"Indeed there is one mitigation to the anguish of this time of terrors. Death comes to many households now almost as the Glorious Epiphany for which my mother looked; as it were with a great trumpet, in the twinkling of an eye, smiting whole families together, without parting, from earth to heaven.
"For what richer mercy could we ask?
"July.—The sunny sky, unshaded by a cloud, still smiles its terrible steady stony smile on the drooping city; like a countenance which despair has smitten into idiotic vacancy; like an eye from which madness has dried the tears.
"It is strange to have such leisure as we have now to listen and think. For in one thing Roger and Dr. Antony are firm. They will not suffer us to go into the infected streets, nor indeed to leave the garden, save by the water-gate, to give the children fresh air in the meadows by the river.
"We keep everything as much as possible in its wonted, even course. Our family prayer and psalm have not been omitted once; Roger's father leading it, for Roger and Leonard are seldom present.
"Maidie and Dolly sew and help us in the house, where there is much to do; since we hold it duty by no means to suffer our servants to remain in the infected city, unwilling as they were to depart. Mistress Gretel, Mistress Dorothy, and Olive, therefore, do the kitchen and the household work, and I and the young maidens help all we can; although (being brought up too helplessly) I am not of half the use I would be.
"This regular even living Dr. Antony deems the best precaution. He believes a feverish convulsive kind of religion is as dangerous as any other excitement, and that we have great need at such (as at all) times of the exhortation, Study to be quiet, and to do your own business.
"Much as he honours those who preach in the churches, he could desire that their exhortations were sometimes less alarming. The people are roused and alarmed enough, he says, by the pestilence. Death itself is preaching the Alarm and the Call to the unconverted. What sermon can preach 'Prepare' like Ten thousand Deaths in a week? The preachers should preach Christ and His peace, he thinks. And so no doubt many do.
"The magistrates do what they can to produce the same regularity in the city. London is not wholly abandoned by all her rulers in her sore need. Bread is as abundant and cheap as ever, though it must be brought to us at some peril.
"There is a great quiet in the streets. No holiday processions now. The merry-makers are all gone from the city or from the world. No funeral processions. There are no burials, except by night. The city is dying. But there are no tolling bells, no reverent slow steps of the mourning train. The magistrates dare not let the mourners go about the streets by day.
"Death is stripped of all the pomps with which we seek to hide its terrors, and stands bare. The only funeral procession is the dead-cart with its ghastly drivers; the dead-cart met at the head of each alley with shrieks of despair which break the silence of the night. Twice the drivers of that cart were lost, and the horses rushed wildly on. But no one knows if the drivers died or fled. The general tomb is that dread Pit in the fields where the dead are thrown at midnight, of which we scarce dare even think.
"The pestilence makes no distinction that any of us can understand now. Aunt Dorothy has well-nigh given up seeking to read God's judgments, which at first she and many thought so distinct and distinguishing.
"Yet amid all these horrors there are alleviations such as sometimes do make the meaning shine through them, as if they were illuminated from within.
"Divisions have ceased. Instead of disputing questions of precedence as on a mock battle-field, Christians draw inward to the citadel, which is the sole and common refuge of us all.
"Mere religious talk has ceased.
"People whose talk is deeper than their life, do not dare to talk for fear of having to prove their words the same hour in dying.
"People whose life lies deeper than their speech, do not need to talk of what they feel. The peace which sets them free to serve and comfort all around, speaks enough, with very few words.
"Persecution has ceased.
"The pestilence, with its cruel Act of Uniformity has altogether annulled that of the king. Divers of the ejected ministers, now that ten thousand are dying in a week, have resolved that no obedience to the laws of mortal men whatever can justify them in neglecting men's souls and bodies in such extremities. They therefore stay or return. They go into the forsaken pulpits, unforbidden, to preach to the poor people before they die; also to visit the sick, and get such relief as they can for the poor, especially those who are shut up in the smitten houses.
"The fear, and hope, which at first made people avoid each other, have passed together. And the churches are crowded whenever any preach who speak as if they testified what they knew.
"'Religion,' Roger says, 'is gaining such a hold of numbers of these weeping, silent listeners, as, living or dying, will not be loosed again.'
"And (unless the Puritan preaching is different from any I ever heard, or thought to hear) the sermons are such as the evident possibility of the preachers never preaching another, and the certainty of many of the congregation never hearing another, alone can make them.
"They are messages, not statements or arguments; scarcely so much appeals as messages. The calmest allusion to danger penetrates the heart like the archangel's trumpet, when ten thousand dying lips are echoing it.
"'You are lost—wandering and lost in sin.'
"That has a strange power, when we know it to be true, and see before us the edge of the abyss.
"'The son of God has come to seek and to save the lost.'
"He, Himself, not the plague, but the Saviour, is here, seeking the lost now; not to judge but to save.
"God has so loved the world; not hated, let these horrors say what they may—not forgotten—but loved; not willed this open world to perish, let these grass-grown streets, and these shutters rattling against the empty houses, these midnight burials of thousands, these death-wails, this death-silence, say what they will, not to perish; the true perishing, the perishing in sin, of sin, is not His will, never His will, but the being saved, out of sin and from sin. This salvation is as near you as the plague. Nay, the plague is only the merciful thunder calling to it.
"Few words are needed to move men now; no new words. The older the better. If the old forgotten words once lisped at a mother's knee, better than all.
"O Walter! Walter! my brother! Art thou here still in this plague-smitten city, or hast thou fled with that Court smitten with a plague so infinitely more terrible? Would God thou wert here to hear those sacred words of heavenly forgiveness and strength, echoed back to thy heart once more, as from our mother's lips, from among these congregations of dying men!
"August 25.—It has come close to us at last.
"Our door is marked with the red cross now.
"The sweetest and ripest souls among us—Roger's father and Aunt Gretel—have been stricken, and are gone home.
"Yesterday morning, before daybreak, I was resting on my bed, having watched through the night, when I heard the latch of the garden-door, which was left open for Roger and Dr. Antony, softly lifted. I thought it might be Roger, and crept down-stairs.
"At the door I met Annis Nye.
"Her face was pale and worn, but serene as ever, and her voice as calm.
"'I heard that you were all here, without any to serve you,' she said, 'and I thought that was a call to me to come.'
"'Do you know into what peril you come?' I asked.
"'I saw the plague-sign on the street-door,' she said; 'so I came round through the garden.'
"I clasped her in my arms, and kissed her, and wept. Tears are not common with us now; but I could not help these. Generous deeds always touch the spring of tears, I think, more easily than sorrow.
"What was stranger than my being thus moved, when Aunt Dorothy came down and saw Annis, and heard why she had come, she did as I had done; she took the maiden to her heart and wept.
"But what sounded stranger yet in that house and city of death, when the children saw her, they made the hushed house ring for a moment with their joyous welcomes.
"'Annis is at home again!' they said; 'Annis is safe. She will nurse us all, and keep every one, quiet, and we shall all get well.'
"Meantime, Mistress Dorothy had busied herself preparing food, which she set before Annis, and with difficulty persuaded her to take a little bread and milk.
