Though their voices lower be,
Streams have, too, their melody;
Night and day they warbling run,
Never pause, but still sing on.
GEORGE HICKES.
For three summer months Cuthbert Noble was confined to a couch; and
though latterly he was led forth into the garden, and suffered to lie
down on a bench in the shade, yet his confinement had been lonely as
well as tedious. No kindness on the part of any of the family was
wanting: whatever could be thought of for his convenience and comfort
was provided. While he was obliged to keep his own chamber, he was
visited daily by Sir Oliver; Mistress Alice and Katharine looked in
upon him together, and inquired gently concerning his pain; the boy
Arthur would often forego his play in the garden, or his practice in
archery, to sit and read to him; and not a week passed without a
friendly and cheerful visit from George Juxon. Nevertheless, he was
evidently dejected; and while he was grateful for all these
attentions, nothing, it was observed, could effectually rouse his
spirits to cheerfulness, although he repaid, by anxious words and
quiet smiles, the least service which was done him. About the trouble
which he unavoidably gave the servants, who, for their parts, were
ever ready to oblige him, he was scrupulous even to anxiety. He seemed
to pine after liberty--and would sit, for hours together, lost in deep
thought, or in vacant sadness. It so happened that the clergyman of
Milverton, whose manners were coarse, and whose morals were low, did
not visit at the Hall. Although originally appointed by Sir Oliver, at
the request of a friend, who, acquainted with his family, had taken
little care to inquire more particularly into his character, he had
early quarrelled with his patron, and preferred the freedom of an ale
bench to the restraints of good society. This was unfortunate for
Cuthbert; as a learned and religious clergyman, residing in the
village, and intimate at the hall, might have kept him straight in
the plain path of the true churchman. Now, though Juxon, had he been
aware of all that was passing in the mind of Cuthbert, might have been
truly serviceable in disabusing him of some strong prejudices, yet, as
he presumed him to be a true son of the church, the subject was seldom
named.
He came to cheer and amuse him if he could; and the very atmosphere of
Milverton Hall was that of purity and delight to George Juxon. His
summer months presented a strange contrast to those of Cuthbert. He
gave up his buck-hunting in the afternoons: he could not abide the
rude and noisy companions of that sport of which he had been always so
fond; and now he might be seen, day after day, in the guise of an
angler, on the grassy margin of a silver stream, or, not unfrequently,
stretched at his length beneath a shady tree near the bank, or sitting
under a high honeysuckle hedge; and if he were not chewing his own
sweet fancies, some book in his hand, of good old-fashioned poetry, to
aid his pleasant meditations. George Juxon was now a lover--without
melancholy, I do not say,--but only with so much of it as is ever
welcome to a lover’s mood, and gives a dignity to his passion.
Nevertheless, his hope was unavowed; nor was he in haste: a long
courtship was the fashion of those days; and a mistress seemed raised
in the fancy of her admirer, by the thought that she must be slowly
approached, and would be slowly won.
His family, his private fortune, his present provision in the church,
and his future prospects from the favour of the bishop, were such,
that Sir Oliver could not object to him as a suitor for his daughter,
though he might give the preference to another; and certainly, with
her father, the title of a baronet would have outweighed that of a
dean. However, these circumstances could only encourage him in his
more sanguine moments, for Juxon was a modest man; and when he called
up the image of Katharine in his walks, and thought upon a certain
majesty in her countenance, and how serene and unmoved she was, how
unsuspicious of the admiration which she excited, he could not but
fear that she might prove indifferent to the suit of one so plain and
unvarnished as himself, and that she would never entertain his
addresses. Therefore it was that he nursed his love in secret, and
patiently restrained all expression of particular regard for Mistress
Katharine in his present visits to Milverton. How pleasant, in the
mean time, were all those visits; how swiftly he rode through lane and
wood, across field or common, as he went from home on those permitted
errands of friendship; and at what a slow and lingering pace would he
return from the gracious presence of this lady of his love!
He had often heard it rumoured that Sir Charles Lambert was thought to
be the accepted son-in-law of Sir Oliver; but this he had always
doubted from the very first moment of his introduction at Milverton;
and he felt that Katharine could never have endured his attentions. By
these, however, she could now be troubled no farther; for Sir Charles,
being deeply mortified and ashamed of the frantic violence which he
had committed at his last visit, had left his home suddenly for
London, and was solacing himself, for the contemptuous affront which
he had received from Sir Philip Arundel, in the congenial atmosphere
of bear gardens and cock pits. Nor had he forgotten how roughly he was
handled by George Juxon, whom he at once feared for his courage, and
hated for his virtues.
