THE SWORD OF
THE KING
BY
RONALD MACDONALD
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY
THE CENTURY CO.
THE KNICKERBOCKER PRESS, NEW YORK
INTRODUCTION
It is matter of no small difficulty and hesitation for a woman to tell a story—in especial, her own story—from the beginning of it even to the end, and to hold, as it were, a straight course throughout. The perplexities, I say, are many, and among them not the least is found in these same words, beginning and end. For where truly his story has its inception, and what will be its ultimate word, might well puzzle the wisest man of this age, or any other. It has been well said, indeed, that the history of a man is the history of his troubles—but that fashion of considering will bring us, by no devious road, to the latter days of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. Now either I have somewhere read, or my own heart has privily told me, that the story of a woman is the story of her love. And this I take to be truth, and do therefore resolve that the first chapter of my story shall be the first of my heart.
But, lest my book itself should lack apology, I will first tell how it comes that I, the mere wife and daughter of country gentlemen, and of learning, as will be seen, wholly insufficient to the undertaking, should write a book at all.
I write, it is true, but for my own people—for the family that I pray may be long in the land. But in these days, fortunate indeed, yet full of swift and dubious change—these days when every second man, it would seem, must print a book—these days when all the presses in London are not enough to set before us the tithe of what is committed by ink to paper—in these days, I say, none can be assured that what he now pens shall not by some chance hit of fortune attain the resurrection of print. And if this thing befall my work of love, and if the book then prove, not the cere-cloth of the embalmer, but a second and perpetual life to the thoughts of a most happy daughter, wife, and mother long departed and forgotten, I would stand well with my reader.
If any stranger, then, do read, let him believe that I have no taint in me of that scabies scribendi, mentioned by Horace, and mightily inveighed against last Sunday in the pulpit of Royston Church by our good vicar. This itch must be spreading fast, I thought, if there be danger of it here, where scarce a full score of the good man's hearers can spell in a hornbook. And now, lo! I am in dread lest I be thought infected—I, a woman, with all good things that come to women, and one to whom the holding of the pen is soon a weariness.
There hangs yet (and long may it so hang!) in our great hall at Drayton a sword—not in its sheath, but naked, and broken some two parts of its length from the hilt, but shining bright as on the day it was first drawn by the great prince that once used it. Beneath it, also against the wall above the hearth, is the scabbard.
It was on a fine morning of the fall of last year, as I was tending Ned's new Dutch garden, that I heard loud and childish altercation proceeding through the open windows of the great hall above me. And there in a window arose the fair gilded head of my seven-year Mary, my first and best gift to Ned, and his best to me.
"Pray, madam, come up to the hall," she cried, "for Will is ever doing things of naught, and he will not be gainsaid by me."
"Nay, child," I replied, loath to lose the sweet air of the morning and my labor below. "Nay, child, but you must take means and learn cunning to control him."
"I cannot do so, madam," says poor Mary, well-nigh in tears; "and he is even now about dismounting the broken sword from the wall. But if you will come, madam, I will hold his legs while I may."
And with that I ascended in great haste, yet but just in time to save the relic from desecration and the heir of Royston and Drayton a backward fall of great peril. For the noise of my entrance caused his most unserene Highness to turn quick on his heel and to miss in part the footing, already precarious, that he had attained upon the mantel. In short, he fell into my arms and into tears with one and the same movement; tears shed for no danger run—such is not his habit—but of grief for the plaything that was but now within his grasp; for, though but rising five, Master William Maurice Royston would have the broken sword to fight battles with—against King Lewis, forsooth, and the wicked Frenchmen, in the garden.
"It is but a bwoken old sing, madam-muvver," he cried between his sobs, "and of a fit length for me, lacking the pointed end, which I did purpose leaving upon the wall." And so I must needs tell him how dearly I do prize that shattered weapon, thinking the while of the shame that was averted, in part by its means, from our houses—and of the honor, too, that came thereby.
Then Mistress Mary would have the tale of the sword, and Will, his grief forgot, and joyously bent on touzing my hair to the image of his own, made instant demand for the fullest narration—"Every word, madam-muvver—from onceuponatime to happyeverafter." Yet the attempt to bring my tale to the measure of childish apprehension did lead me into quagmires of question and answer so vexing to our diverse ignorance, that dinner and Colonel Royston found us scarce advanced beyond Will's onceuponatime. At meat the children demanded and obtained permission to lay the matter before their father—the promised history, and the obscurity of word and idea found necessary by the historian at the very commencement. At last Ned made as if he would speak, when "Madam," cries Mary, as one big with a great thought, "madam, will you not write it all down, that we may read when we have learned the long words?"
"Wise maid!" said her father. "And indeed, Philippa, it is worth the doing. But, Mistress Wisehead," he continued to the child, "when the long words are spelt from thy mother's head upon the paper, they will cry aloud to be spelt back into thine, if you will have the tale."
Now these words did make my poor maid to blush hotly, who had little love to her book. Yet she answered well, saying: "I know, sir, that I have been a poor scholar, but, if madam will write the tale, I purpose to be diligent to the end that I may read well and fitly against the time it is written."
"'T is plain, Phil," says Ned merrily, "that here is your one hope to make a scholar of your daughter. And, indeed, sweetheart," he went on, with more of gravity, "'t is a book I should like well to read myself."
"And that, sir," said I, "is a compliment you pay to few. For, beyond M. Vauban's work on fortification, I vow I have not seen a book in your hand since we were wed."
So, what with a reluctant daughter to be tempted into the path of letters, and a husband to please,—as I knew by his face his heart was much set on this enterprise of little Mary's suggestion,—I found myself committed to the task. Yet, though I have thought much and uneasily of my promise, I know not indeed when I had begun the fulfilling it had not Mary this very afternoon brought ink and paper, while Will followed close with a new pen.
"Write now, madam," quoth the maid.
"Write now, madam-muvver," says Will in faithful echo.
"If I begin now," said I, hard driven for yet a new plea to postpone the first plunge, "William Maurice Royston will not be able to read the book when it is done."
"William Maurice Royston," said he, "does not purpose reading. Sis says reading is irksome. But, when the tale is wrote, madam-muvver is going to read it to him."
And so it is that I begin.
THE SWORD OF THE KING
CHAPTER I
I was a child of five years when I first saw my lover, and a gallant sight I thought he made, the more that he found me in sore trouble, and drew me out of it, as is ever his way. Colonel Royston, indeed, in these latter days, holds that what I call my memory in this matter is but the light of his after instruction thrown backward on the dark screen of childish oblivion. Whether or no (though I take much pride in the memory, and still will so call it), between him and me the reader shall not lose, but shall know that on that day my nurse, weary and petulant with the great heat and our long ramble afield, was leading me, Philippa Drayton, no less petulant and even more weary, by the hand, or, rather, was hoisting me by the elbow, up the great avenue of elms that leads to Drayton Hall. And, fain as I was for home, her rough speed was too great for my little legs, and her grip pained my arm, so that I cried out. And then I heard the thud of hoofs upon the turf by the roadside, and I looked up to see the little horse pulled well-nigh on his haunches by his rider, whom, from his own mouth, I soon knew to be Master Edward Royston, of Royston Chase. As he pulled up, Betty let go my arm, whereupon, for the greater ease of my legs and the freer exercise of my voice in weeping, I incontinently sat me down in the road.
"For shame!" says Master Ned, looking down from his galloway upon Betty, with a frown that had sat well on thrice his years.
