Chapter X
“Good brother rest—the toil is overpast
The weariness, the travail, and the tears—.
All that did trouble thee—and now beholding
From the high heaven how we lay up thy garments
In the safe treasure-house of Death, thou smil’st
Upon our pains. So, till we follow thee.
Farewell!”
It was a blustering, boisterous day in March; strong-handed winds, errant and violent, were roaming waywardly through London. The city had resumed its former look; the grass-grown streets were again filled with busy crowds. The terror of the great enemy had passed into other places, before himself was gone.
In the Hampstead cottage Edith Field, arrayed for a journey, sat waiting for her father. She looked very sad and downcast, and there were tears in her eyes. Dame Rogers went about her household business with loud lamentations over the departure of her guests. Mercy sat in a corner, silently weeping.
At that time the bells of Aldgate Church tolled mournfully for one dead. By a new grave there, Master Chester and Master Field stood together.
The funeral procession had departed—the grave was closed; they were looking down solemnly upon the resting-place of a brave captain in their brotherhood; a manful and loyal servant of God.
By-and-by Master Chester put his arm through his friend’s, and silently they turned away; they had emerged from the din and bustle of the city before either spoke.
“We have left him to his rest, good brother,” said Master Chester then; “and we who leave him, what remaineth for us? God knoweth—the Lord help us I pray, for there seemeth nothing left for us but to become wanderers and vagabonds on the face of the earth.”
“Yea, truly, God help us!” said Master Field, “for He knoweth that this oppression is even too like to make wise men mad. To think of this—that he, whom we have laid in quiet rest to-day, would have been hunted through the country, had he lived one short month longer, after spending life and strength for this people in their extremity. Who is sufficient for these things?”
“It is well,” said the other, his voice faltering with the sorrow which he restrained; “it is well that the Master hath carried him home, where evil act or statute can harm him nevermore. Thou wert a good soldier, Titus Vincent, brother and son of mine, and a faithful as ever served King; and thou art gotten to thine inheritance; the Lord keep us till we join thee. But, brother, pity me for my Mary—my poor girl.”
The pity was not spoken in words; but the two fathers, old and long friends, understood each other not the less.
“I can but spend a night with my little ones,” said Master Chester, after a long pause; “and God knoweth how many nights shall be spent ere I look on them again. Is it to-morrow, brother, that this dark oppression becomes law?”
“Lady-day—yes, to-morrow,” was the answer; “and then, brother Chester, you join us in the North?”
“My sister Magdalene dwells in mine old parish,” said Master Chester, “and so I may not take refuge with her, though she hath wherewith to give my children bread; but, brother, thou sayest well—it is bitter and hard that I should not dare venture to tarry with them a day, lest pains of imprisonment and evil report come upon me. God strengthen us to bear all. For Cumberland? Yes; thy kinsman, Philip Dacre, offers me shelter in his house, for thy sake, and for mine own. God wot, a painful shelter, brother Field; eating of that for which I have not labored; yet to the Lord, who hath ordained this poverty, be all thanks, because He hath ordained also succor for His poor. And thou, brother, goest thou not also to Thornleigh?”
“Nay,” said Master Field, “my Edith goeth with me wherever I go; and, albeit, Philip Dacre is her kinsman; it can not be to Thornleigh.”
“Our Father bless the little one; she hath a stout heart, and a valiant,” said Master Chester; “and truly I admire and marvel how the Lord bringeth the sweet out of the bitter, as truly, brother, it is oft His good pleasure to bring the bitter out of the sweet. A dark dawn, and a bright noonday, for thy twain, and as fair a morrow as ever broke, and as sad an early even as ever fell for mine. So are our meetings and our sunderings here; and, truly, for the brief joy of them, what better are we than sundered in our very meetings; but the Lord’s will be done.”
“He will console thee, brother,” said Caleb Field. “Thy Mary is young, and fresh, and hopeful. The blast will bend the youthful spirit, but it will not break it.”
