Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: The great ledger-book--which I now saw turned to an
engine of our salvation. Chapter XIV]
IDONIA:
A ROMANCE OF OLD LONDON
BY
ARTHUR F. WALLIS
ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES E. BROCK
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1914
_Copyright, 1913_,
By LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. SIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The irregular pile of buildings known as Petty Wales, of which
considerable mention is made in this book, formerly stood at the
northeast corner of Thames Street. The chronicler, Stow, writes of
"some large buildings of stone, the ruins whereof do yet remain, but
the first builders and owners of them are worn out of memory. Some are
of opinion ... that this great stone building was sometime the lodging
appointed for the princes of Wales when they repaired to this city, and
that therefore the street, in that part, is called Petty Wales;" and he
further adds: "The merchants of Burdeaux were licensed to build at the
Vintry, strongly with stone, as may yet be seen, and seemeth old though
oft repaired; much more cause have these buildings in Petty Wales ...
to seem old, which, for many years, to wit, since the galleys left
their course of landing there, hath fallen to ruin." It appears to
have been let out for many uses, some disreputable; and a certain
Mother Mampudding (of whom one would like to know more) kept a part of
the house for victualling.
CONTENTS
I. IN WHICH I LEARN FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT I HAVE AN UNCLE
II. IN WHICH PTOLEMY PHILPOT COMMENCES HIS STUDY OF THE LATIN
TONGUE
III. HOW A BROTHER, HAVING OFFENDED, WAS FORGIVEN
IV. IN WHICH I SAY FAREWELL THRICE
V. PRINCIPALLY TELLS HOW SIR MATTHEW JUKE WAS CAST AWAY UPON THE
HEBRIDES
VI. HOW THE OLD SCHOLAR AND I CAME TO LONDON
VII. IN WHICH I CONCEIVE A DISLIKE OF AN EARL'S SERVANT AND AN
AFFECTION FOR A MAN OF LAW
VIII. A CHAPTER OF CHEATS
IX. TELLS HOW I CHANGED MY LODGING AND LOST MY MARE
X. HOW I SAW AN ENEMY AT THE WINDOW
XI. IS SUFFICIENT IN THAT IT TELLS OF IDONIA
XII. HOW MR. JORDAN COULD NOT RUN COUNTER TO THE COURSE OF NATURE
XIII. PETTY WALES
XIV. HOW IDONIA TAUGHT ME AND A CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD HOW TO KEEP
BOOKS
XV. IN WHICH I BEGIN TO EARN MY LIVING
XVI. THE SIEGE OF PETTY WALES
XVII. HOW I FOUND AN OLD FRIEND IN A STRANGE PLACE, AND HOW PTOLEMY
RENEWED HIS STUDY OF THE LATIN TONGUE
XVIII. IN WHICH I RECEIVE A COMMISSION AND SUFFER A CHECK
XIX. IN WHICH I COME TO GRIPS WITH MR. MALPAS
XX. THE ADVENTURE OF THE CHINESE JAR
XXI. THE "FAIR HAVEN" OF WAPPING
XXII. HOW MY UNCLE BOTOLPH LOST HIS LUCK
XXIII. THE VOYAGE OF THE _SARACEN'S HEAD_
XXIV. THE TEMPLE BENEATH THE WATERS
XXV. IN WHICH THE SHIPS OF WAR GO BY AND THE TALE ENDS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE GREAT LEDGER-BOOK--WHICH I NOW SAW
TURNED TO AN ENGINE OF OUR SALVATION . . . _Frontispiece_
THE ARGUMENT BETWEEN MR. SKEGS AND PTOLEMY
MR. JORDAN REGARDED ME VERY MOURNFULLY
"YOU CANNOT BE IGNORANT THAT THIS AFFAIR IS
LIKE TO END BADLY FOR YOU, MR. DENIS"
IDONIA
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH I LEARN FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT I HAVE AN UNCLE
The first remembrance I hold of my father is of a dark-suited tall man
of an unchanging gravity on all occasions. He had, moreover, a manner
of saying "Ay, ay," which I early came to regard as the prologue to
some definite prohibition; as when I asked him (I being then but a
scrubbed boy) for his great sword, to give it to a crippled soldier at
our gate, who had lost his proper weapon in the foreign wars--
"Ay, ay," said my father, nodding his grey head, "so he lost his good
sword, and you would make good the loss with mine. Ay, 'twas a
generous thought of yours, Denis, surely."
