XIV. HOW SALVATION YEO SLEW THE KING OF THE GUBBINGS
“Ignorance and evil, even in full flight, deal terrible backhanded strokes at their pursuers.”--HELPS.
Now I am sorry to say, for the honor of my country, that it was by no means a safe thing in those days to travel from Plymouth to the north of Devon; because, to get to your journey's end, unless you were minded to make a circuit of many miles, you must needs pass through the territory of a foreign and hostile potentate, who had many times ravaged the dominions, and defeated the forces of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, and was named (behind his back at least) the King of the Gubbings. “So now I dare call them,” says Fuller, “secured by distance, which one of more valor durst not do to their face, for fear their fury fall upon him. Yet hitherto have I met with none who could render a reason of their name. We call the shavings of fish (which are little worth) gubbings; and sure it is that they are sensible that the word importeth shame and disgrace.
“As for the suggestion of my worthy and learned friend, Mr. Joseph Maynard, that such as did inhabitare montes gibberosos, were called Gubbings, such will smile at the ingenuity who dissent from the truth of the etymology.
“I have read of an England beyond Wales, but the Gubbings land is a Scythia within England, and they pure heathens therein. It lieth nigh Brent. For in the edge of Dartmoor it is reported that, some two hundred years since, two bad women, being with child, fled thither to hide themselves; to whom certain lewd fellows resorted, and this was their first original. They are a peculiar of their own making, exempt from bishop, archdeacon, and all authority, either ecclesiastical or civil. They live in cots (rather holes than houses) like swine, having all in common, multiplied without marriage into many hundreds. Their language is the dross of the dregs of the vulgar Devonian; and the more learned a man is, the worse he can understand them. During our civil wars no soldiers were quartered upon them, for fear of being quartered amongst them. Their wealth consisteth in other men's goods; they live by stealing the sheep on the moors; and vain is it for any to search their houses, being a work beneath the pains of any sheriff, and above the power of any constable. Such is their fleetness, they will outrun many horses; vivaciousness, they outlive most men; living in an ignorance of luxury, the extinguisher of life. They hold together like bees; offend one, and all will revenge his quarrel.
“But now I am informed that they begin to be civilized, and tender their children to baptism, and return to be men, yea, Christians again. I hope no CIVIL people amongst us will turn barbarians, now these barbarians begin to be civilized.” *
* Fuller, p. 398.
With which quip against the Anabaptists of his day, Fuller ends his story; and I leave him to set forth how Amyas, in fear of these same Scythians and heathens, rode out of Plymouth on a right good horse, in his full suit of armor, carrying lance and sword, and over and above two great dags, or horse-pistols; and behind him Salvation Yeo, and five or six north Devon men (who had served with him in Ireland, and were returning on furlough), clad in head-pieces and quilted jerkins, each man with his pike and sword, and Yeo with arquebuse and match, while two sumpter ponies carried the baggage of this formidable troop.
They pushed on as fast as they could, through Tavistock, to reach before nightfall Lydford, where they meant to sleep; but what with buying the horses, and other delays, they had not been able to start before noon; and night fell just as they reached the frontiers of the enemy's country. A dreary place enough it was, by the wild glare of sunset. A high tableland of heath, banked on the right by the crags and hills of Dartmoor, and sloping away to the south and west toward the foot of the great cone of Brent-Tor, which towered up like an extinct volcano (as some say that it really is), crowned with the tiny church, the votive offering of some Plymouth merchant of old times, who vowed in sore distress to build a church to the Blessed Virgin on the first point of English land which he should see. Far away, down those waste slopes, they could see the tiny threads of blue smoke rising from the dens of the Gubbings; and more than once they called a halt, to examine whether distant furze-bushes and ponies might not be the patrols of an advancing army. It is all very well to laugh at it now, in the nineteenth century, but it was no laughing matter then; as they found before they had gone two miles farther.
On the middle of the down stood a wayside inn; a desolate and villainous-looking lump of lichen-spotted granite, with windows paper-patched, and rotting thatch kept down by stones and straw-banks; and at the back a rambling court-ledge of barns and walls, around which pigs and barefoot children grunted in loving communion of dirt. At the door, rapt apparently in the contemplation of the mountain peaks which glowed rich orange in the last lingering sun-rays, but really watching which way the sheep on the moor were taking, stood the innkeeper, a brawny, sodden-visaged, blear-eyed six feet of brutishness, holding up his hose with one hand, for want of points, and clawing with the other his elf-locks, on which a fair sprinkling of feathers might denote: first, that he was just out of bed, having been out sheep-stealing all the night before; and secondly, that by natural genius he had anticipated the opinion of that great apostle of sluttishness, Fridericus Dedekind, and his faithful disciple Dekker, which last speaks thus to all gulls and grobians: “Consider that as those trees of cobweb lawn, woven by spinners in the fresh May mornings, do dress the curled heads of the mountains, and adorn the swelling bosoms of the valleys; or as those snowy fleeces, which the naked briar steals from the innocent sheep to make himself a warm winter livery, are, to either of them both, an excellent ornament; so make thou account, that to have feathers sticking here and there on thy head will embellish thee, and set thy crown out rarely. None dare upbraid thee, that like a beggar thou hast lain on straw, or like a travelling pedlar upon musty flocks; for those feathers will rise up as witnesses to choke him that says so, and to prove thy bed to have been of the softest down.” Even so did those feathers bear witness that the possessor of Rogues' Harbor Inn, on Brent-Tor Down, whatever else he lacked, lacked not geese enough to keep him in soft lying.
Presently he spies Amyas and his party coming slowly over the hill, pricks up his ears, and counts them; sees Amyas's armor; shakes his head and grunts; and then, being a man of few words, utters a sleepy howl--
“Mirooi!--Fushing pooale!”
A strapping lass--whose only covering (for country women at work in those days dispensed with the ornament of a gown) is a green bodice and red petticoat, neither of them over ample--brings out his fishing-rod and basket, and the man, having tied up his hose with some ends of string, examines the footlink.
“Don vlies' gone!”
“May be,” says Mary; “shouldn't hay' left mun out to coort. May be old hen's ate mun off. I see her chocking about a while agone.”
The host receives this intelligence with an oath, and replies by a violent blow at Mary's head, which she, accustomed to such slight matters, dodges, and then returns the blow with good effect on the shock head.
Whereon mine host, equally accustomed to such slight matters, quietly shambles off, howling as he departs--
“Tell Patrico!”
Mary runs in, combs her hair, slips a pair of stockings and her best gown over her dirt, and awaits the coming guests, who make a few long faces at the “mucksy sort of a place,” but prefer to spend the night there than to bivouac close to the enemy's camp.
So the old hen who has swallowed the dun fly is killed, plucked, and roasted, and certain “black Dartmoor mutton” is put on the gridiron, and being compelled to confess the truth by that fiery torment, proclaims itself to all noses as red-deer venison. In the meanwhile Amyas has put his horse and the ponies into a shed, to which he can find neither lock nor key, and therefore returns grumbling, not without fear for his steed's safety. The baggage is heaped in a corner of the room, and Amyas stretches his legs before a turf fire; while Yeo, who has his notions about the place, posts himself at the door, and the men are seized with a desire to superintend the cooking, probably to be attributed to the fact that Mary is cook.
Presently Yeo comes in again.
“There's a gentleman just coming up, sir, all alone.”
“Ask him to make one of our party, then, with my compliments.” Yeo goes out, and returns in five minutes.
“Please, sir, he's gone in back ways, by the court.”
“Well, he has an odd taste, if he makes himself at home here.”
Out goes Yeo again, and comes back once more after five minutes, in high excitement.
“Come out, sir; for goodness' sake come out. I've got him. Safe as a rat in a trap, I have!”
“Who?”
“A Jesuit, sir.”
“Nonsense, man!”
“I tell you truth, sir. I went round the house, for I didn't like the looks of him as he came up. I knew he was one of them villains the minute he came up, by the way he turned in his toes, and put down his feet so still and careful, like as if he was afraid of offending God at every step. So I just put my eye between the wall and the dern of the gate, and I saw him come up to the back door and knock, and call 'Mary!' quite still, like any Jesuit; and the wench flies out to him ready to eat him; and 'Go away,' I heard her say, 'there's a dear man;' and then something about a 'queer cuffin' (that's a justice in these canters' thieves' Latin); and with that he takes out a somewhat--I'll swear it was one of those Popish Agnuses--and gives it her; and she kisses it, and crosses herself, and asks him if that's the right way, and then puts it into her bosom, and he says, 'Bless you, my daughter;' and then I was sure of the dog: and he slips quite still to the stable, and peeps in, and when he sees no one there, in he goes, and out I go, and shut to the door, and back a cart that was there up against it, and call out one of the men to watch the stable, and the girl's crying like mad.”
“What a fool's trick, man! How do you know that he is not some honest gentleman, after all?”
“Fool or none, sir; honest gentlemen don't give maidens Agnuses. I've put him in; and if you want him let out again, you must come and do it yourself, for my conscience is against it, sir. If the Lord's enemies are delivered into my hand, I'm answerable, sir,” went on Yeo as Amyas hurried out with him. “'Tis written, 'If any let one of them go, his life shall be for the life of him.'”
So Amyas ran out, pulled back the cart grumbling, opened the door, and began a string of apologies to--his cousin Eustace.
Yes, here he was, with such a countenance, half foolish, half venomous, as reynard wears when the last spadeful of earth is thrown back, and he is revealed sitting disconsolately on his tail within a yard of the terriers' noses.
Neither cousin spoke for a minute or two. At last Amyas--
“Well, cousin hide-and-seek, how long have you added horse-stealing to your other trades?”
“My dear Amyas,” said Eustace, very meekly, “I may surely go into an inn stable without intending to steal what is in it.”
“Of course, old fellow,” said Amyas, mollified, “I was only in jest. But what brings you here? Not prudence, certainly.”
“I am bound to know no prudence save for the Lord's work.”
“That's giving away Agnus Deis, and deceiving poor heathen wenches, I suppose,” said Yeo.
Eustace answered pretty roundly--
“Heathens? Yes, truly; you Protestants leave these poor wretches heathens, and then insult and persecute those who, with a devotion unknown to you, labor at the danger of their lives to make them Christians. Mr. Amyas Leigh, you can give me up to be hanged at Exeter, if it shall so please you to disgrace your own family; but from this spot neither you, no, nor all the myrmidons of your queen, shall drive me, while there is a soul here left unsaved.”
“Come out of the stable, at least,” said Amyas; “you don't want to make the horses Papists, as well as the asses, do you? Come out, man, and go to the devil your own way. I sha'n't inform against you; and Yeo here will hold his tongue if I tell him, I know.”
“It goes sorely against my conscience, sir; but being that he is your cousin, of course--”
“Of course; and now come in and eat with me; supper's just ready, and bygones shall be bygones, if you will have them so.”
How much forgiveness Eustace felt in his heart, I know not: but he knew, of course, that he ought to forgive; and to go in and eat with Amyas was to perform an act of forgiveness, and for the best of motives, too, for by it the cause of the Church might be furthered; and acts and motives being correct, what more was needed? So in he went; and yet he never forgot that scar upon his cheek; and Amyas could not look him in the face but Eustace must fancy that his eyes were on the scar, and peep up from under his lids to see if there was any smile of triumph on that honest visage. They talked away over the venison, guardedly enough at first; but as they went on, Amyas's straightforward kindliness warmed poor Eustace's frozen heart; and ere they were aware, they found themselves talking over old haunts and old passages of their boyhood--uncles, aunts, and cousins; and Eustace, without any sinister intention, asked Amyas why he was going to Bideford, while Frank and his mother were in London.
“To tell you the truth, I cannot rest till I have heard the whole story about poor Rose Salterne.”
“What about her?” cried Eustace.
“Do you not know?”
“How should I know anything here? For heaven's sake, what has happened?”
Amyas told him, wondering at his eagerness, for he had never had the least suspicion of Eustace's love.
Eustace shrieked aloud.
“Fool, fool that I have been! Caught in my own trap! Villain, villain that he is! After all he promised me at Lundy!”
And springing up, Eustace stamped up and down the room, gnashing his teeth, tossing his head from side to side, and clutching with outstretched hands at the empty air, with the horrible gesture (Heaven grant that no reader has ever witnessed it!) of that despair which still seeks blindly for the object which it knows is lost forever.
Amyas sat thunderstruck. His first impulse was to ask, “Lundy? What knew you of him? What had he or you to do at Lundy?” but pity conquered curiosity.
“Oh, Eustace! And you then loved her too?”
“Don't speak to me! Loved her? Yes, sir, and had as good a right to love her as any one of your precious Brotherhood of the Rose. Don't speak to me, I say, or I shall do you a mischief!”
So Eustace knew of the brotherhood too! Amyas longed to ask him how; but what use in that? If he knew it, he knew it; and what harm? So he only answered:
“My good cousin, why be wroth with me? If you really love her, now is the time to take counsel with me how best we shall--”
Eustace did not let him finish his sentence. Conscious that he had betrayed himself upon more points than one, he stopped short in his walk, suddenly collected himself by one great effort, and eyed Amyas from underneath his brows with the old down look.
“How best we shall do what, my valiant cousin?” said he, in a meaning and half-scornful voice. “What does your most chivalrous Brotherhood of the Rose purpose in such a case?”
Amyas, a little nettled, stood on his guard in return, and answered bluntly--
“What the Brotherhood of the Rose will do, I can't yet say. What it ought to do, I have a pretty sure guess.”
“So have I. To hunt her down as you would an outlaw, because forsooth she has dared to love a Catholic; to murder her lover in her arms, and drag her home again stained with his blood, to be forced by threats and persecution to renounce that Church into whose maternal bosom she has doubtless long since found rest and holiness!”
“If she has found holiness, it matters little to me where she has found it, Master Eustace, but that is the very point that I should be glad to know for certain.”
“And you will go and discover for yourself?”
“Have you no wish to discover it also?”
“And if I had, what would that be to you?”
“Only,” said Amyas, trying hard to keep his temper, “that, if we had the same purpose, we might sail in the same ship.”
“You intend to sail, then?”
“I mean simply, that we might work together.”
“Our paths lie on very different roads, sir!”
“I am afraid you never spoke a truer word, sir. In the meanwhile, ere we part, be so kind as to tell me what you meant by saying that you had met this Spaniard at Lundy?”
“I shall refuse to answer that.”
“You will please to recollect, Eustace, that however good friends we have been for the last half-hour, you are in my power. I have a right to know the bottom of this matter; and, by heaven, I will know it.”
“In your power? See that you are not in mine! Remember, sir, that you are within a--within a few miles, at least, of those who will obey me, their Catholic benefactor, but who owe no allegiance to those Protestant authorities who have left them to the lot of the beasts which perish.”
Amyas was very angry. He wanted but little more to make him catch Eustace by the shoulders, shake the life out of him, and deliver him into the tender guardianship of Yeo; but he knew that to take him at all was to bring certain death on him, and disgrace on the family; and remembering Frank's conduct on that memorable night at Clovelly, he kept himself down.
“Take me,” said Eustace, “if you will, sir. You, who complain of us that we keep no faith with heretics, will perhaps recollect that you asked me into this room as your guest, and that in your good faith I trusted when I entered it.”
The argument was a worthless one in law; for Eustace had been a prisoner before he was a guest, and Amyas was guilty of something very like misprision of treason in not handing him over to the nearest justice. However, all he did was, to go to the door, open it, and bowing to his cousin, bid him walk out and go to the devil, since he seemed to have set his mind on ending his days in the company of that personage.
Whereon Eustace vanished.
“Pooh!” said Amyas to himself, “I can find out enough, and too much, I fear, without the help of such crooked vermin. I must see Cary; I must see Salterne; and I suppose, if I am ready to do my duty, I shall learn somehow what it is. Now to sleep; to-morrow up and away to what God sends.”
“Come in hither, men,” shouted he down the passage, “and sleep here. Haven't you had enough of this villainous sour cider?”
The men came in yawning, and settled themselves to sleep on the floor.
“Where's Yeo?”
No one knew; he had gone out to say his prayers, and had not returned.
“Never mind,” said Amyas, who suspected some plot on the old man's part. “He'll take care of himself, I'll warrant him.”
“No fear of that, sir;” and the four tars were soon snoring in concert round the fire, while Amyas laid himself on the settle, with his saddle for a pillow.
* * * * *
It was about midnight, when Amyas leaped to his feet, or rather fell upon his back, upsetting saddle, settle, and finally, table, under the notion that ten thousand flying dragons were bursting in the window close to his ear, with howls most fierce and fell. The flying dragons past, however, being only a flock of terror-stricken geese, which flew flapping and screaming round the corner of the house; but the noise which had startled them did not pass; and another minute made it evident that a sharp fight was going on in the courtyard, and that Yeo was hallooing lustily for help.
Out turned the men, sword in hand, burst the back door open, stumbling over pails and pitchers, and into the courtyard, where Yeo, his back against the stable-door, was holding his own manfully with sword and buckler against a dozen men.
Dire and manifold was the screaming; geese screamed, chickens screamed, pigs screamed, donkeys screamed, Mary screamed from an upper window; and to complete the chorus, a flock of plovers, attracted by the noise, wheeled round and round overhead, and added their screams also to that Dutch concert.
The screaming went on, but the fight ceased; for, as Amyas rushed into the yard, the whole party of ruffians took to their heels, and vanished over a low hedge at the other end of the yard.
“Are you hurt, Yeo?”
“Not a scratch, thank Heaven! But I've got two of them, the ringleaders, I have. One of them's against the wall. Your horse did for t'other.”
The wounded man was lifted up; a huge ruffian, nearly as big as Amyas himself. Yeo's sword had passed through his body. He groaned and choked for breath.
“Carry him indoors. Where is the other?”
“Dead as a herring, in the straw. Have a care, men, have a care how you go in! the horses are near mad!”
However, the man was brought out after a while. With him all was over. They could feel neither pulse nor breath.
“Carry him in too, poor wretch. And now, Yeo, what is the meaning of all this?”
Yeo's story was soon told. He could not get out of his Puritan head the notion (quite unfounded, of course) that Eustace had meant to steal the horses. He had seen the inn-keeper sneak off at their approach; and expecting some night-attack, he had taken up his lodging for the night in the stable.
As he expected, an attempt was made. The door was opened (how, he could not guess, for he had fastened it inside), and two fellows came in, and began to loose the beasts. Yeo's account was, that he seized the big fellow, who drew a knife on him, and broke loose; the horses, terrified at the scuffle, kicked right and left; one man fell, and the other ran out, calling for help, with Yeo at his heels; “Whereon,” said Yeo, “seeing a dozen more on me with clubs and bows, I thought best to shorten the number while I could, ran the rascal through, and stood on my ward; and only just in time I was, what's more; there's two arrows in the house wall, and two or three more in my buckler, which I caught up as I went out, for I had hung it close by the door, you see, sir, to be all ready in case,” said the cunning old Philistine-slayer, as they went in after the wounded man.
But hardly had they stumbled through the low doorway into the back-kitchen when a fresh hubbub arose inside--more shouts for help. Amyas ran forward breaking his head against the doorway, and beheld, as soon as he could see for the flashes in his eyes, an old acquaintance, held on each side by a sturdy sailor.
With one arm in the sleeve of his doublet, and the other in a not over spotless shirt; holding up his hose with one hand, and with the other a candle, whereby he had lighted himself to his own confusion; foaming with rage, stood Mr. Evan Morgans, alias Father Parsons, looking, between his confused habiliments and his fiery visage (as Yeo told him to his face), “the very moral of a half-plucked turkey-cock.” And behind him, dressed, stood Eustace Leigh.
“We found the maid letting these here two out by the front door,” said one of the captors.
“Well, Mr. Parsons,” said Amyas; “and what are you about here? A pretty nest of thieves and Jesuits we seem to have routed out this evening.”
“About my calling, sir,” said Parsons, stoutly. “By your leave, I shall prepare this my wounded lamb for that account to which your man's cruelty has untimely sent him.”
The wounded man, who lay upon the floor, heard Parsons' voice, and moaned for the “Patrico.”
“You see, sir,” said he, pompously, “the sheep know their shepherd's voice.”
“The wolves you mean, you hypocritical scoundrel!” said Amyas, who could not contain his disgust. “Let the fellow truss up his points, lads, and do his work. After all, the man is dying.”
“The requisite matters, sir, are not at hand,” said Parsons, unabashed.
“Eustace, go and fetch his matters for him; you seem to be in all his plots.”
Eustace went silently and sullenly.
“What's that fresh noise at the back, now?”
“The maid, sir, a wailing over her uncle; the fellow that we saw sneak away when we came up. It was him the horse killed.”
It was true. The wretched host had slipped off on their approach, simply to call the neighboring outlaws to the spoil; and he had been filled with the fruit of his own devices.
“His blood be on his own head,” said Amyas.
“I question, sir,” said Yeo, in a low voice, “whether some of it will not be on the heads of those proud prelates who go clothed in purple and fine linen, instead of going forth to convert such as he, and then wonder how these Jesuits get hold of them. If they give place to the devil in their sheepfolds, sure he'll come in and lodge there. Look, sir, there's a sight in a gospel land!”
