Westward Ho!

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Westward Ho!


"Hark how the old fox is praising himself all along on the sly," said
Cary.

"Mr. William, Mr. William, peace;--silentium, my graceless pupil. Urge
the foaming steed, and strike terror into the rapid stag, but meddle not
with matters too high for thee."

"He has given you the dor now, sir," said Lady Bath; "let the old man
say his say."

"I bring, therefore, as my small contribution to this day's feast; first
a Latin epigram, as thus--"

"Latin? Let us hear it forthwith," cried my lady.

And the old pedant mouthed out--

"Torriguiam Tamaris ne spernat; Leighius addet
Mox terras terris, inclyte Drake, tuis."

"Neat, i' faith, la!" Whereon all the rest, as in duty bound, approved
also.

"This for the erudite: for vulgar ears the vernacular is more consonant,
sympathetic, instructive; as thus:--

"Famed Argo ship, that noble chip, by doughty Jason's steering,
Brought back to Greece the golden fleece, from Colchis home
careering;
But now her fame is put to shame, while new Devonian Argo,
Round earth doth run in wake of sun, and brings wealthier cargo."

"Runs with a right fa-lal-la," observed Cary; "and would go nobly to a
fiddle and a big drum."

"Ye Spaniards, quake! our doughty Drake a royal swan is tested,
On wing and oar, from shore to shore, the raging main who
breasted:--
But never needs to chant his deeds, like swan that lies a-dying,
So far his name, by trump of fame, around the sphere is flying."

"Hillo ho! schoolmaster!" shouted a voice from behind; "move on, and
make way for Father Neptune!" Whereon a whole storm of raillery fell
upon the hapless pedagogue.

"We waited for the parson's alligator, but we wain't for yourn."

"Allegory! my children, allegory!" shrieked the man of letters.

"What do ye call he an alligator for? He is but a poor little starved
evat!"

"Out of the road, old Custis! March on, Don Palmado!"

These allusions to the usual instrument of torture in West-country
schools made the old gentleman wince; especially when they were followed
home by--

"Who stole Admiral Grenville's brooms, because birch rods were dear?"

But proudly he shook his bald head, as a bull shakes off the flies, and
returned to the charge once more.


"Great Alexander, famed commander, wept and made a pother, At conquering
only half the world, but Drake had conquer'd t'other; And Hercules to
brink of seas!--"


"Oh--!"

And clapping both hands to the back of his neck, the schoolmaster began
dancing frantically about, while his boys broke out tittering, "O! the
ochidore! look to the blue ochidore! Who've put ochidore to maister's
poll!"

It was too true: neatly inserted, as he stooped forward, between his
neck and his collar, was a large live shore-crab, holding on tight with
both hands.

"Gentles! good Christians! save me! I am mare-rode! Incubo, vel ab
incubo, opprimor! Satanas has me by the poll! Help! he tears my jugular;
he wrings my neck, as he does to Dr. Faustus in the play. Confiteor!--I
confess! Satan, I defy thee! Good people, I confess! [Greek text]! The
truth will out. Mr. Francis Leigh wrote the epigram!" And diving through
the crowd, the pedagogue vanished howling, while Father Neptune, crowned
with sea-weeds, a trident in one hand, and a live dog-fish in the other,
swaggered up the street surrounded by a tall bodyguard of mariners, and
followed by a great banner, on which was depicted a globe, with Drake's
ship sailing thereon upside down, and overwritten--

"See every man the Pelican,
Which round the world did go,
While her stern-post was uppermost,
And topmasts down below.
And by the way she lost a day,
Out of her log was stole:
But Neptune kind, with favoring wind,
Hath brought her safe and whole."

"Now, lads!" cried Neptune; "hand me my parable that's writ for me, and
here goeth!"

And at the top of his bull-voice, he began roaring--

"I am King Neptune bold,
The ruler of the seas
I don't understand much singing upon land,
But I hope what I say will please.

"Here be five Bideford men,
Which have sail'd the world around,
And I watch'd them well, as they all can tell,
And brought them home safe and sound.

"For it is the men of Devon.
To see them I take delight,
Both to tack and to hull, and to heave and to pull,
And to prove themselves in fight.

"Where be those Spaniards proud,
That make their valiant boasts;
And think for to keep the poor Indians for their sheep,
And to farm my golden coasts?

"'Twas the devil and the Pope gave them
My kingdom for their own:
But my nephew Francis Drake, he caused them to quake,
And he pick'd them to the bone.

