Chapter X: Lettice's Diary (1)

_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.'