The Lady Catherine de Laval, in her own right Countess of Beaumanoir,
and mistress of fiefs and manors, rights of chase and warren, mills and
hospices, the like of which were not in Picardy, was happy in all things
but her family. Her one son had fallen in his youth in an obscure fray
in Guienne, leaving two motherless boys who, after her husband's death,
were the chief business of life to the Countess Catherine. The elder,
Aimery, grew to manhood after the fashion of the men of her own house,
a somewhat heavy country gentleman, much set upon rustic sports, slow
at learning, and averse alike from camps and cities. The ambition of the
grandmother found nothing to feed upon in the young lord of Beaumanoir.
He was kind, virtuous and honest, but dull as a pool on a winter's
highway.
Catherine would fain have had the one youth a soldier and the other a
saint, and of the two ambitions she most cherished the latter. The first
made shipwreck on the rustic Aimery, and therefore the second burned
more fiercely. She had the promise from the saints that her line had a
great destiny, and the form of it she took to be sanctitude. For, all
her married days she had ruled her life according to the canons of God,
fasting and praying, cherishing the poor, tending the afflicted, giving
of her great wealth bountifully to the Church. She had a name for
holiness as far as the coasts of Italy. Surely from the blood of
Beaumanoir one would arise to be in dark times a defender of the Faith,
a champion of Christ whom after death the Church should accept among the
beatified. Such a fate she desired for her seed more hungrily than any
Emperor's crown.
In the younger, Philip, there was hope. He had been an odd child, slim
and pale while Aimery was large and ruddy, shy where his brother was
bold and bold where he was shy. He was backward in games and unready in
a quarrel, but it was observed that he had no fear of the dark, or of
the Green Lady that haunted the river avenue. Father Ambrose, his tutor,
reported him of quick and excellent parts, but marred by a dreaminess
which might grow into desidia that deadly sin. He had a peculiar grace
of body and a silken courtesy of manner which won hearts. His grey
eyes, even as a small boy, were serious and wise. But he seemed to dwell
aloof, and while his brother's moods were plain for all to read, he
had from early days a self-control which presented a mask to his little
world. With this stoicism went independence. Philip walked his own
way with a gentle obstinacy. “A saint, maybe,” Father Ambrose told his
grandmother. “But the kind of saint that the Church will ban before it
blesses.”
To the old dame of Beaumanoir the child was the apple of her eye;
and her affection drew from him a tenderness denied to others. But it
brought no confidences. The dreaming boy made his own world, which
was not, like his grandmother's, one of a dark road visited rarely by
angels, with heaven as a shining city at the end of it; or, like his
brother's, a green place of earthy jollity. It was as if the Breton
blood of the Lavals and Rohans had brought to the solid stock of
Beaumanoir the fairy whimsies of their dim ancestors. While the moors
and woodlands were to Aimery only places to fly a hawk or follow a stag,
to Philip they were a wizard land where dreams grew. And the mysteries
of the Church were also food for his gold fancy, which by reshaping them
stripped them of all terrors. He was extraordinarily happy, for he had
the power to make again each fresh experience in a select inner world in
which he walked as king, since he was its creator.
He was a child of many fancies, but one especially stayed with him. When
still very small, he slept in a cot in his grandmother's room, the
walls of which were hung with tapestry from the Arras looms. One picture
caught his eye, for the morning sun struck it, and when he woke early
it glowed invitingly before him. It represented a little river twining
about a coppice. There was no figure in the piece, which was bounded
on one side by a great armoire, and on the other by the jamb of the
chimney; but from extreme corner projected the plume of a helmet and
the tip of a lance. There was someone there; someone riding towards the
trees. It grew upon Philip that that little wood was a happy place, most
happy and desirable. He fancied himself the knight, and he longed to be
moving up the links of the stream. He followed every step of the way,
across the shallow ford, past the sedges of a backwater, between two
clumps of willows, and then over smooth green grass to the edge of
the wood. But he never tried to picture what lay inside. That was
sacred--even from his thoughts.
