On Both Sides of the Sea:
A STORY OF
The Commonwealth and the Restoration
A SEQUEL TO
"THE DRAYTONS AND THE DAVENANTS"
_BY THE AUTHOR OF_
"Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family."
NEW YORK:
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY,
PUBLISHERS.
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."
Contents
Chapter
I. Olive's Recollections
II. Olive's Recollections
III. Lettice's Diary
IV. Lettice's Diary
V. Olive's Recollections
VI. Olive's Recollections
VII. Olive's Recollections
VIII. Olive's Recollections
IX. Notes by Magdalene Antony
X. Lettice's Diary
XI. Lettice's Diary
XII. Lettice's Diary
On Both Sides of the Sea.
ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA.
CHAPTER I.
OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.
Since England was, such an event was never witnessed within sound of
her seas, as that which darkened London on the fatal 30th of January,
1649. In the recollection of such moments it is difficult to
disentangle feeling from fact, what we saw with our eyes and heard
with our ears from what others told us, from what we saw with the
imagination and heard with the heart.
In my memory that day lies shrouded and silent, as if all that
happened in it had been done in a city spell-bound into silence in a
hushed, sunless, colorless world, where all intermediate tints were
gathered into funereal black and white, the black of the
heavily-draped scaffold and the whiteness of the frosty ground from
which it rose into the still and icy air; whilst behind the palace
slept, frost-bound, the mute and motionless river, imprisoning with
icy bars the motionless ships.
From early in the day the thoroughfares and squares and open
gathering-places of the city were filled with the Commonwealth
soldiers. I remember no call of trumpet or beat of drum; only a slow
pacing of horsemen, and marching of footmen, silently, to their
assigned positions, the tramp of men and the clatter of the
horse-hoofs ringing from the hard and frosty ground, and echoing from
the closed and silent houses on the line of march.
It was no day of triumph to any. To the army, and those who felt
with them, it was a day of solemn justice, not of triumphant
vengeance. To the Royalists it was a day of passionate hushed sorrow
and bitter inward vows of retribution; to the people generally a day
of perplexity and woe.
Old Mr. Prynne, who owed the king nothing, as he said, but the loss
of his ears, the pillory, imprisonment, and fines, had pleaded for
him generously in the House, before the House had been finally
"purged."
And the most part of the men, and well-nigh all the women, I think,
would have said "Amen" to Mr. Prynne. If the king's captivity and
trial and condemnation had been a solemn drama enacted to win the
hearts of the people back to him, it could not have been more
effectual. Political and civil rights, rights of taxation and rights
of remonstrance, seemed to the hearts of most people to become mere
technical legal terms in the presence of Royalty and Death.
Pillories and prisons were dwarfed into mere private grievances
beside the scaffold on which the king, son of so many kings, kings of
so many submissive generations, the source of power, the only
possible object of the dreadful crime called treason, was to die the
death of a traitor.
The trial brought out all that was most pathetic in royalty and most
noble in the king. The haughty glance which had been resented on the
throne, was simply majestic when it encountered unflinchingly the
illegal bench of judges on whom his life depended.
The Parliament, mutilated to a remnant of fifty; the High Court of
Justice, who could not agree among themselves, whose assumption of
legal forms sounded (to many) like mockery, whose trappings of
authority sat on them (many thought) like masquerade-robes, were a
poor show to confront with that lonely majestic figure defying their
sentence and their authority, a captive in the ancient Hall of
Justice from which, throughout the centuries, not a sentence had
issued save by the sanction of his forefathers.
The royal banners, which drooped from the roof above him, taken from
his Cavaliers at Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby, seemed to float
there rather in his honor than in that of his judges. Many felt that
adversity had restored to him his true royalty, and that he sat far
more a king now, arraigned at the bar, than when, eight years before,
at the last trial those walls had witnessed, he sat as a helpless
spectator of the proceedings which brought Strafford, his greatest
minister, to the scaffold.
It was well for his adversaries that those days of the king's
humiliation were not prolonged. Irrepressible veneration and pity
began to stir among the crowds who beheld him, and the cries of
"Justice! justice!" were changed more than once into murmurs of "God
save the king."
But the pity was a slowly-rising tide of waves now advancing and now
recoiling. The determination for "justice on the chief delinquent"
was a strong and steady, though narrow current; and it swept the
ration on irresistibly to its end.
The soldiers, foot and horse, had taken up their position. My
brother Roger and Job Forster were posted opposite Whitehall. Roger
waved his hand as he passed our windows. His face, as was his wont
in times of strong emotion, was fixed and stern. He was riding in a
funeral procession, which for him led to more graves than one.
At ten o'clock His Majesty walked through St. James's Park to
Whitehall, passing rapidly through the bitter cold, under the bare
branches of the silent trees, through a crowd in appearance as cold
as silent. His face, men said, was calm and majestic as ever,
although worn; his beard had become gray, and his form had a slight
stoop, although he was not fifty years of age, but his step was firm.
He disappeared through the Palace gates, from which he was never to
step forth again. Then followed six hours of suspense and terrible
expectation, the crowds surging uneasily to and fro, unable to rest,
repelled and yet attracted by the terrible fascination of the empty,
expectant scaffold, whose heavy funereal draperies fell from the
windows of the Banqueting Hall on the frosty ground beneath. There
were whispers that the ambassador of the United Provinces was
pleading not hopelessly with Lord Fairfax; that the Prince of Wales
had sent a blank letter signed by himself, to be filled with any
conditions the Commons chose to demand; but that the king had burned
this letter, and refused the ministrations of any but the clergy of
the Episcopal Church of the realm;--so that if he was indeed to die,
it would be as a martyr to the rights of the Crown and the Church.