I was for reaching it down forthwith, where it hung by the wall in its
red velvet scabbard, delighted at the pleasure I was to do my bedesman.
"Go to your chamber, boy," said my father in a voice smaller than
ordinary.
"But, sir, the sword!" I cried.
"Ay, the sword," he replied, nodding as before. "But, go warn Simon
Powell that he look to his poultry-lofts. And learn wisdom, Denis, for
you have some need of it, in my judgment."
The same temperate behaviour he ever showed; granting little, and that
never to prayers, but sometimes upon good reasoning. He seemed to have
put by anger as having no occasion for the use of it, anger being
neither buckler nor broadsword, he would say, but Tom Fool's motley.
This calmness of his, I say, it was I first remember, and it was this
too that put a distance between us; so that I grew from boyhood to nigh
manhood, that is until my eighteenth year, without any clear
understanding of what lay concealed behind his mask of quiet. That he
had a passion for books I soon discovered, and the discovery confirmed
me in the foolish timidity with which I regarded him. For hours
together would he sit in the little high room beyond the hall, his
beard buried in his ruff, while the men awaited his orders to go about
the harvesting, and would read continuously in his great folios: the
Lives of Plutarch, or Plato, or the Stoick Emperor, or other such
works, until the day was gone and all labour lost. I have known our
overseer to swear horrid great oaths when he learned that Master Cleeve
had received a new parcel of books by the carrier, crying out that no
estate would sustain the burden of so much learning so ill applied.
Our house stood within a steep combe close under the Brendon hills, and
not far from the Channel, by which ships pass to Bristol, and
outward-bound to the open sea. Many a time have I stood on a rise of
ground between the Abbey, whence it is said we take our name of Cleeve,
and the hamlet on the cliff above the seashore, gazing out upon the
brave show of ships with all sails set, the mariners hauling at the
ropes or leaning over the sides of their vessels; and wondered what
rich cargo it was they carried from outlandish ports, until a kind of
pity grew in me for my father in his little room with his rumpled ruff
and his Logick and Physick and Ethick, and his carrier's cart at the
door with Ethick and Physick and Logick over again.
At such times Simon Powell was often my companion, a lad of a strange
wild spirit, lately come out of Wales across the Channel, and one I
loved for the tales he had to tell of the admirable things that
happened long since in his country, and indeed, he said, lately too. I
cannot call to mind the names of the host of princes that filled his
histories, save Arthur's only; but of their doings, and how they talked
familiarly with beasts and birds, and how they exchanged their proper
shapes at will, and how one of them bade his companions cut off his
head and bear it with them to the White Mount in London; which journey
of theirs continued during fourscore years; of all these marvels I have
still the memory, and of Simon Powell's manner of telling them, which
was very earnest, making one earnest who listened to him.
For ordinary teaching, that is, in Latin and divinity and arithmetick,
I was sent to one Mr. Jordan, who lived across the combe, in a sort of
hollow half way up the moor beyond, in a little house of but four
rooms, of which two were filled with books, and his bed stood in one of
them. The other two rooms I believe he never entered, which were the
kitchen and the bedchamber. For having dragged his bed, many years
before, into the room where he kept the most of his books, he found it
convenient, as he said, to observe this order ever afterwards; and
being an incredibly idle man, though a great and learned scholar, he
would lie in bed the best part of a summer's day and pluck out book
after book from their shelves, reading them half aloud, and only
interrupting his lecture for extraordinary purposes. My father paid
him handsomely for my tuition, though I learned less from him than I
might have done from a far less learned man. He was very old, and the
common talk was that he had been a clerk in the old Abbey before the
King's Commission closed it. It was therefore strange that he taught
me so little divinity as he did, unless it were that the reading of
many pagan books had somewhat clouded his mind in this particular. For
I am persuaded that for once he spoke of the Christian faith he spoke a
hundred times of Minerva and Apollo, and the whole rout of Atheistical
Deities which we rightly hold in abhorrence.