When he grew older and was allowed to prowl about in the scriptorium of
the Abbey of Montmirail which lay by the Canche side, he found his wood
again. It was in a Psaltery on which a hundred years before some Flemish
monk had lavished his gold and vermilion. Opposite the verse of Psalm
xxiii., “In loco pascuae,” was a picture almost the same as that in the
bedroom arras. There were the river, the meadows, and the little wood,
painted in colours far brighter than the tapestry. Never was such bloom
of green or such depth of blue. But there was a difference. No lance or
plume projected from the corner. The traveller had emerged from
cover, and was walking waist-deep in the lush grasses. He was a thin,
nondescript pilgrim, without arms save a great staff like the crozier
of a Bishop. Philip was disappointed in him and preferred the invisible
knight, but the wood was all he had desired. It was indeed a blessed
place, and the old scribe had known it, for a scroll of gold hung above
it with the words “Sylva Vitae.”
At the age of ten the boy had passed far beyond Father Ambrose, and was
sucking the Abbey dry of its learning, like some second Abelard. In
the cloisters of Montmirail were men who had a smattering of the New
Knowledge, about which Italy had gone mad, and, by the munificence of
the Countess Catherine, copies had been made by the Italian stationarii
of some of the old books of Rome which the world had long forgotten.
In the Abbey library, among a waste of antiphonaries and homilies and
monkish chronicles, were to be found texts of Livy and Lucretius and the
letters of Cicero. Philip was already a master of Latin, writing it with
an elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine. At fourteen he entered the
college of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholastic
pedantry. But in the capital he learned the Greek tongue from a
Byzantine, the elder Lascaris, and copied with his own hand a great part
of Plato and Aristotle. His thirst grew with every draught of the new
vintage. To Pavia he went and sat at the feet of Lorenzo Vallo. The
company of Pico della Mirandola at Florence sealed him of the Platonic
school, and like his master he dallied with mysteries and had a Jew in
his house to teach him Hebrew that he might find a way of reconciling
the Scriptures and the classics, the Jew and the Greek. From the verses
which he wrote at this time, beautifully turned hexameters with a
certain Lucretian cadence, it is clear that his mind was like Pico's,
hovering about the borderland of human knowledge, clutching at the
eternally evasive. Plato's Banquet was his gospel, where the quest of
truth did not lack the warmth of desire. Only a fragment remains now of
the best of his poems, that which earned the praise of Ficino and the
great Lorenzo, and it is significant that the name of the piece was “The
Wood of Life.”
At twenty Philip returned to Beaumanoir after long wanderings. He was
the perfect scholar who had toiled at books and not less at the study
of mankind. But his well-knit body and clear eyes showed no marks of
bookishness, and Italy had made him a swordsman. A somewhat austere
young man, he had kept himself unspotted in the rotting life of the
Italian courts, and though he had learned from them suavity had not lost
his simplicity. But he was more aloof than ever. There was little warmth
in the grace of his courtesy, and his eyes were graver than before. It
seemed that they had found much, but had had no joy of it, and that
they were still craving. It was a disease of the time and men called it
aegritudo. “No saint,” the aged Ambrose told the Countess. “Virtuous,
indeed, but not with the virtue of the religious. He will never enter
the Church. He has drunk at headier streams.” The Countess was nearing
her end. All her days, for a saint, she had been a shrewd observer of
life, but with the weakening of her body's strength she had sunk
into the ghostly world which the Church devised as an ante-room to
immortality. Her chamber was thronged with lean friars like shadows. To
her came the Bishop of Beauvais, once a star of the Court, but now in
his age a grim watch-dog of the Truth. To him she spoke of her hopes for
Philip.
“An Italianate scholar!” cried the old man. “None such shall pollute the
Church with my will. They are beguiled by such baubles as the holy Saint
Gregory denounced, poetarum figmenta sive deliramenta. If your grandson,
madame, is to enter the service of God he must renounce these pagan
follies.”