And, indeed, the sight was curious enough. For Parsons was kneeling by the side of the dying man, listening earnestly to the confession which the man sobbed out in his gibberish, between the spasms of his wounded chest. Now and then Parsons shook his head; and when Eustace returned with the holy wafer, and the oil for extreme unction, he asked him, in a low voice, “Ballard, interpret for me.”
And Eustace knelt down on the other side of the sufferer, and interpreted his thieves' dialect into Latin; and the dying man held a hand of each, and turned first to one and then to the other stupid eyes,--not without affection, though, and gratitude.
“I can't stand this mummery any longer,” said Yeo. “Here's a soul perishing before my eyes, and it's on my conscience to speak a word in season.”
“Silence!” whispered Amyas, holding him back by the arm; “he knows them, and he don't know you; they are the first who ever spoke to him as if he had a soul to be saved, and first come, first served; you can do no good. See, the man's face is brightening already.”
“But, sir, 'tis a false peace.”
“At all events he is confessing his sins, Yeo; and if that's not good for him, and you, and me, what is?”
“Yea, Amen! sir; but this is not to the right person.”
“How do you know his words will not go to the right person, after all, though he may not send them there? By heaven! the man is dead!”
It was so. The dark catalogue of brutal deeds had been gasped out; but ere the words of absolution could follow, the head had fallen back, and all was over.
“Confession in extremis is sufficient,” said Parsons to Eustace (“Ballard,” as Parsons called him, to Amyas's surprise), as he rose. “As for the rest, the intention will be accepted instead of the act.”
“The Lord have mercy on his soul!” said Eustace.
“His soul is lost before our very eyes,” said Yeo.
“Mind your own business,” said Amyas.
“Humph; but I'll tell you, sir, what our business is, if you'll step aside with me. I find that poor fellow that lies dead is none other than the leader of the Gubbings; the king of them, as they dare to call him.”
“Well, what of that?”
“Mark my words, sir, if we have not a hundred stout rogues upon us before two hours are out; forgive us they never will; and if we get off with our lives, which I don't much expect, we shall leave our horses behind; for we can hold the house, sir, well enough till morning, but the courtyard we can't, that's certain!”
“We had better march at once, then.”
“Think, sir; if they catch us up--as they are sure to do, knowing the country better than we--how will our shot stand their arrows?”
“True, old wisdom; we must keep the road; and we must keep together; and so be a mark for them, while they will be behind every rock and bank; and two or three flights of arrows will do our business for us. Humph! stay, I have a plan.” And stepping forward he spoke--
“Eustace, you will be so kind as to go back to your lambs; and tell them, that if they meddle with us cruel wolves again to-night, we are ready and willing to fight to the death, and have plenty of shot and powder at their service. Father Parsons, you will be so kind as to accompany us; it is but fitting that the shepherd should be hostage for his sheep.”
“If you carry me off this spot, sir, you carry my corpse only,” said Parsons. “I may as well die here as be hanged elsewhere, like my martyred brother Campian.”
“If you take him, you must take me too,” said Eustace.
“What if we won't?”
“How will you gain by that? you can only leave me here. You cannot make me go to the Gubbings, if I do not choose.”
Amyas uttered sotto voce an anathema on Jesuits, Gubbings, and things in general. He was in a great hurry to get to Bideford, and he feared that this business would delay him, as it was, a day or two. He wanted to hang Parsons, he did not want to hang Eustace; and Eustace, he knew, was well aware of that latter fact, and played his game accordingly; but time ran on, and he had to answer sulkily enough:
“Well then; if you, Eustace, will go and give my message to your converts, I will promise to set Mr. Parsons free again before we come to Lydford town; and I advise you, if you have any regard for his life, to see that your eloquence be persuasive enough; for as sure as I am an Englishman, and he none, if the Gubbings attack us, the first bullet that I shall fire at them will have gone through his scoundrelly brains.”
Parsons still kicked.
“Very well, then, my merry men all. Tie this gentleman's hands behind his back, get the horses out, and we'll right away up into Dartmoor, find a good high tor, stand our ground there till morning, and then carry him into Okehampton to the nearest justice. If he chooses to delay me in my journey, it is fair that I should make him pay for it.”
Whereon Parsons gave in, and being fast tied by his arm to Amyas's saddle, trudged alongside his horse for several weary miles, while Yeo walked by his side, like a friar by a condemned criminal; and in order to keep up his spirits, told him the woful end of Nicholas Saunders the Legate, and how he was found starved to death in a bog.
“And if you wish, sir, to follow in his blessed steps, which I heartily hope you will do, you have only to go over that big cow-backed hill there on your right hand, and down again the other side to Crawmere pool, and there you'll find as pretty a bog to die in as ever Jesuit needed; and your ghost may sit there on a grass tummock, and tell your beads without any one asking for you till the day of judgment; and much good may it do you!”
At which imagination Yeo was actually heard, for the first and last time in this history, to laugh most heartily.
His ho-ho's had scarcely died away when they saw shining under the moon the old tower of Lydford castle.
“Cast the fellow off now,” said Amyas.
“Ay, ay, sir!” and Yeo and Simon Evans stopped behind, and did not come up for ten minutes after.
“What have you been about so long?”
“Why, sir,” said Evans, “you see the man had a very fair pair of hose on, and a bran-new kersey doublet, very warm-lined; and so, thinking it a pity good clothes should be wasted on such noxious trade, we've just brought them along with us.”
“Spoiling the Egyptians,” said Yeo as comment.
“And what have you done with the man?”
“Hove him over the bank, sir; he pitched into a big furze-bush, and for aught I know, there he'll bide.”
“You rascal, have you killed him?
“Never fear, sir,” said Yeo, in his cool fashion. “A Jesuit has as many lives as a cat, and, I believe, rides broomsticks post, like a witch. He would be at Lydford now before us, if his master Satan had any business for him there.”
Leaving on their left Lydford and its ill-omened castle (which, a century after, was one of the principal scenes of Judge Jeffreys's cruelty), Amyas and his party trudged on through the mire toward Okehampton till sunrise; and ere the vapors had lifted from the mountain tops, they were descending the long slopes from Sourton down, while Yestor and Amicombe slept steep and black beneath their misty pall; and roaring far below unseen,
“Ockment leapt from crag and cloud Down her cataracts, laughing loud.”
The voice of the stream recalled these words to Amyas's mind. The nymph of Torridge had spoken them upon the day of his triumph. He recollected, too, his vexation on that day at not seeing Rose Salterne. Why, he had never seen her since. Never seen her now for six years and more! Of her ripened beauty he knew only by hearsay; she was still to him the lovely fifteen years' girl for whose sake he had smitten the Barnstaple draper over the quay. What a chain of petty accidents had kept them from meeting, though so often within a mile of each other! “And what a lucky one!” said practical old Amyas to himself. “If I had seen her as she is now, I might have loved her as Frank does--poor Frank! what will he say? What does he say, for he must know it already? And what ought I to say--to do rather, for talking is no use on this side the grave, nor on the other either, I expect!” And then he asked himself whether his old oath meant nothing or something; whether it was a mere tavern frolic, or a sacred duty. And he held, the more that he looked at it, that it meant the latter.
But what could he do? He had nothing on earth but his sword, so he could not travel to find her. After all, she might not be gone far. Perhaps not gone at all. It might be a mistake, an exaggerated scandal. He would hope so. And yet it was evident that there had been some passages between her and Don Guzman. Eustace's mysterious words about the promise at Lundy proved that. The villain! He had felt all along that he was a villain; but just the one to win a woman's heart, too. Frank had been away--all the Brotherhood away. What a fool he had been, to turn the wolf loose into the sheepfold! And yet who would have dreamed of it? . . .
“At all events,” said Amyas, trying to comfort himself, “I need not complain. I have lost nothing. I stood no more chance of her against Frank than I should have stood against the Don. So there is no use for me to cry about the matter.” And he tried to hum a tune concerning the general frailty of women, but nevertheless, like Sir Hugh, felt that “he had a great disposition to cry.”
He never had expected to win her, and yet it seemed bitter to know that she was lost to him forever. It was not so easy for a heart of his make to toss away the image of a first love; and all the less easy because that image was stained and ruined.
“Curses on the man who had done that deed! I will yet have his heart's blood somehow, if I go round the world again to find him. If there's no law for it on earth, there's law in heaven, or I'm much mistaken.”
With which determination he rode into the ugly, dirty, and stupid town of Okehampton, with which fallen man (by some strange perversity) has chosen to defile one of the loveliest sites in the pleasant land of Devon. And heartily did Amyas abuse the old town that day; for he was detained there, as he expected, full three hours, while the Justice Shallow of the place was sent for from his farm (whither he had gone at sunrise, after the early-rising fashion of those days) to take Yeo's deposition concerning last night's affray. Moreover, when Shallow came, he refused to take the depositions, because they ought to have been made before a brother Shallow at Lydford; and in the wrangling which ensued, was very near finding out what Amyas (fearing fresh loss of time and worse evils beside) had commanded to be concealed, namely, the presence of Jesuits in that Moorland Utopia. Then, in broadest Devon--
“And do you call this Christian conduct, sir, to set a quiet man like me upon they Gubbings, as if I was going to risk my precious life--no, nor ever a constable to Okehampton neither? Let Lydfor' men mind Lydfor' roogs, and by Lydfor' law if they will, hang first and try after; but as for me, I've rade my Bible, and 'He that meddleth with strife is like him that taketh a dog by the ears.' So if you choose to sit down and ate your breakfast with me, well and good: but depositions I'll have none. If your man is enquired for, you'll be answerable for his appearing, in course; but I expect mortally” (with a wink), “you wain't hear much more of the matter from any hand. 'Leave well alone is a good rule, but leave ill alone is a better.'--So we says round about here; and so you'll say, captain, when you be so old as I.”
So Amyas sat down and ate his breakfast, and went on afterwards a long and weary day's journey, till he saw at last beneath him the broad shining river, and the long bridge, and the white houses piled up the hill-side; and beyond, over Raleigh downs, the dear old tower of Northam Church.
Alas! Northam was altogether a desert to him then; and Bideford, as it turned out, hardly less so. For when he rode up to Sir Richard's door, he found that the good knight was still in Ireland, and Lady Grenville at Stow. Whereupon he rode back again down the High Street to that same bow-windowed Ship Tavern where the Brotherhood of the Rose made their vow, and settled himself in the very room where they had supped.
“Ah! Mr. Leigh--Captain Leigh now, I beg pardon,” quoth mine host. “Bideford is an empty place now-a-days, and nothing stirring, sir. What with Sir Richard to Ireland, and Sir John to London, and all the young gentlemen to the wars, there's no one to buy good liquor, and no one to court the young ladies, neither. Sack, sir? I hope so. I haven't brewed a gallon of it this fortnight, if you'll believe me; ale, sir, and aqua vitae, and such low-bred trade, is all I draw now-a-days. Try a pint of sherry, sir, now, to give you an appetite. You mind my sherry of old? Jane! Sherry and sugar, quick, while I pull off the captain's boots.”
Amyas sat weary and sad, while the innkeeper chattered on.
“Ah, sir! two or three like you would set the young ladies all alive again. By-the-by, there's been strange doings among them since you were here last. You mind Mistress Salterne!”
“For God's sake, don't let us have that story, man! I heard enough of it at Plymouth!” said Amyas, in so disturbed a tone that mine host looked up, and said to himself--
“Ah, poor young gentleman, he's one of the hard-hit ones.”
“How is the old man?” asked Amyas, after a pause.
“Bears it well enough, sir; but a changed man. Never speaks to a soul, if he can help it. Some folk say he's not right in his head; or turned miser, or somewhat, and takes naught but bread and water, and sits up all night in the room as was hers, turning over her garments. Heaven knows what's on his mind--they do say he was over hard on her, and that drove her to it. All I know is, he has never been in here for a drop of liquor (and he came as regular every evening as the town clock, sir) since she went, except a ten days ago, and then he met young Mr. Cary at the door, and I heard him ask Mr. Cary when you would be home, sir.”
“Put on my boots again. I'll go and see him.”
“Bless you, sir! What, without your sack?”
“Drink it yourself, man.”
“But you wouldn't go out again this time o' night on an empty stomach, now?”
“Fill my men's stomachs for them, and never mind mine. It's market-day, is it not? Send out, and see whether Mr. Cary is still in town;” and Amyas strode out, and along the quay to Bridgeland Street, and knocked at Mr. Salterne's door.
Salterne himself opened it, with his usual stern courtesy.
“I saw you coming up the street, sir. I have been expecting this honor from you for some time past. I dreamt of you only last night, and many a night before that too. Welcome, sir, into a lonely house. I trust the good knight your general is well.”
“The good knight my general is with God who made him, Mr. Salterne.”
“Dead, sir?”
“Foundered at sea on our way home; and the Delight lost too.”
“Humph!” growled Salterne, after a minute's silence. “I had a venture in her. I suppose it's gone. No matter--I can afford it, sir, and more, I trust. And he was three years younger than I! And Draper Heard was buried yesterday, five years younger.--How is it that every one can die, except me? Come in, sir, come in; I have forgotten my manners.”
And he led Amyas into his parlor, and called to the apprentices to run one way, and to the cook to run another.
“You must not trouble yourself to get me supper, indeed.”
“I must though, sir, and the best of wine too; and old Salterne had a good tap of Alicant in old time, old time, old time, sir! and you must drink it now, whether he does or not!” and out he bustled.
Amyas sat still, wondering what was coming next, and puzzled at the sudden hilarity of the man, as well as his hospitality, so different from what the innkeeper had led him to expect.
In a minute more one of the apprentices came in to lay the cloth, and Amyas questioned him about his master.
“Thank the Lord that you are come, sir,” said the lad.
“Why, then?”
“Because there'll be a chance of us poor fellows getting a little broken meat. We'm half-starved this three months--bread and dripping, bread and dripping, oh dear, sir! And now he's sent out to the inn for chickens, and game, and salads, and all that money can buy, and down in the cellar haling out the best of wine.”--And the lad smacked his lips audibly at the thought.
“Is he out of his mind?”
“I can't tell; he saith as how he must save mun's money now-a-days; for he've a got a great venture on hand: but what a be he tell'th no man. They call'th mun 'bread and dripping' now, sir, all town over,” said the prentice, confidentially, to Amyas.
“They do, do they, sirrah! Then they will call me bread and no dripping to-morrow!” and old Salterne, entering from behind, made a dash at the poor fellow's ears: but luckily thought better of it, having a couple of bottles in each hand.
“My dear sir,” said Amyas, “you don't mean us to drink all that wine?”
“Why not, sir?” answered Salterne, in a grim, half-sneering tone, thrusting out his square-grizzled beard and chin. “Why not, sir? why should I not make merry when I have the honor of a noble captain in my house? one who has sailed the seas, sir, and cut Spaniards' throats; and may cut them again too; eh, sir? Boy, where's the kettle and the sugar?”
“What on earth is the man at?” quoth Amyas to himself--“flattering me, or laughing at me?”
“Yes,” he ran on, half to himself, in a deliberate tone, evidently intending to hint more than he said, as he began brewing the sack--in plain English, hot negus; “Yes, bread and dripping for those who can't fight Spaniards; but the best that money can buy for those who can. I heard of you at Smerwick, sir--Yes, bread and dripping for me too--I can't fight Spaniards: but for such as you. Look here, sir; I should like to feed a crew of such up, as you'd feed a main of fighting-cocks, and then start them with a pair of Sheffield spurs a-piece--you've a good one there to your side, sir: but don't you think a man might carry two now, and fight as they say those Chineses do, a sword to each hand? You could kill more that way, Captain Leigh, I reckon?”
Amyas half laughed.
“One will do, Mr. Salterne, if one is quick enough with it.”
“Humph!--Ah--No use being in a hurry. I haven't been in a hurry. No--I waited for you; and here you are and welcome, sir! Here comes supper, a light matter, sir, you see. A capon and a brace of partridges. I had no time to feast you as you deserve.”
And so he ran on all supper-time, hardly allowing Amyas to get a word in edge-ways; but heaping him with coarse flattery, and urging him to drink, till after the cloth was drawn, and the two left alone, he grew so outrageous that Amyas was forced to take him to task good-humoredly.
“Now, my dear sir, you have feasted me royally, and better far than I deserve, but why will you go about to make me drunk twice over, first with vainglory and then with wine?”
Salterne looked at him a while fixedly, and then, sticking out his chin--“Because, Captain Leigh, I am a man who has all his life tried the crooked road first, and found the straight one the safer after all.”
“Eh, sir? That is a strange speech for one who bears the character of the most upright man in Bideford.”
“Humph. So I thought myself once, sir; and well I have proved it. But I'll be plain with you, sir. You've heard how--how I've fared since you saw me last?”
Amyas nodded his head.
“I thought so. Shame rides post. Now then, Captain Leigh, listen to me. I, being a plain man and a burgher, and one that never drew iron in my life except to mend a pen, ask you, being a gentleman and a captain and a man of honor, with a weapon to your side, and harness to your back--what would you do in my place?”
“Humph!” said Amyas, “that would very much depend on whether 'my place' was my own fault or not.”
“And what if it were, sir? What if all that the charitable folks of Bideford--(Heaven reward them for their tender mercies!)--have been telling you in the last hour be true, sir,--true! and yet not half the truth?”
Amyas gave a start.
“Ah, you shrink from me! Of course a man is too righteous to forgive those who repent, though God is not.”
“God knows, sir--”
“Yes, sir, God does know--all; and you shall know a little--as much as I can tell--or you understand. Come upstairs with me, sir, as you'll drink no more; I have a liking for you. I have watched you from your boyhood, and I can trust you, and I'll show you what I never showed to mortal man but one.”
And, taking up a candle, he led the way upstairs, while Amyas followed wondering.
He stopped at a door, and unlocked it.
“There, come in. Those shutters have not been opened since she--” and the old man was silent.
Amyas looked round the room. It was a low wainscoted room, such as one sees in old houses: everything was in the most perfect neatness. The snow-white sheets on the bed were turned down as if ready for an occupant. There were books arranged on the shelves, fresh flowers on the table; the dressing-table had all its woman's mundus of pins, and rings, and brushes; even the dressing-gown lay over the chair-back. Everything was evidently just as it had been left.
“This was her room, sir,” whispered the old man.
Amyas nodded silently, and half drew back.
“You need not be modest about entering it now, sir,” whispered he, with a sort of sneer. “There has been no frail flesh and blood in it for many a day.”
Amyas sighed.
“I sweep it out myself every morning, and keep all tidy. See here!” and he pulled open a drawer. “Here are all her gowns, and there are her hoods; and there--I know 'em all by heart now, and the place of every one. And there, sir--”
And he opened a cupboard, where lay in rows all Rose's dolls, and the worn-out playthings of her childhood.
“That's the pleasantest place of all in the room to me,” said he, whispering still, “for it minds me of when--and maybe, she may become a little child once more, sir; it's written in the Scripture, you know--”
“Amen!” said Amyas, who felt, to his own wonder, a big tear stealing down each cheek.
“And now,” he whispered, “one thing more. Look here!”--and pulling out a key, he unlocked a chest, and lifted up tray after tray of necklaces and jewels, furs, lawns, cloth of gold. “Look there! Two thousand pound won't buy that chest. Twenty years have I been getting those things together. That's the cream of many a Levant voyage, and East Indian voyage, and West Indian voyage. My Lady Bath can't match those pearls in her grand house at Tawstock; I got 'em from a Genoese, though, and paid for 'em. Look at that embroidered lawn! There's not such a piece in London; no, nor in Alexandria, I'll warrant; nor short of Calicut, where it came from. . . . Look here again, there's a golden cup! I bought that of one that was out with Pizarro in Peru. And look here, again!”--and the old man gloated over the treasure.
“And whom do you think I kept all these for? These were for her wedding-day--for her wedding-day. For your wedding-day, if you'd been minded, sir! Yes, yours, sir! And yet, I believe, I was so ambitious that I would not have let her marry under an earl, all the while I was pretending to be too proud to throw her at the head of a squire's son. Ah, well! There was my idol, sir. I made her mad, I pampered her up with gewgaws and vanity; and then, because my idol was just what I had made her, I turned again and rent her.
“And now,” said he, pointing to the open chest, “that was what I meant; and that” (pointing to the empty bed) “was what God meant. Never mind. Come downstairs and finish your wine. I see you don't care about it all. Why should you! you are not her father, and you may thank God you are not. Go, and be merry while you can, young sir! . . . And yet, all this might have been yours. And--but I don't suppose you are one to be won by money--but all this may be yours still, and twenty thousand pounds to boot.”
“I want no money, sir, but what I can earn with my own sword.”
“Earn my money, then!”
“What on earth do you want of me!”
“To keep your oath,” said Salterne, clutching his arm, and looking up into his face with searching eyes.
“My oath! How did you know that I had one?”
“Ah! you were well ashamed of it, I suppose, next day! A drunken frolic all about a poor merchant's daughter! But there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, nor done in the closet that is not proclaimed on the house-tops.”
“Ashamed of it, sir, I never was: but I have a right to ask how you came to know it?”