"For the sea my realm it is,
As good Queen Bess's is the land;
So freely come again, all merry Devon men,
And there's old Neptune's hand."

"Holla, boys! holla! Blow up, Triton, and bring forward the freedom of
the seas."

Triton, roaring through a conch, brought forward a cockle-shell full of
salt-water, and delivered it solemnly to Amyas, who, of course, put a
noble into it, and returned it after Grenville had done the same.

"Holla, Dick Admiral!" cried neptune, who was pretty far gone in liquor;
"we knew thou hadst a right English heart in thee, for all thou standest
there as taut as a Don who has swallowed his rapier."

"Grammercy, stop thy bellowing, fellow, and on; for thou smellest vilely
of fish."

"Everything smells sweet in its right place. I'm going home."

"I thought thou wert there all along, being already half-seas over,"
said Cary.

"Ay, right Upsee-Dutch; and that's more than thou ever wilt be, thou
'long-shore stay-at-home. Why wast making sheep's eyes at Mistress
Salterne here, while my pretty little chuck of Burrough there was
playing at shove-groat with Spanish doubloons?"

"Go to the devil, sirrah!" said Cary. Neptune had touched on a sore
subject; and more cheeks than Amyas Leigh's reddened at the hint.

"Amen, if Heaven so please!" and on rolled the monarch of the seas; and
so the pageant ended.

The moment Amyas had an opportunity, he asked his brother Frank,
somewhat peevishly, where Rose Salterne was.

"What! the mayor's daughter? With her uncle by Kilkhampton, I believe."

Now cunning Master Frank, whose daily wish was to "seek peace and ensue
it," told Amyas this, because he must needs speak the truth: but he was
purposed at the same time to speak as little truth as he could, for fear
of accidents; and, therefore, omitted to tell his brother how that he,
two days before, had entreated Rose Salterne herself to appear as the
nymph of Torridge; which honor she, who had no objection either to
exhibit her pretty face, to recite pretty poetry, or to be trained
thereto by the cynosure of North Devon, would have assented willingly,
but that her father stopped the pretty project by a peremptory
countermove, and packed her off, in spite of her tears, to the said
uncle on the Atlantic cliffs; after which he went up to Burrough, and
laughed over the whole matter with Mrs. Leigh.

"I am but a burgher, Mrs. Leigh, and you a lady of blood; but I am too
proud to let any man say that Simon Salterne threw his daughter at your
son's head;--no; not if you were an empress!"

"And to speak truth, Mr. Salterne, there are young gallants enough in
the country quarrelling about her pretty face every day, without making
her a tourney-queen to tilt about."

Which was very true; for during the three years of Amyas's absence, Rose
Salterne had grown into so beautiful a girl of eighteen, that half North
Devon was mad about the "Rose of Torridge," as she was called; and
there was not a young gallant for ten miles round (not to speak of her
father's clerks and 'prentices, who moped about after her like so many
Malvolios, and treasured up the very parings of her nails) who would
not have gone to Jerusalem to win her. So that all along the vales of
Torridge and of Taw, and even away to Clovelly (for young Mr. Cary was
one of the sick), not a gay bachelor but was frowning on his fellows,
and vying with them in the fashion of his clothes, the set of his ruffs,
the harness of his horse, the carriage of his hawks, the pattern of his
sword-hilt; and those were golden days for all tailors and armorers,
from Exmoor to Okehampton town. But of all those foolish young lads
not one would speak to the other, either out hunting, or at the archery
butts, or in the tilt-yard; and my Lady Bath (who confessed that there
was no use in bringing out her daughters where Rose Salterne was in the
way) prophesied in her classical fashion that Rose's wedding bid fair
to be a very bridal of Atalanta, and feast of the Lapithae; and poor
Mr. Will Cary (who always blurted out the truth), when old Salterne once
asked him angrily in Bideford Market, "What a plague business had he
making sheep's eyes at his daughter?" broke out before all bystanders,
"And what a plague business had you, old boy, to throw such an apple of
discord into our merry meetings hereabouts? If you choose to have such
a daughter, you must take the consequences, and be hanged to you." To
which Mr. Salterne answered with some truth, "That she was none of his
choosing, nor of Mr. Cary's neither." And so the dor being given, the
belligerents parted laughing, but the war remained in statu quo; and
not a week passed but, by mysterious hands, some nosegay, or languishing
sonnet, was conveyed into The Rose's chamber, all which she stowed away,
with the simplicity of a country girl, finding it mighty pleasant; and
took all compliments quietly enough, probably because, on the authority
of her mirror, she considered them no more than her due.

