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Title: The Draytons and the Davenants
A story of the Civil Wars
Author: Elizabeth Rundle Charles
Release date: March 29, 2025 [eBook #75740]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: M. W. Dodd, 1869
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DRAYTONS AND THE DAVENANTS ***
THE
Draytons and the Davenants
_A STORY OF_
THE CIVIL WARS.
_By the Author of_
"CHRONICLES OF THE SCHONBERG-COTTA FAMILY,"
ETC., ETC.
New York:
_M. W. DODD, 506 BROADWAY._
1869.
CARD FROM THE AUTHOR.
"The Author of the 'Schonberg-Cotta Family' wishes it to be generally
known among the readers of her books in America, that the American
Editions issued by Mr. M. W. Dodd, of New York, alone have the
Author's sanction."
NOTICE.
_This Volume will be followed next year by
a supplementary Volume covering the
period of the Commonwealth and
the Restoration, and embracing
incidents connected with
the Early History
of this country._
_Works by the same Author._
CHRONICLES OF THE SCHONBERG-COTTA FAMILY.
THE EARLY DAWN.
DIARY OF KITTY TREVYLYAN.
WINIFRED BERTRAM.
THE DRAYTONS AND THE DAVENANTS.
ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA.
_Each of the above belongs to the "Cotta Family Series," and are
uniform in size and binding._
POEMS--"The Women of the Gospels," etc. _With
other Poems not before published. 1 Vol. 16mo._
MARY, THE HANDMAID OF THE LORD.
_One Vol. 16mo._
THE SONG WITHOUT WORDS.
_Dedicated to Children. Square 16mo_
PUBLISHED BY M. W. DODD,
_By arrangement with the Author._
Contents
Introductory
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
THE
Draytons and the Davenants
INTRODUCTORY.
Yesterday at noon, when the house and all the land were still, and
the men, with the lads and lasses, were away at the harvesting, and I
sat alone, with barred doors, for fear of the Indians (who have of
late shown themselves unfriendly), I chanced to look up from my
spinning-wheel through the open window, across the creek on which our
house stands. And something, I scarce know what, carried me back
through the years and across the seas to the old house on the borders
of the Fen Country, in the days of my childhood. It may have been
the quiet rustling of the sleepy air in the long grasses by the
water-side that wafted my spirit back to where the English winds sigh
and sough among the reeds on the borders of the fens; it may have
been the shining of the smooth water, furrowed by the track of the
water-fowl, that set my memory down beside the broad Mere, whose
gleam we could see from my chamber window. It may have been the
smell of this year's hay, which came in in sweet, soft gusts through
the lattice, that floated me up to the top of the tiny haystack, made
of the waste grass in the orchard at old Netherby Manor, at the foot
of which Roger, my brother, used to stand while I turned up the hay,
assisted by our Cousin Placidia (when she was condescending), and by
our Aunt Gretel, my mother's sister, whenever we had need of her.
Most probably it was the hay. For, as the excellent Mr. Bunyan has
illustriously set forth in his work on the Holy War, the soul hath
five gates through which she holdeth parlance with the outer world.
And correspondent with these outer gates from the sensible world in
space, meseemeth, are as many inner gates into the inner, invisible
world of thought and time; which inner gates open simultaneously with
the outer, by the same spring. But of all the mystic springs which
unlock the wondrous inward world, none act with such swift, secret
magic as those of the Gate of Odors. There stealeth in unobserved
some delicate perfume of familiar field flower or garden herb, and
straightway, or ere she is aware, the soul is afar off in the world
of the past, gathering posies among the fields of childhood, or
culling herbs in the old corner of the old garden, to be laid, by
hands long since cold, in familiar chambers long since tenanted by
other owners.
Wherefore, I deem, it was the new, sweet smell of our New England hay
which more than anything carried me back to the old house in Old
England, and the days so long gone by.
With my heart in far-off days, I continued my spinning, as women are
wont, the hand moving the more swiftly for the speed wherewith the
thoughts travel, until my thoughts and my work came to a pause
together by the flax on my distaff being exhausted. I went to an
upper chamber for a fresh stock, and while there my eye lighted on an
old chest, in the depths whereof lay many little volumes of an old
journal written by my hand through a series of buried years.
An irresistible attraction drew me to them; and as I knelt before the
old chest, and turned over these yellow leaves, in some cases, eaten
with worms, and read the writing--the earlier portions of it in
large, laborious, childish characters, as if each letter were a
solemn symbol of weighty import--the later scrawled hastily in the
snatched intervals of a busy and tangled life--I seemed to be looking
through a series of stained windows into the halls of an ancient
palace. On the windows were the familiar portraits of a little eager
girl, and a young maiden familiar to me, yet strange. But the
paintings were also window-panes; and, after the first glance, the
painted panes seemed to vanish, and I saw only the palace chambers on
which they looked. Not empty chambers, or shadowy, or silent, but
solid, and fresh, and vivid, and full of the stir of much life; so
that, when I laid down those old pages, and looked out through the
declining light over these new shores, across this new sea, towards
the far-off England which still lives beyond, it seemed for a moment
as if the sun setting behind the wide western woods, the strip of
golden corn-fields, the reapers returning slowly over the hill, the
Indian burial-mounds beside the creek, the trim new house, my old
quiet self, were the shadows, and that Old World, in which my spirit
had been sojourning, still the living and the real.
Neighbor Hartop's cheery voice roused me out of my dream, and I
hurried down to open the door, and to set out the harvest supper.
But as I look at the old crumpled papers again to-day, the past lives
again once more before me, and I will not let it die.
There is an hour in the day when the sun has set, and all the dazzle
of day is gone, and the dusk of night has not set in, when I think
the world looks larger and clearer than at any other time. The sky
seems higher and more heavenly than at other hours; and yet the
earth, tinted here and there on its high places with heavenly color,
seems more to belong to heaven. The little landscape within our
horizon becomes more manifestly a portion of a wider world. And is
there not such an hour in life? Before it passes let me use the
light, and fix in my mind the scenes which will so soon vanish into
dreams and silence.
The first entry in those old journals of mine is:
"_The twenty-eighth day of March, in the year of our Lord sixteen
hundred and thirty-seven._--On this day, twelve years since, King
Charles was proclaimed King at Whitehall Gate, and in Cheapside; the
while the rain fell in heavy showers. My father heard the herald;
and my Aunt Dorothy well remembers the rain, because it spoiled a
slashed satin doublet of my father's (the last he ever bought, having
since then been habited more soberly); also because many of the
people said the weather was of evil promise for the new reign. But
father saith that is a superstitious notion, unworthy of Christian
people.
"Also my father was present at the king's coronation, on the 5th of
February in the following year. Our French Queen would not enter the
Abbey on account of her Popish faith. When the king was presented
bareheaded to the people, all were silent, none crying God save the
King, until the Earl of Arundel bade them; which my father saith was
a worse omen than if the clouds poured down rivers."
These in large characters, each letter formed with conscientious
pains.
The second entry is diverse from the first. It runs thus:
"_April the tenth._--The brindled cow hath died, leaving an orphan
calf. Aunt Gretel saith I may bring up the calf for my own, with the
help of Tib the dairy-woman."
The diversity between these entries recalls many things to me. On
the day before the first entry, father brought to Roger my brother,
my Cousin Placidia, and me, three small books stitched neatly
together, and told us these were for us to use to note down any
remarkable events therein. "For," said he, "we live in strange and
notable times, and you children may see things before you are grown,
yea, and perchance do or suffer such things as history is made of."
The stipulation was, that we were each to write independently, and
not to borrow from the other; which was a hard covenant for me, who
seldom then meditated or did anything without the co-operation or
sanction of Roger.
After much solitary pondering, therefore, I arrived at the conclusion
that history especially concerns kings and queens, and lesser people
only as connected with them. That is, when there are kings and
queens. In the old Greek history I remembered there were heroes who
were not kings, but I supposed they did instead. But the English
history was all made up of what happened to the kings. One was shot
while hunting; another was murdered at Berkeley Castle; the little
princes were smothered in the Tower. King Edward III. gained a great
victory at Creçy in France; King Henry V. gained another at
Agincourt. Of course other people were concerned in these things.
Sir Walter Tyrrel shot the arrow by accident that killed King
William, and some wicked people must have murdered King Edward and
the little princes on purpose. And, of course, there were armies who
helped King Edward and King Henry to gain their victories; but none
of these people would have been in history, I thought, except as
connected with the kings. At the same time I thought it was of no
use to relate things which no one belonging to me had had anything to
do with, because any one else could have done that without my taking
the trouble to write a note-book at all. Therefore it seemed to me
that my father, and even my father's slashed satin doublet, fairly
became historical by having been present at the King's proclamation,
and Aunt Dorothy by having commented thereon.
The second entry was caused by an entirely different theory of
history, having its origin in a talk with Roger. Roger said that we
never can tell what things are historical until afterwards, and that
therefore the only way was to note down what honestly interests us.
If these things prove afterwards to be things which interest the
world, our story of them becomes part of the world's story, and, as
such, history to the people who care for us. But to note down feeble
echoes of far-off great events, in which we think we ought to be
interested, is no human speech at all, Roger thought, but mere
monkey's imitative chattering. Every one, Roger thinks, sees
everything just a little differently from any one else, and therefore
if every one would describe truly the little bit they do see, in that
way, by degrees, we might have a perfect picture. But to copy what
others have seen is simply to depart with every fresh copy a little
further from the original. If, for instance, said he, the nurse of
Julius Cæsar had told us nursery stories of what Julius Cæsar did
when he was a little boy, it would have been history; but the
opinions of Julius Cæsar's nurse on the politics of the Roman
republic would probably not have been history at all, but idle tattle.
With respect to kings and queens being the only true subjects for
history, also, Roger was very scornful. He had lately been paying a
visit to Mr. John Hampden, Mr. Oliver Cromwell, and others of my
father's friends, and he had returned full of indignation against the
tyranny of the court and the prelates. The nation, he said wise men
thought, was not made for the king, but the king for the nation.
And, to say nothing of the Greek history, the Bible history was
certainly not filled up with kings and queens, but with shepherds,
herdsmen, preachers, and soldiers; or if with kings, with kings who
had been shepherds and soldiers, and who were saints and heroes as
well as kings.
All which reasoning decided me to make my next entry concerning the
calf of the brindled cow, which at that time was the subject in the
world which honestly interested me the most. If my father, or Roger,
or Cousin Placidia, or Aunt Gretel, ever became historical personages
(and, as Roger said, who could tell?), then anecdotes concerning the
calf of the cow which my father owned and Aunt Gretel cherished, and
which Cousin Placidia thought it childish to care so much about,
might become, in a secondary sense, historical also. At all events,
I resolved I would not be like Julius Cæsar's nurse, babbling of
politics.
The next entry was:
"_August_ 4, 1637.--Dr. Antony has spent the evening with us, and is
to remain some days, at father's entreaty, to recruit his strength;
Aunt Dorothy having knowledge of medicinal herbs, and Aunt Gretel of
savory dishes, which may be of use to him. He hath narrowly escaped
the jail-sickness, having of late visited many afflicted good people
in the prisons through the country, as is his custom. 'Sick and in
prison,' Dr. Antony saith, 'and ye visited me,' is plain enough to
read by the dimmest light, whatever else is hard to understand. He
told us of two strange things which happened lately. At least they
seem very strange to me.
"In the Palace Yard at Westminster, on the 30th of last June (while
Roger and I were making hay in the pleasant sunshine of the orchard),
Dr. Antony saw three gentlemen stand in the pillory. The pillory is
a wooden frame set up on a platform, where wicked people are fastened
helplessly like savage dogs, with their heads and hands coming
through holes, to make them look ridiculous, that people may mock and
jeer at them. But father and Dr. Anthony did not think these
gentlemen wicked, only at worst a little hasty in speech. And the
people did not think them ridiculous; they did not mock and jeer at
them, but kept very still, or wept. Their names were Mr. Prynne, a
gentleman at the bar, Dr. John Bastwick, a physician; and Mr. Burton,
a clergyman of a parish in London. There they stood many hours while
the hangman came to each of them in turn and sawed off their ears
with a rough knife, and then burnt in two cruel letters on their
cheeks, S.L., for seditious libeler. Dr. Anthony did not say the
three gentlemen made one cry or complaint, but bore themselves like
brave men. But the bravest of all, I think, was Mrs. Bastwick, the
doctor's wife. She stayed on the scaffold, and bore to see all her
husband's pain without a word or moan, lest she should make him
flinch, and then received his ears in her lap, and kissed his poor
wounded face before all the people. Sweet, brave heart! I would
fain have her home amongst us here, and kiss her faithful hands like
a queen's, and lay my head on her brave heart, as if it were my
mother's! The sufferers made no moan; but the people broke their
pitiful silence once with an angry shout, and many times with low,
hushed groans, as if the pain and shame were theirs (Dr. Anthony
said), and they would remember it. And Mr. Prynne, when the irons
were burning his face, said to the executioner, 'Cut me, tear me, I
fear not thee; I fear the fire of hell.' Mr. Burton spoke to the
people of God and his truth, and how it was worth while to suffer
rather than give up that. And at last he nearly fainted, but when he
was borne away into a house near, he said, with good cheer, 'It is
too hot to last.' (He meant the persecution.) But the three
gentlemen are now shut up in three prisons--in Launceston, Lancaster,
and Caernarvon. And father and Dr. Antony say it is Archbishop Laud
who ordered it all to be done. But could not the king have stopped
it if he liked?
"But will Roger and I ever turn over the hay again in the pleasant
June sunshine, without thinking how it burned down on those poor,
maimed and wounded gentlemen? And one day I do hope I may see brave
Mistress Bastwick and tell her how I love and honor her, and how the
thought of her will help me to be brave and patient more than a
hundred sermons.
"Dr. Antony's other story was of one Jenny or Janet Geddes, not a
gentlewoman, for she kept an apple stall in Edinburgh streets, and,
moreover, does not appear to have used good language at all. The
Scotch, it seems, do not like bishops, and, indeed, will not have
bishops. But Archbishop Laud and the king will make them. On
Sunday, the 23d of last July, a month since, one of Archbishop Laud's
bishops began the collect for the day in St. Giles's Cathedral,
Edinburgh. Jenny Geddes had brought her folding stool (on which she
sat by her apple stall, I suppose) into the church, and when the
bishop came out in his robes (which Archbishop Laud likes of many
colors, while the Scotch, it seems, will have nothing but black), she
took up her stool and flung it at the bishop's head, calling the
service, the mass and the bishop a thief, and wishing him very ill
wishes in a curious Scottish dialect, which, I suppose, I do not
quite understand; for it sounded like swearing, and if Jenny Geddes
was a good woman (although not a gentlewoman) she would scarcely, I
should think, swear, at least not in church. Whether the bishop was
hurt or not, no one seems to know or care. I suppose the stool did
not reach his head. But it stopped the service. For all the people
rose in great fury, not against Jenny Geddes, but against the bishop,
and the archbishop, and the prayer-book, and against all bishops and
all prayers in books, not in Edinburgh only, but throughout the land.
Which shows, father said, that a great deal of angry talk had been
going on beforehand in the streets around Jenny Geddes' apple stall.
There must always be some angry person, father said, to throw the
folding stool, but no one heeds the angry person unless there is
something to be angry about."
A very long entry, which lost me many hours and many pages.
And about the passages in my own history which it led to, not a word.
Indeed, throughout these journals I notice that it is more what they
recall than what they say which brings back the past to me. I wonder
if it is not thus with most diaries. For to keep to Roger's rule of
writing the things which really interest us at the time seems to me
scarcely possible; because at the time we scarcely know what things
are most deeply interesting us, and if we do, they are the very
things we cannot write about. Underneath the things we see and think
and speak about are the great, dim, silent places out of which we
ourselves are growing into being, and where God is at work. The
things we are beginning to see we can not see, the things we are
feeling without knowing what we feel, the dim, struggling thoughts we
cannot utter or even think. Without form and void is the state of a
world being created. When the world is created, the creation is a
history, and can be written. While it is being created, it is chaos,
and from without can only be described as without form and void--from
within, in the chaos, not at all. The Creator only understands
chaos, and knows the chaos before the new creation from the mere
waste and ruin of the old.
To understand the past is only partly possible for the wisest men.
To understand the present is only possible to God.
Because to understand the present would be to foresee the future. To
see through the chaos would be to foresee the new creation.
Wherefore it seems to me all diaries are of value not as records, but
as suggestions. And all self-examination resolves itself at last
into prayer, saying, "What I see not, teach Thou me."
"Search me and try me, and see Thou, and lead Thou me."
The passages in my history that this story of Dr. Antony led to,
arise before me as clearly as if they happened yesterday, although in
the Journal not a hint of them is given.
The Sunday after Dr. Antony had told us those terrible things about
the sufferings in the pillory, Roger and I had gone to our usual
Sunday afternoon perch in an apple-tree in the corner of the orchard
furthest from the house. We had taken with us for our contemplation
a very terrible delineation, which was the nearest approach to a
picture Aunt Dorothy would let us have on the Sabbath-day. This she
permitted us, partly, I believe, because it was not the likeness of
anything in heaven or earth (nor, I hope, under the earth), and
partly on account of the very awful thoughts it was calculated to
inspire.
It was a huge branching thing like our old family tree. But at the
root of the tree, where would be the name of Adam or Noah, or Æneas
of Troy, or Cassibelaun, or whoever else was recognized as the head
of the family, stood the sacred name of the Holy Trinity. From this
trunk forked off two leading branches, one representing the wicked
and the other the just, with the words written along them to show
that the very same mercies and means of grace which produce
repentance and faith and love in the hearts of the just, produce
bitterness and false security and hatred of God in the hearts of the
wicked. Further and further the branches diverged until one ended in
an angel with wings, and the other in a mouth of a horrible hobgoblin
with a whale's mouth, a dragon's claws, and a lion's teeth, and both
were united by the lines,--
"Whether to heaven or hell you bend,
God will have glory in the end."*
* A similar tree is to be seen in the beginning of Bunyan'a Pilgrim's
Progress, in the edition of 1698.
Most terrible was this delineation to me, sitting that sunny autumn
day in the apple-tree, especially because if you were once on the
wrong branch, it was not at all pointed out how you were ever to get
on the right. All seemed as irrevocable and inevitable as that point
in our own pedigree where Edwy, the eldest son, became a Benedictine
monk and vanished into a thin flourish, and Walter, the second son,
married Adalgiva, heiress of Netherby Manor, and branched off into
us. And it looked so terribly (with unutterable terror I felt it) as
if it mattered as little to the Holy Trinity what became of any one
of us, as to Cassibelaun or Noah what became of his descendants, Edwy
or Walter.
So it happened that Roger and I sat very awe-stricken and still in
our perch in the apple-tree, while the wind fluttered the green
leaves around us, and the sunbeams ripened the rosy apples for their
work, and then danced in and out on the grass below for their play.
And I remember as if it were yesterday how the thought shuddered
through my heart, that the same sun which was shining on Roger and
me, on that last 30th of June, making hay in the orchard, was at that
very same moment scorching those poor wounded gentlemen in the
pillory in the Palace Yard, and not losing a whit of its glory to us
by all the anguish it was inflicting, like a blazing furnace, on
them. And if this fearful tree were true, did it not seem as if it
were the same with God?
I sat some time silent under the weight of this dread. It made me
shiver with cold in the sunshine, and at length I could keep it in no
longer, and said to Roger, in a whisper, for I was half afraid to
hear my own words,--
"Oh, Roger, why did not God kill the devil?"
At that moment something shook the tree, and I clung to Roger in
terror. I could not see what it was from among the thick leaves
where we were sitting. I trembled at the echo of my own voice. The
dark thoughts within seemed to have brought night with its nameless
terrors into the heart of day. But Roger leant down from the branch,
and said,--
"Cousin Placidia! For shame! You shook the tree on purpose. I
heard the apples fall on the ground, and you are picking them up.
That is cheating."
For the fallen fruit was the right of us, children.
Said Placidia in a smooth, unmoved voice,--
"I came against the stem of the tree by accident, and perhaps I did
shake it a little more than I need, when I heard what Olive said.
They were very wicked words, and I shall tell Aunt Dorothy."
"You may tell any one you like," said Roger indignantly. "Olive did
not mean to say anything wrong. You are cruel enough to sit in the
Star-chamber, Placidia."
"She is exactly like our gray cat," he continued to me, as she glided
away, "with her soft, noiseless ways, and her stealthy, steady
following of her own interests. When the fowl-house was burnt down
last year, and the turkeys were screaming, and the hens cackling, and
every one flying hither and thither trying to save somebody or
something, I saw the gray cat quietly licking her lips in a corner
over a poor singed chicken. I believe she thought the whole thing
had been set on foot to roast her supper. And Placidia would have
done precisely the same. If London were on fire, and she in it, I
believe she would contrive to get her supper roasted on the cinders.
And the provoking thing is, she thinks no one sees."
Roger was not often vehement in speech, but Placidia was our standing
grievance, his and mine. There were certain little unfairnesses, not
quite cheating, certain little meannesses, not quite dishonesties,
and certain little prevarications, not quite lies, which always
excited his greatest wrath, especially when, as often happened, I was
the loser or the sufferer by them.
"Do you think she will tell Aunt Dorothy?" I said, for that very
morning Placidia and I had had a quarrel, she having pinched my arm
where it could not be seen, and I having to my shame bitten her
finger where it could be seen.
