“Morrice,” said he solemnly, “I do verily believe you have naught but fish-blood in your veins.”
Whereat I laughed, and he, coming over to me:
“Why, man,” he cried, “had I your fortune on my back — —”
“You would soon find it a ragged cloak,” I interposed.
“And your sword at my side — —”
“You would still lack my skill in using it.”
Larke stopped short in his speech, and his face darkened. I had touched him in the tenderest part of his pride. Proficiency in manly exercises was the single quality on which he plumed himself, and so he had made it his daily habit to repair to the fencing-rooms of a noted French master, who dwelt in Noort-Eynde by the Witte Poort. Thither also, by dint of much pertinacity, for which I had grave reason to thank him afterwards, he had haled me for instruction in the art. Once I got there, however, the play fascinated me. The delicate intricacy of the movements so absorbed brain and muscle in a common service as to produce in me an inward sense of completeness, very sweet and strange to one of my halting diffidence. In consequence I applied myself with considerable enthusiasm, and in the end acquired some nimbleness with the rapier, or, to speak more truly, the foil. For as yet my skill had never been put to the test of a serious encounter.
Now, on the previous day Larke and I had fenced together throughout the afternoon, and fortune had sided with me in every bout; and it was, I think, the recollection of this which rankled within him. However, the fit soon passed— ’twas not in his nature to be silent long — and he broke out again, seating himself in a chair by the table.
“Dost never dream of adventures, Morrice?” he asked. “A life brimful of them, and a quick death at the end?”
“I had as lief die in my bed,” said I.
“To be sure, to be sure,” he replied with a sneer. “Men ever wish to die in the place they are most fond of;” and then he leant forward upon the table and said, with a curious wonder: “Hast never a regret that thy sword rusted in June?”
“Nay,” I answered him quickly. “Monmouth was broken and captured before we had even heard he had raised his flag. And, besides, the King had stouter swords than mine, and yet no use for them.”
But none the less I turned my face to the wall, for I felt my cheeks blazing. My words were indeed the truth. The same packet which brought to us the news of Monmouth’s rising in the west, brought to us also the news of his defeat at Sedgemoor. But I might easily have divined his project some while ago. For early in the spring I had received a visit from one Ferguson, a Scot, who, after uttering many fantastical lies concerning the “Duke of York,” as he impudently styled the King, had warned me that such as failed to assist the true monarch out of the funds they possessed might well find themselves sorely burdened in the near future. At the time I had merely laughed at the menace, and slipped it from my thoughts. Afterwards, however, the remembrance of his visit came back to me, and with it a feeling of shame that I had lain thus sluggishly at Leyden while this monstrous web of rebellion was a-weaving about me in the neighbouring towns of Holland.
“‘Art more of a woman than a man, Morrice, I fear me,” said Jack.
I had heard some foolish talk of this kind more than once before, and it ever angered me. I rose quickly from the couch; but Jack skipped round the table, and jeered yet the more.
“‘Wilt never win a wife by fair means, lad,” says he. “The Muses are women, and women have no liking for them. ‘Must buy a wife when the time comes.”
Perceiving that his aim was but to provoke my anger, I refrained from answering him and got me back to my ode. The day was in truth too hot for quarrelling. Larke, however, was not so easily put off. He returned to his chair, which was close to my couch.
“Horace!” he said gravely, wagging his head at me. “Horace! There are wise sayings in his book.”
“What know you of them?” I laughed.
“I know one,” he answered. “I learnt it yesternight for thy special delectation. It begins in this way:
“Quem si puellarum chore inseres.”
He got no further in his quotation. For he tilted his chair at this moment, and I thrusting at it with my foot, he tumbled over backwards and sprawled on the ground, swearing at great length.
“‘Wilt never win a wife by fair means for all that,” he sputtered.
“Then ’tis no more than prudence in me to wed my books.”
So I spake, and hot on the heels of my saying came the message which divorced me from them for good and all. For as Larke still lay upon the floor, a clatter of horse’s hoofs came to us through the open window. The sound stopped at our door. Larke rose hastily, and leaned out across the sill.
