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Title: On both sides of the sea
        A story of the Commonwealth and the Restoration

Author: Elizabeth Rundle Charles

Release date: March 29, 2025 [eBook #75741]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1867

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA ***







  On Both Sides of the Sea:

  A STORY OF

  The Commonwealth and the Restoration


  A SEQUEL TO

  "THE DRAYTONS AND THE DAVENANTS"



  _BY THE AUTHOR OF_

  "Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family."



  NEW YORK:
  DODD, MEAD & COMPANY,
  PUBLISHERS.




CARD FROM THE AUTHOR.

"The Author of the Schonberg-Cotta Family wishes it to be generally
known among the readers of her books in America, that the American
Editions issued by Mr. M. W. Dodd, of New York alone have the
Author's sanction."




  Contents

  Chapter

  I. Olive's Recollections
  II. Olive's Recollections
  III. Lettice's Diary
  IV. Lettice's Diary
  V. Olive's Recollections
  VI. Olive's Recollections
  VII. Olive's Recollections
  VIII. Olive's Recollections
  IX. Notes by Magdalene Antony
  X. Lettice's Diary
  XI. Lettice's Diary
  XII. Lettice's Diary




On Both Sides of the Sea.




ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA.



CHAPTER I.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

Since England was, such an event was never witnessed within sound of
her seas, as that which darkened London on the fatal 30th of January,
1649.  In the recollection of such moments it is difficult to
disentangle feeling from fact, what we saw with our eyes and heard
with our ears from what others told us, from what we saw with the
imagination and heard with the heart.

In my memory that day lies shrouded and silent, as if all that
happened in it had been done in a city spell-bound into silence in a
hushed, sunless, colorless world, where all intermediate tints were
gathered into funereal black and white, the black of the
heavily-draped scaffold and the whiteness of the frosty ground from
which it rose into the still and icy air; whilst behind the palace
slept, frost-bound, the mute and motionless river, imprisoning with
icy bars the motionless ships.

From early in the day the thoroughfares and squares and open
gathering-places of the city were filled with the Commonwealth
soldiers.  I remember no call of trumpet or beat of drum; only a slow
pacing of horsemen, and marching of footmen, silently, to their
assigned positions, the tramp of men and the clatter of the
horse-hoofs ringing from the hard and frosty ground, and echoing from
the closed and silent houses on the line of march.

It was no day of triumph to any.  To the army, and those who felt
with them, it was a day of solemn justice, not of triumphant
vengeance.  To the Royalists it was a day of passionate hushed sorrow
and bitter inward vows of retribution; to the people generally a day
of perplexity and woe.

Old Mr. Prynne, who owed the king nothing, as he said, but the loss
of his ears, the pillory, imprisonment, and fines, had pleaded for
him generously in the House, before the House had been finally
"purged."

And the most part of the men, and well-nigh all the women, I think,
would have said "Amen" to Mr. Prynne.  If the king's captivity and
trial and condemnation had been a solemn drama enacted to win the
hearts of the people back to him, it could not have been more
effectual.  Political and civil rights, rights of taxation and rights
of remonstrance, seemed to the hearts of most people to become mere
technical legal terms in the presence of Royalty and Death.
Pillories and prisons were dwarfed into mere private grievances
beside the scaffold on which the king, son of so many kings, kings of
so many submissive generations, the source of power, the only
possible object of the dreadful crime called treason, was to die the
death of a traitor.

The trial brought out all that was most pathetic in royalty and most
noble in the king.  The haughty glance which had been resented on the
throne, was simply majestic when it encountered unflinchingly the
illegal bench of judges on whom his life depended.

The Parliament, mutilated to a remnant of fifty; the High Court of
Justice, who could not agree among themselves, whose assumption of
legal forms sounded (to many) like mockery, whose trappings of
authority sat on them (many thought) like masquerade-robes, were a
poor show to confront with that lonely majestic figure defying their
sentence and their authority, a captive in the ancient Hall of
Justice from which, throughout the centuries, not a sentence had
issued save by the sanction of his forefathers.

The royal banners, which drooped from the roof above him, taken from
his Cavaliers at Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby, seemed to float
there rather in his honor than in that of his judges.  Many felt that
adversity had restored to him his true royalty, and that he sat far
more a king now, arraigned at the bar, than when, eight years before,
at the last trial those walls had witnessed, he sat as a helpless
spectator of the proceedings which brought Strafford, his greatest
minister, to the scaffold.

It was well for his adversaries that those days of the king's
humiliation were not prolonged.  Irrepressible veneration and pity
began to stir among the crowds who beheld him, and the cries of
"Justice! justice!" were changed more than once into murmurs of "God
save the king."

But the pity was a slowly-rising tide of waves now advancing and now
recoiling.  The determination for "justice on the chief delinquent"
was a strong and steady, though narrow current; and it swept the
ration on irresistibly to its end.

The soldiers, foot and horse, had taken up their position.  My
brother Roger and Job Forster were posted opposite Whitehall.  Roger
waved his hand as he passed our windows.  His face, as was his wont
in times of strong emotion, was fixed and stern.  He was riding in a
funeral procession, which for him led to more graves than one.

At ten o'clock His Majesty walked through St. James's Park to
Whitehall, passing rapidly through the bitter cold, under the bare
branches of the silent trees, through a crowd in appearance as cold
as silent.  His face, men said, was calm and majestic as ever,
although worn; his beard had become gray, and his form had a slight
stoop, although he was not fifty years of age, but his step was firm.
He disappeared through the Palace gates, from which he was never to
step forth again.  Then followed six hours of suspense and terrible
expectation, the crowds surging uneasily to and fro, unable to rest,
repelled and yet attracted by the terrible fascination of the empty,
expectant scaffold, whose heavy funereal draperies fell from the
windows of the Banqueting Hall on the frosty ground beneath.  There
were whispers that the ambassador of the United Provinces was
pleading not hopelessly with Lord Fairfax; that the Prince of Wales
had sent a blank letter signed by himself, to be filled with any
conditions the Commons chose to demand; but that the king had burned
this letter, and refused the ministrations of any but the clergy of
the Episcopal Church of the realm;--so that if he was indeed to die,
it would be as a martyr to the rights of the Crown and the Church.

And through these soberer reports ever and anon rose wild rumors of
approaching deliverance, of risings in the Royalist counties, of
avenging fleets approaching the Thames, of judgment direct from
heaven on the sacrilegious heads of the regicides.

But to us who knew of the purpose which had been gathering force in
the army since that prayer-meeting at Windsor six months before,
those mid-day hours were hours not of doubt or suspense, but of awful
certainty, as minute by minute the hour approached when that scaffold
was to be empty no more.

We knew that within the still and deserted halls of that palace, the
king was preparing to meet his doom; and (all political questions and
personal wrongs for the time forgotten) from a thousand roofs in the
city went up prayers that he might be sustained in dying, and might
exchange the earthly crown which had sat on his brow so uneasily, for
the crown of life which burdens not, nor fades away.

At length three o'clock, the moment of doom, came.  "It was the ninth
hour," as the Royalists loudly noted.  Save the guard around the
scaffold, and those who attended his dying moments on it, none were
near enough to hear what passed there.  It was all mute; but the
spectacle spoke.  In most royal pageants, the thing seen is but a
sign of the thing not seen.  In this the thing to be seen was no mere
sign, but a dread reality, a tremendous event.  The black scaffold,
the wintry silence, the vast awe-stricken crowd gazing mute and
motionless on the inevitable tragedy; a few plainly dressed men at
last appearing on the scaffold around the well-known stately figure
of the king, richly arrayed "as for his second bridal;" "the comely
head" laid down without a struggle on the block "as on a bed;" the
momentary flash of the axe; the severed head raised an instant on
high as "the head of a traitor;" a shrouded form prostrate on the
scaffold;--and then, as good Mr. Philip Henry, who was present, said,
"at the instant when the blow was given, a diurnal universal groan
among the thousands of people who were within sight of it, as if with
one consent, such as he had never heard before, and desired he might
never hear the like again, or see such a cause for it."

The multitude were not left long to bewail their king.  One troop of
Parliament horse rode instantly, by previous order, from Charing
Cross towards King Street, and another from King Street towards
Charing Cross; and so the crowd were scattered right and left, to
lament as they might each man under his own roof, and to read in
secret the "Eikon Basilike," which it is said the king composed,
copies of which were distributed under his scaffold, and will,
doubtless, be reverently treasured in every Royalist household; not
in the library, but in the oratory, beside the Bible and the
Prayer-book, enkindling loyalty from a conviction into a passion,
deepening it from a passion to a religion, while they compare the
king's trial to that before the unjust judge of old, his walk to the
scaffold to that along the Dolorous Way, his sayings to those last
words on which dying men and women have hung ever since.

Every one knows the heaviness with which even a day of festivity
closes, when the event of the day is over.  The weight with which
that fatal day closed it is hard for any who did not feel it to
imagine.

Scripture words repeated with ominous warning by ministers,
Presbyterian and Episcopal, echoed like curses through countless
hearts: "I gave them a king in my anger and took him away in my
wrath."  "Who am I that I should lay hands on the Lord's anointed?"

Death gave to the king's memory an immaculateness very different from
the technical, "the king can do no wrong of the ancient constitution."

And even with those whose resolution remained unwavering to the last,
this was not the time for speech.  The extremity of justice had been
done, there was nothing more to be said.  It would have been an
ungenerous revenge far from the thoughts of such regicides as Colonel
Hutchinson and General Cromwell to follow it with insulting words,
and their own self-defence they were content to leave to events.  Mr.
Milton's majestic Defences of the English People came later.

Ours was a silent fireside that winter night, as Roger, weary and
numb, came at last to warm himself beside us.

As lie entered, I was saying to my husband, "The terrible thing is,
that he who lived trampling on the constitution and the rights of
conscience, seems to have died a martyr to the constitution and
conscience, doomed by a few desperate men."

"We must concern ourselves as little as possible, sister," Roger said
very quietly, "with what seems."

"I fear this day will turn the tide against all for which you have
fought throughout the war."

"The tide will turn back," he said.

"But what if not in our time?" I said.

"Then in God's time, Olive," he said; "which is the best."

But he looked very worn and sad.  I repented of having said these
discouraging words, and weakly strove to undo them as he asked me to
unlace the helmet which his benumbed hands could not unloose.

"I would rather a thousand times," I said, "have you with Colonel
Hutchinson, and General Cromwell, and those who dared to do what they
thought right in the lace of the world, than with those who thought
it right yet dared not do it.  The nation will recognize their
deliverer in General Cromwell yet."

"I do not know that, Olive," he said; "but it will be enough if
General Cromwell delivers the nation."

"At least the generations to come will do you all justice," I said.

"I am not sure of that," he said.  "It depends on who writes the
history for them.  There is one Judgment Seat whose awards it is safe
to set before us.  Before that we have sought to stand.  That
sentence is irrevocably fixed.  What it is we shall hear hereafter,
when the voice of this generation and all the generations will move
us no more than the murmur of a troubled sea a great way off, and far
below."

Yet he could not touch the food we set before him; and as he sat
gazing into the fire, I knew there was one adverse verdict which he
knew too well, and which moved his heart all the more that it had not
been able to move a hair's breadth his conscience or his purpose.

Many sorrows met in Roger's heart, I knew, that night; the pain of
pity repressed driven back on the heart by a stern sense of justice;
the pain of being misjudged by some whom we honour; the pain of the
resignation of the tenderest love and hope; the pain of giving bitter
pain to the heart dearest to him in the world.  But one pain, perhaps
the worst of all, he and men who, like Cromwell and Colonel
Hutchinson, had carried out that day's doom fearlessly before the
world because in unshaken conviction of its justice before God, were
spared--the enervating anguish of perplexity and doubt.  And this,
perhaps, is the sorest pain of all.


LETTICE'S DIARY.

"'The space between is the way thither,' Mr. Drayton said.  It may
be; it ought to be.  But _is it_?  That seems to me precisely the one
terrible question which, when we can get cleared, all life becomes
clear in the light of the answer, but which it is so exceedingly hard
to have cleared.

"The days, as they pass, whether clothed in light and joy, as the old
time at home was when I had a home, and a mother, and so many
hopes--or in darkness that may be felt, as so many of these later
days have been to me, are indeed surely leading us on to old age, to
death, to the unseen world, and the judgment.  But are they indeed
leading us on to new youth, to changeless life, to heaven, and the
King's 'Well done?'

"If I were as sure of the last as of the first, for me and mine, I
think (at least there are moments when I think) I would scarcely care
whether the days were dark or bright.  For life is to be a warfare.
All kinds of Christian people agree in that.  And having learned what
war means, I do not expect it to be easy or pleasant.

"But I am not sure.  For myself or for any one.

"Roger thinks the execution of the king was a terrible duty.  I think
it was almost an inexpiable crime.

"Olive, I know, thinks I am breaking plighted faith, and betraying
the most faithful affection in the world in parting from Roger.
Mistress Dorothy thinks I am fulfilling a sacred duty, doing what was
meant when we were commanded to pluck out the right eye.  As to the
pain, I am sure she is right.  If I could only be as sure as to the
duty!  For if it is right, it must be good, really, in the end for
him as well as for me.  How, I cannot imagine.  For it seems bad as
well as bitter for me.  And Olive says it will be bad and embittering
for him.

"Happy, happy people, who lived in the old days of dreams, and
visions, and heavenly voices, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it;'
when God's will became manifest in pillars of fire and cloud, in
discriminating dews and fires of sacrifice, and such simple outward
signs as poor perplexed hearts like mine can understand.

"Holy people say these days of ours are in advance of those, that the
light has increased since then.  I suppose it has, for holy people,
who have grown up to it, and have eyes to see those inward leadings,
and ears to hear those inward voices, which to me are so dim.  But I
feel as if I were still a child, and would fain have lived in that
simple childhood of the world, when God spoke to men in plain ways as
to children.

"Since I came here, I saw at the door of one of the churches a very
awful piece of sculpture of the souls in purgatory, all aglow with
the fires in which they were burning, stretching out piteous hands
through iron bars for help and prayers from those still living on the
earth.

"Mistress Dorothy was with me, and she clasped her hands over her
eyes in horror, as she turned away.


"But to me it did not seem so horrible.  At least not for the souls
in purgatory.  If there were a purgatory.  Because the thought of its
being purgatory, must take away all that is unendurable out of the
anguish of the flames.  There are hearts on earth tormented in fires
as real.  But the sting of their anguish is, they cannot be sure they
are purgatorial fires.  The anguish is clear enough.  If we could
only be as sure as to the purification.  That the pain is from the
remedy, not from the disease; that the flames are on the way to
heaven, not mercifully confronting us on the other way to turn us
back.

"It always seemed as if, by Roger's side, I should have grown good
like him.  How am I to grow good without him, severing myself from
him?  Oh, mother, mother! why must you leave me just now, when no one
else in the world could have told me what to do.  Because, while
loving me more than yourself, you loved God's will far more than my
pleasure.

"But Mistress Dorothy says, when I am tempted with 'vain reasonings'
and 'debatings of the flesh,' I must go back to the first sacred
impulse, when, by my mother's death-bed, I felt the death of the king
for whom she would have died must place an impassable barrier between
me and those who slew him, or consented to his death.

"First thoughts, says she, are often from above; second thoughts from
within or from below.  And if we endure to the end, third thoughts
will come crowning the divine impulse of the first with a calm divine
assurance.

"I will try to endure to the end.  At least I will wait.

"To strengthen my resolve, let me go back to that sacred impulse, and
through all it led to, up to this day.

"It was during those terrible days of early January, when hope and
fear had passed, with uncertainty; and I sat by my mother's bedside,
all my heart and soul absorbed in watching her depart, and in
relieving any suffering or supplying any want for her so fast passing
away from all suffering and from all our service.

"The east winds were careering across the Fens, and broke fiercely
against the old house, and one night there was a crash of the great
scarred elm-tree falling close outside the windows.  But she heeded
it not; and I remember feeling a strange kind of despairing triumph
over all the violence of the elements.  They might rage as at the
Deluge; but they could neither hinder nor hasten the slow, silent
progress of the awful power which was silently removing her from us.

"Before, in days of doubt and hope, I had been wont to watch the
winds with a kind of superstitious solicitude, as if there were some
mysterious sympathy between nature and men, and the ravings of her
storms had been ominous of evil to us.  But now that spell seemed
broken.  The sympathy between us and nature ceased with death.  To
her it was natural, a link in her endless chain of ever-recurring
changes.  To her, life and death were but as day and night, bright or
dark phases of her ceaseless revolutions.  She could see her children
die as calmly as her suns set.  To us death was unnatural, a
convulsion, a horror, a curse.  The terrible thing which seemed to
assimilate us to her, in reality rent us from her sphere altogether.
A week before, when we began to fear there was danger, I trembled at
the wind wailing in the dead branches of the elms, or at a bird
beating its wings against the window.  Now that she was dying, I
could have smiled at an earthquake or a tornado.

"All the outward and visible world, the terrors of its stormy nights
as well as the sweet familiar delights of its dawns and days, seemed
to lie outside me like a world of shadows, as for the first time I
learned in my inmost heart that we are but strangers, not belonging
to it, but passing swiftly through.  As I gazed into the eyes which
so soon were to cease to be the portal where my soul could meet hers,
my own body seemed to become a mere phantasm, the innermost shell of
this world of phantasms, where we stay a little while, to read its
lessons and experience its changes, and then vanish, we from it and
it from us.  It was not so with the conflict then going on about the
king.  There, consciences were concerned, and right and wrong.  And
by her dying bed, right and wrong seemed the only realities left.  I
dared not break on the calm of her spirit with one word that might
recall the conflicts of parties.  Thus Love itself severed her spirit
from me before death had sealed her eyes.  And this was terrible
beyond all.  For as I sat there, the conviction became clearer and
clearer that to put the king to death was crime, a crime she would
have abhorred, a crime which, if he persisted in the doing it, must
sever me from Roger.

"But alas, when Death came, this was all terribly reversed.

"When the feeble voice which had called on the Heavenly King, and the
eyes whose tender smiles for me had changed at the last into the awed
yet joyful intensity of the gaze with which her spirit seemed to
welcome heaven and enter it, the whole unseen world seemed to vanish
from my heart with her, and nothing was left but the eyes which could
never look at me, and the lips which could never speak to me more.

"For this horror I was wholly unprepared.  I thought, when she went,
she would have left me standing, if but for one never-to-be-forgotten
moment, on the threshold of an opened Paradise!  She left me
shivering on the brink of an impenetrable darkness.  I could not feel
even on the brink of an abyss.  To have believed in an abyss even
would have been an infinite relief.  The horror was whether the
darkness hid anything, whether there was a beyond at all.

"Could it be, indeed, that all, absolutely all, any one saw of death
was just the heaving breast, the labouring breath, the few, faint,
intermittent sighs; all which, in all animated creatures, marks the
dissolution of natural life, and nothing to mark the distinctive,
continuing, spiritual life of man?

"Was faith, then, to step so absolutely alone, unlighted by the least
glimmer of the old familiar light, into the unknown?

"No one else around me seemed to experience this terrible darkness.

"They recalled the last words she spoke; they spoke of the pure
raiment, clean and white, in which her spirit was clothed, of the
golden streets she was treading, of the 'harps of God' to which she
was listening.  But the words fell altogether outside me, like some
sweet, pathetic story of faëry or romance, such as she used to tell
me.

"I, too, from my childhood had delighted in those fair pictures of a
Paradise beyond the grave, of the city with gates of moon-like pearl,
and walls of radiant gems; of trees whose leaves were healing and
whose fruit was life; of waters clear as crystal, able to satisfy
immortal thirst.  I had delighted in those pictures, my fancy
floating on them as on the glowing clouds of twilight, caring not to
discriminate what was cloud, what were the bright glorified heights
of earth, and what were heavenly, enduring stars; caring not to
separate symbol from fact.

"But now all this was changed.  What were fair pictures to me,
brought face to face with this visible, terrible fact, that the
spirit which had been my guide before I could remember, that my
mother herself had gone where no cry of passionate entreaty, no
tender ministry of love could reach, no agony of prayer avail to win
the faintest sign that she heard, or cared, or existed?

"A few hours since she had said, 'Throw my warm old mantle round
thee, Lettice, the nights are chill.'  She had taken food from my
hands, and murmured, smiling, 'Once I gave it thee.'  And now the
farthest star that sent the faintest ray from the utmost verge of the
world, was near, compared with the impassable gulf of distance
between her and me.  What were fair visions of angels to me?  What
had they been to the Magdalene of old?  If she lived, she was the
same loving, tender saintly mother still, unlike any one else in the
universe; not a white-robed angel lost in an overwhelming multitude
of other white-robed angels, singing.

"My heart ached, and cried to heaven for one word, one syllable, one
touch, to show that she was there.  Would God give me instead, only
fair pictures of an innumerable multitude far off, serenely singing
as if they had not left any on earth bitterly weeping?

"I scarcely dared to think those thoughts, much less to utter them,
until one day, the dreadful day when we left the house with the
precious burden through which she had been all she was to me, and
returned with nothing, the passion of my grief overcame me.

"Olive and Dr. Antony had left.  Mistress Dorothy was standing on one
side of the fire, in the wainscotted parlour which they had reserved
for me.

"It was not her wont to dwell much on symbols and pictures, whether
painted with words or colours.  And seeing me sit with clasped hands
in a kind of stupor, for I could not weep, she said, not in a tone of
consolation so much as of rebuke,--

"'Child, sorrow not as those without hope.  It is a sin.  Thy mother
is with God.'

"There was something in her words which went more to my heart than
all the tenderest consolations had done.  They did not seem said so
much to comfort me, as simply because they were true.

"'If I could hope, I would not sorrow,' I murmured.

"'There is much reason to hope,' said she.  'Papists even have been
saved, I doubt not, at least before the Reformation.  And Lady Lucy
was not a Papist.  I doubt not that the Spirit of God dwelt in her as
his temple.  The Lord, indeed, of old suffered neither idol nor
trafficker in his temple.  But, mayhap, the traffickers are worse
than the idols.  And, indeed, dear heart,' she concluded, 'I do think
sometimes we Protestants are like the later Jews, if the Papists and
the Papistically inclined are like the earlier.  We have cleared out
the idols; but we keep the tables of the money-changers, mayhap the
basest idolatry of all.'

"She had entirely misunderstood my perplexity.  That she should
imagine my mother's title to blessedness required defence to me,
would have stung me to an indignant reply at other moments; but I was
too cast down to be angry, and I only said,--

"'It is not of my mother I doubt, but of heaven; of everything.  It
seems as if all my old faith had vanished like a dream.'

"I scarcely thought of the weight of my words, until their own echo
startled me; and I trembled at what effect they might have on
Mistress Dorothy.

"But, to my surprise, her first words, spoken as if to herself,
were,--

"'Thank God; the good work has begun.'  Then laying her hand with
unwonted tenderness on mine, she said, 'The tempter is cruel, dear
heart; he is cruel indeed.  But fear not, poor, torn, forsaken lamb.
The eye of the Shepherd is on thee, and none shall pluck thee out of
His hand.  The tempter is cruel, not because he is strong, but
because he is weak; he rages, not because he is victorious, but
because he is vanquished; vanquished on behalf of all the flock,
vanquished for thee, since the Lord is leading thee.  His first
lesson is ever to show the emptiness and the darkness; and He has
shown thee this.  Do not strive to hasten His handiwork by blending
it with thine.  Give thyself up to Him to be poor and blind, to walk
in darkness, to have no light, as long as He wills.  He will lay His
hands on thee when the hour is come.  He has begun, and He will
finish.  But thou must tread this part of the way alone.  Take heed
how, by conferring with flesh and blood, thou break the silence He is
making in thy heart.  Hitherto thou hast been dreaming.  We are near
waking when we dream that we dream."*


* These words are in "Novalis."--Editor.


"And she left me alone.  But although she did not say so, I knew she
would go and wrestle for me alone till I had won the victory.

"There was help in the thought.

"Yet, I could not think she was altogether right.  I could not think
all my former life a dream; that all the prayers which, childish and
weak as they might have been, had helped me to bear painful things
and to do difficult things, were delusions; or that the thoughts I
had had about God's loving-kindness, and the joy in His works, were
unreal fancies, that came not from Him.  I could not give the lie to
all that had been heavenly and holy in my efforts and aspirings.  I
could not draw a sharp border-line between one part of my life and
the other, and say, Beyond that all is heathendom, where no God is;
and here God begins.  It seemed to me either He had been always with
me and was near me now, or all was delusion, and I could never reach
Him.  Besides, it was of my mother my heart was full, not of myself.
And the words of Mistress Dorothy which remained with me were,--

"'Thy mother is with God.'

"They turned the current of my thoughts from the future state to the
Living Presence.  Fancy, being of the brain, lay dumb and motionless,
her fairy wings folded, as I think they ever must be, at the touch of
real sorrow.  Imagination, being of the heart, after vainly striving
to penetrate to the heart of things, sank, dazzled by the
impenetrable darkness, blinded by the ineffectual effort to gaze into
the blank out of which she could avail to shape nothing but emptiness
and darkness, no form and no light,--the bare negation of all she
knew.

"Then Faith, turning away from the sepulchre with its impenetrable
darkness, looked up into heaven, and listening, heard the living
words,--

"'Thy mother is with God.'

"Dust to dust; spirit to Spirit; love to Love; weakness with Power;
the mortal with the Eternal.  The thought did not bring a softening
gush of tenderness, but a solemn repose of awe; a silence, a hush, a
subjection, in which my poor, weary, tossed heart seemed to gather
strength.

"The words were the last with me at night; they made a calm in my
heart, and I slept.  They were the first with me in the morning; and
through the days they rose from my heart like a prayer.

"Strong in that calm, on the Sunday after her chamber had been made
empty, I ventured into it alone, to read the service for the day once
more where I had read it so often to her.  I came to the Apostles'
Creed.  The snow lay on the ground, hushing the earth with a
death-like hush.  All the world, seen and unseen, earth and heaven,
seemed to me full of silence.  I could only think of heaven itself as
a vast snow-white mountain of God, silent and spotless, where the
white-robed angels silently came and went on ministries of mercy, and
the white-robed human creatures neither came nor went, but rested and
adored, absorbed in the unutterable light around them.

"Silence in her death-chamber; silence on the cold snowy earth;
silence in the pure light of heaven; silence in my heart.

"But as I sat there, a little robin came and perched on the snowy
window-sill, turning his quick eyes from side to side, as if looking
for the crumbs my mother never let me forget to scatter for him.
Then he hopped off to a neighboring spray, and poured out a brief
happy carol there, leaving the print of his pretty crimson feet on
the snow.

"The silence of the earth was broken by his song.

"There was still a Master's table from which the crumbs fell for him.

"The silence in my heart was broken by the rush of tearful
recollection his little song had brought, and I wept and sobbed as if
my heart were breaking.  Yet through all I felt it was not breaking,
but being healed, as never before.

"For a word came to me which seemed to change the silence in heaven
and earth into music.

"'I believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only
Son our Lord.'

"The Father and the Son.

"This is the fountain-truth of Christianity.  This is God.  No mere
solitary immutable Unity, but the living, eternal communion of
Eternal Love.  Not merely immutable, incomprehensible Being; but
ever-creating, all-comprehending Life.

"This is Eternal Life; the fruitful source of all life.  This is
Eternal Love, not an attribute without object, but the Father and the
Son eternally loving--the loving rejoicing fountain of all love
sending forth the Spirit of power and love.

"This is heaven.  Where the Father and the Son abide, and the holy
angels and the redeemed: not absorbed in the contemplation of far-off
separate light, but folded into the communion of eternal present
love.  '_That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them
and I in them._'

"God is called the Father, not in condescension to our
understandings, because a human father's love is the best image human
creatures can have of Him, but because He is the eternal Father, and
the love of the Father and the Son is the root and bond of all
creation.

"Heaven is called the Father's house, not because a human home is the
purest picture our poor dim hearts can form of heaven, but because it
is the Father's house--the parent-home and sacred health of the
universe.

"And therefore the immortality of pure human love, of all that is
truly human (not a perversion of original humanity) is ensured not by
an Almighty Fiat, not even fundamentally by the incarnation of the
Son in whom God is manifest to us, but by the very nature of God.

"It was to this love my mother had been taken up, and into the
unutterable fulness of this joy--'My joy'--the joy of the Son.  What
images could be glowing enough to picture it?

"If the heavenly visions of the Apocalypse had been blotted out
to-day, it seemed to me as if they must have sprung up spontaneously
around the Apostles' Creed to-morrow.

"Living fountains of water, trees of life and leaves of healing,
gates of pearl and walls of precious stones, raiment white as the
light, rivers bright as crystal, harpers with the harps of God, songs
like the sound of many waters; the very pavement which the feet of
the 'many sons' were to tread, the sea by which they stood, radiant
with combinations of glory impossible on earth, 'water mingled with
fire,' 'pure gold like transparent glass,'--what are these but faint
pictures in such colors as earth and earth's skies can furnish of the
unutterable joy enshrined in the words, '_I in them, and thou in Me;'
'Thou hast loved them as thou hast loved Me?_'

"I began to understand how my mother could be still _herself_, no
tender touch of the old familiar affection lost, yet full of a joy
which must overflow in the new song.

"For as I listened my heart recognized a distinction in the music.

"Not like an angel's her heart; not like an angel's was her song.

"The pathetic human tone should never vanish from the songs of the
redeemed.  The agony of redemption, the rapture of reconciliation,
should never be forgotten there.

"To all He is the Father of Spirits.  To each of the lost sons He is
the Father who saw him while a great way off and ran and fell on his
neck and kissed him, and said, Rejoice with me, for this my son was
lost and is found.

"To all He is the Eternal Son.  To us He is the Son who became the
Lamb, who bore our sins and carried our sorrows, and redeemed us to
God by His blood.

"I suppose my face shone with something of the joy in my heart, for
Mistress Dorothy said solemnly to me that evening, as she bade me
Good-night in my room, 'Has the tempter departed, and have the angels
come and ministered to thee?'

"Then I told her something of the new light in which the old truths
had come to me in my mother's chamber.  She seemed to take hope
concerning me, but not without fear, and questioned me as to whether
I had experienced this and that, and through what instruments this
deliverance had come.

"I could only say, 'I think it was thou, Mistress Dorothy, and the
Apostles' Creed, and the robin redbreast.'  She looked doubtful.

"'I never heard of any being led in such a way as that,' said she,
'and I cannot quite make it out.  Doubtless, however, the Word of God
is still His Word if it be written on the Pope's mitre, much more in
the Apostles' Creed.  Only be sure it is a Word from Him thou art
resting on.  Nothing else will stand when the heavens and the earth
are shaken.  And as to the robin,' she added, 'no doubt the Almighty
once used ravens; and He might use robins.  I have hope of thee, dear
heart, but I would fain be more assured.  I never heard of any soul
being brought into the fold by such a way before.'

"But do any two wandering souls come back by the same way?

"It seem as if the ways back were countless as the wanderings: the
Door is one, being the One who stands there to let us in.

"Nor am I sure that that was my first coming to the fold.

"It seems to me as life were in some sense one long course of
conversion, one series of translations from darkness to light.  Is
not the sun always converting the sun-flowers by shining on them?

"Once and for ever in one sense; day by day in another.

"It seems to me as if every fresh sorrow or joy opens new depths in
our hearts, which must be filled with fresh springs of the living
water or else become empty and waste; as if every new revelation of
life needs to be met by a new and deeper revelation of God.


"That Sunday, so full of peace to me, was the 28th of January.

"On the 30th the fatal scaffold stood outside the Banqueting Hall,
and the king was led forth to die the death of a malefactor, in the
presence of his people and of all the nations.

"On the evening of the next day the news reached Netherby.

"Mistress Dorothy entered my room after I had laid down to rest.

"'It is done!' she murmured under her breath.  'They have laid their
hands on the Lord's anointed.  The irremediable crime is committed.'
And then, as usual with the Puritans in moments of strong emotion,
falling into Bible language as into a mother-tongue, 'The crown is
fallen from our heads,' she said; 'Woe unto us that we have sinned!'

"I could not speak.

"'Before the windows of his palace!' she continued, 'at mid-day, in
face of heaven and of all the people.'

"'And not a voice to plead for him,' I said; 'not one arm lifted to
rescue!'

"'Of what avail? the Ironsides were there,' she replied bitterly.
'They girded the scaffold like a wall of brass.  They would not
suffer the poor people to come near enough to listen to a word from
the dying lips of their king.'

"My eyes met hers.

"'The Ironsides were there!' it was all I could say or think.  For
before me rose the figure of Roger Drayton on horseback amongst his
men, stern and motionless, his soul masked in iron more rigid than
his armour, not suffering the grief and pity at his heart to relax
one muscle of the rigid resolution of his face.

"And between him and me for ever that scaffold and the shrouded
corpse of the martyred king!

"I had, as it were, been living in heaven with her who was at rest
there; and now the words came to me with a terrible desolation, 'I am
no more in the world, _but these are in the world_.'  Around her,
rest, and peace, and songs of joy.  Around me crime, and separation,
and the terrible necessity to resolve.

"Mistress Dorothy spoke again, and her voice trembled,--

"'This is no longer a home for thee or for me, dear heart.  I feared
that thy joy had been sent thee to arm thee for some uncommon woe!'

"'No more a home for me, indeed,' I said; 'but how no longer for
thee?'

"'I told my brother long since that if ever this crime was
consummated, and neither he nor Roger lifted up their voices against
it, I could not sleep another night under his roof, lest I should
seem to embrue my hands in sacred blood.  It is not for us to be like
Pilate, languidly washing our hands of the crime we or ours might
have averted.'

"'But whither will you flee?' I said.

"'I have a small tenement at Kidderminster, where godly Mr. Baxter
dwelleth, a man who is as true to his king as to his God.  There, if
thou wilt, shall be a shelter for thee and me.  It will be no palace,
but the best I have shall be thine; and with Mr. Baxter's ministry
that may suffice us both.'

"The generous offer touched me; but I felt that my father's home was
the only one for me, now that Roger's way and mine must part for ever.

"She shook her head when I said so.

"'Thy father is among papists and idolaters,' she replied.  'It is
written, "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy
of me."'

"'If my father is in a place of peril,' I said, 'all the more my
place is by his side.'

"She was silent some minutes; her eyes cast down, her lips set, and
her hands grasping each other.

"'Child, thou art right.  The heart is deceitful above all things.  I
thought I was pleading for God, and I was pleading for myself.  I
will take thee to thy refuge in France, and then I will go to my
house alone.  Canst thou be ready by to-morrow?  I have vowed never
to sleep nor to break bread under this roof again.'

"'The sooner the better,' I said; for I felt as if nothing but the
overhanging shadow of that dreadful scaffold could strengthen me for
the sacrifice.  I dreaded lest time might make the treason against
the king sink in my eyes into a mere political error, and my own
departure seem more and more like a treason against those to whom I
owed so much, and whom I loved so well.

"I spent the night, under Mistress Dorothy's direction, in packing
the few things I might carry with me.

"In the morning, when Mr. Drayton's step was first heard on the
stairs, Mistress Dorothy went out and followed him into his room
below.  For a few moments they were alone; then I heard her step
re-ascending the stairs.  It was not brisk, as was her wont, but
slow, like the tread of an aged person.  She re-entered the chamber,
looking very white.

"'It is settled, child,' she said.  'My brother will not hinder us.'

"She would not be present at the family-prayer that morning, nor at
breakfast, true to her vow.

"Immediately afterwards, Mr. Drayton requested an interview with me
in his room.

"'My child,' he said, laying his hand on my shoulder, 'conscience is
sacred.  Are you sure that in this deed you are obeying, not my
sister's conscience, nor even your mother's, but your own?'

"The question opened a labyrinth I could not disentangle.

"'It is so difficult to tell what is our own and what we inherit,' I
said.  'My mother was my conscience, and I believe I am doing what
she would have desired.  Politics she said women must leave to men.
But loyalty was like religion or affection.  To the king every
subject is personally related as to a parent or to God.  That is what
she believed and I believe.  I dare not debate with myself.  I dare
not reason about what I feel to be a crime, or remain with those who
sanction it.  I dare not, Mr. Drayton, trust myself any longer to all
that tempts me to stay.'

"He walked up and down the room once or twice with hasty steps.

"'Then, my child,' he said at length, 'neither dare I debate with
thee nor hinder thee.  I have loved thee as I love Olive, and hoped
to have a right to call by a name as dear.  But if thou wilt go, God
forbid I should make my house a prison.  By noon, an escort shall be
ready to convey thee and my sister to the coast.'

"He was as good as his word.  By noon we had left the old house.  By
the morrow we were on the sea on our way to France.

"In the dusk, before we sailed, a boat came to the ship's side, and a
tall, muffled figure sprang on board.  Of what happened, from the
time the vessel began to toss on the short waves, I knew not much,
buried in cushions among the luggage.  But when the French coast was
within reach, and we were waiting for the tide to enter the harbour
of Calais, there was some little stir about a boat putting off from
the ship; and as I lay gazing towards the harbour, I saw this boat
struggle through the breakers to a point of rock, where one of the
crew sprang on shore.

"The next morning we landed.  We were met by the keeper of a
hostelry, who courteously told us that our apartments were ready.
And on the morrow, as I was sitting alone after breakfast, whilst
Mistress Dorothy had gone to make preparation for our journey, there
was a clatter of a horse's feet in the court-yard, and in a few
minutes my father strode into the room and bade me welcome.

"'But by what miracle, father, couldst thou know we were here,' I
said; as soon as I could speak for his kisses and my tears.

"'Didst thou not know?  No miracle; only Roger Drayton riding through
the night to tell me.'

"It was Roger, then, who had crept on board in the dusk, whose boat I
had watched struggling through the breakers to the coast.  And I
dared not trust myself to ask where he was or when he would depart!

"'A brave and gallant gentleman he is,' said my father; 'a thousand
pities such should lend their swords to traitors.'

"Then I began to tell him of all Mr. Drayton's goodness, and how
Mistress Dorothy had undertaken the voyage in her motherly care of me.

"At that moment she re-appeared, and my father poured out his thanks.

"But she was very reserved and grave.

"'Sir Walter,' she said, at last.  'Little thanks I deserve for
bringing this innocent lamb hither.  I have seen awful things to-day.
At the door of a church I saw a number of frightful images in a cage,
standing in painted flames, and stretching out their hands through
the bars, begging for money to buy them out of torment.  And while I
was looking on this, a procession of boys and men, in white clothes,
passed me, bearing aloft something under a canopy, and wherever it
came the people fell on their knees and worshipped.  I asked a
sober-looking woman what it was, and as far as I could understand she
said it was "our Lord."  They thought they were carrying God.  I had
heard much of Papistry, but I had not thought to come to places like
Gaza and Ashdod almost within sight of England.'

"'It was the Host, good mistress Dorothy,' replied my father,
explanatorily; 'the Holy Sacrament.  Doubtless there is superstition
in their reverence.  But I must not forget my message from your
nephew.  Roger Drayton desires to know whether you will be ready to
sail under his care to-night.'

Mistress Dorothy gave a questioning glance at me, and hesitated.

"'Let us persuade you,' my father said, 'to tarry awhile with us.'

"'God forbid, Sir Walter,' she replied, 'that I should tarry a night
longer than I need, among these Philistines.  And God forgive me,'
she added solemnly, 'for bringing this lamb of the flock among them.'

"'Must I then tell Mr. Drayton you will accompany him?'

"Mistress Dorothy hesitated again.

"'It is a sore perplexity,' she said, at last, 'to have to choose
between this land of idolaters and the company of those who, kith and
kin of mine though they be, have embrued their hands in sacred,
though I may not say innocent blood.'

"'Had Roger Drayton aught to do with that monstrous iniquity?' my
father exclaimed fiercely.

"'Alas, was he not one of General Cromwell's Ironsides?' replied
Mistress Dorothy.  'The heart of youth is too easily misguided.'

"'Ay,' said my father, with a strong Cavalier oath, 'and woe to those
who misguided them--the quiet and sober Presbyterians and
Parliamentarians, who made a breach in the dykes, and now wonder to
see the country flooded by the ocean.'

"Again Mistress Dorothy had to lift up her voice in testimony; and in
the midst of it Roger Drayton entered.  The three chief elements of
the civil war were comprised in the little English company gathered
in the chamber of that Calais hostelry.

"My father, sorely irritated by what he considered Mistress Dorothy's
Puritanical cant, lost all control of his temper.  There were high
and fierce words; and bitter epithets were freely exchanged.  I only
remember that in the end Mistress Dorothy, after embracing me with
many a warning word, decided to depart with Roger, and that
throughout it all Roger said not one intemperate or uncourteous word,
bitterly as my father assailed him and those whose honour was dear to
him as his own.

"When Mistress Dorothy and Roger had left, my father, after some
rapid pacings of the room, and some severe soliloquising on the state
of England, gradually become cooler, and then his courtesy returning
he said,--

"'Ungracious return I have made for their generous kindness to you,
Lettice; stay, and make ready for the journey, while I go and see if
I can do anything for that fiery old lady.  It would disgrace us if
she were not well-sped on her homeward way.  And I know the
outlandish ways of this place better than they do.'

"I went to the window, saw him join them, watched them cross the
court, and then sank down in a chair and hid my face in my hands, and
was weeping vain and hopeless tears when the door of the room opened
gently, with the quiet words, in Roger's voice,--

"'My aunt left her mantle.'

"I rose and he came to my side.

"'I had not meant this, Lettice,' he said, 'yet you need not have
fled without one farewell.  Your convictions are as sacred to me as
yourself.'

"'I knew it,' I said, scarcely knowing what I said.  'I was not
afraid of you but of myself.'

"'Lettice,' he said, 'it cannot be always so.  It is impossible that
such a difference can separate us forever.  I must hope.  If, as I
trust, General Cromwell saves our England and makes her noble and
great as ever she was before, say I may hope.'

"'What can I hope?' I said.  'Can I believe a thing a crime, and look
forward to not always so believing it?  Right and wrong are right and
wrong for ever.'

"I think I never saw on his face such a look as then.  Reverence, and
honour, and love, and grief.  I shall never see such a look on any
face again.  But he only said very softly,--

"'And love is love for ever.'

"There was a faltering in his tone which made it like an appeal, and
I answered,--

"'For ever!'

"He wrung my hand once and was gone.

"I scarcely know if after all I should not have called him back, but
for the memory of that look.

"Better to be separated from him all my life than to be dethroned
from his heart by one wavering or unworthy thought or word.  Yet even
that dread scaffold seems sometimes a shadowy ghost to part love like
ours.  I would (at times) it were some plain, homely woman's duty
that separated us instead.  Then there might be heart-breaking, but
scarcely this heavy mist of perplexity and doubt.

"I have to say to myself again and again, as if the words were a
spell,--

"'It is not politics that part us, but right and wrong; what my
mother would surely have deemed a monstrous crime.  And dare I deem
it less?'"




CHAPTER II.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

The next morning, the 31st January, the nation awoke a Republic.  The
king had died "a traitor" (they said) "to the nation;" and in the
space before his scaffold it had been proclaimed, that whoever
presumed to call his son, Charles Stuart, king, was a traitor to the
Commonwealth.  It was a strange, dreary dawning.  As I opened my
casement and looked across the black frozen river to London Bridge,
with its "Traitor's Gate" and the towers of Southwark rising above
from the marshy flats beyond, to the one long cold bar of brazen
light which parted the dark clouds on the horizon from the heavy
vault of snowclouds above, everything seemed hard and metallic--the
heavens "iron and brass," the waters steel, the earth and her living
creatures motionless, rigid, as if turned to stone.

What kind of a day was this to be?  The king was dead; though the
remains of the Westminster Assembly, and many of the Independent
ministers, and well-nigh all the Parliament had protested against his
execution, and well-nigh all the nation bewailed him.  The king was
dead.  What authority had sentenced him? and what power was to rule
in his place?  Half, at least, of the nation looked on his death as a
murder--but there was to be no mourning; the rest, as the terrible
but victorious close of a terrible conflict--but there was to be no
triumph.

No funeral pomp was to darken the streets that day, as for a king
slain.  No triumphal procession was to make them festive, as for an
enemy vanquished.  It was to be a day without mark or sign; and yet
since England was first one nation surely such a day had never dawned
on her.  "The first day of freedom, by God's blessing restored," said
the Commonwealth coins; the first day of England's widowhood, said
the Royalists, widowed and orphaned at one blow.

Yet there was no disorder, no interruption of employment.  The sounds
of day began to awake in the busy city, the cries of countrymen
bringing their vegetables from the fields, the ringing of the hammer
on a forge near our house, the calls of the bargemen and boatmen
locked in by the ice; and then, as the day went on, all distinction
of sound lost in the general hum, like the sound of many waters,
which marks that a great city is awake and at work.

Looking westward, I could see the gardener sweeping the snow from the
walks in the gardens behind Whitehall, as if no terrible black
scaffold had that day to be taken down in front.

Yet, I suppose, in well-nigh every heart, man or woman's, in London
that morning, the first conscious thought was, "the king is dead;"
all the more because there were few lips that would have uttered the
words.

"What are we to do to-day, Leonard?" I said, when we had breakfasted.

"Do! dear heart," quoth he; "it is not thy wont to need thy day's
tasks set thee by any."

"Nay; but to-day seems like a work-day with out work, and a Sabbath
without services," I said.

"There will be a service," he replied.  "The great Dr. Owen is to
preach before the Parliament in St. Margaret's Church."

"The Parliament!" I said; thinking pitifully of the fifty members who
still bore the name.

"You scarcely recognize the Rump as the Parliament," he said,
answering my tone rather than my words.

"I scarce know what to recognize or reverence," I said.  "I was wont
in the old days at Netherby to think I had politics of my own, and
would have belonged to the country party by free choice, if all
around me had deserted it.  But since our own people have split and
divided into so many sections, I begin to fear, after all, it was
nought but a young maid's conceit in me to think I had any
convictions of my own.  Aunt Dorothy and the Presbyterians think the
killing of the king a great crime; my father and the old
Parliamentarians think the forcible purging of the Parliament a
manifest tyranny; Roger and the army think these things but the
necessary violence to introduce the new reign of justice and freedom.
But I know not what to believe, or whom to follow.  What is to come
next?  Who are to rule us?  We must have some to honour and obey; if
not the king, and if not the Parliament, then whom?"

"Sweet heart," said he, "if the government of the three kingdoms has
been resting on thy shoulders, no wonder thou art cast down and
weary.  But thou and I are among the multitude who are to be
governed, not among the few who govern.  Let us be thankful, as good
Mr. Baxter saith, for any government which suffers people to be as
good as they are willing to be.  And let us be willing to be as good
as we can.  That will give us enough to do."

"But," I said, "all these years we have been learning that the
country is as a great mother who demands fidelity from her most
insignificant child; that Liberty is no mere empty name for
schoolboys to make orations about, and Law no mere confused heap of
technicalities for lawyers to disentangle, but simple sacred
realities mothers are to teach their children to reverence; that the
glory and safety of a nation depends on their political rights being
sacred household words.  We have been taught to look to Jewish and
Roman matrons as our examples.  Are we to unlearn all this now, and
go back to the old saws we have been taught to think selfish and
base; that politics are to be left to rulers, and laws to lawyers,
and our liberties and rights to whoever will defend or trample on
them?"

"Not go back, I think," he said gently, looking a little surprised at
my vehemence; "only go deeper.  Some precious rights, I believe, have
been won.  Let us use them.  That is the best way to secure them.  We
are free to do what good we can, to unloose what burdens, and to hear
and speak what good words we will.  Let us use our freedom.  No one
can say how long it may last.  This morning I must go to visit
Newgate, and other gaols, in which there has been much sickness.  For
although the prisons are no longer filled by the Star Chamber, or the
High Commission, they are unhappily still kept too well supplied by a
tyrant more ancient and more universal than these.  Moreover, Olive,"
he added, "there is still one sect not tolerated.  The number of the
imprisoned Quakers is increasing; and in Newgate there is one poor
Quaker maiden whom I think thou mightest succour.  A few days since
thou wert desiring a maiden to wait on the babe.  This Quaker maiden
is a composed and gentle creature, and with kind treatment, such as
she would have from thee, might, I think, be led into ways which seem
to us more sober and rational."

My husband's words opened a prospect of abundant work before me.
Already we had four washing-women of four different unpopular
persuasions.

And I would have preferred choosing a nurse for the babe, on account
of her qualities as a serving-wench, rather than as a Confessor.
Moreover, what he intended to be re-assuring in his description,
alarmed me rather the more.  For of all fanatics, I have found gentle
fanatics the most incorrigible, and of all wilful persons, these
whenever "discompose" themselves, or put themselves wrong by losing
their tempers, are certainly the most immovable.  However, I
repressed such selfish fears as quite unworthy of Leonard Antony's
wife.  And, accordingly, when he returned from the gaol, I was quite
prepared to welcome the Quaker.  And so I told him as we joined the
sober throng who were going to hear Dr Owen preach at "Margaret's"
before the Parliament.

A scanty Parliament indeed!  No Lords, and about fifty Commons; and
among them scarce one of those whose words and deeds had made its
early years so strong and glorious.

Hampden lay among his forefathers in the church of Great Hampden; Pym
among the kings in Westminster Abbey.  Denzil Hollis and Haselrigge
had been expelled from it; old Mr. Prynne, who had been liberated by
its first act, had vehemently denounced its last; even the young Sir
Harry Vane had for the time deserted its austere counsels.

Nevertheless the congregation was great and grave.  And when Dr. Owen
spoke, he led our thoughts at once to spheres compared with whose
sublime chronology the length of the longest Parliament is indeed but
as a moment.  He came of an ancient Welsh ancestry; his bearing had a
courtly grace; his tall and stately figure had the ease and vigor of
one used to manly exercises; his voice was well-tuned, as the tones
of one who loved music as he did should be; his eyes were dark and
keen.

To the death of the king on that dreadful yesterday he barely
alluded.  There was neither regret nor triumph in his discourse.  His
exhortations were addressed not to the vanquished, but to the
victorious party.  If he alluded at all to the oppressions and vices
of the late government, it was in order to conjure those now in power
not to tread in their steps.  His text was: "Let them return unto
thee; but return not thou unto them.  And I will make thee unto this
people a fenced brazen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but
they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee
and to deliver thee, saith the Lord."

God's judgments, he said, are a flaming sword turning every way.  Not
in one of these ways, but in all, He resists those who resist them.
"How do we spend our thoughts to extricate ourselves from our present
pressures!  If this hedge, this pit were passed, we should have
smooth ground to walk on; not considering that God can fill our
safest paths with snares and serpents.  Give us peace; give us
wealth; give us to be as we were, with our own, in quietness.  Poor
creatures! suppose all these designs were in sincerity; yet if peace
were, and wealth were, and God were not, what would it avail you?  In
vain do you seek to stop the streams while the fountains are open;
turn yourselves whither you will, bring yourselves into what
condition you can, nothing but peace and reconciliation with the God
of all these judgments can give you rest in the day of visitation.
You see what variety of plagues are in His hand.  Changing of
condition will do no more to the avoiding of them, than a sick man
turning himself from one side of the bed to another; during his
turning he forgets his pain by striving to move; being laid down
again he finds his condition the same as before.

"It was nothing new," he said, "for the instruments of God's greatest
works to be the deepest objects of a professing people's cursings and
revilings.  _Men that under God deliver a kingdom may have the
kingdom's curses for their pains_.

"Moses was rewarded for the deliverance of Israel from Korah by being
told 'ye have killed the Lord's people.'  Man's condemnation and
God's absolution do not seldom meet on the same person for the same
things.  '_Bonus vir Caius Sejanus, sed malus quia Christianus_.'
What precious men should many be, would they let go the work of God
in their generation!

"Yet be tender towards fainters in difficult seasons.  God's
righteousness, His kindness, is like a great mountain easy to be
seen.  His judgments are like a great deep.  Who can look into the
bottom of the sea, or know what is done in the depths thereof?  When
first the confederacy was entered into by the Protestant princes
against Charles V., Luther himself was bewildered.

"It is by a small handful, a few single persons--a Moses, a Samuel,
two witnesses--He ofttimes opposes the rage of a hardened multitude.
His judgments ofttimes are the giving up of a sinful people to a
fruitless contending with their own deliverers, if ever they be
delivered.  God, indeed, cannot be the author of sin, for He can be
the author of nothing but what hath being in itself (for He works as
the fountain of beings).  This sin hath not.  It is an aberration.
Man writes fair letters upon a wet paper, and they run all into one
blot; not the skill of the scribe, but the defect in the paper, is
the cause of the deformity.  The first cause is the proper cause of a
thing's being; but the second of its being evil."  Not, I understood
him to mean, that sin is natural, but that the faculties of nature
are perverted.

Then he fervently warned against fear of man, covetousness, ambition;
against turning to "such ways as God hath blasted before our eyes,
oppression, self-seeking, persecution."

And at the close he said, "All you that are the Lord's workmen, be
always prepared for a storm.  Be prepared.  The wind blows; a storm
may come."

Opinions about the sermon were various.  On the whole I think it was
hardly popular.  Some said it was pitiless, that the harshest of his
enemies would not have grudged one generous word for the fallen king.
Others deemed it half-hearted, and declared that if John Knox, or one
of the mighty men of old, had been in the pulpit, they would have
made all true hearts thrill, and all false hearts tremble at the
sentence of terrible justice just executed.

"What was thy mind about it, Olive?" my husband asked, when he, and
Roger, and I had returned to the quiet of our little garden-parlor.

"I thought Dr. Owen very wise," I said, "in that he directed his
discourse to those who were there to hear.  I never could see the
profit of denunciations of Popery addressed to those who hate it
enough already; or of arguments addressed to Arminians who are not
present to be crushed; or of railing at people who will not come to
church, for the edification of those who do.  It set me questioning
myself whether God is indeed at work among us, and praying that if He
is, none of us may mistake His hand."

"May it but have set every heart on the same questioning!" said
Roger.  "How can any call those words of Dr. Owen's an uncertain
sound?" he added.  "To me every tone was as clear as the
trumpet-signals before a battle.  God has sent you deliverance, has
sent you a deliverer, he seemed to me to say, as Moses to Israel in
bondage, as Luther to the Church in bondage.  All depends on whether
we acknowledge him--not, indeed, as to the Promised Land being
reached at last, but everything as to when it is reached, everything
as to our reaching it at all.  Events seem to me constantly saying to
us, '_If ye will receive it, this is Elias which was for to come_.'"

The revenges of the Commonwealth were few.  Three Royalist noblemen
beheaded without torture or insult in Palace Yard.  As far as Oliver
Cromwell's rule extended there was not one barbarous execution.
Baiting was not a sport he encouraged, whether of bulls and bears or
of men.

During the ten years of the Commonwealth, the pillory, the
whipping-post, the torture-chamber, were scarcely once used, and not
one Englishman suffered the savage punishment awarded to traitors.

It was difficult to see what most men had to complain of.  Good men
of every party but one, the Royalist Episcopal, were encouraged.

Nevertheless, from every party rose murmurs of discontent.  Before
the king had been executed four months, General Cromwell had to
subdue opposition in the Parliament, the city, among the peasantry,
in the army itself.

Roger grieved sorely at what he deemed the blindness of the people.

Mr. Baxter preached and wrote against General Cromwell and his
measures, at Kidderminster, to Aunt Dorothy's heart's content,
propounding twenty unanswerable queries to show why none should take
the "Engagement to the Commonwealth now established without King or
Lords," and having in reserve twenty other queries equally
unanswerable.

Colonel Hutchinson, the Republican, forbore not to exhort and rebuke
him, seeing, as Mistress Lucy, his stately wife, said, how "ambition
had ulcerated his heart."

Colonel Rich, Commissary Staines, and Watson, made a design on his
life.  The Council would have punished, but the General pardoned
them.  Men in general were indeed moved by such generosity.  But it
could not "blind" the penetrating eyes of Mistress Lucy Hutchinson,
or of Mr. Baxter.  If Oliver did magnanimous deeds in public, it was
"to court popularity;" if little kindly acts in private, it was "to
cajole weak members."  If his plans succeeded, it was a "favor of
fortune."  If his enemies were vanquished, it was because they were
"slaves or puppets," whom he, with marvelous prescience, had "tempted
to oppose him for the easy glory of knocking them down."  If he
pleaded with almost a tearful tenderness against the coldness of old
friends, it was "dissimulation;" if he sought to approve himself to
good men, it was "because his own conscience was uneasy."  If he
disregarded their opinions, it was because he was "inflated with
pride, or hardened to destruction."

Yet Roger thought much of this misapprehension would pass away.  It
was, he hoped, but the dimness natural to the twilight of this new
dawn.

The greatest dangers to the new liberty, he thought, were from the
hopes which it had created.

The first time this danger opened on me was from a conversation
between Job Forster and Annis Nye.

The gentle Quaker maiden had been installed for some weeks as the
nurse of baby Magdalene, who seemed to find a soothing spell in her
still serene face, and quiet even voice.

As yet, no unusual or alarming symptoms had appeared in Annis,
nothing to indicate her being capable of the offence for which it was
said she had been cast into prison, which was that, one Sunday, she
had confronted a well-known Presbyterian minister in his pulpit, at
the conclusion of a sermon against "the Papal and Prelatical
Antichrist" and in a calm and deliberate voice had denounced him in
face of the indignant congregation as himself a "false priest,"
"hireling shepherd," and "minister of Antichrist."

Yet there was something in her different from any one I had yet seen.
You could by no means be always sure of her responding to converse on
good things; but when she did, it was like some one listening to a
far-off heavenly voice and echoing it, and very beautiful often were
the things she said.

Her neglect of ordinary gestures and titles of respect seemed in no
way disrespectful in her.  "Olive Antony" and "Leonard Antony" from
her soft voice had more honour in them than titles at every breath
from ordinary people, and when she called us "thou" and "thee," even
the bad grammar which accompanied the custom had a kind of quaint
grace from her lips.  If asked her reasons for these customs she gave
them.  These customs were false, she said; a hollow compliance with
the hollow world.  The honour was rendered universally, and therefore
insincerely; and to call a single person "you" was an untruth which
"led to great depravation of manners."  Having given these reasons,
she never debated the point further; they satisfied her; if they did
not satisfy you, she could not help it.

Occasionally there was inconvenience arising from the difficulty of
knowing when any command might cross the non-observances she held
sacred.  Nevertheless, her presence had a kind of hallowing calm in
it which compensated for much.

My husband had sympathy with her sect on account of their large
thoughts of the love of God to mankind.  And he said we ought to wait
to see what portion of divine truth or church history it had been
given to the Quakers to unfold, he sharing Mr. Milton's belief, that
truth is found on earth but in fragments either in the world or the
church.  So, for the sake of my husband, and the free development of
church history, and a growing love to the maid, I continued to accept
from Annis such services as her conscience permitted, and to make up
the deficiencies myself.

Job Forster, who, for Rachel's sake, had much reverence for feminine
judgment, had frequent converse with Annis when he came to solace
himself with our little Magdalene.  For between him and the babe
there was the fullest confidence and love, the little one never
seeming more at home than in his brawny arms.

Job thought Annis "a woman of an understanding heart," and had hopes
of reclaiming her from the error of her way.  He did not for a long
time discover that Annis was the most patient of listeners to his
arguments simply as the Cornish cliffs are patient with the beat of
the waves; and that when she "dealt softly" with him, it was not
because she was convinced by his reasoning, but because she
compassionated his blindness.

It was, therefore, with some surprise that I found him one April
evening in 1649 listening with indignant gesticulations to Annis, as
she stood, with clasped hands and eyes looking dreamily forward,
repeating in a low monotonous voice, like a chant, the words,--

"Woe unto those that build with untempered mortar!  Woe unto those
that would build the temple of the Lord with the dust of the
battle-field!  Woe to those who run to and fro and cry, Lo here! and
Lo there!  The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, not with
observation.  The kingdom of God is within you, within you, within!"

Her voice died away into a sigh, and I confess it moved me not a
little.

But Job, on whom the words came in the heat of debate, was by no
means calmed thereby.

"It is no fair fight, Mistress Olive," he said, appealing to me; "she
does not know when she is beaten.  Only yesterday, she quite gave in,
and had never a word to say, and to-day it's all to be begun over
again.  It's them poor honest fellows down in Surrey she means, and
it's a sin to cast up all those Bible texts at them as if they were
blinded persecutors, instead of poor true men striving to hasten the
coming of the Kingdom.  Mistress Annis," he concluded, for there was
something in her which compelled from others the titles she refused
to any, "did I not give you chapter and verse until you had never a
word to gainsay?  Is it not written so plain, that he who runs may
read, that the Jews are to go in and possess the land, and did I not
show thee that the Saxons are the lost tribes, the descendants of the
Jews?"

But Annis had meekly resumed her knitting, and simply said,--

"A concern was upon my spirit regarding thee.  I have spoken; the
rest belongs not to me.  There is the Power and the Anointing.  But
these are not with me."  And she relapsed into silence.

"That is her way, Mistress Olive," exclaimed Job, much ruffled.  "You
shall be judge if any rational discourse can proceed on such
principles.  You bring forth Scripture enough to silence a council of
rabbis--to say nothing of reasons.  She listens as patient as a lamb,
has not a word to answer--and this is the end."

Annis made no defence, she only said,--

"I had hopes, Job Forster, thee had been reached.  But it seemeth
otherwise."

For if Annis heeded not the arguments of others, neither did she rely
on her own.  Her confidence was not on the power of her words, but on
the Power in and with them.  But this Job did not perceive.

"Reached!" he exclaimed, looking hopelessly at me.  "She speaks of me
as if I were a babe in swaddling-clothes; and I old enough to be her
grandfather."

"What was the matter in debate?" I asked.

"There was no debate!" said Job, still agitated.  "Debates are only
possible with people who are amenable to Scripture and reason.  I was
but speaking of the peasants at St. Margaret's Hill in Surrey, and
the great work they are beginning there."

"What great work?  Is there some great preacher risen among them?" I
asked, thinking he meant some great work of conversion.

"There is a prophet among them, mistress," said Job solemnly, "by
name Everard, once in the army.  The work may seem small to the eye
of flesh.  As yet they are but thirty.  But the Apostles were but
twelve.  And soon they may be thousands."

"But what is the work?" I said.

"Simple work enough," he replied mysteriously.  "They began with
digging the ground, and sowing beans therein."

"Surely none will gainsay them," I said, "if it is their own ground
they are digging.  But what is to come of beans except the
bean-stalks?"

"It is not exactly their own ground," Job replied; "it is
common-ground.  And they invite all men to come and help them to make
the barren land fruitful, and to restore the ancient community of the
fruits of the earth, to distribute to the poor and needy, and to
clothe the naked.  Gospel words, Mistress Olive, and gospel deeds,
let the Justices say what they may."

"The Justices interfered, then?" I said.

"Doubtless," he replied.  "Justices do, in all the books of the
martyrs I ever read.  Justices are a stiff-necked race."

"And so it ended?" I said.

"So it began, Mistress Olive," Job replied mysteriously.  "The
country-people also were blinded, and two troops of horse were sent
against them.  They were brought before General Fairfax.  Master
Everard spoke up to him like a lion, and told him how the Saxon
people were of the race of the Jews, how all the liberties of the
people were lost by the coming of William the Conqueror, and how,
ever since, the people of God had lived under tyranny worse than
their forefathers in Egypt.  But that now the time of deliverance was
come, and there had appeared to him a vision, saying, Arise, dig and
plough the earth, and receive the fruits thereof, and restore the
creation to its state before the curse."

"What does General Cromwell say?" I asked.

"He has not yet got the light," replied Job.  "But his eyes will be
opened, for he is of them that sigh and cry for the iniquities of the
land.  The light must be flashed a little stronger in his face, and
he will see."

"But the General is taking away oppression; he has destroyed
slavery," I said.  "And there are so many curses, Job, besides the
thistles and thorns.  Yet even our Lord took them not away.  How can
these thirty countrymen hope to do it by sowing beans in the Surrey
commons?  Our Lord did not take hard things away.  He changed them
into blessings.  The sweat of the brow, the thistles and all; even
death."

"That is what I was trying to explain to Mistress Annis," replied
Job.  "There are the Two Kingdoms.  One cometh not with observation;
the other cometh like the lightning which lighteneth from one end of
heaven to the other."

"But I do not see how digging up the Surrey sand-hills is like
either," I said.

"No," said Job, shaking his head pitifully; "I daresay not, Mistress
Olive.  Others must do their part of the work first.  There are the
'men as trees walking' and there is the 'shining more and more.'  But
I did think Mistress Annis would have had understanding.  For these
country folk were like to those she calls Friends.  They would not
take arms to defend themselves against the powers that be, but would
wait and submit.  And when asked why they did not take off their hats
to General Fairfax, they said, Because he was their fellow-creature."

But not even this orthodoxy as to "hat-honour" moved Annis.

"Not with observation," she said; "not in bean fields, nor
battle-fields, nor in king's palaces.  Within you--within!"

Job rose, and gently laying little Magdalene in my arms, took his
hat, and went away without further farewell.

"She will not see the Two Kingdoms," he murmured.  "This generation
will have to be roused by louder voices.  The foxes must be hunted
with beagles of other make.  Those who will not wake at the lark's
singing will be startled when the trumpet peals.  Five Monarchies,"
he added, turning to us from the threshold; "Two Kingdoms and Five
Monarchies.  Four have been, and are not.  One is yet to come; cut
out of the mountain without hands--to crush the remnants of the four
and fill the world.  Take heed that ye fail not of the signs of its
coming."

Job's words made me uneasy.  They seemed to betray a subterranean
fire of wild hopes, and wild distrusts, and tumultuous purposes,
which might burst up beneath our feet any day anywhere is a volcano
of wilder deeds.

"What does Job mean," I said to my husband afterwards, "by his Fifth
Monarchy and his Kingdom coming like the lightning, and his 'beagles
to hunt foxes'?"

"He means precisely what is endangering the Commonwealth most of all
at this moment," my husband said.  "So many evils have been removed,
that sanguine men think it is nothing but faint-heartedness in the
leaders which suffers any to remain.  Now that the Star Chamber and
the persecutions are suppressed, they seem to think it is only
Cromwell's half-heartedness that prevents the devil being suppressed
also, instantly, with all his works.  Now that fines and persecutions
are swept away, and the laws which sanctioned them, and the men who
made the laws; what, they think, is to hinder poverty being swept
away, and unaccountable inequalities of station, and avarice, and
luxury, and waste, and want, and all the old tangle of too much toil
for some and too much idleness for others?  But we must see after
this.  There are mischief-makers abroad.  'Free-born John Lilburn' is
scattering fire-brands from his prison in the Tower, about England's
'new chains;' and we must not suffer Job Forster to be among his
victims.  To-morrow we will tell Roger of the danger, that he may
counsel Job."

But on the morrow it was too late.  In the night (the 23th of April)
there was much stir in the city; sudden sharp alarms of trumpet and
drum, and galloping to and fro of horsemen, not on parade.

A troop of Whalley's regiment, quartered at the Bull Inn, Bishopsgate
mutinied; why, it was not clear, but with some vague intention of
bringing in swiftly the thousand years of liberty and universal
happiness.

General Cromwell and Lord Fairfax extinguished the fire for the time.
Five ringleaders were seized and condemned, and out of them one,
Sergeant Lockyer, was shot the next day in St. Paul's Churchyard.

They were practical times.  It mattered very much what people's
opinions were about prophecy, when they expressed them by
insurrections and mutinies.

But, naturally, executions did not alter the convictions of the
people who believed the prophets.

Of all the assemblies the old church and the houses round the
churchyard had witnessed, I think there had scarce been a sadder than
when young Trooper Lockyer was led out there to die.  No crime was
laid to his charge, but this unpardonable military crime of mutiny.
He was but twenty-three.  At sixteen he had joined the army of
freedom, and had fought bravely in it seven years.  Blameless and
brave, all the fervour of his early manhood had burnt pure in
aspirations for a Kingdom of God on earth, a free and holy nation,
where the poor and needy should be judged and saved, and deceit and
violence should cease, and the oppressor should be broken in pieces.
And thousands with him had prayed for it by the camp fires at night,
and had fought for it on many battle-fields by day for seven years.
And the poor and needy had been saved, and deceit and violence
avenged, and many oppressors broken in pieces.  The Bible had
promised it, and with prayers and strong right arms they, the army of
freedom, had done it.  But the Bible promised more.  One set of
workers after another had been set aside, they thought, "as doing the
work of the Lord deceitfully."  They were prepared to do it
thoroughly--to pray and fight on till every wrong in England was
redressed, and every chain, new and old, was broken, till every
valley should be exalted, and every mountain and hill should be laid
low, when avarice with its base hoards of gold, and ambition with its
lordly palaces, should vanish, and every home in England should be a
home of plenty and of well-rewarded toil; the praises of God going up
from every holy city and happy hill-side through the land, till the
whole earth stopped to listen, and the thousand years of the better
Eden began.

And for hopes such as these young Trooper Lockyer was led out to die;
for carrying out a little too swiftly what all Christian men hoped to
see; for "doing the Lord's work," "not deceitfully," but too hastily,
at the wrong time, and not altogether in the right way.

There was nothing new to him in facing death.  He stood to receive
the fatal volley; and when he fell, the great crowd of men and women
broke into bitter weeping and bewailed him.

That Saturday and Sunday were sad days in the city.  There was a
sense of hushed murmurs and tears all around us among the people.  We
knew the corpse was being solemnly watched night and day with prayers
weeping in the city.  The death of the king, alone and gray-haired,
had smitten the people with awe; the execution of this brave young
soldier touched them with a passionate reverence and pity.

Nothing was to be seen of Job during those days.  Roger had seen him
once; but he looked gloomy, and would be drawn into no discourse.  He
was among the watchers over the dead, nursing wild hopes of the Fifth
Kingdom, and bitter distrusts of those who hindered its coming.

On Monday the feeling of the people manifested itself in a solemn
procession passing through the city to Westminster.

Ceremonial, funereal or festive, was so foreign to our Puritan
people, that the few occasions on which the irrepressible feeling
burst forth into such manifestation had a terrible reality.

A soldier's funeral is heart-stirring enough at any time; but to me,
scarce any procession, before or since, seemed so moving as this
which bore Trooper Lockyer to his grave in Westminster Churchyard.

There were none of the rich or great among them.  First, a hundred
men, five or six in file.  Then the corpse of the poor brave youth,
with the sword he had long used so well, stained now with blood, and
beside it bundles of rosemary, also dipped in blood.  Then the horse
he had ridden to many battle-fields, moving uneasily under his heavy
mourning draperies, and beside it six men pealing on six trumpets the
soldier's knell.  Behind, thousands of men, marching slow and silent
in order like soldiers.  And after all a crowd of mourning women;
all, men and women, with bunches of black or sea-green ribbon on
their hats and breasts.

At Westminster they were met by thousands more, "of the better sort,"
it was said.  And so the young man died, for trying to fulfil men's
best hopes at a wrong time and in a impracticable way, and was
buried, not without honour.

The crime was not one which moved men to vengeance.  The doom was one
which moved men much to pity.

So the fire went on spreading in the army.  On May the 9th, the
mutinous sea-green ribbons appeared among the soldiers at a review in
Hyde Park.

General Cromwell with one of those speeches of his which critical
gentlemen pronounced so confused, but which those to whom they were
addressed found so plain, made the men in general understand that to
be a soldier meant to obey commands.  If they declined to obey, they
should receive arrears of pay and be dismissed.  If they decided
still to be soldiers, they must obey, or suffer the penalties of
martial law, under which they had put themselves.

I suppose his words told, as usual, for the sea-green ribbons
disappeared, and no further mutiny followed in London.

Meantime Mr. John Lilburn, for whom General Cromwell had once pleaded
with so vehement a passion when he was Mr. Prynne's servant in danger
of the pillory and the whipping-posts, continued to disperse his
incendiary pamphlets from the cell to which he had been committed in
the Tower.  And at length the news came that the conflagration had
burst out in the army in three places at once, two hundred mutineers
at Banbury, at Salisbury a thousand, in Gloucestershire more.

Job Forster had gone westward within those weeks with scarce a word
of farewell to any.  With a grave and glooming countenance, and
avoiding all discourse.  We feared sorely to hear that he was among
the mutineers.

On Sunday, May the 14th, Roger called to bid us farewell, ready
booted and spurred to ride off with Fairfax and Cromwell and their
troops for Salisbury, to quell the mutiny there.

It was an uneasy Sabbath for us who were left behind.  John Lilburn
was in the Tower, and somewhere around the Tower were dwelling the
thousands of grave and determined men who had borne Trooper Lockyer
to his grave scarce a fortnight before.  And the only voice which
seemed able to command the stormy waves was out of hearing,
heartening his men on their rapid march through Hampshire towards
Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire; as they tracked the
mutineers northward till they came on them at midnight taking uneasy
rest at Burford.

But London remained quiet, to all outward seeming.  Whatever vows
were being made in homes where the "Eikon Basilike" was being read
secretly, with a passionate devotion, together with the proscribed
liturgy, the hopes cherished were of a "blessed restoration" and
"vengeance on bloody usurpers;" or, on the other hand, in homes where
Trooper Lockyer was the martyr, and the hopes were of a speedy
millennium with vengeance on all who hindered it,--they did not
disturb the quiet of that Sabbath.  Leonard and I went to the morning
exercise in "Margaret's," and the preaching in the abbey, and Annis
to her obscure meeting of Friends.  And little Magdalene welcomed us
back with crowings "significant" (we thought, as my Diary records),
"of a remarkable vivacity of intelligence."  And as in the evening we
looked on the Lent-lilies and primroses Aunt Gretel had sent from
Netherby, making the little garden behind the house faintly represent
the woods and fields, it seemed to us that the city had even more
than its usual Sabbath stillness, while we listened to the evening
family psalm rising from the open lattices of many houses around us.

Yet all through that Sabbath-day those who were keeping the peace
with their good swords for us, were chasing the mutineers from county
to county and from town to town, making meanwhile such Sabbath
melodies in their hearts as best they might.

The story of the pursuit I heard afterwards from Job.  All through
the Monday the chase went on.

"We thought to cross into Oxfordshire at Newbridge, and join our
fellows at Banbury," said Job.  "But they had been before us? the
bridge was guarded.  We had to double and swim the river.  By this
time it grew dusk, and when we reached the little town of Burford on
Monday evening it grew dark.  At the entrance of the street we made a
halt.  Little welcome had we found at town or village.  The name of
him who was chasing us had been our shield and boast too long not to
weight against us now.

"For the first time these two days since first they came nigh us, we
missed the tramp of the horse in pursuit.  Some of us hoped they were
off the scent.  Others knew better than to think the General was to
be baffled so.  We knew his ways too well.  But be that as it might
we were fain to stay.  The horses stumbled and would not be spurred
further.  We had to cross fifty miles of country that day, to say
nothing of doublings.  We turned the poor brutes out to grass in the
meadows by the river, and, wet and weary as we were, turned in to get
such sleep as we might.

"Running away is work that breaks the heart of man and beast, and
Oliver had not used us to it.

"But as midnight boomed out from the tall old steeple, we found what
the silence of the pursuers had meant.

"They had been lying quiet in ambush outside the town.  On they came,
clattering into the narrow streets, with the old cries we had joined
in with them so long.  It was enough to make any man's heart fail to
have to go against the old watchwords, to which we had charged and
rallied scores of times together.  But worse than all was Oliver's
voice.  Few of us could stand that.  It had been more than a thousand
trumpets to us for years.  A few desperate shots were fired, and all
was over.  We were caught and clapped up together to await the
sentence.  We went to sleep thinking we might yet be the Lord's
handful to bring in the Millennium.  We woke up and found we were
nothing better than a lot of traitorous mutineers.

"Two days of waiting followed, and they finished the work for most of
us.  Some still braved it out, and talked of martyrdom, and of paving
the way to the Kingdom with our corpses.  But the greater part were
downcast and heart-stricken, and in sore bewilderment of soul.  We
minded Oliver's prayers before so many battles, and the cheer of his
voice in the fight, and his thanksgivings afterwards; and how he had
praised the Lord and praised us, and made as though he owed all to
us, while we felt we owed all under God to him.  We minded how he had
never thought it beneath him to write up to Parliament to claim
reward for any faithful service of any among us, and had never
claimed honor or reward for himself.  More than one among us minded
how a glance from his eye singled us out, and had made our hearts
swell like a public triumph, though not a soul saw it besides; how it
had been enough reward for any toil to know that the General knew we
had done our best.  All of us had heard his cheery voice joining in
joke and laugh, and more than one had heard it in low tones beside
the dying, breathing words which could make a man brave to face the
last enemy of all.

