IW WHICH THE SHIPS OF WAR GO BY AND THE TALE ENDS
To tell all that befell me ere I set foot in England once more were
scarce less tedious to the reader than it was to me in the happening,
who counted each day for lost until I had got home; which was upon
Christmas Eve; and should prosecute my search for Idonia Avenon.
But so strangely into peace did all my affairs seem to move, after my
uncle's death (as though upon his removal who had every way troubled us
so long, we were come into an unknown liberty and fulfilment of our
hopes), that my search was ended as soon almost as begun, and Idonia
restored to me within an hour of my landing at Wapping Stairs.
'Twas the simplest cause that led me to her, as it was the simplest act
of mere gratitude that I should go at once to the kindly folk on the
Bridge, I mean Gregory Nelson and his wife, to requite them for all
they had done for me and to excuse myself in having gone away from them
so without warning as I did; which must at that time have appeared very
graceless in me and unhandsome. And being thus come to their house, as
I say, who should be in the doorway, as if expressly to greet me
(although she had heard nought of the arrival of the _Happy
Adventure_), but Idonia herself, sweet lass! and blithe as a carol
burden. 'Twas some while ere we got to relating our histories, but
when Idonia did at length relate her own, I learnt how Nelson's
brother, the yeoman, had found her that dreadful night, lurking about
the precincts of the _Fair Haven_ Inn, nigh distraught with weeping and
the terror of loneliness. He had questioned her straitly of her
purpose in being there, to whom she presently confessed she sought me,
and told him where I was used to lodge, which was in this house upon
London Bridge. And no sooner did the yeoman apprehend the matter, than
he got permission of his captain to leave watching of the Inn, and so
carried her home to his brother's wife, who tenderly cared for her,
until I should return.
"As indeed I never doubted of your doing," said Idonia, her eyes
shining for very pride of this ineffable thing we had entered into
possession of; "though you have been gone a weary great while, dear
heart, and no tidings have I had to comfort me."
"Ay, and mickle tidings you needed, housewife!" interposed the scolding
voice of Madam Nelson, that (good soul) had no notion to leave us two
by ourselves, but burst into whatever room we were in, upon the most
impertinent excuse, as of a mislaid thimble, or a paper of pins, or
else a "Lord! be you here still?" or a "Tell me, Denis, how do the
ladies of Barbary wear their hair?" until I swear I was ready to pitch
her out of the window for a second, but more virtuous, Jezebel.
"Small tidings you needed, I wis," said she, "that turned even silence
to advantage, and the very winds of Heaven to your way of thinking!
'He will be safe in this weather,' would 'a say when 'twas calm; or if
it blew fresh, 'Denis hath no fear of a tempest!' and with such a
fulsome patience of belief, as I think, had she had positive news you
were dead, she would have said you feigned it on purpose to have
leisure to think upon her."
"Had it not been for your own good courage, mother," replied Idonia,
with a run of laughter, "I had often enough desponded. And 'twas you
went to Mr. Osborne for me, as Mr. Nelson did to the Council, to give
account how matters had gone, and to exonerate this long lad of
remissness."
"Tilly vally!" cried the lady. "I exonerate none of your lovers, not
I, that steal away at midnight, to leave their sweethearts weeping by
the shore!" And so, as if blown thence by the strong gust of her
resentment, she was gone from us, ere I could mend her wilful
misconstruction of the part I had been enforced to play.
But that part of captive I was now content enough to continue in for
just so long as Idonia willed, who held me to her, and by a thousand
links bound me, pronouncing my sentence in terms I shall neither ever
forget nor shall I now repeat them. Such sweet words of a maid are not
singular, I think, but rather be common as death; to which for the
first time they give the only right meaning, as of a little ford that
lies in a hollow of the highway of love....
I told her gently of her guardian's drowning, at which report she
shuddered and turned away her face. But all she said was: "He was a
kind man to me, but otherwise, I fear, very wicked."
