CHAPTER IV.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

_September_ 1649, _Paris_.--'Put not your trust in princes.'

"The young king hath left for Jersey; whither further, time will show. Regret at his departure by this hollow French Court is scarce even feigned. Walter is gone to join the gallant Marquis of Montrose. And perilous as the enterprise is, it is a kind of relief to us; so far greater seem to us the perils of the king's idle court than those of the field.

"We are not made to feel so very welcome here as to make our lives a festival. Cardinal Mazarin, who, with the Queen-Mother, ordereth all things (the king, Louis XIV., being but a boy of eleven or twelve years of age), lets it be seen but too plainly that they would not be sorry to see the young king, and even the Queen Henrietta herself (though a daughter of France), translated to any other asylum. His Majesty but lately dismissed some Commissioners from Scotland (where they had the grace to proclaim him in February). They were Covenanted persons, and made so much parley as to the conditions on which they would be subject to him, that it seemed as if their true purpose was but to make him subject to them. The negotiations were broken off all the more abruptly, in consequence of the over-zeal of some followers of the gallant Marquis of Montrose, who assassinated the Ambassador of the 'Parliament' at the Hague. This deed made the Scottish Commissioners more stiff in their ways, so that their Commission ended in nothing. My father, with the most zealous of the king's followers, much misliketh these dealings with men 'whose very Covenant (saith he) constitutes them rebels.'

"'If the Scottish people are happy enough to get their king back,' he protests, 'after basely selling his father (of sacred memory), they must take him as a king, not as a scholar or slave of their arrogant preachers. Otherwise, better remain king of his faithful exiles here, of loyal Jersey and the Isle of Man (which the noble Countess of Derby still holds for him), and bide his time.'

"For my father liketh not subtleties, and the double ways of Courts. The Marquis of Montrose (with his followers) he thinks well-nigh the only Scottish man worthy the name of loyal; he who writ on his master's death--

"'I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds, And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds.'

"_October_ 15_th_.--Good Mr. Evelyn, who came to kiss the king and the queen's hand (an honour few covet now), hath brought us heavy tidings to-day of a dire massacre at Tredah in Ireland; the flower of the Marquis of Ormond's army cut off, and such a panic struck through the land that one stronghold after another has yielded. It was Cromwell's doing. When will the awful career of this man of blood be brought to an end? Not a few among us think he must be master of some dread sorceries. How else should he cast his wicked spells around the good men who, alas! follow him?

"Some even think there are mysterious allusions to him in the Book of the Revelations. Certain Greek figures there, which are also letters, being capable, if ingeniously taken to pieces and put together again, of being made to spell the number of his name, or the name of something belonging to him. Of this I cannot judge, not knowing Greek. And I think it scarce wise to build too much on it, because I understand these same figures have been diversely applied before by various interpreters to their various enemies. And perhaps it is better (at least for people who do not know Greek) to wait until the prophecies are fulfilled before they thus interpret them. It would be a pity (if we should, after all, be mistaken) to find we had been misapplying the Holy Scriptures into a vocabulary for calling people ill names withal. That this terrible man is, however, indeed as a terrible 'Beast,' trampling on kings and peoples and nations, 'dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, having iron teeth, devouring and breaking in pieces, and stamping the residue with his feet,' no Royalist can doubt.

"This loss of Tredah, good Mr. Evelyn saith, forerunneth the loss of all Ireland. His Majesty, when he heard of it, is reported to have said, 'Then I must go and die there too.' But these melancholic and heroical moods, my father saith, do not last long with His Majesty.

"_Jan._ 30_th_, 1650.--A day ever to be remembered with fasting, and weeping, and bitter lamentation.

"So I wrote this morning, and just after, sweet Madame La Mothe came to bid me to a fête. She came into the room in a glow of kindly animation with the pleasure she hoped to give me, but started appalled at my robe of deep mourning (which of late, at my father's wish, I had lightened), and the grave face which too unfeignedly accompanied it.

"'My child,' she said, 'what new calamity? Thou shouldst have let thy mother's old friend share it.'

"'No new calamity, madame,' I said; 'or, at least, a calamity always new until it is expiated. This is the anniversary of the martyrdom.'

"'The fête of a martyr, my friend?' said she 'I thought your English Church had no martyrs, or, at least, no calendar. Besides, we keep our martyrs' days as festivals.'

"'Scarcely, madame,' I said, 'when only a year old. It is the day of the death of our martyred king.'

"'Ah!' she said, drawing a long breath. 'Doubtless the death of the late king of England was a was a sad tragedy. All the Courts of Europe acknowledged it to be so. Most of them went in mourning at the time.'

"But she was evidently much relieved.

"'It matters not, my loyal child!' she said. 'To-day you shall devote to your pious lamentations. I will defer the little fête I promised myself on your account till to-morrow.'

"And with an embrace she left me.

"But I think scarcely anything before has made me feel so much what it is to be an exile. To her the sovereign for whom we have willingly sacrificed so much, and were ready to sacrifice all, is merely 'the late king of England;' the anniversary of his martyrdom is no more than that of St. Pancras or St. Alban; and an ample lamentation for his death is a Court mourning!

