by Howard Pyle
“Sir Christopher Neville,” he went on, “I have been hopelessly wrong, honestly but fatally wrong, and I do most earnestly entreat you who have been so deeply injured to believe in the depth of my grief and repentance.”
“You had every reason—” began Christopher.
“Ay, but of what use are faith and friendship but to warm the fires about reason when she grows too cold. To my life’s end I must bear the bitter thought of my injustice, but I pray God the lesson may not be lost. See, here is my sword, a present from Baltimore! If you can find it in your heart to forgive, accept this and wear it.”
With his unwounded arm Brent drew the sword with difficulty from its scabbard, and extended it towards Neville. It was a symbol of surrender. Neville took it, and seizing Brent’s hand he raised the hilt of the sword, exclaiming, “By this token I swear fealty to my lady, and to all her kindred!”
“Elinor,” said Brent, “this Neville is a worthy gentleman, and thou hast made no mistake in giving thy heart into his keeping.”
“Amen,” said Margaret Brent.
“Ah,” said Elinor, jealously, turning swiftly toward Margaret, “thou didst never doubt him; thou canst afford to be proud.”
Margaret Brent smiled. “No storm,” she said, “no rainbow; no trial, no faith; no faith, no love.”
“Mother,” broke in Cecil, “wilt thou wed Thir Chrithtopher?”
“If he condescend to ask me again, I surely will.”
“Thir Chrithtopher! You do mean to ask her again?”
“Perhaps, some day.”
“Couldst not make thy decidence now?”
“Why dost thou seek to hurry me so? Marriage is a serious matter, and who knows but I might regret any undue haste!”
“Nay, now art thou in jest and I in earnest, for we were to have the feast of Candlemas to-night, and there are not candles enough to go round; but if you and Mother are to be one—”
“I do take your meaning, — then one candle will do for both.”
“‘Xactly.”
“In that case, I must waive all scruples, and I do here commit myself to a solemn promise to ask Mistress Calvert to marry me; and, Cecil, I am fain to ask thee for a betrothal gift.”
“I know, — the Calvert seal.”
“Nay, I have no use for the seal, Cecil, though its motto stood by me well in the dark days last winter. Yes, Elinor, I said them over to myself many a time there in the tobacco-house,— ‘Fatti Maschij: Parole Femine, — Deeds for men; words for women.’ They may not be read so in the bastard Italian, but so they were writ in my heart, and I said, ‘After all, ’tis my life must speak for me. If that condemns me, protests are vain; if that acquits me, who in the end shall be able to stand against me?’ But, Cecil, there is still something I did once decline like a churl when thou didst offer it, and have longed for in secret ever since.”
“Oh, you mean Mother’s picture; why, of course you may have it, and mine too, which has larger pearls round it, — may he not, Mother?”
“Cecil, what is ours is his.”
“And better still, what is his must be ours, so I shall have the bow and arrows without asking. We will have our feast to-night, and we will set out all the candles in the house and deck the table with flowers of purification and the bowl of punch and the seed-cakes.”
“Ave Maria Purificante!” quoth Father White, who had entered unperceived at the open door. “Sir Christopher, you have borne yourself nobly under the shadow of a great tragedy.”
“Tragedy! Nay, the story with a happy ending is not such. My life is no tragedy.”
And Christopher Neville spoke truth, for the only real tragedy is the degeneration of the soul under misfortune, and the only real misfortune is that which dominates character.
“Hurrah for Candlemas Day, raid and all!” cried Cecil.
From the street came an echoing cry, —
“Hey for St. Mary’s, and Wives for us all!”
As for Christopher, he knelt beside Elinor, and putting his arms about her close he whispered, “Now I have thee for always. Fate itself could not separate us. So thou must e’en make the best of a poor bargain, and take me for a life tenant of Robin Hood’s Barn.”
THE END
Captain Ravenshaw (1901) by Robert Neilson Stephens
OR, THE MAID OF CHEAPSIDE
A Romance of Elizabethan London
Illustrated by Howard Pyle
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
The original frontispiece
PREFACE.
Here is offered mere story, the sort of thing Mr. Howells cannot tolerate. He will have none of us and our works, poor “neo-romanticists” that we are. Curiously enough, we neo-romanticists, or most of us, will always gratefully have him; of his works we cannot have too many; one of us, I know, has walked miles to get the magazine containing the latest instalment of his latest serial. This looks as if we were more liberal than he. He would, for the most part, prohibit fiction from being else than the record of the passing moment; it should reflect only ourselves and our own little tediousnesses; he would hang the chamber with mirrors, and taboo all pictures; or if he admitted pictures they should depict this hour’s actualities alone, there should be no figures in costume.