And through these soberer reports ever and anon rose wild rumors of
approaching deliverance, of risings in the Royalist counties, of
avenging fleets approaching the Thames, of judgment direct from
heaven on the sacrilegious heads of the regicides.
But to us who knew of the purpose which had been gathering force in
the army since that prayer-meeting at Windsor six months before,
those mid-day hours were hours not of doubt or suspense, but of awful
certainty, as minute by minute the hour approached when that scaffold
was to be empty no more.
We knew that within the still and deserted halls of that palace, the
king was preparing to meet his doom; and (all political questions and
personal wrongs for the time forgotten) from a thousand roofs in the
city went up prayers that he might be sustained in dying, and might
exchange the earthly crown which had sat on his brow so uneasily, for
the crown of life which burdens not, nor fades away.
At length three o'clock, the moment of doom, came. "It was the ninth
hour," as the Royalists loudly noted. Save the guard around the
scaffold, and those who attended his dying moments on it, none were
near enough to hear what passed there. It was all mute; but the
spectacle spoke. In most royal pageants, the thing seen is but a
sign of the thing not seen. In this the thing to be seen was no mere
sign, but a dread reality, a tremendous event. The black scaffold,
the wintry silence, the vast awe-stricken crowd gazing mute and
motionless on the inevitable tragedy; a few plainly dressed men at
last appearing on the scaffold around the well-known stately figure
of the king, richly arrayed "as for his second bridal;" "the comely
head" laid down without a struggle on the block "as on a bed;" the
momentary flash of the axe; the severed head raised an instant on
high as "the head of a traitor;" a shrouded form prostrate on the
scaffold;--and then, as good Mr. Philip Henry, who was present, said,
"at the instant when the blow was given, a diurnal universal groan
among the thousands of people who were within sight of it, as if with
one consent, such as he had never heard before, and desired he might
never hear the like again, or see such a cause for it."
The multitude were not left long to bewail their king. One troop of
Parliament horse rode instantly, by previous order, from Charing
Cross towards King Street, and another from King Street towards
Charing Cross; and so the crowd were scattered right and left, to
lament as they might each man under his own roof, and to read in
secret the "Eikon Basilike," which it is said the king composed,
copies of which were distributed under his scaffold, and will,
doubtless, be reverently treasured in every Royalist household; not
in the library, but in the oratory, beside the Bible and the
Prayer-book, enkindling loyalty from a conviction into a passion,
deepening it from a passion to a religion, while they compare the
king's trial to that before the unjust judge of old, his walk to the
scaffold to that along the Dolorous Way, his sayings to those last
words on which dying men and women have hung ever since.
Every one knows the heaviness with which even a day of festivity
closes, when the event of the day is over. The weight with which
that fatal day closed it is hard for any who did not feel it to
imagine.
Scripture words repeated with ominous warning by ministers,
Presbyterian and Episcopal, echoed like curses through countless
hearts: "I gave them a king in my anger and took him away in my
wrath." "Who am I that I should lay hands on the Lord's anointed?"
Death gave to the king's memory an immaculateness very different from
the technical, "the king can do no wrong of the ancient constitution."
And even with those whose resolution remained unwavering to the last,
this was not the time for speech. The extremity of justice had been
done, there was nothing more to be said. It would have been an
ungenerous revenge far from the thoughts of such regicides as Colonel
Hutchinson and General Cromwell to follow it with insulting words,
and their own self-defence they were content to leave to events. Mr.
Milton's majestic Defences of the English People came later.
Ours was a silent fireside that winter night, as Roger, weary and
numb, came at last to warm himself beside us.
As lie entered, I was saying to my husband, "The terrible thing is,
that he who lived trampling on the constitution and the rights of
conscience, seems to have died a martyr to the constitution and
conscience, doomed by a few desperate men."
"We must concern ourselves as little as possible, sister," Roger said
very quietly, "with what seems."
"I fear this day will turn the tide against all for which you have
fought throughout the war."
"The tide will turn back," he said.
"But what if not in our time?" I said.
"Then in God's time, Olive," he said; "which is the best."
But he looked very worn and sad. I repented of having said these
discouraging words, and weakly strove to undo them as he asked me to
unlace the helmet which his benumbed hands could not unloose.
"I would rather a thousand times," I said, "have you with Colonel
Hutchinson, and General Cromwell, and those who dared to do what they
thought right in the lace of the world, than with those who thought
it right yet dared not do it. The nation will recognize their
deliverer in General Cromwell yet."
"I do not know that, Olive," he said; "but it will be enough if
General Cromwell delivers the nation."
"At least the generations to come will do you all justice," I said.
"I am not sure of that," he said. "It depends on who writes the
history for them. There is one Judgment Seat whose awards it is safe
to set before us. Before that we have sought to stand. That
sentence is irrevocably fixed. What it is we shall hear hereafter,
when the voice of this generation and all the generations will move
us no more than the murmur of a troubled sea a great way off, and far
below."
Yet he could not touch the food we set before him; and as he sat
gazing into the fire, I knew there was one adverse verdict which he
knew too well, and which moved his heart all the more that it had not
been able to move a hair's breadth his conscience or his purpose.