"My father commended me for my loyal black draperies. But when Barbe began and concluded our dinner with the meagre soup which I thought the only fare appropriate for such a day, he looked a little anxiously for something to follow; and when nothing came, and I reminded him what day it was, and asked him to finish with a grace he said a little hastily,--

"'The grace at the beginning is enough, I think, child, when the end follows so close upon it.'

"Then when Barbe had withdrawn, he went to the window looking into the court and whistled a cavalier tune; and then, checking himself, threw himself into a chair, and murmured,--

"'It has a fearful effect on an English gentleman's brain to be shut up for months in streets, like a London haberdasher. With such a life one might sink into anything in time; a Roundhead--a Leveller--anything! No wonder the Parliament found their adherents in the towns.'

"Then moving uneasily again to the window, he said,--

"'Lettice, can't you get some fellow to stop that doleful broken-nosed woman from everlastingly letting the water drop out of her pitcher? It is enough to drive a man crazy. It is like a perpetual rainy day, and takes away the only comfort one has left in this den of a place, which is the weather.'

"I persuaded him to listen to a little of the 'Icon Basilike' to soothe him. But he even took exception to His Majesty's words. At length he cried,--

"Lettice, my child, prithee stop. It is very excellent, but it is very dismal. I suppose His Majesty did write it all, poor gentlemen, though how he could find it a comfort I cannot imagine. However, there is no saying what a man may be driven to comfort himself withal, if kept months together in one chamber. A day makes me feel like an idiot.'

"Then I took my embroidery, and sought to tempt him to converse.

"But he only went from one melancholy topic to another--the assassination of Dr. Dorislaus at the Hague ('a disgrace to the good cause,' he said); the folly of listening to Covenanting Scottish men; the incivilities of the cardinal and the French Court; the baseness of the Spanish Court in calling the young king the Prince of Wales, and scarce receiving his ambassadors except as private friends. The only topic which he seemed to dwell on with any satisfaction was the wickedness of Cromwell and the Ironsides, which he said was too bad to be tolerated long even in such a wretched place as Puritans and Papists had made of this world. But on this it gave me no delight to hear him expatiate, which he noticed with some irritation, saying,--

"'Between your loyalty, and your objection to hear things said against the rebels, Lettice, and that confounded woman who can never get her pitcher emptied, and Cardinal Mazarin, it is really no easy thing for a man to keep up his spirits.'

"And he paced out of the room, leaving me alone. Thereupon, I went faithfully over the bitter steps of the 'dolorous' way trodden by those royal feet so recently; the while I thought how good Mistress Dorothy was doubtless keeping a Puritan fast at Kidderminster on the same occasion; and my heart wandered involuntarily to other sorrows of a dolorous way not yet finished, and I hugged my crosses until I felt rather like celebrating my own martyrdom as well as the king's. Thus I wept much, and was beginning to feel very wretched, and to hope I was the better for it, when my father returned.

"His countenance was lightened, and he kissed me very kindly on the cheek.

"'Poor pale child!' he said. 'Well, it can't be helped. I hope the fasting does thee good. But it does me none. It makes me, not a saint, but a sour old curmudgeon; as I have proved pretty forcibly to thee, sweet heart. It never suited me when things were cheerful. I always told your mother I could never take it up until she found some Protestant Pope who could grant dispensations when necessary. And now that everything is dismal, it is a great deal more than I can bear. So, my dear, I have told Barbe to bring me the remains of that venison pasty and a flask of Burgundy. And I feel better for the thought of it already. The times are altogether too melancholic for fasts, Lettice. Fasts are all very well for comfortable cardinals like this Mazarin, who know they can dine like princes to-morrow; but not for poor dogs of exiles, who may have to dine with Duke Humphrey any day without getting any benefit out of it for body or soul.'

"Barbe duly appeared with the pasty and the wine, and as I sat beside my father the words came to me, '_Be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance_,' and a chill seemed to pass away from my heart. I began to wonder whether, after all, I had been keeping the right kind of fast; and I said something cheerful to my father.

"'Well, sweet heart,' he replied, 'the fast seems to do thee no harm. What wast thou doing while I was away?'

"'Reading the Acts of the Martyrdom,' I said. 'Going over the king's parting with the royal children, and his walk from St. James's to Whitehall through the biting frost, and what he said to Bishop Juxon on the scaffold, and his taking off the George, and all.'

"'But, dear heart,' said he, 'that is all over! To whom dost think it does good for thee to cry over it all again? Not, of course, to the king, who is on the other side of it; nor to the queen; nor to the young king, who seems able enough to take consolation in one way or another. To whom, then? Because if it is only to thyself, it seems a great deal of pains to take. There are so many people suffering now, whom one might perhaps comfort by weeping with them, that life seems to me scarce long enough to weep for the sorrows of those who weep no more.'

"'He spoke diffidently, as if on ground on which he felt his footing doubtful. And when for a while I did not reply, he rejoined,--

"'Do not speak if it troubles thee, child. Never heed an old Cavalier's confused thoughts. I know there are mysterious rites which only the initiated understand.'

