CHAPTER II.

_May Day_, 1638.

"This morning, before break of day, I went to bathe my face in the May dew by the Lady Well. There I met Lettice Davenant with her maidens. She was dressed in a kirtle of grass-green silk, with a blue taffetas petticoat, and her eyes were like wet violets, and her brown hair like wavy tangles of soft glossy unspun silk, specked and woven with gold, and she looked like a sweet May flower, just lifting itself out of its green sheath into the sunshine, and all the colours changing and blending into each other, as they do in the flowers. And she laid her soft, little hand in mine, and said her mother loved mine, and she wished I would love her, and be her friend. And she kissed me with her dear, sweet, little mouth, like a rosebud--like a child's. And I held her close in my arms, with her silky hair falling on my shoulder. She is just so much shorter than I am. And her heart beat on mine. And I will love her all my life. No wonder Roger thinks her fair.

"I will love her all my life, whatever Aunt Dorothy says.

"Firstly, because I cannot help it. And secondly, because I am sure it is right--right--right to love; always right to love--to love as much, as dearly, as long, as deep as we can. Always right to love, never right to despise, or keep aloof, or turn aside. Sometimes right to hate, at least I think so; sometimes right to be angry, I am sure of that; but never right to despise, and always--always right to love.

"For Roger and I have looked well all through the Gospels to see. And the Pharisee despised, the Priest and the Levite passed by, and the disciples said once or twice, send her away. But the Lord drew near, called them to Him, touched, took in His arms, loved, always loved. Loved when they were wandering--loved when they would not come; loved even when they 'went away.'

"And Aunt Gretel thinks the same. Only I sometimes wish we had lived in the times she speaks of, told of in certain Family Chronicles of hers, a century old. For then it was the people with the wrong religion who despised others, and were harsh and severe. And they went into convents, which must have been a great relief to the rest of the family. And now it seems to be the people with the right religion who do like the Pharisees. And they stay at home, which is more difficult to understand, and more unpleasant to bear."

A very vehement utterance, crossed through with repentant lines in after times, but still quite legible, and of interest to me for the vanished outer world of life, and the tumultuous inward world of revolt it recalls.

For that May morning, on my way home through the wood, I met the village lads and lasses bringing home the May; and when I reached the house, it was late; the serving men and maidens had finished their meal at the long table in the hall, and Aunt Dorothy sat at one end on the table, which crossed it at the top, and span; and Cousin Placidia sat silent at the other end and span, the whirr of their spinning-wheels distinctly reproaching me in a steady hum of displeasure, until I was constrained to reply to it and to Aunt Dorothy's silence.

"Aunt Dorothy, prithee, forgive me. I only went to bathe my face in the May dew by the Lady Well. And there I met Lettice Davenant."

"I never reproached thee, child," said Aunt Dorothy. "There is too much license in this house for that. But this, I will say, the excuse is worse than the fault. How often have I told thee not to stain thy lips with the idolatrous title of that well? And as to bathing thy face in the May dew, Olive, it is Popery--sheer Popery."

"Not Popery, sister Dorothy," said my Father, looking up from his sheet of news just brought from London. "Not Popery; Paganism. The custom dates back to the ancient Romans, probably to the festival of the goddess Maia, mother of Mercury, but here antiquarians are divided."

"And well they may be," said Aunt Dorothy, "what but sects and divisions can be expected from such tampering with vanities and idolatries? For my part, it matters little to me whether the custom dates to the modern or the ancient Romans, or to the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites. Whoever painted the idol, I have little doubt who made it. And of the two I like the unchristened idols best."

"Not quite, sister Dorothy, not always," remonstrated my Father, "it is certainly a great mistake to worship the Virgin Mary. But the Moloch to whom they burned little children was worse, much worse."

"If he was, the less we hear about him the better, Brother," said Aunt Dorothy. "But as to the burning I see little difference. You can see the black sites of Queen Mary's fires still. And Lettice Davenant has been up at the court of the new Queen Marie (as they call her);--an unlucky name for England. And little good she or hers are like to do to our Olive."

On which I turned wholly into a boiling caldron of indignation; and to what it might have led I know not, had not Aunt Gretel at that moment intervened, ruddy from the kitchen fire, and with the glow of a pleasant purpose in her kindly blue eyes.

