Chapter XI: Olive's Story (2)

"_May_.--His Majesty has taken refuge with the Scottish army at Newark.

"We marvel he should have trusted his sacred person with Covenanted Presbyterians. But in good sooth he may well be weary of wandering, and may look for some pity yet in his own fellow-countrymen. Not that they showed much to the sweet fair lady his father's mother.

"We hear it was but unwillingly he went to them at night, between two and three o'clock in the morning, on the 27th of April. A few days since he left the shelter of Oxford, faithful to him so long; riding disguised as a servant, behind his faithful attendant Mr. Ashburnham. Once he was asked by a stranger on the road if his master were a nobleman. 'No,' quoth the king, 'my master is one of the Lower House,' a sad truth, forsooth, though spoken in parable. It is believed amongst us that he would fain have reached the eastern coast, thence to take ship for Scotland, to join Montrose and the true Scots with him. For his flight was uncertain, and changed direction more than once--to Henley-on-Thames, Slough, Uxbridge; then to the top of Harrow Hill, across the country to St. Albans, where the clattering hoofs of a farmer behind them gave false alarm of pursuit; thence by the houses of many faithful gentlemen who knew and loved him, but respected his disguise and made as though they knew him not; to Downham in Norfolk; to Southwell, and thence, beguiled by promises some say, others declare throwing himself of his own free will like a prince on the ancient Scottish loyalty, he rode to Newark into the midst of the Earl of Leven's army.

"_August_, 1646.--The civil war, they give out now, is over. Every garrison and castle in the kingdom have surrendered. In June, loyal Oxford; and now, last and most loyal of all, on the 19th of August, Ragland Castle, with the noble old Marquis of Worcester, who hath ruined himself past all remedy in the king's service, and in this world will scarce now find his reward.

"In June, Prince Rupert rode through the land, and embarked at Dover. Well for the good cause if he had never come. His marauding ways gave quite another complexion to the war from what it might have had without him. His rashness, Harry thought, lost us many a field. His lawlessness infected our army. The king could not forgive him his surrender of Bristol a few days after he was led to believe it could be held for months. But in this some think perchance he is less to blame than elsewhere. Cromwell and the Ironsides were there and they stormed the city, and it seems as if this Cromwell could never be baffled.

"With Prince Rupert went three hundred loyal gentlemen, some despairing of the cause at home, others, and with them my Father, on missions to seek aid from foreign courts.

"_February_, 1647.--The Scottish army has yielded him up ('Bought and sold,' His Majesty said; others say the two hundred thousand pounds the Scotch received was for the expenses of the war,) into the hands of the English Presbyterians at Newcastle.

"_March_.--We have seen the king once more. My Mother has heard for certain the true cause why the king was given up by the Scotch to his enemies. He would not sign their blood-stained Covenant. He would not sacrifice the Church of these kingdoms, with her bishops and her sacred liturgy, though nobles, loyal men and true, nay the queen herself, by letter, entreated him. My mother saith he is now in most literal truth a martyr, suffering for the spotless bride--our dear Mother, the Church of England--and for the truth. We heard he was to arrive at Holmby House in Northamptonshire, and, weak as my Mother is, nothing would content her but to be borne thither in a litter to pay him her homage. I would not have missed it for the world. Numbers of gentlemen and gentlewomen were there to welcome him with tears and prayers and hearty acclamations. It did our hearts good to hear the hearty cheers and shouts, and I trust cheered his also. The rebel troopers were Englishmen enough to offer no hindrance. And we had the joy of gazing once more on that kingly pathetic countenance. He is serene and cheerful, as a true martyr should be, my mother says, accepting his cross and rejoicing in it, not morose and of a sad countenance as those who feign to be persecuted for conscience sake. He scorns no blameless pleasure which can solace the weary hours of captivity, riding miles sometimes to a good bowling-green to play at bowls, and beguiling the evenings with chess or converse on art with Mr. Harrington or Mr. Herbert.

"He will not suffer a Presbyterian chaplain to say grace at his table, and the hard-hearted jailers will allow no other.