The Bishop went, but his words remained. In the hour of her extremity
the vision of Catherine was narrowed to a dreadful antagonism of light
and darkness--God and Antichrist--the narrow way of salvation and a lost
world. She was obsessed by the peril of her darling. Her last act must
be to pluck him from his temptress. Her mood was fanned by the monks who
surrounded her, narrow men whose honesty made them potent.
The wan face on the bed moved Philip deeply. Tenderness filled his
heart, and a great sense of alienation, for the dying woman spoke a
tongue he had forgotten. Their two worlds were divided by a gulf which
affection could not bridge. She spoke not with her own voice but with
that of her confessors when she pled with him to do her wishes.
“I have lived long,” she said, “and know that the bread of this world is
ashes. There is no peace but in God. You have always been the child of
my heart, Philip, and I cannot die at ease till I am assured of your
salvation.... I have the prevision that from me a saint shall be born.
It is God's plain commandment to you. Obey, and I go to Him with a quiet
soul.”
For a moment he was tempted. Surely it was a little thing this, to
gladden the dying. The rich Abbey of Montmirail was his for the taking,
and where would a scholar's life be more happily lived than among its
cool cloisters? A year ago, when he had been in the mood of seeing all
contraries but as degrees in an ultimate truth, he might have assented.
But in that dim chamber, with burning faces around him and the shadow
of death overhead, he discovered in himself a new scrupulousness. It
was the case of Esau; he was bidden sell his birthright for pottage, and
affection could not gloze over the bargain.
“I have no vocation,” he said sadly. “I would fain do the will of God,
but God must speak His will to each heart, and He does not speak thus to
me.”
There was that in the words which woke a far-away memory of her
girlhood. Once another in a forest inn had spoken thus to her. She
stretched out her hand to him, and he covered it with kisses.
But in the night the priests stirred her fears again, and next morning
there was another tragic pleading, from which Philip fled almost in
tears. Presently he found himself denied her chamber, unless he could
give assurance of a changed mind. And so the uneasy days went on, till
in a dawn of wind amid a great praying and chanting the soul of the
Countess Catherine passed, and Aimery reigned in Beaumanoir.
The place had grown hateful to Philip and he made ready to go. For him
in his recalcitrancy there was only a younger son's portion, the little
seigneury of Eaucourt, which had been his mother's. The good Aimery
would have increased the inheritance, but Philip would have none of it.
He had made his choice, and to ease his conscience must abide strictly
by the consequences. Those days at Beaumanoir had plucked him from
his moorings. For the moment the ardour of his quest for knowledge had
burned low. He stifled in the air of the north, which was heavy with
the fog of a furious ignorance. But his mind did not turn happily to the
trifling of his Italian friends. There was a tragic greatness about
such as his grandmother, a salt of nobility which was lacking among the
mellow Florentines. Truth, it seemed to him, lay neither with the old
Church nor the New Learning, and not by either way could he reach the
desire of his heart.
Aimery bade him a reluctant farewell. “If you will not keep me company
here, I go to the wars. At Beaumanoir I grow fat. Ugh, this business of
dying chills me.” And then with a very red face he held out a gold
ring. “Take it, Philip. She cherished it, and you were her favourite and
should wear it. God knows I have enough.”
Likewise he presented him with a little vellum-bound book. “I found this
yesterday, and you being the scholar among us should have it. See, the
grandmother's name is written within.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It was a bright May morning when Philip, attended by only two lackeys
as became a poor man, rode over the bridge of Canche with eyes turned
southward. In the green singing world the pall lifted from his spirits.
The earth which God had made was assuredly bigger and better than man's
philosophies. “It would appear,” he told himself, “that like the younger
son in the tale, I am setting out to look for fortune.”
At an inn in the city of Orleans he examined his brother's gift. It was
a volume of careful manuscript, entitled Imago Mundi, and bearing the
name of one Pierre d'Ailly, who had been Bishop of Cambray when
the Countess Catherine was a child. He opened it and read of many
marvels--how that the world was round, as Pythagoras held, so that if
a man travelled west he would come in time to Asia where the sun rose.