"'Father,' I said, drawing close to him, and sitting on a footstool at his feet. 'I know no mysterious sanctuary which we cannot enter together. We will go everywhere together, will we not? I think your kind of fast seems the Bible kind. I am sure any fast which leaves the head bowed down like a bulrush, cannot be the right kind. And if we live till this day next year, I will try and find out some sorrowful people whom our sympathy might comfort, and our bread might feed. And that will, surely, not make either of us of a sad countenance.'

"'He smiled, and began to tell me what he had seen in his absence. And as he kissed me to-night, he said,--

"'Lettice, child, what didst thou mean by our going everywhere together? I am not such a heathen as to hinder thee from being as good as thou wilt. I lived too long with the sweetest saint on earth for that.'

"'I meant that we will both try to be as good as we can,' I said.

"'True, true,' he said; 'but a man's goodness is one thing, and a young maiden's another. A Cavalier's virtue is to be brave and loyal and true, generous to foes, faithful in friendship, and (as far as possible), in love, faithful to death to the king. For a few slips by the way, if these things are kept to in the main, it is to be hoped there is pardon from a merciful Heaven.'

"'And a young maiden's goodness?' I said. He hesitated,--

"'All this of course, and something pure and tender, and gentle and heavenly, beside. Ask thine own heart, child!' he added; 'what do I know of it?'

"'All this, father,' I said, 'and no failures by the way? Is that the difference?'

"'Nay, saucy child, never flatter thyself,' he said. 'Thou hast perplexed me too often by thy pretty poutings and elfish tricks and wilful ways, that I should say that.'

"Then I ventured to say,--

"'Are the Cavalier's slips by the way forgiven if they do not ask forgiveness, and do not try to mend?'

"'Come, come, I am no father-confessor to meet thy pretty casuistry,' he said; and then gravely, 'Many of us do ask forgiveness. God knows we need it. And when an honest man asks to be forgiven, no doubt he means to do better.'

"'Then where is the difference?' I said.

"'Belike,' he said thoughtfully, 'belike there might be less! So, good-night, child! I trow thou never forgettest thy prayers. And I suppose there is something left in them of what thou wast wont to ask when I used to listen to thee a babe lisping at thy mother's knee; "Pray God bless my dear father and mother and brothers, and make us all good, and take us to Thee when we die." That prayer is answered, surely enough, for two of us. Try it still, child; try it still.'

"Words which made me go to rest with little temptation to be, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance.

"_April_.--The gallant Marquis of Montrose has landed with foreign recruits in Caithness, to venture all for the king, in fair and open war. The king, meanwhile, has been entertaining Commissioners from the Covenanting party, who hate Montrose to the death; writing secretly to assure the marquis of his favour, and openly receiving the marquis's mortal enemies. My father is sick at heart, he and many other of the noblest of the Cavaliers, at these courtly double-dealings.

"_May_.--My father came in to-day sorely dispirited.

"'There,' he exclaimed bitterly. 'A letter from Walter. He is safe, poor boy, in some desert mountain or other, among the wild deer and wild men. But the best of us is gone; the only Scottish captain I would have cared to serve under, Montrose, debated at Invercarron in the Highlands, his foreign hirelings a hundred of them killed, and the rest, with the Highlanders, scattered; the marquis himself taken by those "loyal" Covenanters and hanged at Edinburgh!

"'He died the death of a hero,' he pursued, after a pause; 'it might be well if we were all with him, away from these fatal clever tricks of policy. The king's most faithful servant hanged at the Tolbooth, and the king going to Scotland hand in glove with the canting hypocrites who murdered him; making promises without stint, and meantime encouraging his old followers by promising never to keep them! How can any man know what promises he does mean to keep? A curse on this hollow French Court, and all that comes of it! It would take little to drive many of us back to our English homes, to the farm and the chase, and let these Puritans and politicians hunt each other as they please.'

"'But the brave marquis?' I said, wishing to turn him from bitter thoughts on which I knew he would never act.

"'Deserted by his men, changing clothes with a poor country fellow; taken in this disguise by the enemy, delivered up to General David Lesley, dragged about from town to town, and exhibited to the people in his mean dress, in the hope he would be insulted. But the poor common folk jeered him not--they pitied him; so that in this Lesley's malice was disappointed. Then taken in an open cart through Edinburgh, his arms tied to the sides of the cart, his hat taken off by the hangman, and so dragged in base triumph through the streets of the city. He gave the driver money for conducting what he called his triumphal car. Then persecuted and cursed in the form of prayers, by ministers and men calling themselves judges, for two days, and at last hanged on a gallows thirty feet high, with the book recording his deeds around his neck; a more honourable decoration, he said, than his Order of the Garter which he lost in his last battle. One thing only of the traitor's doom was spared him. They did not torture him, but hanged him till he was dead. His limbs were quartered. When they threatened him with that, he said he would he had flesh enough to be distributed through every town in Christendom, as a testimony of the cause for which he suffered. A brave end; no death on a victorious battle-field more worthy of a loyal gentleman!'

"'But the king will never trust himself with Montrose's murderers?' I said.

