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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 and poultry grunting and cackling out
their bill of grievances against their stronger-snouted or
quicker-witted rivals; Tib's cheery voice instructing her cows and
calves; and at intervals the pleasant regular beat of the flail in
the barn, where they were thrashing the corn,--striking steady time
to all the busy irregular sounds of animal life, and bringing them
into a kind of unity.

All these homely, quiet sounds seemed stranger to me than the howling
of the winds, and fitful clattering of the hail, through the night.
They made me feel impatient with the animals, and with Tib, and with
the inflexible every-day course of things.  Was not Roger--our own
Roger--in agony worse than mortal sickness, in suspense whether or
not his hand had dealt a death-blow.  Were not we in dreadful
suspense whether his whole life might not be overshadowed from this
moment as with a curse?

And yet the calves must be fed, and the swine snuff at their troughs
and grudge if they be not satisfied, and the ducks splash and preen
themselves as if nothing was the matter.

There are many seasons in life when the quiet flow of the stream of
every-day life, as it prattles past our door among the familiar
grasses and pebbles, falls on the heart with a sense of inflexibility
more terrible than the storm which ploughs the waves of the Atlantic
into mountains, and snaps the masts of great ships like withered corn
stalks.

But that morning was the first on which I learned it.

The storm had quite passed.  The dawn was still struggling with the
cold winter moonlight.  Far off the gray morning shone with a steely
gleam on the creek of the Mere, were I used to sit quite still for
hours while Roger angled, holding his fish-basket, amply rewarded at
last by his dictum that there was one little woman in the world who
knew when to hold her tongue, and by the reflecting glory of his
triumph when he brought the basket of fish to Tib for my father's
supper.  Only last autumn, and now it seemed as if it had happened in
another life.

Close to us in the high-road the moonlight still glimmered on the
pools.

Aunt Gretel was dressed and gone.  My last sleep had been sound.  I
reproached myself for my hard-heartedness in sleeping at all.

It was still dusk enough to show the faint red light in my Father's
chamber.  Was he still watching?

My question was answered by the sound of the psalm coming up from the
hall, where the household were gathered for family prayer.  This
reminded me that it was the Sabbath-day, the only day on which we
used to sing a psalm at morning prayers.  I knelt at the window while
they sang.  I heard my father's voice leading the psalm, and Aunt
Dorothy's deep second, and Aunt Gretel's tremulous treble; but not
Roger's.  I felt so strange to be listening, instead of joining in
the song.  Such a thing had never happened to me before.  Aunt Gretel
must have thought it good for me to sleep on, and have crept down
stairs like a ghost.  But the feeling of being _outside_ was terrible
to me that morning.  It brought back my old terror about being "on
the wrong side of the tree."  But not so much for myself.  For Roger!
for Roger!  What if he should be feeling left outside like
this!--outside the prayers, outside the hymns, outside the holy
family gatherings, outside the light and the welcome!  That morning I
felt something of what must be meant by the _outer_ darkness.  The
darkness outside!  Even the "darkness" did not seem to me so terrible
as the being _outside_!  For it showed there was a within--a home;
light within, music within, the Father's welcome within and we
outside!  Could it be that Roger was feeling this now?

All this rushed through my heart as I knelt to the music of the
family psalm.

Then, dressing hastily, I went down.

"Roger has been here, Olive," said my Father, answering my looks.
"He brought the chirurgeon to the Hall, and came home an hour since,
and then went back again to watch."

"Then Sir Launcelot is not out of danger," I said.

"No," he replied; "but there is hope."

There was no morning walk for us that day.  My Father went to his
chamber, my aunts to theirs, and I to the chamber where the dried
herbs lay, partly because it was Roger's and my Sunday
parliament-house, and partly because from it I could see the towers
of Davenant Hall.

In our Puritan household we were brought up with great faith in the
virtues of solitude.  A very solemn part of our ritual was, "Thou,
when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and shut thy door, and pray
to thy Father which is in secret."  "The one minute and unmistakable
rubric," my Father called it, "in the New Testament."  For he used to
say, "not only is the solitary place the place for the Redeemer's
agonies and the apostle's bitter weeping; it is the place of the
largest assemblies.  For therein passing the barriers of the
congregation, we enter into the assembly and Church of the
first-born, and into the temple not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens.  Any religion," said he, "whose secret springs do not exceed
its surface waters, will evaporate in the burden and heat of the day."

We went to church as usual, and slowly and silently we were coming
away, avoiding as much as possible the usual greetings with
neighbours, and I feeling especially anxious to escape Placidia's
sympathy.

But that was impossible.  However, as she joined us she looked really
anxious; too anxious even to find an appropriate text.  She took my
hand kindly, and said--

"We must hope for the best, Olive."

And there was something in the "we," and the briefness of her words,
which brought tears into my eyes, and made me think I might still
have been keeping a hard place in my heart which would have to be
melted.

But we had only just left the church-yard, and gone a few steps
beyond the gate on the field-path to Netherby (I walking behind the
rest), when a soft hand was laid on my shoulder, and my face was
drawn down to Lettice Davenant's kisses, as in a low voice she said--

"Oh, Olive, I am sure Sir Launcelot will get well.  My Mother has
been saying prayers all night.  And Roger is so good.  Indeed, it was
not nearly half Roger's fault.  Sir Launcelot did say terribly
provoking things about the Precisians, and hypocrisy, and your
Father."

"_What_ did he say, Lettice?" I asked, passionately.

"My Mother says we ought to forget bitter words," she said; "and I
think we ought--at all events, until he gets better."

"Oh, Lettice," I implored, "tell me, only me!  That I may know, if he
should not get better.  Roger told my Father it was all his fault;
but I know--I always knew--it was not.  I shall know this if you will
not tell me another word, and perhaps think even worse things than
were said."

"It was not so much the words--they were ordinary enough--it was the
tone," said she.  "And, besides, it is so difficult to repeat any
conversation truly; and it was all in such a moment, I can scarcely
tell.  It began about Lord Strafford, and about Mr. Hampden and Mr.
Pym being canting hypocrites, and Mr. Cromwell being a beggarly
brewer; and then Sir Launcelot muttered something in a whining tone
about wondering that Roger's Father permitted him to indulge in such
ungodly amusements as bonfires; and Roger said it was not fair to
attack when he knew there could be no retort (meaning because I was
there); and Sir Launcelot said he believed the Precisians never
thought it fair to be attacked except behind some good city walls.
And then followed a fire of words about cowardice, and hypocrisy, and
treason; and then something about your father having taken care to
leave the German wars in good time for his own safety.  Then I saw
Roger's hand up, thrusting Sir Launcelot away, rather than striking
him, I thought.  But the next instant Sir Launcelot lay on the
ground, with his head against a jagged log, the other end of which
was in the bonfire, and Roger was pulling him back, and Sir Launcelot
swearing something about a "Puritan dog" and being "murdered."  And
then I saw the blood flowing from a wound in his head.  I gave Roger
my veil to staunch it with.  But it would not stop.  Sir Launcelot
fainted; and Roger told me to run to my Mother.  In five minutes all
the people were on the spot, and Roger was on horseback riding of for
the physician.  There!  I have told you all I know," she said,
"whether I ought or not.  But don't tell Roger.  For I tried to
comfort him by saying how he had been provoked.  But it did not
comfort him in the least.  He looked quite fierce at rue--at me!"
said little Lettice, the tears overflowing, "when he was always so
kind!  And he said there was no excuse for murder.  He was wild with
trouble," she continued, sobbing, "not a bit like himself, Olive; and
since that I cannot tell what to say to him.  Your ways and ours are
not exactly the same, you know.  So I have been with my Mother in her
oratory.  It is so hard to understand anybody.  But I hope God
understands us all.  I do hope He does.  My Mother could not find one
of the church prayers that quite fitted.  But she joined two or three
together, in the Collects, and the Visitation of the Sick, and the
Litany, which seemed to say all she wanted wonderfully.  I never knew
how much they meant before.  And it does seem as if God must hear;
and Roger always so good.  He may say what he likes, always so good,
to me and to every one!"

Lettice's tears opened the sluices of mine, and were a great comfort;
and it was a comfort, too, to think of those dear kind voices joining
in Lady Lucy's oratory.

When we reached home, the great table was spread in the hall, and the
serving-men and maidens were standing round it.

My Father moved to the head and asked the blessing on the meal, then
he said,--

"Friends, the hand of God is heavy on me to-day, and you will not
look that I should eat bread while a life is in peril through deed of
one who is to me as my own soul.  I might brave it out, and put on a
cheerful countenance.  But I would have you know I am humbled.  The
blows of an enemy we may face as men.  Beneath the rod of the Lord we
must bow like smitten children.  And I would have you know I do.  Yet
I cannot refrain from telling you also that it was for bitter words
against good men that the blow was struck.  So much I must say for
the boy, though God forbid I should hide the sin."

He left the hall, and every eye was moist as it followed him.

The general judgment was anything but harsh against Roger, as was
easy to see from the few low broken words which interrupted the
silence of that sorrowful meal, and from the response of Tib, to whom
I secretly ventured to tell how sorely Roger had been provoked.

"No need to tell me, Mistress Olive!" said she.  "That Sir Launcelot
is enough to rouse a saint, his groom told my Margery's Dickon.  And
they may say what they like, but I wouldn't give a farthing for any
saint that can't be roused."

It was not the public verdict Roger had to fear.  Aunt Dorothy took
my Father's place at the head of the table, her face white and rigid,
carving the meat, but eating not a morsel, nor uttering a word.  Aunt
Gretel moved about on one pretence and another, holding
half-whispered discourse with the elder servants of the house, from
the broken snatches of which I gathered that she fell into great
historical difficulties in her double anxiety to say nothing harsh of
the wounded gentleman, and at the same time to prove that Roger had
meant no harm.  And I, meantime, could scarce have sat through that
terrible meal at all, but for Roger's stag-hound Lion, who nestled in
close to me, pressing his great head under my hand, and calling my
attention by a soft moan, and from time to time secretly relieving me
of the food I could not touch, bolting it in a surreptitious manner,
regardless of consequences, which said as plainly as possible, "Thou
and I understand each other.  Our hearts are in the same place.  I
eat, not because I care a straw about it, but to please thee and help
_him_."  Only once, when my tears fell fast on his nose, as I stooped
over him to hide them, his feelings betrayed him, and his great paws
appeared for a moment on the clean Sabbath cloth, as with an
inquiring whine he started up and tried to lick my face, which I
supposed was his way of figuratively wiping away my tears.  But at
the gentlest touch on his paws he subsided, casting one anxious
glance at Aunt Dorothy, who, however, neither saw him nor the brown
foot-prints on the tablecloth.  Always afterwards he maintained his
gentlemanlike reserve, limiting all further expression of his
feelings to spasmodic movements of his tail, and to his great soft
wistful eyes, which he never took off from me, For dogs always know
when anything is the matter.  Their misfortune is they can never make
out what it is.  Roger's ancient foe, the old gray cat, meantime made
secretly off with a piece of meat which Lion had dropped.  And I
caught sight of her slowly luxuriating over it in a corner, entirely
regardless of the family circumstances.

Every most trivial incident in that day glows as vividly and
distinctly in my memory, in the fire of the passion that burned
through it all, as every detail of the carving of Davenant Hall in
the flames of the twelve bonfires.

The meal passed in a silence so deep that every whisper of Aunt
Gretel's and every moan of Lion's were clearly heard.  But afterwards
the men slunk hastily away to the farm-yard and stables, and Tib with
bones and fragments to her hens and pigs, and the maidens began to
clear away the wooden trenchers and our pewter dishes, the clatter
and rattle sounding singularly noisy without the cheerful talk which
generally accompanied it.

Aunt Dorothy, Aunt Gretel, and I, went, at his summons, into my
Father's justice-room.  "Where two or three are gathered together,"
said he; and without further preamble we all knelt down while he
prayed, in a few words and quiet (to the ear).  For he seemed to feel
the great, loving, omnipotent Presence; not far off, where cries only
could reach, but near, close, overshadowing, indwelling, too near
almost for speech.  And we felt the same.

When he ceased, it was some minutes before we rose.  And the silence
fell on me like an answer like an "Amen," like one of those "Verilys"
which shine through so many of the Gospel words, and illumine them so
that they may read in the dark; in the dark when we most need them.

Before we left, I told him of Lady Lucy and Lettice praying the
Collects for Roger in her oratory.

My Father turned away with trembling lips to the window.  Aunt Gretel
sobbed, Aunt Dorothy said, with a faint voice,--

"God forgive me if I said anything of Lady Lucy I should not have
said."

We had not left the room when Lettice's white palfry flashed past the
door, and in another moment she had met us in the porch.

"Sir Launcelot will live!" she said.  "The physician says there is
every hope; and he sleeps.  If he wakes better, all will be right;
and Roger waits to see, because he still fears.  But I am sure all
will be well.  And I could not bear you should wait; so my mother let
me come."

In his thankfulness my Father forgot the stately courtesy with which
he usually treated Lettice, and stooping down, took her in his arms,
as if she had been me, and kissed and blessed her, and called her
"God's sweet messenger and dove of hope!" and prayed she might be so
all her life.  And Aunt Gretel disappeared to tell every one.  But
Aunt Dorothy stood still where she was, and covered her face with her
hands and wept unrestrainedly in a way most uncommon with her.

Lettice, with her own sweet instinct when to come and when to go, was
on the steps by the door in a moment (anticipating her groom's ready
hand), on her white pony, waving her hand to us as we watched her in
the porch, and away out of sight, escaping our thanks, and leaving us
to our hope.

Slowly the dispersed household, who had all been invisibly bound to
the centre they nevertheless would not approach, gathered in the hall
from stall, and shed, and field.

And then my Father said,--

"Friends, God has given us hope.  Therefore let us pray."  And for a
few minutes we all knelt together while he prayed, in brief trustful
words, ending with the Lord's Prayer, in which all the voices joined,
at least all that could, for there were many tears.

Then my Father read Luther's Psalm, "God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in time of trouble."

And we felt it was true.  And so the service ended.  And once more
the household scattered.  For Roger had yet to return, and we all
felt a family-gathering would be a welcome he could ill bear.  So
Aunt Dorothy went to her chamber, and Aunt Gretel to her German
hymn-book by the fireside, and I to my place at her feet, and then to
watch from the porch.  For my Father went out to meet Roger.

And of that meeting neither of them ever spoke.

They came back together, my Father's hand on Roger's shoulder, half
as on a child's for tenderness, half as an old man's on a son's for
support.

"Sir Launcelot is out of danger!" said my Father, when he came into
the hall.

Roger kissed me and Aunt Gretel as he passed, and took my hand and
tried to say something; but said nothing, only let me sob a minute on
his shoulder, and then went up to his chamber.

We were used rather to repress than to give utterance to feeling in
our Puritan households.  And Lion was the only person who made much
show of what he felt, twisting and whining and fondling round Roger
in a way very unsuited to his giant bulk.  We heard him pacing after
Roger to the foot of the great staircase.  Upstairs no dog under Aunt
Dorothy's rule would venture, under the strongest excitement; so
after lying expectant at its foot for some time, Lion returned to
express his satisfaction in a more composed manner to me.

At family-prayer that night, my Father made one brief allusion of
fervent thankfulness to the mercy of the day.  More neither he nor
Roger could have borne.

And so that Sabbath of unrest ended.  To us, but not to Roger;
although I only learned this long afterwards.  For no lamp marked the
watch of agony he kept that night.  And on his haggard countenance,
when he came down the next morning, no one dared question nor comment.

For while others rejoiced in the deliverance, he writhed in agony
under the burden and in the coils of his sin.  The accident of the
log being at hand, that might have made it murder, and the other
accident, that the wound had not been an inch nearer the temple or a
barley-corn deeper, made absolutely no difference in the burden that
weighed on him.  If Sir Launcelot had died, the punishment would have
been heavier; but not the remorse.  And although his living was the
deepest cause of thankfulness, yet it was no lightening of the sin.
For it was the fountain of the sin within that was Roger's misery;
the fountain deep in the heart.

Now he began to feel the meaning of the words, "Out of the heart."
Now the old difficulties he and I had discussed in the apple-tree and
in the herb-chamber rushed back on him.  Now he began to feel that it
was no mere entertaining question in metaphysical dynamics whether he
was a free agent or not, but a question of moral and eternal life or
death.

Could he have resisted the temptation to strike Sir Launcelot?  Or
could he not?  His hand had stirred to deal that blow, at the bidding
of the bitter anger in his heart, as instinctively and almost as
unconsciously as the indignant blood had rushed to the cheek.  What
had stirred the sudden movement of anger in his heart?  Far bitterer
words from the lips of a stranger had not moved him as those mocking
tones of Sir Launcelot's.  The strength of that fatal impulse was but
the accumulated force of the irritation of countless petty
provocations, not retaliated outwardly, but suffered to ferment in
the heart.  Nor was that last sin altogether rooted in sin.  Roger's
search into his own heart was made with too intense a desire of being
true to himself and to God for him to fall into that blind passion of
self-accusing.  It had been more than half-rooted in justice, just
anger against injustice, generous indignation against ungenerous
slander, truth revolting against falsehood.  And so gradual (and in
part so just) had been the growth of deep-rooted detestation of Sir
Launcelot's character, that the last act--which might have been crime
in the eyes of man, which was crime in the eyes of God, whose
judgment is not measured by consequences--had become almost as
irresistible and instinctive as the movement of the eyelid to sweep a
grain of dust from the eye.

When, then, could he have begun to resist?  When would it have been
possible to stem the little stream which had swollen into a torrent
that had all but swept his life into ruin?  Where was the point where
sin and virtue, hatred which leads to murder, and justice which is
the foundation of all virtue, began to intertwine until they were
ravelled inextricably beyond his power to sever or distinguish?  Had
there ever been such a point?  Must not all, he being as he was by
nature, and things being as they were, and Sir Launcelot being as he
was, have necessarily gone on as it had, and led to the result it led
to?

But here came in the low inextinguishable voice of conscience.

"This anguish is no fruit of inevitable necessity.  It was sin--it
was sin.  I have sinned."  And then--

"I have sinned, because there is sin _in me_.  Sin in me; no mere
detached faults, no isolated wrong acts, but a fountain of evil
within me, from which every evil thing proceeds.  Out of the
heart--out of the heart; not from without, not something merely in
me.  It is _I myself_ that am sinful, that have sinned.  This one
evil thing, which, unlike all other seemingly evil things, storms or
frosts, or corruption and death itself, never produces good fruit,
but only evil fruit, is springing is an inexhaustible flow from the
depths of my innocent being."

"Free?  I am _not_ free!  I am in bondage.  I am a slave.  I am tied
and bound.  Yet this bondage is no excuse; it is the very essence of
my sin.  I cannot explain it; but I feel it.  I feel it in this
anguish which I cannot escape any more than we can escape from
anguish in the bones by writhing.  For this is not the anguish of
blows or of wounds, but of disease within, growing from my inmost
heart, preying on my inmost life.  O God, I have sinned, I am a
sinful man.  In me is no help.  Is there none in the universe, none
in Thee?"

Then from the depth of the anguish came the relief.  The thought
flashed through him--

"Unless one worse than the worst conception man ever formed of the
devil is the Maker of man and the Omnipotent Ruler of the world, it
is impossible that we should be so powerless in ourselves to overcome
sin, and so agonized in remorse for it, and yet that there should be
no deliverance."

That thought made a lull in his anguish for a time, a silence; that
thought, and the mere exhaustion of the conflict.  For his thoughts
had whirled him round until thought, with the mere rapidity of
motion, became imperceptible.  In the centre of the whirlwind there
was stillness, and therein he lay prostrate, dumb, and exhausted.

But not alone.

On his mind, wearied out with vain thinking, on his heart, numb with
suffering, fell in the pause of the storm old sweet, familiar words,
still small voices, soft echoes of sacred hymns learned in childhood;
those old familiar, simple words, wherewith the Spirit, moving like a
dove on the face of the waters, knows how to win entrance into souls
tempest-tossed, when new words, though wise and deep as an
archangel's, would only sweep past its closed doors undistinguished
from the wail of the winds, or the raging of the seas on which it
tosses.

Old familiar words,--

"Go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee."

Words of healing to so many!

Forgiveness; not as a far-off result of a life of expiation, but
free, complete, present.  Peace; not after years of doubtful
conflict, but now, to strengthen for the conflict.  Yet these were
not the words he most wanted then.  It was not so much that guilt
pressed on him as a burden, as that sin bound him like a chain.  Not
peace he most wanted, but power; freedom to fight, power to overcome.
It seemed to him as if what he longed for was not so much "Go in
peace," as "Come! and I will chasten thee, smite thee low, humble
thee in the dust; but make thee whole."

Not soft words of comfort, but strong words of hope and promise, were
what he needed, and they did not seem to come.

He crept out of the house before dawn to obtain tidings at the Hall
of Sir Launcelot, and to quiet the restlessness of his heart by
outward movement.

On his way he passed the forge where Job Forster, the blacksmith,
lived alone with his wife at the edge of the village opposite to
ours, on the way to the Hall.

There was a light in Job's window; a strange sight in his orderly and
childless home.  The red glare it cast across the road was struggling
with the growing dawn.  As Roger approached, it was put out; and just
when he reached the door it was opened, and Job's tall figure issued
forth.

Job strode forward and grasped Roger's hand.

"Thee had best not be roaming about the country by theeself in the
dark like a ghost," said he.  "It's wisht!"

"Is anything the matter?" asked Roger, diverting the conversation
from himself.

"There's nought the matter with us," said Job.

"There was a light in your window, so I thought Rachel might be ill,"
said Roger.

"There's nought ailing with us," repeated Job; and after some
hesitation he added, "We were but thinking of thee."

"You used not to need a lamp to think by," said Roger, touched more
than he liked to show.

"No, nor to pray by," said Job.  "But we wanted a promise, she and
I."  (Job seldom called his wife anything but she.)  "We wanted a
promise, Master, for thee.  For she thought the devil would be sure
to be busy with thee just now, and so did I."

"Did you find one?" asked Roger.

"They are as plenty as the stars," said Job, "but we couldn't light
on the one that would fit.  And it's bad work hammering them promises
to fit if they don't go right at first."

"As many as the stars, and not one that fits me!" said Roger,
unintentionally betraying the struggles of the night.  "Peace, and
pardon, and everything every one wants, but not what I want.  You
found none, Job!  Then, of course, there was nothing more to be done.
You and Rachel wouldn't give in easily."

"Well, Master Roger," said Job, "we didn't.  But we came to a stand,
and for a while gave up looking altogether.  And I sat down on one
edge of the bed and she on the other, and we said nothing.  But she
wept nigh as bitter as Esau, for she ever had a tender heart for
thee, having none of her own, and thee no mother.  When all at once
she flashed up through her tears, and said, 'Why, Job, we've gone
a-hunting for a promise, and we've got them all to our hand.  All in
Him!  Yea and amen, in Him!  We've forgotten the blessed Lord!'  Then
it struck me all of a heap what fools we were; and I could have
laughed for gladness, but that she might have thought I'd gone mazed.
So I only said, 'Why, child, here we've been chattering like cranes,
as if we'd been all in the twilight, like poor old Hezekiah.  We've
been hunting for the promises, and we've got the Gift!  We've been
groping for words, and we've got the Word.'  So we knelt down again,
and begged hard of the Lord to mind how He was tempted and forsaken,
and to mind thee, Master Roger, and help thee any way He could.  And
we rose up wonderful lightened, she and I.  And then the promises
came falling about us as thick as hail; and uppermost of them all,
'If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed;'
'Reconciled to God by His death; saved by His life;' and, 'I am come
that they might have _life_.'"

"Job," said Roger, "I think that will do; I think that will fit me."

"Maybe, Master Roger," said Job.  "They're mighty words.  But, please
God, thee and she and I never forget what we learnt to-night.  Words
are not so strong always the thousandth time as the first.  But His
voice goes deeper every time we hearken to it.  And every sore needs
a fresh salve.  But His touch is a salve for all sores.  Never you be
such a fool as we were, Master Roger.  Never you go creeping back
into the dark hunting for a promise and forget that they are all, yea
and amen, in the Lord.  No more if's or maybe's, or peradventure's,
but yea and amen in Him for us all for ever."

Roger grasped Job's hand in silence, and went on to hear tidings of
Sir Launcelot.

The night had been quiet; the fever had subsided, and the danger was
over.  And Roger came back to his chamber at Netherby to give thanks
to God.  For danger averted from others, for a curse averted from
himself, but above all, for the glorious promise of freedom now and
for ever--freedom to overcome sin, freedom to serve God.  Freedom in
the liberating Saviour, life in the Life, sonship in the Son, now and
for ever.


The various streams of the various lives which had been flooded into
one by the common anxiety about Roger and Sir Launcelot soon shrank
back into their various separate channels.

Ah! if we could all keep at the point, "_I will arise_," or better
still, at the place where the Father meets us, how good, and lowly,
and tender-hearted we should be!  No, "_thou never gavest me a kid;_"
no, "_this thy son, which hath devoured thy substance!_"  Strange
that the memory of such moments (and what Christian life can be
without such?) should not keep the heart ever broken and open.  The
best way towards this, no doubt, is to have such an arising and such
an embracing every day we live.  I am sure we need it.  However, we
did not exactly do this at that time at Netherby.

Aunt Dorothy, on thinking matters over with her "sober judgment,"
thought it a duty to warn us against the "spirit of bondage," which,
with all her sweetness, had restrained poor Lady Lucy's prayers to
the limits of the Prayer-Look.  Cousin Placidia, the immediate
anxiety having subsided, could not but feel that Roger's vehemence
had added another step to the distance which already separated them.
Once on that Pharisaic height, to which, alas! we so easily rise
without any trouble of climbing, being puffed up thither by windy
substances within and without, other people's falls necessarily
increase our comparative elevation above them; and whether this is
caused by their descent or by our ascent is difficult to determine;
just as in the case of one boat passing another, it is difficult by
the mere sense of sight to ascertain which is moving.  Not that
Placidia asserted this conscious superiority by reproaches.  Did she
need to descend to speech?  Was not her life a reproach?  That placid
life, unbroken by any movement deeper than the soft ripples of an
approving conscience; or a calm disapproval of any one attempting an
encroachment on her rights,--which of course she never permitted.
Had she not heard of Archbishop Laud's cruelties to the three
gentlemen in the pillory with no further emotion than a gentle regret
that the three gentlemen could not have held their tongues?  Had she
not, on the other hand, heard the tidings of Lord Stratford's arrest,
and the destruction of the Star-Chamber Court, with no more vehement
feeling than a remark on the vanity of human greatness, and a gentle
hope that it might lead to the abolition of the very inconvenient
monopolies on pepper and soap?

Had she not always warned Roger and me against severity on Sir
Launcelot?  Had she not even gone the length of pronouncing him a
very fine gentleman?  And what could be more striking than the
subsequent justification of her warnings by the revengeful act to
which Roger had been betrayed?

Under all these circumstances, Placidia's forbearance must have
seemed to herself remarkable.  She uttered no rebuke, she pointed no
moral, by reminding us of her prophetical sayings.  She merely
towered above us on her serene heights, a little higher, a little
more serene--a very little--than before.  And she called me "Olive,
my dear," and Roger "poor Roger."  But that was partly, no doubt, on
account of her being married.

Roger bore her superiority most meekly.  Indeed, I believe he felt it
as much as she did.  For Roger _did_ remain at that point of
penitence and pardon where the heart keeps sweet, and lowly, and
tender.  Which, most certainly, I very often did not.  For Placidia's
condescension, especially to Roger, chafed me often past endurance.

Only once I remember his being roused.

She had been saying (I forget in what connection) that she hoped
Roger would not be too much cast down.  "It was never too late to
turn over a new leaf; and then there was the consoling example of the
Apostle Peter.  There was reason to believe that the Apostle Peter
was a wiser and better man all his life from his terrible fall.  And
we know that 'all things work for good,'" said she, "'to them that
are called.'"

Then Roger, sitting at the other end of the hall cleaning his gun, as
we believed out of hearing, suddenly rose, and coming to where we
were sitting, stood before Placidia with compressed lips and arms
folded tightly on his breast,--

"Cousin Placidia," he said, "never, never say that again.  St. Peter
was not wiser and better, or even humbler for denying Christ.  No
doubt he was wiser, and better, and tenderer for that look, for ever
and ever; and better for the bitter weeping; but not for the denial,
not for the sin."

Said my Father, who came in behind Roger as he spoke, laying his hand
on Roger's shoulder,--

"True, Roger, true; but though sin can never work for good, the
memory of sin may; and at any point in the lowest depths where we
turn our back on the husks and our face to the Father's house, God
will meet us, and from that moment make the consequences, bitter as
they may be, begin to work for good to us."

"To us!  Father, to us," said Roger, "but to others--how to others?
To those our misdoing may have misled or confirmed in evil?  We may
stop a rock hurled down a precipice.  But who can stop all it has set
in motion, or undo the ruin it has wrought in its way?"

"Nothing works for good," said my Father mournfully, "to those whose
faces are turned from God.  But He can help us, and will, if we set
our whole hearts to it, to counter-work the evil we have wrought.
Counter-work, I say, not undo; for to undo a deed done is impossible
even to Omnipotence.  And that makes sin the one terrible and
unalterably evil and sorrowful thing in the world, and the only one."

The words fell heavily on my heart.  Was this the gospel? I thought.
Evil never, never to be undone, sin never to be the same as if it had
not been?  Placidia said no more until Roger and my Father went out
on the farm together, and we were left alone with Aunt Gretel, and
then she observed in her deliberate way, with a slow shake of her
head,--

"I hope Cousin Roger is not still in the dark.  I trust he
understands the gospel--"

"What do you mean by the gospel, Placidia?" said I, half roused on
Roger's account and half troubled on my own.

Placidia, always ready (at that time) with a theological definition,
neatly folded and packed, entered into a disquisition of some length
as to what she understood by "the gospel."  In a deliberate and
business-like manner she undertook to explain the purposes of the
Almighty from the beginning, as if she had, in some inexplicable way,
been in the confidence of Heaven before the beginning, and
comprehended not only all the purposes of the Eternal, but the
reasons on which these purposes were founded.  The effect produced on
my mind was as if the whole life-giving stream of redeeming love
flowing from the glorious unity of the living God, the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit, had been frozen into a rigid contract
between certain high sovereign powers for the purchase of a certain
inheritance for their own use, in which the utmost care was taken on
all sides that the quantity paid and the quantity received should be
precisely equivalent.  It was as if the whole living, breathing
world, with its infinite blue heavens, its abounding rivers, its
waving corn-fields, its heaving seas, and all that is therein, had
been shrivelled into a map of estates, in which nothing was of
importance but the dividing lines.  These "dividing lines" of her
system might, for aught I knew, be correct enough, might be those of
the Bible itself; but the awful Omnipresence, the real holy
indignation against wrong, the love, the life, the yearning, pitying,
repenting, immutably just, yet tenderly forgiving heart which beats
in every page of the Bible, had vanished altogether.  All the while
she spoke, as it were in spite of myself, the words kept running
through my head, "They that make them are like unto them."

At the close she said, turning to Aunt Gretel,--

"I think I have stated the gospel clearly.  I only hope Cousin Roger
understands it."

"I am sure I do not know, my dear," said Aunt Gretel (for Aunt
Gretel, being always afraid of in some way compromising Dr. Luther by
any confusion in her theological statements, seldom ventured out of
the text of Scripture).  "I am sure, my dear, I do not know.  I am no
theologian.  And it is a blessing that the Holy Scriptures provide
what Dr. Luther calls a gospel in miniature for those who are no
theologians: 'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have
ever-lasting life.'  That is my gospel, my dear.  It is shorter, you
see, than yours, and I think rather better news; especially for the
wandering sheep and prodigal sons, and all the people outside, and
for those who, like me, trust they have come back, but still feel, as
I do, very apt to go wrong again."

"Mr. Nicholls always says I have rather a remarkably clear head for
theology," said Placidia.  "But gifts differ, and we have none of us
anything to be proud of."

"No doubt, my dear," said Aunt Gretel.  "At least I am sure I have
not.  But I cannot say I think the punishment, or at least the sad
consequences of sin are all exactly taken away for us, at least in
this life.  For instance, there is Gammer Grindle's grandchild, poor
Cicely, as pretty a girl as ever danced around the May-pole, that
people say Sir Launcelot Trevor tempted away to London, and left to
no one knows what misery there.  (If it was not Sir Launcelot, may I
be forgiven for joining in an unjust accusation; but he was seen
speaking to her the evening before she left.)  Now if Sir Launcelot
were to repent, as I pray he may, that would not bring back the lost
innocence to little Cicely; nor do I see how the thought of her could
ever bring anything but a bitter agony of remorse to him."

("Ah," interposed Aunt Dorothy, who had joined us, "_I did_ speak my
mind, I am thankful to say, about those May-poles.")

"What is forgiveness, then?" resumed Placidia.  "And what is the good
of being religious, if we are to be punished just the same as if we
were not forgiven?"

"The blessing of forgiveness," said Aunt Dorothy, "is _being
forgiven_; and the good of being godly is, I should think, being
godly."

"Forgiveness, my dear," added Aunt Gretel, "What is forgiveness?  It
is welcome back to the Father's heart.  It is the curse borne for us
and taken from us out of everything, out of death itself.  It is God
with us against all our sins, God for us against all our real foes.
It is the broken link reknit between us and God.  It is the link
broken between us and sin.  What would you have better?  What could
you have more?  Once on the Father's heart, can we not well leave it
to Him to decide what pain we can be spared, and what we can not be
spared, without so much the more sin, which is so infinitely worse
than any pain."

"My theology," Aunt Dorothy continued, "is the doctrine Nathan taught
when he said to David, 'The Lord hath put away thy sin, but the child
shall die,'--and to the Apostle Paul when he wrote, 'God is not
mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap:' the
theology our fathers taught us; no gospel of _tolerating_ sin, but of
_forgiving_ and _destroying_ it.  'Christ has redeemed us from the
curse of the law, being made a curse for us.'  He has brought us
under the rod of the covenant, having Himself 'learned obedience
through the things which He suffered.'  There is as much mercy and as
much justice in one as in the other.  I hope, my dear," she
concluded, "you and Mr. Nicholls do indeed understand the gospel.
But, I confess, people who get into the Covenant so very easily do
puzzle me.  They say the anguish all but cost Dr. Luther his life,
and Mr. Cromwell his reason."

Placidia, from her double height of spiritual serenity and
semi-clerical dignity, looked mildly down on Aunt Dorothy's
suggestions.

"Aunt Dorothy," said she, "I have often thought, you scarcely
comprehend Mr. Nicholls and me.  But it is written, 'Woe unto you
when all men speak well of you.'  And as to Cousin Roger's Gospel, I
should call it simply the Law."

Soon after Placidia rose to leave.  But as she was putting on her
mufflers, she remarked, as if the thought had just occurred to her,--

"Aunt Dorothy, those three beautiful cows Uncle Drayton gave me, I am
a little anxious about them: the glebe farm is on high ground, and
the grass is not so rich as they have been used to, and I was saying
to Mr. Nicholls yesterday morning that I was sure Uncle Drayton would
be quite distressed if he saw how much less yellow and rich the
butter was than it used to be.  And Mr. Nicholls said he quite felt
with me.  And Uncle Drayton is always so kind.  So I said I thought I
had better be quite frank with Uncle Drayton.  You know I always am
frank, and speak out what I think.  It is no merit in me.  It is my
nature, and I cannot help it.  And Mr. Nicholls said he thought I
had.  And yesterday evening it happened that we were passing the
meadow by the Mere, and there were no cattle on it.  And I said to
Mr. Nicholls at once, what a pity that beautiful grass should run to
seed, and our butter be such a poor colour.  And Mr. Nicholls saw it
at once.  And he advised me--or I suggested and he approved of it, I
cannot be certain which (and I am always so anxious to report
everything exactly as it happened)--at once to go to Uncle Drayton
and ask him if he would allow our three cows just to stand for a
little while in that meadow, while there are no other cattle to put
in it, just to prevent the pasture running to waste, which I know
would be quite a trouble to Uncle Drayton if he thought of it, only
no one can be in every place at once, and no doubt he had forgotten
it."

"_Very few_ people's eyes can be in every place at once, certainly,
Placidia," said Aunt Dorothy, with point.  "But it so happens that
your uncle had not forgotten that meadow.  And this morning Bob drove
all our cows there."

"Oh," said Placidia, "that is quite enough.  I only felt naturally
anxious that nothing should be wasted, especially when we happened to
be wanting it.  But, of course, a poor parson's wife cannot expect
such butter as you have at Netherby; only I always remember the
'twelve baskets,' and how important it is 'nothing should be lost,'
and the virtuous woman at the end of the Proverbs.  I shall always
have reason to be grateful to you, Aunt Dorothy, for making me learn
so much Scripture."

"Thank you, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy, "you always had an excellent
memory.  But it is very important with the Holy Scriptures, at least
the English version, not to read them from right to left."

So Cousin Placidia departed, leaving Aunt Dorothy with a comfortable
sense of having defeated a plot.

But half an hour afterwards my Father came in.

"Poor Placidia," said he, "I met her on her way home, and I really
was quite touched by her gratitude for those few cows I gave her, and
also by the feeling she expressed about Roger.  It seems the glebe
pasture does not agree with the beasts as well as ours, and she had
been rather troubled about the butter, but had not liked to speak of
it, especially when we were in such anxiety about Roger.  It really
shows more delicacy of feeling than I thought Placidia possessed,
poor child.  And it shows how careful we ought to be not to form
uncharitable judgments.  So I ordered Bob to put those three cows
with ours in the Mere meadow for a little while."

"Did Placidia mention the Mere meadow?" said Aunt Dorothy.

"Well, I cannot be sure, but I think she did; and I think it was a
very sensible notion."

"What did Bob say?" said Aunt Dorothy, grimly.

"Bob spoke rather sharply," said my Father; "he is apt to be very
free-spoken at times; he said he had like to look well to our
pastures if we were to give change of air to all Mistress Nicholl's
cattle.  It was not likely, Bob thought, they would be in any hurry
to change back again."

"Well, there _are_ men," murmured Aunt Dorothy, "who are as harmless
as doves, and there are women who are as wise as serpents.  And the
less the two meet the better.  I don't care a rush who feeds
Placidia's cows; but it is almost more than I can bear that she
thinks no one sees through her schemes."

But Placidia had triumphed.  And the parsonage cows never needed any
further change of residence.

It irks me somewhat to intertwine these rough dark threads with the
story of those so dear to me, but the whole would drop into
unmeaningness without them.  Placidia and Mr. Nicholls made many a
calumny of the enemy's comprehensible to me.  For in later days it
became the fashion to assert that characters of that stamp formed the
staple of our Commonwealth men and women.  Characters of this stamp
win Naseby and Worcester! save the persecuted Vaudois! make England
the reverence of the world! conceive the "Pilgrim's Progress," the
"Areopagitica," and the "Living Temple!" sacrifice two thousand
livings for conscience sake!

No!  Pharisees, doubtless, there were among us, as, alas, doubtless
there is the root of Pharisaism within us.  But they were of the make
of Saul the disciple of Gamaliel, not of those who tithed the "mint,
anise, and cummin."


At first it seemed to me that Placidia's "Gospel" was more likely to
be fulfilled in Roger's case than his own forebodings.

Good seemed to come out of that hasty act of his rather than evil.
The feeling he, usually so self-repressing, had shown about Sir
Launcelot, revealed him in a new light to Lady Lucy.

"I thought him rather stony, I must confess," she said; "but now I
see it was only a little of your Puritan ice, if I may say so without
offence; and that there is an ocean of feeling below.  My dear, now
all has ended well, he really must not take it so much to heart.  He
has grown too grave.  We cannot have precisely the same standard for
young men, with all their temptations and strong passions, as for
sweet innocent girls sheltered tenderly in homes, with our softer
natures.  I should always wish to be severe to myself.  But young
men; ah, my child, the king is a good man, but if you had seen a
little even of our Court, you would think Roger an angel."

Compared with Sir Launcelot, I most sincerely believed he was.  But
this double standard was unknown in our Puritan home.  One law of
righteousness, and purity, and goodness we knew, and only one, for
man and woman.  And in this I learned to think Aunt Dorothy's
grimmest sternness more pitiful than Lady Lucy's pity.  I do not wish
to set down what seemed to me Lady Lucy's mistakes to any sect or any
doctrine.  In theory all Christian sects are agreed as to the moral
standard.  But I believe in my heart it was the high moral standard
set up, in those days, chiefly (never only) in our Puritan homes,
which will be the salvation of England, if ever that pest-house,
called the Court, is to be cleansed, and if England ever is to be
saved.

Lady Lucy's religion was one of tender, devotional emotions, minute
ceremonial, and gorgeous ritual.  When braced up by Christian
principle, it was beautiful and attractive.  The Puritan religion was
one of principle and doctrine.  When inspired by Divine love, it was
gloriously deep and strong.

Meantime, with Sir Walter and his boys, Roger had manifestly risen
many degrees by his "spirited conduct."  Sir Launcelot's jests, they
admitted, could bite, and it was just as well he should have a
lesson, though rather a severe one.

Sir Launcelot himself, moreover, took a far different demeanour
towards Roger.  "Saints with that amount of fire in their temper," he
observed, "might be dangerous, but were certainly not despicable."

And as to Lettice, whose moral code was chivalrous rather than
Scriptural, and to whom generosity was a far more admirable virtue
than justice, and honour a more glorious thing than duty, she said
candidly she was delighted Roger had lost his temper for once, just
to show every one how much heart and spirit he had.

"You and I knew what he was, Olive," said she; "but I wanted the rest
to feel it too."

And yet there was something lost.  Slowly I grew to see and feel it.

Firstly, in the relative position of Roger and Sir Launcelot.  Deeds
of violence inevitably place the one who does them morally below the
one who suffers.  There had been a real honour to Roger in Sir
Launcelot's previous mockery; there was a real dishonour in the
assumption he now made that Roger stood on his own level.  Moreover,
Roger's own generous self-reproach deprived him of the power of
retort.

And secondly (but chiefly), in Lettice's altered feeling about Sir
Launcelot.  Roger never spoke of him; but now that he had recovered,
I felt that I could not forget how, by Lettice's own account, he had
provoked the blow; nor could I see that the fact of his having
received a blow which he had provoked in any way made his character
different from what it had been.  Many debates we had on the subject,
for we met often during those weeks--those weeks of winter and early
spring, when the whole nation was in suspense about Lord Strafford's
trial, watching during the ploughing and sowing of the year the
solemn reaping of the harvest he had sown.  One of these debates in
particular I remember, because of the way in which it closed.

It was on Thursday, the 13th of May (1641).  We had met in the wood
by the Lady Well.  There seemed a marvellous melody that day in the
music of the little spring, as it bubbled up into its stone trough,
and echoed back from the stone roof of the little sacred cell the
monks had lovingly made for it seven hundred years ago.  The
inscription could still be read on the front:--

  "Ut jucundas cervus undas
  Æstuans desiderat,
  Sic ad rivum Dei vivum
  Mens fidelis properat."


Lettice and I knelt and listened to it.

"It is as if all the bells in fairy-land were ringing," said she at
length, softly; "only hear how the soft peals rise and fall, and go
and come, and how one sound drops into another, and blends with it,
and flows away and comes back, and meets the next, until there is no
following them."

"Then," said I, "there must have been choirs and church-bells in
fairy-land, for there is surely something sad and sacred in the
sound.  It sounds to me like those bells the legends tell us of,
buried beneath the sea, tolling up to us from far beneath the dark
waters of the past."

Then Lettice fastened back her long hair, and stooped down and drank
of the crystal water, bathing her face as she drank.

"Those Israelitish soldiers understood how to enjoy water," said she,
rising from her draught.  "That is delicious."

For we were tired and thirsty with gathering lapfuls of the
blue-bells, of which the woods were full.

As she stood, her moist parted lips, the rich glow on her cheeks, her
eyes dancing with life, her arms full of flowers, she said,--

"It never seems enough to look at the beautiful world, Olive.  I seem
to want another sense for it.  I want to drink of it like this
spring; to take it to my heart, as I do these flowers.  And I suppose
that is why I delight to gather them, just as when I was a little
child.  Do you understand?"

I did; but I thought of the inscription on the Lady Well.

"I suppose we do want to get nearer, Lettice," I said; "we want to
drink of the Fountain.  We want to rest on the Heart."

"Do you think that is what this strange unsatisfied longing means,"
said she, "which all great joys and all very beautiful things give
me?"

For a few moments she was silent.  Then she said,--

"What life there is everywhere!  Everything seems filled too full of
joy, and brimming over--the birds into songs, the fields into
flowers, and the trees into leaves, the oldest and gayest of them.
And I feel just like them all, Olive.  On such a morning one must
love every one and everything, altogether regardless of their being
lovable, just for the sake of loving.  Olive," she added, with one of
her sudden turns of thought, "to-day you must forgive Sir Launcelot
from the very bottom of your heart, once for all."

"Oh, Lettice," said I, "I do forgive him, I really think I did, long
since; at least for everything but his forgiving Roger in that
gracious way, as if Roger had nothing to forgive him.  I have
forgiven him, but I cannot think him good."

"Ungenerous!" said she, half in jest and half in earnest; "you ought
to think every one good on such a morning as this.  Besides, Sir
Launcelot always speaks so kindly and generously of you: he says you
are goodness itself."

"I cannot think what is not true, just because the sun shines and the
birds sing," said I, "and I certainly cannot think any one good
because they call me good, or goodness itself.  How _can_ I, Lettice?
How can I believe a thing because I wish to believe it?"

"Truth, truth!" said she, a little petulantly "truth and duty, and
right and wrong, I wish those cold words were not so often on your
lips.  There are others so much warmer and more beautiful--nobleness
and generosity, and loyalty and devotion, those are the things I
love.  Yours is a world of daylight, Olive.  I like sunshine, glowing
morning and evening like rubies and opals, veiling the distance at
noon with its own glorious haze.  I hate always to see everything
exactly as it is, even beautiful things; and ugly things I never will
see, if I can help it."

"I love to see everything exactly as it is," said I; "I want, and I
pray, to see everything as it is.  And in the end I am sure that is
the way to see the real beauty of everything in the world.  For God
has made it, and not the devil.  And therefore we need never be
afraid to look into things.  And I shall always think truth and duty
the most beautiful words in the world."

"Very pretty!" said she perversely, "and under all those beautiful
words you bury the fact that you will never forgive poor Sir
Launcelot."

"I have long forgiven him," said I; "but I cannot think him good, if
I tried for ever, until he is.  I cannot help thinking of poor little
Cicely, Gammer Grindle's grandchild, wandering lost in London."

"Hush, Olive, hush," said she passionately, "that is ungenerous and
unkind.  I will not listen to village gossip.  My Mother says we must
not be harsh in judging those whose temptations we cannot estimate.
But she means to do all she can in London to help poor Cicely."

"Oh, Lettice," said I, "it is not a question of more or less pity,
but of who needs our pity most."

"You are all alike," she rejoined; "yet I love you all, and I love
you, Olive, dearly.  Without your Puritan training, Olive, you and
Roger would have been the best people and the pleasantest in the
world; but as my Mother says, all these severe doctrines about law,
and justice, and conscience, do make people harsh in judging others,
and bitter in resenting wrong."

I could say no more.  She had taken refuge under the shadow of
Roger's hasty act, and the argument was closed.

When we reached Davenant Hall an unusual crowd was gathered at the
front door--a silent eager throng--around a horseman whose horse was
covered with foam, from the speed with which he had come.  It was
Harry Davenant.  And the tidings he brought were that on yesterday
morning Lord Strafford had been beheaded on Tower Hill, a hundred
thousand people gathered there to see; but through all the silent
multitude neither sighs of sympathy nor sounds of triumph.

The servants silently dispersed.  Harry's horse was led to the
stables, and we went in with Lady Lucy, Sir Walter, and Sir
Launcelot, into the hall.

"That is what they were doing in London while we were gathering
blue-bells!" said Lettice.  And she threw her flowers on the stone
floor.  "I will never gather any more."

She buried her face in her hands and burst into tears--"Cruel,
cruel," she said, "of the king, of the queen, to let him die."

"It was the Parliament which hunted him to death," said Harry,
bitterly.  "And the king did try to save him."

"The Parliament is wicked, and hated him, and I don't care what they
did," said Lettice, looking up with a flushed face; "but the king,
oh, Mother, you said the king would never let Lord Strafford die.
What is the use of being a king if kings can only _try_ to do things
like other people.  I thought kings could _do_ the things they
thought right.  He was faithful to the king, was he not, Mother?"

"A devoted servant to the king Lord Strafford surely was," said Lady
Lucy, "whether a good counsellor or no.  I did not think the king
would have given him up.  Did no one plead for him?" she asked.

"He pleaded with a wonderful eloquence for himself," said Harry
Davenant, "that might well-nigh have turned the heads of his
bitterest enemies, and did win the hearts of every one who heard him."

"But the king did try to save him?" said Lady Lucy, clinging to this.

"The king called his privy council together," said Harry Davenant,
"last Sunday, when the bill of attainder had passed through the Lords
and Commons, and said he had doubts and scruples about assenting to
it, and asked their advice.  Dr. Juxon, Bishop of London, counselled
him never to consent to the shedding of what he believed innocent
blood.  But the rest of the council advised him to yield.--  And the
king yielded."

"Some people," he continued, "think the king was justified by a
letter the earl wrote him on the Tuesday before, wherein he offered
his life in this world to the king with all cheerfulness; nay, even
counselled the sacrifice to reconcile him to his people, saying, 'To
a willing man there is no injury done.'"

"Oh, Harry," said Lettice, "the king could give him up _after that_?"

"It is said the earl scarcely believed it when he heard it, and that
he laid his hand on his heart and exclaimed, 'Put not your trust in
princes.'"

"And well he might!" exclaimed Lettice, her tears dried by the fire
of her indignation.

"Hush, child, hush!" said Lady Lucy.

"The king made another effort to save him," Harry continued; "he
wrote to the Lords recommending imprisonment instead of death; and at
the end of the letter he added a postscript: 'If he must die, it were
charity to relieve him till Saturday.'"

"A miserable, cold request!" exclaimed Lettice, vehemently; "more
cruel than the sentence."

"I would have expected this from his father," murmured Sir Walter,
"but not from the king."  Then turning from a painful subject, he
added, "The earl died bravely, no doubt."

"As he passed the windows of the chamber where Archbishop Laud was,
he bowed to receive his blessing, and he said, 'Farewell, my lord,
God protect your innocence.'  He marched to the Tower Hill more with
the bearing of a general leading his army, than a sentenced man
moving to the scaffold.  At the Tower Gate the lieutenant desired him
to take coach, fearing the violence of the people, but the earl
refused: 'I dare look death in the face,' said he, 'and I hope the
people do.  Have you a care I do not escape, and I care not how I
die, whether by the hand of the executioner or by the madness of the
people.  If that give them better content, it is all one to me.'  And
so, after protesting his innocence, saying he forgave all the world,
and sending a few affectionate words to his wife and four children,
he laid his head on the block.  There was no base triumphing in the
crowd, I will say that for them; they behaved like Englishmen.  The
earl fell in silence.  But in the evening the brutish populace cried
out in exultation, 'His head is off! his head is off!' and the city
was blazing with bonfires.  The people feel they have gained the
first step in a victory.  The Court thinks it has made the
furthermost step in concession, and that thenceforward all must be
peace.  Would to heaven the king and the Court might be right; but it
is hard to say."


It was dusk before all this converse was ended and I left the Hall.
Harry Davenant persisted in guarding me across the fields to
Netherby, until we came to the high road close to the house.  There
he took leave.

"My Father would like to see you," I said.

"Mr. Drayton would be courteous to his mortal enemy," said he.

"We are not enemies," I said, a little pained.

"Heaven forbid," he replied; "but I had better not come, not to-day.
The fall of the earl scarcely means the same thing in your home as in
ours."

"There will be no mean triumphing over Lord Strafford's death at
Netherby," I said, with some indignation.

"There will be no low, or ungenerous, or mean thing said by one of
the Draytons!" he said, warmly.  "But I had better not see Mr.
Drayton this evening."

And waving his plumed hat, he vaulted over the stile; and I felt he
was right.  Looking back at the turn leading to the house, I saw he
was watching me from the field.  But as I turned the corner and came
in sight of the gables of the Manor, a foreboding came on me, as of
siftings and severings to come--of a few pebbles, or a few rushes,
gently giving the slightest turn to the course of the two little
trickling springs, and their waters flowing, ever after, by different
banks, and falling at last into the oceans which wash the shores of
opposite worlds.  But not Lettice, never Lettice; the whole world, I
thought, should be no barrier to sever us from Lettice!  Nor should
all the political or ecclesiastical differences in the world ever
check or chill the current of our love and reverence to all the true,
and brave, and just, and good, and godly.  For politics, even
ecclesiastical politics, are of time; but truth, and courage, and
justice, and goodness, and godliness, are of God, and are eternal.




CHAPTER VI.

The six mouths of the year 1641, from early May till November, shine
back on me beyond the stormy years which part them from us, like a
meadow bright with dew and sunshine on the edge of a dark and heaving
sea.  Beyond those months, in the further distance, stretches the dim
Eden of childhood, with its legends and its mysteries, and its gates
of Paradise scarcely closed.  Bordering them, on the further side,
glooms the broad shadow of Roger's temptation and bitter repentance.
On the hither side heaves the great intervening sea of civil war.
But through all, that little sunny space beams out, peaceful, as if
no stormy waves beat against it; distinct, as if no long space of
life parted it from us.

Did I say childhood was the Eden?  Then youth is the "garden planted
eastward in Eden," the Paradise which "the Lord God plants" in the
outset of the dullest or stormiest life, where the river which
compasseth the land flows over golden sands, "and the gold of that
land is good."  Not childhood, surely, but early youth, "the youth of
youth," is the golden age of life.  Childhood is the twilight.  Youth
is the beautiful dawn.  Childhood is the dream and the struggling out
of it; youth is the conscious, joyful waking.  If childhood has its
fairy robes spun out of every gossamer, its fairy treasures in every
leaf; it has also its eerie terrors woven of the twilight shadows,
its overwhelming torrents of sorrow having their fountains in an
April shower, as it steps uncertainly through the unknown world.  And
neither its joys, nor its sorrows, nor its terrors, nor its
treasures, can it utter.