“It is an Englishman,” he cried. “He comes to us.”
The next moment a noise of altercation filled the air. I could hear the shrill speech of our worthy landlady, and above it a man’s voice in the English dialect, growing ever louder and louder as though the violence of his tone would translate his meaning. I followed Larke to the window. The quiet street was alive with peeping faces, and just beneath us stood the reason of the brawl, a short, thick-set man, whose face was hidden by a large flapping hat. His horse stood in the roadway in a lather of spume. For some reason, doubtless the excitement of his manner, our hostess would not let him pass into the house. She stood solidly filling the doorway, and for a little it amused us to watch the man’s vehement gesticulations; so little thought had we of the many strange events which were to follow from his visit. In a minute, however, he turned his face towards us, and I recognised him as Nicholas Swasfield, the body-servant of my good friend, Sir Julian Harnwood.
“Let him up!” I cried. “Let him up!”
“Yes, woman, let him up!” repeated Larke, and turning to me: “He hath many choice and wonderful oaths, and I fain would add them to my store.”
Thereupon the woman drew reluctantly aside, and Swasfield bounded past her into the passage. We heard him tumble heavily up the dark stairway, cursing the country and its natives, and then with a great bump of his body he burst open the door and lurched into the room. At the sight of me he brake into a glad cry:
“Sir Julian, my master,” he gasped, and stopped dead.
“Well, what of him?” I asked eagerly.
But he answered never a word; he stood mopping his brows with a great blue handkerchief, which hid his face from us. ’Tis strange how clearly I remember that handkerchief. It was embroidered at the corners with anchors in white cotton, and it recurred to me with a quaint irrelevancy that the man had been a sailor in his youth.
“Well, what of him?” I asked again with some sharpness. “Speak, man! You had words and to spare below.”
“He lies in Bristol gaol,” at last he said, heaving great breaths between his words, “and none but you can serve his turn.”
With that he tore at his shirt above his heart, and made a little tripping run to the table. He clutched at its edge and swayed forward above it, his head loosely swinging between his shoulders.
“Hurry!” he said in a thick, strangled voice. “Assizes — twenty-first — Jeffries.”
And with a sudden convulsion he straightened himself, stood for a second on the tips of his toes, with the veins ridged on his livid face like purple weals, and then fell in a huddled lump upon the floor. I sprang to the stair-head and shouted for some one to run for a doctor. Jack was already loosening the man’s shirt.
“It is a fit,” he said, clasping a hand to his heart.
Luckily my bedroom gave onto the parlour, and between us we carried him within and laid him gently on my bed. His eyelids were open and his eyes fixed, but turned inwards, so that one saw but the whites of them, while a light froth oozed through his locked teeth.
“He will die,” I cried.
A ewer of water stood by the bedside, and this I emptied over his head and shoulders, drowning the sheets, but to no other purpose. Our landlady fetched up a bottle of Dutch schnapps,
which was the only spirit the house contained, but his jaws were too fast closed for us to open them. So we stood all three watching him helplessly, while those last words of his drummed at my heart. Jeffries! I knew enough of the bloody work he had taken in hand that summer to assure me there would be short shrift for Julian had he meddled in Monmouth’s affairs. On the other hand, I reflected, if such indeed was my friend’s case, wherein could I prove of effectual help? “None but you can serve his turn,” the fellow had said. Could Julian have fallen under another charge? I was the more inclined to this conjecture, for that Julian had been always staunchly loyal to the King, and, moreover, a constant figure at the Court.
However, ’twas all idle guess-work, and there before my eyes was stretched the one man, who could have disclosed the truth, struck down in the very telling of his story! I began to fear that he would die before the surgeon came. For he breathed heavily with a horrid sound like a dog snoring.
All at once a thought flashed into my mind. He might have brought a letter from Julian’s hand. I searched his pockets on the instant; they held nothing but a few English coins and some metal charms, such as the ignorant are wont to carry on their persons to preserve them from misadventure.