"Ay, shame indeed," says Betty, yet blushing to the color of a well-boiled beet; for she well knew it was at herself his words were aimed; "ay, 't is shame indeed for a great maid like little mistress here to sit in the road and weep."
Now Betty spoke in the broad fashion of our parts—the Doric, as Mr. Telgrove calls it, that I have heard is well-nigh a foreign language to many. For the not giving this outlandish speech to my readers there are two reasons: the one, that, though I do well understand it myself, as is but natural, and do love the sound of it at times, and can even, at a pinch, shape my own mouth to it as well as my ear, I yet have by no means the skill to set it down, knowing, indeed, no combination of letters able to convey its sounds; and the second reason is, that could I make shift so to write, none could read what I had written—which perhaps, by the well-disposed at least, might be held a blemish in my book.
But Master Ned, brushing aside her endeavor to hand on her shame to me, at once declared himself my champion.
"You do not take me," he said, the dark cleft of his frown growing deeper between his brows, so that it was a marvel to see so much austerity on so smooth and young a face. "When little maids weep, my lass, 't is most times the blame of the great ones."
I know not indeed if Colonel Royston yet hold in this belief; but from that point did I love Master Ned, if, indeed, I had not begun to do so some seconds before. And I was glad that he sat upon his horse, that raised his head some few inches above Betty's cap, for she was indeed a great lass, and twice his age, and his reproof had in great measure lost its force had he stood dwarfed beside her great body.
From Betty he turned to me, as I sat in the road, and—"Thou art tired, little one," he cried, with a great tenderness in his young countenance, that to me seemed so old. "If you will ride before me, sweetheart," he said, patting the pommel of his saddle, which was new and fine, as all about his person, "I and Noll will take most gentle care of thee."
At which kind words I rose to my sore feet, stretching out my arms, and crying to him that I would go with him. And, while Betty stood aghast, yet with never a thought her timid and sickly nursling would venture such a deed, I had reached his down-reached hands, had scrambled or was pulled into the saddle before my knight-errant, the little horse had plunged beneath his double burden, and we were away. As I swayed and bounced on the pommel in the first strides of that gallop along the sward that lies between the elm trees and the road, where the air rushed by so cool and green in the shade, he seized me with his right arm, fetching me round against his body so that my chin lay on the arm above the elbow. As my eyes, close shut in the first shock of our flight, came wide in the great comfort of this security, I was gazing back over the way we had sped, and I laughed aloud to see the vain pursuit of Betty. For all but her great self seemed streaming behind her in the wind of her going—cap, hair, and petticoat, while the fatness of her trembled as she ran.
For all this, long as it has been in the telling, happened, as it were, in a single stroke of time, and we were yet little parted from the pursuer. And, as I laughed, Master Royston, between his chidings of his nag for so serving us, would know the reason of my mirth—so "Do but see," I cried, "how Betty runs, and you will laugh too." But he could not, till he had tamed and admonished little Noll to a better pace for my ease. And when it was time for him to laugh at the quaint figure Betty did cut, I had already begun to pity her. But Master Royston would none of it.
"She is very well served," he said, "for her rude manners to thee, little one. I have a mind to give her some more of it. She is weary, is she not?"
"Ay, indeed, poor Bet!" I answered, "else had she not so handled me."
Upon that he drew rein, saying we should wait till she drew near. After a while, as Noll did crop the grass at his feet, Master Royston asked me if I could sit astride. "It is no shame," he said, "thou art so small a maid." And when I was so set, grasping a double handful of the pony's mane, he said: "When she is close I shall run to the house. Hold thou fast, little love, for Betty must run as never before if she would catch us." And as I would have pleaded she drew near, all spent and blowing, and I felt his knee move, and little Noll did also feel it, and was gone.
Oh, that I had a pen to tell of that ride! This time I was not afraid. This time there was no starting aside, no uneasy casting of my poor small person from side to side in grievous oscillation. And, oh! I say again, for the pen of some poet (yet I cannot tell whose to wish) in order to describe this my first taste of the joy there is in a horse when he is between us and turf good and plenty! Many a mile and many a beast have I ridden since that summer afternoon, and I hope so to ride, by the goodness of God, many a year hence; and yet that long, clean, resilient flight through an air that seemed of liquid green, flecked with the gold of the sun dropping here and there through the elms; the soft, fresh thud of hoof meeting turf but to part anew with the impact—that meeting with the soil that gave so lively assurance that Mother Earth was yet kindly and strong beneath; the strong rushing of the wind cooling my face and lifting the tangled curls back over the close cap; the new-born trust, moreover, in the arm that held me—all these things are with me now, distilled into one golden drop of life's very elixir, being, indeed, one of those gems of memory whereof the sweetness can as little be set fast by words as the stamp of them can be erased from the mind so sweetly and strangely impressed.
So much for my memory rather of a frame of being than of an ordered consecution of events. The curtain of childish oblivion here descends, as it is wont to fall, swift and dark, on these pregnant spoils of recollection. I think my dear and honored father's arms were those that lifted me from the saddle. I have since heard that Betty was saved by my new friend from the rating Sir Michael had ready for her, receiving privily from that youthful master of craft a mint-new crown in earnest of future subsidies, did she prove thenceforth tender to the little maid. And, indeed, I think she did deserve whatever wage of kindness the future may have brought her. For I have of her no further memory of harsh entreatment.
For Philippa Drayton there now began a new life of the happiest. I had found what all, at one time or another of life, will look for, yet find most often, I truly believe, when they seek him not—I mean a true friend. And there is none but his children and mine that can tell what a friendship it was my friend did give me. He was my playmate, yet of age and wit to control. He was at whiles my tutor, for I would learn of him when none else had the art to keep my eyes five minutes fast on the book. He was my master of equitation, and did teach me in such manner not only to sit upon a horse's back, but also to understand what the animal would be at, that I learned in time to back many a beast that some could not mount with impunity. Before the five years of our early comradeship were past I would ride the colts round the paddock, often without bridle or saddle, and seated astride, as in my first ride with Ned, which I have described above. And he would blame me for a madcap, and yet, if none else were by to see, would laugh at the frolic, and praise my sitting of the nag, and my tricks of control. With his coming into my story, which before was none at all, my old dread of animals, along with the ill-health of my earlier days, had vanished, to be replaced by a pure confidence in all that breathed, which in itself, maybe, was to the full as childish, but, without controversy, far safer for the child. Anon, Ned was himself my steed, to be guided by tuggings of the hair and ears often, I doubt me, little merciful. And, if not the swiftest, he was surely of all I have ridden the most willing. It could not fail that, thus together, we should quarrel often. I mean, it could not fail where such a child as I made one of the pair. But Ned would bear my poutings, my bickerings, and every wayward mood with a smile when he might, and without it when he must. But did some act of mine wrong some other than himself, as when I would cuff Betty, or strike dog or horse for the easing of my own passion rather than the fit correction of the animal, then would he show the sterner mettle that was in him. Then he would not forgive till confession of wrong or pardon was asked. And, was I stubborn, he would stay away, even days together, but I must submit. Once it was a week—seven days, most long and dark for erring Mistress Philippa. For he said: "You are my friend, little Phil, and some day I shall wed thee, and it is not for my honor that you do thus, or so."