Childhood is the dim Colchis where the Golden Fleece lies hidden;
youth is the Jason that brings thence the "Argosy."  Childhood is the
sweet shadowy Hesperides, lying dreamily in the tropic sunshine,
where the golden fruit ripens silently among the dark and glossy
leaves.  Youth is the Hero who penetrates the garden and makes it
alive with human music, and wins the fruit and bears it forth into
the free wide world.  If childhood is the golden age, youth is the
heroic age, when the heart beats high with the first consciousness of
power, and the first stir of half-conscious hopes; when the earth
lies before us as a field of glorious adventure, and the heaven
spreads above us a space for boundless flight; before we have learned
how mixed earth's armies are, how slow the conquests of truth; how
seldom we can fight any battle here without wounding some we would
fain succour; or win any victory in which some things precious as
those borne aloft before us in triumph, are not trailed in the dust
behind us, dishonoured and lost.

Not that the most vivid and golden hopes of youth are delusions.  God
forbid that I should blaspheme His writing on the heart by thinking
so for an instant!  It is but that the Omniscient, who knows the
glorious End that is to be, sets us in youth on the mountain-tops to
breathe the pure air of heaven, foreshortening the intervening
distance from these heights of hope and by its sunny haze, as
eternity foreshortens it to Him; that, forgetting the things that are
behind, and overspanning the things that are between, every brave and
trusting heart may go down into the battle-field strong in the
promise of the End, of the Triumph of Truth that shall yet surely be,
and of the Kingdom of Righteousness that shall one day surely come.

Such, at least, was youth to us; to Lettice Davenant, and Roger, and
me.  And, looking back, this sunny time of youth seems all gathered
up into those six months before the beginning of the Civil War.

For we were continually meeting through that summer; and the land was
quiet.  At least so it seemed to us at Netherby.

The king had granted Triennial Parliaments; had granted that this
Parliament should never be dissolved like its predecessors by his
arbitrary will, but only with its own consent; had seemed, indeed,
ready to grant anything.  Strafford, the strong prop of his
despotism, had fallen; Archbishop Laud, his instigator to all the
petty irritations of tyranny, which had well-nigh driven the nation
mad, lay helpless in the Tower; the unjust judges, who had decreed
the evil decrees about ship-money, had fled, disgraced, beyond the
seas.  What then might not be hoped, if not from the king's active
good-will, at least from his passive consent?  There had, indeed,
been an attempt to bring Pym and Hampden into the royal councils, and
if this had not quite succeeded, at least the patriot St. John was
solicitor-general.

During much of the summer, after assenting to everything the
Parliament proposed, the king sojourned in Scotland.  It was true
that the reports that reached us thence were not altogether
satisfactory.  There were rumours of army-plots encouraged in the
highest quarters; rumours of some dark plot called "The Incident,"
intending treachery against Argyle and others; of His Majesty going
with five hundred armed men to the Scottish Parliament, to the great
offence of all Edinburgh; rumours that the English Parliament,
hearing of "The Incident," had demanded a guard against similar
outrages, if any "flagitious persons" should attempt them.

But for the most part, hope predominated over fear with us at
Netherby.  One thing was certain; a Parliament alive to every rumour
stood on guard for the nation at St. Stephen's, vowed together by a
solemn "Protestation" to do or suffer ought rather than yield our
ancient rights and liberties, and until the note of warning came
thence, the nation might peacefully pursue its daily work; not
asleep, indeed, and with arms not out of reach, but for the present
called not to contend, but to work and wait.

There was just enough of stir in the air, and of storm in the sky, to
quicken every movement without impeding it; to take all languor out
of leisure, to make moments of intercourse more precious, and
friendships ripen more quickly.

We were still one nation, we owned one law, one throne, one national
council.  We were still one national Church, gathering weekly in one
house of prayer; kneeling, at least at Easter, although with some
scruples, around one Holy Table; together confessing ourselves to
have "gone astray like lost sheep;" together giving thanks for our
"creation and redemption;" kneeling reverently, and with one voice
saying, "Our Father which art in heaven;" together standing as
confessors of one Catholic faith, and with one voice repeating the
ancient creeds; together praying (in the words ordered in King James'
reign) for our sovereign lord King Charles, and (in the form his own
reign first appointed) for the High Court of Parliament, under him
assembled.

There were indeed words and postures and vestments which were not to
the liking of all, which to some were signs of irritating defeat and
to others of petty triumph; but in general--especially since the Book
of Sports had been silenced, and Archbishop Laud had been kept quiet
(and Mr. Nicholls had forsaken his more novel practices)--there was a
strong tide of truth and devotion in the ancient services, which
swept all true and devout hearts along with it.

And besides, there was, at this period, with some of the Puritans, a
hope of peacefully affecting some slight further reformation, so that
even Aunt Dorothy was less controversial than usual; contenting
herself with an occasional warning against going down to Egypt for
horses, or against Achans in the camp, and an occasional hope that,
while his words were smoother than butter, the enemy had not war in
his heart.  But she did not distinctly explain whether by these
Achans and Egyptian cavalry she meant Mr. Nicholls, Placidia, Lady
Lucy, Lettice and the king; or, on the other hand, the little band of
Separatists or Brownists whom we met from time to time coming from
their worship in a cottage on the outskirts of the village, against
whom she considered my Father not a little remiss in his magisterial
duty.  These apparently inoffensive people were suspected of
Anabaptist tendencies.  Aunt Gretel even associated them in her own
mind with some very dangerous characters of the same name at Münster.
It was, indeed, the utmost stretch of her toleration, to connive at
our Bob and Tib's occasional attendance at their assemblies; but the
consideration of Tib's discreet years, and Bob's discreet character,
and Aunt Dorothy's somewhat indiscreet zeal, had hitherto induced her
to do so, her conscience being further fortified by my Father's
solemn promise to bring these sectaries to justice if ever they
showed the slightest tendency towards polygamy or homicide.  They
consisted chiefly of small freeholders and independent hand-workers,
the tailor, the village carpenter, and at the head, Job Forster, the
blacksmith; Tib and Bob were, I think, the only household servants
among them.  They were few, poor, and quiet, doing nothing at their
meetings, it seemed, but read the Bible, listen to one reading or
explaining it, and praying: some among them having scruples as to
whether it might not be a carnal indulgence to sing hymns.
Occasionally they were strengthened by the visit of a preacher of
their way of thinking from Suffolk, where the sect was more numerous.
They were good to each other; not hurtful to any one else.  They
would certainly, every one of them, have died or gone into destitute
exile for the minutest scruple of their belief or disbelief, being
satisfied that every thread of the broidered work of their tabernacle
was as divinely ordered as the tables of the law written with the
finger of God.  But as yet there was nothing to show what their
enthusiasm would do when it was enkindled to action, instead of
smouldering in passive endurance; nothing to show what germs of
vigorous life lay dormant in that little company, each holding his
commission, as he believed, direct from God.  Yet from these, and
such as these, at the touch of Oliver Cromwell, sprang into life that
crop of Ironsides terrible as Samsons, chaste as Sir Galahad,
unyielding as Elijah before the threats of Jezebel, unsparing as
Elijah with the prophets of Jezebel on Carmel, which overthrew power
after power in the state; made England the greatest power in the
world; and if the only human hand that could command it had been
immortal, might have ruled England and the world to this day.

So many hidden germs of life lie around us undeveloped everywhere.
In the primeval forests of this, our New England, when the pines are
felled, a succession of oaks springs up self-sown in their stead.  If
the pines had not been felled what would have become of the acorns?
Would they have perished, or waited dormant through the ages, till
their hour should come?

But I am creeping back to Roger's ancient puzzle of Necessity,
wherewith he bewildered me of old as we sat in the apple-tree at
Netherby.

And after all, however these things be, it is only the king's
ministers that are changed in the universal government of the
nations.  The King never dies.

Meantime these sectaries were the only outward schism in the unity of
the Church and Nation, as represented at Netherby.  Korahs, Dathans,
and Abirams, Aunt Dorothy called them, or (when she was most
displeased) "Anabaptists," and would (theoretically) have liked them
to be made examples of in some striking and uncomfortable way;
harmless enthusiasts my Father called them, and let them alone;
well-meaning persons with dangerous tendencies, Aunt Gretel
considered them, and made them possets and broth when they were ill.
In Lady Lucy's eyes they were misguided schismatics; in Sir Walter's,
self-conceited fools; in Harry Davenant's, vulgar fanatics.  Of all
our circle, I thinkj none cared to find out what they really meant
and wanted, except Roger, who, especially after his great trouble,
had always the most earnest desire not to misjudge any one; or,
indeed, to judge any one as from a judgment-seat above them.  And
Roger said they believed they had found God, and were living in His
Presence, as truly as Moses, or Elijah, or any to whom He appeared of
old, which made everything else seem to them infinitely small in
comparison; that they wanted, above all things, to do what God
commanded, whenever they knew what it was, which made every homeliest
duty on the way towards that end seem to them part of the "service of
the sanctuary," any mountain of difficulty but as the small dust of
the balance; every obstacle as the chaff before the whirlwind.
Convictions which gave an invincible power of endurance, and could
give a tremendous force of achievement, as events proved.

To this better estimate of them, Roger was, no doubt, partly led by
his friendship for Job Forster.  Job, indeed, through the whole of
these six months, so calm and full of hope to us at Netherby,
continued to forebode storms.  "The weather was brewed," he said, "on
the hills and by the sea; and folks who were bred on the flats, out
of sight of sea and hills, and who only knew one-half of the world,
could not reasonably be expected to understand the signs of the sky.
The Lord, in his belief, had plenty of work to do on his anvil yet,
before the swords were beaten into ploughshares and the spears into
pruning-hooks.  It was more likely the ploughshares would have to be
beaten into swords, and priming-hooks into spears."

And the village coulters, spades, and mattocks, received from Job's
hammer treatment all the more vigorous on account of the warlike
figures they supplied.

Moreover, Rachel, his wife, looking out from her chamber-window one
stormy night across the Fens, had seen wonders in the heavens,
black-plumed clouds, marshalled like armies, rolling far away to the
east, till the rising sun smote them to a blood-red; while high
above, from behind these, one white-winged arm, as of an archangel
swept across the sky untouched by the red glow of battle, raised
majestically, as if to warn or to smite.

"There is something terrible going on somewhere," she had said, "or
else something terrible to come."

And Job, to whom Rachel's words had always a tender sacredness in
them, woven of the old reverence of our northern race for the
prophet-woman; of sacred memories of the inspired songs of Deborah
and Hannah, interpreted by his belief that the people of the Bible
were not exceptional but typical; and of his own strong love for
her--believed Rachel's visions with entire unconsciousness how much
they were reflections of his own convictions.  "How," he would say,
"could a feeble creature like her, nurtured and cherished like a
babe, and busy all her life in naught but enduring sicknesses or
doing kindnesses, know aught of wars and battlefields, unless it was
of the Lord?"  So Job foreboded, and we hoped, and the summer months
passed on.

Scarcely a day passed on which we and the Davenants did not meet,
especially Roger, and Lettice, and I; for Roger had taken his degree,
and having overworked at it, was constrained to be idle for a while;
and the boy Davenants were most of the time in London.  At church, at
the Hall, at the Manor, riding, coursing, hay-making, nutting,
boating on the Mere; on rainy days, hunting out wonderful old
illuminated manuscripts in Sir Walter's library, or by the organ in
my Father's, singing glees and madrigals; making essays at Italian
poetry, generally resulting in translations, metrical or otherwise,
by Roger, for Lettice's benefit.  Lettice reigning in all things, by
a thousand indisputable royal rights; as pupil; as sovereign lady; as
the youngest; as the most adventurous; as the most timid; by right of
her need of care, and her clinging to protection; by right of
minority, she being one, and we two; by right of her true constancy
and her little seeming ficklenesses; by right of her brilliant,
ever-changing beauty, and all her nameless, sweet, tyrannical,
winning, willful ways; by right of all her generous
self-forgetfulness, and delight to give pleasure; and firstly and
lastly, by right of the subtle power which, through all these charms,
stole into Roger's heart, and took possession of it, unchallenged and
unresisted, then and for ever.

We spoke little of politics.  Lettice never had any, except loyalty
to the king; and at this time her loyalty was sorely tried by reason
of her perplexity and distress at what seemed to her the ungenerous
desertion of Strafford in his need.

There were no forbidden topics between us.  There was one, indeed,
which by tacit mutual consent we always avoided, and that was all
that concerned Sir Launcelot Trevor.  Lettice, always scenting from
afar the least symptom of what could pain, never approached what had
been the cause of so much anguish to Roger; and me she never freed
from the suspicion of a certain sisterly injustice in my sentiments
towards my brother's enemy.  But a very insignificant and unnecessary
chamber indeed was this to be locked out of the palace of delights
through which we three roamed at will together.  Nor can I remember
one pang of vexation at my own falling from the first place to the
second in Roger's thoughts.  If I had not loved Lettice on my own
account as I did, there was nothing in Roger's love for her that
could have sown one miserable seed of jealousy in my heart.  If he
loved her most, he was more to me than ever before.  The reflection
of his tender reverence for her fell like a glory on all women for
her sake.  He was more to all for being most to her.  Mean
calculations of more or less, better or best, could not enter into
comparison in affections stamped with such a sweet diversity.  All
true love expands, not narrows; strengthens, not weakens; anoints the
eyes with eye-salve, not blinds; opens the heart, and opens the
world, and transfigures the universe into an enchanted palace and
treasure-house of joys, simply by giving the key to unlock its
chambers, and the vision to see its treasures.

This was the innermost heart of the joy of those our halcyon days,
that Roger and Lettice and I were together.  We three made for
ourselves our new Atlantis.  We should have made it equally in the
dingiest street of London city.  Only, there the joy within us would
have had to transform our world into a paradise.  At Netherby, riding
over the fields with the fresh air in our faces, or roaming the
musical woods, or skimming the Mere while Roger rowed, and dipping
our hands in the cool waters, or talking endlessly on the fragrant
garden terraces of the Manor and the Hall, it had not to transform,
only to translate.

Outside this inner world of our own lay a bright and friendly world
all around us.  First, our Father, sweet Lady Lucy, and Aunt
Gretel--scarcely indeed outside, except by the fact of their not
quite understanding what we had within, regarding us, as they fondly
did, as dear happy children not yet out of our paradise of childhood;
next Aunt Dorothy, Job Forster, and Rachel, guarding us as fondly,
though anxiously, as on the unconscious eve of encounter with our
dragons and leviathans; and beyond, the village, of which we were the
children; the country, which was our mother; the world, of which we
were the heirs.  For to us in those days there were no harassing
Philistines, no crushing Babylon; no Egyptians behind, nor Red Sea
before.  The world was to be conquered, but not as a prostrate foe,
rather as a willing tributary to Truth and Right.  The kings of
Tarshish and of the isles were to bring presents; Sheba and Seba were
to offer gifts.  The wilderness and the solitary place were to be
glad for us, and the desert was to rejoice and blossom as the rose.

Meanwhile Lady Lucy came back to her old place in my heart.  Her
sweet motherliness seemed to brood like the wings of a dove over our
whole happy world.

Harry Davenant came more than once to the Hall, and stayed a few
days, to Lady Lucy's perfect content, and entered into our pursuits
as keenly as any of us.  Only with him there was always an undertone
of sadness, a despondency about the country and the world, a
bitterness about the times, a slight cynicism about men and women,
inevitable, perhaps, to a noble spirit like his, which (as it seems
to me) has lost its way, and strayed into the backward current,
contrary to all the generous forward movements of the age; but
strongly contrasted with the steadfast, hopeful temper no danger
could daunt and no defeat could damp, which characterized the nobler
spirits on the patriot side.  The noble Sir Bevil Grenvill had bitter
thoughts of his contemporaries; the generous Lord Falkland craved for
peace and welcomed death.  Eliot, Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, Milton,
looked for liberty; believed in the triumph of truth; thought England
worth fighting for, living for, if needful, dying for; they braved
death indeed like heroes, they met it like Christians, but they did
not long for it like men sick and hopeless of the world.  If God had
willed it so, they had rather have lived on, because of the great
hopes that inspired them, because they believed that not fate nor the
devil were at the heart of the world, or at the head of the nations;
but God.

Yet about such men as Harry Davenant there was an inexpressible
fascination.  There is something that irresistibly touches the heart
in heroism which, like Hector's of Troy, is nourished, not by hope,
but by duty; which sacrifices self in a cause which it believes no
courage and no sacrifice can make victorious, and bates no jot of
heart when all hope has fled.

And to me he was always so gentle a friend.  We had so many things in
common; our love for his Mother, his reverence for my Father's
goodness, justice, and wisdom; his generous appreciation of Roger; a
certain protecting, shielding tenderness we both had for Lettice, who
was, indeed, a creature so tender, and dependent, and willful, so
likely to rush into trouble, so sure to feel it, that no womanly
heart could help feeling motherlike toward her.

Yet there always seemed a kind of half-acknowledged barrier between
us, even from the first, more distinctly acknowledged afterwards,
which gave a strange mixture of frankness and reserve, of nearness
and separation, to our intercourse; wherein, perhaps, lay something
of its charm.


And across this world of ours flashed from time to time during those
months lofty visions of nobleness and wisdom from other spheres;
especially during the last six weeks when the Parliament was in
recess, and many a worthy head found a night's shelter in the
guest-chamber at Netherby.

Mr. Hampden was in Scotland as Parliamentary Commissioner, keeping
watch over the king; Mr. Pym, at his lodgings in Gray's Inn Lane,
keeping guard for the nation.  But Mr. Cromwell went home in the
recess to his family at Ely, and spent some hours with us on his way
back to London.  He was forty-two years old then, my Father said, and
his hair was not without some tinge of gray; tall, all but six feet
in stature, and firmly knit.  Many things seemed to lie hidden in the
depths of his grave eyes; a subdued fire of temper flashing forth at
times sufficiently to show that at the heart of this gravity lay not
ice but fire; a hearty humour, as of a soul at liberty, grasping its
purpose firmly enough to be able to give it play--keen to descry
likenesses in things unlike, inner differences in things similar,
absurdities in things decorous, and the meaning of men and things in
general through all seemings.  Yet withal, capacities and traces of
heart-deep sorrow, as of one who had looked into the depths on many
sides and found them unfathomable.  Moreover, above all, his were
eyes which saw; not merely windows through which you looked into the
soul.  Aunt Gretel said there was a look in him which made her think
of a portrait of Dr. Luther which she had seen in her youth.  He
loved music, too, which was another resemblance to Dr. Luther.  He
was always kind to us children, and now he spoke fondly of his two
"little wenches" at home--Bridget (afterwards Mistress Ireton), a
little beyond my age, and Elizabeth (Mistress Claypole), then about
eleven, his dearly-loved daughter; and the two blithe little ones,
Mary and Frances, about five and three.  Methought his eyes rested
with a sorrowful yearning on Roger; and my Father told us, after he
left, he had only two years before, in May, buried his eldest son
Robert, about nineteen, which was Roger's age.  This son was buried
far from home, at Felsted Church in Essex; a youth whose promise had
been so great that the parson of the parish where he died had
inserted a record of him in the parish register, which reads like a
fond epitaph amidst the dry unbroken list of names and dates.  Mr.
Cromwell spoke also with much reverence of his aged mother, who dwelt
in his house at Ely.

Mr. Cromwell was full of a firm confidence in the future of the
church and the country; but, like Job Forster, he seemed to think
there was much to be done and gone through before the end was gained.
On his way through the village he had held some converse with Job
Forster while having his horse shod; and he said something of such
men as Job being the men for a Parliament army, if ever such an army
should be needed.

Whilst Job, on his part, as he told us afterwards, was deeply moved
by his interview with Mr. Cromwell.  "He was a man," said Job, "who
had been in the depths, and had brought thence the sacred fire, which
made two or three of his words worth a hundred spoken by common men."


Then towards the close of that happy time there was one evening in
October which lingers on my memory as its golden sunset lingered on
the many-coloured autumn woods.

We were standing on the terrace at Netherby, overlooking the orchard,
Roger, Lettice, and I, in the fading light; Lettice twining some
water-lilies Roger had just gathered from the pond.  Through the
embayed window of the wainscoted parlour, which stood open, poured
forth the music of my Father's organ, in chords rich and changing as
the colours of the sunset on wood, and meadow, and Mere.

Mr. John Milton was the musician, and as the intertwined harmonies
flowed from his hands

  "In linked sweetness long drawn out,
  His melting voice through mazes running,
  Untwisted all the chains that tie
  The hidden soul of harmony."

As we listened, enrapt by the power of the music, which seemed

  "Dead things with imbreathèd sense, able to pierce,
  And to our high-raised phantasy present
  That undisturbed song of pure concent
  Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne
  To Him that sits thereon."--

the lilies dropped from Lettice's fingers, and she sat like the
statue of a listening nymph; the knitting fell from Aunt Gretel's
lap, and the tears came into her eyes, and, thinking of my mother,
she murmured "Magdalene!"  Roger and I were leaning on the
window-sill, and all of us were so unconscious of anything present,
that Lady Lucy had advanced from the other end of the terrace near
enough to touch me on the arm without my hearing a footstep.

By her side stood a courtly-looking young clergyman, with dark hair
flowing from under his velvet cap, and dark, meditative eyes, yet
with much light of smiles hidden in them, like dew in violets.  Him
she introduced as "Dr. Taylor, one of His Majesty's chaplains."  He
was not yet eight-and-twenty years of age, but was in mourning for
his first wife, but lately dead.

Mr. Milton joined us soon with my Father.  He was a few years older
than Dr. Taylor, but in appearance much more youthful; with his brown
un-Puritan love-locks, his short stature, his face determined, almost
to severity, yet delicate as a beautiful woman's.

And then between these two, while we listened, ensued an hour's
converse, like the antiphons of some heavenly choir.

Names of ancient heroes and philosophers--Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek,
Latin--dropped from their lips like household words.  Until at last
they rose into a chorus in praise of liberty, of conscience, and of
thought; Dr. Taylor, I thought, basing his argument more on the
dimness of human vision, and Mr. Milton on the inherent and
victorious might of truth.  Dr. Taylor pleading for a charitable
tolerance for error, Mr. Milton for a glorious freedom for truth; the
which converse I often recalled when, in after years, we read the
Liberty of Prophesying by the one, and the Liberty of Printing by the
other.

As they spoke, the glory faded from the sky and the golden autumnal
woods, and when they ceased, and we stepped from the terrace into the
gloom of the dark wainscoted parlour, it seemed to me as if we had
stepped out of a fragrant and melodious elysium into a farm-yard, so
homely and unmeaning, like the cacklings or lowings of animals, did
all common discourse seem afterwards.

The next day, when Mr. Milton had left us, and we were speaking
together of this discourse, Aunt Gretel said it was like beautiful
music, only, being mostly in a kind of Latin, was, of course, beyond
her comprehension.  Aunt Dorothy only consoled herself for what she
regarded as the dangerous licence of their conclusions, by the
thought that their path to them was too fantastic and fine for any
common mortals to tread.  And my Father said afterwards that it
seemed to him as if Dr. Taylor's learning and fancy hung around his
reason like the jewelled state-trappings of a royal palfrey; you
wondered how his wit could move so nimbly under such a weight of
ornament; whilst Mr. Milton's learning and imagination were like
wings to the strong Pegasus of his wisdom, only helping him to soar.
When Dr. Taylor alluded to the lore of the ancients, it seemed like a
treasury wherewith to adorn his fancies or to wing his airy shafts.
But to Mr. Milton it seemed an armory common to him and to the wise
men of whom he spoke, and to which he had as free access as they; to
draw thence weapons for his warfare and theirs, and to add thereto
for the generations to come.

Yet brilliant and glowing as their speech was, Roger would have it
that Mr. Cromwell's brief and rugged words had in them more of the
red heat that fuses the weapons wherewith the great battles of life
are fought.  For we spoke often of that evening, Roger, and Lettice,
and I, in the few short days that remained of our golden age of peace.


Scarcely a fortnight after that evening at Netherby, tidings of the
Irish massacre thrilled through all the land with one shudder of
horror and helpless indignation for the past; awakening one bitter
cry for rescue and vengeance in the future.

On the 20th of October the Parliament had met again.

It was a gray and comfortless evening early in November when a Post
spurred into the village of Netherby, and stopped at Job Forster's
forge to have some slight repair made in the gear of his horse.

Rachel was there immediately with a jug of ale for the weary rider
and water for his horse.  The horseman took both in silence.

"Thou art scant of greetings to-day, good-master," said Job, as he
busied himself about the broken bit, without looking in the rider's
face.

But Rachel, who had caught in an instant the weight of heavy tidings
on the stranger's face, laid her hand with a silencing gesture on her
husband's arm.

Then Job looked up, and meeting the horseman's eye, dropped the bit,
and said abruptly,--

"What tidings, master?  We are not of those who look for smooth
things."

"Rough enough," was the reply.  "A hundred thousand Protestants,*
men, women, and children, surprised, and robbed, and massacred in
Ireland, scarce more than a sennight agone.  At morning, met with
good-days and friendly looks by the Papists around them; before
evening, driven from their burning homes, naked and destitute, into
the roads and wildernesses.  Thousands murdered amidst their ruined
homes; happy those who were only murdered, or murdered quickly; no
mercy on age or sex, no memory of kindness; treachery and torture;
women and little children turning into fiends of cruelty.  Dublin
itself only saved by one who gave warning the evening before.  But
the worst was for the women, and the little helpless tortured babes."


* This was the number commonly believed among us at the time.  Since
I have heard it disputed.  But that the slaughter and the atrocities
were terrible, there can be no doubt.


"Softly, softly, master," said Job; for Rachel had fallen on his
shoulder fainting.  "She can bear to hear any dreadful thing, or to
see any dreadful sight, if she can be of any help; but this is too
much for her."

Gently he bore her in and laid her on the bed, and hesitated an
instant what to do, not liking to leave her.

"She always seems to know whether it's me or any one else, even when
she's clean gone like this," he said; "but yet I dare not hinder the
Post."

"Leave her to me, Job," I said; "she'll not feel strange with me."

And after a moment's further pause, lifting her into an easier
position, he went out.

Sprinkling water on her face and chafing her hands, breathing on her
lips and temples, as I had seen Aunt Gretel do in such a case, I had
the comfort of soon seeing Rachel languidly open her eyes.  For a
moment there was a bewildered, inquiring look in them, but quickly it
gave place to a mournful collectedness.

"I knew it--I knew it, Mistress Olive!" she said, "I knew something
must come.  But I thought the judgment would fall on the Lord's
enemies; and Job and I have been pleading with Him for mercy, even on
them.  I never thought the sword would fall on the sheep of His
pasture.  Least of all on the lambs," she added; "on the innocent
lambs.  But maybe, after all, that was His mercy.  They are but gone
home by a cruel path, poor innocents--only gone home."  Then a burst
of tears came to her relief; a neighbour came in to help; and I left
to go home without further delay.

The few minutes which I had spent at Rachel Forster's bedside had
sufficed to gather all the village around the forge; women with
babies in their arms and little ones clinging to their skirts; men on
their way home from the day's labour with spades and mattocks on
their shoulders; the tailor needle in hand; the miller white from the
mill; women with hands full of dough from the kneading-trough; none
waiting to lay aside an implement, none left hehind but the
bedridden, yet none asking a question, or uttering an exclamation, as
they passed around the messenger, drinking in the horrible details of
the slaughter.  Only, in the pauses, a long-drawn breath, or now and
then a suppressed sob from the women.

Job meanwhile continued, as was his wont, working his feelings into
the task he had in hand, so that long before the villagers were weary
of listening while the Post told the cruel particulars, heightening
the excitement and deepening the silence, the bit was mended, every
weak point of hoof or harness had undergone Job's skillful
inspection, and offering the messenger another draught at the
beer-can, he said to him in his abrupt way,--

"Whither next, master?  We may not delay such tidings."

"I have letters for Squire Drayton of Netherby Manor," was the reply.

"Trust them to me," said Roger.

"The best hands you can trust them to," said Job.

In consideration of the urgent need of haste, the Post gave us a
letter in Dr. Antony's writing to Roger, and in another minute was
out of sight beyond the turn of the village street.

A little murmur arose among the village-gossips.  "No need for
breaking a Post short like that, goodman Forster," said the miller's
wife; "sure he knows his own business best."

"What did we need to hear more, good wife?" was Job's reply.  "All
England has to hear it yet!  Thousand of prayers have to be stirred
up throughout the land before night.  And haven't we heard enough to
make this night a night of watching?  Hearkening to fearful tales
helps little; and talking less.  For this kind goeth not out but with
prayer and fasting."

And Job turned away into his cottage.  But as Roger and I hastened up
the street, the village had already broken into little eager groups,
and the words, "the Irish Popish Army," and "the Popish Queen," came
with bitter emphasis from many voices.

Deep was the excitement at home when we brought the terrible tidings.
Dr. Antony's letter too dreadfully confirmed them, telling how the
House of Commons received the news, brought in by one O'Conolly, in
an awe-stricken silence; how nearly all Ulster, the head-quarters of
the Protestants, was still in the hands of the insurgents; the towns
and villages in flames.

"Tilly and Magdeburg!" were the first words that broke from my
Father's lips.  "The same strife, the same weapons, the same fiendish
cruelty, in the name of the All Pitiful.  If such another conflict is
indeed to come, God send England weapons as good wherewith to wage
it; soldiers that can pray; and, if such can be twice in one
generation, another Gustavus!"

Fervently he pleaded that night together with the gathered household
for the robbed and bereaved sufferers in Ireland.  Far into the night
Roger saw the lamp burning in his window.  No doubt he had sought Job
Forster's Refuge.

But the next morning, when we came in to breakfast, he had taken down
the old sword he had worn through the German wars; and was trying its
edge.

"The good God keep us from war, Brother!" said Aunt Gretel, trembling
at the thoughts that old weapon recalled, "I was thinking we might
search out our stores for woolseys and linseys.  They will be sure to
be sending such to the poor sufferers, and they will be building
orphan houses."

"Citadels have to be built and kept first!" said my Father.  "There
are times when war is as much a work of mercy as clothing the naked
and feeding the hungry."

"But war with whom, Brother?" said Aunt Dorothy, pointedly.  "It is
little use lopping the branches and sparing the tree.  What has
become of the Irish Popish army the king was so loth to dismiss?  Of
what avail is it to smite a few poor blind fanatics, when the Popish
queen and her Jesuits rule in the Palace?  It wearies me to the heart
to hear of honest men like Mr. Hampden, Mr. Pym, and all of them
impeaching Lord Strafford and imprisoning Archbishop Laud, who, I
believe (poor deluded man), thought himself doing God's service; and
yet kissing the hand that appointed Laud and Strafford, and would
sign death-warrants for every patriot and Puritan in the kingdom
to-night, if it were safe."

"Mr. Hampden, Mr. Pym, and Mr. Cromwell are doing their best to make
it not safe, Sister Dorothy," was my Father's reply.  "And meantime
there is more strength in silence than in invective."

"A Parliament of women," said Aunt Dorothy, "would have gone to the
point months since, and let the king understand what they meant."

"Probably," said my Father, "but the great thing is to gain the
point."


Unusually early in the day for her, Lady Lucy appeared at the Manor,
with Harry and Lettice walking beside her horse.

She looked very pale as my Father led her into the wainscoted parlour.

"Mr. Drayton," she said, "who ever could have dreamed of such
tidings!  The only ray of comfort is that they may help to unite our
distracted country.  There can be but one mind throughout the land
about such deeds as these.  The king went at once to the Scottish
Parliament with the news, to seek their counsel and aid.  Now at
least the king, parliament, and nation, will be one in their
indignation."

"It would be well if the king had dismissed before this the Irish
Catholic army which Lord Strafford raised for him," said nay Father.
"It is well known that its officers have been in communication with
the assassins."

"The king did send orders to disband it long since," she said.

"Yes, _public_ orders," my Father replied; "but there are rumours of
secret instructions having accompanied, not precisely to the same
effect."

"Rumours!" she said eagerly; "Mr. Drayton, mere rumours!  You are too
just and generous to listen to a vulgar report, with the king's word
against it."

"Madam," he replied, very gravely, "it would have been the salvation
of the country long since if the king's word had been a sufficient
reply to attacks on his policy.  There is nothing so revolutionary as
falsehood in high places."

"You call the king a revolutionist?" she said.

"I call untruth the great revolutionist," he replied.  "Without truth
and trust all communities must ultimately fall to pieces, with more
or less noise, according as they are assailed by a strong hand from
without, or simply crumble from within.  The ruin is certain."

"But all good men must be agreed in detesting these barbarous deeds,"
she said.  "Even the Earl of Castlehaven, a Catholic, has said that
all the water in the sea would not wash off from the Irish the stain
of their treacherous murders in a time of settled peace."

"No doubt there are Catholics, madam, who speak the truth and hate
injustice," said my Father.

"You are unjust, you are cruel to His Majesty," she said, with tears
in her eyes, "if you could be unjust or cruel to any one."

"Lady Lucy," he replied, "this is a time for all men who fear God and
love England to be united.  Would Lord Strafford (could he come back
among us) contradict the words wrung from him when the king signed
his death-warrant?  Would he say, 'Put your trust in princes?'"

Harry Davenant passionately interposed.

"It is too bad to drive the king to actions he detests, and then to
reproach him for them.  He would have saved Lord Strafford, as all
men know, if he could.  It is the distrust of the country that has
compelled the king to have recourse to subtleties no gentleman would
choose."

"Harry Davenant," said my Father, "I am confident no measure of
unjust distrust would drive you to the policy of making promises you
never meant to keep."

"My life is simple, sir," was the mournful reply, "and it is my own.
If I choose any evil to myself, rather than go from my word, or imply
the thing I do not mean, I am at liberty to do so.  But the king's
life is manifold.  He stands before the Highest with the nation
gathered up into his single person.  He stands above the nation as
the anointed representative of the King of kings.  God himself is
only indirectly King of nations by being King of kings.  He stands
between the past and the future with a sacred trust of prerogative
and right to guard and transmit.  It is not for us to apply the
standards of our private morality to him."

"Apply the standards of Divine morality to all!" said my Father.
"Truth is the pillar of heaven as well as of earth.  There is no bond
of society like a trusted word."

"At least, sir," rejoined Harry Davenant, gently but loftily, "it is
not for me who eat the king's bread to say or hear ought disloyal to
him.  Nor will I."  And he rose to leave.

My Father held out his hand to grasp his.

"One word more," he said, "disloyalty is a terrible word, and we may
hear more of it in these coming years.  Let me say to you, once for
all, the question is not of loyalty or disloyalty, but to whom our
loyalty is due.  I believe it is to England and her laws; to the king
if he is faithful to these."

"What tribunal can judge the king?" Harry Davenant replied.

"More than one," said my Father, solemnly.  "The English laws he has
sworn to maintain; the eternal Lawgiver from whom you say he holds
his crown, whose laws of truth and equity are no secret, and are as
binding on the peasant as the prince."

Lady Lucy's manner had a peculiar tenderness in it to me as she
wished me good-bye.

"Very difficult times, Olive!" she said, kissing me; "but we will
remember women have one work at all times; to make peace and pour
balm into wounds."

And Lettice whispered to me and Roger,--

"Don't believe those wicked things about the king, or I shall not be
able to come to Netherby."

Roger looked sorely perplexed.

"But how can we help believing them," he said, "if we find them true?"

"I can always help believing things I don't like," she said.
"Wishing is half way to believing."  And she slipped away, leaving a
very heavy shadow on Roger's face as he turned back to the house.

"Not quite so clear, Olive," said Aunt Dorothy, when I repeated to
her Lady Lucy's words as a proof of her good will.  "There are times
when Deborah is as necessary as Barak, and more so.  And then there
was Judith, a valiant and godly woman, although she is in the
Apocrypha.  And there are times when the knife is kinder than all the
balm in Gilead."

"Knives are never safe, however," added my Father, "except in hands
that use them for the same purpose as the balms."

The intercourse of the two families did not cease after that little
debate.  It rather became more frequent.  The uneasy consciousness of
the many public differences that might at any time sever us only made
us cling the more tenaciously, although with trembling, to the
private ties that united us For a fortnight after the Irish tidings
reached us, Lady Lucy, Aunt Gretel, and even Aunt Dorothy, found a
practical bond of union in collecting all the clothes and provisions
they could send to the sufferers by the Irish massacre.

Then came the news of divisions in the patriot party in the
Parliament, with reference to the framing and printing of the Grand
Remonstrance, voted to be printed on the 8th of December.  Lady Lucy
dwelt much on the conciliatory intentions of the king, on the
feastings and welcomes prepared for him in the city of London, and
especially on the defection of the gallant Sir Bevil Granvill, Lord
Falkland, and Mr. Hyde, from the popular cause.  "All moderate men,"
she said, "felt it was becoming the cause of disorder, and were
abandoning it; and my Father, the most moderate and candid of men,
would not, she was sure, remain with a little knot of fanatics and
levellers."

That Christmas-tide the Grand Remonstrance, with its long list of
royal and ecclesiastical oppressions, and its statement of the recent
victories of Parliament over evil laws and evil councillors, was read
and eagerly debated at every fire-side in the kingdom.

"But what do they want?" Lady Lucy would say.  "They seem, from their
own statements, to have gained all they sought."

"They want security for everything!" my Father would reply, "security
for what they have won; a guard of their own appointing to keep them
free, to secure them against the guard of his own appointing, with
which they believe the king is endeavouring to surround and make them
prisoners."

"Will no promises, no assurances of good-will satisfy them?" she
said.  "They have sent ten more prelates to keep the archbishop
company in the Tower.  What further guarantees would they demand?"

"It is hard indeed," he said, sorrowfully, "for all the concessions
in the world to restore broken confidence.  All the fortresses in
England, or a standing army of a million, would not be such a
safeguard to the king as his own word might have been.  There is no
cement in heaven or earth strong enough to restore trust in broken
faith."

"It is not always so easy to be sincere," she said, "and God forgives
and trusts us again and again."

"God forgives because he sees," he said.  "Nations are not
omniscient, and therefore cannot forgive, nor trust when they have
been betrayed."

"The Parliament is unreasonable," she said, with tears in her eyes;
"they judge like private gentlemen.  Statesmen and princes cannot
speak with the simple candour of private men.  Politics are like
chess.  You would not confide every move beforehand to your enemy."

"The King and the Parliament do not profess to be on opposite sides
of the game," he replied.  "But if, in fact, it has come to that, can
you wonder at any amount of mutual suspicion?  Yet our Puritan faith
is, that there is but one law of truth and equity in heaven and earth
for prince, soldier, peasant, woman, and child.  And I believe that,
even with hostile nations, not all the diplomatic subtleties in the
world would give us the strength there is in a trusted word.  Let it
once be felt of man or nation, 'They have said it, therefore they
mean it;' and they have a strength nothing else can give.  There must
be two threads to weave a web of false policy.  Withdraw one, and the
other falls to pieces of itself.  I believe the ruler who could make
the word of an Englishman a proverb for truth, would do more for the
strength of England than one who won her fortresses on every island
and coast in the world."

"But see how the king trusts the people, Mr. Drayton," she said.
"His presence in that very tumultuous disorderly city ought to make
them believe him."

"I do not see that His Majesty has had reason to distrust the
people," my Father replied.

"Ah!" she sighed; "if you had only seen His Majesty amidst his
family, his chivalrous tenderness to the queen, his native
stateliness all laid aside in playful fondness for his children."

"It might have made it more painful to have to distrust him as a
king," my Father replied.  "It could scarcely have made it more
possible to trust."

"Well," she said, "either the nation will learn, ere long, to trust
his gracious intentions as he deserves, or will learn to their cost
what a sovereign they have distrusted!"


But scarcely a week afterwards the whole country was set in a flame
by the tidings that His Majesty had gone in person--attended by five
hundred armed men, many of them young desperadoes, feasted the night
before at Whitehall--to arrest the five members (Pym, Hampden,
Hazelrig, Denzil Hollis, and William Strode) in the inviolate
sanctuary of the nation, the Parliament House itself.

And after that my Father and Lady Lucy ceased to hold any more
political debates.

He simply said, when, on the evening of those tidings, we met in the
village,--

"The meaning of His Majesty's promises seems plain at last."

And she replied,--

"But if all good men distrust His Majesty, will he not be driven to
trust to evil men?"

"I am afraid the course of falsehood is ever downward," he answered,
very sadly, "and the breaches of just distrust ever widening."

"But, for heaven's sake, Mr. Drayton," she said, with an imploring
accent, as we returned with her to the Hall, "think before you plunge
into these terrible divisions."

"I have thought long, madam," he said, "for I have fought in the
Thirty Years' War, and seen how war can devastate."

"But that was easy," she said, "that was church against church, state
against state, prince against prince.  This will be the church
divided against itself, the nation divided against itself, subject
against king, one good man against another.  Think, if you join Mr.
Hampden and Mr. Pym what noble and wise men you will have against
you! (for you honour Sir Bevil Grenvill and Lord Falkland as much as
we do); what violent and fanatical men with you!"

"If all good men were on one side," he said, sorrowfully, "there need
be few battles in church or state."

"It seems to me," she added, "there is no party one would willingly
join save that of the peace-makers."

"That indeed is the very party I would seek to join," said my Father.
"But that seems to me the very party which, from ancient times, has
been stigmatized as those who turn the world upside down.  Since the
Fall peace can seldom be reached save through conflict."


Meanwhile Roger had joined us, and Lettice, as we were about to
separate, whispered to me, clasping my hands in hers,--

"They may turn the world upside down, Olive, but they shall not
separate us!  How happy it is for us," she said, turning to Roger,
who was standing a little apart, "that, as Harry says, women have
nothing to do with politics."

"I am afraid," he said, in his abrupt way, "women have often more
than any to suffer from politics."

"You take things so gravely, Roger," she said.  "Everything would be
right if you would not all of you be so hard on people who have done
a little wrong; and would only try and believe what we must all wish,
and so bring it about."

"Everything will be _wrong_," said Roger, with melancholy emphasis,
"if you will believe things and people because you wish, and not
because they are true."

For Roger, true to every one, was truthful to scrupulousness with
Lettice; what she was, or became, being of more moment to him than
even what she thought of him.

But Lettice only laughed, and said,--

"I am not sixteen, and I have seen the country at the point of ruin,
I cannot tell how many times.  Other clouds have blown over, and so
will this."

And she sped away to rejoin her mother, only once more turning back
to wave her hand and say:

"To-morrow morning, Olive, at the Lady Well!  The ice will be strong
enough on the Mere for skating.  To-morrow!"

But the next morning, when Roger and I went to the Lady Well, no
Lettice was there.

Snow had fallen in the night.

The frozen surface of the Mere was strewn with it, except in places
where it was sheltered by the overhanging brushwood, where it lay
black as steel against the white banks.  All the music was frozen in
stream and wood.  The drops, whose soft trickling into the well
beneath, had floated Lettice and me into fairy-land last summer, hung
in glittering silent icicles around the stone sides of the well.

And Roger and I went silently home.

"The snow has detained her," I said.

"She is not so easily turned aside from a promise," he said.

And when we reached home we found a messenger and a letter from
Lettice, saying Lady Lucy had been summoned to attend the Queen at
Windsor, that Lettice had accompanied her, and that Harry Davenant
and Sir Walter, being engaged about the king's person, Sir Launcelot
Trevor had come to escort them.

"The Princess Mary is about to be married to the Prince of Orange,"
Lettice wrote; "and as the queen is to accompany her to the Low
Countries, she wishes to see my mother before she leaves the country."

"It would be a good service to us all if the queen would stay away
for ever," said Aunt Dorothy--and she expressed the feeling of a
large part of the nation--"the king would lose the worst of his evil
counsellors."

"That depends," said my Father, sadly, "on whether the king is not
his own worst counsellor.  If the evil has its origin in others, the
queen may indeed injure him more by remaining here.  But, on the
other hand, she may succour him more on the Continent."

"Well, at all events," said Aunt Dorothy, "her absence may be a
blessing to Lady Lucy and Mistress Lettice.  For that child is not
without gracious dispositions.  Last week she called when every one
else was out, and wishing to turn the time to account, I set her to
read aloud from the sermons of good Mr. Adams; and she read two and
part of the third, only twice going to the window to see if any one
was coming, and never even looking up, after I once asked her if she
was tired."

"Do you think she really enjoyed them, Aunt Dorothy?" I asked;
knowing how difficult it was to ascertain Lettice's distastes, on
account of her predominant taste of doing what pleased other people.

"I think better of the child than to deem she would seem pleased with
aught she did not really like," said Aunt Dorothy; and, although
unconvinced, I rejoiced that Aunt Dorothy had fallen under the spell.

"What did she say?" I asked.

"The first sermon was 'The Spiritual Navigator Bound for the Holy
Land,' about the glassy sea; and she said it was near as pretty
reading as Spenser's 'Faery Queen'--a remark which, though it showed
some lack of spiritual discernment, was something, in that it showed
she was entertained.  The second was 'Heaven's Gate;' and when we
came to the place about the gate being in our own heart,--'Great
manors have answerable porches.  Heaven must needs be spacious, when
a little star fixed in a far lower orb exceeds the earth in quantity;
yet it hath a low gate, not a lofty coming in.'  And she said she had
thought the Gate of Heaven was only opened when we die, not here
while we live, and it was a strange thing to think on.  The third
sermon was 'Semper Idem, the Immutable Mercy of Jesus Christ,' and in
that we did not read far; for when she read 'the sun of divinity is
the Scripture, the sun of Scripture is the gospel, the sun of the
gospel is Jesus Christ.  Nor is this the centre of his word only, but
of our rest.  Thou hast made us for thee, O Christ, and the heart is
unquiet till it rest in thee; seeking, we may find Him--he is ready;
finding, we may still seek Him; he is infinite,'--her voice trembled,
and with tears in her eyes, she looked up and said, 'I suppose that
is what the other sermon means by _entering the Gate of Heaven now_.'
And I deem that a wise thing for a child to say, brought up as she
has been under the very walls of Babylon.  And the poor young thing's
ways pleased me so that I gave her the three sermons to keep.  And
she promised to set store by them, and treasure them in a cedarn box
she hath, together with some books by Dr. Taylor.  And although Dr.
Taylor is an Arminian, I had not the heart to cross the child.
Especially as books are not like us; they are none the worse for
being in bad company."

But Roger made no comment.  Only the next Sunday, as we were walking
home from church together, he said sorrowfully--

"Oh, Olive, so ready to be pleased with everything as she is, so
pleased to please every one, so sure to please, so true and generous,
so ready to believe good of every one; that she should be launched
into that false Court!  I shall always dread to hear any one say,
'To-morrow.'  If we could only have known, there were so many things
one might have said or have left unsaid.  The last thing I said to
her seems to me now so harsh.  She will always think of us as
rebuking her.  And her last look was a defiant little smile!  If we
could only know what days, or what words, are to be the last.
To-morrow," he added, "she was to have met us at the old well, and
now she is at the king's Court; and between us lies a great gulf of
civil war; and the whole country in such tumult, it seems a kind of
disloyalty to England to think of our own private sorrows."

And Roger spoke but too truly.  For it is impossible to say how
deeply that act of the king's in invading the Parliament had incensed
the whole nation.  It showed, as nothing else could have done, my
Father said, that what was holy ground to the nation was mere common
soil to the king.  Men had borne to have soldiers illegally billeted
on their homes; fathers torn, against law, from their families, and
left to die in prisons.  Each such act of tyranny was exceptional or
partial, and might be redressed by patient appeals to our ancient
laws.  Much of personal liberty might be sacrificed rather than
violate the order on which all true liberty is based.  But the
Parliament House during the sitting of the Parliament was the sacred
hearth of the nation itself.  Every man felt his own hearth violated
in its violation.  Henceforth nothing was sacred, nothing was safe,
throughout the land.  And from that day, my Father, dreading civil
war as only a soldier can who knows what the terrors of war are,
never seemed to have a doubt that it must come.  Nor, candid as he
was, to the verge of weakness (as Aunt Dorothy thought), in his
anxiety to allow what was just to all sides, did he ever seem after
that to doubt, if the strife came, on which side he must stand.


There was a strange mixture of rigid adherences to ancient forms,
with the boldest spirit of liberty, in that scene in Parliament on
the 3rd of January 1642.

Dr. Antony wrote us how all the members rose uncovered before the
king, how the speaker on his knee beside his own chair, which the
king had usurped, refused to answer His Majesty's questions as to the
absence of the five members, whom his eye vainly sought in their
vacant places, saying: "Please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to
see, nor ears to hear, nor tongue to speak in this place, save as the
House directs me."  "Words," wrote Dr. Antony, "respectful enough for
a courtier of Nebuchadnezzar, with a meaning as kingly as those of
any Cæsar.  Not a disrespectful word or gesture was directed against
the king as he retired baffled from the House, saying, that he saw
the birds had flown, and protesting that he had intended no breach of
privilege.  But before he descended the steps of the Hall to rejoin
the armed guard outside, the civil war, my Father said, had begun."

The next day the king had returned baffled from another attempt to
arrest the five members in the city.  The aldermen, true
representatives of the great merchants of England, were as resolute
as the Parliament.  They made His Majesty a great feast, but no
concessions.

Within a week a thousand seamen from the good ships in the broad
Thames had offered their services to guard the Parliament from their
refuge in the city by water to Westminster, and as many 'prentices
had entreated to be permitted to render a similar service by land;
four thousand freeholders from Buckinghamshire (Hampden's county) had
entered London on horseback with petitions against wicked
councillors, and (on the 10th of January) the king had left Whitehall
for Hampden Court.

But no man knew he would not return thither until seven years later,
on another January day, never to leave it more.

So few last days come to us clothed in mourning announcing themselves
as the last.  We step smiling into the ferry-boat which is to carry
us for a little while, as we think, across the narrow stream, and
wave our hands and say to those who watch us from the familiar shore,
"_To-morrow!_" and before we are aware the stream is a sea, the
ferry-boat is the boat of Charon, the familiar shore is out of sight;
the window of the Banquetting house has become the threshold of the
scaffold, and to-morrow is eternity.




CHAPTER VII.

When I think of the months which passed between the king's attempted
arrest of the five members and the first battle of the Civil War, I
sometimes wonder how any one can ever undertake to write history.

In the little bit of the world known to us, parties were so strangely
intertwined, so strangely divided, and so heterogeneously composed.
The motives that drew men to one side or the other were so various
and so mixed, that I think scarce one of those we knew fought on the
same side for the same reason; while the differences which separated
many men in the same party were certainly wider in many respects than
those which separated them from others against whom they fought.

How world-wide the difference between Harry Davenant and Sir
Launcelot Trevor!  How nicely balanced the scales that made my Father
and John Hampden "rebels," and Harry Davenant or Lord Falkland
"malignants!"

Yet the distinctions were real, at least so it seems to me.  Nor do I
see how, if all were to be again starting from the same point, either
could avoid coming to the same issue.

Harry Davenant believed revolution to be ruin, and chose the most
arbitrary rule instead.

My Father, equally dreading revolution, believed the king to be the
great revolutionist; by his arbitrary will changing times and laws;
by his hopeless untruth subverting the foundations of society.
Slowly he stepped down into the cold bitter waters of civil war,
having for his watch-word, "Loyalty to England and her laws!"  His
chief hope lay in Mr. Hampden.

Roger again, and others like him, hoping more from liberty than he
feared from revolution, and believing the contest would be fiery, but
brief and decisive, plunged gallantly into the flood, with Liberty
blazoned on their banners; liberty to do right and to speak the
truth.  His chosen captain was Mr. Cromwell, in whose troop he served
from the first.  God only knew the bitter pang it cost him (I knew it
not till years afterwards) to take his post on the field which must,
he knew, make so great a gulf between him and the Davenants.  It was
seldom Roger spoke of what he felt; scarce ever of what he suffered.

Dr. Antony wrote, meanwhile, from London:--

"Chirurgeons, like women, have indeed their place on the
battle-field, and not out of reach of the danger.  But their work is
with the wounded, and their weapons are turned against the enemy of
all; the 'last enemy,' scarce to be destroyed in this war!  I hope to
succour on the battle-field those I sought to comfort in the prisons.
God grant I find the air of the field as wholesome to the spirits of
my patients as that of the dungeon."

Job Forster never hesitated for a moment as to which was the right
side.  To him England was in one sense Canaan to be conquered, in
another the Chosen Land to be kept sacred.  The king was Saul; or, in
other aspects, Sihon king of the Amorites, or Og king of Bashan.  The
Parliament, at first, and then the Lord Protector and the army, were
the chosen people, Moses, Joshua, David.  His only hesitation was
whether he himself ought to fight on the field, or to work at the
forge and protect Rachel and the village at home.  "The Almighty," he
said, "has not given me this big body of mine for nought.  God forbid
it should be said of Job Forster, Why abodest thou amidst the
sheep-folds to hear the bleatings of the flocks?--that is, the ring
of the hammer and anvil, which is as the bleating of my flocks to me.
Yet there is Rachel!  And the old law was merciful; and if it forbid
a man to leave his new-married wife, how should I answer for leaving
her who has more need of me, and has none but me? and she so ailing,
and I, to whom the Lord has said as plain as words can speak, 'Be
thou better to her than ten sons."

It was perhaps the first perplexity he had never confided to her, and
sorely was Job exercised, until one morning in August he came to my
Father with a lightened countenance, and said,--

"Mr. Drayton, she has given the word, as plain as ever Deborah spoke
to Barak.  I've got my commission, and I'm ready to go this night."

Afterwards, in an intimate talk by a camp-fire, he once told Roger
how that morning, between the lights, he woke up and saw her kneeling
down with her arms crossed upon the Book, and her eyes raised up to
heaven, and running fast with tears.  "I lifted myself," he said, "on
my elbow, and I looked at her.  But I didn't like to speak; I saw
there was something going on between her soul and the Lord.  And last
she rose and came to me with a face as pale as the sheet, but without
a tear in her eyes or a tremble in her voice, and she said, 'Job,
thou shalt have thy way; the Lord has made me ready to give thee up.'
And I said, sheepish-like, 'How canst thee know what I willed?  I
never said aught to thee!'  Then she smiled and said, 'Thee never
thinks thee says aught except thee speaks plain enough for the
town-crier.  Have not I heard thy sighs, and seen thy hankering looks
whenever any of the lads listed these weeks past?  But I could not
speak before; now I can.  For I've gotten the word from the Lord for
thee and for me, and woe is me if I hold my peace.'  The word for me
was: 'Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld
thy son, thy only son, from me.'  'And that,' said she, 'means thee,
Job; for thou are more to me than that,' said she, 'more than that,
only and all.  I have no promise to hold thee by, like Abraham had
for Isaac, yet if the Lord calls, what can I do?'  And there her
voice gave way, but she hurried on--'And I've gotten a word for thee,
"_Have not I commanded thee?_  Be strong and of a good courage, for
the Lord thy God is with thee wheresoever thou goest."'  "So,"
concluded Job, "I got my word of command; and there was no more to be
said.  We knelt down together and gave ourselves up; and as soon as
it was fairly day I came to give in my name."

