he said, nodding again. "I thought so."
"Why did you think so?" I retorted impatiently.
"It is time for the young birds to fly when the cuckoo begins to
stir," he answered.
I understood him dimly and in part. "You have been listening," I said
wrathfully, my cheeks burning.
"And been kicked in the face like a fool for my pains," he answered.
"Ah, well, it is better to be kicked by the boot you love than kissed
by the lips you hate. But Master Francis, Master Francis!" he
continued in a whisper.
He said no more, and I looked up. The man was stooping slightly
forward, his pale face thrust out. There was a strange gleam in his
eyes, and his teeth grinned in the moonlight. Thrice he drew his
finger across his lean knotted throat. "Shall I?" he hissed, his hot
breath reaching me, "shall I?"
I recoiled from him shuddering. It was a ghastly pantomime, and it
seemed to me that I saw madness in his eyes.
"In Heaven's name, no!" I cried--"No! Do you hear, Martin? No!"
He stood back on the instant, as a dog might have done being reproved.
But I could hardly finish in comfort after that with him standing
there, although when I next turned to him he seemed half asleep and
his eyes were dull and fishy as ever.
"One thing you can do," I said brusquely. Then I hesitated, looking
round me. I wished to send something to Petronilla, some word, some
keepsake. But I had nothing that would serve a maid's purpose, and
could think of nothing until my eye lit on a house-martin's nest,
lying where I had cast it on the window-sill. I had taken it down that
morning because the droppings during the last summer had fallen on the
lead work, and I would not have it used when the swallows returned. It
was but a bit of clay, and yet it would serve. She would guess its
meaning.
I gave it into his hands. "Take this," I said, "and give it privately
to Mistress Petronilla. Privately, you understand. And say nothing to
any one, or the Bishop will flay your back, Martin."
CHAPTER III.
"DOWN WITH PURVEYORS!"
The first streak of daylight found me already footing it through the
forest by paths known to few save the woodcutters, but with which many
a boyish exploration had made me familiar. From Coton End the London
road lies plain and fair through Stratford-on-Avon and Oxford. But my
plan, the better to evade pursuit, was, instead, to cross the forest
in a northeasterly direction, and, passing by Warwick, to strike the
great north road between Coventry and Daventry, which, running thence
southeastward, would take me as straight as a bird might fly through
Dunstable, St. Albans, and Barnet, to London. My baggage consisted
only of my cloak, sword, and dagger; and for money I had but a gold
angel, and a few silver bits of doubtful value. But I trusted that
this store, slender as it was, would meet my charges as far as London.
Once there I must depend on my wits either for providence at home or a
passage abroad.
Striding steadily up and down hill, for Arden Forest is made up of
hills and dells which follow one another as do the wave and trough of
the sea, only less regularly, I made my way toward Wootton Wawen. As
soon as I espied its battlemented church lying in a wooded bottom
below me, I kept a more easterly course, and, leaving Henley-in-Arden
far to the left, passed down toward Leek Wootton. The damp, dead
bracken underfoot, the leafless oaks and gray sky overhead, nay the
very cry of the bittern fishing in the bottoms, seemed to be at one
with my thoughts; for these were dreary and sad enough.
But hope and a fixed aim form no bad makeshifts for happiness.
Striking the broad London road as I had purposed I slept that
night at Ryton Dunsmoor, and the next at Towcester; and the third day,
which rose bright and frosty, found me stepping gayly southward,
travel-stained indeed, but dry and whole. My spirits rose with the
temperature. For a time I put the past behind me, and found amusement
in the sights of the road; in the heavy wagons and long trains of
pack-horses, and the cheery greetings which met me with each mile.
After all, I had youth and strength, and the world before me; and
particularly Stony Stratford, where I meant to dine.
There was one trouble common among wayfarers which did not touch me;
and that was the fear of robbers, for he would be a sturdy beggar who
would rob an armed foot-passenger for the sake of an angel; and the
groats were gone. So I felt no terrors on that account, and even when
about noon I heard a horseman trot up behind me, and rein in his horse
so as to keep pace with me at a walk, step for step--a thing which
might have seemed suspicious to some--I took no heed of him. I was
engaged with my first view of Stratford, and did not turn my head. We
had walked on so for fifty paces or more, before it struck me as odd
that the man did not pass me.
Then I turned, and shading my eyes from the sun, which stood just over
his shoulder, said, "Good-day, friend."
"Good-day, master," he answered.
He was a stout fellow, looking like a citizen, although he had a sword
by his side, and wore it with an air of importance which the sunshine
of opportunity might have ripened into a swagger. His dress was plain;
and he sat a good hackney as a miller's sack might have sat it. His
face was the last thing I looked at. When I raised my eyes to it, I
got an unpleasant start. The man was no stranger. I knew him in a
moment for the messenger who had summoned me to the Chancellor's
presence.
The remembrance did not please me; and reading in the fellow's sly
look that he recognized me, and thought he had made a happy discovery
on finding me, I halted abruptly. He did the same.
"It is a fine morning," he said, taken aback by my sudden movement,
but affecting an indifference which the sparkle in his eye belied. "A
rare day for the time of year."
"It is," I answered, gazing steadily at him.
"Going to London? Or may be only to Stratford?" he hazarded. He
fidgeted uncomfortably under my eye, but still pretended ignorance of
me.
"That is as may be," I answered.
"No offense, I am sure," he said.
I cast a quick glance up and down the road. There happened to be no
one in sight. "Look here!" I replied, stepping forward to lay my hand
on the horse's shoulder--but the man reined back and prevented me,
thereby giving me a clew to his character--"you are in the service of
the Bishop of Winchester?"
His face fell, and he could not conceal his disappointment at being
recognized. "Well, master," he answered reluctantly, "perhaps I am,
and perhaps I am not."
"That is enough," I said shortly. "And you know me. You need not lie
about it, man, for I can see you do. Now, look here, Master Steward,
or whatever your name may be----"
"It is Master Pritchard," he put in sulkily; "and I am not ashamed of
it."
"Very well. Then let us understand one another. Do you mean to
interfere with me?"
He grinned. "Well, to be plain, I do," he replied, reining his horse
back another step. "I have orders to look out for you, and have you
stopped if I find you. And I must do my duty, sir; I am sworn to it,
Master Cludde."
"Right," said I calmly; "and I must do mine, which is to take care of
my skin." And I drew my sword and advanced upon him with a flourish.
"We will soon decide this little matter," I added grimly, one eye on
him and one on the empty road, "if you will be good enough to defend
yourself."
But there was no fight in the fellow. By good luck, too, he was so
startled that he did not do what he might have done with safety;
namely, retreat, and keep me in sight until some passers-by came up.
He did give back, indeed, but it was against the bank. "Have a care,"
he cried in a fume, his eye following my sword nervously; he did not
try to draw his own. "There is no call for fighting, I say."
"But I say there is," I replied bluntly. "Call and cause! Either you
fight me, or I go where I please."
"You may go to Bath for me!" he spluttered, his face the color of a
turkey-cock's wattles with rage.
"Do you mean it, my friend?" I said, and I played my point about his
leg, half-minded to give him a little prod by way of earnest. "Make up
your mind."
"Yes!" he shrieked out, suspecting my purpose, and bouncing about in
his saddle like a parched pea. "Yes, I say!" he roared. "Do you hear
me? You go your way, and I will go mine."
"That is a bargain," I said quietly; "and mind you keep to it."
I put up my sword with my face turned from him, lest he should see the
curl of my lip and the light in my eyes. In truth, I was uncommonly
well pleased with myself, and was thinking that if I came through all
my adventures as well, I should do merrily. Outwardly, however, I
tried to ignore my victory, and to make things as easy as I could for
my friend--if one may call a man who will not fight him a friend, a
thing I doubt. "Which way are you going?" I asked amicably; "to
Stratford?"
He nodded, for he was too sulky to speak.
"All right!" I said cheerfully, feeling that my dignity could take
care of itself now. "Then so far we may go together. Only do you
remember the terms. After dinner each goes his own way."
He nodded again, and we turned, and went on in silence, eying one
another askance, like two ill-matched dogs coupled together. But,
luckily, our forced companionship did not last long, a quarter of a
mile and a bend in the road bringing us to the first low, gray houses
of Stratford; a long, straggling village it seemed, made up of inns
strewn along the road, like beads threaded on a rosary. And to be
sure, to complete the likeness, we came presently upon an ancient
stone cross standing on the green. I pulled up in front of this with a
sigh of pleasure, for on either side of it, one facing the other, was
an inn of the better class.
"Well," I said, "which shall it be? The Rose and Crown, or the Crown
without the Rose?"
"Choose for yourself," he answered churlishly. "I go to the other."
I shrugged my shoulders. After all, you cannot make a silk purse out
of a sow's ear, and if a man has not courage he is not likely to have
good-fellowship. But the words angered me, nevertheless, for a shabby,
hulking fellow lounging at my elbow overheard them and grinned; a
hiccoughing, blear-eyed man he was as I had ever met, with a red nose
and the rags of a tattered cassock about him. I turned away in
annoyance, and chose the "Crown" at hazard; and pushing my way through
a knot of horses that stood tethered at the door, went in, leaving the
two to their devices.
I found a roaring fire in the great room, and three or four yeomen
standing about it, drinking ale. But I was hot from walking, so, after
saluting them and ordering my meal, I went and sat for choice on a
bench by the window away from the fire. The window was one of a kind
common in Warwickshire houses; long and low and beetle-browed, the
story above projecting over it. I sat here a minute looking idly out
at the inn opposite, a heavy stone building with a walled courtyard
attached to it; such an inn as was common enough about the time of the
Wars of the Roses when wayfarers looked rather for safety than
comfort. Presently I saw a boy come out of it and start up the road at
a run. Then, a minute later, the ragged fellow I had seen on the green
came out and lurched across the road. He seemed to be making, though
uncertainly, for my inn, and, sure enough, just as my bread and
bacon--the latter hot and hissing--were put before me, he staggered
into the room, bringing a strong smell of ale and onions with him.
"_Pax vobiscum!_" he said, leering at me with tipsy solemnity.
I guessed what he was--a monk, one of those unfortunates still to be
found here and there up and down the country, whom King Henry, when he
put down the monasteries, had made homeless. I did not look on the
class with much favor, thinking that for most of them the cloister,
even if the Queen should succeed in setting the abbeys on their legs
again, would have few attractions. But I saw that the simple farmers
received his scrap of Latin with respect, and I nodded civilly as I
went on with my meal.
I was not to get off so easily, however. He came and planted himself
opposite to me.
"_Pax vobiscum_, my son," he repeated. "The ale is cheap here, and
good."
"So is the ham, good father," I replied cheerfully, not pausing in my
attack on the victuals. "I will answer for so much."
"Well, well," the knave replied with ready wit, "I breakfasted early.
I am content. Landlord, another plate and a full tankard. The young
gentleman would have me dine with him."
I could not tell whether to be angry or to laugh at his impudence.
"The gentleman says he will answer for it!" repeated the rascal, with
a twinkle in his eye, as the landlord hesitated. He was by no means so
drunk as he looked.
"No, no, father," I cried, joining in the general laugh into which the
farmers by the fire broke. "A cup of ale is in reason, and for that I
will pay, but for no more. Drink it, and wish me Godspeed."
"I will do more than that, lad," he answered. Swaying to and fro
my cup, which he had seized in his grasp, he laid his hand on the
window-ledge beside me, as though to steady himself, and stooped until
his coarse, puffy face was but a few inches from mine. "More than
that," he whispered hoarsely; and his eyes, peering into mine, were
now sober and full of meaning. "If you do not want to be put in the
stocks or worse, make tracks! Make tracks, lad!" he continued. "Your
friend over there--he is a niggardly oaf--has sent for the hundredman
and the constable, and you are the quarry. So the word is, Go! That,"
he added aloud, standing erect again, with a drunken smile, "is for
your cup of ale; and good coin too!"
For half a minute I sat quite still; taken aback, and wondering, while
the bacon cooled on the plate before me, what I was to do. I did not
doubt the monk was telling the truth. Why should he lie to me? And I
cursed my folly in trusting to a coward's honor or a serving-man's
good faith. But lamentations were useless. What was I to do? I had no
horse, and no means of getting one. I was in a strange country, and to
try to escape on foot from pursuers who knew the roads, and had the
law on their side, would be a hopeless undertaking. Yet to be haled
back to Coton End a prisoner--I could not face that. Mechanically I
raised a morsel of bacon to my lips, and as I did so, a thought
occurred to me--an idea suggested by some talk I had heard the evening
before at Towcester.
Fanciful as the plan was, I snatched at it; and knowing each instant
to be precious, took my courage in my hand--and my tankard. "Here," I
cried, speaking suddenly and loudly, "here is bad luck to purveyors,
Master Host!"
There were a couple of stablemen within hearing, lounging in the
doorway, besides the landlord and his wife and the farmers. A villager
or two also had dropped in, and there were two peddlers lying half
asleep in the corner. All these pricked up their ears more or less at
my words. But, like most country folk, they were slow to take in
anything new or unexpected; and I had to drink afresh and say again,
"Here is bad luck to purveyors!" before any one took it up.
Then the landlord showed he understood.
"Ay, so say I!" he cried, with an oath. "Purveyors, indeed! It is such
as they give the Queen a bad name."
"God bless her!" quoth the monk loyally.
"And drown the purveyors!" a farmer exclaimed.
"They were here a year ago, and left us as bare as a shorn sheep,"
struck in a strapping villager, speaking at a white heat, but telling
me no news; for this was what I had heard at Towcester the night
before. "The Queen should lie warm if she uses all the wool they took!
And the pack-horses they purveyed to carry off the plunder--why, the
packmen avoid Stratford ever since as though we had the Black Death!
Oh, down with the purveyors, say I! The first that comes this way I
will show the bottom of the Ouse. Ay, that I will, though I hang for
it!"
"Easy! easy, Tom Miller!" the host interposed, affecting an air of
assurance, even while he cast an eye of trouble at his flitches. "It
will be another ten years before they harry us again. There is
Potter's Pury! They never took a tester's worth from Potter's Pury!
No, nor from Preston Gobion! But they will go to them next, depend
upon it!"
"I hope they will," I said, with a world of gloomy insinuation in my
words. "But I doubt it!"
And this time my hint was not wasted. The landlord changed color.
"What are you driving at, master?" he asked mildly, while the others
looked at me in silence and waited for more.
"What if there be one across the road now!" I said, giving way to the
temptation, and speaking falsely--for which I paid dearly afterward.
"A purveyor, I mean, unless I am mistaken in him, or he tells lies. He
has come straight from the Chancellor, white wand, warrant, and all.
He is taking his dinner now, but he has sent for the hundredman, so I
guess he means business."
"For the hundredman?" repeated the landlord, his brows meeting.
"Yes; unless I am mistaken."
There was silence for a moment. Then the man they called Tom Miller
dashed his cap on the floor and, folding his arms defiantly, looked
round on his neighbors. "He has come, has he!" he roared, his face
swollen, his eyes bloodshot. "Then I will be as good as my word! Who
will help? Shall we sit down and be shorn like sheep, as we were
before, so that our children lay on the bare stones, and we pulled the
plow ourselves? Or shall we show that we are free Englishmen, and not
slaves of Frenchmen? Shall we teach Master Purveyor not to trouble us
again? Now, what say you, neighbors?"
So fierce a growl of impatience and anger rose round me as at once
answered the question. A dozen red faces glared at me and at one
another, and from the very motion and passion of the men as they
snarled and threatened, the room seemed twice as full as it was. Their
oaths and cries of encouragement, not loud, but the more dangerous for
that, the fresh burst of fury which rose as the village smith and
another came in and learned the news, the menacing gestures of a score
of brandished fists--these sights, though they told of the very effect
at which I had aimed, scared as well as pleased me. I turned red and
white, and hesitated, fearing that I had gone too far.