While I was thus engaged, the doctor was ushered into the room, very deliberate in manner, and magnificent in his dress. Erudition was marked in the very cock of his wig. I sprang towards him.
“Make him speak, Mynheer!” I implored. “He hath a message to deliver, and it cannot wait.”
But he put me aside with a wave of his hand and advanced towards the bed, pursing his lips and frowning as one sunk in a profundity of thought.
“Can you make him speak?” I asked again with some impatience. But again he merely waved his hand, and taking a gilt box from his pocket, inhaled a large pinch of snuff. Then he turned to Larke, who stood holding the bottle of schnapps.
“Tell me, young gentleman,” he said severely, “what time the fit took him, and the manner of his seizure!”
Larke informed him hastily of what had passed, and he listened with much sage bobbing of his head. Then to our hostess:
“My assistant is below, and hath my instruments. Send him up!”
He turned to us.
“I will bleed him,” he said. “For what saith the learned Hippocrates?” Whereupon he mouthed out a rigmarole of Latin phrases, wherein I could detect neither cohesion nor significance.
“Leave him to me, gentlemen!” he continued with a third flourish of his wrist. “Leave him to me and Hippocrates!”
“Which we do,” I replied, “with the more confidence in that Hippocrates had so much foreknowledge of the Latin tongue.”
And so we got us back to the parlour. How the minutes dragged! Through the door I could still hear the noise of the man’s breathing; and now and again the light clink of instruments and a trickling sound as of blood dripping into a bason. I paced impatiently about the room, while Jack sat him down at the table and began loading his pistols.
“The twenty-first!” I exclaimed, “and this day is the fourteenth. Seven days, Jack! I have but seven days to win from here to Bristol.”
I went to the window and leaned out. Swasfield’s horse was standing quietly in the road, tethered by the bridle to a tree.
“‘Canst do it, Morrice, if the wind holds fair,” replied Jack. “Heaven send a wind!” and he rose from the table and joined me. Together we stretched out to catch the least hint of a breeze. But not a breath came to us; not a tree shimmered, not a shadow stirred. The world slumbered in a hot stupor. It seemed you might have felt the air vibrate with the passage of a single bird.
Of a sudden Larke cried out:
“Art sure ’tis the fourteenth to-day?”
With that we scrambled back into the room and searched for a calendar.
“Ay, lad!” he said ruefully as he discovered it; “’tis the fourteenth, not a doubt of it.”
I flung myself dejectedly on the couch. The volume of Horace lay open by my hand, and I took it up, and quite idly, with no thought of what I was doing, I wrote this date and the name of the month and the date of the year on the margin of the page.
“Lord!” exclaimed Jack, flinging up his hands. “At the books again? Hast no boots and spurs?”
I slipped the book into my pocket, and sprang to my feet. In the heat of my anxiety I had forgotten everything but this half-spoken message. But, or ever I could make a step, the door of the bedroom opened and the surgeon stepped into the room.
“Can he speak now?” I asked.
“The fit has not passed,” says he.
“Then in God’s name, what ails the man?” cries Larke.
“It is a visitation,” says the doctor, with an upward cast of his eyes.
“It is a canting ass of a doctor,” I yelled in a fury, and I clapped my hat on my head.
“Your boots?” cried Larke.
“I’ll e’en go in my shoes,” I shouted back.
I snatched up one of Jack’s pistols, rammed it into my pocket, and so clattered downstairs and into the street. I untied Swasfield’s horse and sprang on to its back.
“Morrice!”
I looked up. Jack was leaning out from the window.
“Morrice,” he said whimsically, and with a very winning smile, “‘art not so much of a woman after all.”
I dug my heels into the horse’s flanks and so rode out at a gallop beneath the lime-trees to Rotterdam.
CHAPTER II.
I REACH LONDON, AND THERE MAKE AN ACQUAINTANCE.