Thus Master Edward Royston, aged some fourteen years. Yet was my Ned no untimely saint, fitted but for the fatal love of the gods. Passion and frolic were in him, laughter, and—no, not tears—only twice have I seen them in his eyes, heard them mar the government of his speech. Boyish escapades were plentiful enough with him to give his mother and my father some knowledge of the unbending nicety in the point of honor which was yet seen in his most boyish prank or his strongest passion of anger. For the power also of anger was in him, growing, indeed, in its outburst less frequent as he grew in stature, but gaining rather than losing force with its rarer manifestation. I touch on this note of his character designedly, inasmuch as it was the cause of the great change that was soon, I mean at the end of twelve years from our first meeting, to come into my life. But of that in its place.
Sir Michael Drayton, of Drayton Manor, in the southward part of the county of Somerset, was already well on in years when I, the second child of his second wife, was born. And that was in the eighth year of the second Charles. For he, my father, first saw the light in the year of grace 1609, and thus, at the time of my meeting with Ned, which was in the summer of the year 1673, and in the sixth year of my little life, he had fulfilled sixty-four years, of which number some five and forty had brought him trouble sufficient, on moderate computation, to furnish out a fair portion of strife and affliction to six ordinary men. For, ardent and devoted Cavalier though he was, 't was not the outburst of the great war of the Rebellion that marked the worst point of his troubles. Often in his old age have I heard my dear father tell how, after the tedious and ever embittering doubts and hesitations of that civil strife that had endured in England since the coming of the first Stuart, to him as to many another the resort to arms came as a clearing of the vexed mind and settlement of conscience perturbed. Of the momentous action of the Long Parliament, in the year 1642, I have heard him say: "Then at length our duty was plain. I, for one, slept better o' nights thereafter than I had done since the meeting of the Short Parliament." For Sir Michael had been elected of the shire for that hapless assembly, as subsequently for its successor, the Long Parliament; of his seat in the latter he was illegally deprived when he withdrew from Westminster to join the King at Oxford, which he did in the late spring of that same year (I mean 1642), in the excellent company of my Lord Falkland and the late Lord Chancellor Clarendon, then Sir Edward Hyde. And thenceforth his life was war, and raising of money in order to its prosecution; in both which perilous and comfortless means of assisting his sovereign and of hurting his foes Sir Michael Drayton was ever forward, to the most lamentable detriment of his own person and estate. He raised on his own land, and maintained at his own expense, a troop of horse that were ever with him throughout the first period of that long and evil war, I mean until the fight at Naseby in Yorkshire. There he lost great part of his following upon the field, and was himself grievously hurt. Yet with that scent, as I may say, which led him in all those years ever where the work was hottest, he was found again in the Welsh rising three years later, whence, escaping after the fall of Pembroke Castle, he joined himself with his little remnant of troopers to the Scots, in bare time to share their overthrow at Warrington by the late Protector (although he had not then that title).
Sore in mind, sick in body,—for he was never wholly healed of his great wound in the right thigh which he took at Naseby,—he reached home only to hear of his King's terrible end. 'T is perhaps strange to tell that this awful deed of murder and sacrilege put a new heart in that much-buffeted and enduring gentleman, my father. That Martyrdom, I think, went far to atone, in Sir Michael's mind and heart, for certain wrongs and fickle veerings of purpose, proceeding as much from the complexion as the misfortunes of that pious Martyr and unhappy King. No word did he ever utter to asperse the royal memory; yet once in the passage of these more recent transactions of state, which have brought into my life, as into that of the nation at large, so much of betterment, did I hear him murmur (though but as for his own ear alone), "Ay, ay—he served us best, when they served him worst." Be that as it may, from that hour until the happy restoration of King Charles the Second, all that he had—the remnant of health, much of his land, the lives of his sons, the thoughts of his mind, and the prayer of his heart, were given to forward that happy end, which was achieved, as all men know and many remember, in the year 1660—but, for the house of Drayton, at what a cost!
But my father's story I must not make overlong, lest I never come at my own. In brief, then, all his money and much of the Drayton timber, with here and there a fair slice of his land, were gone while the head of the royal Martyr was yet where God had set it. From that fatal day, however, he set himself to the husbanding what God and the rebels had left to him. Here again was disaster in wait for him; for when, by dint of living as a peasant, and by help of his breeding of horses (for which he was already famous in the west, and, in the early years of the war, well known to the farriers of Prince Rupert's Horse), he had begun to lay by the means of one day aiding the cause to which his life was given, he was, through the lust and malice of a certain Puritan neighbor, denounced as a Malignant, and most heavily fined by the despotic rule of the late Lord Protector Cromwell. Through Mr. Nathaniel Royston (of whom more in good time), he was warned of this instant spoliation, and was so enabled privily to convey his store of gold into France, and to lay it in the hands of his exiled sovereign, to be spent, no doubt, in far other fashion than the earning of it. And though he proved to the commissioners sent down upon that proditorious information to be less worth the plucking than had been supposed, yet his acts in the late troubles being known, and somewhat, perhaps, of that sending of money into France leaking out, the blow fell upon him even as his psalm-singing but ungodly neighbor had designed. So, the gold in France, land must be sold. And sold it was, but not as that godly brewer of Yeovil did intend—to wit, into his own hand; for here again Mr. N. Royston did us great service, buying of the land which adjoined his own a small portion at so high a price that the great fine was paid with the loss of a few fields.
Yet none the less was the work all to begin again. So begun again it was, and that most stubbornly. And it was well the land was fat, and the breed of horses unmatched in the west country, for, when our western discontent grew to a head in the year 1655, Rupert, his youngest son by his first lady, was with Penruddock at Salisbury, whither he carried and left, on his own undertaking, most of that painful saving. Some few of his following drifted back to Drayton, but Rupert had spent the gold and himself for his King, even as Sir Michael had now spent all his family. For Henry and Maurice, the elder sons, had fallen, the one at Worcester fight, the other in duel with a Frenchman at The Hague, whither he had followed his sovereign, his opponent, it was said, being a spy of Cardinal Mazarin, and suspected by my brother of some ill intent to his exiled prince. Over and above all these troubles, that same affair of Penruddock's, so foolish and ill-devised, cost Sir Michael within the year the life of his wife, after a union with her of six and twenty years of that nature as to soften much the sting of his many afflictions, though it could not keep her own heart from bursting with the loss of the last child of their love.
His thereafter speedy marriage with my own dear mother, whom I do but faintly remember, had in it no token, whatever the show may have been, of disrespect to the former Lady Drayton. But here again is a story to excel, perhaps, in the right telling of it, the length of my own. Yet I do not purpose a full relation of so much sorrow, holding that the strong hand only of a master in letters should essay the portraiture of such tragedy as was in those days often enacted in the houses of many an old Royalist family.
