He knocked off after a while, and calling Anthony to his side, patted the great sail housed with its gaff and its boom at the foot of the mainmast.
“Here’s where we win,” he said. “Protestant as I am, I could pray for the soul of Mr Fletcher of Rye, if I thought it in danger of the judgment. But the man who invented fore and aft sails is certainly a saint in Heaven. Come below and see my fine cabin.”
In spite of his bulk and his thirty-seven years he dropped down the narrow, steep companion like a featherweight. He was as eager to show off his trappings as the boy who followed upon his heels was to see them. The cabin was in the stern of the ship with a couple of windows opening above the rudder and a small sleeping cabin leading off. A long table was in the middle, the walls panelled and the furniture of polished oak. Drake’s hourglass stood on a bracket, his astrolabe was hung on a peg against the panel. Anthony hesitated upon the threshold like a pilgrim at a shrine.
“See here, boy,” said the General. He slid back the top half of the table and showed him a drawer, long and dry, wherein lay his charts and his cross-staff.
“Saves room, you see. Room! That’s the sailor man’s trouble.”
He shut up the table with a bang and plumped himself down in the chair with the arms and the damask cushion at the head of it.
“Here I sit, you see, and call my Captains to a conference.
“Whilst I guard the door outside,” said Anthony.
“I ask each man to say his say freely.”
“And you take their advice, Sir?” cried Anthony in horror.
“I certainly should — without one moment’s hesitation — if theirs was better than mine,” the Captain replied seriously. “That hasn’t happened yet. Here I sit at my dinner.”
“I standing behind your chair here,” said Anthony, taking his place.
“With a fine gold chain round your neck,” cried the Captain.
He spread out his strong, broad hands with the long, tapering fingers which seemed hardly to belong to them, palms downward on the oak table.
“Sometimes I shall bid some of the gentlemen adventurers to dine with me. We shall use my silver plate and there will be dishes of guavas and pineapples. We are in the Pacific, you see.”
Anthony Scarr gasped.
“Through the Straits of Magellan!”
“Right on t’other side. I shall look at one of the gentlemen and say to him, lifting up my glass—”
“Oh,” Anthony interrupted anxiously. “Sir, you’ll say it to me.”
The Captain swung round in his chair.
“I’ll say it to you!”
“Yes, and I’ll walk round the table with the jug of wine in my hand and say to him, ‘Sir, the General does you the honour to drink wine with you.”
Captain Drake thumped the table with delight as Anthony bent to the ear of the imagined guest.
“That’s the better way,” he cried. “Ceremony, young gentleman; it’s lavender for keeping us sweet on a long voyage. Grace and good manners wear about and go home unless we bind them close with grapples. I’ll drink to him so — it may be Mr Doughty or Captain Winter of the Elizabeth come aboard for a crack — and whilst we’ve the glasses to our lips down’ll tumble the mate with news that a towering galleon as big as a church is rolling up to Panama five miles ahead.”
“Oh,” cried Anthony with a glowing face, quite carried out of himself. “It’s going to be true!”
“True! By the grace of God it’ll be true ten times over before we get cold again. So we break up our dinner and each man soberly to his station. Where will yours be?”
The question was asked indifferently. It was spoken in the same tone as the rest of the speech. It seemed hardly an independent sentence at all. Not an emphasis underlined it — and it was all the more cunning on that account. Drake waited for the answer, hiding the suspense in his face by looking down upon the table. But indeed he had hardly to wait at all. The answer came back to him with a flash of white teeth and dancing eyes.
“I shall be in the hold, stripped to the waist and black as a monkey, handing up the powder” — and again the Captain’s great fist crashed upon the table.
“By God, you shall!”
The boy was the right metal. Drake would take him. He would have a fine slim page like a My Lord and a stout little ally when the pinch came. A decoration for his cabin and a powder monkey for the cannon play.
“Young Mr Sawle, since “he began, and the boy broke in: “That’s my guardian’s name, Sir.”
“Oh, yes, to be sure.”
He had heard the name Sawle and not troubled his head about any other. He had called Anthony “my boy” and “lad” and once or twice “young gentleman” and to each title Anthony had responded very naturally.
“Well, what is your name?”
“Anthony Scarr.”
And suddenly, all the glamour was wiped out of Anthony’s world. A second ago a golden orange, it was now a ball of clay. Without a word spoken he knew he was not to go. The great Captain sat at the table, still as the idol he was to that one and a thousand boys, his arms spread out with the palms flat, and his face, like an idol’s, shrouding all his thoughts. It seemed to the boy that Drake had discovered a torture never thought of by the Inquisition — the torture of silence. But he was not to sail through the gates of Magellan and share the magic of the new sea and the galleons rolling up to Panama. However the torture ended, that he knew. It ended abruptly.
“We dream when we should work,” said the Captain. “You to your books, Mr Scarr, I to my ship. I will put you on shore.”
The words were as curt as they could be and spoken gruffly. It might be that he was moved by pity and a trifle of regret for himself to make a sharp, clean end of an affair which had already gone too far. It might be that Anthony’s name had waked some old grievance in his mind. But it was probably the first of the two reasons. For he took just one look at the boy’s white face and turned his eyes away quickly and looked at him no more. He bawled up the companion for his boat and nodded his dismissal.
