Complete Works of Mary Shelley

by Mary Shelley

  “What tidings of Effingham?” asked York.

  “Are ye ready?” cried Huntley.

  “All!” replied Frion; “all save him ye name Wiatt. Sir Robert, forsooth, is but half a man, and never does more than half deed, though that half makes a whole crime. All is ready. I hear the sound of oars; the boat nears the shore.”

  Through the tall, bare trunks of the trees, a glimpse of the beach might be gained; the roaring of the surges was distinct, now mingled with the cry of sailors.

  “Then lose we no time,” said Huntley. “My Lord of York, these words sound strange. You expected a noble countryman, to lead you to victory; you find nameless fellows, and the prince of knaves, most ready and willing to lead you to everlasting prison. Lo, the scene shifts again! Never be cast down, Master Frion; you are as subtle as any of your race — only to be outwitted by a niggard Scotchman, who can ill read, and worse write; except when villainy is blazoned in a man’s face, and his sword indites a traitor’s fate. Your clerkship will find none among us learned enough to afford you benefit of clergy.”

  Huntley drew his sword; and at the signal his Highlanders arose from their ambush. Frion was seized and bound. None, who even a moment before had seen the smooth-faced villain, could have recognised him; he was pale as the snow on Ben Nevis. A Highlander, an adept in such acts, dexterously threw a knotted rope over his head, and cast his eye up to the trees for a convenient branch. Such had been the orders; such the summary justice of the Earl.

  Richard meanwhile looked on the blanched visage and quailing form of his betrayer in mere compassion. “Is it even so, Etienne?” he said; “and after long companionship we part thus.”

  The trembling craven fell on his knees, though he tightened the halter by the movement, so that when Richard turned away, saying, “I had thought better of thee: Jesu pardon thee as readily as I — farewell!” he had scarce voice to cry for mercy.

  “Aye,” cried the Gordon; “such mercy as we grant the wolf and thievish fox. Short shrift be thine, Master Secretary!”

  “By our Lady’s grace, stay!” said Katherine; “do not kill the false-hearted knave. He is a coward, and dares survive his honour; let him live.”

  Richard looked sternly on the kneeling slave. To the good there is something awful in the sight of a guilty man. It is a mystery to them how the human heart can be so perverted. Is it a spirit from hell, that incorporates itself with the pulsations of our mortal bosom; a darkness that overshadows; a fiendly essence that mingles with the breath God gave to his own image? York felt a shrinking horror. “Thou hast pursued me since my youth,” he said, “forcing thyself into my councils; sometimes as a wily enemy; at others, befriending me in seeming, raising my soul, that flagged beneath the world’s unkind ministry; dropping balm by thy words into a wounded heart; to end thy office thus! Was this thy purpose ever; or what demon whispered thee to betray? Die! oh, no! too many, the good, the great, the true, have died for me; live thou a monument — a mark to tell the world that York can pardon, York can despise — not so base a thing as thee — that were little, but even thy employer. Go, tell my sister’s husband that I bear a charmed life; that love and valour are my guards. Bid him bribe those, nor waste his ill-got crowns on such as thee. Unbind him, sirs; make signal to the boat; let him on board; the winds stand fair for England.”

  The fall of many a hope, roused by the forgery on Surrey’s name, was forgotten by Richard, as he sickened at this other mark of man’s wickedness and folly. He was surely the dear sport of fortune, a tale to chronicle how faithless friends may be. If such thoughts, like summer clouds, darkened his mind, they vanished, driven by the winds of life that bore him onward. This was no time for mere gloomy meditation. Though he was obliged to return to his forgotten Irish scheme, and to dismiss the glorious anticipation in which he had indulged, of leading the chivalry of England to the field; though no real defeat had ever visited him so keenly as this mockery of one; yet he was forced to forget himself, and to apply himself to console and rouse his downcast friends; but his skill was well repaid, and soon he again awoke to those feelings of buoyant hope, unwearied energy, and unshaken confidence which were the essence of his character.

  In this last trial he felt how much good he might derive from the sweetness and constant spirit of the Lady Katherine. She hoped for none of the world’s blessings, except they came in the shape of loves from him to whom she was united; happiness — all her’s as centered in her blameless affections; and her confidence was placed in the belief and knowledge, that by devoting herself to her lord, to the wandering outcast who so dearly needed her sacrifice, she fulfilled her destiny upon earth, and pleased the “great Task Master,” who for happiness or misery, but certainly for good, had given her life. All her gentle eloquence was spent in dissuading Richard from those unkind thoughts towards his species, which the treason of these base men, the caprice of James, the harsh sentence (for this was again brought home to him by disappointment) of Surrey, awakened in his bosom. It proved no hard task; soon the princely Adventurer, with eagle flight, soared from the sad prostration of spirit, the birth of his disasters, to fresh hopes and lofty resolves.