Many sorrows met in Roger's heart, I knew, that night; the pain of
pity repressed driven back on the heart by a stern sense of justice;
the pain of being misjudged by some whom we honour; the pain of the
resignation of the tenderest love and hope; the pain of giving bitter
pain to the heart dearest to him in the world. But one pain, perhaps
the worst of all, he and men who, like Cromwell and Colonel
Hutchinson, had carried out that day's doom fearlessly before the
world because in unshaken conviction of its justice before God, were
spared--the enervating anguish of perplexity and doubt. And this,
perhaps, is the sorest pain of all.
LETTICE'S DIARY.
"'The space between is the way thither,' Mr. Drayton said. It may
be; it ought to be. But _is it_? That seems to me precisely the one
terrible question which, when we can get cleared, all life becomes
clear in the light of the answer, but which it is so exceedingly hard
to have cleared.
"The days, as they pass, whether clothed in light and joy, as the old
time at home was when I had a home, and a mother, and so many
hopes--or in darkness that may be felt, as so many of these later
days have been to me, are indeed surely leading us on to old age, to
death, to the unseen world, and the judgment. But are they indeed
leading us on to new youth, to changeless life, to heaven, and the
King's 'Well done?'
"If I were as sure of the last as of the first, for me and mine, I
think (at least there are moments when I think) I would scarcely care
whether the days were dark or bright. For life is to be a warfare.
All kinds of Christian people agree in that. And having learned what
war means, I do not expect it to be easy or pleasant.
"But I am not sure. For myself or for any one.
"Roger thinks the execution of the king was a terrible duty. I think
it was almost an inexpiable crime.
"Olive, I know, thinks I am breaking plighted faith, and betraying
the most faithful affection in the world in parting from Roger.
Mistress Dorothy thinks I am fulfilling a sacred duty, doing what was
meant when we were commanded to pluck out the right eye. As to the
pain, I am sure she is right. If I could only be as sure as to the
duty! For if it is right, it must be good, really, in the end for
him as well as for me. How, I cannot imagine. For it seems bad as
well as bitter for me. And Olive says it will be bad and embittering
for him.
"Happy, happy people, who lived in the old days of dreams, and
visions, and heavenly voices, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it;'
when God's will became manifest in pillars of fire and cloud, in
discriminating dews and fires of sacrifice, and such simple outward
signs as poor perplexed hearts like mine can understand.
"Holy people say these days of ours are in advance of those, that the
light has increased since then. I suppose it has, for holy people,
who have grown up to it, and have eyes to see those inward leadings,
and ears to hear those inward voices, which to me are so dim. But I
feel as if I were still a child, and would fain have lived in that
simple childhood of the world, when God spoke to men in plain ways as
to children.
"Since I came here, I saw at the door of one of the churches a very
awful piece of sculpture of the souls in purgatory, all aglow with
the fires in which they were burning, stretching out piteous hands
through iron bars for help and prayers from those still living on the
earth.
"Mistress Dorothy was with me, and she clasped her hands over her
eyes in horror, as she turned away.
"But to me it did not seem so horrible. At least not for the souls
in purgatory. If there were a purgatory. Because the thought of its
being purgatory, must take away all that is unendurable out of the
anguish of the flames. There are hearts on earth tormented in fires
as real. But the sting of their anguish is, they cannot be sure they
are purgatorial fires. The anguish is clear enough. If we could
only be as sure as to the purification. That the pain is from the
remedy, not from the disease; that the flames are on the way to
heaven, not mercifully confronting us on the other way to turn us
back.
"It always seemed as if, by Roger's side, I should have grown good
like him. How am I to grow good without him, severing myself from
him? Oh, mother, mother! why must you leave me just now, when no one
else in the world could have told me what to do. Because, while
loving me more than yourself, you loved God's will far more than my
pleasure.
"But Mistress Dorothy says, when I am tempted with 'vain reasonings'
and 'debatings of the flesh,' I must go back to the first sacred
impulse, when, by my mother's death-bed, I felt the death of the king
for whom she would have died must place an impassable barrier between
me and those who slew him, or consented to his death.
"First thoughts, says she, are often from above; second thoughts from
within or from below. And if we endure to the end, third thoughts
will come crowning the divine impulse of the first with a calm divine
assurance.
"I will try to endure to the end. At least I will wait.
"To strengthen my resolve, let me go back to that sacred impulse, and
through all it led to, up to this day.
"It was during those terrible days of early January, when hope and
fear had passed, with uncertainty; and I sat by my mother's bedside,
all my heart and soul absorbed in watching her depart, and in
relieving any suffering or supplying any want for her so fast passing
away from all suffering and from all our service.
"The east winds were careering across the Fens, and broke fiercely
against the old house, and one night there was a crash of the great
scarred elm-tree falling close outside the windows. But she heeded
it not; and I remember feeling a strange kind of despairing triumph
over all the violence of the elements. They might rage as at the
Deluge; but they could neither hinder nor hasten the slow, silent
progress of the awful power which was silently removing her from us.
"Before, in days of doubt and hope, I had been wont to watch the
winds with a kind of superstitious solicitude, as if there were some
mysterious sympathy between nature and men, and the ravings of her
storms had been ominous of evil to us. But now that spell seemed
broken. The sympathy between us and nature ceased with death. To
her it was natural, a link in her endless chain of ever-recurring
changes. To her, life and death were but as day and night, bright or
dark phases of her ceaseless revolutions. She could see her children
die as calmly as her suns set. To us death was unnatural, a
convulsion, a horror, a curse. The terrible thing which seemed to
assimilate us to her, in reality rent us from her sphere altogether.