However, he was no longer a visiter at Milverton; his sisters, indeed,
still rode over from the Grange occasionally to pass a day with
Katharine, and twice Juxon was of the party at table.
To most eyes he would have appeared the admirer rather of these ladies
than of Mistress Katharine; for Old Beech rectory was only four miles
from Bolton Grange: and though he seldom accepted the invitations of
Sir Charles, yet he met them often in hunting or hawking parties, and
was apparently a very great favourite with them both. Sophy and Jane
Lambert were both pretty: the one, with the rosy cheeks of health and
laughing blue eyes; the other, brown and freckled, with an arch look
that seemed to detect those secrets which men, and women too, most
anxiously conceal, with a provoking and unerring sagacity.
These good-tempered and warm-hearted girls had been at first sadly
afflicted about their brother’s conduct; but this last care concerning
him was now six weeks old, and had been dismissed from their minds. He
was, to their great contentment, now absent, and their tongues were
again loosened to playfulness.
As the party sat at dinner in Milverton Hall one day, about the middle
of June, and as Juxon was carving a capon, that he might help Mistress
Alice to a delicate wing,--
“Prithee, Master Juxon,” said Jane Lambert with a very roguish
expression of the eye, “did you not hear our merry voices on Wednesday
evening as we killed a buck under Walton coppice? and did you not see
us lift our velvet caps to you? and did you shut your ears to the
pleasant horn? or were you charmed to sleep by the fairies under that
broad beech tree in the Bird Meadow? or were you saying your prayers?
or were you reading Master Ford’s Lover’s Melancholy? or were you
thinking of our Lady St. Katharine here at Milverton?”
Juxon was so confused at this last question that he put the wing of
the capon into the sauce boat instead of on the trencher of Mistress
Alice, and said, with a stammer and a blush,--
“Really, Mistress Jane, you are too bad; but I know that you dearly
love a joke upon anglers: you are always jeering poor Moxon.”
“O do not mind her,” said Katharine Heywood, coming to his relief:
“she is privileged to say what she pleases, without meaning what she
says; and my poor name always serves to point a fancy, if she wants
one: if she were not so young and so pretty, she might be taken up for
a false fortune-teller, and a dealer in witchcraft.”
“Cousin Kate, if I am a fortune-teller, I am a true one; and if a
witch, you know I am a white one, and work marvellous cures. Shall I
tell your fortune? and shall I name the name of a true knight in a far
country?”
A glance from the noble eyes of Katharine, which no one perceived but
Jane Lambert, rebuked her into silence; and trying, though awkwardly,
to laugh off the liberty which she had evidently taken with the
feelings of Katharine, she sent her trencher for some venison, and
said no more.
Sir Oliver, too, fastening upon the simple fact of Juxon having turned
a fisherman, began rallying him for having made so bad an exchange, as
to leave the merry and social sport of hunting for the dull and
solitary exercise of angling.
“It is true,” said the knight, “I have myself been forced to give up
the jolly buck hunt; but, life of me, I could never take up with a rod
and line in the place of it. I do wonder, when I see a man mope about
the meadows, and stand, it may be, for hours, under the same willow,
by the broken bank of a sluggish river, that it doth not end in his
hanging himself for very weariness of the flat world.”
“And yet,” quoth Juxon, “fishing hath its pleasures, ay, and its sport
too; but if the angler catch nothing, still he hath a wholesome walk
in the pure air; and if he go abroad early, and listeneth to the
matins of the heaven-loving lark, he shall not want sweeter music
than the cry of hounds, and the blasts of hunting horns.”
“By my faith, Master Juxon, you are bewitched; but whether by old
Margery or by the sparkling eyes of Jane I say not; by Margery,
methinks; for the faint heart of an angler will never win such a
sprightly lady of the woods as our Jane.”
“Nay, nay, Sir Oliver, when a man is bewitched, and by love, too, as
Mistress Jane will have it, his thoughts must be too roving and
unquiet to sit still upon a mossy bank watching for the trembling of a
quill.”
“Ay, ay; but he may sit quiet enough, and not watch any thing but his
own fancies. I do verily think that thou must be touched with some
strange care, to let thy brave gelding race it round his pasture for
the madness of his desire to follow the chase, at sound of which he
neigheth for his rider, and thou sitting the while like some poor
scholar alone upon a tree stump.”
“At the least I find one blessing rests on anglers--where they walk,
the grace of humility doth grow, lowly as the daisy, and plentiful as
the meadow sweet.”
“I think,” said Katharine, “that Master Juxon has good right to walk
the valley with his rod, without being thus rated for his pleasure;
and if he useth to find good thoughts in all he meeteth by the river
side in summer evenings it is more than hunters do in the forest.”