"I don't know, and I don't care," said Roger loftily. "What is the
good of minding? I suppose we must all go through a certain quantity
of punishment, Olive, and it is to be hoped it will do us good for
the future, if we did not deserve it by the past. At least Aunt
Dorothy says so. Go on with what you were saying."
So I recurred to my question.
"Oh, Roger, I wish I knew why God did not destroy the devil in the
beginning, or at least not let him come into the garden. Because,
then, nothing would have gone wrong, would it? Eve would not have
eaten the fruit, Mr. Prynne and Dr. Bastwick would not have been set
in the pillory. And I should not, most likely, have quarrelled with
Placidia, because, I suppose, Placidia would not have been provoking."
"I wish I knew why my Father lets Cousin Placidia live with us, and
always be making us do wrong," said Roger.
"She is an orphan, and some one must take care of her, you know," I
said. "Besides, surely, Father has reasons, only we don't always
know."
"And I suppose God has reasons," said Roger reverently, "only we
don't always know."
"But the devil is all bad," said I, "and will never be better; and
Cousin Placidia may. It could not be for the devil's own sake God
did not kill him, for he only gets worse; and I do not see how it
could be for ours."
"The devil was not always the devil, Olive," said Roger, after
thinking a little while. "He was an angel at first."
"Then, O Roger," said I eagerly, for the perplexity lay heavy on my
heart, "why did not God stop the devil from ever being the devil?
That would have been better than anything."
Roger made no reply.
"It cannot be because God could not," I pursued, "because Aunt
Dorothy says He can do everything. And it cannot be because He would
not, because Aunt Gretel says He hates to see any one do wrong or be
unhappy. But there must be some reason; and if we only knew it, I
think everything else would become quite plain."
"I do not see the reason, Olive," said Roger, after a long pause. "I
cannot see it in the least. I remember hearing two or three people
discuss it once with Father and Aunt Dorothy; and I think they all
thought they explained it. But no one thought any one else did. And
they used exceedingly long and learned words, longer and more learned
the further they went on. But they could not agree at all, and at
last they became angry, so that I never heard the end. But in two or
three years, you know, I am going to Oxford, and then I will try and
find out the reason. And when I have found it out, Olive, I will be
sure to tell you."
"But that is not at all the most perplexing thing to me, Olive," he
began, after a little silence; "because, after all, if we or the
angels were to be persons and not things, I don't see how it could be
helped that we might do wrong if we liked. The great puzzle to me
is, why we do anything, or if we can help doing anything we do; that
is, if we are really persons at all, and not a kind of puppets."
"Of course we are not puppets, Roger," said I. "Of course we can
help doing things if we like. I do not think that is any puzzle at
all. I could have helped biting Placidia's finger if I had
liked--that is, if I had tried. And that is what makes it wrong."
"But you did not like it," said Roger, "and so you did not help it.
And what was to make you like to help it, if you did not?"
"If I had been good, I should not have liked to hurt Placidia,
however provoking she was," I said.
"And what is to be good?" said he.
"To like to do right," I said. "I think that is to be good."
"But what is to make you like to do right?"
"Being good, to be sure," said I, feeling myself helplessly drawn
into the whirlpool.
"That is going round and round, and coming to nothing," said Roger.
"But leaving alone about right and wrong, what is to make you do
anything?"
"Because I choose," said I, "or some one else chooses."
"But what makes you choose?" said he. "What made you choose, for
instance, to come here this afternoon?"
"Because you wished it, and because it was a fine afternoon; and we
always do when it is," said I.
"Then you chose it because of something in you which makes you like
to please me, and because the sun was shining. Neither of which you
could help; therefore you did not really choose at all."
"I _did_ choose, Roger," said I. "I might have felt cross, and
chosen to disappoint you, if I had liked."
"But you are not cross; you are good-tempered, on the whole, so you
could not help liking to please me."
"But I am cross sometimes with Placidia," I said.
"That is because, as Aunt Gretel says, your temper is like what our
mother's was, quick but sweet," said he; "and that is a deeper puzzle
still, because it goes further back than you and your character, to
our mother's character, that is to say; and if to hers, no one can
say how much further, probably as far as Eve."
"But sometimes," said I, "for instance, when you talk like this, my
temper is tempted to be cross even with you, Roger. But I choose to
keep my temper, and it must be I myself that choose, and not my
temper or my mother's."
"That is because of the two motives, the one which inclines you to
keep your temper is stronger than the one which inclines you to lose
it," said he. "But there is always something before your choice to
make you choose, so that really you must choose what you do, and
therefore you do not really choose at all."
"But I do choose, Roger," said I. "I choose this instant to jump
down from this tree--so--and go home."
"That proves nothing," said he, following me down from the tree with
provoking coolness; "you chose to jump down, because there is a
wilful feeling in you which made you choose it, and that is part of
your character, and probably can be traced back to Eve, and proves
exactly what I say."
"I am not free to do right or wrong, or anything, Roger!" I said.
"Then I might as well be a cat, or a tree, or a stone."
"I suppose you might, if you were," said Roger drily.
"Is there no way out of the puzzle, Roger?" I said.
"I do not see any," he said; "at least not by thinking. But there
seems to me no end to the puzzles, if one begins to think."
He did not seem to mind it at all, but rather to enjoy it, as if it
were a mere tossing of mental balls and catching them.
But I, on the other hand, was in great bewilderment and heaviness,
for I felt like being a ball myself, tossed helplessly round and
round, without seeing any beginning or end to it, and it made me very
unhappy.
We came back to the house at supper-time with a vague sense of some
judgment hanging over our heads. Aunt Dorothy met us in the porch
with a switch in her hand.
"Naughty children," said she, "Placidia says she heard you using
profane language in the apple-tree, taking God's holy name in vain."
"I was not speaking so much of God, Aunt Dorothy," said I in
confusion, "as of the devil."
"Worse again," said Aunt Dorothy, "that is swearing downright. It is
as bad as the cavaliers at the Court. Hold out your hand, Roger;
and, Olive, go to bed without supper."
Roger scorned any self-defence. He held out his hand, and received
three sharp switches without flinching. Only at the end he said,--
"Now I shall tell my father how Placidia stole the apples and get
justice done to Olive."
"You will tell your father nothing, sir," said Aunt Dorothy. "I have
sent Placidia to bed three hours ago for tale-bearing, and given her
the chapter in the Proverbs to learn. And you will sit down and
learn the same, and both of you say it to me to-morrow morning before
breakfast."
This was what Aunt Dorothy considered even-handed justice. Time, she
said, was too precious to spend in searching out the rights of
children's quarrels, and human nature being depraved as it is, all
accusations had probably some ground of truth, and all accusers some
wrong motive. And in all quarrels there is always, said she, fault
on both sides. She therefore punished accused and accuser alike,
without further investigation. I have observed something of the same
plan pursued since by some persons who aspire to the character of
impartial historians. But it never struck me as quite fair in the
historians or in Aunt Dorothy. However, I must say, in Aunt
Dorothy's case, this mode of administering justice had a tendency to
check accusations. It must have been an unusually strong desire of
vengeance, or sense of wrong, which induced us to draw up an
indictment which was sure to be visited with equal severity on
plaintiff and defendant. And although our sense of justice was not
satisfied, and Roger and I in consequence formed ourselves into a
permanent Committee of Grievances, the peace of the household was
perhaps on the whole promoted by the system. The embittering effects
were, moreover, softened in our case by the presence of other
counteracting elements.
I had not been long in bed according to the decrees of Justice in the
person of Aunt Dorothy, when Mercy, in the person of Aunt Gretel,
came to bind up my wounds.
"Olive, my little one," said she, sitting down on the side of my bed,
"what hast thou been saying? Thou wouldst not surely say anything
ungrateful against the dear Lord and Saviour?"
Whereupon I buried my face in the bed-clothes, and sobbed so that the
bed shook under me.
She took my hand, and bending over me, said tenderly,--
"Poor little one! Thou must not break thy heart. The good Lord will
forgive, Olive, will forgive all. Tell me what it is, darling, and
don't be afraid."
Still I sobbed on, when she said,--
"If thou canst not tell me, tell the dear Saviour. He is gentler
than poor Aunt Gretel, and knows thee better. Only do not be afraid
of Him, nothing grieves Him like that, sweet heart; anything but
that."
Then I grew a little calmer, and moaned out,--
"Indeed, Aunt Gretel, I did not mean anything wicked. But it is so
hard to understand. There are so many things I cannot make out. And
oh, if I should be on the wrong side of the tree after all! If I
should be on the wrong side of the tree!"
And at the thought my sobs burst forth afresh.
Aunt Gretel was sorely perplexed. She said--
"What tree, little one? Where is thy poor brain wandering?"
"The tree with God at the beginning," said I, "and with heaven at one
end and hell at the other, and no way to cross over if once you get
wrong, and God never seeming to mind."
"A very wicked tree," said Aunt Gretel. "I never heard of it. The
only tree in the Bible is the Tree of Life. And of that the Blessed
Lord will give freely to every one who comes--the fruit for life and
the leaves for healing. Never mind the other, sweet heart."
"If there were only a way across!" said I, "and if I could be sure
God did care!"
"There is a way across, my lamb," said she. "Only it is not a way.
It is but a step. It is a look. It is a touch. For the way across
is the blessed Saviour Himself. And He is always nearer than I am
now, if you could only see."
"And God does care," said I, "whether we are lost or saved?"
"Care! little Olive," said she. "Hast thou forgotten the manner and
the cross? That comes of trying to see back to the beginning. _He_
was in the beginning, sweet heart, but not thou or I! He is the
beginning every day and for ever to us. Look to Him. His face is
shining on you now, watching you tenderly as if it were your
mother's, my poor motherless lamb. Whatever else is dark, that is
plain. And you never meant to grieve or question Him! You did not
mean to say the darkness was in Him, Olive! You never meant that.
Put the darkness anywhere but there, sweet heart--anywhere but there.
There is darkness enough, in good sooth. But in Him is no darkness
at all." And then she murmured, half to herself, "It is very
strange, Dr. Luther made it all so plain, more than a hundred years
ago. And it seems as if it all had to be done over again."
"Didst thou say thy prayers, my lamb?" she added.
I had. But it was sweet to kneel down with Aunt Gretel again, with
her arms and her warm dress folded around me, and say the words after
her, the Our Father, and the prayer for father and Roger and all.
But when I came to ask a blessing on Cousin Placidia, my lips seemed
unable to frame the words.
"Thou didst not pray for thy cousin, Olive," said Aunt Gretel.
"She is so very difficult to love, Aunt Gretel," said I; "she often
makes me do wrong. And I bit her finger this morning."
Aunt Gretel shook her head.
"Poor little one," said she, "ah, yes! It is always hardest to
forgive those we have hurt."
"But she pinched my arm where no one could see," said I.
"It will not help thee to think of that, poor lamb," said Aunt
Gretel, "what thou hast to do is to forgive. Think of what will help
thee to do that."
"I can't think of anything that helps me," said I.
"Dost thou wish anything bad to happen to thy cousin?" said Aunt
Gretel, after a pause. "If thou couldst bring trouble on her by
praying for it, wouldst thou do it?"
"No, not from God," said I. "Of course I could not ask anything bad
from God."
"Then wouldst thou ask thy father to send her away, poor neglected
orphan child that she was?"
"No, no, Aunt Gretel," I said, "not that. But I should like to see
her punished by Aunt Dorothy."
"How much?" said Aunt Gretel.
"I am not sure. Only as much as she quite deserves."
"That would be a good deal for us all," said she; "perhaps even for
thee a little more than going to bed one night without supper."
"Then until she was good," said I.
"Thou wishest thy cousin to be good, then?" said Aunt Gretel. "Then
thou canst at least pray for that."
"It would make the house like the Garden of Eden, I think," I said,
"before the tempter came, if Placidia were only not so provoking."
"Would it?" said she, gravely. "Art thou then always so good? Then,
perhaps, thou canst ask that thy cousin's trespasses may be forgiven,
even if _thou_ canst not forgive her, and hast _none of thine own_ to
be forgiven!"
"O, Aunt Gretel." said I, suddenly perceiving her meaning, "I see it
all now! It is the bit of ice in my own heart that made everything
dark and cold to me. It is the bit of ice in my own heart!"
She smiled and folded me to her heart.
And then she prayed once more for Placidia the orphan, and for me,
and Roger, "that God in His great pity would bless us and forgive us,
and make us good and loving, and like Himself and His dear Son who
suffered for us and bore our sins."
And after that I did not so much care even whether Roger brought the
answer he promised from Oxford or not.
And it flashed on me for an instant, as if the answer to Roger's
other puzzle might come somehow from the same point; as if it
answered everything to the heart to think that light and not
darkness, love and not necessity, are at the innermost heart of all.
For love is at once perfect freedom and inevitable necessity.
But before I fell asleep, while Aunt Gretel was still sitting on the
bedside with her knitting, I heard her say to herself--
"Not so very strange--not so strange after all, although Dr. Luther
did make it all clear as sunshine more than a hundred years ago. It
is that bit of ice in the heart, that bit of ice that is always
freezing afresh in the heart."
But Aunt Dorothy, on a night's consideration, thought the affair of
the apple-tree too important to be passed over, as most of our
childish quarrels were, without troubling my father about them.
Accordingly the next morning we were summoned into my father's
private room, where he received his rents as a landlord, and
sentenced offenders as a magistrate, and kept his law-books, and many
other great hereditary folios on divinity, philosophy, and things in
general. A very solemn proceeding for me that morning, my conscience
oppressed with a sense of having done some wrong intentionally, and I
knew not how much more without intending it.
Gradually, Roger and I standing on the other side of the table, with
the law-books and the mathematical instruments my father was so fond
of between us, he drew from us what had been the subject of our
conversation.
Then, to my surprise, as we stood awaiting our sentence, he called me
gently to him, and, seating me on his knee, pointed out a paper
spread on a huge folio volume, which lay open before him. It was a
diagram of the sun and the planets, with the four moons of Jupiter,
the earth and the moon, complicated by circles and lines mysteriously
intersecting each other.
"Olive," said he, "be so good as to explain that to me. It is made
by a gentleman who learned about it from the great astronomer
Galileo, and is meant to explain how the earth and the sun are kept
in their places." I looked at the complication of figures and lines
and magical-looking signs, and then in his face to see what he could
mean.
"You do not understand it?" he said, as if he were surprised.
"Father," said I, "a little child like me!"
"And yet this is only a drawing of a little corner of the world,
Olive--the sun and the earth and a few of the planets in the nook of
the world in which we live. The whole universe is a good deal harder
to understand than this."
"Father," said I, ashamed and blushing, "indeed I never thought I
could understand these things--at least not yet; I only thought you
might, or some wise people somewhere."
"Olive," said he, in a low voice, tenderly and reverently, stroking
my head while he spoke, "before the great mysteries you and Roger
have fallen on, I can only wonder, and wait, and say like you,
'_Father, a little child like me!_' And I do not think the great
Galileo himself could do much more."
But to Roger he said, rising and laying his hand on his shoulder--
"Exercise your wits as much as you can, my boy; but there are two
kinds of roads I advise you for the most part to eschew. One kind
are the roads that lead to the edge of the great darkness which
skirts our little patch of light on every side. The other are the
roads that go in a circle, leading you round and round with much toil
to the point from which you started. I do not say, never travel on
these--you cannot always help it. But for the most part exercise
yourself on the roads which lead somewhere. The exercise is as good,
and the result better." And he was about to send us away.
But Aunt Dorothy was not at all satisfied. "That Signor Galileo was
a very dangerous person," she said. "He said the sun went round, and
the earth stood still, which was contrary at once to common sense,
the five senses, and Scripture; and if chits like Roger and me were
allowed to enter on such false philosophy at our age, where should we
have wandered at hers?"
"Not much further, Sister Dorothy," said my Father, "if they reached
the age of Methuselah. Not much further into the question, and not
much nearer the answer."
"I see no difficulty in the question at all," said Aunt Dorothy.
"The Almighty does everything because it is His will to do it. And
we can do nothing except He wills us to do it. Which answers Olive
and Roger at once. All doubts are sins, and ought to be crushed at
the beginning."
"How would you do this, Sister Dorothy?" asked my Father; "a good
many persons have tried it before and failed."
"How! The simplest thing in the world," said Aunt Dorothy. "In the
first place, set people to work, so that they have no time for such
foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions."
"A wholesome plan, which seems to be very generally pursued with
regard to the whole human race," said Father. "It is mercifully
provided that those who have leisure for such questions are few. But
what else would you do?"
"For the children there is the switch," said Aunt Dorothy. "They
would be thankful enough for it when they grew wiser."
"So think the Pope and Archbishop Laud," replied my Father; "and so
they set up the Inquisition and the Star Chamber."
"I have no fault to find with the Inquisition and the Star Chamber,"
said Aunt Dorothy, "if they would only punish the right people."
"But sometimes we learn we have been mistaken ourselves," said
Father. "How can we be sure we are absolutely right about
everything?"
"_I am_," said Aunt Dorothy, emphatically. "Thank Heaven I have not
a doubt about anything. Heresy is worse than treason, for it is
treason against God; and worse than murder, for it is the murder of
immortal souls. The fault of the Pope and Archbishop Laud is that
they are heretics themselves, and punish the wrong people."
This was a point often reached in discussions between my Father and
Aunt Dorothy, but this time it was happily closed by the clatter of a
horse's hoofs on the pavement of the court before the house.
My father's face brightened, and he rose hastily, exclaiming, "A
welcome guest, Sister Dorothy--the Lord of the Fens--sot the table in
the wainscoted parlour."
He left the room, and we children watched a tall, stalwart gentleman,
well known to us, with a healthy, sunburnt face, alight from his
horse.
"The Lord of the Fens, indeed!" said Aunt Dorothy in a disappointed
tone, as she looked out of the window. "Why, it is only Mr. Oliver
Cromwell of Ely, with his coat as slovenly as usual, and his hat
without a hat-band. I am as much against gewgaws as any one. If I
had my way, not a slashed doublet, or ribboned hose, or feather, or
lace, should be seen in the kingdom. But there is reason in all
things. Gentlemen should look like gentlemen, and a hat without a
hat-band is going too far, in all conscience. The wainscoted
parlour, in good sooth! Why, his boots are covered with mud, and I
dare warrant it, he will never think of rubbing them on the straw in
the hall. And they will get talking, no one knows how long, about
that everlasting draining of the Fens. I can't think why they won't
let the Fens alone. They did very well for our fathers as they were,
and they were better men than we see now-a-days; and if the Almighty
made the Fens wet, I suppose he meant them to be wet; and people had
better take care how they run against His designs. And they say the
king is against it, or against somebody concerned in it, so that
there is no knowing what it may lead to. All Scotland in a tumult,
and the godly languishing in prison, and our parson putting on some
new furbelow and setting up some new fandango every Sabbath; and a
godly gentleman like Mr. Oliver Cromwell (for he is that, I don't
deny) to have nothing better to do than to try and squeeze a few
acres more of dry land out of the Fens!"
But Roger whispered to me,--
"Mr. Hampden says Mr. Cromwell would be the greatest man in England
if things should come to the worst, and there should be any
disturbance with the king."
At that moment my father called Roger, and to his delight he was
allowed to accompany him and our guest over the farm.
And the next entry in my Journal is this,--
"Mr. Oliver Cromwell of Ely was at our house yesterday. Roger walked
over the farm with him and my father. Their discourse was concerning
twenty shillings which the king wants to oblige Mr. Hampden of Great
Hampden to lend him, which Mr. Hampden will not, not because he
cannot afford it, but because the king would then be able to make
every one lend him money whether they like it or not, or whether they
are able or not. They call it the ship-money. Concerning this and
also concerning some good men, ministers or lecturers, whom Mr.
Cromwell wishes to set to preach the Gospel to the people in places
where no one else preaches, so that they can understand, but whom
Archbishop Laud has silenced with fines and many threats, Aunt
Dorothy thinks it a pity godly men like Mr. Hampden and Mr. Cromwell
should concern themselves about such poor worldly things as shillings
and pence. Regarding the lecturers, she says that they have more
reason. Only, she says, it is a wonder to her they will begin with
such small insignificant things. Let them set to work, root and
branch (says she), against Popery under false names and in high
places, and these lesser matters will take care of themselves. But
father says, 'poor worldly things' are just the things by which we
are tried and proved whether we will be faithful to the high
unworldly calling or not. And 'small insignificant things' are the
beginnings of everything that lives and endures, from a British oak
to the kingdom of heaven."
CHAPTER II.
_May Day_, 1638.
"This morning, before break of day, I went to bathe my face in the
May dew by the Lady Well. There I met Lettice Davenant with her
maidens. She was dressed in a kirtle of grass-green silk, with a
blue taffetas petticoat, and her eyes were like wet violets, and her
brown hair like wavy tangles of soft glossy unspun silk, specked and
woven with gold, and she looked like a sweet May flower, just lifting
itself out of its green sheath into the sunshine, and all the colours
changing and blending into each other, as they do in the flowers.
And she laid her soft, little hand in mine, and said her mother loved
mine, and she wished I would love her, and be her friend. And she
kissed me with her dear, sweet, little mouth, like a rosebud--like a
child's. And I held her close in my arms, with her silky hair
falling on my shoulder. She is just so much shorter than I am. And
her heart beat on mine. And I will love her all my life. No wonder
Roger thinks her fair.