That was Job Forster's motive.  He believed he had the word of
command direct from the King of kings.  And this was the motive, I
believe, of hundreds and thousand more or less like him; men who, as
the Lord Protector said when the strife was over, were "never
beaten."  Gloriously distinct the two armies and the two causes
seemed to him, perplexed by no subtle perceptions of right on the
wrong side, or of wrong on the right.

To Aunt Dorothy also matters were equally clear, although her point
of view was not precisely the same, and in the subsequent
subdivisions she and Job became seriously opposed.  Aunt Dorothy
believed that she saw in the New Testament a model of church ritual
and government, minutely defined to the last stave or pin or loop of
the tabernacle; and rather that abandon the minutest of these sacred
details she would willingly have suffered any temporal loss.  The
whole Presbyterian order of church government she saw clearly
unfolded in the Acts and the Epistles; and that godly men like Mr.
Cromwell on the other hand, or learned men like Dr. Jeremy Taylor on
the other, should fail to see it also, was a miracle only to be
accounted for by the blinding power of Satan, especially predicted in
these last days.  With regard to the Government of the State also,
her belief was equally definite, derived, as she considered, from the
same Divine source.  The king was "the anointed of the Lord."  In
this, she said, Lady Lucy had undoubted insight into the truth.  His
wicked councillors might be put to death, as traitors at once against
him and the realm; armies might by his Parliament be raised against
him; but it must be in his name, with the purpose of setting him free
from those evil councillors by whom he was virtually kept a prisoner;
his judgment being by them enthralled, so that he was irresponsible
for his acts, and might quite lawfully by his faithful covenanted
subjects be placed, respectfully, under bodily restraint, if thereby
his mind might be disenthralled from the hard bondage of the wicked.
But beyond this no subject might go.  The king's person was sacred;
no profane hand could be lifted with impunity against him.  Any
difficulty, disorder, or evil, must be endured, rather than touch a
hair of the consecrated head.  This also was a conviction for which
Aunt Dorothy was fully prepared to encounter any amount of
contradiction or disaster.  The narrow ridge on which she walked
erect, without wavering or misgiving, was, she was persuaded, marked
out as manifestly as the path of the Israelites through the Red Sea
by the wall of impassable waters on either hand, by the pillar of
cloud and fire behind.  To this narrow way she would have allured,
led, or if needful compelled every human soul, for their good, and
the glory of God.  No vicissitudes of fortune affected her
convictions; the sorrows of all who deviated from this narrow path
being, in her belief, from the Sword of the Avenger, while the
sorrows of those who kept to it were from the Rod of the Comforter.
My Father's adherence to very much the same course of conduct, from a
belief of its expediency, and Aunt Gretel's from the tenderness of
sympathy which inevitably drew her to the side on which there was the
most suffering, seemed to Aunt Dorothy happy accidents, or special
and uncovenanted mercies, singularly vouchsafed to persons of their
uncertain and indefinite opinions.  Not that Aunt Dorothy's nature
was in any way vulgar, small, and narrow.  Her heart was deep and
high, if not always wide.  To her convictions she would have
sacrificed first herself, then the universe.  Her convenience she
would have sacrificed to the comfort of the meanest human being in
the universe.  She would not have swerved from her ridge of orthodoxy
for the dearest love on earth.  She would have stooped from it to
save or help the most degraded wanderer, or her greatest enemy.

But the most dangerous conviction she held was unfortunately one of
the deepest.  It was that of her own practical infallibility.  It was
strange that, with the profoundest and most practical convictions of
her own sinfulness, she never could learn the impossibility that all
error should be removed whilst any sin remains; that there should be
no darkness in the mind while there is so much in the heart.
Strange, but not uncommon.  Her sin she acknowledged as her own.  Her
creed she identified entirely with the Holy Scriptures.  It was not
her own, she said, it was God's truth to the minutest point, and, as
such, she would have suffered or fought for every clause.

Nevertheless, with advancing years Roger and I grew into a deeper
reverence for her character.  If in our childhood she represented to
us Justice with the sword and scales (often in our belief very
effectually blindfolded), whilst Aunt Gretel enacted counteracting
Mercy; in after years we grew rather to look on them as Truth and
Tenderness, acting not counter to each other, but in combination.
And in this imperfect world, where truth and love are never blended
in perfect proportions in any one character, it is difficult to say
on which we leant the most.  It was strange to see how often their
opposite attributes led them to the same actions.  "Speaking the
truth in love," was Aunt Dorothy's maxim; and if the love were
sometimes lost in the emphasis on truth, neither truth nor love were
ever sacrificed to selfish interest.  "First pure then peaceable" was
her wisdom; and I cannot say she always got as far as the "gentle,
and easy to be entreated."  But it is something to be able to look
back on a life like hers, unprofaned by one stain of untruthfulness,
or by one low or petty aim.  It is only in looking back that we learn
what a rock of strength she was to us all, or how the tenderest
memories of home often cling like mosses around such rocks; the more
closely, sometimes, for their very ruggedness.  Thus our home at
Netherby contained various elements ecclesiastical and political as
well as moral, all of which, however, at the commencement of the
civil wars were gathered together under the watchword, "Loyalty above
all to the King of kings.  Liberty to obey God."

It was this indeed, that, with all our internal differences as to
church government and secular government, united us into one party.
Whatever varieties of opinion as to church government our party
contained: Presbyterian, Independent, Moderate Episcopal, or Quaker;
classical, republican, aristocratic, English constitutional, or,
finally, the adherents of the Deliverer, chosen (they deemed) as
divinely and to be obeyed as implicitly as any Hebrew judge--all
believed in the theocracy.

The liberty our party contended for was no mere unloosing of bonds.
It was liberty to obey the highest law.  It was no mere levelling to
clear an empty space for new experiments.  It was sweeping away ruins
to clear a platform for the kingdom of God.

And this was another point in which the recollections of my life make
me feel how vast and complicated an undertaking it must be to write
history.

In our early days we used to be given histories of the Church and
histories of the world.  Profane histories and sacred histories as
neatly and definitely separated as if the Church and the world had
been two distinct planets.

But in our own times, at least, it seems to me absolutely impossible
thus to separate them.  The Battle of Dunbar was to Oliver Cromwell
and his army as religious an act as their prayer-meeting at Windsor.
The righting the poor folks who lost their rights on the Soke of
Somersham was, I believe, as religious an act to Mr. Cromwell as the
appointment of the gospel-lectures.  And as with the actions so with
the persons.  Who can say which persons of our time belong to
ecclesiastical and which to secular history?

Does the history of the Convocation, of the Star-Chamber, or of the
Westminster Assembly, belong to sacred history; and the history of
the Long Parliament, where decisions were made for time and eternity,
or of the battle-fields whence thousands went to their last account,
to profane?  Is the making of confessions of faith a religious act,
and the living by them or dying for them secular?  Are Archbishop
Laud, Bishop Williams, Mr. Baxter, Dr. Owen, Mr. Howe, ecclesiastical
persons; and Lord Falkland, Mr. Hampden, Mr. Pym, or Oliver Cromwell,
secular?

In our times, as in my own life, it seems to me absolutely impossible
to say where sacred history begins and where the profane ends.

My consolation is that it seems to me much the same in the Holy
Scriptures.  We call Genesis sacred history; and what is it, chiefly,
but a story of family life?  What is Exodus but a record of national
deliverances?  What are the Chronicles and Kings but histories of
wars and sieges, interspersed with pathetic family stories?  What,
indeed, are the gospels themselves but the record, not of creeds or
ecclesiastical conflicts, but of a life, the Life, coming in contact
with every form of sickness, and sin, and sorrow in this our common
everyday human life?  What would the gospels be with nothing but the
Sabbaths and the synagogues, and the Sanhedrim, and the Scribes and
Pharisees left in them?  With the widow's only son left out of them,
and the ruler's little daughter, and the woman who was a sinner, and
the five thousand fed on the grassy slopes of Galilee, and the one
young man who departed sorrowful 'for he had great possessions?'
Would it have been more truly Church history for being the less human
history?

The Bible history seems to me to be a history of all human life in
relation to God.  The sins of the Bible are terribly manifest,
secular sins; injustice, impurity, covetousness, cruelty.  Its
virtues are simple homely, positive virtues; truth, uprightness,
kindness, mercy, gratitude, courage, gentleness; such sins and
virtues as make the weal or woe of nations and of homes.  Ordinary
ecclesiastical history seems to me too often a record of secular
struggles for consecrated things, and names, and places, and of
selfish strivings for which shall be greatest.  The sins it blames,
too often mere transgressions of rules, mistakes as to religious
terms, neglect of the tithe of mint, anise, and cummin.  The virtues
it commends, alas! too often negative renunciations of certain
indulgences, scruples as to certain observances, fasting twice in the
week; things which, done or undone, leave the heart the same.

But underneath all this a Church history like that of the Bible is
being silently lived on earth, is being silently written in heaven.
Little glimpses of it we see here from time to time.  What will it be
when we see it all?


All through that summer the country was astir with the enlistings for
the king and the Parliament.

These began about April.

On the 23d of February, Queen Henrietta Maria had embarked at Dover
for the Low Countries, with the Princess Mary and the crown jewels.

From the time that she was in safety the king's tone to the
Parliament began (it was thought) to change.  Always chivalrously
regardful of her, and in different to danger for himself (for none of
his father's timidity could ever be charged to him), he began to give
more open answers to the popular demands.  He hoped also, it was
said, much from the queen's eloquence and exertions in his cause on
the Continent.  It was his misfortune, my Father said, that any
favourable turn in his affairs made him unyielding; and thus it
happened that he only came to terms when his cause was at the worst,
so that his treaties had the double disadvantage of being made under
the most adverse circumstances, and with men who knew from repeated
experience that not one of his most sacred promises would be kept if
he could help it.  Such virtues as he possessed seemed always to come
into action at the wrong moment; his courage when it could only
kindle irritation; his graciousness when it could only inspire
contempt.

The queen being safely out of the country, and the king safely out of
the capital, from his refuge at York came the renewal of the old
irritating demand for tonnage and poundage, rooting the opposition
firmer than ever in the irrevocable distrust of the royal word.

The demand of the king for the old usurpations was met by the
assertion of the Parliament of old rights, with the demand for new
powers to secure these; by the assertion of the power of the purse,
and the demand for power over the militia.

But to us women at Netherby all these negotiations and fencings
between the king and the Parliament sounded so much like what had
gone on for so long, everything was couched in such orderly and
constitutional language, that it was difficult to think anything more
than Protestations, Remonstrances, Breach of Privilege, and Protests
for Privilege, would ever come of it.

The first thing that roused me to the sense that it might end not in
words but in battles, was the news that reached us one April evening
that the king had gone in person with three hundred horsemen to the
gates of Hull, and had summoned Sir John Hotham to surrender the
city; that Sir John had refused to surrender or to admit the king's
troops (offering all loyal courtesy at the same time to the king
himself); that the king and his three hundred had thereon gone off
baffled to Beverly, and there proclaimed Sir John Hotham a traitor.

That night I said to Aunt Gretel,--

"This seems to me altogether to introduce a new set of terms and
things.  Instead of Protestations and Remonstrances, we hear of
Summonses and Surrenders.  The king and his cavaliers repulsed from
the closed gates of one of his own cities!  Aunt Gretel, these are
new words to us; does not this look like war?"

And she replied, in a tremulous voice,--

"Alas, sweet heart, these are no new words to me.  Your people seem
to arrange many things others fight about, by talking about them.
And it is difficult for me to say what words mean with you.  But
these words are indeed terribly familiar to me.  And in my country
they would certainly mean war."

And that night I well remember the perplexity that crossed my
prayers, whether in praying as usual for the king I might not be
praying against the Parliament, and against my Father and Roger, and
the nation; until after debating the matter in my own mind for some
time, I came to the conclusion that on whatever dark mountains
scattered, and by whatever deep waters divided, to Him there is still
"One flock, one Shepherd," and that however ill I knew how to ask, He
knew well what to give.


LETTICE DAVENANT'S DIARY.

(_From another source._)

"_York_, _April_, 1642.--It has actually begun at last.  The
rebellion has begun.  Sir John Hotham (Sir I hesitate to call him,
for what knight is worthy the name who turns his disloyal sword
against the very Fountain of knighthood and of all honor?) has closed
the gates of Hull against the summons--against the very voice and
person of His Sacred Majesty.  At once the king withdrew to Beverley,
and under the shadow of the grand old Minster proclaimed the false
knight a traitor.

"The rebellion has begun, but every one says it cannot last long.
Next Christmas at latest must see us all at peace again; the nation
once more at the feet of the king.  My Mother says like a prodigal
child; Sir Launcelot says like a beaten hound.  Mobs, says he, like
dogs, can only learn to obey by being suffered to rebel a little, and
then being whipped for it.  (I like not well this talk of Sir
Launcelot.  If the nation is like a hound, at what point in the
nation does the dog-nature begin, and the human end?)  Speaking so, I
told him, we might include ourselves.  But he laughed, and said, such
discerning of spirits required no miraculous gift.  Moreover, he
said, the king himself had once compared the Parliaments to 'cats, to
be tamed when young but cursed when old;' and had called his sailors
in the Thames who offered to guard the Parliament 'water-rats.'  If
the king said so, I confess I think His Majesty might have chosen
more courtly similes.  But I do not believe he did.  I will never
believe any evil of His Majesty, whoever says it, scarcely if I were
to see it myself, for my eye?  might be deceived.

"Only I should be sorely vexed if they heard these things at
Netherby; because they never said rough things of any one.
Especially now I am not there to explain things.  For I am not
allowed to write to them, nor to see them again, until things are
right again in the country; which makes me write this.

"However, it cannot last long.  Every one here agrees in that.  Every
one except Harry, whom we call 'Il Penseroso.'  He sees such a long
way, and on so many sides, or at least he tries to do so; and he
talks of the Wars of the Roses, and the Wars in Germany; as if there
were any resemblance!  In Germany there were kings and states
opposed.  In the Wars of the Roses royal persons, with some kind of
claim to reign.  But this is nothing but flat rebellion.  The family
against the father; sworn liegemen against their sovereign lord; the
body against the head.  And how can any one think for a moment there
can be any end to it but one, and that soon?  Yes; at Christmas, I
trust, we Davenants shall be at the Hall again, and the Draytons at
Netherby, looking back to the end of this frantic and unnatural
outbreak.

"And I mean to be most generous to them all about it.  I do not mean
even to say, 'I always told you how it would end.'  They will see,
and that will be enough.  The king will forgive every one, I am sure,
he is so gracious and gentle--(he spoke to me like a father the other
day, and yet with such knightly deference!)--except, perhaps, a very
few, who will have to be made examples of, unless they make examples
of themselves by running out of the country, which I hope they may.
For having once re-asserted his rightful authority, the king will be
able to be forgiving without being suspected of weakness.  There need
not be any more poor mistaken people set in the pillory, which really
seems to do no one any good, as far as I can see, and to make every
one so exceedingly angry.  The Puritans (that is, those among them
who have any sense) will see that it really can make no difference
whether the clergyman says the prayers in a white dress or a black.
Perhaps even the bishops and archbishops might own the same.
Because, although it cannot be good management to give a naughty
child its way for crying, if it stops crying and is good, it is quite
another thing.

"And then everything would go on delightfully.  The very troublesome
and obstinate people (on both sides, I think) might, perhaps, all go
to America, some to the north and some to the south.  For the
American plantations are very wide, they say, and by the time they
met--say in one or two hundred years--their great-great grandchildren
might have given up caring so much about the colours of the vestments
and the titles of the clergymen who do the services in the church.
So that by that time everything would go on delightfully in America
as well as in England.  And by next Christmas, from what the
gentlemen and ladies about here say, I should think this might all
have begun.  Only just now this little unpleasant contest has to be
gone through first.  And I am very much afraid as to what Mr. Drayton
and Roger may do, or even Olive.  They are so terribly conscientious.
They will pick up the smallest questions with their consciences
instead of with their common sense; which seems to me like watering a
daisy with a fire-engine, or weeding a flower-bed with a plough.
Mistress Dorothy is the worst of them (dear, kind, old soul, I must
now and then look at her sermons, in order to make it quite clear to
myself I was not a hypocrite in listening to them all that time).
But I do not think any of them are quite safe in this way.  And yet I
know, in my inmost heart, they are better than any one in the world,
except my Mother, and perhaps Harry.  (Of His Majesty it is not for
me to speak.)  And I love them better than any one in the world,
which, I am afraid, they will not believe, now I am not allowed to
write to them.  I love them for their noble perverseness, and their
heroic conscientiousness, and their terrible truthfulness, and
everything that separates us.  And these last months at home have
been the happiest of my life.  I felt growing quite good.  And one
thing I have resolved.  I will not say one word I should mind their
hearing, so that when we meet again I may have nothing to explain or
to unsay.  For it is only misunderstanding that will ever make any of
them take the wrong side; nothing but misunderstanding.  And facts
will set that all right when they see how things really are.  As they
will, I trust, before Christmas.

"It is not so easy to be good here as at Netherby.  People say so
many pretty things to me.  My Mother says I must not heed them; they
are only Court ways of speaking, which mean nothing; and that rightly
used, I might even make them means of mortification, saying every
time I hear such pretty phrases, as good Dr. Taylor recommended, 'My
beauty is in colour inferior to many flowers; and even a dog hath
parts as well proportioned to the designs of his nature as I have;
and three fits of an ague can change it into yellowness and leanness,
and to hollowness and wrinkles of deformity.'  But this I find not so
easy.  If I were a rose, I should be pleased at being a rose, and at
being thought sweet and fair.  And even a well-favoured dog, meseems,
has some harmless delight in his good looks.  And as to the ague, I
see no likelihood of it.  And as to becoming yellow and lean, the
more I think of it, the gladder I am to think I am not.  And yet
there is some little flutter in my pleasure at these fair speeches
which hardly seems to me quite altogether good.  And I do not think
my Mother quite knows what nonsense these young Cavaliers talk.
Perhaps no one did ever talk nonsense to her.  Or, if they did, I am
sure she never liked it.  And I am afraid I do sometimes a little.
Else, why should it all come back into my mind at wrong times?--in
the Minster or at prayers.  Heigh, ho!  I wish I was at Netherby.  No
one ever called me fair enchantress there, or my cheeks Aurora's
rose-garden, or my teeth strings of pearls, or my hands lilies, or my
hair imprisoned sunbeams, or my voice the music of the spheres.  Sir
Launcelot talked enough of that kind of poetry to me, between
Netherby and Windsor, to make a book of ballads.  (For my Mother was
in the sedan-chair, whilst I rode most of the way with Sir
Launcelot.)  And yet, I think, there is more honour in Roger
Drayton's telling me in his straight-forward way he thought me wrong,
as he so often did, than in all Sir Launcelot's most honeyed
compliments.

"Not that I think Olive just to poor Sir Launcelot.  If she could
have seen his debonair and courteous ways to every clown and poor
wench we met, and how he flung his crowns and angels to any beggar,
she must have felt there is much kindliness in him, with all his wild
ways.

"And when he saw I liked not so many fair speeches, he gave them up
in a measure.  I must say that for him; and he has been as
deferential to me ever since at the Court, as if I were one of the
princesses.  Only I wish he would not always see when I drop my glove
or my posy: at least, I think I do.  Yet it is rather pleasant, too,
at times to feel there is some one who cares about one among so many
strange people, and some one who is always ready to talk about poor
old Netherby, and who honours the Draytons, moreover, so generously.
I wish Olive knew this.

"And I wish I were like my Mother, and had 'a chapel built in my
heart.'  Or else that I could live at Netherby.

"Sir Launcelot admires the 'beauty of holiness' in my Mother.  He
says, in all times, happily, there have been these sweet exalted
Saints, especially among women, bright particular stars, celestial
beauties, and princesses, that all men must revere.  Quite another
kind of thing, he says, from the Puritan notion of calling all men to
be 'saints,' or else consigning them to reprobation as among the
wicked.

"_Note_.--I am at a loss what to call this writing of mine.  It is
scarcely a Diary or Journal, for I certainly shall not do anything as
regular as write in it every day.  It shall not be 'Annals;' for I
hope to have done with it before Christmas, when I shall have met
Olive and all of them again at home.  'Chronicles' are more solemn
still.  'Thoughts?' where shall I find them?  'Facts?' how is one to
know them, when people give such different accounts of things?
'Meditations?' worse again.  'Religious Journals,' 'Confessions,'
etc., always puzzled me.  I could never make out for whom they were
written.  Especially the prayers I have seen written out at length in
them.  They cannot be meant for other people to read.  That would be
turning the 'closet' into 'the corners of the street.'  They cannot
be meant for the people themselves to read.  For what good could that
do?  It would not be praying to see how I prayed some years since.
They cannot surely be meant for God to read.  He is always near, and
can hear, or read our hearts, which is quite another thing from
reading our Diaries.


"_May_ 30, _York_.--The birds begin to sing in the trees around the
Minster.  Our lodging is opposite.  And the courtiers begin to gather
once more around the king.  Many lords have come these last days from
London, with some faithful members of the Commons' House, and old
Lord Littleton has come, with somewhat limping loyalty, they say,
after the Great Seal, now in the right hand.  So that this grave old
town begins to look gay.  Cavaliers caracolling about the streets,
doffing their hats to fair faces in the windows.  Troops mustering
but slowly; somewhat slowly.  Nor can I make out if these townspeople
altogether like us and our ways.  There are so many Puritans among
these traders.  And Sir Launcelot says they have great sport in the
Puritan household where he is quartered, in making the Puritan lads
learn the 'Distracted Puritan,' and other roystering Cavalier songs,
and drink confusion to the Covenant; and in making the host and
hostess bring out their best conserves, linen and plate, for the use
of the men.  Sir Launcelot told them, he said, that they should only
look on it as the payment of an old debt the children of Israel had
owed to the Egyptians these three thousand years.  I do not think
such jokes good manners in any other person's house, and I told him
so.  But he said their ridiculous gravity makes the temptation too
strong to be resisted.  If they would jest good-humouredly in return,
he said, they would soon understand each other.  But would they?  I
am not quite sure how Sir Launcelot enjoys not having the best of a
joke.  And I could not bear his calling the Puritans all canting, or
ridiculous.  He knows better.  And I told him so.  I felt quite
indignant, and the tears were in my eyes (for I thought of them all
at Netherby).  He seemed penitent.  Indeed, I hope it did him good.

"_June_.--The Parliament are growing more insolent every day; they
dared to say in one of their ridiculous Remonstrances that 'the king
is for the kingdom, not the kingdom for the king, that even the crown
jewels are not His Majesty's own, but given him in trust for the
regal power.'  However, they will soon learn their mistake about
that, for the crown-jewels are safe in Holland, and have there
purchased for the Crown good store of arms and ammunition.  These
were all embarked in a Dutch ship called the _Providence_.  A great
Providence, my Mother says, attended her.  For although she was
wrecked on the coast of Yorkshire, nevertheless, all her stores have
this day been safely brought into York.

"Now we shall see what gentlemen can do against tapsters, and
tailors' and haberdashers' 'prentices, such as make up the wretched
army they have been mustering in London!  The citizens' wives
actually brought their thimbles and bodkins, it is said, to pay the
men; to such mean and ludicrous straits are they reduced.  The
Cavaliers call it 'the Thimble and Bodkin Army.'

"_July_ 20.--Sir John Hotham is said to be wavering back to loyalty.
A day or two since, a gallant little army of four thousand men rode
forth hence through the Mickle Bar, to demand the surrender of that
presumptuous city, Hull, and if refused, to storm it.  Better they
had listened to His Majesty's gentle summons with his three hundred.
How gallant and brave they looked.  Plumed helmets gleaming swords
flashing, pennons flying, horses looking as proud of the cause as the
riders.  Not a cavalier among them who would not face battle as gayly
as the hunting-field.

"_July_ 22.--Those treacherous townspeople!  Not a troop of them is
to be relied on.  Our gallant Cavaliers came back in disorder.  And
all because of the faithless train-bands, and those turbulent
citizens of Hull.  Lord Lindsay, with three thousand men, was at
Beverley, and on the lighting of a fire on Beverley Minster, the
gates of Hull were to be opened by some loyal men inside.  But five
hundred rebels within the town, hearing too soon of the intention of
these loyal men, made a sortie under the command of Sir John Hotham.
The true Cavaliers would have stood firm, every one says, but the
Yorkshire train-bands would not draw sword against their neighbours,
but ran away to Beverley, and so the whole ended in disgrace and
defeat.  If we could only have an army entirely composed of
gentlemen, and their sons, and retainers, the Parliament could not
stand a day.  But the worst news that has reached us lately, is the
treachery of the Earl of Warwick and the navy.  They have all gone
over to the Parliament, in spite of the king's offering them better
pay than they ever received before.  Five ships stood firm at first,
but the rest overpowered them.  I hope no one ever told them about
their being called 'water-rats,' but there are always some malicious
people who delight to make mischief by telling tales.  I should think
royal persons ought to be very careful about their jests.

"_August_.--We are on the point of leaving York to spend a few days
at Nottingham, where the king's standard is to be set up.

"I am not sorry to leave this old town.  I miss the pleasant walks at
home.  For here one dare scarce venture much out of doors.  If the
Cavaliers are as dangerous to their enemies as they are sometimes to
their friends, the Parliament has good cause to tremble.  The streets
echo dismally at night with the shouts of drunken revelry.  But, I
suppose, all armies are alike.  Only it is rather unfortunate for us
that gravity and the show of piety being the badge of the Puritans,
levity and a reckless dashing carriage are taken up as their badge by
many of the young Cavaliers.

"I would they took example by the king.  His Majesty has been riding
around the country lately himself, calling his lieges to follow him.
And his majestic courtesy and grace, with his loving and winning
speeches, such as he made at Newark and Lincoln, showing his good
intentions and desires for their liberty and welfare, must, I am
sure, be worth him a mint of such money as the London citizens can
coin out of their thimbles and bodkins.

"The North country is well disposed, they say; and Lancashire, where
the queen hath much hold on the Catholic gentlemen of ancient lineage
there; and the West country, where brave Sir Bevil Granvill lives, is
full of loyalty.  Mr. Hampden has done mischief in Buckinghamshire,
and Mr. Cromwell (a brewer, Sir Launcelot says, rather than a
country-gentleman, though not of low parentage) calls himself
captain, and is disaffecting the eastern counties, already disloyal
enough, with their French Huguenot weavers, and their 'Anabaptists,
Atheists, and Brownists,' as His Majesty calls them.

"The towns are the worst, however.  I suppose there is something in
buying and selling, and tinkering and tailoring, which makes people
think more of mean money considerations, than of loyalty and honour.
Then there are so many Puritans in the town.  Perhaps the narrow dark
high streets make them naturally inclined to be gloomy and
strait-laced.  I think, however, the less our Cavalier soldiers are
quartered in the towns, the better, till they mend their manners.  It
may make the citizens less pleased than ever with the Book of Sports.

"_Nottingham, August_ 23.--This evening the king himself set up his
standard on the top of the field behind the castle.  There was much
sounding of drums and trumpets.  Several hundreds gathered around the
royal party, and we watched a little way off.  But, I know not how,
the act did not seem as solemn as the occasion.  The night was
stormy; and the trumpets and drums, and then the voice of the herald
reading the royal proclamation, sounded small and thin against the
rush and howling of the winds.  The troops have not yet answered the
king's call as they should, and those present were mostly the
train-bands.  Then His Majesty, on the spot, made some alterations in
the proclamation, which perplexed the herald, so that he blundered
and stumbled in reading it.  Altogether I wish I had not been there.

"The king's standard ought to be something more than a pole no higher
than a May-pole with a few streamers, and a common flag at the top.
And the trumpets which are to rouse a nation, ought to have a certain
magnificence in them, altogether different from the trumpets they
blow at the carols at Netherby at Christmas.  I am sure I cannot tell
how.  But I always pictured it so.  The words are grander than the
things.

"Perhaps all our pomps and solemnities look poor and mean under the
open sky.  We had better keep them beneath roofs of our own making.
The pomps we are used to under the open sky are the purple and
crimson and gold of sunset and sunrise, great banners of storm-clouds
flung across the sky.  And the solemnities are the thunders, and the
mighty winds, and the rushing of rivers, and the dashing of seas.

"The things are grander, infinitely, than any words wherewith we can
speak of them.

"But when I said so to my Mother, she said, 'And yet, my child, one
soul, and even one human voice, is grander, or more godlike than all
the thunders.  It is their significance, Lettice, which gives the
grandeur to any solemnities of ours.  If we heard those trumpets
summon our countrymen by thousands to the battle, or saw that flag
borne blood-stained from the field, we should not think the voice of
the trumpet wanted terrible magnificence, or call the flag a common
thing ever more.'

"Perhaps, after all, it was only a little inward depression that made
me feel this disappointment.  For only three days before, Coventry
had shut her gates in the king's face, and the Earl of Essex is at
hand, they say, with a great army, and so few flocking loyally to the
king.

"But worst of all, I think, is this Prince Rupert.  His mother's
name, Elizabeth of Bohemia, has been like a sacred name in the
country for years; a saint and a heroine in courage and patience.
But this prince is so noisy and reckless, and takes so much upon
himself, that he angers the older gentlemen and experienced soldiers
sorely.  My Father says he is little better than a petulant boy.  Yet
he has great weight with the king, his uncle, and takes the command
into his own hands; so that the gallant old Earl of Lindsay deems his
own command little better than nominal.  And, meanwhile, the younger
Cavaliers take their colour from him, and use that new low cant word
of his, 'plunder,' quite as a jest, as if it meant some new sport or
sword-exercise, instead of meaning, as it does, scouring all over the
country, burning lonely farm-houses, robbing the inmates, and
sometimes hanging the servants at the doors for refusing to betray
their masters, sacking villages, and I know not what other
wickednesses.  In the fortnight he has been here, he has flown
through Worcestershire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire,
Leicestershire, and Cheshire.  And not a night but we have seen the
sky aglow with the fires of burning villages and homesteads.  I
should fear to hear how the people along his line of march, coming
back to their ruined homes, speak of the king.

"Moreover, it is said, the rebel troops are strictly forbidden to
take anything without paying for it, a contrast worth them much.

"_August_ 24.--This morning, before I rose, my Mother's waiting
gentlewoman brought dismal news.  The royal standard, said she, has
been blown down in the night, and lies a wreck along the hill.

"My Mother says it is heathenish to talk of omens and auguries.  And
my Father says these foreigners are the worst omen, and all would be
well enough if they would leave Englishmen to fight out their own
quarrels, like neighbours, who exchange blows and are friends again,
instead of like wretched hired Lanzknechts or Free Companions.

"But Sir Launcelot laughs, and says it is a good thing to give the
whining Puritans something to cry for at last.  And Harry sighs, and
says he supposes it is necessary to make the rebels see we are in
earnest.

"Altogether, we do not seem in very good humour with each other just
now.  However, a few victories will no doubt set us all right again.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the king will bring these
rebels to their senses sooner or later; in a few months at latest.

"Only I had not understood at all how very melancholy war is.  I
thought of it as concerning no one but the soldiers.  And men must
incur danger one way or another.  And there is the glory, and the
excitement, and the exercise of noble courage, making such men as
nothing but such trials can make.

"But the battles seem but a small part of the misery; the misery
without glory to any one.

"On our way hither from York, my Mother was faint and tired, and we
stopped at a little farm-house with an orchard.  It was evening, and
the woman had just finished milking the cows by the door, and she
gave my Mother a cup of new milk while she rested on the settle in
the clean little kitchen.  There were two little children playing
about, and the father was at work in the orchard, and one of the
children called him, and he brought my Father a cup of cider.  And
there was a Bible on the table with wood-cuts; and I found the eldest
child knew the meaning of them.  He said his father had told him.
They were very kind and pleasant to us.

"And a few days since Harry told me they had passed a little farm
with an orchard, and the man was surly and a Puritan, and refused to
tell the way some fugitives had fled; and Prince Rupert had him
hanged on his own threshold, and drove off the cows for plunder.

"And from what Harry says I feel sure it is the same.

"And I have scarcely slept since, thinking of that poor man, and the
silent voice that will never any more explain the wood-cuts in the
old Bible, and the poor hands that will never show their willing
hospitality again.

"But it is only one, Harry says, among hundreds; and such things must
be, and I must not think of it.

"But every one of the hundreds is just that terrible only one, which
leaves the world all lonely to some poor mourner!

"Those gentlemen in Parliament have dreadful things to answer for.

"Why did not Mr. Hampden pay a thousand times his miserable
ship-money rather than lead the country on to such horrors?

"For the king cannot have his commands disobeyed.  If he did, how
could he be a king?

"I do wish he could be more a king with his own troops; I am sure he
hates this ravaging and marauding.  But so many of the gentlemen
serve, and, indeed, keep their regiments at their own cost, which
makes them difficult to control.

"_October_.--Prince Rupert has been driven from Worcester.  If it
were only a lesson in reverence and modesty for the prince, it would
not so much matter, some think, that he left twenty good and true men
dead there.  The Earl of Essex occupies the city.  He has been there
a fortnight doing nothing.  Some remnants of loyalty, we think,
hinder him from coming to open collision.  But what the use of
collecting an army can be unless it is to fight, it is hard to see.
The truth is, perhaps, that he begins to feel the peril of setting
his haberdashers and grocers' 'prentices, commanded by a forsworn
peer, against gentlemen's sons fighting under their king!  Meantime,
our army is gathering at last, and only too eager, they say, to give
the rebels a lesson.  Once for all, God grant it be a lesson once for
all.  Although the battles do not seem to me half so dreadful as
these 'plunderings.'  But perhaps that is because I never came near a
battle; nor, indeed, can the oldest man in England remember any one
that ever did on English soil."


OLIVE DRAYTON'S RECOLLECTIONS.

All through the summer the armies were gathering.  In our seven
eastern counties--Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincoln,
Huntingdonshire, and Hertfordshire--called the associated counties,
because bound by Mr. Hampden and Mr. Cromwell into an association for
mutual defence, the King's Commission of Array and the Parliament's
Ordinance of Militia clashed less than elsewhere.  In August Mr.
Cromwell seized a magazine of arms and ammunition at Cambridge.  The
stronghold of the Puritans was in these eastern regions; and except
where a few Royalist gentlemen, like the Davenants, led off their
retainers, the Parliament had, amongst us, mostly its own way.  All
the more reason, my Father said, for our men to risk their persons,
since our homes were safer than elsewhere.

My Father, from his old military experience, had much to do with
training and drilling the men.  Strange sounds of clanging arms and
sharp words of command echoed from the old court of the Manor.  Old
arms, the very stories belonging to which were well-nigh forgotten,
were taken down; arms which had hung on the walls of manor-house and
farm-house since the Wars of the Roses.  The newest weapon we had at
Netherby which had seen service in England was a short jewel-hilted
sword the Drayton of the day had worn at the Battle of Bosworth
Field, fighting, by a rare piece of good luck for us, under Henry
VII., on the winning side.  Since then the Reformation had
revolutionized the Church, and gunpowder had revolutionized the art
of war; so that instead of the sturdy bow-men, each provided with his
weapon and ready trained to the use of it, whom his ancestors brought
to the field, my Father could only muster a few labourers and
servants, without weapons and without training, with no further
preparation for war than hands used to labour, wits ready to learn,
and hearts ready to dare.

My Father did not mean to lead his own men.  Having had experience of
engineering in the German wars, he was employed here and there as his
directions were needed.  Roger and those who went from Netherby
served from the first with Mr. Cromwell's Ironsides; my Father, as
his contribution, providing the armour, which, like that of
Haselrigge's Lobsters, was complete and costly.  Other bands passed
and repassed often, and shared the hospitalities of the Manor, to
join Lord Brook's purple-coats, Lord Say and Lord Mandeville's
bluecoats.  Hollis' red-coats were London men, and Mr. Hampden's
green-coats all from his own county, Buckinghamshire; while the badge
of all was the orange scarf round the arm--the family colours of Lord
Essex, the general.  Each regiment had its own motto--Hampden's,
"_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_;" Essex's (pointing many a cavalier jest,
if seen in plunder or retreat), "_Cave adsum_."  On the reverse of
each banner was the common motto of all, "God with us"--the
watch-word of so many a battle.

Money was not stinted; the city of London heading the contributions
in January with £50,000, and the Merchants' Companies with nigh as
large a sum (then intended to avenge the Irish massacre); whilst Mr.
Hampden gave £1000, and his cousin, Mr. Cromwell, £500.

Women brought their rings and jewels; cherished old family plate was
not held back.  We in our sober Puritan household had few jewels to
bring, but such as we had were disinterred from their caskets, and
the few silver drinking-cups which distinguished our table from any
farmers round were packed up by Aunt Dorothy's own hands, and
despatched to the London Guildhall, not without sighs, but without
hesitation, with all the money that could be spared.

Cousin Placidia also offered what she called her "mite," when she
heard that the poor citizens' wives in London had even offered their
thimbles and bodkins.

"I am but a poor parson's wife," said she, "but I am thankful they
will receive even such poor offerings as I can bring."

And she brought those embroidered Cordova gloves, the search for
which had so incensed Aunt Dorothy.

"It is remarkable," she observed, "that I always said one never knew
what use anything might be in a poor parson's household; and now I
have found the use."

"What use, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy; "do you think the Parliament
soldiers will fight in embroidered gloves?"

"Spanish leather is dear," replied Placidia, "and things will always
sell.  It is only a poor mite I know, but so is a thimble.  The
Parliament soldiers cannot, of course, fight in thimbles any more
than in gloves, and the widow's mite was accepted."

"A mite and the 'widow's mite,' are some way apart, my dear," said
Aunt Dorothy; "your 'widow's mite,' I suppose, might be the parsonage
and the glebe, and those cows in your uncle's park and meadow.  Take
care what you offer to the Lord.  He sometimes takes us at our word.
And there are plunderers abroad who take their own estimate of
people's mites, widows' and others."

Said Placidia, never taken aback--

"Aunt Dorothy, Mr. Nicholls and I regard the glebe as a sacred trust,
of which we feel we must on no account relinquish the smallest
fraction.  And as to the cows Uncle Drayton gave me, I wonder you can
suspect me of such ingratitude as to give them up to any one."

"I did not, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy, quietly.  "What shall I
label your Cordova gloves?  A parson's mite?  You know I cannot
exactly say 'widow's.'"

"An orphan's perhaps, Aunt Dorothy."

"Very well, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy; "I should think that would
affect the Parliament very much.  It may even get into history."

With which this little passage at arms closed.

Happily for the popular cause, the common interpretation of
acceptable 'mites' differed from Placidia's, so that in a short time
a considerable army was levied.

The navy ever remained true to the Parliament; irritated, some
foolish persons said, by a report that the king had called them
"water-rats."  As well say the whole Parliament stood firm, because
the king once compared them to cats.  The navy had its own
watchwords, better pointed than by the sting of a sorry jest.
English seamen were not likely to trust too implicitly to the
promises of the Sovereign who had tried to sell them to aid in the
destruction of the brave little band of beleaguered Protestants at
Rochelle.

All through the summer the armies were being levied, and the breach
was silently widening.

In July an incident showed, my Father said, as much as anything
could, how entirely the king's mind was unchanged, and how "thorough"
would have been the tyranny established in his hands, though Laud,
and Strafford, and the Queen, and every violent councillor, had been
removed.  My old friend, Dr. Bastwick, the physician, was seized by
the royal forces at Worcester while engaged in levying men for the
Parliament, under Earl Stamford, who retreated.  It was with the
greatest difficulty that one of the judges restrained the king from
having him hanged on the spot although there could be no reason why
he should have been sentenced with this exceptional severity except
the fact that he had already been scourged, pilloried, and maimed by
the cruelty of the Star-Chamber.

The deep distrust which such indications of the king's true mind
produced, cost him more than many lost battles.

They tended to inspire such resistances as that made a few weeks
afterwards by the brave commoners of Coventry, when, without
garrison, without engineers, with no defence but their feeble ancient
walls, they shut their gates in the Sovereign's face, defied the
royal forces, and when the breach was made by artillery in the old
tottering walls, barricaded the streets with barrows and carts, made
a sally, carried the nearest lines, seized the guns, and turned them
against the besiegers, compelling them at last to retire baffled.

But it was Prince Rupert, "the Prince Robber," who, perhaps, more
than any, turned the hearts of the people against the Sovereign who
could use such an instrument.  Trained in the cruel school of the
Palatinate wars, he had read its terrible lessons the wrong way;
having learned from the sufferings of his father's subjects not pity,
but a savage recklessness of suffering.  He brought home to hundreds
of burning villages and plundered lonely farms, which no
Parliamentary remonstrances or declarations would have reached, the
conviction that the king looked on his people, not as a flock, but as
mere live-stock on an estate, to be kept up if profitable and
manageable, and if not to be sacrificed to any system of management
which gave less trouble and brought in more profit.

"_Whose own the sheep ore not_," was written in the ashes of every
home ruined by Prince Rupert in the king's service.

With these deeds the people contrasted the well-kept orders of the
Parliament to Lord Essex.  "You shall carefully restrain all
impieties, profaneness, and disorders, violence, insolence, and
plundering in your soldiers, as well by strict and severe punishment
of such offences as by all others means which you in your wisdom
shall think fit."

And we grew to think that whoever the true shepherd and king of the
people might be, it was scarcely one who employed the wolf for a
sheepdog.

It was but slowly and reluctantly that this conviction grew on the
nation.  Those who look back on the king's life, hallowed by the
shadow of his death, little know how slowly and reluctantly.  We
would fain have trusted him if he would have let us.  The nation
tried it again and again, and only too much was sacrificed before
they would believe it was in vain.  Still there had been no battle.
The Earl of Essex, after following the Prince from Worcester,
lingered there three weeks, doing nothing.  No battle worth the name
for nearly a hundred and seventy years, until Sunday the 23d of
October, 1642.

Then came the first great shock.  All that Sunday afternoon our
countrymen, husbands, brothers, fathers, sons of the women left in
the quiet villages at home, were fighting in the desperate struggle
for life and death, until at night four thousand Englishmen lay dead
on the slopes of Edgehill, or dying in the villages around--the day
before as tranquil and peaceful as ours.

I remember there was a peculiar quiet about that Sunday at Netherby.
So many of the men of the village had gone to the war.  Roger had
been away many weeks, and my Father had left some days before to join
Lord Essex at Worcester.  In all our household there were no men left
except Bob the herdsman.  The church was strangely deserted.  The
Hall pew empty.  Scarcely one deep manly voice in response or psalm.
On the benches in the village a few old men had an unwonted monopoly
of talk, and the lads on anything like the verge of manhood strode
heavily about with a new sense of importance.  One asked another for
news.  But there was none, save rumours of mysterious marchings and
counter-marchings of troops, without any aim that we knew, or the
echo of some far-off foray of Prince Rupert's.  There was a dreamy
stillness all around.  Tib's voice came up alone from the kitchen as
she moved about some Sabbath work of necessity, and sung rather
uncertainly snatches of the psalm we had sung at prayers in the
morning.  From the slope where the house stood (which gave us that
wide range over the levels which I miss everywhere else), I saw the
cattle feeding far off in the marshy lands, too far for any sound of
their voices to reach me.  The harvest was over on the nearer slopes,
so that there was no music of the wind rustling through the corn.
The land lay half slumbering in its autumn rest, like Roger's
faithful Lion in his Sunday afternoon sleep on the terrace below.
But, I knew not why, there seemed to me a kind of expectancy in this
calm.  A waiting and listening seemed to palpitate through this
stillness of the land such as pervaded Lion's slumbers as he couched,
quivering at every sound, vainly waiting for Roger's voice to summon
him as usual at this hour for a walk in the fields.

The feeling grew on me, till all this quiet seemed not as the rest
after a calm, but the calm before a storm; and the silence excited in
me as if it were the breathless hush of thousands of beating hearts.

Then I thought of Rachel Forster in her lonely home.  And it was a
relief to rise at once and go to her.  Her door was open.  She was
sitting before the old Bible.  It was open, but she was not reading.
Her hands were clashed on her knees.  There was a stillness on her
face as great as that over the country.  But in this calm there was
something that calmed me.

It seemed to me conscious and victorious, not dreamlike, and liable
at any moment to a terrible waking.

I told her the restlessness I had been feeling.

"Can we wonder, Mistress Olive?" said she.  "Do we not know what we
might be giving them up for?"

"This quietness of the world seems awful to me to-day, Rachel," said
I, "but in you there is something that quiets me.  You find peace in
prayer Rachel," said I.  "Is it not that?"

"I scarce know whether it is prayer, Mistress Olive.  It is nothing
but going to the Rock that is higher than I, and taking all that is
precious to me there, and staying there.  It is just creeping to the
foot of the Cross, and keeping there."

"You feel, then, as if something terrible were coming, Rachel," I
said.

"I know something terrible must come," she said, with a tremulousness
in her voice which was more from enthusiasm than from fear.  "To-day,
or to-morrow, or some day.  For the Day of Vengeance is come; and the
year of His redeemed is at hand."

"Oh, Rachel," I said, "I cannot silently rest as you do.  I want
words, entreaties for Roger, for my Father, for Job, and also for the
good men who, if the battle comes, must die on the wrong side, and
for the king; the king who, if he would but be true, might set all
right again."

And she knelt down and prayed in words brief and burning, like the
prayers in the Bible.

"You do not feel it too lonely here, Rachel?" I said as I left, "Why
not come up to us?  Your presence would be like a strong wall and
fortress to me."

"I am less lonesome here, Mistress Olive," said she.  "Job made so
many little plans to spare me trouble before he went.  I see his hand
everywhere.  There is the pile of wood close to the fire, and the
little pipe carrying the water to the very door.  It would seem like
making light of his work not to use it all.  And besides," she added,
"there's a few poor tried folk who used to look to Job for a good
word and a good turn, and now some of them look to me.  And I could
not fail them for the world."

As I wished her good-bye, and walked home and thought of her, a
glorious new sense came on me of the strength there is in waiting on
God, of the possibility of the feeblest who lean on him being not
only sustained, but becoming themselves strong to sustain others.

When I went to see Rachel, the whole solid world had seemed to me, in
my anxiety for the precious lives I could do nothing to preserve, but
as some treacherous and quaking ground among our marshes, ready to
sink down and overwhelm, us, beneath the weight of our passing
footsteps.

As I returned, the world, though in itself as transitory and
uncertain as ever, was once more a solid pathway to me, because
underneath it stood the foundation of an Almighty love, one word from
whom was stronger and more enduring than all the worlds.

So we sang our evening psalm, and slept quietly that night at
Netherby, knowing nothing of the four thousand pale and rigid corpses
that lay stretched on the blood-stained battle-slopes at Edgehill,
while Lord Essex encamped on the silent battle-field, and the king's
watch-fires were kindled on the hill above, where he began the day,
and no ground was gained on either side; only the lives of four
thousand men lost.

If we may say "lost" of any life yielded up to duty, and called back
to God!

In the tongues of men, we speak of lives lost on battle-fields:
perhaps in the tongue of angels they speak of lives lost in easy and
luxurious homes.




CHAPTER VIII.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

It was not till mid-day on Monday the 24th of October 1642, that the
first tidings reached us of Keinton Fight, or, as some call it, the
Battle of Edgehill.  Tidings indeed they scarcely were, only rumours,
as of far-off thunder faintly moaning through the heat and stillness
of a summer's noon, mysterious, uncertain, scarcely louder than the
hum of insects in the sunshine, yet almost more awful than the crash
of the thunder-peal overhead.  "Wars and rumours of wars."  Until
that Monday I had no conception of the significance of that word
"rumours."  I had anticipated the sudden shocks, the ruthless
desolations of war; I had not thought of its terrible uncertainties,
its heart-sickening suspenses.

At noon, when the few men left in the village were all away in the
fields at work, a travelling tinker passed by who that morning about
daybreak had done some work at a farm where the swineherd keeping his
swine the evening before, on the edge of a beech-forest some miles to
the south, had heard the sounds far off in the south-west, in the
direction of Oxford, like the thunder of great guns, and the sharp
cracking of musketry.

The tinker did what tinkering was needed in the village, in the
absence of Job the village smith, and went on his way.  Just after he
left, Aunt Gretel and I went to take broken meat and broth to two or
three sick and aged people, and we found all the women gathered
around the black and silent forge, or rather around Rachel, while she
sat quietly patching in the porch of the cottage; the latticed,
narrow cottage-windows letting in too little light for any work that
required to be neatly done.

An eager excited crowd it was, the scanty measure of the text only
furnishing wider margin for the commentary.  Rachel, meanwhile, sat
quietly in the middle, like a mother among a number of eager
chattering children.

As we reached the group, poor Margery, Dickon's young wife, with her
child in her arms, half-sobbed,--

"I wonder, Rachel, thee can bear to go on stitch, stitch.  Since the
news came I have been all of a tremble thinking of my goodman, who
went off with yourn.  I couldn't bring my fingers together to hold a
needle, do what I would."

"I don't know that I could well bear it without the stitching,
neighbour," said Rachel, softly.  "When trouble is come, we may well
sit still and weep.  The Lord calls us to it.  But in the
waiting-times I see nought for it but to brace up the heart and work."

When we came, all turned to tell us of the dread rumour.  Aunt Gretel
brought one or two cheering stories of providence and deliverance out
of the eventful histories of her youth; and then we went on our
errands, Aunt Gretel thinking we should do more to soothe and quiet
these agitated hearts by the example of steadily pursuing our task,
than by the wisest talking in the world.

"For," said she, "the true tidings have yet to come; and they are
like to be sad enough to some.  And how will they bear it, if all the
strength is wasted before-hand in vain and mournful guesses?"

The result proved her right, for when our baskets were emptied, and
Aunt Gretel returned home, while I went to see Rachel again, the
village was stirring as usual with quiet sounds of labour in house
after house, and the excited group around the porch had dispersed.
Only poor Margery lingered, Rachel having found her occupation in
lighting the fire and preparing supper, to save her returning to her
lonely cottage; while the baby crowed and kicked on the ground at
Rachel's feet.

"But, Rachel," I said, "would it not have quieted the neighbours to
pray together, you with them?"

"Maybe, sweetheart," she said.  "But I did not feel I could.  If the
news is true, the fight is over.  It's over hours since.  The dead
are lying cold, out of the reach of our prayers.  And the living are
saved and are giving thanks; and the wounded are writhing in their
anguish, and we know not who is dead, or wounded, or whole.  And when
we look to the earth to think, it comes over us like a rush of dark
waters when the dykes are pierced.  So I can but look to heaven and
work.  It's light and not dark where He sitteth.  And beyond the
thunders and the lightnings He is caring for us in the great calm of
the upper sky.  Caring for us, sweetheart, as the poor mother cares
for this babe; not sitting on a throne and smiling like the king in
the picture, with both hands full of his sceptre and his bauble; but
with both hands free, to help and to uphold.  So I try to do the bit
of work He sets me, and to look up to Him and feel, 'There is no fear
but that Thou wilt do the work Thou hast set Thyself; and that is, to
care for us all.'  And I told the neighbours they had best try the
same."

The words were scarcely out of her lips, when a horseman came
clattering down the village and stopped at Job's well-known forge.

"What news?" asked a score of voices one after another, as the women
crowded round him.

"Dismal news enough for some, and glorious for others," he said.
"The king's army and Lord Essex's met yesterday.  Lord Essex below in
the Vale of the Red Horse, and the king on Edgehill above.  Prince
Rupert charged down on the Parliament horse, under Commissary-General
Ramsay, broke them in a trice, and pursued them to Keinton, killing
and plundering.  I heard it from one of the routed horsemen who
escaped.  Everything is lost, he said, for Lord Essex, and I hasten
to carry the news to one who loves the king."

Hastily draining Rachel's can of home-brewed ale, he was off in a
minute, and out of sight.

All through the afternoon confused and contradictory news continued
to drop in from one and another.  But it was not till the next day
(Tuesday) that we could collect anything like a true account of the
battle,--how for hours, all through the noon-tide of that autumn
Sunday, the two armies had couched, like two terrible beasts of prey,
watching each other; the king on the height, and Essex in the
plain--as if loth to break with the murderous roar of cannon our
England's two centuries of peace.

Prayers, no doubt, there were, many and deep, breaking that silence,
to the ear of God; but few, perhaps, better than that of gallant Sir
Jacob Ashley, one of the king's major-generals: "Lord, Thou knowest I
must be busy this day; if I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me."

Who began the fight at last, we could not well make out.  The most
part said Lord Essex, directing a sally up the hill, which Prince
Rupert answered by dashing down like a torrent, from the royal
vantage-ground to the plain, on the left wing of the Parliament army.
The men fell or fled on all sides before his furious charge; and he
pursued them to the village of Keinton, where Lord Essex had encamped
the day before.  Deeming the day won, his men gave themselves up to
plundering the baggage, and slaughtering the wagoners and unarmed
labourers.  But meantime Sir William Balfour, on the right wing,
charged the king's left, broke it, seized and spiked many of the
king's guns, took the royal standard after a struggle which left
sixty brave men dead in sixty yards around it, and drove nearly the
whole royal army to their morning's position up the hill.  There they
rallied.  Prince Rupert returned, laden with his blood-stained
plunder, to find the king's army in confusion.  But darkness was
setting in; it is said the Parliament gun-powder began to fail; so no
further pursuit was made, and on Sunday night again both armies
encamped on the ground where they had begun the battle.  The king's
camp-fires blazed on the hill, and the Parliament's in the Vale of
the Red Horse.  But between them lay four thousand dead
Englishmen,--that Sabbath morning full of life and courage, now lying
stiff and helpless on the quiet slopes where they had fallen in the
tumult of the mortal conflict.

It is said, most of those who fell on the king's side fell standing
firm, and of ours running away; which means, I suppose, that they
lost their bravest, and we our cowards.

I found my Father, and many of the soldiers I know, always loth to
speak much of the battle-field after a battle.  My Father and Roger
would discuss by the hour the handling of troops and the strategy of
the commanders, and all which related to war as an art or a science,
and regarded the troops as pieces on a board.  But of the
after-misery, when the terrible excitement and the skillful
manœuvres of the day were over, and the troops and regiments had
again become only men, wounded, weary, dead, I never heard them to
speak save in a few broken words.

