Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley (book club reads txt) 📖

dear knight of the burning pestle, I have a plan, a device, a disentanglement, according to most approved rules of chivalry. Let us fix a day, and summon by tuck of drum all young gentlemen under the age of thirty, dwelling within fifteen miles of the habitation of that peerless Oriana.”

“And all ‘prentice-boys too,” cried Amyas, out of the pasty.

“And all ‘prentice-boys. The bold lads shall fight first, with good quarterstaves, in Bideford Market, till all heads are broken; and the head which is not broken, let the back belonging to it pay the penalty of the noble member’s cowardice. After which grand tournament, to which that of Tottenham shall be but a flea-bite and a batrachomyomachy—”

“Confound you, and your long words, sir,” said poor Will, “I know you are flouting me.”

“Pazienza, Signor Cavaliere; that which is to come is no flouting, but bloody and warlike earnest. For afterwards all the young gentlemen shall adjourn into a convenient field, sand, or bog— which last will be better, as no man will be able to run away, if he be up to his knees in soft peat: and there stripping to our shirts, with rapiers of equal length and keenest temper, each shall slay his man, catch who catch can, and the conquerors fight again, like a most valiant main of gamecocks as we are, till all be dead, and out of their woes; after which the survivor, bewailing before heaven and earth the cruelty of our Fair Oriana, and the slaughter which her basiliscine eyes have caused, shall fall gracefully upon his sword, and so end the woes of this our lovelorn generation. Placetne Domini? as they used to ask in the Senate at Oxford.”

“Really,” said Cary, “this is too bad.”

“So is, pardon me, your fighting Mr. Coffin with anything longer than a bodkin.”

“Bodkins are too short for such fierce Bobadils,” said Amyas; “they would close in so near, that we should have them falling to fisticuffs after the first bout.”

“Then let them fight with squirts across the market-place; for by heaven and the queen’s laws, they shall fight with nothing else.”

“My dear Mr. Cary,” went on Frank, suddenly changing his bantering tone to one of the most winning sweetness, “do not fancy that I cannot feel for you, or that I, as well as you, have not known the stings of love and the bitterer stings of jealousy. But oh, Mr. Cary, does it not seem to you an awful thing to waste selfishly upon your own quarrel that divine wrath which, as Plato says, is the very root of all virtues, and which has been given you, like all else which you have, that you may spend it in the service of her whom all bad souls fear, and all virtuous souls adore,—our peerless queen? Who dares, while she rules England, call his sword or his courage his own, or any one’s but hers? Are there no Spaniards to conquer, no wild Irish to deliver from their oppressors, that two gentlemen of Devon can find no better place to flesh their blades than in each other’s valiant and honorable hearts?”

“By heaven!” cried Amyas, “Frank speaks like a book; and for me, I do think that Christian gentlemen may leave love quarrels to bulls and rams.”

“And that the heir of Clovelly,” said Frank, smiling, “may find more noble examples to copy than the stags in his own deer-park.”

“Well,” said Will, penitently, “you are a great scholar, Mr. Frank, and you speak like one; but gentlemen must fight sometimes, or where would be their honor?”

“I speak,” said Frank, a little proudly, “not merely as a scholar, but as a gentleman, and one who has fought ere now, and to whom it has happened, Mr. Cary, to kill his man (on whose soul may God have mercy); but it is my pride to remember that I have never yet fought in my own quarrel, and my trust in God that I never shall. For as there is nothing more noble and blessed than to fight in behalf of those whom we love, so to fight in our own private behalf is a thing not to be allowed to a Christian man, unless refusal imports utter loss of life or honor; and even then, it may be (though I would not lay a burden on any man’s conscience), it is better not to resist evil, but to overcome it with good.”

“And I can tell you, Will,” said Amyas, “I am not troubled with fear of ghosts; but when I cut off the Frenchman’s head, I said to myself, ‘If that braggart had been slandering me instead of her gracious majesty, I should expect to see that head lying on my pillow every time I went to bed at night.’”

“God forbid!” said Will, with a shudder. “But what shall I do? for to the market tomorrow I will go, if it were choke-full of Coffins, and a ghost in each coffin of the lot.”

“Leave the matter to me,” said Amyas. “I have my device, as well as scholar Frank here; and if there be, as I suppose there must be, a quarrel in the market tomorrow, see if I do not—”

“Well, you are two good fellows,” said Will. “Let us have another tankard in.”

“And drink the health of Mr. Coffin, and all gallant lads of the North,” said Frank; “and now to my business. I have to take this runaway youth here home to his mother; and if he will not go quietly, I have orders to carry him across my saddle.”

“I hope your nag has a strong back, then,” said Amyas; “but I must go on and see Sir Richard, Frank. It is all very well to jest as we have been doing, but my mind is made up.”