"She had a strange story to tell, and she told it in few words, as was her wont, at our questioning.
"'I and other women Friends were sentenced to the plantations in Jamaica,' she said. 'But the ship-masters refused to take us. They held our sentence unjust, and feared the judgment of the Lord if they meddled with us. At last one was found who took us, he being denied a pass down the river from the plague-smitten city unless he covenanted to carry us. They had trouble in getting some of us on board. For they would not acknowledge their sentence so far as to climb willingly into the ship. So they had to be hoisted on board like merchandise. To this I was not called. For which I was thankful. For it angered the sailors sorely. "They would hoist merchants' goods," said they, "but not men and women." But the officers took the ropes, saying, "They are the king's goods." So, as chattels, we were shipped for the plantations. But we had scarce reached the sea when the pestilence broke out among us. One and another sickened and died. So that the ship-masters would proceed no further, but cast us on shore, and me among the rest.'
"There was a kind of comfort in feeling that, coming thus from an infected ship, the generous maiden had not really increased her risk by devoting herself to our service, freely as she had dared to do so. And our risk could scarce be increased.
"Having told her tale, Annis quietly folded her out-of-door garments, laying them aside in the old places, and said to Aunt Dorothy, 'Which way can I serve thee best?'
"We took her to Mr. Drayton's sick-chamber, Olive's eyes brightened with the soft moisture of grateful tears as Annis entered, where she sate by her father's bed.
"But that was no place or season for spoken thanks or questionings. Annis at once fitted into her place among the nurses. And I know not how any of us could have survived those days and nights of watching, but for her help.
"Aunt Dorothy said,—
"'I will take heed how I speak lightly of Quakers and their calls again.'
"Yes; the two readiest among us have been called home. Roger's father and his mother's sister. Honoured and beloved beyond any.
"Yet we speak of them quietly, almost without tears.
"Death is so around us—without, within, everywhere—that it seems the most natural thing. We say, 'They are gone home,' with less sense of separation than in ordinary times we say, 'They are gone to Netherby,' with far less than we should have said, 'They have gone across the seas.'
"It is so likely we may be with them again to-morrow—to-day!
"I look back a page or two in this Diary, and the words they spoke and I wrote so lately have become sacred, dying, farewell words.
"'The Father's rod.' Yes, that was what they thought. 'The King's touch smiting them from the lower service to the higher,' That is what we think, and we say it to each other as their epitaph.
September.—No distinction, indeed, this pestilence makes as to whom it smites.
"What I wished, yet scarce dared to wish, for Walter has come true.
"Could I have dared to wish it, had I thought it could come?
"Two nights since, Roger came to my bedside and said,—
"'Lettice, I dare not spare thee, even thee, from a call such as this. Canst thou be ready to come with me quickly, to visit one smitten with plague?'
"From any voice but his, the sudden, midnight summons would have set my heart beating so as to rob me of the power to obey.
"But there is always a calm about him which nerves me to do anything. Besides, he said, 'Come with me.' And that was strength itself.
"I did not waste time in questioning. He left me to tell Annis Nye not to wake Olive.
"I was dressed in a few minutes. Then I went and kissed the babe. It might be perilous for me to touch his soft cheek, rosy with sleep, when I came back. If ever I came back to him! For that was a probability which must be met in such a leave-taking.
"As I stood by the child's little bed, Roger came back.
"'We will kneel beside him,' he said.
"And in a few brief words he prayed, for strength to comfort, for wisdom to guide, for balm to heal.
"Before we rose, I knew what he meant
"'It is Walter,' I said.
"He took my hand in his, and we spoke no more.
"Silently we went out, our steps echoing through the streets, the great bonfires, kept up now in each street to purify the air, lighting us on our way, now illuminating with tongues of fitful flame the red cross and the closed door, now more drearily lighting up the empty chambers of the houses of the dead, which needed no longer to be closed, whose half-opened shutters creaked restlessly in the night winds.
"We stopped at the steps of what had been a stately mansion.
"The door was ajar, as Roger must have left it. There were none to usher us into the lofty hall or up the wide staircase, on whose stone stairs our steps echoed so noisily through the deserted chambers, step as softly as we might.
"Through one luxurious chamber after another we passed, our steps hushed on soft Persian rugs, and softened by tapestried walls.
"In one lay virginals and lutes and song-books, as if from a recent concert. In another, a table spread for a feast—the wine still sparkling in the glasses, and summer-fruits mouldering on the porcelain.
"And in the last chamber, upon a stately gilded bed with silk curtains, he lay, my brother, with scarce open, half-vacant eyes, which seemed as if their sight and meaning were gone, his hands clenched in agony.
"Yet he saw and knew me, for he cried with an energy which pierced the silence like a death-wail—
"'Take her away, Roger! take her away! I will not have that at my door! Take her away!'
"But I went close to him, and gently unclasped his clenched hand, and kissed his forehead, and said—
"'Two of us have been smitten already, Walter. We are past peril.'
"'Who have been smitten?' he asked suddenly. 'Not your child?'
"'No,' I said—and I felt my voice falter—'not our Harry.'
"Then his mind seemed to wander, for the far-off past came back so vividly as to blot out the days that had intervened.
"'Harry, my brother Harry—don't speak to me of Harry,' he said. 'He loved me, and sent a dying message that he looked to meet me. And he never will—he never will.' And then,—
"'I am dying, Lettice, don't you see? dying—body and soul. For mercy's sake don't come near me. If you can bear it, I can't. There will be torments enough soon. Don't burn my soul thus with your purity and your love.'
"I took his hand, and pressed it to my lips, for I could not speak. But he drew it away with a convulsive energy.
"Take her away, Roger!—don't let her! She doesn't know what I am, or who it was these hands touched last.'
"And then at intervals he told us how, when the Court left, a small company of the more reckless young courtiers had persuaded him it would be cowardly to go; and they had established themselves in this house, belonging to a kinsman of one of them, and held wild revelries there. How he had half intended, when he had heard we remained in the City, to break with these dissolute associates, and find us out; and had once or twice crept into churches by himself and heard sermons, but had delayed and hesitated from week to week; until at last, towards the end of August, a singing-girl, one of their company, had been smitten with the plague. Then the door had been closed and marked, and all the revellers had escaped through windows, over the leads of other houses, or over the palings of gardens to the river, and so into the country. But he could not shut his heart to the dying shrieks of that poor lost girl, and abandon her to die alone.
"'I meant to wait till she was dead,' he said. 'and leave the men of the dead-cart to find her in the empty house and bury her, and then to follow the rest. I had enough on my conscience without being followed through life with those dying cries. But before she died I began to feel ill myself. I tried to keep up my spirits with wine; but that was of no use. And then I found half a dozen leaves of an old Prayer-book—the sentences and the Confession, and the Absolution, and one or two of the Gospels. I entreated her to let me read to her, but she would not listen, but kept deliriously singing, mixing up light songs, bad enough at any time from a woman's lips, with strains of music from the Royal Chapel, and melodies of innocent old Christmas village carols, in a way horrible to hear. And then she died, and I was too ill to leave. And I crept into this bed. That was yesterday. And at night-fall there was a rattling at the door, and heavy steps up-stairs, and heavier down again. So I knew they would bury her. But I lay still under the coverlet; for a horrid dread came over me that they might find me, carry me down, and bury me with her, to save time. There had been horrible jests among us of such things happening. But the door shut, echoing through the empty house like thunder.