The thing was done, however; and, what was more, I had soon to take
care of myself. At the very moment when the hubbub was at its loudest
I felt a chill run down my back as I met the monk's eye, and, reading
in it whimsical admiration, read in it something besides, and that was
an unmistakable menace. "Clever lad!" the eye said. "I will expose
you," it threatened.
I had forgotten him--or, at any rate, that my acting would be
transparent enough to him holding the clew in his hand--and his look
was like the shock of cold water to me. But it is wonderful how keen
the wits grow on the grindstone of necessity. With scarcely a second's
hesitation I drew out my only piece of gold, and unnoticed by the
other men, who were busy swearing at and encouraging one another, I
disclosed a morsel of it. The monk's crafty eye glistened. I laid my
finger on my lips.
He held up two fingers.
I shook my head and showed an empty palm. I had no more. He nodded;
and the relief that nod gave me was great. Before I had time, however,
to consider the narrowness of my escape, a movement of the crowd--for
the news had spread with strange swiftness, and there was now a crowd
assembled which more than filled the room--proclaimed that the
purveyor had come out, and was in the street.
The room was nearly emptied at a rush. Though I prudently remained
behind, I could, through the open window, hear as well as see what
passed. The leading spirits had naturally struggled out first, and
were gathered, sullen and full of dangerous possibilities, about the
porch.
I suppose the Bishop's messenger saw in them nothing but a crowd of
country clowns, for he came hectoring toward the door, smiting his
boot with his whip, and puffing out his red cheeks mightily. He felt
brave enough, now that he had dined and had at his back three stout
constables sworn to keep the Queen's peace.
"Make way! Make way, there, do you hear?" he cried in a husky, pompous
voice. "Make way!" he repeated, lightly touching the nearest man with
his switch. "I am on the Queen's service, boobies, and must not be
hindered."
The man swore at him, but did not budge, and the bully, brought up
thus sharply, awoke to the lowering faces and threatening looks which
confronted him. He changed color a little. But the ale was still in
him, and, forgetting his natural discretion, he thought to carry
matters with a high hand. "Come! come!" he exclaimed angrily. "I have
a warrant, and you resist me at your peril. I have to enter this
house. Clear the way, Master Hundredman, and break these fellows'
heads if they withstand you."
A growl as of a dozen bulldogs answered him, and he drew back, as a
child might who has trodden on an adder. "You fools!" he spluttered,
glaring at them viciously. "Are you mad? Do you know what you are
doing? Do you see this?" He whipped out from some pocket a short white
staff and brandished it. "I come direct from the Lord Chancellor and
upon his business, do you hear, and if you resist me it is treason.
Treason, you dogs!" he cried, his rage getting the better of him, "and
like dogs you will hang for it. Master Hundredman, I order you to take
in your constables and arrest that man!"
"What man?" quoth Tom Miller, eying him fixedly.
"The stranger who came in an hour ago, and is inside the house."
"Him, he means, who told about the purveyor across the road,"
explained the monk with a wink.
That wink sufficed. There was a roar of execration, and in the
twinkling of an eye the Jack-in-office, tripped up this way and shoved
that, was struggling helplessly in the grasp of half a dozen men, who
fought savagely for his body with the Hundredman and the constables.
"To the river! To the Ouse with him!" yelled the mob. "In the Queen's
name!" shouted the officers. But these were to those as three to a
score, and taken by surprise besides, and doubtful of the rights of
the matter. Yet for an instant, as the crowd went reeling and fighting
down the road, they prevailed; the constables managed to drag their
leader free, and I caught a glimpse of him, wild-eyed and frantic with
fear, his clothes torn from his back, standing at bay like some
animal, and brandishing his staff in one hand, a packet of letters in
the other.
"I have letters, letters of state!" he screamed shrilly. "Let me
alone, I tell you! Let me go, you curs!"
But in vain. The next instant the mob were upon him again. The packet
of letters went one way, the staff was dashed another. He was thrown
down and plucked up again, and hurried, bruised and struggling, toward
the river, his screams for mercy and furious threats rising shrilly
above the oaths and laughter.
I felt myself growing pale as scream followed scream. "They will kill
him!" I exclaimed trembling, and prepared to follow. "I cannot see
this done."
But the monk, who had returned to my side, grasped my arm. "Don't be a
fool," he said sharply. "I will answer for it they will not kill him.
Tom Miller is not a fool, though he is angry. He will duck him, and
let him go. But I will trouble you for that bit of gold, young
gentleman."
I gave it to him.
"Now," he continued with a leer, "I will give you a hint in return. If
you are wise, you will be out of this county in twelve hours. Tethered
to the gate over there is a good horse which belongs to a certain
purveyor now in the river. Take it! There is no one to say you nay.
And begone!"
I looked hard at him for a minute, my heart beating fast. This was
horse-stealing. And horse-stealing was a hanging matter. But I had
done so much already that I felt I might as well be hanged for a sheep
as for a lamb. I was not sure that I had not incited to treason, and
what was stealing a horse beside that? "I will do it!" I said
desperately.
"Don't lose time, then," quoth my mentor.
I went out then and there, and found he had told the truth. Every soul
in the place had gone to see the ducking, and the street was empty.
Kicked aside in the roadway lay the bundle of letters, soiled but not
torn, and in the gutter was the staff. I stooped and picked up one and
the other--in for a lamb, in for a sheep! and they might be useful
some day. Then I jumped into the saddle, and twitched the reins off
the hook.
But before I could drive in the spurs, a hand fell on the bridle, and
the monk's face appeared at my knee. "Well?" I said, glaring down at
him--I was burning to be away.
"That is a good cloak you have got there," he muttered hurriedly.
"There, strapped to the saddle, you fool. You do not want that, give
it me. Do you hear? Quick, give it me," he cried, raising his voice
and clutching at it fiercely, his face dark with greed and fear.
"I see," I replied, as I unstrapped it. "I am to steal the horse that
you may get the cloak. And then you will lay the lot on my shoulders.
Well, take it!" I cried, "and go your way as fast as you can."
Throwing it at him as hard as I could, I shook up the reins and went
off down the road at a gallop. The wind whistled pleasantly past my
ears. The sounds of the town grew faint and distant. Each bound of the
good hack carried me farther and farther from present danger, farther
and farther from the old life. In the exhilaration and excitement of
the moment I forgot my condition; forgot that I had not a penny-piece
in my pocket, and that I had left an unpaid bill behind me; forgot
even that I rode a--well, a borrowed horse.
CHAPTER IV.
TWO SISTERS OF MERCY.
A younger generation has often posed me finely by asking, "What, Sir
Francis! Did you not see _one_ bishop burned? Did you not know _one_
of the martyrs? Did you _never_ come face to face with Queen Mary?" To
all which questions I have one answer, No, and I watch small eyes grow
large with astonishment. But the truth is, a man can only be at one
place at a time. And though, in this very month of February, 1555,
Prebendary Rogers--a good, kindly man, as I have heard, who had a wife
and nine children--was burned in Smithfield in London for religion,
and the Bishop of Gloucester suffered in his own city, and other
inoffensive men were burned to death, and there was much talk of these
things, and in thousands of breasts a smoldering fire was kindled
which blazed high enough by and by--why, I was at Coton End, or on the
London Road, at the time, and learned such things only dimly and by
hearsay.
But the rill joins the river at last; and ofttimes suddenly and at a
bound, as it were. On this very day, while I cantered easily southward
with my face set toward St. Albans, Providence was at work shaping a
niche for me in the lives of certain people who were at the time as
unconscious of my existence as I was of theirs. In a great house in
the Barbican in London there was much stealthy going and coming on
this February afternoon and evening. Behind locked doors, and in fear
and trembling, mails were being packed and bags strapped, and fingers
almost too delicate for the task were busy with nails and hammers,
securing this and closing that. The packers knew nothing of me, nor I
of them. Yet but for me all that packing would have been of no avail;
and but for them my fate might have been very different. Still, the
sound of the hammer did not reach my ears, or, doing so, was covered
by the steady tramp of the roadster; and no vision, so far as I ever
heard, of a dusty youth riding Londonward came between the secret
workers and their task.
I had made up my mind to sleep at St. Albans that night, and for this
reason, and for others relating to the Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, in
which county Stony Stratford lies, I pushed on briskly. I presently
found time, however, to examine the packet of letters of which I had
made spoil. On the outer wrapper I found there was no address, only an
exhortation to be speedy. Off this came, therefore, without ceremony,
and was left in the dirt. Inside I found two sealed epistles, each
countersigned on the wrapper, "Stephen Winton."
"Ho! ho!" said I. "I did well to take them."
Over the signature on the first letter--it seemed to be written on
parchment--were the words, "Haste! haste! haste!" This was the thicker
and heavier of the two, and was addressed to Sir Maurice Berkeley, at
St. Mary Overy's, Southwark, London. I turned it over and over in my
hands, and peeped into it, hesitating. Twice I muttered, "All is fair
in love and war!" And at last, with curiosity fully awake, and a
glance behind me to make sure that the act was unobserved, I broke the
seal. The document proved to be as short and pithy as it was
startling. It was an order commanding Sir Maurice Berkeley forthwith
in the Queen's name, and by the authority of the Council, and so on,
and so on, to arrest Katherine Willoughby de Eresby, Duchess of
Suffolk, and to deliver her into the custody of the Lieutenant of the
Tower, "These presents to be his waranty for the detention of the said
Duchess of Suffolk until her Grace's pleasure in the matter be known."
When it was too late I trembled to think what I had done. To meddle
with matters of state might be more dangerous a hundred times than
stealing horses, or even than ducking the Chancellor's messenger!
Seeing at this moment a party of travelers approach, I crammed the
letter into my pocket, and rode by them with a red face, and a tongue
that stuttered so feebly that I could scarcely return their greetings.
When they had gone by I pulled out the warrant again, having it in my
mind to tear it up without a moment's delay--to tear it into the
smallest morsels, and so get rid of a thing most dangerous. But the
great red seal dangling at the foot of the parchment caught my eye,
and I paused to think. It was so red, so large, so imposing, it seemed
a pity to destroy it. It must surely be good for something. I folded
up the warrant again, and put it away in my safest pocket. Yes, it
might be good for something.
I took out the other letter. It was bound with green ribbon and sealed
with extreme care, being directed simply to Mistress Clarence--there
was no address. But over Gardiner's signature on the wrapper were the
words, "These, on your peril, very privately."
I turned it over and over, and said the same thing about love and war,
and even repeated to myself my old proverb about a sheep and a lamb.
But somehow I could not do it. The letter was a woman's letter; the
secret, her secret; and though my fingers itched as they hovered about
the seals, my cheek tingled too. So at last, with a muttered, "What
would Petronilla say?" I put it away unopened in the pocket where the
warrant lay. The odds were immense that Mistress Clarence would never
get it; but at least her secret should remain hers, my honor mine!
It was dark when I rode, thoroughly jaded, into St. Albans. I was
splashed with mud up to the waist and wetted by a shower, and looked,
I have no doubt, from the effect of my journeying on foot and
horseback, as disreputable a fellow as might be. The consciousness too
that I was without a penny, and the fear lest, careful as I had been
to let no one outsrip me, the news of the riot at Stratford might have
arrived, did not tend to give me assurance. I poked my head timidly
into the great room, hoping that I might have it to myself. To my
disgust it was full of people. Half-a-dozen travelers and as many
townsfolk were sitting round the fire, talking briskly over their
evening draught. Yet I had no choice. I was hungry, and the thing had
to be done, and I swaggered in, something of the sneak, no doubt,
peeping through my bravado. I remarked, as I took my seat by the fire
and set to drying myself, that I was greeted by a momentary silence,
and that two or three of the company began to eye me suspiciously.
There was one man, who sat on the settle in the warmest corner of the
chimney, who seemed in particular to resent my damp neighborhood. His
companions treated him with so much reverence, and he snubbed them so
regularly, that I wondered who he was; and presently, listening to the
conversation which went on round me, I had my curiosity satisfied. He
was no less a personage than the Bailiff of St. Albans, and his manner
befitted such a man; for it seemed to indicate that he thought himself
heir to all the powers of the old Abbots under whose broad thumb his
father and grandfather had groaned.
My conscience pricking me, I felt some misgiving when I saw him, after
staring at me and whispering to two or three of his neighbors, beckon
the landlord aside. His big round face and burly figure gave him a
general likeness to bluff King Hal and he appeared to be aware of this
himself, and to be inclined to ape the stout king's ways, which, I
have heard my uncle say, were ever ways heavy for others' toes. For a
while, however, seeing my supper come in, I forgot him. The bare-armed
girl who brought it to me, and in whom my draggled condition seemed to
provoke feelings of a different nature, lugged up a round table to the
fire. On this she laid my meal, not scrupling to set aside some of the
snug dry townsfolk. Then she set a chair for me well in the blaze, and
folding her arms in her apron stood to watch me fall to. I did so with
a will, and with each mouthful of beef and draught of ale, spirit and
strength came back to me. The cits round me might sneer and shake
their heads, and the travelers smile at my appetite. In five minutes I
cared not a whit! I could give them back joke for joke, and laugh with
the best of them.
Indeed, I had clean forgotten the Bailiff, when he stalked back to his
place. But the moment our eyes met, I guessed there was trouble afoot.
The landlord came with him and stood looking at me, sending off the
wench with a flea in her ear; and I felt under his eye an
uncomfortable consciousness that my purse was empty. Two or three late
arrivals, to whom I suppose Master Bailiff had confided his
suspicions, took their stand also in a half-circle and scanned me
queerly. Altogether it struck me suddenly that I was in a tight place,
and had need of my wits.
"Ahem!" said the Bailiff abruptly, taking skillful advantage of a lull
in the talk. "Where from last, young man?" He spoke in a deep choky
voice, and, if I was not mistaken, he winked one of his small eyes in
the direction of his friends, as though to say, "Now see me pose him!"
But I only put another morsel in my mouth. For a moment indeed the
temptation to reply "Towcester," seeing that such a journey over a
middling road was something to brag of before the Highway Law came in,
almost overcame me. But in time I bethought me of Stephen Gardiner's
maxim, "Be slow to speak!" and I put another morsel in my mouth.
The Bailiff's face grew red, or rather, redder. "Come, young man, did
you hear me speak?" he said pompously. "Where from last?"
"From the road, sir," I replied, turning to him as if I had not heard
him before. "And a very wet road it was."
A man who sat next me chuckled, being apparently a stranger like
myself. But the Bailiff puffed himself into a still more striking
likeness to King Henry, and including him in his scowl shouted at me,
"Sirrah! don't bandy words with me! Which way did you come along the
road, I asked."
It was on the tip of my tongue to answer saucily, "The right way!" But
I reflected that I might be stopped; and to be stopped might mean to
be hanged at worst, and something very unpleasant at best. So I
controlled myself, and answered--though the man's arrogance was
provoking enough--"I have come from Stratford, and I am going to
London. Now you know as much as I do."
"Do I?" he said, with a sneer and a wink at the landlord.
"Yes, I think so," I answered patiently.
"Well, I don't!" he retorted, in vulgar triumph. "I don't. It is my
opinion that you have come from London."
I went on with my supper.
"Do you hear?" he asked pompously, sticking his arms akimbo and
looking round for sympathy. "You will have to give an account of
yourself, young man. We will have no penniless rogues and sturdy
vagabonds wandering about St. Albans."
"Penniless rogues do not go a-horseback," I answered. But it was
wonderful how my spirits sank again under that word "penniless." It
hit me hard.
"Wait a bit," he said, raising his finger to command attention for his
next question. "What is your religion, young man?"
"Oh!" I replied, putting down my knife and looking open scorn at him,
"you are an inquisitor, are you?" At which words of mine there was a
kind of stir. "You would burn me as I hear they burned Master Sandars
at Coventry last week, would you? They were talking about it down the
road."