“Stop,” said Cary. “You must stay here tonight; first, for good fellowship’s sake; and next, because I want the advice of our Phoenix here, our oracle, our paragon. There, Mr. Frank, can you construe that for me? Speak low, though, gentlemen both; there comes my father; you had better give me the letter again. Well, father, whence this morning?”

“Eh, company here? Young men, you are always welcome, and such as you. Would there were more of your sort in these dirty times! How is your good mother, Frank, eh? Where have I been, Will? Round the house-farm, to look at the beeves. That sheeted heifer of Prowse’s is all wrong; her coat stares like a hedgepig’s. Tell Jewell to go up and bring her in before night. And then up the forty acres; sprang two coveys, and picked a leash out of them. The Irish hawk flies as wild as any haggard still, and will never make a bird. I had to hand her to Tom, and take the little peregrine. Give me a Clovelly hawk against the world, after all; and—heigh ho, I am very hungry! Half-past twelve, and dinner not served? What, Master Amyas, spoiling your appetite with strong ale? Better have tried sack, lad; have some now with me.”

And the worthy old gentleman, having finished his oration, settled himself on a great bench inside the chimney, and put his hawk on a perch over his head, while his cockers coiled themselves up close to the warm peat-ashes, and his son set to work to pull off his father’s boots, amid sundry warnings to take care of his corns.

“Come, Master Amyas, a pint of white wine and sugar, and a bit of a shoeing-horn to it ere we dine. Some pickled prawns, now, or a rasher off the coals, to whet you?”

“Thank you,” quoth Amyas; “but I have drunk a mort of outlandish liquors, better and worse, in the last three years, and yet never found aught to come up to good ale, which needs neither shoeing-horn before nor after, but takes care of itself, and of all honest stomachs too, I think.”

“You speak like a book, boy,” said old Cary; “and after all, what a plague comes of these newfangled hot wines, and aqua vitaes, which have come in since the wars, but maddening of the brains, and fever of the blood?”

“I fear we have not seen the end of that yet,” said Frank. “My friends write me from the Netherlands that our men are falling into a swinish trick of swilling like the Hollanders. Heaven grant that they may not bring home the fashion with them.”

“A man must drink, they say, or die of the ague, in those vile swamps,” said Amyas. “When they get home here, they will not need it.”

“Heaven grant it,” said Frank; “I should be sorry to see Devonshire a drunken county; and there are many of our men out there with Mr. Champernoun.”

“Ah,” said Cary, “there, as in Ireland, we are proving her majesty’s saying true, that Devonshire is her right hand, and the young children thereof like the arrows in the hand of the giant.”

“They may well be,” said his son, “when some of them are giants themselves, like my tall schoolfellow opposite.”

“He will be up and doing again presently, I’ll warrant him,” said old Cary.

“And that I shall,” quoth Amyas. “I have been devising brave deeds; and see in the distance enchanters to be bound, dragons choked, empires conquered, though not in Holland.”

“You do?” asked Will, a little sharply; for he had had a half suspicion that more was meant than met the ear.

“Yes,” said Amyas, turning off his jest again, “I go to what Raleigh calls the Land of the Nymphs. Another month, I hope, will see me abroad in Ireland.”

“Abroad? Call it rather at home,” said old Cary; “for it is full of Devon men from end to end, and you will be among friends all day long. George Bourchier from Tawstock has the army now in Munster, and Warham St. Leger is marshal; George Carew is with Lord Grey of Wilton (Poor Peter Carew was killed at Glendalough); and after the defeat last year, when that villain Desmond cut off Herbert and Price, the companies were made up with six hundred Devon men, and Arthur Fortescue at their head; so that the old county holds her head as proudly in the Land of Ire as she does in the Low Countries and the Spanish Main.”

“And where,” asked Amyas, “is Davils of Marsland, who used to teach me how to catch trout, when I was staying down at Stow? He is in Ireland, too, is he not?”

“Ah, my lad,” said Mr. Cary, “that is a sad story. I thought all England had known it.”

“You forget, sir, I am a stranger. Surely he is not dead?”

“Murdered foully, lad! Murdered like a dog, and by the man whom he had treated as his son, and who pretended, the false knave! to call him father.”

“His blood is avenged?” said Amyas, fiercely.

“No, by heaven, not yet! Stay, don’t cry out again. I am getting old—I must tell my story my own way. It was last July,—was it not, Will?—Over comes to Ireland Saunders, one of those Jesuit foxes, as the Pope’s legate, with money and bulls, and a banner hallowed by the Pope, and the devil knows what beside; and with him James Fitzmaurice, the same fellow who had sworn on his knees to Perrott, in the church at Kilmallock, to be a true liegeman to Queen Elizabeth, and confirmed it by all his saints, and such a world of his Irish howling, that Perrott told me he was fain to stop his own ears. Well, he had been practising with the King of France, but got nothing but laughter for his pains, and so went over to the Most Catholic King, and promises him to join Ireland to Spain, and set up Popery