"'He will go with them immediately,' was his reply, 'accepting all their conditions, spite of all that Mr. Hyde and other counsellors, who love him and love truth, can say. Not one of his old friends and counsellors permitted to be with him, nor one who fought for his father against the Parliament, without taking the Covenant. And he is to take the Covenant himself. How is it he cannot see (as Mr. Hyde says), that "to be a king but in name _in his own kingdom_, is a far lower degradation than to be a king but in name anywhere else?" How is it he cannot see, that promises made to be broken, ruin the soul in making and the cause in breaking? But it is all the Queen Mother's doing, and those hollow French Papistical ways. Tossed to and fro between Papists and Covenanters, what can a sanguine and good-natured young king of twenty do?'

"Thus having relieved himself by some hearty abuse of the French politicians and the Scottish preachers, my father's loyalty began to blaze bright again, and he concluded,--

"'And we shall have to go to him, and get him out of his Covenanting jailers' hands as best we may.'

"So His Majesty has landed in Cromarty, having to sign the Covenant before they would suffer him to tread on Scottish ground. He is being led about listening to sermons containing invectives on his father's tyranny, his mother's idolatry, and his own malignity; rebuked by preachers on their knees, in humble postures, but in very plain terms.

"_July_.--A letter from Mistress Dorothy, full of hopeful expectation, rejoicing that the best hopes are entertained of His Majesty's salvation, temporal and eternal. She understands that he is desirous of being instructed in the ways of the Lord, listens with marvellous earnestness to gospel sermons in which he and his are not spared, and has already signed the Solemn League and Covenant. The only thing to be wished, saith she, is that the instructions could have preceded the signing. Marvellous, she thinks, are the ways of the Almighty; that 'out of the ashes, as it were, of the late king, who, whatever his excellences, it could not be denied had prelatical predilections and prejudices strongly opposed to the Covenant, should spring a young monarch of so docile a disposition and so hopeful a piety, for the everlasting sanctification and benediction of the three kingdoms.'

"My father gave a low significant whistle when I read him this passage.

"'Poor Mistress Dorothy!' he said; 'and poor young king!'

"_July_ 3.--Another letter from Mistress Dorothy, in a strain unusual with her, speaking of increasing infirmity, and hinting that she may not be able to write often again to me. It is only me, saith she, to whom she does write. By my father's permission I have written to tell Olive.

"_August_ 14.--Oliver Cromwell is on his way to Scotland. There will be fighting. The king and the Covenanted Scottish Puritans against the Ironsides and the uncovenanted English Puritans! A strange jumble! My father is set on going, to take his share of the fighting. He is to leave me under the care of Madame la Mothe, who has designs of making me acquainted with some of her friends of Port Royal.

"_August_ 16.--My father has left to-day.

"'Don't turn Puritan or Papist, Lettice,' he said, 'and do not forget thy old father in thy prayers.'

"'Nor you me, father,' I whispered, 'in yours.'

"'The men the fighting, and the women the praying, is an old soldier's rule,' he said.

"'But not ours, father,' I said, half afraid to say so. 'There must be quiet times before the and after them.'

"'Not very quiet,' he said, 'where Oliver is. However, there is always quiet enough for old Sir Jacob Astley's prayer--or the publican's;' he added reverently.

"And with a kiss, and a blessing in a faltering voice, he was gone.

"Never so entirely bound to each other as the moment before parting; never so free from heart-barriers as when time and space are about to interpose their impenetrable barriers between us.

"This feeling must be a promise, not a terrible mockery. Surely it must mean that the barriers are made of corruptible things, the bonds of the incorruptible."

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

When we came back to London from Netherby, my husband and I, Maidie and the babe and Annis Nye, on the 31st May 1650, the whole city was awake and astir with the triumphal welcome of Oliver Cromwell on his way home from the Irish war. In Hyde Park the Train-bands and salvoes of artillery; through the streets eager crowds thronging around him, shouting welcomes, as he rode to the royal lodgings the nation had assigned him in "the Cockpit" at Whitehall, whither Mistress Cromwell and her daughters had moved (not very willingly, some said) a few weeks before.

In a short time Roger came into the house.

"At last the nation acknowledges him, Roger!" I said; "and now, we may trust, the wars are over, and we may begin to reap the fruit."

"Always hoping still, Olive!" he replied, with a quiet smile. "Always thinking we are getting out of the Book of Judges into the Book of Ruth; out of the 'Book of the wars of the Lord,' into the greetings of the reapers and the welcome of the gleaners. Not yet, I am afraid. The Scottish Covenanters are even now making ready to welcome their Stuart king; and that matter will have to be settled before there is peace."

"But, meantime," I said, "it must cheer the Lord-Lieutenant's heart to be thus received."

"I am not sure, Olive," he said. "I just heard that a person said to him, thinking to please him, 'What a crowd to see your lordship's triumph!' but that he replied, 'There would be a greater crowd to see me hanged.'"

"I do not believe that, Roger," said I. "I do not believe his is a heart not to be stirred by a people's welcome."