"You will come to a bad end, young man!" he retorted viciously, his
outstretched finger shaking as if the palsy had seized him. For this
time my taunt had gone home, and more than one of the listeners
standing on the outer edge of the group, and so beyond his ken, had
muttered "shame." More than one face had grown dark. "You will come to
a bad end!" he repeated. "If it be not here, then somewhere else! It
is my opinion that you have come from London, and that you have been
in trouble. There is a hue-and-cry out for a young fellow just your
age, and a cock of your hackle, I judge, who is wanted for heresy. A
Londoner too. You do not leave here until you have given an account of
yourself, Master Jack-a-Dandy!" The party had all risen round me, and
some of the hindmost had got on benches to see me the better. Among
these, between two bacon flitches, I caught a glimpse of the
serving-maid's face as she peered at me, pale and scared, and a queer
impulse led me to nod to her--a reassuring little nod. I found myself
growing cool and confident, seeing myself so cornered.
"Easy! easy!" I said, "let a man finish his supper and get warmed in
peace."
"Bishop Bonner will warm you!" cried the Bailiff.
"I dare say--as they warm people in Spain!" I sneered.
"He will be Bishop Burner to you!" shrieked the Bailiff, almost beside
himself with rage at being so bearded by a lad.
"Take care!" I retorted. "Do not you speak evil of dignitaries, or you
will be getting into trouble!"
He fairly writhed under this rejoinder.
"Landlord!" he spluttered. "I shall hold you responsible! If this
person leaves your house, and is not forthcoming when wanted, you will
suffer for it!"
The landlord scratched his head, being a good-natured fellow; but a
bailiff is a bailiff, especially at St. Albans. And I was muddy and
travel-stained, and quick of my tongue for one so young; which the
middle-aged never like, though the old bear it better. He hesitated.
"Do not be a fool, Master Host!" I said. "I have something
here----" and I touched my pocket, which happened to be near my
sword-hilt--"that will make you rue it if you interfere with me!"
"Ho! ho!" cried the Bailiff, in haste and triumph. "So that is his
tone! We have a tavern-brawler here, have we! A young swashbuckler!
His tongue will not run so fast when he finds his feet in the stocks.
Master landlord, call the watch! Call the watch at once, I command
you!"
"You will do so at your peril!" I said sternly. Then, seeing that my
manner had some effect upon all save the angry official, I gave way to
the temptation to drive the matter home and secure my safety by the
only means that seemed possible. It is an old story that one deception
leads inevitably to another. I solemnly drew out the white staff I had
taken from the apparitor. "Look here!" I continued, waving it. "Do you
see this, you booby? I am traveling in the Queen's name, and on her
service. By special commission, too, from the Chancellor! Is that
plain speaking enough for you? And let me tell you, Master Bailiff," I
added, fixing my eye upon him, "that my business is private, and that
my Lord of Winchester will not be best pleased when he hears how I
have had to declare myself. Do you think the Queen's servants go
always in cloth of gold, you fool? The stocks indeed!"
I laughed out loudly and without effort, for there never was anything
so absurd as the change in the Bailiff's visage. His color fled, his
cheeks grew pendulous, his lip hung loose. He stared at me, gasping
like a fish out of water, and seemed unable to move toe or finger. The
rest enjoyed the scene, as people will enjoy a marvelous sudden stroke
of fortune. It was as good as a stage pageant to them. They could not
take their eyes from the pocket in which I had replaced my wand, and
continued, long after I had returned to my meal, to gaze at me in
respectful silence. The crestfallen Bailiff presently slipped out, and
I was left cock of the walk, and for the rest of the evening enjoyed
the fruits of victory.
They proved to be more substantial than I had expected, for, as I was
on my way upstairs to bed, the landlord preceding me with a light, a
man accosted me, and beckoned me aside mysteriously.
"The Bailiff is very much annoyed," he said, speaking in a muffled
voice behind his hand, while his eyes peered into mine.
"Well, what is that to me?" I replied, looking sternly at him. I was
tired and sleepy after my meal. "He should not make such a fool of
himself."
"Tut, tut, tut, tut! You misunderstood me, young sir," the man
answered, plucking my sleeve as I turned away. "He regrets the
annoyance he has caused you. A mistake, he says, a pure mistake, and
he hopes you will have forgotten it by morning." Then, with a skillful
hand, which seemed not unused to the task, he slid two coins into my
palm. I looked at them, for a moment not perceiving his drift. Then I
found they were two gold angels, and I began to understand. "Ahem!" I
said, fingering them uneasily. "Yes. Well, well, I will look over it,
I will look over it! Tell him from me," I continued, gaining
confidence as I proceeded with my new role, "that he shall hear no
more about it. He is zealous--perhaps over zealous!"
"That is it!" muttered the envoy eagerly; "that is it, my dear sir!
You see perfectly how it is. He is zealous. Zealous in the Queen's
service!"
"To be sure; and so I will report him. Tell him that so I will report
him. And here, my good friend, take one of these for yourself," I
added, magnificently giving him back half my fortune--young donkey
that I was. "Drink to the Queen's health; and so good-night to you."
He went away, bowing to the very ground, and, when the landlord
likewise had left me, I was very merry over this, being in no mood for
weighing words. The world seemed--to be sure, the ale was humming in
my head, and I was in the landlord's best room--easy enough to
conquer, provided one possessed a white staff. The fact that I had no
right to mine only added--be it remembered I was young and foolish--to
my enjoyment of its power. I went to bed in all comfort with it under
my pillow, and slept soundly, untroubled by any dream of a mischance.
But when did a lie ever help a man in the end?
When I awoke, which I seemed to do on a sudden, it was still dark. I
wondered for a moment where I was, and what was the meaning of the
shouting and knocking I heard. Then, discerning the faint outline of
the window, I remembered the place in which I had gone to bed, and I
sat up and listened. Some one--nay, several people--were drumming and
kicking against the wooden doors of the inn-yard, and shouting
besides, loud enough to raise the dead. In the next room to mine I
caught the grumbling voices of persons disturbed, like myself, from
sleep. And by and by a window was opened, and I heard the landlord ask
what was the matter.
"In the Queen's name!" came the loud, impatient answer, given in a
voice that rose above the ring of bridles and the stamping of iron
hoofs, "open! and that quickly, Master Host. The watch are here, and
we must search."
I waited to hear no more. I was out of bed, and huddling on my
clothes, and thrusting my feet into my boots, like one possessed. My
heart was beating as fast as if I had been running in a race, and my
hands were shaking with the shock of the alarm. The impatient voice
without was Master Pritchard's, and it rang with all the vengeful
passion which I should have expected that gentleman, duped, ducked,
and robbed, to be feeling. There would be little mercy to be had at
his hands. Moreover, my ears, grown as keen for the moment as the
hunted hare's, distinguished the tramping of at least half-a-dozen
horses, so that it was clear that he had come with a force at his
back. Resistance would be useless. My sole chance lay in flight--if
flight should still be possible.
Even in my haste I did not forsake the talisman which had served me so
well, but stayed an instant to thrust it into my pocket. The Cluddes
have, I fancy, a knack of keeping cool in emergencies, getting,
indeed, the cooler the greater the stress.
By this time the inn was thoroughly aroused. Doors were opening and
shutting on all sides of me, and questions were being shouted in
different tones from room to room. In the midst of the hubbub I heard
the landlord come out muttering, and go downstairs to open the door.
Instantly I unlatched mine, slipped through it stealthily, sneaked a
step or two down the passage, and then came plump in the dark against
some one who was moving as softly as myself. The surprise was
complete, and I should have cried out at the unexpected collision, had
not the unknown laid a cold hand on my mouth, and gently pushed me
back into my room.
Here there was now a faint glimmer of dawn, and by this I saw that my
companion was the serving-maid. "Hist!" she said, speaking under her
breath, "Is it you they want?"
I nodded.
"I thought so," she muttered. "Then you must get out through your
window. You cannot pass them. They are a dozen or more, and armed.
Quick! knot this about the bars. It is no great depth to the bottom,
and the ground is soft from the rain."
She tore, as she spoke, the coverlet from the bed, and, twisting it
into a kind of rope, helped me to secure one corner of it about the
window-bar. "When you are down," she whispered, "keep along the wall
to the right until you come to a haystack. Turn to the left there--you
will have to ford the water--and you will soon be clear of the town.
Look about you then, and you will see a horse-track, which leads to
Elstree, running in a line with the London Road, but a mile from it
and through woods. At Elstree any path to the left will take you to
Barnet, and not two miles lost."
"Heaven bless you!" I said, turning from the gloom, the dark sky, and
driving scud without to peer gratefully at her. "Heaven bless you for
a good woman!"
"And God keep you for a bonny boy," she whispered.
I kissed her, forcing into her hands--a thing the remembrance of which
is very pleasant to me to this day--my last piece of gold.
A moment more, and I stood unhurt, but almost up to my knees in mud,
in an alley bounded on both sides, as far as I could see, by blind
walls. Stopping only to indicate by a low whistle that I was safe, I
turned and sped away as fast as I could run in the direction which she
had pointed out. There was no one abroad, and in a shorter time than I
had expected I found myself outside the town, traveling over a kind of
moorland tract bounded in the distance by woods.
Here I picked up the horse-track easily enough, and without stopping,
save for a short breathing space, hurried along it, to gain the
shelter of the trees. So far so good! I had reason to be thankful. But
my case was still an indifferent one. More than once in getting out of
the town I had slipped and fallen. I was wet through, and plastered
with dirt owing to these mishaps; and my clothes were in a woeful
plight. For a time excitement kept me up, however, and I made good
way, warmed by the thought that I had again baffled the great Bishop.
It was only when the day had come, and grown on to noon, and I saw no
sign of any pursuers, that thought got the upper hand. Then I began to
compare, with some bitterness of feeling, my present condition--wet,
dirty, and homeless--with that which I had enjoyed only a week before;
and it needed all my courage to support me. Skulking, half famished,
between Barnet and Tottenham, often compelled to crouch in ditches or
behind walls while travelers went by, and liable each instant to have
to leave the highway and take to my heels, I had leisure to feel; and
I did feel, more keenly, I think, that afternoon than at any later
time, the bitterness of fortune. I cursed Stephen Gardiner a dozen
times, and dared not let my thoughts wander to my father. I had said
that I would build my house afresh. Well, truly I was building it from
the foundation.
It added very much to my misery that it rained all day a cold,
half-frozen rain. The whole afternoon I spent in hiding, shivering and
shaking in a hole under a ledge near Tottenham; being afraid to go
into London before nightfall, lest I should be waited for at the gate
and be captured. Chilled and bedraggled as I was, and weak through
want of food which I dared not go out to beg, the terrors of capture
got hold of my mind and presented to me one by one every horrible form
of humiliation, the stocks, the pillory, the cart-tail; so that even
Master Pritchard, could he have seen me and known my mind, might have
pitied me; so that I loathe to this day the hours I spent in that foul
hiding-place. Between a man's best and worse, there is little but a
platter of food.
The way this was put an end to, I well remember. An old woman came
into the field where I lay hid, to drive home a cow. I had had my eyes
on this cow for at least an hour, having made up my mind to milk it
for my own benefit as soon as the dusk fell. In my disappointment at
seeing it driven off, and also out of a desire to learn whether the
old dame might not be going to milk it in a corner of the pasture, in
which case I might still get an after taste, I crawled so far out of
my hole that, turning suddenly, she caught sight of me. I expected to
see her hurry off, but she did not. She took a long look, and then
came back toward me, making, however, as it seemed to me, as if she
did not see me. When she had come within a few feet of me, she looked
down abruptly, and our eyes met. What she saw in mine I can only
guess. In hers I read a divine pity. "Oh, poor lad!" she murmured;
"oh, you poor, poor lad!" and there were tears in her voice.
I was so weak--it was almost twenty-four hours since I had tasted
food, and I had come twenty-four miles in the time--that at that I
broke down, and cried like a child.
I learned later that the old woman took me for just the same person
for whom the Bailiff at St. Albans had mistaken me, a young apprentice
named Hunter, who had got into trouble about religion, and was at this
time hiding up and down the country; Bishop Bonner having clapped his
father into jail until the son should come to hand. But her kind heart
knew no distinction of creeds. She took me to her cottage as soon as
night fell, and warmed, and dried, and fed me. She did not dare to
keep me under her roof for longer than an hour or two, neither would I
have stayed to endanger her. But she sent me out a new man, with a
crust, moreover, in my pocket. A hundred times between Tottenham and
Aldersgate I said "God bless her!" And I say so now.
So twice in one day, and that the gloomiest day of my life, I was
succored by a woman. I have never forgotten it. I have tried to keep
it always in mind; remembering too a saying of my uncle's, that "there
is nothing on earth so merciful as a good woman, or so pitiless as a
bad one!"
CHAPTER V.
MISTRESS BERTRAM.
"Ding! ding! ding! Aid ye the poor! Pray for the dead! Five o'clock and
a murky morning."
The noise of the bell, and the cry which accompanied it, roused me
from my first sleep in London, and that with a vengeance; the bell
being rung and the words uttered within three feet of my head. Where
did I sleep, then? Well, I had found a cozy resting-place behind some
boards which stood propped against the wall of a baker's oven in a
street near Moorgate. The wall was warm and smelt of new bread, and
another besides myself had discovered its advantages. This was the
watchman, who had slumbered away most of his vigil cheek by jowl with
me, but, morning approaching, had roused himself, and before he was
well out of his bed, certainly before he had left his bedroom, had
begun--the ungrateful wretch--to prove his watchfulness by disturbing
every one else.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes, grinding my shoulders well against the
wall for warmth. I had no need to turn out yet, but I began to think,
and the more I thought the harder I stared at the planks six inches
before my nose. My thoughts turned upon a very knotty point; one that
I had never seriously considered before. What was I going to do next?
How was I going to live or to rear the new house of which I have made
mention? Hitherto I had aimed simply at reaching London. London had
paraded itself before my mind--though my mind should have known
better--not as a town of cold streets and dreary alleys and shops open
from seven to four with perhaps here and there a vacant place for an
apprentice; but as a gilded city of adventure and romance, in which a
young man of enterprise, whether he wanted to go abroad or to rise at
home, might be sure of finding his sword weighed, priced, and bought
up on the instant, and himself valued at his own standard.
But London reached, the hoarding in Moorgate reached, and five o'clock
in the morning reached, somehow these visions faded rapidly. In the
cold reality left to me I felt myself astray. If I would stay at home,
who was going to employ me? To whom should I apply? What patron had I?
Or if I would go abroad, how was I to set about it? how find a vessel,
seeing that I might expect to be arrested the moment I showed my face
in daylight?
Here all my experience failed me. I did not know what to do, though
the time had come for action, and I must do or starve. It had been all
very well when I was at Coton, to propose that I would go up to
London, and get across the water--such had been my dim notion--to the
Courtenays and Killigrews, who, with other refugees, Protestants for
the most part, were lying on the French coast, waiting for better
times. But now that I was in London, and as good as an outlaw myself,
I saw no means of going to them. I seemed farther from my goal than I
had been in Warwickshire.
Thinking very blankly over this I began to munch the piece of bread
which I owed to the old dame at Tottenham; and had solemnly got
through half of it, when the sound of rapid footsteps--the footsteps
of women, I judged from the lightness of the tread--caused me to hold
my hand and listen. Whoever they were--and I wondered, for it was
still early, and I had heard no one pass since the watchman left
me--they came to a stand in front of my shelter, and one of them
spoke. Her words made me start; unmistakably the voice was a
gentlewoman's, such as I had not heard for almost a week. And at this
place and hour, on the raw borderland of day and night, a gentlewoman
was the last person I expected to light upon. Yet if the speaker were
not some one of station, Petronilla's lessons had been thrown away
upon me.
The words were uttered in a low voice; but the planks in front of me
were thin, and the speaker was actually leaning against them. I caught
every accent of what seemed to be the answer to a question. "Yes, yes!
It is all right!" she said, a covert ring of impatience in her tone.
"Take breath a moment. I do not see him now."