The difference of language served a little to veil the common
humanity in the German wars, my Father said; but to hear the fallen
entreating for quarter, or the dying calling on God and on dear
familiar names, or the wounded praying for help which, in the rush of
the battle, could not be given, in the old mother-tongue, was enough,
he said, to take all the pomp and glory out of war, and to leave it
nothing but its agony and its horror.

Both sides claimed the victory,--Lord Essex by right of encamping on
the field, and the king (some said) by the weight of Prince Rupert's
plunder.

However that might be, neither side pursued the advantage they both
boasted to have gained.

The king, who was between the Parliament army and London, to the
great anxiety of the city, did not advance, but retired on
Oxford,--the Parliament garrison of Banbury, however, surrendering to
him without a struggle.

Lord Essex made no pursuit, but withdrawing to London, left the
country open to Prince Rupert's foragers.

But victory or defeat were scarcely the chief questions to us women
that day at Netherby.

Margery's anxieties were the first relieved.  Her husband Dickon
being in the king's army, sent her an orange scarf taken from a
Parliament horseman at Keinton, in token of his safety.

Then, on Wednesday, poor Tim, Gammer Grindle's half-witted grandson,
who would, in spite of all that could be said, follow Roger to the
war, came limping into the village, emaciated and footsore, with his
arm bound up in a sling.  He stopped at Rachel Forster's door, and
began stammering a confused account of Master Roger and Job lying
wounded at Keinton, and the prince's men murdering some of the
wounded, and carrying off Roger and Job, pinioned, in a cart to gaol,
and Tim's trying to follow on foot, and having his arm broken by a
musket-shot, and his leg wounded, and so, being left behind, having
limped home to tell Mistress Olive.

But where the gaol was, or how severe Roger's wound was, or Job's,
could in no way be extracted from poor Tim's confused brain and
tongue!  "Poor Tim!" he said, apologising with broken words, as a
faithful dog might with wistful looks, for having escaped without his
master, "Poor Tim tried hard to follow Master Roger--tried hard!
Master Roger knows Tim did not wish to leave him; Master Roger knows.
Master Roger said, 'Tim, you've done all you could.  Go home.  And
tell them Master Roger's all right.'"  When first he saw Rachel, he
said, "Poor Job said, 'Take care!'"  And then clenching his hand,
with a smile, "Poor Tim took care!"  But he never repeated or
explained it.  It was quite useless to question him.  That one
purpose of obeying Roger possessed the whole of his poor brain.  The
poor creature was faint from pain and weariness, and loss of blood.
Rachel would have made him a bed in the cottage, and not one of us at
Netherby but would have counted it an honour to have nursed him for
his love to Roger; but he shook his head: 'Master Roger said, 'Tim,
you've done all you could.  Go home.'"  And nothing would satisfy him
but to go on to the hovel by the Mere, were his grandmother lived.

Gammer Grindle was a poor, wizened, old woman, soured by much trouble
and by the constant fretting of a sharp temper against poverty and
wrong, until few in the village liked to venture near her.  Indeed,
there were dark suspicious afloat about her.  Many a labouring-man
would have gone a mile round rather than pass her door after dusk,
and many a yeoman-farmer and goodwife who had lost an unusual number
of sheep or poultry would propitiate her by the present of a lamb or
a fat pullet.  And, in general, in the neighbourhood she was spoken
of with a reverent terror much akin to that of the man who, after
hastily using the name of the devil, crossed himself, and said, "May
he pardon me for taking his holy name in vain."

But Roger and I happened to have come across her on another and very
different side.  In our fishing expeditions on the Mere her grandson
Tim had often followed us with the fish-basket or tackle; and the
rare contrast of Roger's kindly tones and words with the jeerings of
the rough boys in the village, had won him in Tim's heart an
affection intense, absorbing, disinterested, and entirely free from
demand of return or hope of reward; more like that of a faithful dog
than of a human being with purposes and interests of his own.

This had given us access to his grandmother's hovel, and many a time
she had saved me from the consequences of Aunt Dorothy's just wrath
by kindling up her poor embers of fire to dry my soaked shoes, and
cleaning the mud from my clothes.  Simple easy services, but such as
made it altogether impossible for Roger and me to regard the poor,
kind, shrivelled hands that had rendered them as having signed a
compact with Satan.  Besides, did we not see how good she was, with
all her scoldings, to Tim, and know from broken words which had
dropped now and then how she had loved her only daughter, the mother
of Cicely and Tim, and how sore her heart was for the poor, lost
girl, and what a power of wronged and disappointed love lay seething
and fermenting beneath the sour sharp words she spoke?

Roger and I knew that Gammer Grindle was no outlaw from the pale of
humanity by seeing it; and Rachel Forster knew it, I believe, by
seeing Him at whose feet so many outcasts from human sympathy found a
welcome.  And so it happened, that of all the village no one but
Rachel, Roger and I sought access, or would have had it, to Gammer
Grindle's hovel, so that Rachel that day accompanied Tim home, and
was permitted to share his grandmother's watch that night.

For Tim's exhaustion soon changed to delirious fever, as his wound
began to be inflamed, and it was as much as both the women could do
to keep him from rushing out of the hovel to "follow Master Roger."

All the time, they noticed he kept the hand of his unwounded arm
firmly clenched over something.  But no coaxing or commands, even
from his grandmother's voice, which he was so used to obey, would
induce him to unclasp his hand or let it go.

All that night and the next day the two women watched by the poor
lad, bathing his head, and trying vainly to keep him still.  But
towards evening his strength began to fail, and it was plain that the
fever, having done its work, was relinquishing its hold to the cold
grasp of Another stronger than it.

The poor lad's delirious entreaties ceased, and he lay so still, that
Rachel could hear the cold ripples of the Mere outside plashing
softly among the rushes, stirred by the night wind; and they sounded
to her like the slow waters of the river of Death.

Only now and then he said, in a low voice, like a child crooning to
itself, "Poor Tim, Master Roger knows.  Master Roger said, you have
done all you could.  Go home."

Once also his eye brightened, and he said, "Cicely, sister Cicely!
Tell her to come soon--soon.  I have watched for her so long!"

Rachel tried to speak to him about Jesus, the loving Master of us
all; he did not object, but whether he understood or not, she could
not tell.  He did not alter the words which had been so engraven on
his poor faithful heart.  Only they grew fainter and fainter, and
fewer and more broken, until, with one sigh, "Master--home," the poor
feeble spirit departed, and the poor feeble body was at rest.

But Rachel said it seemed to her as if the blessed Lord would most
surely not fail to understand the poor lad who could not understand
about Him, yet had served so faithfully the best he knew.  And she
almost thought she heard a voice from heaven saying, "Poor Tim! the
Master knows.  You have done the best you could.  Come home!"


It was not until the poor lad was dead that they found what he had
been so tightly clasping in his hand.

It was a fragment of paper containing a few words written by Job
Forster, of which Tim had indeed "taken care," as the clasp of the
lifeless hand proved too well.

The words were,--

"Rachel, be of good cheer, as I am.  I am hurt on the shoulder, but
not so bad.  They are taking me with Roger to Oxford goal.  His wound
is in the side, painful at first, but Dr. Antony got the ball out,
and says he will do well.  Thee must not fret, nor try to come to us.
It would hurt thee and do us no good.  The Lord careth."

Rachel read this letter, with every word made emphatic, by her
certainty that Job would make as light as possible of any trouble, by
her knowledge that his pen was not that of a ready writer, and by her
sense of what she would have done herself in similar circumstances.

"Rachel!"--the word, she knew, had taken him a minute or two to spell
out, and it meant a whole volume of esteem and love; and by the same
measure, "hurt" meant "disabled;" and "not so bad," simply not in
immediate peril of life; and "thee must not come," to her heart meant
"come if thou canst, though I dare not bid thee."

It was not Rachel's way to let trouble make her helpless, or even
prevent her being helpful where she was needed.  God, she was sure,
had not meant it for that.  She lived at the door of the House of the
Lord, and therefore, at this sudden alarm, she did not need a long
pilgrimage by an untrodden path to reach the sanctuary.  A moment to
lay down the burden and enter the open door, and lift up the heart
there within; and then to the duty in hand.  She remained, therefore,
with Gammer Grindle until they had laid the poor faithful lad in his
shroud; then she gave all the needful orders for the burial, so that
it was not till dusk she was seated in her own cottage, with leisure
to plan how she should carry out what, from the moment she had first
glanced at her husband's letter, she had determined to do.

Half an hour sufficed her for thinking, or "taking counsel," as she
called it; half an hour more for making preparations and coming
across to us at Netherby, with her mind made up and all her
arrangements settled.

Arrived in the Hall, she handed Job's letter to Aunt Dorothy.

"What can be done?" said Aunt Dorothy.  "How can it be that we have
not heard from my brother or Dr. Antony?  The king's forces must be
between us and Oxford, and the letters must have been seized.  But
never fear, Rachel," she added, in a consoling tone.  "At first they
talked of treating all the Parliament prisoners as traitors; but that
will never be.  A ransom or an exchange is certain.  Stay here
to-night; it will be less lonely for you.  We can take counsel
together; and to morrow we will think what to do."

"I have been thinking, Mistress Dorothy; and I have taken counsel.  I
am going at day-break to-morrow to Oxford; and I came to ask if I
could do aught for you, or take any message to Master Roger."

"How?" said Aunt Dorothy.  "And who will go with you?  Who will
venture within the grasp of those plunderers?"

"I have not asked any one, Mistress Dorothy.  I am going alone on our
own old farm-horse."

"You travel scores of miles alone, and into the midst of the king's
army, Rachel!" said Aunt Dorothy.

"I have taken counsel, Mistress Dorothy," said Rachel calmly, and,
looking up, Aunt Dorothy met that in Rachel's quiet eyes which she
understood, and she made no further remonstrance.

"We will write letters to Roger," she said, after a pause.

In a short time they were ready, with one from me to Lettice Davenant.

Neither my Aunts nor I slept much that night.  We were revolving
various plans for helping Rachel, each unknown to the other.

I had thought of a letter to a friend of my Father's who lived
half-way between us and Oxford, and rising softly in the night,
without telling any one, I wrote it.  For I had removed to Roger's
chamber while he was away; it seemed to bring me nearer to him.

Then, before daybreak, feeling sure Rachel would be watching for the
first streaks of light, I crept out of our house to hers.

She was dressed, and was quietly packing up the great Bible which lay
always on the table, and laying it in the cupboard.

"Happy Rachel!" I said, kissing her; "to be old enough to dare to go."

"There is always some work, sweetheart," said she, "for every season,
not to be done before or after.  That is why we need never be afraid
of growing old."

I gave her my letter.  She took it gratefully; but she said--

"Too fine folks for a plain body like me, Mistress Olive.  God bless
you for the thought.  But in one village I must pass there is a
humble godly man who has oft tarried with us for a night, and has
expounded the word to us, and no doubt he will give me a token to
another.  And if not, the seven thousand are always known to the
Lord.  The prophet Elijah, indeed, did not know; but after he was
told about it once for all, none of us ought ever to say again, 'I
only am left alone.'"

"But how will you manage when you get to Oxford?" I said.

"God forbid I should presume to say, sweet-heart," said she.  "Oxford
is many steps off.  And the Lord has only shown me the next step.
Job is wounded and in prison and wants me, and will my God, and his,
fail to show me how to get to him?"

As she spoke these last words, the force of repressed passion, and of
faith contending in them, gave her voice an unwonted depth, which
made it sound to me like another voice answering her.

At that moment Aunt Gretel arrived, laden with a small basket
containing spiced cordials and preserved meats for Rachel's journey.

And not a quarter of an hour afterwards, Aunt Dorothy, on horseback,
bent on protecting Rachel through some portion of her way.

And then Margery and the babe, who had come at Rachel's request.

Before mounting her horse, Rachel said,--

"You will have thought of being at poor Tim's burying, Mistress
Olive?"

We promise all to be there.

And Rachel from the mounting-steps climbed up on the patient old
horse, and was gone, only turning back once to smile at us as we
watched her.

She was not a woman for after-thoughts, or last lingering words.  She
had always said what she wanted before the last.

She had left us the heavy key of the cottage-door, that we might give
away the little stores which she had divided the night before into
various portions for her poor neighbours.  She had intended
committing them to Margery, but as we were there first, we undertook
the charge.  How simply and how unheralded events come which hallow
our common tables and chambers with the tender solemnity as of places
of worship or of burial.  The sound of Rachel's horse-hoofs was
scarcely out of hearing when the empty cottage had become to us as a
sacred place.  The little packets her neat hands had arranged so
thoughtfully were no common loaves, or meat, but sacred relics
hallowed by her loving touch.  And it was hard to look at the
firewood Job had piled by the fire for her, and the little stone
channel he had made to bring the water near the door, without tears.


LETTICE DAVENANT'S DIARY.

"_Oxford, November_ 1, 1642.--Victoria!  The first step is gained;
the first lesson given, though at some cost of noble lives to us and
to the king.  Lord Essex is fain to retreat to London to console the
affrighted citizens, leaving the whole country open to the king.  Yet
my Father saith privately to us, this victory of Edgehill might have
been far more complete had it not been for Prince Rupert's rashness.
Indeed, after the fight there had well-nigh been a duel in the king's
presence between the prince and a gentleman who expressed his mind
pretty freely on the matter.  The prince, after pursuing the rebels
to Keinton, lingered there, plundering the baggage, and returned with
his horses laden with the spoils to find the royal army not in such
order as it might have been had his troops kept with it.  'We can
give a good account of the enemy's horse, your Majesty,' he said.
'Yes,' said this gentleman standing by, 'and of their carts too.'
For which jest the haughty hot-blooded prince would have had severe
revenge, had not the king with much ado brought them to an
accommodation.

"_Note_.--The young Princes Charles and James, of but ten or twelve
years old, had a narrow escape.  Their governor, Dr. Harvey, a
learned man, was sitting quietly with them on the grass reading his
book, and never perceived anything was amiss until the bullets came
whizziug round him.  I wonder royal persons should be trusted to the
care of people whose wits are always at the ends of the earth, like
philosophers.  Who knows how different things might have been in the
world if Dr. Harvey and the young princes had sat there a few minutes
longer!

"However, the best fruits of victory are beginning to appear.
Gentlemen, whose loyalty had been somewhat wavering, are riding in
from all quarters, well accoutred, abundantly attended, finely
mounted, to offer their services to His Majesty.

"This grave and stately old city is gorgeous with warlike array, and
echoing with warlike music.

"My Father, Mother, and I are lodged in Lincoln College.  A distant
cousin of ours, Sir William Davenant, who hath writ many plays and
farces, and now fights in the army, being of this college, and also
others of our kindred from the north country.  I feel quite at home
in the rooms with their thick walls, and high narrow arched windows
like those in the turret-chamber at the Hall, more at home than the
old quadrangles and walls themselves can be with all this clamour and
trumpeting to arms.

"Not that there is much to be seen in the great inner court on which
my chamber-window looks.  An ancient vine climbs up one side of the
walls, encircling the entrance arch, and its leaves, brown and
crimson with the autumn, stirred with the breeze, are making a
pleasant quiet country music as I write.  This vine is held in high
honour in the college, having illustrated the text of the sermon,
'Look on this vine,' which inspired good Bishop de Rotheram, more
than two hundred years since, to become the second Founder of the
College.

"Through this entrance-arch I look beyond its shadow to the sunny
street, crossed now and then by the flash of arms, and gay Cavaliers'
mantles, or the prancings of a troop of horse.  That is all the
glimpse I have of the outer world.  But I think my Mother were
content to live in such a place for ever.  Every day she resorts more
than once to a quiet corner of the new Chapel to pay her orisons,
taking delight in the stillness, and in the brilliant colours of the
painted windows Bishop Williams (once the antagonist of Archbishop
Laud, and now with him in the Tower) had brought but a few years
since from Italy.

"Outside this chapel there is a garden, where we walk, and discourse
of the prospects of the kingdom, and of those friends at Netherby
from whom we are now so sadly parted.

"For Roger and Mr. Drayton are in the rebel army--alas! there is no
longer doubt of it--and any day their hands and those of my seven
brothers, all in the king's army, may be against each other.

"_November_ 8th.--The king and the army are away at Reading, with my
Father and my brothers; and the city is quiet enough without them.

"Sir Launcelot is now on service about the Castle.  I would he were
on the field, and one of my brothers here.  However, I am not like to
see much of him at present.  He will scarce venture to come after
what I had to say to him this morning.

"He came in laughing, saying he had just seen an encounter between an
old rebel woman at the gate and four of Prince Rupert's plunderers.
'She was contending with them for the possession of a sober
Puritanical-looking old horse,' said he.  'They claimed it for the
king's service.  She said 'that might be, but in that case she chose
to give it up herself unto the care of one of His Majesty's court, to
whom she had a letter.'

"'Did you not give her a helping word?' said I.

"'I am scarcely such a knight errant as that, Mistress Lettice,' said
he; 'I should have enough to do, in good sooth.  Moreover, the godly
generally make good fight for their carnal goods, and in this
instance the woman seemed as likely as not to have the best of the
debate, to say nothing of her being wrinkled and toothless.'

"That made me flash up, as speaking lightly of aged women always
does.  'Poor chivalry,' said I, 'which has not recollection enough of
a mother to lend a helping hand to the old and wrinkled.  We shall be
wrinkled and toothless in a few years, sir, and our imagination is
not so weak but that we can fore-date a little while, and transfer
all such heartless jests to ourselves.  I have been used to higher
chivalry than that among the Puritans.

"He laughed, and made a pretty pathetic deprecation.  His mother had
died (quoth he) when he was too young to remember.  Some little
excuse, perchance.  However, Roger Drayton's mother also died when he
was in infancy.  But be that as it might, I was in no mood to listen.
And as we were speaking, a serving-man came to tell me a poor woman
from Netherby was in the ante-room craving to see me or my Mother.

"It was Rachel Forster.

"Her neat Puritan hood, so dainty, I think around her pale
worn-looking face, was rather ruffled, and although her eyes had the
wonted quiet in them, (only a little loftier than usual,) she was
trembling, and willingly took the chair I offered her.

"'You did not find it easy coming through the royal lines,' I said.

"'Nothing but a few rude jests at the gate, Mistress Lettice,' said
she; 'but I am not used to them, or to going about the world alone.
But I have been taken good care of.  And I am _here_,'  she added,
fervently; 'which is all I asked.'

"'Did they try to take your horse from you?' I said.

"'They took him,' she said.  'But that matters little.  He was a
faithful beast, and I am feared how they may use him.  But the beasts
have only now, neither fore nor after, which saves them much.'  Then
without more words she gave me a letter from Olive.

"From this I found that Roger is a prisoner in the Castle here, with
Job Forster.

"I went into the other chamber, and asked Sir Launcelot had he known
of this.

"'I learned it a day or two since,' he replied, hesitating, 'but I
did not tell you or Lady Lucy, because you are so pitiful, I feared
to pain you uselessly.'

"'_We_ might have judged whether it was uselessly or not, Sir
Launcelot!' said I.

"'Can I do anything for you?' he asked, in confusion.

"'Nothing,' said I.  'You might have helped an aged woman, a friend
of mine, whom you found in difficulties at the gate this morning.
But now, excuse me, I have no time to spare--I must go to my Mother.'
And I withdrew to the inner room, to bring my Mother out at once to
see what could be done; leaving him to retire through the ante-room,
where Rachel Forster sat.

"I trow he will not be in a hurry to visit us again.

"My Mother and Rachel had always been friends.  They both live a good
deal at the height where the party-colours blend in the one sunlight;
and they neither of them ever speak half as much as they feel about
religion.

"There was not much to say, therefore, when my Mother understood her
errand.  My Mother's word had weight, and in a few hours she had
procured a permit for Rachel to see her husband, provided the
interview was in her presence.

"It was a noisome place, she said--many persons crowded together like
cattle in dungeons, with scant light or air, and none to wait on them
but each other.  Job was on some straw in a corner, looking sorely
altered--his strong limbs limp and emaciated, and his eye languid.
But it was wonderful how his face lighted up when he saw Rachel.

"'I thought thee would come', said he, 'though I bid thee not.  I
knew thee had learned how "all things are possible."'

"My Mother's intercessions procured for them the great favour of a
cell, which, though narrow, low, damp, and underground, they were to
have to themselves.  And before she left, Rachel's neat hands had
made the straw and matting look like a proper sick-bed, while her
presence had lighted the cell into a home.

"Then my Mother went to see Roger Drayton.  His wound was not so
severe as Job's, and his lodging was better, though wretched enough.
Great complaints were made about the prisons.  But, I fear, all
war-prisons, suddenly and not very tenderly arranged, are hard enough.

"'Have you seen Job Forster?' was his first question after greeting
her.

"She told him what had been done.

"'I begged hard to be allowed to share his prison.  But they would
not let me,' said Roger.

"Roger, though far less suffering, looked less tranquil than Job, my
Mother said.  He did not ask for me until he had read Olive's letter,
and then he said abruptly,--

"'Olive says she has written to Mistress Lettice.'  And his face
flushed deeply as he added, 'Olive is but a child in such things,
Lady Lucy, and cannot know the hard laws of war.  You will not be
offended if she pleads, fancying you could do anything for us.  You
must not let anything she says trouble you, you are so kind.  For I
know nothing can be done.'

"'Only one thing troubles me,' my Mother said, evasively, 'I would
give much if _that_ could be changed.'

"She did not think it generous to say more, but he understood, and
answered,--

"'_That_ can _not_ be changed, unless all could be changed.  It makes
me restless enough to be shut up here, Lady Lucy, but it does not
make me _doubt_.'

"'Those Draytons are like rocks--as firm, and almost as hard.  No,
not hard.  Nothing they ought not to be, if only they were on the
right side!

"And Roger called Olive a child.  I wonder, then, what he thinks me,
who am two years younger!

"However, my Mother thinks something can be done for Roger.
Exchanges can be made.  Little comfort in that.  He is less dangerous
to himself and every one else where he is, than in the field again.
Yet my Mother says the air and food of the prison are none of the
most wholesome.  And, of course, Olive wants to have him free.  These
are most perplexing times.  One cannot even tell what to wish.

"I would send him a message when my Mother goes again, but that he
scarcely even asked for me; only defended himself against joining in
Olive's pleadings for himself.  So proud!  I will send him no
message, not a word.  Nothing but a few sweet autumn violets from the
college garden; because the air of the prison is so bad.

"_February_ 10.--Job Forster all but sank.  He must have died if my
Mother had not pleaded hard and got permission at last for him to be
taken home to Netherby in one of our Hall wagons.  She thought it
would scarce be more than to die.  But to-day we have had a letter
from Rachel, saying, the very sight of the forge and smell of the
fields seemed to work on him like a heavenly cordial, and she doubts
not he will rally.  Dr. Antony hath been to see him, and Olive, and
Mistress Gretel, and Mistress Dorothy, and brought him meats and
strong waters, and read him sermons, saith she, and they say he could
not be doing better.  But, she adds, she hopes Lady Lucy will not
think it thankless that he should use his liberty to fight for the
Parliament, as no condition was made on his return; and he thinks the
Covenant under which he fights must stand good, and dares not break
it.  So my sweet Mother hath on her conscience the guilt of tenderly
nourishing a viper to sting what she loveth best!

"But Roger Drayton is to be exchanged for one of our Cavaliers, and
is to leave Oxford to-morrow.  All these weeks he hath been here, and
never a word between us, except some cold thanks for those violets.
So proud is he!  And it was not for me to begin.

"_February_ 11.--Roger Drayton had the grace to pay us his devoirs
before he left, at Lincoln College.  But he would scarce sit down.  I
trow he was afraid of being vanquished if he ventured into debate
concerning his bad cause.  He did not say anything to me.  If he had,
I felt tempted to say something angry.  But he did not begin; and why
should I?  Until at last, as he was leaving, he said,--

"'Mistress Lettice, I am going to join Colonel Cromwell at Cambridge.
But I may see Olive by the way.  May I say a word to her from you?
Sometimes a message is better than a letter.'

"I could not think of anything to say.  It took me so by surprise
after his silence.  For it was just like his old tone by the Mere, or
in the woods, or on the terraces at Netherby, and at the Hall.  And
it so brought poor old Netherby back to me, and all the old happy
days, that I was afraid my voice would tremble if I spoke.  I could
only think of Mistress Dorothy's sermons; things come into one's head
so strangely.  So, after a little while, I said very abruptly, 'I
sent Olive dear love--and to tell Mistress Dorothy I had read her
sermons.'

"But his voice trembled a little as he wished us good-bye; I
certainly think it did.  And he was not out of the door when I
thought of ten thousand messages to send to Olive.  But I could not
go after him to say them.  I could only go to the window and watch
him through the court.  I was almost sorry I did.  For he looked up
and saw me, and seemed half inclined to turn back.  But, instead, he
made a strange little reverence, as if he did not quite know whether
to seem to see me or not.  I wonder if he also had thought of a few
things he would have liked to have said!  He was always rather slow
in speech; I mean, his words always meant about ten times as much as
any other man's.

"And so he strode across the court and under the shadow of the
archway into the sunny street outside.  To join Colonel Cromwell.
Colonel, indeed!  By whose commission?  Roger might at least have
spared us that.  If it had been Mr. Hampden even, or Lord Essex, it
would not have been so bad.  But this fanatic brewer!

"However, I am glad I said nothing angry.  One never knows in these
days where or when the next word may be spoken.  And then alack, this
Mr. Cromwell, they say, is sure to be just where the fighting is.

"He did not look amiss in that plain Puritan armour.  The cap-a-pie
armour of the 'Ironsides,' as some begin to call them.  It seems to
me more martial and more manly than the gay trappings of our
Cavaliers.  Gallant decorations are well enough for a dance or a
masque; but in real warfare I think the plainest vesture looks the
noblest.  At Edgehill His Majesty must have looked most stately in
his suit of plain black velvet, with no ornament but the George.

"_March_ 1643.--There is a Dr. Thomas Fuller lodging here at present,
who is a great solace to my Mother, and also to me, being a kind of
cousin of ours through his maternal uncle Dr. Davenant, Bishop of
Salisbury.

"He is tall and athletic, with pleasant blue eyes, full of mirth, and
withal of kindness, of a ruddy complexion, with fair wavy locks.  He
hath wit enough for a play-wright, and piety enough,--I had almost
said for a Puritan--I should rather say for an archbishop.

"He was in London a few weeks since, and preached a sermon to incline
the rebels to peace, which is all his desire.  But they did not
relish it, and would have him sign one of their unmannerly Covenants;
which not being able to do, he has fled hither.  Yet am I not sure
that he is more at home among our rollicking Cavaliers.

"I would I could remember half the wise and witty things he saith.  I
like his wit, because is often cuts both ways--against Puritan and
Cavalier; and more especially at present against the younger sort of
the latter, whose reckless manners suit him ill.  The poor Puritans
are so hit on all sides with the shafts of ridicule, that in fairness
I like to see some of the darts flying the other way, especially
against such as assume to themselves the monopoly of wit.

"'Harmless mirth,' said Dr. Fuller the other day, 'is the best
cordial against the consumption of the spirits, but jest not with the
two-edged sword of God's word.  Will nothing please thee to wash thy
hands in but the font?  Or to drink healths in but the
church-chalice?'

"He is very busy, and is abstemious in eating and drinking, and is an
early riser.  Sir Launcelot, liking not, I ween, to feel the jest so
against himself, calls him a Puritan in disguise; but Harry and he
are good friends, and to my Mother he behaveth ever with a gentle
deference, as all men, indeed, are wont to do.  With her his wit
seems to change its nature from fire to sunshine.  So tenderly doth
he seek to brighten her pensive and somewhat self-reproachful spirit
into peace and praise.  She on her part hath her sweet returns of
sympathy for him, drawing him forth to discourse of his young wife
lately dead, and his motherless infant boy.

"Religion with my Mother is a life of affections, not merely a code
of rules; and, I suppose, like all affections, brings its sorrows as
well as its joys.  Otherwise I could scarce account for the heaviness
she so often is burdened withal.

"One day, when she was fearing to embrace the cheering words of
Scripture, Dr. Fuller encouraged her by reminding her how in the
Hebrews the promise, 'I will not leave thee, nor forsake thee,'
though at first made only to Joshua, is applied to all good men.
'All who trust the Saviour, and follow him,' said he, 'are
heirs-apparent to all the promises.'

"But she, who being a saint (by any laws of canonization) ever
bemoaneth herself as though she were a penitent weeping between the
porch and the altar, put off his consolation with--

"'True, indeed, for all _good_ men.'

"To which he, unlike most ghostly comforters I have heard, replied
with no honeyed commendation, false or true, but said,--

"'In the agony of a wounded conscience always look upward to God to
keep thy soul steady.  For looking downward on thyself, thou shalt
find nothing but what will increase thy fear; infinite sins, good
deeds few and imperfect.  It is not thy faith, but God's faithfulness
thou must rely on.  Casting thine eyes down to thyself, to behold the
great distance between what thou desirest and what thou deservest is
enough to make thee giddy, stagger, and reel unto despair.  Ever,
therefore, lift up thine eyes to the hills whence cometh thine help.'

"'The reason,' quoth he afterwards, 'why so many are at a loss in the
agony of a wounded conscience, is, that they look for their life in
the wrong place--namely, in their own piety and purity.  Let them
seek and search, dig and dive never so deep, it is all in vain.  For
though Adam's life was hid in himself, yet, since Christ's coming all
the original evidences of our salvation are kept in a higher
office--namely, hidden in God himself.  Surely many a despairing soul
groaning out his last breath with fear to sink down to hell, hath
presently been countermanded by God to eternal happiness.'

"His words brought tears to my Mother's eyes, but comfort, said she,
to her heart.

"Yet, though she saw sunshine through the clouds, she feared to find
the cloud again beyond the sunshine, whereon he heartened her further
by saying, 'Music is sweetest near or over rivers, where the echo
thereof is best rebounded by the water.  Praise for pensiveness,
thanks for tears, and blessing God over the floods of affliction,
makes the most melodious music in the ear of heaven.'

"Good and fit words for her who needs and deserves such.  To me these
other words of his are more to the purpose.

"'How easy,' saith he, 'is pen and paper piety.  It is far cheaper to
work one's head than one's heart to goodness.  I can make a hundred
meditations sooner than subdue one sin in my soul.'

"He gave my Mother also a sermon of his 'on the doctrine of
assurance,' which she much affects.  'All who seek the grace of
assurance,' he writes, 'in a diligent and faithful life, may attain
it without miraculous illumination.  Yet many there are who have
saving faith without it.  And those who deny this will prove racks to
tender consciences.  As the careless mother killed her little child,
for she overlaid it, so this heavy doctrine would press many poor but
pious souls, many infant faiths, to the pit of despair.'

"_April_ 1643.--Dr. Fuller hath left us to be chaplain in the
regiment of Lord Hopton, an honorable man, who will honour him, and
give him scope to do all the good that may be to the soldiers.

"He took leave of us in the college-garden, and gave my Mother a book
of his imprinted last year, when he was preacher at the Savoy in
London.  It is entitled the Holy State and the Profane State, and
seemeth wise and witty like himself.  As he parted from us, he begged
her to remember that 'all heavenly gifts, as they are got by prayer,
are kept and increased by praise.'

"_Note_.--I like well what he writes of anger.  'Anger is one of the
sinews of the soul.  He that wants it hath a maimed mind.'  I would I
had known this saying to comfort Roger Drayton withal, when Sir
Launcelot provoked him to that blow.

"Yet another saying is perhaps as needful, at least for me, 'Be not
mortally angry for a venial fault.  He will make a strange combustion
in the state of his soul who at the landing of every cock-boat sets
the beacons on fire.'

"We miss Dr. Fuller sorely; my Mother for his words of ghostly cheer,
and I for the just and generous things he dares to say of good men on
the other side, and saith with a wit and point which leaves no
opening for scornful jest to controvert.

"If Dr. Fuller had been the vicar of Netherby, and if the Draytons
had known him, maybe many things had gone otherwise.

"Now, alack! there seems less hope of accommodation by this Christmas
than I had felt sure of by the last.

"The Parliament Commissioners were here through March, and have but
now left.

"Some Lords and some Commons.  But nought could they accomplish.
How, indeed, could aught be hoped from subjects who presume to treat
with their liege lord as with a rival power?

"My Lord Falkland (now the king's secretary) comes now and then to
converse with my Mother.  Those who knew him before this sad
rebellion began, say he is sorely changed from what he was.  Whereas
his mind used to be as free and open to entertain all wise and
pleasant thoughts of others, as his mansion at Great Tew, near this
was free and open to entertain their persons, so that they called it
'a college of smaller volume in a purer air;' now, they say, he is
often preoccupied, and when in private will sigh and moan 'Peace!
peace!' and say he shall soon die of a broken heart, if this dire war
be prolonged.  This especially since the royal army was driven back
from Brentford on its way to London.

"But to us, who contrast him not with his former self, but with other
men, he seems the gentlest and most affable of Cavaliers, ever ready
to give ear and due weight to thought and wish of any, the least or
the lowest.

"We had not known him much of old, because he leant to the Puritan
party (being a close friend of Mr. Hampden), and thought ill of
Archbishop Laud, and spoke not too well of bishops or episcopacy.

"But in this conflict I think the noblest on each side are those who
are all but on the other; not, I mean, in affection--for lukewarmness
is never a virtue--but in conviction and character.

"The queen is amongst us again, as graceful and full of charms as
ever.  But some think the king were liker to follow moderate counsels
without her.  He holds her as ever in a perfect adoration, and it is
not likely to conciliate him that Parliament have actually dared to
'impeach' her.  Blasphemy almost, if it were not more like the folly
of naughty children playing at being grandsires and grandames!

"_June_ 26.--Mr. Hampden is dead!  By a singular mark of the divine
judgment (Mr. Hyde says), he was mortally wounded on Chalgrove Field,
the very place where he began not many months since to proclaim the
rebellious Ordinance Militia.  It was in a skirmish with Prince
Rupert.  The same night the rumour spread among us that something
beyond ordinary ailed him, for he was seen to ride off the field in
the middle of the fight (a thing never before known in him), with his
head low drooping, and his hands on his horse's neck.  Less than a
fortnight afterwards, he died in sore agonies, they say, but
persevering in his delusion to the end, so that his heart was not
troubled.

"The king would have sent him a chirurgeon of his own, had it been of
any use.

"He was much on my Mother's heart, since she heard of his being
wounded, for he was ever held to be a brave and blameless gentleman.
She grieved sore that he uttered no one repentant word.

"(Yet the last word we heard he spoke was not so ill a word to die
with; 'O God, save my bleeding country!')

"'But,' said she, 'there are Papists who die without ever seeing
anything wrong in the mass, or in regarding the blessed Virgin as
Queen of Heaven, who yet die calling on the blessed Saviour with such
piteous entreaty as he surely faileth not to hear.  And it may be
trusted Mr. Hampden's heresy is no worse.'

"To most around us it is simply the rebels' loss in him that is
accounted of.  And that they say is more than an army.  For he was
the man best beloved in all the land.  Some of us, however, speak of
the loss to England, and say that his and my Lord Falkland's were the
only right hands through which this sundered realm might have met in
fellowship again.

"I see nothing glorious in the glories of this war, nothing
triumphant in its triumphs, no gain in its spoils.

"It makes my heart ache to see Prince Rupert and his Cavaliers return
flushed with success and laden with plunder from raids all over the
country.  I cannot help seeing in my heart the poor farmers wandering
about their despoiled granaries and stalls, and the goodwife
bemoaning her empty dairy, and the children missing the cattle and
poultry, which are not 'provision' only to them, but friends; and
soon, alack poor foolish babes, to miss provision too and cry for it
in vain.

"These are our own English homes that are ravaged and wasted.  What
triumph is there in it for any of us?  I would the hearts of these
Palatine princes yearned a little more tenderly towards their
mother's countrymen.

"The only hope is that all these horrors will bring the end, the end,
the 'Peace, peace,' for which my Lord Falkland groans.

"But I know not; I think of Netherby and the Draytons; and I scarce
deem English hearts are to be won back by terror and plunder.

"_August_ 28, 1643.--Better hopes!  Something like a glimpse of the
end, at last.

"Two memorable months.

"Everything is going prosperously for the king and the good cause,
north, and south, and west.

"In the north, on June the 3rd, the Earl of Newcastle defeated Lord
Fairfax and the rebels at Atherton Moor.  A few days afterwards York
and Gainsborough and Lincoln surrendered, and now not a town remains
to the Parliament between Bewich and Hull.

"On the 13th of July, not a fortnight afterwards, Sir William Waller
was defeated and his whole army scattered on Lansdowne Heath, near
Devizes; the only offset to this advantage being the death of the
brave and good Sir Bevill Grenvill, for whose wife, Lady Grace, bound
to him in the truest honour and love, my Mother mourned much.

"The West, they say, is loyal; Cornwall fervent for the king.

"And on July 22nd, not a fortnight after this, Prince Rupert took
Bristol, thus doing much to secure Wales, otherwise, moreover,
well-affected.

"Our hopes are high indeed.  In all the horizon there seems but one
shadow like a cloud, and that so small I should scarce mention it but
that an old friend is under it.  Mr. Cromwell (or Colonel, as they
call him now, forsooth) gained some slight advantage at Grantham and
Gainsborough, and stormed Burleigh House.  Indeed, wherever he is,
they say, he seems just now to bring good fortune.  But this, I
think, bodes no ill.  Little weight indeed can these unsuccessful
skirmishes have to counterbalance victories, and captured cities, and
reviving loyalty throughout the North and West and South.  And if the
rebels are to succeed anywhere, I had rather it were where Roger
Drayton is, because it is in the nature of the Draytons to be more
yielding in prosperity than in ill fortune.

"His Majesty has just set forth with the army, all in high feather,
to besiege the obstinate and disloyal city of Gloucester.

"Lord Essex, they say, is collecting an army to meet him.  But we
could wish for no better.  One decisive battle, my Lord Falkland and
other wise men think, is the one thing to end the war.

"_September_ 22_nd_, 1643.--I cannot make it out.  They say there has
been a victory at Newbury, yet nothing seems to come of it.  The king
is here again, and the siege of Gloucester is given up, and our
people begin to quarrel among themselves, treading on each other in
their eagerness for places and titles and honours.  I think they
might wait a little, at all events, till the Court is at Whitehall
again.

"One good sign is that three rebel Earls--Bedford, Holland, and
Clare--have returned to their allegiance.  The Earl of Holland raised
the militia for the Parliament, so that he hath somewhat to repent
of.  There is much discussion how they should be received; the elder
Cavaliers recommending a politic forgetting of their offence; but we,
who are younger, desire they should be received as naughty children,
if not with reproaches, at most with a cool and lofty indifference,
to show we need them not.  It would not look well to be too glad.
And, moreover, they are three more claimants for the royal grace, and
the faithful like not that the faithless should be better served than
they who have borne the burden and heat of the day.

"I thought prosperity would have made us one, but it seems otherwise.

"And Harry says the noblest is gone.  The noblest, he says, always
fall the first victims in such conflicts as these, so that the strife
grows more cruel, and baser from year to year.

"The Lord Falkland was slain at Newbury.  He was missing on the
evening of the fight, but all through the night they hoped he might
have been taken prisoner.  On the morrow, however, they found him
among the slain, 'Only too glad to receive his discharge,' Harry
said.  On the morning of the battle he was of good cheer, as was his
wont; his spirits rising at the approach of danger.  His friends
urged him not to go into the battle, he having no command, but he
would not be kept away.  He rode gallantly on in the front ranks of
Lord Byron's regiment, between two hedges, behind which the
Roundheads had planted their musketeers.  'I am weary of the times,'
he said to those who urged him to withdraw; 'I foresee much misery to
my country, but I believe I shall be out of it before night.'

"And so he was; and needeth now no more dolefully to moan for 'Peace,
peace!' as so often in these last months.  He is singing it now, we
trust, where good men understand all perplexed things, and each other.

"Falkland and Hampden!  Alas! how many more before the peace songs
are chanted here on earth!

"The two right hands are cold and stiff through which the king and
the nation might have been clasped together again in fellowship.

"Who, or what, will reunite us now?"




CHAPTER IX.

The winter of 1642-43 was one of uneasy uncertainty to us at
Netherby.  The whole world seemed to lie dim and hazy, as if wrapped
in the heavy folds of a November fog.  The next villages seemed to
become far-off and foreign, in the unsettled state of the country.
There was no knowing the faces and voices of friends from those of
foes, in the rapid shifting of parties.  The comrade of yesterday was
the opponent of to-day.  Who could say what the comrade of to-day
might be to-morrow?  Mr. Capel, the Member for Hertfordshire, who had
been the first in Parliament to complain of grievances, had become
Lord Capel, and was threatening the seven associated counties with
his plunderers.

Lord Essex (many thought) seemed as frightened at success as at
failure.  Victories lulled him into fruitless negotiations; and the
only thing that roused him to action was imminent ruin.  Some
murmured that "professional soldiers love long wars as physicians
love long diseases."  Some whispered of treachery, and others of
Divine displeasure.  The explosion of battle had come; but the only
consequence seemed to be the loosening of the whole ground around,
the crumbling away of the nation in all directions.

Partly, no doubt, this sense of vagueness and dimness was caused by
the absence from most homes and communities of the most capable and
manly men in each,--in the garrisons, on the field, taking counsel
with the King at Oxford, or taking counsel for the nation at
Westminster.  Thus events were left to be guessed and debated by old
men despondent with the decay of many hopes; or women, draining in
anxious imaginations the dregs of every peril they could not share in
fact; or boys delighting in magnifying the dangers they hoped soon to
encounter, therewith to magnify themselves in the eyes of mothers and
maids.

Rachel Forster, on whose gentle strength the whole village was wont
to lean, was away; and Aunt Dorothy, the manliest heart left among
us, had a belief in the general wickedness of men, and the general
going wrong of things in this evil world, which was anything but
reassuring to those whose fears were quickened with the life-blood of
more vivid hopes than hers.

Thus we were ripe for all kinds of credulities that winter at
Netherby.

I can remember nothing rising prominently out of the general hum and
fog except two convictions, which enlarged before us steadily,
becoming more solid instead of more shadowy as they came nearer.  The
first was the impossibility of trusting the King.  The second was
that everything went right where Colonel Cromwell was; for by this
time he was Colonel Cromwell, at the head of his regiment, which he
was slowly sifting and compressing into the firm invincible kernel of
his invincible army.

A dim, dreary time it was for us from the Edgehill Fight, in October,
1642, to the beginning of February, 1643.  Roger in prison at Oxford
with Job; my Father at Reading or in London with Lord Essex and the
army.

But in the beginning of February a new time dawned on us.  My Father
came home to us for a few days, to make the old house as tight as he
could against any assaults from Lord Capel, or any straggling party
of Prince Rupert's plunderers, who were always making dashing forays
into the counties favourable to the Parliament, and appearing where
they were least expected.  The old moat, which in front of the house
had long been the peaceful retreat of many generations of ducks, and
elsewhere had been partially blocked up with fallen stones and trees,
was carefully cleared out and filled with water.  The terraces which
led to it on the steep side of the house were scarped, all but the
uppermost, which was palisadoed, and had two great guns planted on
it.  The drawbridge was repaired, and ordered to be always drawn up
at night.  We were provided with a garrison of four of the
farm-servants, drilled as best might be for the occasion, and placed
under the command of Bob, which virtually placed the whole fortress
under the command of Tib, whose orders were the only ones Bob was
never known not to disregard.  Meantime my aunts and I, with the
serving-maids, were instructed how to make cartridges, and prepare
matches for the match-locks; and Aunt Gretel gave us the benefit of
her experience in pulling lint, preparing bandages, and other
hospital work.

If an attack, however, were ever made, the general belief in the
household was that Aunt Dorothy would take her place as commandant,
her courage being of the active rather than the passive kind.
Indeed, I think the sense of danger to ourselves was a kind of relief
to most of us.  It seemed to make us sharers in the great struggle,
which we believed to be for God, and truth, and righteousness.  It
took us out of the position of uneasy listeners for rumours into that
of sentinels on the alert for an attack.  And the whole spirit of the
household rose from dreamy disquiet into cheery watchfulness and
activity.

My Father brought us the story of the king's attempt to surprise
London.  "It was a treacherous, unkingly deed," my Father said,
"enough to quench in the heart of the people every spark of trust
left in His Majesty."

He said it happened on this wise.  On Thursday, the 11th of November,
1642 (my father told us), the king received messengers from the
Commons with proposals of peace, declared his readiness to negotiate,
and his intention to remain peaceably in the same neighborhood till
all was amicably settled.  The Parliament, trusting him, ceased
hostilities.  Nevertheless, instantly after despatching this message,
he set off in full march for London.  On Saturday he sent forces
under Prince Rupert to surprise Brentford under cover of a November
fog, and of his own too loyally trusted word.  But Denzil Hollis,
with part of his regiment, made a noble stand, and stopped the
Prince's progress.

Hampden came up first, and Lord Brook, to the succour of Hollis'
imperilled regiment; they tried to fight through the royal troops,
which had surrounded Hollis and his men in the streets of Brentford.
This they could not effect.  But Hollis' little band themselves
fought to their last bullet, and then threw themselves into the
river, those who were not drowned swimming past Prince Rupert's
troops to Hampden and his Greencoats.  Lord Essex, hearing the sound
of guns in the Parliament House, where he was at the time, took horse
and galloped across the parks and through Knightsbridge to the scene
of action.  After this, all through the Saturday night, soldiers came
pouring out from the roused city, until, on Sunday morning, four and
twenty thousand men were gathered on Turnham Green.

Then the tables were turned, and Hampden fell on the king's rear.

"And then?" asked Aunt Dorothy.

"And then," replied my Father, drily, "Lord Essex recalled him, and
so nothing further came of it; but things have gone on simmering ever
since; always getting ready, and discussing how things should be
done, and never doing them."

"How do Mr. Hampden and Mr. Pym brook these delays?" said Aunt
Dorothy.

"Mr. Hampden would have had my Lord Essex invest Oxford," said my
Father, "but he is a subordinate, and Lord Essex a veteran; and Mr.
Hampden, I trow, deems military obedience the best example he can
give an army scarce six months recruited from the shop or the plough."

"And meantime," said Aunt Dorothy, "I warrant Prince Rupert is active
enough.  There is no end to the tales of his devastations, seizing
whole teams from the plough, setting fire to quiet villages at
midnight, with I know not what iniquities besides, and carrying home
the spoil from twenty miles around to the king's quarters at Oxford.
If Lord Essex does not want to fight the king, why does not he submit
to him?  Keeping twenty-four thousand men armed and fed at the public
expense, and doing nothing, is neither peace nor war to my mind!"

"True, sister Dorothy," said my Father, "I know of no method by which
war can be carried on in a friendly way.  And when Lord Essex has
come to the same conclusion, perhaps things will go a little faster."

"Will they ever, under Lord Essex?" said she.

"Time will show," said he.  "We have scarcely found our Great
Gustavus yet."

"Colonel Cromwell has been doing something better than dreaming what
to do, at Cambridge, since he saved the magazine there and £2,000 of
plate for the Parliament last June," said Aunt Dorothy.  "Troops are
pouring up to him from Essex and Suffolk, and all around, they say;
and Cambridge is being fortified; and they say it is owing to Colonel
Cromwell we are so quiet in these seven counties."

"Colonel Cromwell has a rare gift of sifting the chaff from the
wheat; finding out who can do the work and setting them to do it,"
said my Father, thoughtfully.

"So strict with his soldiers too," said Aunt Dorothy.  "They say the
men are fined twelve pence if they swear a profane oath."

"Then," said my Father, "he is doing what he told his cousin Mr.
Hampden must be done, if ever the Parliament army is to match the
king's."

"What is that?" said she.

"Getting men of religion," my Father replied, "to fight the men of
birth.  You will never do it," said Colonel Cromwell, "with tapsters
and 'prentice lads.  Match the enthusiasm of loyalty with the
enthusiasm of piety!"

"It is strange," rejoined Aunt Dorothy, "that Mr. Cromwell never
discovered his right profession before.  A farmer till forty-three,
and then all at once to find out he was made for a soldier!"

"What can make or find out soldiers but wars, sister Dorothy?" said
my Father.  "Moreover, I warrant Colonel Cromwell has known what it
is to wage other kinds of war before this.  It is only taking up new
weapons.  It is only the same conflict for the oppressed against the
oppressor, in which he contended for those of the Fen country against
Royal assumption, and for the poor men of Somersham against the
courtiers who would have ousted them from their ancient
common-rights; or for the gospel lecturers whom Archbishop Laud
silenced.  The same war, only a new field and new weapons.  At any
rate, I am glad the lad Roger is to serve under him; and so you may
tell him when he gets his liberty and comes home, as I trust he will
in a fortnight."

This was said as my Father was taking an early breakfast alone with
us in the Hall, with his horse saddled at the door, ready to take him
back to the Lord General's quarters.


Rachel and Job Forster came home before Roger, in Sir Walter
Davenant's wagon, stored with provisions and cordials, and soft
pillows, by Lady Lucy.

I believe every one in Netherby slept with a greater feeling of
security on the night after their return.  Poor Margery, Dickon's
young wife, said it was like the Ark coming back from the
Philistines, regardless of the slur she thereby cast on the Royalist
army, in which Dickon fought.  And yet there was nothing very
reassuring in Job's appearance.  He looked like a gaunt ghost, and
stumbled into the cottage like a tottering infant, and rather fell on
the bed, which had been made up for him in the kitchen, than lay down
on it, so broken was his strength.  When the neighbours came in after
a while, however, he had a good word to hearten each of them.  As to
Rachel, she settled in at once, without more ado, to her old ways and
plans, doing everything with the purpose-like quietness which so
calms the sick.

Cheered by Job's greetings to the neighbours, she told me it was not
until the place was still, and she was making up the fire for the
night, that she knew how low his strength was.  As she took the wood
from the pile he had made for her close to the fire, she was
startled, she told me, by a sound like a stifled sob from where he
lay.

"Art laid uneasy?" said she, at his side in an instant.  "Does aught
ail thee?  Is the bed ill-made?"

"Naught," said he.  "It's better than the bed of Solomon to me, with
the pillars of silver and the bottom of gold.  But I am like to them
that dream, laughing and crying all in one.  For I used to think
before thee come to the gaol, how I should never see thee kindle a
fire in the old place again, and how every stick thee had to take
from where I laid it for thee would go to thy heart like a stab.  And
it shamed me not to have made a better shot at the Lord's meaning for
thee and me."

"How could thee tell His meaning," said Rachel, "before He told thee?
He gave thee no promise to bring thee out of prison, nor me."

"Nay," said Job, "but it's making very bold with Him, and making
fools of ourselves, to guess at His words when they're half spoken,
instead of waiting to hear them out.  And it grieves me I should have
suspected Him when He was moaning us so well.  Read me what the
Scripture saith about the forgiveness of sins."

"But, Mistress?  Olive," concluded Rachel, when she told me this
little history, "when Elijah, worn out with trouble, misunderstood
the Lord, the angel comforted him, not with a text, but with a cake
baken on the coals; so, when Job took to misunderstanding the
Almighty like that, thinking He would be angered with what would not
have fretted one of the likes of us poor hasty creatures, instead of
the Bible I gave him a good cup of strong broth.  I knew it was the
body, poor soul, and not the spirit that was to blame, and that all
those brave words he spoke to the neighbours had cost more than they
were worth; and, of course, I was not going to profane the Holy Word
by using it like the spell in a witch's charm."

So for several days she kept every creature out of the cottage, which
deprived me of her counsel in a moment of difficulty, which happened
the week of their return.

Lord Capel's troops continued to hover round, and to keep the
district in a state of suspense and alarm, ripe for any marvellous
stories of horror, or for any acts of terrified revenge.  For in
stormy times there are sure to be some cowardly spirits ready to
throw any helpless victim as an expiatory sacrifice to the powers of
evil.

One Saturday evening, late in February, I was returning home through
the village from Gammer Grindle's cottage, which I had very often
visited since poor Tim's death.  The old woman had seemed gentler in
her way of speaking of her neighbours, and once or twice had betrayed
her pleasure in seeing me by speaking sharply to me if I stayed away
longer than usual, as if I had been one of her own lost grandchildren.

I had made rather a long circuit in returning, not liking to try the
high road again, because, in going, I had encountered a dozen or so
of the king's troopers, and as I was hurrying past them, they
complimented me in a way I did not like, and came after me.  I
recognized Sir Launcelot Trevor's voice among them, and then I turned
round and spoke to him, and begged him to call his men away.  Which,
when he recognized me, he did; but not without some more idle
Cavalier jesting, which set my heart beating, and made me resolve to
come back by a quiet path through the Davenant woods, which led round
through the village by Job Forster's.

Poor old Gammer was very friendly.  I suppose I was trembling a
little, though I did not tell her why, for she declared I was
chattering with cold, and would have me drink a hot cup of peppermint
water, and kindled up the fire, and took off my shoes, which were
wet, and dried them, wrapping up my feet, meanwhile, in her own best
woolsey whimple.  Indeed, she was so gracious and approachable, that
I ventured to say something about the benefit of coming to church,
and mingling a little more with her neighbours.

"Too late, too late for that!" said she, firing up.  "This twenty
year, come Lammas, my Joan, Cicely's mother, was buried, she and her
man, Cicely's father, in one grave.  And the parson would do nothing
without his fee.  So I sold the cover from my bed to pay him.  And I
vowed I'd never darken his church-door again."

"But that parson is dead, Gammer," said I, "and it was not his church
after all."

"That may be," said she.  "But a vow is a vow.  Besides, I could
never bear the folks' eyes speiring at me.  I'm ugly, and lone, and
poor, and they make mouths at me, and call me an old hag and a witch.
But it's only natural.  All the brood will peck at the lame chick.
All the herd will leave the stricken deer.  Didn't all the village
hoot and jeer at my poor, tender, innocent Tim?"