"I will love her all my life, whatever Aunt Dorothy says.
"Firstly, because I cannot help it. And secondly, because I am sure
it is right--right--right to love; always right to love--to love as
much, as dearly, as long, as deep as we can. Always right to love,
never right to despise, or keep aloof, or turn aside. Sometimes
right to hate, at least I think so; sometimes right to be angry, I am
sure of that; but never right to despise, and always--always right to
love.
"For Roger and I have looked well all through the Gospels to see.
And the Pharisee despised, the Priest and the Levite passed by, and
the disciples said once or twice, send her away. But the Lord drew
near, called them to Him, touched, took in His arms, loved, always
loved. Loved when they were wandering--loved when they would not
come; loved even when they 'went away.'
"And Aunt Gretel thinks the same. Only I sometimes wish we had lived
in the times she speaks of, told of in certain Family Chronicles of
hers, a century old. For then it was the people with the wrong
religion who despised others, and were harsh and severe. And they
went into convents, which must have been a great relief to the rest
of the family. And now it seems to be the people with the right
religion who do like the Pharisees. And they stay at home, which is
more difficult to understand, and more unpleasant to bear."
A very vehement utterance, crossed through with repentant lines in
after times, but still quite legible, and of interest to me for the
vanished outer world of life, and the tumultuous inward world of
revolt it recalls.
For that May morning, on my way home through the wood, I met the
village lads and lasses bringing home the May; and when I reached the
house, it was late; the serving men and maidens had finished their
meal at the long table in the hall, and Aunt Dorothy sat at one end
on the table, which crossed it at the top, and span; and Cousin
Placidia sat silent at the other end and span, the whirr of their
spinning-wheels distinctly reproaching me in a steady hum of
displeasure, until I was constrained to reply to it and to Aunt
Dorothy's silence.
"Aunt Dorothy, prithee, forgive me. I only went to bathe my face in
the May dew by the Lady Well. And there I met Lettice Davenant."
"I never reproached thee, child," said Aunt Dorothy. "There is too
much license in this house for that. But this, I will say, the
excuse is worse than the fault. How often have I told thee not to
stain thy lips with the idolatrous title of that well? And as to
bathing thy face in the May dew, Olive, it is Popery--sheer Popery."
"Not Popery, sister Dorothy," said my Father, looking up from his
sheet of news just brought from London. "Not Popery; Paganism. The
custom dates back to the ancient Romans, probably to the festival of
the goddess Maia, mother of Mercury, but here antiquarians are
divided."
"And well they may be," said Aunt Dorothy, "what but sects and
divisions can be expected from such tampering with vanities and
idolatries? For my part, it matters little to me whether the custom
dates to the modern or the ancient Romans, or to the Hittites, the
Perizzites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites. Whoever painted the
idol, I have little doubt who made it. And of the two I like the
unchristened idols best."
"Not quite, sister Dorothy, not always," remonstrated my Father, "it
is certainly a great mistake to worship the Virgin Mary. But the
Moloch to whom they burned little children was worse, much worse."
"If he was, the less we hear about him the better, Brother," said
Aunt Dorothy. "But as to the burning I see little difference. You
can see the black sites of Queen Mary's fires still. And Lettice
Davenant has been up at the court of the new Queen Marie (as they
call her);--an unlucky name for England. And little good she or hers
are like to do to our Olive."
On which I turned wholly into a boiling caldron of indignation; and
to what it might have led I know not, had not Aunt Gretel at that
moment intervened, ruddy from the kitchen fire, and with the glow of
a pleasant purpose in her kindly blue eyes.
"They are like to have the blithest May to-day they have seen for
many a year," said she. "Our Margery, the daughter of Tib the
dairywoman, is to be queen. And a better maiden or a sweeter face
there is not in all the country side. And Dickon, the gardener's son
at the Hall, is her sweetheart, and the Lady Lucy Davenant has let
them deck the bower with posies from her own garden, and they are
coming from the Hall, the Lady Lucy and Sir Walter, and Mistress
Lettice and her five brothers, to see the jollity."
"Tell Tib's goodman to broach a barrel of the best ale, sister
Gretel," said my Father, "and we will go and see."
This was said in the tone Aunt Dorothy never answered, and she made
no remonstrance except through the whirr of her spinning-wheel, which
always seemed to Roger and me to be a kind of "_famulus_," or a
second-self to Aunt Dorothy (of course of a white not a black kind),
saying the thing she meant but would not say, and in a thousand ways
spinning out and completing, not her thread only, but her life and
thought.
My Father soon rose and went to the farm. Aunt Dorothy span silent
at one end of the table, and Cousin Placidia at the other; while I
sat too indignant to eat anything, and Aunt Gretel moved about in a
helpless, conciliatory state between.
"The Bible does speak of being merry, sister Dorothy," said she at
length, metaphorically putting her foot into Aunt Dorothy's spiritual
spinning, as she was wont to do.
"No doubt it does," said Aunt Dorothy. "'Is any merry among you, let
him sing psalms.'"
"I am sure I wish they would," said Aunt Gretel, "there is nothing I
enjoy so much. And," pursued she, waxing bold, "after all, sister
Dorothy, the whole world does seem to sing and dance in the green
May, the little birds hop and sing, (sing love-songs too, sister
Dorothy), and the leaves dance and rustle, and the flowers don all
the colours of the rainbow."
"As to the flowers," said Aunt Dorothy, "they did not choose their
own raiment, so no blame to them, poor perishing things. I hold they
were clothed in their scarlet and purple, like fools in motley, for
the very purpose of shaming us into being sober and grave in our
attire. The birds, indeed, may hop and sing if they like it. Not
that I think they have much cause, poor inconsiderate creatures, what
with the birds'-nesting, and the poaching, and Mr. Cromwell draining
the fens. But they have no foresight, and they have not immortal
souls, and if they're to be in a pie to-morrow they don't know it;
and they are no worse for it the day after."
"But," said Aunt Gretel, "we have immortal souls, and I think that
ought to make us sing a thousand-fold better than the birds."
"We have not only souls, we have sins," said Aunt Dorothy; "and there
is enough in sin, I hold, to stop the sweetest music in the world
when the burden is felt."
"But we have the Gospel and the Saviour," said Aunt Gretel, "glad
tidings of great joy to all people."
"Tell them, then, to the people," said Aunt Dorothy; "get a godly
minister to go and preach them to the poor sinners in the village,
and that will be better than setting up May-poles and broaching beer
barrels."
"I do tell them whenever I can, sister Dorothy," said Aunt Gretel
meekly, "as well as I can. But the best of us cannot always be
listening to sermons."
"We might listen much longer than we do if we tried," said Aunt
Dorothy, branching off from the subject. "In Scotland, I am told,
the Sabbath services last twelve hours."
Aunt Gretel sighed; whether in compassion for the Scottish
congregations, or in lamentation over her own shortcomings, she did
not explain.
"But," she resumed, "it does seem that if the good God meant that
there should have been no merry-making in the world he would have
arranged that people should have come into the world full-grown."
"Probably it would have been better if it could have been so
managed," said Aunt Dorothy; "but I suppose it could not. However
that may be, the best we can do now is to make people grow up as soon
as they can, and not keep them babies with May games, and junketings,
and possetings."
"But," said Aunt Gretel timidly, "after all, sister Dorothy, the
Bible does not give us any strict rules by which we can judge other
people in such things."
"I confess," replied Aunt Dorothy, "that if there could be a thing to
be wished for in the Bible (with reverence I say it), it is just that
there were a few plain rules. St. Paul came very near it when he was
speaking of the weak brethren at the idol-feasts; but I confess I do
think it would have been a help if he had gone a little further while
he was about it. Then, people would not have been able to pretend
they did not know what he meant. I do think it would have been a
comfort if there could have been a book of Leviticus in the New
Testament."
"But your Mr. John Milton," said Aunt Gretel, "in his new masque of
Comus, which your brother thinks beautiful, introduces music and
dancing."
"Mr. Milton is a godly man," said Aunt Dorothy "but, poor gentleman,
he is a poet; and poets can not always be expected to keep straight,
like reasonable people."
"But Dr. Martin Luther himself dearly loved music," said Aunt Gretel,
driven to her final court of appeal, "and even sanctioned dancing, in
a Christian-like way, without rioting and drunkenness."
"Dr. Luther might," rejoined Aunt Dorothy. "Dr. Luther believed in
consubstantiation, and rejected the Epistle of St. James. And,
besides, by this time he has been in heaven, it is to be hoped, for
nearly a hundred years, and there can be no doubt he knows better."
Aunt Gretel was roused.
"Sister Dorothy," she said, "Dr. Luther does not need to be defended
by me. But I sometimes think if he came to England in these days he
would think some of you had gone some way towards painting again that
terrible picture of God, which made the little ones fly from Him
instead of taking refuge with Him, and which it took him so much toil
to destroy."
And she fled to the kitchen, rosier than she came, but with tears
instead of smiles in her eyes.
"If people could enjoy themselves harmlessly, without rioting and
drunkenness," said Aunt Dorothy, half yielding, "there might be less
to be said against it.
"What is rioting, Aunt Dorothy?" asked Placidia from her
spinning-wheel.
"Idling and romping, and doing what had better not be done nor talked
about."
"Because, Aunt Dorothy," said Placidia solemnly, "I saw Dickon trying
to kiss our Tib's daughter, Margery, behind the door; and she would
not let him. But she laughed and did not seem angry. Is that
rioting?"
"Dickon may kiss Margery as often as he likes without hurting you or
any one, Placidia," said Aunt Dorothy, incautiously. "Margery is a
good honest girl, and can take care of herself. And you have no
right to watch what any one does behind doors. You, at least, shall
not go to the May-pole to-day, but shall stay with me and learn the
thirteenth of First Corinthians."
"I do not wish to go to any rioting or May games," said Placidia. "I
like my spinning and my book. I never did care for dancing and
playing and fooling, Aunt Dorothy, I am thankful to say."
"Don't be a Pharisee, Placidia," said Aunt Dorothy, turning hotly on
her unwelcome ally. "Better play and dance like a flipperty-gibbet,
than watch what other people do behind doors, and tell tales."
And I left them to settle the controversy, while I went to join Aunt
Gretel, who was in my Father's chamber preparing for me such sober
decorations in honor of the festivities as our Puritan wardrobes
admitted of. It was a great day for me; chiefly for the expectation
of meeting the Lady Lucy and the sweet maiden Lettice.
I was starting full of glee when the sight of Aunt Dorothy, spinning
silently in the hall as we passed the door, with Placidia beside her,
threw a little shadow over my contentment. Aunt Dorothy so
completely represented to me the majesty of law, and at the bottom of
our hearts both Roger and I so trusted and honored her, that in spite
even of my Father's sanction, something of misgiving troubled me at
the sight of her grave face. With a sudden impulse I ran back, and,
standing before her, said--
"Aunt Dorothy, you are not angry? I shall not dance, only look, and
soon be at home again, and all will go on the same as ever."
She shook her head, but more sorrowfully than angrily.
"Eve only looked," said she, "but nothing went on the same evermore."
At that moment my father came back to seek me, and, catching Aunt
Dorothy's last words, he said kindly but gravely, "Do not let us
trouble the child's conscience with our scruples. It is a serious
danger to force our scruples on others. When experience of their own
peculiar weaknesses and besetments has led them to scruple at things
for themselves, it is another matter. But to add to God's laws is
almost as tremendous a mistake as to subtract from them. Our
additions, moreover, are sure to end in subtractions in some other
direction. Indifferent things done with a guilty conscience lead to
guilty things done with an indifferent conscience. In inventing
imaginary sins you create real sinners."
"Well, brother, it is as you please," said Aunt Dorothy, "but I
should have thought our new parson reading from that blasphemous
'Book of Sports' from the pulpit, commanding the people to dance
around the May-poles on the Sabbath afternoons, was enough to turn
any serious person against them."
"Nay; that is exactly one of the strongest reasons why I go to-day,"
said my father. "I go to show that it is not the May-poles we
scruple at, but the cruel robbing of the poor by the desecration of
the day given them by God for higher things."
And he led me away. But my free, innocent gladsomeness was gone.
Conscience had come in with her questionings, and her discernings and
her dividings. I was not sure whether God was pleased with me or
with any of us. Even when I looked at the garlanded May-pole, I
thought of the old tree in Eden with its pleasant fruit, which I had
embroidered with a serpent coiled round it, darting out his forked
tongue at Eve. I wondered whether if my eyes were opened I should
see him there, writhing among the hawthorn garlands, or hissing
envenomed words into the ear of our Tib's Margery as she sat in her
royal bower of green boughs crowned with flowers, or gliding in and
out among the dancers, as hand in hand they moved singing around the
May-pole, wreathing and unwreathing the long garland which united
them, and making low reverences, as they passed, to their blushing
Queen. I wondered whether the whole thing had some mysterious
connection with idolatry, and heaven itself were after all watching
us with grieved displeasures like Aunt Dorothy, and secretly
preparing fiery serpents, or a rain of fire and brimstone, or a
thunder storm, or whatever came instead of fiery serpents and fire
and brimstone in these days when there were no more miracles.
These thoughts, however, all vanished when the family appeared from
the Hall. The Lady Lucy was borne by two men in a sedan-chair which
she had brought from London, a thing I had never seen before. It so
happened that I had never seen the Lady Lucy until that day. The
family had been much about the court, and on the few occasions on
which they had spent any time at the Hall, the Lady Lucy's health had
been too feeble to admit of her attending at the parish church with
the rest of the family. From the moment, therefore, that Sir Walter
handed her out of the chair and seated her on cushions prepared for
her, I could not take my eyes from her, not even to look at Lettice.
So queenly she appeared to me, such a perfection of grace and dignity
and beauty. Her complexion was fair like Lettice's, but very
delicate and pale, like a shell; and her hair, still brown and
abundant, was arranged in countless small ringlets around her face.
On her neck and her forehead there was a brilliant sparkle and a
glitter, which must, of course, have been from jewels; and her dress
had a sheen and a gloss, and a delicate changing of gorgeous colours
on it which must have been that of velvet and brocade and rare laces.
But in my eyes she sat wrapped in a kind of halo of unearthly glory.
I no more thought of resolving it into the texture of any earthly
looms than if she had been a lily or a star. All around her seemed
to belong to her, like the moonbeams to the moon or the leaves to a
flower. Not her dress only, but the green leaves which bent lovingly
down to her, and the flowery turf which seemed to kiss her feet. If
I thought of any comparison, it was Aunt Gretel's fairy-tale of the
princess with the three magic robes, enclosed in the magic
nut-shells, like the sun, like the moon, and like the stars.
Even Sir Walter, burly, and sturdy, and noisy, and substantial as he
was, seemed to me to acquire a kind of reflected glory by her
speaking to him. And her seven sons girdled her like the planets
around the sun, or like the seven electors Aunt Gretel told us about
around the emperor. But when at last her eyes rested on me, and she
whispered something to Sir Walter, and he came across and doffed his
plumed hat to my father, and then led me across to her, and she
looked long in my face, and then up in my father's, and said, "The
likeness is perfect," and then kissed me, and made me sit down on the
cushion beside her with her hand in mine, I thought her voice like an
angel's, and her touch seemed to me to have something hallowing in it
which made me feel safe like a little bird under its mother's wing.
The silent smile of her soft eyes under her smooth, broad, unfurrowed
brow, as she turned every now and then and looked at me, fell on my
heart like a kiss. And I thought no more of Eve and the serpent, or
Aunt Dorothy, or anything, until she rose to go. And then she kissed
me again. But I scarcely seemed to care that she should kiss me.
Her presence was an embrace; her smile was a kiss; every tone of her
voice was a caress. A tender motherliness seemed to fold me all
round as I sat by her. As she left me she said softly,--
"Little Olive, you must come and see me. Your mother and I loved
each other." Then holding out her hand to my father, she added,--
"Politics and land-boundaries, Mr. Drayton, must not keep us any
longer apart."
He bowed, and they conversed some time longer; but the only thing I
heard was that he promised I should go and see her at the Hall.
I think every one felt something of the soft charm there was in her.
For, quiet and retiring as she was, when she left, a light and
gladness seemed to go with her. Before long the dancing and singing
stopped, the tables were set on the green, and the feasting began,
and we left and went home.
"Oh, Roger," said I, when we were alone that evening, "there can be
no one like her in the world."
"Of course not," said Roger decisively. "Did I not always say so?"
"But you never saw her before."
"Never saw her, Olive? How can I help seeing her every Sunday? She
sits at the end of the pew just opposite mine."
"She never came to church, Roger."
"Never came to church? Who do you mean?"
"Mean? The Lady Lucy, to be sure."
"Oh," said Roger, "I thought, of course, you were speaking of
Mistress Lettice."
But when we came back to Netherby, full as my heart was of my new
love, there was something in Aunt Dorothy's manner that quite froze
any utterance of it, and brought me back to Eve and the apple. Yet
she spoke kindly,--
"Thou lookest serious, Olive," said she. "Perhaps thou didst not
find it such a paradise after all. Poor child, the world's a shallow
cup, and the sooner we drain it the better. I think better of thee
than that thou wilt long be content with such May games and vanities.
Come to thy supper."
But my honesty compelled me to speak. I did not wish Aunt Dorothy to
think better of me than I deserved.
"It _was_ rather like paradise, Aunt Dorothy," I said.
"Paradise around a May-pole," said she compassionately. "Poor babe,
poor babe!"
"It was not the May-pole," said I, my face burning at having to bring
out my hidden treasure of new love; "not the May-pole, but Lady Lucy."
"Lady Lucy took a fancy to the child, Sister Dorothy," said my
father, "and asked her to the Hall." And lowering his voice he
added, "She thought her like Magdalene."
I had scarcely ever heard him litter my mother's Christian name
before, and now it seemed to fall from his lips like a blessing.
Aunt Dorothy's brow darkened.
"Thou wilt never let the child go, brother?"
He did not at once reply.
"Into the very jaws of Babylon, brother? The Lady Lucy is one of the
favourites, they say, of the Popish Queen."
"Very probably," said my father dryly, "I do not see how the Queen or
any one else could help honouring or favouring the Lady Lucy."
My heart bounded in acquiescence.
"They say she has a chapel at the Hall fitted up on the very pattern
of Archbishop Laud, and priests in coats of no one knows how many
colours, and painted glass, and incense. Thou wilt never let the
poor unsuspecting lamb go into the very lair of the Beast?"
"There are jewels in many a dust-heap, Sister Dorothy, and the Lady
Lucy is one," said my father a little impatiently, for Aunt Dorothy
had the faculty of arousing the latent wilfulness of the meekest of
men. "Let us say no more about it. I have made up my mind."
Had he known how deep was the spell on me, he might have thought
otherwise. For, ungrateful that I was, having lost my heart to this
fair strange lady, I sat chafing at Aunt Dorothy's injustice, in a
wide-spread inward revolt, which bid fair to extend itself to
everything Aunt Dorothy believed or required. All her life-long care
and affection, and patient (or impatient) toiling and planning for me
and mine, blotted out by what I deemed her blind injustice to this
object of my worship, who had but kissed me twice, and smiled on me,
and said half-a-dozen soft words, and had won all my childish heart!
And yet, looking back from these sober hours, I still feel it was not
altogether an infatuation. Such true and tender motherliness as
dwelt in Lady Lucy is the greatest power it seems to me that can
invest a woman.
All mothers certainly do not possess it. On some, on the contrary,
the motherly love which passionately enfolds those within is too like
a bristling fortification of jealousy and exclusiveness to those
without. Or rather (that I dishonour not the most sacred thing in
our nature), I should say, the mother's love which is from above is
lowered and narrowed into a passion by the selfishness which is not
from above. And some unmarried women possess it, some little maidens
even who from infancy draw the little ones to them by a soft
irresistible attraction, and seem to fold them under soft dove-like
plumage. Without something of it women are not women, but only
weaker, and shriller, and smaller men. But where, as in Lady Lucy,
the whole being is steeped in it, it seems to me the sweetest,
strongest, most irresistible power on earth, to control, and bless,
and purify, and raise, and the truest incarnation (I cannot say
anything so cold as image), the truest embodying and ensouling of
what is divine.
But that night it so chanced that I, who had fallen asleep lapped in
sweet memories of Lady Lucy and in the protection of Aunt Gretel's
presence, awakened by the long roll of a thunder-peal which seemed as
if it never would end.
For some time I tried to hide myself from the flash and the terrific
sound under the bed-clothes. But it would not do. At length I
sprang speechless from my little bed to Aunt Gretel's. She took me
in close to her. And there, with my head on her shoulder, speech
came back to me, and I said, in a frightened whisper (for it seemed
to me like speaking in church),--
"Aunt Gretel, will the last trumpet be like that?"
"I do not know, Olive," said she quietly. "More awful, I think, yet
plainer, for we shall all understand it, even those in the graves;
and it will call us home."
"O Aunt Gretel," I said at last, "can it have anything to do with the
May-pole?"
"What, sweet heart! the thunder?"
"It is God's voice, is it not? Does not the Bible say so? And it
does sound like an angry voice," I whispered, for the windows were
rattling and the house was quivering with the repeated peals, as if
in the grasp of a terrible giant.
"There is much indeed to make the good God angry, my lamb, much more
than May-poles."
"Yes," said I, "there were the three gentlemen in the pillory! That
must have been worse certainly. But do you think God can be angry
with me, Aunt Gretel?"
