When the laughter had a little subsided, my father told of a strange experiment made by Taliacotius, professor of physic and surgery at Bologna University in Italy, to the truth of which Sir Kenelm had solemnly vouched. When a certain gentleman had lost a piece of his nose in a duel, and the piece could not be recovered to be clapped on again, this Doctor built him a new one, cutting a piece of flesh from the brawny part of a coachman’s buttocks, and grafting it to the stump of the nose, but leaving two holes for nostrils. This supplemental nose lasted the gentleman very well and seemed firmly grafted. But one day he felt the tip of his nose quiver and then suffer a convulsion, and finally it grew numb and decayed; for the coachman had met with an accident from which he died, and the nose suffered sympathetically and died too.
However, Mun was not to be drawn off from the theme by these lewd instances, but warmed to it and in a simple and eloquent manner reasoned that husband and wife, when by the blessing given them in holy matrimony they are made one flesh, often become so united in spirit as well that (as in a case he had known) the wife sitting in an upper chamber thinks to herself: “Now, alack, I am come here without my thimble! I left it upon the shelf in the parlour, I believe”; and the husband drinking wine in the parlour starts up from the company. “By your leave, gentlemen,” says he, “my wife has need of her thimble, but does not wish to break in upon our discourse—I will take it to her.” And so he does.
My mother said, sneering a little, that this was indeed a good and complaisant husband and that she regretted that she was not married to one who could read her thoughts so well.
“O Nan,” cried my father, “how did you know that I cannot so? Indeed, I can, but often it is not convenient to come running with your thimble, your fan, or your little gilt-leaved prayer book. Why, my dear, I was down in Oxford City, these four or five days past, and as I sauntered along the High Street, there I saw a mercer standing in the door of his shop displaying to a lady some very wonderful French velvet of cream colour with fine gold flowers upon it, at two guineas the yard only. And I heard your voice, as clear as I hear you now, saying in a coaxing voice: ‘Dick, Dick, pray buy me five yards of that fine velvet: it is a great bargain at the price.’ And I answered you aloud: ‘Willingly, my love, had I but the money!’ which astonished the mercer, and gave the lady great offence, for she thought that I addressed those words to herself.”
My mother made my father pay dearly for this drollery, for she swore that she would not lie on the same bolster with him until she had the velvet in her hands, for she longed for it as a breeding woman longs for cherries, and would not be denied.
This new interruption did not stagger Mun, who ingenuously told us a tale of love at first sight. He told us how in a garden at Paris a young Catalan gentleman, who had never loved in all his life before, meeting for the first time with a young French woman who was in the same case as he, the two looked fixedly upon each other and found themselves, like the magnet and iron, drawn together so violently that, though the young woman’s aunt was present in the garden, and the young man’s elder brother, the two lovers immediately clipped and kissed as in a swoon and knew of nothing else but that they loved.
My mother put in her spoke again. “Fie, the wantons,” she bawled out, with that huge laugh of hers. “I wager then that the young woman’s aunt and the young man’s brother caught the infection by sympathy (as yawns are caught at the hour of bedtime) and went off to make the beast with two backs among the rose-bushes. Nay, Captain Verney, if I may call you Captain, when you have no Fortune to command—this is a dangerous medicine for young girls. Come, will somebody tell us instead a true tale of natural antipathy, which would be of equal interest with its opposite.”
Then James gave us an account of what he called an “antipathetical bombus”: how a newly elected fellow of King’s College, at Cambridge, being one day required to read the second lesson in the Chapel, began to read from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, the chapter upon Charity, but his voice was of so peculiar a sonorousness that no sooner had he begun than the stalls shrieked, the arches rumbled, the rafters groaned, the floor quaked, which put him into great fear and astonishment. He hastily tumbled the pages back, thinking doubtless that the uproar was in objection to St. Paul rather than to himself, and read instead from the parable of the vineyard; but again the same commotion was stirred, and the Master of the College comes running from his seat and cries: “In God’s name, Sirrah, leave off, or the roof will leap up and fall on us again, and beat us into a hash!”
