Capes Where England Sets Her Feet, A Romance

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-98826-224-0
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Excerpt: ?When, in the second year of Elizabeth, the Act of Supremacy was passed, there were found only some two hundred in all of the clergy bold enough to dissent from it. Many, it is true, who conformed, did so without sincerity, fearing to lose their livings, and of these was Mr Robert Angell, Vicar of Clapham, or Clappenham village in Surrey, which was in the advowson of the lords of Larkhall and a very good cure. This Mr Angell, a worthy but weak divine, gained nothing, however, by his accommodation, for being suspected, whether rightly or wrongly, of Romanist sympathies, he was shortly deprived of his benefice, and forced to look elsewhere than to the Establishment for a means to subsistence. In this pass he bethought himself to set up a little private school, or palestra, for the sons of such of his neighbours as were well disposed towards him; and this he did, and with fair success, many coming to receive of him their early grounding in the A.B.C.-darius, Lily?s grammar, the Sententiæ Pueriles, and so on by way of Erasmus?s Colloquies to Cæsar and the Georgics, so that they were well ripe for College and University when their time came. For the Vicar was a sound scholar no less than an amiable man, and ruled by love without much authority, being little addicted to the harsh methods which obtained, and indeed were expected, in his day. He had a dame, a stupid woman but as benevolent as himself, and two or three little children, who tumbled up anyhow and were for ever in hot water, save when they most needed it.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Capes, Bernard