But who shall decide in these matters what is to be and what is not to be? Who shall deny that all kinds of fiction have equal right to exist? Who shall dictate our choice of theme, or place, or time? Who shall forbid us in our faltering way to imagine forth the past if we like? The dead past, say you? As dead as yesterday afternoon, no more. “Where’s he that died o’ Wednesday?” As dead as the Queen of Sheba. But on the pages of Sienkiewicz, for example, certain little matters of Nero’s time seem no more dead than last week’s divorce trial in the columns of those realists, the newspaper reporters. All that is not immediately before our eyes, whether dead or distant, can be visualised only by imagination informed by description, and a small transaction in the reign of Elizabeth can be made as sensible to the mind’s eye as a domestic scene between Mr. and Mrs. Jones in the administration of McKinley. But how can one describe authentically what one can never have seen? You may propound that question to the realists; they are often doing it, or else they see extraordinary things now and then.
But, now that I remember it, Mr. Howells is not really illiberal. He has, upon occasion, admitted a tolerance — nay, an admiration — for “genuine romance.” But what is genuine romance? Is psychological romance, for instance, more “genuine” than melodramatic romance? Are we not all — we “neo-romanticists” — aiming at genuine romance in some kind? Shall there not be many misses to a hit? many inconsiderable achievements to a masterpiece? And we suffer under limitations which the great romancers had not to observe. We must be watchful against anachronisms, against many liberties in style and matter which the esteemed Sir Walter, for instance, might take — and did take — without stint. One’s fancy was less restrained, in his day. One cannot, as he did, bring Shakespeare to Greenwich palace before the festivities at Kenilworth occurred; or let a shopman recommend a pair of spectacles to a doctor of divinity with the information that the king, having tried them on, had pronounced them fit for a bishop; or make the divine buy them with the cheerful remark that a certain reverend brother’s advancing age gives hopes of an early promotion. Fancy such an exchange of jocularity between a shop “assistant” in Piccadilly and Doctor Ingram, while the late D
octor Creighton was Bishop of London! Flow of fancy is easier upon such terms; or, when one may even, as the great Dumas did, be so free of care for details as to have the same character in two places at the same time.
It is not meant to be implied that Mr. Howells is thought to consider the work of Scott or Dumas genuine romance. If he has anywhere mentioned an example of what he takes to be true romance, I have missed that mention. I should like to read his definition (perhaps he has published one which I have not seen) of genuine romance. But I would rather he taught us by example than by precept. What a fine romance he could write if he chose!
But as for us less-gifted ones, the “neo-romanticists,” shackled as Scott and Dumas were not, we must work a while under the new conditions, the new checks upon our imagination, ere we shall get a masterpiece. Meanwhile none of us yields to Mr. Howells in admiration of a true romance, and none of us would be sorry to lay down the pen, or shut up the typewriter, some fine afternoon and find it achieved. But until then may we not have indifferent romances, just as we have indifferent realistic novels? Why not, pray? Again, shall one man, one group, one school, decide what shall be and what shall not? “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Now, of merits which mere story may possess, and usually does possess in measure greater than the other sort of thing does, one is — construction. Wherefore, the opponents of this sort of thing belittle that merit. But it is a prime merit, nevertheless. Is not the first thing for praise, in a picture, its composition? in a building, its main design? in a group of statuary, its general effect? So, too, in a work of fiction. “Real life does not contrive so curiously,” says Professor Saintsbury. Precisely; if it did, what would be the good of fiction? Neither does nature contrive well-ordered squares of turf, with walks, flower-beds, hedge-rows, shrubbery, trees set with premeditation; shall we, on that account, make no gardens for ourselves? Who shall ordain that there be no well-constructed plots in fiction because life, seen in sections as small as a novel usually represents, is not well constructed? It is time somebody put in a word for plot. When all is said and done, the main thing in a story is the story.
Mr. Howells said, long ago, that the stories were all told. It is doubtful. But even if it were certain, what of it? Because there was an old tale of a king’s wife whose lover lost the ring she gave him, whereupon the king, finding out, bade her wear it on a certain soon-coming occasion, and she was put to much concern to get it in time, was the world to go without the pleasure of D’Artagnan’s mission for Anne of Austria? And what though Dumas himself had used the old situation of a real king imprisoned, and his “double” filling the throne in his place, were we to have no “Prisoner of Zenda?” Or even if the story of the man apparently wooing the handsome sister, while really loving the plain sister, had already been told, as it had, was Mr. Howells prohibited from making it twice told, in “Silas Lapham?”
