LOVE AND WAR.
When Richard reached home and recounted the escape he had had, an
imprecation, the first he had ever heard him utter, broke from his
father's lips. With the indiscrimination of party spirit, he looked upon
the warder's insolence and attempted robbery as the spirit and behaviour
of his master, the earl being in fact as little capable of such conduct
as Mr. Heywood himself.
Immediately after their early breakfast the next morning, he led his son
to a chamber in the roof, of the very existence of which he had been
ignorant, and there discovered to him good store of such armour of both
kinds as was then in use, which for some years past he had been quietly
collecting in view of the time--which, in the light of the last rumour,
seemed to have at length arrived--when strength would have to decide the
antagonism of opposed claims. Probably also it was in view of this time,
seen from afar in silent approach, that, from the very moment when he
took his education into his own hands, he had paid thorough attention to
Richard's bodily as well as mental accomplishment, encouraging him in
all manly sports, such as wrestling, boxing, and riding to hounds, with
the more martial training of sword-exercises, with and without the
target, and shooting with the carbine and the new-fashioned flint-lock
pistols.
The rest of the morning Richard spent in choosing a headpiece, and mail
plates for breast, back, neck, shoulders, arms, and thighs. The next
thing was to set the village tailor at work upon a coat of that thick
strong leather, dressed soft and pliant, which they called buff, to wear
under his armour. After that came the proper equipment of Lady, and that
of the twenty men whom his father expected to provide from amongst his
own tenants, and for whom he had already a full provision of clothing
and armour; they had to be determined on, conferred with, and fitted,
one by one, so as to avoid drawing attention to the proceeding. Hence
both Mr. Heywood and Richard had enough to do, and the more that
Faithful Stopchase, on whom was their chief dependence, had not yet
recovered sufficiently from the effects of his fall to be equal to the
same exertion as formerly--of which he was the more impatient that he
firmly believed he had been a special object of Satanic assault, because
of the present value of his counsels, and the coming weight of his deeds
on the side of the well-affected. Thus occupied, the weeks passed into
months.
During this time Richard called again and again upon Dorothy, ostensibly
to inquire after her mother. Only once, however, did she appear, when
she gave him to understand she was so fully occupied, that, although
obliged by his attention, he must not expect to see her again.
'But I will be honest, Richard,' she added, 'and let you know plainly
that, were it otherwise in respect of my mother, I yet should not see
you, for you and I have parted company, and are already so far asunder
on different roads that I must bid you farewell at once while yet we can
hear each other speak.'
There was no anger, only a cold sadness in her tone and manner, while
her bearing was stately as towards one with whom she had never had
intimacy. Even her sadness seemed to Richard to have respect to the
hopeless condition of her mother's health, and not at all to the changed
relation between him and her.
'I trust, at least, mistress Dorothy,' he said, with some bitterness,
'you will grant me the justice that what I do, I do with a good
conscience. After all that has been betwixt us I ask for no more.'
'What more could the best of men ask for?'
'I, who am far from making any claim to rank with such--'
'I am glad to know it,' interjected Dorothy.
'--am yet capable of hoping that an eye at once keener and kinder than
yours may see conscience at the very root of the actions which you,
Dorothy, will doubtless most condemn.'
Was this the boy she had despised for indifference?
'Was it conscience drove you to sprain my cousin Rowland's knee?' she
asked.
Richard was silent for a moment. The sting was too cruel.
'Pray hesitate not to say so, if such be your conviction,' added
Dorothy.
'No,' replied Richard, recovering himself. 'I trust it is not such a
serious matter as you say; but any how it was not conscience but
jealousy and anger that drove me to that wrong.'
'Did you see the action such at the time?'
'No, surely; else I would not have been guilty of that for which I am
truly sorry now.'
'Then, perhaps, the day will come when, looking back on what you do now,
you will regard it with the like disapprobation.--God grant it may!' she
added, with a deep sigh.
'That can hardly be, mistress Dorothy. I am, in the matters to which you
refer, under the influence of no passion, no jealousy, no self-seeking,
no--'
'Perhaps a deeper search might discover in you each and all of the
bosom-sins you so stoutly abjure,' interrupted Dorothy. 'But it is
needless for you to defend yourself to me; I am not your judge.'
