Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley (christmas read aloud .txt) 📕

He had returned to England about a month before, in obedience to the proclamation which had been set forth for that purpose (and certainly not before it was needed), that, “whosoever had children, wards, etc., in the parts beyond the seas, should send in their names to the ordinary, and within four months call them home again.” So Eustace was now staying with his father at Chapel, having, nevertheless, his private matters to transact on behalf of the virtuous society by whom he had been brought up; one of which private matters had brought him to Bideford the night before.

So he sat down beside Amyas on the pebbles, and looked at him all over out of the corners of his eyes very gently, as if he did not wish to hurt him, or even the flies on his back; and Amyas faced right round, and looked him full in the face. with the heartiest of smiles, and held out a lion’s paw, which Eustace took rapturously, and a great shaking of hands ensued; Amyas gripping with a great round fist, and a quiet quiver thereof, as much as to say, “I AM glad to see you;” and Eustace pinching hard with white, straight fingers, and sawing the air violently up and down, as much as to say, “DON’T YOU SEE how glad I am to see you?” A very different greeting from the former.

“Hold hard, old lad,” said Amyas, “before you break my elbow. And where do you come from?”

“From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,” said he, with a little smile and nod of mysterious self-importance.

“Like the devil, eh? Well, every man has his pattern. How is my uncle?”

Now, if there was one man on earth above another, of whom Eustace Leigh stood in dread, it was his cousin Amyas. In the first place, he knew Amyas could have killed him with a blow; and there are natures, who, instead of rejoicing in the strength of men of greater prowess than themselves, look at such with irritation, dread, at last, spite; expecting, perhaps, that the stronger will do to them what they feel they might have done in his place. Every one, perhaps, has the same envious, cowardly devil haunting about his heart; but the brave men, though they be very sparrows, kick him out; the cowards keep him, and foster him; and so did poor Eustace Leigh.

Next, he could not help feeling that Amyas despised him. They had not met for three years; but before Amyas went, Eustace never could argue with him, simply because Amyas treated him as beneath argument. No doubt he was often rude and unfair enough; but the whole mass of questions concerning the unseen world, which the priests had stimulated in his cousin’s mind into an unhealthy fungus crop, were to Amyas simply, as he expressed it, “wind and moonshine;” and he treated his cousin as a sort of harmless lunatic, and, as they say in Devon, “half-baked.” And Eustace knew it; and knew, too, that his cousin did him an injustice. “He used to undervalue me,” said he to himself; “let us see whether he does not find me a match for him now.” And then went off into an agony of secret contrition for his self-seeking and his forgetting that “the glory of God, and not his own exaltation,” was the object of his existence.

There, dear readers, Ex pede Herculem; I cannot tire myself or you (especially in this book) with any wire-drawn soul-dissections. I have tried to hint to you two opposite sorts of men,—the one trying to be good with all his might and main, according to certain approved methods and rules, which he has got by heart, and like a weak oarsman, feeling and fingering his spiritual muscles over all day, to see if they are growing; the other not even knowing whether he is good or not, but just doing the right thing without thinking about it, as simply as a little child, because the Spirit of God is with him. If you cannot see the great gulf fixed between the two, I trust that you will discover it some day.

But in justice be it said, all this came upon Eustace, not because he was a Romanist, but because he was educated by the Jesuits. Had he been saved from them, he might have lived and died as simple and honest a gentleman as his brothers, who turned out like true Englishmen (as did all the Romish laity) to face the great Armada, and one of whom was fighting at that very minute under St. Leger in Ireland, and as brave and loyal a soldier as those Roman Catholics whose noble blood has stained every Crimean battlefield; but his fate was appointed otherwise; and the Upas-shadow which has blighted the whole Romish Church, blighted him also.

“Ah, my dearest cousin!” said Eustace, “how disappointed I was this morning at finding I had arrived just a day too late to witness your triumph! But I hastened to your home as soon as I could, and learning from your mother that I should find you here, hurried down to bid you welcome again to Devon.”

“Well, old lad, it does look very natural to see you. I often used to think of you walking the deck o’ nights. Uncle and the girls are all right, then? But is the old pony dead yet? And how’s Dick the smith, and Nancy? Grown a fine maid by now, I warrant. ‘Slid, it seems half a life that I’ve been away.

“And you really thought of your poor cousin? Be sure that he, too, thought of you, and offered up nightly his weak prayers for your safety (doubtless, not without avail) to those saints, to whom would that you—”

“Halt there, coz. If they are half as good fellows as you and I take them for, they’ll help me without asking.”