"Perhaps it was stirred, Olive; only a little more deeply than to a ripple of pleasure. Perhaps he thought of the poor peasants trying to till the Millennium in on the Surrey hills, and the poor soldiers trying to fight it in at Burford, and of the mutiny in Bishopsgate Street among his bravest troopers, and of the many who began the struggle at his side now in deadly opposition to him; and of that ancient crowd whose hosannas and palm-branches were so quickly changed."

"Roger," I said, "you and General Cromwell have been wanting us and _home_! It is not like you to look in this melancholic way on things."

And I took him into the nursery to see Maidie and the babe; a sight which, my husband used to say, I superstitiously thought a charm against well-nigh any despondencies.

Maidie had forgotten him, and went through a number of pretty, shy, feminine tricks, before she would be coaxed to come near him. The plain Ironsides' armour was not so attractive to her as would have been the Cavalier plumes and tassels. Her approval, however, once won, she became completely at her ease, subjecting Roger entirely to her petty tyrannies, and making the room ring with her merry little voice; while the babe looked on, serious and amazed, expressing her sympathy in the festivities by senselessly crowing, and by vainly endeavouring to embrace her own rosy toes, as if she had been a benighted baby of the Dark Ages, instead of an enlightened infant of the Commonwealth.

So we talked no more politics that evening. And in the morning, Roger's views of the world seemed to me more hopeful. Indeed, there was work to be done, and so no more time for despondency; a bitter root which needs leisure to make it grow.

In June, General Cromwell was appointed Captain-General of the Forces instead of General Fairfax, and set off at once with his troops for Scotland, Roger and Job Forster among them.

My husband also accompanied them.

My father soon afterwards took Aunt Gretel to pay a visit they had been desiring to make to Germany ever since the Thirty Years' War had ended (in 1648); two years before.

Early in August, a letter came from Lettice Davenant, telling me that, from a letter she had received, she thought ill of Aunt Dorothy's health, and deemed that she stood in need of succour and sympathy, which, rigid to her vow, and all its consequences, she would never ask.

If this was true, there was no time to be lost, Nor was there anything to detain me from Aunt Dorothy. The old house at Netherby was, for the time, deserted, and London just then, in the sweet summer time, seemed to me a wilderness and solitary place.

Moreover, our departure was made all the easier, in that it gave me an opportunity of doing a kindness to one of my husband's prison friends, good Dr. Rich, an ancient clergyman whom Leonard had found in gaol on account of his having given aid to the Royalists, and to whom, being now liberated but deprived of his benefice, our house might offer a welcome asylum. Dr. Rich was a sober, devout, and learned gentleman; a man who dwelt much in the past, and was more interested in the present as illustrating the past, than for its own sake.

Nothing gave him more satisfaction than tracing the pedigree of doctrines, heterodox or orthodox, to the primitive centuries, in which he assured us were to be found the parents, or the parallels, of all the heretics and sectaries of our own day, from the monks to the Quakers; including the Fifth Monarchy men, who, he declared, were nothing but a resuscitation of certain deluded persons called Chiliasts, who had been convincingly refuted by I know not how many Fathers.

Meantime (the fifth of the revenue of his benefice, allowed to deprived ministers by the Parliament, being but irregularly paid), Dr. Rich, Mistress Rich, and his eleven children found a parallel in their own circumstances to the primitive poverty of the earliest centuries too obvious to be pleasant; and it was a delight to be able to offer them a home under the guise of taking care of our house in our absence.

He was a man at all times pleasantly easy to practise upon with little friendly devices, having little more knowledge than the birds of the air as to the storehouse or barn whence his table was supplied, and being always diverted by a little subtlety from the perplexing cares of the present to the perplexed questions of a thousand years ago.

Accordingly, with little parley, or preparation, Dr. Rich and his family were lodged in our house, and we were ready to depart. If Aunt Dorothy's stronghold was to be entered, it must be by surprise or storm; surrender was not in her dictionary, much less entreaties for succour.

We set off, under the care of our serving-man, Annis and I with Maidie and the babe, our cavalcade consisting of three horses, one carrying Annis on a pillow behind the serving-man; the other (a sober old roadster) bearing the babes in panniers, and me enthroned between them; the third, a pack-horse, with our luggage and provender for the way.

This mode of travelling was neither swift nor exciting. It left me much leisure to meditate by what subtleties I might avoid encounters between Annis and Aunt Dorothy, should Aunt Dorothy be sufficiently well for her orthodoxy to be in full force.

To forewarn Annis was only to bring on the conflict I dreaded with more speed and certainty; to tell her a road was dangerous being the first step towards convincing her it was right.

To forewarn Aunt Dorothy, on the other hand, was equally perilous. So I came to the conclusion that I could only let things take their course.

For without Annis I could not have come at all. Her care of the babes was pleasant. Her quiet, firm will, her stillness, and her sweet even voice kept them serene. They were as content with her as with me. She seemed to grudge no weariness or toil for them, and her temper was never ruffled. Her dainty neatness and cleanliness were like perpetual fresh air around them; and, moreover, my heart was tender to the orphan maiden with a heart so womanly, and a belief so perilous, in the midst of a rude world, which might crush her delicate frame to dust, yet never bend her will a hair's breadth.