  It was necessary immediately to prepare for his departure. The Earl of Huntley, struck by his magnanimity, no longer opposed his daughter’s wish. The English exiles were eager for a new, and, they believed (for untired is Hope in man); for a prosperous career. Scotland grew rude, confined, and remote in their eyes. In Ireland were placed for them the portals of the world, to be opened by their sowrds; the dancing sea-waves invited them; the winds of heaven lent themselves to their service. “My friends,” said Richard, “dear and faithful partners of my wayward fortunes, I would fondly believe that we are favoured of heaven. We are few; but the evil and the treacherous are no longer among us. And does old Time in all his outworn tales tell any truer, than that the many, being disunited, and so false, have ever been vanquished by the loving, bold, and heroic few? That a child may scan with its fingers our bare arithmetic, will therefore be to us the source of success, as assuredly it will be of glory. The English were few when they mowed down thickly planted French at Cressy and Poictiers. Which among us, armed as we are in the mail of valour, but would encounter ten of Tudor’s scant-paid mercenaries? For me! I do believe that God is on my side, as surely as I know that justice and faith are; and I fear no defeat.”

  It is thus that man, with fervent imagination, can endue the rough stone with loveliness, forge the mis-shapen metal into a likeness of all that wins our hearts by exceeding beauty, and breathe into a dissonant trump soul-melting harmonies. The mind of man — that mystery, which may lend arms against itself, teaching vain lessons of material philosophy, but which, in the very act, shows its power to play with all created things, adding the sweetness of its own essence to the sweetest, taking its ugliness from the deformed. The creative faculty of man’s soul — which, animating Richard, made him see victory in defeat, success and glory in the dark, the tortuous, the thorny path, which it was his destiny to walk from the cradle to the tomb.

  Oh, had I, weak and faint of speech, words to teach my fellow-creatures the beauty and capabilities of man’s mind; could I, or could one more fortunate, breathe the magic word which would reveal to all the power, which we all possess, to turn evil to good, foul to fair; then vice and pain would desert the new-born world!

  It is not thus: the wise have taught, the good suffered for us; we are still the same; and still our own bitter experience and heart-breaking regrets teach us to sympathize too feelingly with a tale like this; which records the various fortunes of one who at his birth received every gift which most we covet; whose strange story is replete with every change of happiness and misery; with every contrast of glorious and disgraceful; who was the noble object of godlike fidelity, and the sad victim of demoniac treason; the mark of man’s hate and woman’s love; spending thus a short eventful life. It is not spent; he yet breathes: he is on the world of waters. What new scene unfolds itself
? Where are they who were false, where those who were true? They congregate around him, and the car of life bears him on, attended by many frightful, many lovely shapes, to his destined end. He has yet much to suffer; and, human as he is, much to enjoy.

  CHAPTER II.

  One moment these were heard and seen; another

  Past, and the two who stood beneath that night.

  Each only heard, or saw, or felt the other.

  — SHELLEY.

  The hour had now arrived when Richard took leave of Scotland. The King was humbled by the necessity he felt himself under, of sending forth his friend and kinsman into the inhospitable world; and he felt deep grief at parting with his lovely cousin. She grew pale, when for the last time she saw the friend of her youth. But Katherine looked upon life in a mode very different from the usual one: the luxuries and dignities of the world never in her mind for a moment came in competition with her affections and her duty; she saw the plain path before her; whatever her father’s or her royal cousin’s idea had been in giving her to the Duke of York, she knew that, being his, her destiny upon earth was to share his fortunes, and soothe his sorrows. This constant looking on, giving herself up to, and delighting in one aim, one object, one occupation, elevated her far above the common cares of existence. She left

  —”All meaner things.

  The low ambition and the pride of Kings;”

  — to shroud herself in love; to take on herself the hallowed state of one devoting herself to another’s happiness. Cleopatra, basking in sunny pomp, borne, the wonder of the world, in her gilded bark, amidst all the aroma of the east, upon the gently rippling Cydnus, felt neither the pride nor joy of Katherine, as, on the poor deck of their dark weather-beaten skiff, she felt pillowed by the downy spirit of love, fanned by its gentle breath.

  The Duke of York was more depressed; he thought of how, since his miserable childhood, he had been the sport of fortune and her scorn. He thought of the false, the cold, the perished: a dark wall seemed to rise around him; a murky vault to close over him: success, glory, honour, the world’s treasures, which he had been brought up to aspire to as his dearest aim, his right, were unattainable; he was the defeated, the outcast; there was a clog in his way for ever; a foul taint upon his name. Thus seated on the deck, his arm coiled round a rope, his head leaning on his arm, while the stars showered a dim silvery radiance, and the sparkling sea mocked their lustre with brighter fires; while the breeze, that swelled his sail, and drove him merrily along, spent its cold breath on him; he, painting all natural objects with the obscure colouring suggested by his then gloomy spirit, distorting the very scenery of heaven and vast ocean into symbols of his evil fate, gave himself up to the very luxury of woe, — meanwhile the shadow of a lovely form fell on him, soft fingers pressed the curls of his hair, and Katherine asked, “Are the nights of Andalusia more glorious than this?”