And then she poured forth the story of her life of sorrow as I had
never heard it before.  A heart trained to distrust and suspect
through a childhood of bondage under the petty tyrannies of a
stepmother and her children.  One year of happy married life, ending
in a sudden widowhood, which widowed her heart also of all its
remnant of hope in God, and left her to struggle prayerless and alone
with a hard world, for bread for herself and her orphan babe.  The
growing up of this child to be a stay and comfort, and, for three
years, a second home with her when she married.  This second home
broken up as suddenly as the first, by the death of the daughter and
her husband in one month, from a catching sickness, leaving the
grandmother once more alone to toil with enfeebled strength for two
orphan babes; the boy, poor, faithful Tim, half-witted and sickly;
the girl, Cicely, wilful and high-spirited, and the beauty of the
village.  Then the terrible morning when Cicely was gone, and no
account could be got of her beyond Tim's confused and exulting
statement, that Cicely had cried, and laughed, and kissed him, and
told him to wish grandmother good-bye for her, and she would come
back a lady and bring Tim a gun like Master Roger's; to Gammer
Grindle tidings worse than bereavement or all the misery she had
known, for she came of a truly honourable yeoman's house that had
never known shame.  Tim, however, could never be brought to look on
his sister's disappearance in any but the most cheerful light, and
would watch for hours at the corner of the path leading to the
village for Cicely and the "gun like Master Roger's," until, as time
passed on, the expectation seemed to fade away, only to be awakened
once again by the mysterious touch of death.  And since then not a
word of the poor lost girl.  Tim in the grave, and the vain longing
that Cicely were there too.  And all the little world around her, as
she believed, leagued against her crushed but unconquered heart.  She
ended with,--

"But it's but natural.  When the lightnings have rent the trunk the
winds soon snap the boughs.  They say the devil stands by me.  If he
did no one need wish him for a friend.  They say the Almighty is
against me.  And most times I think belike He is."

Then Aunt Gretel's words came back to me, "_Anywhere but there.  Put
the darkness anywhere but there_;" and I said,--

"Never, Gammer, never.  The devil said that thousands of years ago;
but the Lord Christ came to show what a lie it was.  He stood by the
stricken and wounded always.  The lame and the blind came to Him in
the temple, and he healed them."

She listened as if she half believed, and then, after a silence, she
said,--

"The devil is no easy enemy to deal with, mistress, but if I could be
sure it was only him, maybe I might look up and try again."

At last she was persuaded so far as to let me say I might call for
her the next Sunday on my way to church.  "It was as like as not she
would not go, but at any rate it would do her no harm to see me."

And as I left I heard something like a blessing follow me, and I saw
the poor, bent old figure leaning out of the door and watching me.

But when I came back to Netherby I found the whole village at the
doors in a ferment of eager talk.

I thought at once of Sir Launcelot and the troopers, and asked if
there had been another battle.

"Nay, nay," said the woman I spoke to, "it's naught but folks going
to reap their deserts at last."

Then came a chorus of grievances.

"Three of Farmer White's finest milch kine gone in one night!"
"Goodwife Joyce's best black hen killed, and not a feather touched;
no mortal fox's work it was too plain to see!"  "The dogs yelling as
if they were possessed, as belike they were, on Saturday evening,
seeing no doubt more than they could tell, poor beasts, of what was
going on in the air!"  "Lord Essex and his army lying spellbound,
able to do nothing, while the Prince Robber was plundering the land
far and wide!"  "Job and Master Roger, the best in the village, the
first stricken; too clear where the blows came from!"  "And to-day
the squire's own cattle driven off the meadow, with Mistress
Nicholl's, by a troop of plunderers, who came no one knew whence, and
had gone no one knew whither!"  "And finally, Tony Tomkin had been
pursued by a headless hound through the Davenant woods, where he had
only gone to take a rabbit or two he had snared, and thought no harm,
the family being away and fighting against the country!"  "And," but
this was muttered under the breath, "there were those who said they
had seen something that was not smoke come out of Gammer Grindle's
chimney--something that flew away over the fens faster than any bird.
And this was only on last Saturday night, and every one knew that
Saturday was the day of the witches' Sabbath ever since the Jews had
brought the innocent blood on their heads!"

Then suddenly it flashed on me what it all meant.  They were going to
execute some dreadful vengeance on Gammer Grindle, believing her to
be one of the witches who were causing all the mischief in the land.

It was no use to set myself against the torrent of fear and rage, so
I said as quietly as I could,--

"What are they going to do, and when?"

"First," was the reply, "they're going to duck her in the Mere before
her own door.  If she sinks they will pull her out if they can, as it
mayn't be her doings after all.  If she swims she's a witch, clear
and plain."

"And what then?" I said.

"Nothing too bad, Mistress Olive, for the like of them.  But the
lads'll see when it comes to the point.  It isn't often their master
helps the wretches out at last, they say.  And if she don't sink
natural, as a Christian ought, belike the lads'll make her."

"When did they go to do this?" I asked.

"They're but just off," was the answer.  "But they'll make short work
of it, never fear.  It's time a stop could be put to such things, if
ever it was."

"If Rachel and Job had been among you this would never have been," I
thought.  I longed to have consulted Rachel, had it been possible.
But there was no time to hesitate.

My first impulse was to rush after the cruel boys; but I felt that in
the maddened state of terror in which the village was, they would
most probably keep me back.  So, without saying a word or visibly
quickening my pace, I walked quietly on towards home.

In the porch I found Aunt Gretel.  She was watching for me.

I took her arm, not violently, I was so afraid of frightening her
from doing what I had determined must be done.  And I said quite
quietly,--

"Aunt Gretel, we must go together this instant to Gammer Grindle's."

"What is the matter?" she said.

"I will tell you as we go," I said.  "There is no time to be lost."

She came with me.  I turned into the path by the meadows.

"Not this way, Olive," she said.  "The plunderers have been there
to-day.  Your Father's best cattle are taken, and Placidia's."

"If the cattle are gone, then belike so are the plunderers," I said.
"But if the king's whole army were there we must take the shortest
way."

And I told her the whole story.

She said nothing but,--

"Then the good God guard us, sweetheart, and don't waste your breath
in words."

We went quickly on.

Only once I thought I heard shouts, and I said,--

"Aunt Gretel, what do they do with witches at the worst?"

"They have roasted them alive," she said, under her breath.  And we
said no more.

As we came to the creek of the Mere, on the opposite side of which
the cottage was, we heard yells and shouts too plainly borne across
the water in the stillness of the evening, unbroken by the lowing of
the stolen cattle which had been feeding there that morning.  And in
another moment we saw the reflection of torches gleaming in the
water, as wo stumbled along in the dusk among the reeds.  I listened
eagerly for poor old Gammer's voice.  But I heard nothing.  Indeed,
my own heart began to beat so fast, I could hear little but that.
Until, just as we reached the cottage, there was a dull splash, and
then a silence.  It was followed by a low moan, but by no cry.  They
were drowning the poor old woman, and the brave broken heart would
vouchsafe them the triumph of no entreaty for mercy and no cry of
distress!  I knew it as if I saw it.  And the next moment I had flown
along the shore and was in the midst of the crowd on the brink of the
water, clinging with one hand round the stem of an alder, and
stretching out the other till it grasped the poor shrivelled hands
which had caught at the branches which drooped over the water.

"Cling to me, Gammer!--to me, Olive Drayton!  I am holding
fast--cling to me!"

I was scarcely prepared for the desperate tenacity of the grasp which
returned mine.  I never felt till that moment what it means to cling
to Life.  My other arm held firm, but the bank was oozy and slippery,
and I felt as if I were losing my power, when at that instant Aunt
Gretel came and knelt beside me, and clutching Gammer Grindle's
dress, between us we dragged her to land.

Then the second part of the work of rescue began, and the hardest.

The men, or rather lads (for they were few of them more), who formed
the crowd, had been startled into inaction by our sudden appearance
among them; but now they began to mutter angrily, and would have
pushed us rudely away, saying "it was no matter for women to meddle
in.  They had not come there for nothing, and they would have it out.
The whole country-side should not be laid waste to save one wicked
old witch, that no one had a good word to say for."

By this time Gammer Grindle had recovered so far as to rise out of
that mere instinct of self-preservation with which she had
desperately clung to me.  And disengaging herself from me, she said,
standing erect and facing her assailants,--

"Let me alone, Mistress Olive.  They say right.  They are all gone
who would have said a good word for me.  Let me go to them."

Two of the men seized her again.

"Confess!" said one of them, shaking her rudely; "confess, and we'll
leave you to the justices.  If not you shall try the water once more
to sink or swim."

And they dragged her again to the brink.  The touch of the cold
oozing water made the horror and weakness come over her again.  Her
courage forsook her, and she cried like the feeble old woman she
was,--

"Have pity on me, neighbours.  I'll confess anything, if you'll leave
me alone--anything I can.  I've been a sinful old woman, and the
Lord's against me; the Lord's against me!"

"Hear her, mistress," said the men with a cry of triumph; "she'll
confess anything.  She says the Almighty's against her.  It isn't fit
such should live."

They were forcing her on; her poor, patched, thin garments tore in my
hands as I clung to them.  Aunt Gretel, driven to the end of her
English, as usual with her in strong emotion, was pouring forth
entreaties and prayers in German, when I caught sight of a Netherby
lad well known as the pest of the village, and the ringleader in all
mischief.  He was carrying a torch.  I caught his arm and looked in
his face.

"Tony Tomkin," I said, "Squire Drayton shall know of this, and it
shall not be unpunished.  It is your wickedness, and such as yours,
that brings the trouble on us all, and not Gammer Grindle's.  God is
angry with you, Tony, for breaking your little brother's head, and
idling away your time, while your poor mother toils her life away to
get you bread.  You will not give up your hearts to be good like
brave men, which is the only sacrifice God will have; and instead,
like a pack of cowards, you are sacrificing a poor helpless old woman
to the devil.  Isn't there one man here with the heart of a man in
him?  What harm can the devil do you, much less a witch, if you
please God?  And which of you thinks God will be pleased by a troop
of you slinking here in the dark to murder a helpless old woman at
her own door?  Can none of you lads of Netherby remember poor Tim,
and how he died for Master Roger, and how good she was to him?  Or
can't you trust Squire Drayton to do justice, and leave her to him?"

Tony let his torch fall and slunk back.  Then two Netherby men came
forward and said,--

"She's right; Mistress Olive is right!  Squire Drayton'll see justice
done."

Two or three others joined them.  The cry arose, "No one shall touch
the old woman to-night, as long as there's any Netherby lads to
hinder it."

A scuffle ensued, during which Aunt Gretel and I got hold of Gammer
Grindle once more, and led her back into the cottage.

Once there, we barricaded the door with the logs and fagots which
formed Gammer's store of firewood, and felt safe.

But it was not until the angry voices had quite died away in the
distance, and we heard again the quiet plashing of the water among
the rushes, that we could quiet the poor old woman so that she would
let go her clasp of our hands.  Then she let us kindle a fire, and
wrap her in warm dry things.

We wanted to lay her in a clean comfortable bed which was made in the
corner of the hut.  But this she would not suffer.  "It is Cicely's,"
she said.  "It's not for me."  So we had to pack her up as
comfortably as we could upon the heap of straw and rags laid on an
old chest, which was her bed.

There she lay quite still for a long time, while Aunt Gretel and I
sat silent by the fire, hoping she would sleep.

But in about an hour she said, in a quiet voice--

"Take away those logs from the door."

I went to her bedside.

"In the morning, Gammer," I said, "when it is quite safe."

"This moment!" said she, starting up any trying to walk.  But the
terrors of the night had made her so faint and feeble, that she fell
helplessly back.

"This moment, Mistress Olive!" she repeated, in a faint querulous
voice, very unlike her usual sharp firm tones--"this moment!  The
poor maid might come and try the door, and go away, and never come
again.  I've been sharp with her, I know, and she might be afraid,
not knowing, poor lamb, how I watch for her."

Aunt Gretel went to the door and began to unpile the logs.

"God will care for us, Olive," said she with a faltering voice.  "He
will know and care; He who never closes the door against us."

And gently we withdrew the logs which formed our protection.

"Set the light in the window," Gammer said.

By the window she meant a rough crevice in the wall, with a canvas
curtain hung before it.

Aunt Gretel ventured a little remonstrance.

"Hardly that to-night," said she.  "It might guide any evil-disposed
people here."

"It will guide her, and what does it matter for anything else?" said
Gammer Grindle, almost fiercely.  "She knew there was always a light
burning, and if she saw none, she might think I was dead, and turn
away."

And the lamp was placed in the window.

Then another long silence, broken again by Gammer.

"What'll they think's come to you, my mistresses?  What a selfish old
woman I've been.  Why didn't I let them do for me, and be quiet.  I
never knew before what fear was.  I've wished to die scores of times;
but when death came near, I clung to life like a drowning dog or cat,
and never cared who I pulled in to save myself.  I never thought I
should live to be such a pitiful old coward.  But the Lord's against
me," she cried, going back to her old wail--"the Lord's against me.
Everybody says so, and it must be true.  He not only leaves me to be
drowned; He leaves me also to be as selfish and wicked as I will.
The Lord's against me.  Why did you try to save me?  I must fall into
His hands at last!"

This was exactly what Aunt Gretel never could hear with patience.

"You are a little better than those bad men, my dear woman," said
she.  "You, none of you, can see the difference between the good God
and the devil.  You talk of falling into His hands, as if His arms
were hell.  And all the while He is stretching out His arms that you
may fall on His heart.  You slander, grandmother, you slander God!"
she added.

"He is not against you; you are against Him."

"Much the same in the end," moaned poor Gammer, "if we're going
against each other."

"It is not the same," said Aunt Gretel.  "You can turn and go with
Him, and He will not have to drive you home.  You can bow under his
yoke, and you will not feel it heavy.  You can bow under His rod, and
you will find it comfort you as much as His staff."

"Not so easy, mistress," said Gammer, after a pause.  "I have turned
from Him so long, how can I know if I should have a welcome?"

"That is what Cicely is waiting for, Gammer," I whispered, kneeling
down beside.  "But the door is open and the light is burning for her.
If she could only know!  if she could only have a glimpse _inside_!"

"If she could only know!" murmured the poor old woman, her eyes
moistening as she turned from the thought of her own sorrows to those
of her lost child.

And she said no more.  But there was something in the quiet of her
face which made me hope that she herself had got a "glimpse inside."

And soon afterwards she fell asleep.


Aunt Gretel and I were left to our watch.  Then, for the first time,
when we ceased to watch for sleep to come over the poor exhausted
aged frame, I began to watch the noises outside, and feel a creeping
horror as I listened to the slow cold plashing of the water among the
rushes, and the soughing, and wailing, and whistling of the wind
among the leafless boughs of the wood behind us.  There was one
gnarled old oak especially, just outside the house, whose dry boughs
creaked in the wind as if they had been dead beams instead of living
branches.

Often I thought I heard long sighs and wailings as of human voices,
and with difficulty persuaded myself that it was fancy.  But at last
there came sounds which could not be mistaken--low whistles, and
short, peculiar cries, responded to by others, until we became sure
that a number of men must be moving about in the darkness around us.
At first Aunt Gretel and I thought it must be the witch-finders come
again for Gammer Grindle, and very softly we replaced the logs to
barricade the door.

But other sounds began to mingle with those of human voices, like the
lowings of cattle forcibly driven.  Suddenly I remembered my
encounter that very morning with the royal troopers, which, with all
that happened since, seemed weeks distant.

"It is Sir Launcelot and the plunderers!" I exclaimed.

"That accounts for their not sending after us," said Aunt Gretel.
"They have tried to reach us, no doubt, and cannot."

And we listened again.

Then came something like a soft knock and a low cry, which seemed
close to the door, and a heavy thud as of something falling.  But,
though we listened breathlessly, no second sound came; and the old
stories of supernatural horrors haunting the place crept back to us,
and kept us motionless.

By this time the dawn was slowly creeping in, and making the lamp in
the window red and dim.

We sat crouching close together by the embers of the dying fire, and
took each others' hands, and listened.

The voices came nearer, till we could plainly distinguish them, and
with them the sound of trampling: feet of men and horses, and then of
men springing from the saddle and approaching the hut.

"It's the old witch's den," a gruff voice said; "she's burning a
candle to the devil.  No one ever got good by going near her."

Then a laugh, and Sir Launcelot Trevor's mocking voice,--

"One would think you were a Roundhead, from the respect with which
you mention the old enemy's name.  At all events, witches don't live,
like saints, on air and prayers.  We'll get some warmth and comfort
this bitter night out of the old hag's stores.  Some sack or malmsey,
perchance, and a fat capon or two bewitched from good men's cellars
and larders.  Stay here, if you are afraid.  And I will storm this
witch's castle for you," And his long heavy stride approached the
door.  We sat with beating hearts, expecting the rickety door to be
shaken or forced in by a strong hand.  But instead, the steps
suddenly ceased, and the intruder seemed to start back as if struck
by an invisible hand on the threshold.

Then there was an exclamation of amazement and horror, ending in a
fearful oath in a low deep tone, very different from Sir Launcelot's
usual bravado.  Afterwards a few hasty retreating steps, and as he
rejoined his men, some words in the old light tone, but hurried and
wild as of one overacting his part.

"Belike you are right, lads.  Black art or white, better keep to beer
of mortal brewing than seize anything from a witch's caldron, or
touch anything of a witch's brood.  Besides, the country will be
awake, and it's as well we were in safe quarters with the booty.
Steady, and look out tor pitfalls in this cursed place."

After which there was a splashing of horses' feet on the reedy margin
of the Mere.  Then a heavy trampling as they reached firmer ground,
succeeded by a sharp gallop across the meadow, until every sound was
lost in the distance, and we were left in the silence to listen once
more to the cold plashing of the water among the rushes, and to the
breathing of poor old Gammer in her heavy sleep, as we watched the
slow breaking of the morning.

We had not sat half an hour after the last tramp of the horsemen had
died away, when we heard a faint sound as of something stirring on
the threshold.

Aunt Gretel laid her hand on mine.

"What made Sir Launcelot turn back, Olive?" she whispered.  "He is
scarcely a man likely to dream dreams or see visions."

By one impulse we softly removed the logs with which we had
barricaded the door, and opened it.

There was a rude porch outside to keep off the beat of the weather,
and under it a low seat where Gammer used to sit in summer and carry
on any work that needed more light than could be had in the hut.

Across this lay stretched, in a death-like swoon, the form of a
woman.  She was half kneeling, half prostrate, her head towards the
door, resting on the seat, one arm beneath it, the other fallen
helpless by her side, half hidden in a heavy mass of long hair.  A
puny little child lay cuddled up close to her, clasping the
unconscious form with both arms, asleep.

The features were sharp as with age, and pallid as with the touch of
death, and the long soft hair was gray, but it was still easy to
recognise in the sharp and altered face what memories it had brought
back to Sir Launcelot, and why that poor faded form had guarded her
threshold from him better than an army of fiends.

It was the flaming sword of conscience which had guarded us that
night.

Poor pallid wasted face, so terrible in its mute reproach!

We took her up between us.  It was easy.  She was light enough to
carry.  We laid her on the old bed which her grandmother had kept
always ready for her.  Aunt Gretel loosened her dress and chafed her
hands, while I took the poor puny child to the fire to keep it quiet
while I made some warm drink to revive the mother.

But the poor sickly little one was not easily to be quieted.  In
spite of all my soothing it awoke, and began wailing for mammy.
Perhaps, after all, the best restorative!  The sharp fretful cry
aroused the mother from her swoon, and the grandmother from her heavy
sleep.

In another instant the old woman was kneeling by the poor girl's
bedside, clasping and fondling her, and calling her by tender,
endearing, childish names, such as no one at Netherby would have
dreamed could have poured forth from Gammer Grindle's lips.  The
first words Cicely spoke when she fully recovered consciousness and
sate up (her beautiful large gray eyes gleaming from her faded hollow
cheeks like living souls among a pale troop of ghosts), were,--

"Gammer, I heard him--I heard his voice.  Where is he?  I thought I
saw his face.  But it was dusk, and faces change.  But voices will be
the same, I think, even in heaven or in hell.  And I heard his voice,
the same as when he called me darling and wife."

"Wife!" said the old woman, starting and standing erect.  "Say that
again, Cicely."

"All in vain, Gammer!" she said, with a slow hopeless tone.  "With
the priest and the ring!  But it was all false.  He told me so when
it was too late.  He said I must have known.  But how was I to know,
Gammer?  I trusted him; I trusted him.  Yet, perhaps, I ought to have
known better, Gammer?  I suppose it must have been wicked of me.
Every one seems to think it was."

"Not me, sweetheart!" the old woman cried; "never me!  Thank God, my
lamb comes back to me as pure as she went.  Thank God, Cicely my
darling, thank God, sweetheart, and take courage.  If all the cruel
world hunted my lamb to death and cried shame on her, there's one in
the world who knows she's as pure as the sweetest lady that ever trod
the church floor in her bride's white, with her path strewn with
roses."  Then, taking the child in her arms, and cuddling it to her,
she added, "And thy child's as much a crown of joy to thee and me,
Cicely, as to any lady in the land.  Take courage, sweetheart.  What
does all the world matter, if grandmother knows; and Him that's
above, darling," she added, in a voice faltering again into
feebleness.  "For He is above, Cicely, and He's not against us, for
He's brought thee home."

All this time the old woman and Cicely had seemed quite unconscious
of our presence, as we sat in a shadowed corner of the dark old hut,
keeping as quiet as sobs would let us.  But when the poor girl was
calmed by the long-forgotten relief of a burst of tears on a heart
that trusted her, she looked up and around with a quieter glance, and
began to ask again how it could be that she had heard the voice.

Then I stepped forward to explain.

She started, and covered her face with her hands, as if she would
have hidden herself.

"It's only me, Cicely, Olive Drayton," I said, as plainly as I could
for weeping.  "You've come back among those that know you and trust
you, Cicely."

Then, after giving her such explanation as I could of the events of
the night, and after Aunt Gretel had made up the fire, we bade them
farewell, and left the three together to go over the mournful history
that lay between their meetings; while we hastened away to assure
those at home of our safety.

"What a night, Aunt Gretel!" I said, as we went.  "It seems like a
life-time."

"Things come often thus in life," said she, "as far as I have seen;
the fruits ripened through the long silent year, reaped in a day."  I
scarcely understood her then, but since, I have often thought she was
right.  Sowing-times and growing-times, long, silent, underground;
and then bursts of flowering days, reapings and gatherings; a
life-time in a day; a thousand long-prepared events bursting into
flower in a moment.  A thousand ghosts of forgotten deeds gathered
together and confronting us at one point.  The probation thousands of
years; the Judgment a day.

Aunt Dorothy was a little doubtful as to our having too much commerce
with Gammer Grindle or Cicely.  "If Gammer was not a witch," said
she, "which God forbid--though that there are witches who ill-wish
cattle, and ride on broom-sticks, is as certain as there are
wandering stars and sea-serpents; at all events it is a solemn
warning to every one on the danger of not going to church like your
neighbours.  And if Cicely was not as bad as had been feared--for
which God be praised--she was nevertheless an awful example of the
danger of dancing round May-poles, and wearing bits of ribbons and
roses on your head."

But when Job heard of it, his anger was greatly kindled.

"One would think," said he, "the Book of Job had been put into the
Apocrypha, that men who profess themselves Christians should go
worrying the afflicted like Zophar, Bildad, and Eliphaz, heaping
coals on the devil's furnace.  Witches there were, no doubt, poor
wretches, or they could not have been hanged and burned, although for
the most part he believed the devil was too good a general to let his
soldiers waste their time in cavalcading about on broom-sticks.  But,
be that as it might, it was ill work piling wood on fires that were
hot enough already, especially when you could not be sure who had
kindled the flames.  The only comfort was, that after all the devil
was nothing more than the Almighty's furnace-heater.  All his toil
only went to heating it to the right point to fuse the silver.  The
Master would see that none of the true metal was lost."


At the end of February, Roger came to us.  He was pale with
prison-air and meagre from prison-fare, and the hair had grown on his
upper lip.  In my eyes he had gained far more than he had lost.  His
eyes had a look of purpose and command in them, pleasant to yield to;
though little enough of command had he exercised during the last four
months, except, indeed, that command of himself which is true
obedience, and lies at the root of all true command.

He was even less given than of old to long narratives or orations of
any kind.

The history of what he had seen and heard dropped from him in broken
sentences, as he went about seeing to various little plans for
strengthening the defences of the house, or as he repaired or cleaned
his arms in the evening.  Of what he had suffered he said nothing,
except to make light of it in answer to any questioning of mine.
More than once he mentioned, in a few brief words, Lady Lucy's
kindness.  But he did not speak at all of Lettice except once, when
we were all sitting together round the Hall fire--Aunt Dorothy, Aunt
Gretel, and I--when he said carelessly, as if he had just remembered
it by accident,--

"Mistress Lettice told me she had read the sermons you gave her, Aunt
Dorothy.  And she sent you her love, Olive."

"There are gracious dispositions in the child," said Aunt Dorothy.
"I have been sure of it for a long time."

And I ventured after a little while to say,--

"She sent me her love, Roger, and was that all?"

"Her dear love, I think it was," said he dryly, as if the adjective
made little difference in the value of the substantive.

"And she said no more, Roger?  Not one message?"

"I only saw her for ten minutes, Olive," said he, a little
impatiently, "and most of the time she was talking to a little French
poodle, a little wretch with wool like a sheep and eyes like
glass-beads."

"You are hard on the poor child, Roger," said Aunt Dorothy; "consider
her bringing up.  I warrant she never spun a web, or learned a
chapter in Proverbs through in her life.  What can you expect from a
mother who is a friend of the Popish queen, and, I am only too sure,
wears false hair and paint?"

"Aunt Dorothy," said he, firing up, "the Lady Lucy is as near a
ministering angel as any creature I ever wish to see.  And if it were
not so, it's not for me, who have lived on her bread and on her kind
looks for months, to hear a word against her."

And Roger arose, and strode out of the hall and across the court,
whistling for Lion; leaving Aunt Dorothy in perplexity as to whether
he were more aggrieved with her for defending Lettice or for
assailing Lady Lucy, and me in equal perplexity as to how I could
ever venture to introduce Lettice's name again, longing as I did to
hear more of her.

"You never saw Lettice after she gave you that message?" I ventured
at last to say one day when we were walking alone together.

"How could I, Olive?" said he, "I went away instantly; except
indeed," he added, "when I happened to look back, as I was leaving
the court, I saw her standing at the window with that poodle in her
arms.  But I did not look again, for at the same moment Sir Launcelot
Trevor came out of another door, looking as if he were, as no doubt
he is, quite at home in the place with them all."

"O Roger," I said, "some of us ought to write to Lady Lucy at once to
say how wicked he is!"

"What is the use, Olive?" said he, sadly.  "It is not from us, rebels
and traitors, she will believe evil of a good Cavalier.  Least of all
from me or mine about Sir Launcelot!" he added, in a lower voice.

"But he may be deceiving them all," I said, passionately.  "It is a
sin to let him.  Can nothing be done?  Have you never thought of it?"

"You had better ask me could I think of nothing else, Olive?" said
he.  "For I had to ask myself that many times as I paced up and down
in prison, and knew about it all.  And the more I thought, the more
helpless I saw we were about it."

"And what did you decide on at last?" I asked.

"I decided that _this was what the Civil War cost_," he replied; "not
battles and loss of limb or life only, but misunderstandings and loss
of friends.  To have all we say and do reported to those we love best
through those who think the worst of us, and to have no power of
saying a word in justification or explanation.  To be identified with
the worst men and the most violent acts on our side, and, in loyalty
to the principles of our party, not to be able to disown them.  To
see often the people we love best estranged more and more from the
principles we hold dearest; and to watch a great gulf widening
between us which no voice of man can reach across."

"I feel sure nothing and no one could make Lettice think harshly of
us, Roger," I exclaimed; "I feel as sure as if I had been speaking to
her yesterday."

"How can it be otherwise, Olive?" said he, "especially when I am
under Colonel Cromwell.  You should have seen the little start and
scornful look she gave when I mentioned his name.  'Colonel!' said
she, almost under her breath, as if she were talking only to that
poodle.  But I heard her There is no one the Cavaliers hate like him."

"It seems almost a pity you must be with him!" I said, thinking only
of Roger and Lettice.

"A pity, Olive!" said he, flashing up.  "The Cavaliers hate Colonel
Cromwell, because wherever he is there is doing instead of debating.
And for what better reason can we hold to him?  If we fight at all,
it is because we believe there is something worth fighting for to be
lost or won; and where Colonel Cromwell is, it is won.  The country
he defends is defended; the city he holds is held; the men he trains
fight; and, thank God, my lot is with him, to defend the old
liberties under him, Olive, or, if he fails, to find new liberty in
the New England across the seas."

The next day Roger went off to join his regiment at Cambridge, where
Colonel Cromwell was.

How silent and languid the old house seemed when he left us, without
his firm, soldier-like tread clearing the stairs at a few bounds, and
his whistle to the dogs, and his voice singing with a firm precision,
like the tramp of a regiment, snatches of the grave, grand old psalm
tunes which the Ironsides loved to march to!

A fortnight afterwards, Job Forster followed him.  And then came
again months of listening and waiting, and of contradictory rumours,
ending too often in ill-tidings worse than the worst we had feared.

For that whole year brought little but disaster to the Parliament
troops.  Day after day in that yellow old Diary of mine is marked
with black tidings of defeat and death.

First comes--

"_June_ 18.--Mr. Hampden wounded in trying to keep off Prince
Rupert's plunderers, until Lord Essex came.  Lord Essex did not come
in time, and Mr. Hampden went off the field sorely wounded.  They say
he felt himself death-stricken, and turned his horse towards the
house of his first wife, whom he loved so dearly, that he might die
there.  But his strength failed.  It was as much as he could do to
make one last effort, and spurring his horse over a little brook
which bounded the field, to find his way to the nearest village, and
home.

"_June_ 24.--Mr. Hampden died, thinking to the last more of his
country than himself.  In the midst of terrible pain he wrote (my
Father tells us) to entreat Lord Essex to act with more vigour, and
to collect his forces round London.  He received the sacrament, and
spoke with affection of the services of the Church of England,
although not altogether so of her bishops.  He received the Lord's
Supper, and for himself looked humbly and peacefully to God.  But for
England his heart looked sorrowfully onward.  And his last words
were, 'Lord, have mercy on my bleeding country;' and then another
prayer, the end not heard by mortal ears.  My Father writes: 'His
love for his country will scarce fail in the better country whither
he is gone.  But his counsel and all his slowly garnered treasures of
wisdom are lost to us for ever.'"

The next death marked is--

"_September_ 20.--A battle at Newbury, in Gloucestershire.  Lord
Falkland killed.  Once Hampden's friend, and now (must it not be?)
his friend again.  A good man, and gentle, and wise, they say.  I
wonder how it all looks and sounds there where they are gone."

And the next--

"_November_.--Mr. Pym is dead.  They have buried him among the kings
in Westminster Abbey.  I wonder how many of the people who began the
war will be fighting at the end of it, and whether they will be
fighting for the same things as when they began."

Then, mixed up with these notices of the dead, are long accounts of
skirmishes and fights, which every one thought all-important then,
but which no one thinks of now, save those who have their beloved
dead lying beneath the fields where they were fought.

And through it all a steady going downward and downward of the
Parliament cause, from that fatal June, 1643, when Hampden died, to
near the close of the following year.

"_June_ 30, 1643.--The Fairfaxes defeated at Atherton Moor.

"_July 13_.--Sir William Waller (once vainly boasted of as William
the Conqueror) defeated, and his army scattered, in Lansdowne.

"_July_ 22.--Prince Rupert took Bristol."

And so the war surged away to the Royalist West and Royalist North,
until in all the West Country not a city was left to the Parliament
but Gloucester; and in the North Country, not a city but Hull, which
the Hothams had been baffled in an attempt to betray to the king;
whilst in the counties between, Prince Rupert and the plunderers were
having it much their own way.  Very evil times we thought them.  And
many different reasons were assigned for the failure of the good
cause.  Aunt Dorothy feared it was a punishment for a licentious
spirit of toleration to zealots and sectaries, and the sins of the
Independents.  The zealous preacher who came from Suffolk
occasionally to expound at Job Forster's meeting, was sure it was
carnal compromise lording it over God's heritage, and the sins of the
Presbyterians.  And Rachel believed it was the sins of us all, and of
herself in particular, who had, she considered, been too much like
Ananias and Sapphira, in that she had professed to give the whole
price to God and then would fain have kept back the half, having
indulged the deceitful hope that Job was so wounded as never to be
able to go to the wars again.

Placidia and Mr. Nicholls were much "exercised."  Especially since
the loss of the three parsonage cows, which were (by what Aunt
Dorothy considered a very solemn warning to Placidia) swept off with
my Father's by the plunderers from the meadow by the Mere.  "There
were two texts," said Placidia, "which had always seemed to her
exceedingly hard to reconcile.  One was, 'Godliness hath promise of
the life which now is as well as of that which is to come.'  And the
other, 'Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.'  What could be done with
texts so exceedingly difficult to reconcile as these?"

To which Aunt Dorothy replied,--

"Give up trying to reconcile them at all, my dear.  Let them fight,
as frost and heat do, fire and water, sunshine and storm; and out of
the strife come the flower and the fruit, spring-time and harvest,
which shall never cease.  Not that I see any difficulty in it.  The
promise is not meadows or cows, but grace and peace.  The perplexity
is over when you make up your mind that what you want is not to feel
warm for a day or two, but to have things grow; not a few sunny
hours, but the harvest."

Perhaps among us all, the person least perplexed by these continued
disasters was Aunt Gretel; because, leaving the whole field of
politics as altogether too complicated for her to comprehend, she
continued to see only the links which bind every day to the Eternal
Day, and every event to the hand of the merciful Father; and thus her
chief wonders ever were the pity which forgave so many sins, and the
love which provided so many mercies.  Overlooking all the battles and
skirmishes around us, she saw but one Battle and one Battle-field,
and but two Captains.  Overlooking all the subordinate divisions of
nations and parties, she saw only a flock and a Shepherd, and the
Shepherd calling each one by one, from the Great Gustavus to little
Cicely and poor Tim; folded, one, in the heavenly fold of which he
knew nothing till he was in it, and the other in the poor earthly
house which she and her child and her grateful love had made, once
more, a home and a refuge for poor old Gammer.  For since Cicely's
return, Gammer's broken links with her fellow-creatures began to be
knit again; and more than one at Netherby took Job's words to heart.
The broad shield of her love and welcome which she threw around the
wanderer had shielded herself.

But side by side with the doleful records in my Diary run two series
of letters full of victory and hope.

One was to my Father from Dr. Antony, who spent most of that period
in London.  And there, throughout all these disasters, the courage of
the citizens seemed never to fail.

When Lord Essex returned from Edgehill with very doubtful success,
which he had entirely failed to convert into lasting gain by his
hesitations and delays, London, of as brave and generous a heart as
old Rome, voted him £5,000.

When Bristol fell before Prince Rupert, and every city in the west
save Gloucester fell into the hands of the king, and Lord Essex
timidly recommended accommodation with His Majesty, and the Lords
would have petitioned him, the Commons, the Preachers, and the
citizens (knowing that no accommodation with the king could be relied
on unless secured by victory) rejected all such wavering thoughts.
The shops were all shut for some days, not to make holiday, but for
solemn fasting.  These days were spent in the churches, and the
people came forth from them ready for any sacrifice for the eternal
truth and the ancient liberty.  It was determined to surround London
with entrenchments.  Knights and dames went forth, spade in hand, to
the beat of drum, to share in the digging of the trenches, and to
hearten others to the work.  And in a few days twelve miles of
entrenchment were dug.  Whereof we heard His Majesty took notice, and
lost heart thereby.

Throughout all those adverse times London never lost heart.  Plate
and jewels kept pouring into the Parliament's treasury at Guildhall.
Time spent by the 'prentices in the Parliament army was ruled to
count as time served in their trades.  And jests against the courage
of men bred in streets and trained behind counters lost their point.
Dr. Antony's letters through all that dreary time had the cheer and
stir of a triumphal march in them, although he had no triumphs to
relate, but only defeats borne with the courage which repairs them,
and although he himself went to the battle-field not to wound but to
bind up wounds.

The other series of letters was from Roger.  And these cheered us,
because they always told of victory.  They were brief, and mostly
written from the battle-field, to assure us at once of victory and
safety.  They crossed the dark shadows of my Diary like sunbeams.  In
June, when we were mourning over the death of Hampden, and over the
slow debates of the Lord-General what to do first for the bleeding
country, wounded in every part by the stabs of plunderers and
reckless Cavaliers, came Roger's first letter, delayed on its way,
dated, "Grantham, 18th May, 1643."  It spoke of a glorious victory
won that day against marvellous odds of number, the enemy running
away for three miles, four colours taken, and forty-five prisoners,
and many prisoners rescued.  Again in July, when we were bewailing
the Fairfaxes defeated at Atherton Moor in the north, Sir William
Waller's army routed at Lansdowne Heath in the west, and Bristol
lost, Roger was writing us, on the 31st, news from Gainsborough of a
"notable victory with a chase of six miles."

Mingled with these good tidings were sayings which Roger had heard of
Colonel Cromwell's.  Some of these sayings were like proverbs, so
closely did the word fit the thought.  Others had in them the ring of
a war-song, as when he wrote to the Commissioners at Cambridge.  "You
see by this enclosed how sadly your affairs stand.  It's no longer
disputing, but out instantly all you can.  Raise all your bands; send
them to Huntingdon; get up what volunteers you can; hasten your
horses.  Send these letters to Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex without
delay.  I beseech you, spare not.  You must act lively; do it without
distraction.  Neglect no means."  Yet often it seemed, when you
listened to Colonel Cromwell, as if it were by some marvellous
accident his thoughts did ever tumble into their right clothes, so
strangely did they come lumbering out.  But every now and then, if
you had patience, amidst the rattling of the rough stones and
pebbles, flashed a sentence, sharp cut and brilliant as a diamond,
although, apparently, as unconscious of its polish and sharpness as
the rest of their uncouth ness.  "Subtilty may deceive you, integrity
never will;"  "Truly, God follows us with encouragements, who is the
God of blessings; and I beseech you, let him not lose his blessing
upon us!  They come in season, and with all the advantages of
heartening, as if God should say, 'Up and be doing, and I will stand
by you and help you!'  There is nothing to be feared but our own sin
and sloth."  "If I could speak words to pierce your hearts with the
sense of our and your condition, I would.  It may be difficult to
raise so many men in so short time; but let me assure you it's
necessary, and, therefore, to be done."  "God hath given reputation
to our handful (the Ironsides), let us endeavour to keep it.  I had
rather have a plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights
for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call 'a gentleman'
and nothing else.  I honour a gentleman that is so indeed."

"Yet," said Roger in one of his letters, "it gives you little
knowledge of what the Colonel is to extract these bits of his
sayings, and make them emphatic, as if he meant them for epigrams,
when the force is that they are said without force; the thought and
purpose in him, which always go to the point in deeds, from time to
time flashing straight to the point in words, which are then as
strong as other men's deeds.  But this I know, when he says of us,
'We never find our men so cheerful as when there is work to do,' or,
'God hath given reputation to our handful,' we all feel as if we were
dubbed knights, and were moving about glorious with Royal Orders."

So, slowly as the year passed on, some of us began dimly to feel that
a kingly being had arisen among us, such a king as David was before
he was crowned, when he ruled in the hearts of the thousands of
Israel by right of the slain giant and the secret anointing of the
seer; a mighty man, who felt nothing impossible which he believed
right, with whom, if a thing was "necessary," it was "to be done."




CHAPTER X.

LETTICE DAVENANT'S DIARY.

Oxford, _January_ 30_th_, 1644.--Another Christmas, and another
birthday, shut up within these monkish old stone walls.  To my mother
the chapel, with the painted windows, and the organ, and the daily
services, makes up for much that we lose.  But as to me, when I hear
the same sounds, and see the same sights, from day to day, I scarcely
seem to hear or see them at all.  They do not wake my soul up.  The
sacred music of the woods and fields seems to do me more good, at
least on week-days.  For it is sacred, and it is never the same.  And
the choristers there, while they are singing their psalms, are busy
all the time building their nests, and finding food for their
nestlings, which make their songs all the more tender and sacred to
me.

"Not a word from them at Netherby.  And not a step nearer to the end.

"Yet it is wrong to complain.  It is something to have my Father and
my seven brothers still untouched, after being exposed during all
this time to the risks of the war.  I dread to think what a gulf
would yawn between me and Olive, and all of them, if once one very
dear to either of us fell in the strife.

"I have nothing to complain of, but that things do not change; and
with what a passion of regret I should long for one of these
unchanging days, if one of the terrible changes that might come, came.

"A wretched phantom of a Parliament appeared here on the 22nd of
January.  I would the king had not summoned it.  We should leave it
to the rebels, I think, to deal with shows and phantoms of real
things, with their presumptuous talk of colonels and generals.  I
would his Majesty had not encountered their pretence of royal
authority, with this pretence of Parliamentary debate.  Sixty Lords
and a hundred Commons, or thereabouts, moving helplessly about these
old University streets, with no more power or life in them than the
effigies of the saints and crusaders in the churches.  Indeed far
less, for the effigies are memorials of persons who once were alive,
and this Parliament is nothing but a copy of the clothes and
trappings of a power now living.  The king does not consult them, and
the nation does not heed them, and they only show how real the
division is amongst us.  The king himself calls them the 'mongrel
Parliament.'  His Majesty is so grand and majestic when he is grave,
I feel one could give up anything to bring a happy smile over his sad
and kingly countenance.  But I would he did not make these jests.
Many grave persons, I have noticed, when they set about jesting, are
apt to do it rather cruelly.  Their jests want feathers.  They fall
heavily, weighted with the gravity of their character, and instead of
pleasantly pricking and stimulating, they wound.  Therefore I wish
His Majesty would not jest.  Especially about Parliaments and the
navy.  People are apt not to see the wit of being called 'cats,' or
'water-rats,' or 'mongrel.'  They only feel the sting.

"_March_.--The Scottish General Leslie has led an army over the
Borders.  Traitor!  When the king was so gracious as to create him
Earl of Leven but a few years since.  Oh, faithless Scottish men!
Infatuated by a thing they call Presbytery, and treacherous to their
compatriot and anointed king!

"_June_, 1644.--Another summer within the walls of this old city.
Another summer away from the woods at home.  I am tempted sometimes
to wish the war would end in any way.  Politics perplex me more and
more.  So many people wishing the same thing, for contrary reasons.
So many people wishing contrary things for the same reasons.  So many
on our side whom one hates; so many against us whom we honour.  The
best men doing the worst mischief by beginning the strife; and then
dying, or doubting, and giving place to the worst men, who finish
it--if ever it is to be finished.  Hampden gone, and Lord Falkland;
and the names one hears most of now, Prince Rupert and this Oliver
Cromwell.  They call him General now.  What next?  A country
gentleman, none of the most notable or of the greatest condition,
eking out his farming, some way, with brewing ale, at Huntingdon,
until he was forty-two--and at forty-five, forsooth, General
Cromwell, with men of condition capping to receive his orders.  A
fanatic, moreover, who preaches in the open-air to his men between
the battles.

"A cheerful life for Roger Drayton, methinks!  For commander, this
fanatic brewer; for comrades, preaching tailors and fighting
cobblers; for recreation, General Cromwell's sermons; and for martial
music, Sir Launcelot says, Puritan Psalms, entoned pathetically
through the nose.  A change for Roger Drayton from Mr. Milton's
organ-playing, or the madrigals we sang at Netherby.  And yet I
question whether our Harry would not find even that doleful Puritan
music more to his taste than many a mocking Cavalier ditty wherewith
our men entertain themselves.  The times are grave enough, and I
doubt sometimes but the Puritan music suits them best.

"_July_ 20.--Terrible tidings, if true.  Lord Newcastle and Prince
Rupert defeated at Marston Moor, on the 2nd of July, by the Earl of
Manchester and Cromwell.  A hundred colours taken, and all the
baggage; the royal army scattered in all directions.  And ten days
afterwards, York surrendered.  Loyal York, in the heart of the loyal
North, His Majesty's first retreat from his faithless capital!

"Strange that men speak more of Oliver Cromwell than of the Earl of
Manchester in this battle.  Strange, if it is true, as some say, that
this firebrand was already in a ship bound for flight to America a
few years since, when the king forbade him to go.  My Father says,
however, that the man who really won the victory for the Parliament
was Prince Rupert, who, saith he, is no general, but a mere reckless
chief of foraging-parties.  It was he who hurried the Marquis of
Newcastle into battle, against his judgment.  And now it is reported
that my Lord Newcastle, despairing of himself, with such associates
(or of the cause with such leaders), has taken ship for France.  I
would it were the Palatine princes instead.  Their standard was taken
at Marston Moor.

"Three of my brothers were there; one wounded, but not severely; the
other two have gone northward we know not where.

"Harry is much with us, being about the king's person.  He will have
nothing to do with the prince's plundering parties.  But he chafes at
having missed this battle, and is eager for the king to go westward
to inspire and reward loyal Devon and Cornwall by his presence, and
to pursue my Lord Essex, who has gone thither with the rebel forces.

"_August_.--The queen embarked on the 14th of July for France.  I
marvel she can bear to put the seas between her and the king at such
times as these.  But my Mother says she could not help it, and
sacrifices herself most, and most to the purpose, by taking off the
burden, of her safety from His Majesty, and going among her royal
kindred, whom she may stir up to fight.  And indeed she did essay to
rejoin the king.  After the birth of the little princess at Exeter,
she asked my Lord Essex for a safe-conduct to the Bath to drink the
waters; but he offered her instead a safe-conduct to London, 'where,'
quoth he, 'she would find the best physicians.'  A sorry jest I deem
this, inviting her to run into the very den of the disloyal
parliament, which lately dared to 'impeach' her.

"Rebel galleys followed her from Torbay, but she escaped safe to
Brest, and I trow the king's affection for her is so true he had
rather know her safe than have her with him.  Yet, methinks, in her
case I would not have left it to him to decide.  The more one I so
loved cared for my welfare and safety, the more I would delight to
risk and dare all.

"_August_.--They are off to the West, the faithful West--the king,
and my Father, and Harry, with an army enthusiastical in their
loyalty, and high in hope and courage.  Prince Rupert not with them,
and Oliver Cromwell not with the rebels.  Surely there must be great
things done!

"_September_.--The glorious news has come:--

"Lord Essex's army is ruined, gone, vanished.  Not routed in a hard
fight, but steadily pursued to Fowey, in a corner of loyal Cornwall,
there cooped up ingloriously, closer and closer, until the general
was fain to flee by sea, and the whole of the foot had to surrender.
The cavalry, indeed, fought their way through, which, being
Englishmen, I excuse them.  But never was ruin more complete.

"Harry writes from Tavistock, where His Majesty has retired, a small
town nestled among wooded hills at the foot of the wild moors, Mr.
Pym was member for it; nevertheless the place seems not ill-disposed.

"_November_.--Harry is with us.  I have never seen him so in spirits
since the war began.

"The royal army received a slight check at Newbury, a place fatal
already with the blood of the brave Lord Falkland.

"But Harry seems to think nothing of that in comparison with the
state of things this battle hath revealed among the rebels.
Rebellion, saith he, is at last obeying its own laws, and crumbling
away by its own inherent disorganization.

"After the second battle of Newbury the quiet of our life was
effectually broken by a threatened attack on Oxford.

"Artillery booming at our gates, bullets falling in our streets.  At
last I had a little taste of real war.  I did not altogether dislike
it.  There was something that made my heart beat firmer in the
thought of sharing my brothers' and my Father's danger.  But then, I
must confess, it did not come very near.  The walls were still
between us and the enemy.  After a short cannonading the rebels drew
off, from a cause, Harry says, worth us many victories.  Lord Essex
and Sir William Waller, their two generals, could not agree, and
between them the attack on Oxford was abandoned; and what was more,
the king, who was encamped outside the city, with a force in numbers
quite unequal to cope with their combined forces, was suffered to
retreat without a blow to Worcester.

"But better than all.  Harry says the rebel generals are assailing
each other with all kinds of reproaches in the Parliament, accusing
each other as the cause of all the late failures.  Lord Essex, Lord
Manchester, and Sir William Waller, none of them cordially uniting
with each other against us, but all most cordially uniting in
assailing Oliver Cromwell, who is the only one among them we have
cause to dread.  And to complete the mêlée, the Scotch preachers are
having their say in the matter, and solemnly accuse Mr. Cromwell of
being an 'Incendiary!'

"Which is quite plain to us he is.  So that now, when the
Incendiaries themselves have set about to fight each other, and to
put out the flames, it is probable the arson will be avenged, the
flames _will_ be put out, and we quiet and loyal subjects shall have
nothing left to do but to rebuild the ruins.

"Then we will try to say as little as we can about who began the
mischief, and only see who can work best in repairing it.

"The King and the Parliament throughout the land, and the Draytons
and the Davenants at dear old Netherby."


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

At the end of July, 1644, we had a letter from Roger:--

"_Marston Moor, July_ 3_d._--To my dear sister Mistress Olive
Drayton.--On the battle-field.  A messenger going south will take
these.

"Thank God we are here this day.  And the enemy is not here, but
flying right and left, over moor and mountain.  No such victory has
been vouchsafed us before.

"Yesterday, the 2nd July, early in the morning, we were moving off
the ground--Lord Manchester, General Leslie, and General Cromwell.

"Prince Rupert had gallantly thrown provisions into York, which we
were beleaguering; but the generals thought he would not venture an
attack on our combined forces.

"But when we were fairly in order of march the prince fell on our
rear.

"It took us till three in the day to face round, front them, and
secure the position we wanted.  There is a rye field here with a
ditch in front, where the dead bear witness how we had to fight for
it.

"At three, Prince Rupert gave their battle-cry: '_For God and the
king;_' and we ours: '_God with us._'  From three till five we
pounded each other with the great guns.  But little impression was
made on either side.  And at five there was a pause.  Two hours'
silence, confronting each other, from five to seven.  Such silence as
may be where many are wounded, and many are waiting in agonies for
the summons to die, while the rest were waiting for the summons to
charge.  At last, at seven, it came.

"Our foot, under Lord Manchester, ran across the ditch before that
rye field for which they had fought so hard.  Thus far was clear to
all.  The rest we know only from comparing what we did, and seeing
what we had done afterwards.  For immediately on the attack of the
foot came the charges of the horse.  The left wing of the king's army
on our right they all but routed, driving the Lord Manchester, Lord
Fairfax, and the old veteran Leslie from the field.  Meantime our
right--that is, we, the Ironsides with the general--charged their
left.  We were not beaten.  I trust we gave him no reason to be
ashamed of us.  But everywhere the fighting was hard.  Having
discharged our pistols, we flung them from us and fell to it with
swords.  Then came the shock, like two seas meeting, each man
encountering the foe before him, but few knowing how the day was
speeding elsewhere, till we found ourselves with the whole front of
the battle changed, each victorious wing having wheeled round as they
fought, and standing where the enemy had stood when the fight began.
Then came up General Cromwell's reserves with General Leslie's, and
decided the day, sending Prince Rupert and his plunderers flying
headlong through the gathering dusk.  It was the first time they had
encountered the Ironsides.  Their broken horse trampled, as they
fled, on the broken and flying foot, we spurring after them, till
within a mile of York.  Arms, ammunition, baggage, colours, all cast
away in the mad terror of the flight.  To within a mile from York we
followed them, and then turned back, and slept on the battle-field.

"Another silence, Olive; not as before, in expectation of another
fight, but with our work done, and four thousand dead around us to be
buried.

"Job Forster is safe, and would have you tell Rachel that the Lord
has sent Israel a judge at last, and all must go right now.

"He went about with Dr. Antony all night, seeing to the wounded and
the dying.

"When I awoke, the summer morning was shining on the field, and I
wondered how I could have slept with all those sights and sounds
around me.  But, thank God, I did, for there is more to be done yet.
York has to be taken.

"Tell Rachel, by using my military authority, I got Job to lie down
in my place, while I went round with Dr. Antony.  At first he
wavered.  But I said: 'The general is sharp on any of us who neglect
our arms or powder.  And the body has to be looked to as well as the
powder.'  Whereon he lay down in my cloak, and in a minute was beyond
the reach of any rousing, short of a cannonade.

"_N.B._--Two young Davenants fought well a few yards from me;
scarcely more than lads.

"God grant we gained yesterday a step towards peace."

A fortnight after, another letter, dated:--

"_York, the_ 15_th July_.--York has surrendered.  The North is ours.
This moment returned from a thanksgiving in the minster.  The
grandest music of the organ scarce, I think, could have echoed more
solemnly among the old roofs and arches than that psalm, sung by the
thousands of rough soldiers' voices.  King David was a soldier, and
knew how to make such psalms as soldiers need.  Nor do I think the
old minster has often seen a congregation more serious and devout.
If some on the Cavalier side had heard it, they could scarce have
said afterwards, our Puritan religion lacked its solemnities.  Our
solemnities begin indeed within; but when the tide of devotion is
high and deep enough, no music like that it makes in overflowing."


To Roger, as to any one borne on the chariot of the sun, the whole
world seemed full of light.  To us, however, meanwhile in the Fens,
things seemed verging more and more from twilight into night.

Not much more than a month after the letter of Roger's concerning the
surrender of York, came tidings which, it seemed to us, more than
counterbalanced these advantages.

The royal letter post, lately established on the great North Road
between London and Edinburgh, and southward between London and
Plymouth, had been interrupted during the war.  Netherby lay in the
line of one of the more recent branch-posts; and we missed at first
the pleasant sound of the horn which the postman was commanded to
blow four times every hour, besides at the posting-stations.

At first Aunt Dorothy had rather rejoiced.  She had been wont to say
it was a grievous interference with the liberty of the subject, that
we should be compelled to send all our letters by the hands of the
king's messengers, instead of by any private carrier we chose.  And,
moreover, she deemed it highly derogatory to His Majesty to demean
himself to take a few pence each letter for such services.  But a few
months of return to the old private method, with all its
uncertainties and suspenses, made her receive the public posts again
as a boon, when the Commonwealth government re-established them.

It was from Dr. Antony, therefore, that we first heard the tidings of
the Lord Essex's flight from Fowey, and the ruin of his whole army.

This was not until November.

He brought two letters from my Father and Roger.  My Father's was
sad; Roger's was indignant.  Both spoke of divisions among the
supporters of the Parliament.  They were written at different times,
but reached us together by Dr. Antony's hand as the first safe
opportunity.  The first was from Roger, dated late in September,
speaking of the surrender of Lord Essex's foot:--"Marston Moor with
the four thousand that lie dead there," he wrote, "was after all, it
seems, not a step towards the end.  Everything gained there is thrown
away again by the indecisions of noblemen who are afraid to win too
much; and old soldiers who will not move a finger except in the
fashion some one else moved it a hundred years ago.  As if when war
is once begun, there were any way to peace but by the ruin of one
party, except, indeed, by the ruin of both; as if a lingering war
were a kind of half peace, instead of being as it is, the worst of
wars; the opening of the nation's veins at a thousand points, whereby
she slowly bleeds to death.  Lieutenant-General Cromwell takes sadly
to heart the sad conditions of our army in the West.  He saith, had
we wings we would fly thither.  Indeed, wings he hath at command, in
the hearts of his men, 'never so cheerful,' he says, 'as when there
is work to do.'  But there are those whose chief business is to clip
these wings, lest affairs fly too fast.  The general saith, 'If we
could all intend our own ends less, and our ease too, our business in
this army would go on wheels for expedition.'  If he were at the head
of affairs, we should not, in sooth, lack wheels or wrings."