"Thank heaven the common people are true to him still, as they took him from Newcastle to Holmby House the simple peasants flocked round to see him and bless him, and to feel the healing touch of his sacred hand for the king's evil. Sir Harry Marten, a rebel and a republican, made a profane jest thereon, and said, 'The touch of the great seal would do them as much good.' But no one relished the scurrilous jest. And the blessings and prayers of the poor followed the king everywhere. Yes; it is the common people and the nobles that honour true greatness. The Scribes and Pharisees, I am persuaded, sprang from the middle-order yeomen, craftsmen, chapmen. "Tithing mint and devouring widows' houses," are just base, weeping, unpunishable middle-station sins. The troubles of this middle class are wretched, low, carking money-troubles. The sorrows of the high and low are natural ennobling sorrows; bereavement, pain, and death. It is the sordid middle order that envies the great. The common people reverence them when on high places, and generously pity them when brought low. My Mother says, belike the sorrows of their king shall yet move the honest heart of the nation to a reverent pity, and thus back to loyalty, and so, as so often in great conflicts, more be won through suffering than through success.

"_April_, 1647.--We are to pay our last penalty. Our old hall is declared to be a perilous nest of traitors and cradle of insurrection. A rebel garrison is to be quartered on us.

"Our expedition to Holmby, has led to two results; it offended some of the people in authority among the rebels, and thereby caused them to take possession of the hall; and it so taxed my mother's wasted strength that she is unfit for any journey, so that we must even stay and suffer the presence of these insolent and rebellious men in our home.

"_April, Davenant Hall_.--Mr. Drayton hath been here to-day. He looked pale and thin from the long imprisonment he has had, and he hath lost his right arm--a sore loss to him who ever took such pleasure in his geometrical instruments, and played the viol-di-gambo so masterly.

"He gave a slight start when he saw my mother, and there was a kind of anxious compassionate reverence in his manner towards her which makes me uneasy. I fear he deems her sorely changed, and ofttimes I have feared the same. But then this mourning garb which she will never more lay aside, and her dear gray hair, which I love, put back like an Italian Madonna from her forehead, in itself makes a difference. Although I think her eyes never looked so soft and beautiful as now. The golden hair of youth, and all its brilliant colour, seems to me scarcely so fair as this silver hair of hers, with the soft pale hues on her cheeks.

"Mr. Drayton asked us to take asylum at Netherby Hall till such time as we join my father elsewhere. My mother knows what Harry thought, and seems not averse to accept his hospitality. I certainly had not thought to enter old Netherby again in such guise as this."

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

The old house seemed to gain a kind of sacredness when it became the refuge of that dear bereaved Lady and sweet Lettice. Lady Lucy was much changed. Her voice always soft, was low as the soft notes in a hymn; her step, always light, was slower and feebler; her hair, though still abundant, had changed from luxuriant auburn to a soft silvery brown; her cheeks were worn into a different curve, though still, I thought, as beautiful, and the colour in them was paler. Everything in her seemed to have changed from sunset to moonlight. Her voice and her very thoughts seem to come from afar; from some region we could not tread, like music borne over still waters. It was as if she had crossed a river which severed her far from us, which she would never more recross, but only wait till the call came to mount the dim heights on the other side. Not that she was in any way sad or uninterested, or abstracted, only she did not seem to belong to us any more.

I wondered if Lettice saw this as I did. And many a time the tears came to my eyes as I looked at those two and thought how strong were the cords of love which bound them, and how feeble the thread of life.

Aunt Dorothy welcomed Lady Lucy with as true a tenderness as any one. The silvery hair in place of those heart-breakers--the hair silvered so suddenly by sorrow--softened her in more ways than one. One thing, however, tried her sorely. And I much dreaded the explosion it might lead to if Aunt Dorothy's conscience once got the upper hand of her hospitality.

The Lady Lucy always had a little erection closely resembling an altar, in her oratory at home, dressed in white, with sacred books on it; the Holy Scriptures, A Kempis, Herbert, and others, and above them a copy of a picture by Master Albert Durer, figuring our Lord on the Cross, the suffering thorn-crowned form gleaming pale and awful from the terrible noonday darkness. Before this solemn picture stood two golden candlesticks, which at night the waiting gentlewomen were wont to light. I shall never forget Aunt Dorothy's expression of dismay and distress when she first saw this erection, one evening soon after Lady Lucy's arrival. She mastered herself so far as to say nothing to Lady Lucy then, beyond the good wishes for the night, and directions as to some possets which she had come to administer.

But the solemn change that came over her voice and face she could not conceal. And afterwards she solemnly summoned us into my Father's private room to make known her discovery.