The points at which she and her sect came into antagonism with the rest of the world were scattered all over the surface of every-day social life; and to her every one of these became, when assailed, no mere outwork, but the very citadel of her most central convictions, in which, for the time, all the forces of her mind and heart were gathered, and which she could no more voluntarily yield than could voluntarily cease to breathe.

It was a serious responsibility to have the charge of a person, every one of whose minutest convictions was to her essential as the distinctive conviction of each sect to its members, and whose convictions crossed those of the rest of the world, not only in what they profess in church on Sunday, but in what they practise at home every hour of every day.

Nor was this all. If Annis's resistance had been merely passive, there might still have been hope of escape.

But not only did all the world believe the Quakers wrong; they believed all the world wrong. Nor only this. They believed themselves commanded jointly and severally to set all the world right, a conviction which, under no conceivable form of government, is likely to lead to a tranquil life. We could never tell at what moment Annis might feel moved to tell any peaceful Presbyterian minister, in the gentlest tones, that he was "a minister of Antichrist;" or any strict Precisian matron, who would no more have indulged in a feather than in an idol-feast, that she was "swallowed up with the false and heathen customs of the world," in calling a single person you; or in "idolatrously naming the second or third day after the hosts of heaven."

However, the duty had been assigned me by my husband, and was bound fast on me by the pity and love I felt for Annis. This did not hinder her being a far more anxious charge to me than my babes.

On the occasion, however, we owed a brotherly welcome to her.

We were benighted on the Surrey hills, to which we had turned aside with a view of lodging at a friend's house.

The babes began to mewl and be weary. The place was solitary, sandy, with sweeps of barren heath. It was St. George's Hill, and I began to recall wild stories of the poor peasants "called Saxons, but believing themselves Jews, and inheritors of the earth," who had tried to dig the wild moors into millennial fertility a few months before, and had threatened park palings;--so that I should have half feared to ask shelter had any human dwelling appeared. Yet to camp on the wilds, with two young fretting babes, even on an August night, was unwelcome.

As I was plodding on, seeking to soothe the infant in my arms, and singing soft songs to Maidie, a wild figure issued forth from a hollow tree, at sight of whom my heart stood still. He was clad in leather from top to toe.

But his carriage was grave, not like a plunderer, and he accosted me soberly, though without any titles (as Mistress or Madam), calling me "friend" and "thou."

At once Annis recognized him, calling him "George," and greeting him as one she honoured.

After a brief conference with her, he came and bade me be of good cheer, there were some of the Children of Light dwelling not far off, to whom he would take us for shelter.

In a few minutes we came to a humble cot in a hollow of the downs, where, without many words, we found kindness and hospitality worthy of any mansion; the good woman preparing food and fire, so that the babes were soon quiet and asleep, while far into the night they entertained us with heavenly discourse, which was more restful than sleep. The goodman told us how, "when after Everard and Winstanley and their promised millennium had failed, he had gone back hopeless and dispirited to his old toils for a froward master, working early and late taking rest, knocked about by his master for an idle knave, jeered at by his mates for a lunatic, earning with all his toil scarce enough to still the hungry cries of his babes; the world, dark enough before, made dark as night by the putting out of the glory of the kingdom, which was so soon to have made it day. ("And," said the good-wife with moist eyes, "too oft with a sour word from me.") How then, when he was feeling like one forsaken of God and man, George Fox, the man in leather, from among the woods where he passed much time in solitude with his Bible, but lately battered and bruised by a mob in a market-place, where he had exhorted the people against false weights, had come to him like Elijah from the wilderness, and had told him of the universal free grace of God to all mankind, of the _kingdom within_, and the Light within, and the Spirit within, and the one Priesthood of the Eternal Intercessor, and the way of stillness and simplicity by the rivers of the valleys, and the true language of Thou and Thee, and the sin of war, and of all false words and looks; and how, at last, looking for the Lord within his heart, he had found in Him both the kingdom and the garden, and rivers of water in a dry place."

After him spoke George Fox himself. He could not have been more than six-and-twenty; but I confess his discourse came to me with marvellous power.

The words were sometimes confused, as if they were burst and shattered with the fulness of the thought within them. Something of the same kind we had noticed of old in Oliver Cromwell.

He seemed like one looking into depths into which he himself only saw a little way, and by glimpses; like one listening to a far-off voice, which reached his spirit but in broken cadences, and our spirits still more faintly, through the echo of his voice. Yet he inspired me with the conviction that these depths exist, and this music is going on; a conviction worth something.

He spoke somewhat of his early life--of his father, Christopher Fox, a weaver of Drayton-in-the-Clay in Leicestershire, whom the neighbours called Righteous Christer; of his mother, an upright woman, and "of the stock of the martyrs;" of the "gravity and staidness of mind" he had when very young. How he sought to act faithfully inwardly to God and outwardly to man, and to keep to yea and nay in all things. And how men said, "If George says Verily, there is no altering him."

He felt himself "a stranger in the world," and when others were keeping Christmas with jollity he kept it by giving what he had to some poor widows whom he visited.