We spoke of the Chinese jar, that had contained that great treasure of
diamonds and precious stones my uncle had rent away and stolen from
those he privily slew. Idonia said it had been seized upon by the
party of soldiers that had searched the Inn, and that the Queen had
confiscated it to her own use, as indeed she was accustomed to keep
whatever prizes came into her hands, without scruple of lawful
propriety. "Which was the occasion, I fear, of some sharp passages
betwixt Madam Nelson and her husband," said Idonia, with a smile, "she
being for his boldly demanding them of the Queen's Secretary, as
pertaining to my dowry, but he stoutly dissenting from such a course,
and, I hold, rightly. But in either case I would not have kept them,
knowing as I do how they were come by; and although the loss of them
leaveth us poor."
I was of her mind in that, and said so. However, we were not to be so
poor as we then supposed; for besides the jewels which Her Grace had
possessed herself of, with her slender and capable fingers, there was
afterwards discovered a pretty big sum of money her guardian had laid
up, together with his testament and general devise of all he had to
Idonia Avenon, whom he named his sole heir. This we learned from the
attorney in whose hands as well the money was, as the will, which
himself had drawn; who, upon my solemn attestation, and the witness of
Captain Tuchet, admitted, and procured it to be allowed by the
magistrates, that Botolph Cleeve, the testator, was legally deceased,
and Idonia Avenon, the beneficiary, incontestably alive. And upon our
counting over the sum (we both being notable accountants, as is already
sufficiently known), we found it more by nigh a thousand pounds than my
father had formerly lost by this man whose death now allowed of the
restitution of all. For Idonia would hear of nothing done until my
father should be first paid, and of her own motion made proposal that
we should immediately journey down into Somerset to pay him, in the
which course I concurred with great contentment, for it was already
near upon two years since I had set eyes upon him, and upon our old
home of Combe.
The snow lay somewhat less thickly upon the downs, as we rode over them
past Marlborough and Devizes, than it had done when I set out in the
company of that very warlike scholar, Mr. Jordan, whose campaign I had
seen to be diverted against the books and featherbeds of Baynards
Castle, with so singular a valour and so remote a prospect to be ever
determined.
Idonia was delighted with these great fields, all white and shining,
that we passed over, they being like nothing she had ever seen, she
said, except once, when she had gone with her guardian into Kent, where
he lay one whole winter in hiding, though she did not know wherefore.
By nights it was my custom to request a lodging for Idonia of the
clergyman of the town we rested at, while I myself would lie at the
inn; and by this means I was enabled to renew my pleasant acquaintance
with the Curate of Newbury; who (it will be remembered) had preached
that Philippic sermon against the Papists, and had moreover so
earnestly desired me that I should tell the Archbishop of his adding a
rood of ground to his churchyard. He seemed, methought, a little
dejected when I said I had had none occasion to His Grace, who
therefore remained yet in ignorance of the progress the Church made in
Newbury; but he soon so far forgot his disappointment as to tell me of
an improvement of his tithes-rents, by which he was left with seventeen
shillings to the good at Michaelmas; and with a part of this surplus he
had, he confessed, been tempted to purchase of a pedlar a certain book
in the French tongue called _Pantagruel_, from which he had derived no
inconsiderable entertainment, albeit joined to some scruples upon the
matters therein treated of, whether they were altogether such as he
should be known to read them.
"However, since none here hath any French but I," said he, "I bethought
me that no public scandal was to be feared, and so read on."
We rode into the little town of Glastonbury, where it lieth under its
strange and conical steep hill, about four o'clock in the afternoon; it
being then, I think, toward the end of January, and clear still
weather. And because it was already dusk I would not proceed further
that day; but in the morning, before daybreak, we proceeded again
forward, going by the ridgeway that, as a viaduct, standeth high above
the levels, then all veiled in chill grey mists. We got into Taunton a
little ere noon, and there baited our horses, being determined to end
our journey before nightfall, which we could not have done except by
this respite. The name of Simon Powell had been so oft upon my lips,
and I had with so many and lively strokes depainted him in conversation
with Idonia, that she had come to know him almost as well as I, and
thus I was hardly astonished when she turned about in her saddle to
gaze after a young man that walked in a meadow a little apart from the
highway as we were entering the hamlet of Tolland, and asked me whether
he were not, as in truth he was, my old companion.