"'And I knew I was left alone to die. And then another horrible feeling came over me; that it would be better if they had found me, and taken me out to die quietly among the dead, without thinking any more about it, than leave me here lingering alone to think of it; to look at death steadily, alone, no one knows how long; with nothing but dying between me and it.
"'And to pass the time and break the silence I took up the old Prayer-book and read aloud,—
"'When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness. But I thought, I can never turn away from my wickedness. I can only turn round and round in it for ever and ever. So I stopped, until the silence was worse to bear than the words; and then I read on again. But my own voice sounded to me like a parody. Dreadful jesting voices seemed reading the sacred words after me, until I came to the Confession.
"'Then the jesting voices vanished. And, instead, came my mother's voice, and my own, as a boy, saying it after her, "We have gone astray like lost sheep." I might have said it once, I knew, and have come back; now I should have to go on saying it for ever, with her voice echoing it as if from heaven, and never come back. If I could hear the voice of some one good reading this Confession and the Gospels, I thought they might seem true, even for me, yet, but never in my own.
"'So I flung the book from me, and lay still until I heard a man's feet coming softly up the staircase; and I thought it was a thief come to pillage, and then perhaps to murder me. And the insane desire of life mastered me again; and I covered my face again and hushed my breath, until I heard Roger's voice beside me saying, "There is no one living here." And then I looked up. And all night he has been speaking to me, Lettice—nursing me as my mother might, and now and then reading out of the Gospels and the Confession. And if the merciful words would seem true to me in any voice sister, they would in his. If I had only gone to you all before! But it is too late, Is it not too late? Is not my life wasted, lost—lost for ever?'
"He gazed into my eyes with that wistful, thirsting look of the souls who are departing. I knew nothing but truth would avail. So I said as quietly as I could,—
"'Your life—this life, Walter—I am afraid it is lost—lost for ever. Your life; but not you, Walter; not you.'
He kept his eyes fixed on mine, and said,—
"And there is no second, Lettice. God Himself cannot give us back the lost life again.'
"Then all that he might have been, all my mother hoped he might be, rushed over my heart, and I could not say any more. I could only kneel down by his bedside and take his hand and sob out,—
"'O Father, Thou knowest all he might have been, all Thou wouldest have had him be. And Thou seest the ruin they have made of him. Have pity, have pity, and forgive.'
"He laid his hand on mine.
"'Hush, Lettice, hush!' he said; 'not they—I. I have ruined myself. No one could have ruined me but myself. The sin is mine.'
"Then I rose. For I felt as if my prayer was answered. I felt as if, weak, trembling woman that I was, a priestly voice was in my ears pronouncing absolution, ready to breathe the gospel of forgiveness through my lips. For it seemed to me these were the first words of real repenting I had ever heard Walter utter. I had heard him again and again speak of himself or his life with a passionate loathing. But that was not repenting. Too often if any one admitted the justice of such self-accusations, he would turn them into self-excusing and accusings of others. But now, it seemed to me, he was indeed coming to himself, coming home; and I said,—
"'Walter, you could not turn from the cries of that poor dying creature. Will you set your pity above God's?'
"'I had none but myself to think of,' he said. 'It mattered nothing to any one whether I did right or wrong about it. He is King and Judge, and has the whole world to think of in forgiving any one.'
"'Our Lord did not say so,' I said. 'When the lost son arose to come home to be forgiven, it seemed as if the father had nothing to do with any one in the world but with him. He did not think of what the servants would say, or the elder brother, or how any one else might be tempted by the forgiveness to wander. He was watching the wanderer! Oh, Walter, He was the first to see him turn—the first! He was the first to see you. I know it by the parable; I know it because, after all—after all, Walter—He has let you die at your post. Think of the mercy of that! You might have died helping to ruin some one. You die trying to help. Think of the mercy of being suffered to do that!'
"A softer light came into his eyes, and after a minute he said,—
"'I cannot doubt His pity; no, I dare not. What I doubt is myself. How can you know, Lettice, how can I know, that if life were given back to me I might not waste it all again?'
"Then turning that intense searching gaze from me to Roger, he went on,—
"'How can I know whether I am clinging to Him, as a dying man clings to anything, or indeed as the repenting son to the Father? How can you know or I?'
"Roger bent low over him and said,—
"'Neither you nor I can know. One only knows. He only can forgive. He knew, on the cross, when He was dying for the world, and the thief beside Him was dying for his own crimes, and dying He forgave the dying. He knows now. He is as near as then, and not dying; living for evermore; almighty to save. But even if you are clinging to Him, as a drowning man to a rock, or to an outstretched hand, in mere terror of the waves, is He one likely to wrench His hand even from such a poor, desperate, selfish grasp as that? Did He on the Sea of Galilee?'
"Walter drank in all Roger said, but made no reply.
"Roger's next words fell solemn as a summons from another world.
"'What do you want Him to save you from?'
"Walter's answer was a cry of agony.
"'From myself!—from myself!'
"Roger's voice was firm no longer, but low and broken as Walter's own, as he replied,—
"That He died to do; that He lives to do. That He can never refuse to do for any that ask Him, for ever and for ever.'
"Then, after a few moments, Roger said,—
"'If He sees no other way to save you but that you should lose your life, that you should not be trusted with it again, could you be content?'
"'How can I be content?' Walter answered, 'Think what my life might have been, It might have been like yours! And I have no second. I would not complain. It is no wonder I cannot be trusted. I cannot trust myself. But you can never know how bitter it is to begin to see what life might have been when it is all over, and when you begin to see how well He you have grieved was worth serving.'
"He lingered some days. And then the lost life was over.
"The life those we had served not disloyally had done their utmost to ruin.
"The spirit had departed, which He we have served so unworthily even to the uttermost can save.
"It was beyond comparison the bitterest sacrifice we had ever made.
"Yet this sacrifice England is now making by hecatombs on the same foul altar.
"A sacrifice not of life ennobled, and made infinitely worthier in laying it down, but of honour, of virtue, of all that makes men men. Of souls degraded in the sacrifice to the level of that to which they are sacrificed. A sacrifice to devils, and not to God."
"Broad Oak, February, 1666.—For a brief season we are in this haven, driven into rest by many storms.
"The Plague has left London. The Court has returned to it unchanged, to pursue its revelries. The ejected ministers who preached to the dying city are once more silenced and driven from their pulpits, and not only driven from their pulpits but from the city, by the Five Mile Act, which prohibits any ejected minister, on severe penalties, from approaching within five miles of the church where he was wont to preach.
"Roger deemed his work in London for the present done.