And now, to add to the general confusion, home was come young Amyas
Leigh, more desperately in love with her than ever. For, as is the
way with sailors (who after all are the truest lovers, as they are the
finest fellows, God bless them, upon earth), his lonely ship-watches
had been spent in imprinting on his imagination, month after month, year
after year, every feature and gesture and tone of the fair lass whom he
had left behind him; and that all the more intensely, because, beside
his mother, he had no one else to think of, and was as pure as the day
he was born, having been trained as many a brave young man was then,
to look upon profligacy not as a proof of manhood, but as what the old
Germans, and those Gortyneans who crowned the offender with wool, knew
it to be, a cowardly and effeminate sin.



CHAPTER III

OF TWO GENTLEMEN OF WALES, AND HOW THEY HUNTED WITH THE HOUNDS, AND YET
RAN WITH THE DEER

"I know that Deformed; he has been a vile thief this seven years;
he goes up and down like a gentleman: I remember his name."--Much
Ado About Nothing.

Amyas slept that night a tired and yet a troubled sleep; and his mother
and Frank, as they bent over his pillow, could see that his brain was
busy with many dreams.

And no wonder; for over and above all the excitement of the day, the
recollection of John Oxenham had taken strange possession of his mind;
and all that evening, as he sat in the bay-windowed room where he had
seen him last, Amyas was recalling to himself every look and gesture
of the lost adventurer, and wondering at himself for so doing, till
he retired to sleep, only to renew the fancy in his dreams. At last he
found himself, he knew not how, sailing westward ever, up the wake of
the setting sun, in chase of a tiny sail which was John Oxenham's.
Upon him was a painful sense that, unless he came up with her in time,
something fearful would come to pass; but the ship would not sail. All
around floated the sargasso beds, clogging her bows with their long
snaky coils of weed; and still he tried to sail, and tried to fancy that
he was sailing, till the sun went down and all was utter dark. And then
the moon arose, and in a moment John Oxenham's ship was close aboard;
her sails were torn and fluttering; the pitch was streaming from her
sides; her bulwarks were rotting to decay. And what was that line of
dark objects dangling along the mainyard?--A line of hanged men! And,
horror of horrors, from the yard-arm close above him, John Oxenham's
corpse looked down with grave-light eyes, and beckoned and pointed, as
if to show him his way, and strove to speak, and could not, and pointed
still, not forward, but back along their course. And when Amyas looked
back, behold, behind him was the snow range of the Andes glittering in
the moon, and he knew that he was in the South Seas once more, and that
all America was between him and home. And still the corpse kept pointing
back, and back, and looking at him with yearning eyes of agony, and lips
which longed to tell some awful secret; till he sprang up, and woke with
a shout of terror, and found himself lying in the little coved chamber
in dear old Burrough, with the gray autumn morning already stealing in.

Feverish and excited, he tried in vain to sleep again; and after an
hour's tossing, rose and dressed, and started for a bathe on his beloved
old pebble ridge. As he passed his mother's door, he could not help
looking in. The dim light of morning showed him the bed; but its
pillow had not been pressed that night. His mother, in her long white
night-dress, was kneeling at the other end of the chamber at her
prie-dieu, absorbed in devotion. Gently he slipped in without a word,
and knelt down at her side. She turned, smiled, passed her arm around
him, and went on silently with her prayers. Why not? They were for him,
and he knew it, and prayed also; and his prayers were for her, and for
poor lost John Oxenham, and all his vanished crew.

At last she rose, and standing above him, parted the yellow locks from
off his brow, and looked long and lovingly into his face. There was
nothing to be spoken, for there was nothing to be concealed between
these two souls as clear as glass. Each knew all which the other meant;
each knew that its own thoughts were known. At last the mutual gaze was
over; she stooped and kissed him on the brow, and was in the act to
turn away, as a tear dropped on his forehead. Her little bare feet were
peeping out from under her dress. He bent down and kissed them again and
again; and then looking up, as if to excuse himself,--

"You have such pretty feet, mother!"

Instantly, with a woman's instinct, she had hidden them. She had been a
beauty once, as I said; and though her hair was gray, and her roses had
faded long ago, she was beautiful still, in all eyes which saw deeper
than the mere outward red and white.

"Your dear father used to say so thirty years ago."

"And I say so still: you always were beautiful; you are beautiful now."

"What is that to you, silly boy? Will you play the lover with an old
mother? Go and take your walk, and think of younger ladies, if you can
find any worthy of you."