"They are like to have the blithest May to-day they have seen for many a year," said she. "Our Margery, the daughter of Tib the dairywoman, is to be queen. And a better maiden or a sweeter face there is not in all the country side. And Dickon, the gardener's son at the Hall, is her sweetheart, and the Lady Lucy Davenant has let them deck the bower with posies from her own garden, and they are coming from the Hall, the Lady Lucy and Sir Walter, and Mistress Lettice and her five brothers, to see the jollity."

"Tell Tib's goodman to broach a barrel of the best ale, sister Gretel," said my Father, "and we will go and see."

This was said in the tone Aunt Dorothy never answered, and she made no remonstrance except through the whirr of her spinning-wheel, which always seemed to Roger and me to be a kind of "_famulus_," or a second-self to Aunt Dorothy (of course of a white not a black kind), saying the thing she meant but would not say, and in a thousand ways spinning out and completing, not her thread only, but her life and thought.

My Father soon rose and went to the farm. Aunt Dorothy span silent at one end of the table, and Cousin Placidia at the other; while I sat too indignant to eat anything, and Aunt Gretel moved about in a helpless, conciliatory state between.

"The Bible does speak of being merry, sister Dorothy," said she at length, metaphorically putting her foot into Aunt Dorothy's spiritual spinning, as she was wont to do.

"No doubt it does," said Aunt Dorothy. "'Is any merry among you, let him sing psalms.'"

"I am sure I wish they would," said Aunt Gretel, "there is nothing I enjoy so much. And," pursued she, waxing bold, "after all, sister Dorothy, the whole world does seem to sing and dance in the green May, the little birds hop and sing, (sing love-songs too, sister Dorothy), and the leaves dance and rustle, and the flowers don all the colours of the rainbow."

"As to the flowers," said Aunt Dorothy, "they did not choose their own raiment, so no blame to them, poor perishing things. I hold they were clothed in their scarlet and purple, like fools in motley, for the very purpose of shaming us into being sober and grave in our attire. The birds, indeed, may hop and sing if they like it. Not that I think they have much cause, poor inconsiderate creatures, what with the birds'-nesting, and the poaching, and Mr. Cromwell draining the fens. But they have no foresight, and they have not immortal souls, and if they're to be in a pie to-morrow they don't know it; and they are no worse for it the day after."

"But," said Aunt Gretel, "we have immortal souls, and I think that ought to make us sing a thousand-fold better than the birds."

"We have not only souls, we have sins," said Aunt Dorothy; "and there is enough in sin, I hold, to stop the sweetest music in the world when the burden is felt."

"But we have the Gospel and the Saviour," said Aunt Gretel, "glad tidings of great joy to all people."

"Tell them, then, to the people," said Aunt Dorothy; "get a godly minister to go and preach them to the poor sinners in the village, and that will be better than setting up May-poles and broaching beer barrels."

"I do tell them whenever I can, sister Dorothy," said Aunt Gretel meekly, "as well as I can. But the best of us cannot always be listening to sermons."

"We might listen much longer than we do if we tried," said Aunt Dorothy, branching off from the subject. "In Scotland, I am told, the Sabbath services last twelve hours."

Aunt Gretel sighed; whether in compassion for the Scottish congregations, or in lamentation over her own shortcomings, she did not explain.

"But," she resumed, "it does seem that if the good God meant that there should have been no merry-making in the world he would have arranged that people should have come into the world full-grown."

"Probably it would have been better if it could have been so managed," said Aunt Dorothy; "but I suppose it could not. However that may be, the best we can do now is to make people grow up as soon as they can, and not keep them babies with May games, and junketings, and possetings."

"But," said Aunt Gretel timidly, "after all, sister Dorothy, the Bible does not give us any strict rules by which we can judge other people in such things."

"I confess," replied Aunt Dorothy, "that if there could be a thing to be wished for in the Bible (with reverence I say it), it is just that there were a few plain rules. St. Paul came very near it when he was speaking of the weak brethren at the idol-feasts; but I confess I do think it would have been a help if he had gone a little further while he was about it. Then, people would not have been able to pretend they did not know what he meant. I do think it would have been a comfort if there could have been a book of Leviticus in the New Testament."

"But your Mr. John Milton," said Aunt Gretel, "in his new masque of Comus, which your brother thinks beautiful, introduces music and dancing."

"Mr. Milton is a godly man," said Aunt Dorothy "but, poor gentleman, he is a poet; and poets can not always be expected to keep straight, like reasonable people."