A week before, when we began to fear there was danger, I trembled at
the wind wailing in the dead branches of the elms, or at a bird
beating its wings against the window. Now that she was dying, I
could have smiled at an earthquake or a tornado.
"All the outward and visible world, the terrors of its stormy nights
as well as the sweet familiar delights of its dawns and days, seemed
to lie outside me like a world of shadows, as for the first time I
learned in my inmost heart that we are but strangers, not belonging
to it, but passing swiftly through. As I gazed into the eyes which
so soon were to cease to be the portal where my soul could meet hers,
my own body seemed to become a mere phantasm, the innermost shell of
this world of phantasms, where we stay a little while, to read its
lessons and experience its changes, and then vanish, we from it and
it from us. It was not so with the conflict then going on about the
king. There, consciences were concerned, and right and wrong. And
by her dying bed, right and wrong seemed the only realities left. I
dared not break on the calm of her spirit with one word that might
recall the conflicts of parties. Thus Love itself severed her spirit
from me before death had sealed her eyes. And this was terrible
beyond all. For as I sat there, the conviction became clearer and
clearer that to put the king to death was crime, a crime she would
have abhorred, a crime which, if he persisted in the doing it, must
sever me from Roger.
"But alas, when Death came, this was all terribly reversed.
"When the feeble voice which had called on the Heavenly King, and the
eyes whose tender smiles for me had changed at the last into the awed
yet joyful intensity of the gaze with which her spirit seemed to
welcome heaven and enter it, the whole unseen world seemed to vanish
from my heart with her, and nothing was left but the eyes which could
never look at me, and the lips which could never speak to me more.
"For this horror I was wholly unprepared. I thought, when she went,
she would have left me standing, if but for one never-to-be-forgotten
moment, on the threshold of an opened Paradise! She left me
shivering on the brink of an impenetrable darkness. I could not feel
even on the brink of an abyss. To have believed in an abyss even
would have been an infinite relief. The horror was whether the
darkness hid anything, whether there was a beyond at all.
"Could it be, indeed, that all, absolutely all, any one saw of death
was just the heaving breast, the labouring breath, the few, faint,
intermittent sighs; all which, in all animated creatures, marks the
dissolution of natural life, and nothing to mark the distinctive,
continuing, spiritual life of man?
"Was faith, then, to step so absolutely alone, unlighted by the least
glimmer of the old familiar light, into the unknown?
"No one else around me seemed to experience this terrible darkness.
"They recalled the last words she spoke; they spoke of the pure
raiment, clean and white, in which her spirit was clothed, of the
golden streets she was treading, of the 'harps of God' to which she
was listening. But the words fell altogether outside me, like some
sweet, pathetic story of faëry or romance, such as she used to tell
me.
"I, too, from my childhood had delighted in those fair pictures of a
Paradise beyond the grave, of the city with gates of moon-like pearl,
and walls of radiant gems; of trees whose leaves were healing and
whose fruit was life; of waters clear as crystal, able to satisfy
immortal thirst. I had delighted in those pictures, my fancy
floating on them as on the glowing clouds of twilight, caring not to
discriminate what was cloud, what were the bright glorified heights
of earth, and what were heavenly, enduring stars; caring not to
separate symbol from fact.
"But now all this was changed. What were fair pictures to me,
brought face to face with this visible, terrible fact, that the
spirit which had been my guide before I could remember, that my
mother herself had gone where no cry of passionate entreaty, no
tender ministry of love could reach, no agony of prayer avail to win
the faintest sign that she heard, or cared, or existed?
"A few hours since she had said, 'Throw my warm old mantle round
thee, Lettice, the nights are chill.' She had taken food from my
hands, and murmured, smiling, 'Once I gave it thee.' And now the
farthest star that sent the faintest ray from the utmost verge of the
world, was near, compared with the impassable gulf of distance
between her and me. What were fair visions of angels to me? What
had they been to the Magdalene of old? If she lived, she was the
same loving, tender saintly mother still, unlike any one else in the
universe; not a white-robed angel lost in an overwhelming multitude
of other white-robed angels, singing.
"My heart ached, and cried to heaven for one word, one syllable, one
touch, to show that she was there. Would God give me instead, only
fair pictures of an innumerable multitude far off, serenely singing
as if they had not left any on earth bitterly weeping?
"I scarcely dared to think those thoughts, much less to utter them,
until one day, the dreadful day when we left the house with the
precious burden through which she had been all she was to me, and
returned with nothing, the passion of my grief overcame me.
"Olive and Dr. Antony had left. Mistress Dorothy was standing on one
side of the fire, in the wainscotted parlour which they had reserved
for me.
"It was not her wont to dwell much on symbols and pictures, whether
painted with words or colours. And seeing me sit with clasped hands
in a kind of stupor, for I could not weep, she said, not in a tone of
consolation so much as of rebuke,--
"'Child, sorrow not as those without hope. It is a sin. Thy mother
is with God.'
"There was something in her words which went more to my heart than
all the tenderest consolations had done. They did not seem said so
much to comfort me, as simply because they were true.
"'If I could hope, I would not sorrow,' I murmured.