Philip brooded over the queer pages, letting his fancy run free, for
he had been so wrapped up in the mysteries of man's soul that he had
forgotten the mysteries of the earth which is that soul's place of
pilgrimage. He read of cities with silver walls and golden towers
waiting on the discoverer, and of a river on whose banks “virescit sylva
vitae.” And at that phrase he fell to dreaming of his childhood, and a
pleasant unrest stirred in his heart. “Aimery has given me a precious
viaticum,” he said.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He travelled by slow stages into Italy, for he had no cause for haste.
At Pavia he wandered listlessly among the lecture halls. What had once
seemed to him the fine gold of eloquence was now only leaden rhetoric.
In his lodging at Florence he handled once again his treasures--his
books from Ficino's press; his manuscripts, some from Byzantium yellow
with age, some on clean white vellum new copied by his order; his busts
and gems and intaglios. What had become of that fervour with which he
had been used to gaze on them? What of that delicious world into which,
with drawn curtains and a clear lamp, he could retire at will? The
brightness had died in the air.
He found his friends very full of quarrels. There was a mighty feud
between two of them on the respective merits of Cicero and Quintilian
as lawgivers in grammar, and the air was thick with libels. Another pair
wrangled in public over the pre-eminence of Scipio and Julius Caesar;
others on narrow points of Latinity. There was a feud among the
Platonists on a matter of interpretation, in which already
stilettos had been drawn. More bitter still was the strife about
mistresses--kitchen-wenches and courtesans, where one scholar stole
shamelessly from the other and decked with names like Leshia and
Erinna.... Philip sickened at what he had before tolerated, for he had
brought back with him from the north a quickened sense of sin. Maybe
the Bishop of Beauvais had been right. What virtue was there in this new
knowledge if its prophets were apes and satyrs! Not here grew the Wood
of Life. Priapus did not haunt its green fringes.
His mind turned towards Venice. There the sea was, and there men dwelt
with eyes turned to spacious and honourable quests, not to monkish hells
and heavens or inward to unclean hearts. And in Venice in a tavern off
the Merceria he spoke with destiny.
It was a warm evening, and, having dined early, he sought the balcony
which overlooked the canal. It was empty but for one man who sat at
a table with a spread of papers before him on which he was intently
engaged. Philip bade him good evening, and a face was raised which
promptly took his fancy. The stranger wore a shabby grey doublet, but he
had no air of poverty, for round his neck hung a massive chain of gold,
and his broad belt held a richly chased dagger. He had unbuckled his
sword, and it lay on the table holding down certain vagrant papers which
fluttered in the evening wind. His face was hard and red like sandstone,
and around his eyes were a multitude of fine wrinkles. It was these
eyes that arrested Philip. They were of a pale brown as if bleached by
weather and gazing over vast spaces; cool and quiet and friendly, but
with a fire burning at the back of them. The man assessed Philip at
a glance, and then, as if liking what he found in him, smiled so that
white furrows appeared in his tanned cheeks. With a motion of his hand
he swept aside his papers and beckoned the other to sit with him. He
called on the drawer to bring a flask of Cyprus.
“I was about to have my evening draught,” he said. “Will you honour me
with your company, sir?”
The voice was so pleasant that Philip, who was in a mood to shun talk,
could not refuse. He sat down by the board, and moved aside a paper to
make room for the wine. He noticed that it was a map.
The Bishop of Cambray had made him curious about such things. He drew
it to him, and saw that it was a copy of Andrea Bianco's chart, drawn
nearly half a century before, showing the Atlantic Sea with a maze of
islands stretching westwards.
The other shook his head. “A poor thing and out of date. Here,” and he
plucked a sheet from below the rest, “here is a better, which Fra Mauro
of this city drew for the great prince, Henry of Portugal.”
Philip looked at the map, which showed a misshapen sprawling Africa, but
with a clear ocean way round the south of it. His interest quickened. He
peered at the queer shapes in the dimming light.
“Then there is a way to the Indies by sea?”
“Beyond doubt. I myself have turned the butt of Africa.... If these
matters interest you? But the thought of that dry land has given me an
African thirst. He, drawer!”