"And now his eyes had rested on us in grave displeasure, and grieved
disappointment.  He had thought we knew him, his sorrowful eyes had
said; he had thought we could have trusted him to do the good work,
and would have helped him in it.

"The Royalists hated him, good Mr. Baxter and the Presbyterians
distrusted him, but he had thought we knew him!

"And so we did!  And before those two days were over, there were many
among us who would have asked no better from him or from Heaven than
that we might have one chance of following him to the field, and
showing how faithful we could be to him again.

"So we came to the Thursday.  The court-martial sat and gave
sentence.  Ten out of every hundred of us were doomed to die.  We
were taken up to a flat place on the roof of the old church to see
our comrades shot in the church-yard and to abide our turn.  Cornet
Thompson came; he and his brother had been at the bottom of it, and
he had no hope of pardon.  But he spoke out bravely, and said that
what befell him was just; God did not own the ways he went; he had
offended the General; he asked the people to pray for him; he told
the men who stood ready with loaded guns, when he should hold out his
hands to do their duty.  I suppose he gave the sign.  I was too sick
at heart to look.  But the volley came and he fell.  Next came two
corporals--made no sign of fear, said no word of repentance, looked
the men in the face till they gave fire, and fell.  Then came Cornet
Dean--confessed he had done wrong, after a short pause received
pardon from the generals.  And so we, standing sentenced on the roof
of the old church, waited what would befall us next.

"The shooting was over.  Oliver had us called into the church.  There
he preached us a sermon none of us are like to forget.  Not long nor
under many heads, but home to every heart.  Some say the General is
blundering in speech, and no man knows what he would say.  We always
knew.  And all I knew of the sermon that day, is that blundering or
not, he made us all feel we had blundered sorely as to the Almighty's
purposes--blundered as to him.  There were silence enough in the old
church that day, but for the weeping.  The sobs of men like some of
ours are catching to listen to; Oliver's Ironsides are not too easily
moved.  But that day I believe we all wept together like children.
We had lost our lives and we had them given back to us; we had lost
our way in the wilderness and we had found it again.  We had lost our
leader and we had found him, and it will be hard if any noisy talker,
free-born John Lilburn or other, tempt us to leave his lead again.
We Ironsides are not going to use our Captain as the children of
Israel used their Moses.  Thank God, we have another chance given us,
and we are ready to follow him to Ireland, or to the world's end.

"The General is breaking the chains fast enough, and opening the
prisons, and breaking in pieces the oppressors.  And God forbid we
should hinder him again.  And as to the millennium, the Lord must
bring it about in His own way, and in His own time.  I for one will
never try to hurry the Almighty again, nor the General."

The Surrey labourers went home to sow beans in their master's fields.
The army Levellers, after being sent for a while to the Devizes, were
restored to their own regiments, and were eager to prove their
fidelity to General Cromwell by following him to the new campaign in
Ireland.

It rejoiced me to hear that Dr. John Owen was going to Ireland as
General Cromwell's chaplain.  His strong calm words were such as were
able to move and to quiet men like the Ironsides, who were not to be
stirred with zephyrs, or quieted with sweet murmurs as of a lady's
lute;--words plain and strong as their own armour.  The sound of a
trumpet was in them, Job said, and the voice of words.

Often and often his words echoed back to me as we heard them before
the Parliament in St. Margaret's, on the day of humiliation, the 28th
of February.

"How is it that Jesus is in Ireland only as a lion, staining all His
garments with the blood of His enemies, and none to hold Him out as a
lamb sprinkled with His own blood to His friends?  Is it the
sovereignty and interest of England that is alone to be there
transacted?  For my part, I see no further into the mystery of these
things, but that I could heartily rejoice that, innocent blood being
expiated, the Irish might enjoy Ireland so long as the moon endureth,
so that Jesus Christ might possess the Irish.  In this to deal
faithfully with the Lord Jesus--call Him out to the battle, and then
keep away His crown?  God hath been faithful in doing great things
for you; be faithful in this one, do your utmost for the preaching of
the gospel in Ireland."*


* "On the sinfulness of Staggering at the Promises."


And again in the great sermon on the shaking of heaven and earth, on
the 19th of April.

"The Lord requireth that in the great things He hath to accomplish in
this generation all His should close with Him; that we be not
sinfully bewildered in our own cares, fears, and follies, but that we
may follow hard after God, and be upright in our generation.

"God does not care to set His people to work in the dark.  They are
the children of light, and they are no deeds of darkness which they
have to do.  He suits their light to their labour.  The light of
every age is the forerunner of the work of every age.

"Every age hath its peculiar work, hath its peculiar light.  The
peculiar light of this generation is the discovery which the Lord
hath made to His people of the mystery of civil and ecclesiastical
tyranny.

"The works of God are vocal-speaking works.  They may be heard, and
read, and understood.  Now what, I pray, are the works He is bringing
forth upon the earth?  What is He doing in our own and the
neighbouring nations?  Show me the potentate on earth that hath a
peaceable molehill to build a habitation upon.  Are not all the
controversies, or most of them, that are now disputed in letters of
blood among the nations somewhat of a distinct constitution from
those formerly under debate? those tending thereof to the power and
splendour of single persons, and these to the interest of the many.
Is not the hand of the Lord in all this?  Is not the voice of Christ
in the midst of all this tumult?  What speedy issue all this will be
driven to, I know not: so much is to be done as requires a long
space.  Though a tower may be pulled down faster than it was set up,
yet that which hath been building a thousand years is not like to go
down in a thousand days.

"Let the professing people that are among us look well to themselves.
'The day is coming that will burn like an oven.'  Dross will not
stand this day.  We have many a hypocrite yet to be uncased.  Try and
search your hearts; force not the Lord to lay you open to all.

"Be loose from all shaken things.  You see the clouds return after
the rain; one storm on the neck of another.  'Seeing that all these
things must be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in
all holy conversation?'  Let your eyes be upwards, and your hearts be
upwards, and your hands be upwards, that you be not moved at the
passing away of shaken things.  I could encourage you by the glorious
issue of all these shakings, whose foretaste might be as marrow to
your bones, though they should be appointed to consumption before the
accomplishment of it.

"See the vanity and folly of such as labour to oppose the bringing of
the kingdom of the Lord Jesus!  Canst thou hinder the rain from
falling?  Canst thou stop the sun from rising?  Surely with far more
ease mayest thou stop the current and course of nature than the
bringing in of the kingdom of Christ in righteousness and peace.
Some are angry, some are troubled, some are in the dark, some full of
revenge; but the truth is, whether they will hear, or whether they
will forbear, Babylon shall fall, and all the glory of the earth be
stained, and the kingdoms become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus
Christ."*


* "On the Shaking of Heaven and Earth."


On the 7th of June, Dr. Owen preached again at "Margaret's" before
the Parliament, on the great thanksgiving day, when the city feasted
the Parliament, and distributed £100 to feast the poor.

Aunt Gretel and my father, who had come up from Netherby, heard him,
with us.  About the same time, Annis Nye returned from one of the two
"threshing-floors,"* where the "Friends" had been suffered publicly,
by "searching words," to sift the chaff from the wheat; and a
"prelatical" friend of ours came in to tell us of his having joined
in the ancient Common Prayer at St. Peter's Church on Paul's wharf,
and heard good Archbishop Ussher preach.


* These two threshing floors are first spoken of a few years later,
in 1655.


Whereon Aunt Gretel, who (believing far more in the power of light
than in that of darkness) was ever wont to be seeing the clouds
breaking, before others could, remarked to me,--

"Surely, sweet heart, the years of peace are already in sight.
Quakers, Prelatists, and Puritans free to do what good they can in
their different ways, what is that but the lion lying down with the
lamb?"

"Ah, sister Gretel," said my father, "lions and lambs have lain down
together in cages, with the keeper's eye on them, many a time before
now, when they were well fed, and could not help it.  It remains to
be seen what they will do when the keeper's eye is removed.  General
Cromwell saith all sects cry for liberty when they are oppressed, but
he never yet met with any that would allow it to any one else when
they were in power."

And as we passed the kitchen door on our way upstairs, we heard
sounds of scarcely millennial debate.

I am afraid Annis Nye had been taking a feminine advantage of the
failure of her antagonist's cause to remind him how she had
forewarned him.  For Job was saying,--

"Convinced we are not to look for the Fifth Monarchy because we poor
soldiers blundered about the ways and the times!  As little as a man
would be convinced the sun was never to rise because some idle
watch-dog waked him up too soon by baying at the moon.  Moved from
the error of my ways!  Moved at farthest from the First of
Thessalonians to the Second.  Not a whit farther.  But that folks
should call themselves Friends of Truth, who are not to be brought
round by chapter and verse, is a marvel.  General Cromwell knows what
he is about in letting such have their 'threshing-floors.'  There are
those that think another sort of threshing-floor might be best to
sift such chaff away.  Eden is before us, Mistress Annis; before as
well as behind.  And the best Paradise is to come."

"The lion and the lamb are scarcely at peace yet, sister Gretel!"
said my father.

But when we were all seated together in the parlour that evening, my
father said,--

"How many hearts, like Job Forster's, have believed they saw the
breaking of the dawn, which was to usher in the golden age, when it
was only the breaking forth of the moon from the clouds, or perhaps
only the deepening of the darkness, which they thought must be the
darkest hour preceding the dawn.  The Thessalonians of old; the early
Church in her persecutions; Gregory the Great at the breaking up of
the Empire; the Middle Ages in the year One Thousand, with a
trembling expectation which led men, not indeed to sow beans on
commons to make the whole earth fruitful, but to sow nothing,
believing that earth's last harvest was at hand."

"Yet were they far wrong?" said my husband.  "The moonlight and the
morning both draw their light from the sun.  The dawn shows that he
is coming, but all light worth the name testifies that he is.  In the
moon, which dimly lights our night, it is already day.  So that the
moonlight, in truth, is as sure a promise of the day as the dawn."




CHAPTER III.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

"_Rouen_.--We have not yet been able to enter Paris.  The city is in
great excitement with the wars of the Fronde.  The queen-mother, Anne
of Austria, and the young king Louis XIV., have been compelled to fly
to St. Germains.  It is strange to be exiled from one Civil War to
another.  The French Court is so poor in consequence of these
tumults, that they have had to dismiss some of their pages; and it is
reported that our own youngest princess, Henrietta, was obliged to
stay in bed to keep herself warm for lack of fuel to light a fire.

"I have not had to wait long for the fulfilment of my murmuring wish,
that some simple, homely woman's duty were separating me from Roger,
instead of a political crime.

"When my father returned from paying such farewell courtesies as he
might to Mistress Dorothy, he said, fixing a penetrating look on me
(who, if I cast down my eyes, could not hide from him my eyelids
swollen with weeping),--

"'Master Roger Drayton was longer than need be in fetching Mistress
Dorothy's mantle.  I trust, Lettice, thou gavest him no cause.'

"Then I told him all, as well as brief words might tell it.

"'Thou hast done well,' said he.  'Could I think daughter of mine
would have felt otherwise to one of those who have made England a
reproach and a curse on the earth, I would sooner she had died.  For
to eternity my curse would rest on her, and never would I see her
face again.'

"Then seeing me grow pale, he added, in a cheery voice,--

"'But what need to speak of curses?  Thou art a true maiden, Lettice,
as true as fair.  And many a hand there is that would be glad to be
linked with this little hand, none the less that it has rejected a
traitor.'

"Then I gathered courage once for all, and said,--

"'Father, they were good as angels to mother and to me.  I shall
always love them better than any in the world, save thee; I shall
always think them holier and wiser, and more true and good than any
in the world, save mother.  For my sake, father, say no ill of them.
It wounds me to the heart.  And, father, say no more of any other
wooer.  I will live for thee and for no other.'

"He was not moved as I hoped by my pleading.  He only smiled and
said,--

"'No need for me to say anything of other wooers, child.  They may
speak for themselves.  But as to living for me, I fear thou wilt find
me a rough old tyrant enough to live with, say nothing cf living for.
See already, when I meant to cheer thee I have made thee weep.
Maidens are mysterious,' he added, going to the window and whistling
uneasily.  Then returning, he laid his hand kindly on my shoulder,
saying, 'Come, come child.  Thou shalt be as good to me as thou wilt.
And I will say as little evil of any thou carest for as I can, though
as to picking my words it is what I am little used to.  Only no
tragedy, Lettice, and no heroics!  Your mother knew I had no capacity
for the heroics, and she never troubled me with them.  I knew that
she loved the mountain-tops, and now and then I should hear her
singing there as it were like a lark or an angel.  But she never
expected me to climb.  She had her divine songs, and her heroic
epics, and her lays, and her romaunts, and I loved her all the better
for them, but to me she always talked in prose, so that we understood
each other.  Thou and I will do the same."

"And then the horses were ready, and we rode away together to Rouen.

"But his words are very mournful to me.  Are only the streets and
market-places, as it were, of our souls to be open to each other, and
the inmost places, the hearth and the church, always to be closed?

"Yet there is a kind of unreasonable consolation in the prohibition
of my father's as to Roger.  It is a terrible strain to have to keep
that door closed myself; whilst, at the same time, the barrier of
another's will seems less impenetrable than that of my own purpose.

"_May_ 3_rd_.--I am not sure that my father's words were not the best
medicine in the world for me.  It is so much better to have to meet
others than to expect them to meet us.

"I have not to erect my cross into an idolatry, serving it with a
ritual of passionate kisses and tears.  I have to carry it; and to do
my work carrying it.

"'_Si tu crucem portas; ipsa te vicissim portabit_,' saith my
mother's A Kempis.

"Shall I indeed ever prove that?  Not as a sufferer only, but as a
conqueror?  Then how?  Not surely by looking at my cross, but by
bearing it.  Not by bearing it with downcast eyes, but with eyes
upward to the redeeming Cross now empty;--to the living Conqueror who
once suffered there!

"_May_ 4_th_.--Mistress Dorothy left a sermon of Dr. Owen's with me.
It was preached on occasion of a Parliament victory over the king at
Colchester and Romford.  She asked my forbearance with the occasion.
'Not difficult to exercise (I said), since victor and vanquished,
King and Parliament, are both banished now before this new
usurpation.'

"I read it with interest.  Little of the cant some think
characteristic of the Puritan speech there.  Dr. Owen calls
Colchester, Colchester, and not Gilead or Manasseh; and England,
England, not Canaan; and Naseby, Naseby, not Jezreel or Armageddon;
and his enemies their own English names, not bulls of Bashan, or
Amorites, or Edomites, or Hagarenes.

"But it is for what he saith therein on trouble, that she gave it me.
The text is the prayer of Habakkuk the prophet upon Shigionoth.
Shigionoth, saith the doctor, means 'variety, a song in various
metres.'  'Are not God's variable dispensations held out under these
variable tunes, not all alike fitted to one string?  Are not several
tunes of mercy and judgment in those songs?  "_By terrible things in
righteousness wilt thou answer us_."  Nothing more refreshes the
panting soul than an "answer" of its desires; but to have this answer
by "_terrible things_"--that string strikes a humbling, a mournful
note.

"'We are clothed by our Father in a party-coloured coat; here a piece
of unexpected deliverance, and there a piece of deserved correction.
The cry of every soul is like the cry of old and young at the
foundation of the second temple.  A mixed cry is in our streets.

"'A full wind behind the ship drives her not so fast forward as a
side wind that seems almost as much against her as with her; and the
reason, they say, is, because a full wind fills but some of her
sails, which keep it from the rest that they are empty, when a side
wind fills all her sails, and sends her speedily forward.

"'Labour to have your hearts right tuned for these variable songs,
and sweetly to answer all God's dispensations in their choice
variety.  It is a song that reacheth every line of our hearts, to be
framed by the grace and Spirit of God.  Therein hope, fear,
reverence, with humility and repentance have a space, as well as joy,
delight, and love, with thankfulness.

"'That instrument will make no music that hath but some strings in
tune.  If, when God strikes on the string of joy and gladness, we
answer pleasantly; but when He touches upon that of sorrow and
humiliation, we suit it not; we are broken instruments that make no
melody unto God.  A well-tuned heart must have all its strings, all
its affections, ready to answer every touch of God's finger.  He will
make everything beautiful in its time.  Sweet harmony cometh out of
some discords.  When hath a gracious heart the soundest joys, but
when it hath the deepest sorrows?  When hath it the humblest
meltings, but when it hath the most ravishing joys?

"'In every distress learn to wait with patience for the appointed
time.  Wait for it believing, wait for it praying, wait for it
contending.  Waiting is not a lazy hope, a sluggish expectation.

"'Ye must be weary and thirsty, ye must be led into the wilderness
before the rock-waters come.  Yet (to those who wait) they shall
come.  Though grace and mercy seem to be locked up from them like
water in a flint, whence fire is more natural than water,--yet God
will strike abundance out of Christ for their refreshment with His
rod of mercy.

"'He would have His people wholly wrapt up in His all-sufficiency.
Have your souls never in spiritual trial been drawn from all your
outworks to this main fort?  God delights to have the soul give up
itself to a contented losing of all its reasonings even in the
infinite unsearchableness of His goodness and power.  Here He would
have us secure our shallow barks in this quiet sea, this infinite
ocean whither neither wind nor storm do once approach.

"'Those blustering temptations which rage at the shore, when we are
half at land and half at sea, half upon the bottom of our own reason
and half upon the ocean of Providence, reach not at all into this
deep.  Oh, that we could in all our trials lay ourselves down in
these arms of the Almighty, His all-sufficiency in power and
goodness.  Oh, how much of the haven should we have in our voyage;
how much of home in our pilgrimage, how much of heaven in this
wretched earth!'


"Words of strong consolation, Dr. Owen, to reach even to us
'malignant' exiles in this foreign land.

"_May_ 4_th_.--It was well I copied these words out; for my father,
seeing the superscription of the pamphlet, grew very fierce at it,
called it a firebrand and a seditious libel, and bade Barbe, our
servant, light her next fire therewith.

"And to-day he hath brought me the 'Icon Basilike,' daintily bound
like a missal.

"'Here is reading fitter for a loyal maiden,' quoth he.  Since which
I have done little else but lament ever the sorrows and heavenly
patience of His Sacred Majesty.

"If Olive and the rest could but see this, they would surely be
melted to repentance, and enkindled to counterwork their sad
misdoings.  And who shall say any repentance is vain?

"My father is full of hope at present.  We have had fearful accounts
of the disorders in the city of London and in the army; the very
strongholds of the rebels.  The whole country seems to be in a blaze.
Executions, funeral processions in honour of the people executed,
mutiny suppressed only by the strongest measures.  Surely this tumult
must spend itself, or exhaust the nation soon.  And, as if smitten
with madness, they say the substance of the army and its greatest
chiefs are to depart for Ireland, leaving this half-suppressed
conflagration behind them.

"These things nourish great hopes among us.

"Meanwhile, from Scotland there are the most encouraging tidings, the
whole nation seeming to be awaking to their duty.  His Majesty the
young king will depart before long, to be a rallying point for this
reviving loyalty."

_August_ 20, _Paris_.--The tumults of the Fronde are over.  The
French Court has returned to Paris, and it is my work at present to
give as much a look of home as I can to these four or five great
rooms on one floor of an hotel belonging to one of the ancient
decayed nobility, where we are to make our sojourn.  (_Abode_ is a
word I will never use in relation to this land of our exile.)

"These rooms open into each other, and command an inner courtyard,
where a fountain flows all day from a classical marble urn held by a
nymph.  The cool trickle is very pleasant to hear in this great heat.
On this nymph and on other classical statues, the cook of the French
family who live below us irreverently hangs his pots and pans to dry
singing, meanwhile, snatches of chansons, which end high up in the
scale, with all kinds of unexpected and indescribable flourishes.

"Our family is enlarged.  Besides our own cook, we have a French
waiting-maid, who also does work about my rooms.  She has wonderfully
lissom fingers, turning everything out of her hands, from my coiffure
to my father's chocolate, with a finish and neatness which give to
our little household arrangements such a grace and order as if we had
a splendid establishment.  Indeed, few of our fellow-exiled have the
comforts we have.  Our revenues come to us regularly, my father knows
not (or will not know) how.  But I feel little doubt to whose hands
and hearts we owe them.  They enable us to keep something like an
open table in a simple way for our countrymen, so that we hear much
of what is going on.

"_August_ 26_th_.--Our rooms do begin to have something of a home
feeling.  My youngest brother, Walter, has joined us.  Roland, now
our eldest, is not hopeful as to the king's prospects while Oliver
Cromwell lives, and has offered his sword to the Spanish Court.  But
Walter is a marvellous solace and delight to us.  He was always the
gayest and lightest-hearted of the band of brothers, and (except
Harry) the kindest and gentlest.  In all other respects he resembled
my mother more than any of us.  The bright auburn hair (such a crown,
when flowing in the Cavalier love-locks); the soft eyes.  And, next
to Harry, he was most on her heart.  In a different way--Harry as her
stay and rest; Walter as her tenderest anxiety.  So much she thought
there was of promise in him, yet so much to cause solicitude.  None
amongst us were so moved in childhood by devotional feeling.  As a
child, he said lovely things to her, having an angelic insight, she
deemed, into the beauty of heavenly truth.  She would weep in
repeating these sayings, and say she feared ('but ought to hope') it
betokened early death.  But this passed away with early childhood.
As a boy, he was the merriest, and, in some ways, the wildest of all;
the oftenest in difficulties, though the soonest out of them.  But
she had ever the strongest influence over him.  And up to her death,
although he had done many things to make her anxious, he had done
nothing to make her despond.

"In her last illness she spoke of him more than of any one, and
charged me to care for him.

"And now he is once more at home with us, and seems to cling to me
with much of the fond reverence he had for her.  In the twilight on
Sundays he likes me to talk of her, and sing the heavenly songs she
loved.

"And for his sake mainly I tune my lute, and sing old English songs,
and learn some new French ones, and mind the fashions of the Court;
not that for my own sake I like to have ill-made or miscoloured
clothes.  (I think, too, there is one who would care; and whether he
ever see me again or not, I have a kind of self-regard due to him.
Who can tell if Oliver might repent, or die, and England be England
once more?)

"_August_ 27_th_.--This day my father has presented me to a sweet
aged French lady, Madame la Motha St. Rémy.  She knew my mother, in
long past days, at the English Court, and for her sake has welcomed
me as a child (having none of her own), embracing me tenderly,
kissing me on both cheeks.  A most lovely lady, with a sweet grandeur
in her demeanour, which made me feel as if I had been given the
honour of the Tabouret at Court, when she seated me on a low seat
beside her, clasping my hands in hers.

"When we were left alone together, after some conversation on
indifferent topics, pushing my hair back from my forehead, she said,--

"'The same face, my child! but different tints; and a different soul.
More colour, I think, without and within.  The brown richer, the gold
brighter, the eyes darker, and a look in them which seems to say,
life will not easily conquer what looks through them.  Of colour
here,' she said, stooping and kissing my cheek, 'perhaps I must not
judge at this moment.  Pardon me, my child, that I spoke as if I was
speaking to a picture.  When we see the children of those whom we
loved in early years, we see our youth in their faces.  To me thou
art not only Mademoiselle Lettice, thou art a whole lost world of
love and delight.  When I look at thee I see not thee only, I see
visions and dream dreams.  Ah, pardon, my child, I have made thee
weep; I have brought back her image indeed into thine eyes.'

"Tell me of her, madame,' I said.

"How shall I tell thee of her?  She was a St. Agnes--a beautiful soul
lent for a season to this world never belonging to it.  Some called
her an angel; that she never was.  When first I knew her, she was
simple, joyous, guileless as a child, but always tender, with tears
near the brim, a heart sensitive to every touch of delight or pain;
not strong, radiant, triumphant, like the angels who have never
suffered.'

"'She had suffered even then,' I said, 'when you knew her, madame?'

"'She never told thee?  Ah then, perhaps, I make treacherous
revelations.  What right have I to lift the veil she kept so
faithfully drawn?'

"'You can tell me nothing of my mother, madame,' I said, 'which will
not make her memory more sacred.'

"'Again, that look is not hers!  Your face bewilders me, my child.
This moment soft like hers; now all enkindled, full of fire; to do
battle for her, I know,'--she added.  'But, as thou sayest, there is
nothing which needs to be concealed.'

"'Madame,' I said, 'her life belongs to me, does it not? any
recollection of her is my legacy and treasure.  I also may have to
endure.  Most women have.'

"'It was my brother, my child,' she said.  'The sorrow was half mine,
which perhaps gives me some right to speak.  He was in the embassy in
London, and I, recently married, was there also.  They loved each
other.  They were all but betrothed.  But they were separated.
Calumnious cabals, I know not what.  The misery of these things is,
that one never knows how they go wrong.  A bewildering mist, a breath
of gusty rumour, and the souls which saw into each other's depths
with a glance, which revealed to each other life-secrets in a tone,
which were as one, which are as one, lose each other on the sea of
life, drifting for ever further and further apart, beyond reach of
look, or tone, or cry of anguish.  So it was with them.  He came back
to France, bewildered, despairing; sought death on more than one
battle-field; at last found it.  And then we learned how true she was
to him; what a depth of passionate love dwelt in the child-like
heart.  But two years afterwards your father entreated and your
grandfather insisted, till at length she yielded and was married.
They thought the old love was dead.  But when I &aw her afterwards,
pale, meek, and passive, like the ghost of herself, I thought it was
not the love that was dead, but the heart.'

"'But her heart was not dead, madame,' I said.  'She loved us all at
home with a love tender, and living, and fervent as ever warmed heart
or home.'

"'Without doubt, my child,' said madame.  'Duty was a kind of passion
with her always.  She was ardent in goodness, as others are in love.
There is the passion of maternal love, and there is the flame of
devotion.  A great passion may leave fuel for other fires in a pure
heart, but it leaves no place for a second like itself.  But why
should I speak to thee thus? thou who art but a child.  After all,
have I been a traitor?'

"'It is my English fairness and colour, perhaps, which make madame
think me younger than I am.  Do not repent what you have told me; I
may need such memories yet to strengthen me.'

"She smiled, one of those smiles which always bring youth into the
faces that have them; a smile from the heart, which lit up her dark
eyes so that my heart was warmed at their light--and turned the
wrinkles into dimples, and seemed to bring sunshine on the silky
white hair.

"'No, no, my friend,' she said, 'thou wilt never suffer as she did.
Thou wilt conquer thy destiny.'

"'She conquered,' I said; 'she was the joy and blessing of every
heart that knew her.'

"'As to heaven and duty, yes, my child; she was a saint.  But thou
wilt conquer as to earth also; I see it in thine eyes.'

"How little she knows!

"This history has made so many things clear to me.  I know now what
my mother meant when she said I could never save Sir Launcelot by
marrying him, unless I loved him.  I know now how it was she bore so
passively some things which I could have wished otherwise at home.
She felt, I think, that, give what she might in patience, and duty,
and loyal regard, she could not give my father what he had given her.
And therefore, perhaps, she could not, as he said, help him to
'climb.'  She could come down to him in all loving, lowly ministries
and forbearances; but love only (I think), in that relationship, can
have that instinctive sympathy, that secret irresistible constraint
which, with a thousand wilfulnesses and blunderings, yet could have
drawn his soul up to hers.  When so much of the strength of the
nature is spent in keeping doors of memory rigidly closed, perchance
too little is left to meet the little daily difficulties of life with
the play and freedom which makes them light.  And this awakens a new
strong hope in my heart, binding me as never before with a fond,
regretful reverence to my father.  Something she has left me to do.

"Something, perhaps, which she could never have done for him.  I (so
far beneath her!) may, by virtue of there being no locked-up world of
the past between us, help a little more to lead him to those other
heights which he protested to her he could never climb.  By virtue,
moreover, of not having to stoop from any heights to him, but being
in the valley with him, so that I can honestly say and feel, 'we will
try to climb together.'

"For in this at least I am sure the Puritans are right.  The up-hill
path is no exceptional supererogatory excursion for those who have a
peculiar fancy for mountain-tops; it is the one necessary path for
every one of us, and it is always up-hill to the end; the only other
being, not along the levels, but downward, downward, every step
downward, out of the pure air, out of the sun-light; downward for
ever!

"_August_ 23_d_.--To-day I kissed our queen's hand.  She embraced me,
and said gracious words about my mother.  She was in deep mourning;
and with her was the little Princess Henrietta, a child cf marvellous
vivacity and grace.  Her Majesty graciously have taken me into closer
connection with her Court, and with the French Court also.  But my
father seems not solicitous for this.  He is all the more an
Englishman for being an exile; and he misliketh their Popish doings,
and some other doings of which probably the Pope would disapprove as
much as the Puritans.  He saith the French courtiers, many of them,
seem to think of nothing but making love, without sufficiently
considering to whom; not making love and settling it once for all
like reasonable people, but going on making it the amusement of their
lives all the way through, which is quite another thing.  And he
thinks the less I hear of all this the better.

"He saith, moreover, that the company around the young king, if fit
enough for His Majesty and for young men like Walter, who 'must sow
their wild oats on some field,' is not the fittest for me.

"But it seems to me I should be ten thousand times safer in such
company than Walter, impetuous and gay, and easily moved, and with no
great love in his heart to keep it pure and warm.  I would I could
find him some such French maiden as Madame la Mothe must have been
when she was young.  Are these wild oats, then, the only seeds in the
world that yield no harvest?  My heart aches for Walter in that bad
world where I cannot follow him, and whence he so often comes back
flushed, and hasty, and impatient, and unlike himself.

"Last Sunday we attended the English service, which our queen has
obtained permission to be held in a hall at the palace of the Louvre.
Bishop Cosins officiated.

"It was the happiest hour I have spent in this strange land.  The
sacred old words, how they come home to the heart.  Not heaven alone
is in them; but England, home, childhood.

"Unhappy Puritans! to have banished the old prayers from
parish-church, hall, and minster.

"Unhappy Papistical people! to banish them into a dead ancient
language.  The other day I went with my father into the Cathedral of
Notre Dame.  The priests were chanting in Latin at the altar.  Those
Catholic children can have none of the memories so dear to us of the
gradual breaking of the light into the dear old words, as in our
childhood we wake up to them one by one to see they are not music
only, but words: to find a joyful significance in each sentence of
the creeds and hymns and prayers.

"I wonder what they have instead?

"_September_ 8_th_.--To-day Madame la Mothe came into my bed-chamber.
Seeing the little table with the picture of the Crucifixion my mother
loved, resting on it, and her Bible and A Kempis on it (with the
'Icon Basilike'), she crossed herself and embraced me, pointing to
the picture.

"'It was my mother's,' I said.

"'Had she then come back to the Church?'

"'She was always in the Church, madame,' I said; 'she was no Sectary.'

"'Excuse me, I do not understand your English terms.  I mean the
true, the ancient Church,' she rejoined.

"'My mother believed ours to be the ancient Church, madame,' I said.
'We are not mere Calvinists or Lutherans.'

"'No doubt, my child, I would not give you offence; but it is not to
be expected a Catholic should recognize those little distinctions
among those we must consider heretics.  You understand, I mean no
offence, it is simply that I am ignorant.  Perplex me not with those
subtleties, my child; I ask, can it be possible that thou and thine
are returning to allegiance to His Holiness the Pope, and the holy
Roman Church?'

"'Our Church does not indeed acknowledge the Pope, madame, nor the
Roman Church,' I said, trying to recall some of the debates I had
heard on the matter, which had in itself never much occupied me.  'We
are English, not Roman.  But I have heard our chaplain speak with the
greatest respect of some popes who lived, I think, a little more than
a thousand years ago, and say he would gladly have received
consecration from them.'

"'No doubt, my friend, no doubt,' said madame, becoming a little
excited, 'but the priests of to-day cannot be consecrated by popes
who lived a thousand years ago.  I would ask, are any of you willing
to return to the popes of to-day?  We used to hear your Bishop Laud
well spoken of, and were not without hopes of you all at that time.
It was once reported he had been offered a Cardinal's hat--of course
on conditions.  Have you advanced a little nearer since then?  Are
you coming back to the fold in earnest?'

"'To the Pope who lives now, madame?' I said; 'I do not think the
archbishop or our chaplain ever dreamed of that.  Our chaplain was
always hoping the Church of Rome would come back towards us.'

"'Towards you! towards heresy, my child!  You speak of what you know
not,' she replied, waving her hands rapidly, as if to brush away a
swarm of insects.  'Any one of us, our priests, His Holiness himself
may indeed move towards a Protestant, as the good Shepherd towards
the wandering sheep, to bring it back.  But the Church, never!  She
is the rock, my friend, on which the world rests.  She moves not.
The world moves, the sand shifts, the sea beats, but she is the rock.'

"'But, madame, pardon me,' I said, 'the chaplain thought the Church
of Rome _had_ changed.  There is a Rock, he thought, on which all the
Churches rest.  All we want (he said) is to remove some accumulations
with which the lapse of time has encumbered this rock; and then he
thought we might all be one again.'

"'My child,' she replied, 'the Church does not move; but most surely
she _builds_, or rather she grows.  She is living, and all things
living grow.  She is as one of our great cathedrals.  Age after age
adds to its towers, its chapels, its side aisles.  Heart after heart
adds to its shrines.  But it is still one cathedral.  We do not need
to hunt out obsolete books to see if we are building according to the
oldest rules.  New needs create new rules.  When we want to know what
to believe, we do not need to send for antiquaries.  We do not need
to grope back among the far-off centuries and see what those
excellent popes, of whom your good chaplain spoke, said a thousand
years ago.  We have a living Pope now.  He is the vicar of Christ; we
listen, he can speak, he can teach, he can command.  We do not need
to go to ancient worm-eaten books for our creeds.  They were living
voices in their age, and spoke for it.  We have the living voice for
our age, and we listen to it.  Tell me then, quite simply; are your
English people, or any of them, coming back to the true ancient
Catholic Church?'

"'Many among us have sighed for a union with the rest of Catholic
Christendom,' I said.  'Our chaplain used to speak much of it.  We
are not of the sects, he said, who have overrun Germany and other
Protestant countries, Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, Huguenot.  He
used to speak much of their errors.  One or two little concessions,
he said, and all might be one again.'

"'Concessions from us, my child!' said madame, shaking her head.
'What would you have?  The doors of the Church stand open.  You have
but to enter.  The arms of His Holiness are outstretched.  You have
but to fly to them.  You have pardon, welcome, reconciliation, not a
reproach for the past, all forgotten!  What would you have more?'

"'Madame,' I said, 'we think we _are_ in the Catholic Church.'

"'Ah, my charming child,' she said, smiling compassionately.  'I see
it is in vain to speak of these things.  In your island you have the
ideas of an island.  You have so many things to yourselves that you
think you may have everything to yourselves.  You have your
constitution, your seas, your mountains and plains, your clouds, your
skies, all to yourselves.  But the Catholic Church!  Ah, my child,
that is impossible; you are a remarkable people, and have remarkable
ambitions.  But there are things possible and things impossible.  You
cannot have a Catholic Church all to yourselves.  It is not a thing
possible.'

"Then the slight excitement there had been in her manner passed away,
and she said,--

"'My child, we will not perplex ourselves much with these difficult
things.  I have a very holy cousin among the ladies of Port Royal.
Perhaps one day I may introduce her to you.  For women, happily, if
they can help to welcome each other within the sacred doors, have not
the keys to close them.  And with regard to thy mother, all this has
nothing to do.  Heavenly beings are not subject to earthly laws.  And
that among the heathen there were such, my director assures me there
is no doubt.  I trust even there were such among the Huguenots; for
some of my ancestors were unhappily 'gentlemen of the religion.'"

"'Did any of them suffer in the St. Bartholomew?' I asked; 'and do
you know if any among them took refuge in London?'

"'I have heard there is one of their descendants established in
London as a physician,' she said.

"'I know him, madame,' I said.  And it made me feel a kind of kindred
with the gentle French lady that a connection of hers, however
remote, had married Olive.

"But this evening, when Barbe, the waiting-woman, was arranging my
hair, and I was consoling her with telling her some of Dr. Owen's
thoughts about sorrow (for Barbe has lately lost her mother, and is a
destitute orphan, and has had a sorrowful life in many ways), she
said, in a choked voice,--

"'Ah, if mademoiselle could only hear the minister at the prêche.
For the people of the religion are allowed to meet again, in a quiet
way.'

"'You belong to the religion then, Barbe?'

"'Without doubt, mademoiselle.  Have not my kindred fought and been
massacred for it these hundred years?  This is what made me so glad
when the chevalier engaged me to wait on mademoiselle.  I knew at
once it was the good hand of God.  For the English are also of the
religion, my father said; and although they have sometimes perplexed
our people by promising much and doing little for us, we always knew
these were mere Court intrigues; and that in heart we were one.'

"'But, Barbe,' I said, with some hesitation, wishing not to mislead,
nor yet to pain her, 'we are not exactly of "the religion."  The
English Church is not like yours.  We are not Calvinists.  We have
bishops and a liturgy, and have changed as little as possible the old
Catholic ritual.'

"'Ah, what does that matter?' replied Barbe, unmoved; 'to each
country its customs!  These little distinctions are affairs of the
clergy.  They aro not for such as me.  And I have known from my
infancy that the English are Protestant.  They do not acknowledge the
Pope nor the Mass.  They do not burn for these things; on the
contrary, they have been burned for them.  They may, indeed, have
their little eccentricities,' continued Barbe charitably.  'Bishops
even, and a Book of Prayers!  Do they not live on an island?  Which
in itself is an eccentricity.  But they are Protestant.  I have
always known it, and now I see it.  Mademoiselle does not go to
Confession; she does not adore the Host.  Every morning and evening
she reads her Bible in her own language.  She consoles me with the
excellent words of a Protestant minister, as good as we hear at our
prêche.  Therefore mademoiselle is doubtless of "the religion."  And
to me it is a privilege, for which I thank God day and night, that I
am called to wait on her.'

"It is very strange how differently things look a little way off.
Neither Barbe nor Madame la Mothe seem able even to perceive the
differences which to us have been so important.  In spite of all I
can say, Madame la Mothe regards me as outside; 'very good, very
dear, very charming,' but still outside; as a heretic, as a Huguenot.
And in spite of all I can say, Barbe regards me as within; of her
community, of her Church, of her religion, of her family; as a sister.

"What are we to do?

"We offer our hands courteously to all the ancient Churches.  And
they turn scornfully away, saying, On your knees, as penitents, we
will receive you, but, otherwise, never!  You are outcasts,
prodigals, in the 'far country.'

"On the other hand we turn away from the new Protestant Churches
saying, In some respects you are right, but you have lost the ancient
priesthood you have rent yourselves from Catholic antiquity.  And
nevertheless they persist in embracing us, in calling us kindred,
sisters and brethren.

"What are we to do?

"In England it was in comparison easy.  We had things to ourselves.
Across the seas, where these foreign Churches loomed on our vision in
rocky masses through the mist and distance, it was easy to maintain
our theory about them.  But here, where we are amidst them, and
Churches break into communities of men and women, it is difficult to
continue stretching out peaceable hands to those who scornfully pass
by on the other side, and not to clasp in brotherly greeting the
hands held out in welcome to us.  Barbe and her Huguenots (since they
have will it so) I must then acknowledge as kindred.

"Yet whether they heed or not, I must and will also honour as our
brethren every Catholic who is just, and good, and Christian.  Their
treasures of goodness are ours, in as far as they are our delight and
our example, and none can deprive us of the possession.

"It seems to me, if the English Church shuts her heart against the
Protestants on one side, and the Roman Church on the other, her fold
becomes the narrowest corner of Christendom a Christian can creep
into.  But if, on the contrary, she stretches out her hands to both,
bound on one side by her creeds and liturgies to the Catholic past,
and on the other free to receive all the truth yet to be revealed in
the free Word of God, what field on earth so fertile and so free,
enriched by all the past, free to all the future?

"It is those who exclude who are really the excluded.  The more our
hearts can find to love and honour, the richer they are.

"The outlaws, I think, in God's Church are not those who are cast out
of the synagogue, but those who cast others out."


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

At five o'clock on the evening of the 10th of July, 1649, the
trumpets sounded again in London streets, not for a soldier's
funeral, and not for a triumph, but for an army going forth to war.
To battle with a whole nation in insurrection, or rather in tumult;
every man's hand practised in cruel and treacherous warfare against
every man through those blood stained eight years since the massacre
of 1641, now all combined against the Commonwealth and Oliver.

With hopeful hearts they went forth with Cromwell, as Lord-Lieutenant.

It was the first time General Cromwell had taken on him much show of
outward state.  But men said it seemed to fit him well, as I think
state must which grows out of power, like the pomp of summer leaves
around massive trunks.  He rode in a coach drawn by six gray Flanders
mares; many coaches in his train; his life-guard eighty gentlemen,
none of them below the rank of an esquire; the trumpets echoing
through the city, stirring the hearts of the Ironsides, who, when he
led them, "thank God, were never beaten."  His colours were white, as
of one who made war to ensure peace; who was going not as a soldier
only and a conqueror, but as a ruler and judge to bring order into
chaos, and law into lawlessness.  This state beseemed the occasion
well.

The army went with a good heart, and in unshaken trust that he was
leading them to a good work, and that it was "necessary and therefore
to be done;" the most part, like Roger, proud of being the men who
had never mistrusted him; a few, like Job Forster, all the more eager
in their loyalty for the shame of having once mistrusted; and many,
like the chief himself, all the stronger in this and every work for
sharing his conviction that all earthly work (to say nothing of
pleasure), compared with the inward spiritual work from which it drew
its strength, was only done "upon the Bye."

But we women who watched them go, looked on them with anxious hearts.
They were plunging into a chaos, which for hundreds of years no man
had been able to bring into light and order.  What they would do
there seemed doubtful; who would return thence terribly uncertain;
that all could never return terribly certain.

Poor Bridget Cromwell, then young Mistress Ireton, and many beside,
could the veil have been lifted, would, instead of festive white
banners, have seen funeral draperies, and for the call to arms would
have heard the trumpets peal for the soldier's knell.

Mistress Lucy Hutchinson needed not to speak scornfully of the fine
clothing which became General Cromwell's daughters "as little as
scarlet an ape."  They did not wear it long.  And indeed holiday
garments at the longest are scarcely worn long enough in this world
for it to be worth while that any should envy or flout at them.

For the rest, the Lord-Lieutenant's life was no holiday; nor did he
or his Ironsides look that it should be.  Not for merry-making or
idling, he thought, but "for public services a man is born."  If
victories and successes came, "these things are to strengthen our
faith and love," he said, "against more difficult times."

We are always in a warfare, he believed; the scenes change, but the
campaign ends not.

As Mr. John Milton wrote of him: "In a short time he almost surpassed
the greatest generals in the magnitude and rapidity of his
achievements.  Nor is this surprising, for he was a soldier
disciplined to perfection in the knowledge of himself.  He had either
extinguished, or by habit had learned to subdue, the whole host of
vain hopes, fears, and passions which infest the soul; so that on the
first day he took the field against the external enemy he was a
veteran in arms, consummately practised in the toils and exigencies
of war."

The portion of the army which went before the General gained a
victory in July over the Marquis of Ormond, who was besieging Dublin;
so that when Oliver landed, with hat in hand, and spoke gently to the
people in Dublin, and told them he wished, by God's providence, to
spread the gospel among them, to restore all to their just rights and
liberties, and the bleeding nation to happiness, many hundreds
welcomed him and vowed they would live and die with him.

Three letters are preserved among my old Diaries which came to us
during that Irish Campaign.  One was from Job not long after the
storming of Wexford.

"We have had to do '_terrible things in righteousness_,'" he wrote.
"For years the land has been like one of the wicked old Roman
wild-beast shows in the Book of Martyrs; the wild beasts first
tearing the Christians in pieces, and then in their fury falling on
each other.  This the General is steadfastly minded shall not any
longer be.  Whereon all the people of the land have for a time given
over rending each other in pieces, to fall on us.  We, how ever,
praised be God, are not, like the ancient Christians, thrown to the
wild beasts unarmed, nor untrained in fighting.  For which cause, and
through the mercy of God, the wild beasts have not slaughtered us,
but we not a few of them.  And the rest we hope in good time to send
to their dens, that the peaceable folk may have rest, may till their
fields in peace, and may have freedom to worship God.

"For peaceable folk there are in the land.  It has lightened my heart
to find that the natives are not all savages, like the Irish women
with knives we found on the field at Naseby.  Many of the more kindly
creatures, well understand fair treatment, and generously return it.
Their countenances are many of them open, and their understandings
seem quick, to a marvel, for poor folks who have been brought up
without knowing either the English tongue or the Christian religion.
It seems as if they had been seduced with evil reports of us; for at
first they ran away, and hid themselves in caves and dens of the
earth, whenever we came near them.  But since they understand that we
are no persecutors nor plunderers, the common people begin to come
freely to the camp, and bring us meat for man and horse, for which we
pay.

"The Lord-General is very stern against all misuse or plundering of
these poor folk.  Two of ours have been hanged for dealing ill with
them; which was a wonderful sight to the natives, and hath encouraged
them much.

"The storm of Tredah was no child's-play.  The Lord-General offered
the garrison (mostly Englishmen) mercy.  'But if upon refusing this
offer, what you like not befalls you,' he said, 'you will know whom
to blame.'  They refused mercy.  Wherefore, after winning the place
by some hard fighting (being once driven back, a thing we were not
used to), the garrison had justice.  They were three thousand.
Scarce any of them survived to dispute on whom to lay the blame.  It
was not so bad as some of the things Joshua had to do; the judgment
not going beyond the fighting men.  But praised be God, that for the
most part it pleases Him to work his terrible things by the stormy
winds, the earthquakes, and pestilence, and not by the hands of men.

"The General saith, 'I trust this bitterness will save much effusion
of blood, through the goodness of God.'

"And truly, after Tredah, few garrisons waited for our summons, and
fewer still refused the Lord-General's mercy.  We had but one piece
of storming work since then.  That was at Wexford.  There was some
confusion; the Lord-General wishing to save the town from plunder.
His summons by words scorned, he summoned them by batteries.  Then
the captain would have yielded the castle, and the enemy left the
walls of the town, whereon our men got the storming ladders, and
scaled the walls.  In the market-place there was again a hot fight,
and near two thousand of the enemy fell; some were drowned in trying
to escape in boats by the harbour.  A notable judgment, we thought,
for some eight score of poor Protestants, who had been sent out not
long before in a ship into the harbour, then the ship scuttled, and
they left to sink; also for other Protestants shut up in one of their
mass-houses, and famished to death.

"Since then the enemy has been scattered before us like dust before
the whirlwind.  Their strong places yield to our summons one by one.
Please God we may have no more of the work of the whirlwind and
pestilence to do!  For these poor towns, on the day after the
storming, with the blackened walls and the empty houses, from which
the poor foolish folks have fled away into the fields, are a sad
desolation to behold.  It hath cast some little light on the slaying
of the women and little ones in the Bible; in that when the men are
slain, the lot of the widows and orphaned little ones is sure to see.
But war is not peace; and they who try to mix up the two, most times
but put off the peace, and in the end make the war more cruel.  The
surgeon who laid down his knife at every groan of the patient, would
make a sorry cure.  The Lord-General has great hope of yet bringing
the land to be a place for honest and godly men and women to live in,
which, they say, it hath not been since the memory of man.  But one
thing will by no means be suffered; and that is the Mass.  Some say
this is cruel mercy (since the deluded people hang their salvation on
it); and that it is contrary to the Lord-General's promises of
freedom of conscience.  But liberty to think is one thing, and
liberty to do another.  The poor folk may believe what lies they
will; but that they should be suffered to act falsehoods in the sight
of a godly Church and army is an abomination not to be borne."

The letter from Roger came later.  In it he wrote much of the
Lord-Lieutenant.  It was dated February, from Fethard in Tipperary,
which, with Cashe, and other towns in the west, had lately come under
the Commonwealth.

"Six months since," Roger wrote, "only three cities were for the
Commonwealth--Dublin, Belfast, and Derry, and Derry besieged.  The
Lord Lieutenant stormed two, after mercy refused, with severity of
the severest--Tredah and Wexford, since which, none but have yielded
in time to avoid the same fate: and in a little while, we have good
hopes, if matters go on as they have, not a town or a stronghold will
be left in the enemy's hands.  The misery and desolation of the
country is sore indeed; but it has not been the fruit of only these
six months' war.  Scarce, I think, of the terrible eight years'
tumult since the massacre of 1641; rather, perhaps, of no one can say
how many centuries of misrule, or no rule at all.

"The people united at first against us; loyal Catholics of the Pale,
disloyal Catholics beyond the Pale, Presbyterian Royalists, and
Papists of the massacre.  Now their union seems crumbling to pieces
again, being founded, not on love, but on hatred; and out of hatred
no permanent bonds can, I think, be woven, even as my Lord-Lieutenant
told them last month in his Declaration.

"Divers priests met at the Seven Churches of Clonmacnoise, on the
Shannon, to patch up this crumbling 'union' against us, if they
could.  Upon this was issued the 'Declaration for the Undeceiving of
Deluded and Seduced People;' wherein the Lord-Lieutenant told these
clergymen many things which, perhaps, they thought little to the
point, but which to him (and to us) are the root of all things, and
therefore must naturally be to the point, especially when it is a
question of uprooting.

"'The terms "laity and clergy,"' he said, 'are dividing,
anti-christian terms.

"'_Ab initio non fuit sic_.  The most pure and primitive times, as
they best know what true union is, so in all addresses unto the
churches, not one word of this.

"'The members of the churches are styled "brethren," and saints of
the same household of faith; and although they had orders and
distinctions among them for administrating of ordinances (of a far
different use and character from yours), yet it nowhere occasioned
them to say _contemptim_, and by way of lessening or
contra-distinguishing, "laity and clergy."  It was your pride that
begat this expression; and ye (as the Scribes and Pharisees of old
did by their "laity") keep the knowledge of the law from them, and
then be able in their pride to say, "This people that know not the
law are cursed."

"'Only consider what the Master of the apostles said to them--"So
shall it not be among _you_: whoever will be chief shall be servant
of all."  For He Himself came "_not to be ministered unto but to
minister_."  And by this he that runs may read of what tribe you are.

"'This principle, that people are for kings and churches, and saints
are for the pope and churchmen, begins to be exploded.

"'Here is your argument.  "The design is to extirpate the Catholic
religion.  But this is not to be done but by the massacring and
banishing or otherwise destroying the Catholic inhabitants; ergo, it
is designed to massacre, banish, and destroy the Catholic
inhabitants."  This argument doth agree well with your principles and
practice, you having chiefly made use of fire and sword in all the
changes in religion you have made in the world.  But I say there may
be found out another means than massacring, destroying, and
banishing, to wit, the Word of God, which is able to convert.

"'Therefore in these words your false and twisted dealing may be
discovered.  Good now!  Give us an instance of one man, since my
coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or banished,
concerning the massacre or destruction of whom justice hath not been
done or endeavoured to be done.

"'If ever men were engaged in a righteous cause in the world, this
will scarce be second to it.  We are come to ask an account of
innocent blood that hath been shed.  We come to break the power of a
company of lawless rebels, who, having cast off the authority of
England, live as enemies to human society.  We come, by the
assistance of God, to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of
English liberty; wherein the people of Ireland, if they listen not to
seducers such as you are, may equally participate in all benefits; to
use their liberty and fortune equally with Englishmen, if they keep
out of arms.'

"Then the Lord-Lieutenant offers peace, their estates, and fortunes,
to all except the leading contrivers of the Rebellion, to soldiers,
nobles, gentle and simple, who will lay down arms and live peaceably
and honestly; and promises justice on all soldiers or others who
insolently oppress them.

"The which (Roger wrote) we have hopes the people will listen to; and
so, some ringleaders being banished, some of the murderers of the
massacre of 1641 having after fair trial been hanged, this terrible
war end in order and blessing to all who will be orderly.  It hath
been no beating the air, this campaign in Ireland.  Of courage there
is no lack among this people.  And many of ours have suffered by the
country sickness, which, with the famine, came in the train of such
wild lawlessness and fierce factions as have long desolated this
unhappy country.  The Lord-Lieutenant himself has been but crazy in
health, and has been laid up more than once.  But, as he said, _God's
worst is better than the world's best_.  He writes to the Parliament
that he hopes before long to see Ireland no burden to England, but a
profitable part of the Commonwealth.  And we are not without hope
that our rough work here has ploughed up the land for better harvests
than it has yet yielded."

Then, some weeks later, another letter from Job to Rachel, mentioning
the storming of Clonmel on the 10th of May, 1650, after many hours
fiery fighting.

"Against the stoutest enemy," Job writes, "we have yet encountered in
Ireland.  Not that the Irish are enemies to be despised.  Their
faculty for fighting seems of the highest, indeed it seems their
taste, and the thing they like best, since they are always ready, it
seems, to be at it at the shortest notice, and for the smallest
cause, or none--which is not the way of the Ironsides.  We are
peaceful quiet men, as thou knowest, and went into the fighting, not
for the love of it, but for the love of what they would not let us
have without fighting.  Which is a difference.

"It is said our Oliver hath permitted such officers as lay down their
arms to gather regiments of such as will join them and to cross the
seas to Spain or France, there to fight for whoever will pay them,
They say 45,000 of these Kurisees are going.  Which seems to me
pretty nearly the worst thing human beings can do.  Worse than
slavery, inasmuch as it must be worse for men to sell themselves than
to be bought and sold.  Who can say what such courses may end in?
For the Almighty does not buy his soldiers; He has no mercenaries.
But the devil has.  And he pays; though not as he promises.  However,
no doubt the country is better without them."

We thought again often of Job's words, when three regiments of these
"Kurisees" were found, in after years, massacring and torturing the
peaceable Vaudois peasants in their valleys, in the pay of the Duke
of Savoy, doing some of the direst devil's work that perhaps was ever
done on this earth.

This letter reached us at Netherby, where about this time our little
Dorothea was born.

I remember well how it cheered my heart as I sate at my open
chamber-window in some of the soft days which now and then break the
sharpness of our early spring, and are as like a foretaste of heaven
as anything may be, to think that perchance the long night of tumult
and disorder which had hung over that distracted land was passing
away, and a new kingdom was arising of liberty and righteousness and
truth.

Our little Magdalen (Maidie) playing at my feet with the first
snowdrops she had ever seen, and the baby Dorothea (Dolly) asleep on
a pillow on my knee.  Spring-time, I thought, for the earth, and for
these darling; and for the nations.  When _life_ is given, who minds
through what throes or storms?

The old home was much changed by the absence of Aunt Dorothy.  I
missed the force of her determined will and her sharp definite
beliefs and disbeliefs.  The music seemed too much all treble.  I
missed the decisive discords which give force and meaning to the
harmonies.  There seemed no one to waken us up with a hearty vigorous
No!

In the village, too, her firm straight-forward counsels and rebukes
were missed.  Aunt Gretel and my father seemed to have grown quieter
and older.  Forcible, truthful, militant characters like Aunt
Dorothy's make a healthy stir about them, which tends to keep youth
alive in themselves and those around.  They are as necessary in this
world, where so much has to be fought against, as the frosts which
destroy the destructive grubs.  The foes of our foes are often our
best friends; and none the less because they are the foes of our
indolent peace.

My father had been, moreover, not a little shaken by the loss of his
arm.  He had withdrawn from war and politics, and had thrown himself
with new vigor into his old pursuits, investigating the earth and sky
and all things therein.

But the more we stay together the more needful we all grew to each
other.  Maidie especially so twined herself around her grandfather's
heart, that we made a compact to spend the larger portion of the
years henceforth together; we with them in the summers at Netherby,
and they with us in the winters in London.  In this way, moreover, my
father would be able to attend the meetings and weekly lecturings of
the association of gentlemen, for the prosecution of the "new
experimental philosophy," which met during the Commonwealth chiefly
at Gresham College, and was, after the Restoration, incorporated as
the Royal Society.

Aunt Dorothy's absence, with the cause of it, was much on my mind
during those quiet spring days.  Every error, she thought, had seeds
of death in it, and carried out to its consequences must lead to
death; therefore no error ought to be tolerated.  This perplexed me
much, until I learned a lesson from the old beech tree outside my
chamber window.

"Aunt Gretel," I said one day as we were sitting there quietly with
the babes, "I have learned a lesson which makes me glad."

"From whom?" said she.

"From that old beech-tree," I said.  "The old dead leaves are hanging
on it still.  Now, if the world were governed on Aunt Dorothy's
principles, strong winds would have been sent to sweep every one of
them away weeks ago.  But God carries on his controversy with dead
things, simply by making the living things grow.  The young leaves
are pushing off the old, one by one, and will displace them all when
the hour is come when all things are ready.  It seems as if the old
things hold on just as long as they have any life left in them
wherewith to serve the new."

"Yes, that is it, sweet heart," she said as if assenting to what she
had long known.  "I, at least, know no way of fighting with what is
wrong, like helping everything good and true to grow."

So April grew into May.  The snowdrops, hawthorns, and blue
hyacinths, and all the early flowers were lost in the general tide of
colour and song which suffused the earth.  These "first-born from the
dead" were succeeded by the universal resurrection which they
prefigured and promised.

The first forerunners of spring which come one by one, like saints or
heroes, bearing solitary witness to the new kingdom of life, which
meanwhile is secretly and surely expanding round their roots, had
fought the fight with snows and storms, had borne their testimony and
then had vanished in the growing dawn of the year.

A thousand happy thoughts came to me as I wandered in the old
gardens, and sat on the old terrace, with Aunt Gretel and Placidia,
while Placidia's little Isaac and our little Maidie played around us;
and none of them were happier than those suggested by little Isaac
himself.  Again and again he recalled to me Aunt Gretel's words, "The
good God has more weapons than we wot of, and more means of grace
than are counted in any of our catechisms and confessions.  The touch
of a little child's hand has opened many a door through which the
Master has afterwards come in, and sate down and supped."

It seemed as if the child were ever leading his mother on (all the
more surely because so unconsciously to him and to her,) opening her
heart to love, and, what is not less essential, opening her eyes to
see the truth about herself.  For it in not only through their
trustfulness and their helplessness that little children are such
heavenly teachers in our homes.  It is by their truthfulness, or
rather by their incapacity to understand hypocrisy.  They are simply
unable to see the filmy disguises with which we cover and adorn our
sins and infirmities.  The disguises are invisible to them.  They see
only (and so help to make us see) the reality within; and thus confer
on us, if we will attend, the inestimable blessing of calling our
faults by their right names.

I remember one little incident among many.

I was sitting by the fireside in the Parsonage hall, and had just
finished reading a letter from Roger, and telling my father about the
Irish war.

"It is a conflict between light and darkness," said my father.  "And
the Mornings of the Ages do not dawn silently like the morning of the
days, but with storms and thunders, like the spring, the morning of
the year."

As he spoke, I looked out through the door to the sunshine.  Placidia
was sitting at the porch at her spinning-wheel, Maidie at her feet
pulling some flowers to pieces with great purpose and earnestness,
singing to herself the while, when little Isaac came running to her
across the farmyard hugging a struggling cackling hen, which he
plumped in a triumphant way into Maidie's lap.  "I give it you,
Maidie," said he, "for your very own."  But Maidie, far more
overwhelmed by the hen than by the homage; began to cry; whereon
Placidia, leaving her spinning-wheel, rescued the hen and Maidie, and
said--

"I was very foolish, Isaac.  You should ask me before you give
presents.  Maidie is too little to understand hens.  If you wanted to
give her anything, you should have asked mother."

"But I was afraid you might say no," said Isaac.  "And I had been
planning it all night.  I thought it would be so nice for Maggie."

"Maggie is a very little girl," rejoined Placidia; "and if you wanted
to give her something, a very little thing would please her quite as
much.  There is your little gilt bauble, that you used to play with
when you were Maidie's age.  It is of no use to you now, and it would
be nice for her."

"But," said Isaac scornfully, "that would not be giving, that would
be only _leaving_.  I want to give Maidie something.  And I love
Maidie dearly, and and so I want to give her the nicest thing I have.
Don't you understand, mother," he continued, in the eager hasty way
natural to him, knitting his brows with earnestness.  "I want to
_give_ something to Maidie.  There is no pleasure in throwing old
things away, to Maidie or any where else.  It is giving that is so
pleasant."

The colour came into Placidia's face.  She said in a hesitating way,--

"But the hen will lay ever so many eggs, Isaac.  You could give
Maidie the eggs, and keep the hen, which would lay more."

"But I want the hen to lay the eggs _for Maidie_," he replied.  "I
have thought of it all.  It is a great pity you don't understand,
Maidie," he continued, seriously appealing to Maidie's reason in a
way she could not at all appreciate.  "It is the prettiest hen in the
yard, and she will give you a new egg every morning, and it would be
your very own, and you could give it Aunt Olive yourself."

But this extensive future was entirely beyond Maidie's powers of
vision.  She shook her head, apparently hesitating between
encountering a fresh assault from Isaac and the hen, and sacrificing
the precious bits of flowers she had so diligently pulled to pieces
and thought so beautiful; until at length, as Isaac again approached,
terror won the day, and gathering up her treasures as best she could,
in her lap, she fled to me for protection, and hid her face in my
skirt.

"It is a great pity Maidie cannot understand," murmured Isaac in the
porch, not venturing, however, to follow and renew his homage.  "But
mother, don't you understand?"

It is not the mother, it was the child that did not understand.  But
she made no further explanation nor opposition.  She only said
softly,--

"Never mind, Isaac.  You shall have the pleasure of giving.  You
shall keep the hen for Maidie, and give it her when she is old enough
to know what it means."

She would not, for much, that her child should see into the dark
place he had revealed to her in her own heart.  So ennobling it is to
be believed incapable of being ignoble.

I seemed to see the mother, through the coming years, led gently away
from all that kept her spirit down, and on to the best of which she
was capable by the hallowing trust of the child.

It seemed to me that a conflict between light and darkness was going
on in the quiet parsonage at Netherby, as well as on the
blood-stained fields in Ireland.

And I thought that hour had witnessed one of its silent victories.




CHAPTER IV.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

_September_ 1649, _Paris_.--'Put not your trust in princes.'

"The young king hath left for Jersey; whither further, time will
show.  Regret at his departure by this hollow French Court is scarce
even feigned.  Walter is gone to join the gallant Marquis of
Montrose.  And perilous as the enterprise is, it is a kind of relief
to us; so far greater seem to us the perils of the king's idle court
than those of the field.

"We are not made to feel so very welcome here as to make our lives a
festival.  Cardinal Mazarin, who, with the Queen-Mother, ordereth all
things (the king, Louis XIV., being but a boy of eleven or twelve
years of age), lets it be seen but too plainly that they would not be
sorry to see the young king, and even the Queen Henrietta herself
(though a daughter of France), translated to any other asylum.  His
Majesty but lately dismissed some Commissioners from Scotland (where
they had the grace to proclaim him in February).  They were
Covenanted persons, and made so much parley as to the conditions on
which they would be subject to him, that it seemed as if their true
purpose was but to make him subject to them.  The negotiations were
broken off all the more abruptly, in consequence of the over-zeal of
some followers of the gallant Marquis of Montrose, who assassinated
the Ambassador of the 'Parliament' at the Hague.  This deed made the
Scottish Commissioners more stiff in their ways, so that their
Commission ended in nothing.  My father, with the most zealous of the
king's followers, much misliketh these dealings with men 'whose very
Covenant (saith he) constitutes them rebels.'

"'If the Scottish people are happy enough to get their king back,' he
protests, 'after basely selling his father (of sacred memory), they
must take him as a king, not as a scholar or slave of their arrogant
preachers.  Otherwise, better remain king of his faithful exiles
here, of loyal Jersey and the Isle of Man (which the noble Countess
of Derby still holds for him), and bide his time.'

"For my father liketh not subtleties, and the double ways of Courts.
The Marquis of Montrose (with his followers) he thinks well-nigh the
only Scottish man worthy the name of loyal; he who writ on his
master's death--

  "'I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds,
  And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds.'


"_October_ 15_th_.--Good Mr. Evelyn, who came to kiss the king and
the queen's hand (an honour few covet now), hath brought us heavy
tidings to-day of a dire massacre at Tredah in Ireland; the flower of
the Marquis of Ormond's army cut off, and such a panic struck through
the land that one stronghold after another has yielded.  It was
Cromwell's doing.  When will the awful career of this man of blood be
brought to an end?  Not a few among us think he must be master of
some dread sorceries.  How else should he cast his wicked spells
around the good men who, alas! follow him?

"Some even think there are mysterious allusions to him in the Book of
the Revelations.  Certain Greek figures there, which are also
letters, being capable, if ingeniously taken to pieces and put
together again, of being made to spell the number of his name, or the
name of something belonging to him.  Of this I cannot judge, not
knowing Greek.  And I think it scarce wise to build too much on it,
because I understand these same figures have been diversely applied
before by various interpreters to their various enemies.  And perhaps
it is better (at least for people who do not know Greek) to wait
until the prophecies are fulfilled before they thus interpret them.
It would be a pity (if we should, after all, be mistaken) to find we
had been misapplying the Holy Scriptures into a vocabulary for
calling people ill names withal.  That this terrible man is, however,
indeed as a terrible 'Beast,' trampling on kings and peoples and
nations, 'dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, having iron
teeth, devouring and breaking in pieces, and stamping the residue
with his feet,' no Royalist can doubt.

"This loss of Tredah, good Mr. Evelyn saith, forerunneth the loss of
all Ireland.  His Majesty, when he heard of it, is reported to have
said, 'Then I must go and die there too.'  But these melancholic and
heroical moods, my father saith, do not last long with His Majesty.

"_Jan._ 30_th_, 1650.--A day ever to be remembered with fasting, and
weeping, and bitter lamentation.

"So I wrote this morning, and just after, sweet Madame La Mothe came
to bid me to a fête.  She came into the room in a glow of kindly
animation with the pleasure she hoped to give me, but started
appalled at my robe of deep mourning (which of late, at my father's
wish, I had lightened), and the grave face which too unfeignedly
accompanied it.

"'My child,' she said, 'what new calamity?  Thou shouldst have let
thy mother's old friend share it.'

"'No new calamity, madame,' I said; 'or, at least, a calamity always
new until it is expiated.  This is the anniversary of the martyrdom.'

"'The fête of a martyr, my friend?' said she 'I thought your English
Church had no martyrs, or, at least, no calendar.  Besides, we keep
our martyrs' days as festivals.'

"'Scarcely, madame,' I said, 'when only a year old.  It is the day of
the death of our martyred king.'

"'Ah!' she said, drawing a long breath.  'Doubtless the death of the
late king of England was a was a sad tragedy.  All the Courts of
Europe acknowledged it to be so.  Most of them went in mourning at
the time.'

"But she was evidently much relieved.

"'It matters not, my loyal child!' she said.  'To-day you shall
devote to your pious lamentations.  I will defer the little fête I
promised myself on your account till to-morrow.'

"And with an embrace she left me.

"But I think scarcely anything before has made me feel so much what
it is to be an exile.  To her the sovereign for whom we have
willingly sacrificed so much, and were ready to sacrifice all, is
merely 'the late king of England;' the anniversary of his martyrdom
is no more than that of St. Pancras or St. Alban; and an ample
lamentation for his death is a Court mourning!

"My father commended me for my loyal black draperies.  But when Barbe
began and concluded our dinner with the meagre soup which I thought
the only fare appropriate for such a day, he looked a little
anxiously for something to follow; and when nothing came, and I
reminded him what day it was, and asked him to finish with a grace he
said a little hastily,--

"'The grace at the beginning is enough, I think, child, when the end
follows so close upon it.'

"Then when Barbe had withdrawn, he went to the window looking into
the court and whistled a cavalier tune; and then, checking himself,
threw himself into a chair, and murmured,--

"'It has a fearful effect on an English gentleman's brain to be shut
up for months in streets, like a London haberdasher.  With such a
life one might sink into anything in time; a Roundhead--a
Leveller--anything!  No wonder the Parliament found their adherents
in the towns.'

"Then moving uneasily again to the window, he said,--

"'Lettice, can't you get some fellow to stop that doleful
broken-nosed woman from everlastingly letting the water drop out of
her pitcher?  It is enough to drive a man crazy.  It is like a
perpetual rainy day, and takes away the only comfort one has left in
this den of a place, which is the weather.'

"I persuaded him to listen to a little of the 'Icon Basilike' to
soothe him.  But he even took exception to His Majesty's words.  At
length he cried,--

"Lettice, my child, prithee stop.  It is very excellent, but it is
very dismal.  I suppose His Majesty did write it all, poor gentlemen,
though how he could find it a comfort I cannot imagine.  However,
there is no saying what a man may be driven to comfort himself
withal, if kept months together in one chamber.  A day makes me feel
like an idiot.'

"Then I took my embroidery, and sought to tempt him to converse.

"But he only went from one melancholy topic to another--the
assassination of Dr. Dorislaus at the Hague ('a disgrace to the good
cause,' he said); the folly of listening to Covenanting Scottish men;
the incivilities of the cardinal and the French Court; the baseness
of the Spanish Court in calling the young king the Prince of Wales,
and scarce receiving his ambassadors except as private friends.  The
only topic which he seemed to dwell on with any satisfaction was the
wickedness of Cromwell and the Ironsides, which he said was too bad
to be tolerated long even in such a wretched place as Puritans and
Papists had made of this world.  But on this it gave me no delight to
hear him expatiate, which he noticed with some irritation, saying,--

"'Between your loyalty, and your objection to hear things said
against the rebels, Lettice, and that confounded woman who can never
get her pitcher emptied, and Cardinal Mazarin, it is really no easy
thing for a man to keep up his spirits.'

"And he paced out of the room, leaving me alone.  Thereupon, I went
faithfully over the bitter steps of the 'dolorous' way trodden by
those royal feet so recently; the while I thought how good Mistress
Dorothy was doubtless keeping a Puritan fast at Kidderminster on the
same occasion; and my heart wandered involuntarily to other sorrows
of a dolorous way not yet finished, and I hugged my crosses until I
felt rather like celebrating my own martyrdom as well as the king's.
Thus I wept much, and was beginning to feel very wretched, and to
hope I was the better for it, when my father returned.

"His countenance was lightened, and he kissed me very kindly on the
cheek.

"'Poor pale child!' he said.  'Well, it can't be helped.  I hope the
fasting does thee good.  But it does me none.  It makes me, not a
saint, but a sour old curmudgeon; as I have proved pretty forcibly to
thee, sweet heart.  It never suited me when things were cheerful.  I
always told your mother I could never take it up until she found some
Protestant Pope who could grant dispensations when necessary.  And
now that everything is dismal, it is a great deal more than I can
bear.  So, my dear, I have told Barbe to bring me the remains of that
venison pasty and a flask of Burgundy.  And I feel better for the
thought of it already.  The times are altogether too melancholic for
fasts, Lettice.  Fasts are all very well for comfortable cardinals
like this Mazarin, who know they can dine like princes to-morrow; but
not for poor dogs of exiles, who may have to dine with Duke Humphrey
any day without getting any benefit out of it for body or soul.'

"Barbe duly appeared with the pasty and the wine, and as I sat beside
my father the words came to me, '_Be not as the hypocrites, of a sad
countenance_,' and a chill seemed to pass away from my heart.  I
began to wonder whether, after all, I had been keeping the right kind
of fast; and I said something cheerful to my father.

"'Well, sweet heart,' he replied, 'the fast seems to do thee no harm.
What wast thou doing while I was away?'

"'Reading the Acts of the Martyrdom,' I said.  'Going over the king's
parting with the royal children, and his walk from St. James's to
Whitehall through the biting frost, and what he said to Bishop Juxon
on the scaffold, and his taking off the George, and all.'

"'But, dear heart,' said he, 'that is all over!  To whom dost think
it does good for thee to cry over it all again?  Not, of course, to
the king, who is on the other side of it; nor to the queen; nor to
the young king, who seems able enough to take consolation in one way
or another.  To whom, then?  Because if it is only to thyself, it
seems a great deal of pains to take.  There are so many people
suffering now, whom one might perhaps comfort by weeping with them,
that life seems to me scarce long enough to weep for the sorrows of
those who weep no more.'

"'He spoke diffidently, as if on ground on which he felt his footing
doubtful.  And when for a while I did not reply, he rejoined,--

"'Do not speak if it troubles thee, child.  Never heed an old
Cavalier's confused thoughts.  I know there are mysterious rites
which only the initiated understand.'

"'Father,' I said, drawing close to him, and sitting on a footstool
at his feet.  'I know no mysterious sanctuary which we cannot enter
together.  We will go everywhere together, will we not?  I think your
kind of fast seems the Bible kind.  I am sure any fast which leaves
the head bowed down like a bulrush, cannot be the right kind.  And if
we live till this day next year, I will try and find out some
sorrowful people whom our sympathy might comfort, and our bread might
feed.  And that will, surely, not make either of us of a sad
countenance.'

"'He smiled, and began to tell me what he had seen in his absence.
And as he kissed me to-night, he said,--

"'Lettice, child, what didst thou mean by our going everywhere
together?  I am not such a heathen as to hinder thee from being as
good as thou wilt.  I lived too long with the sweetest saint on earth
for that.'

"'I meant that we will both try to be as good as we can,' I said.

"'True, true,' he said; 'but a man's goodness is one thing, and a
young maiden's another.  A Cavalier's virtue is to be brave and loyal
and true, generous to foes, faithful in friendship, and (as far as
possible), in love, faithful to death to the king.  For a few slips
by the way, if these things are kept to in the main, it is to be
hoped there is pardon from a merciful Heaven.'

"'And a young maiden's goodness?' I said.  He hesitated,--

"'All this of course, and something pure and tender, and gentle and
heavenly, beside.  Ask thine own heart, child!' he added; 'what do I
know of it?'

"'All this, father,' I said, 'and no failures by the way?  Is that
the difference?'

"'Nay, saucy child, never flatter thyself,' he said.  'Thou hast
perplexed me too often by thy pretty poutings and elfish tricks and
wilful ways, that I should say that.'

"Then I ventured to say,--

"'Are the Cavalier's slips by the way forgiven if they do not ask
forgiveness, and do not try to mend?'

"'Come, come, I am no father-confessor to meet thy pretty casuistry,'
he said; and then gravely, 'Many of us do ask forgiveness.  God knows
we need it.  And when an honest man asks to be forgiven, no doubt he
means to do better.'

"'Then where is the difference?' I said.

"'Belike,' he said thoughtfully, 'belike there might be less!  So,
good-night, child!  I trow thou never forgettest thy prayers.  And I
suppose there is something left in them of what thou wast wont to ask
when I used to listen to thee a babe lisping at thy mother's knee;
"Pray God bless my dear father and mother and brothers, and make us
all good, and take us to Thee when we die."  That prayer is answered,
surely enough, for two of us.  Try it still, child; try it still.'

"Words which made me go to rest with little temptation to be, as the
hypocrites, of a sad countenance.

"_April_.--The gallant Marquis of Montrose has landed with foreign
recruits in Caithness, to venture all for the king, in fair and open
war.  The king, meanwhile, has been entertaining Commissioners from
the Covenanting party, who hate Montrose to the death; writing
secretly to assure the marquis of his favour, and openly receiving
the marquis's mortal enemies.  My father is sick at heart, he and
many other of the noblest of the Cavaliers, at these courtly
double-dealings.

"_May_.--My father came in to-day sorely dispirited.

"'There,' he exclaimed bitterly.  'A letter from Walter.  He is safe,
poor boy, in some desert mountain or other, among the wild deer and
wild men.  But the best of us is gone; the only Scottish captain I
would have cared to serve under, Montrose, debated at Invercarron in
the Highlands, his foreign hirelings a hundred of them killed, and
the rest, with the Highlanders, scattered; the marquis himself taken
by those "loyal" Covenanters and hanged at Edinburgh!

"'He died the death of a hero,' he pursued, after a pause; 'it might
be well if we were all with him, away from these fatal clever tricks
of policy.  The king's most faithful servant hanged at the Tolbooth,
and the king going to Scotland hand in glove with the canting
hypocrites who murdered him; making promises without stint, and
meantime encouraging his old followers by promising never to keep
them!  How can any man know what promises he does mean to keep?  A
curse on this hollow French Court, and all that comes of it!  It
would take little to drive many of us back to our English homes, to
the farm and the chase, and let these Puritans and politicians hunt
each other as they please.'