"But Dr. Martin Luther himself dearly loved music," said Aunt Gretel, driven to her final court of appeal, "and even sanctioned dancing, in a Christian-like way, without rioting and drunkenness."

"Dr. Luther might," rejoined Aunt Dorothy. "Dr. Luther believed in consubstantiation, and rejected the Epistle of St. James. And, besides, by this time he has been in heaven, it is to be hoped, for nearly a hundred years, and there can be no doubt he knows better."

Aunt Gretel was roused.

"Sister Dorothy," she said, "Dr. Luther does not need to be defended by me. But I sometimes think if he came to England in these days he would think some of you had gone some way towards painting again that terrible picture of God, which made the little ones fly from Him instead of taking refuge with Him, and which it took him so much toil to destroy."

And she fled to the kitchen, rosier than she came, but with tears instead of smiles in her eyes.

"If people could enjoy themselves harmlessly, without rioting and drunkenness," said Aunt Dorothy, half yielding, "there might be less to be said against it.

"What is rioting, Aunt Dorothy?" asked Placidia from her spinning-wheel.

"Idling and romping, and doing what had better not be done nor talked about."

"Because, Aunt Dorothy," said Placidia solemnly, "I saw Dickon trying to kiss our Tib's daughter, Margery, behind the door; and she would not let him. But she laughed and did not seem angry. Is that rioting?"

"Dickon may kiss Margery as often as he likes without hurting you or any one, Placidia," said Aunt Dorothy, incautiously. "Margery is a good honest girl, and can take care of herself. And you have no right to watch what any one does behind doors. You, at least, shall not go to the May-pole to-day, but shall stay with me and learn the thirteenth of First Corinthians."

"I do not wish to go to any rioting or May games," said Placidia. "I like my spinning and my book. I never did care for dancing and playing and fooling, Aunt Dorothy, I am thankful to say."

"Don't be a Pharisee, Placidia," said Aunt Dorothy, turning hotly on her unwelcome ally. "Better play and dance like a flipperty-gibbet, than watch what other people do behind doors, and tell tales."

And I left them to settle the controversy, while I went to join Aunt Gretel, who was in my Father's chamber preparing for me such sober decorations in honor of the festivities as our Puritan wardrobes admitted of. It was a great day for me; chiefly for the expectation of meeting the Lady Lucy and the sweet maiden Lettice.

I was starting full of glee when the sight of Aunt Dorothy, spinning silently in the hall as we passed the door, with Placidia beside her, threw a little shadow over my contentment. Aunt Dorothy so completely represented to me the majesty of law, and at the bottom of our hearts both Roger and I so trusted and honored her, that in spite even of my Father's sanction, something of misgiving troubled me at the sight of her grave face. With a sudden impulse I ran back, and, standing before her, said--

"Aunt Dorothy, you are not angry? I shall not dance, only look, and soon be at home again, and all will go on the same as ever."

She shook her head, but more sorrowfully than angrily.

"Eve only looked," said she, "but nothing went on the same evermore."

At that moment my father came back to seek me, and, catching Aunt Dorothy's last words, he said kindly but gravely, "Do not let us trouble the child's conscience with our scruples. It is a serious danger to force our scruples on others. When experience of their own peculiar weaknesses and besetments has led them to scruple at things for themselves, it is another matter. But to add to God's laws is almost as tremendous a mistake as to subtract from them. Our additions, moreover, are sure to end in subtractions in some other direction. Indifferent things done with a guilty conscience lead to guilty things done with an indifferent conscience. In inventing imaginary sins you create real sinners."

"Well, brother, it is as you please," said Aunt Dorothy, "but I should have thought our new parson reading from that blasphemous 'Book of Sports' from the pulpit, commanding the people to dance around the May-poles on the Sabbath afternoons, was enough to turn any serious person against them."

"Nay; that is exactly one of the strongest reasons why I go to-day," said my father. "I go to show that it is not the May-poles we scruple at, but the cruel robbing of the poor by the desecration of the day given them by God for higher things."

And he led me away. But my free, innocent gladsomeness was gone.