Mr. Denzil Holroyd's only surviving child, the lady who afterwards became my mother, had passed a jejune childhood in a house impoverished by her father's loyalty to the Stuart cause, and persecuted in the latter days, even to bitterness, for its stanch adherence to the faith of Rome. She had been the close and tender friend of the first Lady Drayton. Following hard upon the death of that lady came fresh ill-fortune upon the Holroyd family, of which the death of Denzil, its head, was a part; and Mistress Alicia Holroyd, left without a natural protector, and stripped by cruel laws and wicked informers of her last acres, flung herself late of a bitter winter's night against my father's door, begging shelter from the inclemency of Nature, and protection from the baseness of her Puritan cousin, who, not content with the filching her inheritance, would have added her person to his plunder as the price of food and lodging, hoping thus to make sure his title against future turns of fate. Silas Holroyd pursuing, found her clinging as some frightened child to my father. Silas soon returned the way he came, but after what words with my father was never known, since he dared tell no man what passed between them, and none dared question Sir Michael. Yet Alicia could not dwell in the house where now was no mistress, so out of this difficulty, as of so many another, my father must needs find a way; which indeed he did, as the words he used in telling me of the matter shall now inform any that has read so far in my narrative. "I told your good mother, little daughter Phil," he said, "that I had little power or credit in the land to help my friend. 'But,' said I, that bitter night that she came to me, 'if you will wed an old man and a broken, there is yet left in Drayton the strength to make some show of cover for the mistress of his board and the partner of his bed. 'T is a poor thing to offer, but it will serve to make a fool of that knave Silas, when he shall try, as well I know he will, to recover the custody of your person by a process of law, charging me with your abduction. I will cherish you well, if you will have me for husband.'" And if the poor lady let gratitude usurp the place of love who shall blame her, being in such straits? Not I, her most happy daughter. Were it but for the father she gave me, I will thank her next in order only to her God and mine till I die, and after, I do firmly trust.
And so out of hand they were married, nor do I think either found cause of regret. For the lady found peace, and license to practise, as far as might be, the duties of her faith, with now and again the comfort of its holiest offices at the hands of some wandering or hunted priest. For my father's old and loud-spoken hatred of Rome, now indeed much softened by the mellowing of his own temper and the fellow-feeling of a common persecution, was yet so well fixed in the memory of that countryside, that Mistress Alicia Holroyd was generally held to have abjured the errors of Rome in committing the error of becoming Lady Drayton. Certain it is, that none ever discovered the secret chapel so cunningly hid among the wine vaults, devised by Sir Michael, and painted and floored, dressed and furnished by no hands save his and those of Simon Emmet. I have heard that Simon would grumble as he worked, predicting ill to come of this idolatry. For his own soul, he would say, he cared not so greatly, in the pleasing of so sweet a lady—but, for Sir Michael's, his same sweet lady's, and their children's to come, he would the cursed job were not to do. But, if bidden then to lay down his tools, "Nay," he would say, "you cannot do alone in the business. And if it be sin, as I verily think it, I will not hand it on to another."
From the few and petty memories of my infancy, antecedent to my first encounter with Ned, there stands out the vision of my mother's face, as she would ascend the stair that led, as I understood then, and for many a year thereafter, but from the cellars; the vision of a face shedding upon all a shining calm, so tender, and withal so glorious, as no cunning of the greatest painter's brush, I think, has ever coaxed into the nimbus of his saint. It is how I recall her face in my dreams, sleeping or waking. And when I learned at length the secret of the chapel I understood many things that each must find for himself.
Her first child was my brother Philip, born in the year 1658. Ten years later she gave my father his only girl and last child,—me, Philippa, to wit,—and died herself in the first days of the year 1673, some five months before my rescue from Betty at the hands of Master Royston, to which, in this opening chapter, as in my life, I will yet be referring all things, as it were an Hegira.
And all this time, though I am ever dinning this Master Royston, this Ned, this time-worn but, I hope, sempiternal lover, in your ears, as yet introduction of him into these pages does as much lack formal ceremony as did the beginning of our friendship.
Mr. Nathaniel Royston, of Cheapside, in the City of London, was of a well-known and highly respected west-country parentage. Apprenticed in London at an early age to a merchant of repute, he had soon displayed considerable sagacity, not only in the intricacies of the Turkey trade, but also in the more perilous and no less subtile labyrinth of matters political. As in the first, after winning his way to a large share in the undertakings of him who had been his master, he had devoted himself to the patient amassing of a large fortune, so in the second he had used his judgment and foresight to the one end of retaining intact what he had so laboriously gathered. I would not be understood to throw anything of blame on his conduct of his life. Ned hath often told me that to his father all governments were alike, for all, he would say, were equally at fault, and that it became a man of his temper and estate to make in each case the best of a bad business. The Turkey trade thriving, Mr. Royston continued to increase by this means of regarding affairs of state, in despite of King and Parliament, Army and Protector, Presbyterian and Independent. And this in so great measure that, in the year 1653, he acquired by honest purchase those lands of the family whose scion he was, which lay in the county of Somerset. So he came to live among us, but it was not until two years after the Restoration that his son Edward was born, that being six years after his marriage to the Lady Mary Harlowe. He was wont to say that it was indeed strange that the sole precarious venture in the life of a solid and cautious merchant should prove his most profitable, referring in this to his marriage with a lady whose family had been proscribed for its affection to the royal cause. In this circumstance, indeed, there would appear to be some resemblance between the fates of my mother and Ned's; with this difference, however, that in Mr. Royston's case love impelled to the single hazardous act of a lifetime, while in my dear father's, duty and the very danger itself brought about a union ultimately rewarded with affection.
This Mr. Nathaniel Royston, after some twenty years spent mostly at his estate of Royston Chase in our neighborhood, during which time he had much endeared himself to my father by many acts of a thoughtful and temperate goodness, which his wealth and general esteem well enabled him to perform, died quietly in his bed in the same winter as my dear mother.
Of my own brother Philip, my early recollection is most slender. His was, I believe, ever a studious and contemplative complexion of mind, which had led him at an early age to adopt, against the earnest wish of his father, the erroneous opinions in the matter of religion pressed on him, I am sure, far more earnestly by his mother's spiritual advisers than by herself. I have neither wish nor ability to expatiate on this subject, and will only say, in justice to both sides, that it was more on account of the sorrow I had seen deeply graved upon my father's face when Philip's adhesion to the Church of Rome was mentioned, than from any ecclesiastical predilection of my own, that I found means to resist certain assaults by Philip and others on my own acquiescence in the position and authority of the Church of England as by law established.
It fell shortly after the Restoration that the death of the childless Silas Holroyd much simplified the process at law whereby the attempt was making to recover my mother's property. The matter being brought to a successful issue, the revenues of our family became so vastly improved that in the year 1676, when I was eight years of age, and Philip eighteen, he was sent travelling on the continent of Europe with a governor. I heard my father murmur, as he returned to the house after bidding his son farewell: "Pray God it drive some of the folly out of him!"
This, in my father's view of it, was far from the result of that foreign tour. After a while he ceased to tell me of Philip and his letters, reading them ever in a clouded silence; till at length I was bidden not to speak of my brother, and I knew some bad thing had befallen, but what, for many years, I did not learn. Nor did I see him after that departure for a space of twelve years. And when at length I did see him—but that I will tell in its place.
I had thought clearly to lay, as it were, the groundwork of my narrative in far fewer words than these that stretch already behind me like a dusty and winding road at the traveller's back.
Now, when as a child I would read a tale or history (after that Ned had coaxed and driven both desire and skill of reading into my little head), I did use to pass over the early pages in scorn, and "to come to the part," I would tell the chiding Ned, "where things fall to happening." Since many in graver years do keep lively this desire of action and movement in what they read, I am now resolved to reach, as quickly as may be, the place "where things begin happening."