"Thank Heaven!" muttered another voice. As I had fancied, there were
two persons. The latter speaker's tone smacked equally of breeding
with the former's, but was rounder and fuller, and more masterful; and
she appeared to be out of breath. "Then perhaps we have thrown him off
the trail," she continued, after a short pause, in which she seemed to
have somewhat recovered herself. "I distrusted him from the first,
Anne--from the first. Yet, do you know, I never feared him as I did
Master Clarence; and as it was too much to hope that we should be rid
of both at once--they took good care of that--why, the attempt had to
be made while he was at home. But I always felt he was a spy."
"Who? Master Clarence?" asked she who had spoken first.
"Ay, he certainly. But I did not mean him, I meant Philip."
"Well, I--I said at first, you remember, that it was a foolhardy
enterprise, mistress!"
"Tut, tut, girl!" quoth the other tartly--this time the impatience lay
with her, and she took no pains to conceal it--"we are not beaten yet.
Come, look about! Cannot you remember where we are, nor which way the
river should be? If the dawn were come, we could tell."
"But with the dawn----"
"The streets would fill. True, and, Master Philip giving the alarm, we
should be detected before we had gone far. The more need, girl, to
lose no time. I have my breath again, and the child is asleep. Let us
venture one way or the other, and Heaven grant it be the right one!"
"Let me see," the younger woman answered slowly, as if in doubt. "Did
we come by the church? No; we came the other way. Let us try this
turning, then."
"Why, child, we came that way," was the decided answer. "What are you
thinking of? That would take us straight back into his arms, the
wretch! Come, come! you loiter," continued this, the more masculine
speaker, "and a minute may make all the difference between a prison
and freedom. If we can reach the Lion Wharf by seven--it is like to be
a dark morning and foggy--we may still escape before Master Philip
brings the watch upon us."
They moved briskly away as she spoke, and her words were already
growing indistinct from distance, while I remained still, idly seeking
the clew to their talk and muttering over and over again the name
Clarence, which seemed familiar to me, when a cry of alarm, in which I
recognized one of their voices, cut short my reverie. I crawled with
all speed from my shelter, and stood up, being still in a line with
the boards, and not easily distinguishable. As she had said, it was a
dark morning; but the roofs of the houses--now high, now low--could be
plainly discerned against a gray, drifting sky wherein the first signs
of dawn were visible; and the blank outlines of the streets, which met
at this point, could be seen. Six or seven yards from me, in the
middle of the roadway, stood three dusky figures, of whom I judged the
nearer, from their attitudes, to be the two women. The farthest seemed
to be a man.
I was astonished to see that he was standing cap in hand; nay, I was
disgusted as well, for I had crept out hot-fisted, expecting to be
called upon to defend the women. But, despite the cry I had heard,
they were talking to him quietly enough, as far as I could hear. And
in a minute or so I saw the taller woman give him something.
He took it with a low bow, and appeared almost to sweep the dirt with
his bonnet. She waved her hand in dismissal, and he stood back still
uncovered. And--hey, presto! the women tripped swiftly away.
By this time my curiosity was intensely excited, but for a moment I
thought it was doomed to disappointment. I thought that it was all
over. It was not, by any means. The man stood looking after them until
they reached the corner, and the moment they had passed it, he
followed. His stealthy manner of going, and his fashion of peering
after them, was enough for me. I guessed at once that he was dogging
them, following them unknown to them and against their will; and with
considerable elation I started after him, using the same precautions.
What was sauce for the geese was sauce for the gander! So we went,
two--one--one, slipping after one another through half a dozen dark
streets, tending generally southward.
Following him in this way I seldom caught a glimpse of the women. The
man kept at a considerable distance behind them, and I had my
attention fixed on him. But once or twice, when, turning a corner, I
all but trod on his heels, I saw them; and presently an odd point
about them struck me. There was a white kerchief or something attached
apparently to the back of the one's cloak, which considerably assisted
my stealthy friend to keep them in view. It puzzled me. Was it a
signal to him? Was he really all the time acting in concert with them;
and was I throwing away my pains? Or was the white object which so
betrayed them merely the result of carelessness, and the lack of
foresight of women grappling with a condition of things to which they
were unaccustomed? Of course I could not decide this, the more as, at
that distance, I failed to distinguish what the white something was,
or even which of the two wore it.
Presently I got a clew to our position, for we crossed Cheapside close
to Paul's Cross, which my childish memories of the town enabled me to
recognize, even by that light. Here my friend looked up and down, and
hung a minute on his heel before he followed the women, as if
expecting or looking for some one. It might be that he was trying to
make certain that the watch were not in sight. They were not, at any
rate. Probably they had gone home to bed, for the morning was growing.
And, after a momentary hesitation, he plunged into the narrow street
down which the women had flitted.
He had only gone a few yards when I heard him cry out. The next
instant, almost running against him myself, I saw what had happened.
The women had craftily lain in wait for him in the little court into
which the street ran and had caught him as neatly as could be. When I
came upon them the taller woman was standing at bay with a passion
that was almost fury in her pose and gesture. Her face, from which the
hood of a coarse cloak had fallen back, was pale with anger; her gray
eyes flashed, her teeth glimmered. Seeing her thus, and seeing the
burden she carried under her cloak--which instinct told me was her
child--I thought of a tigress brought to bay.
"You lying knave!" she hissed. "You Judas!"
The man recoiled a couple of paces, and in recoiling nearly touched
me.
"What would you?" she continued. "What do you want? What would you do?
You have been paid to go. Go, and leave us!"
"I dare not," he muttered, keeping away from her as if he dreaded a
blow. She looked a woman who could deal a blow, a woman who could both
love and hate fiercely and openly--as proud and frank and haughty a
lady as I had ever seen in my life. "I dare not," he muttered
sullenly; "I have my orders."
"Oh!" she cried, with scorn. "You have your orders, have you! The
murder is out. But from whom, sirrah? Whose orders are to supersede
mine? I would King Harry were alive, and I would have you whipped to
Tyburn. Speak, rogue; who bade you follow me?"
He shook his head.
She looked about her wildly, passionately, and I saw that she was at
her wits' end what to do, or how to escape him. But she was a woman.
When she next spoke there was a marvelous change in her. Her face had
grown soft, her voice low. "Philip," she said gently, "the purse was
light. I will give you more. I will give you treble the amount within
a few weeks, and I will thank you on my knees, and my husband shall be
such a friend to you as you have never dreamed of, if you will only go
home and be silent. Only that--or, better still, walk the streets an
hour, and then report that you lost sight of us. Think, man, think!"
she cried with energy--"the times may change. A little more, and Wyatt
had been master of London last year. Now the people are fuller of
discontent than ever, and these burnings and torturings, these
Spaniards in the streets--England will not endure them long. The times
will change. Let us go, and you will have a friend--when most you need
one."
He shook his head sullenly. "I dare not do it," he said. And somehow I
got the idea that he was telling the truth, and that it was not the
man's stubborn nature only that withstood the bribe and the plea. He
spoke as if he were repeating a lesson and the master were present.
When she saw that she could not move him, the anger, which I think
came more naturally to her, broke out afresh. "You will not, you
hound!" she cried. "Will neither threats nor promises move you?"
"Neither," he answered doggedly; "I have my orders."
So far, I had remained a quiet listener, standing in the mouth of the
lane which opened upon the court where they were. The women had taken
no notice of me; either because they did not see me, or because,
seeing me, they thought that I was a hanger-on of the man before them.
And he, having his back to me, and his eyes on them, could not see me.
It was a surprise to him--a very great surprise, I think--when I took
three steps forward, and gripped him by the scruff of his neck.
"You have your orders, have you?" I muttered in his ear, as I shook
him to and fro, while the taller woman started back and the younger
uttered a cry of alarm at my sudden appearance. "Well, you will not
obey them. Do you hear? Your employer may go hang! You will do just
what these ladies please to ask of you."
He struggled an instant; but he was an undersized man, and he could
not loosen the hold which I had secured at my leisure. Then I noticed
his hand going to his girdle in a suspicious way. "Stop that!" I said,
flashing before his eyes a short, broad blade, which had cut many a
deer's throat in Old Arden Forest. "You had better keep quiet, or it
will be the worse for you! Now, mistress," I continued, "you can
dispose of this little man as you please."
"Who are you?" she said, after a pause; during which she had stared at
me in open astonishment. No doubt I was a wild-looking figure.
"A friend," I replied. "Or one who would be such. I saw this fellow
follow you, and I followed him. For the last five minutes I have been
listening to your talk. He was not amenable to reason then, but I
think he will be now. What shall I do with him?"
She smiled faintly, but did not answer at once, the coolness and
resolution with which she had faced him before failing her now,
possibly in sheer astonishment, or because my appearance at her side,
by removing the strain, sapped the strength. "I do not know," she said
at length, in a vague, puzzled tone.
"Well," I answered, "you are going to the Lion Wharf, and----"
"Oh, you fool!" she screamed out loud. "Oh, you fool!" she repeated
bitterly. "Now you have told him all."
I stood confounded. My cheeks burned with shame, and her look of
contempt cut me like a knife. That the reproach was deserved I knew at
once, for the man in my grasp gave a start, which proved that the
information was not lost upon him. "Who told you?" the woman went on,
clutching the child jealously to her breast, as though she saw herself
menaced afresh. "Who told you about the Lion Wharf?"
"Never mind," I answered gloomily. "I have made a mistake, but it is
easy to remedy it." And I took out my knife again. "Do you go on and
leave us."
I hardly know whether I meant my threat or no. But my prisoner had no
doubts. He shrieked out--a wild cry of fear which rang round the empty
court--and by a rapid blow, despair giving him courage, he dashed the
hunting-knife from my hand. This done he first flung himself on me,
then tried by a sudden jerk to free himself. In a moment we were down
on the stones, and tumbling over one another in the dirt, while he
struggled to reach his knife, which was still in his girdle, and I
strove to prevent him. The fight was sharp, but it lasted barely a
minute. When the first effort of his despair was spent, I came
uppermost, and he was but a child in my hands. Presently, with my knee
on his chest, I looked up. The women were still there, the younger
clinging to the other.
"Go! go!" I cried impatiently. Each second I expected the court to be
invaded, for the man had screamed more than once.
But they hesitated. I had been forced to hurt him a little, and he was
moaning piteously. "Who are you?" the elder woman asked--she who had
spoken all through.
"Nay, never mind that!" I answered. "Do you go! Go, while you can. You
know the way to the Wharf."
"Yes," she answered. "But I cannot go and leave him at your mercy.
Remember he is a man, and has----"
"He is a treacherous scoundrel," I answered, giving his throat a
squeeze. "But he shall have one more chance. Listen, sirrah!" I
continued to the man, "and stop that noise or I will knock out your
teeth with my dagger-hilt. Listen and be silent. I shall go with these
ladies, and I promise you this: If they are stopped or hindered on
their way, or if evil happen to them at that wharf, whose name you had
better forget, it will be the worse for you. Do you hear? You will
suffer for it, though there be a dozen guards about you! Mind you," I
added, "I have nothing to lose myself, for I am desperate already."
He vowed--the poor craven--with his stuttering tongue, that he would
be true, and vowed it again and again. But I saw that his eyes did not
meet mine. They glanced instead at the knife-blade, and I knew, even
while I pretended to trust him, that he would betray us. My real hope
lay in his fears, and in this, that as the fugitives knew the way to
the wharf, and it could not now be far distant, we might reach it,
and go on board some vessel--I had gathered they were flying the
country--before this wretch could recover himself and get together a
force to stop us. That was my real hope, and in that hope only I left
him.
We went as fast as the women could walk. I did not trouble them with
questions; indeed, I had myself no more leisure than enabled me to
notice their general appearance, which was that of comfortable
tradesmen's womenfolk. Their cloaks and hoods were plainly fashioned,
and of coarse stuff, their shoes were thick, and no jewel or scrap of
lace, peeping out, betrayed them. Yet there was something in their
carriage which could not be hidden, something which, to my eye, told
tales; so that minute by minute I became more sure that this was
really an adventure worth pursuing, and that London had kept a reward
in store for me besides its cold stones and inhospitable streets.
The city was beginning to rouse itself. As we flitted through the
lanes and alleys which lie between Cheapside and the river, we met
many people, chiefly of the lower classes, on their way to work. Yet
in spite of this, we had no need to fear observation, for, though the
morning was fully come, with the light had arrived such a thick,
choking, yellow fog as I, being for the most part country-bred, had
never experienced. It was so dense and blinding that we had a
difficulty in keeping together, and even hand in hand could scarcely
see one another. In my wonder how my companions found their way, I
presently failed to notice their condition, and only remarked the
distress and exhaustion which one of them was suffering, when she
began, notwithstanding all her efforts, to lag behind. Then I sprang
forward, blaming myself much. "Forgive me," I said. "You are tired,
and no wonder. Let me carry the child, mistress."
Exhausted as she was, she drew away from me jealously.
"No," she panted. "We are nearly there. I am better now." And she
strained the child closer to her, as though she feared I might take it
from her by force.
"Well, if you will not trust me," I answered, "let your friend carry
it for a time. I can see you are tired out."
Through the mist she bent forward, and peered into my face, her eyes
scarcely a foot from mine. The scrutiny seemed to satisfy her. She
drew a long breath and held out her burden. "No," she said; "you shall
take him. I will trust you."
I took the little wrapped-up thing as gently as I could. "You shall
not repent it, if I can help it, Mistress----"
"Bertram," she said.
"Mistress Bertram," I repeated. "Now let us get on and lose no time."
A walk of a hundred yards or so brought us clear of the houses, and
revealed before us, in place of all else, a yellow curtain of fog.
Below this, at our feet, yet apparently a long way from us, was a
strange, pale line of shimmering light, which they told me was the
water. At first I could hardly believe this. But, pausing a moment
while my companions whispered together, dull creakings and groanings
and uncouth shouts and cries, and at last the regular beat of oars,
came to my ears out of the bank of vapor, and convinced me that we
really had the river before us.
Mistress Bertram turned to me abruptly. "Listen," she said, "and
decide for yourself, my friend. We are close to the wharf now, and in
a few minutes shall know our fate. It is possible that we may be
intercepted at this point, and if that happen, it will be bad for me
and worse for any one aiding me. You have done us gallant service, but
you are young; and I am loath to drag you into perils which do not
belong to you. Take my advice, then, and leave us now. I would I could
reward you," she added hastily, "but that knave has my purse."
I put the child gently back into her arms. "Good-by," she said, with
more feeling. "We thank you. Some day I may return to England, and
have ample power----"
"Not so fast," I answered stiffly. "Did you think it possible,
mistress, that I would desert you now? I gave you back the child only
because it might hamper me, and will be safer with you. Come, let us
on at once to the wharf."
"You mean it?" she said.
"Of a certainty!" I answered, settling my cap on my head with perhaps
a boyish touch of the braggart.
At any rate, she did not take me at once at my word; and her thought
for me touched me the more because I judged her--I know not exactly
why--to be a woman not over prone to think of others. "Do not be
reckless," she said slowly, her eyes intently fixed on mine. "I should
be sorry to bring evil upon you. You are but a boy."
"And yet," I answered, smiling, "there is as good as a price upon my
head already. I should be reckless if I stayed here. If you will take
me with you, let us go. We have loitered too long already."
She turned then, asking no questions; but she looked at me from time
to time in a puzzled way, as though she thought she ought to know
me--as though I reminded her of some one. Paying little heed to this
then, I hurried her and her companion down to the water, traversing a
stretch of foreshore strewn with piles of wood and stacks of barrels
and old rotting boats, between which the mud lay deep. Fortunately it
was high tide, and so we had not far to go. In a minute or two I
distinguished the hull of a ship looming large through the fog; and a
few more steps placed us safely on a floating raft, on the far side of
which the vessel lay moored.
There was only one man to be seen lounging on the raft, and the
neighborhood was quiet. My spirits rose as I looked round. "Is this
the _Whelp?_" the tall lady asked. I had not heard the other open her
mouth since the encounter in the court.