He filled his glass from a fresh bottle. “'Twas in June four years back.
I was in command of a caravel in the expedition of Diaz. The court
of Lisbon had a fit of cold ague and we sailed with little goodwill;
therefore it was our business to confound the doubters or perish.
Already our seamen had reached the mouth of that mighty river they
called the Congo, and clearly the butt of Africa could not be distant.
We had the course of Cam and Behaim to guide us thus far, but after that
was the darkness.”
The man's face had the intent look of one who remembers with passion.
He told of the struggle to cross the Guinea Deep instead of hugging
the shore; of blue idle days of calm when magic fish flew aboard and
Leviathan wallowed so near that the caravels were all but overwhelmed
by the wave of him; of a storm which swept the decks and washed away the
Virgin on the bows of the Admiral's ship; of landfall at last in a place
where the forests were knee deep in a muddy sea, strange forests where
the branches twined like snakes; of a going ashore at a river mouth full
of toothed serpents and giant apes, and of a fight with Behemoth among
the reeds. Then a second storm blowing from the east had flung them
seaward, and for weeks they were out of sight of land, steering by
strange stars. They had their magnets and astrolabes, but it was a new
world they had entered, and they trusted God rather than their wits. At
last they turned eastward.
“What distance before the turn?” Philip asked.
“I know not. We were far from land and no man can measure a course on
water.”
“Nay, but the ancients could,” Philip cried, and he explained how the
Romans had wheels of a certain diameter fixed to their ships' sides
which the water turned in its passing, and which flung for each
revolution a pebble into a tally-box.
The other's eyes widened. “A master device! I would hear more of it.
What a thing it is to have learning. We had only the hour-glass and
guesswork.”
Then he told how on a certain day the crews would go no farther, being
worn out by storms, for in those seas the tides were like cataracts and
the waves were mountains. The admiral, Bartholomew Diaz, was forced to
put about with a heavy heart, for he believed that a little way to the
east he should find the southern cape of Africa. He steered west by
north, looking for no land till Guinea was sighted. “But on the second
morning we saw land to the northward, and following it westward came to
a mighty cape so high that the top was in the clouds. There was such
a gale from the east that we could do no more than gaze on it as we
scudded past. Presently, still keeping land in sight, we were able to
bend north again, and when we came into calm waters we captains went
aboard the admiral's ship and knelt and gave thanks to God for His
mercies. For we, the first of mortals, had rounded the butt of Africa
and prepared the sea-road to the Indies.”
“A vision maybe.”
“Nay, it was no vision. I returned there under mild skies, when it was
no longer a misty rock, but a green mountain. We landed, and set up a
cross and ate the fruits and drank the water of the land. Likewise we
changed its name from the Cape of Storms, as Diaz had dubbed it, to the
Bona Esperanza, for indeed it seemed to us the hope of the world.”
“And beyond it?”
“Beyond it we found a pleasant country, and would doubtless have made
the Indies, if our ships had not grown foul and our crews mutinous from
fear of the unknown. It is clear to me that we must establish a port of
victualling in that southern Africa before we can sail the last stage to
Cathay.”
The man spoke modestly and simply as if he were talking of a little
journey from one village to another. Something in his serious calm
powerfully caught Philip's fancy. In all his days he had never met such
a one.
“I have not your name, Signor,” he said.
“They call me Battista de Cosca, a citizen of Genoa, but these many
years a wanderer. And yours?”
Philip gave it and the stranger bowed. The de Lavals were known as a
great house far beyond the confines of France.
“You contemplate another voyage?”
The brown man nodded. “I am here on the quest of maps, for these
Venetians are the princes of mapmaking. Then I sail again.”
“To Cathay?”
A sudden longing had taken Philip. It was as if a bright strange world
had been spread before him compared with which the old was tarnished and
dingy.
Battista shook his head. “Not Cathay. To go there would be only to make
assurance of that which we already know. I have shown the road: let
others plan its details and build hostelries. For myself I am for a
bolder venture.”