"'But the brave marquis?' I said, wishing to turn him from bitter
thoughts on which I knew he would never act.

"'Deserted by his men, changing clothes with a poor country fellow;
taken in this disguise by the enemy, delivered up to General David
Lesley, dragged about from town to town, and exhibited to the people
in his mean dress, in the hope he would be insulted.  But the poor
common folk jeered him not--they pitied him; so that in this Lesley's
malice was disappointed.  Then taken in an open cart through
Edinburgh, his arms tied to the sides of the cart, his hat taken off
by the hangman, and so dragged in base triumph through the streets of
the city.  He gave the driver money for conducting what he called his
triumphal car.  Then persecuted and cursed in the form of prayers, by
ministers and men calling themselves judges, for two days, and at
last hanged on a gallows thirty feet high, with the book recording
his deeds around his neck; a more honourable decoration, he said,
than his Order of the Garter which he lost in his last battle.  One
thing only of the traitor's doom was spared him.  They did not
torture him, but hanged him till he was dead.  His limbs were
quartered.  When they threatened him with that, he said he would he
had flesh enough to be distributed through every town in Christendom,
as a testimony of the cause for which he suffered.  A brave end; no
death on a victorious battle-field more worthy of a loyal gentleman!'

"'But the king will never trust himself with Montrose's murderers?' I
said.

"'He will go with them immediately,' was his reply, 'accepting all
their conditions, spite of all that Mr. Hyde and other counsellors,
who love him and love truth, can say.  Not one of his old friends and
counsellors permitted to be with him, nor one who fought for his
father against the Parliament, without taking the Covenant.  And he
is to take the Covenant himself.  How is it he cannot see (as Mr.
Hyde says), that "to be a king but in name _in his own kingdom_, is a
far lower degradation than to be a king but in name anywhere else?"
How is it he cannot see, that promises made to be broken, ruin the
soul in making and the cause in breaking?  But it is all the Queen
Mother's doing, and those hollow French Papistical ways.  Tossed to
and fro between Papists and Covenanters, what can a sanguine and
good-natured young king of twenty do?'

"Thus having relieved himself by some hearty abuse of the French
politicians and the Scottish preachers, my father's loyalty began to
blaze bright again, and he concluded,--

"'And we shall have to go to him, and get him out of his Covenanting
jailers' hands as best we may.'

"So His Majesty has landed in Cromarty, having to sign the Covenant
before they would suffer him to tread on Scottish ground.  He is
being led about listening to sermons containing invectives on his
father's tyranny, his mother's idolatry, and his own malignity;
rebuked by preachers on their knees, in humble postures, but in very
plain terms.

"_July_.--A letter from Mistress Dorothy, full of hopeful
expectation, rejoicing that the best hopes are entertained of His
Majesty's salvation, temporal and eternal.  She understands that he
is desirous of being instructed in the ways of the Lord, listens with
marvellous earnestness to gospel sermons in which he and his are not
spared, and has already signed the Solemn League and Covenant.  The
only thing to be wished, saith she, is that the instructions could
have preceded the signing.  Marvellous, she thinks, are the ways of
the Almighty; that 'out of the ashes, as it were, of the late king,
who, whatever his excellences, it could not be denied had prelatical
predilections and prejudices strongly opposed to the Covenant, should
spring a young monarch of so docile a disposition and so hopeful a
piety, for the everlasting sanctification and benediction of the
three kingdoms.'

"My father gave a low significant whistle when I read him this
passage.

"'Poor Mistress Dorothy!' he said; 'and poor young king!'

"_July_ 3.--Another letter from Mistress Dorothy, in a strain unusual
with her, speaking of increasing infirmity, and hinting that she may
not be able to write often again to me.  It is only me, saith she, to
whom she does write.  By my father's permission I have written to
tell Olive.

"_August_ 14.--Oliver Cromwell is on his way to Scotland.  There will
be fighting.  The king and the Covenanted Scottish Puritans against
the Ironsides and the uncovenanted English Puritans!  A strange
jumble!  My father is set on going, to take his share of the
fighting.  He is to leave me under the care of Madame la Mothe, who
has designs of making me acquainted with some of her friends of Port
Royal.

"_August_ 16.--My father has left to-day.

"'Don't turn Puritan or Papist, Lettice,' he said, 'and do not forget
thy old father in thy prayers.'

"'Nor you me, father,' I whispered, 'in yours.'

"'The men the fighting, and the women the praying, is an old
soldier's rule,' he said.

"'But not ours, father,' I said, half afraid to say so.  'There must
be quiet times before the and after them.'

"'Not very quiet,' he said, 'where Oliver is.  However, there is
always quiet enough for old Sir Jacob Astley's prayer--or the
publican's;' he added reverently.

"And with a kiss, and a blessing in a faltering voice, he was gone.

"Never so entirely bound to each other as the moment before parting;
never so free from heart-barriers as when time and space are about to
interpose their impenetrable barriers between us.

"This feeling must be a promise, not a terrible mockery.  Surely it
must mean that the barriers are made of corruptible things, the bonds
of the incorruptible."


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

When we came back to London from Netherby, my husband and I, Maidie
and the babe and Annis Nye, on the 31st May 1650, the whole city was
awake and astir with the triumphal welcome of Oliver Cromwell on his
way home from the Irish war.  In Hyde Park the Train-bands and
salvoes of artillery; through the streets eager crowds thronging
around him, shouting welcomes, as he rode to the royal lodgings the
nation had assigned him in "the Cockpit" at Whitehall, whither
Mistress Cromwell and her daughters had moved (not very willingly,
some said) a few weeks before.

In a short time Roger came into the house.

"At last the nation acknowledges him, Roger!" I said; "and now, we
may trust, the wars are over, and we may begin to reap the fruit."

"Always hoping still, Olive!" he replied, with a quiet smile.
"Always thinking we are getting out of the Book of Judges into the
Book of Ruth; out of the 'Book of the wars of the Lord,' into the
greetings of the reapers and the welcome of the gleaners.  Not yet, I
am afraid.  The Scottish Covenanters are even now making ready to
welcome their Stuart king; and that matter will have to be settled
before there is peace."

"But, meantime," I said, "it must cheer the Lord-Lieutenant's heart
to be thus received."

"I am not sure, Olive," he said.  "I just heard that a person said to
him, thinking to please him, 'What a crowd to see your lordship's
triumph!' but that he replied, 'There would be a greater crowd to see
me hanged.'"

"I do not believe that, Roger," said I.  "I do not believe his is a
heart not to be stirred by a people's welcome."

"Perhaps it was stirred, Olive; only a little more deeply than to a
ripple of pleasure.  Perhaps he thought of the poor peasants trying
to till the Millennium in on the Surrey hills, and the poor soldiers
trying to fight it in at Burford, and of the mutiny in Bishopsgate
Street among his bravest troopers, and of the many who began the
struggle at his side now in deadly opposition to him; and of that
ancient crowd whose hosannas and palm-branches were so quickly
changed."

"Roger," I said, "you and General Cromwell have been wanting us and
_home_!  It is not like you to look in this melancholic way on
things."

And I took him into the nursery to see Maidie and the babe; a sight
which, my husband used to say, I superstitiously thought a charm
against well-nigh any despondencies.

Maidie had forgotten him, and went through a number of pretty, shy,
feminine tricks, before she would be coaxed to come near him.  The
plain Ironsides' armour was not so attractive to her as would have
been the Cavalier plumes and tassels.  Her approval, however, once
won, she became completely at her ease, subjecting Roger entirely to
her petty tyrannies, and making the room ring with her merry little
voice; while the babe looked on, serious and amazed, expressing her
sympathy in the festivities by senselessly crowing, and by vainly
endeavouring to embrace her own rosy toes, as if she had been a
benighted baby of the Dark Ages, instead of an enlightened infant of
the Commonwealth.

So we talked no more politics that evening.  And in the morning,
Roger's views of the world seemed to me more hopeful.  Indeed, there
was work to be done, and so no more time for despondency; a bitter
root which needs leisure to make it grow.

In June, General Cromwell was appointed Captain-General of the Forces
instead of General Fairfax, and set off at once with his troops for
Scotland, Roger and Job Forster among them.

My husband also accompanied them.

My father soon afterwards took Aunt Gretel to pay a visit they had
been desiring to make to Germany ever since the Thirty Years' War had
ended (in 1648); two years before.

Early in August, a letter came from Lettice Davenant, telling me
that, from a letter she had received, she thought ill of Aunt
Dorothy's health, and deemed that she stood in need of succour and
sympathy, which, rigid to her vow, and all its consequences, she
would never ask.

If this was true, there was no time to be lost, Nor was there
anything to detain me from Aunt Dorothy.  The old house at Netherby
was, for the time, deserted, and London just then, in the sweet
summer time, seemed to me a wilderness and solitary place.

Moreover, our departure was made all the easier, in that it gave me
an opportunity of doing a kindness to one of my husband's prison
friends, good Dr. Rich, an ancient clergyman whom Leonard had found
in gaol on account of his having given aid to the Royalists, and to
whom, being now liberated but deprived of his benefice, our house
might offer a welcome asylum.  Dr. Rich was a sober, devout, and
learned gentleman; a man who dwelt much in the past, and was more
interested in the present as illustrating the past, than for its own
sake.

Nothing gave him more satisfaction than tracing the pedigree of
doctrines, heterodox or orthodox, to the primitive centuries, in
which he assured us were to be found the parents, or the parallels,
of all the heretics and sectaries of our own day, from the monks to
the Quakers; including the Fifth Monarchy men, who, he declared, were
nothing but a resuscitation of certain deluded persons called
Chiliasts, who had been convincingly refuted by I know not how many
Fathers.

Meantime (the fifth of the revenue of his benefice, allowed to
deprived ministers by the Parliament, being but irregularly paid),
Dr. Rich, Mistress Rich, and his eleven children found a parallel in
their own circumstances to the primitive poverty of the earliest
centuries too obvious to be pleasant; and it was a delight to be able
to offer them a home under the guise of taking care of our house in
our absence.

He was a man at all times pleasantly easy to practise upon with
little friendly devices, having little more knowledge than the birds
of the air as to the storehouse or barn whence his table was
supplied, and being always diverted by a little subtlety from the
perplexing cares of the present to the perplexed questions of a
thousand years ago.

Accordingly, with little parley, or preparation, Dr. Rich and his
family were lodged in our house, and we were ready to depart.  If
Aunt Dorothy's stronghold was to be entered, it must be by surprise
or storm; surrender was not in her dictionary, much less entreaties
for succour.

We set off, under the care of our serving-man, Annis and I with
Maidie and the babe, our cavalcade consisting of three horses, one
carrying Annis on a pillow behind the serving-man; the other (a sober
old roadster) bearing the babes in panniers, and me enthroned between
them; the third, a pack-horse, with our luggage and provender for the
way.

This mode of travelling was neither swift nor exciting.  It left me
much leisure to meditate by what subtleties I might avoid encounters
between Annis and Aunt Dorothy, should Aunt Dorothy be sufficiently
well for her orthodoxy to be in full force.

To forewarn Annis was only to bring on the conflict I dreaded with
more speed and certainty; to tell her a road was dangerous being the
first step towards convincing her it was right.

To forewarn Aunt Dorothy, on the other hand, was equally perilous.
So I came to the conclusion that I could only let things take their
course.

For without Annis I could not have come at all.  Her care of the
babes was pleasant.  Her quiet, firm will, her stillness, and her
sweet even voice kept them serene.  They were as content with her as
with me.  She seemed to grudge no weariness or toil for them, and her
temper was never ruffled.  Her dainty neatness and cleanliness were
like perpetual fresh air around them; and, moreover, my heart was
tender to the orphan maiden with a heart so womanly, and a belief so
perilous, in the midst of a rude world, which might crush her
delicate frame to dust, yet never bend her will a hair's breadth.

The points at which she and her sect came into antagonism with the
rest of the world were scattered all over the surface of every-day
social life; and to her every one of these became, when assailed, no
mere outwork, but the very citadel of her most central convictions,
in which, for the time, all the forces of her mind and heart were
gathered, and which she could no more voluntarily yield than could
voluntarily cease to breathe.

It was a serious responsibility to have the charge of a person, every
one of whose minutest convictions was to her essential as the
distinctive conviction of each sect to its members, and whose
convictions crossed those of the rest of the world, not only in what
they profess in church on Sunday, but in what they practise at home
every hour of every day.

Nor was this all.  If Annis's resistance had been merely passive,
there might still have been hope of escape.

But not only did all the world believe the Quakers wrong; they
believed all the world wrong.  Nor only this.  They believed
themselves commanded jointly and severally to set all the world
right, a conviction which, under no conceivable form of government,
is likely to lead to a tranquil life.  We could never tell at what
moment Annis might feel moved to tell any peaceful Presbyterian
minister, in the gentlest tones, that he was "a minister of
Antichrist;" or any strict Precisian matron, who would no more have
indulged in a feather than in an idol-feast, that she was "swallowed
up with the false and heathen customs of the world," in calling a
single person you; or in "idolatrously naming the second or third day
after the hosts of heaven."

However, the duty had been assigned me by my husband, and was bound
fast on me by the pity and love I felt for Annis.  This did not
hinder her being a far more anxious charge to me than my babes.

On the occasion, however, we owed a brotherly welcome to her.

We were benighted on the Surrey hills, to which we had turned aside
with a view of lodging at a friend's house.

The babes began to mewl and be weary.  The place was solitary, sandy,
with sweeps of barren heath.  It was St. George's Hill, and I began
to recall wild stories of the poor peasants "called Saxons, but
believing themselves Jews, and inheritors of the earth," who had
tried to dig the wild moors into millennial fertility a few months
before, and had threatened park palings;--so that I should have half
feared to ask shelter had any human dwelling appeared.  Yet to camp
on the wilds, with two young fretting babes, even on an August night,
was unwelcome.

As I was plodding on, seeking to soothe the infant in my arms, and
singing soft songs to Maidie, a wild figure issued forth from a
hollow tree, at sight of whom my heart stood still.  He was clad in
leather from top to toe.

But his carriage was grave, not like a plunderer, and he accosted me
soberly, though without any titles (as Mistress or Madam), calling me
"friend" and "thou."

At once Annis recognized him, calling him "George," and greeting him
as one she honoured.

After a brief conference with her, he came and bade me be of good
cheer, there were some of the Children of Light dwelling not far off,
to whom he would take us for shelter.

In a few minutes we came to a humble cot in a hollow of the downs,
where, without many words, we found kindness and hospitality worthy
of any mansion; the good woman preparing food and fire, so that the
babes were soon quiet and asleep, while far into the night they
entertained us with heavenly discourse, which was more restful than
sleep.  The goodman told us how, "when after Everard and Winstanley
and their promised millennium had failed, he had gone back hopeless
and dispirited to his old toils for a froward master, working early
and late taking rest, knocked about by his master for an idle knave,
jeered at by his mates for a lunatic, earning with all his toil
scarce enough to still the hungry cries of his babes; the world, dark
enough before, made dark as night by the putting out of the glory of
the kingdom, which was so soon to have made it day.  ("And," said the
good-wife with moist eyes, "too oft with a sour word from me.")  How
then, when he was feeling like one forsaken of God and man, George
Fox, the man in leather, from among the woods where he passed much
time in solitude with his Bible, but lately battered and bruised by a
mob in a market-place, where he had exhorted the people against false
weights, had come to him like Elijah from the wilderness, and had
told him of the universal free grace of God to all mankind, of the
_kingdom within_, and the Light within, and the Spirit within, and
the one Priesthood of the Eternal Intercessor, and the way of
stillness and simplicity by the rivers of the valleys, and the true
language of Thou and Thee, and the sin of war, and of all false words
and looks; and how, at last, looking for the Lord within his heart,
he had found in Him both the kingdom and the garden, and rivers of
water in a dry place."

After him spoke George Fox himself.  He could not have been more than
six-and-twenty; but I confess his discourse came to me with
marvellous power.

The words were sometimes confused, as if they were burst and
shattered with the fulness of the thought within them.  Something of
the same kind we had noticed of old in Oliver Cromwell.

He seemed like one looking into depths into which he himself only saw
a little way, and by glimpses; like one listening to a far-off voice,
which reached his spirit but in broken cadences, and our spirits
still more faintly, through the echo of his voice.  Yet he inspired
me with the conviction that these depths exist, and this music is
going on; a conviction worth something.

He spoke somewhat of his early life--of his father, Christopher Fox,
a weaver of Drayton-in-the-Clay in Leicestershire, whom the
neighbours called Righteous Christer; of his mother, an upright
woman, and "of the stock of the martyrs;" of the "gravity and
staidness of mind" he had when very young.  How he sought to act
faithfully inwardly to God and outwardly to man, and to keep to yea
and nay in all things.  And how men said, "If George says Verily,
there is no altering him."

He felt himself "a stranger in the world," and when others were
keeping Christmas with jollity he kept it by giving what he had to
some poor widows whom he visited.

Yet in his youth "strong temptations came on him to despair."  He
went to various ministers (he called them "priests").  But none
helped him.  One "ancient priest" reasoning with him about the ground
of hie despair, bid him "take tobacco and sing psalms."  But "tobacco
he did not love, and psalms he was not in a state to sing."

When he was twenty-two (in 1645), as he approached the gate of
Coventry, "a consideration arose in him that all Christians are
believers, both Protestants and Papists," and that "if all were
believers then they were all born of God, and passed from death to
life, and that none were believers but such; and that being bred at
Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to qualify men to be ministers of
Christ."

The "darkness and covetousness of professors" troubled him sorely in
London and elsewhere.

Then (said he), it was "opened in him," that "God dwelleth not in
temples made with hands; but in people's hearts."

This seemed at first to him "a strange word," because both priests
and people call their churches "holy ground" and "dreadful places,"
and temples of God.

He ceased to go near the priests, and wandered about night and day,
in "the chase," in the open fields, and woods, and orchards with his
Bible; until finding no help in man, at last he heard a voice which
said, _There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy
condition_."  "_He on whom the sins of the whole had been laid; He
who hath the key, and openeth the door of light and life_."  There
were "two thirsts in him, after the creature and after the Lord, the
Creator."  At length, "his thirst was stilled in God," his soul was
"wrapped up in the love of God," and when storms came again, "his
still, secret belief was stayed firm; and hope underneath held him as
an anchor in the bottom of the sea, and anchored his immortal soul to
Christ its Bishop, causing it to swim above the sea (the world),
where all raging waves, foul weather, tempests, and temptations are."

He "found that his inward distresses had come from his selfish
earthly will, which could not give up to the will of God," and that
"the only true liberty is the liberty of subjection in the spirit to
God;" and "his sorrows wore off, and he could have wept night and day
with tears of joy to the Lord, in humility and brokenness of heart."

As I listened to him, my thoughts ebbed and flowed within me.  At one
time he seemed a daring self-willed youth, setting his judgment
against the world; at another, as a simple lowly child who had
_listened to God_, and must obey Him and none else; again, as one who
might have been a poet, or a discoverer of great secrets of
nature--so inward and penetrating seemed his glimpse into the heart
of things; and again, as a reformer to break in pieces the empire of
lies throughout the world.

"I saw," said he, "that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but
_an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of
darkness_."

Again, "one morning as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came
over me, and a temptation beset me; but I sate still.  And it was
said, '_all things come by nature_,' and the elements and stars came
over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it.  But as I
sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and
a true voice, which said, _There is a living God who made all
things_.  And immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and
life rose over it all; my heart was glad, and I praised the living
God.  After some time I met with some people who had a notion that
there is no God, but that all things come by nature.  I had a dispute
with them, and made some of them confess there is a living God.  Then
I saw it was good I had gone through that exercise."

His search into the reality of people's beliefs led him among strange
people, some who held that "women have no more soul than a goose,"
whom he answered in the words of Mary, "My soul doth magnify the
Lord;" others (Ranters) whom he went to visit in prison, who
blasphemously held themselves to be God.

"Now," said he, "after a time was I come up in spirit into the
Paradise of God.  All things were new; and all the creation gave
another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.  The
creation was opened unto me, and it was showed me how all things had
their names given them according to their nature and virtue."

Again, "while I was in the Vale of Beavor, the Lord opened to me
three things, in relation to those three great professions in the
world, physic, divinity (so called), and law.  He showed me that the
physicians were out of the wisdom of God, by which the creatures were
made, and so knew not their virtues; that the priests were out of the
true faith which purifies and gives victory, and gives access to God;
that the lawyers were out of the true equity.  I felt the power of
the Lord went forth unto all, by which all might be reformed; if they
would bow to it.  The priests might be brought to the true faith,
which is the gift of God; the lawyers unto the true law, which brings
to love one's neighbour as oneself, and lets man see if he wrongs his
neighbour he wrongs himself; the physicians unto the wisdom of God,
the Word of Wisdom, by which all things were made and are upheld.
For as all believe in the light, and walk in the light, which Christ
hath enlightened every man that cometh into the world withal, and so
become Children of the Light and of the Day of Christ;--in His Day
all things are seen, visible and invisible, by the divine light of
Christ, the spiritual heavenly Man by whom all things were created."

Very strange words those seemed to me for so young a man.  At first I
felt disposed to turn from him as one full of an amazing
self-conceit, lifting himself up above all in church and the world;
but I remembered what my husband always said about trying to find the
real meaning of all men.  And as I sate still, and thought, a strange
depth opened in those words.  Something true, real, and eternal (I
thought he meant), some divine meaning lay at the root of all human
works, and states, and callings.  By this they stand, and live; By
departing from this they become hollow, and at last crumble away, by
returning to this they are reformed.

He spoke also of the whole of nature and history as being repeated in
the wonderful world within us.  How the spirit has its Egypts and its
Sodom, and its wildernesses and its Red Seas; its Paradise and its
mountains of the Lord's House; its Cains, and Esaus, and Judases.
"Some men," said he, "have the nature of swine wallowing in the mire.
Some the nature of dogs, to bite both the sheep and one another.
Some of lions and of wolves, to tear, devour, and destroy; some of
serpents, to sting, envenom, and poison; some of horses, to prance
and vapour in their strength, and be swift in doing evil; some of
tall sturdy oaks to flourish and spread in wisdom and strength.  Thus
the evil is one in all, but worketh many ways; therefore take heed of
the enemy and keep in the faith of Christ."

These thoughts in him were no mere visionary meditations, revolving
on themselves.  The strange thing in him was the blending of
far-reaching mystical thought with direct and most practical action.

"The Lord," said he, "commanded me to go abroad unto the world, which
was like a briery thorny wilderness; and when I came in the Lord's
mighty power with the word of life into the world, the world swelled
and made a noise like the great raging waves of the sea.  Priests and
professors, magistrates and people, were all like the sea when I came
to proclaim the day of the Lord among them, and to preach repentance
to them."

His preaching places were no secluded chambers, or conventional
religious assemblies, but the market-place, the "sitting of justices
to hire servants," schools, firesides, sea-shores where wreckers
watched, and, at times, the very "steeple-houses" where the "false
priests" seemed to him "a lump of clay set up in the pulpit above a
dead fallow ground."

By preaching repentance he did not mean crying out in general that
sin was evil.  He meant, like him who preached in the Desert of old,
pointing out to each man, and class of men, their particular sins,
telling magistrates to judge justly, tradesmen to have no false
weights and measures, Cornish wreckers to save wrecked ships and
shelter wrecked men, masters not to oppress servants, servants to
serve honestly, soldiers to do violence to no man, excisemen to make
no inequitable demands, "priests" to speak the truth.

And the results of his preaching were two-fold: everywhere priests,
excisemen, soldiers, masters, tradesmen, and magistrates were
enraged, seized him, beat and bruised and trampled on him, threw him
into prisons; and everywhere some ministers, soldiers, tradesmen, and
magistrates, and even his jailers listened, gave up their false
weights, or unjust dealings, and sought to live uprightly before God.

After this discourse there was silent prayer, and the good couple
insisted on yielding up their own bed in the upper chamber to Annie
and me, and the babes.  But it was far on in the night before I could
sleep.  And in my sleep I had strange confused dreams of John the
Baptist in the wilderness; of a madhouse, full of Quakers clothed in
camels' hair with leathern girdles; and of the world shining in a
wondrous light, neither of sun nor moon, which made it like Paradise.

In the morning the poor people of the house set us on our way with
great loving-kindness, and I had much ado to make them take any
recompense.  And I have always been thankful that through this
interview I learned to distinguish those whom many confound--the
Ranters, Fifth Monarchy men, and other lawless fanatics--from the
true Quakers, or (as they would be called) "Friends of truth."

After that we had no adventures until we reached Kidderminster.

Our way lay past many ruins of unroofed cottages, with their
blackened walls deserted and bare; gardens of herbs running wild, and
orchards still flourishing, and overhanging with pleasant fruit; the
open and broken casements of the charred and ruined homestead; here
and there a stately castle or mansion battered and breached by
cannon, while choice flowers still bloomed in patches on the trampled
terraces or round the broken fountains, where fair hands had tended
them.

In the heat of the day we rested.  But wondrous pleasant were the
sights we saw and the sounds we heard as we journeyed through the
land through those summer morns and eves; the pleasant old country,
well-watered everywhere with broad still rivers among the meadows,
and little talking brooks among the woods, orchards, and corn-fields;
and soft waving sweeps of hill and valley, all smooth and green, as
if the waters of the great sin-flood of old had never torn and
convulsed them, but only gently heaved and rippled over them.  And as
we neared Kidderminster, far off on either side rose two ranges of
hills, with blue peaks pointing to the sky like church-roofs, the
Malverns and the hills of Wales.

Again and again, now, as I read godly Mr. Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress, pictures of what I saw on that journey in old England rise
before me--the "river with the green trees on its banks;" the "meadow
curiously beautified with lilies, and green all the year long;" the
"tempting stile into Bypath Meadow;" the "hills with gardens and
orchards and fountains of waters;" the "delicate plain called Ease;"
the valley of humiliation, "green through the summer; fat ground,
consisting much in meadows," with its "pleasant air;" the
"fruit-trees, with their mellow fruit, which shot over the garden
walls;" the Delectable Mountains, not too high and savage for the
shepherds to fold their flocks thereon.  I can remember, also, many a
Hill Difficulty, up which our horses slowly toiled, and Sloughs of
Despond through which they struggled.  But the "valley of the shadow
of death" had nothing outward in that pleasant land to picture it.
Out of the dark and rugged depths of his own despair, John Bunyan
created a landscape he never could have seen.

I was the sole observer of these things among our little band: the
babe saw little but me; Maidie saw nothing of hills and woods, the
wild roses and honeysuckles we gathered for her were the channels
through which the beauty of the world stole into her heart, as it
did, making her clap her hands and laugh with delight as we rode; the
serving-man, being a Londoner, thought scorn of the woods and lanes
as very barbarous and ill-made places compared with Cheapside with
its wares and signs; and Annis, if she saw the outward world at all,
beheld it but as the mystical mirror of the world within, the waters
of quietness and trees of healing among which her spirit dwelt.

And so at last, on the seventh day after leaving home, we came to a
valley on the slopes of which rise the houses of Kidderminster, on
each side of the river Stour--"the church on the brow above the
water," as they say the name signifies in the old tongues, British
and Saxon, which were spoken when first men began to make houses
there.

Rich old English names; every name (like the old minsters of our
land) in itself a poem, with histories imbedded in every syllable!

Fondly we transfer the familiar old words to new places in this New
World.  But here alas, as yet, they are no living, growing
words,--only poor pathetic relics or arbitrary symbols; at least,
until generations to come shall have breathed into them the new
significances of a new human history.




CHAPTER V.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

It was evening when we entered the old town of Kidderminster.  As we
rode along the street to Aunt Dorothy's house, many of the casements
were open to let in cool summer evening air; and from one and
another, as we passed, rose the music of the psalm sung at the
family-worship, the voices of the little ones softly blending with
the deeper tones of the father and mother, or the trembling treble of
age.

It was a heavenly welcome; and, by an irresistible impulse, I
dismounted, for, wearied as I was with the journey, I felt it a kind
of irreverence not to walk.  It was like going up the aisle of a
great church.  The whole town seemed a house of prayer.

None of these sweet musical sounds, however, came out of Aunt
Dorothy's windows as, at length, we stopped at her door; although the
casements were open.  But, as we paused before trying to enter, I
heard the cadences of a soft voice reading in an upper chamber.  I
tried the latch, found it open, and, softly mounting the stairs,
through a bedroom door, which stood slightly ajar, I saw a grave man,
habited like a minister, with a broad collar, and closely-fitting cap
on his head, sitting at a table with an open Bible before him.  By
his side stood a little serving-maiden, whom at the moment he was
questioning in simple language, in a calm, persuasive voice and with
a remarkably clear utterance, while she answered without fear.  His
form was slight, and his gait slightly stooping; his face worn and
grave, yet not unfrequently "tending to a smile," and always lighted
up by his dark, keen, observant eyes.  This, I felt, could be no
other than Mr. Baxter.  Altogether the face made me think of
portraits of saintly monks, worn with fasting and prayer, save that
the eyes were quick and piercing rather than contemplative; as if he
saw, not dreams and visions of Christendom in general, but just the
little bit of it he had to do with at the moment, in the person of
Aunt Dorothy's little maid.  When the little maid had answered, he
turned with a look of approval to some one out of sight, whom I knew
must be Aunt Dorothy.  Judging from the fact of the catechizing being
held in her chamber, that she would be equal to seeing me, and that
therefore I had better appear in an ordinary way, I crept softly
down-stairs again, and knocked at the house-door.

Aunt Dorothy was much moved at my coming; although in words she only
vouchsafed a grave remonstrance.  And I was no less moved to see how
feeble and shrunken she looked.  She had been much enfeebled by an
attack of low fever and although professing to make little of it,
like most people unaccustomed to illness she believed herself much
worse than she really was, and had, dear soul, gone in spirit
pathetically through her own funeral, with the effect so solemn an
event might be hoped to have on the hearts of her misguided kinsmen
and kinswomen.

"Olive, my dear," she said to me, on the morning after our arrival,
after directing me where to find her will, and a letter she had
written, "thou wilt find I had not forgotten thy babes, nor indeed
any of my kindred, unnatural as no doubt they think me.  I wish the
letter to be given to your father at once, immediately after all is
over.  My example and arguments have had little weight; but it may be
otherwise then.  I have no physician but good Mr. Baxter, who is
physician both for body and soul to his people.  He hath endeavoured
to reassure me; but I know what that means.  And yesterday he gave me
his 'Saint's Rest,' which, of course, is only a considerate way of
preparing me for the end."

All through that week Aunt Dorothy continued marvellously meek and
gentle, her grave eyes moistening tenderly as she looked on the
babes.  She commended Annis as a maiden of a modest countenance and
lowly carriage.  (I had not ventured to inform her of Annis's
peculiar belief.)  She spoke tenderly of every one, and agreed as far
as possible with everything; which last symptom I did feel alarming.

The kindness and sympathy of the neighbours were so great, that it
seemed to me their evening psalm was only the musical Amen to the
psalm they had lived all day.  One brought us possets, another dainty
meats, another confections for the babes; others would watch in the
sick-chamber at night; another sent for the babes to play with her
own, to keep the house quiet.  If we gave thanks, they said Mr.
Baxter "thought nothing of godliness which did not show itself in
goodness."  Another told us how Aunt Dorothy had been borne on their
hearts at the Thursday prayer-meeting at Mr. Baxter's; and more than
one came to "repeat to us Mr. Baxter's last Sunday sermon;" repeating
Mr. Baxter's sermon (he only preached one on Sunday) being a great
ordinance at Kidderminster.  Never before did I understand so fully
what the meaning of the word church is, or the meaning of the word
pastor.  Before I came to Kidderminster I had thought of Mr. Baxter
as a godly man, rather fond of debate, and very unjust to Oliver
Cromwell (as I still hold him to have been).  After staying there
that week, I learned that if the joys of fighting (syllogistically)
were his favourite recreation (which, in spite of all his
protestations, I think they were, for a true Ironsides' soul dwelt in
that slight and suffering body); his work was teaching little
children, seeking the lost, bringing back the wandering, supporting
the weak,--all that is meant by being "shepherd" and "ensample" to
the flock; going before them in every good and generous work, going
after them into every depth of misery, if only he could bring them
home.

As I sat by the window of the sick-chamber where I could see Mr.
Baxter's house on the opposite side of the street, with the people
going in to consult him, the poor patients sometimes waiting by
twenty at a time at his door, and a pleasant stir of welcome all down
the street when his "thin and lean and weak" figure passed out and
along, Aunt Dorothy loved to discourse to me of him.  She told me how
in his childhood he had lived in a village called Eaton Constantine,
near the Wrekin Hill, in a rustical region, where Ave Marys still
lingered with paternosters in the peasants' prayers; where the
clergyman, being about eighty years of age, with failing eye-sight,
and having two churches, twenty miles distant, under his charge, used
to say the Common Prayer without book; and got "one year a thresher,
or common day-labourer, another a tailor, and after that a kinsman of
his, who was a stage-player and gamester, to read the psalms and
chapters."  Mr. Baxter's father, "having been addicted to gaming, had
entangled his freehold estate; but it pleased God to instruct and
change him by the bare reading of the Scriptures in private, without
either preaching or godly company, or any other books, so that his
serious speeches of God and the life to come very _early possessed
his son with a fear of sinning_."  For reading the Scripture on the
Sundays, when others were dancing, by royal order, round the
May-pole, he was called a "Puritan."

Good books were the means of Richard Baxter's early teaching, though
when his "sincere conversion" began he was never able to say.  One of
these books (to Aunt Dorothy's perplexity) was by a Jesuit; another
was "Sibbes' Bruised Reed," brought by a poor pedler and
ballad-seller to the door; another was a "little piece" of Mr.
Perkin's works, which a servant in the house had.  For all that while
(Mr. Baxter had told her) neither he nor his father had acquaintance
with any that "had understanding in matters of religion, nor ever
heard any pray extempore."  Their prayers were chiefly the Confession
in the Prayer-book, and one of Bradford, the martyr's, prayers.

But Mr. Baxter deemed his own sicknesses and infirmities to have been
among the chief means of grace to him.  "The calls of approaching
death on one side, and the questioning of a doubtful conscience on
the other hand, kept his soul awake."

His doubts were many; for instance, "whether a base fear did not move
him more than a son's love to God," and "because his grief and
humiliation were no greater;" until, at last, he understood that
"_God breaketh not all men's hearts alike_; that the change of our
heart from sin to God is true repentance; and that he that had rather
leave his sin than have leave to keep it, and that had rather be the
most holy, than _have leave_ to be unholy or _less_ holy, is neither
without repentance nor the love of God."

His diseases were more than his doubts, and his physicians more (and
belike more dangerous) than his diseases.  He had thirty-six
physicians, by whose orders he took drugs without number, which, said
he, "God thought not fit to make successful;" whereupon at last he
forsook the physicians altogether.  Under which circumstances he had
doubtless reason to count it among his mercies (as he did) that he
was never overwhelmed with "real melancholy."  "For years," as he
said, "rarely a quarter of an hour's ease, yet (through God's mercy)
never an hour's melancholy, nor many hours in the week disabled from
work."

Mr. Baxter's being so much indebted to good books as his teachers and
comforters, was perhaps partly the reason why he wrote so many.  Of
his "Saint's Rest" he himself said: "Whilst I was in health I had not
the least thought of writing books, or of serving God in any more
public way than preaching; but when I was weakened with great
bleeding, and left solitary in my chamber at Sir John Cook's in
Derbyshire, without any acquaintance but my servant about me, and
sentenced to death by the physicians, I began to contemplate more
seriously on the everlasting rest which I believed myself to be on
the borders of."  He originally intended it to be no more than the
length of one or two sermons; but the weakness being long continued,
the book was enlarged.  The first and last parts being for his own
use were written first, and then the second and third.  It was
written with no books at hand but a Bible and a Concordance, and he
found that "the transcript of the heart hath the greatest force on
the hearts of others;" and for the good he had heard that multitudes
have received by that writing, he humbly thanked "Him that compelled
him to it."

A history which interested me much; for I delight to think of books I
love as growing in this and that unexpected way from little unnoticed
seeds, like living creatures, not as constructed deliberately from
outside, like a thing made by hands.  Doth not John Milton say that a
good book is "the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed
and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life; so that he who
destroys a good book commits not so much a murder as a massacre, and
slays an immortality rather than a life."

Much also Aunt Dorothy had to say of Mr. Baxter's good works; how out
of his narrow income he contrived to send promising young men to the
university, and to relieve the destitute without stint, "having ever
more to give," he said, "as he gave more;" how he had been the
physician of his people, fighting against their sicknesses as well as
their sins; how the old were moved by him, who had never been moved
before, and little children were stirred by his eloquent entreaties,
and trained by his patient teaching, so that they brought the light
of love and godliness into many a home which before had been all
darkness.

She said Mr. Baxter was wont humbly to attribute the wonderful
efficacy of his ministry to many causes rather than to any peculiar
power in his words; to the following among others:--.

1. That "the people had never had any awakening ministry before, and
therefore were not sermon-proof."

2. The infirmity of his health.  That "as he had naturally a
familiar, moving voice, and doing all in bodily weakness as a dying
man, his soul was more easily brought to seriousness, and to preach
as a dying man to dying men."

3. That many of the bitter enemies to godliness, "in their very
hatred of Puritans," had gone into the king's armies, and "were
quickly killed."

4. The change made in public affairs by the success of the wars;
"which (said Mr. Baxter), however it was done, and though much
corrupted by the usurpers, yet removed many impediments to men's
salvation.  Before, godliness was the way to shame and ruin; but
though Cromwell gave liberty to all sects, and did not set up any
party alone, by force, yet this much gave abundant advantage to the
gospel; especially considering that godliness now had countenance and
reputation also as well as liberty; and such liberty (even under a
usurper) as never before since the gospel came into the land did it
possess.  And" (said he) "much as I have written against
licentiousness in religion, and the power of the magistrate in it,
yet, in comparison of the rest of the world, I think that land happy
that hath but _bare liberty to be as good as they are willing to be,
and toleration for truth to bear down her adversaries_."

5. Another advantage was the zeal, diligence, the holy, humble,
blameless lives, and the Christian concord of the religious sort.

6. The private meetings for prayer, repetitions, and asking
questions, and his personal intercourse with every family apart.

7. Being able to give his writings, and especially a Bible, to every
family that had none.

8. That the trade of the weaving of Kidderminster stuffs enabled them
to set a Bible on the loom before them, wherewith to edify one
another while at their work.  For (thought Mr. Baxter) "free-holders
and tradesmen are the strength of religion and civility in the land,
and gentlemen (_idle_ men, I think he meant) and beggars the strength
of iniquity."

9. His own single life, "enabling him the easilier to take his people
for his children."

10. That God made great use of sickness to do good to many: and then
of Mr. Baxter's practice of physic; at once recovering their health
and moving their souls.

11. The quality of the wicked people of the place, who, "being
chiefly drunkards, would roar and rave in the streets like stark
madmen, and so make that sin abhorred."

12. The assistance of good ministers around.

To these things, and such as these, said Aunt Dorothy, Mr. Baxter
loved to attribute those conversions which "at first he used to count
up as jewels, but of which afterwards he could not keep any number."

All this made me greatly desire the time when I might hear Mr. Baxter
preach; and, at last, on the second Sunday after our arrival, Aunt
Dorothy insisted on my going to church.

The only perplexity was Annis Nye.  However, I trusted that Aunt
Dorothy's subdued frame of mind, and Annis's being busy with the
babes or in the kitchen, would avert a collision.

The sermon went far to explain to me Kidderminster and Mr. Baxter.
But no written words will ever explain to those who did not hear them
what his sermons were.

The pulpit was at once Mr. Baxter's hearth, his throne, and his true
battle-field: the central hearth at which the piety of every fireside
in Kidderminster was weekly enkindled; the throne from which the
hearts of men and women, old men and little children, were swayed;
the battle-field where he fought, not so much against sectaries and
misbeliefs, but against sin and unbelief.  He was at home there,
close to every heart there; yet at home as a father among his
children.  All that he was, turn by turn, through the week--pleading,
teaching, exhorting, consoling, from house to house--he was in the
pulpit altogether; but with the difference between glow and flame,
between speech and song; between a man calmly using his faculties one
by one and a man with his whole soul awake and on fire, and
concentrated into one burning desire to save men and make them holy;
with a message to deliver, which he knew could do both.  His eye
enkindled, his face illumined, his whole emaciated frame quivering
with emotion as he leant over the pulpit, and spoke to every heart in
the church.

"Though we speak not unto you as men would do that had seen heaven
and hell, and were themselves perfectly awake," he said.  But it
seemed to me as if he _had_ seen heaven and hell (or rather _felt_
them); and as if, while I listened to him, for the first time in my
life, my soul was "perfectly awake" all through.

And of all this, the next generation, and those who never heard him
in this, will know nothing!  Instead, they will have one hundred and
sixty little books and treatises, out of which they may vainly strive
to piece together what Mr. Baxter was during those fourteen most
fruitful years of his ministry at Kidderminster.  But even if they
could put the fragments together right, they would only have created
an image of clay.  And most likely they will piece them together
wrong (as I did before I knew him).  And then they will wonder at the
clumsy image, and wonder what gentlemen of the neighbourhood, trained
in universities, in courts, and in armies, and at the same time the
poor weavers of Kidderminster, and the nailers of Dudley, who
clustered round the doors and windows when he preached, could find in
his words so beautiful and so moving.

Most words, written or spoken, are perhaps more spoken to one
generation than men like to think.  If the next generation read them,
it is not so much as living words to move themselves, but as lifeless
effigies of what moved their fathers.  But with great orators this
must be especially the case, and with great preachers more perhaps
than with other orators.  Nor need they complain.  Their words reach
far enough, moving hearts whose repentings move the angels in the
presence of God.  They live long enough: on high, in the deathless
souls they awaken; on earth, in the undying influence from heart to
heart, from age to age, of the holy lives they inspire.

The large old church was thronged to the extremity of the five new
galleries which had been built since Mr. Baxter preached, to
accommodate the congregation.

When he ceased speaking, there was a long hush, as of reluctance to
supersede the last tones of that persuasive voice by any other sound.

And as the congregation gently dispersed, that sacred hush seemed on
them still.  They were treasuring up the words wherewith they would
strengthen themselves and each other during the week; the housewife
keeping them in her heart like a song from heaven; the weaver, as he
worked with his open Bible before him on the loom, seeing them shine
on its verses like the fingers of a discriminating sunbeam.

As I came home, I remember feeling not so much as if I had been in a
church where something good had been said, as in a battle-field where
something great had been done.  Death-blows had been given to
cherished sins; angels of hell had been despoiled of their false
"armour of light," and compelled to appear in their own hideous
shrunken shapes; hidden faults had been dragged from their ambush in
the heart, and smitten; the joints of armour, deemed impervious, had
been pierced at a venture; the powers of darkness had been defeated
by being detected; the powers of light had been aroused, refreshed,
arrayed in order of battle, and sent on their warfare, strengthened
and cheered, as the Ironsides by the voice of Oliver.  A battle had
been fought, and a campaign set in order, and the combatants inspired
for fresh conflicts.  As those living words echoed in my heart, all
the conflicts of armies and politicians seemed mere shadowy
repetitions (like the battles in the Elysian shades) of that eternal
essential conflict between good and evil waged unceasingly within and
around us.

I remember that Aunt Dorothy's first words to me, when I returned,
sounded as if they came up to me on a sunny height, from a strange
voice in some dim region far below.

She said,--

"Olive, dear heart, it rejoices me that you have such a discerning
young woman to serve you.  She is, I deny not, a trifle rustical, and
needs instruction as to gestures and forms of address, but, at least,
she is able to perceive how sadly poor General Cromwell has been
seduced from the ways of humility and uprightness, and has failed in
protecting the people of God."

Nevertheless, these words were not without something consolatory in
them for me.  Much as Aunt Dorothy and Annis had, belike,
misunderstood one another as to what they meant by the "people of
God" whom the Captain-General failed to protect, it was evident they
were still so far on friendly relations with each other.  And it was
also plain to me that Aunt Dorothy's militant faculty (and therefore
she herself) was recovering.

A very opportune improvement.  For on the following day came letters
from Roger and Job Forster announcing the battle of Dunbar, which
those who fought it looked on as an act of the great warfare between
good and evil, as truly as any of Mr. Baxter's preachings.  In which
belief Aunt Dorothy and Mr. Baxter agreed with them; but not as to
the sides on which the combatants were ranged.


The first letter from Dunbar was from Roger, dated September 2nd:--

"A word to thee, Olive, my sister, by the post who is to carry
letters for the Lord-General.  Ill news travel fast, and if such have
reached thee before these, I would have thee know, though our case is
low enough, our hearts are not daunted.

"I write in my tent on my knee--wind and rain driving across this
wild tongue of land, dashing the waves against the rocks, whistling
through the long grasses of the marshes, as in the sedges by old
Netherby Mere.  Nothing to do but to keep our powder dry, if we can,
and pray.

"The enemy think us caught in a worse Pound than my Lord Essex at
Fowey.  Even the General thinks little less than a miracle can save
us.  But maybe the miracle is wrought already in the courage of our
men, without a grain of earthly food to sustain it; the miracles of
the New Covenant being, for the most part, inward.

"For months we have been watching them up and down the hills and the
shores round Edinburgh, yet never able to tempt them to a battle.
And now they deem us trapped and doomed, which may work to better
purpose on them than our challenges.  To all appearance their
boastings are justified.

"The ships we hasted into this 'trap' to meet (sorely needing fresh
victuals), are nowhere in sight.  Through his knowledge of the
country, the enemy has possessed himself of all the passes between us
and England.  His army is on the bill above us, twenty-three thousand
strong, with veteran generals, threatening to sweep down, and with
'one shower, wash us out of the country.'

"We with but eleven thousand to meet them.  Many of ours lying sick
in the town of Dunbar.

"In all Scotland not another stronghold is ours.

"Among them is the shout of a king, 'a Covenanted king;' whatever
strength may lie in that!  Many of their soldiers godly men and brave.

"I think we shall not be suffered to dishonour the good cause or the
General by lack of courage.  But victory is not in our hands.  And
what may be in God's, I am no prophet to tell.

"Between us and England an army twice our number.  Between England
and the old tyranny, as we deem, nothing but Oliver and his eleven
thousand.  A thought to nerve heart and hand.

"'We are sensible of our disadvantages,' as the General saith.  'But
not a few of us stand in this trust, that because of their
numbers--because of their confidence--because of our
weakness--because of our strait, we are in the Mount, and in the
Mount the Lord will be seen; and that He will find out a way of
deliverance and salvation for us.'

"The sea and the waves roaring, but as yet, God be praised, no man's
heart failing him for fear.  Farewell!  Whatever comes to-morrow I
would have thee know we are not dismayed to-day."

And, enclosed, a few lines from my husband:--

"This campaign has been one of more occupation for the leech than the
soldier," he wrote.  "The wild weather, and food not of the best or
most plentiful, with lying out on the wet moors, always restlessly on
the watch for battles which never came, have shattered the troops
more than many a hard fight.  Sickness is on all sides.  The
Captain-General saith the men fall sick beyond imagination.  He
himself has not escaped.  The foe I fight with has left me little
intermission.  The prospect of a battle, such as hangs over us in the
thousands gathering on Doon Hill through the day, and now ready to
sweep down the slopes, seems proving already to some a better physic
than any of mine.  A wound is doubled when the spirit is wounded, and
half healed when the spirit is cheered.

"Never fear for me, dear heart; I know I am where my task is set.
And I keep as well as men for the most part do who have plenty to do
and hope in doing it."


"Ah," sighed Aunt Dorothy, "snared in their own net at last!  Did not
Mr. Baxter write to the well-disposed in the sectarian army, warning
them of the sin of going to war against the godly in Scotland; 'for
which, O blindness!' quoth he, 'they thought me an uncharitable
censurer.'  Remarkable providence!" she concluded; "to have actually
run of their own free will into a place which as if it had been
ordained from the beginning to be just such a trap."

"Had we not better wait till we see whether they get out, Aunt
Dorothy?" said I.

"Get out, child?" said she, fierily; "I think better of them, with
all their transgressions, than to believe they are bad enough to be
suffered to prosper in their evil ways!  Mr. Cromwell himself was, or
seemed to be, in the Covenant once."


But that very evening flew through the land the news of Dunbar
victory: these letters having been delayed by coming round through
London.  The Scottish forces were totally routed.  As Mr. Baxter
said, "Their foot taken, their horse pursued to Edinburgh; when, if
they would only have let Oliver's weakened and ragged army go, or
cautelously followed them, it would have kept their peace and broken
his honour."

For neither Mr. Baxter nor Aunt Dorothy thought it at all a
"remarkable providence" that Oliver and his army had thus escaped.
It was plain, on the contrary, she thought, to all right-thinking
people, that their successes, so far from proving them right, only
proved that they had gone too far wrong to be corrected.

A few days afterwards arrived a letter, sent me by Rachel Forster
from Job.

It began:--

"See Psalm 107.  (_O praise the Lord, all ye nations; praise him all
ye people._

_For his merciful kindness is great towards us; and the truth of the
Lord endureth for ever.  Praise ye the Lord_).*  We sang it on the
battle-field yesterday.  The shortest psalm that is.  Made on
purpose, belike, for such a service and such a congregation.  For we
had no time for more.  We sang it, Oliver and the foremost of us, on
the halt, before the rest came up for the chase.  The music rolled up
grand, like the sea, from the hollow of the brook against the hill of
Doon.  We had cause to sing it, and the whole land hath cause.  Never
better.  Do thou sing it, dear heart, at Netherby, and let Mistress
Olive sing it, and the babes listen, and Mistress Annis (if she will
unlearn her perverse ways); 'old men and children, young men and
maidens.'  For their 'covenant with death' is broken.  The snare is
broken, and we are delivered.  And not we and England only, but all
the godly throughout the three kingdoms; if they will but see.
Surely they must see; kirk-ministers and all, 'spite (as the General
saith) of all their sullenness at God's providences, and their envy
at Eldad and Medad and the Lord's people who prophecy; their envy
(saith he) at instruments, because things did not work forth their
platform, and the great God did not come down to their thoughts.'


* In Mr. Rous's version:--

  "O give ye praise unto the Lord,
    All nations that be;
  Likewise, ye people, all accord
    His name to magnify.
  For great to usward ever are
    His loving-kindnesses;
  His truth endures for evermore,
    The Lord O do ye bless."


"They hung above us on the hill of Doon, twenty-three thousand
strong, all through the night.  A wild night it was; the waves
roaring, the cold rain driving across the tongue of land where they
thought us trapped.  But we prayed, and watched, and kept our powder
dry, which was as much as we could do.  We had some scant shelter
under tents and walls.  They, poor souls, had none; and before dawn
they put out all their matches but two to a company, and lay down
under the corn-shocks.  Oliver did not wait for them to burst on us;
nor for the morning to break.  We did not wait for his word to be on
the alert.  A company of us were in prayer at three o'clock, with a
poor cornet (one of the Eldads and Medads), when Major Hodgson rode
past and stopped to join, and found strength in it, as the day proved.

"We were to have charged before they woke.  But there were delays in
getting all the men forward.  So before we had gathered we heard the
enemy's trumpets wake up one by one in the dark, along the hill-side.
Then the moon broke from a cloud, and, with the first ray of dawn,
made light enough to see where we were going, when at last all the
men came up, and the trumpets pealed out all along our line with the
English battle-shout, and the great guns.

"Their cry and ours met: '_The Covenant!_' and '_The Lord of Hosts!_'
And with it we and they met, met and closed in death-grapple for
three-quarters of an hour; company to company, man to man.  Once we
were pressed back across the brook in the hollow, their horse
charging desperately.  No hearing the winds and waves roar then.
Then we charged back, horse and foot,--such a charge (many say) as
they never saw--back again across the hollow of the brook.  That
charge was never returned.  We heard Oliver's voice, '_They run, I
profess they run!_'  And then the sun broke across the field, and
with it again Oliver's voice, '_Let God arise, and let his enemies be
scattered._'

"And scattered they were.  Three thousand dead in the hollow of the
brook.  (Three thousand whose hands we would fain have held as
brothers.  God knows how Oliver entreated them sore, and how they
gave us hatred for our love.)  Ten thousand prisoners.  The rest
flying right and left through the land.  An army gone in an hour.

"An army of brave Scottish men, godly men many of them doubtless;
ministers there in store to bless them (no Eldads and Medads, but
covenanted kirk-ministers), all swept away like the chaff of the
summer threshing-floor.

"Will they not yet see?  Not our courage did it; they were brave as
we.  Not our numbers; theirs doubled ours.  Not our field: they chose
it.  The passes of the hills were theirs.  What then?  Can any fail
to see?  The lie that is among them makes them weak, the false oaths
to a false Covenant sworn at their command, against his will and
conscience, by the poor, false, young Stuart king.  The difference is
the difference in our battle-cries.  '_The Covenant_,' good once (far
be it from us to speak scorn of it), good twice, but not good always;
strong against one evil yesterday, not strong against all evil for
ever.  And '_The Lord of Hosts_,' Almighty against all evil for ever.
Not His own Covenant even, as far as it is but written in stone; much
less theirs, though signed with their blood; not His own Covenant,
though 'confirmed by an oath,' so much as _Himself_ living to confirm
the oath.

"As the Lord-General saith, 'What He hath done, what He is to us in
Christ, is the root of our comfort; in this is stability; in us is
weakness.  Faith as an act yields not perfect peace; _but only as it
carries into Him who is our perfect peace_.  Rest we here, and here
only.'*


* "What God hath done, what He is to us in Christ, is the root of our
comfort: and this is stability; in us is weakness.  Acts of obedience
are not perfect, and, therefore, yield not perfect peace.  Faith as
an act yields it not; but only as it carries us into Him, who is our
perfect peace, and in whom we are accounted of and received by the
Father even as Christ Himself.  This is our high calling.  Rest we
here, and here only."


"Truly soldiers have cause to sing the 109th Psalm who have such a
General to lead and speak to them; although, in the eyes of the kirk,
he be but an Eldad.  I trust I meddle not with things too high for me
after the lesson I have had.  Often, dear heart, I long for thee, and
thy comfortable speech and smile.

"Master Roger and I talk over many things by the camp-fires when most
are asleep; we knowing old Netherby, and thee, and so many other
things the rest know not.  He is heavier and graver than I would see
him, save where there is work to be done.

"I doubt there is somewhat gnawing, without noise, as worms and
blights do, at his heart.

"There was the pretty lady at the hall, now among the Hivites and
Perizzites (so to speak) in France.  I know nothing, but that he
never speaks of her and hers.  And they were aye together, he and she
and Mistress Olive, in the old days.

"Poor brave young heart, mine is sore for him many a time.  It is not
all who get such plentiful wages beforehand as I, Rachel, in thee."

Which last sentence Rachel had annotated with,--

"The goodman means no harm, Mistress Olive.  But on that matter he
could never be brought to see plain, say what I would."


The next Sunday a Thanksgiving was appointed by the Parliament ("the
Rump") for the victory of Dunbar.  This Mr. Baxter openly
disregarded; using his influence, moreover, to persuade others to do
the same.  He did not hesitate in his sermon to warn his hearers of
the sin of fighting against a loyal Scottish Covenanted army; while,
at the same time, he blamed the Scots themselves for "imposing laws
upon their king, for forcing him to dishonour the memory of his
father, and for tempting him to take God's name in vain by speaking
and publishing that which, they might easily know, was contrary to
his heart."

So, in the afternoon of that Sabbath which Mr. Baxter refused to make
a day of thanksgiving to Kidderminster, I held a private thanksgiving
service in my own chamber.

At first, in my solitude, my spirit was too busy with protesting
against Mr. Baxter to be at leisure for praise.

At the doors of some of the houses opposite, quiet groups of weavers
were gathered, in their Sunday best.  In all the town, Mr. Baxter
rejoiced to think, there was not one Separatist.  The Quakers (he
fondly believed) he had silenced, at a discussion held in his church.
One journeyman shoemaker, indeed, had turned Anabaptist, "but he had
left the town upon it."

No "Eldads and Medads" had troubled Kidderminster with irregular
prophesying; "for," said Mr. Baxter, "so modest were the ablest of
the people, that they were never inclined to a preaching way, but
thought they had teaching enough by their pastors."

"Among all these busy brains and stirring hearts," I thought, as I
sat at my window, "not one that differs from Mr. Baxter; while Mr.
Baxter differs in so many directions from so many people that fifty
books have been written against him."

The thought of a whole town walking on such a narrow path, step by
step after Mr. Baxter, with those fifty precipices and "bye-paths" on
all sides, had something appalling in it;--appalling in its monotony,
and in its precariousness.  What kind of a place would England be to
live in if it were all brought to this Kidderminster standard?  Not
very pleasant certainly for any journeyman shoemaker who was
unfortunate enough to turn Anabaptist!  Perhaps in the end a little
wearisome even for Mr. Baxter himself, when no one was left for him
to silence.

I need not have perplexed myself with such speculations.  Long before
the experiment reached that stage, Mr. Baxter's own eloquent voice
itself was silenced, and his faithful words made doubly precious to
his flock by the prohibition, on peril of imprisonment or fine, of
ever listening to them again.

Nor was a slumbrous unanimity by any means the danger England had
then to dread.

As I opened my Bible and read the Dunbar Psalm, and sought to make
melody with it in heart, my quiet chamber seemed to become a side
chapel of a vast cathedral.  I felt no more alone.  A thousand
services of song seemed going on around me.  From Dr. Jeremy Taylor
silenced in Wales, and good Bishop Hall near Norwich, and numerous
little companies in old halls and manors, meeting secretly to use the
Liturgy banished from churches and cathedrals.  From these same
ancient churches and cathedrals, where hundreds of "painful
ministers," like Mr. Baxter, Joseph Alleine, or John Howe, were
leading the devotions of the people in psalms more ancient than any
Liturgy, and prayers new as every morning's mercies.  From Puritan
armies in Scotland, covenanted and uncovenanted.  From meetings of
Quakers, many of them in prisons.  Beyond these again, from Lutherans
and Calvinists in Protestant Europe; and doubtless also from
countless devout hearts in Catholic cathedrals and convents.  And
farther off still, from the Puritan villages in the wilderness on the
other side of the sea.

At first this concourse of sounds scarce seemed a concert.  Babel has
smitten men with deeper divisions than those of speech.  Too many of
the prayers sounded terribly like anathemas.  Too many of the psalms
like war-cries.

Until, as I still listened, the roof even of this vast cathedral of
Christendom seemed to melt away into the firmament of heaven.  Then I
found that there was a height whence all discords, which were not
music, fell back to earth, and whence all the discords without which
music cannot be, flowed up in one grand River of Praise, in at the
Gates of Pearl.

The burden of the song seemed simply that old prayer, "Our Father
which art in heaven."

But from the crystal fiery sea into which that river flowed, rolled
back, as in an echo of countless ocean waves, the antiphon,--

"_Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty.  Just and
true are Thy ways, Thou King of Saints!_"


Then the thought came to me, "Mr. Baxter, however, with all his
moderatings and balancings cannot antedate these harmonies.  Aunt
Dorothy says he believes he has found the exact middle point between
every extreme--Calvinism and Arminianism, Episcopacy, Presbytery,
Independency.  But, unfortunately, to other people it is but a point.
Aunt Dorothy cannot quite balance herself on it.  It is certain the
whole world cannot.  It is doubtful if any one can, except Mr.
Baxter."

The harmony is made, not by each trying to learn the whole, but by
each keeping faithfully to the part given him to learn and sing,
though the part be only a broken note here and there.

And I thanked God that all the efforts of the worst men, or the best,
to anticipate that majestic anthem of conflicting and embracing sound
by a thin unison of voices, had never succeeded, and never could
succeed, as long as men are men, and the second Man is not St. Paul,
or Apollos, or St. John--but the Son of Man; the Lord from heaven.


LETTICE'S DIARY.

"_Paris_, 1650, _September_.--It is a new world in which I find
myself, here, in the hotel of Madame la Mothe.  Save Barbe and
myself, not one Protestant is of the circle.

"The loneliness is sometimes oppressive, courteous as all are.  It is
not so much the condemnation of Protestant England, as an unfortunate
island shattered from the rest of Christendom by the earthquake of
the Reformation, which makes me feel how far off we are from each
other, as their incapacity to comprehend the divisions which are
convulsing our country.  'From shattering to pulverizing, the process
is but natural,' a good priest said the other day.  They seem to look
on us as the dust of a ruined Church; and between one atom of dust
and another--between atoms Episcopal, atoms Presbyterian, and atoms
Independent--they have no sunbeam strong enough to distinguish.

"_Paris, October_ 1_st_.--This morning Madame la Mothe, always
anxious for my welfare, and now and then awakening to spasms of
conviction that my welfare means my 'conversion,' took me to hear an
excellent priest, called Singlin, preach.

"'I do not go often myself, my child,' she said, 'because the power
of M. Singlin's sermons is redoubtable.  They sweep people away from
transitory ties, like a torrent.  Now, while M. la Mothe lives, this
is a danger to which I scarcely venture to expose myself.  He is, as
you see, more aged than I am.  And what could he do without me?  When
I married him, I was a child; he a man of high reputation, who had
made his mark in the world.  It was considered a brilliant destiny
for me.  It has been a tranquil and a happy destiny.  He was ever to
me the most considerate of friends, guiding me through the
temptations of the world like a director, generously providing me
with the pleasures suited to my age, and consoling me like an angel
when our only child died.  I could never abandon him now.'

"Many things were strange to me in these words.  This married life
seemed so strangely dual, instead of one.  She spoke of him rather as
leading on than going with; rather as providing her joys than joining
in them; rather as consoling her griefs than sharing them.  And as
strange seemed to me this mingled, love and dread of M. Singlin's
sermons.

"We dressed, and set off for the church.

"'Surely, Madame,' I said, as we walked through the streets, 'no good
man would advise you to abandon home and M. la Mothe?'

"'No, certainly,' she said; 'not advise.  But he might make me feel
the world so hollow and momentary, all its relationships so
transitory, that an irresistible attraction would draw my heart from
the world, like that of the young lady you see on the other side of
the street, Mademoiselle Jacqueline Pascal.  And what comfort, then,
would my husband have in my going through life, by his side indeed,
but as a machine wound up to its work, with the spirit elsewhere!'

"And she pointed out to me a maiden habited much like a nun, moving
silently along with downcast eyes.

"'See, my child,' she whispered, 'one of the trophies of M. Singlin's
eloquence, or, at least, of the doctrines he enforces.  A young
person of good family, daughter of M. Etienne Pascal, counsellor of
the king.  At thirteen she was a poetess.  She charmed the Queen,
Anne of Austria, and the Court, by her verses on the birth of the
Dauphin, his present Majesty.  She captivated all by the point of her
repartees.  At fourteen she won from Cardinal Richelieu her father's
pardon for some political offence, by her marvellous acting in a
drama.  Her brother, Blaise, works miracles of science--literally
miracles.  He has weighed the air, and made a machine which
calculates.  She is beautiful, accomplished, not yet twenty-six; the
most brilliant prospects open to her; the only unmarried daughter of
an indulgent father who loves her tenderly.  She hears M. Singlin.
His words give the seal to her vocation.  She renounces
everything--the Court, the world, the family as far as she can, her
genius, her wit, herself.'

"'You mean she renounces her genius by consecrating it.'

"'I mean she _renounces_.  Hereafter God and the Church may
consecrate.  But who can say?  What are our talents to Him?  His
Providence can destroy a navy by a whirlwind or by a little worm.
Henceforth she reads only books of devotion and theology.  She writes
no more poetry.  She denies herself the manifestation of her dearest
affections.  Until her father freely consents to her profession, she
yields, indeed, so far as to remain in his house.  But she makes her
home a convent, her chamber a cell.  She spends the day there in
solitude--last winter without a fire, bleak as it was--reciting
offices, reading books of piety.  She only joins the family at meals.
And of the meals, as far as possible, she makes fasts, refusing to
warm herself at the fire.  Charity alone, and devotion, bring her out
of her retirement.  When her sister's child was dying of the
small-pox she nursed it night and day with devoted tenderness.  She
would, doubtless, have done the same for the child of a beggar; so
entire is her consecration.  Soon, no doubt, such piety will vanquish
all objections; her father will yield (if he lives), and she will
enter Port Royal.  And this is one result of M. Singlin's eloquence,
and of the power of his doctrine.  You will confess it is a power,
beneficent indeed, but formidable.

"'Formidable indeed, Madame,' I said, shuddering, for I thought of my
own father.  'Fire, I think, to the brain, and frost to the heart.'

"'Alas, my child!' she said; 'how should you understand what is meant
by genuine Vocation, or a thorough Conversion?'

"To me, indeed, this seemed not conversion; but annihilation.


"We were silent some way on our return from the church.

"'You were arrested,' said Madame la Mothe.

"'It reminded me of a Puritan sermon I once heard in England,' I
said; 'speaking of the world as a "carcass that had neither life nor
loveliness."  Only M. Singlin seemed to include more in what he meant
by the world than the Puritan did.'

"'That is what I should expect,' she replied.  'The higher the point
of view, the more utter must seem the vanity of all below.  Does he
not make life seem a speck of dust, its history a moment? yet each
speck of dust on the earth a world, and each moment a lifetime, as to
its issues, radiating as these do through eternity!'

"When we came back, Madame la Mothe gave an ardent account of the
sermon to an Abbe, a cousin of hers, who happened to be visiting at
the house.

"To my surprise, he solemnly denounced the recluses of Port Royal,
with M. Singlin and their directors.  He called it a conspiracy.

"He said: 'A renegade Capuchin has (as they confess) been the means
of the conversion of their adored Abbess, Angélique Arnauld.  The
Arnauld family, the soul of the whole thing, were Protestants in the
previous generation; and (as the Spaniards say) it takes more than
one generation to wash the taint of heresy from the blood.'

"At this point Madame la Mothe considerately introduced me.

"'With the Protestants we are on open ground, he said, bowing
graciously to me.  'Mademoiselle will understand I spoke
ecclesiastically.  But these Jansenists are conspirators.  They are
digging mines underneath the altar itself.  However, the Pope lives,
and the Order of Jesus is awake.  We shall see which will perish--the
sanctuary, or the mine which was to explode it.'

"'Is it true,' I asked Madame la Mothe afterwards, 'that the Abbess
of Port Royal owed her first impulse heavenward to a Protestant?'

"'They have told me, indeed, it was a renegade monk who so moved the
young Abbess' heart,' she replied.  'The miserable being, it is said,
spoke so forcibly on the blessedness of a holy life, and on the
infinite love and humiliation of our Lord in His incarnation.'

"'Perhaps, then, he knew the blessedness of a holy life,' I said.

"'He was a wretched fugitive, escaping from his convent, my child,'
she replied, a little impatiently.  'But what of that?  Was not
Balaam one of the prophets?'

"Two things, however, give me a kind of mournful consolation.

"One is, that, deny it as they will, there is an undying link between
the holy people of Port Royal and those of the Protestant Church.  I
like to think that.  Not only has their piety a common source in the
same Sun, but it was enkindled by the touch of a poor heretic hand
they would refuse to grasp in brotherhood.  They will have to grasp
that poor hand by-and-by, I like to think; and then, not reluctantly!

"And the other consolation is, that divisions are not confined to
Protestants; a consolation both as regards the Roman Catholics and
ourselves.  For it seems to me, wherever there is thought there must
be difference; wherever there is life there must be variety.  Life
and sin; these seem to me the chief sources of religious difference.
God only knows from which of these two fountains each drop of the
turbulent stream flows.  Life, which must manifest itself in forms
varied as the living, varying as their growing; sin, which adds to
these varieties of healthy growth the sad varieties of disease,
infirmity, excrescence, or defect.

"_Paris, October_ 2_nd_.--A battle at Dunbar, on the coast of
Scotland.

"Another defeat.  'A complete rout,' my father says in his letter,
which is very desponding.  He is very indignant with the Scots, who
will not let the king's 'loyal servants and counsellors' come near
him, or even fight for him, but drag him about like a culprit and
preach sermons to him, 'once,' he says, 'six in succession.'  (And,
here, His Majesty had not the reputation of being too fond of
sermons.)  He is also grieved with the king himself; at his signing
the Covenant, at his publicly condemning his royal martyred father's
acts, and his mother's religion; and, above all, at his suffering
himself to be conducted in state into Edinburgh, under the gate where
were exposed the dishonoured remains of Montrose, who so gallantly
died for him not six months before.  'Nevertheless,' he concludes,
'we shall all die for him when our time comes, no doubt, as willingly
as Montrose did.  And after all, the true mischief-makers are the
priests.  From the Pope to the kirk preachers, not a disturbance in
the world but you find them at the bottom of it.  Let all the
theologies alone, sweetheart.  One is as bad as another.  Say thy
Creed; keep the Commandments; pray the Lord's Prayer.  And remember
thy old father.'

"_January, Chateau St. Rémi_.--We have come to M. la Mothe's country
chateau for the Christmas.

"The Abbey Church of Port Royal des Champs is our parish-church.
Madame la Mothe often takes me there.

"The first morning after our arrival she took me to the edge of the
Valley of Port Royal.

"It is rather a cup-like hollow in the plain than a valley among
hills.  Its sides are clothed with a sombre mantle of ancient
forests,--at the further end sweeping into the plain into which the
valley opens.  A broad rich plain with rivers, woods, corn-fields,
now ploughed into long brown ridges for sowing; towns, villages with
spires and towers, all stretching far away into a blue dimness.

"The recluses who occupied Les Granges, the abbey farm on the brow of
the hill where we stood.  must find their prayers helped, I think, by
this glimpse into the wide world of life beyond.  The nuns at the
bottom of the valley must lose it.

"The valley was entirely filled by the convent.

"'It is like a vase carved by the Creator Himself for the precious
ointment whose odour fills all His house,' Madame la Mothe said.

"To my unaccustomed eyes it was more like a prosperous village than a
monastery.

"In the midst, the great tower of the church; close to it, the
convent itself, with its lofty roofs, arched windows and gateways,
turrets and pinnacles; around, the infirmary, surgery,
weaving-houses, wash-houses, bake-houses, wood, corn and hay stacks,
the mill and the mill-pond, and fish-ponds; the new and stately hotel
which is the retreat of the Duchess de Longueville, with the
residences of other noble ladies; and beyond, the kitchen-gardens and
meadows divided by a winding brook from the 'Solitude,' where, amidst
groups of ancient trees, and under the steep slopes of the wooded
hill, the nuns repair for confession and meditation.  Even then, on
that winter-day, I thought I perceived the gleam of their white
dresses among the trees.

"As we look, Madame la Mothe told me some of the scenes which had
been witnessed there within the last fifty years.

"Not fifty years since, the abbey had been a place of restless gaiety
and revelry.  Light songs and laughter might have been heard echoing
among the woods, when the child Angélique Arnauld was appointed
Abbess.

"She then described the great king Henri Quatre with his courtiers
invading the valley in the eagerness of the chase, and the child
Abbess with her crozier in her hand marching in state out of that
grand arched gateway at the head of her nuns, and warning His Majesty
from the sacred precincts; the king gallantly kissing the queenly
child's hand, and obeying her behests.

"Then the renegade Capuchin, finding one night's shelter in the abbey
on his flight to a Protestant country, preaching in that church of
the 'blessedness of a holy life and the love of Christ,' so as to
awaken the young Abbess in her seventeenth year to the vision of a
new world and a new life, which, in a subsequent sickness, deepened
into thorough conversion to God.

"The 'Journée du Guichet,' when the Abbess Angélique began her
attempts to reform and seclude the nuns by refusing to admit her own
father within the grating; by the long fainting-fit with which her
resistance ended, showing him what the effort cost her, and
convincing him of her sincerity.

"The reform of Port Royal.  Its growing reputation for sanctity.  The
mission of the young Abbess to reform other convents; the thronging
of new nuns under her rule, until the valley (then undrained) became
too small, health failed, and all the community had to remove for
fifteen years to Paris.

"The arrival of the Abbess Angélique's brother, M. Arnauld d'Andilly,
and the other recluses, to take up their abode at the deserted abbey,
then half in ruins, the meadows a marsh, the gardens a wilderness.
The draining of the marsh and rebuilding of the abbey by the hands of
these gentlemen, working to the sound of psalms.

"The return of the Abbess Angélique, with her long train of
white-robed daughters, welcomed with enthusiasm by the peasants.  The
one meeting of the recluses and the nuns, eighteen of them of the
Arnauld family; as the brothers led the sisters into the church they
had worked so hard to restore, and then retired to the abbey farm, to
see each other no more except at the church services through a
grating.

"As I looked down, nothing struck me so much as the stillness.  To
the eye, the valley was a place of busy human life.  To the ear, it
was a solitude.  No discordant noises came from it, no hum of
cheerful converse, nor voices of children at play.  The nuns have
large schools, which they teach most diligently and intelligently;
the best ever known, it is said.  But the children are accustomed to
play, each by herself, quietly.  The nuns think they like it as
much,--after a little while.  They are also never allowed to kiss or
caress each other.  Caresses might lead to quarrels, and are, besides
(the nuns think), a weakening indulgence of emotion.

"I hope they often read the little ones the gospel which tells how
the Master 'took the little children in His arms.'  They must need it.

"The stillness had a sacred solemnity; but there was something of a
vault-like chill in it, which crept over me like a shadow, as we
descended the steep path, strewn with moist dead leaves among the
roots of the leafless trees.

"I should like better to have seen Port Royal when, as in the wars of
the Fronde a year or two since, it became a refuge for the plundered
peasants of the neighbourhood, the infirmary filled with their sick
and aged, the church with their corn, the sacred napkins for the
altar torn up to bind their wounds.

"Through the grand arched gateway we went into the inner court, and
thence into the church, where the nuns were chanting the service.

"Their music seems all kept for the church.  Sin and eternity!  These
two thoughts seem to hush all the music at Port Royal, except such as
goes up to God.  It was a solemn thing to hear the hundred voices
joining in the severe and simple chants to which they tune their
lives so well.


"Madame la Mothe was pleased to see me moved as I was by it.

"'In England, you have scarcely a choir like that,' she said.

"'Not quite,' I replied; yet not to mislead her with false hopes as
to me I could not help adding,--'With us the singers are not gathered
into a choir, but scattered through the Church; in scattered
Christian homes throughout the nation.  And the pauses of the psalms
are filled up by family joys and sorrows, and by the voices and
laughter of little children; which, it seems to me, make the psalms
all the sweeter and truer.'

"But more solemn than this general assembly it was to me to see, as I
have this evening, while I was in the church alone, that motionless,
white robed, kneeling figure keeping watch in the dusk before the
'Sacred Host' on the altar.  One silver lamp radiated a dim and
silvery light into the recesses of the empty silent church; the lamp
never extinguished, the prayer never ceasing.

"That kneeling worshipper seemed to me herself a living symbol and
portion of the Perpetual living Sacrifice, in which the One sacrifice
unto death is for ever renewed; as Christian heart after heart is
enkindled to love, and sacrifice, and serve; as the Church, redeemed
by Him who offered Himself up without spot to God, offers herself up
in Him to do and suffer the Father's will, to drink of His cup and be
baptized with His baptism; His living body, the fulness of Him that
filleth all in all.'

"As we came up the hill my heart was full of that thought.  We turned
and looked back over the valley.  The massive towers threw long
shadows over the meadows, silvered with dew and moonlight.  The broad
lake shone, like the tranquil lives of the sisterhood, mirroring the
heavens.

"On the other side, on the brow of the hill, the lights of Les
Granges showed where the recluses were keeping their watch.  A
deep-toned bell from the abbey church struck the hour.

"Then, in the deepened hush of silence which followed, the soft chant
of the nuns came stealing up the slopes.  As we listened, it seemed
to be answered from above by the deep music of men's voices from Les
Granges.

"We listened till the last notes died away.  I never heard church
music which so moved me as those unconscious antiphons, where the two
sides of the choir could not hear each other, whilst we heard both.
It made me think of so many things: of the many choirs on earth who
sing a part, and cannot hear or will not recognize each other's
music, while God is listening to all; of the two sides of the choir
in heaven and earth; and of the voices in the higher choir which I
should hear no more on earth.

