Читать книгу The Broken Font - Moyle Sherer - Страница 13

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Though their voices lower be,

Streams have, too, their melody;

Night and day they warbling run,

Never pause, but still sing on.

George Hickes.

For three summer months Cuthbert Noble was confined to a couch; and though latterly he was led forth into the garden, and suffered to lie down on a bench in the shade, yet his confinement had been lonely as well as tedious. No kindness on the part of any of the family was wanting: whatever could be thought of for his convenience and comfort was provided. While he was obliged to keep his own chamber, he was visited daily by Sir Oliver; Mistress Alice and Katharine looked in upon him together, and inquired gently concerning his pain; the boy Arthur would often forego his play in the garden, or his practice in archery, to sit and read to him; and not a week passed without a friendly and cheerful visit from George Juxon. Nevertheless, he was evidently dejected; and while he was grateful for all these attentions, nothing, it was observed, could effectually rouse his spirits to cheerfulness, although he repaid, by anxious words and quiet smiles, the least service which was done him. About the trouble which he unavoidably gave the servants, who, for their parts, were ever ready to oblige him, he was scrupulous even to anxiety. He seemed to pine after liberty—and would sit, for hours together, lost in deep thought, or in vacant sadness. It so happened that the clergyman of Milverton, whose manners were coarse, and whose morals were low, did not visit at the Hall. Although originally appointed by Sir Oliver, at the request of a friend, who, acquainted with his family, had taken little care to inquire more particularly into his character, he had early quarrelled with his patron, and preferred the freedom of an ale bench to the restraints of good society. This was unfortunate for Cuthbert; as a learned and religious clergyman, residing in the village, and intimate at the hall, might have kept him straight in the plain path of the true churchman. Now, though Juxon, had he been aware of all that was passing in the mind of Cuthbert, might have been truly serviceable in disabusing him of some strong prejudices, yet, as he presumed him to be a true son of the church, the subject was seldom named.

He came to cheer and amuse him if he could; and the very atmosphere of Milverton Hall was that of purity and delight to George Juxon. His summer months presented a strange contrast to those of Cuthbert. He gave up his buck-hunting in the afternoons: he could not abide the rude and noisy companions of that sport of which he had been always so fond; and now he might be seen, day after day, in the guise of an angler, on the grassy margin of a silver stream, or, not unfrequently, stretched at his length beneath a shady tree near the bank, or sitting under a high honeysuckle hedge; and if he were not chewing his own sweet fancies, some book in his hand, of good old-fashioned poetry, to aid his pleasant meditations. George Juxon was now a lover—without melancholy, I do not say—but only with so much of it as is ever welcome to a lover’s mood, and gives a dignity to his passion. Nevertheless, his hope was unavowed; nor was he in haste: a long courtship was the fashion of those days; and a mistress seemed raised in the fancy of her admirer, by the thought that she must be slowly approached, and would be slowly won.

His family, his private fortune, his present provision in the church, and his future prospects from the favour of the bishop, were such, that Sir Oliver could not object to him as a suitor for his daughter, though he might give the preference to another; and certainly, with her father, the title of a baronet would have outweighed that of a dean. However, these circumstances could only encourage him in his more sanguine moments, for Juxon was a modest man; and when he called up the image of Katharine in his walks, and thought upon a certain majesty in her countenance, and how serene and unmoved she was, how unsuspicious of the admiration which she excited, he could not but fear that she might prove indifferent to the suit of one so plain and unvarnished as himself, and that she would never entertain his addresses. Therefore it was that he nursed his love in secret, and patiently restrained all expression of particular regard for Mistress Katharine in his present visits to Milverton. How pleasant, in the mean time, were all those visits; how swiftly he rode through lane and wood, across field or common, as he went from home on those permitted errands of friendship; and at what a slow and lingering pace would he return from the gracious presence of this lady of his love!

He had often heard it rumoured that Sir Charles Lambert was thought to be the accepted son-in-law of Sir Oliver; but this he had always doubted from the very first moment of his introduction at Milverton; and he felt that Katharine could never have endured his attentions. By these, however, she could now be troubled no farther; for Sir Charles, being deeply mortified and ashamed of the frantic violence which he had committed at his last visit, had left his home suddenly for London, and was solacing himself, for the contemptuous affront which he had received from Sir Philip Arundel, in the congenial atmosphere of bear gardens and cock pits. Nor had he forgotten how roughly he was handled by George Juxon, whom he at once feared for his courage, and hated for his virtues.