The balcony was filling up. A noisy group of young men were chattering
at one table, and at others some of the merchants from the Merceria were
at wine. But where the two sat it was quiet and dusky, though without on
the canal the sky made a golden mirror. Philip could see his companion's
face in the reflected light, and it reminded him of the friars who had
filled the chamber of his dying grandmother. It was strained with a
steadfast ardour.
Battista leaned his elbows on the board and his eyes searched the
other's.
“I am minded to open my heart to you,” he said. “You are young and of
a noble stock. Likewise you are a scholar. I am on a mission, Sir
Philip--the loftiest, I think, since Moses led Israel over the deserts.
I am seeking a promised land. Not Cathay, but a greater. I sail
presently, not the African seas, but the Sea of Darkness, the Mare
Atlanticum.” He nodded towards Bianco's map. “I am going beyond the
Ultimate Islands.”
“Listen,” he went on, and his voice fell very low and deep. “I take it
we live in these latter days of which the prophets spoke. I remember a
monk in Genoa who said that the Blessed Trinity ruled in turn, and that
the reign of the Father was accomplished and that of the Son nearing
its close; and that now the reign of the Spirit was at hand. It may have
been heresy--I am no scholar--but he pointed a good moral. For, said he,
the old things pass away and the boundaries of the world are shifting.
Here in Europe we have come to knowledge of salvation, and brought the
soul and mind of man to an edge and brightness like a sword. Having
perfected the weapon, it is now God's will that we enter into possession
of the new earth which He has kept hidden against this day, and He has
sent His Spirit like a wind to blow us into those happy spaces....
Now, mark you, sir, this earth is not a flat plain surrounded by outer
darkness, but a sphere hung in the heavens and sustained by God's hand.
Therefore if a man travel east or west he will, if God prosper him,
return in time to his starting-point.”
The speaker looked at Philip as if to invite contradiction, but the
other nodded.
“It is the belief of the best sailors,” Battista went on; “it is the
belief of the great Paolo Toscanelli in this very land of Italy.”
“It was the belief of a greater than he. The ancients--”
“Ay, what of your ancients?” Battista asked eagerly.
Philip responded with a scholar's zest. “Four centuries before our
Lord's birth Aristotle taught the doctrine, from observing in
different places the rise and setting of the heavenly bodies. The sages
Eratosthenes, Hipparchus and Ptolemy amplified the teaching. It is found
in the poetry of Manilius and Seneca, and it was a common thought in the
minds of Virgil and Ovid and Pliny. You will find it in St. Augustine,
and St. Isidore and Beda, and in many of the moderns. I myself have
little knowledge of such things, but on the appeal to high authority
your doctrine succeeds.'
“What a thing is learning!” Battista exclaimed with reverence. “Here
have I and such as I been fumbling in the dark when the great ones of
old saw clearly!... It follows, then, that a voyage westward will bring
a man to Cathay?”
“Assuredly. But how will he return? If the earth is a sphere, his course
will be a descent, and on his way back he will have to climb a great
steep of waters.”
“It is not so,” said Battista vigorously. “Though why it is not so I
cannot tell. Travelling eastward by land there is no such descent, and
in this Mediterranean sea of ours one can sail as easily from Cadiz to
Egypt as from Egypt to Cadiz. There is a divine alchemy in it which I
cannot fathom, but the fact stands.”
“Then you would reach Cathay by the west?”
“Not Cathay.” The man's voice was very earnest. “There is a land between
us and Cathay, a great islandland beyond the Seven Cities of Antillia.”
“Cipango,” said Philip, who had read Marco Polo's book in the Latin
version published a year or two before.
“Nay, not Cipango. On this side Cipango. Of Cipango the Venetians have
told us much, but the land I seek is not Cipango.”
He drew closer to Philip and spoke low. “There was a Frenchman, a
Rochellois--he is dead these ten years--but I have spoken with him. He
was whirled west by storms far beyond Antillia, and was gripped by a
great ocean stream and carried to land. What think you it was? No less
than Hy-Brasil. There he found men, broad-faced dusky men, with gentle
souls, and saw such miracles as have never been vouchsafed to mortals.