"Yes, it is the _Whelp_, madam," the man answered, saluting her and
speaking formally, and with a foreign accent. "You are the lady who is
expected?"
"I am," she answered, with authority. "Will you tell the captain that
I desire to sail immediately, without a moment's delay? Do you
understand?"
"Well, the tide is going out," quoth the sailor, dubiously, looking
steadily into the fog, which hid the river. "It has just turned, it is
true. But as to sailing----"
She cut him short. "Go, go! man. Tell your captain what I say. And let
down a ladder for us to get on board."
He caught a rope which hung over the side, and, swinging himself up,
disappeared. We stood below, listening to the weird sounds which came
off the water, the creaking and flapping of masts and canvas, the whir
of wings and shrieks of unseen gulls, the distant hail of boatmen. A
bell in the city solemnly tolled eight. The younger woman shivered.
The elder's foot tapped impatiently on the planks. Shut in by the
yellow walls of fog, I experienced a strange sense of solitude; it was
as if we three were alone in the world--we three who had come together
so strangely.
CHAPTER VI.
MASTER CLARENCE.
We had stood thus for a few moments when a harsh voice, hailing us
from above, put an end to our several thoughts and forebodings. We
looked up and I saw half a dozen night-capped heads thrust over the
bulwarks. A rope ladder came hurtling down at our feet, and a man,
nimbly descending, held it tight at the bottom. "Now, madame!" he said
briskly. They all, I noticed, had the same foreign accent, yet all
spoke English; a singularity I did not understand, until I learned
later that the boat was the _Lions Whelp_, trading between London and
Calais, and manned from the latter place.
Mistress Bertram ascended quickly and steadily, holding the baby in
her arms. The other made some demur, lingering at the foot of the
ladder and looking up as if afraid, until her companion chid her
sharply. Then she too went up, but as she passed me--I was holding one
side of the ladder steady--she shot at me from under her hood a look
which disturbed me strangely.
It was the first time I had seen her face, and it was such a face as a
man rarely forgets. Not because of its beauty; rather because it was a
speaking face, a strange and expressive one, which the dark waving
hair, swelling in thick clusters upon either temple, seemed to
accentuate. The features were regular, but, the full red lips
excepted, rather thin than shapely. The nose, too, was prominent. But
the eyes! The eyes seemed to glorify the dark brilliant thinness of
the face, and to print it upon the memory. They were dark flashing
eyes, and their smile seemed to me perpetually to challenge, to allure
and repulse, and even to goad. Sometimes they were gay, more rarely
sad, sometimes soft, and again hard as steel. They changed in a moment
as one or another approached her. But always at their gayest, there
was a suspicion of weariness and fatigue in their depths. Or so I
thought later.
Something of this flashed through my mind as I followed her up the
side. But once on board I glanced round, forgetting her in the novelty
of my position. The _Whelp_ was decked fore and aft only, the
blackness of the hold gaping amidships, spanned by a narrow gangway,
which served to connect the two decks. We found ourselves in the
forepart, amid coils of rope and windlasses and water-casks;
surrounded by half a dozen wild-looking sailors wearing blue knitted
frocks and carrying sheath-knives at their girdles.
The foremost and biggest of these seemed to be the captain, although,
so far as outward appearances went, the only difference between him
and his crew lay in a marlin-spike which he wore slung to a thong
beside his knife. When I reached the deck he was telling a long story
to Mistress Bertram, and telling it very slowly. But the drift of it I
soon gathered. While the fog lasted he could not put to sea.
"Nonsense!" cried my masterful companion, chafing at his slowness of
speech. "Why not? Would it be dangerous?"
"Well, madam, it would be dangerous," he answered, more slowly than
ever. "Yes, it would be dangerous. And to put to sea in a fog? That is
not seamanship. And your baggage has not arrived."
"Never mind my baggage!" she answered imperiously. "I have made other
arrangements for it. Two or three things I know came on board last
night. I want to start--to start at once, do you hear?"
The captain shook his head, and said sluggishly that it was
impossible. Spitting on the deck he ground his heel leisurely round in
a knothole. "Impossible," he repeated; "it would not be seamanship to
start in a fog. When the fog lifts we will go. 'Twill be all the same
to-morrow. We shall lie at Leigh to-night, whether we go now or go
when the fog lifts."
"At Leigh?"
"That is it, madam."
"And when will you go from Leigh?" she cried indignantly.
"Daybreak to-morrow," he answered. "You leave it to me, mistress," he
continued, in a tone of rough patronage, "and you will see your good
man before you expect it."
"But, man!" she exclaimed, trembling with impotent rage. "Did not
Master Bertram engage you to bring me across whenever I might be
ready? Ay, and pay you handsomely for it? Did he not, sirrah?"
"To be sure, to be sure!" replied the giant unmoved. "Using
seamanship, and not going to sea in a fog, if it please you."
"It does not please me!" she retorted. "And why stay at Leigh?"
He looked up at the rigging, then down at the deck. He set his heel in
the knothole, and ground it round again. Then he looked at his
questioner with a broad smile. "Well, mistress, for a very good
reason. It is there your good man is waiting for you. Only," added
this careful keeper of a secret, "he bade me not tell any one."
She uttered a low cry, which might have been an echo of her baby's
cooing, and convulsively clasped the child more tightly to her. "He is
at Leigh!" she murmured, flushing and trembling, another woman
altogether. Even her voice was wonderfully changed. "He is really at
Leigh, you say?"
"To be sure!" replied the captain, with a portentous wink and a
mysterious roll of the head. "He is there safe enough! Safe enough,
you may bet your handsome face to a rushlight. And we will be there
to-night."
She started up with a wild gesture. For a moment she had sat down on a
cask standing beside her, and forgotten our peril, and the probability
that we might never see Leigh at all. Now, I have said, she started
up. "No, no!" she cried, struggling for breath and utterance. "Oh, no!
no! Let us go at once. We must start at once!" Her voice was
hysterical in its sudden anxiety and terror, as the consciousness of
our position rolled back upon her. "Captain! listen, listen!" she
pleaded. "Let us start now, and my husband will give you double. I
will promise you double whatever he said if you will chance the fog."
I think all who heard her were moved, save the captain only. He rubbed
his head and grinned. Slow and heavy, he saw nothing in her prayer
save the freak of a woman wild to get to her man. He did not weigh her
promise at a groat; she was but a woman. And being a foreigner, he did
not perceive a certain air of breeding which might have influenced a
native. He was one of those men against whose stupidity Father Carey
used to say the gods fight in vain. When he answered good-naturedly,
"No, no, mistress, it is impossible. It would not be seamanship," I
felt that we might as well try to stop the ebbing tide as move him
from his position.
The feeling was a maddening one. The special peril which menaced my
companions I did not know; but I knew they feared pursuit, and I had
every reason to fear it for myself. Yet at any moment, out of the
fog which encircled us so closely that we could barely see the raft
below--and the shore not at all--might come the tramp of hurrying feet
and the stern hail of the law. It was maddening to think of this, and
to know that we had only to cast off a rope or two in order to escape;
and to know also that we were absolutely helpless.
I expected that Mistress Bertram, brave as she had shown herself,
would burst into a passion of rage or tears. But apparently she had
one hope left. She looked at me.
I tried to think--to think hard. Alas, I seemed only able to listen.
An hour had gone by since we parted from that rascal in the court, and
we might expect him to appear at any moment, vengeful and exultant,
with a posse at his back. Yet I tried hard to think; and the fog
presently suggested a possible course. "Look here," I said suddenly,
speaking for the first time, "if you do not start until the fog lifts,
captain, we may as well breakfast ashore, and return presently."
"That is as you please," he answered indifferently.
"What do you think?" I said, turning to my companions with as much
carelessness as I could command. "Had we not better do that?"
Mistress Bertram did not understand, but in her despair she obeyed the
motion of my hand mechanically, and walked to the side. The younger
woman followed more slowly, so that I had to speak to her with some
curtness, bidding her make haste; for I was in a fever until we were
clear of the _Whelp_ and the Lion Wharf. It had struck me that, if the
ship were not to leave at once, we were nowhere in so much danger as
on board. At large in the fog we might escape detection for a time.
Our pursuers might as well look for a needle in a haystack as seek us
through it when once we were clear of the wharf. And this was not the
end of my idea. But for the present it was enough. Therefore I took up
Mistress Anne very short. "Come!" I said, "be quick! Let me help you."
She obeyed, and I was ashamed of my impatience when at the foot of the
ladder she thanked me prettily. It was almost with good cheer in my
voice and a rebound of spirits that I explained, as I hurried my
companions across the raft, what my plan was.
The moment we were ashore I felt safer. The fog swallowed us up quick,
as the Bible says. The very hull of the ship vanished from sight
before we had gone half a dozen paces. I had never seen a London fog
before, and to me it seemed portentous and providential; a marvel as
great as the crimson hail which fell in the London gardens to mark her
Majesty's accession.
Yet after all, without my happy thought, the fog would have availed us
little. We had scarcely gone a score of yards before the cautious
tread of several people hastening down the strand toward the wharf
struck my ear. They were proceeding in silence, and we might not have
noticed their approach if the foremost had not by chance tripped and
fallen; whereupon one laughed and another swore. With a warning hand I
grasped my companions' arms, and hurried them forward some paces until
I felt sure that our figures could not be seen through the mist. Then
I halted, and we stood listening, gazing into one another's strained
eyes, while the steps came nearer and nearer, crossed our track and
then with a noisy rush thundered on the wooden raft. My ear caught the
jingle of harness and the clank of weapons.
"It is the watch," I muttered. "Come, and make no noise. What I want
is a little this way. I fancy I saw it as we passed down to the
wharf."
They turned with me, but we had not taken many steps before Mistress
Anne, who was walking on my left side, stumbled over something. She
tried to save herself, but failed and fell heavily, uttering as she
did so a loud cry. I sprang to her assistance, and even before I
raised her I laid my hand lightly on her mouth. "Hush!" I said softly,
"for safety's sake, make no noise. What is the matter?"
"Oh!" she moaned, making no effort to rise, "my ankle! my ankle! I am
sure I have broken it."
I muttered my dismay, while Mistress Bertram, stooping anxiously,
examined the injured limb. "Can you stand?" she asked.
But it was no time for questioning, and I put her aside. The troop
which had passed were within easy hearing, and if there should be one
among them familiar with the girl's voice, we might be pounced upon,
fog or no fog. I felt that it was no time for ceremony, and picked
Mistress Anne up in my arms, whispering to the elder woman: "Go on
ahead! I think I see the boat. It is straight before you."
Luckily I was right, it was the boat; and so far well. But at the
moment I spoke I heard a sudden outcry behind us, and knew the hunt
was up. I plunged forward with my burden, recklessly and blindly,
through mud and over obstacles. The wherry for which I was making was
moored in the water a few feet from the edge. I had remarked it idly
and without purpose as we came down to the wharf, and had even noticed
that the oars were lying in it. Now, if we could reach it and start
down the river for Leigh, we might by possibility gain that place, and
meet Mistress Bertram's husband.
At any late, nothing in the world seemed so desirable to me at the
moment as the shelter of that boat. I plunged through the mud, and
waded desperately through the water to it, Mistress Bertram scarce a
whit behind me. I reached it, but reached it only as the foremost
pursuer caught sight of us. I heard his shout of triumph, and somehow
I bundled my burden into the boat--I remember that she clung about my
neck in fear, and I had to loosen her hands roughly. But I did loosen
them--in time. With one stroke of my hunting-knife, I severed the
rope, and pushing off the boat with all my strength, sprang into it as
it floated away--and was in time. But one second's delay would have
undone us. Two men were already in the water up to their knees, and
their very breath was hot on my face as we swung out into the stream.
Fortunately, I had had experience of boats on the Avon, at Bidford and
Stratford, and could pull a good oar. For a moment indeed the wherry
rolled and dipped as I snatched up the sculls; but I quickly got her
in hand, and, bending to my work, sent her spinning through the mist,
every stroke I pulled increasing the distance between us and our now
unseen foes. Happily we were below London Bridge, and had not that
dangerous passage to make. The river, too, was nearly clear of craft,
and though once and again in the Pool a huge hulk loomed suddenly
across our bows, and then faded behind us into the mist like some
monstrous phantom, and so told of a danger narrowly escaped, I thought
it best to run all risks, and go ahead as long as the tide should ebb.
It was strange how suddenly we had passed from storm into calm.
Mistress Anne had bound her ankle with a handkerchief, and bravely
made light of the hurt; and now the two women sat crouching in the
stern watching me, their heads together, their faces pale. The mist
had closed round us, and we were alone again, gliding over the bosom
of the great river that runs down to the sea. I was oddly struck by
the strange current of life which for a week had tossed me from one
adventure to another, only to bring me into contact at length with
these two, and sweep me into the unknown whirlpool of their fortunes.
Who were they? A merchant's wife and her sister flying from Bishop
Bonner's inquisition? I thought it likely. Their cloaks and hoods
indeed, and all that I could see of their clothes, fell below such a
condition; but probably they were worn as a disguise. Their speech
rose as much above it, but I knew that of late many merchant's wives
had become scholars, and might pass in noblemen's houses; even as in
those days when London waxed fat, and set up and threw down
governments, every alderman had come to ride in mail.
No doubt the women, watching me in anxious silence, were as curious
about me. I still bore the stains of country travel. I was unwashen,
unkempt, my doublet was torn, the cloak I had cast at my feet was the
very wreck of a cloak. Yet I read no distrust in their looks. The
elder's brave eyes seemed ever thanking me. I never saw her lips move
silently that they did not shape "Well done!" And though I caught
Mistress Anne scanning me once or twice with an expression I could ill
interpret, a smile took its place the moment her gaze met mine.
We had passed, but were still in sight of, Greenwich Palace--as they
told me--when the mist rose suddenly like a curtain rolled away, and
the cold, bright February sun, shining out, disclosed the sparkling
river with the green hills rising on our right hand. Here and there on
its surface a small boat such as our own moved to and fro, and in the
distant Pool from which we had come rose a little forest of masts. I
hung on the oars a moment, and my eyes were drawn to a two-masted
vessel which, nearly half a mile below us, was drifting down, gently
heeling over with the current as the crew got up the sails. "I wonder
whither she is bound," I said thoughtfully, "and whether they would
take us on board by any chance."
Mistress Bertram shook her head. "I have no money," she answered
sadly. "I fear we must go on to Leigh, if it be any way possible. You
are tired, and no wonder. But what is it?" with a sudden change of
voice. "What is the matter?"
I had flashed out the oars with a single touch, and begun to pull as
fast as I could down the stream. No doubt my face, too, proclaimed my
discovery and awoke her fears. "Look behind!" I muttered between my
set teeth.
She turned, and on the instant uttered a low cry. A wherry like our
own, but even lighter--in my first glance up the river I had not
noticed it--had stolen nearer to us, and yet nearer, and now throwing
aside disguise was in hot pursuit of us. There were three men on
board, two rowing and one steering. When they saw that we had
discovered them they hailed us in a loud voice, and I heard the
steersman's feet rattle on the boards, as he cried to his men to give
way, and stamped in very eagerness. My only reply was to take a longer
stroke, and, pulling hard, to sweep away from them.
But presently my first strength died away, and the work began to tell
upon me, and little by little they overhauled us. Not that I gave up
at once for that. They were still some sixty yards behind, and for a
few minutes at any rate I might put off capture. In that time
something might happen. At the worst they were only three to one, and
their boat looked light and cranky and easy to upset.
So I pulled on, savagely straining at the oars. But my chest heaved
and my arms ached more and more with each stroke. The banks slid by
us; we turned one bend, then another, though I saw nothing of them. I
saw only the pursuing boat, on which my eyes were fixed, heard only
the measured rattle of the oars in the rowlocks. A minute, two
minutes, three minutes passed. They had not gained on us, but the
water was beginning to waver before my eyes, their boat seemed
floating in the air, there was a pulsation in my ears louder than that
of the oars, I struggled and yet I flagged. My knees trembled. Their
boat shot nearer now, nearer and nearer, so that I could read the
smile of triumph on the steersman's dark face and hear his cry of
exultation. Nearer! and then with a cry I dropped the oars.