"'There is much reason to hope,' said she. 'Papists even have been
saved, I doubt not, at least before the Reformation. And Lady Lucy
was not a Papist. I doubt not that the Spirit of God dwelt in her as
his temple. The Lord, indeed, of old suffered neither idol nor
trafficker in his temple. But, mayhap, the traffickers are worse
than the idols. And, indeed, dear heart,' she concluded, 'I do think
sometimes we Protestants are like the later Jews, if the Papists and
the Papistically inclined are like the earlier. We have cleared out
the idols; but we keep the tables of the money-changers, mayhap the
basest idolatry of all.'
"She had entirely misunderstood my perplexity. That she should
imagine my mother's title to blessedness required defence to me,
would have stung me to an indignant reply at other moments; but I was
too cast down to be angry, and I only said,--
"'It is not of my mother I doubt, but of heaven; of everything. It
seems as if all my old faith had vanished like a dream.'
"I scarcely thought of the weight of my words, until their own echo
startled me; and I trembled at what effect they might have on
Mistress Dorothy.
"But, to my surprise, her first words, spoken as if to herself,
were,--
"'Thank God; the good work has begun.' Then laying her hand with
unwonted tenderness on mine, she said, 'The tempter is cruel, dear
heart; he is cruel indeed. But fear not, poor, torn, forsaken lamb.
The eye of the Shepherd is on thee, and none shall pluck thee out of
His hand. The tempter is cruel, not because he is strong, but
because he is weak; he rages, not because he is victorious, but
because he is vanquished; vanquished on behalf of all the flock,
vanquished for thee, since the Lord is leading thee. His first
lesson is ever to show the emptiness and the darkness; and He has
shown thee this. Do not strive to hasten His handiwork by blending
it with thine. Give thyself up to Him to be poor and blind, to walk
in darkness, to have no light, as long as He wills. He will lay His
hands on thee when the hour is come. He has begun, and He will
finish. But thou must tread this part of the way alone. Take heed
how, by conferring with flesh and blood, thou break the silence He is
making in thy heart. Hitherto thou hast been dreaming. We are near
waking when we dream that we dream."*
* These words are in "Novalis."--Editor.
"And she left me alone. But although she did not say so, I knew she
would go and wrestle for me alone till I had won the victory.
"There was help in the thought.
"Yet, I could not think she was altogether right. I could not think
all my former life a dream; that all the prayers which, childish and
weak as they might have been, had helped me to bear painful things
and to do difficult things, were delusions; or that the thoughts I
had had about God's loving-kindness, and the joy in His works, were
unreal fancies, that came not from Him. I could not give the lie to
all that had been heavenly and holy in my efforts and aspirings. I
could not draw a sharp border-line between one part of my life and
the other, and say, Beyond that all is heathendom, where no God is;
and here God begins. It seemed to me either He had been always with
me and was near me now, or all was delusion, and I could never reach
Him. Besides, it was of my mother my heart was full, not of myself.
And the words of Mistress Dorothy which remained with me were,--
"'Thy mother is with God.'
"They turned the current of my thoughts from the future state to the
Living Presence. Fancy, being of the brain, lay dumb and motionless,
her fairy wings folded, as I think they ever must be, at the touch of
real sorrow. Imagination, being of the heart, after vainly striving
to penetrate to the heart of things, sank, dazzled by the
impenetrable darkness, blinded by the ineffectual effort to gaze into
the blank out of which she could avail to shape nothing but emptiness
and darkness, no form and no light,--the bare negation of all she
knew.
"Then Faith, turning away from the sepulchre with its impenetrable
darkness, looked up into heaven, and listening, heard the living
words,--
"'Thy mother is with God.'
"Dust to dust; spirit to Spirit; love to Love; weakness with Power;
the mortal with the Eternal. The thought did not bring a softening
gush of tenderness, but a solemn repose of awe; a silence, a hush, a
subjection, in which my poor, weary, tossed heart seemed to gather
strength.
"The words were the last with me at night; they made a calm in my
heart, and I slept. They were the first with me in the morning; and
through the days they rose from my heart like a prayer.
"Strong in that calm, on the Sunday after her chamber had been made
empty, I ventured into it alone, to read the service for the day once
more where I had read it so often to her. I came to the Apostles'
Creed. The snow lay on the ground, hushing the earth with a
death-like hush. All the world, seen and unseen, earth and heaven,
seemed to me full of silence. I could only think of heaven itself as
a vast snow-white mountain of God, silent and spotless, where the
white-robed angels silently came and went on ministries of mercy, and
the white-robed human creatures neither came nor went, but rested and
adored, absorbed in the unutterable light around them.
"Silence in her death-chamber; silence on the cold snowy earth;
silence in the pure light of heaven; silence in my heart.
"But as I sat there, a little robin came and perched on the snowy
window-sill, turning his quick eyes from side to side, as if looking
for the crumbs my mother never let me forget to scatter for him.
Then he hopped off to a neighboring spray, and poured out a brief
happy carol there, leaving the print of his pretty crimson feet on
the snow.
"The silence of the earth was broken by his song.
"There was still a Master's table from which the crumbs fell for him.
"The silence in my heart was broken by the rush of tearful
recollection his little song had brought, and I wept and sobbed as if
my heart were breaking. Yet through all I felt it was not breaking,
but being healed, as never before.
"For a word came to me which seemed to change the silence in heaven
and earth into music.
"'I believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only
Son our Lord.'
"The Father and the Son.