“What if a poor fat squinny rogue, a low-born fellow even as I am, whom you had baffled and made a laughing-stock, had come to me in my loneliness and sworn before God that if you honorable gentlemen would not keep your words, he the clown would?”
“John Brimblecombe?”
“And what if I had brought him where I have brought you, and shown him what I have shown you, and, instead of standing as stiff as any Spaniard, as you do, he had thrown himself on his knees by that bedside, and wept and prayed, sir, till he opened my hard heart for the first and last time, and I fell down on my sinful knees and wept and prayed by him?”
“I am not given to weeping, Mr. Salterne,” said Amyas; “and as for praying, I don't know yet what I have to pray for, on her account: my business is to work. Show me what I can do; and when you have done that, it will be full time to upbraid me with not doing it.”
“You can cut that fellow's throat.”
“It will take a long arm to reach him.”
“I suppose it is as easy to sail to the Spanish Main as it was to sail round the world.”
“My good sir,” said Amyas, “I have at this moment no more worldly goods than my clothes and my sword, so how to sail to the Spanish Main, I don't quite see.”
“And do you suppose, sir, that I should hint to you of such a voyage if I meant you to be at the charge of it? No, sir; if you want two thousand pounds, or five, to fit a ship, take it! Take it, sir! I hoarded money for my child: and now I will spend it to avenge her.”
Amyas was silent for a while; the old man still held his arm, still looked up steadfastly and fiercely in his face.
“Bring me home that man's head, and take ship, prizes--all! Keep the gain, sir, and give me the revenge!”
“Gain? Do you think I need bribing, sir? What kept me silent was the thought of my mother. I dare not go without her leave.”
Salterne made a gesture of impatience.
“I dare not, sir; I must obey my parent, whatever else I do.”
“Humph!” said he. “If others had obeyed theirs as well!--But you are right, Captain Leigh, right. You will prosper, whoever else does not. Now, sir, good-night, if you will let me be the first to say so. My old eyes grow heavy early now-a-days. Perhaps it's old age, perhaps it's sorrow.”
So Amyas departed to the inn, and there, to his great joy, found Cary waiting for him, from whom he learnt details, which must be kept for another chapter, and which I shall tell, for convenience' sake, in my own words and not in his.
XV. HOW MR. JOHN BRIMBLECOMBE UNDERSTOOD THE NATURE OF AN OATH
“The Kynge of Spayn is a foul paynim, And lieveth on Mahound; And pity it were that lady fayre Should marry a heathen hound.”
Kyng Estmere.
About six weeks after the duel, the miller at Stow had come up to the great house in much tribulation, to borrow the bloodhounds. Rose Salterne had vanished in the night, no man knew whither.
Sir Richard was in Bideford: but the old steward took on himself to send for the keepers, and down went the serving-men to the mill with all the idle lads of the parish at their heels, thinking a maiden-hunt very good sport; and of course taking a view of the case as favorable as possible to Rose.
They reviled the miller and his wife roundly for hard-hearted old heathens; and had no doubt that they had driven the poor maid to throw herself over cliff, or drown herself in the sea; while all the women of Stow, on the other hand, were of unanimous opinion that the hussy had “gone off” with some bad fellow; and that pride was sure to have a fall, and so forth.
The facts of the case were, that all Rose's trinkets were left behind, so that she had at least gone off honestly; and nothing seemed to be missing, but some of her linen, which old Anthony the steward broadly hinted was likely to be found in other people's boxes. The only trace was a little footmark under her bedroom window. On that the bloodhound was laid (of course in leash), and after a premonitory whimper, lifted up his mighty voice, and started bell-mouthed through the garden gate, and up the lane, towing behind him the panting keeper, till they reached the downs above, and went straight away for Marslandmouth, where the whole posse comitatus pulled up breathless at the door of Lucy Passmore.
Lucy, as perhaps I should have said before, was now a widow, and found her widowhood not altogether contrary to her interest. Her augury about her old man had been fulfilled; he had never returned since the night on which he put to sea with Eustace and the Jesuits.
* “Some natural tears she shed, but dried them soon”
as many of them, at least, as were not required for purposes of business; and then determined to prevent suspicion by a bold move; she started off to Stow, and told Lady Grenville a most pathetic tale: how her husband had gone out to pollock fishing, and never returned: but how she had heard horsemen gallop past her window in the dead of night, and was sure they must have been the Jesuits, and that they had carried off her old man by main force, and probably, after making use of his services, had killed and salted him down for provision on their voyage back to the Pope at Rome; after which she ended by entreating protection against those “Popish skulkers up to Chapel,” who were sworn to do her a mischief; and by an appeal to Lady Grenville's sense of justice, as to whether the queen ought not to allow her a pension, for having had her heart's love turned into a sainted martyr by the hands of idolatrous traitors.
Lady Grenville (who had a great opinion of Lucy's medical skill, and always sent for her if one of the children had a “housty,” i. e. sore throat) went forth and pleaded the case before Sir Richard with such effect, that Lucy was on the whole better off than ever for the next two or three years. But now--what had she to do with Rose's disappearance? and, indeed, where was she herself? Her door was fast; and round it her flock of goats stood, crying in vain for her to come and milk them; while from the down above, her donkeys, wandering at their own sweet will, answered the bay of the bloodhound with a burst of harmony.
“They'm laughing at us, keper, they neddies; sure enough, we'm lost our labor here.”
But the bloodhound, after working about the door a while, turned down the glen, and never stopped till he reached the margin of the sea.
“They'm taken water. Let's go back, and rout out the old witch's house.”
“'Tis just like that old Lucy, to lock a poor maid into shame.”
And returning, they attacked the cottage, and by a general plebiscitum, ransacked the little dwelling, partly in indignation, and partly, if the truth be told, in the hope of plunder; but plunder there was none. Lucy had decamped with all her movable wealth, saving the huge black cat among the embers, who at the sight of the bloodhound vanished up the chimney (some said with a strong smell of brimstone), and being viewed outside, was chased into the woods, where she lived, I doubt not, many happy years, a scourge to all the rabbits of the glen.
The goats and donkeys were driven off up to Stow; and the mob returned, a little ashamed of themselves when their brief wrath was past; and a little afraid, too, of what Sir Richard might say.
He, when he returned, sold the donkeys and goats, and gave the money to the poor, promising to refund the same, if Lucy returned and gave herself up to justice. But Lucy did not return; and her cottage, from which the neighbors shrank as from a haunted place, remained as she had left it, and crumbled slowly down to four fern-covered walls, past which the little stream went murmuring on from pool to pool--the only voice, for many a year to come, which broke the silence of that lonely glen.
A few days afterwards, Sir Richard, on his way from Bideford to Stow, looked in at Clovelly Court, and mentioned, with a “by the by,” news which made Will Cary leap from his seat almost to the ceiling. What it was we know already.
“And there is no clue?” asked old Cary; for his son was speechless.
“Only this; I hear that some fellow prowling about the cliffs that night saw a pinnace running for Lundy.”
Will rose, and went hastily out of the room.
In half an hour he and three or four armed servants were on board a trawling-skiff, and away to Lundy. He did not return for three days, and then brought news: that an elderly man, seemingly a foreigner, had been lodging for some months past in a part of the ruined Moresco Castle, which was tenanted by one John Braund; that a few weeks since a younger man, a foreigner also, had joined him from on board a ship: the ship a Flushinger, or Easterling of some sort. The ship came and went more than once; and the young man in her. A few days since, a lady and her maid, a stout woman, came with him up to the castle, and talked with the elder man a long while in secret; abode there all night; and then all three sailed in the morning. The fishermen on the beach had heard the young man call the other father. He was a very still man, much as a mass-priest might be. More they did not know, or did not choose to know.
Whereon old Cary and Sir Richard sent Will on a second trip with the parish constable of Hartland (in which huge parish, for its sins, is situate the Isle of Lundy, ten miles out at sea); who returned with the body of the hapless John Braund, farmer, fisherman, smuggler, etc.; which worthy, after much fruitless examination (wherein examinate was afflicted with extreme deafness and loss of memory), departed to Exeter gaol, on a charge of “harboring priests, Jesuits, gipsies, and other suspect and traitorous persons.”
Poor John Braund, whose motive for entertaining the said ugly customers had probably been not treason, but a wife, seven children, and arrears of rent, did not thrive under the change from the pure air of Lundy to the pestiferous one of Exeter gaol, made infamous, but two years after (if I recollect right), by a “black assizes,” nearly as fatal as that more notorious one at Oxford; for in it, “whether by the stench of the prisoners, or by a stream of foul air,” judge, jury, counsel, and bystanders, numbering among them many members of the best families in Devon, sickened in court, and died miserably within a few days.
John Braund, then, took the gaol-fever in a week, and died raving in that noisome den: his secret, if he had one, perished with him, and nothing but vague suspicion was left as to Rose Salterne's fate. That she had gone off with the Spaniard, few doubted; but whither, and in what character? On that last subject, be sure, no mercy was shown to her by many a Bideford dame, who had hated the poor girl simply for her beauty; and by many a country lady, who had “always expected that the girl would be brought to ruin by the absurd notice, beyond what her station had a right to, which was taken of her,” while every young maiden aspired to fill the throne which Rose had abdicated. So that, on the whole, Bideford considered itself as going on as well without poor Rose as it had done with her, or even better. And though she lingered in some hearts still as a fair dream, the business and the bustle of each day soon swept that dream away, and her place knew her no more.
And Will Cary?
He was for a while like a man distracted. He heaped himself with all manner of superfluous reproaches, for having (as he said) first brought the Rose into disgrace, and then driven her into the arms of the Spaniard; while St. Leger, who was a sensible man enough, tried in vain to persuade him that the fault was not his at all; that the two must have been attached to each other long before the quarrel; that it must have ended so, sooner or later; that old Salterne's harshness, rather than Cary's wrath, had hastened the catastrophe; and finally, that the Rose and her fortunes were, now that she had eloped with a Spaniard, not worth troubling their heads about. Poor Will would not be so comforted. He wrote off to Frank at Whitehall, telling him the whole truth, calling himself all fools and villains, and entreating Frank's forgiveness; to which he received an answer, in which Frank said that Will had no reason to accuse himself; that these strange attachments were due to a synastria, or sympathy of the stars, which ruled the destinies of each person, to fight against which was to fight against the heavens themselves; that he, as a brother of the Rose, was bound to believe, nay, to assert at the sword's point if need were, that the incomparable Rose of Torridge could make none but a worthy and virtuous choice; and that to the man whom she had honored by her affection was due on their part, Spaniard and Papist though he might be, all friendship, worship, and loyal faith for evermore.
And honest Will took it all for gospel, little dreaming what agony of despair, what fearful suspicions, what bitter prayers, this letter had cost to the gentle heart of Francis Leigh.
He showed the letter triumphantly to St. Leger; and he was quite wise enough to gainsay no word of it, at least aloud; but quite wise enough, also, to believe in secret that Frank looked on the matter in quite a different light; however, he contented himself with saying:
“The man is an angel as his mother is!” and there the matter dropped for a few days, till one came forward who had no mind to let it drop, and that was Jack Brimblecombe, now curate of Hartland town, and “passing rich on forty pounds a year.
“I hope no offence, Mr. William; but when are you and the rest going after--after her?” The name stuck in his throat.
Cary was taken aback.
“What's that to thee, Catiline the blood-drinker?” asked he, trying to laugh it off.
“What? Don't laugh at me, sir, for it's no laughing matter. I drank that night naught worse, I expect, than red wine. Whatever it was, we swore our oaths, Mr. Cary; and oaths are oaths, say I.”
“Of course, Jack, of course; but to go to look for her--and when we've found her, cut her lover's throat. Absurd, Jack, even if she were worth looking for, or his throat worth cutting. Tut, tut, tut--”
But Jack looked steadfastly in his face, and after some silence:
How far is it to the Caracas, then, sir?”
“What is that to thee, man?”
“Why, he was made governor thereof, I hear; so that would be the place to find her?”
“You don't mean to go thither to seek her?” shouted Cary, forcing a laugh.
“That depends on whether I can go, sir; but if I can scrape the money together, or get a berth on board some ship, why, God's will must be done.”
Will looked at him, to see if he had been drinking, or gone mad; but the little pigs' eyes were both sane and sober.
Will knew no answer. To laugh at the poor fellow was easy enough; to deny that he was right, that he was a hero and cavalier, outdoing romance itself in faithfulness, not so easy; and Cary, in the first impulse, wished him at the bottom of the bay for shaming him. Of course, his own plan of letting ill alone was the rational, prudent, irreproachable plan, and just what any gentleman in his senses would have done; but here was a vulgar, fat curate, out of his senses, determined not to let ill alone, but to do something, as Cary felt in his heart, of a far diviner stamp.
“Well,” said Jack, in his stupid steadfast way, “it's a very bad look-out; but mother's pretty well off, if father dies, and the maidens are stout wenches enough, and will make tidy servants, please the Lord. And you'll see that they come to no harm, Mr. William, for old acquaintance' sake, if I never come back.”
Cary was silent with amazement.
“And, Mr. William, you know me for an honest man, I hope. Will you lend me a five pound, and take my books in pawn for them, just to help me out?”
“Are you mad, or in a dream? You will never find her!”
“That's no reason why I shouldn't do my duty in looking for her, Mr. William.”
“But, my good fellow, even if you get to the Indies, you will be clapt into the Inquisition, and burnt alive, as sure as your name is Jack.”
“I know that,” said he, in a doleful tone; “and a sore struggle of the flesh I have had about it; for I am a great coward, Mr. William, a dirty coward, and always was, as you know: but maybe the Lord will take care of me, as He does of little children and drunken men; and if not, Mr. Will, I'd sooner burn, and have it over, than go on this way any longer, I would!” and Jack burst out blubbering.
“What way, my dear old lad?” said Will, softened as he well might be.
“Why, not--not to know whether--whether--whether she's married to him or not--her that I looked up to as an angel of God, as pure as the light of day; and knew she was too good for a poor pot-head like me; and prayed for her every night, God knows, that she might marry a king, if there was one fit for her--and I not to know whether she's living in sin or not, Mr. William.--It's more than I can bear, and there's an end of it. And if she is married to him they keep no faith with heretics; they can dissolve the marriage, or make away with her into the Inquisition; burn her, Mr. Cary, as soon as burn me, the devils incarnate!”
Cary shuddered; the fact, true and palpable as it was, had never struck him before.
“Yes! or make her deny her God by torments, if she hasn't done it already for love to that--I know how love will make a body sell his soul, for I've been in love. Don't you laugh at me, Mr. Will, or I shall go mad!”
“God knows, I was never less inclined to laugh at you in my life, my brave old Jack.”
“Is it so, then? Bless you for that word!” and Jack held out his hand. “But what will become of my soul, after my oath, if I don't seek her out, just to speak to her, to warn her, for God's sake, even if it did no good; just to set before her the Lord's curse on idolatry and Antichrist, and those who deny Him for the sake of any creature, though I can't think he would be hard on her,--for who could? But I must speak all the same. The Lord has laid the burden on me, and done it must be. God help me!”
“Jack,” said Cary, “if this is your duty, it is others'.”
“No, sir, I don't say that; you're a layman, but I am a deacon, and the chaplain of you all, and sworn to seek out Christ's sheep scattered up and down this naughty world, and that innocent lamb first of all.”
“You have sheep at Hartland, Jack, already.”
“There's plenty better than I will tend them, when I am gone; but none that will tend her, because none love her like me, and they won't venture. Who will? It can't be expected, and no shame to them?”
“I wonder what Amyas Leigh would say to all this, if he were at home?”
“Say? He'd do. He isn't one for talking. He'd go through fire and water for her, you trust him, Will Cary; and call me an ass if he won't.”
“Will you wait, then, till he comes back, and ask him?”
“He may not be back for a year and more.”
“Hear reason, Jack. If you will wait like a rational and patient man, instead of rushing blindfold on your ruin, something may be done.”
“You think so!”
“I cannot promise; but--”
“But promise me one thing. Do you tell Mr. Frank what I say--or rather, I'll warrant, if I knew the truth, he has said the very same thing himself already.”
“You are out there, old man; for here is his own handwriting.”
Jack read the letter and sighed bitterly. “Well, I did take him for another guess sort of fine gentleman. Still, if my duty isn't his, it's mine all the same. I judge no man; but I go, Mr. Cary.”
“But go you shall not till Amyas returns. As I live, I will tell your father, Jack, unless you promise; and you dare not disobey him.”
“I don't know even that, for conscience' sake,” said Jack, doubtfully.
“At least, you stay and dine here, old fellow, and we will settle whether you are to break the fifth commandment or not, over good brewed sack.”
Now a good dinner was (as we know) what Jack loved, and loved too oft in vain; so he submitted for the nonce, and Cary thought, ere he went, that he had talked him pretty well round. At least he went home, and was seen no more for a week.
But at the end of that time he returned, and said with a joyful voice--
“I have settled all, Mr. Will. The parson of Welcombe will serve my church for two Sundays, and I am away for London town, to speak to Mr. Frank.”
“To London? How wilt get there?”
“On Shanks his mare,” said Jack, pointing to his bandy legs. “But I expect I can get a lift on board of a coaster so far as Bristol, and it's no way on to signify, I hear.”
Cary tried in vain to dissuade him; and then forced on him a small loan, with which away went Jack, and Cary heard no more of him for three weeks.
At last he walked into Clovelly Court again just before supper-time, thin and leg-weary, and sat himself down among the serving-men till Will appeared.
Will took him up above the salt, and made much of him (which indeed the honest fellow much needed), and after supper asked him in private how he had sped.
“I have learnt a lesson, Mr. William. I've learnt that there is one on earth loves her better than I, if she had but had the wit to have taken him.”
“But what says he of going to seek her?”
“He says what I say, Go! and he says what you say, Wait.”
“Go? Impossible! How can that agree with his letter?”
“That's no concern of mine. Of course, being nearer heaven than I am, he sees clearer what he should say and do than I can see for him. Oh, Mr. Will, that's not a man, he's an angel of God; but he's dying, Mr. Will.”
“Dying?”
“Yes, faith, of love for her. I can see it in his eyes, and hear it in his voice; but I am of tougher hide and stiffer clay, and so you see I can't die even if I tried. But I'll obey my betters, and wait.”
And so Jack went home to his parish that very evening, weary as he was, in spite of all entreaties to pass the night at Clovelly. But he had left behind him thoughts in Cary's mind, which gave their owner no rest by day or night, till the touch of a seeming accident made them all start suddenly into shape, as a touch of the freezing water covers it in an instant with crystals of ice.
He was lounging (so he told Amyas) one murky day on Bideford quay, when up came Mr. Salterne. Cary had shunned him of late, partly from delicacy, partly from dislike of his supposed hard-heartedness. But this time they happened to meet full; and Cary could not pass without speaking to him.
“Well, Mr. Salterne, and how goes on the shipping trade?”
“Well enough, sir, if some of you young gentlemen would but follow Mr. Leigh's example, and go forth to find us stay-at-homes new markets for our ware.”
“What? you want to be rid of us, eh?”
“I don't know why I should, sir. We sha'n't cross each other now, sir, whatever might have been once. But if I were you, I should be in the Indies about now, if I were not fighting the queen's battles nearer home.”
“In the Indies? I should make but a poor hand of Drake's trade.” And so the conversation dropped; but Cary did not forget the hint.
“So, lad, to make an end of a long story,” said he to Amyas; “if you are minded to take the old man's offer, so am I: and Westward-ho with you, come foul come fair.”
“It will be but a wild-goose chase, Will.”
“If she is with him, we shall find her at La Guayra. If she is not, and the villain has cast her off down the wind, that will be only an additional reason for making an example of him.”
“And if neither of them are there, Will, the Plate-fleets will be; so it will be our own shame if we come home empty-handed. But will your father let you run such a risk?”
“My father!” said Cary, laughing. “He has just now so good hope of a long string of little Carys to fill my place, that he will be in no lack of an heir, come what will.”
“Little Carys?”
“I tell you truth. I think he must have had a sly sup of that fountain of perpetual youth, which our friend Don Guzman's grandfather went to seek in Florida; for some twelvemonth since, he must needs marry a tenant's buxom daughter; and Mistress Abishag Jewell has brought him one fat baby already. So I shall go, back to Ireland, or with you: but somewhere. I can't abide the thing's squalling, any more than I can seeing Mistress Abishag sitting in my poor dear mother's place, and informing me every other day that she is come of an illustrious house, because she is (or is not) third cousin seven times removed to my father's old friend, Bishop Jewell of glorious memory. I had three-parts of a quarrel with the dear old man the other day; for after one of her peacock-bouts, I couldn't for the life of me help saying, that as the Bishop had written an Apology for the people of England, my father had better conjure up his ghost to write an apology for him, and head it, 'Why green heads should grow on gray shoulders.'”
“You impudent villain! And what did he say?”
Laughed till he cried again, and told me if I did not like it I might leave it; which is just what I intend to do. Only mind, if we go, we must needs take Jack Brimblecombe with us, or he will surely heave himself over Harty Point, and his ghost will haunt us to our dying day.”
“Jack shall go. None deserves it better.”