'Twas not Cipango or Cathay' for there were no Emperors or cities, but
a peaceful race dwelling in innocence. The land was like Eden, bringing
forth five harvests in the year, and vines and all manner of fruits grew
without tillage. Tortorel was the man's name, and some thought him mad,
but I judged differently. I have talked with him and I have copied his
charts. I go to find those Fortunate Islands.”
“Alone?”
“I have friends. There is a man of my own city--Cristoforo Colombo, they
call him. He is a hard man and a bitter, but a master seaman, and there
is a fire in him that will not be put out. And there may be others.”
His steadfast burning eyes held Philip's.
“And you--what do you seek?” he asked.
Philip was aware that he had come to a cross roads in life. The easy
path he had planned for himself was barred by his own nature. Something
of his grandmother's blood clamoured within him for a sharper air
than the well-warmed chamber of the scholar. This man, chance met in a
tavern, had revealed to him his own heart.
“I am looking for the Wood of Life,” he said simply and was amazed at
his words.
Battista stared at him with open mouth, and then plucked feverishly at
his doublet. From an inner pocket he produced a packet rolled in fine
leather, and shook papers on the table. One of these was a soiled and
worn slip of parchment, covered with an odd design. “Look,” he said
hoarsely. “Tortorel's map!”
It showed a stretch of country, apparently a broad valley running east
to a seashore. Through it twined a river and on both sides were hills
dotted with trees. The centre seemed to be meadows, sown with villages
and gardens. In one crook of the stream lay a little coppice on which
many roads converged, and above it was written the words “Sylva Vitae.”
“It is the finger of God,” said Battista. “Will you join me and search
out this Wood of Life?”
At that moment there was a bustle at the door giving on the main room
of the tavern. Lights were being brought in and a new company were
entering. They talked in high-pitched affected voices and giggled like
bona-robas. There were young men with them, dressed in the height of the
fashion; a woman or two, and a man who from the richness of his dress
seemed to be one of the princely merchants who played Maecenas to the
New Learning. But what caught Philip's sight was a little group
of Byzantines who were the guests of honour. They wore fantastic
headdresses and long female robes, above which their flowing dyed beards
and their painted eyebrows looked like masks of Carnival time. After
Battista's gravity their vain eyes and simpering tones seemed an
indecent folly. These were the folk he had called friends, this the life
he had once cherished. Assuredly he was well rid of it.
He grasped Battista's hand.
“I will go with you,” he said, “over the edge of the world.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As it happened Philip de Laval did not sail with Columbus in that first
voyage which brought him to San Salvador in the Bahamas. But he and
Battista were in the second expedition, when the ship under the command
of the latter was separated by a storm from her consorts, and driven on
a westerly course when the others had turned south. It was believed to
be lost, and for two years nothing was heard of its fate. At the end of
that time a tattered little vessel reached Bordeaux, and Philip landed
on the soil of Franc. He had a strange story to tell. The ship had been
caught up by a current which had borne it north for the space of fifteen
days till landfall was made on the coast of what we now call South
Carolina. There it had been beached in an estuary, while the crew
adventured inland. The land was rich enough, but the tribes were not the
gentle race of Battista's imagining. There had been a savage struggle
for mastery, till the strangers made alliances and were granted
territory between the mountains and the sea. But they were only a
handful and Philip was sent back for further colonists and for a cargo
of arms and seeds and implements.
The French court was in no humour for his tale, being much involved in
its own wars. It may be that he was not believed; anyhow he got no help
from his king. At his own cost and with the aid of friends he fitted out
his ship for the return. After that the curtain falls. It would appear
that the colony did not prosper, for it is on record that Philip in the
year 1521 was living at his house at Eaucourt, a married man, occupied
with books and the affairs of his little seigneury. A portrait of him
still extant by an Italian artist shows a deeply furrowed face and stern
brows, as of one who had endured much, but the eyes are happy. It is
believed that in his last years he was one of the first of the gentlemen
of Picardy to adhere to the Reformed faith.