"When we left, the streets were fragrant with the smoke of sweet woods, burned in the houses, and curling through the open windows day and night. The air was laden with strange Oriental odours of incense, of aromatic gums and perfumes, floating the spirit on their dream-like fragrance (as perfumes only can), within the spells of Enchanted ground.
"Yet the change is pleasant, to this wholesome country air, fresh with the smell of the new-ploughed earth, of the young mosses and grasses shooting out everywhere bright tiny spikes or stars of jewel-like green, of the breath of cows, of gummy swelling leaf-buds, and fir-stems warmed into pungent fragrance by the sun, of early peeping snow-drops and rare violets, of sedges moistened by the prattling brooks, of free winds coming and going we know not whence or whither—from the mountains, from the sea, or from the forests of the American wilderness. It is invigorating to body and soul to change those costly foreign manufactured perfumes for all these countless, changing, blending, breathing fragrances, which make what I suppose is meant by 'the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed.'
"It is a wonderful relief to be here, after what we have gone through; free to go where we will, living with open doors, neighbours freely coming and going, guests, unsuspected, dropping in at the hospitable door from the highway.
"It is not so much like coming in a ship out of the storm into the haven, as like being quietly laid on a friendly sunny shore, after buffeting with panting chest and weary arms through the waves which have made the ship a wreck.
"Something of this calm, indeed, began to come even before we left London.
"It is a thing never to forget, the change that came over people's countenances on the first morning late in September, when the number of the dead was in the week declared to have diminished instead of increasing; the tears that those first gleams of hope brought to eyes long dry in despair; the re-awaking of neighbourly sympathy, as each house ceased to be either a refuge against infection, or a pest-house from which it issued; windows opened fearlessly, once more, to hear good news. The reserve which, like a fortress, rampart with rampart, guards the deepest feelings of our people, broken down by the common deliverance; strangers grasping each others' hands in the streets, merely for the joy of telling the good news, weeping aloud for gladness, or uttering the brief fervent thanksgiving—''Tis all wonderful; 'tis all a dream? Blessed be God, 'tis all His own doing. Human help and skill were at an end. Let us give thanks to Him.'
"This melting together of men's hearts in the rapture of a common deliverance, struck me more than all. It made me think how the best balsam to heal the wounds of Christendom would be for Christianity to be once more understood as the Gospel of Great Joy which it assuredly is. There would be little room for controversy, I thought, and none for isolation and exclusion, if every heart could only be penetrated with the joy of the forgiven Prodigal, and of the Angels' Christmas hymn.
"Some people in their eagerness to purify their houses burned them down. Wild despair was succeeded on every side by hopes as wild. Those who had suspected every one, and crept along the streets, fearing to touch each other's garments, grew so bold that they no longer feared even the poor ghastly scarce-recovered victims of the Plague, who began to limp about the streets with the bandages of the dreaded sores and swellings still around their heads and limbs.
"If even the reckless Court itself had lived through that peril and that rescue, I think it would never have affronted Heaven and this city of mourners again with its profligate revelries. The City, indeed, was well fumigated from infection with perfumes, and with brimstone, to make it a safe dwelling for the Court. But what incense, what fires, can purify England from the infection of the Court itself?
"We should have gone to Netherby, but that is scarce a safe home just now for Roger. A vexatious suit has been instituted against him, on the ground of his aiding or abetting in some 'disloyal' attempt of which he knew nothing. But we know it is his work during the Commonwealth that is the true ground of prosecution. Sir Launcelot Trevor will never pardon Roger's detecting him in one of the plots for assassinating Cromwell. It is not the hard laws themselves, severe as their restrictions and penalties are, that cause the most suffering. It is the power they give to bad men to annoy the good.
"Already much of the Drayton property has been sacrificed through vexatious exactions. But now it is more than property that is threatened. And so this pleasant home of Broad Oak, which is a house of mercy to so many, has now become a refuge for us. We are, in fact, here as in a hiding-place, until this tyranny be overpast, or we can find some other refuge.
"Our host, Mr. Philip Henry's courtly deference of manners, his listening to every one as if he had something to learn from each, has more charm for me than I like to confess to myself. It recalls the stately courtesy of my brother Harry and of the Cavaliers who were his contemporaries.
"The Puritan manners are severer and less chivalrous than those of our old Cavaliers, though with more of true knightly honour to women in them than the courtiers of this New Court are capable of comprehending.
"We read together often, Roger and I, these old records of the early settlers in the American wildernesses. We are beginning now to glean more particular tidings concerning the various village communities into which the settlers have now organized themselves. For more and more we begin to speak of a 'New Netherby' rising beside some inland mere or pleasant creek of the forest in New England.
"'Not that I despair for a moment of England,' Roger says. 'But we have but one life, and its years are few and precious; and if the good fight is going on victoriously elsewhere, it seems scarce a man's place to stay where the best he can do is to keep quiet and hide for his life.'
"February, 1666, Broad Oak.—There is a serenity and sunshine about this house which makes it like an island of fair weather in the midst of the turbulent world. Continually it recalls to me Port Royal. And even more by resemblance than by Contrast.
"It seems to me as fully as Port Royal a temple or house of God. (In one sense I, as a Protestant, should believe more, since the church, not the convent, is God's sacred Order.) Every morning and evening all the inmates and family assemble for prayer and reading of the Bible. 'As the priests in the tabernacle,' Mr. Henry says, 'used daily to burn the incense, and to light the lamps.' All pray kneeling; for Mr. Henry 'has high thoughts of the body as God's workmanship, and desires that it should share in the homage offered to Him.'
"Mr. Henry never makes this service long, so as to be a weariness; he calls it the 'hem to keep the rest of the day from ravelling.' In the evening he gathers his household, servants, workmen, day labourers, and sojourners, early, that the youngest, or those who have done a good day's work, may not be sleepy. 'Better one absent than all sleepy,' he says.
"He explains the Bible as he reads it, not merely 'mincing it small, but by easy unforced distribution.' Above all, he seeks to lift up before the heart 'Christ, the Treasure in the field of the Bible.' 'Every word of God is good,' he says, 'but especially God the Word.' He closes with a psalm; sometimes many verses, but sung quickly, every one having a book, so that there is no interruption to the singing.
"Afterwards his two little boys kneel with folded hands before their father and mother, and ask their blessing, while he pronounces the benediction over them, saying, 'The Lord bless thee.' On Thursday he catechizes the servants on some simple subject.
"On Sunday, 'the pearl of the week, the queen of days,' the perpetual Easter-day on which we sing, 'The Lord is risen indeed,' the whole house seems so full of tranquil light, all sounds and signs of needless labour banished, all the sweet sounds of nature, birds and bees and running brooks, heard with a new music in the hush of human rest, the men and maids in their sober holiday attire, that it is difficult to believe there is not an audible, visible increase of light and music in the external world, that the fields, and woods, and skies, have not also donned a festive attire, that the sun is not shining with a new radiance, like the ancient Lamp of the sanctuary, fresh filled and trimmed for the Sabbath. It shines on the heart with a quiet radiance, like the last chapters of the Gospels; the resurrection chapters. The household, since Mr. Henry has been silenced, attend the Church service in the little neighbouring parish-church of Whitechurch, always going early, before the service begins. The walks through the field to and from the church are a sacred service in themselves, by virtue of Mr. Henry's discourse. In truth, there is no silencing the music of such a piety as his, unless you could make it cease to flow.