"This is the fountain-truth of Christianity. This is God. No mere
solitary immutable Unity, but the living, eternal communion of
Eternal Love. Not merely immutable, incomprehensible Being; but
ever-creating, all-comprehending Life.
"This is Eternal Life; the fruitful source of all life. This is
Eternal Love, not an attribute without object, but the Father and the
Son eternally loving--the loving rejoicing fountain of all love
sending forth the Spirit of power and love.
"This is heaven. Where the Father and the Son abide, and the holy
angels and the redeemed: not absorbed in the contemplation of far-off
separate light, but folded into the communion of eternal present
love. '_That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them
and I in them._'
"God is called the Father, not in condescension to our
understandings, because a human father's love is the best image human
creatures can have of Him, but because He is the eternal Father, and
the love of the Father and the Son is the root and bond of all
creation.
"Heaven is called the Father's house, not because a human home is the
purest picture our poor dim hearts can form of heaven, but because it
is the Father's house--the parent-home and sacred health of the
universe.
"And therefore the immortality of pure human love, of all that is
truly human (not a perversion of original humanity) is ensured not by
an Almighty Fiat, not even fundamentally by the incarnation of the
Son in whom God is manifest to us, but by the very nature of God.
"It was to this love my mother had been taken up, and into the
unutterable fulness of this joy--'My joy'--the joy of the Son. What
images could be glowing enough to picture it?
"If the heavenly visions of the Apocalypse had been blotted out
to-day, it seemed to me as if they must have sprung up spontaneously
around the Apostles' Creed to-morrow.
"Living fountains of water, trees of life and leaves of healing,
gates of pearl and walls of precious stones, raiment white as the
light, rivers bright as crystal, harpers with the harps of God, songs
like the sound of many waters; the very pavement which the feet of
the 'many sons' were to tread, the sea by which they stood, radiant
with combinations of glory impossible on earth, 'water mingled with
fire,' 'pure gold like transparent glass,'--what are these but faint
pictures in such colors as earth and earth's skies can furnish of the
unutterable joy enshrined in the words, '_I in them, and thou in Me;'
'Thou hast loved them as thou hast loved Me?_'
"I began to understand how my mother could be still _herself_, no
tender touch of the old familiar affection lost, yet full of a joy
which must overflow in the new song.
"For as I listened my heart recognized a distinction in the music.
"Not like an angel's her heart; not like an angel's was her song.
"The pathetic human tone should never vanish from the songs of the
redeemed. The agony of redemption, the rapture of reconciliation,
should never be forgotten there.
"To all He is the Father of Spirits. To each of the lost sons He is
the Father who saw him while a great way off and ran and fell on his
neck and kissed him, and said, Rejoice with me, for this my son was
lost and is found.
"To all He is the Eternal Son. To us He is the Son who became the
Lamb, who bore our sins and carried our sorrows, and redeemed us to
God by His blood.
"I suppose my face shone with something of the joy in my heart, for
Mistress Dorothy said solemnly to me that evening, as she bade me
Good-night in my room, 'Has the tempter departed, and have the angels
come and ministered to thee?'
"Then I told her something of the new light in which the old truths
had come to me in my mother's chamber. She seemed to take hope
concerning me, but not without fear, and questioned me as to whether
I had experienced this and that, and through what instruments this
deliverance had come.
"I could only say, 'I think it was thou, Mistress Dorothy, and the
Apostles' Creed, and the robin redbreast.' She looked doubtful.
"'I never heard of any being led in such a way as that,' said she,
'and I cannot quite make it out. Doubtless, however, the Word of God
is still His Word if it be written on the Pope's mitre, much more in
the Apostles' Creed. Only be sure it is a Word from Him thou art
resting on. Nothing else will stand when the heavens and the earth
are shaken. And as to the robin,' she added, 'no doubt the Almighty
once used ravens; and He might use robins. I have hope of thee, dear
heart, but I would fain be more assured. I never heard of any soul
being brought into the fold by such a way before.'
"But do any two wandering souls come back by the same way?
"It seem as if the ways back were countless as the wanderings: the
Door is one, being the One who stands there to let us in.
"Nor am I sure that that was my first coming to the fold.
"It seems to me as life were in some sense one long course of
conversion, one series of translations from darkness to light. Is
not the sun always converting the sun-flowers by shining on them?
"Once and for ever in one sense; day by day in another.
"It seems to me as if every fresh sorrow or joy opens new depths in
our hearts, which must be filled with fresh springs of the living
water or else become empty and waste; as if every new revelation of
life needs to be met by a new and deeper revelation of God.
"That Sunday, so full of peace to me, was the 28th of January.
"On the 30th the fatal scaffold stood outside the Banqueting Hall,
and the king was led forth to die the death of a malefactor, in the
presence of his people and of all the nations.
"On the evening of the next day the news reached Netherby.
"Mistress Dorothy entered my room after I had laid down to rest.
"'It is done!' she murmured under her breath. 'They have laid their
hands on the Lord's anointed. The irremediable crime is committed.'
And then, as usual with the Puritans in moments of strong emotion,
falling into Bible language as into a mother-tongue, 'The crown is
fallen from our heads,' she said; 'Woe unto us that we have sinned!'
"I could not speak.
"'Before the windows of his palace!' she continued, 'at mid-day, in
face of heaven and of all the people.'
"'And not a voice to plead for him,' I said; 'not one arm lifted to
rescue!'
"'Of what avail? the Ironsides were there,' she replied bitterly.