"An idol, brother!" she concluded, "an abomination! At this moment, probably, idol-worship going on under this roof, drawing down on us all the lightnings of heaven!"

"I should not use such a thing as a help to devotion myself, Sister Dorothy," said my Father; "but what would you have me do?"

"Help to devotion!" she exclaimed, "'Thou shalt not make any graven image, nor the likeness of any thing.' Sweep them away with the besom of destruction, and cast the idols to the moles and to the bats."

"Sister Dorothy," he said, "you would not have me take a hammer, and axe, and cords, and drag this piece of painted work from the Lady Lucy's chamber before her eyes."

"Thine eye shall not spare," she replied, solemnly.

"But in the first place I must know that it is an idol to Lady Lucy," he said, "and that she does bow down to it."

"Subtle distinctions, brother; traffickings with the enemy. Heaven grant they prove not our ruin, as of Jehoshaphat before us."

For Aunt Dorothy, although she had forsaken the judgment seat for private offences, would still have deemed it an impiety to abandon it in cases of heresy.

"Sister Dorothy," interposed Aunt Gretel, "in my country good men and women do use such things and do not become idolaters thereby in their private devotion and in the churches."

"Belike they do, sister Gretel," rejoined Aunt Dorothy, drily. "The hand that would have pulled down the Epistle of St. James might well leave some idols standing. An owl sees better than a blind man. But it is no guide to those whose eyes are used to-day."

This profane comparison of Dr. Luther to an owl dismayed Aunt Gretel, so as to throw her entirely out of the conflict, which finished with an ordinance from my Father that liberty of conscience should be the order of his household; and a protest from Aunt Dorothy that, be the consequences what they may, she would not suffer any immortal soul within her reach to go the broad road to ruin without warning.

Which threat kept us in anxious anticipation. We took the greatest care not to leave the combatants alone; one so determined and the other so unconscious of danger.

At last, however, the fatal moment arrived.

It was early in April, a fortnight after Lady Lucy and Lettice took shelter under our roof.

Dr. Anthony had arrived from London with tidings which made us all very uneasy.

The Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons, believing the civil war ended, were very eager to disband the army which had ended it, but which, being mostly composed of Independents, they dreaded even more than the king.

In February, they had voted that no officer under Sir Thomas Fairfax should hold any rank higher than a colonel, intending thereby to displace Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, Ludlow, Blake, Skippon, and Algernon Sydney, and, in short, every commander whom the army most trusted, and under whom their victories had been gained.

They were to be disbanded, moreover, without receiving their pay, now due for more than half a year. It was also proposed that such of the soldiers as were still kept together should be sent to Ireland to settle matters there, under new Presbyterian commanders, instead of those whom they knew and trusted.

The indignation in the army was deep. But it was as much under the restraint of law, and was expressed in as orderly a way, as if the army had been a court of justice. The regiments met, deliberated, remonstrated, and drew up a petition, demanded arrears of pay, and refused to go to Ireland save under commanders they knew. "For the desire of our arrears," they said, "necessity, especially of our soldiers, enforced us thereunto. We left our estates, and many of us our trade and callings to others, and forsook the contentments of a quiet life, not fearing nor regarding the difficulties of war for your sakes; after which we hoped that the desires of our hardly earned wages would have been no unwelcome request, nor argued us guilty of the least discontent or intention of mutiny."

No one, my Father said, could deny the truth of this. The Parliament army had not eked out with plunder their arrears of pay.

On the 3d of April three soldiers--Adjutators (or Agitators, as some called them)--had been sent with a respectful but determined message to the House of Commons. General Cromwell (attending in his place in the House in spite of the plots there had been during the past weeks, as he knew, to commit him to the Tower) rose and spoke at length of the danger of driving the army to extremities.

And now Dr. Antony came with the tidings that General Cromwell was at Saffron Walden, bearing to the army the promise of indemnity and arrears. He brought also a brief letter from Roger, saying that now all was sure to go right.

This news drew us all together, and it was not until she had been absent some time that it was discovered that Aunt Dorothy had left us.

Aunt Gretel was the first to perceive her departure, and to suspect its cause. At once she repaired to Lady Lucy's chamber, whence, in a minute or two, she returned, and pressing me lightly on the shoulder, she said, in a solemn whisper,--

"Olive, it must be stopped; the Lady Lucy is looking like a ghost, and Mistress Lettice like a damask rose, and your Aunt Dorothy is talking Latin."