'So much the better for me!' returned Richard; 'I should else have an
unjust as well as severe one. I, on my part, hope the day may come when
you will find something to repent of in such harshness towards an old
friend whom you choose to think in the wrong.'
'Richard Heywood, God is my witness it is no choice of mine. I have no
choice: what else is there to think? I know well enough what you and
your father are about. But there is nothing save my own conscience and
my mother's love I would not part with to be able to believe you
honourably right in your own eyes--not in mine--God forbid! That can
never be--not until fair is foul and foul is fair.'
So saying, she held out her hand.
'God be between thee and me, Dorothy!' said Richard, with solemnity, as
he took it in his.
He spoke with a voice that seemed to him far away and not his own. Until
now he had never realized the idea of a final separation between him and
Dorothy; and even now, he could hardly believe she was in earnest, but
felt, rather, like a child whose nurse threatens to forsake him on the
dark road, and who begins to weep only from the pitiful imagination of
the thing, and not any actual fear of her carrying the threat into
execution. The idea of retaining her love by ceasing to act on his
convictions--the very possibility of it--had never crossed the horizon
of his thoughts. Had it come to him as the merest intellectual notion,
he would have perceived at once, of such a loyal stock did he come, and
so loyal had he himself been to truth all his days, that to act upon her
convictions instead of his own would have been to widen a gulf at least
measurable, to one infinite and impassable.
She withdrew the hand which had solemnly pressed his, and left the room.
For a moment he stood gazing after her. Even in that moment, the vague
fear that she would not come again grew to a plain conviction, and
forcibly repressing the misery that rose in bodily presence from his
heart to his throat, he left the house, hurried down the pleached alley
to the old sun-dial, threw himself on the grass under the yews, and wept
and longed for war.
But war was not to be just yet. Autumn withered and sank into winter.
The rain came down on the stubble, and the red cattle waded through red
mire to and from their pasture; the skies grew pale above, and the earth
grew bare beneath; the winds grew sharp and seemed unfriendly; the
brooks ran foaming to the rivers, and the rivers ran roaring to the
ocean. Then the earth dried a little, and the frost came, and swelled
and hardened it; the snow fell and lay, vanished and came again. But
even out of the depth of winter, quivered airs and hints of spring,
until at last the mighty weakling was born. And all this time rumour
beat the alarum of war, and men were growing harder and more determined
on both sides--some from self-opinion, some from party spirit, some from
prejudice, antipathy, animosity, some from sense of duty, mingled more
and less with the alloys of impulse and advantage. But he who was most
earnest on the one side was least aware that he who was most earnest on
the other was honest as himself. To confess uprightness in one of the
opposite party, seemed to most men to involve treachery to their own; or
if they were driven to the confession, it was too often followed with an
attempt at discrediting the noblest of human qualities.
The hearts of the two young people fared very much as the earth under
the altered skies of winter, and behaved much as the divided nation. A
sense of wrong endured kept both from feeling at first the full sorrow
of their separation; and by the time that the tide of memory had flowed
back and covered the rock of offence, they had got a little used to the
dulness of a day from which its brightest hour had been blotted. Dorothy
learned very soon to think of Richard as a prodigal brother beyond seas,
and when they chanced to meet, which was but seldom, he was to her as a
sad ghost in a dream. To Richard, on the other hand, she looked a lovely
but scarce worshipful celestial, with merely might enough to hold his
heart, swelling with a sense of wrong, in her hand, and squeeze it very
hard. His consolation was that he suffered for the truth's sake, for to
decline action upon such insight as he had had, was a thing as
impossible as to alter the relations between the parts of a sphere.
Dorothy longed for peace, and the return of the wandering chickens of
the church to the shelter of her wings, to be led by her about the paled
yard of obedience, picking up the barley of righteousness; Richard
longed for the trumpet-blast of Liberty to call her sons together--to a
war whose battles should never cease until men were free to worship God
after the light he had lighted within them, and the dragon of priestly
authority should breathe out his last fiery breath, no more to drive the
feebler brethren to seek refuge in the house of hypocrisy.