Conscience had come in with her questionings, and her discernings and her dividings. I was not sure whether God was pleased with me or with any of us. Even when I looked at the garlanded May-pole, I thought of the old tree in Eden with its pleasant fruit, which I had embroidered with a serpent coiled round it, darting out his forked tongue at Eve. I wondered whether if my eyes were opened I should see him there, writhing among the hawthorn garlands, or hissing envenomed words into the ear of our Tib's Margery as she sat in her royal bower of green boughs crowned with flowers, or gliding in and out among the dancers, as hand in hand they moved singing around the May-pole, wreathing and unwreathing the long garland which united them, and making low reverences, as they passed, to their blushing Queen. I wondered whether the whole thing had some mysterious connection with idolatry, and heaven itself were after all watching us with grieved displeasures like Aunt Dorothy, and secretly preparing fiery serpents, or a rain of fire and brimstone, or a thunder storm, or whatever came instead of fiery serpents and fire and brimstone in these days when there were no more miracles.

These thoughts, however, all vanished when the family appeared from the Hall. The Lady Lucy was borne by two men in a sedan-chair which she had brought from London, a thing I had never seen before. It so happened that I had never seen the Lady Lucy until that day. The family had been much about the court, and on the few occasions on which they had spent any time at the Hall, the Lady Lucy's health had been too feeble to admit of her attending at the parish church with the rest of the family. From the moment, therefore, that Sir Walter handed her out of the chair and seated her on cushions prepared for her, I could not take my eyes from her, not even to look at Lettice. So queenly she appeared to me, such a perfection of grace and dignity and beauty. Her complexion was fair like Lettice's, but very delicate and pale, like a shell; and her hair, still brown and abundant, was arranged in countless small ringlets around her face. On her neck and her forehead there was a brilliant sparkle and a glitter, which must, of course, have been from jewels; and her dress had a sheen and a gloss, and a delicate changing of gorgeous colours on it which must have been that of velvet and brocade and rare laces. But in my eyes she sat wrapped in a kind of halo of unearthly glory. I no more thought of resolving it into the texture of any earthly looms than if she had been a lily or a star. All around her seemed to belong to her, like the moonbeams to the moon or the leaves to a flower. Not her dress only, but the green leaves which bent lovingly down to her, and the flowery turf which seemed to kiss her feet. If I thought of any comparison, it was Aunt Gretel's fairy-tale of the princess with the three magic robes, enclosed in the magic nut-shells, like the sun, like the moon, and like the stars.

Even Sir Walter, burly, and sturdy, and noisy, and substantial as he was, seemed to me to acquire a kind of reflected glory by her speaking to him. And her seven sons girdled her like the planets around the sun, or like the seven electors Aunt Gretel told us about around the emperor. But when at last her eyes rested on me, and she whispered something to Sir Walter, and he came across and doffed his plumed hat to my father, and then led me across to her, and she looked long in my face, and then up in my father's, and said, "The likeness is perfect," and then kissed me, and made me sit down on the cushion beside her with her hand in mine, I thought her voice like an angel's, and her touch seemed to me to have something hallowing in it which made me feel safe like a little bird under its mother's wing. The silent smile of her soft eyes under her smooth, broad, unfurrowed brow, as she turned every now and then and looked at me, fell on my heart like a kiss. And I thought no more of Eve and the serpent, or Aunt Dorothy, or anything, until she rose to go. And then she kissed me again. But I scarcely seemed to care that she should kiss me. Her presence was an embrace; her smile was a kiss; every tone of her voice was a caress. A tender motherliness seemed to fold me all round as I sat by her. As she left me she said softly,--

"Little Olive, you must come and see me. Your mother and I loved each other." Then holding out her hand to my father, she added,--

"Politics and land-boundaries, Mr. Drayton, must not keep us any longer apart."

He bowed, and they conversed some time longer; but the only thing I heard was that he promised I should go and see her at the Hall.

I think every one felt something of the soft charm there was in her. For, quiet and retiring as she was, when she left, a light and gladness seemed to go with her. Before long the dancing and singing stopped, the tables were set on the green, and the feasting began, and we left and went home.

"Oh, Roger," said I, when we were alone that evening, "there can be no one like her in the world."

"Of course not," said Roger decisively. "Did I not always say so?"

"But you never saw her before."

"Never saw her, Olive? How can I help seeing her every Sunday? She sits at the end of the pew just opposite mine."

"She never came to church, Roger."

"Never came to church? Who do you mean?"

"Mean? The Lady Lucy, to be sure."

"Oh," said Roger, "I thought, of course, you were speaking of Mistress Lettice."