This tale Sir Thomas capped with another: about a cousin of his father’s, now dead, a fine-looking man, living at Bristol, who there upon the Quay met with an Irish woman of conspicuous beauty; who, upon their first sight of each other, fell into such a sudden causeless and single hatred that nothing would serve them but they should marry, and thus each be in a condition to provoke and torment the other perpetually; and married they were within the month.
My brother Richard asked, what came of the match? Were they long in one house together?
“For three-and-sixty-years,” says Sir Thomas, “and neither was he ever faithless to her, nor did she ever wrong his bed—she, because she wished to give him no occasion for a separation, lest, with herself away, he might be merry with other women; and he because he knew well that every night spent under the same coverlet with him she accounted perfect misery. The greatest trouble for this antipathetical couple was that they had many tastes in common, and opinions too: indeed, they could find no grand point of disagreement, either in fashion or in religion or in the management of the estate, upon which either might take a stand; and neither would ever appear before the other but smiling and self-possessed; they were like practised duellists, or great sovereigns at enmity. He died the first and she wept inconsolably, to think that he was escaped out of her hands, and survived but for two days more. They were buried at the one time and their numerous progeny mourned them as the honestest couple in Bristol.”
“To be sure, love and hate may often be confounded, the one with the other,” says my brother James, “especially by persons of a sensual nature. I mean this: that just as it would be hard to declare certainly whether that bombus of King’s College Chapel were a sympathetic or antipathetic one—whether the fabric of the building groaned for joy or for loathing when the Fellow read—so it is sometimes a case of odi atque amo between two persons caught in a mutual flame of passion.”
“Well said, James,” cried my mother, who had taken a cup or two of mead beyond what was ordinary with her, “for despite our immortal souls, what are we corporeally but beasts? Look out into the farmyard: when Goodman Chantecler seeks out Goodwife Partlet and treads her, does he slobber her with kisses first, or does he tear at her head with his beak? And my Lord Tom Cat, when he comes wooing my Lady Tib Cat, what a song of hatred, what scratches, what bites and scuffles! Look not abashed, daughters! As Eve was my grandam, so also was she your great-grandam; and as men have four legs by nature, so also have women. It matters not greatly whom any of you may take for your husband, since all flesh is but flesh, and since sympathy and antipathy have, by Sir Thomas’s logic, been proved equals; only be sure that the gentleman can show you a good estate and is clear of debts and of the pox, and has honour enough to prefer a stroke with the sword to a buffet with the fist. And if he comes drunk to bed, why, so much the better! Especially avoid deboshed third sons and cashiered captains, I speak to you, Zara”—for my sister Zara was making great eyes at Mun, so that I glowered with rage—“for when you have married such a one you will lie sick one day in a Westminster garret, with a pack of lousy brats tugging at your skirts and crying ‘bread, bread,’ while mounseer your husband ruffles it at the tavern around the corner, and dices away your silver pap-spoon and your lace apron.”
Mun laughed pleasantly at my mother’s raillery, but said: “Madam, surely you will not deny me whatever sympathy may flow to me from any one of your household? Cashiered captain I may be, but
I am promised a company in the troops that are sailing to Ireland in a little while. Who knows but what I may one day be preferred to high rank and find myself indifferent rich?”
“Put this sympathy to the trial, then, my bold warrior,” cried my father. “Come, now—think steadfastly upon some single object, and let us see whether there be a woman here will sympathize and hit upon the same thing.”
“Allow me half a minute only,” said Mun, “and I will be ready…. Now, gentlewomen, do your best by me, for I have thought upon something. Tell me, each in turn, what is in my mind.”
My mother guessed a string of Bologna sausages; my she-cousin Archdale guessed an Irish wolf-hound, my sister Zara guessed a weeping willow, my sister Ann a white cloud; and when my turn came the words leaped into my mouth almost against my will: “It is the bolt on the Church door.”