The second letter was from my Father written early in November, after
the second battle of Newbury (fought on the 27th of October).

He wrote,--

"It is the old story, I fear, of our Protestant lack of unity.
People do not seem able to see that the military unity of the Roman
Church being broken, the only ecclesiastical unity possible for us is
the unity as of an empire, like that of Great Britain, with different
races and local constitutions under one sovereign; or the unity as of
a family of grown-up children, in free obedience to one father.  If
Lutherans and Calvinists could have merged their lesser differences
in their real agreement, probably that terrible war, which is still
crushing the life out of Germany, need never have begun.  If
Prelatists, Presbyterians, and Independents could agree now to yield
each other liberty, this war of ours might end.  But while they had
power, Prelatists would rather let the nation be torn asunder than
tolerate Presbyterians.  And now the Presbyterians think they have
power, they had rather lose everything we have gained than tolerate
Independents.  The merit of the Independents and Anabaptists being,
perhaps, only this, that they never have had the power to persecute.
I cannot see whither it is all tending.

"We have lost an army in Cornwall; but that is little.  It seems to
me some of us are losing all hold of what we are fighting for.  This
success at Newbury shows our weakness more than the ruin at Fowey.
Lord Manchester will not pursue the king, lest our last army should
be lost; in which case, he says, His Majesty might hang us all.  As
if the block or the gallows had not been the alternative of success
from the beginning.  In consequence of a disagreement between him and
Sir William Waller, the combined attack on Oxford failed; and eleven
days after our success at Newbury, His Majesty's troops were suffered
quietly to withdraw their artillery from Donington Castle, in face of
our victorious army lying inactive.

"The indignation in the army is unbounded.  But all minor divisions
bid fair to resolve themselves into two great factions of
Presbyterians and Independents; Lieutenant-General Cromwell having
addressed a remonstrance to the Parliament against Lord Manchester,
and Lord Manchester, Lord Essex, and Hollis, with the Scotch
Commissioners, being set on crushing General Cromwell.

"The quarrel is of no new origin.  The affair of Donington Castle did
but set the tinder to the train.  It dates back to the first setting
of the Westminster Assembly, when the Presbyterians, not content with
absorbing the Church revenues, which would have been conceded to
them, would have had the magistrate imprison and confiscate the goods
of all whom they excommunicated.  'Toleration,' said one of them,
'will make the kingdom a chaos, a Babel, another Amsterdam, a Sodom,
an Egypt, a Babylon.  Toleration is the grand work of the devil; his
masterpiece and chief engine to support his tottering kingdom.  It is
the most compendious, ready, sure way to destroy all religion, lay
all waste, and bring in all evil.  As original sin is the fundamental
sin, having the seed and spawn of all sin in it, so toleration hath
all errors in it and all evils.'  They call toleration the 'great
Diana of the Independents.'  Yet no one contends for toleration to
extend beyond the orthodox Protestant sects.  These divisions set
many of us thinking what we are fighting for.  It would be scarcely
worth so much blood-shedding to establish one hundred and twenty
popes at Westminster, instead of one at Lambeth.  They are golden
words of General Cromwell's: 'All that believe have the real unity,
which is most glorious, because inward and spiritual, in the Body and
to the Head.  For being united in forms, every Christian will, for
peace' sake, study and do, as far as conscience will permit.  And for
brethren, in things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that
of light and reason.'"

"What does my brother mean, Master Antony?" quoth Aunt Dorothy, when
she came to this passage.  "And what doth General Cromwell mean?  'No
compulsion!' and 'light and reason!'  Most dangerous words.  An
assembly of godly divines at Westminster to settle everything!  That
is precisely what we have been fighting for.  Not for disorder; not
for each man to think what is right in his own judgment, and do what
is right in his own eyes.  But for those who believe right to have
the power to instruct, or else to silence, those who believe wrong.
Light and reason indeed!  The cry of all the heretics from the
beginning.  Why, reason is the very source of all error.  And light
is precisely what we lack, and what the Westminster Assembly is
providing for us; and when they have just kindled it, and set it up
like a city on a hill, does Mr. Cromwell, forsooth, think we are
going to let every tinker and tailor kindle his farthing candle
instead, and lead people into any wilderness he pleases?"

Said Dr. Antony,--

"There was a great light enkindled and set up on a Sorrowful Hill
sixteen hundred years ago.  But it has only enlightened the hearts of
those who would look at it.  And if the Sun does not put out these
poor farthing candles, Mistress Dorothy, I am afraid we shall find it
a hard matter to do so with our fingers."

"Well," said Aunt Dorothy, "I am sure I cannot see whither things are
tending."

And even Aunt Gretel remarked,--

"That Independents and Presbyterians should agree might indeed be
easy enough.  But Lutherans and Calvinists are quite another
question.  In the next world--well, it is to be hoped.  Death works
miracles.  But in this, scarcely.  The dear brother-in-law is one of
the wisest of men.  But it cannot be expected that the wisest
Englishman should quite fathom the religious differences of Germany."

Of toleration towards Papists, Infidels, or Quakers, no one dreamed.
Infidelity, all admitted, comes direct from the devil, and, of
course, no Christian should tolerate the devil or his works.  The
Papists had within the memory of our older men sent fetters to bind
us, and fagots to burn us in the Armada, which the winds of God
scattered from our coasts.  In France they had massacred our brethren
in cold-blood to the number of one hundred thousand in the slaughter
which began on St. Bartholomew's day.  They had assassinated our
kindred by tens of thousands in Ireland in our own times.  And they
were binding, and burning, and torturing, and making galley-slaves of
our brethren still on the Continent of Europe.  Not as heretics we
kept them under, but as rebels.  And as to the Quakers, they were
reported to be liable to attacks of objections to clothes very
perplexing to sober-minded Christians, and were probably many of them
lunatics.  These should not indeed be burned, but they should at all
events be clothed, and, if possible, silenced, until they came to
their right mind.

The third letter which Dr. Antony had brought us was from Job
Forster.  I went with Dr. Antony to take it to Rachel.  In it Job
spoke much of Roger's courage and goodness, in a way it made my heart
beat quick to hear.

"Master Roger fights like a lion-like man of Judah," wrote Job, "and
commands like one of the chief princes.  And at other times he can
tend a wounded man, friend or foe, or speak good words to the dying,
most as tender, Rachel, as thee."

Job's letter was by no means doubtful or desponding.  He had the
advantage of those in the ranks.  He saw only the rank and the step
immediately before him, and heard not the discussions of the
commanders but only the word of command.  "I think," he concluded,
"we have come about to 1 Sam. xxii. 14.  Some time back we were in 1
Sam. xxii. 1, in cave Adullam: 'Every one that was in debt, and every
one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto them,' and a
sorry troop they were.  But that is over.  The General saith himself:
'I have a lovely company; honest, sober Christians; you would respect
them did you know them.'  And respect us they do; leastways the
enemy.  And now David (that is, General Cromwell) is in Keilah.  And
they inquired of the Lord and the Lord said, 'They will deliver thee
up.'  _But God delivered him not_.  The rest has to come in its
season."

Job wrote also of "the young gentleman the chirurgeon."  "Of as good
a courage as the best," quoth Job.  "For I hold it harder to stand
about among the whizzing bullets, succouring or removing the wounded
than to fight.  It is always harder to stand fire than to charge.
And it is harder to spend days and nights tending poor groaning
suffering men than to suffer yourself.  That is, if you have got a
heart.  Which that doctor hath.  But every man hath his calling.  And
Dr. Antony hath his.  Straight from headquarters, as I deem."

It was curious that what struck me first in those words of Job's was
his calling Dr. Antony "young."  It set me wondering what his age
might be; and as we walked home together I glanced at him to see.  I
had always thought of him as my Father's friend, and therefore of
another generation.  Besides there was the doctor's cap, and a
physician is always, _ex officio_, an elder.  But when I came to
consider his face, it had certainly nothing of old age in it.  His
carriage was erect and easy; his hair, raven-black, had not a streak
of gray; his eyes, dark as they were, had fire enough in them.  These
researches scarce took me a moment, but his eyes met mine, and it
seemed as if he half guessed what I was thinking of, for he said,--

"You wondered at Job's talking of the courage of a chirurgeon."

"Not at all," said I, somewhat confused.  "I was only thinking how it
was you were always our Father's friend instead of ours."

"Was I not yours?" he said, half smiling.

"Oh, yes, of course," I said, "every one's."

"Every one's, Mistress Olive," he said inquiringly, "only, not yours?"

"Mine, of course," I said, feeling myself becoming hopelessly
entangled, "and every one's besides."

"Thank you," he said, gravely, "I should not have liked the exchange."

"Is it easier, do you think, Dr. Antony," I said, breaking hurriedly
from the subject, "to fight, than to be a chirurgeon on the
battle-field?"

"Easier, probably, to me," he said.  "Fighting is in our blood.  My
grandfather was a soldier, and fought in the French wars of religion.
He was assassinated at the St. Bartholomew with Coligny.  My father,
then a child, was seized, baptized, and educated in a Catholic
seminary.  But he escaped, at the risk of his life, to England.  In
France we had enough of wars of religion.  I have thought it better
work to devote myself as far as I may to succour the oppressed, and
heal such as can be healed of the wounds and sorrows of men.  There
is enough of danger and of warfare in these days in such a calling to
satisfy a soldier's passion, and not to let the blood stagnate or
grow cold."

There was a subdued fire in his eye and a deep sonorous ring in his
voice, which gave force to his words.

"But Antony is not a French name," I said.

"It was my father's Christian name, which he adopted for safety.  His
name was properly Antoine la Mothe Duplessis, from an estate our
family had held for some centuries.  But, Mistress Olive," he said,
turning the discourse, as if it led to painful subjects, or as if he
shrank from continuing on a theme so unusual with him as himself, "I
understand you are accused of upholding witches."

Whereby I was led into an earnest defence of Gammer Grindle.

"But even if she had been a witch," I ventured to say, in conclusion,
"would it not have been more like the Sermon on the Mount to rescue
and then to instruct her, than to drown her?  And is not the Sermon
on the Mount the highest law we have?"

"It is the last edition of the Divine law yet issued, Mistress
Olive," he said.  "And one great glory of it is, it seems to me, that
it is not only so plain itself as to need no commentary of lawyer or
scribe, but if we try to keep it, it has a wonderful power of making
other things plain as we go on."

At which point we reached the porch at Netherby.

Said Aunt Dorothy, as Dr. Antony was taking leave the next day,--

"You must not trouble yourself to be our letter-carrier.  Less useful
men can be spared on such errands.  I wonder my brother should have
burdened you therewith."

"I thank you, Mistress Dorothy," said he; "but it was my free choice
to come.  And I promise you I will only come when it is no burden."

Said she, holding his hand,--

"Pardon me; but I am old enough to be your mother.  Suffer an aged
woman to warn you against new-fangled notions.  Beware of 'light' and
'reason,' prithee, and such presumptuous pleas.  The light that is in
us is darkness, and our reason is corrupt.  The spiritual armour your
fathers fought in Master Antony, is proof still."

"I believe it, Mistress Dorothy," he replied; "and if in new times
and in new dangers I should need new weapons, believe me, I will only
go to my fathers' armoury for them."

I was provoked with myself when he had left, that of all the wise
discourse that had been held since he came, the things that kept
recurring to my mind were what Job had said of Dr. Antony, and how
foolish I had been in the answers I gave him on our way home from
Rachel's.  He must deem me so unmannerly, I thought.  And, besides,
so many fitting things now occurred which I might have said.  Nothing
occupies one like a conversation in which one has failed to say what
one ought to have said.  It haunts one like a melody of which you
cannot find the end.

It was evident, moreover, that Aunt Dorothy took the same view of Dr.
Antony's age as Job.  It made Dr. Antony seem like some one quite
new, to think of this; new, and yet certainly not strange.

The next Christmas, the army being in winter-quarters, my Father
spent with us, which made it a holiday indeed.

In February, 1645, he read us a letter which Dr. Antony wrote to him,
narrating what was going on in London.  At the beginning there was a
considerable piece which he did not read to us.  He said it related
to family matters, which he could speak of hereafter, and contained
greetings to us.  Thus the letter proceeded--it was dated January
21st, 1645:

"Sir Thomas Fairfax is this day appointed by the Commons' House
general-in-chief, in lieu of Lord Essex; Skipton major-general; while
the post of lieutenant-general is _left open_.  Most men deem that he
who fills it will fill _more than it_, as his name and fame now fill
all men's mouths.  There have been fierce debates, whisperings,
conspirings, mysterious midnight meetings at Essex House: the aim of
the whole of these conspirings, the bond of all these gatherings,
being to 'remove out of the way General-Lieutenant Cromwell, whom,'
said the Scottish Commissioners, 'ye ken very weel is no friend of
ours.'  This 'obstacle,' this '_remora_' this 'INCENDIARY,' as they
called him (soaring high into Latin in their vain endeavours to find
words lofty enough to express their abhorrence), had hundreds of
grave English and Scottish Presbyterian divines, soldiers and
lawyers, been labouring for months to remove out of the way; yet,
nevertheless, on the 9th of December, there he stood in the Commons'
House, as immovable an obstacle and '_remora_' as ever, and about to
prove himself an 'Incendiary' indeed by kindling a flame which should
consume their eloquent Latin accusations and their authority at once.

"There was a long silence in the House.  General Cromwell broke it,
speaking abruptly, and not in Latin.

"'It is now a time to speak,' he said, 'or for ever hold the tongue.
The important occasion now is no less than to save a nation out of a
bleeding, nay, almost dying condition, which the long continuance of
this war hath already brought it into; so that without a more speedy,
vigorous, effectual prosecution of the war--casting off all lingering
proceedings like those of soldiers of fortune beyond sea to spin out
a war--we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a
Parliament.

"'For what do the enemy say?  Nay, what do many that were friends at
the beginning of the Parliament?  Even this, that the members of both
Houses have got great places and commands, and the sword into their
hands, and what by interest in Parliament, what by power in the army,
will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit the
war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it.
This that I speak here to our own faces, is but what others do utter
abroad behind our backs.  I am far from reflecting on any.  I know
the worth of those commanders.  Members of both Houses who are still
in power; but if I may speak my conscience without reflection on any,
I do conceive if the army is not put into another method, and the war
more vigorously prosecuted, the people can bear the war no longer,
and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace.

"'But this I would recommend to your prudence.  Not to insist upon
any complaint or oversight of any commander-in-chief upon any
occasion whatsoever, for as I must acknowledge myself guilty of
oversights, so I know they can rarely be avoided in military affairs.
Therefore, waiving a strict inquiry into the issues of these things,
let us apply ourselves to the remedy, which is most necessary.  And I
hope we have such true English hearts, and zealous affections towards
the general weal of our mother-country, as no members of either House
will scruple to _deny_ themselves and their own private interests for
the public good, nor account it to be a dishonour done to them,
whatever the Parliament shall resolve upon in this weighty matter.'

"Another member followed and said,--

"'Whatever be the cause, two summers are passed over, but we are not
saved.  Our victories (the price of blood invaluable) so gallantly
gotten, and (which is more pity) so graciously bestowed, seem to have
been put into a bag with holes; what we won one time, we lost
another; the treasure is exhausted, the country wasted, a summer's
victory has proved but a winter's story; the game, however, shut up
with autumn, was to be played again the next spring, as if the blood
that had been shed were only to manure the field of war for a more
plentiful crop of contention.  Men's hearts have failed them with the
observation of these things.'

"The cause General Cromwell deemed to be the multiplication of
commanders.  The remedy, that members of both Houses should _deny
themselves_ the right to appoint _themselves_ to posts of military
command.  The 'Self-Denying Ordinance' and the 'New Model' of the
army were proposed, and soon passed the House of Commons.  The Lords
debated and rejected it; but this day the Commons have appointed Sir
Thomas Fairfax commander-in-chief, superseding Lord Essex.  And few
doubt but they will carry it through.

"Thus may, we trust, a few vigorous strokes bring peace; and peace,
order.

"But meanwhile, during these dark January days, another conflict has
ended; on Tower Hill.

"The fallen archbishop, whose name was a terror for so many years in
every Puritan home in England, there, on this 10th of January, laid
down his life heroically and calmly as a martyr, which he surely
believed himself to be.  He read a prayer he had composed for the
occasion.  I grieve to say, the scaffold was crowded, not with his
friends.  He said he would have wished an empty scaffold, but if it
could not be so, God's will be done; he was more willing to go out of
the world than any could be to send him.  A helpless, forsaken old
man, heavily laden with bodily infirmities, four years a prisoner,
uneasily dragged from trial to trial, I never heard that his courage
failed.  I would they had let him die in quiet.  But Sir John
Clotworthy, over zealous, as I think, asked him what text was most
comfortable to a man in his departure.  'Cupio dissolviet esse cum
Christo,' said the archbishop.  'That is a good desire,' was the
rejoinder; 'but there must be a foundation for that desire, an
assurance.'  'No man can express it,' was the calm reply, 'it must be
found within.'  'Yet it is founded on a word, and that word should be
known.'  'It is the knowledge of Jesus Christ,' said the archbishop,
'and that alone;' and to finish the discussion, he turned to the
headsman, gave him some money, and said, 'Here, honest friend, God
forgive thee, and do thy office on me in mercy;' and so, after a
short prayer, his head was struck off at one blow.  The crowd
dispersed, and the fatal hill was left once more silent and deserted,
with the scaffold and the Tower facing each other, the weary prison
of so many, and the blood-stained key, which had for so many unbarred
its heavy gates, and also, we may trust, another gate, from inside
which our whole earth seems but a prison chamber.

"If we look at the world only as divided into _parties_, truly this
death of his were worth to those who think with him, more than many
victories in Parliament or in the field.  But if we think of the One
Kingdom, surely we may rejoice that one who, as it seems to us, erred
much in head and heart, and did no little hurt, came right at last,
and took refuge with Him who receives us not as Archbishops, or
Presbyterians or Independents, but as repentant, weary, and
heavy-laden men and women.

"Some few friends reverently buried him in Barking Church to the
words of the old burial-service, prohibited by the Parliament a few
days before.  All honour to them."

Said Aunt Gretel, when my Father had finished reading this letter,--

"It is a great pity the martyrs should not all be on the right side.
It would make it so very much easier to know which is the right."

"Martyrs on the wrong side," exclaimed Aunt Dorothy, indignantly;
"you might as well talk of orthodox heretics."

But my Father replied,--

"If obedience is better than sacrifice, then obedience is the best
part of the sacrifice of martyrdom; and may we not trust that the
Master may accept the act of obedience even of some who misread the
word of command?"

The next day he left us for London, and we saw him no more for many
months.

On the 29th of January, commissioners of the Parliament and of the
king met at Uxbridge to negotiate for peace.  But they did not get on
at all.  Dr. Stewart syllogistically defended the divine right of
Episcopacy, and Dr. Henderson the divine right of the Presbyterial
government.  My Lord Hertford and my Lord Pembroke would have passed
this by, to proceed to the particular points to be settled; but the
divines declined to be hurried, insisting on disputing
syllogistically "as became scholars."  So, after twenty days, Dr.
Stewart and Dr. Henderson, being each confirmed in their conviction
of his own orthodoxy, the commissioners separated with no further
result.

One evening, indeed, it is said, the king had consented to honourable
terms; but in the night a letter came from Montrose announcing
Royalist victories, and in the morning His Majesty retracted the
concessions of the evening.

Meanwhile the two armies continued fighting; not in two large bodies,
but in scattered skirmishes, sieges, surprises, all over the country,
making well-nigh every quiet home in England a sharer in the misery
and tumult of the war.

The moral difference between the forces of the Parliament and the
king became, it was said, more obvious.  It could scarce be
otherwise.  War must make men firmer in virtues or more desperate in
sin.  Men must get less and less human with years of plundering, and
indulgence in every selfish sinful pleasure.  No good woman durst
venture near the Royalist army, my Father said, and vice and
profaneness were scarcely punished; whereas in the Parliament camp,
as in a well-ordered city, passage was safe, and traffic free.  It
was the armies of the great Gustavus and that of Wallenstein over
again.  I think it would be blasphemy to deem such differences can
have no weight in a world where God is King.

I wonder if it can be that, after all, it leads to more good to fight
out the great battles of right and wrong in this way, than
syllogistically, in Dr. Stewart and Dr. Henderson's way.  The logical
battles making good men fierce, and not hurting the bad at all; the
battles for life and death making good men nobler, at all events,
even if they make the bad men worse.  Making good men better seems
the end of so many things that God permits or orders in this world.
And as to making bad men worse, it seems as if that could not be
helped, because everything does that until they change the direction
they are going in, which great troubles and dangers sometimes startle
them to do.  If this be so, the pain and misery and death would cease
to be so perplexing.  Aunt Dorothy used to say, a Church without a
rod in her hand is a Church without sinews.  But a Church with a rod
seems sometimes as blind and severe in using it as the world.  For
which reason, I suppose, the best periods of Church history seem
often to be those in which the world holds the rod instead of the
Church.  And a war may sometimes be as effectual an instrument of
godly discipline as a synod.


LETTICE'S DIARY.

"_June_ 14_th_, 1645, _Davenant Hall, Three o'clock in the
morning_.--We came home yesterday, and I grudge to sleep away any of
these first hours in the old house.  It is like travelling into some
marvellous foreign country, to rise at an unwonted hour in the
morning.  The sky looks so much higher before the roof of daylight
has quite spread over it.  For after all, daylight is a roof shutting
us in to our own green sunny home of earth.  And that is partly what
makes the night so awful.  We stand roofless at night, open to all
the other worlds, with no walls or bounds on any side.  And at dawn
something of the boundlessness and awfulness are still left.  With a
majestical slow pomp the morning sweeps the veil of sunlight over
star after star, falling in grand solemn folds of purple and crimson
as it touches the edge of our world, until the great spaces of the
upper worlds are all shut out, and we are shut in with our own kindly
sun, and our own many-coloured fleeting clouds, and our own green
earth.

"Then the other aspect of the dawn begins.  Her first steps and
movements are all grand and silent.  But when the awful infinity
beyond is shut out, and we are left alone, face to face with her, she
changes altogether.

"The stars pass away in silence.  But the day awakes with all kinds
of joyful sounds.  The clouds are transformed from solemn purple
banners in some great martial or sacred procession to royal or bridal
draperies.  They garland the earth with roses, they strew pearls and
diamonds; they spread the path of the new sun with cloth of gold.
The whole world, earth, and sky, seems to blossom into colour, like a
flower from its sheath.  Every leaf of the limes outside my window,
every spike of the horse-chestnuts seems to awake with a flutter of
joy.

"It seems as if infinity came back to us in a new way.  For the
infinite spaces of night, we have the infinite numbers of day.
Instead of the heavy masses of foliage waving an hour or two dimly
since against the sky, there is a countless multitude of leaves
fluttering in and out of the sunlight, a countless multitude of birds
singing, chirping, twittering, among the branches, a countless throng
of insects hovering, wheeling, darting in and out among the leaves;
there are the infinite varieties of colour on every blade of grass,
on every blossom, on every insect's wing.

"It is a wonderful joy to be here again.  Every creature seems to
welcome me.  I seem to long to speak to every one of them, and just
add a little drop of happiness to the happiness of them all.  I want
to take all of them, in some way, like little children, to my heart
and kiss them.

"Olive said that feeling was really the longing to be folded to the
Heart which is at the heart of all; but nearer us than any other
creature.

"'_He fell on his neck and kissed him_.'

"She thought it meant something like that.

"Leaning out of my window, looking down from the slopes of the Wolds,
as we do across the long space of fens which stretches before us like
a sea, I see the gables of Netherby.

"Olive is there asleep.

"Olive, and Mistress Dorothy and Mistress Gretel.

"And here, my mother and I.

"Fathers and brothers all at the war.  In sight, yet how sadly out of
reach!  This terrible war that seems as if it would never end.
Things have not been going on quite so prosperously with us lately;
although many strong places in the North are still loyal; and all the
West is ours, and much of Wales.  A new vigour seems to have come
into the rebel councils.  They say the soul of them all is this
Oliver Cromwell, that he and his friends have brought in some new
regulation, called by some of their unpleasant Parliament names.
They call everything a covenant or an ordinance, as if it were all
out of the Bible.  They call this the Self-Denying Ordinance.  The
meaning of it seems to be that they are all to deny themselves to
give Mr. Cromwell the real command.  At least, Harry thinks so.  And
he looks gloomily on our affairs.  He was at home before we came, to
make the place ready for us.  And he only left yesterday morning to
rejoin the king's army, which is in Leicestershire.  Not so very far
off.

"I wonder, if there were a battle, if we should hear the sound of it!

"A few days since the troops stormed Leicester, and sacked it.  Harry
would not tell us much about it.  He said it was too much after the
fashion of those dreadful German wars of religion, which Prince
Rupert has taught our men to imitate too well.

"Poor wretched city!  We could not hear anything of that.  Groans and
even helpless cries for pity do not reach far.  At least, not on
earth.  I suppose nothing reaches heaven sooner.

"I wish that thought had not come into my head about hearing the roar
of a battle if there were one.  Since it came, I cannot help
listening, through all the sweet cheerful country-sounds, the
twitterings of the swallows under the eaves, the soft cadences of the
thrushes, the stirring of the grasses, for something in the distance!

"If we did hear anything, it would be very, very far off, fainter
than the fluttering of the leaves: like the moan of distant thunder.

"In summer days there are often mysterious, far-off sounds one cannot
account for.  And now I can do nothing but listen for it.

"For almost the last thing Harry said when he went away was, that
there would be a battle, probably, before long, and if a battle,
probably a great battle.

"The forces are gathering and approaching each other.

"He took leave of us gayly, my Mother and me.  But ten minutes
afterwards, he galloped back to the place in the outer field where I
was standing looking after him (my Mother having gone to be alone, as
she always does when Harry leaves us).  His face had lost all the
gaiety, and he said,--

"'Lettice, if things were not to prosper with the king, and the
rebels were to attack this house, I think it would be better not
attempt to stand a siege.  The house extends too far to be defended,
except with a larger garrison than you could muster.  And the country
is against us.  If it came to the very worst, Mr. Drayton is a
generous enemy and a gentleman, and would give you safe harbour for a
time.  If all on their side or ours had been like the Draytons, there
need have been no war.  You may tell them that I said so, if you
like, if it ever comes to that.'

"'Comes to _what_, Harry?' I said, shuddering.

"He tried to smile.  But then, his countenance suddenly changing, he
said,--

"'Lettice, we must think of all possibilities.  You are young, and my
Mother is used to lean on others.'

"'Only on _you_, Harry,' I said.

"'Yes,' he said, hurriedly; 'too much, perhaps.  But trust the
Draytons, if necessary, Lettice.  They will never do anything unjust
or ungenerous.  If you ask their advice, they will advise you for
your good, though it cut their own throats or broke their own hearts.'

"Then, after a moment's pause, he said,--

"'It is never any good to try to say out a farewell, Lettice.  If one
had years to say it in, there would always be something left unsaid.
Partings are always sudden, whether we are snatched from each other
as if by pirates in the dead of night, or watch the lessening sail
till it becomes a speck in the horizon.  The last step is always a
plunge into a gulf.  But, Lettice,' he added, lowering his voice,
'death itself is not really a gulf, only to those on this edge of it.
Do not tell my Mother I came back.  If she asks you anything about
it, tell her I never went away with a lighter heart.  For I see less
and less what the end will be, or what to wish for, and I am content
more and more to make the day's march, and leave the conduct of the
campaign to God.'

"And he rode off, looking like a prince, and I watched him till he
disappeared behind the trees.  He looked back once again and waved
his plumed hat to me, and then galloped out of sight in a moment.

"I crept back by a side-door near the stable, that my Mother might
not see me; and Cæsar, Harry's dog, made a dismal whining, and
crouched and fawned on me, so that it went to my heart not to be able
to grant him what he asked for so plainly in his poor dumb way, and
set him free to follow Harry.

"_June_ 14, _Ten o'clock at night_.--Some men who came from the North
this evening, say there has been fighting towards the North-west,
somewhere on the borders of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire The
roar of the guns began early in the day, and then there was sharp
interrupted firing, which went on till the afternoon, when it seemed
gradually to cease.

"All day it has been going on.  All this quiet summer day.  My Father
there, perhaps, and Harry certainly.  And nothing to be heard until
to-morrow.

"My Mother will not seek rest to-night.  I see the lamp in her
oratory-window.  And far off across the fields, another light in the
gable of old Netherby, where Olive Drayton used to sleep.  It is some
comfort to think we are watching together.  Olive is so good.  And
she will be sure to remember us.

"_June_ 20.--We heard before the morrow.  The next morning, when the
dawn began to break again, a horseman galloped hastily up to the
door.  I was in my mother's room; we were both dressed.  We had
neither of us slept.  I looked out.  It was Roger Drayton.  My Mother
sat up on the bed, when I had persuaded her to rest.

"'I will go down and ask,' I said.

"'We will go together, Lettice,' said she.

"Then came a cry from one of the maids.

"'Perhaps it is poor Margery,' I said.  For Margery had come to stay
with us since we returned.  It comforted us to keep together, all of
us who had kindred at the field.

"My Mother shook her head.

"She knelt down one moment, and drew me down beside her, by the
bedside, heart against heart, and murmured,--

"'Thy will, not mine!  Oh, help us to say it.  For His sake who said
it first.'

"Then she rose, and with a firm step went down into the hall with me.

"She held out her hand to Roger when she saw him.

"His face spoke evil-tidings only too plainly.

"'There has been a battle,' she said.

"'At Naseby, Lady Lucy,' he replied.

"'Was the victory for the king or not?' she asked; unable to utter
the question uppermost on her heart and mine.

"'There was hard fighting on both sides' he replied.  'The king and
Prince Rupert have gone westward towards Wales.'

"I could hear that his voice trembled.

"'Then the king has lost,' she said.  'But it was not to tell us this
you came.  Who is hurt?'

"He hesitated an instant.

"'It is Harry!' she exclaimed.  'You have come to summon us to him.
Is the wound severe?  Is there hope?  Can we go to him at once?'

"There was a pause, and a dreadful irresponsive silence between each
of her questions.  He answered only the last,--

"'He will be brought to you, Lady Lucy.  They are bringing him now.'

"At once the whole depth of her sorrow opened beneath her.  Not an
instant too soon.  For the words had scarcely left Roger's lips when
the heavy regular tramp of men bearing a burden echoed through the
silence of the morning outside, and paused at the porch.

"My Mother took my hand, and led me forward.

"'He must not come home unwelcomed!' she said.

"For an instant I feared she had not yet grasped Roger's meaning.
For this awful burden they were bearing was _not Harry_, I knew.  No
welcomes would ever greet him more.  But I had not fathomed her
sorrow nor her strength.

"She met the bearers at the door.  They stood with uncovered heads,
having laid down what they bore on the stone seat of the porch.  They
were mostly old servants of the family.

"'My friends, I thank you,' she said.  'You have done all you could.
But not there.  On the place of honour.  He was worthy.'

"And she motioned them to the dais at the head of the Hall, where the
heads of our house are wont to receive the homage of their retainers.

"Silently they bore him there, and laid their sacred burden gently
down.  She thanked them again for their good service.  And then as
silently they withdrew.  I saw many a rough hand lifted to brush away
the tears.  But she did not weep.  She stood motionless, with clasped
hands, beside the bier, and murmured to herself again and again, in a
low voice,--

"'He was worthy.'

"Then, turning with her own sweet, never-forgotten courtesy to Roger,
she held out her hand to him again, and said,--

"'You did kindly to come and tell us.  He always honoured you.'

"He held her hand, and said rapidly, as if uncertain of the firmness
of his own voice,--

"'I was near him at the last, and he made me promise to see you, or I
could not have dared to come.'

"She looked up with trembling, parted lips, listening for more.

"'He made me promise to tell you he had little pain and no fear,'
Roger said, in a low voice.  'And he gave me this for you, and said,
"Tell my mother these words of hers have often helped me to believe,
through all these evil days, that God is living and commanding still.
But, more than all words, tell her my faith in God has been kept
unquenched by the thought of _herself_."'

"She took the packet from him.  It was a little book, with Scriptures
and prayers written in it by her own hand, given to Harry when he was
a boy.  On the crimson silk cover she had embroidered for it, was one
stain of a deeper crimson.  As she opened it, a little well-worn leaf
dropped out, with a child's prayer on it she had written for him when
first he went to school.

"When she saw it, the thought of the hero dying on the battle-field
for the good cause vanished, and in its place came the memory of the
little hands clasped on her knees in prayer.

"And withdrawing her hand from Roger, a sudden quiver passed through
all her frame, and throwing her arms around me, she sobbed,--

"'My boy, my boy!  O Lettice, it is Harry we have lost!  It is our
Harry!'

"When I looked up again Roger was at the door.  It seemed to me, from
the glance he gave he was waiting to say something more.  And I
resolved, cost what it might, to hear it.  We led my Mother into the
nearest chamber, and then leaving her with the maidens, I went back
to the Hall.

"Roger was still waiting in the porch.

"He came forward when he saw me.

"'Did he say anything more?' I asked.

"He hesitated an instant.

"He said, 'The Draytons and the Davenants might have to combat one
another in these evil times, but that we should never distrust each
other, and that he never had distrusted one of us.'

"He said so to me, the last thing before he left us.  I said; 'And
that was all?'

"'The battle swept on; I had to mount again,' he said, 'and I could
not leave my men.'

"'You saw him no more,' I said.  'You could not even stay to watch
his last breath!'

"The moment I had uttered them I felt there was something like
reproach in my words, and I would have recalled them if I could.

"'I saw him no more until the fighting was over,' he said.  'Then I
came back and found him; and we brought him home.  It was all we
could do,' he added; 'and it was little indeed.'

"'I am sure you did all you could, Roger,' I said; for I feared I had
wounded him.  'I should always be sure you would do all you could for
any of us.'

"'Should you, indeed!' he said.  'God knows I would.'

"And there was a tremor and a depth of pleased surprise in his tones
that startled me, and I could not look up.

"'Would to God I could do anything to comfort Lady Lucy or you,' he
said.

"'No one can comfort her, Roger,' I said; and the tears I had been
trying to put back choked my voice, 'Harry was everything to her.  He
was everything to us all.  No one will ever comfort her more.'

"'_You_ will comfort her, Lettice,' he said, with that quiet
commanding way he has sometimes.  'God gives it you to do; and He
will give you to do it.'

"And as he ceased speaking, and I went back to my Mother, I felt as
if there were indeed a strength through which I could do anything
that had to be done.

"_July_ 1.--Sir Launcelot Trevor has come with tidings of my Father
and my brothers.

"They are in the West, save the two younger, who went across the
Borders after the battle of Marston Moor, and have joined Montrose in
the Scottish Highlands, deeming that the king's cause will best rally
there.

"The good cause is low; lower than ever before.  Soon after that
fatal day at Naseby the town of Bridgewater surrendered to General
Fairfax.

"Prince Rupert (with such courage as one might expect, I think, from
a chief of plunderers) thereon counselled the king to make peace.
But His Majesty, never so majestic as in adversity, said, 'That
although, as a soldier and a statesman, he saw no prospect but of
ruin, yet, as a Christian, he knew God would never forsake his cause,
and suffer rebels to prosper; that he knew his obligations to be,
both in conscience and honour, neither to abandon God's cause, to
injure his successors, or forsake his friends.  Nevertheless, for
himself (he said) he looked for nothing but to die with honour and a
good conscience; and to his friends he had little prospect to offer,
but to die in a good cause, or, what was worse, to live as miserable
in maintaining it as the violence of insulting rebels could make
them.'

"What promises, or royal orders, could bind men, with any soul in
them, to their sovereign as words like these?  Least of all those
who, like us, are bound to the cause by having given up our best for
it.  Nothing, my Mother says, makes a thing so precious to us as what
we suffer for it.  Indeed, nothing now seems able to kindle her to
anything like life, save aught associated with that sacred cause for
which Harry died.

"Sir Launcelot saith, moreover, that the rebels have been base enough
to lay bare to the eyes of the common people of London the private
letters from His Majesty to the queen, found in his cabinet on the
field at Naseby.  And that these letters contain things which have
even lost the king some old loyal friends.  Sorry friendship, indeed,
or loyalty, to be moved by discoveries, made only through treachery
and breach of confidence, which no gentleman would practice to save
his life.

"But there is one thing Sir Launcelot hinted to me which I dare not
breathe to my Mother.  He said there was reason enough why Roger was
near Harry when he fell; for it was by the hand of one of the
Ironsides, beyond doubt, that he died.

"But never by Roger's hand!  Or, if possibly such a curse could have
been suffered to fall on one like Roger, it must have been unknown to
him.  Of this I am as sure as of my life.

"Sir Launcelot said that Roger's hand was wont to be a little too
ready to be raised.  Ungenerous of him to say it, and yet too true.
Slowly roused; but once roused, blind to all results.

"How bitter his vain repentance would be if this terrible thing were
possible, and he once came to know it.

"How bitter and how vain!

"But even if it were possible, and he never knew it, but we knew it,
what a gulf from henceforth for ever between us and him!

"I cannot breathe this to my Mother.  And yet, if Sir Launcelot's
fears could have any ground, it would seem a treachery, if ever Roger
came to us again to let her touch in welcome the hand that dealt that
blow!

"I know not what to do.  It is the first perplexity I ever knew in
which I could not fly to her for aid and counsel.

"What a child I have been.

"What a child I am!

"Can it be possible that our Lord thought of His disciples being
perplexed and bewildered at all, as I am, when, just before He went
away, He called them 'little children?'  Can it be possible that He
meant, Come to me, as little children to their mother; when you want
wisdom, come to Me!"




CHAPTER XI.

OLIVE'S STORY.

The first trustworthy tidings we had of the battle of Naseby were
from Dr. Antony.  I saw him coming hastily across the fields from the
direction of Davenant Hall.

It was very early in the morning.  The village had been stirring
through the previous afternoon with uneasy rumours, and I had not
slept.  I was watching the light in the window of Lady Lucy's
oratory, and thinking how she and Lettice had watched there together
that terrible night so long ago, saying collects for Roger, and how
Lettice had hastened to us in the morning, on her white palfrey with
the welcome tidings that Sir Launcelot would recover.  And now how
far we were from each other!  What a sea between us!  Two moats, (the
moonlight was shining on ours just below me,) drawbridges, and
fortifications.  But deeper and stronger than all the moats and walls
in the world lay between us the memories of those bitter years of
war, and ever-widening misconception and division.  Yet I felt sure
Lettice loved us still.

And as I was thus looking and thinking, I saw Dr. Antony coming
hastily down the road from the stile which led across the fields to
the Hall, where I had parted from Harry Davenant that night when he
brought the tidings of Lord Strafford's execution, and would not come
in.

My first impulse was to rush down the stairs and unbar the door.  But
many things held me back.  A presentiment that the news he brought
might be such as there was no need to fore-date by hurrying to meet
it; an uncomfortable recollection of Job Forster's letter, and of
that conversation in which I had said nothing right.

I went, therefore, to summon Aunt Dorothy as head of the household.
She had so many preparations to make, that Dr. Antony's hand was on
the great house-bell long before she was ready.  Nothing so slow she
said as hurry, besides its being a proof of the impatience of the
flesh.  She would even fold up scrupulously the clothes she took off,
faithful to her maxim, that we should always leave everything as if
we might never return to it.

The bell rang again.

I went to see if Aunt Gretel was more capable of being hastened.
She, dear soul, was sympathizing, excited, and agitated beyond my
utmost desires, for she could lay her hands on nothing she wanted.
So that I had to return to Aunt Dorothy, who, by that time, was
ready; and feeling how cold and trembling my hand was as she took it
to lead me downstairs, she laid her other on it with an unwonted
demonstration of tenderness, and said,--

"Child, we can neither hasten the Lord's steps nor make them linger.
But He will do right."  There was strength in her words, but almost
as much to me in the tones, which were tremulous, and in the cold
touch of her hand, which showed that the blood at her heart stood as
still as mine.

We went down together in time to meet Dr. Antony just as he entered
the Hall.

My Father was wounded, not dangerously, only so as to render him
incapable of further service in the field, at least at present.  His
right arm was broken.  Roger was coming home with him.

I wondered that Dr. Antony seemed so heavy at heart, to bring tidings
which made my heart leap with thankfulness.  What could be better
than that Roger was unhurt, and that my Father had received a slight
wound just sufficient to keep him at home with us?

Then it flashed on me in what direction I had seen him coming.

"Dr. Antony!" I said, "there is sorrow for the Davenants!"  And then
he told us how Harry Davenant had fallen.

We had little time for bewailing him, for the household had to be
roused, and refreshment and a bed prepared for my Father.

I had scarce ever seen Roger so cast down as he was about Harry
Davenant's death.  One of the noblest gentlemen the king had on his
side, he thought so pure, and true, and brave.  If all had been like
him there had been no war, and no need for it.  "And," said Roger, "I
always looked for the day to come when Harry Davenant would
understand us.  For we were fighting for the same thing, though on
opposite sides--for England and her old laws and liberties; for a
righteous kingdom.  And I always thought one day he would see where
it could be found, and where it could _not_."

Roger could not stay with us long.  But before he went, Harry
Davenant was buried, very quietly in the old vault of the Davenants
in Netherby church.

It was at night, for the liturgy had been abolished six months
before, and was unlawful, and the Vicar risked something in suffering
it to be read even by Lady Lucy's chaplain, as it was.  And we
honoured him and Placidia for the venture.  Roger had asked to be one
of the bearers.  Aunt Gretel, Rachel Forster, and I, waited for them
in the church-porch.  Slowly through the silent summer-night came the
heavy tramp of the bearers, until they paused and laid their burden
down under the old Lych Gate.  Then, while they came up the
churchyard, we crept quietly back into the church, dark in all parts
except where the funeral torches lit up a little space around the
open vault, and threw strange flickering shadows on the recumbent
forms of the dead of Harry Davenant's race, knight and dame, priest
and crusader.  It made them look as if they moved, to meet him; for
none of the living men of his house were there, although of all his
race none had fallen more bravely.

Behind the bier followed four women closely veiled.  The first, by
the height and movement, I knew was his Mother, and at her side, as
the sacred words were read, knelt Lettice.  I think in times of
overwhelming joy or sorrow, when no words could fathom the depths of
the heart, when almost every human voice would fall outside it
altogether, or jar rudely if it reached within, there is a wonderful
comfort in the calm of those ancient immutable liturgies.  They are a
channel worn deep by the joys and sorrows of ages.  Their
changelessness links them to eternity, and seems thus to make room
for the sorrow which overflows the narrow measures of thought and
time.

"Delivered from the burden of the flesh," "are in joy and liberty,"
"not to be sorry as men without hope for them that sleep in Him, that
when we shall depart this life, we may rest on Him as our hope is,
this our brother doth."  How tranquilly the simple words sank into
the very depths of the heart.

All the more precious and sacred, doubtless, for the tender sanctity
which ever invests a proscribed religion.

Not that our Puritan faith is without its liturgies.  Older than
England, and older than Christendom, fused in the burning heart of
the king of old, warrior, patriot, exile, conqueror, and penitent.
But it is a perilous thing to make services like those of the Church
of England, dear enough already to every faithful heart who has used
them from infancy, dearer still by making them dangerous.  I never
knew how I loved them till we lost them.

And as that night the sacred, simple, time-honoured words fell like
heavenly music among the shadows of the dim old church, I felt as if
the decree which made them unlawful, and the grave of the brother
slain at Naseby, were slowly mining a gulf which could never be
crossed between the Draytons and the Davenants.

Alas, alas for truth! or at least for us who fain would ever
recognise and be loyal to her, when she changes raiment with error,
when the crown of thorns is transferred to the brows of her enemies,
and the martyrs are on the wrong side.  But such transformations have
not hitherto lasted long, and meantime the crown of thorns may
imprint its lessons even on those who wear it by mistake.

There was no sound of loud weeping.  But when, for the last time,
before the coffin was lowered out of sight, Lady Lucy knelt once more
to embrace it, she did not rise until Lettice went gently to lift her
thence; when it was found that she had fainted, and had to be borne
away.  But for this, Lettice would probably never have known we were
there.  I went at Roger's bidding to see if I could render any
assistance.  And then for a moment Lettice drew aside her veil, and
with a suppressed sob clasped my hands in hers, and murmured,--

"Thank God, Olive.  I knew you would all feel with us.  Pray for her
and for me, Olive; we have no one like him left."

Then she kissed me once, and hastened on after the rest; as they
silently went back through the fields, bearing instead of the corpse
of the son the almost lifeless form of the mother.

The day after the funeral Roger left us to go back to the army.  I
told him what Lettice had said.  And he seemed more hopeful than he
had been for a long time about her not misunderstanding or forgetting
us.

"We must never distrust her again, Olive," he said.  "She has trusted
us all through."

It was strange that he should thus admonish me, for it was only Roger
who ever had distrusted her caring still for us.  But such little
oblivions are the common lot of sisters situated as I was.  I was far
too satisfied with his conclusion to dispute as to the way he reached
it.

Yet for many weeks after he left we heard nothing from any one of the
Davenants.

Sir Launcelot Trevor came and stayed there some days at the beginning
of July; and again I was tormented with fears that he had been
poisoning their hearts with some evil reports of us.  And as I sat
watching by my Father's bed-side, many a time I rejoiced that Roger
was away, so that he could not share my anxieties.

It so happened that most of the nursing fell on me, to my great
thankfulness.  Aunt Dorothy's sphere was governing every one outside,
and Aunt Gretel's more especially preparing food and cooling drinks.
Dr. Antony was pleased to say there was something in my step which
fitted a sick-room.  Quiet and quick, and not hasty.  And in my
voice, he fancied, too; cheerful, he said, as a bird singing, yet
soft and low.

Be that as it might, my Father naturally liked best to have me about
him; me and Rachel Forster, in whose presence he found that repose
she seemed to breathe on every one.  As if she had wings invisible,
which enfolded a warm, quiet space around her, like a hen brooding
over her chickens.  Rachel Forster and Lady Lucy, of all the women I
ever knew, had most of this.  And my Father felt it.

One day Rachel had a letter from Job, written a few days after the
battle of Naseby.

"We began marching at three o'clock in the morning of the 14th of
June," he wrote.  "The day before we, the Ironsides, had come with
General Cromwell from the eastern counties to our army.  They had
gathered after him like Abi-Ezer after Gideon.  The horse already
there gave a mighty shout for joy of his coming to them.  By five we
were at Naseby, and saw the heads of the enemy coming over the hill.
Such a thing as they call a hill in these parts.  A broad up and down
moor.  We fought it out in a fallow field, a mile broad, near the
top, from early morning till afternoon.  It began somewhat like the
day at Marston Moor.  They came on first up the hill.  Prince Rupert
and the plunderers were on our left, charging swift and steady,
crying out: 'For God and Queen Mary.'  'God our strength,' cried we.
They broke our left, though this we did not know till afterwards.
Our right, that is we, General Cromwell's horse, fell on their left
and drove them back, flying down the hill through the furze-bushes
and rabbit-warrens.  The main body, horse and foot, fought hard,
breaking and gathering again, like the sea at Lizard at turn of tide.
This raging back and forward lasted till Prince Rupert's horse and
ours came back from the chase.

"The difference between keeping the Ten Commandments and breaking
them tells in the long run.  Plundering, firing villages, and
slaughtering innocents, shrinks up the courage of men after a time.
Prince Rupert's men could charge to the end like devils, but they
could not rally like ours.  Neither the prince's nor the king's word
can bind their men together again to stand a second shock, as
Oliver's word can rally the Ironsides.  This difference turned the
day.  The difference between keeping the Ten Commandments (as far as
mortal men can) and breaking them.  The king rode about fearless as a
lion to the last.  'One charge more and we recover the day,' quoth
he.  But there was no power in his word to rally them, and the sun
was still high when he and they fled headlong into Leicester, and we
after them.

"But the Ten Commandments fought against them there too.  'The stars
in their courses fought against Sisera.'"  There was no night's rest
for the king in the houses he had seen rifled and dishonoured but a
few days before, and never lifted up his voice to hinder it.  And on
and on he had to fly, to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Wales, and who knows
where?  The plunder of Leicester lay strewn about the fallow field at
Naseby, where we camped that night, with six hundred of the
plunderers dead.  Yet God forbid I slander the dead.  They fought
like true men.  And brave, young Master Harry Davenant was among
them.  Belike the true men fell; and the plunderers fled off safe, as
such vermin do.  Until the Lord and the Ten Commandments take them in
hand and bring them to account, whether in the body or out of the
body.

"A hundred Irish Papist women were found hanging about the
battle-field, armed with long knives, and speaking no Christian
tongue.  Poor benighted savages!  Very strange to think such have
husbands, and children, and hearts, and souls.  Yet belike so had the
Canaanites.  These things are dark to me.  I have wrestled sore there
about, but can get no light on them.

"Two or three days after the battle a young gentleman, a preacher,
aged some thirty years, came amongst the army.  His name was Richard
Baxter, a puny feeble body, marked with small-pox, and bowed and worn
at thirty like an old man.  Yet had the puny body good quality of
courage in it.  Courage of the soul, burning out of his dark eyes.
Courage, surely, he had of his kind.  For he came amongst our men,
flushed and strong from the victorious fight, and exhorted us as if
we had been a pack of school-boys.  Called us--the Ironsides, and
Whalley's and Rue's regiments of horse--'hot-headed, self-conceited
sectaries,' Anabaptists, Antinomians, and what not--us who had been
fighting the Lord's battles for him and the like of him these two
years!  Took our camp jokes ill, about 'Scotch _dryvines_,'
'Dissembling men at Westminster,' and '_priest_byters.'  Called us
profane; us who had paid twelve-pence fine for one careless oath ever
since we came together.

"Argued with us, dividing his discourse into as many heads as
Leviathan, and using words from every heathen tongue under the sun.
If we had the best of it, called us levellers and fire-brands.  If we
were silent under his flood of talk, thought we were beaten, as if to
have the best in talk were to win the day.  As if an honest
Englishman was to change his mind, because he could not, all in a
moment, see his way out of Mr. Baxter's Presbyterial puzzles.
Scarcely grateful, I think, seeing our men had once asked him to be
their chaplain.  Some of us reminded him of it, and he said he was
sorry he had refused, or we should not have come to what we are.  And
he rebuked us sore, and called us out of our names in a gentlemanly
way, in Latin and Greek, as if we had been plunderers and malignants;
us of General Cromwell's own regiment.  Of his courage there can
after this, I think, be no doubt.  Nor forsooth of our patience.  And
he hath gone back to Coventry and spoken slanders of the 'sad state'
of the army!

"Sad state of the army indeed, where every morsel we put in our
mouths is paid for, through which every modest wench, if she were as
fair as Sarah, can walk, if she had need, as safe as past her
father's door.  An army which had just won Naseby, by the strength of
the Lord and the Ten Commandments--where not an oath is heard--where
psalms and prayers rise night and morning as from the old Temple--and
where a young gentleman like Mr. Richard Baxter, could come and go,
and call the soldiers what ill names he chose, without hurt.  For a
godly young gentleman we all hold him to be, and a scholar, and
honour him in our souls as such, and for the chastening hand of the
Lord on the poor suffering, puny, brave body of him, although in some
ways he and the likes of him cost me more wrestlings than even the
Irish Papist women with their knives."

Wherever General Cromwell was throughout that summer, there continued
to be a series of successes.  Job's letters and Roger's were records
of castles stormed or surrendered, sieges raised and troops
dispersed, in Devonshire from Salisbury to Bovey Tracey.

On the 4th of August, Roger wrote of the dispersing of the poor
mistaken Clubmen; a new force of peasants who had gathered to the
number of two thousand on Hambledon Hill, in Surrey.  Blind, as my
Father says peasant armies mostly are.  Aunt Gretel turned pale when
she heard of them, and talked of dreadful peasant wars in Dr.
Luther's time in Saxony; Dr. Luther dearly loving and fighting, in
his way, for the peasants, but not being able to make them understand
him, like Oliver Cromwell now.

These poor fellows had gathered like brave men in the West to defend
their homes from Lord Goring's band--"the child-eaters" as some
called them, the most lawless and merciless among the Cavalier
troops, surpassing even Prince Rupert's, whom one of their own called
afterwards, "terrible in plunder, and resolute in running away."

  "If ye offer to plunder or take our cattle,
  Be you assured we'll give you battle,"

was the clubmen's motto.  A good one enough.  But in time they became
hopelessly involved in political plots, of which they understood
nothing, demanded to garrison the coast-towns, picked out and killed
peaceable Posts, fired on messengers of peace sent by General
Cromwell, who had much pity for them, and finally had to be fallen
upon and beaten from the field.  "I believe," the General wrote to
Sir Thomas Fairfax, "not twelve of them were killed, but very many
were cut, and three hundred taken--poor silly creatures, whom if you
please to let me send home, they promise to be very dutiful for time
to come, and will be hanged before they come out again."  So men and
leaders were taken, and the army dispersed, and came not out again;
and the land all around had quiet.

But, as Job Forster said, it was the Ten Commandments that fought
best for us.

The king's cabinet at Naseby, with all the false and traitorous
letters found therein in his handwriting, did more to undermine his
power than a hundred battles.  For in it was shown how, while
solemnly promising to make no treaties with Papists, and speaking
words of peace at Uxbridge, he was negotiating for six thousand
Papist soldiers from Ireland, and for more than ten thousand from
across the seas; that he had only agreed to call the Parliament
Parliament "in the treating with them, in the sense that it was not
the same to call them so, and to acknowledge them so to be."  He
spoke, moreover, of the gentlemen who gathered around him loyally at
Oxford, as "the mongrel Parliament."  So that many of his old friends
were sorely aggrieved, and many neutrals began to see that, call men
by what titles you will, there can be no loyalty where there is no
truth.

In the North affairs went not so prosperously, though there, too,
reckless ravaging wrought its own terrible cure in time.  For six
weeks Montrose with his Irish, and Highlanders, and some English
adventurers, laid Argyleshire waste, killing every man who could bear
arms, plundering and burning every cottage.  It was not like the war
in England, save where Prince Rupert and Lord Goring brought the
savage customs of foreign warfare in on us.  It was a war of clans,
bent on extirpating each other like so many wild beasts, and of
mountain-robbers set on carrying away as much spoil as they could
from the Lowland cities, and on inflicting as much misery as they
could by the way to inspire a profitable terror for the future.
Perth was sacked by them, and Aberdeen, and Dundee.