But when we came back to Netherby, full as my heart was of my new love, there was something in Aunt Dorothy's manner that quite froze any utterance of it, and brought me back to Eve and the apple. Yet she spoke kindly,--

"Thou lookest serious, Olive," said she. "Perhaps thou didst not find it such a paradise after all. Poor child, the world's a shallow cup, and the sooner we drain it the better. I think better of thee than that thou wilt long be content with such May games and vanities. Come to thy supper."

But my honesty compelled me to speak. I did not wish Aunt Dorothy to think better of me than I deserved.

"It _was_ rather like paradise, Aunt Dorothy," I said.

"Paradise around a May-pole," said she compassionately. "Poor babe, poor babe!"

"It was not the May-pole," said I, my face burning at having to bring out my hidden treasure of new love; "not the May-pole, but Lady Lucy."

"Lady Lucy took a fancy to the child, Sister Dorothy," said my father, "and asked her to the Hall." And lowering his voice he added, "She thought her like Magdalene."

I had scarcely ever heard him litter my mother's Christian name before, and now it seemed to fall from his lips like a blessing.

Aunt Dorothy's brow darkened.

"Thou wilt never let the child go, brother?"

He did not at once reply.

"Into the very jaws of Babylon, brother? The Lady Lucy is one of the favourites, they say, of the Popish Queen."

"Very probably," said my father dryly, "I do not see how the Queen or any one else could help honouring or favouring the Lady Lucy."

My heart bounded in acquiescence.

"They say she has a chapel at the Hall fitted up on the very pattern of Archbishop Laud, and priests in coats of no one knows how many colours, and painted glass, and incense. Thou wilt never let the poor unsuspecting lamb go into the very lair of the Beast?"

"There are jewels in many a dust-heap, Sister Dorothy, and the Lady Lucy is one," said my father a little impatiently, for Aunt Dorothy had the faculty of arousing the latent wilfulness of the meekest of men. "Let us say no more about it. I have made up my mind."

Had he known how deep was the spell on me, he might have thought otherwise. For, ungrateful that I was, having lost my heart to this fair strange lady, I sat chafing at Aunt Dorothy's injustice, in a wide-spread inward revolt, which bid fair to extend itself to everything Aunt Dorothy believed or required. All her life-long care and affection, and patient (or impatient) toiling and planning for me and mine, blotted out by what I deemed her blind injustice to this object of my worship, who had but kissed me twice, and smiled on me, and said half-a-dozen soft words, and had won all my childish heart!

And yet, looking back from these sober hours, I still feel it was not altogether an infatuation. Such true and tender motherliness as dwelt in Lady Lucy is the greatest power it seems to me that can invest a woman.

All mothers certainly do not possess it. On some, on the contrary, the motherly love which passionately enfolds those within is too like a bristling fortification of jealousy and exclusiveness to those without. Or rather (that I dishonour not the most sacred thing in our nature), I should say, the mother's love which is from above is lowered and narrowed into a passion by the selfishness which is not from above. And some unmarried women possess it, some little maidens even who from infancy draw the little ones to them by a soft irresistible attraction, and seem to fold them under soft dove-like plumage. Without something of it women are not women, but only weaker, and shriller, and smaller men. But where, as in Lady Lucy, the whole being is steeped in it, it seems to me the sweetest, strongest, most irresistible power on earth, to control, and bless, and purify, and raise, and the truest incarnation (I cannot say anything so cold as image), the truest embodying and ensouling of what is divine.

But that night it so chanced that I, who had fallen asleep lapped in sweet memories of Lady Lucy and in the protection of Aunt Gretel's presence, awakened by the long roll of a thunder-peal which seemed as if it never would end.

For some time I tried to hide myself from the flash and the terrific sound under the bed-clothes. But it would not do. At length I sprang speechless from my little bed to Aunt Gretel's. She took me in close to her. And there, with my head on her shoulder, speech came back to me, and I said, in a frightened whisper (for it seemed to me like speaking in church),--

"Aunt Gretel, will the last trumpet be like that?"

"I do not know, Olive," said she quietly. "More awful, I think, yet plainer, for we shall all understand it, even those in the graves; and it will call us home."

"O Aunt Gretel," I said at last, "can it have anything to do with the May-pole?"

"What, sweet heart! the thunder?"

"It is God's voice, is it not? Does not the Bible say so? And it does sound like an angry voice," I whispered, for the windows were rattling and the house was quivering with the repeated peals, as if in the grasp of a terrible giant.

"There is much indeed to make the good God angry, my lamb, much more than May-poles."