“It is alongside,” he said.
Anthony took up his hat. Though his lips quivered his voice must not.
“I thank you, Captain Drake, for showing so much kindness to a strange boy. Not another but must envy me. I shall remember this cabin all my life.”
He bowed and climbed the companion. It seemed to him that the General almost began to speak again and thought the better of it. And in a moment he was being carried back in the long boat to the Barbican, with a head held high and a face that smiled and a heart that broke. Could he have looked into the fine cabin at that moment he would have seen Drake standing in a muse with so great a pity in his brown and friendly eyes that all his dignity must have gone down before it. But he had seen nothing of that look. And as he sat in the little church of St. Anthony-in- Meneage, he could only think that someone had been beforehand with his name and set the Captain against him as a boy tainted and dishonoured. Well, the little fleet had gone without him. So, too, had his breakfast and so, too, his dinner would go unless he made haste about it. He pushed his boat from the beach and, with the tide to help him, pulled round the Head and across the river to his house.
XIV. THE MAN OF SECRETS
ABOVE ALL THINGS I wish God’s glory and next Her Majesty’s safety.
— Letter of Walsingham
When Anthony, washed and dressed, went down into the hall, he stopped in surprise on the last tread of the stair. A stranger was warming himself at the great log fire, and strangers were rare in this house and in these far corners of the country. The stranger turned. He was a thin, sickly, Italianate man of about forty-five years of age, as Anthony judged. He was dark of complexion with a beard and was well, but sombrely, dressed. He had deep-set, very patient eyes, and he looked as if he could hardly counterfeit a smile even were anything so impossible to happen as that he should be lightened of his cares. As he turned, he bowed gravely and said nothing whatever. A
nthony stepped down into the hail and bowed in return, and he too said nothing whatever. Pat upon these courtesies the house steward entered the hall.
“Gentlemen, you are served.”
Dr Evans bustled forward.
“Shall we go in before the meat grows cold? You are behind the time, Anthony, and a faithless truant into the bargain. Here it is twelve o’clock and not a page of Tully digested. I must fit my pupil with a dunce’s cap.”
Now, this was waggish, and the Reverend Doctor was not a wag. He was in a fluster and said the first foolish thing which rose to his lips. Anthony held his ground, with his eyes upon his visitor.
“I am Mr Walsingham,” said the visitor.
Anthony moved at once.
“You will forgive me if I lead the way. Such welcome as an empty house can offer is yours, Mr Walsingham.”
He insisted upon the name as his right, and, having been given it, asked no questions. Mr Walsingham followed him, reflecting that in the way of manners the new gentry had very little to learn from the old. He rejoiced, so far as he was capable of joy, being one of the new gentry himself and also because these good manners of Anthony Scarr fitted in with certain hopes and plans never far absent from his mind. Anthony, on his side, was also putting two and two together as he led the way into the dining room. As he took his seat at the head of the table and placed his visitor upon his right hand, he was wondering why Mr Francis Walsingham, Private Secretary to Her Majesty who, what with the stone and Her Majesty’s incommodities, must have had a busy enough time of it, found the leisure to visit a plumeless boy on the edge of the Helford River. It must have been an irksome journey for him, for he had not the aspect of a man who took any pleasure in a horse.
But of these matters he must leave his guest to speak at his own time. Mr Walsingham, too, had his reservations, and after Anthony had arranged with his house steward for the proper disposition of Mr Walsingham’s men, the conversation was left, in the main, to the Reverend Dr Evans, who made a gallant show. When they rose from the table, however, Mr Walsingham looked like coming to his point.
“Since you have played truant all the morning, Mr Scarr,” he said, “will you make a day of it and show me your garden? I get some pleasure from my garden, though, to be sure, I know little about it.”
Wrapped in a cloak, he paced the terraces with Anthony. It was a garden of thick, close-clipped hedges, paths upon a rigid plan, topiary work and subtropical plants. It was the very garden, indeed, for Mr Walsingham, and it is to be conceded that he remarked upon an oleander with pleasure. But it was as a preface to what he had to say rather than as a flowering tree.
“It was an old ambition of your father’s, Mr Scarr, to build his house and lay out an exotic garden just here whence so many of his sailors came. I knew him well. He was born at Chislehurst as I was. For a time we were neighbours in London, by St. Mary’s Axe. And you at times travelled with him, I think.”
Anthony nodded his head. His father, Julian Scarr, had belonged to the Guild of Merchant Adventurers and, trading with the Levant and Italy and Spain in a little fleet of his own ships, had made a great fortune by the time he reached middle age.
“Whilst I was a child,” said Anthony. “Afterwards I must go to school.”
“But you remember something of those voyages,” Mr Walsingham insisted.
Anthony answered: “I have a jumble of memories. We visited so many towns in so many countries that a child could hardly keep them ticketed. Certain towns I do remember.”
In Spain, perhaps.