Leseproben

CHAPTER III.
THE JOURNEY WEST
The speed of the little party was the speed of Brion, but they made what haste they could, for dusk was closing down, and the road none too free of dangers. At first Bagott would have the boy to ride with him, part for kindness’ sake, and part to draw from him the particulars of his past life; but soon his questions lapsed into vagueness, and he sunk into a preoccupation which lost account of everything but its own dark melancholy. So Brion rode alone, Master Clerivault lacking any invitation to join him, and indulged his own unhappy fancies—which the cold wind and the gloomy road did nothing to assuage—to the limit of their bent. To be uprooted in a moment from that kindly soil, delivered to a relative of whose existence he had never even guessed hitherto, haled out into the night and the world, with an unknown future before him—it needed the utmost of his young resolution to bear up under such a battery of strokes. Sometimes, seizing him in gusts and spasms, his fate would seem to be monstrous, impossible, a nightmare from which he would waken in a little to hear Gregory breathing placidly in his bed by the window that overlooked the quiet garden; sometimes, realising the truth, he would be almost irresistibly moved to turn his horse’s head, and gallop desperately back the way he had come. But he had a high spirit to conquer, and a reason effectively to dismiss, such vain impulses. Yet, though he rode stiff, his chin up, his heart was full of misery and his soul of longing. He was all at sea, too, as to the meaning of things. He had been wont to gather, from the attitude of his playmates, and from the little which, in his quiet observant way, he had managed to piece together, that he was an orphan and alone in the world—though why alone, and for what reason adopted, some instinct of pride in him forbade his inquiring. He had understood that his treatment was in a manner preferential, and may have childishly to himself debated the why and the wherefore; but since the facts, as his intelligence could not but comprehend, were designedly withheld from him, he would not seem to seek what it was not wanted to tell. Indeed, from hints let fall, he believed that his foster-parents knew really little more concerning him than he knew himself; and, in that, for whatever they might secretly surmise, he thought right; nor was the incident recorded as happening on a day of poignant memory allowed by them to affect their determination to close their minds to any conjecture or speculation whatever as to the possible truth. And so had Brion grown in content of ignorance, regarding his adoption as permanent, and never dreaming that there existed one on whose favour he continued, and to whom he owed duty and obedience as the solitary kinsman surviving to him, it seemed, in all the world. Out of the amazing dark had this figure risen, to claim and appropriate him—a great man, a Judge, as Mr Angell, though with some seeming reluctance and agitation, had whispered when he came to fetch him—and henceforth through this apparition was he to approach so much nearer the mystery of his own being. Well, there was attraction in that, but not so absorbing for the moment as to assuage the anguish of this sudden severance from all to which he was attached by the living ligaments of custom and affection. He felt very lost and very lonely. They got down to Lambeth after dark, joining by the road a party happily met and agreed to combine against footpads, and took the horse-ferry, close by the Palace gates, to cross the river into the Honour of Westminster. And thence they wended their way through a maze of narrow crowded streets, with dim lights hanging overhead like ships’ lanterns suspended in shrouds, and presently, passing by the Abbey, and the walls and ruined towers of the old deserted Palace—vast cliffs of stone that loomed through the obscurity—turned into the yard of the Cock tavern and dismounted. Now, so spent with cold and emotion was the boy that his brain was insensible to any impressions save those of his own weariness; wherefore he took but little notice of the novel matters about him, but only obeyed blindly when he was directed up a flight of stairs into a comfortable chamber, where a meal lay ready spread on a table, and a good sea-coal fire burned in the hearth. He ate and drank as he was told, asking no questions and being put none, while Master Clerivault, appearing after attending to the horses, waited on him and his uncle. There seemed a mystery and a silence about everything—the place, the hour, the company he was in—and those, combining with the warmth and animal comfort, so operated upon his senses that in the midst of the meal he fell fast asleep, and thereafter remembered nothing more till he awoke to sunlight in a little room. He sat up in his bed, dazed for a moment, and then recollection rushed upon him in a flood, and he sank back again overwhelmed; when, lying so, with his eyes closed, presently he heard a footstep enter the room, and, without moving, raised his lids just so as to peer under them at the intruder. It was Master Clerivault, come in with a pile of clothes, which it seemed he had been brushing and folding, and these he proceeded to lay out ready, glancing in the act at the sleeper, as he thought him, and afterwards going soft-footed about the room, to open the casement and prepare the ewer for washing. Now curiosity, ever the main tonic of youth, began to stir powerfully in the boy, stimulated, no doubt, by the fresh sunlight, and the unwonted sights and sounds about him; for with the opening of the window had risen a noise of cheery gossip and the stamping of horses from the yard below. So, widening his eyes, he took interested stock of this individual, who had so unexpectedly returned upon him out of the past. That past had been nine years ago, and without question the mental enlargement of the interval spoke in his new observation; for Master Clerivault did not seem to him at all what he had thought he remembered him to be. It was not that he looked older, for in fact he did not by a day; it was a question of the moral impression. The pale staring eyes appeared now a little mad; the grotesque weakness of the face, with its hanging underlip and its long nose dividing the sardonic moustache, was its definite feature; what had figured for martial in him suggested somehow the showy fustian of the stage. And yet, through all, his aspect was likeable, and such as seemed to invite confidences without fear of a rebuff. Watching him a moment, Brion spoke:— ‘Where am I, Master Clerivault?’ The intruder started, turned round, advanced with a mincing step, and leaning gracefully against the bedpost, one arm akimbo, answered in that queer rusty hinge voice of his:— ‘In a room of the Cock tavern, Sir, in Westminster town.’ Brion looked about him. He lay in his shift in a comfortable bed, the appointments of the room were plain and clean, fresh rushes strewed the floor, and there was a great bunch of rosemary on the window-sill. Moreover, it was the morning of the day as of his own young life, and, pay what dole he would to sorrow, a sense of exhilaration would rise in him, to paint his fancy with bright anticipation. After all, a beard and a gruff voice came early to the stripling in Elizabeth’s time, and, though they were not yet for him, he was near enough to manhood, as they read it, to hear, in his mind’s ear, its distant shout to enterprise and glory. Suddenly he wanted to be up and afoot; but there was some curiosity to feed first. ‘I remember not my passage hither,’ he said. ‘Sense and memory were out of thee,’ replied the other, tapping his head twice. ‘Might have fired a great culverin in thy ear, and not awakened thee. I carried thee—ha! in these arms.’ ‘Master Clerivault,’ said the boy, ‘will it please you to tell me?’ ‘Anything,’ was the answer, ‘that my reason and my honour permits.’ ‘Who and what art thou, then?’ ‘Who but Harlequin Clerivault, please your Grace, some time gentleman of fortune, and since confidant and right-hand man to thine Uncle. He hangs on me, ha!’ ‘His confidant, say you? In what way of speaking, Master Clerivault?’ ‘In the law’s way of speaking, Sir, which is to say that, being a Judge, he hath judged most excellently of a paragon.’ ‘Yourself, to wit?’ ‘Thou hast said it, not I.’ ‘What is it to be a paragon?’ ‘It is to be the best of one’s kind, Sir, as a king most kingly, as a knight most knightly, as a retainer the most capable and to be trusted; to which mental graces those of the body should figure, as it were, in apposition, whereby a straight leg should express honesty, an arched brow love, or attachment, a chin slightly receding forbearance, and a fine shape signify proportion in all. Possessing the sum of which endowments, a man may call himself superlative, which is to be a paragon.’ His lids half closed; he pointed his moustache with an inimitable air. The corners of Brion’s mouth flickered. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘And of all that my uncle was the judge? I think he must be a great Judge, Master Clerivault.’ ‘Great in judgment,’ answered the paragon, ‘but, alack, no longer a great Judge or a Judge at all.’ ‘Not a Judge?’ ‘We have resigned, Sir, our Commission. Let it rest at that. The question drops—in Law, cadit quæstio.’ Brion felt a momentary stupefaction; yet, after all, the news told him nothing where he knew nothing. After a brief consideration,...