Читать книгу For God and Gold - Julian Stafford Corbett - Страница 3

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Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, has uttered a sharp note against those scribbling fops who think to eternise their memory by setting up for authors, and especially those who spoil paper in blotting it with mere trifles and impertinences. Yet have I, that was none before, resolved to turn author, and set down certain passages in my life that I have thought not unworthy to be remembered.

Many who share my respect for him who is rightly called the honour of learning of all our time, forgetting therein, as it must be said, all tenderness for me, have marvelled openly that I listen not to his wisdom, but will still be spending paper, time, and candles upon such trifles and impertinences as he condemns. It were better, say they, for a scholar to take in hand some weighty matter of religion, or philosophy, or civil government.

But stay, good friends, till I bid you show me how it were better. Such treatises are ordnance of power; and are we sure that of late years scholars have not been forging too many weapons for dunces to arm themselves withal in these wordy wars that now be? A harquebuss is a dangerous toy in unskilled hands, and so I know may be a discourse of religion, or philosophy, or civil government to unlearned controversialists, of whom, God knows, there is a mighty company in this present time.

So, I pray you, consider whether Erasmus has not here a little dishonoured his scholarship and sounded his note false. Should he not rather have placed amidst all other folly that he praises these very trifles and impertinences also with which a scholar may seek to comfort his solitude?

I am the more moved to the part I have chosen because it is not clear that all I have to tell shall be found wholly trifling and impertinent. Indeed I think it may contain something noteworthy, not in respect of myself, or even of that noble gentleman whose story this is as much as mine, but rather in respect of that very mirror and pattern of manhood who was my good friend in those days, though now with God, and whom of all I ever knew or heard of I honour as in courage unsurpassed, in counsel unequalled, and in constancy passing all I ever deserved.

So much by way of preface or apology; and now, with a good wish on all honest, kindly readers, let me to my tale.

As with many others, my life, it may be said, began with my father's death. Till then I had been kept in so great subjection that, save in my books, I had hardly lived. For he was an austere, grave man of the Reformation party, and one whom the fires of Mary's reign had hardened against all Popery, so that towards the end of his life he became what is now called a Puritan, ay, and that of a strict sort too.

Outwardly to his great friends in the county he was still good company. For, not to speak more, because of the honour I bear him, he was a worldly man, and not one to use a shoe-horn to drag ill-fitting opinions on to men of quality, nor in any way to seek a martyr's crown. His chiding and severity were kept for me and his servants and tenants, who were all hard-pressed, though, in truth, not beyond what justice would warrant were mercy laid aside.

It was a hard case for me, because of my mother I had not even a memory. The same hour that I was born she died, leaving my father alone in the world save for me. It was then that he most changed, they told me, but in no respect showed his grief so much as in misliking me.

Yet I think I loved him, for all his chiding and sharpness. Indeed I had so little else to love. At least I know that I was sobbing bitterly when my old nurse came to tell me that his short sickness had come suddenly to an end: for he had but a little time past been seized with a quartan ague, which carried off so many that same glorious year that our great Queen came to her throne.

It was a cold, gray afternoon in January. I was sitting, hungry and forgotten, in my favourite nook in the dim old library. It was an ancient, low room, which my father had left standing when he had rebuilt the rest of the place in the new style soon after he had purchased it. It had been a house of Austin Canons which fell to the lot of some spendthrift courtier in King Henry's time, which gentleman, getting past his depth in my father's books with over much borrowing, was at last driven to release the place to him. So it was that the old monastery became our dwelling, but this, the Canons' refectory, was all that was left of the former buildings.

At one end there was a deep recess, where I could sit and see the dreary darkness settling down on the distant Medway, and the Upchurch Marshes, and the Saltings. It was but a sad prospect at any time in winter, and made me sad, though I would never sit elsewhere with my books. I must have loved it because my father never came to chide me there, and because on that cold stone sill I could sit and sob undisturbed over the sorrows of men long dead, as I now sat sobbing over my own, when Cicely came hurriedly to me.

'The Lord has taken him, Master Jasper,' she cried, as well as her sobs would allow. 'The Lord has taken him, before I could call you to see how sweet an ending he made. God-a-mercy on him, for he was a just and upright gentleman, and one that dallied not with mercy, and died a good Reformation man. Ay, that he did, and would see never a priest of them all, with their hocus-pocus and Jack-in-the-box, and their square caps and their Latins. When the end was coming he cried out, "God-a-mercy on me and all usurers," once or twice he did, for the usurers seemed to trouble him. So I opened the windows, and bade him not trouble himself with the rogues at such a time, but get on sweetly with his dying. That was a comfort to him, I know, for he grew quiet then, and passed away with but one more cry for mercy on them. May the rogues be better for a good man's prayers, that he shall pray no more! For 'tis all passed, 'tis all passed; and you are Squire of Longdene now, Master Jasper; and maybe your worship would like to see how your father lies.'

I dried my tears then, for I had been dreading the summons to see him die, and felt glad that I was spared the sight. I was able to follow Cicely into the great chamber where he lay, and look bravely for the last time on the wise, hard face.

It was when I came out that I felt indeed my life had begun. For there stood old Miles, our steward, who had married my nurse, bowing respectfully.

'A wise man has gone this day, sir,' he said, 'and a godly and a rich. May the Lord in His mercy give your worship strength to bear his loss and walk in his footsteps.'