"Quick!" I panted to my companions. "Change places with me! So!"
Trembling and out of breath as I was, I crawled between the women and
gained the stern sheets of the boat. As I passed Mistress Bertram she
clutched my arm. Her eyes, as they met mine, flashed fire, her lips
were white. "The man steering!" she hissed between her teeth. "Leave
the others. He is Clarence, and I fear him!"
I nodded; but still, as the hostile boat bore swiftly down upon us, I
cast a glance round to see if there were any help at hand. I saw no
sign of any. I saw only the pale blue sky overhead, and the stream
flowing swiftly under the boat. I drew my sword. The case was one
rather for despair than courage. The women were in my charge, and if I
did not acquit myself like a man now, when should I do so? Bah! it
would soon be over.
There was an instant's confusion in the other boat, as the crew ceased
rowing, and, seeing my attitude and not liking it, changed their
seats. To my joy the man, who had hitherto been steering, flung a
curse at the others and came forward to bear the brunt of the
encounter. He was a tall, sinewy man, past middle age, with a
clean-shaven face, a dark complexion, and cruel eyes. So he was Master
Clarence! Well, he had the air of a swordsman and a soldier. I
trembled for the women.
"Surrender, you fool!" he cried to me harshly. "In the Queen's
name--do you hear? What do you in this company?"
I answered nothing, for I was out of breath. But softly, my eyes on
his, I drew out with my left hand my hunting-knife. If I could beat
aside his sword, I would spring upon him and drive the knife home with
that hand. So, standing erect in bow and stern we faced one another,
the man and the boy, the flush of rage and exertion on my cheek, a
dark shade on his. And silently the boats drew together.
Thought is quick, quicker than anything else in the world I suppose,
for in some drawn-out second before the boats came together I had time
to wonder where I had seen his face before, and to rack my memory. I
knew no Master Clarence, yet I had seen this man somewhere. Another
second, and away with thought! He was crouching for a spring. I drew
back a little, then lunged--lunged with heart and hand. Our swords
crossed and whistled--just crossed--and even as I saw his eyes gleam
behind his point, the shock of the two boats coming together flung us
both backward and apart. A moment we reeled, staggering and throwing
out wild hands. I strove hard to recover myself, nay, I almost did so;
then I caught my foot in Mistress Anne's cloak, which she had left in
her place, and fell heavily back into the boat.
I was up in a moment--on my knees at least--and unhurt. But another
was before me. As I stooped half-risen, I saw one moment a dark shadow
above me, and the next a sheet of flame shone before my eyes, and a
tremendous shock swept all away. I fell senseless into the bottom of
the boat, knowing nothing of what had happened to me.
CHAPTER VII.
ON BOARD THE "FRAMLINGHAM."
I am told by people who have been seasick that the sound of the waves
beating against the hull comes in time to be an intolerable torment.
But bad as this may be, it can be nothing in comparison with the pains
I suffered from the same cause, as I recovered my senses. My brain
seemed to be a cavern into which each moment, with a rhythmical
regularity which added the pangs of anticipation to those of reality,
the sea rushed, booming and thundering, jarring every nerve and
straining the walls to bursting, and making each moment of
consciousness a vivid agony. And this lasted long; how long I cannot
say. But it had subsided somewhat when I first opened my eyes, and
dully, not daring to move my head, looked up.
I was lying on my back. About a foot from my eyes were rough beams of
wood disclosed by a smoky yellow light, which flickered on the
knotholes and rude joists. The light swayed to and fro regularly; and
this adding to my pain, I closed my eyes with a moan. Then some one
came to me, and I heard voices which sounded a long way off, and
promptly fell again into a deep sleep, troubled still, but less
painfully, by the same rhythmical shocks, the same dull crashings in
my brain.
When I awoke again I had sense to know what caused this, and where I
was--in a berth on board ship. The noise which had so troubled me was
that of the waves beating against her forefoot. The beams so close to
my face formed the deck, the smoky light came from the ship's lantern
swinging on a hook. I tried to turn. Some one came again, and with
gentle hands arranged my pillow and presently began to feed me with a
spoon. When I had swallowed a few mouthfuls I gained strength to turn.
Who was this feeding me? The light was at her back and dazzled me.
For a short while I took her for Petronilla, my thoughts going back at
one bound to Coton, and skipping all that had happened since I left
home. But as I grew stronger I grew clearer, and recalling bit by bit
what had happened in the boat, I recognized Mistress Anne. I tried to
murmur thanks, but she laid a cool finger on my lips and shook her
head, smiling on me. "You must not talk," she murmured, "you are
getting well. Now go to sleep again."
I shut my eyes at once as a child might. Another interval of
unconsciousness, painless this time, followed, and again I awoke. I
was lying on my side now, and without moving could see the whole of
the tiny cabin. The lantern still hung and smoked. But the light was
steady now, and I heard no splashing without, nor the dull groaning
and creaking of the timbers within. There reigned a quiet which seemed
bliss to me; and I lay wrapped in it, my thoughts growing clearer and
clearer each moment.
On a sea-chest at the farther end of the cabin were sitting two people
engaged in talk. The one, a woman, I recognized immediately. The gray
eyes full of command, the handsome features, the reddish-brown hair
and gracious figure left me in no doubt, even for a moment, that I
looked on Mistress Bertram. The sharer of her seat was a tall, thin
man with a thoughtful face and dreamy, rather melancholy eyes. One of
her hands rested on his knee, and her lips as she talked were close to
his ear. A little aside, sitting on the lowest step of the ladder
which led to the deck, her head leaning against the timbers, and a
cloak about her, was Mistress Anne.
I tried to speak, and after more than one effort found my voice.
"Where am I?" I whispered. My head ached sadly, and I fancied, though
I was too languid to raise my hand to it, that it was bandaged. My
mind was so far clear that I remembered Master Clarence and his
pursuit and the fight in the boats, and knew that we ought to be on
our way to prison. Who, then, was the mild, comely gentleman whose
length of limb made the cabin seem smaller than it was? Not a jailer,
surely? Yet who else?
I could compass no more than a whisper, but faint as my voice was they
all heard me, and looked up. "Anne!" the elder lady cried sharply,
seeming by her tone to direct the other to attend to me. Yet was she
herself the first to rise, and come and lay her hand on my brow. "Ah!
the fever is gone!" she said, speaking apparently to the gentleman,
who kept his seat. "His head is quite cool. He will do well now, I am
sure. Do you know me?" she continued, leaning over me.
I looked up into her eyes, and read only kindness. "Yes," I muttered.
But the effort of looking was so painful that I closed my eyes again
with a sigh. Nevertheless, my memory of the events which had gone
before my illness grew clearer, and I fumbled feebly for something
which should have been at my side. "Where is--where is my sword?" I
made shift to whisper.
She laughed. "Show it to him, Anne," she said; "what a never-die it
is! There, Master Knight Errant, we did not forget to bring it off the
field, you see!"
"But how," I murmured, "how did you escape?" I saw that there was no
question of a prison. Her laugh was gay, her voice full of content.
"That is a long story," she answered kindly. "Are you well enough to
hear it? You think you are? Then take some of this first. You remember
that knave Philip striking you on the head with an oar as you got up?
No? Well, it was a cowardly stroke, but it stood him in little stead,
for we had drifted, in the excitement of the race, under the stern of
the ship which you remember seeing a little before. There were English
seamen on her; and when they saw three men in the act of boarding two
defenseless women, they stepped in, and threatened to send Clarence
and his crew to the bottom unless they sheered off."
"Ha!" I murmured. "Good!"
"And so we escaped. I prayed the captain to take us on board his ship,
the _Framlingham_, and he did so. More, putting into Leigh on his way
to the Nore, he took off my husband. There he stands, and when you are
better he shall thank you."
"Nay, he will thank you now," said the tall man, rising and stepping
to my berth with his head bent. He could not stand upright, so low was
the deck. "But for you," he continued, his earnestness showing in his
voice and eyes--the latter were almost too tender for a man's--"my
wife would be now lying in prison, her life in jeopardy, and her
property as good as gone. She has told me how bravely you rescued her
from that cur in Cheapside, and how your presence of mind baffled the
watch at the riverside. It is well, young gentleman. It is very well.
But these things call for other returns than words. When it lies in
her power my wife will make them; if not to-day, to-morrow, and if not
to-morrow, the day after."
I was very weak, and his words brought the tears to my eyes. "She has
saved my life already," I murmured.
"You foolish boy!" she cried, smiling down on me, her hand on her
husband's shoulder. "You got your head broken in my defense. It was a
great thing, was it not, that I did not leave you to die in the boat?
There, make haste and get well. You have talked enough now. Go to
sleep, or we shall have the fever back again."
"One thing first," I pleaded. "Tell me whither we are going."
"In a few hours we shall be at Dort in Holland," she answered. "But be
content. We will take care of you, and send you back if you will, or
you shall still come with us; as you please. Be content. Go to sleep
now and get strong. Presently, perhaps, we shall have need of your
help again."
They went and sat down then on their former seat and talked in
whispers, while Mistress Anne shook up my pillows, and laid a fresh
cool bandage on my head. I was too weak to speak my gratitude, but I
tried to look it and so fell asleep again, her hand in mine, and the
wondrous smile of those lustrous eyes the last impression of which I
was conscious.
A long dreamless sleep followed. When I awoke once more the light
still hung steady, but the peacefulness of night was gone. We lay in
the midst of turmoil. The scampering of feet over the deck above me,
the creaking of the windlass, the bumping and clattering of barrels
hoisted in or hoisted out, the harsh sound of voices raised in a
foreign tongue and in queer keys, sufficed as I grew wide-awake to
tell me we were in port.
But the cabin was empty, and I lay for some time gazing at its dreary
interior, and wondering what was to become of me. Presently an uneasy
fear crept into my mind. What if my companions had deserted me? Alone,
ill, and penniless in a foreign land, what should I do? This fear in
my sick state was so terrible that I struggled to get up, and with
reeling brain and nerveless hands did get out of my berth. But this
feat accomplished I found that I could not stand. Everything swam
before my eyes. I could not take a single step, but remained, clinging
helplessly to the edge of my berth, despair at my heart. I tried to
call out, but my voice rose little above a whisper, and the banging
and shrieking, the babel without went on endlessly. Oh, it was cruel!
cruel! They had left me!
I think my senses were leaving me too, when I felt an arm about my
waist, and found Mistress Anne by my side guiding me to the chest. I
sat down on it, the certainty of my helplessness and the sudden relief
of her presence bringing the tears to my eyes. She fanned me, and gave
me some restorative, chiding me the while for getting out of my berth.
"I thought that you had gone and left me," I muttered. I was as weak
as a child.
She said cheerily: "Did you leave us when we were in trouble? Of
course you did not. There, take some more of this. After all, it is
well you are up, for in a short time we must move you to the other
boat."
"The other boat?"
"Yes, we are at Dort, you know. And we are going by the Waal, a branch
of the Rhine, to Arnheim. But the boat is here, close to this one,
and, with help, I think you will be able to walk to it."
"I am sure I shall if you will give me your arm," I answered
gratefully.
"But you will not think again," she replied, "that we have deserted
you?"
"No," I said. "I will trust you always."
I wondered why a shadow crossed her face at that. But I had no time to
do more than wonder, for Master Bertram, coming down, brought our
sitting to an end. She bustled about to wrap me up, and somehow,
partly walking, partly carried, I was got on deck. There I sat down on
a bale to recover myself, and felt at once much the better for the
fresh, keen air, the clear sky and wintry sunshine which welcomed me
to a foreign land.
On the outer side of the vessel stretched a wide expanse of turbid
water, five or six times as wide as the Thames at London, and
foam-flecked here and there by the up-running tide. On the other side
was a wide and spacious quay, paved neatly with round stones, and
piled here and there with merchandise; but possessing, by virtue of
the lines of leafless elms which bordered it, a quaint air of
rusticity in the midst of bustle. The sober bearing of the sturdy
landsmen, going quietly about their business, accorded well with the
substantial comfort of the rows of tall, steep-roofed houses I saw
beyond the quay, and seemed only made more homely by the occasional
swagger and uncouth cry of some half-barbarous seaman, wandering
aimlessly about. Above the town rose the heavy square tower of a
church, a notable landmark where all around, land and water, lay so
low, where the horizon seemed so far, and the sky so wide and breezy.
"So you have made up your mind to come with us," said Master Bertram,
returning to my side--he had left me to make some arrangements. "You
understand that if you would prefer to go home I can secure your
tendance here by good, kindly people, and provide for your passage
back when you feel strong enough to cross. You understand that? And
that the choice is entirely your own? So which will you do?"
I changed color and felt I did. I shrunk, as being well and strong I
should not have shrunk, from losing sight of those three faces which I
had known for so short a time, yet which alone stood between myself
and loneliness. "I would rather come with you," I stammered. "But I
shall be a great burden to you now, I fear."
"It is not that," he replied, with hearty assurance in his voice. "A
week's rest and quiet will restore you to strength, and then the
burden will be on the other shoulder. It is for your own sake I give
you the choice, because our future is for the time uncertain. Very
uncertain," he repeated, his brow clouding over; "and to become our
companion may expose you to fresh dangers. We are refugees from
England; that you probably guess. Our plan was to go to France, where
are many of our friends, and where we could live safely until better
times. You know how that plan was frustrated. Here the Spaniards are
masters--Prince Philip's people; and if we are recognized, we shall be
arrested and sent back to England. Still, my wife and I must make the
best of it. The hue and cry will not follow us for some days, and
there is still a degree of independence in the cities of Holland which
may, since I have friends here, protect us for a time. Now you know
something of our position, my friend. You can make your choice with
your eyes open. Either way we shall not forget you."
"I will go on with you, if you please," I answered at once. "I, too,
cannot go home." And as I said this, Mistress Bertram also came up,
and I took her hand in mine--which looked, by the way, so strangely
thin I scarcely recognized it--and kissed it. "I will come with you,
madam, if you will let me," I said.
"Good!" she replied, her eyes sparkling. "I said you would! I do not
mind telling you now that I am glad of it. And if ever we return to
England, as God grant we may and soon, you shall not regret your
decision. Shall he, Richard?"
"If you say he shall not, my dear," he responded, smiling at her
enthusiasm, "I think I may answer for it he will not."
I was struck then, as I had been before, by a certain air of deference
which the husband assumed toward the wife. It did not surprise me, for
her bearing and manner, as well as such of her actions as I had seen,
stamped her as singularly self-reliant and independent for a woman;
and to these qualities, as much as to the rather dreamy character of
the husband, I was content to set down the peculiarity. I should add
that a rare and pretty tenderness constantly displayed on her part
toward him robbed it of any semblance of unseemliness.
They saw that the exertion of talking exhausted me, and so, with an
encouraging nod, left me to myself. A few minutes later a couple of
English sailors, belonging to the _Framlingham_, came up, and with
gentle strength transported me, under Mistress Anne's directions, to a
queer-looking wide-beamed boat which lay almost alongside. She was
more like a huge Thames barge than anything else, for she drew little
water, but had a great expanse of sail when all was set. There was a
large deck-house, gay with paint and as clean as it could be; and in a
compartment at one end of this--which seemed to be assigned to our
party--I was soon comfortably settled.
Exhausted as I was by the excitement of sitting up and being moved, I
knew little of what passed about me for the next two days, and
remember less. I slept and ate, and sometimes awoke to wonder where I
was. But the meals and the vague attempts at thought made scarcely
more impression on my mind than the sleep. Yet all the while I was
gaining strength rapidly, my youth and health standing me in good
stead. The wound in my head, which had caused great loss of blood,
healed all one way, as we say in Warwickshire; and about noon, on the
second day after leaving Dort, I was well enough to reach the deck
unassisted, and sit in the sunshine on a pile of rugs which Mistress
Anne, my constant nurse, had laid for me in a corner sheltered from
the wind.