"For what, sweet heart?"
"For loving Lady Lucy," said I; "she is so very sweet."
"God is never angry with any one for loving," said Aunt Gretel, "only
for not loving. But there is a better voice of God than the thunder,
Olive," added she. "A voice that does not roar but speaks, sweet
heart. Hast thou never heard that?"
I was silent, for I half guessed what she meant.
"'_It is I, be not afraid,_'" she said, in a low, clear tone,
contrasting with my awe-stricken whisper. "Whenever thou dost not
understand the voice that thunders, sweet heart, go back to the voice
that speaks, and that will tell thee what the voice that thunders
means."
"Aunt Gretel," said I, after a little silence, "it seemed to me as if
Lady Lucy were like some words of our Saviour's. As if everything in
her were saying in a soft dove's voice, 'Suffer the little children
to come unto Me.' Was it wrong to think so? It seemed as if I were
sitting beside my Mother, and then I thought of those very words.
Was it wrong?"
"Not wrong, my poor motherless lamb," said she, "no, surely not
wrong. Remember, Olive, from Paradise downwards the worst heresy has
been slander of the love of God; distrust of His love, and disbelief
of the awful warnings His love gives against sin. Whenever we feel
anything very tender in any human love, we should feel as if the
blessed God were stretching out His arms to us through it, and
saying, 'That is a little like the way I love thee. But only a
little, only a little.'"
And the thunder rolled on, and the lightning that night cleft the
great elm by the gate, so that in the morning it stood a scorched and
blackened trunk.
And Aunt Dorothy said what an awful warning it was. But to me, if it
was an "awful warning," it stood also like a parable of mercy. I
could not exactly have explained why; but I thought I could read the
meaning of the Voice that thundered by the Voice that spoke.
I thought how He had been scathed and bruised for us.
And I pleaded hard with my father that the old scathed tree might not
be felled. For to me its great bare blackened branches seemed to
shelter the house like that accursed tree which had spread its bare
arms one Good Friday night outside Jerusalem, and had pleaded not for
vengeance, but for pity and for pardon.
I think the resentment of injustice is one of the first-born and
strongest passions in an ingenuous heart. And to this, I believe, is
often due the falling off of children from the party of their
parents, They hear hard things said of opponents; on closer
acquaintance they find these to be exaggerations, or, at least,
suppressions; the general gloom of a picture being even more produced
by effacing lights than by deepening shadows. The discovery throws a
doubt over the whole range of inherited beliefs, and it is well if in
the heat of youth the revulsion is not far greater than the wrong; if
in their indignation at discovering that the heretic is not an
embodied heresy, but merely a human creature believing something
wrong, they do not glorify him into a martyr and a model.
For Roger and me it was the greatest blessing that our father was
just and candid to the extent of seeing (often to his own great
distress and perplexity) even more clearly the defects of his own
party which he might correct, than of the other side, which he could
not; and that Aunt Gretel was apt to see all opinions and characters
melted into a haze of indiscriminate sunshine by the light of her own
loving heart.
Our indignation, therefore, during the period of our lives which
followed on this May-day was almost entirely directed against Aunt
Dorothy.
My idol remained for some time precisely at the due idolatrous
distance, enshrined in general behind a screen of sweet mystery, with
occasional flashes of beatific vision; the intervals filled up with
rumours of the music, and breaths of the incense of the inner
sanctuary, enhanced by what I deemed the unjust murmurs of the
profane outside.
My father fulfilled his promise of taking me to the Hall. On our way
to Lady Lucy's drawing-chamber I caught a glimpse through a half-open
door into her private chapel, which left on my memory a haze and a
fragrance of coloured light falling on the marble pavements through
windows like rubies and sapphires, of golden chalices and
candelabras, of aromatic perfumes, with a rise and fall of sweet
chords of sacred music, all blended together into a kind of sacred
spell, like the church bells on Sunday across the Mere. The Lady
Lucy herself was embroidering a silken church vestment with gold and
crimson; skeins of glossy silk of brilliant colours lay around her,
which thenceforth invested the descriptions of the broidered work of
the tabernacle for me with a new interest. She received my father
with a courtly grace, and me with her own motherly sweetness. She
made me sit on a tabouret at her feet, while she conversed with my
father, and gave me a French ivory puzzle to unravel. But I could do
nothing but drink in the soft modulations of her voice without
heeding what she said, except that the discourse seemed embroidered
with the names of the King and the Queen, and the Princes and
Princesses, which seemed as fit for her lips as her rich dress was
for her person. She seemed to speak with a gentle raillery,
reminding him of old times, and asking why he deserted the court.
But his words and tones were very grave. Then, as he spoke of
leaving, she unlocked a little sandal-wood cabinet, and took out a
locket containing a curl of fair hair, and she said softly, "This was
Magdalene's!" and held it beside mine. And then, as she carefully
laid it aside again, the conversation for a few moments rose to
higher things, and a Name higher than those of kings and queens was
in it. And she said reverently, "In whatever else we differ, that
good part, I trust, may be mine and yours! as we know so well it was
hers." And my father seemed moved, took leave, and said nothing more
until we had passed through the outer gate, when in the avenue
Lettice met us, cantering on a white palfrey, in a riding coat laced
with red, blue and yellow; and springing off, left her horse to go
whither it would, as she ran to welcome me, saying a thousand pretty,
kindly things, while I, in a shy ecstasy, could only stand and hold
her hand, and feel as if I had been transported, entirely unprepared,
straight into the middle of a fairy tale.
After that for some weeks there was a stream of courtly company at
the Hall, and Roger and I only saw Lettice and occasionally the Lady
Lucy at church, or met them now and then in our rides and rambles by
the Mere or through the woods. But whenever we did meet there was
always the same eager cordial greeting from Lettice, and the same
affectionate manner in her mother. And from time to time we heard,
through Tib's sweetheart Dickon, of the gracious little kindnesses of
both mother and daughter, of their thoughtful care for tenant and
servant, of the honour in which they were held by prince and peasant.
And so on me and on Roger the spell worked on.
The Draytons were of as old standing in the parish as the Davenants.
Indeed, if tradition and our family tree spoke true, many a broad
acre around Netherby had been in the possession of our ancestors,
maternal or paternal, when the forefathers of the Davenants had been
holding insignificant fiefs under Norman dukes, or cruising on very
doubtful errands about the northern seas. Our pedigree dated back to
Saxon times; the porch of the oldest transept of the church had, to
Aunt Dorothy's mingled pride and horror, an inscription on it
requesting prayers for the soul of one of our progenitors; and the
oldest tomb in the church was ours. But while our family had
remained stationary in place as well as in rank, the Davenants had
climbed far above us. Our old Manor House had received no additions
since the reign of Elizabeth, when the third gable had been built
with the large embayed window, and the three terraces sloping to the
fish-pond and the orchards, while on the other side of the court
extended, as of old, the cattle-sheds and stables. Meantime, the old
Hall of the Davenants had been degraded into farm-buildings, whilst a
new mansion, with sumptuous banqueting halls and dainty ladies'
withdrawing-chamber like a palace, had gradually sprung up around the
remains of the suppressed Priory, which had been granted to the
family; the ancient Priory Church serving as Lady Lucy's private
chapel, the monks' refectory as the family dining-hall, whilst all
signs of farm life had vanished out of sight, and scent, and hearing.
During the same period, the new transept of our parish church, which
had been the Davenants' family chapel, had become enriched with
stately monuments, where the effigies of knight and dame rested under
decorated canopies. The titles and armorial bearings of many a noble
family were mingled with theirs on monumental brass and stained
window; whilst the plain massive architecture of our hereditary
portion of the church was not more contrasted with the rich and
delicate carving of theirs than were we and our servingmen and
maidens, in our plain, sad-colored stuffs, unplumed, unadorned hats,
caps or coifs, and white linen kerchiefs, with the brocades, satins,
and velvets, ostrich feathers and jewels, ribboned hosen and buckled
shoes of the Hall.
The contrast had gone deeper than mere externals, as external
contrasts mostly do, in this symbolical world. In the Civil Wars,
when no political principle was involved, it had chanced that the
Draytons and the Davenants had seldom been on the same side. But at
and after the Reformation the difference manifested itself plainly
and steadily.
The Davenants had recognized Henry VIII.'s supremacy to the extent of
receiving from him a grant of the lands belonging to the neighbouring
abbey. But it had probably cost them little change of belief to
return zealously to the old religion, under the rule of Queen Mary;
whereas the Draytons, adhering with Saxon immobility to the Papal
authority when Henry VIII. discarded it, had slowly come round to the
conviction of the truth of the reformed religion by the time it
became dangerous; and we hold it one of our chief family distinctions
that we have a name closely connected with us enrolled among the
noble army in "Fox's Book of Martyrs." Indeed, throughout their
history, our family had an unprosperous propensity to the dangerous
side. The religious convictions, so painfully adopted and so dearly
proved, had throughout the reign of Elizabeth given our ancestors a
leaning to the Puritan side; deep religious conviction binding them
from generation to generation to the noblest spirits of their times,
whilst a certain almost perverse honesty and inflexibility of temper
naturally drove them to resist any kind of pressure from without, and
a taste for what is solid and simple rather than for what is elegant
and gorgeous, whether in life or in ritual, inclined them to the
simplest forms of ecclesiastical ceremonial.
It was this strong hereditary Protestantism which had led my Father
to join the religious wars in Germany. He held King Gustavus
Adolphus, the Swede, to be the noblest man and the greatest general
of ancient or modern times. And he held that the fearful conflict by
which that great king turned the tide against the Popish arms was
little less than a conflict between truth and falsehood, barbarism
and civilization, light and darkness. It was enough to make any one
believe in the necessity of hell, he said, to have seen, as he had,
the city of Magdeburg, ten days after Tilly's soldiers had sacked it,
when scarce three thousand corpse-like survivors crept around the
blackened ruins where lay buried the mangled remains of their
fourteen thousand happier dead. To see that, said my Father, would
make any one understand what is meant by the wrath of the Lamb; and
that there are things which can make a gospel of vengeance as
precious to just men as a gospel of mercy. And some foretaste of
that merciful vengeance, he said, had been given already. For after
Magdeburg it was said Tilly never won a battle. My Father fought
with the Swedish army till the death of the king, on the sixth of
November, 1632; and that day of his victory and death at Lützen, was
always kept in our household as a day of family mourning.
Had Elizabeth been on the throne, my Father used to say, and Cecil at
the helm of state, it would not have been the little northern kingdom
of Sweden which should have stemmed the torrent of Popish and
Imperial tyranny, while England stood by wringing helpless womanish
hands, beholding her brethren in the faith tortured and slaughtered,
her own king's daughter exiled and dethroned, and, at the same time,
her brave soldiers and sailors trifled to inglorious death by
thousands at the bidding of a musked and curled court favourite at
Rhé and Rochelle.
It was in Germany that my Father met my mother. She was a Saxon from
Luther's own town, Wittemberg. Her name was Reichenbach, and her
family retained affectionate personal memories of the great Reformer,
as well as an enthusiastic devotion to his doctrines. She and Aunt
Gretel (Magdalene and Margarethe) were orphan daughters of an officer
in the Protestant armies. And I often count it among my mercies that
our family history linked us with more forms of our religion than
one, and extended our horizon beyond the sects and parties of
England. Our mother died two years after my father's return to
England, leaving him us two children, and a memory of a love as
devoted, and a piety as simple, as ever lit up a home by keeping it
open to heaven.
It was during these years she made the acquaintance with Lady Lucy.
They had been very closely attached, although political differences,
and the long absences of the Davenants at Court, had prevented much
intercourse between the families since her death.
Roger recollected her face and voice and her foreign accent, and one
or two things she said to him. I remember nothing of her but a kind
of brooding warmth and care, tender caressing tones, and being
watched by eyes with a look in them unlike any other, and then a day
of weeping and silence and black dresses and sad faces, and a
wandering about with a sense of something lost. Lost for ever out of
my life. As much as by any possibility could be, Aunt Gretel made up
the tenderness, and Aunt Dorothy the discipline; and my father did
all he could to supply her place by a fatherly care softened into an
uncommon passion by his sorrow, and deepened into the most sacred
principle by his desire to remedy our loss. Yet, in looking back, I
feel more and more we did indeed inevitably lose much. All these
balancing and compensating cares and affections and restraints from
every side yet missed something of the tender constraints and the
heart-quickening warmth they would have had all living, blended, and
consecrated in the one mother's heart. Yet to Roger, perhaps, the
loss was at various points in his life even greater than to me.
If she had lived, perchance the lessons we had to learn after that
May Day would have been learned with less of blundering and heat.
Yet how can I tell? It seems to me the true painter keeps his
pictures in harmony not by mixing the colours on the palette, but by
blending them on the canvass, not by painting in leaden monotonous
grays, but by interweaving and contrasting countless tints of pure
and varied colour. And in nature, in history, in life, it seems to
me the Creator does the same.
Yes, God forbid that in lamenting what we lost I should blaspheme the
highest love--the love which, as Aunt Gretel says, takes every image
of human affection, and fills and overfills it, and casts it away as
too shallow; in its unutterable intensity putting as it were a tender
paradox of slander on even a mother's love for her babes, and saying,
"They may forget, yet will not I."
For that love, we believe, gave and took away, and has led us through
fasting and feasting, dangers and droughts, Marahs and Elims,
chastenings and cherishings, ever since.
CHAPTER III.
At length the time arrived when my dark ages of mystery and adoration
were to to close. The pestilence so constantly hovering over the
wretched wastes of devastated Germany had been brought to Netherby by
a cousin of my mother's, who had come on a visit to us. He fell sick
the day after his arrival, and died on the third day. That evening
Tib, the dairywoman, sickened, and before the next morning, Margery,
her daughter. A panic seized the household. My father accepted Lady
Lucy's generous offer, to take charge of Roger and me, we happening
to have been from the first secluded from all contact with the sick.
Aunt Dorothy made a faint remonstrance. There were, said she,
contagions worse than any plague. If her brother would answer for
it, to his conscience, it was well. She, at least, would wash her
hands of the whole thing. But my father had no scruples. "He only
hoped," he said, "that Lady Lucy might touch us with the infection of
her gracious kindliness; Olive would be only with her, and as to
Roger and the rest of the household, if he was ever to be a true
Protestant, the time must come when he must learn, if necessary, to
protest."
So much to Aunt Dorothy. To Roger himself, he said, in a low voice,
as we were riding off, with his hand on the horse's mane,--
"Remember, my lad, there is no true manliness without godliness."
Aunt Gretel watched and waved her hand to us from the infected
chamber window where she sat nursing Margery; and when I opened my
bundle of clothes that evening, I found in the corner a little book
containing my mother's favorite psalms copied in English for us, the
46th (Dr. Luther's own psalm), the 23d, and the 139th.
Thus armed, Roger and I sallied forth into our enchanted castle.
To be disenchanted. Not to be repelled, but certainly to be
disenchanted. Not by any subtle spell of counter-magic, or rude
shock of bitter discovery, but by the slow changing of the world of
misty twilight splendours, of dreams and visions, guesses and
rumours, into a world of daylight, of sight and touch.
My first disenchantment was the Lady Lucy's artificial curls. She
allowed me to remain with her while her gentlewoman disrobed her that
evening. I shall never forget the dismay with which I beheld one
dainty ringlet after another, of the kind called "heart-breakers,"
disentangled from among her hair--itself still brown and
abundant--and laid on the dressing-table. The perfumes, essences,
powders, ointments, salves, balsams, crystal phials, and porcelain
cups, among which these "heart-breakers" were laid, (mysterious and
strange as they were to me who knew of no cosmetics but cold water
and fresh air,) seemed to me only so many appropriate decorations of
the shrine of my idol. But the hair was false, and perplexed me
sorely, Puritan child that I was, brought up with no habits of subtle
discernment between a deception and a lie.
The next morning brought me yet greater perplexity, I slept in a
light closet in a turret off the Lady Lucy's chamber. The Lady
Lucy's own gentle woman came in to dress me, but before she appeared
I was already arrayed, and was kneeling at the window-seat of my
little arched window, reading my mother's psalms.
I thought she came to call me to prayers, with which we always began
the day at home; my father reading a psalm at daybreak and offering a
short solemn prayer in the Hall, where all the men and maidens were
gathered, after which we sat down at one table to breakfast as the
family had done since the days of Queen Elizabeth. But when I asked
her if she came for this, she smiled, and said it was not a saint's
day, so that it was not likely the whole household would assemble,
though no doubt my Lady and Mistress Lettice would attend service
with the chaplain in the chapel. But she said I might attend Lady
Lucy in her chamber before she rose, I gladly accepted, and Lady Lucy
invited me to partake of a new kind of confection called chocolate,
brought from the Indies by the Spaniards, which finding I could not
relish, she sent for a cup of new milk and a manchet of fine
milk-bread on which I breakfasted. Then she began her dressing; and
then ensued my second stage of disenchantment. Out of the many
crystal and porcelain vases on the table, her gentlewoman took
powders and paints, and to my unutterable amazement actually began to
tint with rose-colour Lady Lucy's checks, and to lay a delicate
ivory-white on her brow. She made no mystery of it; but I suppose
she saw the horror in my eyes, for she laughed and said,--
"You are watching me little Olive, with great eyes, as if I were Red
Riding Hood's wolf-grand-mother. What is the matter?"
I could not answer, but I felt myself flush crimson, and I remember
that the only word that seemed as if it could come to my lips, was
"Jezebel." I quite hated myself for the thought; the Lady Lucy was
so tender and good! Yet all the day, through the service in the
chapel, and my plays with Lettice, and my quiet sitting on my
favorite footstool at Lady Lucy's feet, those terrible words haunted
me like a bad dream: "and she painted her face and tired her head and
looked out at a window." A thousand times I drove them away. I
repeated to myself how she loved my mother, how my father honored
her, how gracious and tender she was to me and to all. Still the
words came back, with the visions of the false curls, and the paint,
and the powder. And I could have cried with vexation that I had ever
seen these. For I felt sure Lady Lucy was inwardly as sweet and true
as I had believed, and that these were only little court customs
quite foreign to her nature, to which she as a great lady had to
submit, but which no more made her heart bad than the washed hands
and platters made the Pharisees good. Yet the serene and perfect
image was broken, and do what I would I could not restore it.
My third disenchantment was more serious.
At the ringing of the great tower bell for dinner, summoning the
household and inviting all within hearing to share the hospitality of
the Hall, a cavalcade swept up the avenue, consisting of the family
of a neighbouring country gentleman. Lady Lucy who was seated at her
embroidery frame in the drawing-chamber, was evidently not pleased at
this announcement. "They always stay till dark," she said, "and
question me till I am wearied to death, about what the queen wears,
what the princesses eat, or how the king talks, as if their majesties
were some strange foreign beasts, and I some Moorish showman hired to
exhibit them. Lettice, my sweet, take them into the garden after
dinner, or I shall not recover it."
Yet when the ladies entered she received them with a manner as
gracious as if they had been anxiously expected friends. I reasoned
with myself that this graciousness was an inalienable quality of
hers, as little voluntary or conscious as the soft tones of her
voice; or that probably she repented of having spoken hastily of her
visitors and compensated for it by being more than ordinarily kind.
But when it proved that they had to leave early, and she lamented
over the shortness of the visit, and yet immediately after their
departure threw herself languidly on a couch, and sighed, "What a
deliverance!" I involuntarily shrank from her to the farthest corner
of the room, and watching the departing strangers, wished myself
departing with them.
I stood there long, until she came gently to me and laid her hand
kindly on my head. I looked up at her, and longed to look straight
into her heart.
"Tears on the long lashes!" said she, caressingly. "What is the
matter, little one?"
My eyelids sank and the tears fell.
"What ails thee, little silent woman?" said she, stooping to me.
I threw my arms around her and sobbed, "You are _really_ glad to have
me, Lady Lucy; are you not? You would not like me to go?"
She seemed at first perplexed.
"You take things too much to heart, Olive, like your poor mother,"
she said at last, very gently. "Those ladies are nothing to me; and
your mother was dear to me, Olive, and so are you."
But in the evening when I was in bed she came herself into my little
chamber, and sat by my bedside, like Aunt Gretel, and played with my
long hair in her sweet way; and then before she left, said tenderly,--
"My poor little Olive, you must not doubt your mother's old friend.
I am not all, or half I would be, but I could not bear to be
distrusted by you. But you have lived too much shut up in a world of
your own. You wear your heart too near the surface. You bring heart
and conscience into things which only need courtesy and tactics. You
waste your gold where beads and copper are as valuable. I must be
courteous to my enemies, little one, and gracious to people who weary
me to death; but to you I give a bit of my heart, and that is quite a
different thing."
And she left me reassured of her affection, but not a little
perplexed by this double code of morals. That one region of life
should be governed by the rules of right and wrong, and another by
those of politeness, was altogether a strange thing to me.
Meantime Lettice and I were rapidly advancing from the outer court of
courtesies into the inner one of childish friendship, spiced with
occasional sharp debates, and very undisguised honesties towards each
other; as Lettice and her brothers initiated me and Roger into the
various plays and games in which they were so much superior to us,
and we became eager on both sides for victory. A very new world this
play-world was to us, who had known scarcely any toys but such as we
made for ourselves, and no amusements but such as we had planned for
ourselves.