Marvellous glad to meet with Simon after this long interval, I drew
rein and beckoned to him, who, running forward almost at the same
instant, took my hand, gloved as it was, and covered it with kisses.
"How doth my father?" I demanded eagerly, and ere he had concluded his
salutation.
"His worship may mend when he sees you come home," said he gravely, and
by that I saw I was not to indulge too large a hope of his mending.
"I would we were indeed arrived home, Simon," I replied; "but at all
events, this lodging shall soon be exchanged for a better; that is, if
he may yet bear to be moved."
We walked our horses along very slowly, Simon between us as we went, to
whom Idonia addressed herself so kindly that the lad, falling instantly
in love with her, had nearly forgot the principal thing of all he had
to say, which was that Sir Matthew Juke had but at the Christmas
quarter-day past renounced his tenancy of the Court and gone to
Bristol, where he had formed the acquaintance of a merchant-adventurer
that was about to attempt the Northwest passage (as it is named,
although none hath yet found it); and upon this voyage the knight also
was set to go.
"His head is full of the design," said Simon, "so that those about him
fear his wits unsettled, and indeed he spends the better part of every
day poring upon books of navigation, treatises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert
and the like, while his speech is ever of victualling and charts and
ships' logs, but of other things, and even in the Justices' room at the
Sessions, never a word."
"Say you he hath resigned his lease of our house at Combe?" cried I,
interrupting him for the very impatience of my joy; and when I knew he
certainly had so done, struck the spurs into my tired beast and
galloped forward to the Inn.
Of the interval I say nothing, nor of the mutual delight with which my
father and I embraced each other; and afterwards of the bestowal of his
welcome upon Idonia, which he did with that accustomed courtly grace of
his, and bound the maid to him in love by the simple manner of his
doing it.
Within a week, or perhaps a little over, we were all returned to the
Court, where Idonia was at once proclaimed mistress; and a week after
Easter we were married. My father was for giving up to us the great
room, hung about with tapestries, he had always used, but neither
Idonia nor I would allow of it, preferring for our own chamber that
high narrow attic in the tower that had been mine before, and was,
moreover, as wholesome and sweet a place as any man could lead a wife
to, with a rare prospect of meadow and moorland from the window; too,
and away up the deep valley to where it is closed in ascending ranks of
pines.
Here yet we live, Idonia and I: "Idonia of Petty Wales" I have named
her, and Simon is therefore wondrous pleased to suppose some affinity
in her to his wild ancestors, of whom he now tells her, as he formerly
did me, incredible long legends; yet none so out of all compass of
belief as is the story we might have told him, had we chosen, of that
ruinous secret house over against the Galley Quay, where she dwelt so
long, pure and brave, amidst desperate evil men.
Here we live, as I say, Idonia and I, but no longer my father, who
after we had been married but a year, died. Worn out by that lingering
malady of which I have spoken, and having been for so long a while
confined to that poor shelter where, I learned, was to be had the
merest necessaries but nothing to foster his strength, he soon gave
manifest signs that the betterment of his fortune had come too late to
advantage him. To himself it had of necessity been well known, but the
knowledge neither discouraged him at all, nor caused him to exchange
his habitual discourse for those particular sentences that men in such
case will sometimes burden their speech withal.
In Idonia's company he seemed to take an extraordinary quiet pleasure,
and indeed spoke with her (as she afterwards told me) of matters he had
seldom enlarged upon with me, but to which she opened so ready an
apprehension as drew him on from familiar chat to reveal to her the
most cherished speculations of his mind. To me he continued as I
always remember him, using that gentle satire that was a sauce to all
his sayings. He would oftenwhiles question me of the difficulties and
dangers of my sojourn in London, but although he would hear me
attentively, I knew he took small pleasure in tales of tumult and
strife. There was in his nature that touch of woman that, however, is
not womanliness but rather is responsive to the best a woman hath; and
thus it was, in the perfect sympathy that marked his converse with
Idonia, I read, more clearly than I had done in all the years we had
lived together, the measure of his loss in losing his wife, and the
pitiful great need which he endeavoured so continuously, in his
reading, to fill.