  At the voice of the charmer the dæmon fled: sky and sea cast off the dim veil his grief had woven, and creation was restored its native beauty. Hitherto the halls of palaces, the gaiety of a court, the council-chamber, had been the scenes in which the princely pair had lived together; linked to an engrossing state of things, surrounded by their partizans, they had been friends, nay lovers, according to the love of the many. But solitary Nature is the true temple of Love, where he is not an adjunct, but an essence; and now she alone was around them, to fill them with sublime awe, and the softest tenderness. In Richard’s eyes, the kingdom of his inheritance dwindled into a mere speck; the land of her nativity became but a name to Katherine. It sufficed for their two full hearts that they were together on the dark wide sea; the bright sky above, and calm upon the bosom of the deep. They could ill discern each other in the shadowy twilight; a dream-like veil was cast over their features, as sleep curtains out the soul; so that we look on the beloved slumberer, and say “He is there, though the mystery of repose wraps me from him;” so now darkness blinded and divided them: but hand clasped hand; he felt that one existed who was his own, his faithful; and she rejoiced in the accomplishment of the mastersentiment of her soul, the desire of self-devotion, self-annihilation, for one who loved her. The passion that warmed their hearts had no fears, no tumult, no doubt. One to the other they sufficed; and, but that the trance is fleeting, Happiness, the lost child of the world, would have found here her home; for when love, which is the necessity of affectionate hearts, and the sense of duty, which is the mystery and the law of our souls, blend into one feeling, Paradise has little to promise save immortality.

  For many days this state of forgetful extacy lasted. Plantagenet and Neville spoke of wars in England; Lord Barry and Keating of their Irish schemes — the Prince listened and replied; but his soul was far away — Oh, that for ever they might sail thus on the pathless, shoreless sea! — Nothing mean or trivial or ignoble could visit them; no hate, no care, no fear — this might not be, but to have felt, to have lived thus for a few short days, suffices to separate mortal man from the groveling part of his nature — no disgrace, no despair can so bring him back to the low-minded world, as to destroy the sense of having once so existed. And Richard, marked for misery and defeat, acknowledged that power which sentiment possesses to exalt us — to convince us that our minds, endowed with a soaring, restless aspiration, can find no repose on earth except in love.

  CHAPTER III.

  “Now for our Irish wars!”

  — SHAKSPEARE.

  Again the Duke of York approached the rocky entrance of the Cove of Cork, again he passed through the narrow passage, which opening, displayed a lovely sheet of tranquil water, decked with islands. The arrival of his fleet in the harbour was hailed with joy. Old John O’Water had returned to his civic labours, and had contrived to get himself chosen mayor for this year, that he might be of greater assistance to the White Rose in his enterprize.

  As soon as the arrival of his ships off the coast was known, O’Water dispatched messengers to the Earl of Desmond, and busied himself to give splendour to Richard’s entrance into Cork. Tapestry and gay-coloured silks were hung from the windows; the street was strewn with flowers — citizens and soldiers intermixed crowded to the landing-place. York’s heart palpitated with joy. It was not that thence he much hoped for success to his adventure, which required more than the enthusiasm of the remote inhabitants of the south of Ireland to achieve it, but Cork was a sort of home to him; here he had found safety when he landed, barely escaped from Trangmar’s machinations — here he first assumed his rightful name and title — here, a mere boy, ardent, credulous, and bold — he had seen strangers adopt his badge and avouch his cause. Five years had elapsed since then — the acclaim of a few kind voices, the display of zeal, could no longer influence his hopes as then they had done, but they gladdened his heart, and took from it that painful feeling which we all too often experience — that we are cast away on the inhospitable earth, useless and neglected.

  He was glad also in the very first spot of his claimed dominions whereon he set foot, to see the Lady Katherine received with the honours due to her rank. Her beauty and affability won the hearts of all around, and O’Water, with the tenderness that an old man is so apt to feel towards a young and lovely woman, extended to her a paternal affection, the simplicity and warmth of which touched her, thrown as she was among strangers, with gratitude.

  Lord Desmond arrived — he was struck by the improvement in York’s manner, still ingenuous and open-hearted: he was more dignified, more confident in himself than before — the husband of Katherine also acquired consideration; as an adventurous boy, he might be used according to the commodity of the hour — now he had place — station in the world, and Desmond paid him greater deference, almost unawares.

  But the Earl was sorely disappointed; “Reverend Father,” said he to Keating, “what aid does Scotland promise? Will they draw Tudor with his archers and harquebussiers, and well-horsed Knights, to the north, giving our Irish Kern some chance of safe landing in the west?”

  “
Peace is concluded between Scotland and England,” replied Keating.

  Desmond looked moody. “How thrives the White Rose over the water? How sped the Duke, when he entered England? Some aid somewhere we must have, besides yonder knot of wanderers, and our own hungry, naked kerns.”

  “By my fay!” replied Keating, “every budding blossom on the Rose-bush was nipped, as by a north-east wind. When Duke Richard sowed his hopes there, like the dragon’s teeth of Dan Cadmus, they turned into so many armed men to attack him.”

  “Sooth, good Prior,” said the Earl, with a sharp laugh, “we shall speed well thereby: would you a re-acting of the gleeful mime at Stowe?”