"I felt lifted into a higher world.  And we two walked home in one of
those restful silences which sometimes say so much more than words.

"It broke a little rudely on this when, at the gate of the chateau,
M. la Mothe's servant met us, exclaiming:

"'Ah, madame!  M. le Comte is much agitated.  He says it is ten
minutes after the time when madame brings him his posset.'

"We hastened into the salon.  M. la Mothe was indeed much agitated.

"'Pardon me, my friend,' she said; 'I am ten minutes late.'

"He pointed to the clock.

"'Ten, madam!' he exclaimed.  'Fourteen and a half, at the least!
when the physician said every minute was of consequence.  But we must
bear it, no doubt.  Neglect is the portion of the aged.  And madame
has her salvation to accomplish, no doubt!  In my youth married women
accomplished their salvation in accomplishing the comfort of their
husbands.  But times change.  In a few months I shall, no doubt, be
beyond the reach of neglect; and then madame can accomplish her
salvation without further interruption.  Heaven grant it may prove
your salvation after all!  Those learned gentlemen, the Jesuits,
think otherwise, and they have great saints among them.'

"I shall never forget the sweet humility with which she acknowledged
the justice of his reproaches, and tact and tenderness with which she
soothed his feeble irritability into tranquillity again.

"'You mean well, no doubt, my poor friend!' he said at last, with a
lofty air of forbearance; 'and no doubt we shall not soon have such
an omission again.

"'Ah, my child!' she said to me, as she came into my room afterwards;
'if you had only known how good he was, and how patient with me, when
I was wild and young!  These little irritations are not from the
heart, but from the brain, which is over-tasked and tired.  He had no
sleep last night on account of the gout, and I read aloud to him
romances, insipid enough, I think, to send me asleep in a house on
fire.  But they had no effect on him, the pain was so acute.'

"The tears came into my eyes.  She thought nothing of her own fatigue.

"'You need not pity me,' she said, with her own bright smile.  'I am
an easy, happy old woman, far too contented, I fear, with the world
and with my lot in it.  If I have any virtue, it is good temper; and
that is scarcely a virtue, not certainly a grace--indeed, merely a
little hereditary advantage, like skin that heals quickly.'

"'I was not pitying you, madame,' I ventured to say; 'I was only
thinking how much better God makes our crosses for us than they make
them even at Port Royal.'

"'Alas, my child!' she sighed; 'there is no need for the holy ladies
and gentlemen of Port Royal to make their own crosses.  The Jesuits
are preparing plenty of crosses, I fear, for them.  But do not, I
entreat you, dignify such little prickles as mine by the name of
crosses.'

"I made no answer, save by kissing her hand.  For I thought her
crosses were none the worse discipline because to her they seemed
only prickles; and her graces all the more genuine and sweet because
to her they seemed only 'little hereditary advantages.'

"It is such a help to 'crosses,' in the work they have to do for us,
when they have no chance of looking grand enough to be set up on
pedestals and adored; and it is such a blessing for 'graces' when
they are not clothed in Sunday or 'religious' clothes, so as to have
any opportunity of looking at themselves at all.

"Good temper, kindliness, cheerfulness, lowliness, tenderness,
justice, generosity, seem to me to lose so much of their beauty and
fragrance when they change their sweet familiar home-names (which are
also their true Christian names) for three-syllabled saintly titles,
such as 'holy indifference,' or 'saintly resignation,' and pace
demurely about in processions, saying, in every deprecatory look and
regulated gesture, 'See how unlike the rest of the world we are!'

"'_When saw we Thee an hungered?_?'--how much that means!  It was not
so much, I think, that the 'righteous' had not recognized the Master
in their acts, as that they did not recall the acts.  They did not
recognize the sweet blossoms of their own graces, because His life
had gone down to the root, and flowed through every stem and twig of
everyday feeling, and overflowed in every bud and blossom of
every-day words and works, as naturally and inevitably as a fountain
bubbles up in spray.  It was not His presence they had been
unconscious of, but their own services.  For it seems to me just the
acts religious people least remember that are the most beautiful, and
that Christ most remembers, because they flow from the deepest
source; not from a conscious purpose, but from a pervading
instinctive life.

"In such unconscious acts the noble men and women of Port Royal are
rich indeed.  I love, for instance, to think how M. de St. Cyran,
when himself a prisoner in the Bastille, sold some of the few
precious books remaining to buy clothes for two fellow-prisoners of
his--the Baron and Baroness de Beau Soleil--and said to the lady who
undertook the commission for him, 'I do not know what is necessary,
but some one has told me that gentlemen and ladies of their condition
ought not to be seen in company without gold lace for the men and
black lace for the women.  Pray purchase the best, and let everything
be done modestly, and yet handsomely, that when they see each other
they may forget, for a few minutes at least, that they are captives.'
Madame de Beau Soleil's beautiful 'worldly' lace will perhaps prove a
more religious robe for M. de St. Cyran than his own 'religious
habit.'

"The selling of the church plate at Port Royal to relieve the poor is
certainly as much a religious act as the buying it.  The voluntary
desecration of their church into a granary, to save the corn of the
poor peasants from plunder during the wars of the Fronde, was
certainly a true consecration of it.  The lovely wax models which the
sister Angélique makes to purchase comforts for our Royalist
countrywomen, heretics though she believes us to be, seem (to us at
least) a labour of love sure not to be forgotten above.  The delight
in acts of kindness to others, for which Blaise Pascal is said to
torture himself by pressing the sharp studs of his iron girdle into
the flesh, may prove to have been more sanctifying than the pain by
which he seeks to expiate it.  The homely services which Jacqueline
Pascal rendered her little dying niece on the nights she spent in
nursing her through 'confluent smallpox,' may prove to have been more
'divine offices' than those she spent so many nights, half-benumbed
with cold, in reciting.


"And so, after all, from the most self-questioning religious life, as
well as from the lowliest life of love that scarcely dared call
itself religious, may come that same answer of the righteous.  He who
scarce dared lift his eyes to heaven, saying with rapture, 'Was it
indeed Thee to whom I gave that cup of cold water?'--and the austere
Puritan (Catholic or Protestant, saying), 'Was it indeed the
_feeding_ and _clothing_, those little forgotten acts of kindness I
thought nothing of, that were pleasing Thee?"

"_February_.--I wonder what Olive is doing and learning.  These
misunderstandings of God and of one another perplex me at times not a
little.  I wonder if she has any perplexities of the same kind in
England?

"This morning Madame la Mothe told me a beautiful saying of M.
Arnauld d'Andilly, brother to the Mère Angélique, when some one was
exhorting him to rest, 'There is all eternity,' he replied, 'to rest
in.'

"This evening I repeated this to Barbe.  She replied: 'It reminds me
of a saying of a good pastor of ours, who said, when some one tried
to comfort him in severe sickness by wishing him health and rest,
"Mon lit de santè et de repos sera dans le ciel."'*


* Told of M. Drelincourt, pastor of Charenton, who died in 1669.


"The two sides of the choir again!--taking up the responses from each
other without knowing anything of each other's singing!  How
wonderful it all is!  This deafness to each other's music; these
misunderstandings of each other's words! this deafness to what God
tells us of Himself in the Gospels, and in the world; these
misunderstandings of Him!  And His patient listening, and
understanding us all!




CHAPTER VI.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

As Aunt Dorothy continued to recover, I knew the dreaded clash of
arms with Annis Nye could not be long delayed; and I had been casting
about in my mind for some means of settling Annis for the time
elsewhere, when the storm burst suddenly upon me.  Maidie and I had
come from a ramble near the town; Maidie enraptured with her first
experience of the treasures of the woods, having that day discovered
that in the autumn the trees drop showers of inestimable jewels in
the form of spiky green balls, which, when opened, proved to be each
a casket containing a glossy, brown lump of delight, called in the
tongues of men a horse-chestnut, but in the tongue of Maidie having
no word adequate to express its beauty and preciousness.  I was
bringing home a store of these treasures in a kerchief; while Maidie
held my hand, discoursing, like a person just entered on a fortune,
as to how much of her wealth she would bestow on Annis, and how much
on Aunt Dorothy; baby she considered not able to appreciate; but in
time, perhaps, she might grow up to it, and then she should have her
share.

But at the door Aunt Dorothy met us, pale and agitated.

"Child!" she said, in the tone of one deeply wronged--"Olive!  I did
not look for this from thee!"

In her hand was a sheet of writing.  She gave it me with a trembling
hand.

"Read it, Olive," she said.  "It is from George Fox, now in the House
of Correction at Derby!  a person concerning whom no sober person can
entertain a hope, save that he may be mad.  And it is sent to your
maid Annis Nye; and is by her acknowledged.  He is a Quaker, Olive!
One of that mad sect opposed to all rule in Church, Army, and State.
I knew the perilous latitude of thy husband's courses.  I had even
fears as to his being entirely free from Arminian heresies; but this,
I confess, I had not looked for from thee!"

We came into the parlour; and while I was reading, Maidie took
advantage of the silence to display her treasures.

"Poor innocent!" said Aunt Dorothy, taking her on her knee, and
kissing her.  "Poor innocent lamb! entrusted to a very wolf in
sheep's clothing.  I little thought to live to see this!  Pretty!
yes, pretty, my lamb!" she added, absently, as the little hands were
held up to her with the new wonders.

But this reception of her treasures was far too absent and
parenthetical to satisfy Maidie, who slipped off to the ground, and,
calling on Annis, was making her way to the kitchen, when Aunt
Dorothy anticipated her by closing the door and planting the little
one summarily on the table, with an injunction to be quiet.

"The moment is come!" she said, solemnly, to me.  "This house shall
never be profaned by the presence of a person who calls Mr. Baxter a
'priest,' his church a steeple-house, and George Fox a servant of the
Lord."

"She is fatherless and motherless, Aunt Dorothy," I said.  "What
would you have me to do?  She cannot be turned houseless on the world
to starve."

"Let her go to her Friends, as she calls them," said Aunt
Dorothy--"her 'children of light!'  Alas for the land! there is no
lack of them.  Although in the town Mr. Baxter has silenced them, by
a remarkable discussion he held with them in the church, I doubt not
they lie, like other foxes, in the holes and corners of the hills
around.  Although, in good sooth, the safest and mercifulest place
for Quakers, in my judgment, is a prison, where they cannot spread
their poison, or make everybody angry with them, as they do
everywhere else.  And to the inside of a prison, it seems, the maid
is no stranger already.  I am no persecutor, Olive.  But when people
scatter fire-brands, the only mercy to them and to the world is to
tie their hands.  Do you know," she added, "for what George Fox is in
the House of Correction?  For brawling in the church; in a solemn
congregation of ministers, soldiers, and people, which had assembled
to hear godly Colonel Barton preach!"

"Is Colonel Barton a minister?" I said.

"Belike not," she replied, a little testily.  "I am not for defending
Colonel Barton, nor the times, nor the ways of those in power ('in
_authority_' I will not call them, for authority in these disorderly
days there is none).  But there are degrees in disorder.  Colonel
Barton preaching in the pulpit is one thing, and George Fox the
weaver's son crying out in the pews is another."

"Did he say anything very bad?" I said.

"What need we care what an ignorant upstart like that said, Olive?
It was _where_ he said it that was the crime.  No place is sacred to
the youngster.  He preaches in market-places against cheating and
cozening, in fairs against mountebanks, in courts of justice against
the magistrates, in churches against the ministers."

"But, Aunt Dorothy," I ventured to say, "if he must preach at all, at
least this way seems to me better than preaching in church against
the mountebanks, and in the markets against the priests.  To tell
people their own sins to their faces is more like right preaching, is
it not, than telling them of other people's sins behind their backs?
Whether it is wrong or not for George Fox to exhort the ministers
before their own congregations who _dislike_ it, I think it would be
meaner and more wrong to rail at them in a congregation of Quakers
who might _like_ it."

"If you can defend George Fox, Olive," she said, "we may as well give
up debating anything!  At all events, I am thankful to say, whatever
divisions there may be on other questions, the professing Church in
general is of one opinion as to the Quakers.  Whatever you may think
of the mercy of imprisoning Quakers as regards their souls, there is
no doubt it is a mercy to their bodies.  For George Fox is no sooner
at liberty from the prison, than he begins exhorting every one,
making every one so angry that he is whipped and hunted from one town
to another, and finds no rest until he is mercifully shut up in
another prison.  And I much doubt if you will not find it the same
with Annis Nye."

I was not without fears of the kind.  But I said,--

"She has shown a marvellous tenderness and love for the babes, Aunt
Dorothy; and since she came to us, she has been as quiet as any other
Christian.  I dare not do anything to drive her forth into the cruel
world; for she is tender and gentle as any gentlewoman born."

"Tender and gentle indeed!" exclaimed Aunt Dorothy.  "Yes, she told
me George Fox's letter was written to the Friends, and other 'tender
people,' wherever they might be.  I, at least, am not one of the
tender people, to tolerate such ways.  I hear much talk of
toleration; and I will not deny that even Mr. Baxter has looser
thoughts on Christian concord than I altogether like.  He would be
content if all Christians would unite on the ground of the Apostles'
Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.  Whereas, in my
opinion, you might nigh as well have no walls at all around the fold
as walls any wolf can leap in over to devour the sheep, and any poor
lamb may leap out over to lose itself in the wilderness.  Why, a
Socinian, an Arminian, a Papist, for I ought I know, might sign the
Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments (praying
and keeping them is, no doubt, another thing.)  Belike any one might,
but a Quaker; for the Quakers will sign nothing, so that they are
safe to be out of a fold that has any walls, which is some
consolation.  Everybody's toleration must stop somewhere; yours, I
suppose, would stop at house-breaking.  Mine stops at sacrilege or
church-breaking; and that I consider every Quaker may be considered
to be guilty of.  So, Olive, you must e'en choose between Annis Nye
and me.  Your company, and that of the babes, poor lambs, is pleasant
to me.  But I have not lifted up my testimony against my mother's
son, whom I love as my own soul, and forsaken the only place I shall
ever feel a home on earth, to have my house made a refuge, or a
madhouse, for Quakers, Jews, Turks, and Infidels."

At this point Aunt Dorothy's face was considerably flushed, and her
voice raised in a way which was altogether too much for Maidie's
feelings.  Her eyes were fixed anxiously on Aunt Dorothy's; two large
tears gathered in them, and her lip began to quiver ominously, when I
caught her softly in my arms, just in time to hush a great sob on my
bosom.

Poor little Maidie!  I do not think she had ever seen any one really
angry before, except herself; and not being able to distinguish
between righteous ecclesiastical anger and ordinary unecclesiastical
hastiness of temper, it was some time before she could be induced to
respond to all the helpless blandishments and tender epithets which
poor Aunt Dorothy lavished on her, with anything but "Naughty,
naughty! go away!"--an insult which Aunt Dorothy bore in patience
once, but on its repetition, observed, "That comes of Antinomian
serving-wenches, Olive!  The child has no idea of any one being angry
about anything; a most dangerous delusion!  Mark my words, Olive! the
world is not Eden, and Antinomianism is the natural religion of us
all; and it is too plain Maidie is not free from the infection of
nature; and if you bring up the babes to look for nothing but fair
weather, they will find the Lord's rough winds only the harder to
bear.  Thou wast not brought up altogether on sweetmeats, Olive!
Though may be on too many after all.  It seems, however, that her
poor old aunt's ways are not to the babe's mind; so I suppose I had
better withdraw."

Nothing makes one feel more helpless than the uncontrollable
repugnance of a child to some one it ought to love.  I knew that Aunt
Dorothy loved Maidie dearly, and that her sharp voice and manner were
nothing but the pain of repressed and wounded feeling.  But there
were no words by which I could translate those harsh tones into
Maidie's language of love.  On the other hand, I knew that Maidie's
repugnance was not naughtiness, but a real uncontrollable terror,
which nothing but soothing and caressing could allay.  Yet, while
thus seeking to soothe the child, I felt conscious I was regarded by
Aunt Dorothy as one of Solomon's unwise parents; and I knew that, if
it had been in her power, she would have sentenced me, as in our
childhood, to learn a punitive "chapter in Proverbs."

My confusion was still worse confounded by the gentle opening of the
door, and the sudden appearance of Annis with a bundle in her arms,
at sight of whose calm face Maidie's countenance brightened, and she
stretched out her hands to go to her.

Annis softly laid down her bundle and took the child in her arms, the
little hands clinging fondly round her neck.

It was the last drop in Aunt Dorothy's cup and mine.  "The babe at
least has chosen, Olive!" she said, in a dry, hard voice.  "And I
suppose the mother will obey, according to the rule of these
republican days."  Aunt Dorothy was really "naughty" at that moment,
in the fullest acceptation of the word; and she knew it, which made
her worse.

Gently Annis replaced the child in my arms, but there was a tremor in
her voice when she spoke.

"Olive Antony," she said, "thee and thine have been true friends to
me.  But it is best I should leave thee.  I have gathered my goods
together" (they were easily gathered, poor orphan maid), "and I am
going.  Fare thee well!"

My heart ached.  I knew her determined ways so well; I knew so well
the hard things that must await her in the world; and I felt as if by
even for a moment debating in my mind the possibility of letting her
depart, I was accessory to her banishment, and so betraying my
husband's trust.

"Not so, Annis," I said; "this once I must be mistress.  How else
could I answer to my husband for his trust of the fatherless;--or,
what is more, to the Father of the fatherless?"

"Thy husband had no power to entrust thee with me," she replied,
gently; "nor have I the power to commit myself to the care of any
mortal.  God has entrusted me with myself, soul and body, and I
answer only to Him."

"But think, Annis, of the ruthlessness of the world," I said; a weak
argument, I felt, the moment I had uttered it, and one which with
Annis would be sure to turn the wrong way.  The softness which
Maidie's caresses had brought into her eyes left them, and a lofty
courage came instead.

"Bonds and imprisonments may await me," she said.  "If it were death,
who that loved God was ever turned from His ways by that?"

"But the babes," I pleaded, "the little ones, will miss thee so
sorely."

A tender smile came over her face as she glanced at Maidie.

"I have thought of that.  I have pleaded it rebelliously with my Lord
many days," she said; "but it is of no avail.  His fire burneth in
me, and who can stand it?  I must go."

"But whither, Annis?" I said.

"There is a concern on my spirit," she said, "for my people and my
father's house.  They reviled me, and drove me from them.  I must
return.  They have smitten me on the right cheek; I must turn to them
the left.  Maybe they will hear; but if not, I must speak.  Or if
they will not let me speak, I must be silent among them, and suffer.
Sometimes silence speaks best.--Fare thee well, Olive Antony, and
thou, aged Dorothy Drayton!  I have said to thee what was given me to
say.  Thou hast done me no despite.  It is not for thy words I
depart.  If they had been softer than butter, I dared not have
tarried.  The Power is on my spirit, and I must go."

She kissed Maidie, and I kissed her serene forehead.  Further
remonstrance was in vain.  I would have pressed money on her, but she
refused.

"I have no need," she said, with a smile.  "I shall not be forsaken.
And I have not earned it.  Little enough have I done for all thee and
thine hath been to me."

With tears I stood at the door and watched her quietly pass down the
street, not knowing whither she went.  But before she had gone many
steps Aunt Dorothy appeared with a basket laden with meat, bread, and
wine, which, hurrying after Annis, she succeeded in making her take.

"It is written, 'Thou shalt not receive him into thy house, or bid
him God speed,'" said she apologetically to me, as she re-entered the
door.  "But it is not written, 'Thou shalt send him out of thy house
hungry and fasting.'"

"It is written, 'If thine enemy hunger, feed him,'" I said.

"I had thought of that text also, Olive," said she, "but I do not
think it quite fits.  For the pool maid is not mine enemy.  God knows
I would not have shut house or heart against her if she had been only
that!"

We were very silent that day.  The house seemed very empty and quiet,
when Maidie's last sobbing entreaties for Annis were hushed, and, the
babes being asleep, Aunt Dorothy and I seated ourselves by the
fireside.

"It was a hard duty, Olive, to speak as I did; and belike, after all,
the flesh had its evil share in the matter," she said, as we parted
for the night.  "But I did it.  And I think it has been owned."

But I did not think her conscience was as easy as she tried to
persuade herself.

The night was wild and stormy, and I heard her pacing unquietly about
her room and opening her casement more than once, as I sat watching
Maidie in a restless sleep, and reading the papers by George Fox
which Annis had left behind her.  The words were such as no
Christian, it seemed to me, could but deem good.  Some of them rang
like an ancient hymn out of some grand old liturgy.

"Oh, therefore," he wrote from his prison, "mind the pure spirit of
the everlasting God, which will teach you to use the creatures in
their right place, and which judgeth the evil.  To Thee, O God, be
all glory and honour, who art Lord of all, visible and invisible!  To
Thee be all praise, who bringest out of the deep to Thyself, O
powerful God, who art worthy of all glory.  For the Lord who created
all, and gives life and strength to all, is over all, and is merciful
to all.  So Thou who hast made all, and art over all, to Thee be all
glory!  In Thee is my strength and refreshment, my life, my joy, and
my gladness, my rejoicing and glorying for evermore.  For there is
peace in resting in the Lord Jesus."

"Love the cross; and satisfy not your own minds in the flesh, but
prize your time, while you have it, and walk up to that you know, in
obedience to God; then you shall not be condemned for that you know
not; but for that you know and do not obey."

So I read on, watching Maidie's restless tossings and her flushed
cheek, hearing now and then Aunt Dorothy's uneasy footsteps, and
wondering whether Annis Nye had found shelter, or whether she were
still wandering along the wet and windy roads; whilst beneath these
thoughts every now and then I kept falling back on the things that
were never long absent from me: those two Puritan armies watching
each other in Scotland, with the "covenanted king" at the head of
one, and Oliver at the heart of the other, where my husband, and
Roger, and Job Forster were.  I thought also of my father and Aunt
Dorothy journeying through the desolations made by the Thirty Years'
religious war in Germany.  Who could say when our war would cease,
and what further desolations it would leave behind?  Then my mind
wandered to Lettice Davenant, from whom Aunt Dorothy had lately
received a letter, which had made her uneasy, from its comparing
certain godly Catholic people who live in a nunnery called Port Royal
with the godly people in England.  Thence, reverting to my early days
I thought how small the divisions of the great battle-field seemed
then, and how complicated now!  And, looking fondly at Maidie and the
babe, it occurred to me whether the child's simple divisions of
"good" and "naughty" might not after all be more like those of the
angels than we are apt to think.

Aunt Dorothy looked pale and haggard the next morning, but she
betrayed nothing of her nightly investigations into the weather, only
manifesting her uneasiness by looking up anxiously when a peculiarly
violent gust of wind drove the rain against the windows, and by an
unusual tolerance and gentleness with Maidie, who was in a very
fretful temper.

In the evening, when the children were asleep, and Aunt Dorothy and I
were left alone: "It is very strange!" she said; "something in that
Quaker woman's ways seems to have marvellously moved my little maid
Sarah.  I found the child crying over her Bible, and she said, 'Annis
Nye had told her _God would teach her_; but she wished He would send
her some one like Annis again to help her to learn.'

"It is very strange, Olive," she added.  "The directions about
heretics coming to one's house are so very plain.  But then I always
thought of a heretic as a noisy troublesome person, puffed up with
vanity and conceit, whom it would be quite a pleasure to put down.
It is rather hard that a heretic should come to me in the shape of a
poor, lonely orphan maid, for the most part quiet and peaceable, and
so like a sober Christian; that I should have to send her away alone
no one knows where; and that such a night would follow, just as if on
purpose to make right look like wrong.  I begin to see a mercy in the
persecutions of the Church.  When one comes to know the heretics, the
natural man gets such a terrible hold of one, that it would certainly
be easier to suffer the punishment than to inflict it.  Although, of
course, I am not going to shrink from my duty on account of its not
being easy."

It was Aunt Dorothy's first experience of being at the board of the
Star-chamber instead of its bar.  And she certainly did not enjoy it.


The year 1651 seemed to roll on rather heavily at Kidderminster.

Aunt Dorothy kept her private fasts, in loyal contempt of the
Parliament, especially that one which Mr. Philip Henry, and other
Royalist Presbyterians, so faithfully held until some years after the
Restoration, in memory of the death of King Charles the First.

Mr. Baxter helped to make many people good by his fervent sermons,
and meantime made many good people angry by his "convincing"
controversial books, calling out fifty angry, controversial books in
reply.

Meantime, in a quiet hollow of the hills near the town, I discovered
a small manor-house where certain Episcopal Christians met secretly
to hear a deprived clergyman read the proscribed liturgy.  And more
than once I crept in among them to join in the familiar prayers.  The
calm, ancient words seemed to lift me so far above the dust and din
of our present strifes.  Once I heard Dr. Jeremy Taylor preach a
sermon to this little company.  And the rich intertwining harmonies
of his poetical speech, and the golds, crimsons, and purples of his
eloquent imagery, seemed to transform the plain old hall, in which we
listened to them, into a cathedral glorious with organ music and
choristers' voices, and with the shadows and illuminations of
richly-sculptured shrines and richly-coloured windows.

So the year passed on.  To us, chronicled in skirmishes and sieges
and political changes; and to Maidie in daisies and cowslips,
primroses, violets, strawberries, and heart-stirring promises of
another Eldorado of those living jewels known among men as
horse-chestnuts.

Letters came frequently, after the Battle of Dunbar, from Scotland.

One from Job Forster, forwarded by Rachel:--

"Godly Mr. Baxter puzzled me sore at Naseby by miscalling us poor
soldiers who had left our farms and honest trades to fight his
battles, as if we had been mere common hirelings or fanatic praters.
It was a bewilderment in Ireland to see how angry the poor natives
were with us for trying to bring them law and order.  But all the
puzzles, and bewilderments, and subtleties were nothing to these
Scottish covenanted ministers and their kirk.

"They slander us behind our backs to the country people, calling us
'monsters of the world,' till the poor deluded people run away from
us as if we were savage black Indians.  And when the few who stay
behind find we are sober Christians who eat not babes but bread (and
little enough, in this poor stripped county, of that), and pay for
what we eat, and the women-folk (who, I will say, have quicker wits
than the men) come back and peaceably brew and bake for us, they
still go on slandering us to those who have not seen us.

"They calls us names to our faces in their pulpits, 'blasphemers,
sectaries,' and what not.  And when we deal softly with them and are
as dumb as lambs (when we could chase them into their holes like
lions), and let them talk on, even that does not convince them that
we mean no one any harm.

"Meantime they drag about the late king's son, poor young gentleman,
until one cannot but pity him, chief mangnant as he is.  For they
will not let any of his old friends and followers come near him.  The
other day he made off, like a poor caged bird, to get among his true
malignants near Perth.  But his friends had no gilded cage and
sugared food to suit his taste, and after spending a dismal night
among them in a Highland hut, he had to creep back to the ministers,
and take some more oaths, and hear some more sermons.

"Very dark it is to me the notions these Kirkmen have concerning many
things, especially kings, oaths, and sermons.  Concerning oaths.
They seem to think the more a man swears the more he cares for it,
instead of the less; as if a second oath made a first worth more,
instead of showing that it was worth nothing.  It is enough to make
one turn Quaker--(But this I would not have known to Annis Nye, poor
perverse maid)!  Concerning sermons.  As if they did a man good,
whether he will or no, like physic, if he only takes enough of them!
Concerning kings.  As if dragging a poor young gentleman, like a bear
in a show, with a crown on his head, about with them, and scolding
him (on their knees), and doing what they like without asking him,
and never letting him do what he likes, or see whom he likes, was
having a _king_!  If they have their way, and drive Oliver and us
into the sea, and make their covenanted show-king into a real king, I
wonder how he will show them his gratitude.  Scarcely, I think, by
listening to sermons, such as they like.  Perhaps by making them
listen to sermons such as he likes, whether they will or no.

"But, thank God, Oliver lives, though more than once this spring he
has been sick and like to die; and we are little likely (God helping
us) to be chased into the sea by enemies who already cannot agree
among themselves.  Meantime, Dr. Owen has been preaching to them with
his plain words, in Edinburgh, and Oliver with his guns; and it is
yet to be hoped the wise among them may open their ears and hear.

"Not that I think it any wonder that any poor mortal should blunder,
and get into a maze.  A poor soul that went so far astray as to
misdoubt Oliver, and to think of bringing in the Fifth Monarchy by
muskets and pikes, and could not be got right again without being
stuck on the leads of Burford Church to see his comrades shot, has no
great reason to wonder at the strange ways of others, be they Kirk
ministers or Quakers."

My husband wrote:--

"I have watched by many death-beds.

"I have seen many die these last months, Olive.  The hails, and
frosts, and scanty food, and scanty clothing, have done more despatch
than the muskets or great guns.  I have saved some lives, I trust,
but I have seen many die; men of all stamps, Covenanted,
Uncovenanted, Resolutioners, Protesters, Presbyterians, Sectaries;
and within all these grades of theological men (and outside them all)
I have seen not a few, thank God, to whom dying was not death.  Death
brings back to any soul which meets it awake, the hunger and thirst
which nothing but God can satisfy.  Resolutions, Covenants, and
Confessions may, like other perishable clothes, be needful enough on
earth.  But they have to be left entirely behind, as much as money,
or titles, or any other corruptible thing.  If they have been
garments to fit us for earthly work, well; they have had their use,
and can be gently laid aside.  If they have been veils to hide us
from God and ourselves, how terribly bare they leave us!  Alone,
unclothed, helpless, the only question then is, can we trust
ourselves to the Father as a babe to the bosom of its mother?

"Does the Christ, the Son, who has died for us, offering Himself up,
without spot, to God, and lives for ever; does He who, dying,
committed His spirit to the Father's hands, enable us to offer
ourselves up, in Him,--commit our spirits, helpless, but redeemed,
into the Father's hands?  Then the sting is plucked out.  I have seen
it again and again.  Death is abolished.  It is not seen.  It is not
tasted.  Christ is seen instead.  The eternal life no more begins
than it ends at death.  It continues.  The cramping chrysalis shell
is thrown off, and it expands.  But it no more begins then than it
ends.

"If ever there is to be a Confession of Faith which is to unite
Christendom, I think it should be drawn from dying lips.  For these
will never freeze the Confession into a profession.  On dying lips
the Creed and the Hymn are one; for they are uttered not to man, but
to God."

And later Roger wrote:--

"This campaign has aged the Captain-General sensibly.  He has had
ague, and has more than once been near death.  I think the cold in
godly men's hearts has struck at his heart more than the cold of the
country at his life.  The other day a gentleman who is much near him,
said to me: '_My lord is not aware that he has grown an old man_.'
So do deeds count for years.  For, as we know, he is barely fifty
years of age.  But as he wrote to one not long since, he knows where
the life is that never grows old.  'To search God's statutes for a
rule of conscience, and to seek grace from Christ to enable him to
walk therein,--this _hath life in it, and will come to somewhat_.
What is a poor creature without this?'

"Some, indeed, call him a tyrant and usurper; some very near him.  (A
_hypocrite_ I think none very near him dare call him; though men are
ever too ready to think that no one can honestly see things otherwise
than they do.)

"But I know not what they mean.  He would respect every trace of the
ancient laws, every hard-won inch of the new liberties, and every
honest scruple of the conscience,--if men would have it so.  I see
not what tyranny he exercises, save to keep men from tyrannizing over
each other.  But this power to tyrannize over others seems, alas!
what too many mean by liberty.

"Sometimes, Olive, I am ashamed to feel myself growing old.  Hope is
faint in me sometimes for the country and myself.  And when hope is
gone, youth is gone, be our age what it may.  In the General, I
think, this youth never fails, as one who knows him said: 'Hope shone
in him like a pillar of fire when it had gone out in all others.'

"_P.S._--There is talk of the Scottish army faring southward with
their king.  Scarce credible.  But if true, we shall follow swift on
their trail, and swiftly be in old England and with thee."


They came, the two armies, as swiftly as Roger could have dreamed.
The Scottish Covenanted-Royalist force, 14,000 strong, sweeping down
through the west, by Carlisle, Lancashire, Cheshire, Shrewsbury, to
Worcester; the English Uncovenanted-Puritan army through the east by
Yorkshire.

Two tides to meet in deadly shock for the last time at Worcester.
Two tides between which the difference became more and more apparent
as they swept on: the one flowing like a summer torrent through some
dark valley in a tropical country, receiving no tributaries, welcomed
in no quiet resting-places, becoming ever shallower and narrower as
it advanced; the other swelling as it swept on like a thing that was
at home, and was to last, gathering force here, gathering bulk there,
ever deepening and widening as it went.

King Charles and his Scottish leaders summoned place after place, but
they met with no response.  His trumpeters went to the gates of
Shrewsbury and proclaimed the king, but the gates remained closed,
and the unwelcome tide had to sweep sullenly past the walls.  I
scarce know how this came to pass.  Oliver, as I think, was never
popular throughout the nation; nothing of the old unquestioning
loyalty which slumbered everywhere (as time proved) in the dumb heart
of the people was accorded to him.  Even those who acknowledged him,
with some few exceptions, acknowledged him rather sullenly as a
break-water against tyranny, than enthusiastically as a hero and a
chief.  It might be dread of the Ironsides pursuing; it might be
bitter memories of the Star-chamber and of Prince Rupert's
plunderings, not yet effaced by years of liberty and security.  It
might be, as Mr. Baxter said, that the Scots came into England rather
in the manner of fugitives; it being hard for the common people to
distinguish between an army going before another following it, and an
army running away; and into a flying army few men will enlist.  But
however this may have been, all along that dreary progress scarce a
note of welcome cheered the Scottish army and their king, until
Worcester received them under the shadow of her Cathedral (ominously
tenanted by the remains of the King of the Magna Charta), opening her
gates to give them the shelter which so soon was to become to
thousands of them the shelter of a grave.

Part of the Scots army passed not further than a field's length from
Kidderminster; and a gallant orderly company they seemed, being
governed, as Mr. Baxter said, far differently from Prince Rupert's
troopers; "not a soldier of them durst wrong any man the worth of a
penny."  Honest, hard-fighting, covenanted men, sorely bewildered, I
should think, with the ways of King and Kirk, and not a little also
with the ways of Providence; but true, nevertheless, to the Covenant
and to the Ten Commandments.

Divers messages were sent from the army (and, it was believed, from
the king himself) to Mr. Baxter, to request him to come to them.  But
Mr. Baxter was at that time "under so great an affliction of sore
eyes, that he was not scarce able to see the light, nor to stir out
of doors; and being (moreover) not much doubtful of the issue which
followed, he thought if he had been able it would have been no
service to the king--it being so little that, on such a sudden, he
could add to his assistance."

It was not until some days after this that Oliver and his army came
up.  I knew it first from my husband, who came for an hour to see me
and the babes on the 2nd of September, the day before the battle,
bringing good tidings of Roger and of Job Forster.  I thought he
might have tarried with us until after the fight, when his skill
would be in request.  But he took not that view of his duty.
Skirmishes might occur at any moment, he said, and he must be on the
spot.  He had little doubt what the end would be; but he deemed the
struggle would be hard, being, so to speak, a death-struggle.  And so
it proved.

On the 3d of September the shock of battle came.  It was Oliver's
White Day, the first anniversary of his victory at Dunbar (to be made
memorable to England afterwards by another death-struggle, which
would have no anniversary on earth to him, but which, none the less,
I think, made it the White Day of his hard and toilsome life).

Soon after noon, stragglers came in and told us what was going on;
and all through the rest of the day the town was in unquiet
expectation, the people thronging at a moment's notice from loom, and
forge, and household work, into the market-place in front of Mr.
Baxter's house, to hear any report brought by any passing traveller.

The first news was that Oliver was making two bridges of boats,
across the Severn and the Teme; that the young king and his generals
had seen him from the spire of Worcester Cathedral, and had
despatched troops to contest the passage of the river, and that a
hard struggle was going on by its banks.  Then, after these tidings
had been eagerly turned over and over until no more could be made of
them, the townsmen returned to their homes.  For some hours there was
a cessation of tidings, and the whole town seemed unusually still.
The ordinary interests were suspended, and the minds of men were not
sufficiently united for any general assembling together.  There was
no gathering for prayer in the church.  Mr. Baxter was sitting apart
in his house, unable to bear the light; certainly not praying for
Oliver to win, yet, I think, scarce wishing very earnestly for the
complete success of the Scots.

Aunt Dorothy, on the first rumour of the fight, had rigidly shut
herself up in her chamber for a day of solitary fasting.  But if we
had been together, we should each have been none the less solitary;
perhaps more, shut out from each other by the door of our lips.  The
lives dearest to us both on earth were at stake.  Of these we could
neither of us have spoken.  The things dearest to each of us were at
stake.  But of these we thought not alike, and would not have spoken.
It was almost a boon for me that Annis Nye had departed, so that the
babes were thrown entirely on my care.  It kept me from straining my
hearing with that vain effort to catch the terrible sounds which I
knew were to be heard not far off.  It kept me from straining my
heart with that vain effort to catch some intimation of what might be
the will of God, and from distracting self-questioning whether I had
done as much as I could, by praying, to help those who were certainly
doing as much as they could for us, by fighting.  And instead, it
left me only leisure to lift up my soul from time to time in one
brief simple reiteration: "Father, Thou seest, Thou carest; I commit
them to Thee."

Towards evening further tidings came, putting an end to our suspense
in one direction.  After hours of stiff fighting, from hedge to
hedge, the Scots army had been driven into Worcester, out of
Worcester, out of reach of Worcester.

The issue of the day as to victory was no longer doubtful.  But its
issue as to the lives so precious to us remained to us unknown.

So the slow hours of the afternoon wore on, until the declining
autumn sun threw the shadow of the opposite houses over the room, and
with the babe on my knee, and Maidie singing to herself low lullabies
as she dressed and undressed her wooden baby at my feet, my thoughts
went back to the October Sunday nine years before (1642), when the
stillness of the land was terribly broken by the first battle of the
Civil War, the fight of Edgehill.

How simple it all seemed to me then; how complex now.  Then there
seemed visibly two causes, two ends, two ways, two armies, the choice
being plainly that between wrong and right.  Now so perplexed and
interlaced were convictions, parties, leaders, followers, that it
seemed as if to our eyes the causes and armies were legion; and to
none but the Divine eyes, which see, through all temporary party
differences, the eternal moral differences, could the divisions of
the hosts be clear.

Partly no doubt this perplexity was simply the consequence of the
armies having encountered; no longer couched expectant opposite each
other on their several opposite heights, but grappling in deadly
struggle on the plains between.

Partly, perhaps, also because the eternal moral differences on which
we believed the final judgment must be based, had become more the
basis of ours.

And Maidie and the babe, I thought, poor darlings, had all this yet
to learn!  How could I help them, so that they might have less than I
to unlearn?

How! except by engraving deep on their hearts Aunt Gretel's trust in
God.  "Put the darkness anywhere but there, sweetheart; anywhere but
in Him!"  By slowly dyeing their hearts in grain, as Mr. Baxter would
have wished, in the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten
Commandments, so that any after surface-colouring, if it modified
these heavenly tints, should never be able to efface them.

There are qualities in some waters, it is said, as at Kidderminster,
which tend to fix dyes, and give value to the fabrics of the places
where they flow.

Has not God given a mother's love this fixing power for all truths
that come to a child's heart steeped in its living waters?

So far, therefore, Maidie and the babe might have something through
my lessons, which the combined teaching of Aunt Gretel and Aunt
Dorothy, each in herself so much better than I, could not quite
possess for Roger's childhood and mine.

The thought made me glad and strong; and I was still going in the
strength of it, when Job Forster appeared at the door.

I ran out and met him on the threshold.

He brought good news of my husband and Roger.  The fight was over.
Leonard was attending to the wounded.  Roger was still engaged in the
pursuit.  But the Scots were scattered hither and thither among the
woods and harvest-fields.  The reapers and labourers had taken up the
pursuit, and before night-fall, probably, not a stray party would
hold together strong enough to offer ten minutes' resistance.

"And His Majesty?" said a grim voice behind us.

"The King of Scots is in hiding, Mistress Dorothy," said Job
controversially, but very respectfully.  "No one knows the road he
has taken."

"Then there is something to pray for yet," said she.  "That this
blood-stained land may imbrue her hands no deeper in the blood of her
kings."

"Aunt Dorothy," I ventured to say, "you will give thanks as well as
pray?  Leonard and Roger are safe."

"I know," said she, "it is written, 'In everything give thanks.'"

And without further concession she turned back to her chamber.  But
on her way she halted, and said, turning to me,--

"Olive, see that Job is fed and lodged.  We must make a difference.
A heretic is one thing, and a rebel another."

Without giving Job the privilege of reply, she remounted the stairs.

I asked him into the kitchen.  But Job was somewhat hard to persuade.

"It is hard, Mistress Olive," said he, "to have bread and shelter
flung at you like a dog, without a chance to explain.  When Mistress
Dorothy herself was one of the keenest to set us against the
oppressors!  And when, but for Oliver, though I say it, she herself
might have been in Newgate among the Quakers years ago."

Yet without Maidie I doubt whether I should have prevailed.  She,
poor lamb, seeing nothing in Job but a bit of home, and a
never-failing storehouse of kindnesses, had already enthroned herself
in his arms, undaunted by breast-plate or sword, and with her arms
clinging around him constrained him to come into the kitchen, if it
were only to set her down.

Once there, to make him stay was easier.  For he was wounded in the
left shoulder, so that he could not hold the horse's reins, and had
little strength to walk further.  But for that, indeed, he would not
have been Roger's messenger.  The pallor of his countenance, when his
helmet was unlaced, startled me; yet, after refreshing him with ale
and meat, it was with no little difficulty that I persuaded him to
let me dress and bandage his wound.

After that he seemed easier, and his first inquiries were for Annis
Nye, concerning whom we had had no tidings for some weeks.  "When I
am set up a bit, mistress," said he, "I must see after that poor maid
the first thing, for she is a godly maid, although a Quakeress.  And
I misdoubt whether she be not in jail.  It's beyond the wisest of us
to keep a Quaker safe anywhere.  Only," he added, "I must be set up a
bit first.  I don't feel sure flesh and blood could stand her
discourse on the wickedness of war, until the pain's a bit less
sharp.  She's so terrible quiet, Mistress Olive, and so shut up
against reason."

At night we were roused by the clattering of flying horsemen through
the streets, Kidderminster being but eleven miles from Worcester.
Then came a party of thirty of the Parliament troopers and took
possession of the market-place.  Then hundreds more of the flying
Royalists, who "not knowing in the dark how few they were that
charged them," when the Parliament troopers cried "stand," either
hasted away, or cried quarter.  And so, as Mr. Baxter said, "as many
were taken there, as so few men could lay hold on; and until midnight
the bullets flying towards my doors and windows, and the sorrowful
fugitives hasting for their lives, did tell me the calamitousness of
war."

So ended the last battle of the Civil War.

Maidie, terrified, clung to me and would not leave my arms.  Aunt
Dorothy remained in her chamber; the little maid Sarah took shelter
in mine.  Only the babe and Job Forster were unmoved by the noise.
The babe slept peacefully on, the storm of war in the streets being
no more to her on her mother's knee, than an earthquake to the planet
Jupiter's satellites; and Job being wearied out with pain and
fatigue, and lulled by the absence of the duty of soldierly
vigilance, which had kept him on the stretch so long.

The next day Roger passed through the town, pausing a minute at the
door to see me and the babes.  He told us my husband would come in a
few days to take us home.  He told us also how complete the ruin of
the enemy was.

"Now," he said, as he remounted at the door, "we shall see what peace
and Oliver can make of England."

And there was a ring of hope in his voice, as ha rode away, I had not
heard in it for many a day.

England he thought was to be made such a kingdom of righteousness and
peace, that all the nations far and wide must see and acknowledge it.
And amongst them, I felt sure he dreamed also of one fair loyal
maiden, whose verdict I knew was worth more to him than he dared to
own to himself.

But Job watching him up the street, turned back to us shaking his
head.

"It remains to be seen, on the other hand, what England will do with
peace and Oliver!" he said.  "Sometimes my heart misgives me that we
may have longer to wait for the Fifth Monarchy than Master Roger or
most of us dream.  There do seem so many things to be set right
first.  The Kirk ministers and the Quakers do puzzle a plain
Cornishman sore!"

Roger had not been gone more than a few seconds, and we had not yet
ceased looking after him, when he came galloping back to the door.

Bending low from his saddle as I went up to him, "Olive," he said, "I
saw some constables in a village near Worcester taking Annis Nye to
prison.  I could have rescued her, but she refused my aid, saying
that I was a man of war, and she chose rather to be set in gaol by a
man of peace than to have her bonds broken by the carnal sword.  On
second thoughts, I concluded that at present she might be safer in
gaol, while men's minds are so disturbed.  But I thought it best to
let thee know."

And he was away once more.

This tidings cost Job and me many heavy musings.  At length he
resolved on losing no time (his wound having proved less severe than
we feared); but to set out on the morrow to rescue Annis, and bring
her back, if possible to return with us to London.

Accordingly early on the morrow he went forth.

In the evening, to my relief, and to Maidie's joy, he returned, with
Annis, looking very pale and worn; but with her face as serene and
her eyes as steady and clear as ever.

I embraced her on the threshold.  Beyond that she would not step.

"Dorothy Drayton would have none of me," said she.  "We are to give
our coat to him who takes away our cloak.  But it never says we are
to take a cloak from him that denied us his coat.  I may not enter
this house."

"But it is night-fall," said I.  "Whither would you turn?"

"It is not the first night-fall I have been content with such lodging
as the fowls of the air," said she, and quietly went her way.

I would have followed her; but Job Forster restrained me.

"Let her be, Mistress Olive!" he whispered, "She is as hard to catch
as a wild colt, and far harder to hold.  There be reins to turn
colts, and there be corn to coax them; but there be no reins to hold
and no lure to coax a Quaker.  Their ways are wonderful.  Let her be:
maybe she'll come back of herself and, if not, neither love nor fear
will bring her.  It is not to be told, Mistress Olive," he added, as
we reluctantly turned back into the kitchen, "what I've borne from
that poor maid this day.  I had some work to get her off on bail, for
she had angered the justices and the constables grievously, and I had
to contrive; for the Quakers will not let any one go bail for them.
They're as lofty as the apostle Paul with his Roman rights, and would
rather stay in prison than be set free as guilty.  When I came to the
gaol and gave her joy that I had come to set her free, she smiled at
me as innocent as a babe, as meek (seemingly) as one of Fox's
martyrs, and yet bold as a lion, and said: 'Thee cannot set me free,
Job Forster.  What is the bondage of bars and stocks to such bondage
as thine?'  And then she railed, that is, railed in her way, as soft
as if she were saying the civilest things--at Oliver and the
Ironsides, and the war, and all war, until it was a harder trial of
patience to stand quiet before her than before any pounding of great
guns.  I could only get her off at last by getting her put in my
charge, as if I had been a constable, to bring home to her mistress;
and all the way back, from time to time she discoursed on the
wickedness of soldiering,--mixing up Bible texts in a way to make a
man mazed, and at times 'most think he might as well have been at
home by the forge at Netherby, as raging over the world fighting the
Lord's battles.  Although I knew, of course, Mistress Olive, that was
only a temptation.  At last I gave her my mind plain.  'Mistress
Annis,' I said, 'of all the fighting men of the time, it's my belief
there's none who have more fight in them than you and your friends.
It's very well to say you won't fight, when you rouse every drop of
fighting blood there is in other people by your words.  For Scripture
saith there be words which are fiercer weapons of war than any
swords.  You talk a deal of keeping to the spirit, and not to the
letter; and you talk of giving the left cheek to him that smites the
right.  But it's my belief, the spirit of those words is, you shall
not provoke your enemies; and it's my belief that it's dead against
the spirit when, by keeping to the letter and turning the left cheek,
you are just doing the provokingest thing you can.  It's not the
virtues of _war_, it seems to me, you are lacking in,' I said, 'but
the virtues of _peace_.  You and yours, from first to last, have had
courage enough to lead a forlorn hope.  The thing you want most, to
my seeming, is meekness.  I would give somewhat for thee and my
mistress to meet.  She is real meek, and, withal, brave as a lion, if
need be; and she would treat thee like a child, as thou art, instead
of like a martyr--which would, belike, do thee more good.  Yet she
would give thee a hearty welcome, with all thy wilfulness.'  And,
after that, she was quiet a good bit.  And then she said, quite
simple and natural: 'Job Forster, I am but a child; and one day,
belike, I may have a call to see thy wife.  I feel as if she would be
like a mother.  From all thou sayest, she must be a woman of a tender
spirit and an understanding heart.'"

In the morning Aunt Dorothy came down from her solitary chamber.  She
looked pale, but relieved in spirit.  "Olive," said she, "I heard
that poor bewildered maid come to the house last night, and go away;
and I do not mean to pass through such another night as these two she
has cost me.  I have wrestled the thing out in my heart.  On the one
side, there is the heretic the Apostle John spake of in the epistle.
But I consider that heretic was a tempter, and a man.  Now Annis,
poor soul, is tempted, and a maid; which makes a difference, to begin
with.  Then, on the other hand, there is the man who fell among
thieves.  I consider Annis Nye has fallen among thieves; and I don't
think one of Mr. Baxter's people, in this year of our Lord sixteen
hundred and fifty-one, ought to be outdone by an ignorant Samaritan,
who lived in no year of our Lord at all."

"Then, Aunt Dorothy," I suggested, "there were the Samaritans all
through the Gospels, and our Lord's pitiful ways with them
altogether.  I think the Samaritans must have been at least as wrong
as the Quakers."

"Maybe, my dear; I am not so well informed as I should wish as to the
theology of the Samaritans.  I should think it was a great medley.
But our Saviour knew all things, and could do what He pleased."

"And may not we do what pleased Him?"

"Olive," said Aunt Dorothy, turning on me, "I am not going to have
Scripture quoted against me by one I taught to read it.  I never did
call down fire from heaven on any one, nor wished to do so, and I am
not to be enticed by any smooth by-paths into such tolerations as
yours and your husband's.  You need not think it.  But, with regard
to Annis Nye, my conscience is satisfied; and you may bring her at
once to the house.  Besides," she added, "I do not mean to let any of
you depart without bearing my testimony."

Whereon Job Forster departed in search of Annis Nye; whom, with some
difficulty, he persuaded to place herself again within range of Aunt
Dorothy's hospitalities and admonitions.

The day passed in much stillness.  Aunt Dorothy herself moved
heavily, like a thunder-cloud with lightnings in it; and the weight
of her impending "testimony" made the air heavy.

Towards evening my husband came, and all thunder-clouds naturally
grew much lighter to me.

He brought more tidings of the campaign in Scotland and the Battle of
Worcester.  He believed it would be the last of the war.  Aunt
Dorothy loaded us with every kind of bodily refreshment and comfort.
But she kept herself apart from the conversation, and never
vouchsafed to ask one question, save concerning the safety of the
king, of whom no news had been heard.  It was decided we were to
leave on the morrow; and often I saw her eyes moisten tenderly as she
glanced at Maidie, who, in her sweet trustful way, kept drawing her
amongst us by claiming her sympathy with her joy in the little
treasures her father had brought her.

In the night, before the dawn of the next morning, Aunt Dorothy and
her little maid were astir, and wonderful cookings and bakings must
have gone forward.  For when we came down to breakfast, a huge basket
stood laden with provisions for the way, substantial and dainty, with
special reference to Maidie's tastes; little tender preparations
which often brought tears to my eyes on the journey, as I found them
out one by one, and thought of the self-repressed rigour of the dear
old rock from which those springs of kindness flowed.

Yet all the while we were at breakfast together at the great table in
the kitchen, every slightest want watched and anticipated by Aunt
Dorothy, I felt as if she were looking on every morsel as a coal of
fire heaped on our heads; while the weight of the impending testimony
hung over us.

At length it came.

"Nephew and niece, Leonard and Olive Antony," said she, as we were
about to rise; "and thou, Annis Nye and Job Forster, I have somewhat
to say to you."

And then she testified against us all, and also against Oliver
Cromwell, the army, and the country; comparing us to the people who
built Babel to make themselves a name, to Jeroboam who made priests
of the lowest of the people, to Absalom, to Jezebel, to the evil
angels who speak evil of dignities, and to the Laodiceans, in a way
which made the blood rush to my face on behalf of my husband.
Finally, turning to Annis Nye, she launched on her a separate
denunciation; beginning with the devil who clothed himself as an
angel of light, and ending with the Anabaptists of Münster, and the
Jesuits, who, Mr. Baxter believed, had emissaries among the Quakers.

I knew that the more tenderness Aunt Dorothy felt at heart for
offenders, the more severe were her denunciations of their offences.
But Annis could not be expected to be aware of this, and I trembled
to see how she would bear it, lest it should drive her once more from
us into the world, so hard on Quakers.  The calm on her countenance,
however, was not even ruffled.  She kept her eyes, all the time,
fully opened, fixed with an expression, not of defiance, but of
wonder and compassion, on Aunt Dorothy, until Aunt Dorothy herself at
length paused, apparently checked by the strength of her own
language, held out her hand to Annis and added,--

"Now I have said what was on my mind.  I did not mean to anger thee;
but less, in conscience, I dared not say."

Annis took the hand offered to her with a tender compassion, as she
might that of an aged sick person.

"Why should I be angered, friend?" said she in her softest voice.
"Can thy words touch the truth?  It was there when they began; and it
is there when they end.  And one day we shall all have to see it;
whatever it is, wherever we be, thee, and Olive Antony and her
husband, and all."

Aunt Dorothy had no further words to lavish on obduracy so hopeless.
She only struck her palms together, shook her head slowly, and looked
up in speechless dismay.

Job muttered under his breath, as he rose to saddle the horses,--

"Poor souls! poor dear souls!  They have got somewhat yet to learn.
They have got to learn the lesson Oliver taught us on old Burford
steeple!"

But my husband only replied,--.

"Mistress Dorothy, you have been the truest of friends to me and
mine.  We cannot agree on all things, although I shall always honour
you in my heart more than nine-tenths of the people I do agree with.
But there is one admonition of Oliver Cromwell's which I should like
to have engraved deep on the hearts of us all.  It is one which he
addressed last year, in a letter, to the General Assembly of the Kirk
of Scotland.  'I beseech you,' he wrote, 'in the bowels of Christ,
_think it you may be mistaken_?'"




CHAPTER VII.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS

The last battle of the Civil Wars was fought.  Or rather the
battle-field was changed, and the long contest of the Commonwealth
began, between Oliver governing and all the rest of parties and men
who wished England otherwise governed, who wished it ungoverned, or
who wished to govern it themselves.

The Royalists, Prelatical or Presbyterian, necessarily against him,
the classical Republicans, the Anabaptist levellers, and, in their
passive way, the Quakers.  Indeed, it seemed as if all parties, as
parties, were against him.  The wonder was, that the arm which kept
them all at bay should be strong enough at the same time to keep the
world at bay, for England; and to keep England so ordered, that many
of those who hated the Protector's rule confessed that the times--"by
God's merciful sweetening (said they) of bitter waters"--had never
been so prosperous as under it.

I confess that the change from Kidderminster to our home in London
was in some measure a relief.  It was like coming from a walled
garden (admirably kept, indeed, and watered) into the open fields.
It had not been my wont to live in a place so pervaded by one man as
Kidderminster, or at least what I saw of it, was at that time by Mr.
Baxter.  He was so very active and self-denying and good, that do
what I would whilst there, I could never get over the feeling of
being, in some way, a transgressor if I happened to differ from him.
His writings and sermons were certainly mainly directed against the
great permanent evils of ungodliness and unrighteousness.  But he
wrote so many controversial books on every kind of ecclesiastical
topic, and was so convinced that they were all convincing to all
sound minds, that it was difficult, while in the Kidderminster world,
to regard oneself, if not convinced, as having anything but a very
sound mind.

So that it did feel like getting into a large room, to meet and
converse again with people who did not think Mr. Baxter's judgment,
moderate and wise as it doubtless was, the one final standard of
truth in the universe.  Not, certainly, that London at that time was
a world free from debate and controversy of the fiercest kind.  A
Commonwealth in which, during the eleven years of its existence,
thirty thousand controversial pamphlets of the fiercest and most
contradictory kind were battering each other, each regarded by its
author and his particular friends as absolutely convincing to all
sound minds, was not likely to be that.

From our home, however, such debates were mostly absent.  My father
fled from controversy to the Bible, and to the Society for the
promotion of the new experimental philosophy, which met at Gresham
College; the revelation of God in His Word and in His world.  Aunt
Gretel had the happy exemption of a foreigner from our English
debates, political and ecclesiastical, and tranquilized herself at
all times by her knitting, her hymns, and the making of possets
acceptable to sick people of all persuasions.  And my husband had
what he regarded as the advantage of differing on some theological
questions from the good men with whom he acted in religious work (he
having a leaning rather to Dr. Thomas Goodwin, in his "Redemption
Redeemed," than to Dr. Owen, or even to Mr. Baxter); so that he had
to avoid the intermediate debatable grounds, and keep to those
highest heights of adoration where Christianity is incarnate in
Christ, or to those lowly duties where it is embodied in kindnesses.
So much of his time, moreover, was spent in what the Protector vainly
endeavoured to persuade his Parliaments to keep to, namely, the "work
of healing and settling" that he had little left for the
"definitions" of all things in Church and State, into which those
unhappy Parliaments were so continually, to the Protector's vexation,
straying.

Then there were the children, Maidie and Dolly, and the two boys who
came after them, renewing one by one, in their happy infancy, the
golden age; the joyous little ones, around whom it was manifestly our
duty to gather as many relics of Eden, and foretastes of the thousand
years of peace, as were to be had in a world where thirty thousand
fiery pamphlets were flying about.

The spirit of Annis Nye, meantime, abode, listening and looking
heavenward, on lofty heights far above all debate, though ready for
any lowly service.  And in a house in our garden, on the river bank,
enlarged for his accommodation, lived our High Church friend, Dr.
Rich, with his eleven children, his spirit also loftily looking down
on the strifes of the present, not from the heights of immediate
inspiration, but from those of history; while his eleven children,
lately orphaned of their mother, made no small portion of my world,
with its many interests and cares.

So that, in spite of the wide divergences of judgment in our
household concerning matters political and ecclesiastical (perhaps
rather in consequence of the mutual self-restraint they rendered
necessary), our home came to be looked on by many as a kind of haven
where people might meet face to face on the common ground of humanity
and Christianity.

The mere meeting face to face on common ground, if it be pure and
high, or helpful and lowly, the mere taking and giving the cups of
cold water in the Master's name, the mere looking into each others'
faces and grasping each others' hands as kindred, has in itself, I
think, something almost sacramental.  How much, indeed, of the depth
and sacredness of the Highest Sacrament consists in such communion
union through what we are in Him instead of agglomeration through
what we think; union in Him who is to us all the Way, the Truth, the
Life, but of whom the best we can think is so dim, and poor, and low.

In those years we learned to know and revere many whose memories (now
that so many of them are gone, and that we so soon must be going),
shining from the past we shared with them, throw a sacred yet
familiar radiance on the future we hope to share.

Dr. Owen, coming now and then from his post as Vice-chancellor of
Oxford to preach before the Parliament on state occasions.

Mr. John Howe, the Protector's chaplain, living on radiant lofty
heights, far above the thirty thousand controversial pamphlets,
himself a living temple of the living truth he adored.

Colonel Hutchinson and Mistress Lucy, with that lofty piety of
theirs, which, as she said, "is the blood-royal of all the virtues."
He with his republican love of liberty, and stately chivalry of
character and demeanour: she with her pure and passionate love; with
her earnest endeavours to judge men and things by high impartial
standards; and her success in so far as that standard was embodied in
her husband.  Much of their time, however, during the Commonwealth
they spent on the Colonel's estate, collecting pictures and
sculpture, planting trees, "procuring tutors to instruct their sons
and daughters in languages, sciences, music, and dancing, whilst he
himself instructed them in humility, godliness, and virtue."

And Mr. John Milton, blinded to the sights of this lower world by his
zeal in writing that Defence of the English People which wakened all
Europe like a trumpet; and by his very blindness, it seemed, made
free of higher worlds than were open to common mortals.  Whitehall, I
think, was not degraded by his dwelling there, nor its chambers made
less royal by his eyes having looked their last through those windows
on

  "Day, or the sweet approach of morn or even,
  Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
  Or flocks, and herds, and human face divine,"

before his

                    .....light was spent,
  Ere half his days, in this dark world and wide."

For his life was indeed the pure and lofty poem he said the lives of
all who would write worthily must be.

The Society of our Puritan London in those Commonwealth days was not
altogether rustical or fanatical.  Discourse echoes back to me from
it which can, I think, have needed to be tuned but little higher to
flow unbroken into the speech of the City, where all the citizens are
as kings, and all the congregation seers and singers.

The first public event after our return to London was the funeral of
General Ireton, Bridget Cromwell's brave husband, who had died at his
post in Ireland.

He was buried in Henry the Seventh's Chapel.  The concourse was
great.  Dr. Owen preached the funeral sermon.  There was no pomp of
funeral ceremonial, of organ-music or choir.  The Puritan funeral
solemnities were the pomp of solemn words, and the eloquent music of
the truths which stir men's hearts.

The text was, "But go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt
rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days."  (Dan. xii. 13).

"It is not the manner of God," Dr. Owen said, "to lay aside those
whom He hath found faithful in His service.  _Men indeed do so_; but
God changeth not.

"There is an appointed season wherein the saints of the most eminent
abilities, in the most useful employments, must receive their
dismission.  There is a manifold wisdom which God imparteth to the
sons of men; there is a civil wisdom, and there is a spiritual
wisdom: both these shone in Ireton.

"He ever counted it his wisdom to look after the will of God in all
wherein he was called to serve.  For _this_ were his wakings,
watchings, inquiries.  When that was made out, he counted not his
business half done, but even accomplished, and that the issue was
ready at the door.  The name of God was his land in every storm; in
the discovery whereof he had as happy an eye, at the greatest seeming
distance, when the clouds were blackest and the waves highest, as any.

"Neither did he rest here.  Some men have wisdom to know things, but
not seasons.  Things as well as words are beautiful in their time.
He was wise to discern the seasons.  There are few things that belong
to civil affairs but are alterable upon the incomprehensible variety
of circumstances.  He that will have the garment, made for him one
year, serve and fit him the next, must be sure that he neither
increase nor wane.  Importune insisting on the most useful things,
without respect to alterations of seasons, is a sad sign of a narrow
heart.  He who thinks the most righteous and suitable proposals and
principles that ever were in the world (setting aside general rules
of unchangeable righteousness and equity) must be performed as
desirable, because once they were, is a stranger to the affairs of
human kind.

"Some things are universally unchangeable and indispensable: as that
a government must be.  Some again are allowable merely on the account
of preserving the former principles.  If any of them are out of
course, it is a vacuum in _nature politic_, which all particular
elements instantly dislodge and transpose themselves to supply.  And
such are all forms of government among men.

"In love to his people Ireton was eminent.  All his pains, labour,
jeopards of life, and all dear to him, relinquishments of relatives
and contents, had sweetness of life from this motive, intenseness of
love to his people.

"But fathers and prophets have but their season: they have their
dismission.  So old Simeon professeth, _Nunc dimittis_.  They are
placed of God in their station as a sentinel on his watch-tower, and
then they are dismissed from their watch.  The great Captain comes
and saith, Go thou thy way; thou hast faithfully discharged thy duty;
go now to thy rest.  Some have harder service, harder duty, than
others.  Some keep guard in the winter, others in the summer.  Yet
duty they all do; all endure some hardship, and have their appointed
season for dismission; and be they never so excellent in the
discharging of their duty, they shall not abide one moment beyond the
bounds which He hath set them who saith to all His creatures, 'Thus
far shall you go and no further.'

"The three most eminent works of God in and about His children in the
days of old were His giving His people the law, and settling them in
Canaan; His recovering them from Babylon; and His promulgation of the
gospel unto them.  In these three works he employed three most
eminent persons.  Moses is the first, Daniel is the second, and John
Baptist is the third; and none of them saw the work accomplished in
which he was so eminently employed.  Moses died the year before the
people entered Canaan; Daniel some few years before the foundation of
the temple; and John Baptist in the first year of the baptism of our
Saviour, when the gospel which he began to preach was to be published
in its beauty and glory.  I do not know of any great work that God
carried out, the same persons to be the beginners and enders thereof.
Should He leave the work always on one hand, it would seem at length
to be the work of the instrument only.  Though the people opposed
Moses at first, yet it is thought they would have worshipped him at
the last; and therefore God buried him where his body was not to be
found.  Yet, indeed, he had the lot of most who faithfully serve God
in their generation--despised while they are present, idolized when
they are gone.

"God makes room, as it were, in His vineyard for the budding,
flourishing, and fruit-bearing of other plants which He hath planted.

"You that are employed in the work of God, you have but your allotted
season--your day hath its evening.  You have your _season_, and you
have _but_ your season; neither can you lie down in peace until you
have some persuasion that your _work_ as well as your _life_ is at an
end.

"Behold here one receiving his dismission about the age of forty
years; and what a world of work for God did he in that season.  And
now rest is sweet to this labouring man.  Provoke one another by
examples.  Be diligent to pass through your work, and let it not too
long hang upon your hands; yea, search out work for God.  You that
are entrusted with power trifle not away your season.  Is there no
oppressed person that with diligence you might relieve?  Is there no
poor distressed widow or orphan whose righteous requests you might
expedite and despatch?  Are there no stout offenders against God and
man that might be chastised?  Are there no slack and slow counties
and cities in the execution of justice that might be quickened by
your example? no places destitute of the gospel that might be
furnished?

"God takes His saints away (among other reasons) to manifest that He
hath better things in store for them than the _best_ and _utmost_ of
what they can desire or aim at here below.  He had a heaven for
Moses, and therefore might in mercy deny him Canaan.  Whilst you are
labouring for a handful of _first-fruits_, He gives you the _full
harvest_.

"You that are engaged in the work of God, seek for the reward of your
service _in the service itself_.  Few of you may live to see that
beauty and glory which perhaps you aim at.  God will proceed at His
own pace, and calls us to go along with Him; to wait in faith and not
make haste.  Those whose minds are so fixed on, and swallowed up
with, some end (though good) which they have proposed to themselves,
do seldom see good days and serene in their own souls.  There is a
sweetness, there is wages to be found in the work of God itself.  Men
who have learned to hold communion with God in every work He calls
them out unto, though they never see the main harvest they aim at,
yet such will rest satisfied, and submit to the Lord's limitation of
their time.  They bear their sheaves in their own bosom.

"_The condition of a dismissed saint is a condition of rest_.  Now
rest holds out two things to us; a freedom from what is opposite
thereunto, and something which satisfies our nature; for nothing can
rest but in that which satiates the whole nature of it in all its
extent and capacity.

"They are at rest from sin, and from labour and travail.  They sin no
more; they wound the Lord Jesus no more; they trouble their own souls
no more; they grieve the Spirit no more; they dishonour the gospel no
more; they are troubled no more with Satan's temptations, no more
with their own corruption; but lie down in a constant enjoyment of
one everlasting victory over sin.  They are no more in cold
communion.  They have not one thought that wanders from God to all
eternity.  They lose Him no more.

"There is no more watching, no more fasting, no more wrestling, no
more fighting, no more blood, no more sorrow.  There tyrants pretend
no more title to their kingdom; rebels lie not in wait for their
blood; they are no more awakened by the sound of the trumpet, nor the
noise of the instruments of death; they fear not for their relations;
they weep not for their friends.  The Lamb is their temple, and God
is all in all unto them.

"Yet this cessation from sin and labour will not complete their rest;
something further is required thereto; even something to satisfy and
everlastingly content them.  Free them in your thoughts from what you
please, without this they are not at rest.  _God is the rest of their
souls_.  Dismissed saints rest in the bosom of God; because in the
fruition of Him they are everlastingly satisfied, as having attained
the utmost end whereto they were created, all the blessedness whereof
they are capable.

"Every man stands in a threefold capacity--natural, civil, religious.
And there are distinct qualifications unto these several capacities.
To the first are suited some seeds of those _heroical virtues_ as
courage, permanency in business.  To the civic capacity, ability,
faithfulness, industry.  In their religious capacity, men's peculiar
ornament lies in those fruits of the Spirit which we call Christian
graces.  Of these, in respect of usefulness, there are three most
eminent, faith, love and self-denial.  Now all these were eminent in
the person deceased.  My business is not to make a funeral oration,
only I suppose that without offence I may desire that in courage and
permanency in business (which I name in opposition to that unsettled,
pragmatical, shuffling disposition which is in some men), in ability
for wisdom and counsel, in faithfulness to his trust and in his
trust, in indefatigable industry, in faith in the promises of God, in
love to the Lord Jesus and all His saints, in a tender regard to
their interest, delight in their society, contempt of himself and all
his for the gospel's sake, in impartiality and sincerity in the
execution of justice, that in these and the like things we may have
many raised up in the power and spirit wherein he walked before the
Lord and before this nation.  This I hope I may speak without offence
here upon such an occasion as this.  MY business being occasionally
to preach the Word, not to carry on a part of a funeral ceremony, I
shall add no more, but commit you to Him who is able to prepare you
for your eternal condition."

Often I had longed, if only for once, to hear the organ rolling its
grand surges of music through the aisles of the Abbey.  But when that
grave voice ceased, and left a hush through that great assembly, I
felt no music could be more worthy of the solemn place than those
nobly reticent words of lamentation and praise; nor could England
raise a nobler statue to any of her heroes than that Puritan picture
of a Christian statesman.

Indeed, the public pomps of the Commonwealth which have engraven
themselves most deeply on my memory were of the funereal kind.

In 1650, five years after Ireton's death, for once, by the
Protector's command, the dear, long-unfamiliar sound of the old
Prayer-book was heard in the Abbey, as the funeral service was read
over the remains of good Archbishop Usher, buried at the Protector's
expense in the great mausoleum of the nation and her kings.

In November, 1654, three years after the funeral of Ireton, Mistress
Cromwell, the Protector's mother, was buried beside him among the
kings.

She was ninety-four years of age.  She died on the 15th of November.
A little before her death (we heard) she gave the Protector her
blessing, saying, "The Lord cause His face to shine upon you, and
comfort you in all your adversities, and enable you to do great
things for the glory of your most high God, and to be a relief unto
His people.  My dear son, I leave my heart with thee.  Good-night!"

She, living wellnigh all those fifty-five years of his beside him,
knew well that his life had been no triumphal procession, but a
toilsome march and a sore battle, little indeed changed by the
battle-field being transferred from moors and hill-sides to palaces
and parliament-houses.  At sound of a gun she was wont to tremble in
that stately home at Whitehall, fearing lest some of the many plots
of assassination had at last succeeded in proving to the assassin
that killing her son was no murder, And once at least every day she
craved to see him, if only to know that he lived.

They laid her to rest reverently among the kings in Henry the
Seventh's Chapel.  And so the consecrating presence of
tenderly-reverenced age passed from that English home, which during
the years of the Commonwealth was at the head of all the homes of the
land.

And five years after came that last funeral, which was, indeed, the
funeral of the Commonwealth itself.

These are the state ceremonies of the Commonwealth which have left
the deepest mark on my memory.  Its thanksgivings for victories, its
inauguration, installation, and enthronization of the Lord Protector
in Westminster Hall were not without a certain sober republican
grandeur, nor did the ermine and the sceptre misbecome the true
dignity of his bearing; but they did not, I think, enhance it.
Clothes need some mystical links to the unseen and the past to make
them glorious; and Oliver certainly did not need clothes to make him
glorious.  The brow, furrowed with thought for England, was his
crown; the sceptre seemed a bauble in the hand that had ruled so long
without it; and the robes of state that fitted him best were the
plain armour of the Ironsides.  Roger, however, thought otherwise.
He would have had every symbol of the royalty within our "chief of
men" outwardly gathered around him, even to the crown and title of
king.  Whatever may be the case in religion, in politics (he
thought), the common people are taught by ceremonial.  As the
Protector said "The people love that they do know; they love
settlement and know names."  If Oliver, he thought, had been
proclaimed king, no Stuart would have returned to proclaim him
traitor.

Be that as it might, it was not done; and the omission seemed (to
many) to make the rest of the state ceremonials of the Commonwealth
ragged and incomplete.  Crowned, Oliver might have become in the eyes
of the people King Oliver; uncrowned, he seemed but Mr. Cromwell of
Huntingdon, with a sceptre in his hand which did not belong to him.

But after all, the great solemnities of the Commonwealth were the
sermons.  Great sermons and great congregations to hear them.  They
were our state-music, our military-music, our church-music, all in
one.  The _Te Deum_ of our thanksgiving days for victories, our
coronation anthems, our requiems.

The sermons which so moved the heart of Puritan England were no empty
sound of words harmoniously arranged,--a lower music, I think, than
that of any true musician;--for words have a higher sphere than mere
melodious tones; and, like all orders in creation, if they do not
rise to the height of their own sphere, fall below the sphere below
them.

It was the eloquence of men speaking to men, of things which most
deeply concerned all men; of the ablest men in England speaking to
her ablest men; of the loftiest spirits in England speaking to all
that was loftiest in the spirit of man.

Dr. Owen's appearances in London were only occasional.

The sermons that come back on me across the years like the voice of a
great river resounding with deep even flow through all the petty or
tumultuous noises of the times, are those of Mr. John Howe, chaplain
to the Protector.

He came to London as a country minister from his parish of
Torrington, somewhere about 1654, and went to hear the preaching in
Whitehall Chapel.  But Oliver, "who generally had his eyes
everywhere," and whose eyes had such a singular faculty for seeing
men's capacity, discerned something more than ordinary in his
countenance, and sent to desire to speak with him after the worship
of God was over.  The interview satisfied him he had not been
mistaken.  The great heart that so singularly honoured the worth his
eyes were so quick to discern, whether those he honoured honoured him
or not; and the will so strong to bend all men's wills, would not
rest until he had induced the parson of Torrington, though somewhat
reluctantly, to become his own chaplain.

The choice might reflect some light on the nature of the Protector's
own piety.

There was abundance of vehement fiery eloquence to be had among the
Puritan preachers, and (I doubt not) there could have been found too
many flatterers.

But Mr. Howe so little flattered the Protector, that he deliberately
preached against the doctrine of a particular persuasion in prayer,
which was one of the Protector's strongholds.

And so far was his eloquence from being vehement, that its very glory
was a majestic evenness of flow, which, while it swept the whole soul
irresistibly on to his conclusion, seldom tossed it up and down with
those changeful heavings of emotion that are the luxuries of popular
orations.  Any preacher who was less of a fiery declaimer and of a
fanatic, or less of a brilliant popular orator than John Howe,
Oliver's chosen chaplain, can, I think, scarcely be found in the
history of preaching.  If he had a fault, it is the difficulty of
detaching any word, image, or pointed sentence from the grand sweep
of his argument sufficiently to give any conception of its power to
those who did not hear him.  If his eloquence was a river, it was one
without the dash and sparkle of rapids and eddies, steadily deepening
and broadening, in a majestic current to its end.  If it was a fire,
it was no mere spark or flame to make the heart glow for a moment,
but a steady furnace enkindling principles into divine affections.
If it was a flight, it was no mere darting hither and thither, as of
smaller birds; scarcely even the upward musical mounting of the lark
to descend on her nest; but the soaring of the eagle with his eye on
the sun.  He strengthened you for duty by transporting you to the
divine spring of all duty.  He strengthened you against earthly care
simply by lifting you above it to "the holy order of God."  "Do not
hover as meteors; do not let your minds hang in the air in a
pendulous, uncertain, unquiet posture," he said; "a holy rectitude,
composure, and tranquillity in our life, carries with it a lively,
sprightly vigour.  Our Saviour says that life consists not in things,
but in a good healthy internal habit of spirit.  What a blessed
repose, how pleasant a vacancy of diseasing, vexatious thoughts, doth
that soul enjoy which gives a constant, unintermittent consent to the
divine government, when it is an agreed, undisputed thing, that God
shall always lead and prescribe, and it follow and obey.  Discontent
proceeds from self-conceit, self-dependence, self-seeking, all which
despicable idols (or that one great idol _self_ thus variously
idolized) one sight of God would bring to nothing."