And so the son went forth, and the mother returned to her prayers.

He walked down to the pebble ridge, where the surges of the bay have
defeated their own fury, by rolling up in the course of ages a rampart
of gray boulder-stones, some two miles long, as cunningly curved, and
smoothed, and fitted, as if the work had been done by human hands, which
protects from the high tides of spring and autumn a fertile sheet of
smooth, alluvial turf. Sniffing the keen salt air like a young sea-dog,
he stripped and plunged into the breakers, and dived, and rolled, and
tossed about the foam with stalwart arms, till he heard himself hailed
from off the shore, and looking up, saw standing on the top of the
rampart the tall figure of his cousin Eustace.

Amyas was half-disappointed at his coming; for, love-lorn rascal, he had
been dreaming all the way thither of Rose Salterne, and had no wish
for a companion who would prevent his dreaming of her all the way back.
Nevertheless, not having seen Eustace for three years, it was but civil
to scramble out and dress, while his cousin walked up and down upon the
turf inside.

Eustace Leigh was the son of a younger brother of Leigh of Burrough, who
had more or less cut himself off from his family, and indeed from his
countrymen, by remaining a Papist. True, though born a Papist, he had
not always been one; for, like many of the gentry, he had become a
Protestant under Edward the Sixth, and then a Papist again under Mary.
But, to his honor be it said, at that point he had stopped, having
too much honesty to turn Protestant a second time, as hundreds did, at
Elizabeth's accession. So a Papist he remained, living out of the way
of the world in a great, rambling, dark house, still called "Chapel,"
on the Atlantic cliffs, in Moorwinstow parish, not far from Sir Richard
Grenville's house of Stow. The penal laws never troubled him; for, in
the first place, they never troubled any one who did not make conspiracy
and rebellion an integral doctrine of his religious creed; and next,
they seldom troubled even them, unless, fired with the glory of
martyrdom, they bullied the long-suffering of Elizabeth and her council
into giving them their deserts, and, like poor Father Southwell in
after years, insisted on being hanged, whether Burleigh liked or not.
Moreover, in such a no-man's-land and end-of-all-the-earth was that old
house at Moorwinstow, that a dozen conspiracies might have been hatched
there without any one hearing of it; and Jesuits and seminary priests
skulked in and out all the year round, unquestioned though unblest; and
found a sort of piquant pleasure, like naughty boys who have crept
into the store-closet, in living in mysterious little dens in a lonely
turret, and going up through a trap-door to celebrate mass in a secret
chamber in the roof, where they were allowed by the powers that were to
play as much as they chose at persecuted saints, and preach about hiding
in dens and caves of the earth. For once, when the zealous parson
of Moorwinstow, having discovered (what everybody knew already) the
existence of "mass priests and their idolatry" at Chapel House, made
formal complaint thereof to Sir Richard, and called on him, as the
nearest justice of the peace, to put in force the act of the fourteenth
of Elizabeth, that worthy knight only rated him soundly for a
fantastical Puritan, and bade him mind his own business, if he wished
not to make the place too hot for him; whereon (for the temporal
authorities, happily for the peace of England, kept in those days
a somewhat tight hand upon the spiritual ones) the worthy parson
subsided,--for, after all, Mr. Thomas Leigh paid his tithes regularly
enough,--and was content, as he expressed it, to bow his head in the
house of Rimmon like Naaman of old, by eating Mr. Leigh's dinners
as often as he was invited, and ignoring the vocation of old Father
Francis, who sat opposite to him, dressed as a layman, and calling
himself the young gentleman's pedagogue.

But the said birds of ill-omen had a very considerable lien on the
conscience of poor Mr. Thomas Leigh, the father of Eustace, in the form
of certain lands once belonging to the Abbey of Hartland. He more than
half believed that he should be lost for holding those lands; but he did
not believe it wholly, and, therefore, he did not give them up; which
was the case, as poor Mary Tudor found to her sorrow, with most of her
"Catholic" subjects, whose consciences, while they compelled them to
return to the only safe fold of Mother Church (extra quam nulla salus),
by no means compelled them to disgorge the wealth of which they had
plundered that only hope of their salvation. Most of them, however, like
poor Tom Leigh, felt the abbey rents burn in their purses; and, as John
Bull generally does in a difficulty, compromised the matter by a second
folly (as if two wrong things made one right one), and petted foreign
priests, and listened, or pretended not to listen, to their plottings
and their practisings; and gave up a son here, and a son there, as a
sort of a sin-offering and scapegoat, to be carried off to Douay, or
Rheims, or Rome, and trained as a seminary priest; in plain English, to
be taught the science of villainy, on the motive of superstition. One of
such hapless scapegoats, and children who had been cast into the fire to
Moloch, was Eustace Leigh, whom his father had sent, giving the fruit of
his body for the sin of his soul, to be made a liar of at Rheims.