“They have helped you, Amyas.”

“Maybe; I’d have done as much, I’m sure, for them, if I ‘d been in their place.”

“And do you not feel, then, that you owe a debt of gratitude to them; and, above all, to her, whose intercessions have, I doubt not, availed for your preservation? Her, the star of the sea, the all-compassionate guide of the mariner?”

“Humph!” said Amyas. “Here’s Frank; let him answer.”

And, as he spoke, up came Frank, and after due greetings, sat down beside them on the ridge.

“I say, brother, here’s Eustace trying already to convert me; and telling me that I owe all my luck to the Blessed Virgin’s prayers for me.

“It may be so,” said Frank; “at least you owe it to the prayers of that most pure and peerless virgin by whose commands you sailed; the sweet incense of whose orisons has gone up for you daily, and for whose sake you were preserved from flood and foe, that you might spread the fame and advance the power of the spotless championess of truth, and right, and freedom,—Elizabeth, your queen.”

Amyas answered this rhapsody, which would have been then both fashionable and sincere, by a loyal chuckle. Eustace smiled meekly, but answered somewhat venomously nevertheless—

“I, at least, am certain that I speak the truth, when I call my patroness a virgin undefiled.”

Both the brothers’ brows clouded at once. Amyas, as he lay on his back on the pebbles, said quietly to the gulls over his head—“I wonder what the Frenchman whose head I cut off at the Azores, thinks by now about all that.”

“Cut off a Frenchman’s head?” said Frank.

“Yes, faith; and so fleshed my maiden sword. I’ll tell you. It was in some tavern; I and George Drake had gone in, and there sat this Frenchman, with his sword on the table, ready for a quarrel (I found afterwards he was a noted bully), and begins with us loudly enough about this and that; but, after awhile, by the instigation of the devil, what does he vent but a dozen slanders against her majesty’s honor, one atop of the other? I was ashamed to hear them, and I should be more ashamed to repeat them.”

“I have heard enough of such,” said Frank. “They come mostly through lewd rascals about the French ambassador, who have been bred (God help them) among the filthy vices of that Medicean Court in which the Queen of Scots had her schooling; and can only perceive in a virtuous freedom a cloak for licentiousness like their own. Let the curs bark; Honi soit qui mal y pense is our motto, and shall be forever.”

“But I didn’t let the cur bark; for I took him by the ears, to show him out into the street. Whereon he got to his sword, and I to mine; and a very near chance I had of never bathing on the pebble ridge more; for the fellow did not fight with edge and buckler, like a Christian, but had some newfangled French devil’s device of scryming and foining with his point, ha’ing and stamping, and tracing at me, that I expected to be full of eyelet holes ere I could close with him.”

“Thank God that you are safe, then!” said Frank. “I know that play well enough, and dangerous enough it is.”

“Of course you know it; but I didn’t, more’s the pity.”

“Well, I’ll teach it thee, lad, as well as Rowland Yorke himself,

‘Thy fincture, carricade, and sly passata, Thy stramazon, and resolute stoccata, Wiping maudritta, closing embrocata, And all the cant of the honorable fencing mystery.’”

“Rowland Yorke? Who’s he, then?”

“A very roystering rascal, who is making good profit in London just now by teaching this very art of fence; and is as likely to have his mortal thread clipt in a tavern brawl, as thy Frenchman. But how did you escape his pinking iron?”

“How? Had it through my left arm before I could look round; and at that I got mad, and leapt upon him, and caught him by the wrist, and then had a fair side-blow; and, as fortune would have it, off tumbled his head on to the table, and there was an end of his slanders.”

“So perish all her enemies!” said Frank; and Eustace, who had been trying not to listen, rose and said—

“I trust that you do not number me among them?”

“As you speak, I do, coz,” said Frank. “But for your own sake, let me advise you to put faith in the true report of those who have daily experience of their mistress’s excellent virtue, as they have of the sun’s shining, and of the earth’s bringing forth fruit, and not in the tattle of a few cowardly backstair rogues, who wish to curry favor with the Guises. Come, we will say no more. Walk round with us by Appledore, and then home to breakfast.”

But Eustace declined, having immediate business, he said, in Northam town, and then in Bideford; and so left them to lounge for another half-hour on the beach, and then walk across the smooth sheet of turf to the little white fishing village, which stands some two miles above the bar, at the meeting of the Torridge and the Taw.

Now it came to pass, that Eustace Leigh, as we have seen,