* * * * *
Fortunately the weather was mild and warm, and the sunshine fell
brightly on the wide river and the wider plain of pasture which
stretched away on either side of the horizon, dotted, here and there
only, by a windmill, a farmhouse, the steeple of a church, the brown
sails of a barge, or at most broken by a low dike or a line of
sand-dunes. All was open, free; all was largeness, space, and
distance. I gazed astonished.
The husband and wife, who were pacing the deck forward, came to me. He
noticed the wondering looks I cast round. "This is new to you?" he
said smiling.
"Quite--quite new," I answered. "I never imagined anything so flat,
and yet in its way so beautiful."
"You do not know Lincolnshire?"
"No."
"Ah, that is my native county," he answered. "It is much like this.
But you are better, and you can talk again. Now I and my wife have
been discussing whether we shall tell you more about ourselves. And
since there is no time like the present I may say that we have decided
to trust you."
"All in all or not at all," Mistress Bertram added brightly.
I murmured my thanks.
"Then, first to tell you who we are. For myself I am plain Richard
Bertie of Lincolnshire, at your service. My wife is something more
than appears from this, or"--with a smile--"from her present not too
graceful dress. She is----"
"Stop, Richard! This is not sufficiently formal," my lady cried
prettily. "I have the honor to present to you, young gentleman," she
went on, laughing merrily and making a very grand courtesy before me,
"Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk."
I made shift to get to my feet, and bowed respectfully, but she forced
me to sit down again. "Enough of that," she said lightly, "until we go
back to England. Here and for the future we are Master Bertram and his
wife. And this young lady, my distant kinswoman, Anne Brandon, must
pass as Mistress Anne. You wonder how we came to be straying in the
streets alone and unattended when you found us?"
I did wonder, for the name of the gay and brilliant Duchess of
Suffolk was well known even to me, a country lad. Her former husband,
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, had been not only the one trusted
and constant friend of King Henry the Eighth, but the king's
brother-in-law, his first wife having been Mary, Princess of England
and Queen Dowager of France. Late in his splendid and prosperous
career the Duke had married Katherine, the heiress of Lord Willoughby
de Eresby, and she it was who stood before me, still young and
handsome. After her husband's death she had made England ring with her
name, first by a love match with a Lincolnshire squire, and secondly
by her fearless and outspoken defense of the reformers. I did wonder
indeed how she had come to be wandering in the streets at daybreak, an
object of a chance passer's chivalry and pity.
"It is simple enough," she said dryly; "I am rich, I am a Protestant,
and I have an enemy. When I do not like a person I speak out. Do I
not, Richard?"
"You do indeed, my dear," he answered smiling.
"And once I spoke out to Bishop Gardiner. What! Do you know Stephen
Gardiner?"
For I had started at the name, after which I could scarcely have
concealed my knowledge if I would. So I answered simply, "Yes, I have
seen him." I was thinking how wonderful this was. These people had
been utter strangers to me until a day or two before, yet now we were
all looking out together from the deck of a Dutch boat on the low
Dutch landscape, united by one tie, the enmity of the same man.
"He is a man to be dreaded," the Duchess continued, her eyes resting
on her baby, which lay asleep on my bundle of rugs--and I guessed what
fear it was had tamed her pride to flight. "His power in England is
absolute. We learned that it was his purpose to arrest me, and
determined to leave England. But our very household was full of spies,
and though we chose a time when Clarence, our steward, whom we had
long suspected of being Gardiner's chief tool, was away, Philip, his
deputy, gained a clew to our design, and watched us. We gave him the
slip with difficulty, leaving our luggage, but he dogged and overtook
us, and the rest you know."
I bowed. As I gazed at her, my admiration, I know, shone in my eyes.
She looked, as she stood on the deck, an exile and fugitive, so gay,
so bright, so indomitable, that in herself she was at once a warranty
and an omen of better times. The breeze had heightened her color and
loosened here and there a tress of her auburn hair. No wonder Master
Bertie looked proudly on his Duchess.
Suddenly a thing I had clean forgotten flashed into my mind, and I
thrust my hand into my pocket. The action was so abrupt that it
attracted their attention, and when I pulled out a packet--two
packets--there were three pairs of eyes upon me. The seal dangled from
one missive. "What have you there?" the Duchess asked briskly, for she
was a woman, and curious. "Do you carry the deeds of your property
about with you?"
"No," I said, not unwilling to make a small sensation. "This touches
your Grace."
"Hush!" she cried, raising one imperious finger. "Transgressing
already? From this time forth I am Mistress Bertram, remember. But
come," she went on, eying the packet with the seal inquisitively, "how
does it touch me?"
I put it silently into her hands, and she opened it and read a few
lines, her husband peeping over her shoulder. As she read her brow
darkened, her eyes grew hard. Master Bertie's face changed with hers,
and they both peeped suddenly at me over the edge of the parchment,
suspicion and hostility in their glances. "How came you by this, young
sir?" he said slowly, after a long pause. "Have we escaped Peter to
fall into the hands of Paul?"
"No, no!" I cried hurriedly. I saw that I had made a greater sensation
than I had bargained for. I hastened to tell them how I had met with
Gardiner's servant at Stony Stratford, and how I had become possessed
of his credentials. They laughed of course--indeed they laughed so
loudly that the placid Dutchmen, standing aft with their hands in
their breeches-pockets, stared open-mouthed at us, and the kindred
cattle on the bank looked mildly up from the knee-deep grass.
"And what was the other packet?" the Duchess asked presently. "Is that
it in your hand?"
"Yes," I answered, holding it up with some reluctance. "It seems to be
a letter addressed to Mistress Clarence."
"Clarence!" she cried. "Clarence!" arresting the hand she was
extending. "What! Here is our friend again then. What is in it? You
have opened it?"
"No."
"You have not? Then quick, open it!" she exclaimed. "This too touches
us, I will bet a penny. Let us see at once what it contains. Clarence
indeed! Perhaps we may have him on the hip yet, the arch-traitor!"
But I held the pocket-book back, though my cheeks reddened and I knew
I must seem foolish. They made certain that this letter was a
communication to some spy, probably to Clarence himself under cover of
a feminine address. Perhaps it was, but it bore a woman's name and it
was sealed; and foolish though I might be, I would not betray the
woman's secret.
"No, madam," I said confused, awkward, stammering, yet withholding it
with a secret obstinacy; "pardon me if I do not obey you--if I do not
let this be opened. It may be what you say," I added with an effort;
"but it may also contain an honest secret, and that a woman's."
"What do you say?" cried the Duchess; "here are scruples!" At that her
husband smiled, and I looked in despair from him to Mistress Anne.
Would she sympathize with my feelings? I found that she had turned her
back on us, and was gazing over the side. "Do you really mean,"
continued the Duchess, tapping her foot sharply on the deck, "that you
are not going to open that, you foolish boy?"
"I do--with your Grace's leave," I answered.
"Or without my Grace's leave! That is what you mean," she retorted
pettishly, a red spot in each cheek. "When people will not do what I
ask, it is always, Grace! Grace! Grace! But I know them now."
I dared not smile; and I would not look up, lest my heart should fail
me and I should give her her way.
"You foolish boy!" she again said, and sniffed. Then with a toss of
her head she went away, her husband following her obediently.
I feared that she was grievously offended, and I got up restlessly and
went across the deck to the rail on which Mistress Anne was leaning,
meaning to say something which should gain for me her sympathy,
perhaps her advice. But the words died on my lips, for as I approached
she turned her face abruptly toward me, and it was so white, so
haggard, so drawn, that I uttered a cry of alarm. "You are ill!" I
exclaimed. "Let me call the Duchess!"
She gripped my sleeve almost fiercely, "Hush!" she muttered. "Do
nothing of the kind. I am not well. It is the water. But it will pass
off, if you do not notice it. I hate to be noticed," she added, with
an angry shrug.
I was full of pity for her and reproached myself sorely. "What a
selfish brute I have been!" I said. "You have watched by me night
after night, and nursed me day after day, and I have scarcely thanked
you. And now you are ill yourself. It is my fault!"
She looked at me, a wan smile on her face. "A little, perhaps," she
answered faintly. "But it is chiefly the water. I shall be better
presently. About that letter--did you not come to speak to me about
it?"
"Never mind it now," I said anxiously. "Will you not lie down on the
rugs awhile? Let me give you my place," I pleaded.
"No, no!" she cried impatiently; and seeing I vexed her by my
importunity, I desisted. "The letter," she went on; "you will open it
by and by?"
"No," I said slowly, considering, to tell the truth, the strength of
my resolution, "I think I shall not."
"You will! you will!" she repeated, with a kind of scorn. "The Duchess
will ask you again, and you will give it to her. Of course you will!"
Her tone was strangely querulous, and her eyes continually flashed
keen, biting glances at me. But I thought only that she was ill and
excited, and I fancied it was best to humor her. "Well, perhaps I
shall," I said soothingly. "Possibly. It is hard to refuse her
anything. And yet I hope I may not. The girl--it may be a girl's
secret."
"Well?" she asked, interrupting me abruptly, her voice harsh and
unmusical. "What of her?" She laid her hand on her bosom as though to
still some secret pain. I looked at her, anxious and wondering, but
she had again averted her face. "What of her?" she repeated.
"Only that--I would not willingly hurt her!" I blurted out.
She did not answer. She stood a moment, then to my surprise she turned
away without a word, and merely commanding me by a gesture of the hand
not to follow, walked slowly away. I watched her cross the deck and
pass through the doorway into the deck-house. She did not once turn
her face, and my only fear was that she was ill; more seriously ill,
perhaps, than she had acknowledged.
CHAPTER VIII.
A HOUSE OF PEACE.
As the day went on, therefore, I looked eagerly for Mistress Anne's
return, but she appeared no more, though I maintained a close watch
on the cabin-door. All the afternoon, too, the Duchess kept away from
me, and I feared that I had seriously offended her; so that it was
with no very pleasant anticipations that, going into that part of the
deck-house which served us for a common room, to see if the evening
meal was set, I found only the Duchess and Master Bertie prepared to
sit down to it. I suppose that something of my feeling was expressed
in my face, for while I was yet half-way between door and table, my
lady gave way to a peal of merriment.
"Come, sit down, and do not be afraid!" she cried pleasantly, her gray
eyes still full of laughter. "I vow the lad thinks I shall eat him.
Nay, when all is said and done, I like you the better, Sir Knight
Errant, for your scruples. I see that you are determined to act up to
your name. But that reminds me," she added in a more serious vein. "We
have been frank with you. You must be equally frank with us. What are
we to call you, pray?"
I looked down at my plate and felt my face grow scarlet. The wound
which the discovery of my father's treachery had dealt me had begun to
heal. In the action, the movement, the adventure of the last
fortnight, I had well-nigh lost sight of the blot on my escutcheon, of
the shame which had driven me from home. But the question, "What are
we to call you?" revived the smart, and revived it with an added pang.
It had been very well, in theory, to proudly discard my old name. It
was painful, in practice, to be unable to answer the Duchess, "I am a
Cludde of Coton, nephew to Sir Anthony, formerly esquire of the body
to King Henry. I am no unworthy follower and associate even for you,"
and to have instead to reply, "I have no name. I am nobody. I have all
to make and win." Yet this was my ill-fortune.
Her woman's eye saw my trouble as I hesitated, confused and doubting
what I should reply. "Come!" she said good-naturedly, trying to
reassure me. "You are of gentle birth. Of that we feel sure."
I shook my head. "Nay, I am of no birth, madam," I answered hurriedly.
"I have no name, or at any rate no name that I can be proud of. Call
me--call me, if it please you, Francis Carey."
"It is a good name," quoth Master Bertie, pausing with his knife
suspended in the air. "A right good Protestant name!"
"But I have no claim to it," I rejoined, mere and more hurt. "I have
all to make. I am a new man. Yet do not fear!" I added quickly, as I
saw what I took to be a cloud of doubt cross my lady's face. "I will
follow you no less faithfully for that!"
"Well," said the Duchess, a smile again transforming her open
features, "I will answer for that, Master Carey. Deeds are better than
names, and as for being a new man, what with Pagets and Cavendishes
and Spencers, we have nought but new men nowadays. So, cheer up!" she
continued kindly. "And we will poke no questions at you, though I
doubt whether you do not possess more birth and breeding than you
would have us think. And if, when we return to England, as I trust we
may before we are old men and women, we can advance your cause, then
let us have your secret. No one can say that Katherine Willoughby ever
forgot her friend."
"Or forgave her enemy over quickly," quoth her husband naively.
She rapped his knuckles with the back of her knife for that; and under
cover of this small diversion I had time to regain my composure. But
the matter left me sore at heart, and more than a little homesick. And
I sought leave to retire early.
"You are right!" said the Duchess, rising graciously. "To-night, after
being out in the air, you will sleep soundly, and to-morrow you will
be a new man," with a faint smile. "Believe me, I am not ungrateful,
Master Francis, and I will diligently seek occasion to repay both your
gallant defense of the other day and your future service." She gave me
her hand to kiss, and I bent over it. "Now," she continued, "do homage
to my baby, and then I shall consider that you are really one of us,
and pledged to our cause."
I kissed the tiny fist held out to me, a soft pink thing looking like
some dainty sea-shell. Master Bertie cordially grasped my hand. And so
under the oil-lamp in the neat cabin of that old Dutch boat, somewhere
on the Waal between Gorcum and Nimuegen, we plighted our troth to one
another, and in a sense I became one of them.
I went to my berth cheered and encouraged by their kindness. But the
interview, satisfactory as it was, had set up no little excitement in
my brain, and it was long before I slept. When I did I had a strange
dream. I dreamed that I was sitting in the hall at Coton, and that
Petronilla was standing on the dais looking fixedly at me with gentle,
sorrowful eyes. I wanted to go to her, but I could not move; every
dreamer knows the sensation. I tried to call to her, to ask her what
was the matter, and why she so looked at me. But I could utter no
sound. And still she continued to fix me with the same sad,
reproachful eyes, in which I read a warning, yet could not ask its
meaning.
I struggled so hard that at last the spell was in a degree broken.
Following the direction of her eyes I looked down at myself, and saw
fastened to the breast of my doublet the knot of blue velvet which she
had made for my sword-hilt, and which I had ever since carried in my
bosom. More, I saw, with a singular feeling of anger and sorrow, that
a hand which came over my shoulder was tugging hard at the ribbon in
the attempt to remove it.
This gave me horrible concern, yet at the moment I could not move nor
do anything to prevent it. At last, making a stupendous effort, I
awoke, my last experience, dreaming, being of the strange hand working
at my breast. My first waking idea was the same, so that I threw out
my arms, and cried aloud, and sat up. "Ugh!" I exclaimed, trembling in
the intensity of my relief, as I looked about and welcomed the now
familiar surroundings. "It was only a dream. It was----"
I stopped abruptly, my eyes falling on a form lurking in the doorway.
I could see it only dimly by the light of a hanging lamp, which smoked
and burned redly overhead. Yet I could see it. It was real,
substantial--a waking figure; nevertheless, a faint touch of
superstitious terror still clung to me. "Speak, please!" I asked. "Who
is it?"
"It is only I," answered a soft voice, well known to me--Mistress
Anne's. "I came in to see how you were," she continued, advancing a
little, "and whether you were sleeping. I am afraid I awoke you. But
you seemed," she added, "to be having such painful dreams that perhaps
it was as well I did."
I was fumbling in my breast while she spoke; and certainly, whether in
my sleep I had undone the fastenings or had loosened them
intentionally before I lay down (though I could not remember doing
so), my doublet and shirt were open at the breast. The velvet knot was
safe, however, in that tiny inner pocket beside the letter, and I
breathed again. "I am very glad you did awake me!" I replied, looking
gratefully at her. "I was having a horrible dream. But how good it was
of you to think of me--and when you are not well yourself, too."