However, he was no longer a visiter at Milverton; his sisters, indeed, still rode over from the Grange occasionally to pass a day with Katharine, and twice Juxon was of the party at table.

To most eyes he would have appeared the admirer rather of these ladies than of Mistress Katharine; for Old Beech rectory was only four miles from Bolton Grange: and though he seldom accepted the invitations of Sir Charles, yet he met them often in hunting or hawking parties, and was apparently a very great favourite with them both. Sophy and Jane Lambert were both pretty: the one, with the rosy cheeks of health and laughing blue eyes; the other, brown and freckled, with an arch look that seemed to detect those secrets which men, and women too, most anxiously conceal, with a provoking and unerring sagacity.

These good-tempered and warm-hearted girls had been at first sadly afflicted about their brother’s conduct; but this last care concerning him was now six weeks old, and had been dismissed from their minds. He was, to their great contentment, now absent, and their tongues were again loosened to playfulness.

As the party sat at dinner in Milverton Hall one day, about the middle of June, and as Juxon was carving a capon, that he might help Mistress Alice to a delicate wing—

“Prithee, Master Juxon,” said Jane Lambert with a very roguish expression of the eye, “did you not hear our merry voices on Wednesday evening as we killed a buck under Walton coppice? and did you not see us lift our velvet caps to you? and did you shut your ears to the pleasant horn? or were you charmed to sleep by the fairies under that broad beech tree in the Bird Meadow? or were you saying your prayers? or were you reading Master Ford’s Lover’s Melancholy? or were you thinking of our Lady St. Katharine here at Milverton?”

Juxon was so confused at this last question that he put the wing of the capon into the sauce boat instead of on the trencher of Mistress Alice, and said, with a stammer and a blush—

“Really, Mistress Jane, you are too bad; but I know that you dearly love a joke upon anglers: you are always jeering poor Moxon.”

“O do not mind her,” said Katharine Heywood, coming to his relief: “she is privileged to say what she pleases, without meaning what she says; and my poor name always serves to point a fancy, if she wants one: if she were not so young and so pretty, she might be taken up for a false fortune-teller, and a dealer in witchcraft.”

“Cousin Kate, if I am a fortune-teller, I am a true one; and if a witch, you know I am a white one, and work marvellous cures. Shall I tell your fortune? and shall I name the name of a true knight in a far country?”

A glance from the noble eyes of Katharine, which no one perceived but Jane Lambert, rebuked her into silence; and trying, though awkwardly, to laugh off the liberty which she had evidently taken with the feelings of Katharine, she sent her trencher for some venison, and said no more.

Sir Oliver, too, fastening upon the simple fact of Juxon having turned a fisherman, began rallying him for having made so bad an exchange, as to leave the merry and social sport of hunting for the dull and solitary exercise of angling.

“It is true,” said the knight, “I have myself been forced to give up the jolly buck hunt; but, life of me, I could never take up with a rod and line in the place of it. I do wonder, when I see a man mope about the meadows, and stand, it may be, for hours, under the same willow, by the broken bank of a sluggish river, that it doth not end in his hanging himself for very weariness of the flat world.”

“And yet,” quoth Juxon, “fishing hath its pleasures, ay, and its sport too; but if the angler catch nothing, still he hath a wholesome walk in the pure air; and if he go abroad early, and listeneth to the matins of the heaven-loving lark, he shall not want sweeter music than the cry of hounds, and the blasts of hunting horns.”

“By my faith, Master Juxon, you are bewitched; but whether by old Margery or by the sparkling eyes of Jane I say not; by Margery, methinks; for the faint heart of an angler will never win such a sprightly lady of the woods as our Jane.”

“Nay, nay, Sir Oliver, when a man is bewitched, and by love, too, as Mistress Jane will have it, his thoughts must be too roving and unquiet to sit still upon a mossy bank watching for the trembling of a quill.”

“Ay, ay; but he may sit quiet enough, and not watch any thing but his own fancies. I do verily think that thou must be touched with some strange care, to let thy brave gelding race it round his pasture for the madness of his desire to follow the chase, at sound of which he neigheth for his rider, and thou sitting the while like some poor scholar alone upon a tree stump.”

“At the least I find one blessing rests on anglers—where they walk, the grace of humility doth grow, lowly as the daisy, and plentiful as the meadow sweet.”

“I think,” said Katharine, “that Master Juxon has good right to walk the valley with his rod, without being thus rated for his pleasure; and if he useth to find good thoughts in all he meeteth by the river side in summer evenings it is more than hunters do in the forest.”