CHAPTER II
I have said above of this early friendship between a lad of eleven and a maid not half that age, that it endured five years. For at the end of that period the comradeship indeed was broken, and a term was set to the habit of community in all things that was to me at least so comfortable. The day that took my companion to reside in the town of Sherborne, there to attend the King's School, brought on my small mind its first remembered sorrow; wherefore I wept greatly, and would not for many days be comforted. At the time I did not understand (as how should I, being but ten years of age?) the reasons of this so sudden change in his mother's intention. But I have since learned that two causes, of which I myself, poor maid, was one, determined the Lady Mary Royston to take her son from the hands of the learned and pious governor who should have led him in the path of learning and conduct even up to the gates of the University of Oxford. Thus her late husband had intended, but, the tutor growing lazy and overeasy perhaps, while Ned would ever more frequently take the bit of control fast between the teeth of stubbornness, she was minded to subject him to sterner authority. She was moved, moreover, like many another parent of an only son, by some measure of jealousy, directed, in her case, toward "the wild little maid of Drayton," as she would call me; for, with all his duty to his mother, no words or wishes of hers could shake that notable and constant affection that Ned did then, as ever, spend upon me. Knowing, too, by her late husband, of the papistical bias (as she would say) of the Drayton family more than others of those parts had learned, she was ever in dread (pursuing Mr. Nathaniel Royston's policy of caution) lest our acquaintance should lead her or her son into some seeming of complicity with traitors. For we were then in the year 1678 and the full tide of the Popish Plot. But I have always believed that I was far more in this matter of sending Ned to Sherborne than Dr. Titus Gates or the whole College of Cardinals.
By this and by that, certain it is that go to Sherborne he did, and that my days had been from that hour very cheerless but for a notable addition to our family, bringing some measure of solace to a mighty sore little heart.
When he heard that Ned was gone, and that the tutor knew not where to turn himself for a living after his dismission by the Lady Mary, my good father mounted his horse and rode over to Royston, leaving me marvelling greatly at the courage and hardihood of a man that dared encounter a woman so formidable as I then held Ned's mother to be. For only twice had I been with him to Royston Chase, and the second time even happier to be gone than the first. So it was that I deemed my father a very St. George that could face cheerfully this dragon.
He had along with him a mounted servant, leading a quiet pad-nag, which returned after sundown sorely burdened with the great person of the Rev. Joshua Telgrove. I stood on the steps for my father's embrace (always my privilege on his return), and when the little party was dismounted with no small difficulty to Mr. Telgrove and the assistant groom, "Mistress Philippa," says Sir Michael, with something of ceremony in his manner of speech, "this is Mr. Telgrove, who hath taught your friend, Master Royston, these many years."
"That I know well, sir," I replied, trembling; for I feared the old man greatly, having seen him but thrice, and ascribing great austerity to him that had ruled a being so great as my friend and idol.
"And now," he continued, with a little grim smile that was yet not unkind, "Mr. Telgrove has a mind to teach my little half-broke filly" (for so the dear and tender gentleman was wont to pun upon my name), "and I have a mind he should at least make the endeavor."
At this I trembled yet more, and was abashed to a stubborn silence, resolving with a mighty vow in my heart that from none but Ned would I learn. And I finding in the days that followed that my tutor was the mildest of men, and in face of childish wilfulness the most indolent, it was like to have gone mighty hard with my advancement in learning had he not discovered a rod to rule me as by some charm of magic. For coming very soon, with the keen insight of childhood, to fear him not at all, I would in no manner give him rest nor ease, neither by learning my task nor by sitting mumchance, which at first, mayhap, had pleased him near as well, unless he would be talking of Ned. Now Mr. Telgrove had a great and tender affection to his late pupil, and perceiving that I even surpassed him in this, he came, I think, to some measure of love for his new one. With that rose in him the wish that I should do him credit, even as Ned had done; and he made an ordinance that the name, so dear alike to master and scholar, should not be breathed until the task of the day was not only conned but fairly committed and recited. To this rule he did so constantly, for a nature of his softness, adhere, that before six months were past I was much advanced in wisdom, and grown to love my lessons only next in order to their reward—those long colloquies, to wit, in which he would tell me every adventure, escapade, and other act, good or bad, of Ned's childhood. These stories, indeed, soon grew old, but to me and my tutor never trite nor stale. Then from time to time he would read aloud to me, in part or at length, the letters received from Sherborne. But to me Ned did not write.
Thus the months went by, and grew into years less heavily than I had thought. Mr. Telgrove was well content, having found, as he would say, a refuge for his old age. For the Act of Uniformity and the Oath of Non-resistance being against his conscience, had deprived him of his living, while the Five-Mile Act had well-nigh forbidden him to find another. Mr. N. Royston, in the performance of one of his politic acts of charity, his house of Royston Chase being neither near Mr. Telgrove's former incumbency, nor within the proscribed distance of a corporate town, had obtained a good teacher for his son; but I think the good man's power of struggling with a persecuting world was exhausted in his one act of renunciation, and he was left with little desire for aught but a peaceful abode and the leisure to study the great writers of antiquity in a cloud of smoke from his tobacco pipe. His opinions in matters theological and ecclesiastical had, with the passage of time, so softened, that Sir Michael would playfully attack him for a Latitudinarian, an Arminian, or what not, while I on winter evenings would search among my tutor's books that I might plague him with accusation of strange heresies.
But this was after Mr. Telgrove had resided with us some four years, and young Mr. Royston had proceeded from Sherborne to Corpus Christi College, in the University of Oxford, having in the meantime but once visited Royston—one happy summer for me, in my fourteenth year, during two months of which he would ride over to us, not indeed with the frequency of the past, but often twice, and sometimes even three times, in the seven days. Yet, though I say I was happy, it was not as it had been. Something of the distance that had grown between him and me would force itself upon the mind, now of one, now of the other. Pondering the matter from the watch-tower of my present content, I hold that the child in Mistress Phil was ever crying out for the older terms of alliance, with their reckless mirth and unchecked license of jollity, while the woman, unheeded, but waxing ever stronger within, would as often clap stern hand upon the clamorous lips of youth, and so produce that outward show of petulance which is as baffling to the youth in his twentieth as it is alluring to the man in his thirtieth year. Then, too, it was that I first gave thought to the manner of my appearance in the eyes of others, and would ask my glass, I knew not why, for evidence of grace and beauty in person and countenance. And the mirror was a stern arbiter, showing only gaunt length of limb and sunbrowned uncouthness of feature, overhung by heavy brows, and supported, when mirth would display them, by a regiment of very white teeth.
"Dear Ned," I would say, "I would I were fair!"
"Some day you will be so," he would answer.
"But you have grown to the stature of a man, while I——"
"Be content, sweetheart," he would answer. "You are like a yearling colt—nay, 't is filly I mean. How dost spell that same word filly now, Mistress Scholar? With the 'P' and the 'h' it should be, in the Grecian manner. But indeed you will overtake my growth soon enough. When I did first know you, my age to yours was as two to one and more. When I have done with Oxford, it will be but as four to three, and thou older for a woman than I for a man."
"Tell me, then," I said to him one day, after some such talk, "when, last summer, you were at the Court with madam your mother, and I saw you not at all, did you not see many fine ladies and women of great beauty?"
"Ay, many," quoth he, "but none such as you will be. Do but give the colt time."
And when he was gone I would marvel why I cared for the beauty I had not. And since I found no clear answer to the question in my own mind, and ventured to seek it from no other, it was well, maybe, that Ned's long absence at Oxford and in London with the Lady Mary, extending as it did over the better part of four years, put the matter in time clean out of my head. Indeed, even in our quiet corner, we had other matter to consider in those days than the vanity of a half-grown maid.
Now it is only in later times that I have come even to the most partial understanding of the many twists and turns in the fate of our perturbed island, that were then succeeding each other with so bewildering rapidity. This is no public history, or my ignorance would make of it a worse book yet than it promises, and I shall but recall the memory of those unquiet events that affected at this time our quiet life.