After which there was a long consultation on practical matters, and it was concluded that Amyas should go up to London and sound Frank and his mother before any further steps were taken. The other brethren of the Rose were scattered far and wide, each at his post, and St. Leger had returned to his uncle, so that it would be unfair to them, as well as a considerable delay, to demand of them any fulfilment of their vow. And, as Amyas sagely remarked, “Too many cooks spoil the broth, and half-a-dozen gentlemen aboard one ship are as bad as two kings of Brentford.”
With which maxim he departed next morning for London, leaving Yeo with Cary.
XVI. THE MOST CHIVALROUS ADVENTURE OF THE GOOD SHIP ROSE
“He is brass within, and steel without, With beams on his topcastle strong; And eighteen pieces of ordinance He carries on either side along.”
Sir Andrew Barton.
Let us take boat, as Amyas did, at Whitehall-stairs, and slip down ahead of him under old London Bridge, and so to Deptford Creek, where remains, as it were embalmed, the famous ship Pelican, in which Drake had sailed round the world. There she stands, drawn up high and dry upon the sedgy bank of Thames, like an old warrior resting after his toil. Nailed upon her mainmast are epigrams and verses in honor of her and of her captain, three of which, by the Winchester scholar, Camden gives in his History; and Elizabeth's self consecrated her solemnly, and having banqueted on board, there and then honored Drake with the dignity of knighthood. “At which time a bridge of planks, by which they came on board, broke under the press of people, and fell down with a hundred men upon it, who, notwithstanding, had none of them any harm. So as that ship may seem to have been built under a lucky planet.”
There she has remained since as a show, and moreover as a sort of dining-hall for jovial parties from the city; one of which would seem to be on board this afternoon, to judge from the flags which bedizen the masts, the sounds of revelry and savory steams which issue from those windows which once were portholes, and the rushing to and fro along the river brink, and across that lucky bridge, of white-aproned waiters from the neighboring Pelican Inn. A great feast is evidently toward, for with those white-aproned waiters are gay serving men, wearing on their shoulders the city-badge. The lord mayor is giving a dinner to certain gentlemen of the Leicester house party, who are interested in foreign discoveries; and what place so fit for such a feast as the Pelican itself?
Look at the men all round; a nobler company you will seldom see. Especially too, if you be Americans, look at their faces, and reverence them; for to them and to their wisdom you owe the existence of your mighty fatherland.
At the head of the table sits the lord mayor; whom all readers will recognize at once, for he is none other than that famous Sir Edward Osborne, clothworker, and ancestor of the dukes of Leeds, whose romance now-a-days is in every one's hands. He is aged, but not changed, since he leaped from the window upon London Bridge into the roaring tide below, to rescue the infant who is now his wife. The chivalry and promptitude of the 'prentice boy have grown and hardened into the thoughtful daring of the wealthy merchant adventurer. There he sits, a right kingly man, with my lord Earl of Cumberland on his right hand, and Walter Raleigh on his left; the three talk together in a low voice on the chance of there being vast and rich countries still undiscovered between Florida and the River of Canada. Raleigh's half-scientific declamation and his often quotations of Doctor Dee the conjuror, have less effect on Osborne than on Cumberland (who tried many an adventure to foreign parts, and failed in all of them; apparently for the simple reason that, instead of going himself, he sent other people), and Raleigh is fain to call to his help the quiet student who sits on his left hand, Richard Hakluyt, of Oxford. But he is deep in talk with a reverend elder, whose long white beard flows almost to his waist, and whose face is furrowed by a thousand storms; Anthony Jenkinson by name, the great Asiatic traveller, who is discoursing to the Christ-church virtuoso of reindeer sledges and Siberian steppes, and of the fossil ivory, plain proof of Noah's flood, which the Tungoos dig from the ice-cliffs of the Arctic sea. Next to him is Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law (as Sidney also is now), a valiant captain, afterwards general of the soldiery in Drake's triumphant West Indian raid of 1585, with whom a certain Bishop of Carthagena will hereafter drink good wine. He is now busy talking with Alderman Hart the grocer, Sheriff Spencer the clothworker, and Charles Leigh (Amyas's merchant-cousin), and with Aldworth the mayor of Bristol, and William Salterne, alderman thereof, and cousin of our friend at Bideford. For Carlile, and Secretary Walsingham also, have been helping them heart and soul for the last two years to collect money for Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert's great adventures to the North-West, on one of which Carlile was indeed to have sailed himself, but did not go after all; I never could discover for what reason.
On the opposite side of the table is a group, scarcely less interesting. Martin Frobisher and John Davis, the pioneers of the North-West passage, are talking with Alderman Sanderson, the great geographer and “setter forth of globes;” with Mr. Towerson, Sir Gilbert Peckham, our old acquaintance Captain John Winter, and last, but not least, with Philip Sidney himself, who, with his accustomed courtesy; has given up his rightful place toward the head of the table that he may have a knot of virtuosi all to himself; and has brought with him, of course, his two especial intimates, Mr. Edward Dyer and Mr. Francis Leigh. They too are talking of the North-West passage: and Sidney is lamenting that he is tied to diplomacy and courts, and expressing his envy of old Martin Frobisher in all sorts of pretty compliments; to which the other replies that,
“It's all very fine to talk of here, a sailing on dry land with a good glass of wine before you; but you'd find it another guess sort of business, knocking about among the icebergs with your beard frozen fast to your ruff, Sir Philip, specially if you were a bit squeamish about the stomach.”
“That were a slight matter to endure, my dear sir, if by it I could win the honor which her majesty bestowed on you, when her own ivory hand waved a farewell 'kerchief to your ship from the windows of Greenwich Palace.”
“Well, sir, folks say you have no reason to complain of lack of favors, as you have no reason to deserve lack; and if you can get them by staying ashore, don't you go to sea to look for more, say I. Eh, Master Towerson?”
Towerson's gray beard, which has stood many a foreign voyage, both fair and foul, wags grim assent. But at this moment a Waiter enters, and--
“Please my lord mayor's worship, there is a tall gentleman outside, would speak with the Right Honorable Sir Walter Raleigh.”
“Show him in, man. Sir Walter's friends are ours.”
Amyas enters, and stands hesitating in the doorway.
“Captain Leigh!” cry half a-dozen voices.
“Why did you not walk in, sir?” says Osborne. “You should know your way well enough between these decks.”
“Well enough, my lords and gentlemen. But, Sir Walter--you will excuse me”--and he gave Raleigh a look which was enough for his quick wit. Turning pale as death, he rose, and followed Amyas into an adjoining cabin. They were five minutes together; and then Amyas came out alone.
In few words he told the company the sad story which we already know. Ere it was ended, noble tears were glistening on some of those stern faces.
“The old Egyptians,” said Sir Edward Osborne, “when they banqueted, set a corpse among their guests, for a memorial of human vanity. Have we forgotten God and our own weakness in this our feast, that He Himself has sent us thus a message from the dead?”
“Nay, my lord mayor,” said Sidney, “not from the dead, but from the realm of everlasting life.”
“Amen!” answered Osborne. “But, gentlemen, our feast is at an end. There are those here who would drink on merrily, as brave men should, in spite of the private losses of which they have just had news; but none here who can drink with the loss of so great a man still ringing in his ears.”
It was true. Though many of the guests had suffered severely by the failure of the expedition, they had utterly forgotten that fact in the awful news of Sir Humphrey's death; and the feast broke up sadly and hurriedly, while each man asked his neighbor, “What will the queen say?”
Raleigh re-entered in a few minutes, but was silent, and pressing many an honest hand as he passed, went out to call a wherry, beckoning Amyas to follow him. Sidney, Cumberland, and Frank went with them in another boat, leaving the two to talk over the sad details.
They disembarked at Whitehall-stairs; Raleigh, Sidney, and Cumberland went to the palace; and the two brothers to their mother's lodgings.
Amyas had prepared his speech to Frank about Rose Salterne, but now that it was come to the point, he had not courage to begin, and longed that Frank would open the matter. Frank, too, shrank from what he knew must come, and all the more because he was ignorant that Amyas had been to Bideford, or knew aught of the Rose's disappearance.
So they went upstairs; and it was a relief to both of them to find that their mother was at the Abbey; for it was for her sake that both dreaded what was coming. So they went and stood in the bay-window which looked out upon the river, and talked of things indifferent, and looked earnestly at each other's faces by the fading light, for it was now three years since they had met.
Years and events had deepened the contrast between the two brothers; and Frank smiled with affectionate pride as he looked up in Amyas's face, and saw that he was no longer merely the rollicking handy sailor-lad, but the self-confident and stately warrior, showing in every look and gesture,
“The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,”
worthy of one whose education had been begun by such men as Drake and Grenville, and finished by such as Raleigh and Gilbert. His long locks were now cropped close to the head; but as a set-off, the lips and chin were covered with rich golden beard; his face was browned by a thousand suns and storms; a long scar, the trophy of some Irish fight, crossed his right temple; his huge figure had gained breadth in proportion to its height; and his hand, as it lay upon the window-sill, was hard and massive as a smith's. Frank laid his own upon it, and sighed; and Amyas looked down, and started at the contrast between the two--so slender, bloodless, all but transparent, were the delicate fingers of the courtier. Amyas looked anxiously into his brother's face. It was changed, indeed, since they last met. The brilliant red was still on either cheek, but the white had become dull and opaque; the lips were pale, the features sharpened; the eyes glittered with unnatural fire: and when Frank told Amyas that he looked aged, Amyas could not help thinking that the remark was far more true of the speaker himself.
Trying to shut his eyes to the palpable truth, he went on with his chat, asking the names of one building after another.
“And so this is old Father Thames, with his bank of palaces?”
“Yes. His banks are stately enough; yet, you see, he cannot stay to look at them. He hurries down to the sea; and the sea into the ocean; and the ocean Westward-ho, forever. All things move Westward-ho. Perhaps we may move that way ourselves some day, Amyas.”
“What do you mean by that strange talk?”
“Only that the ocean follows the primum mobile of the heavens, and flows forever from east to west. Is there anything so strange in my thinking of that, when I am just come from a party where we have been drinking success to Westward-ho?”
“And much good has come of it! I have lost the best friend and the noblest captain upon earth, not to mention all my little earnings, in that same confounded gulf of Westward-ho.”
“Yes, Sir Humphrey Gilbert's star has set in the West--why not? Sun, moon, and planets sink into the West: why not the meteors of this lower world? why not a will-o'-the-wisp like me, Amyas?”
“God forbid, Frank!”
“Why, then? Is not the West the land of peace, and the land of dreams? Do not our hearts tell us so each time we look upon the setting sun, and long to float away with him upon the golden-cushioned clouds? They bury men with their faces to the East. I should rather have mine turned to the West, Amyas, when I die; for I cannot but think it some divine instinct which made the ancient poets guess that Elysium lay beneath the setting sun. It is bound up in the heart of man, that longing for the West. I complain of no one for fleeing away thither beyond the utmost sea, as David wished to flee, and be at peace.”
“Complain of no one for fleeing thither?” asked Amyas. “That is more than I do.”
Frank looked inquiringly at him; and then--
“No. If I had complained of any one, it would have been of you just now, for seeming to be tired of going Westward-ho.”
“Do you wish me to go, then?”
“God knows,” said Frank, after a moment's pause. “But I must tell you now, I suppose, once and for all. That has happened at Bideford which--”
“Spare us both, Frank; I know all. I came through Bideford on my way hither; and came hither not merely to see you and my mother, but to ask your advice and her permission.”
“True heart! noble heart!” cried Frank. “I knew you would be stanch!”
“Westward-ho it is, then?”
“Can we escape?”
“We?”
“Amyas, does not that which binds you bind me?”
Amyas started back, and held Frank by the shoulders at arm's length; as he did so, he could feel through, that his brother's arms were but skin and bone.
“You? Dearest man, a month of it would kill you!”
Frank smiled, and tossed his head on one side in his pretty way.
“I belong to the school of Thales, who held that the ocean is the mother of all life; and feel no more repugnance at returning to her bosom again than Humphrey Gilbert did.”
“But, Frank,--my mother?”
“My mother knows all; and would not have us unworthy of her.”
“Impossible! She will never give you up!”
“All things are possible to them that believe in God, my brother; and she believes. But, indeed, Doctor Dee, the wise man, gave her but this summer I know not what of prognostics and diagnostics concerning me. I am born, it seems, under a cold and watery planet, and need, if I am to be long-lived, to go nearer to the vivifying heat of the sun, and there bask out my little life, like fly on wall. To tell truth, he has bidden me spend no more winters here in the East; but return to our native sea-breezes, there to warm my frozen lungs; and has so filled my mother's fancy with stories of sick men, who were given up for lost in Germany and France, and yet renewed their youth, like any serpent or eagle, by going to Italy, Spain, and the Canaries, that she herself will be more ready to let me go than I to leave her all alone. And yet I must go, Amyas. It is not merely that my heart pants, as Sidney's does, as every gallant's ought, to make one of your noble choir of Argonauts, who are now replenishing the earth and subduing it for God and for the queen; it is not merely, Amyas, that love calls me,--love tyrannous and uncontrollable, strengthened by absence, and deepened by despair; but honor, Amyas--my oath--”
And he paused for lack of breath, and bursting into a violent fit of coughing, leaned on his brother's shoulder, while Amyas cried,
“Fools, fools that we were--that I was, I mean--to take that fantastical vow!”
“Not so,” answered a gentle voice from behind: “you vowed for the sake of peace on earth, and good-will toward men, and 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.' No my sons, be sure that such self-sacrifice as you have shown will meet its full reward at the hand of Him who sacrificed Himself for you.”
“Oh, mother! mother!” said Amyas, “and do you not hate the very sight of me--come here to take away your first-born?”
“My boy, God takes him, and not you. And if I dare believe in such predictions, Doctor Dee assured me that some exceeding honor awaited you both in the West, to each of you according to your deserts.”
“Ah!” said Amyas. “My blessing, I suppose, will be like Esau's, to live by my sword; while Jacob here, the spiritual man, inherits the kingdom of heaven, and an angel's crown.”
“Be it what it may, it will surely be a blessing, as long as you are such, my children, as you have been. At least my Frank will be safe from the intrigues of court, and the temptations of the world. Would that I too could go with you, and share in your glory! Come, now,” said she, laying her head upon Amyas's breast, and looking up into his face with one of her most winning smiles, “I have heard of heroic mothers ere now who went forth with their sons to battle, and cheered them on to victory. Why should I not go with you on a more peaceful errand? I could nurse the sick, if there were any; I could perhaps have speech of that poor girl, and win her back more easily than you. She might listen to words from a woman--a woman, too, who has loved--which she could not hear from men. At least I could mend and wash for you. I suppose it is as easy to play the good housewife afloat as on shore? Come, now!”
Amyas looked from one to the other.
“God only knows which of the two is less fit to go. Mother! mother! you know not what you ask. Frank! Frank! I do not want you with me. This is a sterner matter than either of you fancy it to be; one that must be worked out, not with kind words, but with sharp shot and cold steel.”
“How?” cried both together, aghast.
“I must pay my men, and pay my fellow-adventurers; and I must pay them with Spanish gold. And what is more, I cannot, as a loyal subject of the queen's, go to the Spanish Main with a clear conscience on my own private quarrel, unless I do all the harm that my hand finds to do, by day and night, to her enemies, and the enemies of God.”
“What nobler knight-errantry?” said Frank, cheerfully; but Mrs. Leigh shuddered.
“What! Frank too?” she said, half to herself; but her sons knew what she meant. Amyas's warlike life, honorable and righteous as she knew it to be, she had borne as a sad necessity: but that Frank as well should become “a man of blood,” was more than her gentle heart could face at first sight. That one youthful duel of his he had carefully concealed from her, knowing her feeling on such matters. And it seemed too dreadful to her to associate that gentle spirit with all the ferocities and the carnage of a battlefield. “And yet,” said she to herself, “is this but another of the self-willed idols which I must renounce one by one?” And then, catching at a last hope, she answered--
“Frank must at least ask the queen's leave to go; and if she permits, how can I gainsay her wisdom?”
And so the conversation dropped, sadly enough.
But now began a fresh perplexity in Frank's soul, which amused Amyas at first, when it seemed merely jest, but nettled him a good deal when he found it earnest. For Frank looked forward to asking the queen's permission for his voyage with the most abject despondency and terror. Two or three days passed before he could make up his mind to ask for an interview with her; and he spent the time in making as much interest with Leicester, Hatton, and Sidney, as if he were about to sue for a reprieve from the scaffold.
So said Amyas, remarking, further, that the queen could not cut his head off for wanting to go to sea.
“But what axe so sharp as her frown?” said Frank in most lugubrious tone.
Amyas began to whistle in a very rude way.
“Ah, my brother, you cannot comprehend the pain of parting from her.”
“No, I can't. I would die for the least hair of her royal head, God bless it! but I could live very well from now till Doomsday without ever setting eyes on the said head.”
“Plato's Troglodytes regretted not that sunlight which they had never beheld.”
Amyas, not understanding this recondite conceit, made no answer to it, and there the matter ended for the time. But at last Frank obtained his audience; and after a couple of hours' absence returned quite pale and exhausted.
“Thank Heaven, it is over! She was very angry at first--what else could she be?--and upbraided me with having set my love so low. I could only answer, that my fatal fault was committed before the sight of her had taught me what was supremely lovely, and only worthy of admiration. Then she accused me of disloyalty in having taken an oath which bound me to the service of another than her. I confessed my sin with tears, and when she threatened punishment, pleaded that the offence had avenged itself heavily already,--for what worse punishment than exile from the sunlight of her presence, into the outer darkness which reigns where she is not? Then she was pleased to ask me, how I could dare, as her sworn servant, to desert her side in such dangerous times as these; and asked me how I should reconcile it to my conscience, if on my return I found her dead by the assassin's knife? At which most pathetic demand I could only throw myself at once on my own knees and her mercy, and so awaited my sentence. Whereon, with that angelic pity which alone makes her awfulness endurable, she turned to Hatton and asked, 'What say you, Mouton? Is he humbled sufficiently?' and so dismissed me.”
“Heigh-ho!” yawned Amyas;
“If the bridge had been stronger, My tale had been longer.”
“Amyas! Amyas!” quoth Frank, solemnly, “you know not what power over the soul has the native and God-given majesty of royalty (awful enough in itself) when to it is superadded the wisdom of the sage, and therewithal the tenderness of the woman. Had I my will, there should be in every realm not a salique, but an anti-salique law: whereby no kings, but only queens should rule mankind. Then would weakness and not power be to man the symbol of divinity; love, and not cunning, would be the arbiter of every cause; and chivalry, not fear, the spring of all obedience.”
“Humph! There's some sense in that,” quoth Amyas. “I'd run a mile for a woman when I would not walk a yard for a man; and--Who is this our mother is bringing in? The handsomest fellow I ever saw in my life!”
Amyas was not far wrong; for Mrs. Leigh's companion was none other than Mr. Secretary, Amyas's Smerwick Fort acquaintance; alias Colin Clout, alias Immerito, alias Edmund Spenser. Some half-jesting conversation had seemingly been passing between the poet and the saint; for as they came in she said with a smile (which was somewhat of a forced one)--“Well, my dear sons, you are sure of immortality, at least on earth; for Mr. Spenser has been vowing to me to give your adventure a whole canto to itself in his 'Faerie Queene'.”
“And you no less, madam,” said Spenser. “What were the story of the Gracchi worth without the figure of Cornelia? If I honor the fruit, I must not forget the stem which bears it. Frank, I congratulate you.”
“Then you know the result of my interview, mother?”
“I know everything, and am content,” said Mrs. Leigh.
“Mrs. Leigh has reason to be content,” said Spenser, “with that which is but her own likeness.”
Spare your flattery to an old woman, Mr. Spenser. When, pray, did I” (with a most loving look at Frank) “refuse knighthood for duty's sake?”
“Knighthood?” cried Amyas. “You never told me that, Frank!”
“That may well be, Captain Leigh,” said Spenser; “but believe me, her majesty (so Hatton assures me) told him this day, no less than that by going on this quest he deprived himself of that highest earthly honor, which crowned heads are fain to seek from their own subjects.”
Spenser did not exaggerate. Knighthood was then the prize of merit only; and one so valuable, that Elizabeth herself said, when asked why she did not bestow a peerage upon some favorite, that having already knighted him, she had nothing better to bestow. It remained for young Essex to begin the degradation of the order in his hapless Irish campaign, and for James to complete that degradation by his novel method of raising money by the sale of baronetcies; a new order of hereditary knighthood which was the laughing-stock of the day, and which (however venerable it may have since become) reflects anything but honor upon its first possessors.
“I owe you no thanks, Colin,” said Frank, “for having broached my secret: but I have lost nothing after all. There is still an order of knighthood in which I may win my spurs, even though her majesty refuse me the accolade.”
“What, then? you will not take it from a foreign prince?”
Frank smiled.
“Have you never read of that knighthood which is eternal in the heavens, and of those true cavaliers whom John saw in Patmos, riding on white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, knights-errant in the everlasting war against the False Prophet and the Beast? Let me but become worthy of their ranks hereafter, what matter whether I be called Sir Frank on earth?”
“My son,” said Mrs. Leigh, “remember that they follow One whose vesture is dipped, not in the blood of His enemies, but in His own.”