'They girded the scaffold like a wall of brass. They would not
suffer the poor people to come near enough to listen to a word from
the dying lips of their king.'
"My eyes met hers.
"'The Ironsides were there!' it was all I could say or think. For
before me rose the figure of Roger Drayton on horseback amongst his
men, stern and motionless, his soul masked in iron more rigid than
his armour, not suffering the grief and pity at his heart to relax
one muscle of the rigid resolution of his face.
"And between him and me for ever that scaffold and the shrouded
corpse of the martyred king!
"I had, as it were, been living in heaven with her who was at rest
there; and now the words came to me with a terrible desolation, 'I am
no more in the world, _but these are in the world_.' Around her,
rest, and peace, and songs of joy. Around me crime, and separation,
and the terrible necessity to resolve.
"Mistress Dorothy spoke again, and her voice trembled,--
"'This is no longer a home for thee or for me, dear heart. I feared
that thy joy had been sent thee to arm thee for some uncommon woe!'
"'No more a home for me, indeed,' I said; 'but how no longer for
thee?'
"'I told my brother long since that if ever this crime was
consummated, and neither he nor Roger lifted up their voices against
it, I could not sleep another night under his roof, lest I should
seem to embrue my hands in sacred blood. It is not for us to be like
Pilate, languidly washing our hands of the crime we or ours might
have averted.'
"'But whither will you flee?' I said.
"'I have a small tenement at Kidderminster, where godly Mr. Baxter
dwelleth, a man who is as true to his king as to his God. There, if
thou wilt, shall be a shelter for thee and me. It will be no palace,
but the best I have shall be thine; and with Mr. Baxter's ministry
that may suffice us both.'
"The generous offer touched me; but I felt that my father's home was
the only one for me, now that Roger's way and mine must part for ever.
"She shook her head when I said so.
"'Thy father is among papists and idolaters,' she replied. 'It is
written, "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy
of me."'
"'If my father is in a place of peril,' I said, 'all the more my
place is by his side.'
"She was silent some minutes; her eyes cast down, her lips set, and
her hands grasping each other.
"'Child, thou art right. The heart is deceitful above all things. I
thought I was pleading for God, and I was pleading for myself. I
will take thee to thy refuge in France, and then I will go to my
house alone. Canst thou be ready by to-morrow? I have vowed never
to sleep nor to break bread under this roof again.'
"'The sooner the better,' I said; for I felt as if nothing but the
overhanging shadow of that dreadful scaffold could strengthen me for
the sacrifice. I dreaded lest time might make the treason against
the king sink in my eyes into a mere political error, and my own
departure seem more and more like a treason against those to whom I
owed so much, and whom I loved so well.
"I spent the night, under Mistress Dorothy's direction, in packing
the few things I might carry with me.
"In the morning, when Mr. Drayton's step was first heard on the
stairs, Mistress Dorothy went out and followed him into his room
below. For a few moments they were alone; then I heard her step
re-ascending the stairs. It was not brisk, as was her wont, but
slow, like the tread of an aged person. She re-entered the chamber,
looking very white.
"'It is settled, child,' she said. 'My brother will not hinder us.'
"She would not be present at the family-prayer that morning, nor at
breakfast, true to her vow.
"Immediately afterwards, Mr. Drayton requested an interview with me
in his room.
"'My child,' he said, laying his hand on my shoulder, 'conscience is
sacred. Are you sure that in this deed you are obeying, not my
sister's conscience, nor even your mother's, but your own?'
"The question opened a labyrinth I could not disentangle.
"'It is so difficult to tell what is our own and what we inherit,' I
said. 'My mother was my conscience, and I believe I am doing what
she would have desired. Politics she said women must leave to men.
But loyalty was like religion or affection. To the king every
subject is personally related as to a parent or to God. That is what
she believed and I believe. I dare not debate with myself. I dare
not reason about what I feel to be a crime, or remain with those who
sanction it. I dare not, Mr. Drayton, trust myself any longer to all
that tempts me to stay.'
"He walked up and down the room once or twice with hasty steps.
"'Then, my child,' he said at length, 'neither dare I debate with
thee nor hinder thee. I have loved thee as I love Olive, and hoped
to have a right to call by a name as dear. But if thou wilt go, God
forbid I should make my house a prison. By noon, an escort shall be
ready to convey thee and my sister to the coast.'
"He was as good as his word. By noon we had left the old house. By
the morrow we were on the sea on our way to France.
"In the dusk, before we sailed, a boat came to the ship's side, and a
tall, muffled figure sprang on board. Of what happened, from the
time the vessel began to toss on the short waves, I knew not much,
buried in cushions among the luggage. But when the French coast was
within reach, and we were waiting for the tide to enter the harbour
of Calais, there was some little stir about a boat putting off from
the ship; and as I lay gazing towards the harbour, I saw this boat
struggle through the breakers to a point of rock, where one of the
crew sprang on shore.
"The next morning we landed. We were met by the keeper of a
hostelry, who courteously told us that our apartments were ready.
And on the morrow, as I was sitting alone after breakfast, whilst
Mistress Dorothy had gone to make preparation for our journey, there
was a clatter of a horse's feet in the court-yard, and in a few
minutes my father strode into the room and bade me welcome.
"'But by what miracle, father, couldst thou know we were here,' I
said; as soon as I could speak for his kisses and my tears.
"'Didst thou not know? No miracle; only Roger Drayton riding through
the night to tell me.'