That same year of Ned's coming again to Royston, between his leaving Sherborne and going to Oxford, was the time of the late Duke of Monmouth's progress through England, wherein he did take upon himself so much of the state of his royal ancestry as to encourage greatly the fond belief of the common people, particularly in the west country, in that vain story of a certain Black Box, where should be found (did one credit these mystery-mongers) proof indisputable of the marriage of the Duke's mother, Mistress Lucy Walters, with his acknowledged father, King Charles II., then upon the throne. Of the merits of the matter I know nothing, but remember well how Sir Michael would say the wish was father to the thought in the minds of such as dreaded most the coming to the throne of the Papist Duke of York. He had no patience, he said, with those that went after these idle tales; yet he showed much in exhorting, threatening, and persuading those of his own people that seemed most in peril of misleading by these errors. In especial, I do recall something of a disputation between him and Simon Emmet, our steward. This good man was in a measure privileged in his intercourse with Sir Michael, being an old trooper of the first force my father had raised and led for King Charles the Martyr. He was, though Cavalier and Royalist to the marrow, a Protestant of an earnestness well-nigh fanatical.
Simon stood beneath the open window of my bedchamber, on the sward that there sweeps up right to the walls of the house from the park, so that I have often dropped bread to the deer grown bold in their feeding. My father leaned from the window beneath me, smoking a pipe of Virginia tobacco, while I sat gazing over the trees and busied, till my ear was caught by their words, with thought of Oxford and the Court at London. And this is what I heard:
Said Sir Michael Drayton: "Ill will come of this madness, Simon. To uphold the claim of a bastard to the throne you and I have fought for is not the work of a wise man nor a good."
"'T is not so sure the Duke is that," answered Emmet. "I, for one, hold him as well born as the other Duke" (meaning the Duke of York), "and, at any rate, my lord of Monmouth is no Papist."
"I had not voted for the Exclusion Bill had I been at Westminster," said my father, yet as if he had a doubt in the matter; "for I do think a Catholic may be no bad king—if he will but uphold the law."
"If—ay, if! I do not say a Papist must needs be a bad man nor a bad king. Not but what they all are so—for the most part," said Simon as in fear of overmuch concession. "But this is a Papist for sure, and as surely a bad man. 'T is pretty work he has had the doing of in Scotland, sir; and that not for his own superstition, but for a faith he doth not hold. Give him power and the time to use it, and what will he not attempt for the Scarlet Woman? Moreover, if the Duke of Monmouth be the King's son, born in lawful wedlock, as this same story of the Black Box would show——"
"No more, Simon," interrupted my father angrily. "Say not another word of that. It is rank blasphemy and treason, and I, being a faithful subject of His Majesty, and on his commission of the peace, and holding command in the train-bands, may not hear repeated what His Majesty has denied. And most of all, Simon," he continued more kindly, "I do fear this sort of wild talk will get thee into trouble. Leave it to Republicans and Fifth Monarchy Men, old friend. I fear you have been running after sectaries in your old age, Simon." He knew it well, for the old steward, like the poor land that had asked and taken many years and much blood of his youth, had passed through many contrarious fits of thought and sentiment. In religion his politic fear of Rome had well-nigh driven him out of the back door of the Church into the arms of the Puritans. As he hovered between respect of his ancient captain and present master, and the enticements of controversy, "Go, Simon!" cried Sir Michael; "bid Parson Greenlow pray with you, and read you a lecture on Passive Obedience and the Duty of Non-resistance."
"Humph!" muttered the old malcontent, as he walked toward the stable; "the parsons will be mighty ready to eat their sermons when the Duke's Scottish boot is on their leg. They 'll resist then, Sir Michael, even as we resisted Old Noll."
And so three further years went by, and Ned came not, but did spend such time as he was not in Oxford with Madam Royston in his father's noble house in Basinghall Street in the City of London. Twice did he send me a letter in those days, with no word, indeed, of love in them, but so breathing the constancy of our old terms of alliance, and bringing me so much joy, that I cannot endure they should run the risk of the cold monument of print, and so will not here set down their words.
And I grew in length and thickness, and, I hope, in other things beside, and had almost forgot my mirror but for the kinder and more pleasing glance it would now and again, toward the latter part of my seventeenth year, begin to throw back upon me, as I would pin a collar, or struggle to twist into some show of order the stubborn and difficult blackness of my hair.
CHAPTER III
And then, one Sunday morning of late winter, we heard from the pulpit of Drayton Parish Church how the King was dead, when was read to the congregation there assembled the speech to his Council of the new King, James, in which he did fairly promise to uphold the laws, and in especial to respect the rights of the Church of which he was the head, though no member. And my father was cheered, and Emmet was sombrely downcast, and the country people murmured of King Monmouth under the breath. Later came the news of the late King's apostasy in the very article of death. If these things were true of Charles, whom in some sort they had contrived to love, what should be looked for, said Emmet and those of his kidney, from him who, as Duke of York, was but lately the most hated and hateful of all in the three kingdoms?
And then came the rumors of the late King's doing to death by his brother now on the throne. The truth, grave as it was, would not content our more turbulent and hot-headed spirits of the west, but they must even mix falsehood, none being too scandalous, to overseason a dish already too heavy for stomachs unused to high fare. And so there followed an indigestion—I mean the mad and wicked insurrection of the Duke of Monmouth. To this day I cannot think, and much less write, of the summer and autumn that followed the death of King Charles II. without some return upon my spirits of the horror and gloom that the doings of those days engendered. So I will pass over our share in these things as quickly as may be.
When we heard of the Duke's landing at Lyme Regis, in the county of Dorset, and not more than twenty good miles from our little village of Drayton, it was already late on the eleventh day of June; yet that very night did my father set himself to the task of getting at once under arms his small company of the yellow-coated Somerset train-bands. Receiving the next morning instructions from Sir William Portman, the colonel of that force and a near friend of his own, he was enabled to despatch them out of hand on their road to join with the red-coated militia of Dorset at Bridport, saying that thus the poor hinds might at least die cleanly, if die they must; while staying at home they had, like enough, taken the rebel infection and ended on a gallows. His old wound and other infirmities, to my great joy, kept him with me at Drayton. But, not content with what was already done, he made during the week that followed a visitation of the neighborhood, exhorting all and sundry to loyalty, and with so good result that our Drayton folk suffered less in the cruel days so near at hand than any other village for forty miles round.
And these cruel days came upon us but too quickly. In the latter end of June Simon Emmet did one day make off, and we had great fear that he was gone to join the rebel mob that of its friends was flattered with the name of army. On the seventh day of July came the news of the battle fought at Sedgemoor, near the town of Bridgewater; and then of the great slaughter on that field, to be followed day by day with yet more grisly tales of the cruelty of the royal troops, in especial those of wicked Colonel Kirke and his regiment of soldiers from Tangier, as wicked and ruthless as himself. This bad man, whose later service in a nobler cause I can never hold as atoning for his acts at this time among us, began, after some days of butchery in the town of Taunton, to send out small bodies of soldiers to spread his horrid work in the smaller towns and villages in the southern parts of the county. And then there came in a party of the militiamen on their way home, having passed through Taunton, with word that some of Kirke's Lambs would next day visit Drayton, having with them a batch of prisoners belonging to our part, in order to hanging them, with all customary foulness of detail, on their own village-green, the better to encourage the loyalty of those on whom no faintest breath of suspicion could be raised.