“I have remembered it for many a day; and remembered, too, that the garments of the knights may need the same tokens as their captain's.”
“Oh, Frank! Frank! is not His precious blood enough to cleanse all sin, without the sacrifice of our own?”
“We may need no more than His blood, mother, and yet He may need ours,” said Frank.
* * * * *
How that conversation ended I know not, nor whether Spenser fulfilled his purpose of introducing the two brothers and their mother into his “Faerie Queene.” If so, the manuscripts must have been lost among those which perished (along with Spenser's baby) in the sack of Kilcolman by the Irish in 1598. But we need hardly regret the loss of them; for the temper of the Leighs and their mother is the same which inspires every canto of that noblest of poems; and which inspired, too, hundreds in those noble days, when the chivalry of the Middle Ages was wedded to the free thought and enterprise of the new.
* * * * *
So mother and sons returned to Bideford, and set to work. Frank mortgaged a farm; Will Cary did the same (having some land of his own from his mother). Old Salterne grumbled at any man save himself spending a penny on the voyage, and forced on the adventurers a good ship of two hundred tons burden, and five hundred pounds toward fitting her out; Mrs. Leigh worked day and night at clothes and comforts of every kind; Amyas had nothing to give but his time and his brains: but, as Salterne said, the rest would have been of little use without them; and day after day he and the old merchant were on board the ship, superintending with their own eyes the fitting of every rope and nail. Cary went about beating up recruits; and made, with his jests and his frankness, the best of crimps: while John Brimblecombe, beside himself with joy, toddled about after him from tavern to tavern, and quay to quay, exalted for the time being (as Cary told him) into a second Peter the Hermit; and so fiercely did he preach a crusade against the Spaniards, through Bideford and Appledore, Clovelly and Ilfracombe, that Amyas might have had a hundred and fifty loose fellows in the first fortnight. But he knew better: still smarting from the effects of a similar haste in the Newfoundland adventure, he had determined to take none but picked men; and by dint of labor he obtained them.
Only one scapegrace did he take into his crew, named Parracombe; and by that scapegrace hangs a tale. He was an old schoolfellow of his at Bideford, and son of a merchant in that town--one of those unlucky members who are “nobody's enemy but their own”--a handsome, idle, clever fellow, who used his scholarship, of which he had picked up some smattering, chiefly to justify his own escapades, and to string songs together. Having drunk all that he was worth at home, he had in a penitent fit forsworn liquor, and tormented Amyas into taking him to sea, where he afterwards made as good a sailor as any one else, but sorely scandalized John Brimblecombe by all manner of heretical arguments, half Anacreontic, half smacking of the rather loose doctrines of that “Family of Love” which tormented the orthodoxy and morality of more than one Bishop of Exeter. Poor Will Parracombe! he was born a few centuries too early. Had he but lived now, he might have published a volume or two of poetry, and then settled down on the staff of a newspaper. Had he even lived thirty years later than he did, he might have written frantic tragedies or filthy comedies for the edification of James's profligate metropolis, and roistered it in taverns with Marlowe, to die as Marlowe did, by a footman's sword in a drunken brawl. But in those stern days such weak and hysterical spirits had no fair vent for their “humors,” save in being reconciled to the Church of Rome, and plotting with Jesuits to assassinate the queen, as Parry and Somerville, and many other madmen, did.
So, at least, some Jesuit or other seems to have thought, shortly after Amyas had agreed to give the spendthrift a berth on board. For one day Amyas, going down to Appledore about his business, was called into the little Mariners' Rest inn, to extract therefrom poor Will Parracombe, who (in spite of his vow) was drunk and outrageous, and had vowed the death of the landlady and all her kin. So Amyas fetched him out by the collar, and walked him home thereby to Bideford; during which walk Will told him a long and confused story; how an Egyptian rogue had met him that morning on the sands by Boathythe, offered to tell his fortune, and prophesied to him great wealth and honor, but not from the Queen of England; had coaxed him to the Mariners' Rest, and gambled with him for liquor, at which it seemed Will always won, and of course drank his winnings on the spot; whereon the Egyptian began asking him all sorts of questions about the projected voyage of the Rose--a good many of which, Will confessed, he had answered before he saw the fellow's drift; after which the Egyptian had offered him a vast sum of money to do some desperate villainy; but whether it was to murder Amyas or the queen, whether to bore a hole in the bottom of the good ship Rose or to set the Torridge on fire by art-magic, he was too drunk to recollect exactly. Whereon Amyas treated three-quarters of the story as a tipsy dream, and contented himself by getting a warrant against the landlady for harboring “Egyptians,” which was then a heavy offence--a gipsy disguise being a favorite one with Jesuits and their emissaries. She of course denied that any gipsy had been there; and though there were some who thought they had seen such a man come in, none had seen him go out again. On which Amyas took occasion to ask, what had become of the suspicious Popish ostler whom he had seen at the Mariners' Rest three years before; and discovered, to his surprise, that the said ostler had vanished from the very day of Don Guzman's departure from Bideford. There was evidently a mystery somewhere: but nothing could be proved; the landlady was dismissed with a reprimand, and Amyas soon forgot the whole matter, after rating Parracombe soundly. After all, he could not have told the gipsy (if one existed) anything important; for the special destination of the voyage (as was the custom in those times, for fear of Jesuits playing into the hands of Spain) had been carefully kept secret among the adventurers themselves, and, except Yeo and Drew, none of the men had any suspicion that La Guayra was to be their aim.
And Salvation Yeo?
Salvation was almost wild for a few days, at the sudden prospect of going in search of his little maid, and of fighting Spaniards once more before he died. I will not quote the texts out of Isaiah and the Psalms with which his mouth was filled from morning to night, for fear of seeming irreverent in the eyes of a generation which does not believe, as Yeo believed, that fighting the Spaniards was as really fighting in God's battle against evil as were the wars of Joshua or David. But the old man had his practical hint too, and entreated to be sent back to Plymouth to look for men.
“There's many a man of the old Pelican, sir, and of Captain Hawkins's Minion that knows the Indies as well as I, and longs to be back again. There's Drew, sir, that we left behind (and no better sailing-master for us in the West-country, and has accounts against the Spaniards, too; for it was his brother, the Barnstaple man, that was factor aboard of poor Mr. Andrew Barker, and got clapt into the Inquisition at the Canaries); you promised him, sir, that night he stood by you on board the Raleigh: and if you'll be as good as your word, he'll be as good as his; and bring a score more brave fellows with him.”
So off went Yeo to Plymouth, and returned with Drew and a score of old never-strikes. One look at their visages, as Yeo proudly ushered them into the Ship Tavern, showed Amyas that they were of the metal which he wanted, and that, with the four North-Devon men who had gone round the world with him in the Pelican (who all joined in the first week), he had a reserve-force on which he could depend in utter need; and that utter need might come he knew as well as any.
Nor was this all which Yeo had brought; for he had with him a letter from Sir Francis Drake, full of regrets that he had not seen “his dear lad” as he went through Plymouth. “But indeed I was up to Dartmoor, surveying with cross-staff and chain, over my knees in bog for a three weeks or more. For I have a project to bring down a leat of fair water from the hill-tops right into Plymouth town, cutting off the heads of Tavy, Meavy, Wallcomb, and West Dart, and thereby purging Plymouth harbor from the silt of the mines whereby it has been choked of late years, and giving pure drink not only to the townsmen, but to the fleets of the queen's majesty; which if I do, I shall both make some poor return to God for all His unspeakable mercies, and erect unto myself a monument better than of brass or marble, not merely honorable to me, but useful to my countrymen.” * Whereon Frank sent Drake a pretty epigram, comparing Drake's projected leat to that river of eternal life whereof the just would drink throughout eternity, and quoting (after the fashion of those days) John vii. 38; while Amyas took more heed of a practical appendage to the same letter, which was a list of hints scrawled for his use by Captain John Hawkins himself, on all sea matters, from the mounting of ordnance to the use of vitriol against the scurvy, in default of oranges and “limmons;” all which stood Amyas in good stead during the ensuing month, while Frank grew more and more proud of his brother, and more and more humble about himself.
* This noble monument of Drake's piety and public spirit still remains in full use.
For he watched with astonishment how the simple sailor, without genius, scholarship, or fancy, had gained, by plain honesty, patience, and common sense, a power over the human heart, and a power over his work, whatsoever it might be, which Frank could only admire afar off. The men looked up to him as infallible, prided themselves on forestalling his wishes, carried out his slightest hint, worked early and late to win a smile from him; while as for him, no detail escaped him, no drudgery sickened him, no disappointment angered him, till on the 15th of November, 1583, dropped down from Bideford Quay to Appledore Pool the tall ship Rose, with a hundred men on board (for sailors packed close in those days), beef, pork, biscuit, and good ale (for ale went to sea always then) in abundance, four culverins on her main deck, her poop and forecastle well fitted with swivels of every size, and her racks so full of muskets, calivers, long bows, pikes, and swords, that all agreed so well-appointed a ship had never sailed “out over Bar.”
The next day being Sunday, the whole crew received the Communion together at Northam Church, amid a mighty crowd; and then going on board again, hove anchor and sailed out over the Bar before a soft east wind, to the music of sacbut, fife, and drum, with discharge of all ordnance, great and small, with cheering of young and old from cliff and strand and quay, and with many a tearful prayer and blessing upon that gallant bark, and all brave hearts on board.
And Mrs. Leigh who had kissed her sons for the last time after the Communion at the altar-steps (and what more fit place for a mother's kiss?) went to the rocky knoll outside the churchyard wall, and watched the ship glide out between the yellow denes, and lessen slowly hour by hour into the boundless West, till her hull sank below the dim horizon, and her white sails faded away into the gray Atlantic mist, perhaps forever.
And Mrs. Leigh gathered her cloak about her, and bowed her head and worshipped; and then went home to loneliness and prayer.
XVII. HOW THEY CAME TO BARBADOS, AND FOUND NO MEN THEREIN
“The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out; At one stride comes the dark.”
COLERIDGE.
Land! land! land! Yes, there it was, far away to the south and west, beside the setting sun, a long blue bar between the crimson sea and golden sky. Land at last, with fresh streams, and cooling fruits, and free room for cramped and scurvy-weakened limbs. And there, too, might be gold, and gems, and all the wealth of Ind. Who knew? Why not? The old world of fact and prose lay thousands of miles behind them, and before them and around them was the realm of wonder and fable, of boundless hope and possibility. Sick men crawled up out of their stifling hammocks; strong men fell on their knees and gave God thanks; and all eyes and hands were stretched eagerly toward the far blue cloud, fading as the sun sank down, yet rising higher and broader as the ship rushed on before the rich trade-wind, which whispered lovingly round brow and sail, “I am the faithful friend of those who dare!” “Blow freshly, freshlier yet, thou good trade-wind, of whom it is written that He makes the winds His angels, ministering breaths to the heirs of His salvation. Blow freshlier yet, and save, if not me from death, yet her from worse than death. Blow on, and land me at her feet, to call the lost lamb home, and die!”
So murmured Frank to himself, as with straining eyes he gazed upon that first outlier of the New World which held his all. His cheeks were thin and wasted, and the hectic spot on each glowed crimson in the crimson light of the setting sun. A few minutes more, and the rainbows of the West were gone; emerald and topaz, amethyst and ruby, had faded into silver-gray; and overhead, through the dark sapphire depths, the Moon and Venus reigned above the sea.
“That should be Barbados, your worship,” said Drew, the master; “unless my reckoning is far out, which, Heaven knows, it has no right to be, after such a passage, and God be praised.”
“Barbados? I never heard of it.”
“Very like, sir: but Yeo and I were here with Captain Drake, and I was here after, too, with poor Captain Barlow; and there is good harborage to the south and west of it, I remember.”
“And neither Spaniard, cannibal, or other evil beast,” said Yeo. “A very garden of the Lord, sir, hid away in the seas, for an inheritance to those who love Him. I heard Captain Drake talk of planting it, if ever he had a chance.”
“I recollect now,” said Amyas, “some talk between him and poor Sir Humphrey about an island here. Would God he had gone thither instead of to Newfoundland!”
“Nay, then,” said Yeo, “he is in bliss now with the Lord; and you would not have kept him from that, sir?”
“He would have waited as willingly as he went, if he could have served his queen thereby. But what say you, my masters? How can we do better than to spend a few days here, to get our sick round, before we make the Main, and set to our work?”
All approved the counsel except Frank, who was silent.
“Come, fellow-adventurer,” said Cary, “we must have your voice too.”
“To my impatience, Will,” said he, aside in a low voice, “there is but one place on earth, and I am all day longing for wings to fly thither: but the counsel is right. I approve it.”
So the verdict was announced, and received with a hearty cheer by the crew; and long before morning they had run along the southern shore of the island, and were feeling their way into the bay where Bridgetown now stands. All eyes were eagerly fixed on the low wooded hills which slept in the moonlight, spangled by fireflies, with a million dancing stars; all nostrils drank greedily the fragrant air, which swept from the land, laden with the scent of a thousand flowers; all ears welcomed, as a grateful change from the monotonous whisper and lap of the water, the hum of insects, the snore of the tree-toads, the plaintive notes of the shore-fowl, which fill a tropic night with noisy life.
At last she stopped; at last the cable rattled through the hawsehole; and then, careless of the chance of lurking Spaniard or Carib, an instinctive cheer burst from every throat. Poor fellows! Amyas had much ado to prevent them going on shore at once, dark as it was, by reminding them that it wanted but two hours of day.
“Never were two such long hours,” said one young lad, fidgeting up and down.
“You never were in the Inquisition,” said Yeo, “or you'd know better how slow time can run. Stand you still, and give God thanks you're where you are.”
“I say, Gunner, be there goold to that island?”
“Never heard of none; and so much the better for it,” said Yeo, dryly.
“But, I say, Gunner,” said a poor scurvy-stricken cripple, licking his lips, “be there oranges and limmons there?”
“Not of my seeing; but plenty of good fruit down to the beach, thank the Lord. There comes the dawn at last.”
Up flushed the rose, up rushed the sun, and the level rays glittered on the smooth stems of the palm-trees, and threw rainbows across the foam upon the coral-reefs, and gilded lonely uplands far away, where now stands many a stately country-seat and busy engine-house. Long lines of pelicans went clanging out to sea; the hum of the insects hushed, and a thousand birds burst into jubilant song; a thin blue mist crept upward toward the inner downs, and vanished, leaving them to quiver in the burning glare; the land-breeze, which had blown fresh out to sea all night, died away into glassy calm, and the tropic day was begun.
The sick were lifted over the side, and landed boat-load after boat-load on the beach, to stretch themselves in the shade of the palms; and in half-an-hour the whole crew were scattered on the shore, except some dozen worthy men, who had volunteered to keep watch and ward on board till noon.
And now the first instinctive cry of nature was for fruit! fruit! fruit! The poor lame wretches crawled from place to place plucking greedily the violet grapes of the creeping shore vine, and staining their mouths and blistering their lips with the prickly pears, in spite of Yeo's entreaties and warnings against the thorns. Some of the healthy began hewing down cocoa-nut trees to get at the nuts, doing little thereby but blunt their hatchets; till Yeo and Drew, having mustered half-a-dozen reasonable men, went off inland, and returned in an hour laden with the dainties of that primeval orchard,--with acid junipa-apples, luscious guavas, and crowned ananas, queen of all the fruits, which they had found by hundreds on the broiling ledges of the low tufa-cliffs; and then all, sitting on the sandy turf, defiant of galliwasps and jackspaniards, and all the weapons of the insect host, partook of the equal banquet, while old blue land-crabs sat in their house-doors and brandished their fists in defiance at the invaders, and solemn cranes stood in the water on the shoals with their heads on one side, and meditated how long it was since they had seen bipeds without feathers breaking the solitude of their isle.
And Frank wandered up and down, silent, but rather in wonder than in sadness, while great Amyas walked after him, his mouth full of junipa-apples, and enacted the part of showman, with a sort of patronizing air, as one who had seen the wonders already, and was above being astonished at them.
“New, new; everything new!” said Frank, meditatively. “Oh, awful feeling! All things changed around us, even to the tiniest fly and flower; yet we the same, the same forever!”
Amyas, to whom such utterances were altogether sibylline and unintelligible, answered by:
“Look, Frank, that's a colibri. You 've heard of colibris?”
Frank looked at the living gem, which hung, loud humming, over some fantastic bloom, and then dashed away, seemingly to call its mate, and whirred and danced with it round and round the flower-starred bushes, flashing fresh rainbows at every shifting of the lights.
Frank watched solemnly awhile, and then:
“Qualis Natura formatrix, si talis formata? Oh my God, how fair must be Thy real world, if even Thy phantoms are so fair!”
“Phantoms?” asked Amyas, uneasily. “That's no ghost, Frank, but a jolly little honey-sucker, with a wee wife, and children no bigger than peas, but yet solid greedy little fellows enough, I'll warrant.”
“Not phantoms in thy sense, good fellow, but in the sense of those who know the worthlessness of all below.”
“I'll tell you what, brother Frank, you are a great deal wiser than me, I know; but I can't abide to see you turn up your nose as it were at God's good earth. See now, God made all these things; and never a man, perhaps, set eyes on them till fifty years agone; and yet they were as pretty as they are now, ever since the making of the world. And why do you think God could have put them here, then, but to please Himself”--and Amyas took off his hat--“with the sight of them? Now, I say, brother Frank, what's good enough to please God, is good enough to please you and me.”
“Your rebuke is just, dear old simple-hearted fellow; and God forgive me, if with all my learning, which has brought me no profit, and my longings, which have brought me no peace, I presume at moments, sinner that I am, to be more dainty than the Lord Himself. He walked in Paradise among the trees of the garden, Amyas; and so will we, and be content with what He sends. Why should we long for the next world, before we are fit even for this one?”
“And in the meanwhile,” said Amyas, “this earth's quite good enough, at least here in Barbados.”
“Do you believe,” asked Frank, trying to turn his own thoughts, “in those tales of the Spaniards, that the Sirens and Tritons are heard singing in these seas?”
“I can't tell. There's more fish in the water than ever came out of it, and more wonders in the world, I'll warrant, than we ever dreamt of; but I was never in these parts before; and in the South Sea, I must say, I never came across any, though Yeo says he has heard fair music at night up in the Gulf, far away from land.”
“The Spaniards report that at certain seasons choirs of these nymphs assemble in the sea, and with ravishing music sing their watery loves. It may be so. For Nature, which has peopled the land with rational souls, may not have left the sea altogether barren of them; above all, when we remember that the ocean is as it were the very fount of all fertility, and its slime (as the most learned hold with Thales of Miletus) that prima materia out of which all things were one by one concocted. Therefore, the ancients feigned wisely that Venus, the mother of all living things, whereby they designed the plastic force of nature, was born of the sea-foam, and rising from the deep, floated ashore upon the isles of Greece.”
“I don't know what plastic force is; but I wish I had had the luck to be by when the pretty poppet came up: however, the nearest thing I ever saw to that was maidens swimming alongside of us when we were in the South Seas, and would have come aboard, too; but Drake sent them all off again for a lot of naughty packs, and I verily believe they were no better. Look at the butterflies, now! Don't you wish you were a boy again, and not too proud to go catching them in your cap?”
And so the two wandered on together through the glorious tropic woods, and then returned to the beach to find the sick already grown cheerful, and many who that morning could not stir from their hammocks, pacing up and down, and gaining strength with every step.
“Well done, lads!” cried Amyas, “keep a cheerful mind. We will have the music ashore after dinner, for want of mermaids to sing to us, and those that can dance may.”
And so those four days were spent; and the men, like schoolboys on a holiday, gave themselves up to simple merriment, not forgetting, however, to wash the clothes, take in fresh water, and store up a good supply of such fruit as seemed likely to keep; until, tired with fruitless rambles after gold, which they expected to find in every bush, in spite of Yeo's warnings that none had been heard of on the island, they were fain to lounge about, full-grown babies, picking up shells and sea-fans to take home to their sweethearts, smoking agoutis out of the hollow trees, with shout and laughter, and tormenting every living thing they could come near, till not a land-crab dare look out of his hole, or an armadillo unroll himself, till they were safe out of the bay, and off again to the westward, unconscious pioneers of all the wealth, and commerce, and beauty, and science which has in later centuries made that lovely isle the richest gem of all the tropic seas.
XVIII. HOW THEY TOOK THE PEARLS AT MARGARITA
P. Henry. Why, what a rascal art thou, then, to praise him so for running! Falstaff. O' horseback, ye cuckoo! but a-foot, he will not budge a foot. P. Henry. Yes, Jack, upon instinct. Falstaff. I grant ye, upon instinct.
Henry IV. Pt. I.