Mun startled when I said this, but told us with an affectation of sorrow that we were all antipathetical to him, for none of us had guessed aright: he was thinking, he said, upon a pious book which his brother Ralph had sent out to him to his leaguer in Flanders, and which he had studied at York a few months since—it was called The Four Best Things, but the author’s name, he said, was no matter.
I had the prudence to keep silence, but my heart leaped within me. As I knew well, Mr. Bolton was the author of this book and clearly the name “Bolton” had been thrown from his mind into my own, and there displayed in a rebus, or riddling picture, as a bolt on the church door; and that this was so Mun himself evidently knew, for he had glozed over the author’s name.
The conversation continued for a while longer as it had begun, my mother very ribald, Sir Thomas facetious, Mun courteous, my father light-hearted, James grave, Richard dull; and so we came to our dessert, which in autumn was often the best course of the meal, with Royal Windsor pears, medlars, Green-hastings apples, Kentish pippins, walnuts, filberts, marchpane comfits, conserves of quince and damson (moulded into little figures of men and beasts) and sweet wines of Greece and Portugal.
Suddenly there blew a bitter cold draught from the West. For the Clerk of the Peace came running in, with a hasty reverence to the company and, upon my father sharply asking him his business, he cried out: “Oh, your Worship, there are come from London with the post very woeful and heavy tidings from Ireland!”
“Ireland!” cried my father. “What in the Devil’s name is Ireland to me? I have no moneys there, nor land, nor any kindred but some cousins of my mother whom I never saw. What care I for Ireland? No, Sirrah, had you told me that the least thing was amiss in the Dominion of Wales…”
But my mother bade the Clerk to speak up and not heed his Worship’s raillery. Then he told us what he knew, that the Irish papists, upon the instigation of one Rory O’More, having sworn a solemn covenant and protested both their faithful allegiance to King Charles and their abhorrence of his Parliament, had suddenly risen to the number of 30,000 armed men at once, and made a horrid massacre of the Scottish and English settlers among them. They were going about in great divisions, and had already possessed themselves of the whole of the Province of Ulster, and it was thought likely that by this time Dublin Castle and the Pale were also in their hands; that in short, all Ireland was lost, for there were not above two thousand foot and one thousand horse to defend Dundalk and Drogheda and the other few places that remained untaken. The Irish, to revenge themselves for past injuries, when their ancestral lands were wrested from them by the Scots and the English in the several plantations, had behaved, it was reported, in a manner almost incredibly barbarous.
The Clerk told of thousands of men, women and children in County Tyrone stripped naked and murdered—either burned alive in their plundered dwellings or forced into bogs and rivers to be drowned; in particular, of eighteen Scotch infants hanged on clothes’ tenter-hooks; and one young fat Scot butchered, and candles for the altar made of his grease; and of another who had collops cut off him while he was alive and fire-coals forced into his mouth on a tongs—with equal horrors from each of the other counties of Ulster, as also from Connaught and Leinster. He went on, spewing up these black gobbets of report, until my father told him that we had heard enough for our dessert, and so dismissed him.
For about the time that one might say the Lord’s Prayer there was silence at the board; and then Sir Thomas said in a tone of great resentment: “If they had not taken off the noble Earl of Strafford’s head, this evil thing would never have come upon us. My Lord of Essex who was appointed in his room has never yet set foot in Ireland, and his lieutenants are men of straw.”
My mother spoke tartly. “Well, Captain Verney,” said she, “if you are sent into Ireland, I doubt not you will find brisker work to do there than you could undertake against the Scots…. However, if I make no mistake, Parliament will send those same Blue Bonnets into Ireland now, to snatch the chestnuts out of the fire for us, as Æsop’s ape used the cat’s paw.”
My father said: “It is very ill news, which will serve to divide this country further and heap yet greater taxes upon us all.”