"It was Roger, then, who had crept on board in the dusk, whose boat I
had watched struggling through the breakers to the coast. And I
dared not trust myself to ask where he was or when he would depart!
"'A brave and gallant gentleman he is,' said my father; 'a thousand
pities such should lend their swords to traitors.'
"Then I began to tell him of all Mr. Drayton's goodness, and how
Mistress Dorothy had undertaken the voyage in her motherly care of me.
"At that moment she re-appeared, and my father poured out his thanks.
"But she was very reserved and grave.
"'Sir Walter,' she said, at last. 'Little thanks I deserve for
bringing this innocent lamb hither. I have seen awful things to-day.
At the door of a church I saw a number of frightful images in a cage,
standing in painted flames, and stretching out their hands through
the bars, begging for money to buy them out of torment. And while I
was looking on this, a procession of boys and men, in white clothes,
passed me, bearing aloft something under a canopy, and wherever it
came the people fell on their knees and worshipped. I asked a
sober-looking woman what it was, and as far as I could understand she
said it was "our Lord." They thought they were carrying God. I had
heard much of Papistry, but I had not thought to come to places like
Gaza and Ashdod almost within sight of England.'
"'It was the Host, good mistress Dorothy,' replied my father,
explanatorily; 'the Holy Sacrament. Doubtless there is superstition
in their reverence. But I must not forget my message from your
nephew. Roger Drayton desires to know whether you will be ready to
sail under his care to-night.'
Mistress Dorothy gave a questioning glance at me, and hesitated.
"'Let us persuade you,' my father said, 'to tarry awhile with us.'
"'God forbid, Sir Walter,' she replied, 'that I should tarry a night
longer than I need, among these Philistines. And God forgive me,'
she added solemnly, 'for bringing this lamb of the flock among them.'
"'Must I then tell Mr. Drayton you will accompany him?'
"Mistress Dorothy hesitated again.
"'It is a sore perplexity,' she said, at last, 'to have to choose
between this land of idolaters and the company of those who, kith and
kin of mine though they be, have embrued their hands in sacred,
though I may not say innocent blood.'
"'Had Roger Drayton aught to do with that monstrous iniquity?' my
father exclaimed fiercely.
"'Alas, was he not one of General Cromwell's Ironsides?' replied
Mistress Dorothy. 'The heart of youth is too easily misguided.'
"'Ay,' said my father, with a strong Cavalier oath, 'and woe to those
who misguided them--the quiet and sober Presbyterians and
Parliamentarians, who made a breach in the dykes, and now wonder to
see the country flooded by the ocean.'
"Again Mistress Dorothy had to lift up her voice in testimony; and in
the midst of it Roger Drayton entered. The three chief elements of
the civil war were comprised in the little English company gathered
in the chamber of that Calais hostelry.
"My father, sorely irritated by what he considered Mistress Dorothy's
Puritanical cant, lost all control of his temper. There were high
and fierce words; and bitter epithets were freely exchanged. I only
remember that in the end Mistress Dorothy, after embracing me with
many a warning word, decided to depart with Roger, and that
throughout it all Roger said not one intemperate or uncourteous word,
bitterly as my father assailed him and those whose honour was dear to
him as his own.
"When Mistress Dorothy and Roger had left, my father, after some
rapid pacings of the room, and some severe soliloquising on the state
of England, gradually become cooler, and then his courtesy returning
he said,--
"'Ungracious return I have made for their generous kindness to you,
Lettice; stay, and make ready for the journey, while I go and see if
I can do anything for that fiery old lady. It would disgrace us if
she were not well-sped on her homeward way. And I know the
outlandish ways of this place better than they do.'
"I went to the window, saw him join them, watched them cross the
court, and then sank down in a chair and hid my face in my hands, and
was weeping vain and hopeless tears when the door of the room opened
gently, with the quiet words, in Roger's voice,--
"'My aunt left her mantle.'
"I rose and he came to my side.
"'I had not meant this, Lettice,' he said, 'yet you need not have
fled without one farewell. Your convictions are as sacred to me as
yourself.'
"'I knew it,' I said, scarcely knowing what I said. 'I was not
afraid of you but of myself.'
"'Lettice,' he said, 'it cannot be always so. It is impossible that
such a difference can separate us forever. I must hope. If, as I
trust, General Cromwell saves our England and makes her noble and
great as ever she was before, say I may hope.'
"'What can I hope?' I said. 'Can I believe a thing a crime, and look
forward to not always so believing it? Right and wrong are right and
wrong for ever.'
"I think I never saw on his face such a look as then. Reverence, and
honour, and love, and grief. I shall never see such a look on any
face again. But he only said very softly,--
"'And love is love for ever.'
"There was a faltering in his tone which made it like an appeal, and
I answered,--
"'For ever!'
"He wrung my hand once and was gone.
"I scarcely know if after all I should not have called him back, but
for the memory of that look.
"Better to be separated from him all my life than to be dethroned
from his heart by one wavering or unworthy thought or word. Yet even
that dread scaffold seems sometimes a shadowy ghost to part love like
ours. I would (at times) it were some plain, homely woman's duty
that separated us instead. Then there might be heart-breaking, but
scarcely this heavy mist of perplexity and doubt.
"I have to say to myself again and again, as if the words were a
spell,--
"'It is not politics that part us, but right and wrong; what my
mother would surely have deemed a monstrous crime. And dare I deem
it less?'"