At home Dorothy was under few influences except those of her mother,
and, through his letters, of Mr. Matthew Herbert. Upon the former a
lovely spiritual repose had long since descended. Her anxieties were
only for her daughter, her hopes only for the world beyond the grave.
The latter was a man of peace, who, having found in the ordinances of
his church everything to aid and nothing to retard his spiritual
development, had no conception of the nature of the puritanical
opposition to its government and rites. Through neither could Dorothy
come to any true idea of the questions which agitated the politics of
both church and state. To her, the king was a kind of demigod, and every
priest a fountain of truth. Her religion was the sedate and dutiful
acceptance of obedient innocence, a thing of small account indeed where
it is rooted only in sentiment and customary preference, but of
inestimable value in such cases as hers, where action followed upon
acceptance.
Richard, again, was under the quickening masterdom of a well-stored,
active mind, a strong will, a judgment that sought to keep its balance
even, and whose descended scale never rebounded, a conscience which,
through all the mists of human judgment, eyed ever the blotted glimmer
of some light beyond; and all these elements of power were gathered in
his own father, in whom the customary sternness of the puritan parent
had at length blossomed in confidence, a phase of love which, to such a
mind as Richard's, was even more enchanting than tenderness. To be
trusted by such a father, to feel his mind and soul present with him,
acknowledging him a fit associate in great hopes and noble aims, was
surely and ought to be, whatever the sentimentalist may say, some
comfort for any sorrow a youth is capable of, such being in general only
too lightly remediable. I wonder if any mere youth ever suffered, from a
disappointment in love, half the sense of cureless pain which, with one
protracted pang, gnaws at the heart of the avaricious old man who has
dropt a sovereign into his draw-well.
But the relation of Dorothy and Richard, although ordinary in outward
appearance, was of no common kind; and while these two thus fell apart
from each other in their outer life, each judging the other insensible
to the call of highest rectitude, neither of them knew how much his or
her heart was confident of the other's integrity. In respect of them,
the lovely simile, in Christabel, of the parted cliffs, may be carried a
little farther, for, under the dreary sea flowing between them, the rock
was one still. Such a faith may sometimes, perhaps often does, lie in
the heart like a seed buried beyond the reach of the sun, thoroughly
alive though giving no sign: to grow too soon might be to die. Things
had indeed gone farther with Dorothy and Richard, but the lobes of their
loves had never been fairly exposed to the sun and wind ere the swollen
clods of winter again covered them.
Once, in the cold noon of a lovely day of frost, when the lightest step
crackled with the breaking of multitudinous crystals, when the trees
were fringed with furry white, and the old spider-webs glimmered like
filigrane of fairy silver, they met on a lonely country-road. The sun
shone red through depths of half-frozen vapour, and tinged the whiteness
of death with a faint warmth of feeling and hope. Along the rough lane
Richard walked reading what looked like a letter, but was a copy his
father had procured of a poem still only in manuscript--the Lycidas of
Milton. In the glow to which the alternating hot and cold winds of
enthusiasm and bereavement had fanned the fiery particle within him,
Richard was not only able to understand and enjoy the thought of which
the poem was built, but was borne aloft on its sad yet hopeful melodies
as upon wings of an upsoaring seraph. The flow of his feeling suddenly
broken by an almost fierce desire to share with Dorothy the tenderness
of the magic music of the stately monody, and then, ere the answering
waves of her emotion had subsided, to whisper to her that the marvellous
spell came from the heart of the same wonderful man from whose brain had
issued, like Pallas from Jove's,--what?--Animadversions upon the
Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnus, the pamphlet which had so
roused all the abhorrence her nature was capable of--he lifted his head
and saw her but a few paces from him. Dorothy caught a glimpse of a
countenance radiant with feeling, and eyes flashing through a watery
film of delight; her own eyes fell; she said, 'Good morning, Richard!'
and passed him without deflecting an inch. The bird of song folded its
wings and called in its shining; the sun lost half his red beams; the
sprinkled seed pearls vanished, and ashes covered the earth; he folded
the paper, laid it in the breast of his doublet, and walked home through
the glittering meadows with a fresh hurt in his heart.