Very charming it was to us at first, the billiard-table, the
tennis-court, or pall-mall; and great delight Roger took in learning
to vault and throw the dart on horseback, to wheel and curvet, or
pick up a lady's glove at full speed, and in the various courtly
exercises and feats, Spanish, French, or Arabian, which the young
Davenants had learned from their riding-master. Naturally agile, he
had been trained to thorough command of his horse, by following my
Father through flood and fen, while his eye had learned quickness and
accuracy from hunting the wild fowl, and tracking hares and foxes
through the wild country around us, and these accomplishments came
easily enough to him. Yet with all these ingenious arrangements for
passing the time, it seemed to hang more heavily on hand at the Hall
than at Netherby; it came, indeed, to Roger and me as something
completely new that any arrangements should be needed to make the
time pass quickly. What with spinning, and sewing, and my helping my
Aunts, and his learning Greek, and Latin, and Italian of my Father,
and helping him about the farm, our holiday hours had always seemed
too brief for half the things we had to do in them. Every morning
found an eager welcome from us, and every evening a reluctant
farewell; and it was not until we spent those days at the Hall that
the question, "What are we to do next?" ever occurred to us, not in
hesitation which to select of the countless things we had to do in
our precious spare hours, but as an appeal for some new excitement.
Moreover, while in outward accomplishments and graces we felt our
inferiority, in many things we could not but feel that our education
had been far more extensive than that of the Davenants.
Allusions to Greek and Roman history, and to new discoveries in art
and science, and even to stories of modern European wars, which were
as natural to us as household words, were plainly an unknown tongue
to them. Even on the lute and the harpsichord, Lattice's
instructions had fallen short of those my father had procured for me,
although her sweet clear voice, and her graceful way of doing
everything, made all she did seem done better than any one else could
have done it.
The brothers, for the most part, laughed off their deficiencies, and
often made them seem for the moment a kind of gentlemanlike
distinction, bantering Roger as if learning were but a little better
kind of servile labour, beneath the attention of any but those who
had to earn their bread. All that kind of thing, they said, was
going out of the mode. The late King James had tired the court out
with overmuch pedantry and learning; the present king indeed was a
grave and accomplished gentleman, but merrier days would come in with
the French queen's court and the young princes, when the "gay
science" would be the only one much worth cultivating by men of
condition. Meantime the elder brothers paid me many choice and
graceful compliments on my hands and my hair, my eyes and my
eye-lashes, my learning and my accomplishments, jesting now and then
in a courtly way on my sober attire; and, child that I was, sent me
looking with much interest and wonder at myself in the long glass in
Lady Lucy's drawing-chamber, to see if what they said was true. I
remember, one noon, after a long survey of myself, I concluded that
much of it was, and thanked God that evening for having made me
pleasant to look at. A few years later, the danger would have been
different.
But Lettice was of a different nature from all her brothers except
one. Generously alive to whatever was to be loved or admired in
others, and ready to depreciate herself, she wanted Roger and me to
teach her all we knew. She made him hunt out the books which would
instruct her in Sir Walter's neglected library. She sat patiently
three sunny mornings trying to learn from Roger the Italian grammar,
which she had pleaded hard he should teach her, she made him read the
poetry to her, and said it was sweeter than her mother's lute. But
on the fourth morning her patience was exhausted;--she declared it
was a wicked prodigality to waste the sunny hours in-doors, and
danced us away to the woods; and all Roger's remonstrances could not
bring her back to such unwonted work. Indeed the more he
remonstrated, the more idle and indifferent she chose to be,
insisting instead on showing him some new French dance or singing him
some snatch of French song she had learned from the Queen's ladies,
until he gave up in despair; when she declared that but for his want
of patience she had been fairly on the way to become a feminine
Solomon.
It was Monday when our visit commenced, so that we were no longer
strangers in the house by the following Sunday. But we were not
prepared for the contrast between the Sundays at Davenant Hall with
those at Netherby. At our own home, grave as the day was, there was
always a quiet festival air about it. The hall was fresh swept, and
strewn with clean sand. My Father and my Aunts, the maids and men,
had on their holiday dresses. That morning at prayers we always had
a psalm, and the mere thrill of my voice against my Father's rich
deep tones was a pleasure to me. Then after breakfast Roger and I
had a walk in the fields with him, and he made us hear, and see a
hundred things in the ways of birds and beasts and insects that we
should never have known without him. One day it was the little brown
and white harvest-mouse, which, by cautiously approaching it, we saw
climbing by the help of its tail and claws to its little round nest
woven of grass suspended from a corn-stalk. Another day it was a
squirrel, with its summer house hung to the branch of a tree with its
nursery of little squirrels; and its warm winter house, lined with
hay, in the fork of an old trunk; or a colony of ants roofing their
dwellings in the wood with dry leaves and twigs. Or he would turn it
into a parable and show us how every creature has its enemies, and
must live on the defensive or not live at all. Or he would watch
with us the butterfly struggling from the chrysalis, or the
dragon-fly soaring from its first life in the reedy creeks of the
Mere to the new life of freedom in the sunshine. Or he would point
out to us how the field-spider had anticipated military science; how
she threw up her bulwarks and strengthened every weak point by her
fairy buttresses, and kept up the communication between the citadel
and the remotest outwork. Or he would teach us to distinguish the
various songs of the birds, the throstles, the chaffinches, the
blackbirds, or the nightingales. God, he said, had filled the woods
with throngs of sacred carollers, and melodious troubadours, and
merry minstrels; some with one sweet monotonous cadence, one
bell-like note, one happy little "peep" or chirp, and no more, and
others overflowing with a passion of intricate and endlessly varied
song; and it was a churlish return for such a concert not to give
heed enough to learn one song from another. Or, together, we would
watch the rooks in the great elm grove behind the house, how strict
their laws of property were, the old birds claiming the same nest
every year, and the young ones having to construct new ones. Or he
would tell us of the different forms of government among the various
creatures; how the bees had an hereditary monarchy, yet owned no
aristocracy but that of labour, killing their drones before winter,
that if any would not work neither should he eat; and how the rooks
held parliaments. Everywhere he made us see, wonderfully blended and
balanced, fixed order, with free spontaneous action; freaks of
sportive merriment, free as the wildest play of childhood, with a
fixedness of law more exact than the nicest calculations of the
mathematicians; "service which is perfect freedom;" delicate beauty
with homely utility; lavish abundance with provident care. And
everywhere he made us feel that the spring of all this order, the
source of all this fullness, the smile through all this humour and
play of nature, the soul of all this law, was none other than God.
So that often after these morning walks with him we fell into an awed
silence, feeling the warm daylight solemn as a starry midnight, with
the Great Presence; and entered the church-porch almost with the
feeling that we were rather stepping out of the Temple than into it;
that, sacred as was the place of worship and of the dead, it was not
more sacred or awful than the world of life we left to enter it.
The other golden hour of our golden day (for Sunday was ever that to
us), was when in the evening he read the Bible with Roger and me in
his own room. I cannot remember much that he used to say about it.
I only remember how he made us reverence and love it; its fragments
of biography which make you know the people better than volumes of
narrative; its characters that are never mere incarnations of
principles, but men and women; its letters that are never mere
sermons concentrated on an individual; its sermons that are never
mere dissertations peculiarly applicable to no one time or place, but
speeches intensely directed to the needs of one audience, and the
circumstances of one place, and therefore containing guiding wisdom
for all; its prayers that are never sermons from a pulpit, but brief
cries of entreaty from the dust or flaming torrents of adoration
piercing beyond the stars, or quiet asking of little children for
daily bread; its confessions that are as great drops of blood, wrung
slowly from the agony of the heart; its hymns that dart upward
singing and soaring in a wild passion of praise and joy.
I can recall little of what my father said to us in those evening
hours, but I remember that they left on our minds the same kind of
joyous sense of having found something inexhaustible which came from
our morning walks. They made us feel that in coming to the Bible, as
to nature, we come not to a cistern or a stream or a ponded store,
though it might be abundant enough for a nation; but to a Fountain,
which, though it might seem at times but a gentle bubbling up of
waters just enough for the thirsty lips which pressed it, was,
nevertheless, living, inexhaustible, eternal, because it welled up
from the fullness of God.
The usual name for the Sabbath in our home was the Lord's Day,
because of our Lord's Resurrection. On other days my Father read to
us, and made us read and love other books--books of history and
science as well as of religion, Shakespeare, Spenser, the early poems
of Mr. John Milton, and, when we could understand them, the Italian
poet Dante, or Davila, and other great Italians who spoke nobly of
order and liberty.
Bui on this day of God he never read but from these two divine books,
Nature and the Holy Scriptures.
In church we had not always any sermon at all. Preaching had not
been much encouraged since the days of Queen Elizabeth. Occasionally
one of the lecturers, or gospel preachers, whom Mr. Cromwell and
other good men were so anxious to supply at their own cost, used, in
our earlier days, to enter our pulpit and arouse us children with
bursts of earnest warning or entreaty (our parish minister then being
a meek and conformable person). But Archbishop Laud soon put a stop
to this, and sent us a clergyman of his own type, who fretted Aunt
Dorothy by changing the places and colours of things, moving the
communion-table from the middle of the church, where it had stood
since the Reformation, to the East End, wearing white where we were
used to black, and coats of many colours where we were used to white,
and in general moving about the church in what appeared to us Puritan
children, uninstructed in symbolism, a restless and unaccountable
manner; standing when we had been wont to sit, kneeling when we had
been wont to stand, making little unexpected bows in one direction
and little inexplicable turns in another, in a way which provided
matter of lively speculation to Roger and me during the week, since
we never knew what new movement might be executed on the following
Sunday. But to Aunt Dorothy these innovations were profanities,
which would have been utterly intolerable had she not consoled
herself by regarding them as signs of the end of all things. For
what to Mr. Nicholls, the parson, was the "beauty of holiness," and
to our father "personal peculiarities of Mr. Nicholls," and to Aunt
Gretel but one more of our "incomprehensible English customs," were
to Aunt Dorothy the infernal insignia of the "Mother of abominations."
She therefore remained resolutely and rigidly sitting and standing as
she had been wont, a target for fiery darts from Mr. Nicholls' eyes,
and a sore perplexity to Aunt Gretel, who, never having mastered our
Anglican rubric, had hitherto had no ceremonial rule, but to do what
those around her did, and was thus thrown into inextricable
difficulties between the silent reproaches of Aunt Dorothy's
compressed lips if she did one thing, and the suspicious glances of
the Parson's eyes if she did another.
On our return Aunt Dorothy frequently made us repeat the sixteenth
and seventeenth chapters of the Revelation. We understood that she
regarded both these chapters as in some way directed against Mr.
Nicholls. In what way--we discussed it often--Roger and I at that
time could never make out. The great wicked city, with ships, and
merchants, and traders, and pipers, and harpers, seemed to us more
like London town, with the Court of the King, than like the parish
church at Netherby. However that may be, I am thankful for having
learned those chapters. Many and many a time, when in after life the
world has tempted me with its splendours, or straitened me with its
cares, and I have been assailed with the Psalmist's old temptation at
seeing the wicked in great prosperity, the grand wail over the doomed
city has pealed like a triumphal march through my soul, and the whole
gaudy pomp and glory of the world has lain beneath me in the power of
that solemn dirge, like the tinsel decorations of a theatre in the
sunbeams, whilst above me has arisen, snow-white and majestic, the
vision of the Bride in her fine linen "clean and white,"--of the City
coming down from heaven "having the glory of God."
Aunt Gretel, on the other hand, would frequently quiet her ruffled
spirits after her perplexities, by making Roger and me read to her
the fourteenth chapter of the Romans, ending with, "We then that are
strong ought to bear with the infirmities of the weak. Let every one
of us please his neighbour for his good to edification. For even
Christ pleased not Himself."--A rubric which secretly seemed to us to
have two edges, one for Aunt Dorothy and one for Mr. Nicholls, but of
which Aunt Gretel contrived to turn both on herself.
"You see, my dears," she would say, "that is a rule of which I am
naturally very fond. Because, of course, I am one of the weak. And
it certainly would be a relief to me if those who are strong would
have a little more patience with me. But then it is a comfort to
think that He who is stronger than all does bear with me. For He
knows I do not wish to please myself, and would be thankful indeed if
I could tell how to please my neighbours." Which seemed to us like
the weak bearing the infirmities of the strong.
After this learning and repeating our chapters from the Bible, while
my Father and my Aunts were going about the cottages and villages
near us on various errands of mercy, Roger and I had a free hour or
two, during which we commonly resorted in summer to our perch on the
apple-tree, and in winter to the chamber over the porch where the
dried herbs were kept, where we held our weekly convocation as to all
matters that came under our cognizance, domestic, personal,
ecclesiastical, or political. Placidia was not excluded, but being
four years older, she preferred "her book" and the society of our
Aunts. Then came the sacred hour with our Father in his own chamber.
Afterwards in winter, we often gathered round the fire in the great
hall, we in the chimney-nook, and the men and maidens in an outer
circle, while my Father told stories of the sufferings of holy men
and women for conscience' sake, or while Dr. Antony (when he was
visiting us) narrated to us his interviews with those who were
languishing for truth or for liberty in various prisons throughout
the realm.
And so the night came, always, it seemed to us, sooner than on any
other day. Although never until our visit at Davenant Hall did I
understand the unspeakable blessing of that weekly closing of the
doors on Time, and opening all the windows of the soul towards
Eternity; the unspeakable lowering and narrowing of the whole being
which follows on its neglect and loss. To us the Lord's Day was a
day of Paradise; but I believe the barest Sabbath which was ever
fenced round with prohibitions by the most rigid Puritanism, looking
rather to the fence than the enclosure, rather to what is shut out
than to what is cultivated within, is a boon and a blessing compared
with the life without pauses, without any consecrated house for the
soul built out of Time, without silences wherein to listen to the
Voice that is heard best in silence.
It was a point of honor and a badge of loyalty with many of the
Cavaliers to protest against the Puritan observance of the Sabbath.
The Lady Lucy, indeed, welcomed the sacred day, as she did everything
else that was sacred and heavenly. She sang to her lute a lovely
song in praise of the day from the new "Divine Poems" of Mr. George
Herbert, and told me how he had sung it to his lute on his death-bed
only a few years before, in 1632.
"On Sunday heaven's gates stand ope,"
she sang; and I am sure they stood ever open to her.
But the rest of the family, whilst reverencing her devout and
charitable life, seemed to have no more thought of following it than
if she had been a nun in a convent. Indeed, in a sense, she did
dwell apart, cloistered in a hallowed atmosphere of her own.
Her husband and her sons requested her prayers when they went on any
expedition of danger, as their ancestors must have sought for the
intercessions of priest or canonized saint. The heavier oaths,
except under strong provocation, were dropped (by instinct rather
than by intention) in her presence; and mild adjurations, as by
heathen gods or goddesses, or by a lover's troth, or by a cavalier's
honor, substituted for them. They would listen fondly as she sang
"divine poems" to her lute, and declare she had the sweetest warbling
voice and the prettiest hands in His Majesty's three kingdoms. But
it never seemed to occur to them that her piety was any condemnation,
or any rule to them. Indeed, she had so many minute laws and
ceremonies that, easily as they suited her, it would have been
difficult to fit them into any but a lady's life of leisure. She had
special prayers and hymns for nine o'clock, mid day, three o'clock,
six o'clock. And once awakening in the night I heard sounds like
those of her lute stealing from the window of the little oratory next
her chamber. She had what seemed to me countless distinctions of
days and seasons, marked by the things she ate or did not eat, which
she observed as strictly as Aunt Dorothy her prohibitions as to not
wearing things. Only in one thing Lady Lucy was happier than Aunt
Dorothy; for whilst Aunt Dorothy fondly wished for a book of
Leviticus in the New Testament, and could not find it, Lady Lucy had
her book of Leviticus,--not indeed exactly in the New Testament, but
solemnly sanctioned by the authority of Archbishop Laud.
A complex framework to adapt to the endless varieties and inexorable
necessities of any man's life, rich or poor, in court, or camp, or
city; or indeed of any woman's, unless provided with waiting
gentlewomen.
In fact, the Lady Lucy herself sometimes spoke with wistful looks and
sighs of Mr. Farrar's Sacred College at Little Gidding (not far from
us), between Huntingdon and Cambridge, where the voice of prayer
never ceased day nor night, and the psalter was chanted through in a
rotatory manner by successive worshippers once in every
four-and-twenty hours.
Sir Walter and her sons never attempted to imitate her. She floated
in their imagination, in a land of clouds, between earth and heaven.
Her religion had a dainty sweetness and solemn grace about it most
becoming, they considered, to a noble lady; but for men, except for a
few clergymen, as inapplicable as Archbishop Laud's priestly
vestments for the street or the battle-field.
In our Puritan homes there was altogether another stamp of religion.
Whatever it might lack in grace and taste, it was a religion for men
as much as for women, a religion for the camp as much as the oratory.
Rough it might be often, and stern. It was never feeble. It had no
two standards of holiness for clergy and laity, men and women. All
men and women, we were taught, were called to love God with the whole
heart; to serve him at all times. If we obeyed we were still (in our
sinfulness) ever doing less than duty. If we disobeyed, we were in
revolt against the King of heaven. There were no neutrals in that
war, no reserves in that obedience.
And unhappily the Lady Lucy's family, in surrendering any hope of
reaching her eminence of piety, surrendered more. For, it is not
elevating, it is lowering, to have constantly before us an image of
holiness which we admire but do not imitate.
In the morning the household met in the Family Chapel (the Parish
Church being for the present avoided until danger of the infectious
sickness was over). In the afternoon, Sir Walter and his sons
loyally played at tennis and bowls with the young men of the
household. And in the evening there was a dance in the hall, in
which all joined.
The merriment was loud, and reached Lettice and me where we sat with
the Lady Lucy and her lute.
Yet now and then one of the boys would come in and complain of the
tedium of the day. It was such an interruption, they said, to the
employments of the week, and just at the best season in the year for
hunting, and with their father's hounds in perfect condition and
training. Tennis they said, was all very well for boys, and
Morris-dancing for girls, but there was no real sport in such things
after all, except to fill up an idle hour or two. The next day there
was to be a rare bear-baiting at Huntingdon, and the day after a
cock-fight in the next village. And at the beginning of the
following week Sir Walter had promised to give them a bull to be
baited. And the Book of Sports, in their opinion, let the Puritans
say what they like, was too rigid by half in prohibiting such true
old English sports on Sundays.
The Lady Lucy said a few pitiful tender words on behalf of Sir
Walter's bull, which they listened to without the slightest
disrespect, or the slightest change of mind--kissing her hand and
laughingly vowing she was too tender and sweet for this world at all,
and that if she had had the making of it she would certainly have
left bears and bulls altogether out of the creation.
It was without doubt a long and dreary Sunday to Roger and me. It
would naturally have been long and melancholy anywhere without our
Father.
I missed the busy work of the week, which made it not only a sacred
day but a holiday. I missed Aunt Dorothy's laws which made our
liberty precious.
But to Roger the day had had other trials.
In the evening he and I had a few minutes alone together in the
window of the drawing-chamber.
"Oh, Roger," said I, "I am afraid it cannot be right; but I am so
glad Sunday is over."
"So am I--rather," he said.
"Has it seemed long to you? I thought I heard your voice in the
tennis-court all the afternoon."
"You did not hear mine," he said.
"You did not think it right?" I asked, "I wondered how they could."
"I am not sure about its being right or wrong for other people," said
Roger. "But I was sure it was wrong for me. My Father would not
have liked it, and, therefore, I could not think of doing it;
especially when he was away."
"Were they angry?" I asked.
"Not exactly," he said. "They only laughed."
"_Only_ laughed!" said I. "I think that is worse to bear than
anything."
"So do I," he said.
"But you did not hesitate?"
"Not after they laughed, certainly," said he. "That set my blood up,
naturally; for it was not so much at me as at my Father and all of
us. They said I was too much of a man for such a crew."
"They laughed at Father!" said I, in horror.
"Not by name," said he, "but at all he thinks right--at the Puritans,
or Precisians, as they call us."
"What did you do, Roger?" I said.
"Walked away into the wood," he replied.
"Why did you not come to us?" I asked.
"Because they told me to go to you," he said, flushing.
"That was a pity; we were singing sweet hymns."
"I heard you," he said. "But I do not think it was a pity I did not
come."
"What did you find in the wood, then?" said I.
"I do not know that I found anything," he said.
"What did you do then, Roger?"
"I went to the Lady Well, and lay down among the long grass by the
stream which flows from it towards the Mere, and separates my
Father's land from Sir Walter's, at the place where you can see
Davenant Hall on one side and Netherby among its woods on the other.
And I thought."
"What did you think of?" said I.
"I thought I had rather live as a hired servant at my Father's than
as master here," said he.
"Was that all?" said I.
"I thought of our talk in the apple-tree about our being puppets, or
free."
I was silent.
"And Olive," he continued, "I seemed like some one waking up, and it
flashed on me that God has no puppets. The devil has puppets. But
God has free, living creatures, freely serving him. And I thought
how glorious it would be to be a free servant and a son of his. And
then I thought of the words, 'Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy
blood;' not from God, Olive, but to God, to be his free servants for
ever."
"That was a great deal to think, Roger," said I. "I think you did
find something in the wood."
"I found I _wanted_ something, Olive," he said very gravely; "and I
thought of something Mr. Cromwell once said when people were talking
about sects and parties,--'To be a seeker is to be of the best sect
next to being a finder.' He meant to be seeking happiness, or
wealth, or peace, or anything in the world, Olive, but to be seeking
God."