And a very fair liar he had become. Not that the lad was a bad fellow at
heart; but he had been chosen by the harpies at home, on account of his
"peculiar vocation;" in plain English, because the wily priests had seen
in him certain capacities of vague hysterical fear of the unseen (the
religious sentiment, we call it now-a-days), and with them that tendency
to be a rogue, which superstitious men always have. He was now a tall,
handsome, light-complexioned man, with a huge upright forehead, a very
small mouth, and a dry and set expression of face, which was always
trying to get free, or rather to seem free, and indulge in smiles and
dimples which were proper; for one ought to have Christian love, and
if one had love one ought to be cheerful, and when people were cheerful
they smiled; and therefore he would smile, and tried to do so; but his
charity prepense looked no more alluring than malice prepense would have
done; and, had he not been really a handsome fellow, many a woman who
raved about his sweetness would have likened his frankness to that of a
skeleton dancing in fetters, and his smiles to the grins thereof.

He had returned to England about a month before, in obedience to the
proclamation which had been set forth for that purpose (and certainly
not before it was needed), that, "whosoever had children, wards,
etc., in the parts beyond the seas, should send in their names to the
ordinary, and within four months call them home again." So Eustace was
now staying with his father at Chapel, having, nevertheless, his private
matters to transact on behalf of the virtuous society by whom he
had been brought up; one of which private matters had brought him to
Bideford the night before.

So he sat down beside Amyas on the pebbles, and looked at him all over
out of the corners of his eyes very gently, as if he did not wish to
hurt him, or even the flies on his back; and Amyas faced right round,
and looked him full in the face with the heartiest of smiles, and held
out a lion's paw, which Eustace took rapturously, and a great shaking of
hands ensued; Amyas gripping with a great round fist, and a quiet quiver
thereof, as much as to say, "I AM glad to see you;" and Eustace pinching
hard with white, straight fingers, and sawing the air violently up and
down, as much as to say, "DON'T YOU SEE how glad I am to see you?" A
very different greeting from the former.

"Hold hard, old lad," said Amyas, "before you break my elbow. And where
do you come from?"

"From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in
it," said he, with a little smile and nod of mysterious self-importance.

"Like the devil, eh? Well, every man has his pattern. How is my uncle?"

Now, if there was one man on earth above another, of whom Eustace Leigh
stood in dread, it was his cousin Amyas. In the first place, he knew
Amyas could have killed him with a blow; and there are natures, who,
instead of rejoicing in the strength of men of greater prowess than
themselves, look at such with irritation, dread, at last, spite;
expecting, perhaps, that the stronger will do to them what they feel
they might have done in his place. Every one, perhaps, has the same
envious, cowardly devil haunting about his heart; but the brave men,
though they be very sparrows, kick him out; the cowards keep him, and
foster him; and so did poor Eustace Leigh.

Next, he could not help feeling that Amyas despised him. They had not
met for three years; but before Amyas went, Eustace never could argue
with him, simply because Amyas treated him as beneath argument. No doubt
he was often rude and unfair enough; but the whole mass of questions
concerning the unseen world, which the priests had stimulated in his
cousin's mind into an unhealthy fungus crop, were to Amyas simply, as he
expressed it, "wind and moonshine;" and he treated his cousin as a
sort of harmless lunatic, and, as they say in Devon, "half-baked." And
Eustace knew it; and knew, too, that his cousin did him an injustice.
"He used to undervalue me," said he to himself; "let us see whether he
does not find me a match for him now." And then went off into an agony
of secret contrition for his self-seeking and his forgetting that
"the glory of God, and not his own exaltation," was the object of his
existence.

There, dear readers, Ex pede Herculem; I cannot tire myself or you
(especially in this book) with any wire-drawn soul-dissections. I have
tried to hint to you two opposite sorts of men,--the one trying to be
good with all his might and main, according to certain approved methods
and rules, which he has got by heart, and like a weak oarsman, feeling
and fingering his spiritual muscles over all day, to see if they are
growing; the other not even knowing whether he is good or not, but just
doing the right thing without thinking about it, as simply as a little
child, because the Spirit of God is with him. If you cannot see the
great gulf fixed between the two, I trust that you will discover it some
day.