My chief occupation, when I was not at school with Mr. Jordan nor on
the hills with Simon, was to go about our estates, which, although they
were not very large, were fair, and on the whole well ordered. Our
steward, for all his distaste of my father's sedentary habit, had a
reverence for him, and said he was a good master, though he would never
be a wealthy one.
"His worship's brother now," he once said, "who is, I think, one of the
great merchants of London, would make this valley as rich and
prosperous as any the Devon shipmasters have met with beyond the
Western Sea."
I asked him who was my uncle of whom he spoke, and of whom I heard for
the first time.
"'Tis Master Botolph Cleeve," he said. "But his worship does not see
him this many a year, nor offer him entertainment since they drew upon
each other in the great hall."
"Here, in this house!" I cried, for this was all news to me, and
unsuspected.
"In this house it was, indeed, Master Denis," replied the steward,
"while you were a poor babe not yet two year old. But there be some
things best forgotten," he added quickly, and began to walk towards
where the men were felling an alder tree by the combe-brook.
"Nay, Peter Sprot," I cried out, detaining him, "tell me all now, for
things cannot be forgotten, save they have first been spoken of."
He laughed a little at this boyish argument, but would not consent at
that time. Indeed, it was near a year afterwards, and when I had
gained some authority about the estate, that he at length did as I
demanded.
It was a sweet spring morning (I remember) with a heaven full of big
white clouds come up from the westward over Dunkery on a high wind that
bent the saplings and set the branches in the great woods stirring. We
had gone up the moor, behind Mr. Jordan's house, with the shepherd, to
recover a strayed sheep, which, about an hour before noon, the shepherd
chanced to espy a long way off, dead, and a mob of ravens over her,
buffeted about by the gale. The shepherd immediately ran to the place,
where he beat off the ravens and afterwards took up the carcase on his
shoulders and went down the combe, leaving us twain together.
"It is not often that he loses any beast," said the steward. "'Tis a
careful man among the flocks, though among the wenches, not so."
I know not why, but this character of the shepherd put me again in mind
of my uncle Botolph, upon whom I had not thought for a great while.
"Tell me, Peter Sprot," I said, "how it was my father and my uncle came
to fighting."
"Nay, they came not so far as to fight," cried the steward, with a
start.
"But they drew upon each other," said I.
He sat silent for a little, tugging at his rough hair, as was his wont
when he meditated deeply.
After awhile, "You never knew your lady mother," he said, in a deep
voice, "so that my tale must lack for that which should be chief of it.
For to all who knew her, the things which befell seemed a part of her
beauty, or rather to issue from it naturally, though, indeed, they were
very terrible. Mr. Denis, it is the stream which runs by the old
course bursts the bridges in time of winter, and down the common ways
that trouble ever comes."
"But what trouble was in this," I asked, in the pause he made, "that it
were necessary I should have known my mother to comprehend it?"
"Nay, not the trouble, master," he answered, "for that was manifest to
all. But 'twas her grace and beauty, and her pretty behaviour, that
none who knew not Madam Rachel your mother, may conjure e'en the shadow
of.
"You were a toward lad at all times," he went on, "and when your
brother was born, though you were scarce turned two, you would be
singing and talking from dawn to dark. Ah! sir, your father did not
keep his book-room then, but would be in the great chamber aloft, with
you and your lady mother and the nurse, laughing at your new-found
words and ditties, and riding you and fondling you--God save us!--as a
man who had never lived till then.
"'Twas when little Master Hugh came that all changed. For what must 'a
do, but have down Mr. Botolph from London to stand sponsor to him, at
the christening. He came, a fine man, larger than his worship, and
with a manner of bending his brow, which methought betokened a
swiftness of comprehension and an impatience of all he found
displeasing. Indeed, there was little he did not observe, noting it
for correction or betterment. Though a city man and a merchant, Mr.
Botolph had but to cast an eye over this place, and 'Brother,' said he,
'there be some things here ill done or but indifferent well'; and
showed him that the ricks were all drenched and moulded where they
stood, and bade him build them higher up the slope. Master Cleeve took
his advice in good part, for they were friends yet.
"But within a little while, I know not how, a shadow fell athwart all.
In the farm, matters went amiss, and the weather which had formerly
been fine became foul, with snow falling, though it was come
Eastertide, and all the lambs sickened. The maids whispered of Mr.