"This temple also has its shrines and inner sanctuary. Mrs. Henry pointed out to me the little chamber where her husband prays alone; when he changed it he consecrated the new one with a special prayer. I remember Roger's father used to call the direction, 'When thou enterest into thy closet shut thy door,' 'the one unquestionably divine rubric of the New Testament.' And it seems to me beautiful that the inmost sanctuary of our houses, as of our hearts, should be that which it consecrated by solitude with God.
"Then, like Port Royal, this is a house of mercy. Standing near the way-side, it is seldom that the hospitable board has none but inmates round it. And Mr. Henry's simple, fervent thanksgiving at the table must, I think, go along with the traveller on his further journey, like the echo of a hymn.
"The order of the convent, moreover, can scarcely be more thorough than that of this home, save that it is broken, like the order of nature, by the sweet irregularities and varieties which always come to stir all Divine order out of monotony. The Hand which can make Life the mainspring of its machinery may dare irregularities.
"Port Royal was especially recalled to my mind by a letter I received last November from Madame la Mothe, in which she speaks of the return of the nuns to Port Royal des Champs. Four years ago they were dispersed into imprisonment in various convents, in the hope that the courage of each alone might fail, so that in isolation, moved by the most plausible persuasions and the severest threats, the community might separately sign the condemnation of Jansenism, which they had refused to sign together. It was a simple question of fact. They were required to declare that the five condemned propositions were in Jansenius' books; thus asserting what they believed false to be true. But out of the ninety-six nuns thus dispersed eighty-four returned unshaken. Madame la Mothe writes:
"'Such a welcome and restoration home as the holy sisters had was worth sore suffering to win, as the various carriages met, bringing the Mother Angélique and her scattered daughters once more together. The church bells pealed joyous greetings, and the peasants shouted or wept their welcomes, flocking by the roadside, along the steep descent into the valley, in holiday dresses; gray-haired tottering men, little toddling children, mothers and babes in arms—not a creature that could stir left behind to miss the joy of welcoming their benefactresses back. And so the long procession of nuns, in their white robes, with scarlet crosses, disappeared under the great Gothic gates, into the sacred enclosure. It was a sight indescribably beautiful to the eye, but who can say what it was to the heart?'
"Martyrs not so much to truth as to truthfulness, they would not recognize the distinction between consenting to what they deemed a lie and telling it.
"Should not their enemies concede at least this merit to the two thousand ejected ministers? They may be over nice, as I think they are, in some of their scruples. But why cannot people, who see a noble heroism in eighty nuns suffering ejection and dispersion rather than declare that false which they believe to be true—rather than bring on their souls the degradation of a lie—see something of the same heroism in two thousand English clergymen with their families suffering ejection, calumny, and peril of starvation rather than solemnly declare they believe things true which they believe false? The families who have to share the misery whether they will or no, do not make the sacrifice easier.
"Yet many a tender-hearted lady of our acquaintance, of the old Cavalier stock, whose face has glowed with interest when I have told her of the sufferings and constancy of the Mère Angélique and her nuns, and who has rejoiced with me when I read the story of their restoration, can see nothing but vulgar perversity and obstinacy in the conduct of these ejected ministers.
"Why cannot these also be honoured as martyrs, if not to truth, at least to truthfulness?
"Can it be that the white dresses and red crosses, and the grand arched entrance gates make the difference?
"Or is it merely that the one took place in France and the other at home?
"Building the sepulchres of the prophets is such easy and graceful feminine work! As easy as tapestry work, especially when the sepulchres are reared in the imagination, and the prophets prophesied to other people's forefathers.
"But it seems as if, in heaven, not the slightest value was attached to those elegant little erections.
"The one thing regarded there seems to be whether we help and honour those who are contending or suffering for truth and right now. And this is not always so easy.
"For, on the other hand, Aunt Dorothy was not a little incensed when I once told her (intending to be conciliatory) that I thought the Nonconformist ministers quite as much to be honoured as the Mère Angélique and her nuns.
"'To compare Mr. Baxter and two thousand of the most enlightened ministers in England to a set of poor benighted papists!' said she.
"And she was only to be mollified by the consideration of the deficiency in my own religious training.
"Perhaps for us women the safest course is to render as wide a succour as we can to all who suffer. Because then if we make any mistakes as to truth, in the great account they may be counterbalanced by the entries on the side of love; which, on the whole, seems to overrule the final judgment.
"March, 1666.—We are to leave this friendly holy roof for another shelter.
"Many a sharp-cut diamond of Mr. Henry's good sayings I shall carry away with me.
"'Repentance is not a sudden land-flood, but the flowing of a perennial spring; an abiding habit.'
"'Peace is joy in the bloom; joy is peace in the fruit.'
"But more than all such sayings, I bear away with me the memory of a sanctity as fresh and fragrant as any I ever hope to see, fragrant not as with the odours of manufactured perfumes, but with the countless fragrances of a field which the Lord has blessed.
"An Endurance of affliction made all the lovelier by the capacity for the happiness it foregoes,—by the belief that every creature of God is good and to be enjoyed with thanksgiving which prevents its being stiffened into austerity; a submissive Loyalty ennobled by the higher loyalty which prevents its becoming servile; an open-handed charity sustained by busy-handed industry, by the thrift which deems waste a sin, and the justice which deems debt a degradation; a Devotion whose chief delight is to soar and sing, and which sings never the less when it stoops to serve; a Religion as free from fanaticism, worldliness, or austerity as any the world can see.
"A piety which would have been my mother's element; worthy it seems to me of the sober joyful liturgy she loved so dearly, yet to which Mr. Henry cannot entirely conform. Yes; it seems to me a piety more unlike that of the Puritans of our early days than unlike that of George Herbert or of Port Royal. A lovely, patient, quiet, meek-eyed piety! It recalls to me the group of St. Paul's gentle graces, 'love, joy, peace,' and the rest, which I used to think pictured my mother's religion, far more than St. Peter's belligerent virtues, godliness, faith, courage, which seemed to me to stand forth in sword and breastplate like the religion of Roger and the Ironsides.
"'If the old Cavaliers, alas, are gone,' I said to Roger to-day, 'it seems to me the old Puritans are gone as well. Mr. Philip Henry is far less like you Ironsides than like my mother. This is a piety, as I deem, which would have suffered in prisons and pillories to any extent, but would scarcely have lifted its voice in the Parliament with Mr. Hampden and Mr. Pym, and would certainly not have raised the standard at Edgehill or Worcester. Where are the old Puritans gone?'
"'Where we may follow them, sweet heart,' said he; 'to fight the wolves and conquer the wildernesses of the West.'