Mun said nothing at all, save that he must return in the early morning to his father’s house at Claydon, and so proceed to London for his orders and commission; and heartily wished it were not so, for he would have rejoiced to come coursing with us instead, as my father had invited him.
Not many minutes later, Mun and Sir Thomas took their leave of us. I had no occasion to speak with Mun alone, for Sir Thomas continued in his company; and yet I knew that he was drawn to me in no common manner, and knew it by all the answering signs that woman ever felt in herself when a man is fallen in love with her. I chafed within myself against my mother that she had used Mun so discourteously, and would have told him how sorry I was that he must go off to the wars again before we had spoken together apart; but I could do nothing, and therefore purposely avoided the ceremonious leave-taking at the gate, when all the household gathered to wish him good fortune and begged him to take a bloody revenge on those savage wolves of Irishmen. I hoped that Mun, when he missed me from among the rest, would know that I could not bear to be one of the general rout who waved their hands and kerchiefs to him for farewell, and that I could not trust myself to withhold my tears.
Now, this was a marvellous thing that, though he and I had exchanged no single word directly during the whole time of his visit—except when he first greeted me; and at another time when he asked me a civil question, how went the guitar music, to which I made some slight answer; and then, again, in the matter of guessing what was in his thoughts—yet, I say, it was a marvellous thing how well I knew that all his discourse upon the sympathy of souls, though addressed to my father and mother and to the company in general, was intended for me alone, because of the strange drawing together of our souls across the table.
I excused myself and went early to bed, but could not sleep, and wrote out in my book a general curse upon Papists, Presbyterians, Arminians and all other religious people, orthodox or schismatic, who these many years throughout the Continent of Europe, and now at last in our own islands, had plunged the Sword of Christ into one another’s bowels. It was because of them that Mun must go off and leave me in the very instant that we had discovered our mutual love. After a while I fell into an uneasy sleep, with inexplicable dreams, and when I woke it was to hear, bim-bam! the twelve swingeing strokes of midnight borne up on a breeze from Great Tom, the bell of Christ Church, and to find Zara lying asleep at my side. I know not whether I was fully awake, but I arose quietly and put on my clothes in the half-light, and the words continually ringing in my head were “The bolt on the Church door.” I felt a strong and irrational compulsion to go out into the cold air, though it froze me to the marrow, and see whether the Church door were bolted or no.
The old hound by the fire growled at me as I came down the stairs, keeping close to the wall; but I quieted him with “’Tis I, Jowler—’tis Marie, your friend,” and he came up and licked my hand in the dark. I avoided the kitchen, where the cook
slept rolled in a blanket by the warm embers, and went out by the pantry door, whereof the bolts slid easily back, and so into the yard, where nobody was stirring. I walked slowly, keeping in the shadow, and out at the gate and was going towards the Church in the dim light when suddenly a screech-owl let out his terrible voice from where he roosted on the faggot-stack a few paces away. At this I leaped into the air and ran back, as though the charm were broken, and when I came to myself I was again at the pantry door.
I turned the knob quietly and pushed at the door, but it was fast; and then I pushed harder, so that it rattled again, but I could not open it, though it was an easy door even in wet weather; and presently it came to me that, while I was outdoors, someone had come after me down the stairs and drawn the bolts again. I went around to the other side of the house, and into the garden, and threw pebbles at the window of my chamber to wake Zara; but though I struck the glass fairly three or four times she did not thrust out her head.
I grew angry, and said to myself: “What do I fear? Must I run off because an owl shrieks in my ears? Nay, since I am barred out from my bed and cannot come in again, I will at least finish the business for which I came out. To the Church again, Marie, and be not afraid of owls or bats, nor of evil spirits, nor of Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones nor of long-legged beasts nor of any other horrible bugbear that may lurk in the churchyard at this hour among the holly bushes and the yews.”
Wife to Mr. Milton Page 12