He strengthened men for death, not by fortifying them against it as a
sleep, but by regarding life as the sleep and death the waking.  "It
fares with the sluggish soul as if it were lodged in an enchanted
bed.  So deep an oblivion hath seized it of its own country, of its
alliance above, of its relation to the Father and world of spirits,
it takes this earth for its home where 'tis both in exile and
captivity at once, as a prince stolen away in his infancy and bred up
in a beggar's shed.  Being in the body, it is as with a bird that
hath lost its wings.  The holy soul's release from its earthly body
will shake off this drowsy sleep.  Now is the happy season of its
awaking into the heavenly vital light of God.  The blessed morning of
the long-desired day hath now dawned upon it; the cumbersome
night-veil is laid aside, and the garments of salvation and immortal
glory are now put on."  "The greatest enemy we have cannot do us the
despite to keep us from dying."  To one whose spirit was thus itself
a living Temple, even the great Abbey seemed an earthly house.  The
incense, the ritual, and the music of the heavenly city were around
Him.  "The sacrifice of Christ," he said, "is of virtue to perfume
the whole world."

Yet I feel that these extracts give as little idea of the power of
his preaching, as a phial of salt-water of the sea.  You perceive
from it that the water of the sea is salt and clear, but of the sea
itself, heaving in multitudinous waves from horizon to horizon, you
have no more idea than before.

The very titles of his books read like arguments of a divine poem--a
Paradise Lost and Regained.  "The Living Temple;" "The Blessedness of
the Righteous;" "Of Delighting in God;" "The Redeemer's Tears wept
over lost Souls;" "The Love of God and our Brother;" "The Carnality
of Religious Contention;" "Of Reconciliation between God and Man;"
"The Redeemer's Dominion over the Invisible World."

Far indeed his spirit dwelt above the small controversies of the
time, engaged in the great controversy of light against darkness.
"Holiness," he said, "is the Christian's armour, the armour of light:
strange armour that may be seen through."  "A good man's armour is
that he needs none; his armour is an open breast.  Likeness to God is
an armour of proof.  A person truly like God is far raised above the
tempestuous stormy region, and converses where winds and clouds have
no place.  Holy souls were once darkness, but now they are light in
the Lord--_darkness_, not in the dark, as if that were their whole
nature, and they were nothing but an impure mass of conglobated
darkness.  So '_ye are light_,'--as if they were that and nothing
else.  How suppose we such an entire sphere of nothing else but pure
light?  What can raise a storm with it?  A calm serene thing,
perfectly homogeneous, void of contrariety.  We cannot yet say that
thus it is with holy souls, but thus it will be when they awake.
Glory is revealed to them, transfused through them; not a
_superficial skin-deep glory_, but a transformation, changing the
soul throughout; _glory, blessedness, brought home and lodged in a
man's own soul_."

Blessedness, to Mr. Howe, consisted in godliness, and godliness
manifested itself in goodness--as high a conception of Christian
religion, I think, as has been realized before or since.  His
learning was not as fragments of a foreign language, intertwined for
purposes of decoration with his own, but as a translation into the
language of day of the converse he had held, on the high places of
the earth, with his kindred among the lofty souls of the past, in the
language native to them all, concerning the infinite heavens above
them all.  This was the kind of eloquence we listened to at Whitehall
and St. Margaret's during the days of the Commonwealth.  And among
all the great Puritan preachers this was the one whom Oliver chose
for his chaplain.

We never intruded ourselves on the Protector during his greatness.
There were so many to claim his notice then.  And we needed it not;
having work enough to occupy us and means enough to do it, and
happiness enough in it, what with the sick and the prisons and the
children in the home.

But Roger was always in his service, and he brought us word
continually what a burden and toil that rule was to the ruler.

Above the noisy strife of parties, men like Howe could dwell in the
purer air; beneath it the people and the churches were silently
prospering.  But Oliver's way lay through the thick of the strife,
with little intermission, from the beginning to the end.  If ever "I
serve" was justly a prince's motto, it was his.  "Ready to serve," as
he said, "_not as a king but as a constable_; if they liked it, often
thinking indeed that he could not tell what his business in the place
he stood in was, save that of a good constable set to keep the peace
of the parish."  Oliver's parish (Roger said) being England with all
her parties, and Europe with her Protestants and Catholics, ready at
a word to fly on each other.  He kept the peace of his parish well.
Others might concern themselves with the _well-being_ of the nation
(as he said)--"he had to consider its _being_."  The ship which the
mixed crew of Anabaptists, Levellers, classical Republicans, and
Royalists, were debating in Parliament and out of it how to work
according to most perfect rules, had meantime _to be worked_, being
not in harbour but on the stormiest sea, amidst hostile fleets.

Parliament after parliament met, debated, did nothing, and was
dissolved.  But still the ship of the nation sailed majestically and
triumphantly on, breasting stormy waves and scattering hostile
fleets, with that one hand on the helm, and the eyes of that one man
on the stars and on the waves.

Roger was full of hope throughout those years.  The time must come,
he said, when the nation would see what the Protector was doing for
her.  All Europe had seen it long.  Ambassadors came from Spain,
France, Denmark, Sweden, Austria.

All Europe felt England a power, and knew who made her so.  England
herself could not fail to see it soon.  Then, instead of taking her
greatness sullenly from Oliver's hands, she would acknowledge him as
the "single person" to whom the parliaments and people owed
allegiance--her sovereign by divinest right--suffer him to rule in
accordance with her ancient order instead of in spite of it--grant
what he passionately craved, the privilege of making her as free as
he had made her strong; rise herself to be the queen of the
Protestant nations.

And then the glorious day would dawn, Roger thought, for England and
the world.  What tender sweet hopes lay deep in his heart, as one of
the roses strewn by this Aurora, I knew well.  What England and the
world said, one maiden's heart would surely be blind to no more!

So the years passed on.  Our fleets, with Blake in command, were
ranging the Mediterranean Sea, Rumours came of victories over Italian
and Mussulman, of compensation for wrong, of slaves set free.

In the late king's reign the Barbary Pirates had carried off our
countrymen from our shores near Plymouth Sound.  Under Oliver, our
fleets battered down the forts of the Pirates on their own shores,
and set the captives free.

All nations courted his alliance.  And from the plantations of New
England (through Mr. John Cotton and others) came joyful voices of
congratulation on the liberties and glories which these children of
Old England felt still to be theirs.

All seemed advancing, Roger thought, like a triumph.  Righteousness
springing out of the earth, Truth looking down from heaven--when
tidings burst upon us which stirred the heart of England to its
depths, from sea to sea.

From the far-off valleys of the Alps of Piedmont came the cry of
wrong.  How a whole race of our fellow-Protestants, "men otherwise
harmless, only for many years famous for embracing the purity of
religion," had been tortured, massacred, and driven from their homes,
to perish naked and starving on the mountains.

Never, since the Irish massacre at the beginning of the Civil Wars,
had England been so moved with one overwhelming tide of indignation
and pity.  But with the indignation at the Irish massacre meaner
feelings of selfish terror had been mingled.  This wrong touched
England only in her noblest part.  For the time we seemed to reach
the depths beneath all our divisions and turmoils.  England felt
herself one, in this common sympathy; and what was more, the
Protestant Church glowed into a living unity through this holy fire
of indignation and pity, which, being true, failed not to burst forth
in generous deeds of succour.  "For," as Milton wrote, "that the
Protestant name and cause, although they differ among themselves in
some things of little consequence, is nevertheless the same, the
hatred of our adversaries alike incensed against Protestants very
easily demonstrates."

The massacre began in December, 1654, that merciless "slaughter on
the Alpine mountains cold."  Six regiments were engaged in it, three
of them the Irish "Kurisees," from whom the Protector had delivered
Ireland.

It was the 3rd of June before the cry of distress reached Oliver at
Whitehall.  The hills had been flashing it for five months to heaven.
For five months our brethren and their families had been wandering
destitute, afflicted, tormented, on the mountains above their ruined,
desolated homes.

Much frightful wrong had been wrought irrevocably, past all the
remedies of earth.  What remedy was still possible there was no delay
in finding, and no lack of generous tenderness in applying.

The Protector at once gave £2,000 from his private purse.  A day of
humiliation was appointed throughout the country, "such a fast as God
hath chosen, to undo the heavy burdens, to break every yoke, to deal
bread to the hungry, and cover the naked."  Thirty-seven thousand
pounds were contributed to the suffering brethren in the Valleys.
Secretary Milton wrote six State letters in the Protector's name to
the princes of Europe and the Switzer Republic.  Oliver showed
plainly to France that he cared more for the righting of this wrong
than for the most profitable alliances in the world.  The Catholic
world perceived for once that Protestantism meant more than mere
doubt and denial, that it meant a common faith and a common life.

And as far as might be the wrong was set right, the exiles were
relieved from their destitution and restored to their homes.


It was something to be an Englishwoman then.

Roger was appointed to accompany the envoys sent by the Protector to
Paris.  He came to take leave of us with a face all alit with hope.

"England is beginning to acknowledge her deliverer," he said.  "All
Europe is flashing back on her his kingly likeness, as if from a
thousand mirrors.  She must acknowledge him at last."

And with a farewell which had the joyous ring of a welcome in it, he
went.

The joyful confidence of his tones and hope made them linger on my
heart long, like music.  "She must acknowledge him at last."  They
mingled with my dreams, and woke with me when I woke, but with a
double meaning subtilely intertwined into them; as if England were
personated, as in some royal festive masque, in the form of Lettice
Davenant, no more weeping and downcast, as when I had seen her last,
but her bright face, and her dear joyous eyes full of serene
determination and unquenchable hope.


LETTICE'S DIARY.

"_Paris, Twelfth Night_, 1655.--My birth-day.  More than four years
since I wrote a word in this book.  The pages begin to look faded,
like my youth.  I scarcely know why I have left such an interval,
except that it is so difficult not to look on the whole of this life
of exile as an interval; a blank space, or an impertinent episode in
the history of life, which, by-and-by, when the true history begins
again, we just tear out or seal together.

"All this time I have heard nothing from the old friends in England,
except two letters; one from Mistress Dorothy, wherein she gave me a
terrible picture of the wrong-doings and thinkings of certain
religious people of an entirely new kind, whom she calls 'Quakers.'
It seems that Olive brought one to her house at Kidderminster, which
Mistress Dorothy thought a great wrong.  As far as I can make out,
Olive has no thought of becoming a Quaker; nor can I find out
distinctly what the Quakers are or do, except that every one seems
enraged against them, and that on that ground Olive and Dr. Antony
took this Quaker maiden under their wing.  Poor sweet Olive, she
always had a way of getting entangled into defending people under
general ban; from witches downward or upward.  I suppose Annis Nye is
Olive's present Gammer Grindle.  In which case, Olive at least seems
little changed.  But that letter was written before the Battle of
Worcester.  From Mistress Dorothy's account they appear to be a new
kind of sect, with a new elaborate ceremonial or ritual, to which
they adhere very strictly.  Mistress Dorothy speaks of their refusing
to take off their hats, and to bow or courtesy.  This must evidently
be a ritual observance; because people would scarcely be sent to
prison simply for keeping on their hats and not courtesying.

"Mistress Dorothy spoke, too, by the way, of Olive's two children,
Maidie and the babe.

"The babe must be now a prattling child of five, and Maidie probably
a little person invested with the solemn responsibilities of the
eldest sister.  I fancy her with Olive's fair, calm face, thinking it
her greatest honour to share her mother's household occupations, or
to run by her side with a basket of food to supplement Dr. Antony's
medicines.  I fancy Mistress Gretel smiling at the babes, and letting
them entangle her knitting with the feeblest of remonstrances, and in
a serene way undermining all Olive's 'wholesome' discipline.  I fancy
Mr. Drayton a little older, a little graver, not quite satisfied with
the fruits of the war, wishing Mr. Hampden back, and Lord Falkland,
and England as they might have made it; and taking refuge with the
stars and his grand-children.  I fancy--till I am angry with myself
for fancying anything, as if it made shadows out of realities.  For
they live; _they live_, in the old solid living England.  If any are
shadows, it is we, poor helpless, voiceless exiles on this shadowy
shore; not they.  And then I begin to think not of what I fancy, but
what I know.  I know they are good, and kind, and godly still.  And I
know--yes, I know--they have not forgotten; they still love and think
of me.

"Only sometimes it troubles me a little that they are going on
thinking of me as the young Lettice they knew so long ago; which is
scarcely the same as thinking of the middle-aged Lettice Davenant who
has reached her twenty-ninth birth-day to-day.

"I think sometimes now of the scorn with which I was wont to speak of
middle-states of things, saying there was no poetry in mid-day,
mid-summer, middle-station, middle-age.  And often and often the
answer comes cheerily back, how _he_ spoke of 'manhood and womanhood,
with their dower of noble work, and strength to do it;' and how he
could not abide 'to hear the spring-tide spoken pulingly of, as if it
faded instead of ripening into summer; and youth, as if it set
instead of dawned into manhood.'  'It was but a half-fledged poetry,'
he said, 'which must go to dew-drops and rosy morning clouds for its
similes and could see no beauty in noon-tide with its patient toil or
its rapturous hush of rest.'--It comes back to me like an
invigorating march music, now that the joyous notes of the reveille
have died away, and the vesper hymns are not yet ready, and the march
of noon-tide life has fairly begun.

"What, then, makes evening and morning, spring and autumn, the
delight of poets?  The light then blossoms or fades into colour.  The
light itself then is a fair picture to look at.  At noon it sinks
deeper no longer on the surface of clouds, but into the chalices of
flowers and into the heart of fruits; it is painting pictures on the
harvest-fields and orchards; it is ripening and making the world
fair, and enabling us to see it.  It is light not to look at, but to
work by.  Its beauty is in making things beautiful.  And so I think
it is with middle-age.  Its beauty is not in itself; but in loving
thought for others, and loving work for others.  Looking at ourselves
in middle-life, we see only the glow faded, the dewy freshness
brushed away.  Therefore we must not look at ourselves, but at the
work the Master gives us to do, the brothers and sisters the Father
gives us to love.  In Olive's heart, no doubt, the thought of youth
passing away scarcely arises.  She sees her children growing around
her, and works and plans for them, and counts the hours again as
morning, not as evening hours, renewing her life in the morning of
theirs.  And although that lot is not mine, I have scarcely more
temptation to 'talk pulingly of morning fading into noon' than she.
Madame la Mothe takes me close to her heart.  With her I am her
friend's child.  Then these revenues which come to us so much more
regularly than to most of the Cavaliers, give us so many means of
helping others, that this alone is an occupation.  Especially as
these revenues are, after all, not unlimited, and my father and
Walter believe they are (as the wants of the Cavaliers certainly
are), so that it requires some planning and combining to make things
go as far as they can.  Which in itself is a great occupation to
Barbe and me, and makes our daily house-keeping as interesting as a
work of charity.  And since the English Service has been prohibited
at the Louvre, as it has been since the Battle of Worcester, I have
some happy work in a kind of little school of young English girls,
amongst whom it is sweet to do what I can, that when they go back,
the Holy Scriptures and the prayers of the dear old Prayer-book may
not be unfamiliar to them.

"Then my father is wonderfully forbearing with me.  For it has vexed
him that I could not listen to some excellent Cavaliers, who wished
for our alliance.

"Madame la Mothe also sometimes lectures me a little on this score
with reference to a nephew of hers.  But as the project was primarily
hers and not his, this little proposal was much easier to decline.
Only sometimes she shakes her head and says,--

"'There has been a history, my poor child!  Every woman's heart has
its history.  But heaven forbid that I should seek to penetrate into
thy secret.  Yet thou art not like thy mother in all things.  She
suffered.  Thou wilt conquer.  Her eyes were as those of Mater
Dolorosa by the Cross.  Thine are as those of Regina Cœli above
the storms.'"

"And I cannot tell her.  Because I can never look on that love as a
history.  I know so well he could not change.  It is scarcely
betrothal, for there is neither promise nor hope.  It is simply
belonging to each other in life and in death.

"Then sometimes she smiles and kisses me and says, 'There is some
little comfort even in thy being of "the religion."  On that rock of
thine, no torrent of Port-Royalist eloquence will sweep thee away
from us into a convent.  And for the rest, God is merciful; and
having made islands, it is possible He has especial dispensations
suited to islands.'"

"For Madame la Mothe has entirely relinquished my conversion.  Seeing
that I can honour the ladies of Port Royal from the bottom of the
heart, without being attracted to Port Royal, she has given me up.

"She says I have no restless cravings, no void to fill, and it is to
the restlessness of the heart that the repose of religion appeals.

"In one way she is right.  Thank God she is right.  Or rather my
whole heart is one great craving unfathomable void.  But Christianity
fills it.  Christ fills it.  He Himself; satisfying every aspiration,
meeting every want, being all I want.  Pitying, forgiving, loving,
_commanding_ me.  The commanding sometimes most satisfying of all.
Always, always; all through my heart.  Redeemer, that is much;
Master, that (afterwards) is almost more.  Father! that is all.

"There have been sorrows.  After Worcester, my father was so terribly
cast down and gentle.  I remember it was almost a relief the first
time he was really a little angry after that; although it was with me
he was angry; and quite a relief to hear him begin to storm at the
French Court again, when they suppressed our English Service at the
Louvre, and did what they could with any civility to suppress or
dismiss us, and began to pay court to the Arch-Traitor.

"Since then the success of the Usurper in making England great, and
the baseness of some of the attempts to assassinate him (not
discouraged, alas, by some of our Court)! have strained my father's
loyalty to the utmost.

"But the sorrow is Walter; the wrong which sometimes makes us ready,
in desperation, to pay our allegiance anywhere but there whence the
evil came, is the sore change in him.  We made some sacrifices in old
times to the royal cause.  But what were poor Dick, and Robert, and
George, slain on the field, or even Harry laying down his life at
Naseby, or even that precious mother stricken into heaven by his
death, compared with a life poisoned in its springs like Walter's at
this selfish wicked Court?  All the fair promise of his youth turned
into corruption; his very heart slain!

"Our martyred king required the lives of our dearest, and they were
given willingly for him.  But this king takes their souls,
themselves, their life of life, not as a living sacrifice, but to be
trampled, and soiled, and crushed in the dust and mire of sin, till
their dear familiar features are scarcely to be distinguished by
those who love them best.

"The gladness of heart my mother delighted in changed into a fickle
irritability, or frozen into mockery at all sacred things human or
divine.  The generous spirit degraded into mere selfish lavishness,
caring not at what cost to others it buys its wretched pleasures.

"And then the miserable reactions of regret and remorse which I used
to rejoice in, until I learned to know they were the mere irritable
self-loathing of exhausted passion, as little moral as when (at other
times) the same irritation turned against my father or me instead of
against himself.  Until at last I dare not profane the sacred names
of mother and of God, by using them as a kind of magic spell to
unseal the springs of maudlin sentimental tears.  Oh, how bitter the
words look!  Walter, Walter, my brother! tenderly committed by my
mother to me, living in the house with us day by day, yet farther
off--more out of reach (it seems) of pleading or prayer than those
who lie on the cold slopes of Rowten Heath and Naseby!  Is there no
weapon in God's armoury to reach thy heart?  Good Mistress Gretel
used to say God had so many weapons we knew not of in His
storehouses.  In mine, alas, there seem none; none except going on
loving.  And perhaps after all that is the strongest in His.

"Going on loving.  Yes; our Lord surely did that, does that.  When
'He turned to the woman' in Simon's house, it was not the first time
He had so turned to her.  Not the first.  How many times from the
first!  Yet at last she turned and came and looked on Him.  And she
was forgiven.  And in loving Him a new fountain of purity was opened
in her heart, the only purity worth the name, the purity of love; the
purity not of ice but of fire.  Yes; in Him there is the possibility
of restoration.

"But, oh, for these desecrated wasted years, for the glory of the
prime turned into corruption, for all that might have been and never
can be, for this one irrevocable life ebbing, ebbing so fast away,
for the terrible possibility of there being no restoration.  For some
looked, and listened, and longed, but never came!

"_May_.--Barbe came into my chamber this morning, weeping and
wringing her hands.

"'Ah, mademoiselle!' she said; 'another St. Bartholomew--a second St.
Bartholomew!'"

"'Have they risen against the Protestants in Paris?' I said.  And my
first thought was of Walter,--a wild thought, whether this might be
the angel's sword to drive him back into the fold.  If we were to be
hunted hither and thither, who could say but in the severe
destitution of some den or cave of refuge, or even in the prison of
the Inquisition, sacred old words might come back to him, and he
might turn and be saved?  And then another flash of thought!  If we
were seized as Protestants, England would rise; Cromwell, Englishman
and Protestant that he was, would demand us back.  We should no more
be Royalist and Rebel, but all English and Protestant; and return to
England, to Netherby, and Walter with us, and a new life begin.  Wild
hopes, flashing through my mind between my question and Barbe's
answer, delayed, as it was, by her tears.

"'Not in Paris yet, mademoiselle; that is to come.  No doubt, the
tyrants will not end where they began.  It is the people of the
valleys--the Vaudois--men of the religion, before France knew what
the religion was.  My mother's kindred came thence,--quiet, loyal
peasants, tilling their poor patches of field and vineyard among the
savage mountains.  The Duke of Savoy would have them all foreswear
the religion in three days.  They held firm.  He sent six
regiments--herds of monsters, wild beasts, among the people.  They
tortured, killed, wrought horrors I cannot name, but which those
faithful men and women had to bear.'  And her sobs choked her words;
until by degrees she told me all she knew of the dreadful story of
outrage and wrong.

"'And is there none to help?' I said.

"'There is none;--unless it be this Mr. Cromwell,' she said, with a
little hesitation, knowing how abhorred the name was amongst us.
'These poor, exiled, outraged Christians have appealed to him.'

"_June_ 8.--My father says all the world is ablaze about this letter
of Mr. John Milton, the Usurper's Latin secretary, concerning these
persecuted exiles from the valleys.  Its words are very strong.  It
seems not unlikely the French Court may be moved to interfere an
their behalf.  'It is some comfort,' said my father, 'to see that the
old country has a voice which must be listened to, even though she
speaks through the mouth of this murderous Usurper.'

"_June_ 9.--My father came in, with his eyes enkindled with a look of
triumph such as I had not seen in them for years.

"'We must have a rejoicing, Lettice, cost what it may.  There is no
help for it, but an English gentleman's heart must be glad at such
news!  Robert Blake has been pounding them right and left--Pope and
Turk, Duke and Dey.  The Blakes of Somersetshire--a good old family:
I knew them well.  The English fleet calls at Leghorn, and the Pope
and his Italians eagerly grant whatever they demand.  The English
fleet calls at Tunis, demanding justice from the Dey and his pirates.
The Dey refuses: Blake batters down his forts, and burns his fleet in
the harbour.  The Dey will not refuse us our rights again.  The world
begins to know what the name of an Englishman means.  Already these
French courtiers practise a little civility.  The very rascal boys in
the streets seem less impudent.  We must have a merry-making,
Lettice.  What can we do?  At home we would have all the village to a
feast, set all the ale-barrels flowing, and all the bells in the
country ringing.  But here the people, poor half-starved creatures,
drink nothing but vinegar.  And as to these everlasting bells, that
are always dropping and trickling, no one knows why; it would do
one's heart good if one could wake them up for once, and set them
free all together, to burst out in the torrent of a grand old English
peal.  But we cannot.  Who can we give a feast to, Lettice?  One
cannot exactly have a Cavalier dinner, because it might look like
celebrating the victory of the Usurper.  Yet somebody or other must
be made the merrier, that the old country has done such a good stroke
of work.  Whom can we have?'

"I could think of no one but Barbe, her father and mother, and the
seven hungry little brothers and sisters she helped to support.
Accordingly the next day we made them a supper in honour of the
victory over the Turks, an attention which seemed to gratify our
guests much, although my father was not a little dissatisfied at
having to entertain guests on what he scornfully termed 'broth,
vinegar, and sugar-plums.'  But I think to the end Barbe and her
family remained in a very misty state of mind as to what they were to
rejoice about; and but for my father's imperfect acquaintance with
the French language, I am afraid the closing speech of Barbe's
father, who was an old gentleman with political theories, and of a
lofty and florid style of eloquence, might have caused an explosion.
For the point of it was:

"'Excellent Monsieur and amiable Mademoiselle, your country is a
great country; though sometimes to us Frenchmen a little difficult to
understand.  No doubt, this Monseigneur Cromwell has not the
advantage of a descent as pure as could be wished; but he has the
advantage of making himself understood in all languages.  The Turks
seem to have understood Mr. Blake.  There is, also, Mr. Milton, who
writes Latin with the elegance of the renowned Tully.  The Duke of
Savoy will have to understand him.  The poor exiled Vaudois are to be
restored to their valleys.  Monseigneur Cromwell has insisted on it.
He has also sent two thousand pounds of his own for their relief, and
your nation has added more than thirty thousand;--a sum scarcely to
be calculated by simple people.  It is a pity Monseigneur should be
out of the legitimate line of your country's kings.  But such changes
must happen at times in dynasties.  Our own has changed more than
once.  And, no doubt, your magnanimous nation understands her own
affairs, and ere long will arrange herself to the satisfaction of all
parties.  Monsieur and mademoiselle, I thank you in the name of my
family.  Such hospitality is a proof of a tender and generous heart,
worthy of the great nation which has sent this princely succour to
the oppressed.'

"'What does he say, Lettice?' whispered my father.

"'That England is a great nation,' I replied; 'and that it is a pity
Oliver Cromwell was not of the house of Stuart.'

"For a moment my father's eyes flashed; but then, shaking his head
compassionately, he only said: 'Of course, these poor foreigners
cannot be expected to understand our politics.  We must make
allowances, Lettice; we must make allowances.  Every man cannot,
after all, be born an Englishman.'

"_June_ 10.--The meaning of Barbe's father's speech is plain.  The
Usurper has sent an Embassy Extraordinary to the French Court and to
Savoy, and all the redress he demands for the Vaudois is to be made.
They are to be restored to their mountain homes, and protected from
future ill usage.  He styles himself 'Oliver, Protector.'  The poor
Vaudois, at least, are likely to think the title not undeserved.

"_June_ 11.--My father says Roger is here.  If any one in the world
could help Walter, he might.  Walter has been terrible lately.  His
reckless, mocking ways drive my father wild.  He storms in righteous
anger.  Walter recriminates with cool, reckless jests.  My father
commands him to go.  Walter goes; does not come back for days.  My
father grows more and more restless and wretched during his absence;
reproaches himself; taps at my door at night, and says: 'Lettice, I
shall never rest any more.  I have driven the lad to destruction.  I
will go and seek him.'  In a few hours he returns with Walter,
destitute and affectionate.  He returns as a prodigal; but, alas! not
come to himself; aggrieved against the husks--against the beggarly
citizens, who would not give him any--but chiefly against the father,
who, having given him his own portion, refused him his brother's.
And so, for the hundredth time, we welcome him, weep over him, make
much of him, and provide him with such best robes and portions of our
living as we can possibly spare.  And in a day or two he meets his
old associates, has some good-natured message from the king, and,
before long, is drawn off into the old tide of riotous living.  Away
from us, heart and soul, in the far country, where we at the old home
are mere shadows to him.  We mere shadows to him; and he the core of
our hearts to us!

"I feel that these tender changes of feelings of my father's, the
very anger springing from affection, and the affection making him
repent of his just anger as of a sin, are not good for Walter.  I
cannot help, sometimes, telling him what sacrifices my father makes
for him; how ungrateful and unjust he is in return.  But he merely
laughs, and talks as if women were creatures with quite another
edition of the Ten Commandments from men; or, sometimes, he says my
Puritan friends have taken the spirit out of me; or that I should
have married, and then I should have understood the world a little,
and had something else to do than to educate my brothers.  But when
he says such things to me, he is always, or often, sorry afterwards,
and tries to expiate them by some little extra gift or attention.

"And often my father also is vexed rather with me than with Walter,
when he and Walter have differed.  He seems to think I ought in some
way to have made life more cheerful to them both.  But this I know he
does not mean.  Such words are only as an inarticulate cry of pain.
He means it no more than he means what he says far oftener and more
vehemently, that he will never waste another groat, nor hazard a drop
of blood again, for the heartless, faithless family ('Scottish and
French not English,' saith he, in his bitterest moments), which fate
has smitten England with; when I know that, at the next glimpse of a
hope of Restoration, he would spend his fortune to the uttermost
farthing, and his blood to the last drop, to see the young king enjoy
his own again.

"_June_ 12th.--We have met, Roger and I, for a few minutes, but those
minutes, seemed to have bridged over all the years between, and it is
as if our lives had been lived side by side all the time, Yet we said
scarcely a connected sentence that I can recall.

"It was in one of the little tumults which now and then arise in the
narrow streets out of disputes for precedence.

"I was in Madame la Mothe's coach, when we met a coach which happened
to belong to a seigneur, whose lands are close to Madame la Mothe's
in the country.  Neither of the coachmen would give way and back his
horses.  It was a rivalry of centimes.  As happens in so many
contests, the immediate interests of the chiefs were lost sight of in
the vehemence of their followers.  Madame la Mothe and I were left
solitary and uneasy in the coach, while the servants contended for
our dignity in the street.  At length the tumult of voices grew
fierce, the hoofs of the horses clattered on the stones as the
postillions urged them with a defiant crack of their whips, and it
seemed as if the two coaches and their inmates were to charge each
other bodily, as if we had been batteries or battalions.

"'There will be bloodshed,' exclaimed Madame la Mothe, 'bloodshed for
a title, for my title!' and pushing open the door, she sprang on the
pavement, and threw herself among the combatants with words of peace.

"The lady in the other coach seeing her descend, did the same.
Advancing rapidly towards each other they made reverences to each
other.

"Madame la Mothe held out her hands.  'Let us make a compromise,
madame,' she said; 'we will both reascend one coach with my young
friend, Let it be yours.  We will then proceed together, while my
coach retires.  Bloodshed will be avoided.  The loyal rivalry of our
people will be satisfied.  Your side will gain the victory, but it
will be in my service.'

"The ladies embraced, and hand in hand entered the other coach.  The
retainers shouted long life to both the illustrious houses; and the
little drama was ending in a general embrace, when an obstacle
presented itself in the determination of one of Madame la Mothe's
horses, which absolutely refused to sacrifice his own sense of
dignity by retreating.

"The perplexity was great when Madame la Mothe, turning to me,
exclaimed, 'My child, you will excuse my making you the victim of a
slight _ruse de guerre_, to avoid wounding the honour of these
excellent people.  We will make it a question of national courtesy.'
And having obtained the other lady's consent, leaning from the
window, she said to one of the young gentlemen in attendance, in a
voice that all round might hear: 'See, this young lady is of a noble
English house, in exile for loyalty to the unfortunate king.  All
noblesse yields to noblesse sacrificing itself for royalty.  Conduct
Mademoiselle Davenant, I pray you, to my carriage, aid let us retire
before her.'

"I wad being reconducted to Madame la Mothe's carriage, pale, perhaps
a little anxious, for there were murmurs of discontent among the
retainers of the adverse company, when suddenly Roger appeared before
me, and in a moment my hand was in his before I knew how, and I was
alone in the carriage, slowly advancing, while he walked beside the
window.

"'A friend of mademoiselle's father!  Move forward!' he said to the
attendants, in slightly broken French, with that quiet expectation of
obedience which always gave credentials to his commands.  He was
obeyed; and we moved slowly on.

"'You excuse me?' he said to me.  His hand was on the edge of the
window.  'I heard your name, and saw you looking alarmed, and before
I had time to question my right to do it, I found myself taking care
of you.'

"He said no more.  And I said nothing.  It was one of those moments
which seemed not to belong to the hour but to the ages; because ore
does not think of looking backward or forward while they last, the
rest they bring is so complete.

"But as we came to the end of the narrow street, and were about to
turn into a broader place, there was again a little tumult which
delayed us.  Looking out, I saw it was caused by a company of young
cavaliers arrogantly pushing the crowd aside.  Among them I saw the
faces of one or two whom I recognized as friends of Walter's, and I
thought I caught a glimpse of Walter himself.

"Then I forgot everything but Walter, the longing I had so often had
that he could know Roger and the possibility of Roger saving him.

"'Roger,' I said, 'you remember Walter the youngest of us, the boy my
mother thought so much of.  Those are some of our king's courtiers.
They are Walter's friends.  They are bad friends.  They are ruining
him for life and for ever.  I have thought sometimes if you could
have been his friend, it might have been different.'

"'I will do all what I can, Lettice,' he said, and that was all.  But
his 'what I can,' and his 'Lettice,' are volumes that need no
commentary.

"Madame la Mothe re-appeared.

"I introduced Roger as best I could.

"She lavished thanks on him, and kept him some little time in
conversation, while the men were setting something right about the
harness.

"But he replied only in monosyllables.

"For some time after he had taken leave we drove on in silence.

"I was thinking whether I had done right.  In committing my brother
to Roger had I not, as it were, made him my knight, set him forth on
a sacred enterprise for my sake, which he might interpret into an
atonement for that terrible deed which separated us?

"That terrible deed which all the blood in the world, and all the
good deeds in the world cannot expiate, which nothing but repentance
can blot out!  And Roger will never repent.

"They came sweeping back on my heart with his voice, all the old
familiar sacred recollections, my mother's affection for him, the
touch of her hand clasping ours, the sound of her voice blessing us.
And far away, like a ghost, at cock-crowing, glided that dreadful
scaffold.  'Politics!' did not every one say; 'what have women to do
with politics?'

"And after all, what had Roger to do with that terrible deed?  He had
sat near on horseback, as a soldier of Parliament, while it was done.
As a soldier of the Parliament, what could he do otherwise?  As a
man, would he not rather have risked his life to save the royal
sufferer's life?  All the consequences of rebellion are involved in
the first act of rebellion.  War means life or death, victory or
death to all involved.  All the terrible results were unfolded in the
first fatal lifting up of the rebel standard at Edgehill; a shot
might have ended His Majesty's life then as easily as the axe years
afterwards.  Roger's loyalty is to England, and, for her sake, to
whomsoever he believed will rule and serve her best.  That first act
of disloyalty once committed, in the choice of a wrong leader, the
more loyal the character the more disloyal must be the acts ever
after.  It was Roger's fatal hereditary misbelief which had enlisted
him in Cromwell's army.  And that my mother knew, and knowing, had
sanctioned his love.  But once enlisted, it was the very loyalty of
heart which would have led him to die with Montrose for the king's
cause, however hopeless, which had lead him thus to guard the king's
scaffold, however he hated to be there.  For I know he did hate to be
there!  If he would but once confess that his heart had bled at the
sight, as I am sure it did!  But I knew too well how that fatal
loyalty of nature which had prevented his resisting the worst deed of
his traitorous leader, would keep his lips sealed for ever from
disclaiming his share in it, when done.

"But if I knew his heart, ought I not to accept the reverent pity
which I knew must have moved him, and made his presence at the
martyrdom a torture to him, in place of any mere words which a heart
less true than his would have uttered so easily?  Indeed, whether I
accepted it or not, had not it been already understood and accepted
above?  As the mistakes of Port Royal were understood and forgiven,
and of Aunt Dorothy, and, as we trust, our own mistakes will be.

"Then came the thought,--

"'You are getting sophistical.  Right and wrong are right and wrong
for all and for ever.  If you try to put yourself into the place, and
feel the temptations of every criminal, as he feels them, you will
end in condemning no crime.'

"Thus as I sat silent by Madame la Mothe's side, while in a few
moments all those arguments rushed in conflict through my heart,
there was anything but silence within.

"At last Madame la Mothe spoke.  Very quietly she laid her hand on
mine, and without looking at me, said,--

"'My child, forgive me.  I shall never ask what your secret is again,
nor wonder why you keep your heart sealed like the doors of Port
Royal.'

"'It is no secret, madame,' I said.  'We were betrothed by my
mother's sanction.  Only this dreadful war has separated us.'

"'Your young Cavalier is not on the king's side?' she said.  'It is a
pity.  He has the manners of the ancient chivalry.  Deferential and
stately, his politeness has something at once protecting and lofty in
it, as if he were a king, and all women as queens to him.  Alas, for
these English politics and these consciences!'

"'It is not politics that separate us, madame,' I said, almost
mechanically; 'it is the king's death.'

"'Surely the young Cavalier was too noble to be concerned in that!'
she said.

"'He was a soldier of the Commonwealth, madame,' I said, 'and as a
soldier had to obey.'

"I found myself defending him in spite of myself.

"'The king's death was not the work of the soldier, was it?" she
said, 'but of the headsman.'

"'The soldiers guarded the scaffold,' I said.

"'This young Cavalier was among those who guarded the scaffold,' she
said.  'Was that all?  Being a soldier, what would you have had him
do?  Surely there is absolution on earth and in heaven for such a
mistake as that.'

"'He does not repent, madame.'

"'Ah, my child,' she said, 'see what it is to be a Protestant; you
have to be your own Supreme Tribunal, even when your conscience is on
the Judgment-seat, and your own heart at the bar, to be broken by the
sentence.  Now, if you would only believe the Pope and the Church,
whatever the unavoidable pain of the sentence, you would at all
events escape the torture of at once inflicting and enduring it.'

"'Alas, madame,' I said, 'can the sisters of Port Royal escape the
torture of being their own tribunal?  Can they believe a fact is a
fact because a Pope says it?  They distinguish, indeed, between fact
and right; but are not rights really but facts of a higher sphere, if
we only knew them?  And as unalterable?  We only want to know what is
right, madame.  It seems to me no decision on earth, or in heaven,
can make a thing right, any more than it makes it true.'

"'My poor child,' she said tenderly, 'heaven guide you.  Only take
care your heart does not get into the judgment-seat, and persuade
your conscience that the very anguish of the sentence is a proof of
its justice.  Noble hearts have made such mistakes ere now.  One, I
think, very dear to thee and to me.'

"She was silent some minutes, and then said in a more cheerful tone,--

"'He was silent, this young Cavalier.  His character is perhaps
rather grave?'

"'It is a way of all the men of our nation who are worth anything,
madame,' I said.  'Your countrymen have a natural eloquence.  Feeling
enkindles them into speech.  With us it oftener fuses men into
silence.  An Englishman who has no dumbness in him is not to be
trusted.'

"She smiled.

"'Ah, my friend,' she said, 'if I defend, you attack; if I attack,
you defend.  I will leave you to defend your own cause against
yourself.'"




CHAPTER VIII.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

Roger brought back from Paris an account of the life led by the son
of the late king and his companions, that might perhaps have
enfeebled Aunt Dorothy's prayers for his restoration, could she have
believed it, which, however (having her belief much under the control
of her will), she doubtless never would, on any evidence we could
have brought.  Of the Davenants he said little.  But he had seen
them, and from his tone I judged that the intercourse had done more
to cheer than to sadden him.  Sir Walter's face, he thought, looked
somewhat lined with care; but, as far as I could gather, he saw no
change in Lettice.  To him she was the same he had parted from seven
years before, the same he had held in his heart all the seven years
through.

"Was she looking older?" I asked.

"In one way, not an hour," he said; "in another seven years."

"Paler?"

He could not tell; "her colour always came and went like sunshine;
like her smile."

"As loyal as ever?"

"To the late king, and to royalty; yes."

"Graver?"

"They spoke of grave things.  He thought, with all the old
changefulness in her countenance, the calm beneath seemed deeper."

"Then she must be fairer than ever?"

"He thought not.  She was the same."

And to him that was evidently the utmost he desired.  If she had in
any way changed, it had only been as he had changed, keeping parallel
with him; therefore from him evidently no more was to be learned.
Yet something in his interview had evidently strengthened him, like a
new dawn of hope.  Sir Walter, no doubt, would not hear of alliance
with an adherent of "the Usurper;" yet he accepted, with scarcely
disguised triumph, the glory England had won under the Usurper.  A
little more experience of what the Court of the young king was like
to be; a little more proof of what free England could be; a little
more of the hallowing touch of time, on the new Power's new glories;
perhaps the Title belonging to the Power, once boldly claimed,
recognized by the nation; and in the end for the sake of the old
England the new dynasty might be recognized.

So Roger hoped; and to him, therefore, the debates in 1657, on the
Protector's assuming the title of king, had a twofold interest.

The year 1656 closed, and the year 1657 began, stormily.

On the 27th of December my husband came to the house looking
dispirited, and, catching up Maidie in his arms, he said to me,--

"I have a mind to sell all we have, and seek our fortunes in the
wilderness, among the Indians."

Then he told me the scene he had just witnessed, Annis Nye and Job
Forster standing by whilst he narrated how the poor fanatic, James
Naylor, had stood in the pillory in front of the Exchange, weakened
by the terrible scourging four days before from Whitehall to the
Exchange, while his tongue was bored with a hot iron by command of
the Parliament "for blasphemy."

"Twenty years have rolled away," he said; "countless precious lives
have been sacrificed, a dynasty displaced, the king and the
archbishop executed, the Star Chamber destroyed; and here stands the
pillory again in the open day, with fierce fire in the hearts of
those in power, to carry out a sentence cruel as any of Archbishop
Laud's, to the uttermost."

"But the people?" I asked.

"As pitiful as in the days when Prynne, Bastwick, and Barton suffered
in Palace Yard!  Scarce an insulting word or gesture.  While the
cruel iron was at work, the crowd stood bareheaded, and Mr. Rich, the
brave merchant, who had waited at the doors of the Parliament House
imploring the members for mercy from eight till eleven this morning,
held the sufferer's hand all the while, and afterwards licked his
wounds."

"But they say the poor wretch was indeed guilty of blasphemy," I
said.  "His crime was at least very different from Mr. Prynne's."

"It was indeed mad blasphemy," he replied; "the madness of spiritual
vanity veiling itself under some mystical notion that the homage was
paid to Christ in him.  The poor wretch suffered half-a-dozen deluded
men and women to lead his horse into Bristol, scattering branches and
garments before him, and crying hosannas."

Job, who was near, could not let the occasion pass.

"Take warning, Mistress Annis," he said, in a low voice aside to her;
"this is what your Quaker inspiration leads to."

"I have need of warnings, Job Forster," she replied, "and so hast
thou.  This is what your tyranny over men's consciences leads to.
This is what ambition has led thy Oliver Cromwell to; once a man of
whom George Fox had hope, and over whose soul the Friends have been
very tender."

"The Lord Protector protests against this cruelty," said my husband.

"His work is not to protest, Leonard Antony," said she, "but to
prevent.  But he has been faithfully warned.  George Fox hath told
him what will come upon him if he heeds not; and George's warnings
are not to be scorned.  Before now, more than one who has despised
them has come to a fearful end."

For once my husband was roused.  "Annis Nye," he said, "you and your
Friends are as unmerciful in heart as the rest.  The Voices that
denounce God's lightnings for their own private wrongs are moved by
the same spirit as the hands that heat the irons for the pillory.
Verily ye know not what spirit ye are of.  Denunciatory prophecies
are the persecution of the persecuted."  And he turned sadly away.

Aunt Gretel wept many tears when she heard the narrative of James
Naylor's sufferings, afterwards completed by a second scourging at
Bristol, the scene of his mad and blasphemous entry.  But she reached
the source of consolation sooner than any of us.  Looking, according
to her wont, beyond all the middle distance which is the battle-field
of the great national questions of churches and governments, and
seeing in the whole primarily the Good Shepherd seeking the sheep and
leading the wandering flock, she said, wiping her eyes,--

"Poor foolish creature!  if Annis speaks right, he was once a humble
and devout Christian.  He had fallen deep and wandered far.  Perhaps
he will have to thank the good Lord that he has found the ways of the
wilderness so cruel.  Perhaps even now, if we could see, he is
beginning to creep back, torn, maimed, and bleeding as he is, body
and soul, to the feet of the Good Shepherd.  Thou wilt not forget
him, Leonard, when thou visitest the prison."

My husband did not, and afterwards brought us word how, during his
imprisonment in Bridewell, James Naylor came to true repentance, and
published his confession of his fall, when "darkness came upon him,
and he ran against that Rock to be broken which had so long borne
him, and whereof he had so largely drunk, and of which at last he
drank in measure again, praising God's mercy in delivering him, and
greatly fearing ever to offend again, whereby the innocent truth, or
the people of God might suffer."

After that the poor restored penitent's career was brief, but
blameless.

Aunt Gretel watched it to the close with a tender pity.  He survived
his fall and punishment four years, dying at the age of forty-four.
And Aunt Gretel was wont to keep the record of what he spoke shortly
before his death among her treasury of trophies of the triumph of
God's good over men's evil.  The words were these:--

"There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil nor to
revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, and hopes to
enjoy its own in the end.  Its hope is to outlive all wrath and
contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty.  If it is
betrayed, it bears it; for its ground and spring is the mercies and
forgiveness of God.  Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting
love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with
contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind."

And two hours afterwards, the brief journey, so full of bewilderment
and pain and repentance, was over.  To a heart burdened with the
dishonour of that blasphemous entry into Bristol, the pillory in
Palace Yard and in the City must, I think, have been a dishonour not
bitter to bear, but rather one for which he would bless God who
suffered him to suffer it.  Perhaps those, his judges, who had in
their memories the dishonour of issuing and enforcing such a
sentence, had also in their turn their sentences to suffer, for which
they also afterwards learned to bless God.

For the wheel went quickly round in those days.  Laud in the Star
Chamber, Prynne in the pillory; the Presbyterians and Prynne in the
Parliament, the archbishop on the scaffold; Naylor in the pillory;
his judges in the prisons of the Restoration.

A quarter of a century accomplished it all.  But no one saw the wheel
turning.  Each revolution, as it came, seemed the last.  For there
was a pause between each.  And in the pause the people who were
uppermost looked round on the earth, and shouted, "Now the Kingdom is
come, and the world will stand still;" while the people who were
underneath looked to heaven, and sighed, "Will the years of peace
never come?  O Lord, how long?"

But I think it a noble trait in the Quakers that, accused as they
were on all sides of fanaticism, and strong as the temptation must
have been to disown any connection with such a fallen man as Naylor,
nevertheless, although they faithfully rebuked him in secret, they
generously stood by him in his degradation, and did not leave him
until they had brought him to repentance, and tenderly welcomed him
back among them.

With James Naylor's torturing sentence, the year 1656 closed.  The
year 1657 began with stratagems and plots.

Towards morning, on the night of the 8th of January, the drowsy voice
of the bellman, speaking benedicites on our home, and calling us to
"hang out our lights," had just died away at the corner of the silent
street, and his bell was faintly echoing in the distance, mingling
with the dream it had broken, when a call at the door aroused us.

It was Job Forster.

His first words as my husband opened the house-door to him (I
listening on the stairs), were an alarming assurance that we need not
be alarmed.  In a minute I was wrapped in my mantle and beside them.

Job's face was haggard and his eyes ringed with dark circles of
anxiety.

"All danger is over!" he said.  "The assassin has been taken after a
hard struggle.  He is in the Tower.  Miles Sindercombe, an old
comrade of mine," added Job with a groan, "one of those that were
sentenced with me at Burford!"  It was another attempt on the Lord
Protector's life.  Some time since, the assassin (having received
£1,500 from the baser spirits among the Royalists for the purpose)
had hired a room at Hammersmith, on the road by which Oliver rode
every Saturday to his Sabbath rest at Hampton Court, watching for an
opportunity to murder him.  But in vain.  And at length this night
the attempt was to have been made at Whitehall.  At midnight the
sentinel had smelt fire, a match had been found close to a basket of
wildfire, the locks of the doors were discovered to have been picked,
and all prepared for a conflagration, in the confusion of which
Oliver was to have been assassinated.  But it had been found out in
time, the danger was averted, and the Protector had refused to have
the city alarmed, or the train-bands roused.  "But, oh!" groaned Job,
"Mistress Olive and Master Antony, think of what a pit I stood on the
brink!  'Mutiny the first step;' and the last, murder.  No doubt the
poor deluded wretch went down easy enough after that first step.  And
I had taken the first!"

He was very gentle and subdued, and said nothing at breakfast.  Not
even Annis Nye's gentle "hope that the Protector would take warning
at last, and see that the poor Friends' prophecies had some meaning
in them," could rouse him.  He only shook his head and said,--

"Poor maid!  She has got to take her lesson by Burford steeple yet."

The excitement in the city that day was great.  It was one of the few
occasions which I remember in which a strong and general display of
personal feeling was called out towards the Protector.

The Parliament ordered a Thanksgiving Day, and numbers went to offer
congratulations.  One sentence of Oliver's reply Roger repeated to
us,--

"If we will have peace without a worm in it," said the Protector,
"lay we foundations in justice and righteousness."

Roger kept full of hope through all.  This danger of death to its
head, as with so many refractory families, had at last (he thought)
roused the nation to gratitude.

The offer of the title of King followed.  Roger believed the
Protector would accept it.  King was a name dear to the English
people, who "love not change," and "love settlement and familiar
words."  King was a name known to the laws, "honoured, and bounded"
by the laws.  Any other name, said the Protector in comparison, was
too "large and boundless."  The power he possessed--and on that he
suffered no debate; the end of all the fighting, he said, had been
settlement.  A Parliament voting itself to sit constantly, and
debating everything, from the nation's faith to the forms of
governing--"debating three months the meaning of the word
encumbrance"--"committees elected to fetch men from the extremest
part of the nation to attend committees set to determine all things,"
Oliver considered would never lead to "settlement."  Between this
nation and general "topsy-turvying" he had submitted to take his
stand; and there, while he lived, whether honoured or reviled, he
would stand, whether as King, Protector, or Constable, to keep the
peace of the parish; "not so much hoping to do much good as to
prevent imminent evil;" to "keep the godly of all judgments from
running on each other;" to keep some men from the kind of liberty
which consisted in "liberty to pinch other men's consciences;" to
keep other men from such liberty as resulted in license or "orderly
confusion;" to keep all Protestants from ruin; to keep England from
becoming "an Aceldama."  This the Protector regarded as the thing God
had given him to do; and by whatever weapons, by whatever title, he
was determined to do it; and then was ready, as he wrote to his
son-in-law, to "flee away and be at rest," being meantime lifted
above men's judgment by the consciousness of "some little sincerity
in him."  Roger said that the new work could have been better done
under the old names; so much necessary change in substance being made
more acceptable to the common people by the least possible change in
forms (the principle, according to Aunt Gretel, on which Luther had
carried out his Reformation).  And so, he believed, thought the
Protector.  But his son-in-law, Fleetwood, and so many of the best
men around him, either considered the very name of king doomed with
the dynasty which had abused it, or valued the forms of a republic as
of the essence of liberty--that his Highness yielded what to him
would indeed have been nothing more than a "feather in a man's cap;"
an adornment at no time sacred or precious to Puritan men for its own
sake.

Thus the debate on the kingly title ended in the solemn inauguration
of Oliver as Lord Protector.

It was on the 25th of June, in Westminster Hall, that the last great
ceremonial of the Commonwealth, except the Great Funerals, took
place.  The old stone of the Scotch kingdom, the purple robe, the
canopy of state, the sword, the Bible, the sceptre given by the
Speaker of the Commons to be "the stay and staff of the nation," into
the hands that, as we believed, had been their stay and staff so
long; the foreign ambassadors of all nations around him, they at
least, recognizing him openly as England's ruler and deliverer; and,
outside, the multitudes shouting "God save the Lord Protector,"--the
hearts of all men still aglow with the news of the great victory of
Blake over the Spaniards in the harbour of Santa Cruz, in Teneriffe.

There was no lack of enthusiasm; nor, indeed, of colour and music.
Some picture our Puritan times as draped in funereal black.  The
Puritan ministers had a very different impression of them as they
bemoaned the glory and bravery of their people's attire; and Mistress
Hutchinson's colonel, in "his scarlet cloak, richly laced," was not
solitary in his splendour.

Music graced all the Protector's festivals.  It was, I think, to him,
as to Martin Luther, the festive thing in the world.  And the music
of lofty and significant words was not wanting in the Speaker's
address, or in the solemn prayer which followed.

Nevertheless there were not a few who, with our friend Dr. Rich,
could not forget what the last great scene in Westminster Hall had
been, when a king discrowned sat at the bar of his subjects, alone,
yet defying their authority.  And among such it was murmured
ominously that there was one thing even the "murderers of his sacred
majesty" did not dare to take; the crown which had fallen from the
"anointed" head.

So the grand ceremonial ended, and all men went again to their work;
the Protector to protect England and the Protestant Church against
the world; the Parliament (as he hoped) to reform laws, "manners,"
and especially the Court of Chancery,--"the delays in suits," the
excessiveness in fees, the costliness of suits,--to see that "men
were not hanged for six and eight-pence, and acquitted for murder."

And we to our humble work, each in his place.  My husband went to his
patients and his prisons.  Roger, strong in trust in the Protector,
and in hope for England, joined the troops which were fighting the
Spaniards with those of Marshal Turenne in Flanders.  My father, on
the verge of seventy, had withdrawn altogether from politics.  Having
as firm a faith in the triumph of truth as Roger, he yet deemed the
cycles wider in which she moved.  Love with him was the reverse of
blind.  It was natural to him to see with painful clearness the
faults of the cause dearest to him.  Much as in many ways he honoured
the Protector, he nevertheless deemed his government a beneficent
despotism undermining the foundations of law.  "Had the Protector
been immortal," he said, "a better government than his could scarce
be.  But Laws and Constitutions are remedies against the mortality of
all men, as well as against the fallibility of the best men.
Therefore I cannot rejoice in a rule which interposes but the heart
and brain of one man between the nation and anarchy."

So he turned therefore from the whirlwind of political affairs to the
calm rule of law in stars and seas; and the wonderful circulation of
life through all the animated world, as, according to Mr. Harvey's
discovery, through the veins of those fearfully made bodies of ours.
Through him we heard much of the proceedings of the Society of Art,
and of such patriotic efforts as the rescue of Raphael's cartoons, by
the Protector's desire.  In promoting such works he hoped to serve
England (he said) as an old man best might.

For if there were an idolatry among us in those Commonwealth days, it
was that of England.

Patriotism with the nobler Commonwealth men was a passion and a
religion; what love is to a lover, and loyalty to such a Royalist as
rose.

It was England for whose sake Cromwell was content to be called a
hypocrite and a despot, and to be a "constable," and a man worn to
old age at fifty with care and toil.

It was the love of England which kindled the calm heart of the
glorious blind poet, who then dwelt among men, to a fanaticism of
passionate invective against all who assailed her.

To him she was "a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a
strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; as an eagle
renewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the
full midday beam, purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the
fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of
timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight,
flutter about, amazed at what she means."

"Thou, therefore," he wrote, "that sittest in light and glory
inapproachable, Parent of angels and men.  Next, Thee I implore,
omnipotent King, Redeemer of that lost remnant whose nature Thou
didst assume; ineffable, and everlasting Love!  And Thou the third
subsistence of Divine Infinitude, illumining Spirit, the joy and
solace of created things! one tri-personal Godhead!

"O Thou that, after the impetuous rage of five blustering
inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the
land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless revolution of
our swift and thick-coming sorrows; when we were quite breathless, of
Thy free grace didst motion peace and terms of covenant with us, and
having first well-nigh freed us from antichristian thraldom, didst
build up this Thy Britannic Empire to a glorious and enviable height,
with all her daughter-islands about her; stay us in this felicity;
let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship bring
forth the viper of sedition, .... that we may still remember in our
solemn thanksgivings how for us the Northern Ocean, even to the
frozen Thule, was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish
Armada, and the very maw of hell ransacked, and made to give up her
concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that terrible and
damned blast.  Hitherto Thou hast but freed us, and that not fully,
from the unjust and tyrannous claim of Thy foes; now unite us
entirely, and appropriate us to Thyself; tie us everlastingly in
willing homage to the prerogatives of Thy eternal throne.

"Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may,
perhaps, be heard offering in high strains, in new and lofty measure,
to sing and celebrate Thy divine mercies and marvellous judgments in
this land throughout all ages; whereby this great and warlike nation,
instructed and inured to the fervent and continual practice of truth
and righteousness, and casting far from her the rags of her whole
vices, may press on hard to that high and happy emulation, to be
found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day,
when Thou, the eternal and shortly-expected King, shall open the
clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and, distributing
national honours to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an
end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming Thy universal and mild
monarchy through heaven and earth, where they, undoubtedly, that, by
their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the
common good of religion and their country, shall receive, above the
inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of principalities,
legions, and thrones, unto their glorious titles, and, in
super-eminence of beatific vision, shall clasp inseparable hands with
joy and bliss, in over-measure for ever!"

This was what ambition meant, and titles and crowns, to the nobler
Puritan men in the days of.  the great Commonwealth.  This was what
England meant, and patriotism.  This was what made it so bitter to
them to see sedition undermining all this glorious possibility; to
see feeble meddling hands untwisting the cordage with which the good
old ship had to be worked through battle and storm; so unutterably
bitter to see good men blindly (as they believed) helping bad men to
undo that glorious past, and render that glorious future, if not
impossible for the world for ever, impossible for ages longer; and
for England perhaps impossible for evermore.

"For if it should fall out otherwise--if you should basely relinquish
the path of virtue, if you do anything unworthy of
yourselves--posterity will sit in judgment on your conduct.  They
will see that the foundations were well laid; that the
beginning--nay, it was more than a beginning--was glorious; but with
deep emotions of concern will they regret that they were wanting who
might have completed the structure.  They will see that there was a
rich harvest of glory, and an opportunity for the greatest
achievements; but that men only were wanting for the execution, while
they were not wanting who could rightly counsel, exhort, enforce, and
bind an unfading wreath of praise around the brows of the illustrious
actors in so glorious a scene."

So he wrote whose hand could best have bound the unfading wreath of
praise, whose vision, as he dwelt under the hallowing "shadow of
God's wing," became prophetic.

But, meantime, Roger and the brave "labouring men" around him, who
reached not to those clear prophetic heights, toiled cheerily on, not
seeing the chasm which yawned between them and the glorious goal they
deemed so near.


LETTICE'S DIARY.

"_January_, 1658.--For a twelvemonth now my father and I have been
alone.  The usurper demanded the banishment of our king from France,
and Mazarin and the French Court submitted to the indignity; an
indignity, it seems to us, to all courts and all kings.

"Walter accompanied the king to Bruges, and has scarce written to us
since.  My father and I seldom mention him to each other, but I know
he is seldom absent from the thoughts of either of us.  The only
things which seem to interest my father now are the movements of our
exiled Court, which he watches with a feverish solicitude, and the
triumphs of the English arms by land and sea, of which he eagerly
learns every detail with a mixture cf patriotic pride and loyal
indignation which it moves me much to see.

"Last May, for instance, he told me how the French King Louis had
come back from reviewing the united French and English troops at
Boulogne, and how the French soldiers and courtiers could not say
enough of the soldierly bearing of those English horsemen and pikemen.

"Roger saw Walter before he left France, and my father.  But I did
not see him again.

"It was from Walter I learned of their interview.

"'An act of sisterly loving-kindness, Lettice,' said he, 'to turn a
Puritan battery on your brother!'

"His tone was light, but not bitter, and he went on in a softened
voice.

"'He has a princely temper, Lettice, and bore from me what I would
not bear from the king.  But all the time he made me feel I lowered
myself and not him by my words.  'Tis a thousand pities, Lettice,
those gentlemen keep us out of house and home.  I might have been
worth something at old Netherby with Roger Drayton for a neighbor.
But what is a fellow to do who has no choice but to amuse himself or
kill himself?  And to throw oneself against Oliver and his England is
nothing less than suicide.  Oliver is responsible, at all events, for
the mischiefs idleness has wrought among loyal men.  Do you know,
Lettice,' he continued, affectionately, after a pause, 'who manages
the old estates for us, and sends us their rents so regularly?'

"'I guessed,' I said.

"'I had been told,' he replied, 'and I asked Roger, and he could not
deny it.  He and Mr. Drayton manage the estate as if they were our
hired bailiffs.  Roger himself paid the fine to the Parliament.  But
he made me promise never to let my father know.'

"I did not answer him.  My heart was too full.

"'Lettice,' he exclaimed, 'you are a brave maiden, and a good sister
to me.  Forgive me if ever I said anything ungenerous to you.  I
would not care to own for a sister the woman whom Roger Drayton
loved, if she could forget him for another.  He is the kind of good
man it would be worth while to be like.  If it were not too
late--altogether too late for me,' he added, despondingly.

"'You know it is never too late,' I said.  'Oh, Walter, that is just
what you might have been!  So my mother thought.'

"'You cannot say might be, Lettice,' he replied; 'not even with Roger
Drayton always by my side.'

"'No one can be like Roger,' I said, 'who can only be like him with
some one always by his side.'

"'No,' he replied, bitterly; 'Roger is a man to be leant on, not to
lean.'

"'He is a man to be leant on,' I said, 'because he does lean.  On One
always by his side, Walter; the only One who can be always with any
of us, the only One we can depend on always, and not grow weak, but
strong in depending.'

"He said no more, but sat in silence some time, which seemed to me
more like what I longed for in him than anything I had seen.  And in
the evening he took leave of me with the old kind way he had after
our mother died.  And for some weeks he was much with us.

"But soon after, the king was desired to quit France, and Walter
would accompany him.  It would be base, he said, to desert his master
when these perfidious Courts and all the world abandoned him.  My
father could but faintly remonstrate.  I ventured to ask if he was
strong enough to go into that temptation.  But he answered, gaily,--

"'We shall have work to do, Lettice.  There is promise of fighting.
The Spaniard is to help us, and we him; and together we will bear you
back to Netherby in triumph, proclaim amnesties and tolerations
without bounds, and bring back the golden age.'

"But there has been no fighting; and since he left we have scarce
once heard from him.  And we know too well what that means, in a
company where nothing good or great is really believed in; neither in
God, nor man, nor woman.

"_February_.--M. la Mothe is dead.  And Madame, when she has arranged
his affairs, has determined to retire to a convent, there to pray for
his soul and to accomplish her own salvation.

"She is somewhat distracted what Order to join.  The ladies of Port
Royal seem to her the holiest people in the world.  But, at the same
time, the condemnation pronounced by the Pope on this book of
Jansenius, which they regard as so excellent, perplexes her.

"Two years ago the world of Paris was set in a blaze by the 'Lettres
Provinciales' of M. Blaise Pascal, in reply to the Jesuits; and by
the attack on Jansenius and Port Royal.  These letters were said to
combine the eloquence and wit of the most finished man of the world
with the devotion of a saint.

"Since then the war has waxed fiercer and fiercer between the
Jansenists and the Jesuits.  To a Protestant the controversy seems
strange.  Both parties seem to agree that the Pope can pronounce
authoritively as to doctrine.  But the offence of the Jansenists
appears to be that they deny his power to create facts.

"But whatever the hinge of the controversy is (and in most
controversies how insignificant the hinge is on which all nominally
turns), the combatants seem to me to be divided by very real
distinctions.  I judge chiefly from their weapons.  The weapons of
the Jesuits seem to be assertions, anathemas, and prisons; those of
Port Royal eloquent words, and a most devout and blameless life.

"Truth seems as sacred to them in its minutest expression as the
noblest of the Puritans.  They cannot lie.  They can be banished,
imprisoned; they can die, if such is the will of God, who loves them,
and of those who hate them.  But they cannot solemnly declare before
Him, they believe a thing true which they believe to be false.
'Where is the Christian,' Jacqueline Pascal wrote, 'who would not
abhor himself, if it were possible for him to have been present in
Pilate's council; and if, when the question of condemning our Saviour
to death arose, he had been content with an ambiguous way of
pronouncing his opinion so that he might appear to agree with those
who condemned his Master, though his words, in their literal meaning,
and according to his own conscience, tended to an acquittal?  M. de
St. Cyran says the least truth of religion ought to be as faithfully
defended as Christ Himself.  The feebleness of our influence does not
lessen our guilt if we use that influence against the truth.  Truth
is the only real liberator, and she makes none free but those that
strike off her own fetters, who bear witness to her with a fidelity
that entitles them to be acknowledged as the true children of God the
true.  Poverty, dispersion, imprisonment, death, these seem to me
nothing compared with the anguish of my whole future life, if I
should be wretched enough to make a league with death.'

"Noble Catholic Puritan woman!

"Nevertheless Jacqueline Pascal's regulations for the little orphan
girls whom they charitably train at Port Royal freeze my heart even
to read.  The poor little ones are to abstain from all kissing of
caressing each other.  Even in their jealously limited hour of
recreation, they are to play, each alone, without noise!

"And Thou has been on earth, O Christ, tender and gracious, folding
the little ones in Thine arms, and these holy sisters of Port Royal
love Thee, and read the gospel of Thy birth and death, and think this
is what pleases Thee!

"The world was made by Thee, and the world knew Thee not.  Alas, the
Church which was made and redeemed by Thee, does she also know Thee
so little!

"What a surprise, what a rapture of surprise, when these Thy servants
who, seeing Thee so dimly, love Thee so much, wake up and see Thee as
Thou art, as (if they could but see it) Thou art _now_!

"_June_ 1658.--Dunkirk has been taken from the Spaniards (chiefly
they say by English troops), and has been given over to an English
garrison.  At last (my father writes), the blot of the loss of Calais
is wiped out of the escutcheon of our country.  All through those
last months he had been watching the movements of the French and
English forces with jealous interest.  'That crafty Italian,' he
said, '(Mazarin) would overreach the usurper yet.  The French Court
would use the help of England as long as they needed it, and as long
as they could pay with fair and flattering words.  And when the time
came to pay in fortunes and solid territory, they would politely bow
Cromwell and his pikemen out of the country.'

"But when we heard that the 'Protector' had insisted on some of the
fruits of the war being made over to England, and that the united
armies were on the Flemish coast preparing for an attack on Dunkirk,
my father's faith in the courage of our countrymen entirely got the
better of his indignation against their politics; and he found
several unanswerable reasons for being present at the seat of war.

"_June_.--Barbe came to me to-day in tears.  Sad news had come again
from her kindred in the Piedmont Valleys.  Protestant surgeons
forbidden to live there; trade prohibited; public worship suppressed;
a new fortress, from which insolent troops sally to plunder and
maltreat the people; commands to sell lands; dim rumours of a second
massacre.

"'And Monseigneur Cromwell,' she said, 'so busy with his wars and
sieges, that there can be little hope he will have leisure to
remember those poor forsaken ones!  What hope is there?  For beside
the English, these sufferers have no friend or protector in the
world.'

"_July_ 3_rd_.--My father has returned.

"'It was worth while to travel round the world,' he said, 'truly, to
hear the shout of the English pikemen before the fight.  Marshal
Turenne could not say enough of their soldierly bearing.  He asked
what that shout meant, and he was told, "They ever rejoice thus when
they behold the enemy."  And to see the Spanish veterans driven back
before them from post after post, on the sandy dunes by the sea, was
a sight to make an old man young.  For the old country is young,
Lettice, as young as when she stood up alone against old Spain and
her Armada!  I would the Duke of York had not been on the Spaniard's
side.  He seemed as out of place as Condé.  I scarce know the cause,'
he added gloomily, 'which saves a man from being a traitor in
fighting against his country.'

"'Then Walter was not there?' I asked.

"His brow darkened.

"'Would to heaven he had been there, on any side!' he answered
fiercely.  'Better fight for any cause than fight or work for none,
but lead a sluggard's life, a Court-jester's, a Fool's, with the
recreant idlers around the king.'

"He was silent for some minutes, going to the window and watching the
melancholy dropping of the water from the urn of his old enemy, the
moss-green nymph.

"Then he turned and said hastily,--

"'Drayton has found his service better rewarded than mine.  Not a
gentleman in England or France but might be proud of such a son as
his.  Firm as a rock, and as calm, who could guess the dash and fire
that are in him, unless they saw him head a charge, as I did?  'Tis a
labyrinth of a world, Lettice,' he added, 'and sometimes a man is
tempted to throw down the clue in despair, and let the Fates take him
and his where they will.  Old Will Shakspeare saw to the bottom of it
all a hundred years ago, "an unsubstantial pageant, the baseless
fabric of a vision."  Shakspeare and the Bible!  There is nothing
else worth reading or thinking of.'

"Then Roger was there; and has come out of the battle unscathed!
Otherwise my father would have told me.

"But I know not whether they met or no.

"_July_ 4.--I told my father of Barbe's sad tidings of the Vaudois.

"'That will all be set right, you may feel sure,' he replied, grimly.
'There was talk enough about it in the midst of all the fighting.
There is nothing that this base and cringing court will not do to
court the alliance of that Traitor.  I laugh when I hear these French
courtiers talk of their ancient nobility, and the glory of their
Royal House.  Our kings and princes, cousins by blood of their own,
may creep about as beggars and outcasts in any poor trading town that
is not afraid to take them.  But when "my lord Fauconbridge" comes as
"ambassador" from this brewer of Huntingdon, Louis, the glorious
monarch, descendant of a line of glorious monarchs (up to Nimrod, for
what I know), talks to him bareheaded; and Mazarin, the Cardinal,
conducts the rebel and heretic to his door with more than royal
honours.  I am sick of the whole hollow pageant, kings, statesmen,
churchmen, all.'

"My father's indignation had led him far from Barbe and the Vaudois.

"'But I may tell Barbe the poor mountaineers will be saved?' I asked.

"'Yes, yes!' he said impatiently.  'There was a Latin letter about
the oppression of these people, written, they say, by this Mr. John
Milton, whom foreigners seem to think another Cicero or Virgil, the
"wisest of Englishmen," and what not; why I know not, except that he
writes good Latin, and they cannot read English, so that of course
they cannot know anything about the wisdom of Englishmen.  And the
king, was all attention, and the fox of a Cardinal all sympathy with
those poor plucked geese, of whose fate he was (of course) in entire
ignorance.  And the Duke of Savoy is to have an exhortation; and the
massacre is to be forbidden.'

"But Barbe when I told her was altogether overcome.  She burst into
tears, and clasping her hands, exclaimed,--

"'To our dying day we will pray for the great heart that in the midst
of wars by sea or land could remember those few poor persecuted
brothers in the far-off mountains, and would not rest until they were
rescued.  To our dying day we will pray for him and for the great
English nation.  Mademoiselle will pardon, if I wound her loyal
feelings,' she added, remembering what the name of Cromwell was to
the Cavaliers, and kneeling for a moment and kissing my hand in
apology; 'English politics are so difficult for us to understand.  To
you this Monseigneur may be such as you cannot approve, but to us
poor Protestants, he is a Protector, Deliverer, Brother.  Can we err
in praying for him?'

"'You can scarcely err in praying for him, or for any one, Barbe,' I
said.  'God will not give wrong because we ask wrong.  If one of your
little brothers, being thirsty, asked you for a drink from a cup of
poison, you would smile and put it aside, and give him the cup of
water he wants instead.'


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

The taking of Dunkirk in June, 1658, and the relief ensured to the
threatened Christians in the Valleys, was a brilliant moment in that
stormy time.

All England triumphed.  The dishonour of the loss of Calais was
undone.  The Protestant Commonwealth had avenged the disgrace which
sank so deep into the heart of the poor dying Popish Queen.

Once more the Lord Protector had shown that the Protestant Church was
not a heap of disjointed fragments, but a living body, which felt
with a pang of actual pain an injury inflicted on its feeblest
member.  A living body to feel, and a living power to avenge.

England was no more an island (except in as far as her seas and ships
were her impassable trench and impregnable walls against the world),
but as in the old days before the Reformation, one of the great
commonwealth of nations, nay, rather the queenly protector of the
great commonwealth of Protestant nations.

Nevertheless this sense of unity and strength seemed but the passing
consciousness of a waking moment.  The rest of the months seemed too
much like a restless feverish dream.  At least so they appear to me
as I look back.  How far the great calamity of that autumn has to do
with darkening the whole year in my memory into a valley of the
shadow of death, it is hard to say.

The clouds gathered and gathered again, thick and dark throughout the
year, over the Commonwealth and over the Protector's household.

The prophets of doom saw sorrows enough break on Oliver's head to
satisfy them that their predictions were just.

On February the 4th, his last Parliament was dissolved, with words
which seem to me noble and mournful as any with which a great man
ever uttered his grief that his people would not understand him, and
that he had to tread his way alone.

A fortnight before he had opened it with words of stern warning, yet
of hope:--"I look upon this to be the great duty of my place," he had
said, "as being set on a watch-tower to see what may be for the good
of these nations, and what may be for the preventing of evil."  Then
warning them of the dangers which environed England and the
Protestant nations, he said,--"You have accounted yourselves happy in
being environed with a great ditch from all the world beside.  Truly
you will not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless
you fight to defend yourselves.  If you shall think this is a time of
sleep and ease and rest,--we may discourse of all things at pleasure,
there is no danger,--I have this comfort to Godward; I have told you
of it."

And now the warnings were fulfilled, the hope had vanished, and with
stern voice he said;--

"I had very comfortable expectations that God would make the meeting
of this Parliament a blessing.  That which brought me into the
capacity I now stand in was the petition and advice given me by you.
There is not a man living can say I sought it; not a man nor woman
treading upon English ground.

"I can say in the presence of God--in comparison with whom we are but
like poor creeping ants upon the earth--I would have been glad to
have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep."  "I
thought I had been doing that which was my duty, and thought it would
have satisfied you.  But if everything must be _too high or too low_,
you are not to be satisfied."  (Theologies puffed up too high on airy
heights, above plain "virtue and honesty, justice, piety," and all
the sober work of men; disorders plunging too low.)  "Yet you have
not only disjointed yourselves, but the whole nation; which is in
likelihood of running into more confusion in these fifteen or sixteen
days that you have sate, than it hath been from the rising of the
session to this day; that some men may rule all!  And they are
endeavouring to engage the army to carry that thing!

"These things tend to nothing but the playing of the King of Scots'
game (if I may so call him), and I think myself bound before God to
do what I can to prevent it.

"The King of Scots hath an army ready to be shipped for England; and
while this is doing, there are endeavours from some who are not far
from this place, to stir up the people of this town into a tumulting.
Some of you have been listing persons by commission of Charles
Stuart.  And if this be the end of your sitting, and this be your
carriage, I think it high time an end should be put to your sitting.
And I do dissolve this Parliament.  And let God be Judge between you
and me."

The Protector, at least, was not afraid to appeal to the highest
tribunal.  Royalists, Quakers, Fifth-Monarchy men, good men of
various kinds, threatened him with the judgment of that bar as a
terror.  He invoked it as a refuge.

So his last Parliament went its way, leaving him to bear the whole
burden alone for the rest of the journey.  It was not long.  Six
months, and he should stand at the tribunal to which he had appealed.
He had appealed to the Highest; to the Highest he was to go.

The blows of death fell thick on those he loved;--on the few who
steadfastly trusted and honoured him.  In the August before, Blake
had died, the sea hero, coming home from his victories.  He had died
off Plymouth, in sight of shore.

Could we have seen it, the Protector also was in sight of shore; the
shore he longed for, and did not fail to reach.

In February one of his young daughters was widowed, the Lady Frances,
bereaved in the first year of their marriage of her husband, young
Mr. Rich, a widow at seventeen.

In April died the good Earl of Warwick, one of the noblemen who had
honoured Oliver from the first; Mr. Rich's grandfather.

In July and early August the shadow drew closer.  The Lady
Claypole--his dearest daughter Betty--lay sorely smitten at Hampton
Court.

The tumults around the palace and the kingdom, for the time, must
have seemed faint, far-off echoes to the father's heart, compared
with the sufferings and fears of the sick-chamber, where his daughter
lay dying.

Yet these were not few.

General Lambert, his old friend and comrade, plotting to throw him
out of one of the windows of Whitehall, under pretence of presenting
a petition; "knowing," Roger said, "how open the brave heart which no
treachery could make suspicious, was to cries for redress of wrong."

Colonel Hutchinson, Independent and Republican, also his old friend
and comrade, while warning him of this plot, piercing his heart,
belike, deeper than the assassin's knife by deeming the "affection"
and trusting words and tears with which the Protector thanked him
(almost beseeching the return of the old friendship) mere "arts" and
"fair courtship."

The Presbyterians coldly holding off from him, or persistently
conspiring with the Cavaliers.

Lord Ormond in London in disguise, organizing a Royalist insurrection.

The tract, "Killing no Murder," warning him that "the muster-roll" of
those who thought it doing God service to kill him, was "longer than
he could count," and some of them "among his own friends."

Fifth-Monarchy men raising the standard of the "Lion of the tribe of
Judah," against what they called his tyranny.