“Marry, Kate, it is to get rid of thought that men go a-hunting. I
tell thee that cares and sorrows, and wrongs and vexations, cannot
keep pace with a bold hunter; self is forgotten; all is life, and joy,
and wild delight. Troth I have lost mind and heart since the merry
days when I hunted.”
“I am of thy mind, Sir Oliver,” said Juxon, “and the falling leaf of
October, and the chill gloom of November skies, can never cloud the
heart of a hunter; but when woods are green, and sunbeams warm, and
birds are singing, methinks the yelp of a hound is unseasonable
music.”
“Well,” said Jane, “all I know is, that you seldom missed an
afternoon last summer; and if it was an early hunting day and a stag
turned out in the morning, in spite of the green trees and the
warbling larks, Master Juxon was never last in the field; but I will
rate you no more: for, may-be, you are afraid of the Puritans, and do
study _Master Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses_, and will give up the
wicked ways of Esau, and turn shepherd--gentle shepherd, shall it be,
or good?”
“Lady,” said Juxon, gravely, “there are good men among the Puritans;”
and seeing her colour a little at his tone, he added, with a smile,
“and good anglers too; but, in truth, you have hit me hard: for there
are good men, who are no Puritans, who think that the sport of hunting
is not seemly in a parson, especially in times like these.”
“Puritans or no Puritans,” said Sir Oliver, “I hope you don’t mind the
muddy race that croak these black lessons of duty. I do not know
whether they be fools or knaves; but they would preach us into walking
tomb-stones, each showing its _memento mori_.”
“Beyond all question,” replied Juxon, “they are wrong in many things;
and push their severity against things innocent and pernicious with
little or no distinction, with a strained application of Scripture
prohibitions, and with a profound ignorance of human nature; and they
seem only to discern God in clouds, and to hear him in the thunder.
But there are men of great and stern virtues among them; and, it may
be, of gentler hearts and gentler views than we give them credit for.”
“I don’t believe a word of it. They are fanatics in religion, and
knavish traitors in their politics: you think of them with more
charity than I do, and it is a false charity, Master Juxon. There was
one of my own name and kin among them: he turned republican, forsooth;
old England, forsooth, had no liberty; our good church was a harlot,
and all the rest of it; and he would seek true freedom in the forests
and swamps of New England; and away he went with wife and daughters,
and a son, whom he had made as great a fool as himself. A youth, sir,
that bearded me with his treason at my own table. I sent him packing
at midnight, sir, and would not let him sleep the night under my roof;
and, in good truth, he was as ready to go as I to bid him; and now he
and his father are felling trees in America for aught I know, or care,
indeed.”
Katharine Heywood proposed to her aunt and the Lamberts that they
should go into the Lime Walk, and Juxon would have turned the
conversation; but Sir Oliver, with the images of his absent cousins
before him, went on venting his feelings, as if in soliloquy. “The son
of a clergyman, too, sir, a younger brother of mine, long dead, and he
himself having been the faithful servant of a king, well accounted of
for valour and discretion in the camp of the great Gustavus, where he
commanded a regiment of musketeers. He to turn against kings and good
order! He that punished a fault against discipline like a sin against
Heaven, and taught his son that obedience was the first duty of a
soldier, to come home, with his brave boy to his own country, and
teach him to flout at the majesty of the crown! Troth, sir, the king
was quit of bad subjects, and I of troublesome relations, when they
took ship for the Plantations. I wish all that are as fantastic in
their notions would follow them.” At the close of this burst, the old
gentleman took a cup of wine with an eagerness that sought relief, and
a trembling hand, that betrayed how deeply he was agitated by angry
feelings.
Juxon, very unwilling to hear him further on so painful a subject,
asked permission of the knight to go and visit Cuthbert Noble for half
an hour, and promised to join him afterwards in the bowling green for
their customary rubber. As he passed out of the hall, a serving man
was coming in with Sir Oliver’s pipe and tobacco-box; and leaving the
strange weed to perform its calming office, Juxon, happy to escape,
ran up stairs to the chamber of Cuthbert.
The surgeon was seated by his side; and from the conversation, which,
although they concealed not the subject or the tenour of it at the
entrance of Juxon, they soon dropped, it was evident to him that they
had a mutual understanding in matters of religion and politics, and
were both of them friendly to the cause of the parliament. It had so
chanced that, during the whole of his confinement, Cuthbert had, in
the person of the surgeon who attended him, been daily in contact with
a mind very deeply imbued with serious and severe principles. By this
man Cuthbert’s heart had been probed to the quick; and, under his
influence, combining with a strong predisposition in itself, was made
sad and heavy.