"'Then,' said I, 'are the wrestling manlike Christian virtues to migrate to New England to subdue the New World; whilst the feminine Christian graces are to stay at home to endure the pillory and the prison? That were a strange division. Meseems, what with prohibitions to speak, and imprisonment, and the banishment of the fighting men, this patient, passive nonconformity can never spread. Rather, perhaps, in a generation or two it will die out.'
"'Scarcely, I think,' he said. 'The old country is patient and dumb, and sometimes takes a long sleep but I believe she will wake one day, and break the nets they have entangled her in, and scatter those who twisted them, simply by rising and shaking herself. Only her sleep may be too long for us to wait to the end of it.'
"'But who is to wake her?' I said. 'A piety this of Mr. Henry's, like that of Mr. Herbert, beautiful and pure enough to convert the world, if some louder voice could only rouse the world to look at it. But whence is this voice to come? For it seems to me our liturgy, though the purest music of devotion that can rise to heaven if once people are awake to hear it and to sing it, has scarcely the kind of fiery force in it to arouse the slumbering world. And if the Puritan religion becomes alike meek and soft-spoken, whence is this enkindling fire to come?
"You might as well have asked our ancestor Cassibelawn where the fire was to come from when the forests were cut down,' he said. 'While the forests give fuel enough, who can foresee the coal-pits?
"'Perhaps,' he added after a pause, as in a muse, 'when the spring comes and the ice melts and the music of the living waters breaks on England again, as it must and will, the new streams will find new channels.'
"Our discourse was broken at this point by the arrival of two horsemen who dismounted at the door. The hospitable board was spread for the midday meal, and as we went down to take our places at it, Mr. Henry introduced us to these new guests as friends of his.
"They were Dr. Annesly and Dr. Wesley,* two of the nonconformist ministers."
* Maternal and paternal grandfather of the Wesleys.
OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.
Troubles came, as troubles are wont to come, in troops, sweeping down on us thick and fast in the year which followed the plague, 1666.
Through the whole year Roger was in concealment with Lettice and their boy. Lands and houses are no safeguards in a persecution where so much lies at the mercy of informers. And Roger—and Lettice also—had an implacable enemy in Sir Launcelot Trevor, the profligacy of whose early years had, at its second fermentation, soured into malignity against those who had reproved or thwarted him. It was Sir Launcelot, indeed, who hunted us hither. In his youth he had made some careless studies in the law, and now he was appointed one of the judges. Vexations which render life impossible for all the best ends of living are terribly easy to inflict when bad laws are executed by worse men. And it was this which made the misery of those times. The laws were indeed (as we believe) harsh and unjust; but it was the authorities who made them and the judges who administered them, it was the spirit in which the letter was carried out that made them (at last) unsupportable.
About the spring of this year the pressure of the times fell hard on cousin Placidia.
Her son Isaac was arrested for attending a forbidden meeting near Bedford, and was thrown into the old jail on Bedford Bridge, where John Bunyan (though loyal as Mr. Baxter), had already been incarcerated for six years.
Thence, Isaac wrote as if imprisonment in such company were not to be imprisoned but emparadised. "Such heavenly discourse as John Bunyan makes here," said he, "would make a dungeon a palace." He gave hints also of a wonderful story, or allegory, which the tinker was penning in the jail, and which (said Isaac) would make as much music in the world, when it came forth, as Mr. Milton's poems. We smiled at the lad's enthusiasm, for it was not to be thought that a poor tinker, however godly, could write anything beyond edifying sheets suited to paste on the walls of poor folks like himself. Indeed, we had seen some verses of his, which, though full of piety and patience, were scarce to be called poetry.
And that very year Mr. Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker (and a friend of Annis Nye's), who had once been reader to Mr. Milton in his blindness, brought us marvellous accounts of a manuscript Mr. Milton had given him to read at a "pretty box" Mr. Ellwood had taken for him, during the Plague, at Giles Chalfont. It contained the Epic Poem called "Paradise Lost." Thomas Ellwood said to him, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?" Some time afterwards, Mr. Milton showed him another poem called Paradise Regained, saying, in a pleasant tone, "This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of."
So that, seeing, besides all he had already done to the marvel of Europe, Mr. Milton had these wonderful epics in store, it naturally amused us not a little that Isaac should compare this good tinker with him. Nevertheless, we honoured the lad's heartiness, and rejoiced that in his doleful condition he had such pious company to comfort him withal.
Not so, however, his mother. Her distress knew no bounds. This affliction tore her heart in twain; setting what was highest in her in fierce civil war with what was lowest. For, in spite of all her protestations of poverty, rumour had rather magnified than diminished the amount of cousin Placidia's hoards. The more she sought to keep them unknown, the more magnificent they grew in the busy imaginations of her neighbours. And coffer after coffer of her painfully hoarded stores had to be confessed and emptied as she sought to bribe one exacting officer after another to release her son; until, the more she gave, the more they believed she could be tortured into giving, the more the ingenuity of informers and the greed of jailers increased, and the more distant grew the prospects of poor Isaac's liberation.
My heart ached for the torture she went through as, bit by bit, she had to offer up the money which was dear to her as life, for the child who was dearer.
"It was worse than the boot or the thumb-screw with which they are torturing the poor Covenanters in Scotland," I said one day to Job Foster, when we were staying at Netherby; "screwed tighter and tighter till it crushes the bone."
"Never heed, Mistress Olive," said Job. "Thank the Lord it isn't in your hands but in His, who loves Mistress Nicholls a sight better than you. It isn't her heart that screw is crushing, it's the worm in her heart which is eating it out."
"Thou art somewhat hard on Mistress Nicholls," said Rachel, "to my mind; after all, she had saved it all for the lad."
"Women's hearts are tender," said Job, giving an emphatic hammer to the spade he was repairing, "and thine tenderer than any. But there's a love tenderer than thine. Glory to His holy name, He did not put away the sorrowing cup for all His own pains. And He will not put aside the healing cup for all our crying. In His warfare it isn't once setting us on Burford church roofs, nor twice, that keeps us steady to the Captain's lead."
This trouble of Isaac's meantime wrought much on Maidie, who had always repaid Isaac's devoted homage loftily, and not always graciously, since the early days when he overwhelmed her with the unwelcome offering of his best hen. Sharp-sighted as these children are (flatter ourselves as we may) to spy out our failings, and intolerant of them as youth with its high standards will be, Maidie had been wont to hear cousin Placidia's moans of poverty with ill-disguised incredulity, and to call her economies by very unsparing scriptural names. But now Isaac's imprisonment seemed at once to exalt him in the perverse maiden's imagination from a boy to a hero. She wrote to him; and what was more, Dolly treacherously reported that she wept nights long about him; and (which was the greatest triumph of all), she began to love his mother for his sake. "It was plain," she said, "how unjust she had been to cousin Placidia; it was plain that it was only for Isaac's sake she had pinched herself, and sometimes also other folk. Otherwise, would she be ready to part with everything for his sake now? It was noble for a mother to deny herself for her son," pronounced Maidie; "and if this denying extended to others sometimes, it must be excused. It was but the exuberance of a virtue; and she, for her part, was ashamed of having ever spoken hardly of cousin Placidia, and would never do so again."