It is said that when Will Blundell, the young gentleman that had in my father's stead taken our company of the militia to Bridport, had begged Colonel Kirke to give our village at least, as untainted in its loyalty, the go-by, that coarse and evil-minded man had replied, with many foul words and blasphemous oaths: "Are we then so loyal in Drayton? God's blood! I will keep them so, if a few bleeding heads and mouldering quarters may in Somerset do so hard a thing. And if my lads hang a few beyond the number they take with them, why," he said, "'t will but physic the land to a better habit."
Now Simon Emmet had in the village a son, Peter, who was by trade a blacksmith, and by custom a prudent fellow that kept to his anvil and never vexed his head in these ill times to fever heat by opening too wide his mouth. And this Peter had a daughter, Prudence, the prettiest maid of the village, and afterward, as you are to hear, my handmaid, and, indeed, my very dear friend. These two (for her mother was dead) had all that day a sore time of it, fearing that Simon was one of those who should be brought and put to death. Well, the party of soldiers came in that night with their three prisoners, but too late of a clouded evening, as the ensign in command did say, with a most vile levity, "for the good and loyal folk of Drayton fitly to enjoy the sight of six traitor legs performing a saraband upon nothing."
And so they quartered themselves upon the village, and their victims in a barn, "until," said this same worthy follower of Kirke, "on the morrow they should be quartered for good and all." Moreover, with a more exquisite touch of that cruelty in which they were so skilled, they had concealed the faces of these three poor fellows from the public gaze, in the hope that anxiety for the morrow should be the more widely spread over the sleepless pillows of the village.
Now during that night, when few slept, but terror reigned more silent than sleep, a strange thing happened. For many a year after, the matter was known in full to few but myself, and to me not till little Prudence Emmet had come to trust and confide in her new mistress. So much narrative I have of my own to unwind, that I will waste little space upon hers, telling but in brief that the third of these men, taken in arms and condemned without judge or jury, was indeed her grandfather; that she and her father had come to know it; that in the dead of night she had contrived with liquor and flattery, and mayhap by implicit proffer of kindness she purposed never to grant, to keep the sentry busy, and even a little to draw him off, while her father, after forced and secret entry at the hinder part of the barn, had privily withdrawn that old hothead Simon (now like to pay so dear for his besotted enthusiasm) from his prison, and had carried him upon his great shoulders, an inglorious Anchises concealed in a sack, five miles across country, and there fairly buried him alive in a secret cave or hole in the hillside by well-nigh walling up the mouth thereof, and bodily transplanting a young tree to conceal all signs of his labors. Yet was he back in his cottage before the ensign and his men had slept off the fumes of their wine.
Thus it was not till near upon noon that they discovered their loss, whereat the greatness of the ensign's fury passes any power of description that is in my pen. He said the two remaining should hang twice or thrice ere they died, to make of the spectacle as good entertainment as he had promised to the folk of that most loyal village of Drayton; but, proceeding to the execution of this cruelty, and having, to the enhancement of his wrath, but a small band of spectators, the most part keeping their houses in fear and sorrow, before he had ordered the hapless men, already in the agony of death, to be cut down the first time, his evil work was interrupted by the coming of that soldier who had on the previous evening been so cunningly cajoled by Mistress Prue and her cozening flatteries. This man had been threatened with the anger of Colonel Kirke and the most terrible military punishments unless he succeeded in discovering his escaped prisoner. Failing in this, he had, on encountering Prudence in a back passage leading to her father's forge, thought at least to display his zeal in hauling her by the hair before his officer, there to denounce her as his seducer from duty. In so doing he gave those two poor rebels a quick and easy death of their first hanging, while Prue shortly found, to the great altering of my after-life, a champion with a strong hand—no other, indeed, than him of whom is my book and my thought while I live.
Two days before this time Mr. Edward Royston was about leaving Oxford to visit Lady Mary at her house in London, when he was apprised of the sufferings of our western folk subsequent to the battle of Sedgemoor. Being now of a man's estate (for his entrance at the College of Corpus Christi was at an age much beyond the common) and of a nature graver than his years, he was impelled by his love for his people of Royston, and his pity of the dangers their misleading might bring upon them, without delay to set out for his home in Somerset, resolved to do what he might to order things fitly. Warning his mother by letter of his purpose, he took the road by Reading and Salisbury, in which city, arrived late at night, he heard what did but increase his desire to be at Royston, so that with moonrise he was again in the saddle, riding all that night alone; for his servant's horse had reached Salisbury clean foundered, and, nags being mighty scarce from the needs of two armies lately in the field at no great distance, he was forced to leave the man behind until he could be mounted. Thus it was that he came riding through Drayton village just in the last struggles of those two poor rebels, and amid the lamentable cries of Prudence in the rough grasp of her outwitted redcoat.
Of what here immediately followed I have received no account of that fulness which would enable me to give a narrative in detail. For Prudence was so mortally in fear, she says, that she remembers little but a quarrel and the noise of a great blow, from the moment of her seizure until she found herself coming again to her wits from a fit of fainting, in her father's arms and cottage. And Ned, when at length the occasion for talking of the matter could be had, did show a reluctance so great to speak of that which he has called the most painful spot in his memory, that even for the purpose of this book I forbear to question him with any particularity. But this much is sure, that in the winking of an eye Mr. Royston was off his horse, the frightened and brutal musketeer was stretched in the dust, and Prudence freed from his clutch only to be seized, with a coarse jest, into a lewd embrace by the officer of the party. There is little reason to doubt that he would shortly, in his anger and with his power at the moment so unbridled, have brought my life's joy to an end by the shooting or hanging of the gallant lad for his resistance to the military authority. But poor Ned's passion, so terrible, as I have said, in certain moments of just anger, was in a moment out of the cage where it had slumbered, and, before the vile words were well cooled upon the wicked lips, the handle of a heavy riding-whip had cut short the sentence with the life of the speaker. It must indeed have been a blow of fearful force (for in those days Ned's strength was growing great even beyond his own knowledge of it), and, falling as it did on the right temple, no other was needed. It was more than an hour before they had sure knowledge that the man was dead, and in the meantime all was confusion; for Ned, seeing Prudence borne off in the arms of her father, leapt upon his horse, and clattered down the village street. Three harmless musket-shots were discharged after him, of which indeed we heard the report up at the house, and then followed a babel of questions and oaths. Some demanded horses, others the name of the miscreant and rebel that had stricken their officer. Now "young master of Royston," as they did use to call him, was as well loved as known in Drayton village; yet on this day there was found, of those that saw his deed, no man, woman, or child that could put a name to him. Nay, I am wrong, for two indeed there were did name him, but so diversely both from each other and from the truth that little was gained, even when, for the better convincing the sergeant, they came to blows over the difference. And on this matter of the death of that poor young ensign, hot, as it were, from his sins, I will say at once that you should have searched our west country for ten years and never found a man to blame his slayer. I am no Papist, nor do I know if this be sound in any theology, but certain it is that in our eyes to this day the blood of one of Kirke's Lambs upon his hands was held fit to wash many a sin from a man's soul.
Now, knowing his life not worth a hoof's paring if he fell into their hands, and unwilling to lead those men of blood to Royston, Ned did lie all that day in some deep woodland near Crewkerne, trusting his knowledge of the roads should give him by night the greater advantage over his pursuers, and hoping to obtain privily a fresh horse, when the sun was well set, for his journey to the coast.