We were looking out across the woods to the Mere, which we could also
see from Netherby. The water was crimson in the sunset, and beyond
it the flats stretched on and on, dark and shadowy except where the
rows of willows and alders in the distance, and some cattle on an
enbankment, stood out distinct and black, like an ink etching,
against the golden sky.
And something in Roger's words made the sky look higher and the world
wider to me than ever before.
The next week, Lady Lucy's eldest son, Harry, came from London to the
Hall with an acquaintance of his, Sir Launcelot Trevor.
I thought Harry Davenant the most polished gentleman I had ever seen.
He was the first person who ever called me Mistress Olive, and
treated me with a gentle deference as if I had been a woman. I
admired his manners exceedingly. His voice, though deep and strong,
had something of the soft cadence of Lady Lucy's. He always saw what
every one wanted before they knew it themselves. He always seemed to
listen to what you said as if he had something to learn from every
one. His whole soul always appeared to be in what he was saying or
what you were saying, and yet there seemed to be another kind of
porter-soul outside, quite independent of this inner soul, always on
the watch to render any little courtesy to all around. I supposed
these courtly attentions had become an instinct to him, so that he
could attend to them and to other things at the same time, as easily
as we can talk while we are eating or walking.
He was his mother's greatest friend. Sir Walter never was this. He
was always almost lover-like in his deference and attention to her,
stormy and soldier-like as his usual manner was. But into her
thoughts he did not seem to care to enter, any more than into her
oratory. They had some portion of their worlds in common, but the
largest portion, by far, apart. And the younger boys were like him,
more or less. But whatever Lady Lucy might have missed in him was
made up to her in her eldest son.
He was a cavalier to her heart,--grave, religious, cultivated,--a
soldier from duty, but finding his delight in poetry and music, and
all beautiful things made by God or by man. It was a great interest
to me to sit at Lady Lucy's feet and listen to their discourse about
music and painting,--about the great Flemish painter Rubens, who had
painted the ceiling of the king's banqueting-house at Whitehall, the
grand building which Mr. Inigo Jones had just erected; and about the
additions the king had lately made to his superb collection of
pictures. He and Lady Lucy spoke of the purchase of the cartoons of
Raffaelle and of other pictures by this great master, and by Titian,
Correggio, and Giulio Romano, or by Cornelius Jansen and other
Flemish painters, with as much triumph as if each picture had been a
province won for the crown. He spoke also with the greatest
enthusiasm of the painter Vandyke, who was painting the portraits of
the Royal Family, and the great gentlemen and ladies of the Court.
He had brought a portrait of himself by Vandyke as a present to his
mother, (only, he said, as a bribe for her own by the same hand); and
it seemed to me that Mr. Vandyke must be as fine a gentleman as Harry
Davenant himself, or he never could have painted so perfectly and
nobly the noble features, the grave almost sad look of the eyes, the
long chestnut-coloured love-locks, the courtly air, and the dress so
easy and yet so rich.
All this was very new discourse to me; paintings, especially
religious paintings such as the Holy Families and Crucifixions by the
foreign masters which Harry Davenant described, never having been
much encouraged among us.
When he spoke of music and poetry I was more at home, and when he
alluded with admiration to the Masque of Comus by Mr. John Milton, I
felt myself flush as at the praise of a friend.
For the names revered at Davenant Hall and at Netherby were usually
altogether different. For instance, of Archbishop Laud and Mr.
Wentworth (afterwards Lord Strafford), whom Lady Lucy and her son
seemed to regard as the two pillars of church and state, I had only
heard as the persecutors of Mr. Prynne, and the subvertors of the
liberties of the nation.
But indeed the nation itself seemed to be little in Harry Davenant's
esteem, except as a Royal Estate with very troublesome tenants who
had to be kept down; and liberty, which in our home was a kind of
sacred word, fell from his lips as if it had been a mere pretext for
every kind of disorder.
With all his refinement, however, it did seem strange to me that
Harry Davenant should enter with apparent zest into the bull-baiting,
bear-baiting, and cock-fighting which were the festivities of the
next week. But he said these were fine old English amusements, and
it was right to show the people that the polish of the court did not
make the courtiers dainty or womanish, or prevent their entering into
these manly sports.
Sir Launcelot Trevor was a man of a different stamp. He had bold
handsome features, black hair, black eyes, and low forehead, a face
with those sharp contrasts of colour some people think handsome. But
there was something in him from which, even as a child, I shrank,
although he paid the most finished compliments to the Lady Lucy,
Lettice, and me, and to everything we did or said. His compliments
always seemed to me like insults. When Harry Davenant spoke of
Beauty in women, or pictures, or nature, he made you feel it
something akin to God and truth, to reverence and give thanks for.
When Sir Launcelot spoke of Beauty, he made you feel it a thing akin
to the dust, to be fingered and smelt and tasted, and then to fade
and perish.
Harry Davenant's was a polish bringing out the grain, as in fine old
oak. Sir Launcelot's was like a glittering crust of ice over a
stagnant pond, with occasionally a flaw giving you a glimpse into the
black depths beneath.
But I suppose it was the way in which he behaved to Roger that more
than anything opened my eyes to what he was. So that, behind all his
bland smiles on us, I always seemed to see the curl of the mocking
smile with which he so often addressed Roger. From the first they
seemed to recognize each other as antagonists.
Two days after his coming Sir Walter's bull was to be baited in a
field near the village. Lettice and I were standing in the hall
porch, debating whether we ought at once to report to Lady Lucy a
dangerous adventure from which we had just escaped, or whether it
would alarm her too much, when we heard voices approaching in eager
and rather angry conversation. First Sir Walter's rather scornful,--
"Let the boy alone. If his father chose to bring him up as a monk or
a mercer it is no concern of yours or mine."
Then Sir Launcelot's smooth tones.
"Far from it. Is there not indeed something quite amiable in such
compassion as Mr. Roger displays for your bull? In a woman it would
be irresistible. Should we not almost regret that the hardening
years are too likely to destroy that delightful tenderness?"
Then Roger's voice, monotonous and low, as always when he was much
moved.
"I see nothing more manly, Sir Launcelot, in tormenting a bull than a
cockchafer, when neither of them can escape. My Father says it is
not so much because it is savage, as because it is mean, that he will
have nothing to do with cock-fighting or bear and bull baiting."
Then a chorus of indignant disclaimers of the comparison from the
boys.
"If you are too tender to stand a bull-baiting, how would you like a
battle?"
But the next moment little Lettice, sweet, generous Lettice (herself
Roger's prime tormentor when he was left to her), confronting the
whole company--the five brothers and Sir Launcelot--and seizing her
father's hand in both hers, exclaimed,--
"For shame on you all, Robert and George, and Roland, and Dick, and
Walter" (Harry was not there, and she scornfully omitted Sir
Launcelot); "you are all baiting Roger. And that is worse than
baiting a dozen bulls. Don't let them, Father. He has done a braver
thing this very day for us than baiting a hundred bulls. This very
morning he faced that very bull in the priory meadow; not an hour
ago. We were crossing it, Olive and I, and the bull ran at us, and
Roger saw him and leapt over the hedge and fronted him, holding up my
scarlet kerchief, which I had dropped, and then moved slowly
backward, never turning till we were safe over the paling beyond the
bull's reach."
Sir Walter's eyes kindled as he turned and held out his hand to Roger.
"Why did you not tell me of this, my boy?" he said.
"I did not think it had anything to do with it," said Roger quietly.
"I did not know any one thought I was a coward."
Sir Launcelot took off his plumed hat and bowed low to Lettice.
"Heaven send me such a fair defender, Mistress Lettice, when I am
assailed."
She looked up in his face with her large deep eyes, and said
indignantly,--
"I am not Roger's defender. He was mine."
He laughed, but not pleasantly.
"Few would take much heed of such a danger for such a reward," he
said.
After this he professed to treat Roger with the profoundest deference.
"A hero and a saint, a Don Quixote and one of the godly, all in one,"
he said, "and such a paragon at sixteen! What might not England
expect from such a son?"
He was, moreover, continually referring questions of conscience to
Roger; asking him whether it was consistent with Christian compassion
to play at tennis; he had heard of a tennis-ball once hitting a man
in the eye, and who could say but that it might happen again? or
whether he seriously thought it charitable to ride horses with sharp
bits, since it was almost certain they did not like it! or whether
certain equestrian feats were not positively profane, since they were
brought to Europe by the Moors; or whether indeed there was not a
text forbidding the riding of horses altogether.
He did not venture on these taunts when Harry Davenant was present.
But he generally contrived to make them with such a quaint and
good-humoured air that the boys joined in the laugh, and Roger,
having neither so nimble nor so practised a wit, could only flush
with indignation, and then with vexation at himself that he could not
control the quick rush of blood which always betrayed that he felt
the sting.
Sir Launcelot had many of the qualities which command the regard of
boys--an indifference to expenditure sustained by the Fortunatus
purse of an unbounded capacity for getting into debt, which passed
for generosity ("if the worst comes to the worst," said he; "I can
but make interest with the king, for a monopoly"); a wit never too
heavily weighted to wheel sharp round on an assailant; skill and
quickness in all the accomplishments of a cavalier, from commanding a
squadron of horse to tuning a lady's lute; a dashing courage which
shrank from no bodily danger; (brave I could not call him, for to be
brave is a quality of the spirit, and spirit it was very difficult to
conceive Sir Launcelot had, except such as there is in a mettlesome
horse); a kindly instinct which would make him take care of his
horses or dogs, or fling a piece of money to a crying child; or in
the wars share his rations with a hungry soldier (plundering the next
Puritan cottage to repay himself). For cruel he was not, at least
not for cruelty's sake; if his pleasures, whether at the bull-baiting
or bear-baiting, or of other baser kinds proved cruelty to others,
that was not his intention, it was only an attendant accident, not,
("of course,") to be avoided, since life was short and enjoyment must
be had, follow what might.
But of all that went on in the tennis-court and the riding-ground I
knew little, except such glimpses as I have given, until long
afterwards, when Lettice, who heard it from her brothers told me;
Roger scorning to breathe a word of complaint on the subject, either
while at the Hall or after our return.
But oh! the joy when one morning my Father came up to the Hall with
two led horses following him, the speechless joy with which, rushing
down from Lady Lucy's drawing chamber, I met him at the great door
and threw myself into his arms as he dismounted.
"Why, Olive," he said, "you are like a small whirlwind."
Yet I shed many tears when the moment came to go. Lady Lucy, if no
more a serene goddess, and embodiment of perfect womanhood to me, was
in some sense more by being less. I loved her as a dear, loving,
mother-like woman. Her tender words that night by my
bedside--"Olive, I am not all or half I would be. But I could not
bear to be distrusted by you"--and all her frank, gracious,
considerate self-forgetful ways had made my heart cling with a true,
reverent tenderness to her, far deeper rooted than my old idolatry.
And Lettice, generous, eager, willful as the wind, truthful as the
light, now imperious as an empress, now self-distrustful and
confiding as a little child, her sweet changing beauty seemed to me
only the necessary raiment of the ever-changing, varying, yet,
constant heart, that glowed in the brilliant flush of her cheek, and
beamed or flashed through her eye.
Lettice and I were friends by right of our differences and our
sympathies, by right of a common antagonism to Sir Launcelot Trevor,
and our common conviction of our each having in Roger and in Harry
Davenant the best brothers in the world. Lettice and Harry royalist,
and Roger and I patriots to the core; they devoted to the King and
the Queen Marie, and we to England and her liberties; they persuaded
that Archbishop Laud was a new apostle, we that he was a new
Diocletian.
I shall never forget the joy of waking early the next morning in my
old chamber, and looking up and seeing the sheen of the morning in
the Mere, and watching Aunt Gretel asleep in the bed close to mine,
and hearing the first solitary crow of the king of the cocks, and
then the clacking of his family as they woke up one by one; the
bleating of the sheep in the orchard meadow, and the lowing of cows
in the sheds--the lowing of White-face, and Beauty my own orphaned
calf, and Meadow-sweet; and then the cheery voice of Tib, the
dairy-woman, recovered from the sickness, remonstrating with them on
their impatience; and the calls of Bob, Tib's husband, to his oxen,
as he yoked them and drove his team a-field; and mingled with all,
the deep soldierly bay of old Lion, the watch-mastiff, and the sharp
business-like bark of the sheep-dogs driving the flocks to fresh
pastures. It was such a delight to be among all the living creatures
again. It felt like coming out of an enchanted castle, drowsy with
perfumes and languid strains of music, into the fresh open air of
God's own work-a-day world--a world of daylight, and truth, and
judgment, and righteousness, and duty.
I was dressed before Aunt Gretel was fairly awake, and down among the
animals, eager to learn from Tib the latest news of all my friends in
field and poultry-yard.
But Roger was out before me. And before breakfast we had visited
nearly all our familiar haunts--the heronry by the Mere, the creek
where the waterfowl loved to build among the rushes, the swan's nest
on the reedy island, the shaded fish-ponds in the orchard, the little
brook below where he and I had made the weir, the bit of waste
low-ground which the brook used to flood, which with Bob's help we
had dyked and embanked into corn-ground for Roger's pigeons.
My very spinning task with Aunt Dorothy was a luxury. I could
scarcely help singing with a loud voice, as I span; my heart was
singing and dancing every moment of the day. The lessons for my
Father were a keen delight, like a race on the dykes in a fresh wind;
the Latin grammar was like poetry to me. It was such a liberation to
have come into a busy, every-day, working world again;--a world of
law, and therefore of liberty, where every one had his task, and
every task its time, and the play-hours were as busy as the
working-hours to heads and hands vigorous with the rebound of real
necessary labour.
All the world became thus again our play-ground, and all the
creatures our play-mates, by the mere fact that when not at play we,
too, were fellow-workers with them--working as hard in our way as ant
or bee, or happy building bird, or cleansing winds, or even the
glorious ministering sunbeams themselves, whose work was all joyous
play, and whose play was all world-helpful work.
An then it was inspiring to hear once more the great old honoured
names of our childhood--Sir John Eliot (honoured in his dishonoured
grave), and Hampden, and Pym, and Sir Bevill Grenvil (loyal then to
his country and his King, and afterwards, as he believed, to his King
for his country's sake), and Mr. Cromwell, who whether in Parliament,
in the Fens, or on the "Soke of Somersham," understood liberty to be,
liberty to restrain the strong from oppressing the weak--liberty to
speak the truth loud enough for all the world to hear.
I thought I began to understand what was meant by, "Thou hast set my
feet in a large room." For it seemed like coming forth from the
ante-room of a court presence-chamber, with low-toned voices.
perfumed atmosphere, constrained, soft movements, into our own dear,
free Old England, where we might run, and sing, and freely use every
free faculty to the utmost, beneath the glorious open heavens, which
are the Presence-chamber of the Great King.
CHAPTER IV.
The very afternoon of Roger's and my return from Davenant Hall Dr.
Antony came on one of his ever-welcome visits. He had, by dint of
much trouble and perseverance, obtained access to Mr. Prynne, in his
solitary cell at Caernarvon, and to Mr. Bastwick and Mr. Burton, in
theirs, in Launceston and Lancaster Castles; and afterwards to the
prisons to which they were removed, in Guernsey, Jersey, and the
Scilly Islands, and also to old Mr. Alexander Leighton, in his
prison, after his most cruel mutilations.
Often in the summer Dr. Antony left his patients for a season, to
visit such throughout the land as were in bonds for conscience' sake,
bearing them the tidings, so precious to the solitary captive, that
in the rush of life outside they were not forgotten; taking them food
or physic, and such poor bodily comforts as were permitted by the
hard rules of their imprisonment, and bringing back messages to their
friends and kinsfolk. This last year Dr. Antony himself (as we heard
from others) had been somewhat impoverished by a fine of £250
sterling, to which he had been sentenced by the Star-Chamber on
account of these visits of compassion; although there was no law
against them.
This time he brought us grievous tidings from many quarters; and very
grave was the discourse between him and my Father.
Everywhere disgrace and disaster to our country; the French Huguenots
cursing our Court for encouraging them to insurrection, and then
sending ships against them to Rochelle (though, thank Heaven!
scarcely one of our brave sailors would bear arms against their
Protestant brethren--officers and men deserting in a body when they
discovered against whom they had been treacherously sold to fight);
our own fisheries on the east coast sold to the Hollanders, and the
capture of one of our Indiamen by Dutch ships; the Barbary corsairs
landing on the coast near Plymouth, and kidnapping our countrymen and
countrywomen from their village homes, to sell them as slaves to the
Moors in Africa; the King of Spain, the very pillar of Popery and
persecution, the sworn foe of our religion and our race from the days
of the Armada, permitted to recruit for his armies in Ireland; the
Government, with Wentworth (traitor to liberty) and Archbishop Laud
at the head of it, weak as scorched tow to chastise our enemies
abroad, yet armed with scorpions against every defender of our
ancient rights at home. The decision but lately given by the judges
against the brave and good Mr. Hampden as to ship money, placing our
fortunes at the mercy of the Court, who chiefly valued them as meant
wherewith to destroy our liberties; Justice Berkeley declaring from
the judgment-seat that Lex was not Rex, but that Rex was Lex;
thirty-one monopolies sold, thus making nearly every article of
consumption at once dear and bad. The sweeping, steady pressure of
Lord Strafford's (Mr. Wentworth) "Thorough" wrought into a vexation
for every housewife in the kingdom, by the king's petty monopolies.
The heavy links of Wentworth's imperious despotism, filed and twisted
by Archbishop Laud's petty tyrannies into needles wherewith to
torture tender consciences, and wiry ligatures wherewith to tie and
bind every limb. "Regulations as to the colours and cutting of
vestments, worthy (Aunt Dorothy said) of a court tailor, enforced by
cruelties minute and persevering enough for a malignant witch." Dark
stories, too, of private wrong, wrought by Wentworth in Ireland,
worthy of the basest days of the Roman emperors; tales of royal
forests arbitrarily extended from six miles to sixty, to the ruin of
hundreds of gentlemen and peasants; disgraceful news of faith broken
with Dutch and French refugees welcome to the heart of England since
the days of Elizabeth, made secure with rights confirmed to them by
James and by King Charles himself, now forbidden by Archbishop Laud
to worship God in the way for which their fathers had suffered
banishment and loss of all things,--driven to seek another home in
Holland, and in their second exile ruining the flourishing town of
Ipswich, where they had lived, and carrying over the cloth-trade
which was the support of our eastern counties to our rivals the Dutch.
"You have a copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs?" Dr. Antony asked of my
Father, after he had been speaking of these lamentable things.
"What good Protestant English household is without one?" exclaimed
Aunt Dorothy; "least of all such as this, whose forefathers are
enrolled in its lists."
"Take good care of it, then," Dr. Antony replied, "for the Primate
hath forbidden another copy to be printed, under the penalties the
Star-Chamber will not fail to enforce."
"The times are dark," he continued, "dark and silent. I stood this
spring by the grave of Sir John Eliot, in the Church of the Tower; as
brave, and loyal, and devout a gentleman as this nation ever knew,
killed by inches in prison for calmly pleading the ancient rights of
England in his place in Parliament, and then his body refused to his
family for honourable burial among his kindred in his parish church
in Cornwall, and cast like a felon's into a dishonoured grave in the
precincts of the prison where he died. And I thought how it might
have thrown a deeper shadow over his deathbed if he could have
foreseen how, during these six years, the tyranny would be tightened,
and the voice of the nation never once be heard in her lawful
Parliaments."
"The voice of the nation is audible enough to those who have ears to
hear," said my Father.
"Yea, verily," said Dr. Antony, "if you had journeyed through the
country as I have, you would say so. When will kings learn that
moans and subdued groans between set teeth are more dangerous from
human lips than any torrents of passionate speech?"
"And," added my Father, "that there is a silence even more
significant and perilous than these!"
"But there are two points of hope," said Dr. Antony. "One is the
Puritan colony in New England, where our brethren have exchanged the
vain struggle with human blindness and tyranny for the triumphant
struggle with nature in her primeval forests and untrodden wilds.
Four thousand good English men and women, and seventy-seven
clergymen, have taken refuge there during these last twenty years.
Not poor men only, for they have taken many thousand pounds of
English money, or money's worth, with them, forsaking country and
comfortable homes for the dear liberty to obey God rather than man.
And these plantations, after the severest struggles and privations,
are beginning to grow.
"What they hope and mean to be is shown by this, that two years
since, while food was still hard to win from the wilderness, and
roads and bridges had yet to be made, the plantation of Massachusetts
voted £400 for the founding of a college. Such an act might seem
more like the foresight of the fathers of a nation than the care of a
little exiled band struggling for existence with the Indians, the
wilderness, and a hostile Court at home.