So a close bond grew up between these two; and it became clear to me I should have to spare a portion of my daughter's love to soften with its free sunshine, and quicken with its own generous youth, this heart that had grown so old and shrivelled with self-imposed cares.
And it was also plain what would come of this when Isaac, always so faithful to her, came out of prison, at once exalted into manhood and smitten into knighthood in Maidie's eyes—by persecution, and found Maidie already ministering to his mother as a daughter. Indeed, the betrothal was already accomplished in all its essentials. And it seemed to me that, so beggared and so enriched, cousin Placidia would have at last no alternative but to throw aside the self-deceiving and self-tormenting which had made her youth old age and her wealth poverty, and in her old age and destitution for the first time to grow rich and young.
As the year went on, more and more our thoughts turned to the New World on the other side of the sea. Roger's mind had been turned thither ever since the Lord Protector's death, as the only place where in his lifetime it was probable he would be able to render England those "public services for which a man is born."
Loyalty he believed England had refused to the prince God sent her, and was suffering for it. Liberty was a word which would scarcely come forth again as a watchword of noble warfare with the men of this bewildered and subdued generation.
On the other hand, my husband, while the prisons were fuller than ever of sufferers for conscience, found it more difficult than ever to obtain access to them or to give them succour.
Cousin Placidia, on her part, was ready for any refuge which would keep Isaac out of the way of John Bunyan and the informers. Job and Rachel Forster still hesitated. They could not "get light upon it." They doubted whether it would not be deserting the post they had been set to keep; and more especially whether it would be safe to take Annis Nye, who had gone to live with them, to New England. I think also they were more moved by sympathy with Annis Nye's beliefs than they quite knew themselves. Rachel thought the Quakers had been set to give a wonderful testimony for peace and patience in an age when there was too much fighting; and for silence in an age when there was too much talking. And Job said, "We have done fighting and talking enough in our day, in my belief, to last some time; and now the Lord seems to be saying to us, 'Study to be quiet and to do your own business,' and, 'Where two or three are gathered together, there am I in the midst of them.' That's about where the lessons for the day seem to me to be just now. And I've a mind we'd better be in no hurry, but sit still and learn them."
Aunt Dorothy was prepared at any moment to shake off the dust from her feet against the profligate Court which encouraged Sabbath-breaking, theatres, and bear-baitings, and banished five miles from its suburbs the loyal and godly ministers who had laboured so faithfully to bring it back; and against the infatuated country which could pay servile adulation to such a Court.
She was also a little troubled at Mr. Baxter's marrying so young a wife, and winced a little when Lettice defended him and declared that at heart Aunt Dorothy's place, after all, was beside the holy maids and recluses of Port Royal.
Still we lingered. It was not so easy to despair of the re-awaking of an England in which John Milton was still living and thinking, and John Bunyan, and John Howe, and Dr. Owen, and Richard Baxter, and through which thirty thousand of Cromwell's soldiers were still scattered, working at their farms and forges throughout the land. Nor was it easy to leave such an England, so few years before a Queen of Nations, as long as she would but give us a little space to work for her, and a little reason to hope.
But slowly the necessities which pressed us from her shores gathered closer and closer around us, until we could linger no more.
The great Fire of London brought my husband to a decision.
Our own house escaped; but many houses in the city, in which much of his property consisted, were burnt. And the misery of so many thousands, whom our losses deprived us of the power to relieve, made us at last resolve to make the voyage, while we had the means yet left to pay the ship-master and purchase such goods as we should need in beginning life again in the wilderness.
At ten o'clock on the 2nd of September, 1660, the flames of that terrible Fire burst forth. By midnight they raged. In three days the whole city was a heap of smoking smouldering ruins.
To us who lived at Westminster, it seemed as if the fierce eastern wind was driving the flames towards that guilty roof at Whitehall, which scarce a righteous man in the nation but deemed to be itself the plague spot and the Gehenna which was bringing desolation by plague and fire on the whole land.
All the night the sky was fiery, "like the top of a burning oven." In the day the air was so thick with the coiling columns of smoke, that "the sun shone through it with a colour like blood." Those who ventured near said that the pavements glowed a fiery red, so that no horse or man could tread them, and the melting lead from the burning churches ran down the streets in a stream. Now and then the dense masses of smoke were broken by the stones of St. Paul's flying like grenadoes, or by a sudden burst of vivid flame making the smoke visible even in the daylight, as some of the coal and wood wharves and stores of oil and resin along the river side were seized by the fire. And the steady roar of the flames was only broken now and then by explosions, as vast powder-stores split asunder, or by the wailings and cries of the ruined people running to and fro in helpless consternation, not even attempting to save their goods.
Still, day and night, the east wind, so steady in its fierceness, drove on the flames and smoke towards us—toward the Court; till, on the third day, they crossed towards Whitehall itself. Fearful, it was said, was the confusion in the houses of revelry. Good men could think of nothing that ever could be like it but the universal conflagration of the world. But again, as in the Plague, the Court escaped. The neighbouring houses were blown up, so as to kill the flames by starvation; and at last their impetuous onset was stayed, and Whitehall was left without one of its gaming-tables or chambers of revelry being touched.
Streets in the west, which were nests of unblushing wickedness, escaped; whilst the city, of which Mr. Baxter said "there was not such another in the world for piety, sobriety, and temperance," was burnt to ashes.
Aunt Dorothy took this much to heart; and from that time I scarcely remember her attempting any more to interpret the Divine judgments, which had once seemed to her so easy to translate.
After the horror came the misery and the desolation. It is when the ashes of the fires which desolate our lives are cold that we first understand our loss. And it was many days before the ashes of the great Fire of London were cold enough for men to tread them safely and learn the extent of the ruin; to see the fountains dried up, the stones calcined white as snow.
Two hundred thousand homeless men, and women, and little children were scattered in the fields and on the hill-sides, chiefly on the north, as far as Highgate, by the wretched remnants of their household stuff. They were ready to perish of hunger;—yet my husband said they did not beg a penny as he passed from group to group. Some of them had been rich and delicately lodged and clothed three days before, and had not learned the art of craving alms. Others were, it seemed, too stupified. His Majesty did his utmost to make provision for their relief (said the admiring courtiers) by "proclamation for the country to come in and refresh them with provisions;" which, moved by the proclamation of the king (or by another proclamation issued sixteen hundred years before by One who spake with authority), the country people did, to the glory of the king and the admiration of the courtiers.
It was not the easiest thing in the world as we looked from one side of our house over the blackened heaps of cinders, where three days before had stood the City of London, and on the other towards Whitehall, standing unscathed; when we thought of two thousand faithful servants of God forbidden to speak for Him; of ten thousand houses, from not a few of which had gone up day and night true prayer and praise, made desolate; of a hundred thousand, not a few of them good men and true, swept away by the Plague the year before; and then of all the riotous voices in the palace not silenced, but permitted to speak their worst for the devil; it was not always easy to keep firm hold of the truth that "all power is given in heaven and earth" not to the accuser and the enemy, but to "Jesus Christ the righteous." It was not easy. We had to endure in those days "as seeing Him who is invisible."