George Fox and the Quakers, in awful letters of denunciation, "laying
on him the weight" of all the persecution of the Friends throughout
England, inflicted under the authority of his name, although, as far
as I know, never by his order.

Aunt Dorothy wrote that deliverance must be at hand, for she
understood that a "synagogue of Portuguese Jews had been suffered to
pollute the land by celebrating publicly their anti-Christian rites
in London."

Annis Nye said little.  "But Thomas Oldham, Margaret Fell, George
Fox, and Edward Burrough have warned Oliver," she observed, "that if
he listen to lies against the innocent, and fail to release the
Friends from prison, God will suddenly smite him, and that without
remedy."

"Not so easy, Mistress Annis," replied Job, "for a mortal man,
protector or king, to know what are lies, and who are the innocent,
nor to set all the wrongs right in a day.  Not so easy it seems, even
for the Almighty, who has been ruling all these ages.  I thought once
it could be done all in a day.  But I had to learn otherwise, and so
wilt thou.  Seems to me one half of the godly grumble at the
Protector because they think he wants to be almighty, and the other
because they want him to be all-seeing and all-present."

Meanwhile, the ambassadors of all rations thronged to pay homage to
the man who made all men honour England, whether she honoured him or
not.  Through those summer months after the victory and capture of
Dunkirk, the streets were brave with coaches of ambassadors and
princes, from France, Denmark, Austria, and the ends of the earth.

The strong hand was still on the helm, the clear strong eyes were
still on the waves and stars, keeping watch for England, whether she
acknowledged it or not.

No man saw the hand relax its grasp, or the eyes waver from their
purpose, for all the noise and clamour, or the aiming at his life.
He saw all, and calmly put aside the danger when too near; but never
turned from his steadfast watch, steadfastly piloting the good ship
on.

Until at last, for a brief season, the brave heart gave way.  His
dearest child was dying; and for fourteen days the Lord Protector
could attend to nothing save the dying moans and tears of that bed of
anguish.  For her death was slow, and approached through terrible
pain, so that her anguish was more than her father could bear to see.

George Fox wrote to her some words of warm and tender sympathy:

"Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts,
and be stayed in the principle of God in thee, that it may raise thy
mind up to God, and stay it upon God, and find Him to be a God at
hand.  The humble, God will teach His way.  The same light which lets
you see sin and transgression will let you see the covenant of God
which blots out your sin and transgression, which gives victory and
dominion over it.  For looking down at sin and corruption and
desolation, ye are swallowed up in it; but looking at the light which
discovers them, you will see over them: that ye may feel the power of
an endless life, the power of God which is immortal; which brings the
immortal soul up to the immortal God, in whom it doth rejoice.  So,
in the name and power of the Lord Jesus Christ, God Almighty
strengthen thee."

Good words, though no new truth to the daughter of him who had
written, years before, to General Fleetwood, his daughter Bridget's
husband: "Faith, as an act, yields not grace; but only as it leads to
Him who is our perfect rest and peace."  But when they were read to
the poor suffering lady, she said they "stayed her mind."  She had
need of all the stay that could be given.  And her father was not one
to keep one word of comfort from her fainting heart because he could
have spoken it better, or because it dropped from lips which had
denounced him.

On the 5th of August the long watch by the bed of anguish in the
mournful palace-chamber was over.  The weary body and spirit were at
rest.  The Lady Elizabeth lay dead.

The Protector roused himself once more to take up the burden of the
State, which while she suffered, he had been, for the first time,
unable to bear.  Attempts at assassination, insurrections, had not
interrupted his work a day.  But for fourteen days even England was
forgotten, as he watched the slow death agonies of his child.

Now that she was dead, he arose and girded himself once more for his
warfare.

Another fourteen days, and he could put his armour off and lie down
for the long rest!

The sources of his strength were not altogether hidden from us.  We
heard that a few days after his daughter's death he called on one to
read him from the Bible the words: "_Not that I speak in respect of
want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be
content.  I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound:
everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to
be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.  I can do all things
through Christ which strengthened me._"

"This Scripture did once save my life," he said, "when my eldest son
died, which went as a dagger to my heart, indeed it did."

"It's true, Paul," he went on, after a pause, "you have learned this,
and attained to this measure of grace, but what shall _I_ do?  Ah,
poor creature, it's a hard lesson for me to take out.  I find it so."
Then, looking on, he read aloud: "_I can do all things through Christ
which strengthened me_;" and his heart seemed comforted, for he said:
"He that was Paul's Christ is my Christ too."

He was standing near the end of the arduous journey, though neither
he nor any knew it; and from the height he looked back over the many
battle-fields of his life; from this last sorrow to that first, to
the grave of his first-born, and all the promise buried with him in
the quiet old church at Felsted.

A day or two after George Fox met him, riding at the head of his
life-guard.  Oliver stopped and listened, and spoke to him about the
sufferings of Friends.  Always so ready to listen to men he believed
good and true, denounce him as they might!  And he bade George Fox
come to his house.  But on the morrow when George went to Hampton
Court to wait on him, the physicians deemed the Protector too ill to
see him, and the Quaker went away and never saw him more.  He thought
that he had felt a "waft of death" go forth against the Protector
when he met him at the head of his guard.  It would be long before
George Fox found again one in king's palaces, lord of England, and
dread of Europe, who would "catch him by the hand," as Oliver did,
regardless of discourtesies and denunciations, and say with tears in
those searching and commanding eyes, "Come again to my house.  If
thou and I were but an hour of the day together, we should be nearer
one to the other.  I wish no more harm to thee than I do to my own
soul."

Perhaps as George went away from the door so freely opened to him,
the memory of these welcomes and farewells came back to him.  And he
may have thought that in prophesying death to the Protector, he and
his Friends had uttered rather a promise than a threat.  But I know
not.

On Friday, the 20th of August, uneasy rumours began to spread of his
Highness's sickness.  On the following Tuesday, the 24th, the
symptoms were worse.  It was tertian ague, and the doctors had him
removed to Whitehall for drier air.

The anxiety in the city grew speechless; brief questions to any who
knew of his state; brief unsatisfying answers.  And then prayers,
fervent, frequent, constant, in churches, in cathedrals, in palaces,
in homes; from Owen and Goodwin in a a room at Whitehall adjoining
that in which the Protector lay.  Prayers so fervent, that those who
poured them forth from hearts made eloquent by hope and fear, mistook
this inward glow for a responsive divine fire, and assured others
that their offerings were accepted, that their petitions would be
granted, and the precious life be spared to England yet.

But through all those days Roger, who had returned from France, spoke
scarce a word, save in answer to our questions about his Highness's
health, when he came from the palace.  He looked pale as death
himself, and well-nigh as rigid.  The longings in his heart for
Oliver's life were so fervent that to himself his own prayers and
those of other men seemed in comparison as if struck with a death
chill.  "I cannot pray, Olive," he said to me once.  "When I look up
to heaven I seem to see nothing but a great silent, stately Company,
making a path between them for him, straight to the Throne, and
waiting to see him pass."

Once when coming from a place where many had met in prayer, broken by
tears and sobs, I said to Roger: "Surely God only suffers this to
show England what he is.  The people begin to understand him now!
They will never forget!"

"They begin to understand now," he said.  "Wayward children do begin
to understand many things by a father's death-bed."

The word fell from his lips like a tolling bell.  I knew well he
could not have uttered it if he had felt any hope.

Annis Nye was quieter than even her wont, and very gentle, during
those days.  Once having heard how his Highness' "spirit was stayed,"
she said a thing which drew my heart to her very closely.

"May be the words of the Friends are being fulfilled otherwise than
we looked.  May be the angel is smiting, not Oliver, but only the
fetters, and the prison doors to set him free."

Roger brought us word from time to time of sacred words from the
sick-chamber.

"The Covenants were two--Two put into One before the foundation of
the world."

"It is holy and true--it is holy and true--it is holy and true!  Who
made it holy and true?  The Mediator of the Covenant."

"The Covenant is but one.  Faith in the Covenant is my support.  And
if I believe not, He abides faithful."

Solemn, slow, broken utterances, not to man, but to God.

And then to his wife and children weeping by his bedside--

"Love not the world.  I say unto you it is not good that you should
love this world."

It was becoming "_this_" world, no longer "the" world to him; but one
of two worlds.  For a little while longer _this_ world to him, soon
to be "_that_ world" still surging in tumult below, where he had
fought the good fight which is now over for ever.

"Children, live like Christians; I leave you the Covenant to feed
upon."

Then (belike passing through a chaos of darkness and doubt, such as
seems to edge round and usher in every fresh creation of light),
"three times with great weight and vehemency of spirit"--

"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

And afterwards (the light beyond the darkness being reached)--

"All the promises of God are in _Him_, yea and in Him, Amen, to the
glory of God by us--by us--in Jesus Christ."

"The Lord hath filled me with as much assurance of His favour and His
love as my soul can hold."

"I think I am the poorest wretch that lives; but I love God, or
rather, am beloved of God."

"I am a conqueror, and more than a conqueror through Christ that
strengtheneth me."

So through the weary days and nights he passed, nearer and nearer to
the end, the tumult in men's hearts growing deeper, when on the
Monday the 30th of August, the fearful storm of wind which none who
heard can ever forget raged over the land, as if it were over the
sea; beating back carriages on the roads, as if they had been boats
on the rivers; raging, wailing, rending, destroying, as if the angels
who held the "four winds of the earth" had relaxed their hold, and
set the wild creatures all free together.

But to us who loved Oliver and the Commonwealth, that tempest seemed
but the simple and natural accompaniment to the tumult in our souls,
a response to the storms in men's hearts; simply a fitting dirge to
the life that went out with it.

And meantime, through the storm, his Highness was praying thus:--

"Lord, though I am a miserable and wretched sinner, I am in covenant
with Thee through grace.  And I may, I will, come to Thee for Thy
people.  Thou has made me, though very unworthy, a mean instrument to
do them some good, and Thee some service; and many of them have set
too high a value upon me, though others wish and would be glad of my
death.  Lord, however Thou do dispose of me, continue to go on and do
good for them.  Give them consistency of judgment, one heart, and
mutual love; and go on to deliver them, and with the work of
reformation; and make the name of Christ glorious in the world.
Teach those who look too much on Thy instruments to depend more upon
Thyself.  Pardon such as desire to trample on the dust of a poor
worm, for they are Thy people too.  And pardon the folly of this
short prayer.  Even for Jesus Christ's sake.  And give us a good
night if it be Thy pleasure.  Amen."

He knew it, then, and _he had felt it_; it had pierced his heart,
that those he deemed good men should mistrust him, and be glad that
he should die.  _That_ arrow had gone home, yet with the barb in his
heart it could not make him think evil of those that launched it, nor
leave them out of his prayers.

The last night came.  It was the 2nd of September, the eve of his day
of victory, the day of his "crowning mercy," a Thanksgiving Day in
England since the battle of Worcester.  The voice was low now, and
the words not always to be understood.

"Surely God is good.  He is--He will not--"

And often again and again, "with cheerfulness and fervour in the
midst of his pains,"--

"God is good."

This was the key-note to which "all along" his other tones kept
recurring--

"_Truly God is good--indeed He is._"

"I could be willing to live to be further serviceable to God and His
people.  But my work is done.  Yet God will be with His people."

Through the night much restlessness, yet much inward rest.  Broken
words of holy consolation and peace, "self annihilating" words, words
of kingly care for England, and God's cause there; these among the
very last.

Some drink being offered to him, with an entreaty to try to sleep, he
answered--

"It is not my design to drink or sleep; but my design is to make what
haste I can to be gone."

And on the morrow he had fallen asleep, and was gone.

Amongst us who were left behind, the Thanksgiving Day was turned into
weeping.  But his long day of thanksgiving had begun.  The long night
of his faithful watching of the wars and storms for England was over;
the clear eye, the steady hand, were gone from the helm.  The day of
victory, and rest, and coronation, had dawned for him at last.

For, as his chaplain Mr. John Howe, said:

"The greatest enemy we have in the world cannot do us the despite to
keep us from dying."




CHAPTER IX.

NOTES BY MAGDALENE ANTONY.

The first public event of which I have any recollection, or rather
the first time I can clearly recollect having a glimpse beyond our
own little world in London and Netherby, was one warm evening in
August, 1658.

My mother was coming home with me and Dolly from the house of Mr.
John Milton in Bird-Cage Walk, past Whitehall, when we noticed many
people clustering like bees around the doors of the palace; and I
remember my mother lifting up her finger, and saying to Dolly and me,
who were discussing some of our small affairs eagerly:--

"Hush, children, the Protector is there, in sore sickness."

And then I remember noticing that the groups of people through which
we were passing were all speaking low and walking softly, as people
do in sick-chambers, and every now and then looking up anxiously to
the palace-windows.

I recollect a hush and awe creeping over me, and a guilty feeling, as
if Dolly and I had been chidden for talking in church.

And all spoke in murmurs, and no one said anything I could hear
distinctly, until, as we were leaving the space in front of the
palace, from the last point at which we could see the windows, my
mother turned back to look.  It happened that at that moment two men
were standing close to us, and one pointed to the palace, and said:
"It was _there!_ the murderers set up the black scaffold there, just
under those windows.  I see it now; and so, I trow, does the murderer
on his sick-bed inside.  And so will more than one when the black
pall comes out at those doors.  The day of vengeance always comes at
last."

The words went through me like a shudder.  They were spoken in a deep
hissing whisper, more like the gnashing of teeth than speaking.

I did not venture to tell my mother of them.  I did not know if she
had heard them.  I never told anyone of them.  They lay seething and
working in my brain, as so many perplexities do in children's
minds--half-shaped, half-shapeless, altogether voiceless, like ghosts
waiting to be born--and tormented me greatly.

For in a few days the terrible black train did leave those
palace-doors.  My mother took us to see it.  And my mother wept, and
Aunt Gretel, which was not so wonderful, because Aunt Gretel would
weep as easily at anything that moved her as we, children.  But my
father wept, and even Uncle Roger; and Annis, the nurse, was stiller
than ever.  And there was great silence and quiet weeping among the
people as the black train passed from the Palace to the Abbey.  It
was a great day of mourning; and my father told us we must never
forget it.  For all the people of England, said he, that day had lost
their best friend.  But all the time I could not get it out of my
head that somebody had called him a murderer, and had called this day
of mourning a day of vengeance.

It puzzled me exceedingly, more especially as Dr. Rich, the quiet
clergyman who lived in the little house at the end of our garden, and
Austin his son, our playfellow, would not, I knew, have anything to
do with the procession; and, indeed, would never call the Protector
anything but Mr. Cromwell.  And Annis, our nurse, never called him
anything but Oliver Cromwell (although in her that was not
remarkable, since she called even our father and mother Leonard and
Olive); and I had heard her say often, no man was to be called a
"Protector" who let hundreds of poor Friends languish in prison.
Also Aunt Dorothy, I knew, would not come to stay with us on account
of something that had to do with the Protector.  All which things
made a great tumult and chaos in my brain.

But I must confess that the result was, that we grew up with a great
tenderness for the Royalist side.

There was little in the shows and titles of the Commonwealth to
enkindle the imaginations of children.

In all the fairy tales and romaunts and poems we knew, there was no
such prosaical title as Lord Protector.  Indeed, we agreed that the
Bible history itself became much more interesting after the judges
were changed into kings, however wrong it might have been of the Jews
to wish for the change.  We felt that the threat of his taking our
"sons" to be his horsemen and charioteers, and our "daughters" to be
his cooks and confectionaries, would certainly not have deterred us
from demanding a king.  We thought it would be undoubtedly more
glorious to be my Lady Confectionary to a queen, or my Lord
Charioteer to a king, than to be anything in the sober untitled train
of a protector.  Queen Esther was to us a far more romantic personage
than Deborah, who was only a mother in Israel.  And on Sundays, when
the sermons were very long and we were allowed to read the Bible to
keep us from going to sleep, we found great solace in expatiating
upon Shushan the palace, among the courts of the gardens with
mysterious splendours of fine linen and purple--beds of gold and
silver--pavement of red, blue, white, and black marble--silver rings
and pillars of marble, between which were to be caught glimpses of
fair ladies in robes fragrant with perfumes--of a crown royal and a
golden sceptre.

But besides these enchantments for our earthly imaginations, the
Royalist cause, as expounded to us by Austin Rich and his brothers,
laid hold on our hearts by the irresistible charm of suffering
majesty.  Over the story of the young orphan Princess Elizabeth,
dying in the castle where her father had been imprisoned, with her
head pillowed on the Bible she loved, we wept many tears.  The young
Duke of Gloucester, who had declared to the king just before his
execution that he would let them tear him in pieces rather than
accept his brother's throne, was one of our earliest heroes.

And, above all, the name of King Charles was sacred to us.  Our
mother always spoke of him with a tender respect.  We knew how he had
worn the portrait of the queen his wife next his heart, and only
parted with it with his life.  We thought it quite natural that
Archbishop Usher, seeing from the roof of Lady Peterborough's house
the king's coat laid aside and his hair bound up for the fatal
stroke, should have been able to see no more, but been led fainting
away.  Moreover, Austin Rich had sundry pathetic stories of Episcopal
clergymen plundered, and their parsonages pillaged by Parliament
troopers, because they would not deny the king or refuse to pray for
him.

So that we were quite prepared to welcome the next great public event
which made an impression on us after the funeral of the Protector.
This was the entry of King Charles II. into London.  A king was
actually coming through our streets!  Our king; who had passed his
youth in exile!  He was coming to be crowned in the Abbey, and to
reign over us.  And if a king, then of course the queen would come,
and princes, and princesses, with all the splendours belonging to
them.

We were sorry our kindred did not seem quite happy about it.  But we
had been told to speak respectfully of the king, and we had heard the
minister in one of the churches pray for him.  So that, on the whole,
Dolly and I came to the conclusion that it would not be very wrong
for us to enjoy the magnificence as much as we certainly did.
Especially as Aunt Dorothy (who, our mother told us, was as good as
Aunt Gretel, and Aunt Gretel we well knew was better than any one
else) was coming to town for nothing else but to see the face of His
Majesty and do him honour.

The previous festivities had excited our expectations to a high
pitch.  There had been heralds, in coats of many colours, proclaiming
the king at different places in the streets; and crowds shouting,
"The king, God bless him!" and bells breaking out into peals of joy;
and bonfires--we could count thirty one evening from our upper
windows--along the high road from Westminster to the City, in the
streets, on the bridges, by the water-side.

So at last the great festival came.  Banners hidden for years waving
from the windows all down the streets; fountains flowing with wine;
bells clashing all together in sudden peals, as if they had gone wild
for joy; and all the people as mad for joy as the bells--some
shouting, some weeping; strangers greeting each other like old
friends.  And such dresses!  Old Cavalier wardrobes brought to light
again; and some ladies and gentlemen in the new French fashions, with
dresses gilded, slashed, tasseled, plumed, laced; every one trying to
show their loyalty by going as far from the old Puritan plainness as
possible, in materials as rich as could be purchased, and of every
colour of the rainbow.  We thought it almost as splendid as Shushan
the palace in the days of Esther the queen.  Trumpets, bells, drums,
songs, wild shouts; colour and music everywhere, May-day
everywhere,--in dresses, in banners, in the budding trees, in the
blue skies; all the city, all the world seemed to us gone wild with
joy.

And Aunt Dorothy, the soberest and gravest of all our kindred, as
wild as any one; crying out, "The king, God bless him!" kissing Dolly
and me again and again in a way which surprised us exceedingly, as we
were not aware of having done any thing remarkably good; and even at
bed-time the caresses exchanged between us usually went no further
than our courtesying and kissing her hand, and being told to be good
children.

And then the king!

On horseback, as a king should be; in gorgeous apparel, smiling and
bowing right and left, as if he felt we were all friends;
acknowledging every courtesy with the easy grace natural to him.

And as he passed by, Aunt Dorothy actually sank down on one knee and
clasped her hands as if in prayer, while the tears streamed over her
face; and we thought we heard her murmur, "Lord, now let thy servant
depart in peace."  For she told us the salvation of England had come.

So the king went on to his palace; and the loyal lords and ladies
followed him in their coaches, brilliant with jewels and smiles.  And
Aunt Dorothy, Dolly, and I looked on, when suddenly, while the
procession was pausing for a minute, one of the loveliest of the
ladies turned towards us; and when she saw Aunt Dorothy, her face,
which was graver and paler than most of those in that gay company
broke into smiles and into a sudden glow; and she seemed looking on
beyond us, and then her eyes came back and rested on us again, a
little sadly.

Aunt Dorothy exclaimed,--

"Lettice Davenant!"

And I looked, and loved her face at once, and yet wondered.  For our
mother had talked to us of her as the brightest creature in the
world; and we had always pictured our loveliest fairy princesses as
like what our mother had told us of Lettice Davenant, with eyes like
diamonds, and teeth like pearls, and a colour like fresh roses, and a
brilliant changing face, with a flash and play like precious stones
about it.

And now she sat there quietly dressed, unlike the ladies round her;
bedecked with few jewels; with a sweet, calm face, rather like the
good women in New Testament pictures, than a princess in a fairy tale.

So she also passed on, following the king to the palace.  And the
people rejoiced, and sang and feasted far into the night.

We were wakened from our first sleep by sounds of revelry and wild
songs echoing through the streets.  Strange sounds to us.

We crept close to each other, Dolly and I; and I said, "Dolly, do you
think it was as good as the Book of Esther?"

But Dolly confessed to being a little disappointed.  The king in the
fairy tales was so different from other people, she said; you always
knew him from any one else, even when he was dressed like a beggar.
How, she could not quite tell; perhaps his face actually shone, and
his clothes, instead of being only shone upon, like other people's.

But our king was dressed like a king in a fairy tale, there was
nothing to complain of in that; and yet, if Aunt Dorothy had not told
us, we might not have known him from the gentlemen with him.  We
agreed that it would be convenient, since the faces of real kings did
not shine, that they should always wear crowns.  Otherwise one might
make mistakes, which would be such a pity.

Perhaps, when our king was crowned, however, it would be all right.

But we concluded that it certainly was a very delightful thing to
have a king of our own, whether his face shone, or whether he was a
head and shoulders taller than other men, or not.  It made every one
dress so beautifully, and seem so glad, and set all the bells and
trumpets going so gloriously.  And we hoped very soon there would
come also the queen, and the princes and princesses.

And then the world would be something like fairy-land indeed.  Our
father and mother, and Uncle Roger, and all the good people, would of
course be rewarded, and made happy all the rest of their days, when
our king found them out, as he would be sure to do in time.  Of
course, they were not expecting to be rewarded.  On the contrary,
they would be exceedingly surprised when the king found them out, and
embraced them, and made them sit on his right hand.  The good people
in the fairy tales always were.  But there was sure to be no mistake
in the end.  The good people always had their due when the true
prince came.  And it was not to be thought of that England was to be
worse governed than a kingdom in fairy-land.


The next week we were still more satisfied that we had entered on
this fairy world.  For as Isaac, Dolly, and I were passing
Westminster Abbey, we heard an unwonted sound issuing from it, and
crept in to listen.  Then, for the first time, we heard the organ,
with the chant of the choristers.  But we no more thought of its
being an earthly instrument, made of wood and metal, than of the
golden streets of the New Jerusalem being made of gold like one of
our coins.

The wonderful sounds rolled up and down the aisles, and wound in and
out among the arches, and wreathed the old stone pillars, and seemed
to lose themselves in far-off shrines and mysterious endless recesses
like those in a forest, and then to come back again changed and
intertwined with earlier echoes to mingle with the new tides of music
that kept streaming forth; until we found that all the while the
wondrous tones had seemed wandering at their own sweet will, they had
been building a temple within the temple--a temple of melody within
the temple of stone.  And the Abbey was no more a sculptured edifice,
but a living body with a living soul.  And when this temple was
built, angels came and sang in it--voices such as we had never heard
on earth--clear as bells, and free as winds, without a touch of the
struggle and sadness in them which common human voices have.

Thus Isaac, Dolly, and I walked home, with the gates of paradise all
open around us.

The next morning we crept out again to listen if these heavenly gates
were open still.

But on our way we met a noisy, riotous crowd dragging along a bear
which was to be baited in the Spring Gardens.  Isaac said "baiting"
meant that it was to be torn in pieces by dogs for the amusement of
the people, after killing and gashing as many dogs as it could,
meantime, in its own defence.  This was an amusement which the
Protector had not permitted.  The thought of it closed the gates of
paradise to me, at least for that day.


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

They laid him in the Abbey among the kings.

For two years the dust of Tudors and Plantagenets was honoured (so
Roger thought) by the neighbourhood of the mortal part of the man who
had served England as any of her kings might have been proud to have
served her--had loved her, as we believe, more than home or life, or
even the esteem of good men--had made her greater than any king or
prince had ever made her, from Alfred to the Elizabeth whom he called
"that great queen."

And then, in the September after the Restoration, (by order of the
king who sold Dunkirk to the French, and spent the money like the
prodigal in the parable), the noble dust was taken out of its
resting-place, with the remains of the aged mother, and that
daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, whom the Protector had loved so dearly;
and of Blake, the great admiral, who had made the name of England a
renown from the shores of Italy and Algiers to Teneriffe and the
western islands of the Spanish main, to be cast contemptuously into a
pit in the neighbouring churchyard of St. Margaret's.

I think, when he was gone, most good men in England--at least most
Puritan good men--felt something was lost our generation was scarce
likely to recover.  The Scottish ministers said that God's goodness
had marvellously caused true piety to flourish more under this
usurper than under her rightful kings; "turning bitter waters into
sweet by a miracle."  And so thought Mr. Richard Baxter;
acknowledging, moreover, that he believed the Protector, misled as he
had been, "meant well in the main."

Good Mr. Philip Henry (who kept the day of the late king's death as a
fast day) wrote, that though during the years between forty and
sixty, "the foundations were out of course, yet in the matter of
God's worship thing went well; there was freedom and reformation."

Mistress Lucy Hutchinson acknowledged that he had much natural
greatness, and well became the place he had usurped, and that "his
personal courage and magnanimity upheld him against all enemies and
malcontents."  And Mr. John Maidstone, his faithful "gentleman and
cofferer," wrote (when nothing but dishonour could come to any for
honouring him): "In the direst perils of the war, and the high places
of the field, hope shone in him like a pillar of fire when it had
gone out in others."  And he described him thus: "A body well compact
and strong; his stature under six feet (I believe two inches); his
head so shaped as you might see it both a _storehouse_ and a _shop_"
(full for every need, ready for all occasions); "a vast treasury of
natural parts; his temper exceeding fiery (as I have known), but the
flame of it kept down, for the most part, or soon allayed, with those
moral endowments he had; naturally compassionate towards objects in
distress, even to an effeminate measure, though God had made in him a
heart wherein was left little room for fear.  _A larger soul, I
think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was_."

But he was gone.  And all the people in England who thought they
could govern England better than he had governed her, were at liberty
to try.

They did try, for a little more than a year.  And at the end of that
time the whole nation, distracted to madness from end to end by the
disorders they brought about, threw itself at the feet of Charles the
Second, in a frenzy of loyalty, without conditions, simply
entreating, like a child wearied with its own wilfulness, to be
forgiven and governed and kept quiet, yielding every precious
right--the fruit of our forefathers' blood and toil--into his hands,
content, if he had been strong, to be made as servile as he pleased;
ready, alas, he being not strong, but weak and profligate, to be made
as base as (for the time) he could and did make it.

"Such," said Roger, "was the Aceldama from which that strong faithful
arm had saved us."

"Such," sighed my father, "was the end of the most beneficent of
despotisms that could not be immortal."

Roger never ceased, during the few months of the Commonwealth, to do
all he could to carry out what he believed would have been the Lord
Protector's wish, doing his utmost to serve my Lord Richard, the new
Protector, and, after his resignation, to keep order and discipline
in the army.  But he worked with little hope.  During all the times
of trial before or since, I never saw him so downcast and desponding
as then.

When once the Restoration came his spirits seemed, strangely, to rise
again.

He had done his best; and the worst had come.  The hopeless struggle
without a chief was over, and henceforth he, and those who thought
with him, must gird on a new courage, not to contend but to endure.
I well remember how, on the evening of the day of the king's entry
into London, he came into our parlour, and unlaced his helmet, and
quietly ungirding his sword, laid it on a shelf behind the great
Family Bible.

He said nothing, but the action spoke; and we understood, and also
said nothing.

Then he left the room, and after a time came down, with every vestige
of the old armour of the Ironsides gone, in the plain dress of a
Puritan gentleman, and sitting down, he took Maidie on his knee, and
began to talk to her cheerily.

It overcame me altogether to see him so, for I knew it meant that he
had given up all hope for himself, and well-nigh for England, and the
tears fell fast on my sewing.  He saw them, and gently setting Maidie
down, he came and sat down close by me, and said,--

"Let us thank God, Olive.  The old army has been true to itself, and
to him who made it what it was, to the last.

"We were gathered on Black Heath to-day, thirty thousand of us;
enough to have swept the king and his courtiers, and London and its
citizens, into the Thames.  We had done more than that before, I
think, with fewer of us.  And we know, most of us, that this day is
as our last; the last of the old army he made.  Many of us see
nothing left to fight for, and will go back quietly to farm and home,
to honest toil and trade, that is, if they will let us; for there are
not a few of us that look for a halter rather than a home when the
king enjoys his own again in security.  They will hardly trust us
together in force again.  The discipline which won Naseby and gained
Dunbar never wavered.  But we let the royal party pass quietly, as if
the Lord General had given the word of command.  And that, I think,
is something to give thanks for.  It would not have been well to
tarnish his memory by disorders he would have reproved."

After that, the great army of the Commonwealth died away, as Roger
had expected, and was heard of no more, except when aged yeomen and
tradesmen, on village greens and in city homes, now and then
enkindled, as they spoke to each other of Naseby, Dunbar, Worcester,
and Dunkirk, into an enthusiasm strange to the next generation, who
had only known them peacefully labouring in the field, the workshop,
or at the forge.

But the bones of the Protector had not yet reached their last
resting-place.  On the 3rd of January 1661; the anniversary of the
"martyrdom of His Sacred Majesty" eleven years before, the body of
the "great prince" was once more disinterred, with that of Bradshaw,
hanged throughout the day on a gibbet at Tyburn, and at night thrown
like that of a dog into a pit at the foot of the gallows.

It was a marvellous proof of the just judgments of God, some of the
Royalists thought, slow but sure.

Roger only said, when he could speak of it all, which was not for
long, "'_After that, have no more that they can do_.'  They have done
the worst.  And how little it is, that even the basest vengeance
could add to the dishonour of the dust, and the worm, which awaits
what is mortal of us all!  The distance between Tyburn and the royal
tombs in the Abbey is little indeed, measured from heaven.  Nor will
it take longer time from the one than from the other to hear the
trumpet when it sounds, and to obey its summons."

"But England is dishonoured by the deed."

"I think not," he replied; "or not chiefly by _that_ deed.  The men
of England may be dishonoured that they did not acknowledge him
living.  But no grave in England can dishonour him dead, or can take
his dust from the faithful keeping of his native earth; nor, I think,
can all men may do keep the day from coming when England shall feel
that not one spot only, but every inch of English earth is made more
sacred by his feet having trodden it, and by his dust being mingled
with it."

Little indeed can human vengeance add to the dishonour of death, when
once death is past.

But alas, on this side, how much is possible to human cruelty!

As victim after victim proved, led forth to the ignominy and the
protracted anguish of the traitor's death, patiently giving up their
souls to God amidst such agonies as the torturer's knife could
inflict.

Some were in the prime of life and strong to feel; others aged and
weak to bear.  But I never heard that any of the ten who so suffered
dishonoured either themselves, what they deemed "the good old cause,"
England, or the God who sustained them, by one unworthy word or moan.

The savage punishment of treason had never been inflicted once during
the Commonwealth.  It was suffered eleven times in the first year
after the Restoration.  It came back with the May-poles, and the
beautiful coats of many colours, and courtly manners.

The king was present at some of these executions.  He went from them
to hear the beautiful heavenly music in the Royal Chapel; or to
listen to other music, not heavenly, in the palace.

But the people grew weary of this soon.  It was feared that if these
executions were too often repeated, the minds of the Commonwealth
might once more become confused about the enormity of the crime,
illogically forgetting it in the enormity of the punishment.  And it
was recommended they should not be continued; at all events, not so
near the royal residence.

But amidst all the restorations--which to us seemed not going forward
and upward, but backward and downward--there was one which brought me
some peaceful and hallowed hours.

It was the restoration of the old Liturgy.

There was comfort in creeping into some quiet corner of the Abbey, or
of the great churches of the city, to join in the old familiar sacred
words.

It was rest to kneel in silent adoration, and be certain one's heart
would not be turned aside from lifting itself up to God, by any
allusions to the triumphs or the reverses, the wrongs or the
revenges, of to-day.

It was joy, in the _Te Deum_, to lose sight of divisions and
factions, and with the glorious company of apostles, the goodly
fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, the holy
Church throughout all the world, to praise Him of the majesty of
whose glory all the earth is full.

It was strength to stand up, and say with the Church of all ages and
lands: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty; and in Jesus Christ,
His only Son, our Lord; in the forgiveness of sins, in the holy
Catholic Church, and in the resurrection from the dead."

To stand up above the graves, and under the heavens, and say this to
God; in the words I used in my childhood, and Lady Lucy, and so many
of our holy dead all their lives, and the Church for so many ages;
words which had outlived so many wars, and which flowed from calm
depths so far beneath them all.


LETTICE'S DIARY.

Davenant Hall, _June_ 1660.--The country seems in a delirium of
delight to see us back again, and to have a king once more.

"The Usurper, or the people who followed him, must, one would think,
have made England very wretched, that the restoration of her old
state should drive her well-nigh wild with joy.

"At Dover, where His Majesty landed, and all along the road to
London, sober men and women knelt and sobbed out blessings on him!
Old men thanked God they saw this day before they died; Mothers held
up their children to look at him, that they might be able to carry on
to children and grandchildren the tradition of this glorious day!

"Arches of triumph across the sober old streets; banners from the
windows, mad huzzas from the sober crowds, in whose costume tarnished
relics of old Cavalier gaieties struggled to kindle the Puritan
sobriety into colour.  Oh, the thrill all through the heart of the
old English shout of welcome and triumph, the old English cheer!  No
wonder Marshal Turenne asked what it meant at Dunkirk.

"Dear, sober, solid, silent old England, when she goes wild, she does
it with a will.  Bells, bonfires; dumb, patient crowds waiting, well
content, for hours, just for the moment's sight and the moment's
shout of welcome.  The attempts to utter this joy in speeches and
processions, so hopelessly stiff and clumsy and inadequate, that
laughter and tears are kept in close neighbourhood all the time, so
delightfully inadequate to utter the welcome and delights in the
deep, dumb ocean of the nation's heart.

"So glad, so crazy with joy, to see us back again!  Patient, blind,
hopeful, wilful, loyal old mother of us all; and why?

"Eleven years ago she suffered her king to die on the scaffold; and
this king, I think, is scarce like to be better.

"It is strange to be made so much of as we are by all the neighbours
here.  No one has been very glad to have us for so many years.  And
now we are all heroes and heroines, we who have been with the king in
his exile.  They cannot hear enough of what we did and suffered in
foreign parts, and of the bearing of the royal family in their
adverse fortunes.

"And, in truth, we have come rather soon to the end of what we like
to say about His Majesty.

"Yet His Majesty also cannot fail but be swept on with the joy and
hope of the nation.

"Surely, surely the very welcome must be ennobling to him so
welcomed.  The very love and trust of a whole people, such as this,
must inspire His Majesty to be worthy of the feeling he inspires;
must consume in its pure fires all that we had fain see consumed of
the past; must enkindle in his heart a returning glow of kingly
patriotism, which shall hallow it into an altar on which all falser
and baser fires shall be extinguished.

"I had scarce thought we should have had so much to regret in leaving
France.  We had always felt it so completely a land of exile, and had
always so hoped our sojourn in it must be drawing to a close, that it
was not until we had to sever them we learned how many ties had
slowly been weaving themselves around us, and binding our hearts to
the strange country.

"Even the lofty rooms in the old palace, which had seemed such mere
prison-chambers when we entered them; even my father's old enemy 'the
stone woman, who could never empty her pitcher,' seemed to have
acquired a kind of right in us.

"Madame la Mothe made a vain attempt at softening the parting with
congratulatory little pleasantries.  They broke down into tears and
tender reproaches, her heart being much moved at the time, moreover,
by the death of her nephew, for the sake of whose young widow she
consented to remain in 'the world' to manage the family estates.

"'Thou shouldst, indeed, have a heavy weight on thy conscience,' she
said to me, 'with all thine innocent looks.  My poor nephew would
have been so happy with thee, if thou wouldst have wedded him; he
would never have gone to the wars and left this poor little helpless
widow to my guardianship.  Then my nephew, still happily surviving,
and thou making his life good and pleasant, I should at last,
perhaps, have had leisure and grace to make a thorough conversion.  I
should have gone to Port Royal, and thou, being brought in this way
more intimately acquainted with the exemplary piety of those saintly
ladies, wouldst once more have considered thy heresies, and at last
taken that little step--that one little step which divides thee from
the True Fold.  Thus I should have made my own salvation and thine;
thou the salvation of my nephew.  So all might have ended like a
romance composed for the edification of youth.  And now see the
contrast!  I remain in the world, bound to it by this poor young
widow (with whom otherwise I have no fault to find); thou returnest
to thine unbelieving England.  My heart feels desolate for thee, as
if I lost thy mother and a second youth in losing thee.  And, alas,
these gentlemen the Jesuits threaten to overwhelm Port Royal.  Thus
every thing goes on to the wrong end.  Or, if the romance is ever to
end right, there must be another volume, another volume not yet even
begun, quite out of my sight; which Heaven grant there may be!
Heaven grant there be, my child, here or hereafter.  For me,
certainly, not here; but, if Heaven wills, I pray for thee, here and
hereafter also.'

"Barbe was sorely distracted between me and her seven sisters and
brothers.  At length she decided, with many tears, that duty bound
her to her family.

"'My father is an excellent man, mademoiselle, also a great
politician, and religious as a pastor; but in the affairs of the
earth, mademoiselle, he is a child, blameless--but a child.

"'And there are these seven other children.  I call them still
children, because I am five years older than any of them, and because
they were children when I left them to attend mademoiselle, and gain
a living for the rest.  The youngest is not yet eleven.  The oldest
is scarcely twenty.  He is a student, learned and "eloquent (my
father says) as Demosthenes."  But, unhappily, not endowed with those
talents which earn bread.  As yet I alone have developed these
inferior capacities; transitory, but, alas, so necessary in a world
where our corn has to be baked before it can be eaten, and one's flax
to be spun before it can be worn.  What then can I do?  If my father
should at last obtain that appointment he is always expecting from
some appreciating statesmen, or one of the children should develop
these inferior gifts for earning bread; and if then mademoiselle
should not, in the splendour of the establishment she was born to and
so well deserves, have forgotten her poor little French Huguenot
maid--'

"But here Barbe's eloquence broke down, and she wept.

"'I shall never forget thee, Barbe,' I said, 'nor the ten thousand
lessons of self-denial and sweet temper and cheerful diligence I have
learned from thee.'

"'But mademoiselle will then have ladies for her attendants,' sighed
Barbe, who, in spite of all I could say, had formed very exalted
ideas of our destinies.

"'Never one with such fingers as thine, or with a better heart,' I
said.

"'Then,' sighed Barbe, as she delicately arranged my hair in long
tresses, 'it might yet be.  History, my father says, is more romantic
than the romances.  I might even yet arrange again this luxuriant
hair.'

"'Scarcely luxuriant then, Barbe; or, if luxuriant gray, and only fit
to be soberly bound beneath some simple coif in some homely fashion,
quite unworthy of thy skilful fingers.  You found three white hairs
yesterday.'

"'Sorrow, not years!' she said, quietly.  'Mademoiselle has allowed
me sometimes to know how it was she understood our sorrows so well.'

"'Sorrows partly, and partly years, Barbe,' I said.  'This Book tells
us the years are leading us on to the end of the sorrows, and the
sorrows training us to enjoy the harvest of the years.'

"And we shed tears together as she read the inscription I had written
on the large French Bible I had bought her as a souvenir.

"'Ah, mademoiselle,' she said, 'I shall always hear your voice
reading it; your voice and my mother's, the kindest I have ever known
or shall ever know till I meet you both again.'


"I saw Mistress Dorothy in the crowd at the entry into London.  She
seemed half-kneeling--an unspeakable mark of honour from her dear
inflexible Puritan knees.  She seemed a little aged; but her face was
all aglow with enthusiasm.  And with her were two fair rosy children,
not like city children, who gazed at me with wide-open wondering
eyes--those of the eldest dark and flashing, like Dr. Antony's; the
other has Olive's eyes.  I think she has told them something of
Lettice, little wild Lettice Davenant.  They looked pleased, and yet
so puzzled.

"My eyes went past them, but in vain.  None else of the old Netherby
friends was there.  Alas, I fear, they are not all swept into this
tide of welcome.

"Roger's 'king,' I fear, lies silent underground.  Like mine.  His,
buried in state (they say), among the kings he supplanted, at
Westminster.  Mine, laid in silence among the kings, his fathers, at
Windsor.

"The great gulf between us is hardly bridged over yet.

"Netherby is empty.  Mr. Drayton and Mistress Gretel are in London
with Olive.

"This old place is in such order as if we had left it yesterday,
which is more, I think, than any other of the exiled Cavaliers can
say of their restored homes.

"I know how.  I see the hands that did it all, at every turn, in
every nook, in every flower in my mother's terrace-garden so neat and
trim, in every grove and arbour of the Pleasaunce, where we used to
ramble in the old days.

"Ungrateful that I am!  I could almost wish they had left it
neglected.  I could almost wish the roses had run wild, that the
flower-beds had returned to the possession of forest weeds, the
smooth turf run up into long wild grasses, that the terrace walls
were green and moss-grown, that nature had been suffered to run into
the elfish kind of revels she likes to play when she finds her way
once more into gardens stolen from her domain, that time had been
suffered to weave the tangled garlands wherewith, as with a lavish
funereal pomp, he is wont to strew deserted places which have been
dear to human creatures.

"So much has run wild, has run to seed, has blossomed and shed its
bloom since then!  So much is gone for ever and for ever, it is
almost more than I can bear to find these familiar things so much the
same.  Ungrateful, diseased thoughts, I will not give them a minute's
voluntary entertainment.

"Gone?  _Nothing_ worth keeping has really gone, not one blossom
worth living has really faded.  They have not faded, they have
fruited.  They have fruited, or they are ripening into fruit, sunbeam
by sunbeam, shower by shower, day by day.  Rich summer-time, golden
harvest-time of life!  God forbid that I never speak 'pulingly' (as
he said), as if spring faded and not ripened into summer, or dawn
died instead of glowed into day.

"And most of all this is so with thee, mother, mother! with thee,
whose lost presence makes garden, terrace, chamber, so sacred and so
sad.  I know it--I know it!  Thy dawn was full of tears, and has
glowed indeed into the day.  I know it; and when I think of thee, of
thee and Harry, I rejoice in it.

"As to myself, I cannot rejoice at it.  Nor need I try.  Thank God, I
need not freeze my heart by vainly trying to make sorrow not sorrow.
The sorrow is my share of it now, and the joy is to come _through
that_, through opening our hearts patiently to that, not by closing
them and trying to make some wretched artificial sunshine out of the
shadow of the cloud.  The cloud is sent to bring us not light, but
shadow and rain.  Behind and after it the sunshine, when the time
comes for that!


"I thought I saw Job Forster among the thirty thousand on Blackheath;
the terrible thousands which kept France and Spain and Europe in awe
all these years, and kept us out of England.  Why they let us come
back at all is the wonder.  For they were not broken nor disordered,
but compact and strong as ever.  And I scarce think they share in the
welcome the nation gives us.  I think most of us breathed more freely
when that dread host was passed.

"I thought I saw Job Forster among them.  Yet when I went into
Netherby, there he was at the old forge, working away as steadily and
soberly as if he had never left it, instead of roaming all over the
world at the beck of Oliver, beating army after army--English,
Royalist, Irish, Scottish, Spanish, on field after field.

"I could scarce trust my eyes.  I was half afraid to speak to him,
fearing lest he should give me but a grim greeting as a fragment of
the "malignant interest" wherewith they have dealt somewhat sternly.
Beside him stood a lad in a blacksmith's apron, helping him at the
forge, with a curious perplexing half-resemblance in his face, which
perplexed me like a strain of some familiar tune interwoven into
strange music.

"But before I passed, Job looked up at my footsteps, and seeing me, I
suppose he forgot Naseby Worcester, malignancy, and everything, for
he threw down his tools, and striding forward, took my hands in both
of his, black as they were, and shook them till the tears ran down my
face, mostly for gladness, and a little for the pain in my fingers.

"'Mistress Lettice, my dear,' he said, 'I am right glad to see thee
back again.  Come how ye may,' he added, to guard himself against any
political concession--'come how ye may.'

"Then Rachel came out at the door of the old cottage, her dear quiet
face little aged since I saw her at Oxford, when she made her way
through the royal lines to find her wounded husband in the prison.
Little aged, yet somewhat changed; ripened, not aged; less of outward
suffering, more of protecting motherliness in her ways and looks and
tones.  And she, too, came forward and courtseyed, a little more
mindful of good manners, and bade me welcome, in words like the Book
of Ruth, to my country, and my people, and my father's house.

"How sweet it was!  The old English country tongue; the old English
welcome, shyly suppressing twice as much pleasure as it uttered, so
sweet that I could say nothing, but could only take her hands in
mine, and seek refuge in the cottage, and sit quiet, with my head on
her kind old heart, until the crowding memories and joys and sorrows
and love and loss which stifled each other into silence found their
outlet in a burst of tears.

"It was soon over.  And then a pale woman with a meek still face came
forward at Rachel's bidding from a dark corner of the room, where she
had been sitting sewing, and filled me a cup of fresh water from a
little basin outside the window.

"When she came close to me she smiled, and made a little reverence.
And the smile brought back for a moment the youth into her face.  And
I knew at once she was Cicely, Gammer Grindle's grandchild.  Then it
all flashed on me in an instant.  I had found where the strain of the
familiar tune came from; the lad outside was her son, and by Divine
right, if not by human law, Sir Launcelot's heir.

"I shook her hand, and she lifted it to her lips and kissed it, with
a grace which brought back the day when that pale woman had danced
round the May-pole, laughing and rosy, and light-footed and
light-hearted, with so many looking on whose faces we should not see
again.

"I shall get used to it all in time.  But now scarce a familiar old
sight or sound but would move me to tears, if I did not repress them;
as I do, of course.  For I would not have the people think I came
back among them with a sorrowful heart, or one left in foreign parts.

"And how can they understand how the paths they have been going up
and down upon, and the doors they have been going in and out of every
day these eleven years, to me are doors into a buried past, and paths
trodden by feet that tread our earthly ways never more?

"Yet I think Rachel understands it, for as I was coming away she
said,--

"'There has been One walking all the way with us all, Mistress
Lettice, all the time.  And He knows all.'

"It was just the strengthening word I wanted to turn me, from the
past to the Ever-Present, from the dead to the Living, for all live
unto Him.  A glimpse into the heart of the Son of man, I think, such
as Rachel Forster has, gives those who have it a vision into the
hearts of all men.

"To my father, our home-coming is well-nigh unmixed delight.  He is
as frolicsome as a boy, full of schemes for re-uniting and
reconciling the whole world, by means primarily of ale and roast
beef.  How pleasant it is to hear his great hearty voice ringing
through the hall and court, among the stables, giving orders about
the stud, the farm, the hounds; waxing warm over Roundhead insolence
with the old servants; cracking jokes with the young ones; mistaking
people for their grandfathers and grandmothers; and making his way
out of all his entanglements by chivalrous old courtly compliments
and hearty old English jokes; and through all never ceasing to be the
courtier and the master, and scarcely ever losing his temper, except
now and then with the cool mockeries of Roland, and the reckless
carriage of Walter and the courtiers of the New Court whom he brings
to see us.  Indeed, it needs an occasional refreshing of my father's
recollection of the days of the Roundheads to keep his loyalty to the
Old Court very warm towards the new."


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

Aunt Dorothy was much with us during the months after the Restoration.

She was marvellously gracious and gentle all that time.  She believed
that we had suffered for our political sins, and must be convinced by
the irresistible demonstration of failure of the vanity and folly of
our conduct; and she was too magnanimous and too confident to demand
confession.  It must now be but too plain to us, she thought, that we
had erred grievously, and she only hoped our retribution might not be
too grievous.  For herself, she forgave us our follies on the ground
of their failure.  The King himself, who had so much to forgive, had
written a letter from Breda offering indemnity for the past and
liberty of conscience for the future, and should she be more rigid
than His Majesty?  Far from it.  She would take the whole family
under her wing, and protect us as far as lay in her power from the
consequences of our transgressions.

She had even some thoughts of extending toleration further than she
had once deemed possible.  Mr. Baxter deemed a church government
possible which might include "Diocesans," Presbyterians, and
Independents; and a Liturgy which might be joined in by
moderate--very moderate--Arminians, and moderate (she feared
lukewarm) Calvinists.

She scarcely saw her way to it.  If any one could accomplish such a
thing, Mr. Baxter might.  Some indulgence ought, perhaps (if
possible), to be extended to the Prelatists, on account of their
loyalty.  Some concessions might perhaps be made to the Independents
(among whom she did not deny were some godly men) to prevent their
straying further into the wilderness of the Fifth Monarchy party, the
Quakers, and the Anabaptists.  Much was doubtless due to charity.
And when once the true Presbyterian order was established, the gates
of Zion rebuilt, and her walls--though in troublous times--it was to
be hoped that the sober beauty of her fair towers and palaces would
root out the prelatical passion for Babylonish splendours, and the
Independent predilection for new ways, and "holes and corners," from
the hearts of all that beheld.

For that the day of Presbyterial triumph had at last dawned on this
distracted England, she would not be so faint-hearted as to doubt.

Had not His Majesty three times signed the Scottish Covenant?  Had
not the divines who went to see him at Breda been suffered to listen
(unsuspected of course by His Majesty) to his private devotions,
until their souls were moved within them?  Had not the excellent
Countess of Balcarres told Mr. Baxter how satisfied the French
Presbyterian ministers were with his religious dispositions?  Had not
Monsieur Gaches, pastor of Charenton, himself written to Mr. Baxter
how His Majesty attended and appreciated the French Protestant
services?  Had not Mr. Baxter himself been appointed one of His
Majesty's chaplains?  And if this were insufficient grounds for
confidence, what honest English heart, what loyal soul, could dare to
doubt that a young king with such bitter lessons behind him, with
such glorious hopes before him, trusted and welcomed as never king
had been by the nation, brought back (as she believed) mainly by the
agency of covenanted soldiers, and the prayers and loyal endeavours
of Presbyterian pastors and their flocks, would be faithful to his
oaths, more especially when to be faithful to his promises was to be
faithful to his interests?  Was there not, moreover, the solemn
Conference actually going on among the divines of the various parties
at the Savoy?

Had not Mr. Baxter been encouraged to state all the Puritan
objections to the Prayer-book to the full--to propound any number of
"queries," and elaborate any number of alterations; and had he not
embraced the privilege to the full, sparing not a vestige of the
Babylonish vesture?  Had he not, moreover, in a fortnight, drawn up
an amended Liturgy, correcting all the mistakes of the ancient
Prayer-book, and supplying all its omissions?--a form which, if there
must be forms, might satisfy the most scrupulous.  Had not even the
learned Dr. Gauden, who had issued that most affecting Portraiture of
His Sacred Majesty, called the Icon Basilike, shown himself most
unfeignedly courteous and conciliating, and hopeful of an
accommodation?

All these considerations set Aunt Dorothy on such a lofty pinnacle of
hope, that she suffered even Annis Nye to call her Friend Dorothy
without open rebuke, and was suspected of meditating a scheme which
might even embrace Anabaptists ("if they would only rebaptise each
other, and not blaspheme other people's baptism") and Quakers, if
they would hold silent meetings.

The moment of triumph was not the moment for reproaches.  Aunt
Dorothy, triumphing over us all, in fact, tolerated us all in
prospect.

I confess it was sometimes a little difficult to be thus loftily
forgiven; and, indeed, I remember once when in a moment of
unparalleled magnanimity Aunt Dorothy loftily extended her toleration
to Dr. Martin Luther, saying that, although she could never think him
justified about some things, yet that she believed after all "he was
right in the main, poor man, and great allowance must be made for one
so recently set free from Popery;" that Aunt Gretel herself was
roused to say privately to me, "Olive, dear heart, I believe if St.
Paul were to appear she would tell him that, after all, she believed
he was right in the main, although she never could think he was
justified in shaving his head at Cenchrea, but great allowances were
to be made for any one only just set free from being a Pharisee.'"

There were, indeed, a few symptoms which ruffled even Aunt Dorothy's
calm loyal confidence.  It was unfortunate, she could not deny, that
(in consequence of certain legal technicalities) Mr. Baxter was
deprived of his living, the former vicar displaced by the
Commonwealth having at once entered on it as his right.  But these
little perplexities were sure to be soon set right.  All
transferences of authority were sure at first to press unjustly on
some.

In the meantime Mr. Baxter had been offered a bishopric.  He had
declined the bishopric, until the Comprehension for which the
Conference was labouring was fully accomplished.  But the bishopric
had been offered, the chaplaincy accepted; and who could doubt that
in time, if he wished, his living would be restored? the old vicar
being, moreover, scarce able to preach at all, and sixteen hundred
communicants having sent up a request from Kidderminster for the
restoration of Mr. Baxter.

It was also unfortunate, she admitted, that many hundred "painful
preachers" had been suddenly removed from their churches on the same
grounds as Mr. Baxter; but the Protector and his triers (said Aunt
Dorothy) had set an ill example, and ill fruit must be expected to
grow of it.

Then there were some severe dealings with books.  Mr. John Milton's
"Defence of the English People" was burned at Charing Cross by the
public hangman.  But at that, said Aunt Dorothy, no loyal person
could wonder, seeing that therein he had dared to speak of the late
king's execution as a great and magnanimous act.  Properly regarded,
it was indeed a singular proof of His Majesty's clemency that Mr.
Milton's book only was burned, and not Mr. Milton himself.

The public burning of the Covenant was a more doubtful act.  This she
saw with her own eyes at Kidderminster, in the market-place, before
Mr. Baxter's windows.  The king had signed it and sworn to it, and
there were excellent things in it.  But there was no denying it had
been used to seditious ends.  Some (concluded Aunt Dorothy, pressed
hard for a Scriptural example) had ground the brazen serpent to
powder because it had been made an idol.  And she had little doubt,
with reverence she said it, Moses would have done the same with the
very Tables of the Law, if they had been similarly desecrated.  The
Ark itself was not spared, but suffered to fall into the hands of the
Philistines when Israel would have used it like a heathen charm.

Nevertheless, with these arguments I believe Aunt Dorothy herself was
not easy; she was driven to them by Job Forster, who had asked her
one day, with a grim irony, how she liked the new doings in Scotland,
the execution of Argyle, the forcing of Prelacy and the Prayer-book
on the unwilling Presbyterian people, and the burning of the Covenant
in Edinburgh.

But as the months of 1661 passed on, and the Conference stood still,
whilst Mr. Baxter and the other deprived ministers were not restored,
Aunt Dorothy's lofty confidence gradually changed into an irritable
apprehension, which took the form of vehement indignation against all
who refused to believe in the favorable issue of events, or who, as
she believed, stood in the way of it.  And it often moved me much to
see how, with ingenious fondness, like a mother with a wild son, she
laid the blame on the servants of the house, on the riotous company
or grudging hospitality of the far country, on the very management of
the home itself rather than on the royal prodigal.

A large portion of this diverted current of wrath was poured on the
Queen-mother, Henrietta Maria, who held open celebration of Roman
Catholic rites in her palace.

To any information concerning the appropriation of apartments in the
king's palace to the king's "lady" or "ladies," she refused
absolutely to listen.  "It is written," said she, "thou shalt not
speak evil of the ruler of thy people.  But," she added, "if any one
were to blame, it was the party that had exposed him to the
seductions of his mother Jezebel, and the idolatrous foreign court.
Indeed, who can doubt the pureness of the king's Protestant
principle, which (even if his morals had been a little contaminated)
had resisted Papistical enticements so long?"

The scene in Whitehall, where the king, under a canopy of state, laid
his hands on those who were brought to him to heal them of "the
king's evil," while the chaplain repeated the words, "_He laid His
hands on the sick and healed them_," was indeed a sore scandal to
her.  It made her very indignant with the chaplain, who had misguided
His Majesty.

"Mr. Baxter must be careful," she said, "how he conceded too much to
the Prelatical party."

But the chief force of her wrath was directed against the
Queen-mother, who, she said, had ruined one king and one generation
of Englishmen, and was doing her best to ruin a second; against the
Queen-mother and the Fifth Monarchy men.

To the insurrection of Venner, the winecooper, in January 1661, she
attributed the delay and disappointment in the Conference.  How was a
young king, kept in exile so long, to learn in a moment to
distinguish between the various sects, or not to be induced by such
fanatical outbursts to believe the evil advisers who persuaded him
that outside the ancient Episcopal Church lay nothing but a slippery
descent from depth to depth?

Still she hoped on from month to month, or protested that she did,
although her hopes made her less and less glad, and more and more
irritable, until she tried all our tempers in turn.  All except
Roger's.  His patience and gentleness with her was unwearied.

"I know what she is feeling, Olive," he said.  "I went through it all
between the Protector's death and the Restoration; hoping against
hope.  It strains temper and heart as nothing else does.  She will
have to give it up, and then she will be all right again."

"Give up hoping, Roger?" I said.

"Give up hoping against reason, give up trying to persuade oneself
down hill is up hill, and evening morning," he said, "and going into
the cloud coming out of it; giving up trying to see things as they
are not, Olive.  Seeing things as they are, and still hoping, that
makes the spirit calm again.  Hoping, knowing, that the end of the
road is up the heights, not into the abysses; that the evening is
only a foreshadowing of the morning that shall not tarry; that the
sun and not the cloud abides.  That the Lord Christ," he added,
lowering his voice to tones which, soft as a whisper, vibrated
through my heart like thunder, "and not the devil, has all power in
heaven and in earth, and that His kingdom shall have no end."

"Your hope is for the Church, Roger, but not for England."

His face kindled as he answered,--

"Not for England?  Always for England!--for England everywhere!  Now;
in the ages to come; on this side of the sea, on the other side of
the sea; in the Old World and in the New; under the bondage of this
profligate tyranny, which must wear itself out as surely as a
putrifying carcass must decay; in the wilderness, where our people
are beginning a story more glorious, I believe, than all the heroic
tales of old Greece."

For at that time, whilst doing all in his power by promoting concord
amongst Christians to aid Mr. Baxter and the ministers who were
seeking for "healing and settlement," and whilst sharing my husband's
labours among those in prison, Roger began to look with a new
interest on the tidings which came to us from the Plantations,
especially those concerning Mr. John Eliot, who was labouring to
convert the poor Indian natives to Christianity.  In this he and Aunt
Dorothy had much sympathy.  Mr. Baxter had always taken a lively
interest in this missionary work.  Collections had been made during
the Commonwealth to aid in supporting evangelists, and aid in
translating the Bible and good books into the languages of the
natives; and now, in the midst of all his conferences and
contentions, Mr. Baxter was labouring at obtaining a charter for a
_Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts_.  And in this
he succeeded.

At that time a manuscript was much in Roger's hands, containing a
copy of Journals of the early Puritan settlers of forty years before.
He found it the best lesson of true hope he had ever read.  And
during the winter evenings of 1661 he would often recite passages
aloud to us.  Amidst the misunderstandings of good men and the
conflicts of parties, it was like a breath of bracing wind to listen
to those conflicts of our countrymen with rains and snows and storms,
and all the hardships of the wild country peopled by wild beasts and
wilder men.  As in the Bible stories, there was little making of
sermons or drawing of morals in this narrative.  The whole story was
a sermon, and engraved its own moral on the heart as it went on.  In
three months half the first noble pilgrim band died, of cold and wet,
insufficient shelter and insufficient food.  The original hundred
were reduced to fifty.  Fifty living, and fifty graves to consecrate
the new country.  Then the grave had to be levelled indistinguishably
into the sweep of the earth around, lest the hostile Indians, seeing
them, should violate them.  Yet never a moan nor a murmur.  Their
trust in God revealing itself in their patience and courage, their
cheerfulness and unquenchable hope.  And now for the fifty were more
than twenty thousand; and the wilderness had become a place of
English homesteads and villages, fondly called by the old English
names.

As Roger read and told us of these things the world grew round to me
for the first time.  I began to see there was another side to it.
And the vision of this new world--this new English world--rose before
me as a new Land of Promise, which if persecution ever made this
England for the time "the wilderness," might be a refuge for our
suffering brethren again.

Not indeed for us.  I did not think so much of ourselves: our
convictions were moderate and our lives peaceable; and the Star
Chamber was not likely to be re-established within the memory of the
generation that had destroyed it.  But the Anabaptists, and the more
decided Independents, who objected to all forms of prayer, and the
Quakers, might find such an asylum yet very welcome.  Already there
were four thousand Quakers in prison.  Some had been shut up, sixty
in a cell, and had died of bad air and scanty food.  For sober
Presbyterians, like Aunt Dorothy and Mr. Baxter, or moderate people
attached with few scruples to the Liturgy, like my father, my
husband, and myself, there might not indeed be the triumph in store
of which Aunt Dorothy dreamed.  But of persecution or imprisonment we
did not dream.  The tide could never rise again in our lifetime as
high as that.

It perplexed us much that during all these months we saw nothing of
the Davenants.  We did not chance to be at Netherby during the year
1661, or the beginning of 1662.  My father had rheumatism, and was
ordered not to winter on the Fens; my husband was much occupied; so
that we did not have our usual summer holiday.  Lettice and Sir
Walter, we heard, were for a time in London, about the Court; but we
saw nothing of them.

The children who were at Netherby brought back wonderful stories of
the sweet lady at the hall; and Maidie especially was inspired with a
love for her which reminded me of the fascination of Lady Lucy over
me in my own childhood.

I felt sure Lettice's heart could not change.  Had her will, then,
grown so weak that she dared not make one effort to break through the
barriers which separated us?

Or was it, rather, stronger and more immovable than I had thought?
Did she indeed still refuse indemnity to the political offences of
the Commonwealth?  Could, indeed, no lapse of time efface, no
shedding of traitors' blood expiate, the shedding of that royal blood
which separated her from Roger?

Nothing but repentance?--the repentance he could never feel without
desecrating the memory of that good prince who, as he believed, had
been trained by God, through conflict within and without, anointed by
wars, and crowned by victory after victory, to be such a ruler as
England had never known, over such an England as the world had never
seen.

What Roger thought, I knew not.  He never mentioned the name of any
of the Davenants, except that of Walter, the youngest, who seemed to
come to him from time to time, and whom I saw once at his lodgings,
and did not recognize till after he had left, when Roger told me who
he was.

For I remember Walter Davenant a light-hearted boy, with frank face
and bearing, and eyes like his mother's.  And this Walter Davenant
had a manner half reckless and half sullen; a dress which, with all
its laces and plumes and tassels, looked neglected; and restless,
uneasy eyes, which never steadily met yours.

"Is that Lettice Davenant's brother Walter?" I said.

"It is Walter Davenant, one of the courtiers of King Charles the
Second."

"He is a friend of yours, Roger."

"He is Lettice's brother," he replied; "and she asked me to see him
sometimes; and now and then he likes to come."




CHAPTER X.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

_August_ 19.--My father's wide-embracing schemes of correspondence
and reconciliation have been somewhat narrowed.  My brother Roland
has been with us, and one or two of his friends about the Court; and
he has possessed my father with dark and chilling thoughts of the
Puritans.

"Indeed, there is an icy touch of cynical doubt in Roland which seems
to take the glow out of everything.  He does not assail any person,
or any party, or any belief.  All parties, he protests, are good, to
a certain extent, in their measure, and for their time.  But he makes
you feel he scorns you as a fond and incredulous fool for believing
in any person, any party, or any truth, with the kind of faith which
leads to sacrificing oneself.

"The king, he says, declares that '_nothing_ shall ever part him
again from his three kingdoms;' and the king never says a foolish
thing.

"According to Roland, all enthusiasm is either in foolish men,
fanaticism, or, in able men, the hypocrisy of fanaticism, put on to
deceive the fanatics.

"When my father declaims against Oliver Cromwell as a wild fanatic,
and records instances of the destruction of painted windows and the
desecration of churches, Roland shrugs his shoulders, slightly raises
his eyebrows, smiles, and says:--

"'No doubt, that is what he would have had Job Forster and his
fellows believe.  For himself, his fanaticism had the fortunate
peculiarity of always constraining him to climb as high as he could.
But he should not be too severely blamed.  What can a shrewd man do,
when he sees every one taking the same road, but travel a little
faster than the rest, if he wishes to keep first?'

"'Surely,' said I 'you cannot deny that the Puritans were sincere?'

"'At first, probably, many of them,' he said, 'When they had only two
mites to give, doubtless they gave them.  It is the destiny of mites
to be spent in that manner.  Happily for the widow in the New
Testament, her subsequent history is not told.'

"'For shame, sir!' said my father.  'Say what you like of the
Puritans of to-day; I will suffer no profane allusions to the good
people who lived at the Christian era.'

"'Pardon me, sir!' retorted Roland.  'Anno Domini has no doubt made
those who lived near it sacred; except, of course, the Pharisees and
a few other reprobates, who are fair mark.  But I assure you, nothing
could be further from my intuition than to cast the slightest
imputation on that excellent widow.  I only suggest that if her
circumstances improved, no doubt her views enlarged with them.  She
would naturally feel that while two mites might be bestowed without
regard to results, larger possessions involved wider
responsibilities, and must, therefore, be dispensed with more
prudence; as the Rabbis (who, no doubt, we should charitably suppose,
started with intentions as pure) had found out before.'

"'Speak plainly,' said my father; 'none of your Court riddles for me.
Do you mean to say the Puritans were like that good widow or like the
Pharisees?'

"'Sir,' replied Roland, 'you must excuse me if my charity reaches to
a later century than yours.  You forbid any imputations on the early
Christians; I decline to make any against those of a later date.  I
would leave the sentence to events.  Before long there is reason to
hope that many of the Puritans will once more have an opportunity of
proving their principles, and, if they like, of returning to the
exemplary condition of the widow with the one farthing.'

"'What do you mean?  There are to be no confiscations.'

"'I mean that the Savoy Conference will, I think, issue otherwise
than Mr. Baxter and his friends desire.  Presbyterian shepherds,
Independent lions, and Episcopal lambs will, I think, scarcely at
present be made to lie down in the ample fold of the Church; and the
sheep to whom the fold naturally belongs, cannot, of course, be
expected to withdraw, especially after having tried the tender
mercies of the outside world as long as they have.

"'It is all the clergy!' said my father, provoked into
indiscriminating irritation with some one, as he always is in
discussions with Roland.  'It is always the parsons and the preachers
who won't let the people be quiet.  Banish them all to the
plantations, and we should have peace to-morrow.'

"'And twice as many parsons and preachers to break it the day after
to-morrow,' said Roland.  'They have been trying it in England for
these eleven years; and I think you will find that has been the
result.'

"'Roland,' said my father, changing the conversation, 'we must find
some way of showing our gratitude to the Draytons.  Every corner of
the demesne is in better order than I left it.'

"'Mr. Drayton is a clear-sighted man,' was the reply, 'and no doubt
foresaw that the rightful owners would return.  However, we cannot be
too grateful; and no doubt circumstances will give us opportunities
of returning his kindness.  He will scarcely escape some little
fines, which we can get lightened.  Besides, they are sure, sooner or
later, to get entangled with some of the laws against conventicles;
Mistress Dorothy, or some of them.  It is the way of the family.  And
then we can be the mouse to nibble the lion's net.'

"'At least,' I said, 'you cannot accuse the Daytons of hypocrisy.'

"'Scarcely,' he replied, coolly, 'they are on the other side of the
balance, where conscience weighs heavier than brains.  But at all
events,' he added, turning to my father, 'we are sure to be able to
assist Mr. Drayton's son; for, from all I hear, he is scarcely out of
the circle of those who are liable to the punishment of treason, so
that you may set your mind quite at rest, sir, as to having
opportunities of showing our gratitude.'

"I know he said this to silence me.  And it did silence me.  I dared
not defend the Draytons, for fear of further rousing my father
against them.

"But Walter, who had been listening to the debate hitherto with some
amusement, here broke in.

"'Roger Drayton is no traitor,' said he.  'He took the wrong side,
unfortunately for him, and you the right side; but a more loyal
gentleman does not breathe.'

"'That depends on the construction the crown lawyers set on loyalty,'
retorted Roland.

And the conversation ceased.

"_August_ 20_th_.--After that discussion, Roland had a walk with my
father round the estate, and the next morning he said to me:--

"'I will not have the family disgraced, Lettice, by Walter's reckless
ways.  If he must beg or borrow, let him beg or borrow of some of
those gay courtiers who help him to spend.  Not of a man like Roger
Drayton, to whom we already owe too much--a Puritan, too, a soldier
of the usurper; and, for aught I know, a regicide.'

"'Did Walter borrow of Roger Drayton?' I said, and this time I could
not help flushing crimson.

"'Yes, yes!' he replied, angrily; 'and Roland says, moreover, child,
it was thou who introduced them to each other.  I will have no
clandestine intercourse, Lettice.  Thou shalt see I will not!'

"'Father,' I said, rising, 'has Roland's poisonous tongue gone as far
as that?  Does he dare to accuse me or Roger Drayton of that?  If you
wish to know what the understanding between Roger Drayton and me is,
it is this--I thought you knew it; my mother did.  We have promised
to be true to each other till death, and beyond it, for ever.  And
the promise was scarce needed.  For the love that makes it sacred was
there before.'

"For they had called Roger a traitor.  And it was no time to measure
words.

"I write these down, because I like to see them, as well as to
remember that I said them.

"My father drew a long breath.

"'Pretty words,' he said, 'for a lady who recognizes the divine right
of kings, parents, and all in authority.'

"He paced up and down the room for some time, speaking to himself.

"'Very strange, very strange,' he said; 'up to a certain point as
gentle as her mother; and once past that, like a lioness.  Very
strange.'

"And then still to himself,--

"''Tis a pity; 'tis a thousand pities.  If he had been anything but
what Roland says every one says he is; if he had been only a little
misled!  But now impossible; of course, impossible!

"''Tis a pity, Lettice,' he then said to me in a vexed tone, but very
courteously.  'Roland told me of a neighbour of ours, a good and
loyal gentleman, who would be but too proud of the honour of my
daughter's hand.  As fine an estate as any in the country, and
marching with our own.  'Tis a pity, child, for I should not have
lost thee.  And I should do ill without thee.'

"'You will not lose me, father,' I said.

"'Nay, nay,' he said, 'thou art one to be trusted, I know that well.
Never believe I doubt that, Lettice, for any hasty word I speak.
Never believe I doubt that.'

"And he kissed me and went his way.

"No, he does not doubt me.  But there is something in Roland which
tempts one to doubt everything and every one.

"Did I say his touch was icy?  Would it were only that.  Frost rouses
nature to a vigorous resistance, or checks it with strengthening
repression.  There is a healthy frost of doubt which kills the
insects which infest piety, and checking the too luxuriant growths of
faith with a wholesome cold, braces them from mere leafage to solid
stem and fruit.

"But Roland's influence is not the wholesome winter of doubting and
inquiring, which seems to interpose between the successive summers of
advancing faith, testing its roots.  It is a languid atmosphere of
doubt, in which everything is alike uncertain; every thing alike
mean, worthless, earthly.  The disbelief in goodness itself, and
truth itself, which, like a pestilential malaria, rises from the
sloughs of a wicked life, such as our Court encourages.  In the
depths of its degradation I believe he himself scorns to soil the
sole of his foot.  But he stands on the edge and breathes the poison
into his brain, and breathes it out again in bitter and cynical talk.

"While poor reckless Walter, capable not merely of creeping safely
along the dull wayworn ways of life, but of soaring to its noblest
heights, plunges into the midst of the pollution; until the very
wings with which he was meant to soar upward are clogged with the
evil thing; and instead of buoying him upwards, drag him downwards,
helpless, blinded, so that he can not only no longer soar, but
scarcely even creep.

"What will the end be?

"Often this weighs on me more than even Roger's peril.  For that is
not for the soul, which is the man; and that is but for the moment.

"Sometimes my spirit sinks, sinks as if its wings, too, were all
clipped and broken.  And I have dreadful visions of one precious life
ending in dishonour before man here, in this England, in this age;
and the other in dishonour before God and good men for ever.  And
Roland standing by and observing both, and saying, with a lifting of
his eyebrows, between pity and scorn,--

"Yes, that is the issue of passion, for syrens--or for clouds.  That
is the result of giving the reins to enthusiasms; religious or
otherwise.  Poor Walter; and poor Roger!  With a few grains more of
self-interest and common sense, they might both have stood where I
stand, and learned the vanity of everything in the world or out of
it, except, as the preacher says, getting well through it."

_August_ 27_th_.--The minister who succeeded Placidia Nicholls'
husband during the Commonwealth has been superseded by Dr. Rich, a
scholar who seems to have lived through those stormy times scarce
hearing their tumult; so near and so much more important seem to him
the tumults and controversies of former times.  He will scarce assert
that Monday is the day after Sunday, without proving it by citations
from a catena of fathers and schoolmen; which sets one piously
questioning, whether what needs so many authorities to sustain it is
itself substantial.  Otherwise, the matter of his statements seem so
free from everything every one does not believe, that one would have
thought no proof needed.

"A most friendly, blameless, and harmless gentleman, however, he is;
although weighed down a little as to thinking by the authority of so
many ancients, and as to living by the necessities of eleven
motherless children, who have to be fed and instructed; since,
unfortunately, the children of such a learned man came into the world
as destitute of patristical lore as if they had been born in the
first century, or their father were a Leveller.

"It does seem hard that so much learning cannot become hereditary,
like pointing, or retrieving.  It is such a great hindrance in the
way of the moderns being so much wiser than the ancients as they
ought to be.

"On one page of modern ecclesiastical history, however, it is easy to
make Dr. Rich, or any of his eleven, eloquent.  And that is the
record of the good deeds of Olive and Dr. Antony, who seem to have
maintained and lodged the whole family throughout the times of the
Commonwealth.  They are worthy, he says, to have lived in the days of
the Apostolic Fathers; and tears come into his eyes when he speaks of
Olive's little devices for delicately helping him.  'She thought I
was too buried in my books to see,' he said.  'But, in truth, I was
too much overwhelmed with their kindness to speak.'

"The elder girls, too, have endless stories of Olive's motherly
counsels and succour.  From their account, Maidie and Dolly must be
the blithest little un-Puritanical darlings in the world; and the
boys bold little Cavaliers.

"_August_ 30_th_.--At our first return I felt almost more an exile in
some ways than while we were in France.  People had fitted into each
other so closely as to leave no room for us but a kind of show-place
out of every one's way.  The myriads of fine inter-lacing fibres
which bind communities together, and root each in its place, can only
grow slowly, one by one, as storms straining the boughs, or summers
overlading them with fruit, made them needed.

"Even eleven years of mere Time almost place you in another
generation.  Those we left babes are shy lads and lasses; the
children are young mothers at their cottage doors, with their own
babes in their arms, courtesying and wondering we do not know them;
the youths and maids are sober men and matrons, giving counsel on the
perils of life to the youths and maidens we left babes.  And the
changes of these eleven years have not been those of mere Time.

"Not the people only have changed, but the country:--the whole way in
which every one looks at every thing.  In our youth King and
Parliament were the powers which ruled and divided the world.  Men of
forty now scarcely remember a king really reigning.  Men of twenty
scarcely remember a Parliament, save the poor mockery of a 'Rump'
which Oliver 'purged,' and which the London butchers roasted in
effigy--that is, in beef--at the Restoration.