"Oh, I am better," she murmured, her eyes, which glistened in the
light, fixed steadily on me. "Much better. Now go to sleep again, and
happier dreams to you. After to-night," she added pleasantly, "I shall
no longer consider you as an invalid, nor intrude upon you."
And she was gone before I could reiterate my thanks. The door fell to,
and I was alone, full of kindly feelings toward her, and of
thankfulness that my horrible vision had no foundation. "Thank
Heaven!" I murmured more than once, as I lay down; "it was only a
dream."
Next day we reached Nimuegen, where we stayed a short time. Leaving
that place in the afternoon, twenty-four hours' journeying, partly by
river, partly, if I remember rightly, by canal, brought us to the
neighborhood of Arnheim on the Rhine. It was the 1st of March, but the
opening month belied its reputation. There was a brightness, a
softness in the air, and a consequent feeling as of spring which would
better have befitted the middle of April. All day we remained on deck
enjoying the kindliness of nature, which was especially grateful to
me, in whom the sap of health was beginning to spring again; and we
were still there when one of those gorgeous sunsets which are peculiar
to that country began to fling its hues across our path. We turned a
jutting promontory, the boat began to fall off, and the captain came
up, his errand to tell us that our journey was done.
We went eagerly forward at the news, and saw in a kind of bay, formed
by a lake-like expansion of the river, a little island green and low,
its banks trimly set with a single row of poplars. It was perhaps a
quarter of a mile every way, and a channel one-fourth as wide
separated it from the nearer shore of the river; to which, however, a
long narrow bridge of planks laid on trestles gave access. On the
outer side of the island, facing the river's course, stood a low white
house, before which a sloping green terrace, also bordered with
poplars, led down to a tiny pier. Behind and around the house were
meadows as trim and neat as a child's toys, over which the eye roved
with pleasure until it reached the landward side of the island, and
there detected, nestling among gardens, a tiny village of half a dozen
cottages. It was a scene of enchanting peace and quietude. As we
slowly plowed our way up to the landing-place, I saw the rabbits stand
to gaze at us, and then with a flick of their heels dart off to their
holes. I marked the cattle moving homeward in a string, and heard the
wild fowl rise in creek and pool with a whir of wings. I turned with a
full heart to my neighbor. "Is it not lovely?" I cried with
enthusiasm. "Is it not a peaceful place--a very Garden of Eden?"
I looked to see her fall into raptures such as women are commonly more
prone to than men. But all women are not the same. Mistress Anne was
looking, indeed, when I turned and surprised her, at the scene which
had so moved me, but the expression of her face was sad and bitter and
utterly melancholy. The weariness and fatigue I had often seen lurking
in her eyes had invaded all her features. She looked five years older;
no longer a girl, but a gray-faced, hopeless woman whom the sight of
this peaceful haven rather smote to the heart than filled with
anticipations of safety and repose.
It was but for a moment I saw her so. Then she dashed her hand across
her eyes--though I saw no tears in them--and with a pettish
exclamation turned away. "Poor girl!" I thought. "She, too, is
homesick. No doubt this reminds her of some place at home, or of some
person." I thought this the more likely, as Master Bertie came from
Lincolnshire, which he said had many of the features of this strange
land. And it was conceivable enough that she should know Lincolnshire
too, being related to his wife.
I soon forgot the matter in the excitement of landing. A few minutes
of bustle and it was over. The boat put out again; and we four were
left face to face with two strangers, an elderly man and a girl, who
had come down to the pier to meet us. The former, stout, bluff, and
red-faced, with a thick gray beard and a gold chain about his neck,
had the air of a man of position. He greeted us warmly. His companion,
who hung behind him, somewhat shyly, was as pretty a girl as one could
find in a month. A second look assured me of something more--that she
formed an excellent foil to the piquant brightness and keen vivacity,
the dark hair and nervous features of Mistress Anne. For the Dutch
girl was fair and plump and of perfect complexion. Her hair was very
light, almost flaxen indeed, and her eyes were softly and limpidly
blue; grave, innocent, wondering eyes they were, I remember. I guessed
rightly that she was the elderly man's daughter. Later I learned that
she was his only child, and that her name was Dymphna.
He was a Master Lindstrom, a merchant of standing in Arnheim. He had
visited England and spoke English fairly, and being under some
obligations, it appeared, to the Duchess Katherine, was to be our
host.
We all walked up the little avenue together. Master Lindstrom talking
as he went to husband or wife, while his daughter and Mistress Anne
came next, gazing each at each in silence, as women when they first
meet will gaze, taking stock, I suppose, of a rival's weapons. I
walked last, wondering why they had nothing to say to one another.
As we entered the house the mystery was explained. "She speaks no
English," said Mistress Anne, with a touch of scorn.
"And we no Dutch," I answered, smiling. "Here in Holland I am afraid
that she will have somewhat the best of us. Try her with Spanish."
"Spanish! I know none."
"Well, I do, a little."
"What, you know Spanish?" Mistress Anne's tone of surprise amounted
almost to incredulity, and it flattered me, boy that I was. I dare say
it would have flattered many an older head than mine. "You know
Spanish? Where did you learn it?" she continued sharply.
"At home."
"At home! Where is that?" And she eyed me still more closely. "Where
is your home, Master Carey? You have never told me."
But I had said already more than I intended, and I shook my head. "I
mean," I explained awkwardly, "that I learned it in a home I once had.
Now my home is here. At any rate I have no other."
The Dutch girl, standing patiently beside us, had looked first at one
face and then at the other as we talked. We were all by this time in a
long, low parlor, warmed by a pretty closed fireplace covered with
glazed tiles. On the shelves of a great armoire, or dresser, at one
end of the room appeared a fine show of silver plate. At the other end
stood a tall linen-press of walnut-wood, handsomely carved; and even
the gratings of the windows and the handles of the doors were of
hammered iron-work. There were no rushes on the floor, which was made
of small pieces of wood delicately joined and set together and
brightly polished. But everything in sight was clean and trim to a
degree which would have shamed our great house at Coton, where the
rushes sometimes lay for a week unchanged. With each glance round I
felt a livelier satisfaction. I turned to Mistress Dymphna.
"Senorita!" I said, mustering my noblest accent. "Beso los pies de
usted! Habla usted Castillano?"
Mistress Anne stared, while the effect on the girl whom I addressed
was greater than I had looked for, but certainly of a different kind.
She started and drew back, an expression of offended dignity and of
something like anger ruffling her placid face. Did she not understand?
Yes, for after a moment's hesitation, and with a heightened color, she
answered, "Si, Senor."
Her constrained manner was not promising, but I was going on to open a
conversation if I could--for it looked little grateful of us to stand
there speechless and staring--when Mistress Anne interposed. "What did
you say to her? What was it?" she asked eagerly.
"I asked her if she spoke Spanish. That was all," I replied, my eyes
on Dymphna's face, which still betrayed trouble of some kind, "except
that I paid her the usual formal compliment. But what is she saying to
her father?"
It was like the Christmas game of cross-questions. The girl and I had
spoken in Spanish. I translated what we had said into English for
Mistress Anne, and Mistress Dymphna turned it into Dutch for her
father; an anxious look on her face which needed no translation.
"What is it?" asked Master Bertie, observing that something was wrong.
"It is nothing--nothing!" replied the merchant apologetically, though,
as he spoke, his eyes dwelt on me curiously. "It is only that I did
not know that you had a Spaniard in your company."
"A Spaniard?" Master Bertie answered. "We have none. This," pointing
to me, "is our very good friend and faithful follower, Master
Carey--an Englishman."
"To whom," added the Duchess, smiling gravely, "I am greatly
indebted."
I hurriedly explained the mistake, and brought at once a smile of
relief to the Mynheer's face. "Ah! pardon me, I beseech you," he said.
"My daughter was in error." And he added something in Dutch which
caused Mistress Dymphna to blush. "You know," he continued--"I may
speak freely to you, since our enemies are in the main the same--you
know that our Spanish rulers are not very popular with us, and grow
less popular every day, especially with those who are of the reformed
faith. We have learned some of us to speak their language, but we love
them none the better for that."
"I can sympathize with you, indeed," cried the Duchess impulsively.
"God grant that our country may never be in the same plight: though it
looks as if this Spanish marriage were like to put us in it. It is
Spain! Spain! Spain! and nothing else nowadays!"
"Nevertheless, the Emperor is a great and puissant monarch," rejoined
the Arnheimer thoughtfully; "and could he rule us himself, we might do
well. But his dominions are so large, he knows little of us. And
worse, he is dying, or as good as dying. He can scarcely sit his
horse, and rumor says that before the year is out he will resign the
throne. Then we hear little good of his successor, your queen's
husband, and look to hear less. I fear that there is a dark time
before us, and God only knows the issue."
"And alone will rule it," Master Bertie rejoined piously.
This saying was in a way the keynote to the life we found our host
living on his island estate. Peace, but peace with constant fear for
an assailant, and religion for a supporter. Several times a week
Master Lindstrom would go to Arnheim to superintend his business, and
always after his return he would shake his head, and speak gravely,
and Dymphna would lose her color for an hour or two. Things were going
badly. The reformers were being more and more hardly dealt with. The
Spaniards were growing more despotic. That was his constant report.
And then I would see him, as he walked with us in orchard or garden,
or sat beside the stove, cast wistful glances at the comfort and
plenty round him. I knew that he was asking himself how long they
would last. If they escaped the clutches of a tyrannical government,
would they be safe in the times that were coming from the violence of
an ill-paid soldiery? The answer was doubtful, or rather it was too
certain.
I sometimes wondered how he could patiently foresee such
possibilities, and take no steps, whatever the risk, to prevent them.
At first I thought his patience sprang from the Dutch character. Later
I traced its deeper roots to a simplicity of faith and a deep
religious feeling, which either did not at that time exist in England,
or existed only among people with whom I had never come into contact.
Here they seemed common enough and real enough. These folks' faith
sustained them. It was a part of their lives; a bulwark against the
fear that otherwise would have overwhelmed them. And to an extent,
too, which then surprised me, I found, as time went on, that the
Duchess and Master Bertie shared this enthusiasm, although with them
it took a less obtrusive form.
I was led at the time to think a good deal about this; and just a word
I may say of myself, and of those days spent on the Rhine inland--that
whereas before I had taken but a lukewarm interest in religious
questions, and, while clinging instinctively to the teaching of my
childhood, had conformed with a light heart rather than annoy my
uncle, I came to think somewhat differently now; differently and more
seriously. And so I have continued to think since, though I have never
become a bigot; a fact I owe, perhaps, to Mistress Dymphna, in whose
tender heart there was room for charity as well as faith. For she was
my teacher.
Of necessity, since no other of our party could communicate with her,
I became more or less the Dutch girl's companion. I would often, of an
evening, join her on a wooden bench which stood under an elm on a
little spit of grass looking toward the city, and at some distance
from the house. Here, when the weather was warm, she would watch for
her father's return; and here one day, while talking with her, I had
the opportunity of witnessing a sight unknown in England, but which
year by year was to become more common in the Netherlands, more
heavily fraught with menace in Netherland eyes.
We happened to be so deeply engaged in watching the upper end of the
reach at the time in question, where we expected each moment to see
Master Lindstrom's boat round the point, that we saw nothing of a boat
coming the other way, until the flapping of its sails, as it tacked,
drew our eyes toward it. Even then in the boat itself I saw nothing
strange, but in its passengers I did. They were swarthy, mustachioed
men, who in the hundred poses they assumed, as they lounged on deck or
leaned over the side, never lost a peculiar air of bravado. As they
drew nearer to us the sound of their loud voices, their oaths and
laughter reached us plainly, and seemed to jar on the evening
stillness. Their bold, fierce eyes, raking the banks unceasingly,
reached us at last. The girl by my side uttered a cry of alarm, and
rose as if to retreat. But she sat down again, for behind us was an
open stretch of turf, and to escape unseen was impossible. Already a
score of eyes had marked her beauty, and as the boat drew abreast of
us, I had to listen to the ribald jests and laughter of those on
board. My ears tingled and my cheeks burned. But I could do nothing. I
could only glare at them, and grind my teeth.
"Who are they?" I muttered. "The cowardly knaves!'
"Oh, hush! hush!" the girl pleaded. She had retreated behind me. And
indeed I need not have put my question, for though I had never seen
the Spanish soldiery, I had heard enough about them to recognize them
now. In the year 1555 their reputation was at its height. Their
fathers had overcome the Moors after a contest of centuries, and they
themselves had overrun Italy and lowered the pride of France. As a
result they had many military virtues and all the military vices.
Proud, bloodthirsty, and licentious everywhere, it may be imagined
that in the subject Netherlands, with their pay always in arrear, they
were, indeed, people to be feared. It was seldom that even their
commanders dared to check their excesses.
Yet, when the first flush of my anger had subsided, I looked after
them, odd as it may seem, with mingled feelings. With all their faults
they were few against many, a conquering race in a foreign land. They
could boast of blood and descent. They were proud to call themselves
the soldiers and gentlemen of Europe. I was against them, yet I
admired them with a boy's admiration for the strong and reckless.
Of course I said nothing of this to my companion. Indeed, when she
spoke to me I did not hear her. My thoughts had flown far from the
burgher's daughter sitting by me, and were with my grandmother's
people. I saw, in imagination, the uplands of Old Castile, as I had
often heard them described, hot in summer and bleak in winter. I
pictured the dark, frowning walls of Toledo, with its hundred Moorish
trophies, the castles that crowned the hills around, the gray olive
groves, and the box-clad slopes. I saw Palencia, where my grandmother,
Petronilla de Vargas, was born; Palencia, dry and brown and sun-baked,
lying squat and low on its plain, the eaves of its cathedral a man's
height from the ground. All this I saw. I suppose the Spanish blood in
me awoke and asserted itself at sight of those other Spaniards. And
then--then I forgot it all as I heard behind me an alien voice, and I
turned and found Dymphna had stolen from me and was talking to a
stranger.
CHAPTER IX.
PLAYING WITH FIRE.
He was a young man, and a Dutchman, but not a Dutchman of the stout,
burly type which I had most commonly seen in the country. He had, it
is true, the usual fair hair and blue eyes, and he was rather short
than tall; but his figure was thin and meager, and he had a pointed
nose and chin, and a scanty fair beard. I took him to be nearsighted:
at a second glance I saw that he was angry. He was talking fast to
Dymphna--of course in Dutch--and my first impulse, in face of his
excited gestures and queer appearance, was to laugh. But I had a
notion what his relationship to the girl was, and I smothered this,
and instead asked, as soon as I could get a word in, whether I should
leave them.
"Oh, no!" Dymphna answered, blushing slightly, and turning to me with
a troubled glance. I believe she had clean forgotten my presence.
"This is Master Jan Van Tree, a good friend of ours. And this," she
continued, still in Spanish, but speaking to him, "is Master Carey,
one of my father's guests."
We bowed, he formally, for he had not recovered his temper, and I--I
dare say I still had my Spanish ancestors in my head--with
condescension. We disliked one another at sight, I think. I dubbed him
a mean little fellow, a trader, a peddler; and, however he classed me,
it was not favorably. So it was no particular desire to please him
which led me to say with outward solicitude, "I fear you are annoyed
at something, Master Van Tree?"
"I am!" he said bluntly, meeting me half-way.
"And am I to know the cause?" I asked, "or is it a secret?"
"It is no secret!" he retorted. "Mistress Lindstrom should have been
more careful. She should not have exposed herself to the chance of
being seen by those miserable foreigners."
"The foreigners--in the boat?" I said dryly.
"Yes, of course--in the boat," he answered. He was obliged to say
that, but he glared at me across her as he spoke. We had turned and
were walking back to the house, the poplars casting long shadows
across our path.
"They were rude," I observed carelessly, my chin very high. "But there
is no particular harm done that I can see, Master Van Tree."
"Perhaps not, as far as you can see," he retorted in great excitement.
"But perhaps also you are not very far-sighted. You may not see it
now, yet harm
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