It lifted me up strangely to hear him speak thus; for I was but fourteen years old, and had never been called 'your worship' before, except sometimes on Saturdays by the Medway fisher lads, who knew I had groats in my wallet then. To hear Miles thus call me was a thing I could hardly understand. He who had barely a word for me, except to scold when he caught me bird-nesting in the orchard, or swear after me in breathless chase when I flew my hawk at his pigeons, as happened more than once when Harry came to see me and my father was away.

It is time I should tell of Harry, my friend and rival, my almost brother; for his life was, and, I thank God for His mercy, still is, in spite of all the wrong I did, so bound up in mine, that I cannot tell my tale without unfolding his.

He was the only son of Sir Fulke Waldyve, a gentleman of good estate and ancient family near Rochester, in Kent, and a good neighbour of ours. Ever since my father had come to live at Longdene, Sir Fulke and he had been fast friends. Not that they had much to make them so. For Sir Fulke was an old soldier and courtier of King Henry's day, and had named his only son after him as the pattern of manhood. From the like cause he swore roundly rasping Tudor oaths at all that displeased him, ay, and much that he loved too, from mere habit, but above all at Puritans and those who thought Reformation should go further than his idol King Henry had carried it. In all ways the knight was a man of the old time, while my father was held one of the new men, whom many thought to be ruining the country. He had been a wool merchant in London, and had made much money at trading and by other ways that merchants use.

Even I used to wonder to see them so friendly, and used to watch them by the hour together through a hole I knew of in the yew hedge, as they sat drinking in our orchard after dinner in the summer-time. Sir Fulke was so round and red, with his curly beard and his sunburnt face and his merry blue eyes, and my father was so pale and spare and grave. I wondered how men could be so little alike, and wondered how it would have been with me if that rough old knight had been my father instead of the courtly merchant by his side.

'By this light,' I have heard Sir Fulke burst out in the midst of their talk, 'I marvel every day what a God's name makes me love you, Nick. Your sour face should be as much a rebel in my heart as your damned French claret is in my stomach. Were it not that you are so good a tippler, I would say that at heart you were no better than a pestilent, pragmatical rogue of a Calvinist.'

'Nay, Fulke,' my father would say quickly in his courtly way, being, as it seemed, in no way offended that the old knight should speak to him so roughly, for they always said my father, like other merchants who have thriven, was slow to take offence with men of ancient lineage and good estate; 'what matter that our outward seeming is different? That is only because our lots were cast differently. Not what we are, but what we love, is the talk of friends.'

'Ay, by God's power,' Sir Fulke would cry, 'you have hit it now most nicely, Nick. You love a long fleece, and so do I. You love a fair stretch of meadowland, and so do I. You love a well-grown tree, and so do I; ay, and, you rogue, you love a full money-bag, and so, by this light, do I. Mass, but I run myself out of breath with our likings, and sack must run me back again.'

'Indeed,' my father would answer, 'were it only our delights that we share, I think it would be bond enough, without a common sorrow to help it.'

'Ay, ay, Nick; that is it,' the old knight would murmur, sad in a moment, for Harry's mother, too, had died in childbed. 'But speak not of that. God rest her sweet soul! What is there divided that she could not bring together?'

And so they would fall into silence awhile, till Sir Fulke's eye was dry again, and his thoughts had wandered away from the beautiful woman whom, late in life, he had loved and married and lost, to some new plan he had for mending his estate upon which he wanted his friend's counsel.

It is little to be wondered at, then, that a great friendship grew up also between Harry and me. We were little more alike, I think, than our fathers. For on Harry descended all the sunny beauty of his mother. Indeed, afterwards, when as a page at Court he personated the Princess Cleopatra in a masque before the Queen's grace, an old lord who was in presence swore it must be the gentle Lady Waldyve alive again. He was lithe and active too, and of quick and nimble wit, and as long as I can remember could always give the fisher lads more than he took, either with fist or tongue. But more than all this, it was his gentle, loving spirit that won and kept my love in spite of all our boyish quarrels, ay, and of a greater thing than that. When I think of his noble nature, which never allowed him to turn a span's breadth from the path of honour, the lofty patience wherewith he bore my shortcomings, the tender sympathy I won from him in all my troubles, I can still kneel down and thank God that gave me such a friend to carry a light before me in the way a gentleman should walk.

So what wonder then that I loved him as I loved no one else—save one, of whom I shall forbear yet to speak, until my tale compels me. Then I must, seeing it was surely God's will that tried me so sore.

Had Harry been other than he was, at the time at least of which I now speak, I must yet have loved him, for it was my father's will that I should.

'Jasper,' he would say to me sometimes when I had been reading at home, 'close your book and ride over to Ashtead to bid young Waldyve go a-hawking with you to-morrow. You must see more of him. For know, I would have you no merchant, or parson, or plain scholar, but a gentleman. You will have money, and he shall teach you how to spend it like a gentleman. Make him your friend, and be you his, or you shall smart for it.'

So away I would go blithely enough; for those days with Harry were the only happy ones I knew, though it must be said they often ended sadly with a rebuke and even chastisement from old Miles, till one day my father, seeing him, told him he would not have gainsaid any prank I played in company with Sir Fulke's son.

This I told Harry next day he came, thinking to strangely delight him; but instead he looked grave, and swore one of his father's oaths that he would never fly hawk at Miles's pigeons again.

Such was my friend Harry Waldyve when, in the first year of our most glorious Queen's reign, whom God bless with fullest measure, my father died, and I began my life.