They had slipped past the southern point of Grenada in the night, and were at last within that fairy ring of islands, on which nature had concentrated all her beauty, and man all his sin. If Barbados had been invested in the eyes of the newcomers with some strange glory, how much more the seas on which they now entered, which smile in almost perpetual calm, untouched by the hurricane which roars past them far to northward! Sky, sea, and islands were one vast rainbow; though little marked, perhaps, by those sturdy practical sailors, whose main thought was of Spanish gold and pearls; and as little by Amyas, who, accustomed to the scenery of the tropics, was speculating inwardly on the possibility of extirpating the Spaniards, and annexing the West Indies to the domains of Queen Elizabeth. And yet even their unpoetic eyes could not behold without awe and excitement lands so famous and yet so new, around which all the wonder, all the pity, and all the greed of the age had concentrated itself. It was an awful thought, and yet inspiriting, that they were entering regions all but unknown to Englishmen, where the penalty of failure would be worse than death--the torments of the Inquisition. Not more than five times before, perhaps, had those mysterious seas been visited by English keels; but there were those on board who knew them well, and too well; who, first of all British mariners, had attempted under Captain John Hawkins to trade along those very coasts, and, interdicted from the necessaries of life by Spanish jealousy, had, in true English fashion, won their markets at the sword's point, and then bought and sold honestly and peaceably therein. The old mariners of the Pelican and the Minion were questioned all day long for the names of every isle and cape, every fish and bird; while Frank stood by, listening serious and silent.
A great awe seemed to have possessed his soul; yet not a sad one: for his face seemed daily to drink in glory from the glory round him; and murmuring to himself at whiles, “This is the gate of heaven,” he stood watching all day long, careless of food and rest, as every forward plunge of the ship displayed some fresh wonder. Islands and capes hung high in air, with their inverted images below them; long sand-hills rolled and weltered in the mirage; and the yellow flower-beds, and huge thorny cacti like giant candelabra, which clothed the glaring slopes, twisted, tossed, and flickered, till the whole scene seemed one blazing phantom-world, in which everything was as unstable as it was fantastic, even to the sun itself, distorted into strange oval and pear-shaped figures by the beds of crimson mist through which he sank to rest. But while Frank wondered, Yeo rejoiced; for to the southward of that setting sun a cluster of tall peaks rose from the sea; and they, unless his reckonings were wrong, were the mountains of Macanao, at the western end of Margarita, the Isle of Pearls, then famous in all the cities of the Mediterranean, and at the great German fairs, and second only in richness to that pearl island in the gulf of Panama, which fifteen years before had cost John Oxenham his life.
The next day saw them running along the north side of the island, having passed undiscovered (as far as they could see) the castle which the Spaniards had built at the eastern end for the protection of the pearl fisheries.
At last they opened a deep and still bight, wooded to the water's edge; and lying in the roadstead a caravel, and three boats by her. And at that sight there was not a man but was on deck at once, and not a mouth but was giving its opinion of what should be done. Some were for sailing right into the roadstead, the breeze blowing fresh toward the shore (as it usually does throughout those islands in the afternoon). However, seeing the billows break here and there off the bay's mouth, they thought it better, for fear of rocks, to run by quietly, and then send in the pinnace and the boat. Yeo would have had them show Spanish colors, for fear of alarming the caravel; but Amyas stoutly refused, “counting it,” he said, “a mean thing to tell a lie in that way, unless in extreme danger, or for great ends of state.”
So holding on their course till they were shut out by the next point, they started; Cary in the largest boat with twenty men, and Amyas in the smaller one with fifteen more; among whom was John Brimblecombe, who must needs come in his cassock and bands, with an old sword of his uncle's which he prized mightily.
When they came to the bight's mouth, they found, as they had expected, coral rocks, and too many of them; so that they had to run along the edge of the reef a long way before they could find a passage for the boats. While they were so doing, and those of them who were new to the Indies were admiring through the clear element those living flower-beds, and subaqueous gardens of Nereus and Amphitrite, there suddenly appeared below what Yeo called “a school of sharks,” some of them nearly as long as the boat, who looked up at them wistfully enough out of their wicked scowling eyes.
“Jack,” said Amyas, who sat next to him, “look how that big fellow eyes thee: he has surely taken a fancy to that plump hide of thine, and thinks thou wouldst eat as tender as any sucking porker.”
Jack turned very pale, but said nothing.
Now, as it befell, just then that very big fellow, seeing a parrot-fish come out of a cleft of the coral, made at him from below, as did two or three more; the poor fish finding no other escape, leaped clean into the air, and almost aboard the boat; while just where he had come out of the water, three or four great brown shagreened noses clashed together within two yards of Jack as he sat, each showing its horrible rows of saw teeth, and then sank sulkily down again, to watch for a fresh bait. At which Jack said very softly, “In manus tuas, Domine!” and turning his eyes in board, had no lust to look at sharks any more.
So having got through the reef, in they ran with a fair breeze, the caravel not being now a musket-shot off. Cary laid her aboard before the Spaniards had time to get to their ordnance; and standing up in the stern-sheets, shouted to them to yield. The captain asked boldly enough, in whose name? “In the name of common sense, ye dogs,” cries Will; “do you not see that you are but fifty strong to our twenty?” Whereon up the side he scrambled, and the captain fired a pistol at him. Cary knocked him over, unwilling to shed needless blood; on which all the crew yielded, some falling on their knees, some leaping overboard; and the prize was taken.
In the meanwhile, Amyas had pulled round under her stern, and boarded the boat which was second from her, for the nearest was fast alongside, and so a sure prize. The Spaniards in her yielded without a blow, crying “Misericordia;” and the negroes, leaping overboard, swam ashore like sea-dogs. Meanwhile, the third boat, which was not an oar's length off, turned to pull away. Whereby befell a notable adventure: for John Brimblecombe, casting about in a valiant mind how he should distinguish himself that day, must needs catch up a boat-hook, and claw on to her stern, shouting, “Stay, ye Papists! Stay, Spanish dogs!”--by which, as was to be expected, they being ten to his one, he was forthwith pulled overboard, and fell all along on his nose in the sea, leaving the hook fast in her stern.
Where, I know not how, being seized with some panic fear (his lively imagination filling all the sea with those sharks which he had just seen), he fell a-roaring like any town-bull, and in his confusion never thought to turn and get aboard again, but struck out lustily after the Spanish boat, whether in hope of catching hold of the boat-hook which trailed behind her, or from a very madness of valor, no man could divine; but on he swam, his cassock afloat behind him, looking for all the world like a great black monk-fish, and howling and puffing, with his mouth full of salt water, “Stay, ye Spanish dogs! Help, all good fellows! See you not that I am a dead man? They are nuzzling already at my toes! He hath hold of my leg! My right thigh is bitten clean off! Oh that I were preaching in Hartland pulpit! Stay, Spanish dogs! Yield, Papist cowards, least I make mincemeat of you; and take me aboard! Yield, I say, or my blood be on your heads! I am no Jonah; if he swallow me, he will never cast me up again! it is better to fall into the hands of man, than into the hands of devils with three rows of teeth apiece. In manus tuas. Orate pro anima--!”
And so forth, in more frantic case than ever was Panurge in that his ever-memorable seasickness; till the English, expecting him every minute to be snapped up by sharks, or brained by the Spaniard's oars, let fly a volley into the fugitives, on which they all leaped overboard like their fellows; whereon Jack scrambled into the boat, and drawing sword with one hand, while he wiped the water out of his eyes with the other, began to lay about him like a very lion, cutting the empty air, and crying, “Yield, idolaters! Yield, Spanish dogs!” However, coming to himself after a while, and seeing that there was no one on whom to flesh his maiden steel, he sits down panting in the sternsheets, and begins stripping off his hose. On which Amyas, thinking surely that the good fellow had gone mad with some stroke of the sun, or by having fallen into the sea after being overheated with his rowing, bade pull alongside, and asked him in heaven's name what he was doing with his nether tackle. On which Jack, amid such laughter as may be conceived, vowed and swore that his right thigh was bitten clean through, and to the bone; yea, and that he felt his hose full of blood; and so would have swooned away for imaginary loss of blood (so strong was the delusion on him) had not his friends, after much arguing on their part, and anger on his, persuaded him that he was whole and sound.
After which they set to work to overhaul their maiden prize, which they found full of hides and salt-pork; and yet not of that alone; for in the captain's cabin, and also in the sternsheets of the boat which Brimblecombe had so valorously boarded, were certain frails of leaves packed neatly enough, which being opened were full of goodly pearls, though somewhat brown (for the Spaniards used to damage the color in their haste and greediness, opening the shells by fire, instead of leaving them to decay gradually after the Arabian fashion); with which prize, though they could not guess its value very exactly, they went off content enough, after some malicious fellow had set the ship on fire, which, being laden with hides, was no nosegay as it burnt.
Amyas was very angry at this wanton damage, in which his model, Drake, had never indulged; but Cary had his jest ready. “Ah!” said he, “'Lutheran devils' we are, you know; so we are bound to vanish, like other fiends, with an evil savor.”
As soon, however, as Amyas was on board again, he rounded his friend Mr. Brimblecombe in the ear, and told him he had better play the man a little more, roaring less before he was hurt, and keeping his breath to help his strokes, if he wished the crew to listen much to his discourses. Frank, hearing this, bade Amyas leave the offender to him, and so began upon him with--
“Come hither, thou recreant Jack, thou lily-livered Jack, thou hysterical Jack. Tell me now, thou hast read Plato's Dialogues, and Aristotle's Logic?”
To which Jack very meekly answered, “Yes.”
“Then I will deal with thee after the manner of those ancient sages, and ask whether the greater must not contain the less?”
Jack. Yes, sure.
Frank. And that which is more than a part, contain that part, more than which it is?
Jack. Yes, sure.
Frank. Then tell me, is not a priest more than a layman?
Jack (who was always very loud about the dignity of the priesthood, as many of his cloth are, who have no other dignity whereon to stand) answered very boldly, “Of course.”
Frank. Then a priest containeth a man, and is a man, and something over--viz, his priesthood?
Jack (who saw whither this would lead). I suppose so.
Frank. Then, if a priest show himself no man, he shows himself all the more no priest?
“I'll tell you what, Master Frank,” says Jack, “you may be right by logic; but sharks aren't logic, nor don't understand it neither.”
Frank. Nay but, my recalcitrant Jack, my stiff-necked Jack, is it the part of a man to howl like a pig in a gate, because he thinks that is there which is not there?
Jack had not a word to say.
Frank. And still more, when if that had been there, it had been the duty of a brave man to have kept his mouth shut, if only to keep salt water out, and not add the evil of choking to that of being eaten?
“Ah!” says Jack, “that's all very fine; but you know as well as I that it was not the Spaniards I was afraid of. They were Heaven's handiwork, and I knew how to deal with them; but as for those fiends' spawn of sharks, when I saw that fellow take the fish alongside, it upset me clean, and there's an end of it!”
Frank. Oh, Jack, Jack, behold how one sin begets another! Just now thou wert but a coward, and now thou art a Manichee. For thou hast imputed to an evil creator that which was formed only for a good end, namely, sharks, which were made on purpose to devour useless carcasses like thine. Moreover, as a brother of the Rose, thou wert bound by the vow of thy brotherhood to have leaped joyfully down that shark's mouth.
Jack. Ay, very likely, if Mistress Rose had been in his stomach; but I wanted to fight Spaniards just then, not to be shark-bitten.
Frank. Jack, thy answer savors of self-will. If it is ordained that thou shouldst advance the ends of the Brotherhood by being shark-bitten, or flea-bitten, or bitten by sharpers, to the detriment of thy carnal wealth, or, shortly, to suffer any shame or torment whatsoever, even to strappado and scarpines, thou art bound to obey thy destiny, and not, after that vain Roman conceit, to choose the manner of thine own death, which is indeed only another sort of self-murder. We therefore consider thee as a cause of scandal, and a rotten and creaking branch, to be excised by the spiritual arm, and do hereby excise thee, and cut thee off.
Jack. Nay faith, that's a little too much, Master Frank. How long have you been Bishop of Exeter?
Frank. Jack, thy wit being blinded, and full of gross vapors, by reason of the perturbations of fear (which, like anger, is a short madness, and raises in the phantasy vain spectres,--videlicet, of sharks and Spaniards), mistakes our lucidity. For thy Manicheeism, let his lordship of Exeter deal with it. For thy abominable howling and caterwauling, offensive in a chained cur, but scandalous in a preacher and a brother of the Rose, we do hereby deprive thee of thine office of chaplain to the Brotherhood; and warn thee, that unless within seven days thou do some deed equal to the Seven Champions, or Ruggiero and Orlando's self, thou shalt be deprived of sword and dagger, and allowed henceforth to carry no more iron about thee than will serve to mend thy pen.
“And now, Jack,” said Amyas, “I will give thee a piece of news. No wonder that young men, as the parsons complain so loudly, will not listen to the Gospel, while it is preached to them by men on whom they cannot but look down; a set of softhanded fellows who cannot dig, and are ashamed to beg; and, as my brother has it, must needs be parsons before they are men.
“Frank. Ay, and even though we may excuse that in Popish priests and friars, who are vowed not to be men, and get their bread shamefully and rascally by telling sinners who owe a hundred measures to sit down quickly and take their bill and write fifty: yet for a priest of the Church of England (whose business is not merely to smuggle sinful souls up the backstairs into heaven, but to make men good Christians by making them good men, good gentlemen, and good Englishmen) to show the white feather in the hour of need, is to unpreach in one minute all that he had been preaching his life long.
“I tell thee,” says Amyas, “if I had not taken thee for another guess sort of man, I had never let thee have the care of a hundred brave lads' immortal souls--”
And so on, both of them boarding him at once with their heavy shot, larboard and starboard, till he fairly clapped his hands to his ears and ran for it, leaving poor Frank laughing so heartily, that Amyas was after all glad the thing had happened, for the sake of the smile which it put into his sad and steadfast countenance.
The next day was Sunday; on which, after divine service (which they could hardly persuade Jack to read, so shamefaced was he; and as for preaching after it, he would not hear of such a thing), Amyas read aloud, according to custom, the articles of their agreement; and then seeing abreast of them a sloping beach with a shoot of clear water running into the sea, agreed that they should land there, wash the clothes, and again water the ship; for they had found water somewhat scarce at Barbados. On this party Jack Brimblecombe must needs go, taking with him his sword and a great arquebuse; for he had dreamed last night (he said) that he was set upon by Spaniards, and was sure that the dream would come true; and moreover, that he did not very much care if they did, or if he ever got back alive; “for it was better to die than be made an ape, and a scarecrow, and laughed at by the men, and badgered with Ramus his logic, and Plato his dialectical devilries, to confess himself a Manichee, and, for aught he knew, a turbaned Turk, or Hebrew Jew,” and so flung into the boat like a man desperate.
So they went ashore, after Amyas had given strict commands against letting off firearms, for fear of alarming the Spaniards. There they washed their clothes, and stretched their legs with great joy, admiring the beauty of the place, and then began to shoot the seine which they had brought on shore with them. “In which,” says the chronicler, “we caught many strange fishes, and beside them, a sea-cow full seven feet long, with limpets and barnacles on her back, as if she had been a stick of drift-timber. This is a fond and foolish beast: and yet pious withal; for finding a corpse, she watches over it day and night until it decay or be buried. The Indians call her manati; who carries her young under her arm, and gives it suck like a woman; and being wounded, she lamenteth aloud with a human voice, and is said at certain seasons to sing very melodiously; which melody, perhaps, having been heard in those seas, is that which Mr. Frank reported to be the choirs of the Sirens and Tritons. The which I do not avouch for truth, neither rashly deny, having seen myself such fertility of Nature's wonders that I hold him who denieth aught merely for its strangeness to be a ribald and an ignoramus. Also one of our men brought in two great black fowls which he had shot with a crossbow, bodied and headed like a capon, but bigger than any eagle, which the Spaniards call curassos; which, with that sea-cow, afterwards made us good cheer, both roast and sodden, for the cow was very dainty meat, as good as a four-months' calf, and tender and fat withal.”
After that they set to work filling the casks and barricos, having laid the boat up to the outflow of the rivulet. And lucky for them it was, as it fell out, that they were all close together at that work, and not abroad skylarking as they had been half-an-hour before.
Now John Brimblecombe had gone apart as soon as they landed, with a shamefaced and doleful countenance; and sitting down under a great tree, plucked a Bible from his bosom, and read steadfastly, girded with his great sword, and his arquebuse lying by him. This too was well for him, and for the rest; for they had not yet finished their watering, when there was a cry that the enemy was on them; and out of the wood, not twenty yards from the good parson, came full fifty shot, with a multitude of negroes behind them, and an officer in front on horseback, with a great plume of feathers in his hat, and his sword drawn in his hand.
“Stand, for your lives!” shouted Amyas: and only just in time; for there was ten good minutes lost in running up and down before he could get his men into some order of battle. But when Jack beheld the Spaniards, as if he had expected their coming, he plucked a leaf and put it into the page of his book for a mark, laid the book down soberly, caught up his arquebuse, ran like a mad dog right at the Spanish captain, shot him through the body stark dead, and then, flinging the arquebuse at the head of him who stood next, fell on with his sword like a very Colbrand, breaking in among the arquebuses, and striking right and left such ugly strokes, that the Spaniards (who thought him a very fiend, or Luther's self come to life to plague them) gave back pell-mell, and shot at him five or six at once with their arquebuses: but whether from fear of him, or of wounding each other, made so bad play with their pieces, that he only got one shrewd gall in his thigh, which made him limp for many a day. But as fast as they gave back he came on; and the rest by this time ran up in good order, and altogether nearly forty men well armed. On which the Spaniards turned, and went as fast as they had come, while Cary hinted that, “The dogs had had such a taste of the parson, that they had no mind to wait for the clerk and people.”
“Come back, Jack! are you mad?” shouted Amyas.
But Jack (who had not all this time spoken one word) followed them as fiercely as ever, till, reaching a great blow at one of the arquebusiers, he caught his foot in a root; on which down he went, and striking his head against the ground, knocked out of himself all the breath he had left (which between fatness and fighting was not much), and so lay. Amyas, seeing the Spaniards gone, did not care to pursue them: but picked up Jack, who, staring about, cried, “Glory be! glory be!--How many have I killed? How many have I killed?”
“Nineteen, at the least,” quoth Cary, “and seven with one back stroke;” and then showed Brimblecombe the captain lying dead, and two arquebusiers, one of which was the fugitive by whom he came to his fall, beside three or four more who were limping away wounded, some of them by their fellows' shot.
“There!” said Jack, pausing and blowing, “will you laugh at me any more, Mr. Cary; or say that I cannot fight, because I am a poor parson's son?”
Cary took him by the hand, and asked pardon of him for his scoffing, saying that he had that day played the best man of all of them; and Jack, who never bore malice, began laughing in his turn, and--
“Oh, Mr. Cary, we have all known your pleasant ways, ever since you used to put drumble-drones into my desk to Bideford school.” And so they went to the boats, and pulled off, thanking God (as they had need to do) for their great deliverance: while all the boats' crew rejoiced over Jack, who after a while grew very faint (having bled a good deal without knowing it), and made as little of his real wound as he made much the day before of his imaginary one.
Frank asked him that evening how he came to show so cool and approved a valor in so sudden a mishap.
“Well, my masters,” said Jack, “I don't deny that I was very downcast on account of what you said, and the scandal which I had given to the crew; but as it happened, I was reading there under the tree, to fortify my spirits, the history of the ancient worthies, in St. Paul his eleventh chapter to the Hebrews; and just as I came to that, 'out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens,' arose the cry of the Spaniards. At which, gentlemen, thinking in myself that I fought in just so good a cause as they, and, as I hoped, with like faith, there came upon me so strange an assurance of victory, that I verily believed in myself that if there had been a ten thousand of them, I should have taken no hurt. Wherefore,” said Jack, modestly, “there is no credit due to me, for there was no valor in me whatsoever, but only a certainty of safety; and any coward would fight if he knew that he were to have all the killing and none of the scratches.”
Which words he next day, being Sunday, repeated in his sermon which he made on that chapter, with which all, even Salvation Yeo himself, were well content and edified, and allowed him to be as godly a preacher as he was (in spite of his simple ways) a valiant and true-hearted comrade.
They brought away the Spanish officer's sword (a very good blade), and also a great chain of gold which he wore about his neck; both of which were allotted to Brimblecombe as his fair prize; but he, accepting the sword, steadfastly refused the chain, entreating Amyas to put it into the common stock; and when Amyas refused, he cut it into links and distributed it among those of the boat's crew who had succored him, winning thereby much good-will. “And indeed” (says the chronicler), “I never saw in that worthy man, from the first day of our school-fellowship till he was laid in his parish church of Hartland (where he now sleeps in peace), any touch of that sin of covetousness which has in all ages, and in ours no less than others, beset especially (I know not why) them who minister about the sanctuary. But this man, though he was ugly and lowly in person, and in understanding simple, and of breeding but a poor parson's son, had yet in him a spirit so loving and cheerful, so lifted from base and selfish purposes to the worship of duty, and to a generosity rather knightly than sacerdotal, that all through his life he seemed to think only that it was more blessed to give than to receive. And all that wealth which he gained in the wars he dispersed among his sisters and the poor of his parish, living unmarried till his death like a true lover and constant mourner (as shall be said in place), and leaving hardly wherewith to bring his body to the grave. At whom if we often laughed once, we should now rather envy him, desiring to be here what he was, that we may be hereafter where he is. Amen.”