Yet in his youth "strong temptations came on him to despair." He went to various ministers (he called them "priests"). But none helped him. One "ancient priest" reasoning with him about the ground of hie despair, bid him "take tobacco and sing psalms." But "tobacco he did not love, and psalms he was not in a state to sing."

When he was twenty-two (in 1645), as he approached the gate of Coventry, "a consideration arose in him that all Christians are believers, both Protestants and Papists," and that "if all were believers then they were all born of God, and passed from death to life, and that none were believers but such; and that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to qualify men to be ministers of Christ."

The "darkness and covetousness of professors" troubled him sorely in London and elsewhere.

Then (said he), it was "opened in him," that "God dwelleth not in temples made with hands; but in people's hearts."

This seemed at first to him "a strange word," because both priests and people call their churches "holy ground" and "dreadful places," and temples of God.

He ceased to go near the priests, and wandered about night and day, in "the chase," in the open fields, and woods, and orchards with his Bible; until finding no help in man, at last he heard a voice which said, _There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition_." "_He on whom the sins of the whole had been laid; He who hath the key, and openeth the door of light and life_." There were "two thirsts in him, after the creature and after the Lord, the Creator." At length, "his thirst was stilled in God," his soul was "wrapped up in the love of God," and when storms came again, "his still, secret belief was stayed firm; and hope underneath held him as an anchor in the bottom of the sea, and anchored his immortal soul to Christ its Bishop, causing it to swim above the sea (the world), where all raging waves, foul weather, tempests, and temptations are."

He "found that his inward distresses had come from his selfish earthly will, which could not give up to the will of God," and that "the only true liberty is the liberty of subjection in the spirit to God;" and "his sorrows wore off, and he could have wept night and day with tears of joy to the Lord, in humility and brokenness of heart."

As I listened to him, my thoughts ebbed and flowed within me. At one time he seemed a daring self-willed youth, setting his judgment against the world; at another, as a simple lowly child who had _listened to God_, and must obey Him and none else; again, as one who might have been a poet, or a discoverer of great secrets of nature--so inward and penetrating seemed his glimpse into the heart of things; and again, as a reformer to break in pieces the empire of lies throughout the world.

"I saw," said he, "that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but _an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness_."

Again, "one morning as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me, and a temptation beset me; but I sate still. And it was said, '_all things come by nature_,' and the elements and stars came over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it. But as I sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true voice, which said, _There is a living God who made all things_. And immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all; my heart was glad, and I praised the living God. After some time I met with some people who had a notion that there is no God, but that all things come by nature. I had a dispute with them, and made some of them confess there is a living God. Then I saw it was good I had gone through that exercise."

His search into the reality of people's beliefs led him among strange people, some who held that "women have no more soul than a goose," whom he answered in the words of Mary, "My soul doth magnify the Lord;" others (Ranters) whom he went to visit in prison, who blasphemously held themselves to be God.

"Now," said he, "after a time was I come up in spirit into the Paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. The creation was opened unto me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue."

Again, "while I was in the Vale of Beavor, the Lord opened to me three things, in relation to those three great professions in the world, physic, divinity (so called), and law. He showed me that the physicians were out of the wisdom of God, by which the creatures were made, and so knew not their virtues; that the priests were out of the true faith which purifies and gives victory, and gives access to God; that the lawyers were out of the true equity. I felt the power of the Lord went forth unto all, by which all might be reformed; if they would bow to it. The priests might be brought to the true faith, which is the gift of God; the lawyers unto the true law, which brings to love one's neighbour as oneself, and lets man see if he wrongs his neighbour he wrongs himself; the physicians unto the wisdom of God, the Word of Wisdom, by which all things were made and are upheld. For as all believe in the light, and walk in the light, which Christ hath enlightened every man that cometh into the world withal, and so become Children of the Light and of the Day of Christ;--in His Day all things are seen, visible and invisible, by the divine light of Christ, the spiritual heavenly Man by whom all things were created."

Very strange words those seemed to me for so young a man. At first I felt disposed to turn from him as one full of an amazing self-conceit, lifting himself up above all in church and the world; but I remembered what my husband always said about trying to find the real meaning of all men. And as I sate still, and thought, a strange depth opened in those words. Something true, real, and eternal (I thought he meant), some divine meaning lay at the root of all human works, and states, and callings. By this they stand, and live; By departing from this they become hollow, and at last crumble away, by returning to this they are reformed.

He spoke also of the whole of nature and history as being repeated in the wonderful world within us. How the spirit has its Egypts and its Sodom, and its wildernesses and its Red Seas; its Paradise and its mountains of the Lord's House; its Cains, and Esaus, and Judases. "Some men," said he, "have the nature of swine wallowing in the mire. Some the nature of dogs, to bite both the sheep and one another. Some of lions and of wolves, to tear, devour, and destroy; some of serpents, to sting, envenom, and poison; some of horses, to prance and vapour in their strength, and be swift in doing evil; some of tall sturdy oaks to flourish and spread in wisdom and strength. Thus the evil is one in all, but worketh many ways; therefore take heed of the enemy and keep in the faith of Christ."

These thoughts in him were no mere visionary meditations, revolving on themselves. The strange thing in him was the blending of far-reaching mystical thought with direct and most practical action.