"The names honoured and dreaded in our youth, names scarce uttered
without the eye flashing, and the cheek flushing with admiration or
indignation, have passed from the regions of popular enthusiasm to
the sober and silent tribunals of history.  Many which seemed to us
indelibly engraven on the hearts of men for renown or for abhorrence,
Sir John Hotham, 'the first traitor,' Sir Bevil Granvill, Sir Jacob
Astley, are--except among those who personally recollect
them--unknown; whilst around the loftier heights still in sight
strange mists of legend already begin to gather, especially among the
peasantry.  Prince Rupert is the 'black man' with whose name men of
twenty have been spellbound into submission in the nursery.
Archbishop Laud and Strafford, in our Puritan village, have well-nigh
taken the place of the Spaniard and the Pope of our childhood, and
rise before the imagination of the people as fiery-eyed giants,
rattling chains, and thirsting for the blood of Englishmen.

"Hampden, Pym, Falkland, Eliot, are mere grand, silent shades,
walking the Elysian fields of the past, far-off, among the heroes,
Leonidas, Brutus, or the Gracchi, but in no way disturbing the
pursuits or influencing the thoughts of the present.

"Instead, people speak frequently and familiarly of Lambert,
Fleetwood, and others, whose names to me sound as strange as those of
the combatants of the Fronde.  And, besides these, there are the
names which have shifted from side to side, until they seem to have
lost all meaning.

"The names of religious influence among the Puritans--John Howe, Dr.
Owen, Vice-chancellor of Oxford, and Richard Baxter--are, through
Mistress Dorothy, less unfamiliar to me.  Our good Bishop Hall is
dead.  But Dr. Jeremy Taylor, whose discourse my mother loved so
well, still lives, and fills the church with the music of his
thoughts.

"The one English name which, on the continent of Europe, overshadowed
(or outshone) all the rest--he whom the young King Louis (the
Fourteenth) called 'the greatest and happiest prince in Europe'--is
one men scarce utter willingly now.  The emotions which his name
calls out have indeed still a perilous fire in them.

"The other name, of which we used to hear most in foreign parts,
until it seemed at times as if, to the outer world, the Doing of
England were alone manifest in Oliver Cromwell, and her Thought in
John Milton--is also proscribed.  The poet's treasonable 'Defences,'
which scholars abroad admired (on account of the Latin I suppose),
have been burned in public.  But he himself will, it is thought, be
spared; although for the present he is in concealment.  A poet of our
name and kindred, to whom they say he showed kindness, is doing his
utmost to save him.  His blindness, and the great genius and renown
he hath, also give him a kind of sacredness.  Some say Heaven hath
punished him enough already; others that Heaven shields him, and
makes his head sacred from violent touch by a crown of sorrow.

"It is from Isaac Nicholls, Mistress Placidia's son, I hear most of
Mr. John Milton.  Isaac is a strange sprout from such a stock.  He
careth scarce at all for the world as a place to get on in; and
almost infinitely as a theatre to contemplate, with its scenes
painted by divine hands.  He seems as familiar with the past as Dr.
Rich; but in a different way.  To Dr. Rich the past seems a book, and
the present another book--a commentary on it.  To Isaac the past
seems not a book, but a life, and the present a life flowing from it.

"The names of the heroes seem as the names of friends to him, from
Leonidas to Falkland.  The voices of the poets seem all living, from
Homer to Milton.  And while Mistress Nicholls wears out heart and
brain in anxious cares to make him an inheritance, he finds a king's
treasury in a book, or in a carpet of mosses and wild-flowers, such
as clothes the sweet old glade by the Lady Well.

"Of all the people I remember, no one seems to me to have grown so
old as Mistress Nicholls; and of all the new people, none seems to me
so delightfully new as Isaac Nicholls.

"The prohibition laid by my father (through Roland's influence)
against all intercourse with the Draytons, does not extend to
Mistress Nicholls' home.  She is the nearest link I have with the old
Netherby home.  Isaac comes often to the Hall, and spends long days.
The library is a new world to him.  And he is a new world to me; or,
rather, his mind is to me a mirror in which all the black, blank
England of these eleven years lives and moves, and has voice and
color.

"It was a warm evening early in July when I first saw Isaac.
Mistress Nicholls was sitting spinning in the porch of her neat
house, on the outskirts of the village.

"'As diligent as ever, Mistress Nicholls,' I said.

"'Yes, Mistress Lettice,' said she, in a voice which had fallen into
an habitual whine (such as is thought by some characteristic of the
Puritans in general).  'Ah, yes, these are no times for a lone woman
to slacken her hands.  It is not by folding of the hands that body
and soul are kept together in these days.'

"As she spoke she led me to a chair in the parlor.  In the window was
sitting a lad with round shoulders and long hair falling ever his
forehead, as he pored over a large folio on the window seat.

"He turned round suddenly at her words, and said, in an abrupt, shy
way, yet with a gentle, cheerful voice:

"'Oh, mother, don't speak of body and soul, we have much more than
food and raiment.'

'"I do not deny,' she replied to me in a voice half querulous, half
apologetic, 'that the Lord has been merciful, far above my deserts,
no doubt.  We have never yet been suffered to want, I freely
acknowledge, and we ought to be very thankful, Mistress Lettice; very
thankful, no doubt.'

"Hearing my name the boy rose, and in a quiet, nervous way, came
forward, held out his hand, and then drew back, blushing, and made an
awkward bow.

"'My Isaac has heard of you,' said his mother, 'from his cousins.
Isaac thinks no one fit to be compared with his cousins, Maidie and
Dolly Antony.'

"'Olive's children!' I said.  And I took his hand and held it in both
mine.  It seemed to bring me nearer them.

"'Maidie and Dolly think no one fit to be compared with Mistress
Lettice,' he said.

"It touched me much.  And with so much in common, friendship between
Isaac and me waxed apace.

"Yes, it was I, Lettice Davenant, whom Olive's fond recollections had
made her children's queen of beauty and love; the fairy princess of
their fairy tales; the Una of their 'milk white lamb.'  They knew all
about me; the adventures of our childhood were their nursery stories;
the love of our youth was the ideal friendship of their childhood.

"And now I come back to them no longer their cotemporary in the
perpetual youth of fairyland, but their mother's; and here were these
boys, Isaac and Austin Rich, thinking no one in the world so sweet
and fair as Maidie and Dolly Antony.

"Over again, the old story! Yet it does not make me feel old, but
young again.  For our old friendships,--our old faithful love,--are
not dead, nor like to die; 'incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth
not away.'  That is a heavenly inheritance which the heart enters on
here, or never there.

"Not years nor sorrows make us old, but selfish cares.  As Rachel
Forster said, when I asked her whether Mistress Nicholls had suffered
from any uncommon griefs or necessities, that she looked so old, and
seemed to feel so poor.

"Nay, Mistress Lettice, nay!  To my recollection Mistress Placidia
was never young; and all the riches of the Spanish main could not
make her rich.  She has such a terrible empty space inside to fill.
Not even the Almighty, the possessor of heaven and earth, can make
her rich, at least not with riches.  And, sure enough, He has tried,
to my belief, near all the ways He has.  But it is of no use.  But I
do think He has begun to make her poor.  And that is something.'

"'What do you mean, Rachel?' I said.

"'Time was, though, poor soul, when she was never able to think that
she _had_ anything, she thought great store of what she _was_,' said
Rachel.  'But now that is broken down.  I do believe the Lord took
her down that step when her boy was born.  And that step, the
emptying and going down into the depths, in my belief, begins to make
us Christians.  Then comes the step up again into the light.  And,
poor soul, it seems to me, ever since, the good Lord has been trying,
by all manner of ways, to lead her up that stair.  But she has never
had the heart to come.  And so, down there, out of the light, her
poor wisht soul has grown old, and white, and withered like; and her
voice has got a moan in it, like a voice tuned in a sick-chamber, and
never lifted up in the fresh air, in a good hearty psalm.  'Tisn't
years or griefs that make us old, nor poverty that makes us poor, to
my seeing, but looking down instead of up, and being shut up alone
with self, instead of with God.'

"And Job looked up, and said, with a smile and a nod:--

"'She knows well enough, wife; she knows it isn't anything the Lord
sends that makes us old or poor; but what the devil sends.  The loss
of all the world can't make us poor, and the rolling by of all the
ages can't make us old, any more than the angels.  But there's no
need to tell.  She knows.  Mistress Lettice knows.'

"Job did not look up from the tool he was repairing as he spoke.  But
I felt that his heart had seen into mine.

"And it is a wonderful comfort to me to think that that good old
Puritan blacksmith knows.

"For he has camped many a night on the field with Roger, as Rachel
has often told me.  And, no doubt, he must have seen into Roger's
heart as well as into mine.  And, no doubt, those two, who have loved
each ether so well, have a warm corner in their prayers for us.

"_September_ 1_st_.--Isaac Nicholls has wonderful stories of the
settlers in the American Plantations.  The wilderness across the
Atlantic seems to have been to him and Olive's children a kind of
Atlantis, and Fairy or Giant land;--what the Faery Queen or the
stories of Hercules or the Golden Fleece were to us.

"He has tales of daring and endurance concerning those Pilgrims to
the West which seem to me worthy of the old heroic days.  Of weeping
congregations parting on the sea-shores of the old world, reluctantly
left.  Of congregations, free and delivered, praising God in the
midst of danger and distress on the shores of the new.  Of a hundred
English men and women forsaking land and friends for religion, and
going in a little ship across the ocean, landing among the wooded
creeks, half of them perishing in the cold of the first winter; but
the fifty who survived never murmuring and never despairing.  Of
toils to till the new fields by day, and watchings at night against
the Indians.  Of exploring parties going through trackless forests
till they found a habitable nook by the borders of some lake or
stream.  Of green meadows and golden corn-fields slowly won from the
wilderness; and pleasant gardens springing up around the new homes,
with strange fruits and flowers, and birds with song as strange as
the speech of the Indians.  Of old Puritan psalms sung by the
sea-shore, till the homely villages arose, with their homely
churches, as in Old England on the village greens.

"It sounds, as he tells it, like a story of some old Grecian colony,
with church bells through it;--a curious mosaic of a Greek legend
(such as Roger used to tell me), and the Acts of the Apostles.  But
the colonists were not Athenians nor Spartans, but Englishmen.  And
it all happened only forty years ago.  Or, as Isaac believes, it is
all happening still.  For although the great tide of Puritan
emigration has ceased during the Commonwealth, there are always a few
joining the numbers.

"'And,' saith Isaac, 'Maidie says Uncle Roger thinks the tide will
set in again for the wilderness, if things go on as they are going
now at Court.'

"But here Isaac halts abruptly, as treading on forbidden ground, and
the conversation is turned; he little knowing how gladly I would have
it flow in the same current, and I scarce deeming it keeping faith
with my father to make an effort that it should.

"The two living men who seem to fill the largest space in Isaac's
admiring gaze, are Mr. John Milton, whom all the world knows, and a
John Bunyan (not even a Mr.), a poor tinker and an Anabaptist, whom
no one knows, I should think, out of his own neighbourhood or sect,
but whom Isaac declares to have a way of making past things present,
and far-off things near, and unseen things visible, as only the poets
have.

"Mr. John Milton one can understand being the hero of a boy like
Isaac; losing his sight, as believes, in the 'Defence of the People
of England'; filling all Europe with his song, shaking the thrones of
persecuting princes by his eloquent pleadings for the oppressed
Christians of the Alps, seeming to find in his blindness (as a saint
in the darkness of death) the unveiling of higher worlds; a gentleman
with a countenance which my mother thought noble and beautiful as Dr.
Jeremy Taylor, or any about the late king's Court; a scholar whose
taste and learning the scholars of Italy send to consult, and whose
birth-house they come to see in London as of their own Petrarch or
Dante Alighieri; a poet whom men who can judge seem to lift
altogether out of the choirs of living singers, into a place by
himself among the poets who are dead.

"But this Anabaptist tinker!  It is a strange delusion.  I cannot
wonder at Mrs. Nicholls' aversion from such guidance for her son,
especially as it leads into the most perilous religious path he can
tread.

"_October_.--I have seen the Anabaptist tinker and heard him preach,
and I wonder no more at Isaac's enthusiasm.

"It was in a barn a mile or two out of Netherby.  Isaac persuaded me
to go, and I went; and wrapping myself in a plain old mantle, crept
into a corner and listened.

"And there I heard the kind of sermon I have been wanting to hear so
long.

"Heaven brought so near, and yet shown to be so infinite; the human
heart shown so dark and void, and yet so large and deep, and capable
of being made so fair and full of good.  Grace, the 'grace which
over-mastereth the heart;' not something destroying or excluding
nature, but embracing, renewing, glorifying it.  Christ our Lord
shown so glorious, and yet so human; more human than any man, because
without the sin which stunts and separates.  Yes, that was it.  This
tinker made me see Him, brought me down to His feet; not to the
Baptist, or Luther, or Calvin, or any one, but to Christ, who is all
in one.  Brought me down to His feet, rebuked, humbled, emptied; and
then made me feel His feet the loftiest station any creature could be
lifted to.

"He began, as I think all highest preaching does, by appealing not to
what is meanest, but what is noblest in us; not by showing how easy
religion is, but how great.

"He began thus:--'When He had called the people, Jesus said,
"Whosoever will come after Me let him deny himself, and take up his
cross and follow Me."  Let him count the charge he is like to be at;
for following Me is not like following some other masters.  The wind
sets always on my face, and the foaming rage of the sea of this
world, and the proud and lofty waves thereof, do continually beat
upon the bark Myself and My followers are in; he therefore that will
not run hazards, let him not set foot in this vessel."

"Then he spoke of the greatness of the soul that could be lost and
should be saved.  God breathed it.  'And the breath of the Lord lost
nothing in being made a living soul.  O man! dost thou know what thou
art?  Made in God's image!  I do not read of anything in heaven or
earth so made, or so called, but the Son of God.  The King Himself,
the great God, desires communion with it.  He deems no suit of
apparel good enough for it but one made for itself.'

"Then he spoke of the wonderful beauty of the body.  This 'costly
cabinet of that curious thing the soul.'  The more it is thought of
and its works looked into, the more wonderfully it is seen to be
made.  Yet is the body but the house, the raiment, of that noble
creature the soul.  It is a tabernacle; the soul, the worshipper
within.  Yet we are not to forget the body is a tabernacle, no common
dwelling, but a holy place, a temple.

"Then he spoke of the powers of this 'noble creature:' of Memory, its
'register;' of Conscience, its seat of judgment; of the Affections,
the hands and arms with which it embraces what it loves.  God's anger
is never, he said, against these powers--'the natives of the
soul'--but against their misuse.

"But the soul being so noble, it is the soul that sins.  Not the
body; that is passive.  And it is the sinful impenitent soul which
suffers, 'when the clods of the valley are sweet to the wearied body.'

"A whole world of wisdom, the wisdom I had been longing to hear,
seemed to me to lie in the words of this tinker.  How many dark
hearts would be cheered, and downcast hearts lifted up and closed
narrowed souls opened and expanded to embrace the light around, if
this could be understood!  The body is not vile, it is God's curious
costly cabinet; His tabernacle to be kept holy.  The body sins not.
Sin is not in matter but in spirit.  Conversion is a liberation of
all the '_natives_' from the intrusive tyranny of sin and Satan, a
making the whole man every whit whole.  God's anger is not against
the natural affections or understanding.  They are not to be
destroyed, crushed, or fettered.  They are to be liberated, expanded,
quickened with the new life.

"How many of the dark pages of Church history already written, and
now being written, might never have been, if the theology of this
tinker could be understood!

"Luther, they say, also knew these things (and Roger used to declare
Oliver Cromwell did, but of this I know nothing).  Strange it is to
see how from height to height these souls respond to each other, like
bonfires carrying the good news from range to range, throughout the
ages.  These are the wise; wise like angels; wise like little
children.  Half way down it seems to me, walk the smaller ingenious
men of each generation, laboriously building elaborate erections
which all the ingenious men on their own hill-side and on their own
level admire, but which those on the other side cannot see.  And
below, in the valleys, the reapers reap, and the little children
glean, and the women work and weep and wait, and wonder at the skill
of the builders on the hill-side, so far above them to imitate.  But
when they want to know if the good news from the far country is still
there for them, as for those of old, they look not to the hillsides
but to the hill-tops, where the bonfires flash the gospels--plainer
even in the night than in the day--and where the earliest and latest
sunbeams rest.  And so the eyes of the watchers on the mountain tops,
of the children and the lowly labourers in the valleys, and of the
angels in the heavens, meet.  And when the night comes--which comes
to all on earth--the ingenious builders on the hill-sides, no doubt,
have also to look to the mountain-tops, where the watch-fires burn,
and the sunset lingers and the sunrise breaks.

"This tinker seems to have a soul ordered like a great kingdom, all
its powers in finest use and in most perfect subordination.  But
Isaac says this kingdom sprang from a chaos of war, and conflict, and
anguish, such as scarce any human souls know.

"In this also like Luther, who had his terrible civil wars to pass
through ere the Kingdom came within.  (And Roger said Oliver Cromwell
had.)  To John Bunyan (Isaac told me), the finding of an old thumbed
copy of Luther on the Galatians was like the discovery of the spring
in the wilderness to Hagar.  'I do prefer that book,' he said,
'before all others, except the Holy Bible, for a wounded conscience.'

"So they meet--these simplest, wisest, widest, humblest, highest
souls, and understand each other's language, and take up each other's
song in antiphons from age to age.

"Yet, I fear, this can scarce be so with John Bunyan.  His voice can
scarce reach beyond his own time, deep as it is.  For how could an
unlearned tinker write a book which ages to come would read?

"And, withal, he is a true Englishman.  That also pleased me well in
him.  I think the greatest men who are most human, most for all men,
are also most characteristically national; it is the smaller great
men who are cosmopolitan.  Even as St. Paul was a Hebrew of the
Hebrews, Martin Luther was German to the core, they say (and Roger
said Oliver Cromwell was English to the core).  And so is John Bunyan.

"A square, solid brow; a ruddy, healthy, sensible countenance; a body
muscular, strong-boned, tall, compact; eyes keen, calm, quick,
sparkling, observant, kindly, with twinklings of humour in them, and
tears, and anger, but not restless or dreamy; a mouth firm, capable
of rebuke or of quiet smiles.  In company, Isaac says, not 'given to
loquacity or much discourse, unless some urgent occasion required
it;' and then 'accomplished with a quick discerning of persons, being
of a good judgment and an excellent wit.'  The dumbness (natural to
all Englishmen worth anything) not absent in him; speech being with
him not for ornament but for use.

"_November_, 1660.--Isaac is in great trouble.  John Bunyan has been
cast into prison.  Mistress Nicholls also is in great trouble,
fearing Isaac may be involved in John Bunyan's disgrace, seeing he
loves so much to hear him.

"'It is a very peculiar trial,' saith she, 'that her boy should
embrace the most perilous form of all the perilous religions of the
day.'

"'Not the most, mother,' said Isaac.  'The Quakers are worse.'

"Indeed everyone seems to agree that of all the sects which have
sprung up during the Commonwealth, the Quakers are the worst.  I
should like to see one.

"_February_, 1661.--I am grieved to the heart at these ungenerous
revenges.  It was an ill way to celebrate the martyrdom of His Sacred
Majesty, to drag the bodies of brave men from the graves in the
Abbey, and hang them on gibbets.

"Senseless, mean, and barbarous revenges!  They should have heard
John Bunyan the tinker preach.  It was not the body that sinned.
They should have let it rest.

"My father thinks Oliver Cromwell deserved anything; but he is not
pleased at their having disturbed the bones of his mother and
daughter, and of Robert Blake, and cast them into a pit in St.
Margaret's churchyard.

"'A peaceable old gentlewoman, who never did any harm that I heard,'
said he, 'except bringing the usurper into the world; and a young
gentle lady too good for such a stock.  Their dust would not have
hurt that of the kings'.  Doubtless it was insolence to lay them
there; but it was scarce an English gentleman's work to molest them.'

"But about the violation of Blake's tomb his anger waxed hot.  'A
good old Somersetshire family,' he said.  'They might have let him
rest; if only for the fright he gave the Pope, the Turk, and the
Spaniard.'

"I was afraid to go near Job Forster's for some days after I heard of
these desecrations.  When at last I went, Rachel could not altogether
restrain her indignation.  Job only said, "Never heed, never heed.
_He_ they sought to dishonour doesn't heed.  What is all the world
but a churchyard?  In "the twinkling of an eye" will anyone have time
to see where the bodies rise from?  Or dost think the gold and jewels
on kings' tombs will have much of a shine when the Gates of Pearl are
open, and the poor body they have thrown like a dog's beneath the
gibbet shall enter them shining like a star?'

"But then something broke down his fortitude, and he added, in a
husky voice,--

"'Yet England might have found him another grave.  He did his best
for her; he did his best.'


"_January_, 1662.--A long break in these pages.  There has not been
much very cheerful to write.  And I would never write moans.  These
it is better to make into prayers.

"Our house is not altogether at unity with itself.

"Roland has brought home his wife.

"From the first, my father did not affect her.

"She took her new honours more loftily and easily than he liked.

"'A pretty Frenchified poppet,' he called her.

"I have done my best to smooth matters, although it is a little
vexatious to the temper, sometimes, to be counselled with matronly
airs, and consoled for my single state by this young creature.

"It has been often difficult to keep the peace.

"Naturally, the old associations of the old place are nothing to her,
and she offends my father continually, by laughing at the old
servants, the old furniture, and what she calls our old-fashioned
ways in general.

"But to-day she kindled him into a flame which, for the time, will
probably keep her at a distance.

"She ventured to propose that she should change my mother's oratory
into a cabinet for herself, 'to be draped,' said she, 'with silk, and
adorned with statues, and be like the apartments of the "Lady" at
Whitehall.'

"Which brought out some very plain English from my father concerning
the 'Lady,' and all who favored her.

"'The king,' he vowed, 'might degrade his palaces, if he pleased, and
if he dared.  But he would see the Hall and everything in it burned
to the ground, rather than have the place where my mother had lived
the life and prayed the prayers of an angel, polluted by being
likened to the dwelling of a creature it was a dishonour for a man to
tolerate or for a woman to name.'

"So, for the time, the controversy ended.  And, in a few days, Roland
and his wife went back to the Court.

"But my father is more and more uneasy and irritable.  'In his
youth,' he said, 'in the days of the good of sacred memory, all were
noble, rebels, royalists, all.  Eliot, Pym, Hampden, Essex, were
gentlemen and true Englishmen, as well as Falkland, Bevil Granvill,
or Sir Jacob Astley.  And all, however deluded, feared God, and
honoured all true men and women.  But now,' says he, 'all are base
together--Court, Royalists, Roundheads--all.  Why could not Roger
Drayton have kept to such politics as Hampden's or his own father's,
and not disgraced himself by joining these furious traitors and
sectaries?"

"By which I know that my father has relentings towards the Draytons,
though he will by no means confess it.

"_June_, 1662.--I have seen a Quaker.  And a very soft and mild kind
of creature it seems to be.

"Olive's children are at Netherby.  To-day I met her little girls at
Mistress Nicholls's.  Maidie is a darling little elfin queen.  And
Dolly is a sweet, little Puritan angel.  And with them was Annis Nye,
their nurse, a Quaker maiden, with a heroical serene face, and a
voice even and soft, like a river flowing through meadows.  She
attracted me much; a harmless dove of a maiden she seemed.

"But when I said so to Job Forster, on my way home, he shook his head
and muttered,--

"'Soft enough, and deep enough!  You would find what kind of
gentleness she has if you saw her take the bit between her teeth and
make straight for the pillory, and you had to hold her in and keep
her safe, if you could.  Why, I'm always expecting, morn and night,
that poor maid'll get a 'concern' to go and testify against the
king's mistresses, or the Popish bishops' surplices.  To say nothing
of the chance of her setting off to preach in New England, or to the
Turks, or to the Pope cf Rome, as some of them do when they are well
persuaded it is more dangerous than anything else.  And say what
George Fox may of the Protector, she'd find the tender mercies of the
Court scarce so tender as he was.  If you want to make your life a
burden to you, Mistress Lettice,' he concluded dolefully, shaking his
head, 'you've nought to do but to get your heart tender to a Quaker
(as no man or woman with a heart in them can help getting it to that
wilful maid), and try to keep her out of harm's way.  You'll find
you've no rest left, day nor night.  I've had hard things to do in my
time, but never one that beat me over and over like trying to keep a
Quaker safe.'

"_July_, 1662.--My father, a few days since, met Maidie and Dolly in
the village, and asked whose children they were.

"In the evening he said to me,--

"'Those children of Olive Drayton's, at least, are guilty of no
crimes, political or other.  Have them to the house, Lettice, if thou
wilt.'

"And, since, the old house and the gardens have grown musical with
the frolics of these young creatures, Isaac and Maidie, Austin Rich
and Dolly.  It makes me young again to see their story of life
beginning.

"And it is pleasant to feel there is so much of youth left in my
heart to respond to the youth in theirs, so that they see and feel my
being with a sunshine, not a shadow.

"Sometimes I feel as if I could be content to take this on-looker's
place in life, and be a kind of grandmother to every one's children.
If I could only be sure that Roger and the old friends were also
content and secure.

"But the times press hard on them, and are like, they say, to press
harder yet.

"_August_ 30.--The harder times for the Puritans have come, or have
begun.  A week since, on St. Bartholomew's Day, two thousand of their
ministers resigned their benefices, rather than do what was commanded
by the Act of Uniformity.

"My father is angry with the 'parsons' all round; with the bishops
for driving the Puritans out, with the Puritans for going.

"Mistress Dorothy writes from Kidderminster:--

"'Mr. Baxter and sixteen hundred of His Majesty's most loyal
subjects, and the Church's most faithful ministers, banished from
their pulpits.  We had looked for another return when, like Judah of
old, we hastened to be the first to bring back our king.  But return,
or no return, let not any think we repent our loyalty.  We will pray
for His Majesty by twos or threes, if, by his command, we are
forbidden to assemble in larger numbers.  Pray that his throne may be
established, and his counsellors converted.'

"Job Forster smiles grimly under the gray soldierly hair on his upper
lip, and says, sententiously, between the strokes on his anvil,--

"'They are finding it out.  One after another.  The four thousand
Quakers in the jails.  The Scottish Covenanted men, with the choice
between the bishops and the gallows.  Jenny Geddes will scarce rise
from the dead to help them now.  They are learning how the king
remembers their sermons, to which they made him hearken so many
hours.  And how he keeps their Covenant, to which they had him swear
so many oaths.  The French, and the Dutch, and the Spaniards found it
out long ago.  And now the two thousand parsons are finding it out.
And by-and-by, nigh the whole country will find it out.  But Rachel
and I will scarce be here to see.'

"'Find out what?' I said.

"'That the Lord Protector's death was no such great blessing to any
but himself,' said Job.  And he became at once too absorbed in his
work to pursue the conversation.

"_October_ 29_th_.--To-day, the Post brought tidings which, when my
father read, he dashed the letter from him, and started to his feet
with an anathema, brief but deep.

"Then he paced up and down the room once or twice in silence, and
then he said suddenly to me,--

"'Lettice, where is Roger Drayton?'

"The abrupt question startled me for an instant, so that I could not
reply.  I did not know what new calamity had come, or was coming.
And I suppose the color left my face.  For at once my father added
very gently,--

"'I should not have asked thee.  I know well thou hast kept my
prohibition but too loyally.  I will send a messenger to Netherby
with the letter.'

"He wrote a few rapid lines, and despatched a servant, with the
letter without delay.

"Then deliberately and quietly he took his sword from his side and
hung it up beside my grandfather's in the hall.

"'For the last time!' he said.  'The honor of England is gone for
ever.  _The king has sold Dunkirk to the French_.'

"And with a restless impatience he went on,--

"'Come, come, child!  We will make no babyish moans.  Get on thy
mantle and come round the old place.  A man may still serve the
country by making two blades of grass where one grew before.  But by
bearing arms under traitors who sell the honor of England to pay for
the paint and gewgaws of wicked women, never again.  Henceforth call
thyself a husbandman's daughter; but never again a soldier's.  In
name and in arms England is disgraced, child, dishonored, made a
bye-word and a laughing-stock to the whole world.  But we may still
make the corn grow thicker and the sheep fatter.  So who shall say
there is not something worth living for yet?

"'Something worth doing yet,' he added, 'for the country of Eliot and
Falkland, and Robert Blake, who made the Pope and the Turk quake in
their castles, and now lies tossed like a dog into a pit in St.
Margaret's churchyard!'

"But he did not tell me what was in the letter he sent to Netherby.

"_October_ 31_st_.--The autumn wind was softly drifting the brown
leaves into heaps round the roots of the trees, by the Lady Well, and
softly adding to them by loosening one by one from the branches.  I
was thinking he was God's gardener, tenderly, though with rough
hands, folding warm coverlids over the roots of the flowers.  I was
thinking how wilder winds would come, and with icy breath heap the
snows above the dead leaves; and yet still only be God's gardeners to
keep His flowers housed against the spring, and not to shelter only,
but to feed and enrich them whilst sheltering.  For sleep is not only
a rest, but a cordial of new life.  I was listening to the dropping
of the water into the Holy Well the monks had made so long ago, and
thinking how Olive and I had listened to it long ago, and thought it
like church music from a kind of sacred Fairy land.  The old well,
and the fresh spring; always fresh, always living, always young; when
there came a rustling among the leaves which was not the wind,
nearer, nearer, and before I could look, his hand on my hand, and his
voice, low as the dropping of the water, on my heart, and deep as the
spring from which it flowed.

"'Lettice, your father told me I might come back.  Do you say so?'

"I could scarcely speak, still less could I meet his eyes, which I
felt through the heavy lids I could not raise.

"'My heart has never changed, Roger,' I said at last, 'nor misdoubted
you one instant.'

"'Has your determination changed, Lettice?' he said, gently
withdrawing his hand.

"'Has yours?' I said.  'If you can but say you grieve for one
irrevocable deed, and would recall it if you could?'

"'I repent of much, and would undo much,' he replied.  'But I can
never say I repent of following him who saved England; and to whom
England cannot even return the poor gratitude of a grave.'

"We went silently home side by side, the dead leaves crumbling under
his feet in the still woodland paths, till we came to my mother's
garden, one side of which bordered on the wood.

"There he unlatched the little garden gate, and held it for me to
pass.  The click sounded startling in the silence.  I passed through,
but did not look up, until my hands were suddenly seized in my
father's, and his face shone down on me beaming with smiles I had not
seen there for many a day.

"'How now, child,' said he, 'whither away, pale and downcast as a
white violet?'

"'Dost fear I distrust thee Lettice?' he added softly; 'I never did,
I never could.'

"Then I looked up and met his eyes for a moment, but the softness in
them overcame me, and I could not speak.

"'What does all this mean, Roger Drayton?' he resumed, impatiently.
'Does not she know I sent for thee?  Surely she has not changed?'

"'Mistress Lettice says she has not changed,' said Roger
despondingly, 'and never can.'

"'Then what is all this coil about?  She told me months since, in the
teeth of prohibitions and entreaties to bestow her hand elsewhere,
that you had exchanged troth, and would be true to each other till
death.'

"'And after,' said I.  'Death cannot separate us for ever.  Only that
terrible death, and that only in life.'

"'It was because I guarded the scaffold at the king's beheading,'
said Roger.

"'Tush, tush, child,' my father replied, hastily.  'We have been
through a wilderness, and which of us has not lost his way?  We have
been through the fire and smoke of a hundred battles, who expects us
to come out with face and hands washed like a Pharisee's?'

"Then suddenly turning to Roger and taking his hand, he said
solemnly,--

"'If thou hadst known, Roger Drayton, for what a king that scaffold
was in clearing the way, I trow thou hadst rather laid thy head on
the block thyself.'

"This Roger did not deny.  Was not his silence a confession?  And so,
when my father laid our hands together in his, could I refuse?  The
sacred irresistible touch of another hand which had once before so
joined them, seemed on us all, and a tender voice from heaven seemed
to float above like church music.  And still as I listened to-night,
in the oratory alone, it seemed to say,--

"'My children, the way is rough, tread it together.  The burdens are
heavy; share them all.  Sorrows, fears, fruitless regrets, fruitful
repentances, share them all.  Bear each other's burdens, and in so
bearing, make them sometimes light and always helpful.  To you it is
given to love; not with the poor timid transitory love which dares
not see, but with the love which dares to see because it helps to
purify.  My children, the way will not be smooth.  Tread it together.
The burdens will be heavy.  Share them all.'"


OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

They were married as quietly as might be on a quiet autumn day in the
old parish-church of Netherby.

We waited for them in the porch of the old church--the west porch,
which our forefathers had built--looking across the green graves of
the village churchyard, across the quiet village street to the arched
gate which opened opposite from one of the avenues of the hall; my
father, Aunt Dorothy (once more at Netherby), Aunt Gretel, my
husband, the children and I.

No stately procession issued thence, only Lettice; leaning on her
father's arm, wrapped closely in a mantle, with a few faithful old
servants following.

We saw them in the distance wending towards us among the grey stems
of the beech-trees.  Their footsteps fell softly on the fallen leaves
as they crossed the church path.  We met them at the churchyard gate.

So we entered the church, which we had not done before.

And there a sight met us which went deep to our hearts.

There had been no triumphal wedding arches, no banners, no flowers
strewn on the bride's path.

Netherby was a Puritan village, and we Puritans were at no time great
in pomps and ceremonials, Moreover, there was a weight of joy in the
crowning of this hope so long deferred, and a depth of content, which
moved rather to tears than to shouts of welcome.  Nor were the times
very joyous to us.  With two thousand deprived ministers to be kept
from starving, and thousands of those who believed as we did, not to
be kept from prisons, our festivities naturally took a sober
colouring.

We had not therefore been prepared to find the church full from door
to altar; full of people from the village and from all the country
round--old men and women, and the youngest children that could be
trusted to be quiet.  (For, as one mother said afterwards, "I would
like them to be able to say to their children, 'I was there when Mr.
Roger and Mistress Lettice were married.'")  They rose as we passed
up the aisle, and a soft murmur of benediction seemed to fill the
silent church.

For Roger and Lettice were dearly loved in the dear old place, with
an affection which had grown with their growth from infancy, and
which was strong through the intertwining roots of centuries.  (It
will be long before the new roots in the New World strike so deep.)

And through all the generations of Davenants and Draytons this was
the first time the lines had met in marriage.

It was a solemn as well as a joyful thing to see those two stand with
joined hands at the altar, with the tombs of our fathers beside them
in the oldest transept, and the stately monuments of the Davenants
opposite, whilst the whole village of our tenants and servants
(children of generations of our tenants and servants) were gathered
behind.

As they knelt down side by side on the altar steps, a ray from the
autumn sun fell softly on her bowed head, slightly turned, on the
rich brown hair flowing beneath her veil, on the broad fair brow, the
drooping eyelids, with their long dark lashes, and the pale cheek.
In its repose her face shone on me as if it had been her mother's
looking down on her from heaven; so close seemed the likeness, so
angelic the calm.  It brought my childhood, and all heaven before me,
and blinded my eyes with tears.

Good old Dr. Rich was so completely shaken out of his natural
dwelling-place in the past by his sympathy with them that he seemed
like another man.  His voice was deep and tender, and the
benedictions fell from his lips with a power which resounded from
stone effigies of knight and dame, and thrilled back from every
living heart, in a deep echo, "Yea, and they shall be blessed."

The most rigid Puritan in the place conformed for the occasion.
Responses went up, not, as Mr. Baxter complains, "in a confused and
unmeaning manner," but hearty and clear as an anthem; and the Amens
rang through the church like a salute of artillery.

As the service closed and we followed Lettice and Roger down the
aisle, I noticed a cavalier wrapped in a large mantle, leaning
against one of the pillars near the door.  Lettice saw him and
pointed him out to Roger, and both then went towards him.  It was
Walter Davenant.  He came forward and grasped their hands.

His voice was low, and had a tremor in it.  But I heard him say,--

"If my being publicly here could have been any sign of honour to you,
Roger Drayton, I would have come with a cavalcade.  But my coming is
an honour to none.  I pray you think it not a disgrace."

Sir Walter coloured as he saw him (he had forbidden Walter to enter
his house), but Lettice placed their hands together, and there was no
resisting the entreaty in her sweet pleading face.  So the old
cavalier went back to the hall leaning on his son's arm.

It seemed as happy an augury as could be given of the blessing to
flow from the marriage.

He was the only one of Lettice's kindred except her father who
vouchsafed his presence.  And I believe it was to counterbalance this
cold reception, and testify how he honoured, as much as to show how
he loved, his child, that Sir Walter insisted on all the village
partaking of such a feast as Netherby had never seen, and on the
ringers of all the churches round ringing such peals as the
country-side had never heard.

So it came about that at last, after flowing so parallel, so close,
and so divided for so many centuries, the two streams of life at
Netherby blended in one.

Job Forster said,--

"I always knew it must be--I always knew.  Do you think, Mistress
Olive, I've watched nightly with Master Roger by the camp-fires on
Scotch and Irish moors, on the hills and by the sea, and gone with
him into battle after battle, when neither of us knew who would ever
come back alive--without finding out where his heart was? and when
Mistress Lettice came back from beyond seas as a lily among thorns, I
knew she was all right, which made it plain.  But I never breathed it
to a soul.  _She_ (_i.e._ Rachel) of course always knew everything,
whether she was told or not.  But she was unbelieving about
it--fearful and unbelieving.  I never knew her so bad about anything.
I believe it was because she wished it so much.  Scores of times she
has vexed me sore about it.  'There was no promise folks should be
happy,' said she, 'and have all they wished for.'  I had to mind her
of the morning long ago, when we went hunting in the dark for a
promise for Master Roger when he was in that sore trouble, and no
promise came, till at last she found we wanted none, for we'd got
beyond the promises to Him who was the Promise of all promises.  And
here she was standing up again for a promise!  'It was spiritual
inward blessing we were looking for then, Job,' said she (nigh as
perverse as that poor Quaker maid), 'and of course that's all plain.
This is _outward_, and that's another thing altogether.  No doubt the
good Lord would have us all forgiven and made good.  But it's by no
means clear to my mind He'd have us all married and made happy just
in the way we wish.'  'Well, said I, 'thou'rt a wise woman, a world
wiser than me.  But thou'st never fought under Oliver.  _He_ said he
knew not well to distinguish between outward blessings and inward.
_To a worldly man they are outward; to a saint, Christian_.  The
difference is in the subject, if not in the object.'  Nor," continued
Job, "do I know to distinguish, or care.  Leastways thou'st been the
best means of grace the Lord ever sent to me.  And why shouldn't
Master Roger and Lettice be like thee and me?  Seems to me scarce
thankful, anyway, to put marriage among the outward blessings, like
meat!'  Which, if it did not convince her (for the best of women
can't be always amenable to reason), anyways turned the conversation.
And now it's all come about as I said, wife, and thou must give in at
last," he concluded.  "Sure, thou'lt never be as stiff-necked as
those poor wilful Scottish ministers, who were so wise they couldn't
even see what the Almighty meant after He had spoken in thunder at
Dunbar.  Poor souls," he added, "poor stiff-necked souls; they're
learning it now on the other side of the book, by the gallows and the
boot, and the congregations scattered by the King's soldiers on the
hills."

Rachel did not plunge into the vexed question his words raised; as to
whether the event proved the equity of the cause.  She only said,--

"Promise or no promise, Job; inward or outward, I've no manner of
doubt the good Lord minds whether we're happy or no, and makes us as
happy as may be, while being made as good as we can be.  Which, of
course, He minds ten thousand times more; because the goodness is the
happiness, come which way it may, by the drought or the flood.  But
if the happiness _will_ make us good, no fear of His stinting that.
Good measure pressed down and running over, that's His measure, and
that's the measure He's given Mistress Lettice and Master Roger at
last, and thee and me, this many a year.  Good measure, with His sign
and mark on it to show it is good, and no counterfeit."

Aunt Dorothy was the only one among us who thought it necessary to
temper Roger and Lettice's content with dark forebodings.

"It is no smooth sea, dear heart," said she to Lettice, "thy bark is
launched upon, nor can ye remain long in any haven."

"I know that I have married a soldier," replied Lettice, "and a
soldier in a warfare which has no discharges.  But I know his lot,
and I have chosen it for mine, Aunt Dorothy."

"Aunt Dorothy" fell from her lips for the first time like a caress.
There was always a kind of sweet easy majesty about Lettice, which
made her caresses seem a dignity as well as a delight, and Aunt
Dorothy for the time ceased her forebodings.  Her love for Lettice
was stronger than she confessed or knew, and she was always more
easily led by Lettice than by any amongst us to take a brighter view
of things and men.  Not that Aunt Dorothy was one given to moan or
whine.  She did not dread suffering, but she believed it her duty to
dread joy and was therefore ever wont to shadow sunny days with the
severe foresight of evil days to come.  Dark days indeed were her
bright days, since on these she permitted herself to enjoy such stray
sunbeams as rarely fail to break through the darkest.

During three years after Roger and Lettice's marriage we kept much at
Netherby.  Sir Walter's failing health made him choose the quiet of
his country home.  Moreover, the doings of that degraded court, which
the loyal Mr. Evelyn called "rather a luxurious and abandoned rout
than a court," displeased the old cavalier of the court of Charles
the First as much as it did any Puritan amongst us.  Except for the
contrast which made it yet bitterer for us who had hoped much from
the Commonwealth, and remembered Milton dwelling at Whitehall, and
the blameless family of the Protector making a pure English home,
with dignified courtly festivities and family prayer, where now the
eager contests of the gaming-table and wretched French songs
resounded, on Sundays as well as on other days, through the
apartments where the King's mistresses reigned.

An alliance grew up between Aunt Dorothy, Sir Walter, and good Dr.
Rich.  Aunt Dorothy could never so far forgive my father, Roger, my
husband, or Job Forster, for turning (as she believed) liberty into
license, and lawful resistance into rebellion, as to consort with
them again as of the same party.  With Sir Walter she had a broad
common ground in their loyalty to the late king, their lamentations
over the present court, their general admiration of the nobleness of
the past, and their general hopelessness as to the future.  But with
Dr. Rich her sympathies were deeper.  He would bring her passages
from St. Austin, which she thought only second to St. Paul; and, in
return, she would acknowledge that there was one passage which she
had not once understood as she ought, and that was, "Resist not the
power, for they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
She agreed with Mr. Baxter and Mr. Henry as to the duty of attending,
at least occasionally, the services in the church established by law.
And he agreed that from primitive times private assemblies for
edification in twos and threes were not forbidden.

Sometimes, indeed, they had debates.

"England also has now her St. Bartholomew," she said once, "and no
doubt she will have her retribution.  Charles the Ninth of France
died in agonies of remorse soon after that fatal day of the execution
of the Huguenots."

"Anniversaries are not always wise to observe, madam," he replied.
"On the eve of St. Bartholomew's day seventeen years ago, the
Commonwealth prohibited the use of the Common Prayer even in private.
That also is an anniversary.  And some might say this St. Bartholomew
is the retribution.  God forbid I should accuse Him of punishing one
injustice by another.  But by all means let us avoid predictions.
Even agonies of remorse are not the most hopeless end of guilty
souls."

"Yet," said my father, "nothing is more safe than predictions of
retribution.  Most men being likely to suffer, and all men being sure
to die, what can be safer than to threaten either affliction or
death, or both, to those we deem guilty?  It seems to me," he
continued, "an endless and fruitless toil to make up the balance of
accounts between the churches as to persecution.  Perhaps all that
can be said is, that those who have had the least power have had the
privilege of inflicting the least wrong.  He who ruled England once
said 'he never yet knew the sect who, when in power, would allow
liberty to the rest.'"

"He was for license," interposed Aunt Dorothy.  "Heaven forbid we
should call that liberty."

"Ay, sister Dorothy, no doubt," said my father, smiling, "with many
sects liberty to any other is license.  That was what the Protector
thought.  Be thankful that you have no chance just now of making a
St. Bartholomew of your own."

"The Protector has had his retribution, brother," said Aunt Dorothy,
solemnly, "let us leave him and his politics in peace."

"But, sir," rejoined my father, turning to Dr. Rich, "after all, the
worst retributions are in our sins.  The loss of the soul in sinning
must be greater than any subsequent loss in suffering; and I confess,
to me no severer retribution seems possible to the Church which
inflicts this present wrong than the wrong itself, the loss of two
thousand of her most fervent and holy pastors, and the rending from
her of the tens of thousands who revere and follow them.  The losses
of churches, after all, are not in livings but in lives; not in money
but in men."

Bitter and biting, indeed, were the times around us, yet the prisons
of those days were more honourable than the palaces.  Better beyond
comparison any disgrace and suffering that reckless Court could
inflict than the disgrace of belonging to it.

With two thousand good ministers and their families thrown destitute
on the world, it was impossible that any of those who honoured them
could feel their own possessions anything but a trust to be
scrupulously husbanded for their succour.  Many hundreds also were in
prison, though none, I rejoice to think, of those two thousand, were
ever in prison for debt.  Then there were the Quakers, who bore the
brunt of the battle, carrying passive resistance as close to action
as possible, and persisting in meeting in public assemblies, though
certain to be dispersed by constables or soldiers with wounds or loss
of life.

Indeed it was for this reason, amongst others, we kept away from
London during the years following the passing the Act of Uniformity,
in the hope of keeping Annis Nye out of the peril we knew she would
confront if near enough to attend a meeting of Friends.

It was not any one party in the state whose hearts began to fail, but
the good men of all parties.

It was no longer Royalists or Roundheads only that were sinking, but
England.  It was not Puritanism or Presbyterianism only that the
Court affronted, but righteousness, purity, and truth.

Already the weapons of ecclesiastical or theological controversy, the
subtle and "unanswerable" arguments wherewith Episcopalians,
Presbyterians, Independents, Erastians, Calvinists, Arminians,
Semi-Arminians, and all the sixty sects Mr. Baxter had enumerated,
had been assailing each other during the past years, seemed to hang
rusting over our heads, as mere curious antiquities, such as the
bills and crossbows our ancestors had used in the wars of the Roses.

The contest was being carried to other ground; to the oldest
battle-field of all, and the most plainly marked.

As Job Forster said,--

"There's a good deal of the fighting that's been done these last
years, Mistress Olive, that's been a sore puzzle to a plain man like
me.  I mean the wars with words as well as with swords.  Friend and
foe used so much the same battle-cries, and fought under banners so
much alike, that when a man had gained a victory, it wasn't always
easy to see whether to make it a day of humiliation or of
thanksgiving.  The safest way was to make it both.  And after he who
could see for us all was taken from our head, things got clean
hopeless, and it was all shooting in the dark.  But now there's a
kind of doleful comfort in putting by all the long hard words with
which Christians fight each other, and taking up for weapons the Ten
Commandments.  A man feels more sure anyway they can't hit wrong.
There's been a deal of fighting and a deal of talking these last
years, and seems to me now as if the Almighty were calling us all to
a Quaker's silent meeting, to keep still a bit, and mind our own
business.  Perhaps when the talking and the fighting begin again,
they'll both be the better for the silence."




CHAPTER XI.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

"Davenant Hall, _October_, 1664.--The blow has fallen on us at last.
Aunt Dorothy and Annis Nye are together in prison at Newgate.

"Annis was the first taken.  Olive being for a time in London,
nothing could keep the maiden from attending the forbidden meeting of
Quakers, held at the Bull and Mouth, Bishopsgate.  And so it happened
that, one night, they looked for her return in vain, and Dr. Antony
going to search for her, found that the assembly had been broken up
by the soldiers with violence, and that among those seized and thrown
into prison was Annis Nye.  They would have paid anything, or taken
any pains to rescue her, but the peculiar difficulty in the case of
the imprisonment of the Quakers is, that they will do nothing and
suffer nothing to be done, which would in any way recognize the
justice of their sentence.  The magistrate in this case (as in
another which occurred at the same time) was willing to have set
Annis free, if she would have given any pledge to abstain from
attending such meetings in future.  But she said,--

"'Ask me not to do aught against my conscience?  If I were set free
to-day I must go to-morrow, if the Lord so willed me, to meet the
Friends at the Bull and Mouth.'

"Nor would she suffer bail to be given.  And so she was sentenced to
be carried beyond seas to the plantations in Jamaica--she and divers
other Quakers, men and women; the men being sentenced to Barbadoes,
and the women to Jamaica.

"Aunt Dorothy's heart was moved for the maid; but, nevertheless, she
shook her head, and said she had always prophesied such willfulness
could have no other end.

"'It was a pity,' said she, 'the rashness of such disorderly people
should throw discredit on the sufferings of sober Christians.'

"For she still clung to the belief that there was a legal submission,
a conformity to the furthest limit possibly compatible with fidelity
to conscience, which must be a safeguard for the personal liberty of
those who, like Mr. Baxter and herself, rigidly kept within it.

"But she was soon to be driven from this last point of hope.  In July
the Conventicle Act came into action, ordering that any religious
meetings in private houses, or elsewhere, of more than five people
besides the household, rendered those who attended them liable to
imprisonment or fines.

"And from that time no Puritan gentleman, who had an enemy base
enough to inform against him or happened to come in the way of a
common mercenary informer, could be safe.  Some even deemed it unsafe
to say a grace when five strangers were present.

"At Netherby, a few of the villagers had always been wont to join our
family-prayer from time to time.

"At the time of the coming of the Conventicle Act into operation,
Aunt Dorothy chanced to be alone in the house, the rest of the family
being in London, and she scorned to make any change.

"On Sunday morning, an ill-looking suspicious stranger dropped in on
their morning exercise.  And on the next the constables made their
appearance at the same hour, and arrested Aunt Dorothy in the king's
name.

"The servants talked of resistance, and the constables suggested
bail, but Aunt Dorothy refused either: the first, from loyalty to the
king; the second, from loyalty to truth.  She was guilty of no
offence against God or the king, said she, and was ready to stand her
trial.

"Accordingly she is in Newgate, and Roger is in London, doing all he
can, in conjunction with Mr. Drayton and Dr. Antony, to effect her
liberation.

"_Twelfth Night_, 1665.--I little thought that ever again, while we
are both on earth, anything should separate Roger and me.

"I had gone over, as I thought, all possible dangers, and resolved
that, in all, duty must keep me by his side.  Exile, war,
imprisonment, all I would share.  What duty could ever arise so
strong as my duty to cleave to him?

"And yet now Roger lies in prison in London, and I am imprisoned
here, kept from him by soft ties of duty stronger than bolts of iron.

"For in the cradle by my side, breathing the sweet even breath of an
infant's sleep, lies our little Harry Davenant Drayton.

"And in the next chamber, with the door open between, lies my father,
sleeping the feverish broken sleep of sickness, from time to time
calling me to his side by an uneasy moan or a restless movement;
scarcely able to bear me out of his sight.

"Roger was arrested for speaking some words of good cheer to a little
company who had gathered at early dawn in a solitary place to hear
their ancient pastor.  The pastor had been thrown into prison, and
the poor flock waited in vain.  Roger came to tell them of their
pastor's imprisonment, said a short prayer and a few words of good
counsel, and would thus have heartened and then dismissed them, when
the officers came and seized him.  Strange that he, so little given
to overmuch discourse, should be in prison for speaking.

"There were no bonfires or festivities to-day, as on that
Twelfth-night, all but a quarter of a century since, when all
Netherby, and my own brothers, and I made merry around the winter
bonfires; that night which was nigh costing Roger so dear; all life
and all the Civil War before us, then as unknown as to-morrow now!

"How scattered the company who met then!  On battle-field, and lonely
heath, and in the silent church; in this old house (which feels
almost as lonely and silent now), and in prison.

"Yet better now than then, in many ways, and for most of us.  Some of
the dearest who could never have rested here, at rest for ever above.
Roger with a rest in his heart no prison can rob him of.  And my
father nearer my mother, I think, than ever before in heart and soul.

"I read the Prayer-book to him often, and the Bible.  He makes little
comment, but loves to listen, and asks for the chapters and hymns my
mother loved best.  And sometimes he asks me what comforted her most
when she thought of dying.  And I tell him,--

"'Christ our Lord.  The thought of Him; all He said, did, and
suffered on earth; Himself living now in heaven.  All else, she said,
was Hades, the Invisible.  But Christ had become Visible; had been
manifested, seen, touched, and handled.  "God refuses us all such
poor pictures," (said she,) "as Pagans and Mussulmans have of their
paradises and elysiums; all pictures, except such as it is plain are
not pictures, but symbols; either because they contradict
themselves--as 'gold like transparent glass,' and seas 'mingled with
fire'--or, because we are told they are symbols, like the living
water and the Tree of Life.  The other world remains to us Hades.
But Christ the Lord has been seen by mortal eyes, held in the mortal
arms of a mortal mother.  His feet bathed with tears and kissed by
the lips of an adoring, penitent woman.  His hand laid with healing
touch on the leper none else would touch.  His hands nailed to a
cross, and His feet; the prints of the nails seen by Thomas; His
voice heard on the slopes of Olivet, by the sea-side, by the well.
Christ the Lord was heard and seen,' she said.  'And that makes all
the Hades a place not of darkness, but of light to me, where the
human heart can long to be, to adore Him, and yet remain human.'"

"'Did she say that?' my father says.  'Did she say that?  Then that
is what I can understand too.  Even she could have seen nothing but a
blank of darkness in it but for Him; but for Him. Then, sweetheart,
no wonder I seem like groping in the dark sometimes.  I who have so
much more sin to be forgiven, and so much less faith to see.'

"Then once I told him how that horror of thick darkness came on me
when she died, and how it was shone away by the Apostles' Creed.  And
he listened, gazing at me as if his soul were living on the words.
Then I read him the gospels; the stories of the resurrection.

"And then often, again and again, he asks me to repeat what my mother
said.  And each time, instead of growing dull by repetition, it seems
to grow living to us both.

"So I can have no doubt that my place is here, and not in the prison
with Roger, where otherwise it would be liberation to me to go.

"_January_ 30_th_, 1665.--No word from the prison for some days.  The
snow is white on all the breadths of the Fens, bounded only like the
sea by the gray sky, broken only by the Mere, black with ice, and by
the dark limbs of the trees which have stripped themselves 'like
athletes' to fight the winter storms.

"Sixteen years since they laid the king amidst the falling snow,
among his fathers, in the Chapel at Windsor.

"How little our sentences avail!

"Executed this day sixteen years as a murderer and traitor!
Celebrated to-day in every church throughout the land as a martyr of
blessed memory; while the bones of those who put him to death lie
mouldering under the gallows.

"Yet who shall say that the final sentence is given yet?  Higher and
higher the cause is carried from tribunal to tribunal, from the angry
present to the calm-judging generations to come, from these again to
the Tribunal above, from which there is no appeal.

"Of what avail for us to judge?

"The sentence is given there already; given, and known to those whom
it most concerns.

"What matters it what we are prattling about it here below?

"My husband has left among his papers some letters and journals from
the other side of the sea, which are well worn by much reading, and
noted in the margin in many places, so that in reading them I
converse with him, and find much comfort every way, both in the text
and the comment.

"The simple story goes straight to my heart, nerves and braces it at
once.  Never, I think, were sufferings borne with more of courage and
less of repining.

"Frost, famine, salt water freezing on their scanty clothing till it
was hard as the Ironsides' armour.  Then 'vehement' coughs came on,
'hectic,' and consumption; still they bore cheerfully on.  Out of the
hundred, seventeen died in the first February after their landing,
sixteen in March, sometimes three die in a day.  At last, at the end
of the winter, of one hundred persons, scarce fifty remained; the
living scarce able to bury the dead; the well not sufficient to tend
the sick.  And in a notice which touches me to the quick, the journal
says:--

"'While we were busy about our seed, our governor, Mr. Carver, comes
out of the field very sick, complains greatly of his head; within a
few hours his senses fail, so as he speaks no more, and in a few days
after, dies, to our great lamentation and heaviness.  His care and
pains were so great for the common good, as therewith 'twas thought
he oppressed himself, and shortened his days; of whose loss we cannot
sufficiently complain; and his wife deceases about five or six weeks
after.'

"She, belike, did not complain of his loss.  She endured; and died.

"And shall I complain while Roger lives? and of bodily hardship I
know nothing; though that, indeed, is scarce the hardest.

"Half the exiles dead, yet the rest never lost heart or distrusted
God; but went on, and toiled and conquered;--and made a home and a
refuge for their brethren;--began a New World.

"The sorrows were borne in unrepining silence, as knowing God the
Father would not try them on many that could be spared.  The mercies
are recorded with grateful minuteness.

"After their first harvest from seed saved from half-starving mouths,
they appointed an annual Thanksgiving Day; afterwards, after a time,
an annual fast.  But the thanksgiving came first.  And they made it a
right merry day: preparing for it by a holiday of hunting game for
the feast.  A wholesome and not gloomy piety theirs seems to me, like
John Bunyan's.  Moreover, they have eyes to see.  The journal tells
of forests 'compassing about to the very sea, with oaks, pines, ash,
walnut, birch, holly, juniper, sassafras, and other sweet wood;' of
forest paths and sweet brooks; of quiet pools and deep grassy
valleys; of vines, too, and strawberries; and sorrel and yarrow, and
cherry trees and plum trees.

"Deer range the forests, and wilder animals.  One poor man whose feet
were 'pitifully ill' with the cold, crept abroad into the woods with
a spaniel.  A little way from the plantation, two wolves ran after
the dog, who fled between his legs for succour; he had nothing in his
hand, but took up a stick and threw at one of them and hit him.  They
ran away, but came again; he got a pale-board in his hand, and 'they
sat on their tails grinning at him a good while, and then went their
way, and left him.'

"Cranes and mallards waded about the marshy places and plashed in the
pools; and now and then they started partridges and 'milky-white
fowl;' and birds sang pleasantly among the trees.

"The world seems so wholesome there, so adventurous, so full of life.
Sometimes I think if Roger were out of prison, one day I should like
to go there with him and our babe, and all the rest; away from the
conflicts of this distracted land; out of the way of courts and
prisons and Conventicle Acts, to conquer some more homes from the
wilderness.

"But, perhaps, this is only restlessness and repining; in which case
I should be no worthy member of such a company.

"I wonder if Roger ever thought of this, and never liked to mention
it to me, knowing how I love the old country and the old church?  The
pages are so well-worn and so carefully noted.  When we meet again,
at all events, I will show him I am ready for anything he deems good.
'Thy country shall be my country; whither thou goest I will go; where
thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried.'

"Yes, none can rob me ever more of that sacred right.

"_February_ 2_nd_.--A letter from Roger from the prison.

"Brief enough, as his letters and speeches for the most part are, yet
marvellously lengthy for him.

"'Our case is but little to be commiserated,' he writes, 'being so
much lighter than that of others, and we trust soon to be ended.

"'I might, indeed, have as fair a room as at Netherby, and as good
eggs, cheese, butter, and bacon as a soldier could wish for sold here
in the prison.

"'But no man, hale and strong (as I am, sweet heart, so never be
downcast), could know that hundreds of men and women, imprisoned for
much the same cause as we, are under the same roof, ill-clad,
ill-fed, and worse lodged, and enjoy his feast alone.

"'The Quakers, as usual, provoke the charge, and bear the brunt of
it.  The men's sleeping-room, till lately, was a great bare chamber
with hammocks hung between a pillar in the midst and the wall, in
three tiers, one above another; the air, by the morning, enough to
breed a pestilence.  God grant it do not.  For although this is
somewhat mended, these crowded prisons are little better than
pest-houses at the best.  And pestilences do not stay where they
begin.  Whitehall is not so far from Newgate but that the poison
might spread.  The Friends outside do what they can to succour,
clothe, and feed those within, arranging their help with a singular
order and care.  But much is left for us to aid in.  Wherefore, sweet
heart, send what warm woolseys and wholesome country food thou canst.
Leonard Antony will bring it and see it well bestowed.

"'We have good hope of deliverance, by payment of sundry fines and
other moneys.  Annis Nye, we fear, is sentenced to the plantations in
Jamaica.  But Aunt Dorothy will, no doubt, speedily be free, and
bring thee tidings.  So God keep thee and the babe.  And be of good
cheer.  I was never of better heart.  Farewell.

"'_P.S._--Thy brother Walter hath been to see me.  He was much moved.
And he is doing what he can for our release.  But he looks sorely
aged and changed.'

"_February_ 10_th_.--Aunt Dorothy is at Netherby again.

"She looks thin and pale after such prison-fare and lodging.  She
brings certain tidings that Roger will soon be free.

"Her wrath seems chiefly directed against the exactions of the
prison-officers.

"'Harpies!' said she, 'unconscionable harpies.  I would not have
given a groat of good money to fill their unhallowed coffers, and to
buy the rancid lard and fetid oil they dare to call butter and bacon,
or demeaned myself to ask them the favour of a lodging separate from
the vagabonds and purse-pickers, had it not been for that poor wilful
maid, Annis Nye.  She looked like a ghost or a corpse; a corpse with
the eyes of an angel, and the courage of a lion.  Yea, the courage of
a lion more than the meekness of a martyr.  Brave I say she is as any
woman ever was.  And brave the Quakers are.  But meek I never will
call them.  One of them was imprisoned for "finishing a job," mending
shoes, on the Sabbath morning!  On religious principles, quoth he;
breaking the Sabbath "on religious grounds!"  And when in prison he
let them nearly whip him to death, rather than confess himself guilty
by doing the malefactors prison work.  Indeed, he would have died but
for the tender nursing of Mr. Thomas Ellwood and the other Friends,
dressing his wounds with balsams.  For that they are friendly to each
other, these fanatics, no one can deny, brave and friendly; but
meek'--surely they are not.  I had almost to belie myself by
pretending to want a waiting-woman (a bondage I hate), before I could
prevail on that poor maid to let me have her in a room apart, and
nurse and cherish her as she needed.  For she had been sorely bruised
and wounded in the scattering of the meeting, where the soldiers took
her; and had been busier since with her "concerns" and her
"callings," to all seeming, than with mollifying her wounds and
bruises.  I am a woman of no weak nerve, niece Lettice, but my heart
sickened when I came to see how she must have suffered.  And she as
patient as a lamb, dumb and patient those Quakers can be.  I will
never deny that; dumb and patient, brave and friendly.  And now there
she is again alone, without a creature in their sober senses near her
to keep her from her "concerns" and her "calls."  There she is with
ever so many others, sentenced to "service" in Jamaica.'

"When Job Forster heard this sentence, he brushed his hand across his
eyes.

"'Poor maid! poor, pleasant, wilful maid!' said he.

"But before long he seemed to take a more cheerful view.

"'Perhaps it's for the best, after all, Mistress Lettice.  Who knows
but she might have been seized with a concern to go to preach to the
Grand Turk, or the Pope, or the Dey of Algiers?  Several of the women
Friends have done such things.  Not that the Turks are the worst foes
for a Quaker.  They listen to them as meek as lambs for they think
they are mad; and they think the Almighty speaks through mad people.
And then they escort them out of the country, as gracious as may be.
And I don't see what any saint could do better with a Quaker, poor
blind infidels though those Turks be.  Nay, the Turks are not the
worst danger for a Quaker.  She might have had a concern to go to New
England, to testify, as others of her sect have done, against the
severity of their treatment there.  And New England, they do say, is
about the hottest place a Quaker can go to just now.  They don't
listen to them, like the poor Turks.  And they do escort them out of
the country; but not graciously.  They beat them from town to town,
and threaten them with the gallows if they come back again, which
makes it a stronger temptation than any Quaker can resist to go back
as soon as they can.'

"This is a great perplexity to me.  I thought the people in New
England had gone there on account of religious liberty.  I must ask
Roger.

"_February_ 17.--Roger is with us again; scarce the worse for his
imprisonment, except a little hollow in the cheeks, and a good deal
of want of repair in his clothes.  I see he did not use the clothes I
had made.

"'A little more in good campaigning order,' he says, if I attempt to
condole; 'a little relieved of over-abundance of flesh.  That is all.'

"It is the way of the Draytons generally, and of Roger in particular,
that their spirits rise beyond the ordinary level in a storm.  I
suppose the family has been used to stormy weather so long that they
feel it their element.  They are at home in it, and like it.

"I have asked him about New England.  His face quite beamed, and his
tongue seemed unloosed, when he found the thought of going to the
plantations was not so terrible to me.

"He confessed that he had often thought it might be the best
resource, if things do not mend here, but had shrunk from mentioning
it to me.

"'We are all cowards, in some direction,' he said, with a smile.
'How was I to know, sweet heart, I had married a Deborah, whose heart
would never fail?'

"'Thou dost not despair for England?' I said.

"'God forbid!' said he.  'But the lives of nations count by
centuries, and ours by years, and that but precariously.  And,
meantime, while there is so little to be done here, I have sometimes
thought we might serve the old country best by extending her dominion
and anticipating her freedom in the new.'

"'But,' said I, 'I cannot make out about this freedom.  Job Forster
says they are by no means gentle to Quakers.'

"He paused a little.

"'The Quakers are not quite content with quietly pursuing their own
way,' he said.  'With all their objections to war and teaching of
passive resistance, their warfare is certainly not on the defensive
but a continual assault on other sects.  And at present the New
England plantations are struggling, not "for wellbeing, but for
being;" which is a struggle in which men are apt to make rough terms.
By-and-by, they will feel stronger, and be gentler; and the Quakers,
seeing that every man's hand is no longer against them, will cease to
set their tongues against every man.'

"'I scarce think,' he added, after a pause, in that low tone to which
his voice always naturally falls when he speaks of his old general,
'that the place is yet to be found on earth where such liberty exists
as the Protector would have had in England.

"'But it has scarce come to the alternative of exile yet.  I cannot
think that England will be steeped much longer in this Lethe of false
loyalty, forgetting not Eliot and Hampden, and the Commonwealth
alone, but Magna Charta, and all her history: all that makes her
England.'


LETTICE'S DIARY.--(_Continued._)

"London, _April_, 1665.--The last weeks of watching by my father's
sick-bed are over.  No bitterness mingles with the sorrow.  At first
it seemed as if we could do nothing but give thanks for the peace and
patience of those last days; and the rest for the spirit, so weary
and hopeless as to this world and its future--so full of lowly,
trembling hope as to the other.

"Then came the ebbing back of the tide of affection in a tide of
grief, the sense of blank and loss that must come and Roger thought
it best I should leave the old scenes altogether for a while, and
come to Olive's home.

"For the old home at the hall can never be a home for us again.

"Roland and his wife took possession at once, with workmen from town,
and a train of new servants.  Happily, my father had pensioned many
of the old household.

"My sister-in-law has remodelled my mother's oratory, and the old
places so sacred to me, as she wished, after the newest fashions at
Whitehall.

"But these changes in things, however sacred, are little indeed,
compared with the changes in people; the evil influences brought into
the household and the village by the dissolute train of serving men
and women, trained in the wicked manners of the Court.

"London, _May_, 1665.--The spring seems to unfold her robes slowly
this year, and feebly, like a butterfly I saw yesterday, in which
life was so low that it died whilst struggling out of its chrysalis.
There has been much drought.  The scant foliage in the parks and by
the road-sides grows old and gray with dust and drought almost as
soon as it is out.

"There have been comets and strange sights in the sky this winter.
Aunt Dorothy thinks they are for the nation's sins; but Mr. Drayton,
who attends the lectures of the Royal Society at Gresham College,
says they have to do with the revolutions of the heavens, not with
the revolutions in England.  'The signs of the times,' says he, 'are
not in the sky, but in the Whitehall gaming-tables.'  But Aunt
Dorothy shakes her head, and says the Royal Society, the Quakers, and
the Court together, are fast undermining the faith of the people.

"There are rumours that one or two poor folk in the villages of St.
Giles' and St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, between Westminster and the
City, lie sick with a malady men like not well to name.

"But all just goes on as usual.  The king feeds the wild-fowl and
plays pall-mall in the park, with the throng of idlers about him.

"There is little, indeed, at Whitehall to recall that it ever was
what Roger and the foreign ambassadors say it was in the days of the
Commonwealth; a virtuous princely home; still less to make it
possible to think the king recalls it as the scene of his father's
martyrdom.  A gaming-house, where wicked women are lodged, and fill
the galleries night and day with licentious revelry; where the wife
sits apart, neglected and despised, while her husband spends her
fortune on the mistress with whom he compels her to associate!

"Is there no English gentleman left, no relic of old knighthood, that
these things can be?

"Queen was a sacred name to the cavaliers of my youth.  Were there no
cavaliers left when the young queen, after patiently sitting apart
some time in her neglected corner of the room while the base throng,
with a king at their head, gathered around the mistress--at length
rose and withdrew to hide her bitter tears in her chamber;--were
there none of the old cavaliers left to rally indignantly round her
and shame the king back to her?  Were there no English gentlewomen
left to uphold her in the courageous and womanly resistance she dared
at first to make to the degradation of such company as the king
forced on her?--To say to her, 'For his sake and your own, never
yield to such dishonour!  Better weep alone, neglected for life, a
widowed wife, than stoop to be but the first of such a company!'

"Alas! now, poor lady, she has learned to hide her indignation, and
to converse freely with those any man with a spark of true manhood in
him, profligate though he might be, would have kept from her sight.

"And some still speak of the king as a model of grace and courtesy,
and extol his infinite jest and wit; comparing the polish of those
refined days with the rough, soldierly jokes of the Usurper!

"These days refined, and those coarse!  Roger says there is more
coarseness in the most polished compliment of this hollow Court than
in the roughest joke a man like Cromwell could ever make.  Just as
there is more coarseness in the theatre now established than in the
rudest jests in Shakspeare, whose plays the king's courtiers and
mistresses are too 'polite' to act, and the courtiers too 'polite' to
enjoy.

"For the royal favourites now are to be seen on the stage.  The
'lady' now, they say, does not reign alone.  The poor young queen has
this wretched revenge, at least, that the king can be constant to no
love, lawful or not.

"Bear and bull baiting, too, are restored among the 'refinements' of
the Court.  But, perchance, I am the bitterer on this, in that this
degradation presses me so close.  The gleam of better hope that broke
on us for Walter, when he appeared at our marriage and was reconciled
to my father, has long since vanished; and he is swept away again in
the whirlpool of the Court.

"It is this which obliges me to think of evils from which otherwise I
might turn my eyes.

"This Dance of Satyrs is to my brother, indeed, a Dance of Death.
These fires of sin are burning away his very life and soul, and none
can quench them.

"_June_ 3.--The numbers of poor sick folk in St. Giles' and St.
Martin's have increased fearfully.  The nobles and rich men take
alarm; many houses are deserted; the roads crowded with coaches full
of fugitives.

"The Plague is amongst us!  The Plague!

"To none of us not yet beyond middle life are the terrors of that
word fully known.  Mr. Drayton, Aunt Dorothy, and the aged, know the
meaning of the word too well.  In 1636, nearly thirty years ago, was
the last great desolation of the City.  Before that it recurred, with
more or less force, every few years.  Then it swept away a fifth of
the inhabitants.  But for the last sixteen years it has been scarcely
seen in London; merely four or five people in the year, in the lowest
districts, dying of it, and so preventing its being altogether
forgotten.

"Said Aunt Dorothy: 'The Commonwealth was not all a godly people
could wish.  But during the Commonwealth the Plague did not visit the
City.  That scourge, at all events, was not deemed needful.  Now the
Court has come back--or I should not say come back--such a Court as
was never known has come to us from those wicked, foreign, Popish
parts: and with the Court comes the Plague.'

"'The real Plague has been among us some years,' said Mr. Drayton.
'Heaven grant this Plague may be the purification.  But take heed,
sister Dorothy, take heed how we interpret Providence before the
time.  The scourge has fallen on too many of late for us to say too
hastily this is the Father's rod, and that is the Lictor's; or this
is the King's accolade to smite his servant into knighthood, from the
lower place of service to the higher.  What sayest thou, sister
Gretel?'

"'For me, brother,' she replied, 'there is little temptation of being
too quick to interpret, because I am so slow to understand.  So I
find it the safest way, when the rod falls on others, to hope it is
the King's accolade; when it falls on myself, I know well enough it
is the Father's rod--the loving Father's loving chastening, yet
sorely needed.'

"But Aunt Dorothy set her lips rigidly.

"'Some men's sins are open beforehand,' said she, 'going before to
judgment.  And all men say it does seem very notable just now that
death seizes most on the profane, and seems to pass the sober and
religious people by.'

"_June_ 3.--Rumours of a great victory over the Dutch Fleet.  The
news scarce stirs up the smitten city to the faintest semblance of
joy or triumph.  Yet are victories not so frequent now as to be made
common.

"_June_ 25.--The Court has fled to Oxford.  Whitehall is empty and
silent.  That mockery, at least, is gone out of sight of the people's
misery.

"The Court has fled, and the good Nonconformist ministers have come
back, and are allowed to preach in the churches from which they were
driven.

"_June_ 30.--We have held a family consultation to-day whether to
stay or go.  Roger and Leonard Antony had no doubt of their duty.

"Many of the physicians have left (to attend their fugitive patients,
they say), which makes it all the more needful, Dr. Antony thinks,
for him to remain.

"Many of the clergy, also (though by no means all), have fled (to
tend their fugitive flocks, they say).  And Roger deems it the plain
duty of a Christian man, who is here already by Providence placed in
the midst of the peril, to stay, and give what help he can to the
stricken and the bereaved, by counsel, alms, and words of Christian
hope.  This is the kind of season that unlocks Roger's lips.  He
grows eloquent, when dying men and women look to him to lift their
hearts to God.  At least, the few words he speaks are eloquent, and
refresh the heart like cold water after a burning drought--cold and
fresh, because of the deep places from which it comes.

"They tried a little to persuade Olive and me and the children to
seek refuge elsewhere.

"But not much, seeing that all persuasion could be of no avail to
move us to this.

"Thank God, it is _not_ my duty to be parted from him now.  God
spares us this agony.

"Indeed there is one mitigation to the anguish of this time of
terrors.  Death comes to many households now almost as the Glorious
Epiphany for which my mother looked; as it were with a great trumpet,
in the twinkling of an eye, smiting whole families together, without
parting, from earth to heaven.

"For what richer mercy could we ask?

"_July_.--The sunny sky, unshaded by a cloud, still smiles its
terrible steady stony smile on the drooping city; like a countenance
which despair has smitten into idiotic vacancy; like an eye from
which madness has dried the tears.

"It is strange to have such leisure as we have now to listen and
think.  For in one thing Roger and Dr. Antony are firm.  They will
not suffer us to go into the infected streets, nor indeed to leave
the garden, save by the water-gate, to give the children fresh air in
the meadows by the river.

"We keep everything as much as possible in its wonted, even course.
Our family prayer and psalm have not been omitted once; Roger's
father leading it, for Roger and Leonard are seldom present.

"Maidie and Dolly sew and help us in the house, where there is much
to do; since we hold it duty by no means to suffer our servants to
remain in the infected city, unwilling as they were to depart.
Mistress Gretel, Mistress Dorothy, and Olive, therefore, do the
kitchen and the household work, and I and the young maidens help all
we can; although (being brought up too helplessly) I am not of half
the use I would be.

"This regular even living Dr. Antony deems the best precaution.  He
believes a feverish convulsive kind of religion is as dangerous as
any other excitement, and that we have great need at such (as at all)
times of the exhortation, _Study to be quiet, and to do your own
business_.

"Much as he honours those who preach in the churches, he could desire
that their exhortations were sometimes less alarming.  The people are
roused and alarmed enough, he says, by the pestilence.  Death itself
is preaching the Alarm and the Call to the unconverted.  What sermon
can preach 'Prepare' like Ten thousand Deaths in a week?  The
preachers should preach Christ and His peace, he thinks.  And so no
doubt many do.

"The magistrates do what they can to produce the same regularity in
the city.  London is not wholly abandoned by all her rulers in her
sore need.  Bread is as abundant and cheap as ever, though it must be
brought to us at some peril.

"There is a great quiet in the streets.  No holiday processions now.
The merry-makers are all gone from the city or from the world.  No
funeral processions.  There are no burials, except by night.  The
city is dying.  But there are no tolling bells, no reverent slow
steps of the mourning train.  The magistrates dare not let the
mourners go about the streets by day.

"Death is stripped of all the pomps with which we seek to hide its
terrors, and stands bare.  The only funeral procession is the
dead-cart with its ghastly drivers; the dead-cart met at the head of
each alley with shrieks of despair which break the silence of the
night.  Twice the drivers of that cart were lost, and the horses
rushed wildly on.  But no one knows if the drivers died or fled.  The
general tomb is that dread Pit in the fields where the dead are
thrown at midnight, of which we scarce dare even think.