AT ROTTERDAM I was fortunate enough to light upon a Dutch skipper whose ship was anchored in the Texel, and who purposed sailing that very night for the Port of London. For a while, indeed, he scrupled to set me over, my lack of equipment — for I had not so much with me as a clean shirt — and my great haste to be quit of the country firing his suspicions. However, I sold Swasfield’s horse to the keeper of a tavern by the waterside, and adding the money I got thereby to what I held in my pockets, I presently persuaded him; and a light wind springing up about midnight, we weighed anchor and stood out for the sea.
That my purse was now empty occasioned me no great concern, since my cousin, Lord Elmscott, lived at London, in a fine house in Monmouth Square, and I doubted not but what I could instantly procure from him the means to enable me to continue my journey. I was, in truth, infinitely more distressed by the tardiness of our voyage, for towards sunrise the wind died utterly away, and during the next two days we lay becalmed, rocking lazily upon the swell. On the afternoon of the third, being the seventeenth day of the month, a breeze filled our sheets, and we made some progress, although our vessel, which was a ketch and heavily loaded, was a slow sailer at the best. But during the night the breeze quickened into a storm, and, blowing for twelve hours without intermission or abatement, drove us clean from our course, so that on the morning of the eighteenth we were scurrying northwards before it along the coast of Essex.
This last misadventure cast me into the very bottom of despair. I knew that if I were to prove of timely help in Julian’s deliverance, I must needs reach Bristol before his trial commenced, the which seemed now plainly impossible; and, atop of this piece of knowledge, my ignorance of the nature of his calamity, and of the service he desired of me, worked in my blood like a fever.
For Julian and myself were linked together in a very sweet and intimate love. I could not, and I tried, point to its beginning. It seemed to have been native within us from our births. We took it from our fathers before us, and when they died we counted it no small part of our inheritance. Our estates, you should know, lay in contiguous valleys of the remote county of Cumberland, and thus we lived out our boyhood in a secluded comradeship. Seldom a day passed but we found a way to meet. Mostly Julian would come swinging across the fells, his otter-dogs yapping at his heels, and all the fresh morning in his voice. Together we would ramble over the slopes, bathe in the tarns and kelds, hunt, climb, argue, ay, and fight too, when we were gravel
led for lack of arguments; so that even now, each time that I turn my feet homewards after a period of absence, and catch the first glimpse of these brown hillsides, they become bright and populous with the rich pageantry of our boyish fancies.
But my clearest recollections of those days centre about Scafell, and a certain rock upon the Pillar Mountain in Ennerdale. A common share of peril is surely the stoutest bond of comradeship. You may find exemplars in the story of well-nigh every battle. But to hang half-way up a sheer cliff in the chill eerie silence, where a slip of the heel, a falter of the numbed fingers, would hurl both your companion and yourself upon the stones a hundred yards below — ah, that turns the friend into something closer than even a frère d’armes. At least, so it was with Julian and me.
I think, too, that the very difference between us helped to fortify our love. Each felt the other the complement of his nature. And in later times, when Julian would come down from the Court to Oxford, tricked out in some new French fashion, and with all sorts of fantastical conceits upon his tongue, my rooms seemed to glow as with a sudden shaft of sunlight; and after that he had gone I was ever in two minds whether to send for a tailor, and follow him to Whitehall.
But to return to my journey. On the nineteenth we changed our course, and tacked back to the mouth of the Thames. But it was not until the evening of the twentieth that we cast anchor by London Bridge. From the ship I hurried straight to the house of my cousin, Lord Elmscott, who resided in Monmouth Square, to the north of the town, being minded to borrow a horse of him and some money, and ride forthwith to Bristol. The windows, however, were dark, not a light glimmered anywhere; and knock with what noise I might, for a while I could get no answer to my summons.
At last, just as I was turning away in no little distress of mind — for the town was all strange to me, and I knew no one else to whom I could apply at that late hour — a feeble shuffling step sounded in the passage. I knocked again, and as loudly as I could; the steps drew nearer, the bolts were slowly drawn from their sockets, and the door opened. I was faced by an old man in a faded livery, who held a lighted candle in his hand. Behind him the hall showed black and solitary.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 187