"The Lord," said he, "commanded me to go abroad unto the world, which was like a briery thorny wilderness; and when I came in the Lord's mighty power with the word of life into the world, the world swelled and made a noise like the great raging waves of the sea. Priests and professors, magistrates and people, were all like the sea when I came to proclaim the day of the Lord among them, and to preach repentance to them."

His preaching places were no secluded chambers, or conventional religious assemblies, but the market-place, the "sitting of justices to hire servants," schools, firesides, sea-shores where wreckers watched, and, at times, the very "steeple-houses" where the "false priests" seemed to him "a lump of clay set up in the pulpit above a dead fallow ground."

By preaching repentance he did not mean crying out in general that sin was evil. He meant, like him who preached in the Desert of old, pointing out to each man, and class of men, their particular sins, telling magistrates to judge justly, tradesmen to have no false weights and measures, Cornish wreckers to save wrecked ships and shelter wrecked men, masters not to oppress servants, servants to serve honestly, soldiers to do violence to no man, excisemen to make no inequitable demands, "priests" to speak the truth.

And the results of his preaching were two-fold: everywhere priests, excisemen, soldiers, masters, tradesmen, and magistrates were enraged, seized him, beat and bruised and trampled on him, threw him into prisons; and everywhere some ministers, soldiers, tradesmen, and magistrates, and even his jailers listened, gave up their false weights, or unjust dealings, and sought to live uprightly before God.

After this discourse there was silent prayer, and the good couple insisted on yielding up their own bed in the upper chamber to Annie and me, and the babes. But it was far on in the night before I could sleep. And in my sleep I had strange confused dreams of John the Baptist in the wilderness; of a madhouse, full of Quakers clothed in camels' hair with leathern girdles; and of the world shining in a wondrous light, neither of sun nor moon, which made it like Paradise.

In the morning the poor people of the house set us on our way with great loving-kindness, and I had much ado to make them take any recompense. And I have always been thankful that through this interview I learned to distinguish those whom many confound--the Ranters, Fifth Monarchy men, and other lawless fanatics--from the true Quakers, or (as they would be called) "Friends of truth."

After that we had no adventures until we reached Kidderminster.

Our way lay past many ruins of unroofed cottages, with their blackened walls deserted and bare; gardens of herbs running wild, and orchards still flourishing, and overhanging with pleasant fruit; the open and broken casements of the charred and ruined homestead; here and there a stately castle or mansion battered and breached by cannon, while choice flowers still bloomed in patches on the trampled terraces or round the broken fountains, where fair hands had tended them.

In the heat of the day we rested. But wondrous pleasant were the sights we saw and the sounds we heard as we journeyed through the land through those summer morns and eves; the pleasant old country, well-watered everywhere with broad still rivers among the meadows, and little talking brooks among the woods, orchards, and corn-fields; and soft waving sweeps of hill and valley, all smooth and green, as if the waters of the great sin-flood of old had never torn and convulsed them, but only gently heaved and rippled over them. And as we neared Kidderminster, far off on either side rose two ranges of hills, with blue peaks pointing to the sky like church-roofs, the Malverns and the hills of Wales.

Again and again, now, as I read godly Mr. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, pictures of what I saw on that journey in old England rise before me--the "river with the green trees on its banks;" the "meadow curiously beautified with lilies, and green all the year long;" the "tempting stile into Bypath Meadow;" the "hills with gardens and orchards and fountains of waters;" the "delicate plain called Ease;" the valley of humiliation, "green through the summer; fat ground, consisting much in meadows," with its "pleasant air;" the "fruit-trees, with their mellow fruit, which shot over the garden walls;" the Delectable Mountains, not too high and savage for the shepherds to fold their flocks thereon. I can remember, also, many a Hill Difficulty, up which our horses slowly toiled, and Sloughs of Despond through which they struggled. But the "valley of the shadow of death" had nothing outward in that pleasant land to picture it. Out of the dark and rugged depths of his own despair, John Bunyan created a landscape he never could have seen.

I was the sole observer of these things among our little band: the babe saw little but me; Maidie saw nothing of hills and woods, the wild roses and honeysuckles we gathered for her were the channels through which the beauty of the world stole into her heart, as it did, making her clap her hands and laugh with delight as we rode; the serving-man, being a Londoner, thought scorn of the woods and lanes as very barbarous and ill-made places compared with Cheapside with its wares and signs; and Annis, if she saw the outward world at all, beheld it but as the mystical mirror of the world within, the waters of quietness and trees of healing among which her spirit dwelt.

And so at last, on the seventh day after leaving home, we came to a valley on the slopes of which rise the houses of Kidderminster, on each side of the river Stour--"the church on the brow above the water," as they say the name signifies in the old tongues, British and Saxon, which were spoken when first men began to make houses there.

Rich old English names; every name (like the old minsters of our land) in itself a poem, with histories imbedded in every syllable!

Fondly we transfer the familiar old words to new places in this New World. But here alas, as yet, they are no living, growing words,--only poor pathetic relics or arbitrary symbols; at least, until generations to come shall have breathed into them the new significances of a new human history.