XIX. WHAT BEFELL AT LA GUAYRA
“Great was the crying, the running and riding, Which at that season was made in the place; The beacons were fired, as need then required, To save their great treasure they had little space.”
Winning of Cales.
The men would gladly have hawked awhile round Margarita and Cubagua for another pearl prize. But Amyas having, as he phrased it, “fleshed his dogs,” was loth to hang about the islands after the alarm had been given. They ran, therefore, south-west across the mouth of that great bay which stretches from the Peninsula of Paria to Cape Codera, leaving on their right hand Tortuga, and on their left the meadow-islands of the Piritoos, two long green lines but a few inches above the tideless sea. Yeo and Drew knew every foot of the way, and had good reason to know it; for they, the first of all English mariners, had tried to trade along this coast with Hawkins. And now, right ahead, sheer out of the sea from base to peak, arose higher and higher the mighty range of the Caracas mountains; beside which all hills which most of the crew had ever seen seemed petty mounds. Frank, of course, knew the Alps; and Amyas the Andes; but Cary's notions of height were bounded by M'Gillicuddy's Reeks, and Brimblecombe's by Exmoor; and the latter, to Cary's infinite amusement, spent a whole day holding on by the rigging, and staring upwards with his chin higher than his nose, till he got a stiff neck. Soon the sea became rough and chopping, though the breeze was fair and gentle; and ere they were abreast of the Cape, they became aware of that strong eastward current which, during the winter months, so often baffles the mariner who wishes to go to the westward. All night long they struggled through the billows, with the huge wall of Cape Codera a thousand feet above their heads to the left, and beyond it again, bank upon bank of mountain, bathed in the yellow moonlight.
Morning showed them a large ship, which had passed them during the night upon the opposite course, and was now a good ten miles to the eastward. Yeo was for going back and taking her. Of the latter he made a matter of course; and the former was easy enough, for the breeze blowing dead off the land, was a “soldier's wind, there and back again,” for either ship; but Amyas and Frank were both unwilling.
“Why, Yeo, you said that one day more would bring us to La Guayra.”
“All the more reason, sir, for doing the Lord's work thoroughly, when He has brought us safely so far on our journey.”
“She can pass well enough, and no loss.”
“Ah, sirs, sirs, she is delivered into your hands, and you will have to give an account of her.”
“My good Yeo,” said Frank, “I trust we shall give good account enough of many a tall Spaniard before we return: but you know surely that La Guayra, and the salvation of one whom we believe dwells there, was our first object in this adventure.”
Yeo shook his head sadly. “Ah, sirs, a lady brought Captain Oxenham to ruin.”
“You do not dare to compare her with this one?” said Frank and Cary, both in a breath.
“God forbid, gentlemen: but no adventure will prosper, unless there is a single eye to the Lord's work; and that is, as I take it, to cripple the Spaniard, and exalt her majesty the queen. And I had thought that nothing was more dear than that to Captain Leigh's heart.”
Amyas stood somewhat irresolute. His duty to the queen bade him follow the Spanish vessel: his duty to his vow, to go on to La Guayra. It may seem a far-fetched dilemma. He found it a practical one enough.
However, the counsel of Frank prevailed, and on to La Guayra he went. He half hoped that the Spaniard would see and attack them. However, he went on his way to the eastward; which if he had not done, my story had had a very different ending.
About mid-day a canoe, the first which they had seen, came staggering toward them under a huge three-cornered sail. As it came near, they could see two Indians on board.
“Metal floats in these seas, you see,” quoth Cary. “There's a fresh marvel, for you, Frank.”
“Expound,” quoth Frank, who was really ready to swallow any fresh marvel, so many had he seen already.
“Why, how else would those two bronze statues dare to go to sea in such a cockleshell, eh? Have I given you the dor now, master courtier!”
“I am long past dors, Will. But what noble creatures they are! and how fearlessly they are coming alongside! Can they know that we are English, and the avengers of the Indians?”
“I suspect they just take us for Spaniards, and want to sell their cocoa-nuts. See, the canoe is laden with vegetables.”
“Hail them, Yeo!” said Amyas. “You talk the best Spanish, and I want speech of one of them.”
Yeo did so; the canoe, without more ado, ran alongside, and lowered her felucca sail, while a splendid Indian scrambled on board like a cat.
He was full six feet high, and as bold and graceful of bearing as Frank or Amyas's self. He looked round for the first moment smilingly, showing his white teeth; but the next, his countenance changed; and springing to the side, he shouted to his comrade in Spanish--
“Treachery! No Spaniard,” and would have leaped overboard, but a dozen strong fellows caught him ere he could do so.
It required some trouble to master him, so strong was he, and so slippery his naked limbs; Amyas, meanwhile, alternately entreated the men not to hurt the Indian, and the Indian to be quiet, and no harm should happen to him; and so, after five minutes' confusion, the stranger gave in sulkily.
“Don't bind him. Let him loose, and make a ring round him. Now, my man, there's a dollar for you.”
The Indian's eyes glistened, and he took the coin.
“All I want of you is, first, to tell me what ships are in La Guayra, and next, to go thither on board of me, and show me which is the governor's house, and which the custom-house.”
The Indian laid the coin down on the deck, and crossing himself, looked Amyas in the face.
“No, senor! I am a freeman and a cavalier, a Christian Guayqueria, whose forefathers, first of all the Indians, swore fealty to the King of Spain, and whom he calls to this day in all his proclamations his most faithful, loyal, and noble Guayquerias. God forbid, therefore, that I should tell aught to his enemies, who are my enemies likewise.”
A growl arose from those of the men who understood him; and more than one hinted that a cord twined round the head, or a match put between the fingers, would speedily extract the required information.
“God forbid!” said Amyas; “a brave and loyal man he is, and as such will I treat him. Tell me, my brave fellow, how do you know us to be his Catholic majesty's enemies?”
The Indian, with a shrewd smile, pointed to half-a-dozen different objects, saying to each, “Not Spanish.”
“Well, and what of that?”
“None but Spaniards and free Guayquerias have a right to sail these seas.”
Amyas laughed.
“Thou art a right valiant bit of copper. Pick up thy dollar, and go thy way in peace. Make room for him, men. We can learn what we want without his help.”
The Indian paused, incredulous and astonished. “Overboard with you!” quoth Amyas. “Don't you know when you are well off?”
“Most illustrious senor,” began the Indian, in the drawling sententious fashion of his race (when they take the trouble to talk at all), “I have been deceived. I heard that you heretics roasted and ate all true Catholics (as we Guayquerias are), and that all your padres had tails.”
“Plague on you, sirrah!” squeaked Jack Brimblecombe. “Have I a tail? Look here!”
“Quien sabe? Who knows?” quoth the Indian through his nose.
“How do you know we are heretics?” said Amyas.
“Humph! But in repayment for your kindness, I would warn you, illustrious senor, not to go on to La Guayra. There are ships of war there waiting for you; and moreover, the governor Don Guzman sailed to the eastward only yesterday to look for you; and I wonder much that you did not meet him.”
“To look for us! On the watch for us!” said Cary. “Impossible; lies! Amyas, this is some trick of the rascal's to frighten us away.”
“Don Guzman came out but yesterday to look for us? Are you sure you spoke truth?”
“As I live, senor, he and another ship, for which I took yours.”
Amyas stamped upon the deck: that then was the ship which they had passed!
“Fool that I was to have been close to my enemy, and let my opportunity slip! If I had but done my duty, all would have gone right!”
But it was too late to repine; and after all, the Indian's story was likely enough to be false.
“Off with you!” said he; and the Indian bounded over the side into his canoe, leaving the whole crew wondering at the stateliness and courtesy of this bold sea-cavalier.
So Westward-ho they ran, beneath the mighty northern wall, the highest cliff on earth, some seven thousand feet of rock parted from the sea by a narrow strip of bright green lowland. Here and there a patch of sugar-cane, or a knot of cocoa-nut trees, close to the water's edge, reminded them that they were in the tropics; but above, all was savage, rough, and bare as an Alpine precipice. Sometimes deep clefts allowed the southern sun to pour a blaze of light down to the sea marge, and gave glimpses far above of strange and stately trees lining the glens, and of a veil of perpetual mist which shrouded the inner summits; while up and down, between them and the mountain side, white fleecy clouds hung motionless in the burning air, increasing the impression of vastness and of solemn rest, which was already overpowering.
“Within those mountains, three thousand feet above our heads,” said Drew, the master, “lies Saint Yago de Leon, the great city which the Spaniards founded fifteen years agone.”
“Is it a rich place?” asked Cary.
“Very, they say.”
“Is it a strong place?” asked Amyas.
“No forts to it at all, they say. The Spaniards boast, that Heaven has made such good walls to it already, that man need make none.”
“I don't know,” quoth Amyas. “Lads, could you climb those hills, do you think?”
“Rather higher than Harty Point, sir: but it depends pretty much on what's behind them.”
And now the last point is rounded, and they are full in sight of the spot in quest of which they have sailed four thousand miles of sea. A low black cliff, crowned by a wall; a battery at either end. Within, a few narrow streets of white houses, running parallel with the sea, upon a strip of flat, which seemed not two hundred yards in breadth; and behind, the mountain wall, covering the whole in deepest shade. How that wall was ever ascended to the inland seemed the puzzle; but Drew, who had been off the place before, pointed out to them a narrow path, which wound upwards through a glen, seemingly sheer perpendicular. That was the road to the capital, if any man dare try it. In spite of the shadow of the mountain, the whole place wore a dusty and glaring look. The breaths of air which came off the land were utterly stifling; and no wonder, for La Guayra, owing to the radiation of that vast fire-brick of heated rock, is one of the hottest spots upon the face of the whole earth.
Where was the harbor? There was none. Only an open roadstead, wherein lay tossing at anchor five vessels. The two outer ones were small merchant caravels. Behind them lay two long, low, ugly-looking craft, at sight of which Yeo gave a long whew.
“Galleys, as I'm a sinful saint! And what's that big one inside of them, Robert Drew? She has more than hawseholes in her idolatrous black sides, I think.”
“We shall open her astern of the galleys in another minute,” said Amyas. “Look out, Cary, your eyes are better than mine.”
“Six round portholes on the main deck,” quoth Will.
“And I can see the brass patararoes glittering on her poop,” quoth Amyas. “Will, we're in for it.”
“In for it we are, captain.
“Farewell, farewell, my parents dear. I never shall see you more, I fear.
“Let's go in, nevertheless, and pound the Don's ribs, my old lad of Smerwick. Eh? Three to one is very fair odds.”
“Not underneath those fort guns, I beg leave to say,” quoth Yeo. “If the Philistines will but come out unto us, we will make them like unto Zeba and Zalmunna.”
“Quite true,” said Amyas. “Game cocks are game cocks, but reason's reason.”
“If the Philistines are not coming out, they are going to send a messenger instead,” quoth Cary. “Look out, all thin skulls!”
And as he spoke, a puff of white smoke rolled from the eastern fort, and a heavy ball plunged into the water between it and the ship.
“I don't altogether like this,” quoth Amyas. “What do they mean by firing on us without warning? And what are these ships of war doing here? Drew, you told me the armadas never lay here.”
“No more, I believe, they do, sir, on account of the anchorage being so bad, as you may see. I'm mortal afeared that rascal's story was true, and that the Dons have got wind of our coming.”
“Run up a white flag, at all events. If they do expect us, they must have known some time since, or how could they have got their craft hither?”
“True, sir. They must have come from Santa Marta, at the least; perhaps from Cartagena. And that would take a month at least going and coming.”
Amyas suddenly recollected Eustace's threat in the wayside inn. Could he have betrayed their purpose? Impossible!
“Let us hold a council of war, at all events, Frank.”
Frank was absorbed in a very different matter. A half-mile to the eastward of the town, two or three hundred feet up the steep mountain side, stood a large, low, white house embosomed in trees and gardens. There was no other house of similar size near; no place for one. And was not that the royal flag of Spain which flaunted before it? That must be the governor's house; that must be the abode of the Rose of Torridge! And Frank stood devouring it with wild eyes, till he had persuaded himself that he could see a woman's figure walking upon the terrace in front, and that the figure was none other than hers whom he sought. Amyas could hardly tear him away to a council of war, which was a sad, and only not a peevish one.
The three adventurers, with Brimblecombe, Yeo, and Drew, went apart upon the poop; and each looked the other in the face awhile. For what was to be done? The plans and hopes of months were brought to naught in an hour.
“It is impossible, you see,” said Amyas, at last, “to surprise the town by land, while these ships are here; for if we land our men, we leave our ship without defence.”
“As impossible as to challenge Don Guzman while he is not here,” said Cary.
“I wonder why the ships have not opened on us already,” said Drew.
“Perhaps they respect our flag of truce,” said Cary. “Why not send in a boat to treat with them, and to inquire for--
“For her?” interrupted Frank. “If we show that we are aware of her existence, her name is blasted in the eyes of those jealous Spaniards.”
“And as for respecting our flag of truce, gentlemen,” said Yeo, “if you will take an old man's advice, trust them not. They will keep the same faith with us as they kept with Captain Hawkins at San Juan d'Ulloa, in that accursed business which was the beginning of all the wars; when we might have taken the whole plate-fleet, with two hundred thousand pounds' worth of gold on board, and did not, but only asked license to trade like honest men. And yet, after they had granted us license, and deceived us by fair speech into landing ourselves and our ordnance, the governor and all the fleet set upon us, five to one, and gave no quarter to any soul whom he took. No, sir; I expect the only reason why they don't attack us is, because their crews are not on board.”
“They will be, soon enough, then,” said Amyas. “I can see soldiers coming down the landing-stairs.”
And, in fact, boats full of armed men began to push off to the ships.
“We may thank Heaven,” said Drew, “that we were not here two hours agone. The sun will be down before they are ready for sea, and the fellows will have no stomach to go looking for us by night.”
“So much the worse for us. If they will but do that, we may give them the slip, and back again to the town, and there try our luck; for I cannot find it in my heart to leave the place without having one dash at it.”
Yeo shook his head. “There are plenty more towns along the coast more worth trying than this, sir: but Heaven's will be done!”
And as they spoke, the sun plunged into the sea, and all was dark.
At last it was agreed to anchor, and wait till midnight. If the ships of war came out, they were to try to run in past them, and, desperate as the attempt might be, attempt their original plan of landing to the westward of the town, taking it in flank, plundering the government storehouses, which they saw close to the landing-place, and then fighting their way back to their boats, and out of the roadstead. Two hours would suffice if the armada and the galleys were but once out of the way.
Amyas went forward, called the men together, and told them the plan. It was not very cheerfully received: but what else was there to be done!
They ran down about a mile and a half to the westward, and anchored.
The night wore on, and there was no sign of stir among the shipping; for though they could not see the vessels themselves, yet their lights (easily distinguished by their relative height from those in the town above) remained motionless; and the men fretted and fumed for weary hours at thus seeing a rich prize (for of course the town was paved with gold) within arm's reach, and yet impossible.
Let Amyas and his men have patience. Some short five years more, and the great Armada will have come and gone; and then that avenging storm, of which they, like Oxenham, Hawkins, and Drake, are but the avant-couriers, will burst upon every Spanish port from Corunna to Cadiz, from the Canaries to Havana, and La Guayra and St. Yago de Leon will not escape their share. Captain Amyas Preston and Captain Sommers, the colonist of the Bermudas, or Sommers' Islands, will land, with a force tiny enough, though larger far than Leigh's, where Leigh dare not land; and taking the fort of Guayra, will find, as Leigh found, that their coming has been expected, and that the Pass of the Venta, three thousand feet above, has been fortified with huge barricadoes, abattis, and cannon, making the capital, amid its ring of mountain-walls, impregnable--to all but Englishmen or Zouaves. For up that seven thousand feet of precipice, which rises stair on stair behind the town, those fierce adventurers will climb hand over hand, through rain and fog, while men lie down, and beg their officers to kill them, for no farther can they go. Yet farther they will go, hewing a path with their swords through woods of wild plantain, and rhododendron thickets, over (so it seems, however incredible) the very saddle of the Silla,* down upon the astonished “Mantuanos” of St. Jago, driving all before them; and having burnt the city in default of ransom, will return triumphant by the right road, and pass along the coast, the masters of the deep.
* Humboldt says that there is a path from Caravellada to St. Jago, between the peaks, used by smugglers. This is probably the “unknowen way of the Indians,” which Preston used.
I know not whether any men still live who count their descent from those two valiant captains; but if such there be, let them be sure that the history of the English navy tells no more Titanic victory over nature and man than that now forgotten raid of Amyas Preston and his comrade, in the year of grace 1595.
But though a venture on the town was impossible, yet there was another venture which Frank was unwilling to let slip. A light which now shone brightly in one of the windows of the governor's house was the lodestar to which all his thoughts were turned; and as he sat in the cabin with Amyas, Cary, and Jack, he opened his heart to them.
“And are we, then,” asked he, mournfully, “to go without doing the very thing for which we came?”
All were silent awhile. At last John Brimblecombe spoke.
“Show me the way to do it, Mr. Frank, and I will go.”
“My dearest man,” said Amyas, “what would you have? Any attempt to see her, even if she be here, would be all but certain death.”
“And what if it were? What if it were, my brother Amyas? Listen to me. I have long ceased to shrink from Death; but till I came into these magic climes, I never knew the beauty of his face.”
“Of death?” said Cary. “I should have said, of life. God forgive me! but man might wish to live forever, if he had such a world as this wherein to live.”
“And do you forget, Cary, that the more fair this passing world of time, by so much the more fair is that eternal world, whereof all here is but a shadow and a dream; by so much the more fair is He before whose throne the four mystic beasts, the substantial ideas of Nature and her powers, stand day and night, crying, 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, Thou hast made all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created!' My friends, if He be so prodigal of His own glory as to have decked these lonely shores, all but unknown since the foundation of the world, with splendors beyond all our dreams, what must be the glory of His face itself! I have done with vain shadows. It is better to depart and to be with Him, where shall be neither desire nor anger, self-deception nor pretence, but the eternal fulness of reality and truth. One thing I have to do before I die, for God has laid it on me. Let that be done to-night, and then, farewell!”
“Frank! Frank! remember our mother!”
“I do remember her. I have talked over these things with her many a time; and where I would fain be, she would fain be also. She sent me out with my virgin honor, as the Spartan mother did her boy with the shield, saying, 'Come back either with this, or upon this;' and one or the other I must do, if I would meet her either in this life or in the next. But in the meanwhile do not mistake me; my life is God's, and I promise not to cast it away rashly.”
“What would you do, then?”
“Go up to that house, Amyas, and speak with her, if Heaven gives me an opportunity, as Heaven, I feel assured, will give.”
“And do you call that no rashness?”
“Is any duty rashness? Is it rash to stand amid the flying bullets, if your queen has sent you? Is it more rash to go to seek Christ's lost lamb, if God and your own oath hath sent you? John Brimblecombe answered that question for us long ago.”
“If you go, I go with you!” said all three at once.
“No. Amyas, you owe a duty to our mother and to your ship. Cary, you are heir to great estates, and are bound thereby to your country and to your tenants. John Brimblecombe--”
“Ay!” squeaked Jack. “And what have you to say, Mr. Frank, against my going?--I, who have neither ship nor estates--except, I suppose, that I am not worthy to travel in such good company?”
“Think of your old parents, John, and all your sisters.”
“I thought of them before I started, sir, as Mr. Cary knows, and you know too. I came here to keep my vow, and I am not going to turn renegade at the very foot of the cross.”
“Some one must go with you, Frank,” said Amyas; “if it were only to bring back the boat's crew in case--” and he faltered.
“In case I fall,” replied Frank, with a smile. “I will finish your sentence for you, lad; I am not afraid of it, though you may be for me. Yet some one, I fear, must go. Unhappy me! that I cannot risk my own worthless life without risking your more precious lives!”
“Not so, Mr. Frank! Your oath is our oath, and your duty ours!” said John. “I will tell you what we will do, gentlemen all. We three will draw cuts for the honor of going with him.”
“Lots?” said Amyas. “I don't like leaving such grave matters to chance, friend John.”
“Chance, sir? When you have used all your own wit, and find it fail you, then what is drawing lots but taking the matter out of your own weak hands, and laying it in God's strong hands?”
“Right, John!” said Frank. “So did the apostles choose their successor, and so did holy men of old decide controversies too subtle for them; and we will not be ashamed to follow their example. For my part, I have often said to Sidney and to Spenser, when we have babbled together of Utopian governments in days which are now dreams to me, that I would have all officers of state chosen by lot out of the wisest and most fit; so making sure that they should be called by God, and not by man alone. Gentlemen, do you agree to Sir John's advice?”
They agreed, seeing no better counsel, and John put three slips of paper into Frank's hand, with the simple old apostolic prayer--
“Show which of us three Thou hast chosen.”
The lot fell upon Amyas Leigh.
Frank shuddered, and clasped his hands over his face.
“Well,” said Cary, “I have ill-luck to-night: but Frank goes at least in good company.”
“Ah, that it had been I!” said Jack; “though I suppose I was too poor a body to have such an honor fall on me. And yet it is hard for flesh and blood; hard indeed to have come all this way, and not to see her after all!”