This was Aunt Gretel's formula for controversial language. She said English was composed of two elements; the German she could understand; we used it, she said, when we were speaking of things near our hearts, of matters of business, or of affection, or of religion, in a peaceable and kindly manner. But the Latin was beyond her. There were long words in _ation_, _atical_, or _arian_, which always came on the field when there was to be a battle. And then she always withdrew. In this martial array Aunt Dorothy's thoughts were now being clothed. And Aunt Gretel thought I had better summon my Father to interrupt the debate.

I went at once and indicated to him the danger. He looked half angry half amused.

"Dr. Antony," he said, "your medical attendance is required up-stairs. My sister has recommenced the Civil War."

I flew up to announce the coming of the gentlemen.

At the moment when I entered the room the controversy had reached a climax. Lady Lucy was sitting very pale and upright, and on a high-backed chair with tears in her eyes, and saying in a faint voice,--

"Mistress Dorothy, I am not a Papist, and hope never to be."

Lettice, behind the chair, with her arm round her mother, and her hand on her shoulder, like a champion, stood with quivering lips and burning cheeks, and rejoined that "there were worse heretics than the Papists, worse tyrants than the Inquisition." Whilst Aunt Dorothy, as pale as Lady Lucy, and with lips quivering as much as Lettice's, faced them both with the consciousness of being herself a witness or a martyr for the truth struggling within her against the sense that she was regarded by others in the light of an inquisitor and tormentor of martyrs.

"An't please you, Lady Lucy," I said, "my Father thought Dr. Antony, who is down-stairs, might recommend you some healing draught. He has wonderful recipes for coughs."

And before a reply could be given, my Father and Dr. Antony were at the door, and Aunt Dorothy was arrested in her testimony without the possibility of uttering a last word.

Dr. Antony seemed to comprehend the position at a glance. With a quiet courtesy which introduced him at once, and gave him the command of the field, he went up to Lady Lucy, and, feeling her pulse, observed that it was slightly feverish and uneven, ordered the windows to be open, and recommended that as much air as possible should be obtained, by means of all but Mistress Lettice leaving the room. He had little doubt then that some cooling medicines, which he had at hand, would do the rest. As I was going Lettice entreated me to stay, which I was ready to do.

And ere long we were all three quietly gathered around Lady Lucy's chair, Lettice on a cushion at her feet (where she best loved to be), I on the window-seat near, and Dr. Antony leaning on the back of her chair. She was discoursing to him in French, which she spoke with a marvellously natural accent, and which I had never heard him speak before. I know not why, it seemed as if the language threw a new vivacity and fire into his countenance, and I felt very ignorant, and humbled, not to be able to join. But this feeling did not last long, Lady Lucy had a way of divining what passed in the mind, and she called me near, and made me sit on a little chair beside her, and drew my hand into hers, and encouraged me to say such words as I knew, and praised my accent, and said it had just that pretty English lisp in it that some of the countrymen of poor Queen Henrietta Maria had thought charming.

She made Dr. Antony tell us moving histories still in French of his ancestors, their daring deeds and hair-breadth 'scapes. So an hour passed, and we were all friends, bound together by the easy charm of her sweet gracious manner, and had forgotten the storm and everything else, till we were summoned to supper.

"Ah, Monsieur!" said she, giving him her hand as she took leave of him, with a smile, "re-assure Mistress Dorothy as to my orthodoxy, and make her believe my sympathies are on the right side with the sufferers of St. Bartholomew's Day. And Olive, little champion," said she, drawing my forehead down to her for a kiss, and stroking my cheek, "never think it necessary again to interpose in a battle between your aunt and your Mother's friend. I honour her from my heart for her fidelity to conscience. And if she is more anxious than necessary about my faith--we should surely bear one another no grudge for that. I know it cost her more than it did me for her to exhort me as she did. And I am not sure," she added, smiling, "if after all she does not love me better than any of you."

"Mistress Olive," said Dr. Antony, as we sat that evening in the dusk, by the window of my Father's room, while he wrote, "I would that Christian women understood the beautiful work they might do if they would take their true part as such."

"What would that be?" I said, thinking, after the experience of to-day, it might probably be the part of the Mute.