"The other point of hope is the Greyfriars' Church in Edinburgh,
where, on the 1st of last March, after long prayers and preachings,
the great congregation rose, gathered from all corners of the
kingdom,--nobles, gentlemen, burgesses, ministers, lifted their hands
solemnly to heaven, and swore to the Covenant." Then Dr. Antony took
a manuscript paper from the breast of his coat, and read: "'We
abjure,' they swore, 'the Roman Antichrist,--all his tyrannous law
made upon indifferent things against our Christian liberty; his
erroneous doctrine against the written Word, the perfection of the
law, the office of Christ, and His blessed Evangel; his cruel
judgments against infants departing this life without the sacraments;
his blasphemous priesthood; his canonization of men; his dedicating
of kirks, altars, days, vows to creatures; his purgatory, prayers for
the dead, praying or speaking in a strange language; his desperate
and uncertain repentance; his general and doubtsome faith; his holy
water, baptizing of bells, conjuring of spirits, crossing, saving,
anointing, conjuring, hallowing of God's good creatures.' 'We,
noblemen, barons, gentlemen, burgesses, ministers, and commons,
considering the danger of the true Reformed religion, of the king's
honour, and of the public peace of the kingdom by the manifold
innovations and evils generally contained and particularly mentioned
in our late supplications, complaints, and protestations, do hereby
profess, and before God, his angels, and the world, solemnly declare
that with our whole hearts we agree and resolve all the days of our
life constantly to adhere unto and defend the foresaid true religion,
and forbearing the practice of all novations already introduced in
the matter of the worship of God, or approbations of the corruptions
of the public government of the Kirk, till they be tried or allowed
in free Assemblies and in Parliaments, to labour by all means lawful
to recover the purity and liberty of the Gospel.' 'Neither do we
fear the aspersions of rebellion, combination, or what else our
adversaries, from their craft and malice, could put upon us, seeing
what we do is well warranted, and ariseth from an unfeigned desire to
maintain the true worship of God, the majesty of our king, and the
peace of the kingdom, for the common happiness of ourselves and
posterity. And because we cannot look for a blessing of God on our
proceedings except with our subscription we gave such a life and
conversation as becometh Christians who have renewed their covenant
with God, we therefore promise to endeavour to be good examples to
others of all godliness, soberness, and righteousness, and of every
duty we owe to God and man. And we call the living God, the Searcher
of hearts, to witness, as we shall answer to Jesus in that great day,
under pain of God's ever-lasting wrath and of infamy; most humbly
beseeching the Lord to strengthen us with his Holy Spirit for this
end.' And this," added Dr. Antony, "has been sworn to not in the
Greyfriars' Church alone; but by crowds, signed with their blood on
parchment spread on the stones of the churchyards in Edinburgh and
Glasgow; yea, in church after church, in city, village, and on
hill-side, from John o'Groats' House to the Borders, from Mull to
Fife, with tears, and shouts, and fervent prayers."
"And this means?" said my Father.
"It means that the Scottish nation will rather die than submit to
Archbishop Laud's ceremonies and canons; but that they mean neither
to die nor to submit; that every covenanted congregation will be a
recruiting ground, if necessary, fora covenanted army; that the oath
sworn in the Kirk they are prepared to fulfil on the battle-field."
"And a goodly army they might soon discipline," said my Father, "with
the military officers they have trained under the great Gustavus."
"It means," added Dr. Antony, lowering his voice, "that they are
ready to kindle a fire for religion and liberty in Scotland which
will not stop at the Borders, and will find fuel enough in every
county in England."
"The Court had better, for its own peace, have heeded Jenny Geddes'
folding-stool," said my Father.
"For his own peace," rejoined Aunt Dorothy, "but scarcely for ours."
From that time (1638), through more than a quarter of a century,
public and private life were so intertwined that no faithful history
can divide them. In quieter times, while the great historical
paintings are being wrought in parliament-houses and palaces,
countless small family-pictures are being woven entirely independent
of these in countless homes. But in times of revolution, national
history and private story are interwoven into one great tapestry,
from which the humblest figure cannot be detached without unravelling
the whole web.
Such times are hard, but they are ennobling. Or at least they are
enlarging. Faults, and ordinary virtues become crimes, or heroical
virtues, by mere force of temperature and space. Principles are
tested; pretences are dissolved by the fact of being pretences. Such
times are ennobling, but they are also necessarily tragical. All
noble lives--all lives worth living--are expanded from the small
circles of everyday domestic circumstances into portions of the grand
orbits of the worlds. Yet, doubtless, thereby in themselves such
lives must often become fragments instead of wholes, must seem in
themselves unfinished, must be in themselves inexplicable.
But, indeed, are not the histories of nations, and revolutions
themselves, even the grandest, but fragments of those greater orbits
of which we scarcely, even in centuries, can trace the movement? Is
it any wonder then that national histories as well as personal should
often seem tragical? As now, alas, to us! poor tempest-tossed
fragments of the ship's company which we deemed should have brought
home the argosies for ages to come, driven to these untrodden far off
shores; whilst to England, instead of the golden fleece of peace and
liberty, our enterprise may seem but to have brought a tyranny more
cruel and a court more corrupt. Yet may there be something in the
future which, to those who look back, will explain all!
For England; and perhaps even for these wild shores which we fondly
call New England!
Can it be possible that we have won the Golden Fleece, and have
brought it hither?
There is something, moreover, in having lived in times of storm. The
temperature is raised at such times; all life is keener, colour more
vivid, and growth more rapid.
A nation in revolution is, in more ways than one, like a ship in a
storm. The dividing barriers of selfishness are dissolved for a time
into a common passion of patriotic hope, purpose, and endeavour. We
feel our common humanity in our common throbs of hope and fear, in
our common efforts for deliverance. And we are (or ought to be)
nobler, and more large of heart for ever afterwards. And I think the
greater part are. Perhaps, in some measure, all; unless, indeed, it
be the ship's cats, who, no doubt, privately pursue the ship's mice
with undeviating purpose through the raging of winds and waves, and
look on the strife of the elements as a providential arrangement to
enable them to fulfil their mousing destinies with less interruption.
And what such times of revolution do for a nation, ought not
Christianity, the great perpetual revolution, to do for us always?
The great hindrance seems to me to be, that it is so much easier to
be partizans than patriots, whether in the Church or State.
If men would do for the country what they do for the party, what a
country we should have!
If Christians would do for the Church what they do for their sect,
what a world we should have!
For a quarter of a century, from the signing of the Covenant in the
High Kirk of Edinburgh, the long struggle went on. Nor has it ceased
yet, though the combatants have changed, and the battle-field.
The Scottish covenanted congregations grew quickly indeed into a
covenanted army, and advanced to the border. The King, by Archbishop
Laud's counsel, disbelieving in the Covenant, proclaimed that if
within six weeks the Scotch did not renounce it, he would come and
chastise them (in a fatherly way) with an army. The King and
Archbishop Laud regarded the Covenant as a freak of rebellious
misguided children. The Scotch regarded it as the portion of the
eternal law of God which they then had to keep; and would keep, or
die.
A difference not to be settled by royal proclamation.
The Scotch had the advantage of _being_ their own army, ready to
fight for their Divine law; while the king had to pay his army with
the coin of the realm, and never could inspire them to the end with
the conviction that they were fighting for anything but coin of the
realm.
The coin of the realm, moreover, lay in the keeping of those dragons
called Parliaments, which his majesty had termed "vipers" at their
last meeting, and in a letter to Strafford, had compared to "cats,"
tameable when young, "cursed" if allowed to grow old, and which he
had therefore banished underground for eleven years into shadow and
silence.
When, therefore, the king and the Covenanted army met on the borders,
it was found that the Scotch, commanded, as my Father said, by old
Gustavus Adolphus's officers; every regiment as in that old Swedish
army, also a congregation, meeting morning and evening round its
banner of "Christ's crown and covenant," for prayer was a rock
against which the English army might vainly break; but from which, as
the event proved, it preferred to ebb silently away, the pay for
which only it professed to fight, being, moreover, exhausted.
The king took refuge in a treaty, promising to leave Kirk affairs in
the hands of the Kirk, and to call a free assembly. Poor gentleman,
his promises were still believed to have some small amount of truth
in them, and a pacification was effected.
Then came the moment of hope for those who had been watching those
movements with the intensest interest in England.
Of the two evils, a remonstrating Parliament in London and a fighting
Kirk in Scotland, the former now appeared to the king the least. In
the keeping of the Parliament, dragon-monster as it seemed to him,
lay the gold. And once more, after a silence of eleven years, on the
15th of April, 1640, the Parliament was summoned; a weapon welded by
the wrongs and the patience of eleven years into a temper the king
had done well to heed.
Pym and Hampden were the chief spokesmen, and Mr. Cromwell sat for
Huntingdon.
At the last Parliament they, and brave men like them, had wept bitter
tears at the king's arbitrary measures, and at his false dealing.
At this Parliament there were no tears shed. There were no
disrespectful or hasty words spoken.
It was as if in spirit they met around the grave of the martyred Sir
John Eliot, and would do or say nothing to dishonour the grave to
which since last they met he had been brought for liberty.
But no portion of the hoarded treasure could the king force or cajole
from their grasp. The court insisted on supplies. The Parliament
insisted on grievances.
And on May the 5th, the king dissolved the Parliament.
My Father's voice trembled with emotion when he heard it. "They
would have saved him!" he said. "They would have saved the country
and the king!"
Said Aunt Dorothy grimly, "The king prefers armies to parliaments;
and no doubt he will have his choice."
A second royal army was raised by enforcing ship-money, seizing the
pepper of the Indian merchants, and compelling loans, filling the
towns and cities with angry men who dared not resist, and the prisons
with brave men who dared. And to rouse the country further, the
queen appealed publicly for aid to the Roman Catholics, whilst
Archbishop Laud demanded contributions of the clergy. Earl
Strafford, recalled from Ireland, was appointed commander-in-chief.
The court endeavoured also to enkindle the fury of the old Border
war-memories; but the Borderers were brethren in the faith, and,
refusing to hate each other, combined in hating the bishops.
The second army melted like the first, after some little heartless
fighting in a cause they hated; having distinguished itself mainly by
shouting its sympathy with the Puritan preachers in the various towns
through which it passed; by insisting on testing whether its
commanders were Papists before it would follow them to the field; and
by draining the king's treasury, so that he could proceed no further
without once more looking to the dreaded guardians of the gold.
"They meet in a different temper from the last," my Father said, as
we walked home from the village, where we had eagerly hastened to
meet the flying Post, who galloped from one patriot's house to
another with printed sheets and letters containing the account of the
king's opening speech on the 3d of November; "as different as the
sweet May days of promise during which the Little Parliament debated,
from the gray fogs which creep along the Fens before our eyes to-day.
Summer, and hope, and restitution brightened before that April
Parliament. Over this lower winter, storms, and retribution; slow
clearing of the stubble-fields of centuries, stern ploughing of the
soil for better harvests, not to be reaped, perchance, by the hands
that sow."
For the six months between had been ill-filled by the court party.
I remember now how one day during those months my Father's hands
trembled and his voice grew low as a whisper as he read to us a
letter telling how a poor reckless young drummer lad, who, when, on
leave from the army in the north, had joined a wild mob of London
apprentices in an attack on Lambeth Palace, had been racked and
tortured in the Tower to make him confess his accomplices; and
torture failing to make him base, poor boy, how he had been hanged
and quartered the day after.
"They dared not torture Felton a few years since for the murder of
Buckingham," my Father said, "and now they twist this boy's offence
into treason, because, forsooth, a drum chanced to be sounded by the
mob, that the poor misguided lad may suffer the traitor's doom, and
the honour of his Holiness, their Pontifex Maximus, their Archangel,
as they call him, be avenged."
(These were the things that silenced the pleadings of pity in good
and merciful men when, in after years, the Archbishop was brought to
the scaffold.
Now that the crime and its avenging all are past, and victim, slayer,
avenger, all have met before the great Bar, it is hard to recall the
passion of indignation these deeds awakened in the gentlest hearts
when they were being done with little chance of ever being avenged.
But is not the most inflexible judgment the offspring of outraged
mercy?)
All through that summer the king, the archbishop, and Strafford went
on accumulating wrongs on the nation, too surely to recoil on
themselves.
There may have been many tyrannies more terrible. Never could there
have been one more irritating, more ingenious in sowing discontents
in every corner of the land.
The archbishop in convocation made a new canon, requiring every
clergyman and every graduate of the universities to take an oath that
all things necessary to salvation were contained in the doctrine and
discipline of the Church of England, as distinguished from
Presbyterianism and Papistry.
I remember that canon especially, because it brought Roger home from
Oxford, where he had been studying during the past two years, and was
about to take his degree, and led to results, sad indeed for us,
though not exactly among the miseries to be set down to the
archbishop. Roger would not swear, he said, against the religion of
half the kingdom, at least without understanding it better.
From Northamptonshire, Kent, Devonshire,--old conservative Kent and
the loyal West,--came up indignant petitions against this canon.
London was exasperated by the committal of four aldermen who refused
to set before the king the names of those persons within their wards
who were able to lend his majesty money; every borough in the kingdom
was aroused by the presence of its members ignominiously dismissed
from the dissolved Parliament; nine boroughs were still more deeply
moved by the absence of their members, imprisoned the day after the
dissolution in the Tower. Every day brought reports of some fresh
victim fined in the Star-Chamber on account of the odious ship-money.
Especial complaints came from the North, which Strafford was grinding
with the steady pressure of his presence in the council at York.
And meantime the friendly Scots were practically inculcating
Presbyterianism and the advantages of armed resistance in the four
counties beyond the Tees, where they had been left in possession
until they received the price wherewith the king had paid them for
rebellion.
There was much stir and movement in the land all through those
months. Netherby lay close to the high road, and we had many
visitors. Mr. Cromwell once, on his way to Cambridge (for which
place he then sate in Parliament), brief in speech and to the point,
hearty in look, and word, and gesture, and also at times in laughter.
Mr. Hampden, dignified and courtly as any nobleman of the king's
court. Mr. Pym, with firm, close-set lips and grave eyes. He came
more than once on horseback, and put up for the night, on one of the
many rides he took at that time around the country to stir up the
patriots to act together. My father also was often absent attending
meetings of the country party at Broughton Hall, the Lord Brooks'
mansion, near Oxford, where Roger, being at the university, sometimes
met him.
So the summer passed on, its perishable things fading, and its
enduring things ripening into autumn. Crop after crop of royal
promises budded and bloomed and bore no fruit, until the people grew
sorrowfully to understand that royal words, like flowers cultivated
into barrenness in royal gardens, were never purposed to bear fruit,
but only to attract with empty show of blossom. The nobles
petitioned for a Parliament; ten thousand citizens of London, in
spite of threats, petitioned for parliament; and at last once more
the king summoned it.
A month afterwards, early in December, my Father called the household
around the great hall fire to hear a letter from Dr. Antony:
"_To my very loving friend,_
"_Roger Drayton, Esq.,_
"_November_ 28_th._
"_Present these._
"HONOURED SIR,--Let us rejoice and praise God together. My
occupation is gone. The prisons bid fair to be cleared of all save
their rightful tenants. Parish after parish will welcome back
faithful ministers, undone and imprisoned by Star-Chamber and High
Commission. Heaven send that prison and persecution have made their
voices strong and gentle, and not bitter and shrill; for I have found
the devil not locked out by prison-bolts. And too surely also he
will find his way into triumphal processions such as we have had in
London to-day, on behalf of Mistress Olive's old friends, Mr. Prynne,
Mr. Bastwick, and Mr. Burton. But let me set my narrative in order.
"A fortnight before the Parliament was opened two thousand rioters
had torn down the benches in St. Paul's, where the cruel High
Commission were sitting, shouting that they would have no bishop, no
High Commission. Now these disorders cease. Once more the gag is
off the lips of every borough and county in Old England; and the
bitter helpless moans and wild inarticulate cries which have vainly
filled the land these eleven years give place to calm and temperate
speech. Petitions and remonstrances pour in from north, south, east
and west; some brought by troops of horsemen. The calmest voices are
heard more clearly.
"'He is a great stranger in Israel,' said Lord Falkland, 'who knoweth
not that this kingdom hath long laboured under great oppression both
in religion and liberty. Under pretence of uniformity they have
brought in superstition and scandal; under the titles of reverence
and decency they have defiled our Church by adorning our churches.
They have made the conforming to ceremonies more important than the
conforming to Christianity.'
"Said Sir Edward Deering, in attacking the High Commission Court,--
"'A Pope at Rome will do me less hurt than a patriarch at Lambeth.'
"Said Sir Benjamin Rudyard,--
"'We have seen ministers, their wives, and families, undone against
law, against conscience, about not dancing on Sundays. They have
brought it so to pass, that under the name of Puritans all our
religion is branded. Whosoever squares his actions by any rule
divine or human, he is a Puritan; whosoever would be governed by the
king's laws, he is a Puritan; he that will not do whatsoever other
men will have him do, he is a Puritan.'
"The Commons had not sate four days when, on the 7th of November, by
warrant of the house, they sent for Mr. Prynne, Mr. Bastwick, and Mr.
Burton, from their prisons beyond the seas, to certify by whose
authority they had been mutilated, branded, and imprisoned.
"And now after three weeks these three gentlemen, freed from their
sea-washed dungeons in Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scilly Islands, have
this day arrived in the city. All the way from the coast they have
been eagerly welcomed, escorted by troops of friends with songs and
garlands, from town to town.
"Five thousand citizens of condition rode forth on horseback to meet
them, among them many a citizen's wife, and all with bay and rosemary
in their hats and caps, to do honour to those their enemies had
vainly sought to shame. I trow brave Mrs. Bastwick, who stood
tearless by her husband at the pillory, and who hath not been
suffered to see him in his prison since, thought it no shame to unman
him by shedding tears of joy to-day. Old gray-haired Mr. Leighton,
moreover, bent with imprisonment and torture, and young John Lilburn,
for whom Mr. Cromwell so fervently pleaded, were there to share the
triumph, all marked with honourable scars from the Star-Chamber.
This outside the city. And within, at Westminster, another
victory--not a triumph but a victory--not festive, but solemn and
tragical, as victories on battle-fields are wont to be.
"This day at the bar of the House of Peers, about three of the clock
in the afternoon, Mr. Pym, in the name of all the Commons of England,
impeached Thomas, Earl of Strafford, of high treason. And this night
Lord Strafford lodges in the Tower.
"He is too stately a cedar that there should not be something great
in his fall.
"Scorning the Commons' message, with a proud-glooming countenance the
earl made towards his place at the head of the board. But at once
many bade him void the house. Sullenly he had to move to the door
till he was called. There he, at whose door so many vainly waited,
had to wait till he was summoned. Loftily he stood to hear the
sentence of the House. He was commanded to kneel, and on his knees
he was committed prisoner to the Keeper of the Black Rod. He would
have spoken, but he who had silenced England for eleven years was
sternly silenced now, and had to go without a word. In the outer
room they demanded his sword. The carl cried to his serving-man with
a loud voice to take my Lord-Lieutenant's sword. A crowd thronged
the doors of the House as he stepped out to his coach. No fellow
capped to him before whom yesterday not a noble in England would have
stood uncovered with impunity. One cried to another, 'What is the
matter?' 'A small matter, I warrant you,' quoth the earl. Coming to
where he had left his coach he found it not, and had to walk back
again through the gazing, gaping crowd. He was not suffered to enter
his own coach, but was carried away a prisoner in that of the Keeper
of the Black Rod.
"And this night he lodges--scarce, I trow, rests or sleeps--in the
Tower. Will the memory of his old companion in the days before he
turned traitor to England and liberty, our noble murdered patriot
Eliot, haunt his memory there? From his ghost the earl is safe
enough. Such ghosts are in other keeping and other company. And for
the earl's memory, darker recollections than that of Eliot with all
his wrongs may well haunt it, if report speaks truth; recollections
which the Old Tower itself, with all its chambers of death, can
scarce outgloom.
"But Lord Strafford is not a man to dream while there is work to be
done, or to look back when life may hang on his wisdom in looking
forward.
"The first stroke is struck, but the cedar is not felled yet. Nor
can any surmise what it may bring down with it if it falls.
"Your faithful servant and loving friend.
"LEONARD ANTONY.
"Roger will like to hear that his friend Mr. Cromwell presented the
petition for poor John Lilburn, (some time writer for Mr. Prynne)
that was scourged from Westminster to the Fleet prison. And also
that he hath warmly espoused the cause of certain poor countrymen
whom he knows near St. Ives, robbed of their ancient pasture-rights
on a common tyrannously enclosed by one of the queen's servants.
"Mr. Cromwell seemed to take these poor men's wrongs sorely to heart,
and spoke with a flushed face and much vehement eloquence concerning
them, in a voice which certain courtiers thought loud and untunable,
clad in a coat and band they thought unhandsome and made by an 'ill
country-tailor,' and in a hat without a hatband. But the Parliament
hearkened to him with much regard, and gave great heed to what he
counselled."
Roger's eye kindled.
"Mr. Cromwell will never forget the old friends for the new," said my
Father, "nor pass by little duties in hurrying to great ends."
Then our household broke into twos and threes debating the news.
Aunt Dorothy shook her head. "I do mourn over it," said she. "Mr.
Cromwell might do great things. And here are the Church and State
all on fire, and the Almighty sending His lightnings on the cedars of
Lebanon and the oaks of Bashan, while Mr. Cromwell keeps harping on
these petty worldly things; on the wrongs of an insignificant servant
of Mr. Prynne's, which no doubt would get set right of themselves
when once the great battle is fought; and on whether some poor
clodpoles near St. Ives get a few acres more or less to feed their
sheep on. And, meanwhile, the sheep of the Lord's pasture wandering
on the mountains without pasture or shepherd! I do think it a pity,
too, that Mr. Cromwell does not change his tailor; we ought to
provide things honest in the sight of all men. Not but that I will
say," she concluded, "Mrs. Cromwell and the maidens might take some
of these matters on herself."