“Jack,” said Frank, “you are kept to do better work than this, doubt not. But if the lot had fallen on you--ay, if it had fallen on a three years' child, I would have gone up as cheerfully with that child to lead me, as I do now with this my brother! Amyas, can we have a boat, and a crew? It is near midnight already.”
Amyas went on deck, and asked for six volunteers. Whosoever would come, Amyas would double out of his own purse any prize-money which might fall to that man's share.
One of the old Pelican's crew, Simon Evans of Clovelly, stepped out at once.
“Why six only, captain? Give the word, and any and all of us will go up with you, sack the house, and bring off the treasure and the lady, before two hours are out.”
“No, no, my brave lads! As for treasure, if there be any, it is sure to have been put all safe into the forts, or hidden in the mountains; and as for the lady, God forbid that we should force her a step without her own will.”
The honest sailor did not quite understand this punctilio: but--
“Well, captain,” quoth he, “as you like; but no man shall say that you asked for a volunteer, were it to jump down a shark's throat, but what you had me first of all the crew.”
After this sort of temper had been exhibited, three or four more came forward--Yeo was very anxious to go, but Amyas forbade him.
“I'll volunteer, sir, without reward, for this or anything; though” (added he in a lower tone) “I would to Heaven that the thought had never entered your head.”
“And so would I have volunteered,” said Simon Evans, “if it were the ship's quarrel, or the queen's; but being it's a private matter of the captain's, and I've a wife and children at home, why, I take no shame to myself for asking money for my life.”
So the crew was made up; but ere they pushed off, Amyas called Cary aside--
“If I perish, Will--”
“Don't talk of such things, dear old lad.”
“I must. Then you are captain. Do nothing without Yeo and Drew. But if they approve, go right north away for San Domingo and Cuba, and try the ports; they can have no news of us there, and there is booty without end. Tell my mother that I died like a gentleman; and mind--mind, dear lad, to keep your temper with the men, let the poor fellows grumble as they may. Mind but that, and fear God, and all will go well.”
The tears were glistening in Cary's eyes as he pressed Amyas's hand, and watched the two brothers down over the side upon their desperate errand.
They reached the pebble beach. There seemed no difficulty about finding the path to the house--so bright was the moon, and so careful a survey of the place had Frank taken. Leaving the men with the boat (Amyas had taken care that they should be well armed), they started up the beach, with their swords only. Frank assured Amyas that they would find a path leading from the beach up to the house, and he was not mistaken. They found it easily, for it was made of white shell sand; and following it, struck into a “tunal,” or belt of tall thorny cactuses. Through this the path wound in zigzags up a steep rocky slope, and ended at a wicket-gate. They tried it, and found it open.
“She may expect us,” whispered Frank.
“Impossible!”
“Why not? She must have seen our ship; and if, as seems, the townsfolk know who we are, how much more must she! Yes, doubt it not, she still longs to hear news of her own land, and some secret sympathy will draw her down towards the sea to-night. See! the light is in the window still!”
“But if not,” said Amyas, who had no such expectation, “what is your plan?”
“I have none.”
“None?”
“I have imagined twenty different ones in the last hour; but all are equally uncertain, impossible. I have ceased to struggle--I go where I am called, love's willing victim. If Heaven accept the sacrifice, it will provide the altar and the knife.”
Aymas was at his wits' end. Judging of his brother by himself, he had taken for granted that Frank had some well-concocted scheme for gaining admittance to the Rose; and as the wiles of love were altogether out of his province, he had followed in full faith such a sans-appel as he held Frank to be. But now he almost doubted of his brother's sanity, though Frank's manner was perfectly collected and his voice firm. Amyas, honest fellow, had no understanding of that intense devotion, which so many in those days (not content with looking on it as a lofty virtue, and yet one to be duly kept in its place by other duties) prided themselves on pampering into the most fantastic and self-willed excesses.
Beautiful folly! the death-song of which two great geniuses were composing at that very moment, each according to his light. For, while Spenser was embalming in immortal verse all that it contained of noble and Christian elements, Cervantes sat, perhaps, in his dungeon, writing with his left hand Don Quixote, saddest of books, in spite of all its wit; the story of a pure and noble soul, who mistakes this actual life for that ideal one which he fancies (and not so wrongly either) eternal in the heavens: and finding instead of a battlefield for heroes in God's cause, nothing but frivolity, heartlessness, and godlessness, becomes a laughing-stock,--and dies. One of the saddest books, I say again, which man can read.
Amyas hardly dare trust himself to speak, for fear of saying too much; but he could not help saying--
“You are going to certain death, Frank.”
“Did I not entreat,” answered he, very quietly, “to go alone?”
Amyas had half a mind to compel him to return: but he feared Frank's obstinacy; and feared, too, the shame of returning on board without having done anything; so they went up through the wicket-gate, along a smooth turf walk, into what seemed a pleasure-garden, formed by the hand of man, or rather of woman. For by the light, not only of the moon, but of the innumerable fireflies, which flitted to and fro across the sward like fiery imps sent to light the brothers on their way, they could see that the bushes on either side, and the trees above their heads, were decked with flowers of such strangeness and beauty, that, as Frank once said of Barbados, “even the gardens of Wilton were a desert in comparison.” All around were orange and lemon trees (probably the only addition which man had made to Nature's prodigality), the fruit of which, in that strange colored light of the fireflies, flashed in their eyes like balls of burnished gold and emerald; while great white tassels swinging from every tree in the breeze which swept down the glade, tossed in their faces a fragrant snow of blossoms, and glittering drops of perfumed dew.
“What a paradise!” said Amyas to Frank, “with the serpent in it, as of old. Look!”
And as he spoke, there dropped slowly down from a bough, right before them, what seemed a living chain of gold, ruby, and sapphire. Both stopped, and another glance showed the small head and bright eyes of a snake, hissing and glaring full in their faces.
“See!” said Frank. “And he comes, as of old, in the likeness of an angel of light. Do not strike it. There are worse devils to be fought with to-night than that poor beast.” And stepping aside, they passed the snake safely, and arrived in front of the house.
It was, as I have said, a long low house, with balconies along the upper story, and the under part mostly open to the wind. The light was still burning in the window.
“Whither now?” said Amyas, in a tone of desperate resignation.
“Thither! Where else on earth?” and Frank pointed to the light, trembling from head to foot, and pushed on.
“For Heaven's sake! Look at the negroes on the barbecue!”
It was indeed time to stop; for on the barbecue, or terrace of white plaster, which ran all round the front, lay sleeping full twenty black figures.
“What will you do now? You must step over them to gain an entrance.”
“Wait here, and I will go up gently towards the window. She may see me. She will see me as I step into the moonlight. At least I know an air by which she will recognize me, if I do but hum a stave.”
“Why, you do not even know that that light is hers!--Down, for your life!”
And Amyas dragged him down into the bushes on his left hand; for one of the negroes, wakening suddenly with a cry, had sat up, and began crossing himself four or five times, in fear of “Duppy,” and mumbling various charms, ayes, or what not.
The light above was extinguished instantly.
“Did you see her?” whispered Frank.
“No.”
“I did--the shadow of the face, and the neck! Can I be mistaken?” And then, covering his face with his hands, he murmured to himself, “Misery! misery! So near and yet impossible?”
“Would it be the less impossible were you face to face? Let us go back. We cannot go up without detection, even if our going were of use. Come back, for God's sake, ere all is lost! If you have seen her, as you say, you know at least that she is alive, and safe in his house--”
“As his mistress? or as his wife? Do I know that yet, Amyas, and can I depart until I know?” There was a few minutes' silence, and then Amyas, making one last attempt to awaken Frank to the absurdity of the whole thing, and to laugh him, if possible, out of it, as argument had no effect--
“My dear fellow, I am very hungry and sleepy; and this bush is very prickly; and my boots are full of ants--”
“So are mine.--Look!” and Frank caught Amyas's arm, and clenched it tight.
For round the farther corner of the house a dark cloaked figure stole gently, turning a look now and then upon the sleeping negroes, and came on right toward them.
“Did I not tell you she would come?” whispered Frank, in a triumphant tone.
Amyas was quite bewildered; and to his mind the apparition seemed magical, and Frank prophetic; for as the figure came nearer, incredulous as he tried to be, there was no denying that the shape and the walk were exactly those of her, to find whom they had crossed the Atlantic. True, the figure was somewhat taller; but then, “she must be grown since I saw her,” thought Amyas; and his heart for the moment beat as fiercely as Frank's.
But what was that behind her? Her shadow against the white wall of the house. Not so. Another figure, cloaked likewise, but taller far, was following on her steps. It was a man's. They could see that he wore a broad sombrero. It could not be Don Guzman, for he was at sea. Who then? Here was a mystery; perhaps a tragedy. And both brothers held their breaths, while Amyas felt whether his sword was loose in the sheath.
The Rose (if indeed it was she) was within ten yards of them, when she perceived that she was followed. She gave a little shriek. The cavalier sprang forward, lifted his hat courteously, and joined her, bowing low. The moonlight was full upon his face.
“It is Eustace, our cousin! How came he here, in the name of all the fiends?”
“Eustace! Then that is she, after all!” said Frank, forgetting everything else in her.
And now flashed across Amyas all that had passed between him and Eustace in the moorland inn, and Parracombe's story, too, of the suspicious gipsy. Eustace had been beforehand with them, and warned Don Guzman! All was explained now: but how had he got hither?
“The devil, his master, sent him hither on a broomstick, I suppose: or what matter how? Here he is; and here we are, worse luck!” And, setting his teeth, Amyas awaited the end.
The two came on, talking earnestly, and walking at a slow pace, so that the brothers could hear every word.
“What shall we do now?” said Frank. “We have no right to be eavesdroppers.”
“But we must be, right or none.” And Amyas held him down firmly by the arm.
“But whither are you going, then, my dear madam?” they heard Eustace say in a wheedling tone. “Can you wonder if such strange conduct should cause at least sorrow to your admirable and faithful husband?”
“Husband!” whispered Frank faintly to Amyas. “Thank God, thank God! I am content. Let us go.”
But to go was impossible; for, as fate would have it, the two had stopped just opposite them.
“The inestimable Senor Don Guzman--” began Eustace again.
“What do you mean by praising him to me in this fulsome way, sir? Do you suppose that I do not know his virtues better than you?”
“If you do, madam” (this was spoken in a harder tone), “it were wise for you to try them less severely, than by wandering down towards the beach on the very night that you know his most deadly enemies are lying in wait to slay him, plunder his house, and most probably to carry you off from him.”
“Carry me off? I will die first!”
“Who can prove that to him? Appearances are at least against you.”
“My love to him, and his trust for me, sir!”
“His trust? Have you forgotten, madam, what passed last week, and why he sailed yesterday?”
The only answer was a burst of tears. Eustace stood watching her with a terrible eye; but they could see his face writhing in the moonlight.
“Oh!” sobbed she at last. “And if I have been imprudent, was it not natural to wish to look once more upon an English ship? Are you not English as well as I? Have you no longing recollections of the dear old land at home?”
Eustace was silent; but his face worked more fiercely than ever.
“How can he ever know it?”
“Why should he not know it?”
“Ah!” she burst out passionately, “why not, indeed, while you are here? You, sir, the tempter, you the eavesdropper, you the sunderer of loving hearts! You, serpent, who found our home a paradise, and see it now a hell!”
“Do you dare to accuse me thus, madam, without a shadow of evidence?”
“Dare? I dare anything, for I know all! I have watched you, sir, and I have borne with you too long.”
“Me, madam, whose only sin towards you, as you should know by now, is to have loved you too well? Rose! Rose! have you not blighted my life for me--broken my heart? And how have I repaid you? How but by sacrificing myself to seek you over land and sea, that I might complete your conversion to the bosom of that Church where a Virgin Mother stands stretching forth soft arms to embrace her wandering daughter, and cries to you all day long, 'Come unto me, ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest!' And this is my reward!”
“Depart with your Virgin Mother, sir, and tempt me no more! You have asked me what I dare; and I dare this, upon my own ground, and in my own garden, I, Donna Rosa de Soto, to bid you leave this place now and forever, after having insulted me by talking of your love, and tempted me to give up that faith which my husband promised me he would respect and protect. Go, sir!”
The brothers listened breathless with surprise as much as with rage. Love and conscience, and perhaps, too, the pride of her lofty alliance, had converted the once gentle and dreamy Rose into a very Roxana; but it was only the impulse of a moment. The words had hardly passed her lips, when, terrified at what she had said, she burst into a fresh flood of tears; while Eustace answered calmly:
“I go, madam: but how know you that I may not have orders, and that, after your last strange speech, my conscience may compel me to obey those orders, to take you with me?”
“Me? with you?”
“My heart has bled for you, madam, for many a year. It longs now that it had bled itself to death, and never known the last worst agony of telling you--”
And drawing close to her he whispered in her ear--what, the brothers heard not--but her answer was a shriek which rang through the woods, and sent the night-birds fluttering up from every bough above their heads.
“By Heaven!” said Amyas, “I can stand this no longer. Cut that devil's throat I must--”
“She is lost if his dead body is found by her.”
“We are lost if we stay here, then,” said Amyas; “for those negroes will hurry down at her cry, and then found we must be.”
“Are you mad, madam, to betray yourself by your own cries? The negroes will be here in a moment. I give you one last chance for life, then:” and Eustace shouted in Spanish at the top of his voice, “Help, help, servants! Your mistress is being carried off by bandits!”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Let your woman's wit supply the rest: and forget not him who thus saves you from disgrace.”
Whether the brothers heard the last words or not, I know not; but taking for granted that Eustace had discovered them, they sprang to their feet at once, determined to make one last appeal, and then to sell their lives as dearly as they could.
Eustace started back at the unexpected apparition; but a second glance showed him Amyas's mighty bulk; and he spoke calmly--
“You see, madam, I did not call without need. Welcome, good cousins. My charity, as you perceive, has found means to outstrip your craft; while the fair lady, as was but natural, has been true to her assignation!”
“Liar!” cried Frank. “She never knew of our being--”
“Credat Judaeus!” answered Eustace; but, as he spoke, Amyas burst through the bushes at him. There was no time to be lost; and ere the giant could disentangle himself from the boughs and shrubs, Eustace had slipped off his long cloak, thrown it over Amyas's head, and ran up the alley shouting for help.
Mad with rage, Amyas gave chase: but in two minutes more Eustace was safe among the ranks of the negroes, who came shouting and jabbering down the path.
He rushed back. Frank was just ending some wild appeal to Rose--
“Your conscience! your religion!--”
“No, never! I can face the chance of death, but not the loss of him. Go! for God's sake, leave me!”
“You are lost, then,--and I have ruined you!”
“Come off, now or never,” cried Amyas, clutching him by the arm, and dragging him away like a child.
“You forgive me?” cried he.
“Forgive you?” and she burst into tears again.
Frank burst into tears also.
“Let me go back, and die with her--Amyas!--my oath!--my honor!” and he struggled to turn back.
Amyas looked back too, and saw her standing calmly, with her hands folded across her breast, awaiting Eustace and the servants; and he half turned to go back also. Both saw how fearfully appearances had put her into Eustace's power. Had he not a right to suspect that they were there by her appointment; that she was going to escape with them? And would not Eustace use his power? The thought of the Inquisition crossed their minds. “Was that the threat which Eustace had whispered?” asked he of Frank.
“It was,” groaned Frank, in answer.
For the first and last time in his life, Amyas Leigh stood irresolute.
“Back, and stab her to the heart first!” said Frank, struggling to escape from him.
Oh, if Amyas were but alone, and Frank safe home in England! To charge the whole mob, kill her, kill Eustace, and then cut his way back again to the ship, or die,--what matter? as he must die some day,--sword in hand! But Frank!--and then flashed before his eyes his mother's hopeless face; then rang in his ears his mother's last bequest to him of that frail treasure. Let Rose, let honor, let the whole world perish, he must save Frank. See! the negroes were up with her now--past her--away for life! and once more he dragged his brother down the hill, and through the wicket, only just in time; for the whole gang of negroes were within ten yards of them in full pursuit.
“Frank,” said he, sharply, “if you ever hope to see your mother again, rouse yourself, man, and fight!” And, without waiting for an answer, he turned, and charged up-hill upon his pursuers, who saw the long bright blade, and fled instantly.
Again he hurried Frank down the hill; the path wound in zigzags, and he feared that the negroes would come straight over the cliff, and so cut off his retreat: but the prickly cactuses were too much for them, and they were forced to follow by the path, while the brothers (Frank having somewhat regained his senses) turned every now and then to menace them: but once on the rocky path, stones began to fly fast; small ones fortunately, and wide and wild for want of light--but when they reached the pebble-beach? Both were too proud to run; but, if ever Amyas prayed in his life, he prayed for the last twenty yards before he reached the water-mark.
“Now, Frank! down to the boat as hard as you can run, while I keep the curs back.”
“Amyas! what do you take me for? My madness brought you hither: your devotion shall not bring me back without you.”
“Together, then!”
And putting Frank's arm through his, they hurried down, shouting to their men.
The boat was not fifty yards off: but fast travelling over the pebbles was impossible, and long ere half the distance was crossed, the negroes were on the beach, and the storm burst. A volley of great quartz pebbles whistled round their heads.
“Come on, Frank! for life's sake! Men, to the rescue! Ah! what was that?”
The dull crash of a pebble against Frank's fair head! Drooping like Hyacinthus beneath the blow of the quoit, he sank on Amyas's arm. The giant threw him over his shoulder, and plunged blindly on,--himself struck again and again.
“Fire, men! Give it the black villains!”
The arquebuses crackled from the boat in front. What were those dull thuds which answered from behind? Echoes? No. Over his head the caliver-balls went screeching. The governors' guard have turned out, followed them to the beach, fixed their calivers, and are firing over the negroes' heads, as the savages rush down upon the hapless brothers.
If, as all say, there are moments which are hours, how many hours was Amyas Leigh in reaching that boat's bow? Alas! the negroes are there as soon as he, and the guard, having left their calivers, are close behind them, sword in hand. Amyas is up to his knees in water--battered with stones--blinded with blood. The boat is swaying off and on against the steep pebble-bank: he clutches at it--misses--falls headlong--rises half-choked with water: but Frank is still in his arms. Another heavy blow--a confused roar of shouts, shots, curses--a confused mass of negroes and English, foam and pebbles--and he recollects no more.
* * * * *
He is lying in the stern-sheets of the boat; stiff, weak, half blind with blood. He looks up; the moon is still bright overhead: but they are away from the shore now, for the wave-crests are dancing white before the land-breeze, high above the boat's side. The boat seems strangely empty. Two men are pulling instead of six! And what is this lying heavy across his chest? He pushes, and is answered by a groan. He puts his hand down to rise, and is answered by another groan.
“What's this?”
“All that are left of us,” says Simon Evans of Clovelly.
“All?” The bottom of the boat seemed paved with human bodies. “Oh God! oh God!” moans Amyas, trying to rise. “And where--where is Frank? Frank!”
“Mr. Frank!” cries Evans. There is no answer.
“Dead?” shrieks Amyas. “Look for him, for God's sake, look!” and struggling from under his living load, he peers into each pale and bleeding face.
“Where is he? Why don't you speak, forward there?”
“Because we have naught to say, sir,” answers Evans, almost surlily.
Frank was not there.
“Put the boat about! To the shore!” roars Amyas.
“Look over the gunwale, and judge for yourself, sir!”
The waves are leaping fierce and high before a furious land-breeze. Return is impossible.
“Cowards! villains! traitors! hounds! to have left him behind.”
“Listen you to me, Captain Amyas Leigh,” says Simon Evans, resting on his oar; “and hang me for mutiny, if you will, when we're aboard, if we ever get there. Isn't it enough to bring us out to death (as you knew yourself, sir, for you're prudent enough) to please that poor young gentleman's fancy about a wench; but you must call coward an honest man that have saved your life this night, and not a one of us but has his wound to show?”
Amyas was silent; the rebuke was just.
“I tell you, sir, if we've hove a stone out of this boat since we got off, we've hove two hundredweight, and, if the Lord had not fought for us, she'd have been beat to noggin-staves there on the beach.”
“How did I come here, then?”
“Tom Hart dragged you in out of five feet water, and then thrust the boat off, and had his brains beat out for reward. All were knocked down but us two. So help me God, we thought that you had hove Mr. Frank on board just as you were knocked down, and saw William Frost drag him in.”
But William Frost was lying senseless in the bottom of the boat. There was no explanation. After all, none was needed.
“And I have three wounds from stones, and this man behind me as many more, beside a shot through his shoulder. Now, sir, be we cowards?”
“You have done your duty,” said Amyas, and sank down in the boat, and cried as if his heart would break; and then sprang up, and, wounded as he was, took the oar from Evans's hands. With weary work they made the ship, but so exhausted that another boat had to be lowered to get them alongside.
The alarm being now given, it was hardly safe to remain where they were; and after a stormy and sad argument, it was agreed to weigh anchor and stand off and on till morning; for Amyas refused to leave the spot till he was compelled, though he had no hope (how could he have?) that Frank might still be alive. And perhaps it was well for them, as will appear in the next chapter, that morning did not find them at anchor close to the town.
However that may be, so ended that fatal venture of mistaken chivalry.