"To see that Morals and Theology, Charity and Truth, are never divorced," he replied. "To win us back to the Beatitudes when we are straying into the curses. To lead us back to Persons when we are groping into abstractions. For Books full of dogma, Orthodox, Arminian supra-lapsarian, or otherwise, to give us a home, a living world, full of the Father, the Son, and the Comforter, of angels and brothers. To see that we never petrify the thought of the Living God into a metaphysical formula, still less into a numerical term. Never to let us forget that the great purpose of redemption is to bring us to God; that the great purpose of the Church is to make us good. When we have clipped, and stretched, and stiffened the living Truth into the narrow immutability of our theological or philosophical definitions, to breathe it back again into the unfathomable simplicity of the wisdom that brings heavenly awe over the faces of little children, and heavenly peace into the eyes of dying men. To keep the windows open through our definitions into God's Infinity. To translate our ingenious, definite, unchangeable scholastic terms into the simple, infinite, ever-changing--because ever-living--words of daily and eternal life; so that holiness shall never come to mean a stern or mystic quality quite different from goodness; or righteousness, a mere legal qualification quite different from justice; or, humility, a supernatural attainment quite different from being humble; or charity, something very far from simply being gentle, and generous, and forbearing; and brethren, an ecclesiastical noun of multitude totally unconnected with brother. When women rise to their work in the Church, it seems to me the Church will soon rise to her true work in the world."

"You speak with fervour," said my Father, rising from the table, and smiling as he laid his hand on Dr. Antony's shoulder; "the womanhood you picture is something loftier than that of Eve."

"Mary's Ave has gone far to transfigure the name of Eve," he replied. "'Ecce concilia Domini' shall echo deeper and further and be remembered longer than 'The serpent tempted me and I did eat.' But," he added, "we have a better type than Mary for woman as well as man, in Him who came not to be ministered unto but to minister. I was chiefly thinking of the gifts most common, it seems to me, to women, and least to controversialists, I mean, imagination and common sense. Imagination which penetrates, from signs to things signified, which pierces, for instance, into the depth and meaning of such words as 'eternity' and 'accursed'--which also penetrates behind the adjective 'Calvinistic or Arminian,' to the substantive men and women whose theology they define. And common sense, which, when a conclusion contradicts our inborn conscience of right and wrong, refuses to receive it although the path to it be smoothed and hedged by logic without a flaw.

"In other words," said my Father, "you would say that, with women the heart corrects the errors of the head oftener than we suffer it to do so with us. We must remember, however, that the heart and the conscience also are not infallible, and that the same qualities which can make women the best saints make them the worst controversialists. Theology and morals being in their hearts thus closely intertwined, they fight against a mistake as if it were a sin. They quicken abstractions, and even rites and ceremonies, into personal life, and are apt to defend them with a blind and passionate vehemence as they would the character of a husband or a son."

"Best gifts abused must ever be worst curses," said Dr. Antony.

And I ventured to say,--

"Is it not just the lowliness of our lot that makes it high? Can we help our voices becoming shrill, if we will have them loud?"

"Tune thine then, sweetheart, where first I learnt how sweet it was," said my Father, stroking my cheek. "By sick-beds, or by children's cradles, or, in the house of mourning, or wherever good words are needed only to be heard by the one to whom they are spoken; there women's voices are attuned to their truest tones."

And the next morning I had that walk in the orchard with Dr. Antony, when he told me the secret which my Father would persist in declaring (most unwarrantably, I think) lay at the root of his high expectations as to the future work and destinies of women.

And when, a few hours afterwards, after I had been alone a while, and we had knelt together and received my Father's blessing, and I began to understand my happiness a little, and went and said something about it to Lady Lucy, and especially how strange it was that Dr. Antony said he had thought of it so long, whilst I had not been dreaming of it, she kissed my forehead, and said with a smile,--

"Very strange, my unsuspecting little Puritan. For it crossed my thoughts the first hour I saw you together, and that was yesterday evening. Ah, Olive," she added, very tenderly, in a faltering voice, "I had fond thoughts once that it might have been otherwise. If my Harry had lived, and this poor distracted realm had returned to her allegiance, I had thought perchance some day to have the right to call thee by the tenderest name. But God hath not willed it so. And I try hard that his will may be mine. He hath given thee the great gift of a good man's heart. And I have no fear but that thou wilt keep it."