I remember that night asking Aunt Gretel if she thought it would be
wrong to put Earl Strafford's name into my prayers. He was not
exactly an enemy of mine, or there would be a command to do so; and
he certainly was not a friend, nor, now, any longer "one in
authority." But it went to my heart to think how in a moment all his
glory seemed turned to dishonor, the crowd gaping on him, and no man
capping to him.
"What wouldst thou pray for, Olive?" said Aunt Gretel. "Certainly
not that he may have power again, and set up the Star-Chamber, and
send the three gentlemen to the pillory once more."
"Would he do that if he got out of the Tower?" said I.
"The wise and good men think so, or they would not have him sent
there," said she.
"But might he not be better always afterwards?" I asked.
"The people cannot trust that he would," she said. "Even if he
promised ever so much and intended it, they could not at once trust
him."
"Is it too late then for him to be forgiven?" I said.
"Too late, it seems, for men to forgive him," said she, very gravely.
"But never too late for God?" I said.
"No, never too late for God," said she, slowly. "Because God knows
when we really intend to give up sinning, even when we can do nothing
to show it to men. So it is never too late for Him to take His
prodigals home to his bosom."
"Then I can ask for that," said I. And I did. But that night there
sank down on my heart for the first time (the first time of so many
in the solemn years that, followed) the terrible words, "Too late;"
the terrible sense that an hour may come when, if repentance towards
God is still possible, reparation to man and mercy from man are
possible no longer.
This fervour of patriotic life which animated us all at Netherby made
us rather hard, I am afraid, on Cousin Placidia.
Throughout the year, after our sojourn at Davenant Hall, she had
tried Roger and me (and I believe also secretly Aunt Dorothy) very
seriously by becoming in her way exceedingly religious. One winter
morning when Roger and I were busy with my father about our Italian
lessons at one end of the hall, the following discussion took place
between Placidia and Aunt Dorothy over their spinning near the
hearth. Placidia had seen, she informed Aunt Dorothy, the vanity of
all things under the sun, the folly of pride, and the wickedness of
all worldly pomp, and she washed decidedly to take her place "on the
Lord's side," to work out betimes her own salvation, and to secure
for herself an abundant entrance into the kingdom. Aunt Dorothy
spoke of the heart being deceitful, and hoped Placidia would make
sure of her foundation. Placidia rejoined with some slight
resentment as to any doubts of her orthodoxy, that she humbly trusted
she knew as well as any one, that every one's heart was indeed
deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, that is, every
ungodly person's; indeed one only needed to look around in any
direction to see it. Aunt Dorothy replied that, for her part, she
found her own heart still very ingenious in deceiving her, and in
need of a great deal of daily watching.
Placidia admitted the necessity. Indeed, she said, that on a review
of her life she felt that, although she had been mercifully preserved
from many infirmities which beset other people, (her temper being
naturally even, and her tastes sober,) still no doubt she shared in
the universal depravity. But she had, like Jacob at Bethel, she
said, made a solemn covenant with God, promising to give Him
henceforth His due portion of her affections and substance; she had
signed and sealed it on her knees, and she believed she was accepted,
that she was on the Lord's side, and that, as with Jacob, He would
henceforth be on hers.
Aunt Dorothy's spinning-wheel flew with ominous rapidity, but some
moments passed before she replied. Then she said,--
"My dear, I trust that you know the difference between a _covenant_
and a _bargain_. The patriarch Jacob, on the whole, no doubt meant
well, but I never much liked his 'ifs' and 'thens' with the Almighty.
The best kind of covenants, I think, are those which begin on the
other side. As when the Lord said to Abraham, 'Fear not, Abraham, I
am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward.' Or, 'I am the
Almighty God, walk before me and be thou perfect.' Then follow the
promises, lavish as His riches, which fill heaven and earth; free as
the air He gives us to breathe. When God gives there is no limit, no
reserve, no condition. But, on the other hand, neither is there
reserve, or condition, or limit when He demands. It is not so much
for so much, but _all_ surrendered in absolute trust. It is, 'Be
thou perfect;' it is, 'Leave thy country, and thy kindred, and thy
father's house;' it is, 'Give me thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom
thou lovest.' Is this what you mean by a covenant with God? Think
well, for He 'is not mocked.' His hand is larger than ours, as the
sea is larger than a drinking-cup; but He will not accept our hands
half full."
Said Placidia,--
"Aunt Dorothy, I have no intention whatever of being half for the
world and half for God. I have no opinion at all of the religion
which can dance round May-poles on the week-day, and attend the
worship of God on Sundays; or fast and pray on Fridays, wear mourning
in Lent, and be decked out in curls, and laces, and jewels, on
feast-days. I have made up my mind never to wear a feather, or a
trinket, or a bit of lace to my band, or a laced stomacher, nor to
use crisping-tongs, nor to indulge in any kind of 'dissoluteness in
hair,' nor ever to sport any gayer colour in mantle or wimple than
gray, or at the most 'liver colour.' I have not the least intention,
Aunt Dorothy, of trying to serve two masters. I know in that way we
gain nothing. But I do believe that those that honour Him He will
honour, and that godliness hath promise of the life that now is as
well as of that which is to come."
"The Lord's honours are not often like King Ahasuerus's," said Aunt
Dorothy, gravely; "the Crowns of those He delighted to honour have
sometimes been of fire, and their royal apparel of sack-cloth. There
is such a thing," she continued, her wheel whirling like a whirlwind,
"as serving only one master, yet that not the right one, though
taking His name. And we are near the brink of that precipice
whenever we seek any reward from the Master beyond His 'Well done.'
'_I_ am thy shield,'" she concluded, "'_I, the Lord Himself;_' not
what He promises or what He gives, though it were to be the half of
His kingdom."
By this time my Father's attention had been aroused to the
discussion, and rising from the table and approaching the spinners,
he said,--
"What you say, sister Dorothy, reminds me of some words I heard
lately in a letter of Mr. Cromwell's. 'Truly no creature hath more
cause,' he wrote, 'to put himself forth in the cause of his God than
I. I have had plentiful wages beforehand, and I am sure I shall
never earn the least mite.'"
"Yea, verily," said Aunt Dorothy, "Mr. Cromwell may waste too much
thought on draining and dyking; but he is a godly gentleman, and he
under stands the Covenant."
Cousin Placidia, however, pursued her course, and continued a living
rebuke to Roger and me if we indulged in too noisy merriment, and to
any of the maids who were tempted into a gayer kirtle or ribbon than
ordinary. On Sunday she was never known to smile, nor on any other
day to laugh, except in a mild moderate manner, as a polite
concession to any one who expected it in response to a facetious
remark.
Her conversation meantime became remarkably scriptural. She did not
allow herself an indulgence which she did not justify by a text; if
her dresses wore longer than usual, so as to spare her purse, she
looked on it as a proof that she had been marvellously helped with
wisdom in the choice. If she escaped the various accidents which not
unfrequently brought me into disgrace, and my clothes to premature
ruin, she regarded it as an interference of Providence, like to that
which watched over the Israelites in the wilderness.
Indeed, it seemed to Roger and me that Placidia's primary meaning of
being "on the Lord's side" was, that in a general way the Almighty
should do what she liked; and that in particular the weather should
be arranged with considerate reference as to whether she had on her
new taffetas or her old woolsey. Great therefore was our relief,
although great also our astonishment, when Aunt Dorothy announced to
us one day that Cousin Placidia was about to be married to Mr.
Nicholls, the vicar of Netherby.
"Are you not surprised?" I ventured to ask of my Father. "Cousin
Placidia is such a Precisian, as they call it, and Mr. Nicholls
thinks so much of Archbishop Laud."
"Not much surprised, Olive," he said. "I think Placidia's religion
and Mr. Nicholls' are a little alike. Both have a great deal to do
with the colour and shape of clothes, and with the places and times
at which things are done, and the way in which they are said. And
both are prudent persons, desirous of taking a respectable place in
the world in a religious way. I should think they would agree very
well."
Aunt Dorothy was at once indignant and consoled.
"I never quite trusted Placidia's professions," said she; "but this,
I confess, goes beyond my fears. A person who never passes what he
calls the altar without making obeisances such as the old heathens
made to the sun and the moon, and who, not six months ago, defiled
the house of God with Popish incense!"
But Cousin Placidia had explanations which were quite satisfactory to
herself.
"She had had so many providential intimations," she said (one of the
habits of Placidia that always most exasperated Roger was her way of
always doing what she wished, because, she said, some one else wished
it; and since she had become religious, she usually threw the
responsibility on the Highest Quarter)--"intimations so plain, that
she could not disregard them without disobedience. Mr. Nicholls'
coming to Netherby at all was the consequence of a series of most
remarkable circumstances, entirely beyond his own control. The way
in which the prejudice against each other, with which they began, had
by degrees changed into esteem, and then into something more, was
also very remarkable. And what was most remarkable of all was, that
on the very morning of the day when he proposed to her, she
had--quite by chance, as it might seem, but that there was no such
thing as chance--opened the Bible on the passage, 'Get thee out from
thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, into
a land that I will shew thee: and I will bless thee.'"
"But, my dear," remarked Aunt Gretel, to whom, Aunt Dorothy being
unapproachable, Placidia had made this explanation--"my dear, you are
not going to leave your country, are you? and you do know the land to
which you are going."
"Of course," said Placidia, "there are always differences. But the
application was certainly very remarkable. Mr. Nicholls quite agreed
with me, when I told him of it."
"No doubt, my dear, no doubt," said Aunt Gretel, retreating. "But
there does seem a little difference in your opinions."
"Uncle Drayton says we should look on the things in which we agree,
more than on those in which we differ," said Placidia. "Besides, if
Aunt Dorothy would only see it, I really trust I have been already
useful to Mr. Nicholls. He said, only yesterday, he thought there
was a good deal to be said in favour of some late ordinances of the
Parliament against too close approach to Papistical ceremonies. Mr.
Nicholls had never any propension towards the Pope; and he thinks now
that, it may be, his canonical obedience to Archbishop Laud led him
to some unwise compliances. But the powers that be, he says, must
always have their due honour. The great point is, to ascertain which
powers be, and which only seem to be. And now that the Parliament
has impeached Archbishop Laud, and sent him to the Tower, this is
really an exceedingly difficult question for a conscientious
clergyman, who is also a good subject, to determine."
Aunt Gretel did not pursue the subject, she being always in fear of
losing her way, and straying into wildernesses, when English politics
or rubrics came into question.
And in due time Placidia became Mistress Nicholls, and removed to the
parsonage, with a generous dowry from my Father, and everything that
by the most liberal interpretation could in any way be construed into
belonging to her, down to a pair of perfumed Cordova gloves which had
been given her by some gay kinswoman, and, having been thrown aside
in a closet as useless vanities, cost Aunt Dorothy a long and
indignant search. Everything might be of use, said Placidia, in
their humble housekeeping. And she had always remembered a saying
she had once heard Aunt Gretel quote from Dr. Luther,--"that what the
husband makes by earning, the wife multiplies by sparing."
"An invaluable maxim," she remarked, "for people in narrow
circumstances, who had married from pure godly affection, without
passion or ambition, despising all worldly considerations, like
herself and Mr. Nicholls."
It was a strange Christmas to many in England, that first in the
stormy life of the Long Parliament. Earl Stratford had been in the
Tower since the 28th of November. A week before Christmas day
Archbishop Laud had been impeached and committed to custody. There
was no thought of the Parliament dispersing. Mr. Pym and others of
the patriot members were occupied with preparing for Lord Strafford's
trial, which did not begin until the 22nd of the following March.
On the other hand, faithful voices, long silent in prisons, were
heard again in many pulpits throughout the land.
Judge Berkeley, who had given the unjust decision in favour of
ship-money, was seized on the bench in his ermine, and taken to
prison like a common felon.
The great thunder-cloud of Star-chamber and High Commission Court had
dispersed. The Puritans and Patriots breathed once more, and the
great voice of the nation, speaking at Westminster the words which
were deeds, while it quieted the cries and groans of the oppressed
country, set men's tongues free for earnest and determined speech by
every hall hearth, and every blacksmith's forge, and ale-house, and
village-green, and place of public or social talk throughout the
country.
The blacksmith's forge in Netherby village was indeed a place well
known to Roger and me. Job Forster, the smith, a brave,
simple-hearted giant from Cornwall (given to despising our inland
peasants, who had never seen the sea, and suspected of being the
mainstay of a little band of sectaries in the neighborhood), having
always been Roger's chief friend; while Rachel, his gentle, sickly,
saintly little wife (whom he cherished with a kind of timorous
tenderness, like something almost too small and delicate for him to
meddle with), had always given me the child's place in her motherly
heart, which no child had been given to their house to fill.
Whenever we were missed in childhood, it was commonly at Job
Forster's forge we were sought and found. And by this means we
learned a great deal of politics from Job's point of view, as well as
many marvellous stories of God's providence by sea and land, which
seemed to us to show that God was as near to those who trust Him now,
as to the Israelites of old, which, also, Job and Rachel most surely
believed.
But, meantime, while the clouds over England seemed scattering, a
heavy cloud gathered over us at Netherby.
The Davenant family had come to the Hall for the Christmas
festivities. We met often during the time they were there, more than
ever before. The ties of friendship and of neighbourhood seemed to
prevail over the party strife which had so long kept us apart.
Hope there was also that those party conflicts at last might cease
with the disgrace of the hated Lord-Lieutenant.
His sudden abandonment of the patriot side, his rapid rise, and his
lofty, imperious temper, had not failed to make enemies even among
those of his own party. Sir Walter Davenant said he had no liking
for turn-coats. They always over-acted their new part, and commonly
did more to injure the party they joined than the party they
betrayed. The haughty earl once out of the way, the king would
listen to truer men and better servants.
The Lady Lucy held in detestation the earl's private character. The
king, she said, was a high-minded gentleman, an affectionate husband
and father, his presence and life had done much to reform the court;
the earl was a man of commanding ability, but his hands were not pure
enough to defend so lofty a cause. Better men, she thought, if in
themselves weaker, would yet form stronger stays for the throne of
the anointed of God. If Lord Strafford were displaced, she thought,
the best men of all parties would unite; would understand each other,
would understand their king, and all might yet go well. My Father,
though less sanguine, was not without hope, although on rather
different grounds. While Lady Lucy believed that Lord Strafford's
violence and evil life were a weakness to the cause she deemed in
itself sacred, my Father thought that Lord Strafford's power of
character and mind were a fatal strength to the cause he deemed in
itself evil. The earl once gone, he believed the king would never
find such another prop for his arbitrary measures, the lesser tyrant
would fall like an arch with the key-stone out, and the king would
yield, perforce, to the just demands of the nation.
However, for the time, Lord Strafford's imprisonment formed a bond of
sympathy between the two families, to Roger's and my great content.
Much friendly rivalry there was in the Christmas adornment of the two
transepts with wreaths of ivy and holly, ending in a free confession
of defeat on our part, as our somewhat clumsy bunches of evergreen
stood out in contrast with the graceful wreaths and festoons with
which Lettice had made the memory of the Davenants green.
For a moment she enjoyed her triumph, and then begging permission to
make a little change in our arrangements, with that quick perception
of hers, and those fairy fingers which never could touch anything
without weaving something of their own grace into it, in an hour or
two she had made the massive columns and heavy arches of our
ancestral chapel light and graceful as the most decorated monument of
the Davenants, with traceries of glossy leaves and berries.
Lettice's birthday was on Twelfth Night. She was fifteen, nearly two
years younger than I was, and three than Roger.
There was great merry-making at the Hall that day. In the morning
distributings of garments to all the maidens in the parish of
Lettice's age, by her own hands. She had some kindly or merry word
for every one, and throughout the day was the soul of all the
festivities. There was such a fullness of life and enjoyment in her;
such a power of going out of herself altogether into the pleasures or
wants of others. She seemed to me the centre of all, just as the sun
is, by sending her sunbeams everywhere. While every one else was
full of the thought of her, she was full only of shining into every
neglected corner and shy blossom, making every one feel glad and
cared for, down to Gammer Grindle's idiot boy.
It was a wonderful joy for me to be Lettice's friend. I had almost
as much delight in her as Sir Walter, who watched her with such
pride, or Lady Lucy, whose eyes so oft moistened as they rested on
her. She would have it that Roger and I must be at her right hand in
everything.
In the afternoon Harry Davenant came with Sir Launcelot Trevor.
Harry looked rather grave, I thought, but he was naturally that; and
Lettice's gaiety soon infected him so that he became foremost in the
games, which lasted until the sun went down, and the servants and
villagers dispersed to kindle up the twelve bonfires. But Sir
Launcelot looked sorely out of temper. His heavy brows quite lowered
over his keen, dark eyes, so that they flashed out beneath like the
stormy light under a thunder cloud. He scarcely bent to my Father or
to any of us; and although he was lavish as ever of compliments to
Lady Lucy and Lettice, his brow scarcely relaxed to correspond with
the lip-smiles with which he accompanied them.
When the sun was fairly set, the twelve fires were kindled, this time
on the field in front of the Hall, in honour of Lettice, instead of
as usual on the village green.
We waited to see them kindle up, and then we left. Roger stayed
behind us. There was to be songs and dances round the fires, and
then feasting in the Hall late into the night. But Roger only
intended to remain a little while to see the merriment begin.
I remember looking back for a last glimpse of the fires as they leapt
and sank, one moment lighting up every battlement of the turrets, and
all the carving of the windows with lurid light, and flashing back
from the glass like carbuncles; the next substituting for the reality
their own fantastic light and goblin shadows, so that not a corner or
gable of the old building looked like itself. And I remember
afterwards that close by one of the fires were standing Roger and
Lettice, and Sir Launcelot, near each other; Roger piling wood on the
fire at Lettice's direction, and Sir Launcelot standing a little
apart with folded arms watching them. His face looked red and angry.
I thought it was perhaps because of the angry glare of the flames.
Yet something made me long to turn back and bring Roger away with us.
It was impossible. But involuntarily I looked back once more: the
flames leapt up at the moment, and then I saw Sir Launcelot and Roger
as clearly as in daylight, apparently in eager debate.
I lingered to watch them, but just then the fitful flames fell, I
could see no more, and I had to hasten on to follow my Father and
Aunt Gretel home.
Before we reached home the clouds, which had been threatening all
day, began to fall in showers of hail. We had not been in an hour
when, as we were sitting over the hall fire, talking cheerily over
the doings of the day, Roger suddenly entered, his face ashen-white,
his eyes like burning coals, and, in a low voice, called my Father
out to speak to him outside. For a few minutes, which seemed to me
hours, we sat in suspense, Aunt Gretel's knitting falling on her lap,
in entire disregard of consequence to the stitches--Aunt Dorothy's
spinning-wheel whirling as if driven by the Furies. Then my Father
returned alone, as pale as Roger.
He seated himself again, with his arms on his knees and his hands
over his face--an attitude I had never seen him in before. It made
him look like an old man; and I remember noticing for the first that
his hair was growing gray.
No one asked any questions.
At length, in a calm, low voice, my Father said,--
"Roger and Sir Launcelot Trevor have quarrelled. Roger struck Sir
Launcelot, and he fell against one of the great logs of the bonfires.
He is wounded severely, and Roger is going to ride to Cambridge for a
physician."
"In such a night!" said Aunt Gretel; "not a star; and the hail has
been driving against the panes this half hour!"
"It is the best thing Roger can do," said my Father, quietly.
The next minute we heard the ring of a horse's hoofs on the pavement
of the court, and then the sound of a long gallop dying slowly away
on the road amidst the howling of the wind and the clattering of the
hail.
But no one spoke until the household were gathered for family prayer.
There was no variation in the chapter read or in the usual words of
prayer; only a tremulous depth in my Father's voice as he asked for
blessings on the son and daughter of the house.
And afterwards, as I wished him good-night, he leant his hand on my
head, and said--
"Watch and pray, Olive--watch and pray, my child, lest ye enter into
temptation."
Then I knelt down, and hid my face on his knee, and said--
"O Father, Roger must have been sorely provoked--I am sure he was. I
am sure it was not Roger's fault--I am sure; so sure! Sir Launcelot
is so wicked, and I will never forgive him."
"Roger said it was his fault, my poor little Olive," replied my
Father, very tenderly, "and that he will never forgive _himself_.
And whatever Sir Launcelot said or did, you must forgive him, and
pray that God may forgive him; for he is very seriously hurt, and may
die."
"Roger would be sure to say that," I said. "He is always ready to
blame himself and excuse every one else. But, O Father, God will not
let Sir Launcelot die! What can we do?"
"Pray! Olive," he said in a trembling voice--"pray!" and he went to
his own room.
But all night long, whenever I woke from fitful snatches of sleep,
and went to the window to look if the storm had passed, and if Roger
were coming, I saw the light burning in my Father's window.
The last time Aunt Gretel crept up softly behind me, and throwing her
large wimple over me, drew me gently away.
"I have kept such a poor watch for Roger!" I said; "and see! my
Father's lamp is burning still. He has been watching all night."
"There is Another watching, Olive," she said, softly, "night and day.
The Intercessor slumbers not, nor sleeps. It is never dark now in
the Holiest Place, for he is ever there; and never silent, for He is
ever interceding."
CHAPTER V.
When I awoke again, the cheerful stir of life had begun within and
without the house--the ducks splashing in the pond in the front
court; the unsuccessful swine