“Marry, Kate, it is to get rid of thought that men go a-hunting. I tell thee that cares and sorrows, and wrongs and vexations, cannot keep pace with a bold hunter; self is forgotten; all is life, and joy, and wild delight. Troth I have lost mind and heart since the merry days when I hunted.”

“I am of thy mind, Sir Oliver,” said Juxon, “and the falling leaf of October, and the chill gloom of November skies, can never cloud the heart of a hunter; but when woods are green, and sunbeams warm, and birds are singing, methinks the yelp of a hound is unseasonable music.”

“Well,” said Jane, “all I know is, that you seldom missed an afternoon last summer; and if it was an early hunting day and a stag turned out in the morning, in spite of the green trees and the warbling larks, Master Juxon was never last in the field; but I will rate you no more: for, may-be, you are afraid of the Puritans, and do study Master Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses, and will give up the wicked ways of Esau, and turn shepherd—gentle shepherd, shall it be, or good?”

“Lady,” said Juxon, gravely, “there are good men among the Puritans;” and seeing her colour a little at his tone, he added, with a smile, “and good anglers too; but, in truth, you have hit me hard: for there are good men, who are no Puritans, who think that the sport of hunting is not seemly in a parson, especially in times like these.”

“Puritans or no Puritans,” said Sir Oliver, “I hope you don’t mind the muddy race that croak these black lessons of duty. I do not know whether they be fools or knaves; but they would preach us into walking tomb-stones, each showing its memento mori.”

“Beyond all question,” replied Juxon, “they are wrong in many things; and push their severity against things innocent and pernicious with little or no distinction, with a strained application of Scripture prohibitions, and with a profound ignorance of human nature; and they seem only to discern God in clouds, and to hear him in the thunder. But there are men of great and stern virtues among them; and, it may be, of gentler hearts and gentler views than we give them credit for.”

“I don’t believe a word of it. They are fanatics in religion, and knavish traitors in their politics: you think of them with more charity than I do, and it is a false charity, Master Juxon. There was one of my own name and kin among them: he turned republican, forsooth; old England, forsooth, had no liberty; our good church was a harlot, and all the rest of it; and he would seek true freedom in the forests and swamps of New England; and away he went with wife and daughters, and a son, whom he had made as great a fool as himself. A youth, sir, that bearded me with his treason at my own table. I sent him packing at midnight, sir, and would not let him sleep the night under my roof; and, in good truth, he was as ready to go as I to bid him; and now he and his father are felling trees in America for aught I know, or care, indeed.”

Katharine Heywood proposed to her aunt and the Lamberts that they should go into the Lime Walk, and Juxon would have turned the conversation; but Sir Oliver, with the images of his absent cousins before him, went on venting his feelings, as if in soliloquy. “The son of a clergyman, too, sir, a younger brother of mine, long dead, and he himself having been the faithful servant of a king, well accounted of for valour and discretion in the camp of the great Gustavus, where he commanded a regiment of musketeers. He to turn against kings and good order! He that punished a fault against discipline like a sin against Heaven, and taught his son that obedience was the first duty of a soldier, to come home, with his brave boy to his own country, and teach him to flout at the majesty of the crown! Troth, sir, the king was quit of bad subjects, and I of troublesome relations, when they took ship for the Plantations. I wish all that are as fantastic in their notions would follow them.” At the close of this burst, the old gentleman took a cup of wine with an eagerness that sought relief, and a trembling hand, that betrayed how deeply he was agitated by angry feelings.

Juxon, very unwilling to hear him further on so painful a subject, asked permission of the knight to go and visit Cuthbert Noble for half an hour, and promised to join him afterwards in the bowling green for their customary rubber. As he passed out of the hall, a serving man was coming in with Sir Oliver’s pipe and tobacco-box; and leaving the strange weed to perform its calming office, Juxon, happy to escape, ran up stairs to the chamber of Cuthbert.

The surgeon was seated by his side; and from the conversation, which, although they concealed not the subject or the tenour of it at the entrance of Juxon, they soon dropped, it was evident to him that they had a mutual understanding in matters of religion and politics, and were both of them friendly to the cause of the parliament. It had so chanced that, during the whole of his confinement, Cuthbert had, in the person of the surgeon who attended him, been daily in contact with a mind very deeply imbued with serious and severe principles. By this man Cuthbert’s heart had been probed to the quick; and, under his influence, combining with a strong predisposition in itself, was made sad and heavy.