At Kilsyth, near Stirling, Montrose and his men killed ten times as
many of a Covenanted army, against which they fought, as fell of the
Cavaliers at Naseby.  Six hundred lay slain at Naseby; at Kilsyth,
six thousand.

And the king, meanwhile, speaking of this robber chief as the great
restorer of his kingdom and support of his throne, with never an
entreaty to spare his countrymen and subjects.

Can any wonder that the sheep he commissioned so many hirelings to
fleece, robbers to plunder, and wolves to slay, would not follow him?

In person, indeed, throughout that summer of 1645, His Majesty was
pursuing a kind of warfare too similar to that of Wallenstein or
Montrose.  It was in the August of this year, scarce two months after
the victory of Naseby, that the war surged up nearer us at Netherby,
than at any other time.

The king had fled from Naseby to Ragland Castle, the seat of the
Marquis of Worcester (an ingenious gentleman who spent his living in
seeking out many inventions).  There he held his court for many
weeks; entertained with princely state in the halls of the grand old
castle, and hunting deer gaily through the forests on the banks of
the Wye, as if his subjects were not themselves in his quarrel
hunting each other to death in every corner of his kingdom.

Whilst there tidings came to him of the successes of Montrose, and he
endeavored to go northward to join him in Scotland.  From Doncaster,
however, he fell back on Newark, turned from his purpose by the
Covenanted army of Sir David Leslie, which threatened him from the
North.  And then he turned his steps to us, to the Fens and the
Associated Counties, which General Cromwell's care, and their own
fidelity to the Parliament, had kept hitherto high and dry out of
reach of the war, save for some few stray foraging parties.  During
this August 1645 we learned, however, at His Majesty's hands, the
meaning of civil war.  The eastern counties lay exposed to attack,
having sent their tried men westward with Cromwell and Fairfax; so
that we had nothing but our own more recent foot-levies to defend us.

The king dashed from Stamford through Huntingdonshire and
Cambridgeshire, ravaging the whole country as he passed, and
detaching flying squadrons to plunder Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire,
as far as St. Albans.  Several times he threatened Cambridge.

On the 24th of August, he took Huntingdon by assault, and four days
afterwards, by the 28th, was safe again within the lines of Oxford,
with large store of booty seized from the very cradle and stronghold
of the Parliamentary army.

No doubt the Cavaliers had fine triumphing and merry-making over the
spoils at Oxford.  But to us, around whom lay the empty granaries and
roofless homesteads, and the wrecked and burned villages from which
these spoils came, the lesson was not one of submission or of terror,
but of resistance more resolute than ever.  Prince Rupert had been
teaching this lesson for three years in every corner of the realm.
His Majesty taught it us in person.  A lesson of resistance not
desperate but hopeful; for we could not but deem that a king who
would indiscriminately ravage whole counties of his kingdom, must
look on it as an alien territory already lost to his crown.

Many sins, no doubt, may be laid to the charge of the Parliament and
its army.  But of two sins terribly common in civil strife they were
never guilty; indiscriminate plunder and secret assassination.  The
ruins and desecrations the Commonwealth soldiers wrought in churches
and cathedrals, will tell their tale against us to many a generation
to come.  The ruins the Royalist troopers wrought were in poor men's
homes long since repaired.  The desecrations they wrought were also
in homes, ruins and desecrations of temples not made with hands, and
never to be repaired, but recorded on sacred inviolable tables, more
durable than any stone, though not to be read on earth, at least not
yet.

The village of Netherby lay just beyond the edge of the royal
devastations.  But the cattle all around us were seized, with all the
corn that was reaped.  And at night the sky was all aglow with the
flames of burning cottages, and corn and hay-stacks.  Our own barns
were untouched, but my Father gave orders at once to begin husbanding
our stores by limiting our daily food, looking on what was spared to
us as the granary of the whole destitute neighbourhood through the
coming winter, and as the seed-store for the following spring.  Our
sheds and out-houses, meantime, were fitted up for those who had been
driven from their homes.  Every cottage in Netherby gave shelter to
some homeless neighbour.  Rachel Forster's became an orphan-house.
Yet it was the private lesson which was taught our own family through
this foray of His Majesty's that is engraven most deeply in my memory.

Throughout the summer, Cousin Placidia had been more than ever a
subject of irritation and distress to Aunt Dorothy.  The successes of
Montrose in Scotland, followed by the plunderings of the king's
troops in our own counties, had once more caused her to feel much
"exercised" as to which was the right side.  In February, after the
execution of Archbishop Laud, Mr. Nicholls had obediently substituted
the Directory of Worship for the Common Prayer, sorely trying thereby
Aunt Dorothy's predilections for unwritten, or rather unprinted
prayers; Mr. Nicholls' supplications not having, in her opinion,
either unction or fire, being in fact, she said, nothing but the old
Liturgy minced and sent up cold.  Her only comfort was in the trust
that sifting days were at hand.  (The Triers had not yet been
appointed.)  But what vexed Aunt Dorothy's soul even more than any
ecclesiastical "trimmings," was what she regarded as the gradual
eating up of Placidia's heart by the rust of hoarded wealth.
Placidia had at that time an additional reason to justify herself for
any amount of straitening and sparing, in the expectation of the
birth of her first child.  This prospect opened a new field for her
economies and for Aunt Dorothy's anxieties.  Even the general
devastations of the country, which opened every door and every heart
wide to the sufferers, only effected the narrowest possible opening
in Placidia's stores.  Her health, she said, obviously prevented her
receiving any strangers into the house; and it was little indeed that
a poor parson, with a family to provide for, and nothing but income
to depend on, and the certainty of receiving scarcely any tithes the
next season, could have to spare.  Such as she had, said she, she
gave willingly.  There was a stack of hay but slightly damaged by
getting heated.  And there was some preserved meat, a little strong
perhaps from keeping, but quite wholesome and palatable with a little
extra salt.  These she most gladly bestowed.  Aunt Dorothy was in
despair, and made one last solemn appeal.

"Placidia," she said, "a child will shut up your heart and be a curse
to you, if you let it shut your doors against the poor; until at last
who knows what door may be shut on you?"

But Placidia was impregnable.

"Aunt Dorothy," she said, with mild imperturbability, "everything may
be made either a curse or a blessing.  But to those who are in the
covenant everything is a blessing."

"Sister Gretel," said Aunt Dorothy, afterwards, "I see no way of
escape for her.  The mercies of God's providence and the doctrines of
His grace freeze on that poor woman's heart, until the ice is so
thick that the sunshine itself can do nothing but just thaw the
surface, and make the next day's ice smoother and harder."

Aunt Gretel looked up.

"Never give up hope, sister," said she.  "Our good God has more
weapons than we wot of, and more means of grace than are counted in
any of our Catechisms and Confessions.  Sometimes He can warm the
coldest heart with the glow of a new human love until all the ice
melts away from within.  And the touch of a little child's hand has
opened many a door, where the Master has afterwards come in and sat
down and supped.  When the Saviour wanted to teach the Pharisees, He
set in the midst of them a little child."

Aunt Dorothy shook her head.

"Children have dragged many a godly man back again to Egypt," said
she.  "Many a rope which binds good men tight to the car of Mammon is
twisted by very little hands."

And the proposition being unanswerable, the discussion ended.

A few nights afterwards we were roused by a suspicious glare in the
direction of the Parsonage.  The next morning early we went to see if
anything had happened there.

As we passed through the village, we heard the news quickly enough.

Just after dusk, on the evening before, a party of Royalist troopers
had appeared at the Parsonage gates.  The house stood alone, at some
little distance from the village, at the end of the glebe-fields.
The captain of the little troop said they were on their way to join
His Majesty at Oxford; but seeing a light, they were tempted to seek
the hospitality of Mistress Nicholls, of which they had heard in the
neighbourhood.

Poor Placidia's protestations of poverty were of little avail with
such guests.  They politely assured her they were used to rough fare,
and would themselves render any assistance she required towards
preparing the feast.  Whereupon they put up their horses in the
stables, supplied them liberally with corn from, the granaries,
seized the fattest of the poultry, and strung them in a tempting row
before the kitchen fire, which they piled into huge dimensions with
any wooden articles that came first to hand, chairs and chests
included; the contents of these chests being meanwhile skillfully
rifled, and all that was most valuable in them of plate, linen, or
silk, set apart in a heap "for the king's service."

The supper being prepared, they insisted on their host drinking His
Majesty's health in the choicest wines in his cellar.  The captain
had been informed, he said, that Mr. Nicholls had been induced
(reluctantly, of course, as he perceived from the fervent
protestations of loyalty) to disuse the Liturgy, and even to
contribute of his substance to the rebel cause.  He felt glad,
therefore, to be able to give him this opportunity of proving his
unjustly suspected fidelity, and of contributing, at the same time,
of his substance to His Majesty's service, by means of the portion of
his goods which they would the next day convey to His Majesty's
head-quarters in the loyal city of Oxford, and thus save it from
being misapplied in this disaffected country, in a manner which Mr.
Nicholls' loyal heart must abhor.  This we heard from one of the
frightened serving-wenches, who had escaped towards morning, and
spread the news through the village.

As the night passed on, they grew riotous, and were with difficulty
roused from their carouse by the captain, to see about getting their
plunder together before dawn.  They poured on the ground what wine
they could not drink, set fire (whether by accident or on purpose was
not known) to the large corn-stack whilst hunting about the sheds and
stables for cattle and horses; till finally the inmates were thankful
to get them away early in the morning, although they took with them
all the beasts they could drive and all the booty they could carry.

The sympathy in the village was not deep, and Aunt Dorothy and I went
on in silence to the Parsonage, to give what help and comfort we
could.  Neither Aunt Dorothy nor I spoke a word as we hastened up the
rising ground towards the house.

The homely ruins of the farm-yard moved me more than many a stately
ruin.  The remains of the corn-stack, the flames of which had alarmed
us in the night, stood there black and charred; the stables were
empty and the cattle-sheds; the house-dog was hanged to the door of
one of them; the yard was strewn with trampled corn, which the
sparrows and starlings, in the absence of the privileged poultry,
were making bold to pick up; and the silence of the deserted court
was made more dismal by the occasional restless lowing of a calf,
which was roaming from one empty shed to another in search of its
mother.

We went into the house.  The kitchen was full of the serving-wenches,
and of some of the more curious and idle in the village, who were
condoling with each other, by making the worst of the disaster.  The
hearth was black with the cinders of the enormous fire of the night
before, and the floor was strewn with broken pieces of the chairs and
chests which had helped to kindle it, and with fragments of the
feast.  In a corner of the settle by the cold hearth sat Placidia, as
if she were stupified, with her hands clasped and her eyes fixed upon
them.

When she saw Aunt Dorothy, she turned away, and said,--

"Don't reproach me, Aunt Dorothy; I can't bear it."

"Didst thou think I came for that?" said Aunt Dorothy.  "But belike I
deserve it of thee."

And with a voice a little sharpened by the feeling she strove to
repress, Aunt Dorothy sent the curious neighbours to the right-about,
and disposed of the two serving-wenches, by telling them the very
fowls of the air were setting such lazy sluts as they were an
example, and despatching them to gather up the scattered corn in the
yard.

Then she came again to Placidia, and taking her clasped hands in
hers, said,--

"I've learnt many things, child, this last hour.  I judged thee a
Pharisee, and belike I've been a worse one myself.  I've sat on the
judgment-seat this many a day on thee.  But I'm off it now.  And may
the Lord grant me grace never to climb up there again.  I've wished
for some heavy rod to fall and teach thee.  And now it's come, it
can't smite thee heavier than it does me.  Forgive me, child, and let
us both begin again."

Placidia looked up, and meeting the honest eyes fixed on her, not in
scorn but in entreaty, she sobbed,--

"I shall never have heart to begin again, Aunt Dorothy."

"To begin what again?" said Aunt Dorothy.

"Contriving and saving to make up all the things I have lost,"
replied Placidia.  "I've been years heaping it together, and it's all
gone in a night!"

Aunt Dorothy looked sorely puzzled, between her desire to be
charitable and her horror of Placidia's misreading of the
dispensation.

"Begin that again, my dear," she said, at last.  "Nay; thou must
never begin that again.  It will never do to fly in the face of
Providence like that."

Placidia uncovered her face, but as her eyes rested on the desolation
around her, she covered them again, and sobbed,--

"Just when there was to be one to save it all for, and make it worth
while to deny oneself."

"Nay," said Aunt Dorothy; "that's the mercy.  That's precisely the
mercy.  The Lord will not let the child be a curse to thee.  He will
have it a blessing; so He says to thee as plain as can be, I give
thee a treasure, not to make thee rage and stint and grudge, but to
teach thee to love and serve and give, not to make thee poor, but to
make thee rich.  And He will go on teaching thee till thou openest
thy heart and learnest, and thy burden falls off, and thy heart leaps
up, and thou shalt be free.  I know it by the way my heart is
lightened now.  He's smitten me down for my sitting in judgment on
thee.  Not that I'm safe never to climb that seat again.  One is
there before one knows, and the black-cap on in a moment.  Some one
is always near, I trow, to help us up."

And turning from Placidia, she proceeded to a quiet survey of the
ruins, which, under her brisk and discriminating hands, with such
help as I could give, soon began to show some signs of order.

The fire was lighted; the calf despatched to Netherby to be fed;
sundry fragments of chairs and chests to the village carpenter, to be
mended; the broken meat put into two baskets.

"This is for the household," said Aunt Dorothy, "and that for the
fatherless children at Rachel Forster's.  One of the maids can take
it at once, Placidia, when she leads away the calf."

Placidia was at length quite roused from her stupor.  She looked at
Aunt Dorothy as if she thought she were in league with the plunderers.

"Me send meat to Rachel Forster's orphans!" she said faintly; "a poor
plundered woman like me!"

"Better begin at once, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy; "the fatherless
are God's little ones.  Better give the treasure to them.  You see
our bags have holes in them."

At that moment Mr. Nicholls returned.  Placidia appealed to him for
his usual confirmation of her opinions.

"Dear heart," he said ruefully, "Belike Mistress Dorothy is right.
It's of no use fighting against God.  Who knoweth if He may turn and
repent and leave a blessing behind Him."

"Nay, Master Nicholls," said Aunt Dorothy, "not that way.  It's of no
use trying to escape in that way.  You must let go altogether first,
or the Almighty will never take hold of you.  It's hoping for nothing
again.  If thou and Placidia will send this to the orphans, ye must
send it because it has been given to you, and because they want it
more than you do.  Because thou wast an orphan, Placidia," she added,
tenderly, "and He has not failed to care for thee.  Take heed how ye
slight His staff or His rod.  Both have been used plainly enough for
thee.  I'll divide the stuff," she concluded, "and you must settle
what to do with it yourselves, afterwards."

And insisting on Placidia's resting up-stairs while she subjected the
contents of the chests strewn about the chamber-floor to the same
process of division, she left the house before dusk restored to
something like order, with two significant heaps of clothing on the
bed-chamber, and two significant baskets of provisions in the
kitchen, to speak what parables they might during the night to the
consciences of Placidia and Mr. Nicholls.

But before the morning other teachers had been there.  Death and
Anguish--those merciful curses sent to keep the world, which had
ceased to be Eden, from becoming a sensual Elysium, idle, selfish,
and purposeless--visited the house that night.  Another life was
ushered into the world under the shadow of Death itself.  In the
morning Placidia lay feebly rejoicing in the infant-life for which
her own had been so nearly sacrificed.  Rejoicing in a gift which had
cost her so much, and which was to cost her so much more of patient
sacrifices, toil and watching, sacrifices for which no one would
especially admire her, and for which she would not admire herself;
rejoicing as she had never rejoiced in any possession before.  Not by
any supernatural effort of virtue, but by the simple natural fountain
of motherly love which had been opened in her heart.  One of the
first things she said was to Rachel, who was watching with her
through the next night.  Very softly, as Rachel sat by her bed-side
with the baby on her knee, Placidia said,--

"Strange such a gift should have been given to me and not to thee."

"And," said Rachel (when she told me of it), "I could not answer her
all in a moment, for there are seas stronger and deeper than those
outside our dykes around our hearts.  And it's not safe, even in the
quietest weather, opening the cranny to let in those tides.  So I
said nothing.  And in a few moments Mistress Nicholls spoke again,
'For thou art good and worthy, Rachel,' said she, 'and it would be no
great wonder if the Lord gave thee the best He has to give.'

"Then I understood what she meant, and my heart was nigh as glad as
if the child had been given to me.  For I thought there was a soul
new born to God as a little child, meek and lowly.  The Lord had led
her along the hardest step on the way to Himself, the first step
down.  And she said no more.  I smoothed her pillow, laid the babe
beside her, and she and it fell asleep.  But I sat still and cried
quietly for joy.  And the next morning, when the light broke in,
Mistress Nicholls looked up and saw those two heaps Mistress Dorothy
had set apart, and then she looked down on the babe, and murmured as
if to herself,--

"'Poor motherless little ones!  God has given me thee and spared me
to thee.  The poor motherless babes, they shall have the things.'

"And then," pursued Rachel, "I turned away and cried again to myself
half for gladness, and half for trouble.  For I thought sure the
Lord's a-going to take her, poor lamb, if she's so changed as that."

But Aunt Dorothy, when Rachel narrated this, although she wiped her
eyes sympathetically, at the same time gave her head a consolatory
shake and said,--

"Never fear, neighbour, never fear, not yet.  Depend on it, the old
Enemy will have a fight for it yet.  Depend on it, there's a good
deal of work to be done for her in this world yet, before she's too
good to be left in it."


LETTICE'S DIARY.

"_Davenant Hall, Twelfth Night_, 1645-6.--Only four years since that
merry sixteenth birthday of mine, when all the village were gathered
in the Hall, and Olive and I gave the garments to the village maidens
of my own age, and in the evening Roger stayed to help kindle the
twelve bonfires.

"And now we are walled and moated out from the village and from the
Manor as we were in the old days of the Norman Conquest, when the
Davenants first took possession of these lands, and built the old
ruined keep, where the gateway is (whence they afterwards removed to
this abbey), to overawe the Saxon village, where the Draytons even
then lived in the old Manor.  I wonder if there is anything left of
the old contentions in Saxon and Norman blood now.  The rebel army is
so much composed, they say, both of officers and men, of the stout
old Saxon yeomanry, and the traders in the towns; whilst ours is
officered from the old baronial castles, by gentlemen with the old
Norman historical names.  How many of the higher gentry and nobility
are loyal has been proved these last six months, since fatal Naseby,
by the sieges (and, alas! by the stormings and surrenders) of at
least a score of old castles and mansions, from Bristol, surrendered
on the 11th of September by Prince Rupert to Bovey Tracey in the
faithful West.  Thank Heaven, they gave Oliver Cromwell and Sir
Thomas Fairfax much trouble, Basing Hall especially.  In future days,
when the king shall enjoy his own again (as he surely will), I hold
such a blackened ruin will be a choicer possession to a gentleman's
family than a palace furnished regally.  The rebels called Basing
House _Basting_, for the mischief it did them.  And our men called it
_Loyally_.

"Roger Drayton hath shared, no doubt, in many of these sieges.  So
stern in his delusion of duty, I suppose, if this brewer of
Huntingdon commanded him, he would not scruple to plant his reble
guns against us.  'Thine eye shall not spare,' they say, in their
hateful cant.  Sir Launcelot says they have been chasing His Sacred
Majesty from place to place like a hunted stag; that Mr. Cromwell,
whom Roger loves above king and friend, never sets on any great
enterprise without having a '_text_' to lean on!  That before
storming Basing Hall, he passed the night in prayer, and that the
text he especially 'rested on' for that achievement was Psalm cxviii.
8: '_They that make them are like unto them, so is every one that
trusteth in them!_' as if we Royalists were Canaanites, idolaters,
Papists, I know not what.  Fancy burning down a corn-stack to a
psalm-tune, or setting out on a burglary to a text.  Yet what is it
better to burn down loyal gentlemen's houses about their ears, from
one end of England to another.  It is all Conscience; this dreadful
Moloch of Conscience!  It was the one weak point of the Draytons
always.

"Sir Launcelot Trevor came here a week since to see if anything can
be done to strengthen the fortifications.  My Father was in Bristol
when it was stormed, and has followed the king ever since; two of my
brothers are in Ireland, seeing what can be done there; two fled
beyond the seas after the defeat of the gallant Marquis of Montrose
last September at Philipshaugh, near Selkirk; and two lie on that
fatal Rowton Heath, where on September the 23rd the king's last army,
worth the name, was broken and lost.

"We have made sacrifices enough to endear the royal cause to us.  I
suppose this old house will be the next.  For Harry said it would
never stand a siege.  But, oh, if I could only be sure Sir Launcelot
is mistaken in what he says about Roger giving Harry his death-blow,
much of the rest would seem light.  I have never yet told my Mother
of this dread.  Sometimes when I think how Roger looked and spoke
that morning, I feel sure it cannot be true.  But he always said it
was so wrong to believe things because I wished them true.  And now
the more I long to believe this false, the less I seem able.

"Only four years since that merry sixteenth birthday, when I was a
child.  And then that happy summer afterwards, when the world seemed
to grow so beautiful and great, and it seemed as if we were to do
such glorious things in it.

"First the birthdays seem like triumphal columns, trophies of a
conquered year.  Then like mile-stones, marking rather sadly the way
we have come.  But now I think they look like grave-stones, so much
is buried for ever beneath this terrible year that is gone.  Not
lives only, but love, and trust, and hope.

"I said so to my Mother to-night, as I wished her good-night.  It was
selfish.  For I ought to comfort her.  But she comforted me.  She
said, 'The birthdays will look like mile-stones again, by-and-by,
sweetheart.  They will be marked on the other side, "so much nearer
home," and perhaps at last like trophies again, marking the conquered
years.'

"On which I broke down altogether, and said,--

"'Oh, Mother, don't speak like that, don't say you look on them like
that.  Think of me at the beginning of the journey, so near the
beginning.'

"'I do, Lettice,' said she.  'I pray to live, for thy sake, every
day.'

"For my sake; only for my sake.  For her own she longs to go.  And
that is saddest of all to me.

"For, except on days like these, when I think and look back, I am not
always so very wretched.  It is very strange, after all that has
happened.  But I am sometimes--rather often--a little bit happy.
There is so much that is cheerful and beautiful in the world, I
cannot help enjoying it.  And pleasant things might happen yet.

"I did love Harry, dearly; nearly better than any one.  I do.  But to
my Mother losing him seems just the one sorrow which puts her on the
other side of all earthly joys and sorrows, with a great gulf
between, so that she looks on them from afar off, like an angel.

"I suppose there is just _the one thing_ which would be the darkening
of the whole world to most of us, making it night instead of day.
Other people leave that sepulchre behind.  It is grown over, and in
years it becomes a little sacred grass-grown mound, or a stately
memorial to the life ended there.

"But to one, it has made _the whole earth_ a sepulchre, at which she
stands without, weeping and looking on.

"_There is only one_ Voice which can quiet the heart there.

"_The day after_.--Sir Launcelot and I have had high words to-day.
We were looking from the terrace towards Netherby, and I said
something about old times, and that the Draytons would probably
resume the lands they had lost in old times at the Conquest.

"I fired up, and said not one of the Draytons would ever touch
anything that did not belong to them.  '_They_ were not of Prince
Rupert's plunderers,' said I.

"'No doubt,' said he, 'they hold by a better right than the sword.'
And with nasal solemnity, clasping his hands, he added, 'Voted, it is
written the saints shall possess the land; voted, we are the saints.'

"'Sir Launcelot,' I said, 'you know I hate to hear old friends spoken
of like that.'

"(When I had written bitter things myself of them but yesterday!  But
it always angers me when people are unfair.)

"Here he changed his tone, and spoke seriously enough.  Too
seriously, indeed, by far.  He said something about my opinion being
more to him than anything in the world.  And when I went back into
the garden-parlour, not desiring such discourse, he was on his knees
at my feet, before I could raise him, pouring out, I know not what
passionate protestations, and saying that I could save him, and
reclaim him, and make him all he longed to be, and was not.  And that
if I rejected him, there was not another power on earth or heaven
that could keep him from plunging into perdition, which perplexed and
grieved me much.  For I do not love him.  Of that I am sure.  But it
is terrible to think of being the only barrier between any human soul
and destruction.  And I am half afraid to tell my Mother, for fear
she should counsel me to take Sir Launcelot's conversion on me.
Because she thinks everything of no weight compared with religion.
But I cannot think it would be a duty to marry a person for the same
reason from which you might become his godmother.  Besides, if I did
not love, what real power should I have to save?

"_At night_ (_later_).--I have told my Mother, and she says that last
consideration makes it quite clear.  I could have no power for good,
unless I loved.  And I do not love Sir Launcelot; and I never could.

"At the same time, when I opened my heart to her about this, I
ventured at last to tell her what Sir Launcelot had thought about
Harry and Roger Drayton.  I wish I had told her weeks ago.

"For she does not believe it.  She says Roger would never have come
and told us had it been so.  She has not the slightest fear it can be
true.  It has lightened my heart wonderfully.  Roger is not quite
just in saying I can believe in anything I wish.

"_March_.--A biting March for the good cause.  On the 14th brave Sir
Ralph Hopton surrendered in Cornwall.  On the 22nd brave old Sir
Jacob Astley (he who made the prayer before Edgehill fight, 'Lord, if
I forget Thee this day, do not Thou forget me'), was beaten at Stow
in Gloucestershire, as he was bringing a small force he had gathered
with much pains, to succour the king at Oxford.  'You have now done
your work and may go to play,' he said to the rebels who captured
him, 'unless you fall out among yourselves.'  Gallant sententious old
veteran that he is!

"_May_.--His Majesty has taken refuge with the Scottish army at
Newark.

"We marvel he should have trusted his sacred person with Covenanted
Presbyterians.  But in good sooth he may well be weary of wandering,
and may look for some pity yet in his own fellow-countrymen.  Not
that they showed much to the sweet fair lady his father's mother.

"We hear it was but unwillingly he went to them at night, between two
and three o'clock in the morning, on the 27th of April.  A few days
since he left the shelter of Oxford, faithful to him so long; riding
disguised as a servant, behind his faithful attendant Mr. Ashburnham.
Once he was asked by a stranger on the road if his master were a
nobleman.  'No,' quoth the king, 'my master is one of the Lower
House,' a sad truth, forsooth, though spoken in parable.  It is
believed amongst us that he would fain have reached the eastern
coast, thence to take ship for Scotland, to join Montrose and the
true Scots with him.  For his flight was uncertain, and changed
direction more than once--to Henley-on-Thames, Slough, Uxbridge; then
to the top of Harrow Hill, across the country to St. Albans, where
the clattering hoofs of a farmer behind them gave false alarm of
pursuit; thence by the houses of many faithful gentlemen who knew and
loved him, but respected his disguise and made as though they knew
him not; to Downham in Norfolk; to Southwell, and thence, beguiled by
promises some say, others declare throwing himself of his own free
will like a prince on the ancient Scottish loyalty, he rode to Newark
into the midst of the Earl of Leven's army.

"_August_, 1646.--The civil war, they give out now, is over.  Every
garrison and castle in the kingdom have surrendered.  In June, loyal
Oxford; and now, last and most loyal of all, on the 19th of August,
Ragland Castle, with the noble old Marquis of Worcester, who hath
ruined himself past all remedy in the king's service, and in this
world will scarce now find his reward.

"In June, Prince Rupert rode through the land, and embarked at Dover.
Well for the good cause if he had never come.  His marauding ways
gave quite another complexion to the war from what it might have had
without him.  His rashness, Harry thought, lost us many a field.  His
lawlessness infected our army.  The king could not forgive him his
surrender of Bristol a few days after he was led to believe it could
be held for months.  But in this some think perchance he is less to
blame than elsewhere.  Cromwell and the Ironsides were there and they
stormed the city, and it seems as if this Cromwell could never be
baffled.

"With Prince Rupert went three hundred loyal gentlemen, some
despairing of the cause at home, others, and with them my Father, on
missions to seek aid from foreign courts.

"_February_, 1647.--The Scottish army has yielded him up ('Bought and
sold,' His Majesty said; others say the two hundred thousand pounds
the Scotch received was for the expenses of the war,) into the hands
of the English Presbyterians at Newcastle.

"_March_.--We have seen the king once more.  My Mother has heard for
certain the true cause why the king was given up by the Scotch to his
enemies.  He would not sign their blood-stained Covenant.  He would
not sacrifice the Church of these kingdoms, with her bishops and her
sacred liturgy, though nobles, loyal men and true, nay the queen
herself, by letter, entreated him.  My mother saith he is now in most
literal truth a martyr, suffering for the spotless bride--our dear
Mother, the Church of England--and for the truth.  We heard he was to
arrive at Holmby House in Northamptonshire, and, weak as my Mother
is, nothing would content her but to be borne thither in a litter to
pay him her homage.  I would not have missed it for the world.
Numbers of gentlemen and gentlewomen were there to welcome him with
tears and prayers and hearty acclamations.  It did our hearts good to
hear the hearty cheers and shouts, and I trust cheered his also.  The
rebel troopers were Englishmen enough to offer no hindrance.  And we
had the joy of gazing once more on that kingly pathetic countenance.
He is serene and cheerful, as a true martyr should be, my mother
says, accepting his cross and rejoicing in it, not morose and of a
sad countenance as those who feign to be persecuted for conscience
sake.  He scorns no blameless pleasure which can solace the weary
hours of captivity, riding miles sometimes to a good bowling-green to
play at bowls, and beguiling the evenings with chess or converse on
art with Mr. Harrington or Mr. Herbert.

"He will not suffer a Presbyterian chaplain to say grace at his
table, and the hard-hearted jailers will allow no other.

"Thank heaven the common people are true to him still, as they took
him from Newcastle to Holmby House the simple peasants flocked round
to see him and bless him, and to feel the healing touch of his sacred
hand for the king's evil.  Sir Harry Marten, a rebel and a
republican, made a profane jest thereon, and said, 'The touch of the
great seal would do them as much good.'  But no one relished the
scurrilous jest.  And the blessings and prayers of the poor followed
the king everywhere.  Yes; it is the common people and the nobles
that honour true greatness.  The Scribes and Pharisees, I am
persuaded, sprang from the middle-order yeomen, craftsmen, chapmen.
"Tithing mint and devouring widows' houses," are just base, weeping,
unpunishable middle-station sins.  The troubles of this middle class
are wretched, low, carking money-troubles.  The sorrows of the high
and low are natural ennobling sorrows; bereavement, pain, and death.
It is the sordid middle order that envies the great.  The common
people reverence them when on high places, and generously pity them
when brought low.  My Mother says, belike the sorrows of their king
shall yet move the honest heart of the nation to a reverent pity, and
thus back to loyalty, and so, as so often in great conflicts, more be
won through suffering than through success.

"_April_, 1647.--We are to pay our last penalty.  Our old hall is
declared to be a perilous nest of traitors and cradle of
insurrection.  A rebel garrison is to be quartered on us.

"Our expedition to Holmby, has led to two results; it offended some
of the people in authority among the rebels, and thereby caused them
to take possession of the hall; and it so taxed my mother's wasted
strength that she is unfit for any journey, so that we must even stay
and suffer the presence of these insolent and rebellious men in our
home.

"_April, Davenant Hall_.--Mr. Drayton hath been here to-day.  He
looked pale and thin from the long imprisonment he has had, and he
hath lost his right arm--a sore loss to him who ever took such
pleasure in his geometrical instruments, and played the viol-di-gambo
so masterly.

"He gave a slight start when he saw my mother, and there was a kind
of anxious compassionate reverence in his manner towards her which
makes me uneasy.  I fear he deems her sorely changed, and ofttimes I
have feared the same.  But then this mourning garb which she will
never more lay aside, and her dear gray hair, which I love, put back
like an Italian Madonna from her forehead, in itself makes a
difference.  Although I think her eyes never looked so soft and
beautiful as now.  The golden hair of youth, and all its brilliant
colour, seems to me scarcely so fair as this silver hair of hers,
with the soft pale hues on her cheeks.

"Mr. Drayton asked us to take asylum at Netherby Hall till such time
as we join my father elsewhere.  My mother knows what Harry thought,
and seems not averse to accept his hospitality.  I certainly had not
thought to enter old Netherby again in such guise as this."


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

The old house seemed to gain a kind of sacredness when it became the
refuge of that dear bereaved Lady and sweet Lettice.  Lady Lucy was
much changed.  Her voice always soft, was low as the soft notes in a
hymn; her step, always light, was slower and feebler; her hair,
though still abundant, had changed from luxuriant auburn to a soft
silvery brown; her cheeks were worn into a different curve, though
still, I thought, as beautiful, and the colour in them was paler.
Everything in her seemed to have changed from sunset to moonlight.
Her voice and her very thoughts seem to come from afar; from some
region we could not tread, like music borne over still waters.  It
was as if she had crossed a river which severed her far from us,
which she would never more recross, but only wait till the call came
to mount the dim heights on the other side.  Not that she was in any
way sad or uninterested, or abstracted, only she did not seem to
belong to us any more.

I wondered if Lettice saw this as I did.  And many a time the tears
came to my eyes as I looked at those two and thought how strong were
the cords of love which bound them, and how feeble the thread of life.

Aunt Dorothy welcomed Lady Lucy with as true a tenderness as any one.
The silvery hair in place of those heart-breakers--the hair silvered
so suddenly by sorrow--softened her in more ways than one.  One
thing, however, tried her sorely.  And I much dreaded the explosion
it might lead to if Aunt Dorothy's conscience once got the upper hand
of her hospitality.

The Lady Lucy always had a little erection closely resembling an
altar, in her oratory at home, dressed in white, with sacred books on
it; the Holy Scriptures, A Kempis, Herbert, and others, and above
them a copy of a picture by Master Albert Durer, figuring our Lord on
the Cross, the suffering thorn-crowned form gleaming pale and awful
from the terrible noonday darkness.  Before this solemn picture stood
two golden candlesticks, which at night the waiting gentlewomen were
wont to light.  I shall never forget Aunt Dorothy's expression of
dismay and distress when she first saw this erection, one evening
soon after Lady Lucy's arrival.  She mastered herself so far as to
say nothing to Lady Lucy then, beyond the good wishes for the night,
and directions as to some possets which she had come to administer.

But the solemn change that came over her voice and face she could not
conceal.  And afterwards she solemnly summoned us into my Father's
private room to make known her discovery.

"An idol, brother!" she concluded, "an abomination!  At this moment,
probably, idol-worship going on under this roof, drawing down on us
all the lightnings of heaven!"

"I should not use such a thing as a help to devotion myself, Sister
Dorothy," said my Father; "but what would you have me do?"

"Help to devotion!" she exclaimed, "'Thou shalt not make any graven
image, nor the likeness of any thing.'  Sweep them away with the
besom of destruction, and cast the idols to the moles and to the
bats."

"Sister Dorothy," he said, "you would not have me take a hammer, and
axe, and cords, and drag this piece of painted work from the Lady
Lucy's chamber before her eyes."

"Thine eye shall not spare," she replied, solemnly.

"But in the first place I must know that it is an idol to Lady Lucy,"
he said, "and that she does bow down to it."

"Subtle distinctions, brother; traffickings with the enemy.  Heaven
grant they prove not our ruin, as of Jehoshaphat before us."

For Aunt Dorothy, although she had forsaken the judgment seat for
private offences, would still have deemed it an impiety to abandon it
in cases of heresy.

"Sister Dorothy," interposed Aunt Gretel, "in my country good men and
women do use such things and do not become idolaters thereby in their
private devotion and in the churches."

"Belike they do, sister Gretel," rejoined Aunt Dorothy, drily.  "The
hand that would have pulled down the Epistle of St. James might well
leave some idols standing.  An owl sees better than a blind man.  But
it is no guide to those whose eyes are used to-day."

This profane comparison of Dr. Luther to an owl dismayed Aunt Gretel,
so as to throw her entirely out of the conflict, which finished with
an ordinance from my Father that liberty of conscience should be the
order of his household; and a protest from Aunt Dorothy that, be the
consequences what they may, she would not suffer any immortal soul
within her reach to go the broad road to ruin without warning.

Which threat kept us in anxious anticipation.  We took the greatest
care not to leave the combatants alone; one so determined and the
other so unconscious of danger.

At last, however, the fatal moment arrived.

It was early in April, a fortnight after Lady Lucy and Lettice took
shelter under our roof.

Dr. Anthony had arrived from London with tidings which made us all
very uneasy.

The Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons, believing the
civil war ended, were very eager to disband the army which had ended
it, but which, being mostly composed of Independents, they dreaded
even more than the king.

In February, they had voted that no officer under Sir Thomas Fairfax
should hold any rank higher than a colonel, intending thereby to
displace Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, Ludlow, Blake, Skippon, and
Algernon Sydney, and, in short, every commander whom the army most
trusted, and under whom their victories had been gained.

They were to be disbanded, moreover, without receiving their pay, now
due for more than half a year.  It was also proposed that such of the
soldiers as were still kept together should be sent to Ireland to
settle matters there, under new Presbyterian commanders, instead of
those whom they knew and trusted.

The indignation in the army was deep.  But it was as much under the
restraint of law, and was expressed in as orderly a way, as if the
army had been a court of justice.  The regiments met, deliberated,
remonstrated, and drew up a petition, demanded arrears of pay, and
refused to go to Ireland save under commanders they knew.  "For the
desire of our arrears," they said, "necessity, especially of our
soldiers, enforced us thereunto.  We left our estates, and many of us
our trade and callings to others, and forsook the contentments of a
quiet life, not fearing nor regarding the difficulties of war for
your sakes; after which we hoped that the desires of our hardly
earned wages would have been no unwelcome request, nor argued us
guilty of the least discontent or intention of mutiny."

No one, my Father said, could deny the truth of this.  The Parliament
army had not eked out with plunder their arrears of pay.

On the 3d of April three soldiers--Adjutators (or Agitators, as some
called them)--had been sent with a respectful but determined message
to the House of Commons.  General Cromwell (attending in his place in
the House in spite of the plots there had been during the past weeks,
as he knew, to commit him to the Tower) rose and spoke at length of
the danger of driving the army to extremities.

And now Dr. Antony came with the tidings that General Cromwell was at
Saffron Walden, bearing to the army the promise of indemnity and
arrears.  He brought also a brief letter from Roger, saying that now
all was sure to go right.

This news drew us all together, and it was not until she had been
absent some time that it was discovered that Aunt Dorothy had left us.

Aunt Gretel was the first to perceive her departure, and to suspect
its cause.  At once she repaired to Lady Lucy's chamber, whence, in a
minute or two, she returned, and pressing me lightly on the shoulder,
she said, in a solemn whisper,--

"Olive, it must be stopped; the Lady Lucy is looking like a ghost,
and Mistress Lettice like a damask rose, and your Aunt Dorothy is
talking Latin."

This was Aunt Gretel's formula for controversial language.  She said
English was composed of two elements; the German she could
understand; we used it, she said, when we were speaking of things
near our hearts, of matters of business, or of affection, or of
religion, in a peaceable and kindly manner.  But the Latin was beyond
her.  There were long words in _ation_, _atical_, or _arian_, which
always came on the field when there was to be a battle.  And then she
always withdrew.  In this martial array Aunt Dorothy's thoughts were
now being clothed.  And Aunt Gretel thought I had better summon my
Father to interrupt the debate.

I went at once and indicated to him the danger.  He looked half angry
half amused.

"Dr. Antony," he said, "your medical attendance is required
up-stairs.  My sister has recommenced the Civil War."

I flew up to announce the coming of the gentlemen.

At the moment when I entered the room the controversy had reached a
climax.  Lady Lucy was sitting very pale and upright, and on a
high-backed chair with tears in her eyes, and saying in a faint
voice,--

"Mistress Dorothy, I am not a Papist, and hope never to be."

Lettice, behind the chair, with her arm round her mother, and her
hand on her shoulder, like a champion, stood with quivering lips and
burning cheeks, and rejoined that "there were worse heretics than the
Papists, worse tyrants than the Inquisition."  Whilst Aunt Dorothy,
as pale as Lady Lucy, and with lips quivering as much as Lettice's,
faced them both with the consciousness of being herself a witness or
a martyr for the truth struggling within her against the sense that
she was regarded by others in the light of an inquisitor and
tormentor of martyrs.

"An't please you, Lady Lucy," I said, "my Father thought Dr. Antony,
who is down-stairs, might recommend you some healing draught.  He has
wonderful recipes for coughs."

And before a reply could be given, my Father and Dr. Antony were at
the door, and Aunt Dorothy was arrested in her testimony without the
possibility of uttering a last word.

Dr. Antony seemed to comprehend the position at a glance.  With a
quiet courtesy which introduced him at once, and gave him the command
of the field, he went up to Lady Lucy, and, feeling her pulse,
observed that it was slightly feverish and uneven, ordered the
windows to be open, and recommended that as much air as possible
should be obtained, by means of all but Mistress Lettice leaving the
room.  He had little doubt then that some cooling medicines, which he
had at hand, would do the rest.  As I was going Lettice entreated me
to stay, which I was ready to do.

And ere long we were all three quietly gathered around Lady Lucy's
chair, Lettice on a cushion at her feet (where she best loved to be),
I on the window-seat near, and Dr. Antony leaning on the back of her
chair.  She was discoursing to him in French, which she spoke with a
marvellously natural accent, and which I had never heard him speak
before.  I know not why, it seemed as if the language threw a new
vivacity and fire into his countenance, and I felt very ignorant, and
humbled, not to be able to join.  But this feeling did not last long,
Lady Lucy had a way of divining what passed in the mind, and she
called me near, and made me sit on a little chair beside her, and
drew my hand into hers, and encouraged me to say such words as I
knew, and praised my accent, and said it had just that pretty English
lisp in it that some of the countrymen of poor Queen Henrietta Maria
had thought charming.

She made Dr. Antony tell us moving histories still in French of his
ancestors, their daring deeds and hair-breadth 'scapes.  So an hour
passed, and we were all friends, bound together by the easy charm of
her sweet gracious manner, and had forgotten the storm and everything
else, till we were summoned to supper.

"Ah, Monsieur!" said she, giving him her hand as she took leave of
him, with a smile, "re-assure Mistress Dorothy as to my orthodoxy,
and make her believe my sympathies are on the right side with the
sufferers of St. Bartholomew's Day.  And Olive, little champion,"
said she, drawing my forehead down to her for a kiss, and stroking my
cheek, "never think it necessary again to interpose in a battle
between your aunt and your Mother's friend.  I honour her from my
heart for her fidelity to conscience.  And if she is more anxious
than necessary about my faith--we should surely bear one another no
grudge for that.  I know it cost her more than it did me for her to
exhort me as she did.  And I am not sure," she added, smiling, "if
after all she does not love me better than any of you."

"Mistress Olive," said Dr. Antony, as we sat that evening in the
dusk, by the window of my Father's room, while he wrote, "I would
that Christian women understood the beautiful work they might do if
they would take their true part as such."

"What would that be?" I said, thinking, after the experience of
to-day, it might probably be the part of the Mute.

"To see that Morals and Theology, Charity and Truth, are never
divorced," he replied.  "To win us back to the Beatitudes when we are
straying into the curses.  To lead us back to Persons when we are
groping into abstractions.  For Books full of dogma, Orthodox,
Arminian supra-lapsarian, or otherwise, to give us a home, a living
world, full of the Father, the Son, and the Comforter, of angels and
brothers.  To see that we never petrify the thought of the Living God
into a metaphysical formula, still less into a numerical term.  Never
to let us forget that the great purpose of redemption is to bring us
to God; that the great purpose of the Church is to make us good.
When we have clipped, and stretched, and stiffened the living Truth
into the narrow immutability of our theological or philosophical
definitions, to breathe it back again into the unfathomable
simplicity of the wisdom that brings heavenly awe over the faces of
little children, and heavenly peace into the eyes of dying men.  To
keep the windows open through our definitions into God's Infinity.
To translate our ingenious, definite, unchangeable scholastic terms
into the simple, infinite, ever-changing--because ever-living--words
of daily and eternal life; so that holiness shall never come to mean
a stern or mystic quality quite different from goodness; or
righteousness, a mere legal qualification quite different from
justice; or, humility, a supernatural attainment quite different from
being humble; or charity, something very far from simply being
gentle, and generous, and forbearing; and brethren, an ecclesiastical
noun of multitude totally unconnected with brother.  When women rise
to their work in the Church, it seems to me the Church will soon rise
to her true work in the world."

"You speak with fervour," said my Father, rising from the table, and
smiling as he laid his hand on Dr. Antony's shoulder; "the womanhood
you picture is something loftier than that of Eve."

"Mary's Ave has gone far to transfigure the name of Eve," he replied.
"'Ecce concilia Domini' shall echo deeper and further and be
remembered longer than 'The serpent tempted me and I did eat.'  But,"
he added, "we have a better type than Mary for woman as well as man,
in Him who came not to be ministered unto but to minister.  I was
chiefly thinking of the gifts most common, it seems to me, to women,
and least to controversialists, I mean, imagination and common sense.
Imagination which penetrates, from signs to things signified, which
pierces, for instance, into the depth and meaning of such words as
'eternity' and 'accursed'--which also penetrates behind the adjective
'Calvinistic or Arminian,' to the substantive men and women whose
theology they define.  And common sense, which, when a conclusion
contradicts our inborn conscience of right and wrong, refuses to
receive it although the path to it be smoothed and hedged by logic
without a flaw.

"In other words," said my Father, "you would say that, with women the
heart corrects the errors of the head oftener than we suffer it to do
so with us.  We must remember, however, that the heart and the
conscience also are not infallible, and that the same qualities which
can make women the best saints make them the worst controversialists.
Theology and morals being in their hearts thus closely intertwined,
they fight against a mistake as if it were a sin.  They quicken
abstractions, and even rites and ceremonies, into personal life, and
are apt to defend them with a blind and passionate vehemence as they
would the character of a husband or a son."

"Best gifts abused must ever be worst curses," said Dr. Antony.

And I ventured to say,--

"Is it not just the lowliness of our lot that makes it high?  Can we
help our voices becoming shrill, if we will have them loud?"

"Tune thine then, sweetheart, where first I learnt how sweet it was,"
said my Father, stroking my cheek.  "By sick-beds, or by children's
cradles, or, in the house of mourning, or wherever good words are
needed only to be heard by the one to whom they are spoken; there
women's voices are attuned to their truest tones."


And the next morning I had that walk in the orchard with Dr. Antony,
when he told me the secret which my Father would persist in declaring
(most unwarrantably, I think) lay at the root of his high
expectations as to the future work and destinies of women.

And when, a few hours afterwards, after I had been alone a while, and
we had knelt together and received my Father's blessing, and I began
to understand my happiness a little, and went and said something
about it to Lady Lucy, and especially how strange it was that Dr.
Antony said he had thought of it so long, whilst I had not been
dreaming of it, she kissed my forehead, and said with a smile,--

"Very strange, my unsuspecting little Puritan.  For it crossed my
thoughts the first hour I saw you together, and that was yesterday
evening.  Ah, Olive," she added, very tenderly, in a faltering voice,
"I had fond thoughts once that it might have been otherwise.  If my
Harry had lived, and this poor distracted realm had returned to her
allegiance, I had thought perchance some day to have the right to
call thee by the tenderest name.  But God hath not willed it so.  And
I try hard that his will may be mine.  He hath given thee the great
gift of a good man's heart.  And I have no fear but that thou wilt
keep it."




CHAPTER XII.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

Netherby, _May_, 1647.--They have given us the best upper chambers in
the house, one for a withdrawing-chamber, the other for my Mother's
and my sleeping-chamber.  This last has a broad embayed window
commanding the orchard, at the bottom of which is the pond where the
water-lilies grow that Roger gathered for me on that night when Dr.
Taylor and Mr. Milton discoursed together on the terrace, in speech
like rich music, about liberty of thinking and speaking.

"England has been echoing another kind of music all these years
since, on the same theme; but it seems as if we had drawn but little
nearer a conclusion.  The Presbyterians seem as convinced of the sin
of allowing any one else to think or speak freely as the poor
martyred Archbishop was.  The Presbyterians, it seems, are for the
Covenant (meaning Presbytery), King, and Parliament; the Covenant
first.  We for King without Covenant and with Bishops.  But the
Presbyterians are against conventicles and all sectaries (except
themselves).  Herein, so far, we and they agree, and herein, some
think, may be a hope for the good cause.  If we could make a
compromise, order might, it is thought, be speedily restored.  This,
however, seems very hard.  They would have to sacrifice the Covenant,
which seems nigh as dear to them as the Bible.  We, the Church by law
established; the sacred links, my Mother says, which bind us to the
Catholic Church of all the past, which the king will die, she thinks,
rather than do.  The only chance, therefore, of agreement seems to
be, if the Presbyterians ever reach the point of hating or fearing
the Independents more than they love the Covenant.  Then, some think
the King and the Presbyterians, Scottish and English, might unite and
overpower the Independents; and--what then?

"I cannot at all imagine.  Because, when the common enemy is gone,
Episcopacy and the Covenant still remain, and in the face of each
other.  Sir Launcelot said the king thinks he has a very plain 'game'
to play.  'He must persuade one of his enemies to extirpate the
other, and then come in easily and put the weakened victor under his
feet.'  This he has in letters declared to be his intention.  I trust
the royal letters have been misread.  For such a 'game' seems to me
very far from paternal or kingly; and, except on far better
testimony, I will not credit it.  But for me there is an especial
grief in all these matters.  Olive, who takes her politics mostly
from Roger, seems to lean to the Independents, who constitute the
strength of the army, and to General Cromwell, who is their idol; so
that whatever cause triumphs, nothing is likely to bring peace
between the Davenants and the Draytons.

"At present, however, our peace in this house is much increased.  My
Mother and Mistress Dorothy have concluded a treaty on the ground of
their common loyalty to His Majesty, and their common abhorrence of
'sectaries.'

"Moreover, Mistress Dorothy is marvellous gentle and kind to us.
Having delivered her conscience, she treats my Mother with a tender
consideration and deference that go to my heart, although sometimes I
think it is only from the pity a benevolent jailer would feel for
sentenced criminals.  They have been condemned.  Justice will be
satisfied.  And meantime, mercy may safely satisfy herself by keeping
them fed and warmed.

"She says little; but she watches my Mother's tastes, and supplies
her with unexpected delicacies in a way which binds my whole heart to
her.

"I scarce know why; but I always liked her.  She is so downright and
true; manly, as a man may be womanly.  She is most like Roger in some
ways of any of them, only he, being really a man and a soldier, is
gentler.  And when she loves you, it seems to be in spite of herself,
which makes it all the sweeter.  For she does love me.  I am sure of
it, by the way she watches and exhorts, and contradicts me.
Especially, since I read her those sermons that afternoon when we
were waiting.  I asked Olive, and she told me Mistress Dorothy said,
that afternoon, she thought I had gracious dispositions.  That meant,
I opine, that she liked me.  She wanted to excuse herself for liking
so worldly and Babylonish a young damosel as she believed me to be.
And, therefore, she has invested me with 'gracious dispositions,' and
believes herself commissioned to bring me out of Babylon, and to be a
'means of grace' to me, which, I am sure, I am willing she should be.
For my heart is too light and careless, I know well.  Except on one
or two points.  And, meantime, I flatter myself I may be an
'ordinance and means of grace' in some little measure to her, little
as she might acknowledge it.  It does good people so much good to
love (really love I mean, not take in hand merely like patients)
people who are not so good as themselves.  It sets them planning,
praying for others, and takes them away from looking within for
signs, and forward for rewards; by filling the heart with love, which
is the most gracious sign, and the most glorious reward in itself.

"Sweet Mother, mine! we all have been great means of grace to her in
that way.

"Think what she may, she would not have been a greater saint at
Little Gidding, although she had chanted the Psalter through three
hundred and sixty-five times in the year.

"I think she and Mistress Dorothy help each other.  They make me
think of the two groups of graces in the Bible.  St. Paul's,--'Love,
joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
temperance.'  I picture these as sweet maidenly or matronly forms
white-robed, radiant, with low sweet voices.  They represent my
Mother and the holy people of Mr. Herbert's school.  Then there are
St. Peter's,--'Faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience,
godliness, brotherly-kindness, charity.'  These rise before me like a
company of knights in armour, valiant, true, and pure.  In the kind
of plain, manly armour of the Ironsides, as Roger looked in it that
morning at Oxford, when he turned back and waved farewell to me in
the court of the College.  And these represent Mistress Dorothy and
the nobler Puritans.  They are the same, no doubt, essentially; love
and charity, the mother of one group, the king and crown of the
other.  Yet they seem to represent to me two diverse orders of piety,
the manly and the womanly.  Together, side by side, in mutual aid and
service, not front to front in battle, what a church and what a world
they might make.

"But the great event in the house now is the bethrothal of Olive and
Dr. Antony, which took place on the very morning after Mistress
Dorothy's grand Remonstrance.

"Dr. Antony left a day or two afterwards.  And over since we have
been as busy as possible preparing for the wedding, which is to be in
July.  Not a long betrothal-time.  But they needed not further time
to try each other.

"It is very pleasant to be all of us occupied for her, who is so
little wont to be occupied with herself.  She seems in a little
tumult of happiness, as far as any Puritan soul can be in a tumult.

"Many of these Puritan ways seem to me wondrous innocent and sweet.

"They have their solemnities, I see, and their ritual, and
ceremonial; and their symbolism and sacred art, moreover, say what
Mistress Dorothy may to the contrary.

"Tender sacred family rites and solemnities.  They have, indeed, no
chapel or chaplain.  But the family seems a little church; the father
is the priest.  Not without sacred beauty this order, nor without
sanction either from the fathers of the Church (fathers older than
Archbishop Laud's), the fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

"For instance, when Olive and Dr. Antony were betrothed, Mr. Drayton
led them into his room, and laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
And that was the seal of their betrothal.  Every Sunday morning,
Olive tells me, when she and Roger were children, after family
prayers, they used to kneel thus for their father's blessing.  Sacred
touches, holy as coronation sacring oil, I think, to bear about the
memory of through life.  But then there is this to be remembered.
When the consecrating touch is from hands which work with us in daily
life, they need to be very pure.  No pomp of place, and no mist of
distance glorifies the ministrant.  He had need, indeed, to be all
glorious within.