"The pestilence makes no distinction that any of us can understand
now.  Aunt Dorothy has well-nigh given up seeking to read God's
judgments, which at first she and many thought so distinct and
distinguishing.

"Yet amid all these horrors there are alleviations such as sometimes
do make the meaning shine through them, as if they were illuminated
from within.

"Divisions have ceased.  Instead of disputing questions of precedence
as on a mock battle-field, Christians draw inward to the citadel,
which is the sole and common refuge of us all.

"Mere religious talk has ceased.

"People whose talk is deeper than their life, do not dare to talk for
fear of having to prove their words the same hour in dying.

"People whose life lies deeper than their speech, do not need to talk
of what they feel.  The peace which sets them free to serve and
comfort all around, speaks enough, with very few words.

"Persecution has ceased.

"The pestilence, with its cruel Act of Uniformity has altogether
annulled that of the king.  Divers of the ejected ministers, now that
ten thousand are dying in a week, have resolved that no obedience to
the laws of mortal men whatever can justify them in neglecting men's
souls and bodies in such extremities.  They therefore stay or return.
They go into the forsaken pulpits, unforbidden, to preach to the poor
people before they die; also to visit the sick, and get such relief
as they can for the poor, especially those who are shut up in the
smitten houses.

"The fear, and hope, which at first made people avoid each other,
have passed together.  And the churches are crowded whenever any
preach who speak as if they testified what they knew.

"'Religion,' Roger says, 'is gaining such a hold of numbers of these
weeping, silent listeners, as, living or dying, will not be loosed
again.'

"And (unless the Puritan preaching is different from any I ever
heard, or thought to hear) the sermons are such as the evident
possibility of the preachers never preaching another, and the
certainty of many of the congregation never hearing another, alone
can make them.

"They are messages, not statements or arguments; scarcely so much
appeals as messages.  The calmest allusion to danger penetrates the
heart like the archangel's trumpet, when ten thousand dying lips are
echoing it.

"'_You are lost--wandering and lost in sin_.'

"That has a strange power, when we know it to be true, and see before
us the edge of the abyss.

"'_The son of God has come to seek and to save the lost_.'

"He, Himself, not the plague, but the Saviour, is here, seeking the
lost now; not to judge but to save.

"_God has so loved the world_; not hated, let these horrors say what
they may--not forgotten--but loved; not willed this open world to
perish, let these grass-grown streets, and these shutters rattling
against the empty houses, these midnight burials of thousands, these
death-wails, this death-silence, say what they will, _not to perish_;
the true perishing, the perishing in sin, of sin, is not His will,
never His will, but the being saved, out of sin and from sin.  _This_
salvation is as near you as the plague.  Nay, the plague is only the
merciful thunder calling to it.

"Few words are needed to move men now; no new words.  The older the
better.  If the old forgotten words once lisped at a mother's knee,
better than all.

"O Walter!  Walter! my brother!  Art thou here still in this
plague-smitten city, or hast thou fled with that Court smitten with a
plague so infinitely more terrible?  Would God thou wert here to hear
those sacred words of heavenly forgiveness and strength, echoed back
to thy heart once more, as from our mother's lips, from among these
congregations of dying men!

"_August_ 25.--It has come close to us at last.

"Our door is marked with the red cross now.

"The sweetest and ripest souls among us--Roger's father and Aunt
Gretel--have been stricken, and are gone home.


"Yesterday morning, before daybreak, I was resting on my bed, having
watched through the night, when I heard the latch of the garden-door,
which was left open for Roger and Dr. Antony, softly lifted.  I
thought it might be Roger, and crept down-stairs.

"At the door I met Annis Nye.

"Her face was pale and worn, but serene as ever, and her voice as
calm.

"'I heard that you were all here, without any to serve you,' she
said, 'and I thought that was a call to me to come.'

"'Do you know into what peril you come?' I asked.

"'I saw the plague-sign on the street-door,' she said; 'so I came
round through the garden.'

"I clasped her in my arms, and kissed her, and wept.  Tears are not
common with us now; but I could not help these.  Generous deeds
always touch the spring of tears, I think, more easily than sorrow.

"What was stranger than my being thus moved, when Aunt Dorothy came
down and saw Annis, and heard why she had come, she did as I had
done; she took the maiden to her heart and wept.

"But what sounded stranger yet in that house and city of death, when
the children saw her, they made the hushed house ring for a moment
with their joyous welcomes.

"'Annis is at home again!' they said; 'Annis is safe.  She will nurse
us all, and keep every one, quiet, and we shall all get well.'

"Meantime, Mistress Dorothy had busied herself preparing food, which
she set before Annis, and with difficulty persuaded her to take a
little bread and milk.

"She had a strange story to tell, and she told it in few words, as
was her wont, at our questioning.

"'I and other women Friends were sentenced to the plantations in
Jamaica,' she said.  'But the ship-masters refused to take us.  They
held our sentence unjust, and feared the judgment of the Lord if they
meddled with us.  At last one was found who took us, he being denied
a pass down the river from the plague-smitten city unless he
covenanted to carry us.  They had trouble in getting some of us on
board.  For they would not acknowledge their sentence so far as to
climb willingly into the ship.  So they had to be hoisted on board
like merchandise.  To this I was not called.  For which I was
thankful.  For it angered the sailors sorely.  "They would hoist
merchants' goods," said they, "but not men and women."  But the
officers took the ropes, saying, "They are the king's goods."  So, as
chattels, we were shipped for the plantations.  But we had scarce
reached the sea when the pestilence broke out among us.  One and
another sickened and died.  So that the ship-masters would proceed no
further, but cast us on shore, and me among the rest.'

"There was a kind of comfort in feeling that, coming thus from an
infected ship, the generous maiden had not really increased her risk
by devoting herself to our service, freely as she had dared to do so.
And our risk could scarce be increased.

"Having told her tale, Annis quietly folded her out-of-door garments,
laying them aside in the old places, and said to Aunt Dorothy, 'Which
way can I serve thee best?'

"We took her to Mr. Drayton's sick-chamber, Olive's eyes brightened
with the soft moisture of grateful tears as Annis entered, where she
sate by her father's bed.

"But that was no place or season for spoken thanks or questionings.
Annis at once fitted into her place among the nurses.  And I know not
how any of us could have survived those days and nights of watching,
but for her help.

"Aunt Dorothy said,--

"'I will take heed how I speak lightly of Quakers and their calls
again.'

"Yes; the two readiest among us have been called home.  Roger's
father and his mother's sister.  Honoured and beloved beyond any.

"Yet we speak of them quietly, almost without tears.

"Death is so around us--without, within, everywhere--that it seems
the most natural thing.  We say, 'They are gone home,' with less
sense of separation than in ordinary times we say, 'They are gone to
Netherby,' with far less than we should have said, 'They have gone
across the seas.'

"It is so likely we may be with them again to-morrow--to-day!

"I look back a page or two in this Diary, and the words they spoke
and I wrote so lately have become sacred, dying, farewell words.

"'_The Father's rod_.'  Yes, that was what _they_ thought.  '_The
King's touch smiting them from the lower service to the higher_,'
That is what we think, and we say it to each other as their epitaph.

_September_.--No distinction, indeed, this pestilence makes as to
whom it smites.

"What I wished, yet scarce dared to wish, for Walter has come true.

"Could I have dared to wish it, had I thought it could come?

"Two nights since, Roger came to my bedside and said,--

"'Lettice, I dare not spare thee, even thee, from a call such as
this.  Canst thou be ready to come with me quickly, to visit one
smitten with plague?'

"From any voice but his, the sudden, midnight summons would have set
my heart beating so as to rob me of the power to obey.

"But there is always a calm about him which nerves me to do anything.
Besides, he said, 'Come with me.'  And that was strength itself.

"I did not waste time in questioning.  He left me to tell Annis Nye
not to wake Olive.

"I was dressed in a few minutes.  Then I went and kissed the babe.
It might be perilous for me to touch his soft cheek, rosy with sleep,
when I came back.  If ever I came back to him!  For that was a
probability which must be met in such a leave-taking.

"As I stood by the child's little bed, Roger came back.

"'We will kneel beside him,' he said.

"And in a few brief words he prayed, for strength to comfort, for
wisdom to guide, for balm to heal.

"Before we rose, I knew what he meant

"'It is Walter,' I said.

"He took my hand in his, and we spoke no more.

"Silently we went out, our steps echoing through the streets, the
great bonfires, kept up now in each street to purify the air,
lighting us on our way, now illuminating with tongues of fitful flame
the red cross and the closed door, now more drearily lighting up the
empty chambers of the houses of the dead, which needed no longer to
be closed, whose half-opened shutters creaked restlessly in the night
winds.

"We stopped at the steps of what had been a stately mansion.

"The door was ajar, as Roger must have left it.  There were none to
usher us into the lofty hall or up the wide staircase, on whose stone
stairs our steps echoed so noisily through the deserted chambers,
step as softly as we might.

"Through one luxurious chamber after another we passed, our steps
hushed on soft Persian rugs, and softened by tapestried walls.

"In one lay virginals and lutes and song-books, as if from a recent
concert.  In another, a table spread for a feast--the wine still
sparkling in the glasses, and summer-fruits mouldering on the
porcelain.

"And in the last chamber, upon a stately gilded bed with silk
curtains, he lay, my brother, with scarce open, half-vacant eyes,
which seemed as if their sight and meaning were gone, his hands
clenched in agony.

"Yet he saw and knew me, for he cried with an energy which pierced
the silence like a death-wail--

"'Take her away, Roger! take her away!  I will not have that at my
door!  Take her away!'

"But I went close to him, and gently unclasped his clenched hand, and
kissed his forehead, and said--

"'Two of us have been smitten already, Walter.  We are past peril.'

"'Who have been smitten?' he asked suddenly.  'Not your child?'

"'No,' I said--and I felt my voice falter--'not our Harry.'

"Then his mind seemed to wander, for the far-off past came back so
vividly as to blot out the days that had intervened.

"'Harry, my brother Harry--don't speak to me of Harry,' he said.  'He
loved me, and sent a dying message that he looked to meet me.  And he
never will--he never will.'  And then,--

"'I am dying, Lettice, don't you see? dying--body and soul.  For
mercy's sake don't come near me.  If you can bear it, I can't.  There
will be torments enough soon.  Don't burn my soul thus with your
purity and your love.'

"I took his hand, and pressed it to my lips, for I could not speak.
But he drew it away with a convulsive energy.

"Take her away, Roger!--don't let her!  She doesn't know what I am,
or who it was these hands touched last.'

"And then at intervals he told us how, when the Court left, a small
company of the more reckless young courtiers had persuaded him it
would be cowardly to go; and they had established themselves in this
house, belonging to a kinsman of one of them, and held wild revelries
there.  How he had half intended, when he had heard we remained in
the City, to break with these dissolute associates, and find us out;
and had once or twice crept into churches by himself and heard
sermons, but had delayed and hesitated from week to week; until at
last, towards the end of August, a singing-girl, one of their
company, had been smitten with the plague.  Then the door had been
closed and marked, and all the revellers had escaped through windows,
over the leads of other houses, or over the palings of gardens to the
river, and so into the country.  But he could not shut his heart to
the dying shrieks of that poor lost girl, and abandon her to die
alone.

"'I meant to wait till she was dead,' he said.  'and leave the men of
the dead-cart to find her in the empty house and bury her, and then
to follow the rest.  I had enough on my conscience without being
followed through life with those dying cries.  But before she died I
began to feel ill myself.  I tried to keep up my spirits with wine;
but that was of no use.  And then I found half a dozen leaves of an
old Prayer-book--the sentences and the Confession, and the
Absolution, and one or two of the Gospels.  I entreated her to let me
read to her, but she would not listen, but kept deliriously singing,
mixing up light songs, bad enough at any time from a woman's lips,
with strains of music from the Royal Chapel, and melodies of innocent
old Christmas village carols, in a way horrible to hear.  And then
she died, and I was too ill to leave.  And I crept into this bed.
That was yesterday.  And at night-fall there was a rattling at the
door, and heavy steps up-stairs, and heavier down again.  So I knew
they would bury her.  But I lay still under the coverlet; for a
horrid dread came over me that they might find me, carry me down, and
bury me with her, to save time.  There had been horrible jests among
us of such things happening.  But the door shut, echoing through the
empty house like thunder.

"'And I knew I was left alone to die.  And then another horrible
feeling came over me; that it would be better if they had found me,
and taken me out to die quietly among the dead, without thinking any
more about it, than leave me here lingering alone to think of it; to
look at death steadily, alone, no one knows how long; with nothing
but dying between me and it.

"'And to pass the time and break the silence I took up the old
Prayer-book and read aloud,--

"'_When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness_.  But I
thought, I can never turn away from my wickedness.  I can only turn
round and round in it for ever and ever.  So I stopped, until the
silence was worse to bear than the words; and then I read on again.
But my own voice sounded to me like a parody.  Dreadful jesting
voices seemed reading the sacred words after me, until I came to the
Confession.

"'Then the jesting voices vanished.  And, instead, came my mother's
voice, and my own, as a boy, saying it after her, "We have gone
astray like lost sheep."  I might have said it once, I knew, and have
_come back_; now I should have to _go on saying it_ for ever, with
her voice echoing it as if from heaven, and _never come back_.  If I
could hear the voice of some one good reading this Confession and the
Gospels, I thought they might seem true, even for me, yet, but never
in my own.

"'So I flung the book from me, and lay still until I heard a man's
feet coming softly up the staircase; and I thought it was a thief
come to pillage, and then perhaps to murder me.  And the insane
desire of life mastered me again; and I covered my face again and
hushed my breath, until I heard Roger's voice beside me saying,
"_There is no one living here_."  And then I looked up.  And all
night he has been speaking to me, Lettice--nursing me as my mother
might, and now and then reading out of the Gospels and the
Confession.  And if the merciful words would seem true to me in any
voice sister, they would in his.  If I had only gone to you all
before!  But it is too late, Is it not too late?  Is not my life
wasted, lost--lost for ever?'

"He gazed into my eyes with that wistful, thirsting look of the souls
who are departing.  I knew nothing but truth would avail.  So I said
as quietly as I could,--

"'Your life--this life, Walter--I am afraid it is lost--lost for
ever.  Your _life_; but not you, Walter; not you.'

He kept his eyes fixed on mine, and said,--

"And there is no second, Lettice.  God Himself cannot give us back
the lost life again.'

"Then all that he might have been, all my mother hoped he might be,
rushed over my heart, and I could not say any more.  I could only
kneel down by his bedside and take his hand and sob out,--

"'O Father, Thou knowest all he might have been, all Thou wouldest
have had him be.  And Thou seest the ruin they have made of him.
Have pity, have pity, and forgive.'

"He laid his hand on mine.

"'Hush, Lettice, hush!' he said; 'not _they--I_.  I have ruined
myself.  No one could have ruined me but myself.  The sin is mine.'

"Then I rose.  For I felt as if my prayer was answered.  I felt as
if, weak, trembling woman that I was, a priestly voice was in my ears
pronouncing absolution, ready to breathe the gospel of forgiveness
through my lips.  For it seemed to me these were the first words of
real repenting I had ever heard Walter utter.  I had heard him again
and again speak of himself or his life with a passionate loathing.
But that was not repenting.  Too often if any one admitted the
justice of such self-accusations, he would turn them into
self-excusing and accusings of others.  But now, it seemed to me, he
was indeed coming to himself, coming home; and I said,--

"'Walter, you could not turn from the cries of that poor dying
creature.  Will you set your pity above God's?'

"'I had none but myself to think of,' he said.  'It mattered nothing
to any one whether I did right or wrong about it.  He is King and
Judge, and has the whole world to think of in forgiving any one.'

"'Our Lord did not say so,' I said.  'When the lost son arose to come
home to be forgiven, it seemed as if the father had nothing to do
with any one in the world but with him.  He did not think of what the
servants would say, or the elder brother, or how any one else might
be tempted by the forgiveness to wander.  He was watching the
wanderer!  Oh, Walter, He was the first to see him turn--the first!
He was the first to see you.  I know it by the parable; I know it
because, after all--after _all_, Walter--He has let you die at your
post.  Think of the mercy of that!  You might have died helping to
ruin some one.  You die trying to help.  Think of the mercy of being
suffered to do that!'

"A softer light came into his eyes, and after a minute he said,--

"'I cannot doubt His pity; no, I dare not.  What I doubt is myself.
How can you know, Lettice, how can I know, that if life were given
back to me I might not waste it all again?'

"Then turning that intense searching gaze from me to Roger, he went
on,--

"'How can I know whether I am clinging to Him, as a dying man clings
to _anything_, or indeed as the repenting son to the Father?  How can
you know or I?'

"Roger bent low over him and said,--

"'Neither you nor I can know.  One only knows.  He only can forgive.
He knew, on the cross, when He was dying for the world, and the thief
beside Him was dying for his own crimes, and dying He forgave the
dying.  He knows now.  He is as near as then, and not _dying; living_
for evermore; almighty to save.  But even if you are clinging to Him,
as a drowning man to a rock, or to an outstretched hand, in mere
terror of the waves, is He one likely to wrench His hand even from
such a poor, desperate, selfish grasp as that?  Did He on the Sea of
Galilee?'

"Walter drank in all Roger said, but made no reply.

"Roger's next words fell solemn as a summons from another world.

"'What do you want Him to save you from?'

"Walter's answer was a cry of agony.

"'From myself!--from myself!'

"Roger's voice was firm no longer, but low and broken as Walter's
own, as he replied,--

"That He died to do; that He lives to do.  That He can never refuse
to do for any that ask Him, for ever and for ever.'

"Then, after a few moments, Roger said,--

"'If He sees no other way to save you but that you should lose your
life, that you should not be trusted with it again, could you be
content?'

"'How can I be content?' Walter answered, 'Think what my life might
have been, It might have been like yours!  And I have no second.  I
would not complain.  It is no wonder I cannot be trusted.  I cannot
trust myself.  But you can never know how bitter it is to begin to
see what life might have been when it is all over, and when you begin
to see how well He you have grieved was worth serving.'

"He lingered some days.  And then the lost life was over.

"The life those we had served not disloyally had done their utmost to
ruin.

"The spirit had departed, which He we have served so unworthily even
to the uttermost can save.

"It was beyond comparison the bitterest sacrifice we had ever made.

"Yet this sacrifice England is now making by hecatombs on the same
foul altar.

"A sacrifice not of life ennobled, and made infinitely worthier in
laying it down, but of honour, of virtue, of all that makes men men.
Of souls degraded in the sacrifice to the level of that to which they
are sacrificed.  A sacrifice to devils, and not to God."




CHAPTER XII.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

"Broad Oak, _February_, 1666.--For a brief season we are in this
haven, driven into rest by many storms.

"The Plague has left London.  The Court has returned to it unchanged,
to pursue its revelries.  The ejected ministers who preached to the
dying city are once more silenced and driven from their pulpits, and
not only driven from their pulpits but from the city, by the Five
Mile Act, which prohibits any ejected minister, on severe penalties,
from approaching within five miles of the church where he was wont to
preach.

"Roger deemed his work in London for the present done.

"When we left, the streets were fragrant with the smoke of sweet
woods, burned in the houses, and curling through the open windows day
and night.  The air was laden with strange Oriental odours of
incense, of aromatic gums and perfumes, floating the spirit on their
dream-like fragrance (as perfumes only can), within the spells of
Enchanted ground.

"Yet the change is pleasant, to this wholesome country air, fresh
with the smell of the new-ploughed earth, of the young mosses and
grasses shooting out everywhere bright tiny spikes or stars of
jewel-like green, of the breath of cows, of gummy swelling leaf-buds,
and fir-stems warmed into pungent fragrance by the sun, of early
peeping snow-drops and rare violets, of sedges moistened by the
prattling brooks, of free winds coming and going we know not whence
or whither--from the mountains, from the sea, or from the forests of
the American wilderness.  It is invigorating to body and soul to
change those costly foreign manufactured perfumes for all these
countless, changing, blending, breathing fragrances, which make what
I suppose is meant by 'the smell of a field which the Lord hath
blessed.'

"It is a wonderful relief to be here, after what we have gone
through; free to go where we will, living with open doors, neighbours
freely coming and going, guests, unsuspected, dropping in at the
hospitable door from the highway.

"It is not so much like coming in a ship out of the storm into the
haven, as like being quietly laid on a friendly sunny shore, after
buffeting with panting chest and weary arms through the waves which
have made the ship a wreck.

"Something of this calm, indeed, began to come even before we left
London.

"It is a thing never to forget, the change that came over people's
countenances on the first morning late in September, when the number
of the dead was in the week declared to have diminished instead of
increasing; the tears that those first gleams of hope brought to eyes
long dry in despair; the re-awaking of neighbourly sympathy, as each
house ceased to be either a refuge against infection, or a pest-house
from which it issued; windows opened fearlessly, once more, to hear
good news.  The reserve which, like a fortress, rampart with rampart,
guards the deepest feelings of our people, broken down by the common
deliverance; strangers grasping each others' hands in the streets,
merely for the joy of telling the good news, weeping aloud for
gladness, or uttering the brief fervent thanksgiving--''_Tis all
wonderful; 'tis all a dream?  Blessed be God, 'tis all His own doing.
Human help and skill were at an end.  Let us give thanks to Him_.'

"This melting together of men's hearts in the rapture of a common
deliverance, struck me more than all.  It made me think how the best
balsam to heal the wounds of Christendom would be for Christianity to
be once more understood as the Gospel of Great Joy which it assuredly
is.  There would be little room for controversy, I thought, and none
for isolation and exclusion, if every heart could only be penetrated
with the joy of the forgiven Prodigal, and of the Angels' Christmas
hymn.

"Some people in their eagerness to purify their houses burned them
down.  Wild despair was succeeded on every side by hopes as wild.
Those who had suspected every one, and crept along the streets,
fearing to touch each other's garments, grew so bold that they no
longer feared even the poor ghastly scarce-recovered victims of the
Plague, who began to limp about the streets with the bandages of the
dreaded sores and swellings still around their heads and limbs.

"If even the reckless Court itself had lived through that peril and
that rescue, I think it would never have affronted Heaven and this
city of mourners again with its profligate revelries.  The City,
indeed, was well fumigated from infection with perfumes, and with
brimstone, to make it a safe dwelling for the Court.  But what
incense, what fires, can purify England from the infection of the
Court itself?

"We should have gone to Netherby, but that is scarce a safe home just
now for Roger.  A vexatious suit has been instituted against him, on
the ground of his aiding or abetting in some 'disloyal' attempt of
which he knew nothing.  But we know it is his work during the
Commonwealth that is the true ground of prosecution.  Sir Launcelot
Trevor will never pardon Roger's detecting him in one of the plots
for assassinating Cromwell.  It is not the hard laws themselves,
severe as their restrictions and penalties are, that cause the most
suffering.  It is the power they give to bad men to annoy the good.

"Already much of the Drayton property has been sacrificed through
vexatious exactions.  But now it is more than property that is
threatened.  And so this pleasant home of Broad Oak, which is a house
of mercy to so many, has now become a refuge for us.  We are, in
fact, here as in a hiding-place, until this tyranny be overpast, or
we can find some other refuge.

"Our host, Mr. Philip Henry's courtly deference of manners, his
listening to every one as if he had something to learn from each, has
more charm for me than I like to confess to myself.  It recalls the
stately courtesy of my brother Harry and of the Cavaliers who were
his contemporaries.

"The Puritan manners are severer and less chivalrous than those of
our old Cavaliers, though with more of true knightly honour to women
in them than the courtiers of this New Court are capable of
comprehending.

"We read together often, Roger and I, these old records of the early
settlers in the American wildernesses.  We are beginning now to glean
more particular tidings concerning the various village communities
into which the settlers have now organized themselves.  For more and
more we begin to speak of a 'New Netherby' rising beside some inland
mere or pleasant creek of the forest in New England.

"'Not that I despair for a moment of England,' Roger says.  'But we
have but one life, and its years are few and precious; and if the
good fight is going on victoriously elsewhere, it seems scarce a
man's place to stay where the best he can do is to keep quiet and
hide for his life.'

"_February_, 1666, Broad Oak.--There is a serenity and sunshine about
this house which makes it like an island of fair weather in the midst
of the turbulent world.  Continually it recalls to me Port Royal.
And even more by resemblance than by Contrast.

"It seems to me as fully as Port Royal a temple or house of God.  (In
one sense I, as a Protestant, should believe more, since the church,
not the convent, is God's sacred Order.)  Every morning and evening
all the inmates and family assemble for _prayer_ and _reading of the
Bible_.  'As the priests in the tabernacle,' Mr. Henry says, 'used
daily to _burn_ the _incense_, and to _light the lamps_.'  All pray
kneeling; for Mr. Henry 'has high thoughts of the body as God's
workmanship, and desires that it should share in the homage offered
to Him.'

"Mr. Henry never makes this service long, so as to be a weariness; he
calls it the 'hem to keep the rest of the day from ravelling.'  In
the evening he gathers his household, servants, workmen, day
labourers, and sojourners, early, that the youngest, or those who
have done a good day's work, may not be sleepy.  'Better one absent
than all sleepy,' he says.

"He explains the Bible as he reads it, not merely '_mincing it
small_, but by _easy unforced distribution_.'  Above all, he seeks to
lift up before the heart '_Christ, the Treasure in the field of the
Bible_.'  'Every word of God is good,' he says, 'but especially God
the Word.'  He closes with a psalm; sometimes many verses, but sung
quickly, every one having a book, so that there is no interruption to
the singing.

"Afterwards his two little boys kneel with folded hands before their
father and mother, and ask their blessing, while he pronounces the
benediction over them, saying, 'The Lord bless thee.'  On Thursday he
catechizes the servants on some simple subject.

"On Sunday, 'the pearl of the week, the queen of days,' the perpetual
Easter-day on which we sing, 'The Lord is risen indeed,' the whole
house seems so full of tranquil light, all sounds and signs of
needless labour banished, all the sweet sounds of nature, birds and
bees and running brooks, heard with a new music in the hush of human
rest, the men and maids in their sober holiday attire, that it is
difficult to believe there is not an audible, visible increase of
light and music in the external world, that the fields, and woods,
and skies, have not also donned a festive attire, that the sun is not
shining with a new radiance, like the ancient Lamp of the sanctuary,
fresh filled and trimmed for the Sabbath.  It shines on the heart
with a quiet radiance, like the last chapters of the Gospels; the
resurrection chapters.  The household, since Mr. Henry has been
silenced, attend the Church service in the little neighbouring
parish-church of Whitechurch, always going early, before the service
begins.  The walks through the field to and from the church are a
sacred service in themselves, by virtue of Mr. Henry's discourse.  In
truth, there is no silencing the music of such a piety as his, unless
you could make it cease to flow.

"This temple also has its shrines and inner sanctuary.  Mrs. Henry
pointed out to me the little chamber where her husband prays alone;
when he changed it he consecrated the new one with a special prayer.
I remember Roger's father used to call the direction, '_When thou
enterest into thy closet shut thy door_,' 'the one unquestionably
divine rubric of the New Testament.'  And it seems to me beautiful
that the inmost sanctuary of our houses, as of our hearts, should be
that which it consecrated by solitude with God.

"Then, like Port Royal, this is a house of mercy.  Standing near the
way-side, it is seldom that the hospitable board has none but inmates
round it.  And Mr. Henry's simple, fervent thanksgiving at the table
must, I think, go along with the traveller on his further journey,
like the echo of a hymn.

"The order of the convent, moreover, can scarcely be more thorough
than that of this home, save that it is broken, like the order of
nature, by the sweet irregularities and varieties which always come
to stir all Divine order out of monotony.  The Hand which can make
Life the mainspring of its machinery may dare irregularities.

"Port Royal was especially recalled to my mind by a letter I received
last November from Madame la Mothe, in which she speaks of the return
of the nuns to Port Royal des Champs.  Four years ago they were
dispersed into imprisonment in various convents, in the hope that the
courage of each alone might fail, so that in isolation, moved by the
most plausible persuasions and the severest threats, the community
might separately sign the condemnation of Jansenism, which they had
refused to sign together.  It was a simple question of fact.  They
were required to declare that the five condemned propositions were in
Jansenius' books; thus asserting what they believed false to be true.
But out of the ninety-six nuns thus dispersed eighty-four returned
unshaken.  Madame la Mothe writes:

"'Such a welcome and restoration home as the holy sisters had was
worth sore suffering to win, as the various carriages met, bringing
the Mother Angélique and her scattered daughters once more together.
The church bells pealed joyous greetings, and the peasants shouted or
wept their welcomes, flocking by the roadside, along the steep
descent into the valley, in holiday dresses; gray-haired tottering
men, little toddling children, mothers and babes in arms--not a
creature that could stir left behind to miss the joy of welcoming
their benefactresses back.  And so the long procession of nuns, in
their white robes, with scarlet crosses, disappeared under the great
Gothic gates, into the sacred enclosure.  It was a sight
indescribably beautiful to the eye, but who can say what it was to
the heart?'

"Martyrs not so much to truth as to truthfulness, they would not
recognize the distinction between consenting to what they deemed a
lie and telling it.

"Should not their enemies concede at least this merit to the two
thousand ejected ministers?  They may be over nice, as I think they
are, in some of their scruples.  But why cannot people, who see a
noble heroism in eighty nuns suffering ejection and dispersion rather
than declare that false which they believe to be true--rather than
bring on their souls the degradation of a lie--see something of the
same heroism in two thousand English clergymen with their families
suffering ejection, calumny, and peril of starvation rather than
solemnly declare they believe things true which they believe false?
The families who have to share the misery whether they will or no, do
not make the sacrifice easier.

"Yet many a tender-hearted lady of our acquaintance, of the old
Cavalier stock, whose face has glowed with interest when I have told
her of the sufferings and constancy of the Mère Angélique and her
nuns, and who has rejoiced with me when I read the story of their
restoration, can see nothing but vulgar perversity and obstinacy in
the conduct of these ejected ministers.

"Why cannot these also be honoured as martyrs, if not to truth, at
least to truthfulness?

"Can it be that the white dresses and red crosses, and the grand
arched entrance gates make the difference?

"Or is it merely that the one took place in France and the other at
home?

"Building the sepulchres of the prophets is such easy and graceful
feminine work!  As easy as tapestry work, especially when the
sepulchres are reared in the imagination, and the prophets prophesied
to other people's forefathers.

"But it seems as if, in heaven, not the slightest value was attached
to those elegant little erections.

"The one thing regarded there seems to be whether we help and honour
those who are contending or suffering for truth and right now.  And
this is not always so easy.

"For, on the other hand, Aunt Dorothy was not a little incensed when
I once told her (intending to be conciliatory) that I thought the
Nonconformist ministers quite as much to be honoured as the Mère
Angélique and her nuns.

"'To compare Mr. Baxter and two thousand of the most enlightened
ministers in England to a set of poor benighted papists!' said she.

"And she was only to be mollified by the consideration of the
deficiency in my own religious training.

"Perhaps for us women the safest course is to render as wide a
succour as we can to all who suffer.  Because then if we make any
mistakes as to truth, in the great account they may be
counterbalanced by the entries on the side of love; which, on the
whole, seems to overrule the final judgment.

"_March_, 1666.--We are to leave this friendly holy roof for another
shelter.

"Many a sharp-cut diamond of Mr. Henry's good sayings I shall carry
away with me.

"'_Repentance is not a sudden land-flood, but the flowing of a
perennial spring; an abiding habit_.'

"'_Peace is joy in the bloom; joy is peace in the fruit_.'

"But more than all such sayings, I bear away with me the memory of a
sanctity as fresh and fragrant as any I ever hope to see, fragrant
not as with the odours of manufactured perfumes, but with the
countless fragrances of a field which the Lord has blessed.

"An Endurance of affliction made all the lovelier by the capacity for
the happiness it foregoes,--by the belief that every creature of God
is good and to be enjoyed with thanksgiving which prevents its being
stiffened into austerity; a submissive Loyalty ennobled by the higher
loyalty which prevents its becoming servile; an open-handed charity
sustained by busy-handed industry, by the thrift which deems waste a
sin, and the justice which deems debt a degradation; a Devotion whose
chief delight is to soar and sing, and which sings never the less
when it stoops to serve; a Religion as free from fanaticism,
worldliness, or austerity as any the world can see.

"A piety which would have been my mother's element; worthy it seems
to me of the sober joyful liturgy she loved so dearly, yet to which
Mr. Henry cannot entirely conform.  Yes; it seems to me a piety more
unlike that of the Puritans of our early days than unlike that of
George Herbert or of Port Royal.  A lovely, patient, quiet, meek-eyed
piety!  It recalls to me the group of St. Paul's gentle graces,
'love, joy, peace,' and the rest, which I used to think pictured my
mother's religion, far more than St. Peter's belligerent virtues,
godliness, faith, courage, which seemed to me to stand forth in sword
and breastplate like the religion of Roger and the Ironsides.

"'If the old Cavaliers, alas, are gone,' I said to Roger to-day, 'it
seems to me the old Puritans are gone as well.  Mr. Philip Henry is
far less like you Ironsides than like my mother.  This is a piety, as
I deem, which would have suffered in prisons and pillories to any
extent, but would scarcely have lifted its voice in the Parliament
with Mr. Hampden and Mr. Pym, and would certainly not have raised the
standard at Edgehill or Worcester.  Where are the old Puritans gone?'

"'Where we may follow them, sweet heart,' said he; 'to fight the
wolves and conquer the wildernesses of the West.'

"'Then,' said I, 'are the wrestling manlike Christian virtues to
migrate to New England to subdue the New World; whilst the feminine
Christian graces are to stay at home to endure the pillory and the
prison?  That were a strange division.  Meseems, what with
prohibitions to speak, and imprisonment, and the banishment of the
fighting men, this patient, passive nonconformity can never spread.
Rather, perhaps, in a generation or two it will die out.'

"'Scarcely, I think,' he said.  'The old country is patient and dumb,
and sometimes takes a long sleep but I believe she will wake one day,
and break the nets they have entangled her in, and scatter those who
twisted them, simply by rising and shaking herself.  Only her sleep
may be too long for us to wait to the end of it.'

"'But who is to wake her?' I said.  'A piety this of Mr. Henry's,
like that of Mr. Herbert, beautiful and pure enough to convert the
world, if some louder voice could only rouse the world to look at it.
But whence is this voice to come?  For it seems to me our liturgy,
though the purest music of devotion that can rise to heaven if once
people are awake to hear it and to sing it, has scarcely the kind of
fiery force in it to arouse the slumbering world.  And if the Puritan
religion becomes alike meek and soft-spoken, whence is this
enkindling fire to come?

"You might as well have asked our ancestor Cassibelawn where the fire
was to come from when the forests were cut down,' he said.  'While
the forests give fuel enough, who can foresee the coal-pits?

"'Perhaps,' he added after a pause, as in a muse, 'when the spring
comes and the ice melts and the music of the living waters breaks on
England again, as it must and will, the new streams will find new
channels.'

"Our discourse was broken at this point by the arrival of two
horsemen who dismounted at the door.  The hospitable board was spread
for the midday meal, and as we went down to take our places at it,
Mr. Henry introduced us to these new guests as friends of his.

"They were Dr. Annesly and Dr. Wesley,* two of the nonconformist
ministers."


* Maternal and paternal grandfather of the Wesleys.



OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

Troubles came, as troubles are wont to come, in troops, sweeping down
on us thick and fast in the year which followed the plague, 1666.

Through the whole year Roger was in concealment with Lettice and
their boy.  Lands and houses are no safeguards in a persecution where
so much lies at the mercy of informers.  And Roger--and Lettice
also--had an implacable enemy in Sir Launcelot Trevor, the profligacy
of whose early years had, at its second fermentation, soured into
malignity against those who had reproved or thwarted him.  It was Sir
Launcelot, indeed, who hunted us hither.  In his youth he had made
some careless studies in the law, and now he was appointed one of the
judges.  Vexations which render life impossible for all the best ends
of living are terribly easy to inflict when bad laws are executed by
worse men.  And it was this which made the misery of those times.
The laws were indeed (as we believe) harsh and unjust; but it was the
authorities who made them and the judges who administered them, it
was the _spirit_ in which the _letter_ was carried out that made them
(at last) unsupportable.

About the spring of this year the pressure of the times fell hard on
cousin Placidia.

Her son Isaac was arrested for attending a forbidden meeting near
Bedford, and was thrown into the old jail on Bedford Bridge, where
John Bunyan (though loyal as Mr. Baxter), had already been
incarcerated for six years.

Thence, Isaac wrote as if imprisonment in such company were not to be
imprisoned but emparadised.  "Such heavenly discourse as John Bunyan
makes here," said he, "would make a dungeon a palace."  He gave hints
also of a wonderful story, or allegory, which the tinker was penning
in the jail, and which (said Isaac) would make as much music in the
world, when it came forth, as Mr. Milton's poems.  We smiled at the
lad's enthusiasm, for it was not to be thought that a poor tinker,
however godly, could write anything beyond edifying sheets suited to
paste on the walls of poor folks like himself.  Indeed, we had seen
some verses of his, which, though full of piety and patience, were
scarce to be called poetry.

And that very year Mr. Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker (and a friend of
Annis Nye's), who had once been reader to Mr. Milton in his
blindness, brought us marvellous accounts of a manuscript Mr. Milton
had given him to read at a "pretty box" Mr. Ellwood had taken for
him, during the Plague, at Giles Chalfont.  It contained the Epic
Poem called "Paradise Lost."  Thomas Ellwood said to him, "Thou hast
said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of
Paradise found?"  Some time afterwards, Mr. Milton showed him another
poem called Paradise Regained, saying, in a pleasant tone, "This is
owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to
me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of."

So that, seeing, besides all he had already done to the marvel of
Europe, Mr. Milton had these wonderful epics in store, it naturally
amused us not a little that Isaac should compare this good tinker
with him.  Nevertheless, we honoured the lad's heartiness, and
rejoiced that in his doleful condition he had such pious company to
comfort him withal.

Not so, however, his mother.  Her distress knew no bounds.  This
affliction tore her heart in twain; setting what was highest in her
in fierce civil war with what was lowest.  For, in spite of all her
protestations of poverty, rumour had rather magnified than diminished
the amount of cousin Placidia's hoards.  The more she sought to keep
them unknown, the more magnificent they grew in the busy imaginations
of her neighbours.  And coffer after coffer of her painfully hoarded
stores had to be confessed and emptied as she sought to bribe one
exacting officer after another to release her son; until, the more
she gave, the more they believed she could be tortured into giving,
the more the ingenuity of informers and the greed of jailers
increased, and the more distant grew the prospects of poor Isaac's
liberation.

My heart ached for the torture she went through as, bit by bit, she
had to offer up the money which was dear to her as life, for the
child who was dearer.

"It was worse than the boot or the thumb-screw with which they are
torturing the poor Covenanters in Scotland," I said one day to Job
Foster, when we were staying at Netherby; "screwed tighter and
tighter till it crushes the bone."

"Never heed, Mistress Olive," said Job.  "Thank the Lord it isn't in
your hands but in His, who loves Mistress Nicholls a sight better
than you.  It isn't her _heart_ that screw is crushing, it's the
_worm in her heart_ which is eating it out."

"Thou art somewhat hard on Mistress Nicholls," said Rachel, "to my
mind; after all, she had saved it all for the lad."

"Women's hearts are tender," said Job, giving an emphatic hammer to
the spade he was repairing, "and thine tenderer than any.  But
there's a love tenderer than thine.  Glory to His holy name, He did
not put away the sorrowing cup for all His own pains.  And He will
not put aside the healing cup for all our crying.  In His warfare it
isn't once setting us on Burford church roofs, nor twice, that keeps
us steady to the Captain's lead."

This trouble of Isaac's meantime wrought much on Maidie, who had
always repaid Isaac's devoted homage loftily, and not always
graciously, since the early days when he overwhelmed her with the
unwelcome offering of his best hen.  Sharp-sighted as these children
are (flatter ourselves as we may) to spy out our failings, and
intolerant of them as youth with its high standards will be, Maidie
had been wont to hear cousin Placidia's moans of poverty with
ill-disguised incredulity, and to call her economies by very
unsparing scriptural names.  But now Isaac's imprisonment seemed at
once to exalt him in the perverse maiden's imagination from a boy to
a hero.  She wrote to him; and what was more, Dolly treacherously
reported that she wept nights long about him; and (which was the
greatest triumph of all), she began to love his mother for his sake.
"It was plain," she said, "how unjust she had been to cousin
Placidia; it was plain that it was only for Isaac's sake she had
pinched herself, and sometimes also other folk.  Otherwise, would she
be ready to part with everything for his sake now?  It was noble for
a mother to deny herself for her son," pronounced Maidie; "and if
this denying extended to others sometimes, it must be excused.  It
was but the exuberance of a virtue; and she, for her part, was
ashamed of having ever spoken hardly of cousin Placidia, and would
never do so again."

So a close bond grew up between these two; and it became clear to me
I should have to spare a portion of my daughter's love to soften with
its free sunshine, and quicken with its own generous youth, this
heart that had grown so old and shrivelled with self-imposed cares.

And it was also plain what would come of this when Isaac, always so
faithful to her, came out of prison, at once exalted into manhood and
smitten into knighthood in Maidie's eyes--by persecution, and found
Maidie already ministering to his mother as a daughter.  Indeed, the
betrothal was already accomplished in all its essentials.  And it
seemed to me that, so beggared and so enriched, cousin Placidia would
have at last no alternative but to throw aside the self-deceiving and
self-tormenting which had made her youth old age and her wealth
poverty, and in her old age and destitution for the first time to
grow rich and young.


As the year went on, more and more our thoughts turned to the New
World on the other side of the sea.  Roger's mind had been turned
thither ever since the Lord Protector's death, as the only place
where in his lifetime it was probable he would be able to render
England those "public services for which a man is born."

Loyalty he believed England had refused to the prince God sent her,
and was suffering for it.  Liberty was a word which would scarcely
come forth again as a watchword of noble warfare with the men of this
bewildered and subdued generation.

On the other hand, my husband, while the prisons were fuller than
ever of sufferers for conscience, found it more difficult than ever
to obtain access to them or to give them succour.

Cousin Placidia, on her part, was ready for any refuge which would
keep Isaac out of the way of John Bunyan and the informers.  Job and
Rachel Forster still hesitated.  They could not "get light upon it."
They doubted whether it would not be deserting the post they had been
set to keep; and more especially whether it would be safe to take
Annis Nye, who had gone to live with them, to New England.  I think
also they were more moved by sympathy with Annis Nye's beliefs than
they quite knew themselves.  Rachel thought the Quakers had been set
to give a wonderful testimony for peace and patience in an age when
there was too much fighting; and for silence in an age when there was
too much talking.  And Job said, "We have done fighting and talking
enough in our day, in my belief, to last some time; and now the Lord
seems to be saying to us, '_Study to be quiet and to do your own
business_,' and, '_Where two or three are gathered together, there am
I in the midst of them_.'  That's about where the lessons for the day
seem to me to be just now.  And I've a mind we'd better be in no
hurry, but sit still and learn them."

Aunt Dorothy was prepared at any moment to shake off the dust from
her feet against the profligate Court which encouraged
Sabbath-breaking, theatres, and bear-baitings, and banished five
miles from its suburbs the loyal and godly ministers who had laboured
so faithfully to bring it back; and against the infatuated country
which could pay servile adulation to such a Court.

She was also a little troubled at Mr. Baxter's marrying so young a
wife, and winced a little when Lettice defended him and declared that
at heart Aunt Dorothy's place, after all, was beside the holy maids
and recluses of Port Royal.

Still we lingered.  It was not so easy to despair of the re-awaking
of an England in which John Milton was still living and thinking, and
John Bunyan, and John Howe, and Dr. Owen, and Richard Baxter, and
through which thirty thousand of Cromwell's soldiers were still
scattered, working at their farms and forges throughout the land.
Nor was it easy to leave such an England, so few years before a Queen
of Nations, as long as she would but give us a little space to work
for her, and a little reason to hope.

But slowly the necessities which pressed us from her shores gathered
closer and closer around us, until we could linger no more.


The great Fire of London brought my husband to a decision.

Our own house escaped; but many houses in the city, in which much of
his property consisted, were burnt.  And the misery of so many
thousands, whom our losses deprived us of the power to relieve, made
us at last resolve to make the voyage, while we had the means yet
left to pay the ship-master and purchase such goods as we should need
in beginning life again in the wilderness.

At ten o'clock on the 2nd of September, 1660, the flames of that
terrible Fire burst forth.  By midnight they raged.  In three days
the whole city was a heap of smoking smouldering ruins.

To us who lived at Westminster, it seemed as if the fierce eastern
wind was driving the flames towards that guilty roof at Whitehall,
which scarce a righteous man in the nation but deemed to be itself
the plague spot and the Gehenna which was bringing desolation by
plague and fire on the whole land.

All the night the sky was fiery, "like the top of a burning oven."
In the day the air was so thick with the coiling columns of smoke,
that "the sun shone through it with a colour like blood."  Those who
ventured near said that the pavements glowed a fiery red, so that no
horse or man could tread them, and the melting lead from the burning
churches ran down the streets in a stream.  Now and then the dense
masses of smoke were broken by the stones of St. Paul's flying like
grenadoes, or by a sudden burst of vivid flame making the smoke
visible even in the daylight, as some of the coal and wood wharves
and stores of oil and resin along the river side were seized by the
fire.  And the steady roar of the flames was only broken now and then
by explosions, as vast powder-stores split asunder, or by the
wailings and cries of the ruined people running to and fro in
helpless consternation, not even attempting to save their goods.

Still, day and night, the east wind, so steady in its fierceness,
drove on the flames and smoke _towards us--toward the Court_; till,
on the third day, they crossed towards Whitehall itself.  Fearful, it
was said, was the confusion in the houses of revelry.  Good men could
think of nothing that ever could be like it but the universal
conflagration of the world.  But again, as in the Plague, the Court
escaped.  The neighbouring houses were blown up, so as to kill the
flames by starvation; and at last their impetuous onset was stayed,
and Whitehall was left without one of its gaming-tables or chambers
of revelry being touched.

Streets in the west, which were nests of unblushing wickedness,
escaped; whilst the city, of which Mr. Baxter said "there was not
such another in the world for piety, sobriety, and temperance," was
burnt to ashes.

Aunt Dorothy took this much to heart; and from that time I scarcely
remember her attempting any more to interpret the Divine judgments,
which had once seemed to her so easy to translate.

After the horror came the misery and the desolation.  It is when the
ashes of the fires which desolate our lives are cold that we first
understand our loss.  And it was many days before the ashes of the
great Fire of London were cold enough for men to tread them safely
and learn the extent of the ruin; to see the fountains dried up, the
stones calcined white as snow.

Two hundred thousand homeless men, and women, and little children
were scattered in the fields and on the hill-sides, chiefly on the
north, as far as Highgate, by the wretched remnants of their
household stuff.  They were ready to perish of hunger;--yet my
husband said they did not beg a penny as he passed from group to
group.  Some of them had been rich and delicately lodged and clothed
three days before, and had not learned the art of craving alms.
Others were, it seemed, too stupified.  His Majesty did his utmost to
make provision for their relief (said the admiring courtiers) by
"proclamation for the country to come in and refresh them with
provisions;" which, moved by the proclamation of the king (or by
another proclamation issued sixteen hundred years before by One who
spake with authority), the country people did, to the glory of the
king and the admiration of the courtiers.

It was not the easiest thing in the world as we looked from one side
of our house over the blackened heaps of cinders, where three days
before had stood the City of London, and on the other towards
Whitehall, standing unscathed; when we thought of two thousand
faithful servants of God forbidden to speak for Him; of ten thousand
houses, from not a few of which had gone up day and night true prayer
and praise, made desolate; of a hundred thousand, not a few of them
good men and true, swept away by the Plague the year before; and then
of all the riotous voices in the palace not silenced, but permitted
to speak their worst for the devil; it was not always easy to keep
firm hold of the truth that "all power is given in heaven and earth"
not to the accuser and the enemy, but to "Jesus Christ the
righteous."  It was not easy.  We had to endure in those days "as
seeing Him who is invisible."

My husband said, indeed, that the fire might prove to be God's
fumigation against the pestilence; and that the pestilence itself was
but (as it were) "the ships to take us to the other side, being sent
in a fleet instead of one by one."

But in the pestilence which is inwardly and eternally pestilential,
the pestilence of vice and selfishness, which was corrupting the
inner life of England, the raging fire of sin which consumes not the
disease but the soul,--who could see any good?

Roger's and my old puzzle of the apple tree yawned beneath and around
us, a great gulf, dark and unfathomable as of old.

If our hearts were less tossed about on the surging waves of this
abyss than of old, it was not that the waves were quieter or less
unfathomed.  We knew them to be deeper than we had dreamed.  For we
had tried line after line and touched no bottom.  We felt them to be
more unquiet, for the times were stormier, and we were no longer on
the edge but launched on the sea.  It was simply that, falling at the
feet of Him who stood at the helm, we could worship Him with a deeper
adoration, and trust Him with more confiding simplicity.  "Thou
knowest the other side," we could say.  "Thou art there.  Thou art
taking us thither.  Thou knowest the depths.  Thou alone.  Thou hast
risen thence, Thou knowest God.  We see Him manifested in Thee.  And
Thou hast said, good and not evil is the heart and the crown of all.
And we are satisfied."

So, after a heavy winter on the edge of that desolation which we
could do so little to restore, we left our old house in London in
March, and went in the spring for a few weeks to the old home at
Netherby, before it was broken up and passed out of our hands for
ever.

Many of the old fields--we had roamed over every one of them--had
already been sold to meet the expenses thrown on Roger by the
lawsuit.  And now the old house itself was to be sold.  Oliver's
Parliament had not altogether reformed the Law.  And I suppose no
reformation of laws avails very much when the men who administer them
are corrupt.  Besides, unsuccessful revolution must be dealt with as
rebellious; those who fail must expect to suffer.  Roger and most of
us had made our account for that, and it was not of that we
complained.

It was not safe for Roger and Lettice to be with us at Netherby.

Of this I was almost glad.  The more the old home was like itself,
the harder it would be to leave.  There were enough voices silent for
ever, making every chamber, and every nook of garden and pleasance
sacred by their echoes, to make the parting such a wrench as scarcely
leaves us the same ever after.

All Aunt Dorothy's Puritan training had not swept the heathen
idolatry out of my heart.  For what else was it to feel as if all the
dumb and lifeless things had voices calling me and pleading "for sake
us not, forsake us not, have we served you so ill?" and arms
stretched out to cling to us and draw us back.

The store-room over the porch, where Roger and I had held our Sunday
conversations; the chamber where my father's books and mathematical
instruments still were, where he had taken me on his knee and said,
"Before the great mysteries, I can only wonder and wait and say like
thee, '_Father, how can I understand, a little child like me?_'"--the
wainscoted parlour where "Mr. Cromwell of Ely" had talked to us of
"his little wenches," and looked at Roger with softened eyes,
thinking, perchance, of that death of his first-born which "went as a
sword to his heart, indeed it did;" where John Milton (not blind
then) had played on the organ, and discoursed with Dr. Jeremy
Taylor;--how dared I have tears to spare for leaving such as these,
or even the graves of our fathers in the old church they had helped
to build, and the pews where we and ours had knelt for generations,
when England had lost Liberty and the strenuous heart to strive for
it, and it seemed almost the heart to weep for it now it was gone,
and could not afford her noblest even a grave?

But there were other partings which went far deeper into the heart,
on which even now it is best not to dwell much, partings from those
whom it was no idolatry to feel it very sore to leave, old faithful
friends--our father's friends; (and every familiar face in the
village, as it came to see us go, was as the face of a friend to us,
going we knew not whither, among we knew not whom.)

We could never have left them had it been possible to us to befriend
and succour them longer at home.  As many as could leave went with us.

And hardest of all it was to pass the old forge, and see no friendly
faces there, and know that Job and Rachel were praying for us in the
old cottage within not daring to see us go.

Cousin Placidia was away making the last effort to release her son.

So we went at the beginning of April to Southampton, where the ship
was.  We had to wait some days there for her sailing.  Dreary, blank
days, we thought they must be, suspended between the old life and the
new.  But two surprises made them bright to us as a beginning, rather
an end.

Two days before we started, Isaac appeared, with his mother.  He
looked very much as if the prison had indeed been a Paradise to him;
and her face sharp and worn as it was, seemed to me stamped with the
cares which enrich, instead of impoverishing, the cares of love
instead of the cares of covetousness.  There was a glow and a rest in
her eyes, as she looked on Isaac and Maidie, which I had never seen
there before.  And as to Isaac and Maidie, I believe distinctions of
time and place were just then so dim to them, that if you had asked
them where those days were spent, they would have been clear but on
one point, and that was that it was most surely not in the Old World,
but in a world altogether and for ever New.

Thus, as so often in the music of this changing life, the "dying
falls" were interlinked with the swell of the opening chords.  And
so, with nothing to mark it as the last, the last evening came.

So the last evening came.  Roger and Lettice, with their little Harry
Davenant, were already safe on board.  We were to join them at the
dawn.  And when we climbed up into the ship, very strange it was to
find my hand in the welcoming grasp of a strong hand, certainly not
that of a strange sailor's, and looking up, to see Job Forster, with
Rachel and Annis Nye behind him.

"There was no help for it.  That wilful maid would come," he said,
apologizing to himself for doing what he liked.  "She had the
'concern' at last I have been afraid of all along.  She was set on
going into the lion's den; so, of course, there was nothing for it
but for Rachel and me to come and take care of her."

So we sailed down Southampton water, by the shores the _Mayflower_
had left nearly a half a century before.  There were clouds over the
wooded slopes of the dear old country as we looked our last at her,
which broke ere we had been long on board, blending earth and sky in
a wild storm of rain.  But before we lost sight of the shore, the
clouds were spanned by the rare glory of a perfect rainbow, bridging
the storm with hope.

Then, as we sailed on, the clouds rose slowly and majestically,
detaching themselves from earth in grand sculptured masses, like
couchant lions guarding the land; until at sunset they had soared far
up the quiet heavens, and hovered like angels with folded wings over
a land at rest.

And as we looked, Lettice said to Roger,--

"See, is it not a promise of the better sunshine hereafter to come?"

"It is a witness of the sunshine now behind," he said; "of the
unquenchable sun which shines on both the Old England and the New."
And he added in a low voice, in the words of Oliver Cromwell,
"'_Jesus Christ, of whose diocese we are_,' on Both Sides of the Sea."



CONCLUSION.

OLIVE'S MEDITATIONS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SEA.

_New Netherby_, 1691.--New always to us, but already to many grown
into "the old house at home."

Again I am alone in the house, as on the day when the quiet rustling
of the summer air among the long grasses, and the shining of the
smooth water, and the smell of the hay from the hay-stack, carried me
back to the old house on the borders of the Fen country, in the days
of my childhood.

The crimson and gold of a richer-coloured autumn than that at home
glows in the forests and in the still creek below, over which the
great trees bend, And autumn is also on our lives; its fading leaves,
and also, I trust, its harvests and its calms.

At many intervals, these recollections of my life have been gathered
together out of the old yellow leaves in the oaken chest.

The past has lived again to me through them.  But not through these
pages alone.  The past lives not only in the dried herbs and grasses,
in memories and monuments, but in every blade of grass and ear of
corn of the present; in our new houses and our old home customs, our
new laws, our new conflicts, our victories and our hopes.

Old England lives and breathes in every breath of this our New
England.  Sometimes from what we have heard during the dreary years
of oppression, we have thought she lived more truly here than in the
England we have left.

The household is away, and the pleasant cheery house is silent.  It
is not the harvesting that has emptied the house and the village
to-day.  It is the thanksgiving for the harvest: the one festival
which the first settlers in the wilderness appointed, in the first
year of their exile, when the land was indeed a wilderness and an
exile, and the next harvest a precarious blessing.  More than half a
century this festival has been kept.  A venerable antiquity for New
England.

And now our hearts are rich with tenfold offerings of praise.

For at last we believe the harvest of the seed sown in the wars and
suffering of early days has been brought in!

The great Englishman who, as we believe, served England so well, has
still no monument in our country nor even a grave.

But a true Prince of a race of princely deliverers, a race whose
deeds fulfil more than their words promise, the grandson of William
the Silent, the Liberator of Holland--is on the throne of England.

Once more, on the last days of January, forty years after the death
of Charles the First, the throne was vacant.  For King James had fled.

The link with the past, so sacred in England, which failed Oliver,
places William of Orange on the throne.

"Yet," saith Roger, "but for Oliver, King James had never fled, nor
William of Orange never reigned.  The throne of the one hero is the
best monument of the other."

Heavier and heavier the tidings came to us from across the seas year
after year; until the climax seemed to us to be reached, when in one
year one gentlewoman was beheaded at Winchester for giving refuge to
two fugitives of Monmouth's Rebellion, and another was burnt at
Tyburn for a similar act of mercy.

The free Puritan spirit seemed to us often extinct during those years
of corruption and wrong.  Hope of deliverance for the nation seemed
to have expired in men's hearts.  The best men seemed to gather up
all their courage to suffer cheerfully.  Christianity appeared no
more with the sword of the warrior, keen to redress wrong, or the
sword of justice, heavy to suppress it, but with meek folded hands as
the martyr to endure it.

Yet we know all through the darkness the old fires were burning
still, though they burned now in the still fires of devotion,
patience, and meditation, rather than in the flames which consume
fetters or which evangelize the world.

Beautiful words came to us from across the sea; high words of highest
hope when lower hopes were quenched; of largest tolerance of
difference of thought, blended with a truthfulness ready for any
sacrifice rather than darken the soul with the least shadow of
falsehood.

The very names of the books written then, with the circumstances
under which they were written, sounded to us like a psalm.

From imprisoned Bunyan, a "Pilgrim's Progress from this world to a
better," written in Bedford gaol.

From blind Milton, barely suffered to live, "The Paradise Lost and
Regained" sung in the darkness which he felt to be "the shadow of
celestial wings," in that lost England he never lived to see restored.

From silenced Owen, "The Glory of the Person of Christ," "The
Mortification of Sin in Believers."

From silenced Howe, "The Living Temple,'" "The Blessedness of the
Righteous," "On Delighting in God," "The Redeemer's Dominion over
Hades."

It was of little avail to the kingdom of darkness the silencing of
such as these.  It was silencing their thoughts from "a life," to "an
immortality."  It was giving them a planet to preach from instead of
a pulpit.

It was of little avail to crush with a weight of oppression hearts
such as these.  All the oppressions pressed out of them--no moans,
but only immortal songs.

And dear to us as any were the wise and mellowed words of Richard
Baxter, especially his declaration of the "_things in which he
himself had changed_," as he learned, by the slow teaching of life.

In our hearts they were written in letters of gold, the autumnal gold
of harvests.

"Among all parties," he wrote, "I found some that were naturally of
mild, and calm, and gentle dispositions; some of sour, froward,
peevish natures.  Some were raw, inexperienced, and harsh, like a
young fruit.  And some I found to be like ripe fruit, mellow and
sweet, first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated.

"But the difference between the godly and ungodly was here the most
considerable of all.

"In my youth I was quickly past my fundamentals, and was running up
into a multitude of controversies; but the older I grew the smaller
stress I laid on these controversies and curiosities (though still my
intellect abhorreth confusion), as finding greater uncertainties in
them than I at first discerned; and finding less usefulness even
where there is the greatest certainty.  _The Creed, the Lord's Prayer
and the Ten Commandments, are now to me as my daily bread and drink_;
and as I can speak and write over them again and again, so I had
rather read and hear of them than of any of the school niceties.  And
this I observed with Bishop Hooker also, and with many other men.

"Heretofore I placed much of my religion in tenderness of heart and
grieving for sin, and penitential tears, and less of it in the love
of God, and studying His love and goodness, than now I do.  Now my
conscience looketh at love and delight in God, and praising Him, as
the top of all my religious duties, for which it is that I value and
use all the rest.

"I was once wont to meditate most on my own heart, and to dwell all
at home, and look little higher; I was still poring either on my sins
or wants; but now, though I am greatly convinced of the need of
heart-acquaintance and employment, yet I see more need of a higher
work.  At home I find distempers to trouble me, and some evidences of
grace; but it is above that I must find matters of delight and joy,
and love and praise itself.  Therefore I would have one thought at
home upon myself and my sins, and many thoughts upon Christ, and God,
and heaven.

"Heretofore, I knew much less than now; and yet was not half so much
acquainted with my ignorance; but now I find far greater darkness
upon all things, and perceive, how very little it is that we know in
comparison with that we are ignorant of.

"I see more good and more evil in all men than heretofore I did; I
see that good men are not so good as I once thought they were, but
have more imperfections.  And I find few are so bad as either their
malicious enemies, or censorious separating professors do imagine.
Even in the wicked generally, there is more for grace to make
advantage of, and more to testify for God and holiness than I once
believed there had been.

"I less admire gifts of utterance, and bare profession of religion
than I once did, and have much more charity for those who by the want
of gifts do make an obscurer profession; for I have met with divers
obscure persons, not noted for any extraordinary profession or
forwardness in religion, but only to live a quiet blameless life,
whom I have after found to have long lived, as far as I could
discern, a truly godly and sanctified life.  Yet he that on this
pretence would confound the godly and the ungodly, may as well go
about to bring heaven and hell together.

"I am not so narrow in my special love, nor in my principles of
church communion as heretofore.

"My soul is much more affected with the thoughts of the miserable
world, and more drawn out in desire of their conversion than
heretofore.  Could we but go among Tartarians, Turks, and heathens,
and speak their language, I should be little troubled for the
silencing of eighteen hundred ministers at once in England, nor for
all the rest that were cast out here, and in Scotland and Ireland;
there being no employment in the world so desirable in my eyes as to
labour for the winning of such miserable souls, which maketh me
greatly honour Mr. John Eliot, the Apostle of the Indians in New
England, and whoever else have laboured in this work.

"Yet am I not so much inclined to pass a peremptory sentence of
denunciation upon all that have never heard of Christ, having some
more reason than I had before to think that God's dealing with such
is much unknown to us.

"I am farther than ever from hopes of a golden age here, and more
apprehensive that suffering must be the Church's ordinary lot, and
that Christians must indeed be cross-bearers.  And though God would
have vicissitudes of summer and winter, day and night, that the
Church may grow _extensively_ in the summer of prosperity, and
_intensively_ and radicately in the winter of adversity, yet usually
their night is longer than their day, and that day itself hath its
storms and tempests.  The Church will be still imperfect and sinful,
and will have those diseases which need the bitter remedy.

"My censures of the Papists do much differ from what they were at
first.  I then thought that their errors in doctrine were their most
dangerous mistakes, as to the points of merit, justification by
works, assurance of salvation, the nature of faith.  But now I am
assured that their mis-expressions and misunderstanding, with our
mistakings of them, and inconvenient expressing our own opinions,
hath made the differences in these points to appear much greater than
they are; and that in some of them it is next to none at all.

"But the great and irreconcilable differences lie in their Church
tyranny and usurpations, and in their great corruptions and
abasements of God's worship, with their befriending of ignorance and
vice.  I doubt not but that God hath many sanctified ones among them,
who have received the doctrine of Christianity so practically, that
their contradictory errors prevail not against them to hinder their
love of God and their salvation, but that their errors are like a
conquerable dose of poison which nature doth overcome.  And I can
never believe that a man may not be saved by that religion which doth
but bring him to the true love of God, and a heavenly mind and life;
nor that God will ever cast a soul into hell that truly loveth Him.

"I cannot be so narrow in my principles of Church communion as many
are.  Many are so much for a liturgy or so much against it, so much
for ceremonies or so much against them, that they can hold communion
with no Church that is not of their mind and way.

"I am much less regardful of the approbation of man, and set much
lighter by contempt or applause than I did long ago; all worldly
things appear most unsatisfactory where we have tried them most; yet,
as far as I can perceive, the knowledge of man's nothingness and
God's transcendent greatness, with whom it is that I have most to do,
and the sense of the brevity of human things and the nearness of
eternity, are the principal causes of this effect.

"I am much more apprehensive than long ago of the odiousness and
danger of the sin of pride, especially in matters spiritual and
ecclesiastical.  I think so far as any man is proud he is given to
the Devil, and entirely a stranger to God and himself.  It's a wonder
that it should be a possible sin, to men that still carry about with
them, in soul and body, such humbling matter as we all do.

"I am much more sensible than heretofore of the breadth, length, and
depth of the radical, universal, odious sin of selfishness; and of
the excellency and necessity of self-denial, and of a public mind,
and of loving our neighbour as ourselves.

"I am more and more sensible that most controversies have more need
of right stating than of debating; and if my skill be increased in
anything it is in that; narrowing controversies by explication and
separating the real from the verbal, and proving to many contenders
that they differ less than they think they do.

"I am more solicitous than I have been about my duty to God, and less
about His dealings with me; as being assured that He will do all
things well, and as knowing there is no rest but in the will and
goodness of God.

"I must mention it by way of penitent confession that I am too much
inclined to such words in controversial writings which are too keen,
and apt to provoke the person I write against.  I have a strong
natural inclination to call a spade a spade.  I confess it is faulty,
because it is a hindrance to the usefulness of what I write; and
especially because though I feel no anger, yet (which is worse) I
know there is some want of honour and love and tenderness to others,
and therefore I repent of it, and wish all over-sharp passages were
expunged from my writings, and desire forgiveness of God and man.
And yet I must say that I am often afraid of the contrary extreme,
lest when I speak against great and dangerous errors and sins, I
should encourage men to them by speaking too easily of them, as Eli
did to his sons.

"I mention these distempers that my faults may be a warning to others
to take heed, as they call on myself for repentance and watchfulness.
O Lord, for the merits and sacrifice and intercession of Christ, be
merciful to me a sinner, and forgive my known and unknown sins."


These words are as familiar to us as a liturgy, so often used Aunt
Dorothy to ask them to be read over to her; although to the last the
part she oftenest asked me to read was that about the danger of the
"contrary extreme of speaking too easily of dangerous errors and
sins," to which she always gave her most emphatic Amen.

She forgave Mr. Baxter, however, for his marriage, on consideration
of his young wife's generous assistance of destitute ministers, of
her own and her mother's "manly patience" in adversities, and of the
faithful affection with which she shared and cheered her husband's
imprisonment.

And dear to Aunt Dorothy beyond all other uninspired writings was Mr.
Baxter's, prison-hymn

  "THE RESOLUTION.

  "Must I be driven from my books,
    From house, and goods, and dearest friends?
  One of Thy sweet and gracious looks
    For more than this will make amends.
  The world's Thy book: there I can read
    Thy power, wisdom, and Thy love;
  And thence ascend by faith, and feed
    Upon the better things above.

  "I'll read Thy works of providence:
    Thy Spirit, conscience, and Thy rod
  Can teach without these all the sense
    To know the world, myself, and God,
  Few books will serve when Thou wilt teach,
    Many have stolen my precious time;
  I'll leave my books to hear Thee preach,
    Church-work is best when Thou dost chime,

  "As for my home it was my tent,
    While there I waited on Thy flock;
  That work is done, that time is spent,
    There neither was my home nor stock.
  Would I in all my journey have
    Still the same sun and furniture?
  Or ease and pleasant dwellings crave,
    Forgetting what Thy saints endure?

  "My Lord hath taught me how to want
    A place wherein to put my head;
  While He is mine, I'll be content
    To beg or lack my daily bread.
  Heaven is my roof, earth is my floor;
    Thy love can keep me dry and warm;
  Christ and Thy bounty are my store;
    Thy angels guard me from all harm.

  "As for my friends, they are not lost;
    The several vessels of Thy fleet,
  Though parted now, by tempest tost,
    Shall safely in the haven meet.
  Still we are centred all in Thee;
    Members, thought distant, of one Head;
  In the same family we be,
    By the same faith and Spirit led.

  "Before Thy throne we daily meet,
    As joint petitioners to Thee;
  In spirit we each other greet,
    And shall again each other see.
  The heavenly hosts, world without end,
    Shall be my company above;
  And Thou my best and surest Friend--
    Who shall divide me from Thy love?

  "Must I forsake the soil and air
    Where first I drew my vital breath?
  That way may be as near and fair,
    Thence I may come to Thee by death.
  All countries are my Father's lands;
    Thy sun, Thy love doth shine on all;
  We may in all lift up pure hands,
    And with acceptance on Thee call.

  "What if in prison I must dwell,
    May I not there converse with Thee!
  Save me from sin, Thy wrath, and hell,
    Call me Thy child, and I am free.
  No walls or bars can keep Thee out;
    None can confine a holy soul,
  The streets of heaven it walks about;
    None can its liberty control.

  "Must I feel sicknesses and smart
    And spend my days and nights in pale
  Yet if Thy love refresh my heart,
    I need not overmuch complain.
  This flesh has drawn my soul to sin,
    If it must smart, Thy will be done.
  Oh, fill me with Thy joys within,
    And then I'll let it grieve alone!

  "I know my flesh must turn to dust,
    My parted soul must come to Thee,
  And undergo Thy judgments just,
    And in the endless world must be.
  In this there's most of fear and joy,
    Because there's most of sin and grace;
  Sin will this mortal frame destroy,
    But Christ will bring me to Thy face.

  "Shall I draw back, and fear the end
    Of all my sorrows, fears, and pain,
  To which my life and labours tend,
    Without which all had been in vain?
  Can I for ever be content
    Without true happiness and rest?
  Is earth become so excellent
    That I should take it for my best?

  "Or can I think of finding here
    That which my soul so long has sought?
  Should I refuse those joys, through fear,
    Which bounteous love so dear has bought?
  All that does taste of heaven is good;
    When heavenly light does me inform,
  When heavenly life stirrs in my blood,
    When heavenly love my heart doth warm.

  "Though all the reasons I can see,
    Why should I willingly submit,
  And comfortably come to Thee--
    My God, Thou must accomplish it.
  The love which filled up all my days
    Will not forsake me to the end;
  This broken body Thou wilt raise,
    My spirit I to Thee commend."


Such was the kind of whine or moan which persecution drew from the
true Puritans!  Such was the music oppression drew by its strain from
strings not otherwise deemed musical.  It is the solitary spontaneous
songs of those whose natural speech is a quiet prose, which, more
than anything, make me comprehend what is meant by the New Song.

We sang that hymn by Aunt Dorothy's grave, on the hill-side, under
the old oak-tree where she loved to sit on summer evenings.  She used
to say the sound of the wind in the leaves took her back to old
Netherby; and from its shade she could catch a gleam of the sea, on
the other side of which is England.

We had not expected, and we did not find New England to be an Eden,
where the conflict would be over.  It has been possible, however, to
wage "the good fight" here, not only for our own souls, but "in those
public services for which a man is born."  For that end we took
refuge here; and we are content.  Yet of some wars we have, I trust,
seen the victorious end.  Since the "being" of the plantations seems
secure, men have more leisure to seek their "well-being."  Since law
has grown to have firmer roots, the lawgivers have grown more
merciful.  Magistrates and ministers have ceased to persecute, and
Quakers have ceased to provoke.  Which was the cause and which the
effect, will perhaps long remain a subject of debate.

Just now, however, there are terrible rumours of witches, which
recall the old witch-drowning and rescue of Gammer Grindle on
Netherby Mere in my early days.  Wretched old women are said to be
accusing themselves of riding through the air on sticks, and of
having evil spirits in the form of cats to wait on them, knowing that
if convicted they will be hung.  My husband thinks that, by-and-by,
when the magistrates cease to excite diseased fancies by threats of
the gallows, and thus the stimulus of danger is withdrawn, the
witches will cease to believe they deserved a terrible punishment by
having committed impossible crimes.*


* "When the persecution of the witches ceased, the Lord chained up
Satan, that the afflicted grew presently well."--P. COTTON MATHER.


Meantime John Eliot has been fighting the devil in more undeniable
forms by preaching the gospel to the Indians.  He reduced the
language to writing, and translated the Bible into it.  At first the
Pauwaws, their magicians or "clergymen," were furious, and threatened
his life.  But he went fearlessly, alone, among them.  "I am about
the work of the great God," he said.  "God is with me.  Touch me if
you dare."  Now there are six churches of baptized praying Indians,
and eighteen assemblies of catechumens.

Yet when he was passing away, he said there was a dark cloud on the
work among the Indians.  The nation itself seems to fade before us.
The praying Indians perish like caged deer in their Christian
villages.

Now the life of love which has been shining among them and us so many
years, has at last faded from our vision.

The firm, gentle hand which "rang the curfew for contentions" is
still; the voice and the life which preached among us so constantly
"_bear, forbear, forgive_," are silenced.  The eyes which flashed so
indignantly against wrongs to the weak and helpless, and which
glanced so tenderly on the little children, are closed.  The "lambs
which Christ is not willing to lose" will watch for John Eliot's
smile and kindly word henceforth in vain.

Whenever bad news came from England (and it came so often!), he would
say, "These are some of the clouds in which the Son of man will come."

And now the better tidings have come, he has passed to better still.
The Son of man has come for him, not in a cloud of darkness but of
light.

When he was too feeble to labour longer among his Indians, he said,
"I wonder for what my Lord keeps me longer here."  And then he turned
to such sufferers as his labours could yet reach.  His last efforts
were to gather the negro servants of the settlers and teach them.
His last scholar was a blind boy whom he took to be with him in his
house.

His last words to us still in the battle-field were "Pray, pray,
pray."

His first words to the victors he has joined were, "Welcome, joy."

And soon after this our "Apostle of the Indians" died.  Mr. Baxter
wrote:--

"There was no man on earth whom I honoured above him.  It is his
evangelical work that is the Apostolical Succession I plead for.  I
am now dying, I hope, as he did.  It pleased me to read from him my
case ('my understanding faileth, my memory faileth, my tongue
faileth, but my charity faileth not').  That word much comforted me.
God preserve you and New England."

Thus New England has already her apostolic fathers and her sacred
graves.

A few months passed, and then we heard how Richard Baxter had
followed Eliot home.

"I have pain," he said; "there is no arguing against sense.  But I
have peace--_I have peace_."  And when asked during his mortal
sickness how he did, his reply was "_almost well_."

So the day he looked for as his Sabbath and "high day" came to him,
and he is gone to the great company of those he justly honoured, and
some whom he never learned to honour here, in the "many mansions" of
that "all-reconciling world."

But alas, when shall we say "_almost well_" for, what he called,
"this distracted world?"

In England the better days seem dawning, and here in New England.

But from France Lettice's old servant Barbe, who has taken refuge
here with her family, brings tidings too sad to think of.

Port Royal is extinguished as a source of light; the schools
suppressed; the nuns prisoners in their own convent or elsewhere; the
recluses silenced and scattered.  Hundreds of the best men and women
in France, as Madame la Mothe deemed them, thus rendered powerless
for good.

But the sufferers of whom Barbe speaks count by hundreds of
thousands.  "One soweth and another reapeth."  Who will reap the
harvest of this sowing?

Of these hundred thousand good Protestant men and women scattered,
killed, tortured, at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and
through all the persecutions before and after it, of whom Barbe tells
us stories of horror such as England never knew, those other good men
and women, Fort Royal, on earth, knew nothing!

Oh, joyful revelations of that "all reconciling world!"  Next to the
joy of seeing Him in whom God reconciles us all to Himself and to
each other will be the joy of seeing the wonder on the countenances
of saint after saint as they unlearn their wrong judgments of one
another.

The joy of the unlearning.

Yes! this joy of unlearning is one we shall certainly none of us
miss!  As John Robinson said, on the other side of the sea at Delft
Haven, to the fathers of our New England when they were departing,
"If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument, be very
willing to receive it as from me.  Lutherans go not beyond Luther;
Calvinists beyond Calvin; yet though burning and shining lights in
their time, they penetrated not into the whole course of God.  But
were they now living, they would be as willing to receive further
light as that which they first received from the Word of God."

They _are_ living, living and learning, and ever "receiving further
light" from the Eternal Light (oh, how willingly!), on the other side
of that Great Sea which we must all so soon pass over, to learn
together, with ever deepening love and joy, how wide His dominion is
"of whose Diocese we are" "On Both Sides of the Sea."



THE END.











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