Mr Walsingham saw a shadow dull the boy’s face and his eyes lose all their light. But Mr Walsingham, with his God and his Queen to serve, was not to be stayed by distress in any boy or any man. His voice was smooth and gentle, but he persisted.
In Spain, perhaps?
Anthony answered reluctantly: “Cadiz, Gibraltar, Seville, Barcelona — yes, no doubt if I walked through the streets I should know them again. But” — and his voice shook with a sudden passion— “I hope with all my heart that I shall never have to do so.”
He saw Mr Walsingham purse up his lips discontentedly, but he saw also that he was on the point of returning to the charge. In the hope of preventing him, he made a curious confession — blurted it out rather shamefacedly, hating himself for uttering it at all after he had begun and when it was too late to stop. But it was always near to his thoughts and at this moment, therefore, nearest to his lips. It was the story of a secret fancy, almost a secret belief, of which he had been too shy ever to utter it aloud. Well, let Mr Walsingham think him a fool if he would! What did it matter so long as he put an end to his questions?
“It’ll show you how useless my memories are, Mr Walsingham. For the very clearest I have is of a street, of which I don’t know the name, in a city of which I don’t know the country. All I remember is that it’s very wide with fine arcades and that it descends a hill. I see it always with its shops lighted under the arcades, so I suppose my father must have taken me there at night. It’s my lost street. But I see it so often that I think it has some strange message for me. I think that I shall find it again one day and read the message.”
But Mr Walsingham did not laugh. He had no wish to make of this boy a life-long enemy. Moreover, he was not above believing in a portent or two himself. He nodded his head in a grave sympathy.
“Who shall say that roads have signposts and that lives have none?” he exclaimed. “You say the shops are lighted?”
“Yes.”
“Can you read the names upon the boards?”
“No,” said Anthony slowly. “It always seems to me that in a moment I shall see them bright enough and big enough. I have watched them till I have been quite sure that they will be plain as day if only I can wait a second longer. But” — and he smiled at his own folly— “they have always disappointed me.”
“You speak Spanish, don’t you?” Mr Walsingham asked, and Anthony felt as if a pail of cold water had been emptied on his head.
“I did. Italian, too. We had much to do with Italy. But I am in the mind to forget them.”
Mr Walsingham turned on Anthony with indignation.
“Nay, you throw away a heritage.” He swept his arm round. “This good house, this garden, your books — what are they but dead things without the voice and conference of men? And how shall you know the men of one country unless through a knowledge of languages you can set them side by side with the men of another?”
Mr Walsingham was moved to plead with a fire which Anthony had never imagined could burn in him. He cited his own youth at the University of Padua and how it had helped to place him above his merits. “How else shall you know the dispositions of men, the honest servant from the rogue and what they say to each other under their breaths?” And England, with her horde of enemies, wolves waiting for the campfire to die down. How could she be saved unless her children learnt at first hand the finesse of Italy?
He spoke passionately and like a man who might be balked in some high matter unless his persuasions had their way. Even his sallow cheeks took on some colour, and those deep-set eyes lost their patience. But in a little while he took a hold upon himself.
“I speak too roughly. I beg you to put my tediousness down to my friendship for your father and my wish that his son should be of service to our commonwealth. I said to you that your father and I were neighbours. We were more. For I had some private interest in his ventures.”
And that admission sent Anthony’s thought swinging off upon another track. There was nothing, of course, unusual in the staidest of gentlemen taking shares in the enterprises of the Merchant Adventurers. The Queen set them the example. “But if Mr Walsingham put his money into one, he may well do the same with another,” thought Anthony. How should he put his question? He might be early a man and late a boy, but to this grave statesman he was obviously altogether boy and not one who puts questions and demands answers.
Mr Walsingham, however, helped him.
; “So I proposed to myself to see how his son fared, since I was once more a neighbour to his house.”
“At Plymouth?” asked Anthony Scarr.
Mr Walsingham lifted his eyebrows.
“Did I say Plymouth?” he asked.
“No, I did,” Anthony returned stubbornly. “I could not see what should take Mr Walsingham to Falmouth or to Fowey. But I did know that Captain Drake was at Plymouth.”
Mr Walsingham was silent for a moment. Then: “I have no private interest in this enterprise of Captain Drake,” he said, coldly, but the mere mention of that name, as it shook all Spain with terror, set all England afire with pride, Mr Walsingham amongst the rest. “But I say may God dispose all for the best. Our great Empress has said she must make peace with a sword in her hand. Drake is the sword.”
“And the sword strikes Spain’s weakest point,” cried Anthony. He forgot at that moment his own rebuff and humiliation. He smiled, his eyes brightened, his face flushed. He had his share in that expedition, the tiny share that he was of the same race.
“Yes,” Mr Walsingham replied. “Her Gold Fleet which so vexes the world.”
But Anthony was not content.
“More than that, Mr Walsingham. Her Northwest Frontier. Lima, Peru, Panama — Spain’s Northwest Frontier.
Mr Walsingham for once was at a loss.
“Isn’t that the danger point of all Empires?” Anthony cried. “It was so here, when Rome ruled Britain.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 622