Botolph, who had never so much as set eyes on my lady till that time
(she having kept her bed to within a week of the christening), that he
had spoken no word since the hour he saw her in, nor scarce once
stirred from his chamber. His worship, they said, took no heed of this
melancholy in his brother, or rather seemed not to do so, though he
played no longer with you, and had small joy of the infant. But with
Madam Rachel he sat long in chat, cheering her, and talking of what
should be done in due season, and of how he would remove the state
rooms to the upper floor (as was then generally being done elsewhere),
and would build a noble staircase from the old hall; and of many other
such matters as he had in mind.
"So for a week, and until the eve of the christening, nought could be
called strange, save that Mr. Botolph kept himself apart, and that the
shadow on all men's minds lay cold. I doubt if any slept that night,
for without the wind was high as now it is, and charged with snow. We
could hear the beasts snorting in their stalls and the horses
whinnying. Little do I fear, Master Denis," said the old man, suddenly
breaking off, "but I tell you there was something abroad that night was
not in nature.
"'Twas about midnight that we heard laughter; your lady mother laughing
in her silver voice, which yet had a sort of mockery in it, and his
worship answering her now and then. After awhile comes he to my room,
where I yet sleep, beyond the armoury.
"'Peter,' he says, 'hast seen my brother Botolph?'
"I told him no, but that I supposed he was in the guest-room down the
long corridor.
"'Madam Cleeve cannot sleep,' says he again, 'thinking that he is out
in the storm, and would have us seek him.'
"I lit a candle at this, for we had spoken in the dark hitherto, and
when it had burned up, I saw his worship dressed and with his boots on.
His sword he held naked in his hand, and with his other hand he would
press upon his brow as one whose mind is dull. The gale nearly blew
out the candle the while I dressed myself, and again we listened to the
noises without.
"I took a staff from behind the door.
"'Whither shall we go?' he asked me.
"'Surely to his room, first of all,' said I, 'for it is likely that my
lady is deceived.'
"'I think so,' he said gravely, and we went upstairs.
"Without summoning him, Mr. Cleeve opened the doors of his brother's
chamber, and at once started back.
"'He is not within,' he said, in a low voice, and neither of us spoke
nor even moved forward to search the room thoroughly. It was very
manifest to us that the shadow under which we had been moving for many
days was now to lift; and the certainty that it would lift upon black
terror held us in a sort of trance.
"I am not of a ready wit at most times, Mr. Denis, but somehow without
the use of wit, and almost upon instinct I said: 'Go you again to your
own chamber, master, and if all be well there, be pleased to meet me
below in the great hall,' and with that, hastening away, I left him.
"I ran at once to the stair, which has a window overlooking the base
court; and as I ran methought the sound I had heard before of horses
whinnying, was strangely clear and loud, they being safe in stable long
since and the door shut. The candle which I still bore just then a
gust of wind extinguished, so that I could scarce find my way to the
window, so black was all, and I so distraught. But once there, I
needed not to look a second time, for down below in the snow of the
yard stood a great coach with four sturdy hackneys that kicked and
whinny'd to be gone. 'Twas so dark I could distinguish nought else,
yet I continued to stand and stare like a fool until on a sudden I
heard another sound of steel clashing, which sent my blood to my heart,
and a prayer for God's pity to my lips.
"It was in the hall I found them, my master and Mr. Botolph; he cloaked
as for a journey; and beyond, swooning by the fire which had not yet
burned out, but threw a dull light along the floor, Madam Rachel, your
mother.
"Not many passes had they made, as I think, when I came between them.
And indeed they did not resist me, for your father turned away at once,
striding across the red floor to my lady, while Mr. Botolph, with just
a sob of breath between his teeth, stole off, and as I suppose by the
coach, which we heard wheel about and clatter up the yard. I got me to
my cold bed then, Mr. Denis, leaving my master and mistress together.
It was the chill she took that cruel night which became a fever
suddenly, and of that she died, poor lady, and at the same time the
infant died too."
He twitched his rough sheepskin coat about him as he concluded his
tale, for the sky was gathering to a head of tempest, and after a
little while we went down the moor towards the combe where the great
house lay in which I had been born, and where, as I knew, my father at
this moment was sitting solitary over some ancient folio, in the
endless endeavour after that should stead him in his battle with the
past.