"Yes," said I, "there were the three gentlemen in the pillory! That must have been worse certainly. But do you think God can be angry with me, Aunt Gretel?"

"For what, sweet heart?"

"For loving Lady Lucy," said I; "she is so very sweet."

"God is never angry with any one for loving," said Aunt Gretel, "only for not loving. But there is a better voice of God than the thunder, Olive," added she. "A voice that does not roar but speaks, sweet heart. Hast thou never heard that?"

I was silent, for I half guessed what she meant.

"'_It is I, be not afraid,_'" she said, in a low, clear tone, contrasting with my awe-stricken whisper. "Whenever thou dost not understand the voice that thunders, sweet heart, go back to the voice that speaks, and that will tell thee what the voice that thunders means."

"Aunt Gretel," said I, after a little silence, "it seemed to me as if Lady Lucy were like some words of our Saviour's. As if everything in her were saying in a soft dove's voice, 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me.' Was it wrong to think so? It seemed as if I were sitting beside my Mother, and then I thought of those very words. Was it wrong?"

"Not wrong, my poor motherless lamb," said she, "no, surely not wrong. Remember, Olive, from Paradise downwards the worst heresy has been slander of the love of God; distrust of His love, and disbelief of the awful warnings His love gives against sin. Whenever we feel anything very tender in any human love, we should feel as if the blessed God were stretching out His arms to us through it, and saying, 'That is a little like the way I love thee. But only a little, only a little.'"

And the thunder rolled on, and the lightning that night cleft the great elm by the gate, so that in the morning it stood a scorched and blackened trunk.

And Aunt Dorothy said what an awful warning it was. But to me, if it was an "awful warning," it stood also like a parable of mercy. I could not exactly have explained why; but I thought I could read the meaning of the Voice that thundered by the Voice that spoke.

I thought how He had been scathed and bruised for us.

And I pleaded hard with my father that the old scathed tree might not be felled. For to me its great bare blackened branches seemed to shelter the house like that accursed tree which had spread its bare arms one Good Friday night outside Jerusalem, and had pleaded not for vengeance, but for pity and for pardon.

I think the resentment of injustice is one of the first-born and strongest passions in an ingenuous heart. And to this, I believe, is often due the falling off of children from the party of their parents, They hear hard things said of opponents; on closer acquaintance they find these to be exaggerations, or, at least, suppressions; the general gloom of a picture being even more produced by effacing lights than by deepening shadows. The discovery throws a doubt over the whole range of inherited beliefs, and it is well if in the heat of youth the revulsion is not far greater than the wrong; if in their indignation at discovering that the heretic is not an embodied heresy, but merely a human creature believing something wrong, they do not glorify him into a martyr and a model.

For Roger and me it was the greatest blessing that our father was just and candid to the extent of seeing (often to his own great distress and perplexity) even more clearly the defects of his own party which he might correct, than of the other side, which he could not; and that Aunt Gretel was apt to see all opinions and characters melted into a haze of indiscriminate sunshine by the light of her own loving heart.

Our indignation, therefore, during the period of our lives which followed on this May-day was almost entirely directed against Aunt Dorothy.

My idol remained for some time precisely at the due idolatrous distance, enshrined in general behind a screen of sweet mystery, with occasional flashes of beatific vision; the intervals filled up with rumours of the music, and breaths of the incense of the inner sanctuary, enhanced by what I deemed the unjust murmurs of the profane outside.

My father fulfilled his promise of taking me to the Hall. On our way to Lady Lucy's drawing-chamber I caught a glimpse through a half-open door into her private chapel, which left on my memory a haze and a fragrance of coloured light falling on the marble pavements through windows like rubies and sapphires, of golden chalices and candelabras, of aromatic perfumes, with a rise and fall of sweet chords of sacred music, all blended together into a kind of sacred spell, like the church bells on Sunday across the Mere. The Lady Lucy herself was embroidering a silken church vestment with gold and crimson; skeins of glossy silk of brilliant colours lay around her, which thenceforth invested the descriptions of the broidered work of the tabernacle for me with a new interest. She received my father with a courtly grace, and me with her own motherly sweetness. She made me sit on a tabouret at her feet, while she conversed with my father, and gave me a French ivory puzzle to unravel. But I could do nothing but drink in the soft modulations of her voice without heeding what she said, except that the discourse seemed embroidered with the names of the King and the Queen, and the Princes and Princesses, which seemed as fit for her lips as her rich dress was for her person. She seemed to speak with a gentle raillery, reminding him of old times, and asking why he deserted the court. But his words and tones were very grave. Then, as he spoke of leaving, she unlocked a little sandal-wood cabinet, and took out a locket containing a curl of fair hair, and she said softly, "This was Magdalene's!" and held it beside mine. And then, as she carefully laid it aside again, the conversation for a few moments rose to higher things, and a Name higher than those of kings and queens was in it. And she said reverently, "In whatever else we differ, that good part, I trust, may be mine and yours! as we know so well it was hers." And my father seemed moved, took leave, and said nothing more until we had passed through the outer gate, when in the avenue Lettice met us, cantering on a white palfrey, in a riding coat laced with red, blue and yellow; and springing off, left her horse to go whither it would, as she ran to welcome me, saying a thousand pretty, kindly things, while I, in a shy ecstasy, could only stand and hold her hand, and feel as if I had been transported, entirely unprepared, straight into the middle of a fairy tale.