My husband said, indeed, that the fire might prove to be God's fumigation against the pestilence; and that the pestilence itself was but (as it were) "the ships to take us to the other side, being sent in a fleet instead of one by one."
But in the pestilence which is inwardly and eternally pestilential, the pestilence of vice and selfishness, which was corrupting the inner life of England, the raging fire of sin which consumes not the disease but the soul,—who could see any good?
Roger's and my old puzzle of the apple tree yawned beneath and around us, a great gulf, dark and unfathomable as of old.
If our hearts were less tossed about on the surging waves of this abyss than of old, it was not that the waves were quieter or less unfathomed. We knew them to be deeper than we had dreamed. For we had tried line after line and touched no bottom. We felt them to be more unquiet, for the times were stormier, and we were no longer on the edge but launched on the sea. It was simply that, falling at the feet of Him who stood at the helm, we could worship Him with a deeper adoration, and trust Him with more confiding simplicity. "Thou knowest the other side," we could say. "Thou art there. Thou art taking us thither. Thou knowest the depths. Thou alone. Thou hast risen thence, Thou knowest God. We see Him manifested in Thee. And Thou hast said, good and not evil is the heart and the crown of all. And we are satisfied."
So, after a heavy winter on the edge of that desolation which we could do so little to restore, we left our old house in London in March, and went in the spring for a few weeks to the old home at Netherby, before it was broken up and passed out of our hands for ever.
Many of the old fields—we had roamed over every one of them—had already been sold to meet the expenses thrown on Roger by the lawsuit. And now the old house itself was to be sold. Oliver's Parliament had not altogether reformed the Law. And I suppose no reformation of laws avails very much when the men who administer them are corrupt. Besides, unsuccessful revolution must be dealt with as rebellious; those who fail must expect to suffer. Roger and most of us had made our account for that, and it was not of that we complained.
It was not safe for Roger and Lettice to be with us at Netherby.
Of this I was almost glad. The more the old home was like itself, the harder it would be to leave. There were enough voices silent for ever, making every chamber, and every nook of garden and pleasance sacred by their echoes, to make the parting such a wrench as scarcely leaves us the same ever after.
All Aunt Dorothy's Puritan training had not swept the heathen idolatry out of my heart. For what else was it to feel as if all the dumb and lifeless things had voices calling me and pleading "for sake us not, forsake us not, have we served you so ill?" and arms stretched out to cling to us and draw us back.
The store-room over the porch, where Roger and I had held our Sunday conversations; the chamber where my father's books and mathematical instruments still were, where he had taken me on his knee and said, "Before the great mysteries, I can only wonder and wait and say like thee, 'Father, how can I understand, a little child like me?'"—the wainscoted parlour where "Mr. Cromwell of Ely" had talked to us of "his little wenches," and looked at Roger with softened eyes, thinking, perchance, of that death of his first-born which "went as a sword to his heart, indeed it did;" where John Milton (not blind then) had played on the organ, and discoursed with Dr. Jeremy Taylor;—how dared I have tears to spare for leaving such as these, or even the graves of our fathers in the old church they had helped to build, and the pews where we and ours had knelt for generations, when England had lost Liberty and the strenuous heart to strive for it, and it seemed almost the heart to weep for it now it was gone, and could not afford her noblest even a grave?
But there were other partings which went far deeper into the heart, on which even now it is best not to dwell much, partings from those whom it was no idolatry to feel it very sore to leave, old faithful friends—our father's friends; (and every familiar face in the village, as it came to see us go, was as the face of a friend to us, going we knew not whither, among we knew not whom.)
We could never have left them had it been possible to us to befriend and succour them longer at home. As many as could leave went with us.
And hardest of all it was to pass the old forge, and see no friendly faces there, and know that Job and Rachel were praying for us in the old cottage within not daring to see us go.
Cousin Placidia was away making the last effort to release her son.
So we went at the beginning of April to Southampton, where the ship was. We had to wait some days there for her sailing. Dreary, blank days, we thought they must be, suspended between the old life and the new. But two surprises made them bright to us as a beginning, rather an end.
Two days before we started, Isaac appeared, with his mother. He looked very much as if the prison had indeed been a Paradise to him; and her face sharp and worn as it was, seemed to me stamped with the cares which enrich, instead of impoverishing, the cares of love instead of the cares of covetousness. There was a glow and a rest in her eyes, as she looked on Isaac and Maidie, which I had never seen there before. And as to Isaac and Maidie, I believe distinctions of time and place were just then so dim to them, that if you had asked them where those days were spent, they would have been clear but on one point, and that was that it was most surely not in the Old World, but in a world altogether and for ever New.
Thus, as so often in the music of this changing life, the "dying falls" were interlinked with the swell of the opening chords. And so, with nothing to mark it as the last, the last evening came.
So the last evening came. Roger and Lettice, with their little Harry Davenant, were already safe on board. We were to join them at the dawn. And when we climbed up into the ship, very strange it was to find my hand in the welcoming grasp of a strong hand, certainly not that of a strange sailor's, and looking up, to see Job Forster, with Rachel and Annis Nye behind him.
"There was no help for it. That wilful maid would come," he said, apologizing to himself for doing what he liked. "She had the 'concern' at last I have been afraid of all along. She was set on going into the lion's den; so, of course, there was nothing for it but for Rachel and me to come and take care of her."
So we sailed down Southampton water, by the shores the Mayflower had left nearly a half a century before. There were clouds over the wooded slopes of the dear old country as we looked our last at her, which broke ere we had been long on board, blending earth and sky in a wild storm of rain. But before we lost sight of the shore, the clouds were spanned by the rare glory of a perfect rainbow, bridging the storm with hope.
Then, as we sailed on, the clouds rose slowly and majestically, detaching themselves from earth in grand sculptured masses, like couchant lions guarding the land; until at sunset they had soared far up the quiet heavens, and hovered like angels with folded wings over a land at rest.
And as we looked, Lettice said to Roger,—
"See, is it not a promise of the better sunshine hereafter to come?"
"It is a witness of the sunshine now behind," he said; "of the unquenchable sun which shines on both the Old England and the New." And he added in a low voice, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, "'Jesus Christ, of whose diocese we are,' on Both Sides of the Sea."
CONCLUSION.
OLIVE'S MEDITATIONS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SEA.
New Netherby, 1691.—New always to us, but already to many grown into "the old house at home."
Again I am alone in the house, as on the day when the quiet rustling of the summer air among the long grasses, and the shining of the smooth water, and the smell of the hay from the hay-stack, carried me back to the old house on the borders of the Fen country, in the days of my childhood.
The crimson and gold of a richer-coloured autumn than that at home glows in the forests and in the still creek below, over which the great trees bend, And autumn is also on our lives; its fading leaves, and also, I trust, its harvests and its calms.