Dorothy's time and thoughts were all but occupied with the nursing of
her mother, who, contrary to the expectation of her friends, outlived
the winter, and revived as the spring drew on. She read much to her.
Some of the best books had drifted into the house and settled there,
but, although English printing was now nearly two centuries old, they
were not many. We must not therefore imagine, however, that the two
ladies were ill supplied with spiritual pabulum. There are few houses of
the present day in which, though there be ten times as many books, there
is so much strong food; if there was any lack, it was rather of
diluents. Amongst those she read were Queen Elizabeth's Homilies,
Hooker's Politie, Donne's Sermons, and George Herbert's Temple, to the
dying lady only less dear than her New Testament.
But even with this last, it was only through sympathy with her mother
that Dorothy could come into any contact. The gems of the mind, which
alone could catch and reflect such light, lay as yet under the soil, and
much ploughing and breaking of the clods was needful ere they could come
largely to the surface. But happily for Dorothy, there were amongst the
books a few of those precious little quartos of Shakspere, the first
three books of the Faerie Queene, and the Countess of Pembroke's
Arcadia, then much read, if we may judge from the fact that, although it
was not published till after the death of Sidney, the eighth edition of
it had now been nearly ten years in lady Vaughan's possession.
Then there was in the drawing-room an old spinnet, sadly out of tune, on
which she would yet, in spite of the occasional jar and shudder of
respondent nerves, now and then play at a sitting all the little music
she had learned, and with whose help she had sometimes even tried to
find out an air for words that had taken her fancy.
Also, she had the house to look after, the live stock to see to, her dog
to play with and teach, a few sad thoughts and memories to discipline, a
call now and then from a neighbour, or a longer visit from some old
friend of her mother's to receive, and the few cottagers on all that was
left of the estate of Wyfern to care for; so that her time was tolerably
filled up, and she felt little need of anything more to occupy at least
her hours and days.
Meanwhile, through all nature's changes, through calm and tempest, rain
and snow, through dull refusing winter, and the first passing visits of
open-handed spring, the hearts of men were awaiting the outburst of the
thunder, the blue peaks of whose cloud-built cells had long been visible
on the horizon of the future. Every now and then they would start and
listen, and ask each other was it the first growl of the storm, or but
the rumbling of the wheels of the government. To the dwellers in Raglan
Castle it seemed at least a stormy sign--of which the news reached them
in the dull November weather--that the parliament had set a guard upon
Worcester House in the Strand, and searched it for persons suspected of
high treason--lord Herbert, doubtless, first of all, the direction and
strength of whose political drift, suspicious from the first because of
his religious persuasion, could hardly be any longer doubtful to the
most liberal of its members.
The news of the terrible insurrection of the catholics in Ireland
followed.
Richard kept his armour bright, his mare in good fettle, himself and his
men in thorough exercise, read and talked with his father, and waited,
sometimes with patience, sometimes without.
At length, in the early spring, the king withdrew to York, and a
body-guard of the gentlemen of the neighbourhood gathered around him.
Richard renewed the flints of his carbine and pistols.
In April, the king, refused entrance into the town of Hull, proclaimed
the governor a traitor. The parliament declared the proclamation a
breach of its privileges. Richard got new girths.
The summer passed in various disputes. Towards its close the governor of
Portsmouth declined to act upon a commission to organize the new levies
of the parliament, and administered instead thereof an oath of
allegiance to the garrison and inhabitants. Thereupon the place was
besieged by Essex; the king proclaimed him a traitor, and the parliament
retorted by declaring the royal proclamation a libel. Richard had his
mare new-shod.
On a certain day in August, the royal standard, with the motto, 'Give to
Caesar his due,' was set up at Nottingham. Richard mounted his mare, and
taking leave of his father, led Stopchase and nineteen men more, all
fairly mounted, to offer his services to the parliament, as represented
by the earl of Essex.