After that for some weeks there was a stream of courtly company at the Hall, and Roger and I only saw Lettice and occasionally the Lady Lucy at church, or met them now and then in our rides and rambles by the Mere or through the woods. But whenever we did meet there was always the same eager cordial greeting from Lettice, and the same affectionate manner in her mother. And from time to time we heard, through Tib's sweetheart Dickon, of the gracious little kindnesses of both mother and daughter, of their thoughtful care for tenant and servant, of the honour in which they were held by prince and peasant. And so on me and on Roger the spell worked on.

The Draytons were of as old standing in the parish as the Davenants. Indeed, if tradition and our family tree spoke true, many a broad acre around Netherby had been in the possession of our ancestors, maternal or paternal, when the forefathers of the Davenants had been holding insignificant fiefs under Norman dukes, or cruising on very doubtful errands about the northern seas. Our pedigree dated back to Saxon times; the porch of the oldest transept of the church had, to Aunt Dorothy's mingled pride and horror, an inscription on it requesting prayers for the soul of one of our progenitors; and the oldest tomb in the church was ours. But while our family had remained stationary in place as well as in rank, the Davenants had climbed far above us. Our old Manor House had received no additions since the reign of Elizabeth, when the third gable had been built with the large embayed window, and the three terraces sloping to the fish-pond and the orchards, while on the other side of the court extended, as of old, the cattle-sheds and stables. Meantime, the old Hall of the Davenants had been degraded into farm-buildings, whilst a new mansion, with sumptuous banqueting halls and dainty ladies' withdrawing-chamber like a palace, had gradually sprung up around the remains of the suppressed Priory, which had been granted to the family; the ancient Priory Church serving as Lady Lucy's private chapel, the monks' refectory as the family dining-hall, whilst all signs of farm life had vanished out of sight, and scent, and hearing.

During the same period, the new transept of our parish church, which had been the Davenants' family chapel, had become enriched with stately monuments, where the effigies of knight and dame rested under decorated canopies. The titles and armorial bearings of many a noble family were mingled with theirs on monumental brass and stained window; whilst the plain massive architecture of our hereditary portion of the church was not more contrasted with the rich and delicate carving of theirs than were we and our servingmen and maidens, in our plain, sad-colored stuffs, unplumed, unadorned hats, caps or coifs, and white linen kerchiefs, with the brocades, satins, and velvets, ostrich feathers and jewels, ribboned hosen and buckled shoes of the Hall.

The contrast had gone deeper than mere externals, as external contrasts mostly do, in this symbolical world. In the Civil Wars, when no political principle was involved, it had chanced that the Draytons and the Davenants had seldom been on the same side. But at and after the Reformation the difference manifested itself plainly and steadily.

The Davenants had recognized Henry VIII.'s supremacy to the extent of receiving from him a grant of the lands belonging to the neighbouring abbey. But it had probably cost them little change of belief to return zealously to the old religion, under the rule of Queen Mary; whereas the Draytons, adhering with Saxon immobility to the Papal authority when Henry VIII. discarded it, had slowly come round to the conviction of the truth of the reformed religion by the time it became dangerous; and we hold it one of our chief family distinctions that we have a name closely connected with us enrolled among the noble army in "Fox's Book of Martyrs." Indeed, throughout their history, our family had an unprosperous propensity to the dangerous side. The religious convictions, so painfully adopted and so dearly proved, had throughout the reign of Elizabeth given our ancestors a leaning to the Puritan side; deep religious conviction binding them from generation to generation to the noblest spirits of their times, whilst a certain almost perverse honesty and inflexibility of temper naturally drove them to resist any kind of pressure from without, and a taste for what is solid and simple rather than for what is elegant and gorgeous, whether in life or in ritual, inclined them to the simplest forms of ecclesiastical ceremonial.