CHAPTER IV
Now all this day I had been keeping the house, at my father's strict command, he being most solicitous that for their safety none of his household should meet with the gang of cutthroats he knew to be then in the village. Being thus cut off from news, we had no knowledge of what was toward, conjecturing, however, some wickedness from the sound of those three musket-shots that I have mentioned.
About nine o'clock of the evening, then, I went to my chamber, sad, indeed, and anxious for the fate of the Drayton folk, and with many a shudder of horror as the things I had heard tell of that regiment, called at one time of Tangier, at another, Queen Catharine's, came unwelcome to my mind. And I remember that, as I put off my clothes, I marvelled how a woman high and gently born as that lady of Portugal could take pleasure to have such men bear her name. But, with all my perturbation, my mood was mild and peaceful to what it had been had I known at whom those same shots had been fired. Yet was there on my spirit a sense of unrest, and (as it seems to me now, perhaps in the light of after knowledge) of foreboded evil that would in no manner let me sleep. So it was that, about half an hour after I had bidden good-night to my father and Mr. Telgrove, I extinguished my one candle, and, it being a warm but clouded night, sat at the open window in my night-robe, trying idly to bring my eyes to pierce the darkness, and as idly considering when I was like again to see Ned. Here I sat, but for how long a period of time I know not. Yet I do remember that I heard all those sounds that indicate the closing in of night and sleep over a great house. And last came the drawing of bolts and setting of bars below, and the slow and halting step of my father's ascent of the stairs, and, with the closing of his chamber door, a stillness as of the grave was over all things. I thought it was such a stillness as I had never known; and then there grew upon my spirit (or, at least, it now seems to me that it was so) a foreknowledge that something, I knew not what, but something—something—something was coming out from this silence to break it. And with a slowly growing horror I did then fall to speculating upon the nature of this so certain interruption; would it be some ghastly vision of another world, or a cry of wrath, or some more horrible scream of terror? As one grown suddenly cold I arose from my seat by the window, with a shudder at the creatures of my imagination, gently drew to the casement, and got into my bed, as I should have done an hour, perhaps, before. But I found there no refuge from the silence that should be broke, but was not. And this sense of loneliness brought me in mind of the forgotten duty of prayer, so that I was quickly again out of my bed and on my knees by its side, hoping, childlike, great solace to my oppression of spirit. And then it came,—not the solace, but the breaking of the silence. And, though it was not such as I had looked for, being but the slight click of a pebble upon the glass of my window, yet did it send, as they say, my heart into my throat, and my whole body was a-tremble, as it had been a harpstring overstrained. It is a thing for which I can never to the day of my death sufficiently thank the goodness of God, that my terror took from me the voice in which I would have cried aloud upon the house. And so I gasped for breath, and clutched the clothes of the bed in a fear quite out of reason; and had I been upon my feet instead of my knees, 't is sure I could not have kept them. And then I heard the jingle of a bridle and the thud of an impatient hoof falling soft upon the sod, so that even in my passion of fear I knew it was under my window, or I had not heard it, for the grass was soft with the rain that fell at sunset. Upon that strange thoughts of our bugbear Kirke and of those devils that he ruled crept in my mind; but surely, I thought, my father's good affections to the throne should protect us; and, some movement of curiosity stirring in my breast to combat its army of terrors, I made shift to creep with knees and hands to the window, whence, with caution raising myself and peering through the lower panes, I espied dimly the shape of a man standing beside his horse. Thereupon, perchance having seen the whiteness of face, hand, or sleeve at the window, though the light was almost none, the man below uttered that whimsical little whistle of three notes that was a signal and warning of childhood to me, and I knew it was Ned. And my joy was so great that I forgot the hour, the place, the strangeness in him to come to my chamber window, and the unseemliness of my attire. Indeed I thought but of him as I gently flung back the casement, and cried, but softly: "Ned, dear Ned, is it indeed thou?"
Whereupon he replied, in a voice, as I thought, strangely altered from that I had known (but indeed it was but the day's anxiety and alarms that had so changed its sound): "I indeed it is, dear Mistress Phil. But, I pray you, speak low and secretly, for I do think they will be even now upon me."
"And who are 'they'?" I asked, lightly enough, having as yet no fear that any would harm such as he.
"Kirke's mercenaries, that, because they bear upon their flag the Lamb that doth signify our blessed Redeemer, and because they do never use to show mercy," he said bitterly, "they do call Lambs. 'T is not likely they will show me the mercy of sword-thrust or musket-ball if there be a rope handy where we meet. And hanging is a death I have little love to, Phil."
"But, Ned, O Ned!" I cried, leaning from the window the better to speak low, "what hast done, dear, to be out with these men? Surely you did not fight with the Duke."
"Nay, mistress," says he, "but I have this day struck down, and maybe worse, one that did fight against that same poor foolish man. He was their officer, and I doubt he is not yet risen, for I struck him as I never struck man before. All this day have I lain hid, and should now be on my way to Bridport if my life be worth the saving. But I thought, even now as I was starting on my way, sink or swim, live or swing, I would see Phil once again—I would say, Mistress Philippa. So I rode hither five miles from Crewkerne woods to bid you good-by. And now I am sorry that I did so, for, as I leapt the hedge down there from the lane into the hollow, I saw one on a horse that made for the village, and I doubt he was some picket set to watch after me. 'T is certain they have gotten horses enough by this, and I do fear my rashness may bring them hot foot about this house."
He now mounted his horse, pushed him close to the wall, and went on speaking; "I wish I could come at you," he said. "Would you give a kiss to take over the sea with me, Mistress Phil, an I could reach your lips? I have not felt their touch of velvet since I was a lad."
Now we were indeed very foolish there, with danger so instant upon us, to pause for such a matter. But I, remembering how I had wept because he had not taken, when last we met, what I was ashamed to offer unasked, and being filled with joy at his words, did answer, bold as brass: "That indeed would I, dear Ned, if you were three feet taller than your six." And with that he must again urge his nag close in to the wall, steady him with voice and rein, and then climb to his feet upon the cantel of his saddle; and there, resting one hand upon the ledge of the window, he did take what he had asked and I was not minded to refuse. And whether there were more kisses than one, or whether one did last much longer than the wonted time of such, concerns but two persons in the world.
But, on a sudden, passing athwart my new joy, a newer fear entered my heart; for I heard the sound of many hoofs coming breakneck up the avenue to the house. For the passing of one brief heart-beat that yet seemed the time of an age I felt cold and sick of an awful dread, when there sprang a picture on my brain of import so appalling, that I was flung by recoil from that depth of despair into as excellent a degree of courage. For as in a flash of light I saw a gallows, and thought of a rope clinging yet closer where my arms now clung. And as the courage thus sprang to life in me, and I whispered, "They shall not have thee, Ned," the beat of hoofs drew near with that pulse in the stroke of them that tells of the sharpness of the rider's spur and the wrath in his heart. And that which next followed was a plain effect of Ned's rashness, and of the folly of us both at such a conjuncture to play with the moments that should have been used to his escape. For the horse, on which he precariously stood to reach me, hearing the quick and stirring approach of his kind, did incontinently fling his heels in the air, and, with a shrill nickering, started away across the park at a good round pace, leaving his master hanging by his hands, and partly to a great stem of the ivy that on this side covers the most part of the stonework of the house. After a little struggle he did contrive some sort of footing among the lower branching knots of the ivy, and with a whispered adieu would have made his descent, very hazardous for a man of weight, had I not clutched him hard. For I heard the voices of some that were coming round the house, drawn, doubtless, by the neighing of the faithless nag.