Now, as to this little attempt at romance in a certain kind, I wish merely to say, for the benefit of those who turn over the first leaves of a novel in a bookstore or library before deciding whether to take or leave it, that it differs from the usual adventure-story in being concerned merely with private life and unimportant people. Though it has incidents enough, and perils enough, it deals neither with war nor with state affairs. It contains no royal person; not even a lord — nor a baronet, indeed, for baronets had not yet been invented at the period of the tale. The characters are every-day people of the London of the time, and the scenes in which they move are the street, the tavern, the citizen’s house and garden, the shop, the river, the public resort, — such places as the ordinary reader would see if a miracle turned back time and transported him to London in the closing part of Elizabeth’s reign. The atmosphere of that place and time, as one may find it best in the less known and more realistic comedies of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, in prose narratives and anecdotes, and in the records left of actual transactions, strikes us of the twentieth century as a little strange, somewhat of a world which we can hardly take to be real. If I have succeeded in putting a breath of this strangeness, this (to us) seeming unreality, into this busy tale, and yet have kept the tale vital with a human nature the same then as now, I have done something not altogether bad. Bad or good, I have been a long time about it, for I have grown to believe that, though novel-reading properly comes under the head of play, novel-writing properly comes under the head of work. My work herein has not gone to attain the preciosity of style which distracts attention from the story, or the brilliancy of dialogue which — as the author of “John Inglesant” says— “declares the glory of the author more frequently than it increases reality of effect.” My work has gone, very much, to the avoidance of anachronisms. This is a virtue really possessed by few novels which deal with the past, as only the writers of such novels know. It may be a virtue not worth achieving, but it was a whim of mine to achieve it. Ill health forbade fast writing, the success of my last previous book permitted slow writing, and I resolved to utilise the occasion by achieving one rare merit which, as it required neither genius nor talent, but merely care, was within my powers. The result of my care must appear as much in what the story omits as in what it contains. The reader may be assured at the outset, if it matters a straw to him, that the author of this romance of Elizabethan London (and its neighbourhood) is himself at home in Elizabethan London; if he fails to make the reader also a little at home there in the course of the story, it is only because he lacks the gift, or skill, of imparting.
Robert Neilson Stephens.
London, June 1, 1901.
CHAPTER I.
MEN OF DESPERATE FORTUNES.
“Though my hard fate has thrust me out to servitude,
I tumbled into th’ world a gentleman.” — The Changeling.
It was long past curfew, yet Captain Ravenshaw still tarried in the front room of the Windmill tavern, in the Old Jewry. With him were some young gentlemen, at whose cost he had been drinking throughout the afternoon. For their bounty, he had paid with the satirical conversation for which he was famed, as well as with richly embellished anecdotes of his campaigns. Late in the evening, the company had been joined by a young gallant who had previously sent them, from another chamber, a quantity of Rhenish wine. This newcomer now ordered supper for the party, a proceeding at which the captain dissembled his long-deferred pleasure — for he had not eaten since the day before. Moreover, besides the prospect of supper, there was this to hold him at the tavern: he knew not where he should look for a bed, or shelter, upon leaving it. The uncertainty was a grave consideration upon so black and windy a night.
Master Vallance, the gentleman who had ordered supper, had listened to the last of Ravenshaw’s brag with a rather scornful silence. But the other young men had been appreciative; it was their pose, or affectation, to be as wicked as any man might; hence they looked up to this celebrated bully as to a person from whom there was much to be learned, and in whom there was much to be imitated.
The group had been sitting before the wide fireplace. But as soon as the roast fowls were brought in, there was a movement to the long table in the middle of the room. The captain was gifted with active, striding legs and long, slashing arms. So he was first to be seated, and, as he leaned forward upon his elbows, he seemed to cover more than his share of the table. He had a broad, solid forehead, an assertive nose, a narrow but forward chin, gray eyes accustomed to flash with a devil-may-care defiance, a firm mouth inured to a curve of sardonic derision. His rebellious hair, down-turning moustaches, and pointed beard were of a dark brown hue. He was a man of good height; below the sword-belt, he was lank to the ground; above, he broadened out well for chest and shoulders. His voice was quick, vigorous, and not unpleasantly metallic. He was under thirty, but rough experience had hardened his visage to an older look. His jerkin, shirt, hose, shoes, and ruff also betokened much and severe usage.
Master Vallance, in spotless velvet doublet and breeches, and p
erfectly clean silk stockings, looked at him with contemptuous dislike.
“Take heed you scorch not the capon with your nose, roaring Ravenshaw,” said the youth, quietly.
It was not Ravenshaw’s habit to resent allusions to his character as a “roaring boy;” indeed he encouraged the popular idea which saddled him with that title, at that time applied to bullies of the taverns. But some circumstance of the moment, perhaps something in the young coxcomb’s air of aristocratic ridicule, guided the epithet to a sensitive spot.
“Captain Ravenshaw, by your leave,” he said, instantly, in a loud tone, with an ironical show of a petitioner’s deference.
“Forsooth, yes; a captain of the suburbs,” replied the young gentleman, with a more pronounced sneer.
Now at this time — toward the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth — and for a long time after, certain of the suburbs of London were inhabited numerously by people of ill repute. There were, especially, women whom the law sometimes took in hand and sent to the Bridewell to break chalk, or treated to a public ride in a cart, as targets for rotten vegetables, addled eggs, and such projectiles. Many an unemployed soldier, or bully who called himself soldier, would bestow, or impose, his protection upon some one of these frail creatures in the time of her prosperity, exacting from her the means of livelihood. Hence did Ravenshaw see in the title of “captain of the suburbs” an insult little less than lay in that of “Apple-John,” or “Apple-squire,” itself.
When a gentleman calls another by the name of a bad thing, it is not necessarily implied that he thinks the other is that thing; but it is certain that he means to be defiantly offensive. Therefore, in this case, the captain’s part was not to deny, but to resent. Not only must he keep up his reputation with the other gentlemen as a man not to be affronted, but he really was in a towering rage at being bearded with easy temerity by such a youngling.