It was this strong hereditary Protestantism which had led my Father to join the religious wars in Germany. He held King Gustavus Adolphus, the Swede, to be the noblest man and the greatest general of ancient or modern times. And he held that the fearful conflict by which that great king turned the tide against the Popish arms was little less than a conflict between truth and falsehood, barbarism and civilization, light and darkness. It was enough to make any one believe in the necessity of hell, he said, to have seen, as he had, the city of Magdeburg, ten days after Tilly's soldiers had sacked it, when scarce three thousand corpse-like survivors crept around the blackened ruins where lay buried the mangled remains of their fourteen thousand happier dead. To see that, said my Father, would make any one understand what is meant by the wrath of the Lamb; and that there are things which can make a gospel of vengeance as precious to just men as a gospel of mercy. And some foretaste of that merciful vengeance, he said, had been given already. For after Magdeburg it was said Tilly never won a battle. My Father fought with the Swedish army till the death of the king, on the sixth of November, 1632; and that day of his victory and death at Lützen, was always kept in our household as a day of family mourning.

Had Elizabeth been on the throne, my Father used to say, and Cecil at the helm of state, it would not have been the little northern kingdom of Sweden which should have stemmed the torrent of Popish and Imperial tyranny, while England stood by wringing helpless womanish hands, beholding her brethren in the faith tortured and slaughtered, her own king's daughter exiled and dethroned, and, at the same time, her brave soldiers and sailors trifled to inglorious death by thousands at the bidding of a musked and curled court favourite at Rhé and Rochelle.

It was in Germany that my Father met my mother. She was a Saxon from Luther's own town, Wittemberg. Her name was Reichenbach, and her family retained affectionate personal memories of the great Reformer, as well as an enthusiastic devotion to his doctrines. She and Aunt Gretel (Magdalene and Margarethe) were orphan daughters of an officer in the Protestant armies. And I often count it among my mercies that our family history linked us with more forms of our religion than one, and extended our horizon beyond the sects and parties of England. Our mother died two years after my father's return to England, leaving him us two children, and a memory of a love as devoted, and a piety as simple, as ever lit up a home by keeping it open to heaven.

It was during these years she made the acquaintance with Lady Lucy. They had been very closely attached, although political differences, and the long absences of the Davenants at Court, had prevented much intercourse between the families since her death.

Roger recollected her face and voice and her foreign accent, and one or two things she said to him. I remember nothing of her but a kind of brooding warmth and care, tender caressing tones, and being watched by eyes with a look in them unlike any other, and then a day of weeping and silence and black dresses and sad faces, and a wandering about with a sense of something lost. Lost for ever out of my life. As much as by any possibility could be, Aunt Gretel made up the tenderness, and Aunt Dorothy the discipline; and my father did all he could to supply her place by a fatherly care softened into an uncommon passion by his sorrow, and deepened into the most sacred principle by his desire to remedy our loss. Yet, in looking back, I feel more and more we did indeed inevitably lose much. All these balancing and compensating cares and affections and restraints from every side yet missed something of the tender constraints and the heart-quickening warmth they would have had all living, blended, and consecrated in the one mother's heart. Yet to Roger, perhaps, the loss was at various points in his life even greater than to me.

If she had lived, perchance the lessons we had to learn after that May Day would have been learned with less of blundering and heat. Yet how can I tell? It seems to me the true painter keeps his pictures in harmony not by mixing the colours on the palette, but by blending them on the canvass, not by painting in leaden monotonous grays, but by interweaving and contrasting countless tints of pure and varied colour. And in nature, in history, in life, it seems to me the Creator does the same.

Yes, God forbid that in lamenting what we lost I should blaspheme the highest love--the love which, as Aunt Gretel says, takes every image of human affection, and fills and overfills it, and casts it away as too shallow; in its unutterable intensity putting as it were a tender paradox of slander on even a mother's love for her babes, and saying, "They may forget, yet will not I."

For that love, we believe, gave and took away, and has led us through fasting and feasting, dangers and droughts, Marahs and Elims, chastenings and cherishings, ever since.