"Family solemnities must be very true to be at all fair.  I can fancy
Puritan hypocrisy, or a mere formal Puritanism, the driest and most
hideous thing in the world.

"Then as to symbols and sacred art.  What else are these Scripture
texts, carved over door-ways, graven on chimney-stones, emblazoned on
walls?  'They are not graven images,' saith Mistress Dorothy.  But
what are words but images within the soul, or images, rightly used,
but children's words?  Not that even as to 'holy pictures' and
'images' they are quite destitute.  What else are the paintings from
Scripture on the Dutch tiles in Mr. Drayton's room, where Olive and
Roger learned from Mistress Gretel's lips their earliest Bible lore?
It is true, they are chiefly from the Old Testament.  But Adam and
Eve delving, the serpent darting out his forked tongue from the tree,
Noah and the animals walking out of the ark, are as much pictures as
St. Peter fishing, or the blessed Virgin and the Babe, on church
windows?  What difference, then, except that the Puritan pictures are
on tiles at home instead of on glass at church?  'They are for
instruction, and not for idolatry,' saith Mistress Dorothy.  But did
not the monks in old times paint their pictures also for instruction,
and not for idolatry?  'Centuries of abuse make the most innocent
things perilous,' saith Mistress Dorothy.  'When the brazen serpent
had become an idol, Jehoshaphat called it a piece of brass, and broke
it in pieces.'  I can see something in that.  The sacrilege, then, is
the idolatry, not in the destruction of the idol.  But alas, if we
set ourselves to destroy all things that have been, or can be made
into idols, where are we to stop?  Some people made idols of the very
stones of their houses, without any scriptures thereon, or of their
firesides, without the sacred pictures.  There are two things,
however, which fill me with especial reverence in these Puritan ways.
First, this sweet and sacred family piety.  Second, or rather first,
for it is at the root of all, the intense conviction that every man,
woman, and child, in every word and work, has to do directly with
God, and that he, by virtue of being divine, is nearer us than all
the creatures; that to Him each one is immediately responsible, and
that, therefore, on his word only can it be safe for each one to
believe or do anything.  Such conviction gives a power which ceases
to be wonderful only when you think of its source.  But alas, alas!
what if this Divine word be misunderstood.

"_July_.--Roger Drayton has come, on a few days' leave, to be present
at his sister's wedding.

"He hath brought the strange news that the king is in the keeping of
the army.  We scarcely know whether to mourn or rejoice.  It came
about on this wise, as Roger told my Mother and me:--

"It was reported in the army that the Presbyterian party in the
Parliament designed to remove the king from Holmby, where he was, to
Oatlands, near London, there to make a separate treaty, in which the
soldiers were not to be consulted or considered.

"On the fourth of June, therefore, Cornet Joyce, without commission,
it seems, from any one, but simply as knowing that it would be
agreeable to the army; and to prevent this design of a separate
Presbyterian treaty, went, with some seven or eight hundred men, to
Holmby House, where His Majesty had remained since we saw him in
April.

"The Commissioners of the Parliament, who were His Majesty's jailers,
were very indignant at this interference of Cornet Joyce, and
commanded the gates to be closed, and preparations to be made to
resist an assault.  Their own soldiers, on the contrary, were of the
same mind with the army and the Cornet, and threw open the gates at
once to their comrades.  Nor was the king himself, it seems,
unwilling.  When Cornet Joyce made his way to the royal presence, the
king spoke to him with much graciousness.  He asked the Cornet if he
would promise to do him no hurt, and to force him to nothing against
his conscience.  Cornet Joyce declared he had no ill intention in any
way; the soldiers only wanted to prevent His Majesty being placed at
the head of another army, and that he would be most unwilling to
force any man against his conscience, much less His Majesty.  The
king, therefore, agreed to accompany him the next day, this happening
at night.

"The next morning, at six o'clock, His Majesty condescended to meet
the soldiers.

"He again demanded to know the Cornet's authority, and if he had no
writing from the general, Sir Thomas Fairfax.

"'I pray you, Mr. Joyce,' he said, 'deal ingenuously with me, and
tell me what commission you have.'

Said Joyce,--

"'Here is my commission.'

"'Where?' asked the king.

"'Behind me,' said the Cornet, pointing to his troopers; 'and I hope
that will satisfy your Majesty.'

The King smiled.

"'It is as fair a commission,' he said, 'and as well written as I
have ever seen in my life; a company of as handsome and proper
gentlemen as I have seen a great while.  But what if I should yet
refuse to go with you?  I hope you would not force me!  I am your
king.  You ought not to lay violent hands on your king.  I
acknowledge none to be above me but God.'

"Cornet Joyce assured His Majesty he meant him no harm; and at length
the king went with the soldiers as they desired, they suffering him
to choose between two or three places the one he liked best.

"So, by easy stages, they conducted him to Childerley, near
Newmarket.  And it is said the king was the merriest of the company.
Heaven send it to be a good augury.

"Roger said, moreover, that His Majesty continues to be of good
cheer, and the army to be friendly disposed towards him.  They have
hope yet that Sir Thomas Fairfax, General Cromwell, and Ireton may
make some arrangement to which His Majesty may honourably accede.

"And, meantime, they allow him not only the attendance of his
faithful servants, but his own chaplains to perform the services of
the Church, which the Presbyterians refused him at Holmby.
Englishmen, especially the common people, and most of all, I think,
English soldiers, have honest hearts after all; safer to trust to
than those of men armed _cap-a-pie_ in covenants, and catechisms, and
confessions.  Surely the king will yet win the hearts of the army,
and all will yet go right.  Roger, meanwhile, is as stately in his
courtesy to me as a Spanish hidalgo, listening and assenting to all I
say in a way I detest.  For it means that he feels our differences
too deep to venture on."

"_July_ 2_nd_.--Roger has begun to contradict and controvert me again
delightfully.  This morning we had our first serious battle.

"Yester eve I said something about abhoring all middle states of
things.  It was in reference to the poor peasants flocking around the
king.  I said there was no poetry in mid-way things, or times, or
states, in mid-day, mid-summer, middle-life, or the middle-station in
the state.

"He took this up earnestly after his manner, and went into a serious
argument to prove me wrong.  It was but a weakling and half-fledged
poesy, quoth he, which must needs go to dew-drops, and rosy clouds,
and primroses, and violets, for its smiles and decorations, and could
see no glory and beauty in summer or in noon.  Summer with its golden
ripening harvests, and all its depths of bountiful life in woods and
fields; noon-tide with its patient toil or its rapturous hush of
rest; manhood and womanhood with their dower of noble work and
strength to do it.  He could not abide (he said), to hear the
spring-tide spoken pulingly of as if it faded instead of ripened into
summer, or youth as if it set instead of dawned into manhood.  And as
to the middle station in a nation, its yeomanry and traders, nations
must have their heads to think and their hands to work; but the
middle order was the nation's heart.  If that was sound, the nation
was sound, if that was corrupt and base, the nation's heart was
rotten at the core.  Which (ended he) he thought these last years,
with all their miseries, had proved the heart of England was not.

"Roger Drayton has a strange way of his own in discourse, of putting
aside all your light skirmishing forces, and closing with the very
kernel and core of the people he has to do with.  The way of the
Ironsides, I suppose.  I have been used to little but skirmishing in
discourse among the younger Cavaliers; light jesting talk whether the
heart or the subject be grave or gay.  Even serious feelings being
hidden for the most part under a mask of levity.  But Roger seldom,
perhaps never, exactly jests.  His mirth, like a child's laughter, is
from the heart, as much as his gravity.  He will know and have you
know what you really honour, or love, or want, or dread.

"So it happened that to-day on the terrace we came on the very
subject I had intended always to avoid; General Cromwell.

"I chanced to allude in passing to some of the reports I had heard
against the General, some careless words about his praying and
preaching with his men.

"I had no notion until then how Roger reveres this man, like a son
his father, or a loyal subject his sovereign.

"He said, quietly, but with that repressed passion which often makes
his words so strong, that no man who had ever knelt at General
Cromwell's prayers would jest at his praying, any more than any man
who had ever encountered him in battle would jest at his fighting.
That his word could inspire his men to charge like a word from
heaven, and could rally them like a re-inforcement.  That after the
battle his strong utterance of Christian hope and faith could hearten
men to die, as it had heartened them to fight; that after such a
battle as Marston Moor, while directing the siege-works outside York,
he could find time to go down into the depths of his own past sorrows
to draw thence living waters of comfort for a friend (Mr. Walton)
whose son had been slain, writing him a letter of consolation (which
Roger had seen) containing words deep enough 'to drink up the
father's sorrow.'

"Then Roger spoke of the unflinching justice, which was only the
other side of this same sympathy and care; how General Cromwell had
two of his men hanged for plundering prisoners at Winchester, and
sent others accused of the same offence to be judged by the royal
garrison at Oxford, whence the governor sent them back with a
generous acknowledgment.

"'It is _loyalty_ you feel towards General Cromwell,' I said, 'such a
disinterested, ennobling, self-sacrificing passion as our Harry felt
for the king.'

"He paused a moment,--

"'If God sends us a judge and a deliverer what else can we feel for
him?' he said, at length; 'I believe General Cromwell is the defender
of the law, and will be the deliverer of the nation, and if he will
suffer it,' he added, in a lower voice, 'of the king.'

"'Is it true,' I asked, 'that, as you once told us, General Cromwell
and the army are courteous to His Majesty, and anxious to make good
terms with him?  Can it be possible that there may yet be an
honourable peace?'  'I believe,' he replied, 'that all things else
are possible, if only it is possible for the king to be true.  But if
a word, king's or peasant's, is worth nothing, what other bond
remains between man and man?  Forgive my rough speech.  I know your
loyalty is a sacred thing to you.  If the king will deal truly, I
believe General Cromwell will make him such a king as he never was
before.  But who can twist ropes of sand?  For one who is untrue
seems to me not to be a real substance at all, not even a shadow of a
substance, but simply a dream or phantasm, simply _nothing_.'

"I felt myself flush.  We have sacrificed too much for His Majesty,
not to believe in him.  Yet I fear he has other thoughts as to the
double-dealing to be permitted in diplomacy than Harry had, or many
gentlemen who serve him.

"I could only answer Roger by saying,--

"Adversity makes a king sacred if nothing else can.  If the king's
cause were once more to prosper, we might debate such things as
these.  But not now, Roger.  I dare not now.'

"He looked as if words were on his lips, he could scarcely, with all
his reserve and courtesy, hold back.  But he turned away, and calling
Lion from the pond where he was chasing some wild-fowl, we went into
the house.

"_July_ 4_th_.--Dr. Antony has come for the wedding.  He brought us a
moving account of the two days spent by the Royal children.  James
the Duke of York, the Duke of Gloucester, and the Princess Elizabeth,
with His Majesty, at Caversham, near Reading.  The Independent
officers of the army permitted it.  And they say General Cromwell
himself, having sons and daughters of his own, shed tears to see the
affection of the king and the innocent playfulness of the children,
knowing so little of the dangers around them.

"_July_ 5_th_.--Olive looked wondrous fair as a bride, in her plain
spotless dress, without an ornament, partly from Puritanical
plainness, and partly because the family jewels went long since with
the thimbles and bodkins of the London dames into the treasury at the
Guildhall.  So grave and serene, pure and young, with her fair pale
face, and her smooth white brow and soft true eyes.

"She was married in the church, with some fragments of the
marriage-service, the whole being forbidden.

"It was sweet afterwards to see her kneel while my Mother kissed her
forehead, and placed a string of large pearls round her neck, with a
jewel.

"They had always a singular love for each other, Olive and my Mother.
The bride and bridegroom rode away together after noon-tide towards
their London home.

"_July_ 6_th_.--This morning I rose early and went down to the pond
in the orchard, and being led back by the sight of it to the thought
of Olive and old times, strayed on towards the Lady Well where first
we met.

"By the way I passed old Gammer Grindle's cottage, and finding the
door open, early as it was, went in to tell her about the bride.

"And there I saw Cicely and the child again; and heard her terrible
story of wrong and sorrow.

"It made me very sad, and as I went on towards the Well, it set me
thinking of many things.

"Why did Olive never tell me?  But then I thought how I had more than
once wilfully refused to believe evil of Sir Launcelot, choosing to
believe what I liked.  And a cold shudder came over me as I sat by
the Lady Well, to think how near danger I had been, and how terrible
it would have been if I had cared for him (not indeed that I ever
could).  I meditated also whether it was not yet possible to get
right done to Cicely.  And I resolved as far as I could for the
future never to believe anything because I wished, but because it was
true; that is, to try not to wish about things being true, but to
search out honestly if they are.  And I was standing looking into the
Well, sunk deep in these thoughts, wondering if any one ever really
did quite do this, when I heard a footstep and glancing upwards, I
met Roger Drayton's eyes.

"And then he told me of his love.  I cannot say I had never thought
of it before.  I had sometimes even thought it might one day come to
something like this, and had even imagined a little, what I should
say, or perhaps, not so much what, as how I would say many wise
things to him and manage it so ingeniously that in some marvellous
way all the difficulties about the Civil wars would vanish, he would
see he had made some mistakes, and I would acknowledge candidly that
our side had not been blameless, and then I might admit, that,
perhaps, one day he might speak to me again on the other subject.  At
least I know these dreams of mine always ended in my being left in
perfect certainty that Roger would one day join in the good cause,
and Roger perhaps in a very little uncertainty as to the rest.

"But everything went quite the other way.  Roger was so much in
earnest about what he had to say, that what I had to say about
politics unfortunately went entirely out of my head.  Roger has left
me with anything but a certainty or probability of his ever being a
Cavalier, as things are at present.  And I have left him in no
uncertainty at all about the rest.

"I am afraid it was a golden opportunity lost.  But how could I help
it?  When he showed all his heart to me, how could I help his seeing
mine?  And since I am sure there is no one in the world to be
compared with Roger, how could I help his seeing that I feel and
think so?  Besides, after all, there is something base in such
conditions.  It might have been trifling with his conscience.  And
that would have been almost a crime.

"Wherefore, I am sure I could not have done otherwise, and I think I
have done right.

"Yet we made no promises.  We know we love each other.  That is all.
And I know he has loved me ever since he can remember.  And I know,
with such a heart as his, once is for ever?

"And I know that now, if it were possible, that the whole world could
come between us; a world of oceans and continents, a world of war and
politics and calumnies, it would always be outside, it would never
come between our hearts.

"My Mother thinks so too.  I feel now, for the first time, in some
ways what it is to have a Mother's heart to rest on.  Although
through all her tender silence, I feel she sees more difficulties in
the way than I do.

"_July_ 10_th_.--A world of oceans and continents no separation!  How
boldly I wrote!  Roger is gone back to the army; gone not half an
hour, barely a mile away, scarcely out of sight.  If I listen I fancy
I can almost hear his horse hoofs in the distance.  And it seems as
if that mile were a world of oceans and continents, as if these
moments since he left were the beginning of an eternity, altogether
beyond the poor counted minutes and hours and days of time.  But a
minute since, his hand in mine, and what may happen before I see him
again?  How do I know if I shall ever see him again?  In love such as
ours, ever and never so terribly intertwine!

"Unbelieving that I am.  Now I shall have to learn if I understand
really anything of what it is to trust God and to pray.

"Prayer and trust must be as deep as _this love_, or they are nothing.

"They must be _deeper_, or they are no support."


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

We began our home in London in troublous times.

As we came near our house which was not far from the river and from
Whitehall, we saw something which moved me not a little, a coach
being drawn to St. James's Palace, guarded by Parliament soldiers.  A
few people turned and gazed as it passed; and two children were
looking out of the window.  These were the Royal children being taken
back to St. James's Palace after their two days with the king at
Caversham.  There was something very mournful in beholding these
young creatures, born to be children of the nation as well as of the
king, taken to their royal home as to a prison, dwelling in their own
land as exiles, their Mother a fugitive in France, their Father a
captive among his own people.

There is a terrible strength in the pathetic majesty which enshrines
a fallen king; a well-nigh irresistible power in the crown which has
become a crown of thorns.  A captive monarch is a more perilous foe
than a victorious army to the subjects who hold him captive.  How
often during those sad years, 1647 and 1648, I had to go over all the
causes of the civil war again and again; Eliot slowly murdered in his
unlawful and unwholesome prison; the silenced Parliaments; the
tortured Puritans; the imprisoned patriots.  How often I had to
recall all its course--Prince Rupert's plundering; the king's
repeated duplicity, slowly wearing out the nation's lingering trust
in him, and baffling all attempts at negotiation.  I had to repeat
these things to myself, by an effort of will again and again, in
order to keep true to our principles at all.

And the conflict with this rebound of instinctive loyalty, which went
on in my heart secretly, was going on in the city openly at the time
when we took up our abode there.

So strong and general, indeed, was this rebound of loyalty, that in
that August, 1647, which was our honeymoon, it seemed that the whole
city of London--at the beginning of the war the Parliament's very
strength and stay--was panting to return to its allegiance, led by
the Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons.  The conflict
seemed altogether to have shifted its ground.  The enemy now dreaded
by the city was not the king, but the army which its own liberal
contributions and persevering courage had done so much to create.
Like the German magician, Dr. Faustus, of whom Aunt Gretel used to
tell us, the city crouched trembling before the untameable spirit it
had evoked, as from moment to moment it grew into more terrible
stature and strength.

Sunday the 1st August, 1647, my first Sunday in London, was a
memorable day to me.

Through all the hush of the Puritan Sabbath there was a deep hum of
unrest throughout the city, a ceaseless stir of men walking in silent
haste hither and thither, or gathering for eager debate at the
corners of streets, in the squares, or in any public place.  It was a
notable contrast to the cheerful stir of animal life and the deep
under-stillness at Netherby.

On the Friday before, the House of Commons had been invaded, not as
once in the beginning of the strife by the king trampling on
"Privilege" in quest of five "traitors," but by a crowd of 'prentices
with hats on, clamouring for the king against the army.

Then the two Speakers of the Lords and Commons had fled to the army,
with the mace, and all the Independent members.

The eleven banished Presbyterian members had returned; among them
Denzil Hollis (one of the king's fated "five traitors" who had
afterwards withstood the royal forces so gallantly at Brentford) and
Sir John Clotworthy, whose zeal had pursued Archbishop Laud with
theological questions even on the scaffold.

Recruitings, gatherings of men and arms, and drillings and
gun-practice had been going on in all quarters of the city on the
Saturday.

On Monday these were renewed with the earliest light of the summer
morning.  Drums beating, trumpets calling, 'prentices hurrahing on
all sides, "No peace with Sectaries."  The London militia, "one and
all," against the factious army, then believed to be couching
tranquilly near Bedford.

But on Tuesday the army rose from its lair, and advanced to Hounslow.
Then all Southwark came pouring in terrified throngs across London
Bridge, demanding peace with the army, and declaring they would not
fight.  The Presbyterian General Poyntz was indignant, and there was
tumult and bloodshed in the streets.

Closer and closer that defied but dreaded monster of an army came,
every step forward and every halt watched with fluctuations of hope
and fear in the city.  The army, meanwhile, strong in the presence of
the king, the speakers, the mace, and Oliver Cromwell, looked on
itself as not only representing but _being_ all the three powers of
the state combined, inspired by an invisible power stronger than all
states; and so it advanced majestically free from hurry or disorder.
Not a provision-cart or pack-horse was stopped on its way into the
city.  And on Friday, August the 9th, the army appeared in the city,
marching three deep through Hyde Park with boughs of laurel in their
hats, through Westminster, along the Strand, through the City, to the
Tower.  In a day or two they were quietly established in the villages
around, the headquarters being at Putney.  The king was lodged the
while at Hampton Court.

Not an act of vengeance nor of disorder, as far as I know, disgraced
their triumph.  Not that this was any matter of wonder to us.  Our
wonder was that sober and godly citizens should wonder at the
soberness and godliness of the army, every regiment of which was a
worshipping congregation, and the soul of it Oliver Cromwell.

Job Forster was sorely vexed at the evil reports spread concerning
the soldiers.  We saw him often during that autumn.

"Have they forgotten," he said, "that we have won Marston Moor and
Naseby for them? that we have been marching through the land all
these years, and not left a godly homestead nor a family the worse
for us throughout the length and breadth of the country?  A man might
think it was we who sacked Leicester and plundered and burnt villages
and farms far and wide.  They should have heard the prayers our poor
men poured forth by the camp-fires on the battle-fields where we shed
our blood for them.  Such prayers as might well-nigh lift the roofs
from their great vaults of churches, and belike the great stone also
from their hearts.  Men creeping easily among streets, praying safely
as long as they like behind walls, and sleeping every night on
feather-beds, might be the better for a good stretch now and then in
one of our Cromwell's marches, and a hard bed on the moors, and a
good look right up into the sky, beyond the roofs, and the clouds,
and the stars, and the Covenants and Confessions."

Roger also chafed much at the citizens, but most of all at their
misunderstanding of General Cromwell.  All that autumn, said Roger,
the General, with Ireton, Vane, and Harry Marten, and other faithful
men, were labouring hard to establish peace on a lasting foundation,
as the proposals of the army proved.  They would have provided that
His Majesty's person, the queen, and the royal issue should be
restored to honour and all personal rights; that the royal authority
over the militia should be subject to the advice of Parliament for
ten years; that all civil penalties for ecclesiastical offences (for
instance, whether for using or disusing the Common Prayer), should be
removed; that some old decayed boroughs should be disfranchised, and
the representation be made more equal; that parliaments should last
two years, not to be dissolved except by their own consent, unless
they had sat one hundred and twenty days; that grand jurymen should
be chosen in some impartial way, and not at the discretion of the
sheriff.  But no man would have it so.  The Levellers in the army
clamoured for justice on the "Chief Delinquent," and declared that
General Cromwell had betrayed them to the king.  There was a mutiny
which Cromwell himself barely succeeded in quelling.  The
Presbyterians would not give up the right to enforce the Covenant.
The king carried on negotiations at the same time with General
Cromwell, with the Presbyterians, and with the Irish Papists;
intending, as was showed, alas! too surely, from intercepted letters,
to be true to none, except, perchance, the last.

On November the 12th, early in the morning, the news flashed through
the city, cried from street to street, that the king had fled from
Hampton Court; and Roger, who was with us, that morning, said,--

"Once more General Cromwell would have saved the king and the
country.  But the king will not be saved.  Now he must turn wholly to
the country."

"But what," replied my husband, "if the country also refuses to be
saved by General Cromwell?"

"Then for a New England across the seas," said Roger.  "But we are
not come to that yet."

For even after the king's flight Roger clung to the hope of
reconciliation, his hopes nourished by secret fountains flowing from
the very icebergs of his fears.  For with the bond which bound People
and King, might be snapped for him the bond, not indeed of love, but
of hope between him and Lettice.

Still throughout that dreary winter negotiations went on between the
Parliament and His Majesty at the Castle of Carisbrook.  More and
more hopeless as more and more men became mournfully convinced of the
king's untruth.  Until, in April, 1648, when, from the upper windows
of our house, I could see on one side the trees bursting into leaf in
St. James' Park, and on the other the river shining with a thousand
tints of green and gold with the reflection of the wooded gardens of
the palaces and mansions from Westminster to the Temple; when the
fleets of swans began to pass by on their way to build their nests in
the reedy islets by Richmond or Kew, the news came from all quarters
that, amidst all this sweet stir of natural life, the country was
stirring with fatal insurrections from Kent to the Scottish borders.

The first outburst was in London itself.

A few 'prentices were playing at bowls on Sunday, April 9th, in
Moorfields, during church time.  The train-bands tried to disperse
them.  They fought, were routed by the train-bands, but rallied
quickly to the old cry of "Clubs."  All through that night we heard
the tumult surging up and down through the city.  The watermen, a
powerful body of men, joined them.  The cry was, "For God and King
Charles."  And not till the Ironsides charged on them from
Westminster was the riot quelled.

Then came tidings that Chepstow and Pembroke were taken by the
royalists, and that a Scottish army of forty thousand was coming
across the borders to undo all that had been done and to restore the
king.

About that time Roger came into the chamber where I was busied with
confections, and unlacing and laying aside his helmet, he sat down in
silence.

His face was fixed and very pale.

"No ill-tidings?" I said.

"I ought not to think so," he replied.

And then he told me of a solemn prayer-meeting, held throughout the
day before at Windsor Castle, by the army leaders.  How some of them,
being "sore perplexed that what they had judged to do for the good of
these poor nations had not been accepted by them, were minded to lay
down arms, disband, and return each to his home, there to suffer
after the example of Him who, having done what He could to save His
people, sealed His life by suffering."  But others were differently
minded, and striving to trace back the causes of their present
divisions and weakness, they came at last to what they believed the
root, those cursed carnal conferences which their own conceited
wisdom had prompted them to the year before with the king's party.

Then Major Goffe solemnly rehearsed from the Scripture the words,
"Turn you at my reproof, and I will pour out my Spirit unto you;" and
thereupon their sin and their duty was set unanimously with weight on
each heart, so that none was able to speak a word to each other for
bitter weeping, at the sense and shame of their sins and their base
fear of men."  "Cromwell, Ireton, and his Ironsides weeping bitterly!
It was a thing not to forget," said Roger, pausing.

"Then, Roger," said I, trembling, "if this was the sin they wept for,
what is the _duty_ they see before them?"

Roger bowed his forehead on his hands as they rested on the table
before him, and his reply came muffled and slow.

"'To call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that
blood he hath shed and mischief he hath done to his utmost against
the Lord's cause and people in these poor nations.'  This is what
they deem their duty," he said.

"Call the king to an account, Roger!" I said, "the king!"

I could scarce speak the word for horror.

"Kings have to be called to account," he said.

"Yes, in heaven," I said.  "But on earth, Roger, on earth never."

"Herod was called to account on earth, Olive," said he.

"True, but it was by God, Roger," I said.  "Not by man! never by man!"

"By the law, Olive," he said; "by God's law, which is above all men."

"But what men can ever have right to execute the law on a king?" I
said; "on their own king?"

"Woe to the men who have to do it," said Roger; "but bitterer woe to
the man who does not the work God sets him to do, whatever woe it
brings on the doing.  Olive, who gave," he added, mournfully,
"sanction to Laud and Strafford's oppressions, and to Prince Rupert's
plunderings?"

I could only weep.

"Oh, Roger," I said, "let the thunderbolt, or the pestilence, or any
of God's terrible angels do this work in His time.  They are strong
and swift enough.  It is not for men."

He made no reply.

"What lies between this terrible resolve and its execution?" I asked
at length.

"Chepstow and Pembroke to be besieged and taken; Wales to be
reconquered; the Scottish army of forty thousand to be driven back
over the borders," he replied.

"Then there is a hope of escape for the king yet."

"There is an interval, Olive," he replied.  "These things must take
time.  But they must be done.  In a few days, General Cromwell is to
lead us forth to do them.  The order is given for the army to march
to Wales."

I did not venture to mention Lettice's name to him.  We both knew too
well what a gulf this terrible resolve, if ever it came to action,
must create between us.  But before he left he said,--

"Olive, I don't think it is cowardice not to say anything of this to
Lettice yet.  Her mother, she writes to-day, is failing so sadly.
And there are so many chances in battle.  If I fall, I need not leave
on her memory of me what would so embitter sorrow to her.

"And the king might escape," thought I.  "His Majesty had all but
succeeded in getting through the bars of his chamber-window not a
month since.  But I did not say this to Roger."

On the next day, the 3rd of May, the army marched forth, and with it
Roger and Job Forster.  And my husband went with them on his work of
mercy.

So that this summer of 1648 was a very anxious and solitary one for
me.  I longed much to see my Father, but he was occupied in quelling
insurrection in the North.  And the city was so unquiet, I thought it
selfish to send for either of my aunts.

Not that I was without friends.  Now and then it fortified me greatly
to have a glimpse of Mr. John Milton in his small house at Holborn;
to hear his strong words of determination and hope for the English
people; and, perchance, to catch some strains from his organ.

But my chief solaces were, first the morning exercises, between six
and eight of the clock, at St. Margaret's Church near the Abby, where
there was daily prayer, and praise, and reading of God's word, with
comments to press it home to the heart, from divers excellent and
godly ministers.

And next, a friendship I had made with good Mr. John Henry a Welsh
gentleman who kept the royal garden and orchard at Whitehall, and
lived in a pleasant house close on Whitehall Stairs.  His wife had
died scarce three years before, of a consumption, and it was edifying
to hear him and his daughters speak of her virtue and piety; how she
had looked well to the ways of her household, had prayed daily with
them, catechized her children, and devoted her only son Philip to the
work of the ministry in his infancy, and how a little before she died
she had said, "My head is in heaven, my heart is in heaven; it is but
one step more and I shall be there too."

This friendship solaced me for many causes; primarily for three: in
that Mr. Henry was a godly gentleman; in that he lived in a garden by
fair water, which reminded me of Netherby; and in that he was a
Royalist.  For it did my heart good to near some good words spoken
for the captive king, poor gentleman; and I have been wont ever to
gain benefit from good men who differ from us on party points.  With
such we leave the party differences, and fly to the common harmonies,
which are deeper.

Many a delightsome hour have I spent in Mr. Henry's house in the
orchard, by the river, watching the boats, and gay barges, and the
fishers, and the white fleets of swans, and the flow of the broad
river sweeping by, always like a poem of human life, set to a stately
organ music, plying my needle meanwhile beside the young daughters of
the house, with cheerful converse.  But most of all I loved to
hearken to the father's discourse concerning the king and the court
in the days gone by.  How the young princes used to play with his
Philip, and gave him gifts, and had wondrous courtesy for him; and
how Archbishop Laud took a particular kindness for him when he was a
child, because he would be very officious to attend to the water-gate
(which was part of his father's charge), to let the archbishop
through when he came late from council, to cross the water to
Lambeth; and how afterwards the lad Philip had been taken to see the
fallen archbishop in the Tower, and he had given him some "new money."

It was strange to think how the great River of Time had borne all
that stately company away, king, court, archbishop, council, like
some fleeting pomp of gay barges beneath the windows, or like the
masques and pageants they had delighted in, of which Mr. Henry told
me.  It was good, too, to have such touches of simple kindness, as
remembering a child's taste for bright new money, thrown into the
dark picture we Puritans had among us of the persecutor of our
brethren.  It is good for the persecuted to feel by some human touch
that their persecutors are human; good while the persecuted suffer,
good beyond price if ever they come to rule and judge.

Sometimes, moreover, Mr. Philip the son came home from Christchurch,
Oxford, where he was a student, and his discourse was wondrous sacred
and pleasant for so young a gentleman.  One thing I remember he said
which was a special solace to me.  He would blame those who laid so
much stress on every one knowing the exact time of their conversion.
"Who can so soon be aware of the daybreak," quoth he, "or of the
springing up of the seed sown?  The blind man in the Gospel is our
example.  This and that concerning the recovering of his sight he
knew not: 'But this one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I
see.'"  Which words have often returned to my comfort.  In that,
instead of sending me back into my past life, and down into my heart
to look for tokens of grace, they set me looking up to my Lord, to
see his gracious countenance; and in looking I am enlightened, be it
for the first time, or the thousand and first.

Meantime the great tide of Time was flowing on, bearing on its breast
to the sea royal fleets, and little row-boats such as mine.

In July the sailors of the fleet suddenly declared for the king,
landed the Parliament admiral, and crossing the Channel, took on
board the Prince of Wales, acknowledging him as their commander.

At this news my heart beat as high with hope as the fiercest
royalist's.  The Prince of Wales with a fleet in the Downs! the king
his father in prison close to the shore at Carisbrook! what could
hinder a rescue?  But no rescue was attempted.  Weeks passed on--the
opportunity was lost; the fleet was won back to the Parliament, and
the king remained at Carisbrook.  I have never heard any attempt to
explain why the prince neglected this chance of saving the king.  It
made my heart ache to think of the captive sovereign watching all
those weeks for rescue, (for he sent to entreat it might be
attempted) and listening for the sound of friendly guns, and the
appearance of a band of loyal seamen, all in vain.

For all this time his doom was coiling closer and closer round him.

Pembroke and Chepstow were retaken.  General Cromwell wrote from
Nottingham for shoes for his "poor tried soldiers," wearied with a
hundred and fifty miles hasty marching across the wild country of
Wales towards the north.  In August came the tidings of the total
defeat of the Scottish army at Preston.

I had just received the news of this in a letter from my husband, and
was sitting alone in my chamber, tossed hither and thither in mind,
as was my wont during those anxious months, scarce knowing at any
news whether to rejoice or to mourn, in that every victory of the
army seemed but to bring a step nearer the fulfillment of that
dreadful purpose of calling the king to account.  By way of quieting
these uneasy thoughts, I rose to go to good Mr. Henry's, when a
little stir at the door aroused me, and in another minute I was
clasped to Aunt Gretel's heart, sobbing out my gladness at seeing her.

"Hush, sweetheart, hush," she said, "that is the worst of surprises.
I meant to save thee suspense, and to make as little disturbance as
possible."

"I wanted thee so sorely," said I.  "It is not thy coming that has so
moved me; it was the trying to do without thee."

In half an hour she had unpacked her small bundle, and established
herself in the guest-chamber, with everything belonging to her as
quietly in its place, as if it had never known another.  Her presence
brought an unspeakable quiet with it.  The solitary house became home
again.  And in another fortnight we were rejoicing together over my
first-born, our little Magdalene; the fountain of delight opened for
us in the desert of those dreary times.

And in September my husband returned to me.

Preston was the last battle of that campaign worthy the name.  The
Scottish royalist army was broken up, and General Cromwell was
welcomed in Edinburgh, and by the Covenanters everywhere, as the
deliverer of the land.

Throughout September the king was holding conferences at Newport with
the Commissioners of the Parliament.  All bore witness to the ability
and readiness with which he spoke.  His hair had turned gray, his
face was furrowed with deep lines of care, but all the old majesty
was in his port, and even those who had known him before were
surprised at his learning and wit.

But, alas, it was mere speech.  The king wrote to his friends
excusing himself for making concessions, by the assurance that he
merely did it in order to facilitate his escape.

And more than that, all the actors in that drama, sincere or not,
were rapidly fading into mere performers in a pageant.  The decisive
conferences were held, the true work was done.  The doom was fixed
elsewhere.

By the middle of November the army, victorious from Wales and
Scotland, and mindful of the prayer-meeting at Windsor, was again at
St. Albans, calling for justice on the Chief Delinquent.

On the 29th of November the king was removed from Carisbrook to Hurst
Castle, a lonely, bare and melancholy fort opposite to the Isle of
Wight, whose walls were washed by the sea.

On December the 2d the quiet of Mr. Henry's house and of the royal
orchard was broken, by the arrival of a portion of the Parliament
army at Whitehall, trampling down with heavy armed tread the grass
which had grown in the deserted palace-court.

On Sunday there was much preaching in many quarters, of a kind little
likely to calm the storm.  In the churches the Presbyterian preachers
declaimed fervently against the atrocity and iniquity of seizing the
person of the king.  In the parks Independent soldiers preached on
the equality of all before the law of God.  "Tophet is ordained of
old," one of them took for his text.  For the king it is prepared.  A
notable example, my husband said, of that random reading of the
Sacred Scriptures which turns them into a lottery of texts to conjure
with, like a witch's charms.

In the Parliament my old hero Mr. Prinne, with his cropped ears and
his branded forehead, stood up and boldly pleaded for the king, never
braver, I thought, than then.

On the 5th of December came another invasion of the Parliament House,
Colonel Pride and his soldiers turning all the Presbyterian and
Royalist members back from the doors.  "Pride's Purge."

It was a sorely perplexed time.  Had the very act of despotism which
first roused the nation to the point of civil war now to be repeated
in the name of liberty for the ruin of the king?

"What are we fighting for? I used to ask myself.  The battle-cries,
as well as the front of the armies, had so strangely changed.  For
the king and Parliament?  The king was in prison.  The Parliament was
reduced to fifty members.  For the nation?  The nation was half in
insurrection.  For liberty?  No party seemed to allow it to any other.

Roger and the Ironsides alone seemed clear as to the answer.  "We are
fighting--not under six hundred members of Parliament, nor under
fifty, but under one leader given us by God; under General Cromwell,"
he said.  "And he is fighting for the country, to save it and make it
free and righteous, and glorious in spite of itself.  When he has
done it, it will be acknowledged.  Till then he must be content to be
misjudged, and we must content he should be, as the heroes have been
too often, and the saints nearly always, until their work, perhaps
until their life, is done."

I lay awake much during those nights of December.  My little
Magdalene was often restless, and I used to listen to the flow of the
river through the silence of the sleeping city and think how the sea
was washing the walls of the king's desolate prison, praying for him,
and for General Cromwell, and all, and thanking God that my lot was
the lowly one of submitting instead of that of deciding, in these
terrible times.

But a sorer sorrow was advancing slowly on us all.  On the 10th of
December came an imploring letter from Lettice, saying that her
mother had failed sadly during the last week, that she and her mother
longed for Dr. Antony, and her mother even more for me and the babe.

The next day we were on the road to Netherby, Aunt Gretel, my
husband, the babe, and I.

It was late in the evening of the second day when we reached the dear
old house.

We were met with a hush, which fell on me like a chill.  The Lady
Lucy had fallen into one of those quiet sleeps which of late had
become so rare with her, and the whole household was quieted so as
not to disturb her.

The subdued tone into which everything falls, in a house in which
there has been long sickness, and where everything has been ordered
with reference to one sufferer, fell heavily on us, coming in from
the fresh autumn air with voices attuned to the bracing winds, and
hearts eager with expectations of welcome.  It was like being ushered
into a church hushed for some mournful ceremony; and we stepped
noiselessly, and spoke under our breath, until an unsubdued wail from
the only creature of the company unable to understand the change, the
baby waking suddenly from sleep, broke the dreary spell of stillness.

The Lady Lucy heard the little one's cry, and sent to crave a glimpse
of us all that night.

In her chamber alone, throughout the house that anxious hush was
absent.  She spoke in her natural voice, though now lower than even
its usual sweet low tones, from weakness.  She had a bright welcoming
word for each, and while gratefully heeding my husband's counsel,
declared that baby would be her head physician.  The very touch of
the soft little fingers and the sound of her little cooings and
crowings had healing in them, she said.

She looked less changed than I had expected.  But my husband shook
his head and would give little promise.  Lettice seemed to me more
altered than her mother.  Her eyes had a steady, deep, watchful look
in them, very unlike her wonted changeful brilliancy.  She said
nothing beyond a few words of welcome to me that night.  But the next
morning the first moment we were alone together she took my hands,
and pressing them to her heart, she said,--

"Tell me Olive; I have been afraid to ask any one else, but I must
know.  What do they mean by Petitions from the army for justice on
the King?"

I was so startled by her sudden appeal, I could not meet her eyes nor
think what to say.  I could only murmur something about there having
been so many Petitions, Remonstrances, and Declarations, which had
ended in talking.

"True," said she, "but the army are like no other party in the state.
They do not end with talking.  They know what they want, and mean
what they say, and do what they mean.  What do they mean by Petitions
against the Chief Delinquent?"

"Many do think, Lettice," I said, "that the king himself, and not
only his counsellors, began all the evil."

"I know," she replied.  "But they have had justice enough on the
king, I should think, to satisfy any one.  They have deprived him of
all power, separated him from the queen and the royal children, and
all who love him, and shut him up behind iron bars.  And now, they
petition for justice on him.  What would they do to him worse, Olive?
What can he suffer more?  What has the king left but life?"

I could not answer her.

"To touch _that_, Olive," she continued, looking steadily into my
eyes, and compelling me by the very intensity of her gaze to meet
them, "to touch that would be crime, the worst of crimes.  It would
be regicide, parricide."

"But how could it ever be, Olive?"  She went on.  "They have
assassinated kings I know before now.  But a king brought to justice
(as they call it) like a common criminal!  Since the world was, such
a thing was never known.  It can never be, Olive, she added in a
trembling voice, "I have heard the king dreads assassination.  Do
you?  Could his enemies descend to that depth?"

"Never, Lettice," I replied, "never."  And in saying thus I could
meet her eyes frankly and fearlessly.

Her face lighted up.

"Never! no, I believe not.  Then there can surely be little fear.
There is no tribunal which can judge the king.  No bar for him to
stand arraigned before but the judgment-seat of God.  A king was
never condemned and put to death deliberately and solemnly in the
face of his own people, and of all the nations.  Never since the
world was.  And it never could be.  From assassination you are sure
he is safe.  Be honest with me, Olive.  There are base men in all
parties.  You are _sure_?"

"As sure as of my life," I said, "as sure as of my father's word, or
Roger's."

"Then there can be no reason to fear," she said.  "I will cast away
this awful dread.  Oh, Olive," she exclaimed, bursting into tears,
"you have brought me new life.  Do you know that sometimes during
these last few days, since I heard of those Petitions, I have almost
prayed that if such a fearful crime and curse could be hanging over
England, my Mother might be taken to God first, and learn about it
first there, where we shall understand it all.  But you have
comforted me, Olive.  I need make no such prayers.  What I have so
dreaded can never be."

I felt almost guilty of falsehood in letting her thus take comfort.
Yet if my husband's fears about Lady Lucy were well-founded, there
was little need for such a prayer.  And to Time I might surely leave
it to unveil the horrors that after all might be averted.


But no intervention from above or from below came to avert the steady
unfolding of the great tragedy on which the nation's eyes were fixed.

The king went on to his doom, as the doomed in some terrible old
tragedy of destiny, tremblingly watchful for the storm to break from
the side whence there was no danger, but all the time advancing with
blind fearlessness to confront the lightnings which were to smite him.

In the solitary sea-washed walls of Hurst Castle he listened for the
stealthy tread of the assassin.  And when at midnight, on the 17th of
December, the creak of the drawbridge was heard between the dash of
the waves, and then the tramp of armed horsemen echoing beneath the
castle-gate, the king rose and spent an hour alone in prayer.
Colonel Harrison, who commanded these men, had been named to him as
one likely to be employed to assassinate him.  "I trust in God who is
my helper," said the king to his faithful servant, Herbert; "but I
would not be surprised.  This is a fit place for such a purpose," and
he was moved to tears; no unmanly tears, and no groundless fears.  He
was not the first of his unhappy race who had been the victim of
treacherous midnight murders.  But when on the morrow he recognized
in Colonel Harrison's frank countenance and honest converse one
incapable of such baseness, his spirits rose, and he rode away almost
gayly with his escort of gallant and well-mounted men, courteous
enough in their demeanour to him.  In the daylight, and in the royal
halls of Windsor, where they lodged him, he felt strong again in the
sacredness of the king's person, and alas he fancied himself strong
in those false schemes of policy which, and which only, had divested
his royal person of its sacredness in the hearts of his people.  "He
had yet three games to play," he said, "the least of which gave him
hope of regaining all."

On the 5th of January he gave orders for sowing melon-seed at
Wimbledon; and dwelt on Lord Ormond's work for him in Ireland.  He
made a jest of the threat of bringing him to a public trial.  Kings
had been killed in battle, treacherously put to agonizing deaths in
dungeons whose walls tell no tales, and let no cries of anguish
through, secretly stabbed at midnight.  But the rebels it seemed
plain were not foes of that stamp.  Even the example three of his
Cavaliers had lately given them in treacherously assassinating
Rainsborough, one of Cromwell's bravest officers at Doncaster,
kindled in the most fanatical of the Roundheads no emulation, but
simply a burning indignation and contempt.  Save the sword of battle,
or the dagger of the murderer, no weapon was known wherewith to kill
a king.  The Roundheads did not number assassination among their
"instruments of justice."  The war was over.  What then was there for
His Majesty to fear?

Strafford, indeed, had been almost as confident up to the last.  And
neither gray hairs or consecration had saved the Archbishop's head
from the scaffold.  But between an anointed king and the loftiest of
his subjects, according to the royal and the royalist creed, the
distinction was not of degree but of nature.

All the courts of Europe surely would rise and interfere ere a king
should be tried before a tribunal of his lieges, of creatures who
held honour and life by his breath.

Nor only earthly courts.  Would the One Tribunal before which a
sovereign alone could be summoned, suffer such an infringement of its
rights?

So the king went on jesting at the thought of his subjects bringing
him to trial, playing his "three games," and peacefully sowing seeds
for more harvests than one.


And meanwhile Cromwell came back slowly advancing from Scotland to
London; Petitions for Justice on the Chief Delinquent lay on the
table of the House of Commons not unheeded; on the 6th of January,
Colonel Pride, with his soldiers, guarded the door of the House of
Commons, and sent thence every member who disposed still to prolong
treaties with the king; in the afternoon of that same 6th of January,
General Cromwell was thanked by the "purged" house, or Rump, of fifty
members, for his services, and the High Court of Justice was
instituted for the trial of "Charles Stuart, for traitorously and
tyrannically seeking to overthrow the rights and liberties of the
people."  And on the 19th of January, not three weeks after he had
been tranquilly planning at Westminster for his summer garden crops,
and sowing seed for other harvests in Ireland, the king was sitting
in Westminster Hall arraigned before this Court as a "tyrant,
traitor, and murderer."

And still only were the heavens unmoved, but not a word of
remonstrance or of generous pleading had come from one crowned head
in Europe.

But meantime over our little world at Netherby that awful Presence
was hovering to which all the outward terrors that may, or may not
surround it, the midnight dagger, the headsman's axe, the crowds of
eager gazers around the scaffold, are but as the trappings of the
warrior to his sword, or the glitter of the axe to its edge.  Death
was silently wearing away the little remaining strength of Lady Lucy
Davenant.

There was one amongst us nearer the beginning of the new life than
any of us knew, so near that the roar of the political tempest around
us was hushed ere it reached her chamber, and she lay on the
threshold of the other world almost as unconscious of the storms of
this as our little infant Magdalene, whose cradle she used to delight
to have beside her.

I can remember, as if it were yesterday, the dim tender smile with
which she used to watch the babe asleep beside her.

Once she said to me,--

"There seems to me something strangely alike, Olive, in the darling's
place and mine, though to all outward seeming so different.  I lie
and look at her and think of the angels in the Percy Shrine at the
Minster at Beverly, how they bear in their arms to Jesus a little
helpless new-born soul, and He stretches out His hands to take it to
His bosom--a soul new-born from death, to the deathless life with Him.

"Sometimes it seems like that, Olive, what is coming to me; so great
and perfect the change.  Sometimes so easy and simple; more like
laying aside garments we have worn through the night bathing in the
water of life, and stepping refreshed, strong, and 'clothed in
raiment clean and white'--into the next chamber, to meet Him who
awaits us there.  So little the change, for we have in us the
treasure we shall bear with us.  The new eternal life is in our Lord,
and not in any state or time; and since we have him with us, both
here and there, it seems only like stepping a little further into the
Father's house--from the threshold to the inner chambers--and hearing
Him nearer and seeing Him more clearly.  Tell Lettice I had these
comforting thoughts, Olive," she would say; "I cannot speak to her,
she is too much moved; and she wants me to say I long to stay on
earth, and I cannot, Olive.  I cannot feel at home any more here
since Harry is gone.  And I am so weak and sinful, I may do harm, as
well as good by staying longer, even to Lettice, poor tender child.
The world--at least the world here in England--is very dark to me.
And sometimes I think it will all soon end, not this war only, but
all wars, and the kingdom come for which the Church prayed so long,
and the glorious Epiphany."

One thing I remarked with Lady Lucy, as with others whom since I have
watched passing from this world of shadows into the world of real
things.  The lesser beliefs which separate Christians seemed
forgotten, fallen far back into the distance and the shade, in the
light of the great truths which are our life--which are Christianity.
The spontaneous utterances of such Christian deathbeds as I have
watched, have had little of party-beliefs, and of party-politics
nothing.  As Lady Lucy herself once said,--

"Oh, if all could only see Him as He is!  We are divided because we
are fragments: the whole race is fallen and broken into fragments.
But in Him, in Christ, all the broken fragments are one again and
live.  Truth is no fair ideal vision: it is Christ."

And again she would speak of her death with infinite comfort.  "He
died really--really as I must," she said; "the flesh failed, the
heart failed, but he overcame.  He offered Himself up without spot to
God, and me, sin-stained as I am, in Him--the Son, the Redeemer, the
Lord.  And the Father was in Him, reconciling the world to Himself.
And we are in Him, reconciled, for ever and ever."

Now and then she would ask if we had heard news of the king.  And we
gave her such general and vague accounts as we dared, deeming it
unmeet to distress her with perplexities which would so soon be
unperplexed to her.  And this was easy, her attention being seldom
now fixed long on any subject.

On the 6th of January Roger came on his way to London from the
North--on the old Christmas day, which Lady Lucy had continued to
keep.

In the morning Lettice had read her the gospel for the day.

In the afternoon when she saw Roger, connecting him with the army and
the king, she asked at once for his Majesty.

"The king is at Windsor," Roger said.

"At home!" she said with a smile; "at home again for the Christmas.
That is well."

Roger made no reply, and, to the relief of all, her mind passed
contentedly from the subject.  She took Lettice's hand and Roger's in
hers, and pressed them to her lips, and murmured, "My God, I thank
Thee."  And then, as a faintness came over her, we all withdrew but
Lettice.

Roger and I were alone in the ante-room.  He was waiting to bid
Lettice farewell.  When she came out of her mother's chamber she sat
down on the window seat, her eyes cast down, her trembling mute lips
almost as white as her cheeks.

Roger went towards her, and stood before her; but she made no
movement and did not even lift her eyelids, heavy and swollen as they
were with much weeping.

"Lettice," he said, "let me say one word before I go.  Let me say one
word to comfort you in this sorrow, for is not your sorrow mine?"

"Of what avail?" she said.  "You are taking the king to London to
die.  The greatest crime and curse is about to fall on the nation,
and you will go and share and sanction it, and make it your own.  No
word of mine will move you--how can word of yours comfort me?  You
will, if you are commanded by him you have chosen for your priest and
king, keep guard by the scaffold while the king is murdered.  Did not
you tell me so two hours since?  Did not I entreat and implore and
tell you you were digging a gulf, not only, between me and you, but
between you and heaven?"

He stood for a few moments silent and motionless, and then he said:
"And did I not tell you, that, as a soldier I could do no otherwise
unless I deserted my chief, nor as a patriot unless I betrayed my
country?  It is the king who has betrayed us, Lettice; who has
refused to let us save him and trust him.  The hand that could have
stopped all the oppression and injustice at the source--from the
beginning--and _did not_, must be the guiltiest hand of all.  It is
_falsehood_ that is leading the king to this end, not the country,
nor the Parliament, nor General Cromwell."

At last she looked up,--"Do not try to persuade me, Roger," she said,
"God knows I am too willing to be persuaded.  I cannot reason about
it any more than about loving my Mother or obeying my Father.  I dare
not listen to you.  I am untrue," she added, bursting at length into
passionate tears, "I have been a traitor, to let my Mother be
deceived--to let her thank God for what can never be!"

"Lettice," he said in a tone of anguish, "if you reproach yourself,
if you call yourself a traitor, what am I?"

"You are as true as the Gospel, Roger," she said, her sobs subsiding
into quiet weeping; "as true as heaven itself.  You would never have
done what I did.  You would break your own heart and every one's
rather than utter or act one falsehood, or neglect one thing you
believe to be duty.  That is what makes it so terrible."

His voice trembled as he replied,--"You trust me, and yet you think
me capable of a terrible crime."

"I know that to lay sacrilegious hands on the king is an unspeakable
crime," said she; "but to trust you is no choice of mine.  I cannot
tear the trust of my heart from you if I would, Roger, and God knows
I would not if I could."

A light of almost triumphant joy passed over his face, as, standing
erect before her, with folded arms, he looked on her down-cast face,--

"Then the time must come when a delusion that cannot separate us in
heart can no longer separate us in life," he said, in tones scarcely
audible.  "Your Mother said the truth, Lettice, when she joined our
hands.  Such words from her lips at such a time are surely prophecy."

Lettice shook her head.

"My Mother saw beyond this world," she said, mournfully; "where there
are no delusions, and no divisions, and no partings."

He bent before her for an instant, and pressed her hand to his lips.
And so they parted.

That night Lettice and I watched together by Lady Lucy's bedside.
And all things that could distract and divide seemed for the time to
be dissolved in the peace of her presence.

She revived once or twice and spoke, although it seemed more in rapt
soliloquy than to any mortal ear.

"Everything grows clear to me," she said once; "everything I cared
most to see.  The divisions and perplexities which bewilder us here
are only the colours the light puts on when it steps on earth.  On
earth it is scarlet and purple and bordered work; in heaven it is
fine linen, clean and white, clean and white."

Often she murmured in clear rapid tones, very awful in the silence of
the sick-chamber at night, the words,--

"The king, the king!"

Lettice and I feared to go to her to ask what she meant, dreading
some question we dared not answer.  We thought belike her mind was
wandering, as she did not seem to be appealing to us or looking for
an answer.

But at length the words came more distinctly, though broken and low,
and then we knew what they meant,--

"The King!  King of kings!  Faithful and true.  Mine eyes shall see
the King in His beauty.  He shall deliver the needy when he crieth,
King of the poor, King of the nations, King of kings, Faithful and
true.  I am passing beyond the shadows.  I begin to see the lights
which cast them.  Beyond the storms--I see the angels of the winds.
Beyond the thunders--they are music, from above.  Beyond the
clouds--they are the golden streets, from above.  Mine eyes shall see
the King--as He is; as thou art; no change in Thee, but a change in
me.  In Thy beauty as Thou art."

All the following day the things of earth were growing dim to her,
but to the last her courtesy seemed to survive her strength.  No
little service was unacknowledged; even when the voice was inaudible,
the parched lips moved in thanks or in prayer.

And on the early morning of the 21st of January she passed away from
us, her hand in Lettice's, her eyes deep with the awful joy of some
sight we could not see.

On the evening of that very day came the tidings that the king had
been brought, on the 19th of January, as a criminal, before the High
Court of Justice in Westminster Hall, to be tried for his life as the
"principal author of the calamities of the nation."

When Lettice heard it, the first burst of tears came breaking the
stupor of her sorrow, as she sobbed on my shoulder, "Thank God she is
safe, beyond the storms of this terrible distracted world.  She is
gone where she will never more be perplexed what to believe or what
to do."

"She is gone," said my Father, tenderly taking one of her hands in
his, "where loyalty and love of country, and liberty and law are
never at variance; where the noblest feelings and the noblest hearts
are never ranged against each other.  And we hope to follow her
thither."

"But oh," sobbed Lettice, "this terrible space between!"

"Look up and press forward, my child," he replied, "and the way will
become clear.  Step by step, day by day; the space between is the way
thither."











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