I had supposed him to be a complete Stoick, and to have embraced
without reservation the teaching of that famous school; but Idonia, to
whom I spoke of it, told me that it was not altogether so.
"For," she said, "it was but a week since, as we sat together on the
side of the moor yonder, that he repeated to me a sentence of the Roman
Emperor's, whose works he ever carrieth about with him, in which he
bids a wise man expect each day to meet with idle men and fools and
busybodies and arrogant men. But that, your father said, was to bid a
man shut himself up alone in a high tower, whence he should look down
upon his fellows instead of mixing with them and trying to understand
them. Expect rather, he said, to meet each day with honest, kindly
men; in which expectation if you be disappointed, then consider whether
the cause of offence lieth not in you; the other man being full as
likely to be inoffensive as yourself."
Of time he was wont to say, "When one says to you: There is no time
like the present, reply to him that indeed there is no time but the
present: future and past being but as graven figures on a milestone
which a man readeth and passeth upon his road."
"In order to the greatest happiness in this life," he said, "it is well
freely to give to others all they shall require at your hands, being
well assured that they will readily leave you in the enjoyment of that
the only real possession of yours, which is your thoughts."
To Idonia, who once asked him why he had never written down the rules
he lived by, he answered with his grave smile that rules were the false
scent, subtle or obvious, with which the escaping outlaw, thought,
deludes its pursuers, sworn of the law.
But the speech that hath struck the deepest in me was spoken when he
gave Idonia, as he did, that picture of my mother, of whom he said (but
not of himself) that she had known a world of sorrow, and after awhile
added that "he believed ere she died she had found her sorrow fashioned
to a splendid gift."
I accurately remember the last day he lived, in every least accident of
it: the sense of beauty that all things seemed to have above the
ordinary, and the stillness that clung about the Combe.
We had gone up, all three, and old Peter Sprot with us, to a little
coppice of firs upon the moor side, to see a squadron of the Queen's
ships, that went down the Channel under the command of Sir Richard
Grenville, who was lately appointed to survey the defences of the West,
and to marshal the trained bands that had been put into readiness
against the expected, but long delayed, invasion of the Spanish.
Our talk was naturally of war, and the chances we had to withstand so
notable an army as was gathering against us, upon which my father said,
very quiet, that the principal thing was never victory, but the not
being afraid. Later on, as if pursuing a train of thought that this
observation had set him on, he said--
"That which we are accustomed to call the future hath been by the elder
men of all ages generally despaired of, or at the least feared; and I
think it always will be so, for an old man's courage naturally turneth
backward to the past and occupieth itself in enlarging the obstacles
himself hath overcome, which no young man again might do; and this
maketh him fearful, and oftentimes angry too."
He paused there upon Idonia's pointing with her finger to the Admiral
that just then shook out her standard from the mast-head, but presently
proceeded, smiling: "Had England not already a motto to her shield I
would petition the Heralds to subscribe these words beneath it, that in
what estate so ever we be found, we be neither angry nor afraid."
He sat silent after that, and I thought seemed to fetch his breath
something uneasily. However, he lay back against the bole of a fir
awhile as resting himself.
"Of ourselves too," he went on at length, "I would have it written when
we die, not that we did no wrong, for of none may that be said, but
that as we entered into life without knowledge, so we departed from it
without shame. For to be ashamed is to deny."
He closed his eyes then, and we thought slept. But when the ships had
gone by, Peter Sprot touched my arm and pointed to him. He was already
dead.
We bore him down through the golden sunlight, strangely troubled, but I
think, too, filled with the thought of the majesty of such a dying.
And I was glad his end was upon the hills, rather than in the valley;
for life is ever an ascending, or should be, and to its consummation
reacheth with face upturned toward the vehicle of light.
THE END.