“Yea—yea,” said Master Chester, “it is even so, I know; but truly painful it is, brother, to think that we shall some time forget our pain—thou knowest? She is a good child—a blessed child, as ever made mortal household glad; and I must carry sadness to her. Nevertheless, surely it is well; and it had not been well, He had not sent it.”
An hour after, they were riding forth from the city, which, for a second time, had rejected them, pursued by the rigorous cruelty of that famed “Five-Mile Act,” which Charles and his counselors had devised in the retreat of their cowardice at Oxford, while those very men, whom they sentenced to perpetual banishment, wandering, and poverty, were laboring for the people stricken by God’s judgment. Edith, protected from the cold, as well as her scanty wardrobe would allow, rode behind her father. Master Chester was beside them. As they reached the high road to the north, they encountered Master Franklin.
“Brother Franklin,” said Master Chester, “what is thy destination, that thou art still tarrying here?”
“Good brother, I am a poor man, and alone,” was the answer; “and, in sooth, I see little to choose between a prison, and some distant village, where I could hide me, and earn a morsel of bread; so I will tarry truly, and will stay my preaching for no law. If they do lay violent hands on me, be it so; if I may not preach, I may suffer; for I have no daughter, Master Field—no household, good brother Chester—and surely it is a thing lawful to be resisted, that an Englishman may not speak God’s truth.”
So the stubborn Saxon man remained, in various places stoutly resisting the enacted injustice, and carrying his Master’s message without fear; a persevering, plain, laborious spirit, whose tenacious and obstinate strength had something noble in it—so little show as it made—so little transfusion as it had of the loftier light of genius. The brave and honest common stock, of whom, if there were many, it would be blessed for this land.
And leaving London, the terror of God’s judgment removed, rushing headlong again into its ancient sins, the other Puritans went forth houseless, with only poverty and pain before them, to seek shelter and daily bread. Of all the benefactors of the stricken city, the most bold and untiring, they, and no other, were cast out at its restoration, in hardship, in sorrow, and in reproach, persecuted for their Master’s sake.
While among the many graves of yonder city churchyard, with those around him to whom he had ministered in deadly peril, and for whom he had spent his life, the preacher Vincent, lay quiet and at rest.
Sadly met, and sadly parted, the little company of wayfarers spent the night in the house of Mistress Magdalene Chester; and there, in silent pity and tenderness, by the widowed Mary’s side, Edith Field saw the full cup run over, as she delivered the last greeting intrusted to her by the dead. A sad cloud it was, enveloping the young life in its blinding mist of sorrow, yet nobly borne and gravely, and with that solemn sad hope, of all hopes the deepest and most steadfast.
And so they traveled home—for to no shelter more secure or of higher pretension than the cottage of the Cumberland shepherd, could the Puritan minister direct his steps. The quiet moorland parish, from which he had been ejected long ago by the followers of the first Charles—that hardest of all his trials, as he had described it to Edith—was full five miles away. Carlisle, the nearest town, was further. So in Ralph Dutton’s house he was safe.
Sir Philip Dacre had arrived at Thornleigh some brief time before, and there Master Chester, after a few days’ experience of the lassitude and weariness which follows the excitement of grief, settled down, not unpleasantly, into possession of that grave old library with its rich stores of ancient learning and philosophy. The father of the Lady Dacre had somewhat prided himself on his knowledge of the budding science of his time, and had so much leaning to the stricter party of Reformers in the Church, as to have left on his shelves many old ponderous volumes, which gladdened the quaint divine as he began his most congenial work in the sanctum of the Cumberland baronet. His former pupil and he agreed well. The courtly olden gentleman, indeed, had little in common with those rude clowns—half fool, half fanatic—whom men of these latter days have foisted into the ancient Presbyterian Church of England; as if it were so easy a thing to give up worldly goods, and home, and ease, and kindred, and risk even life itself for the Master’s sake, or as if clowns and fools were the men to make such sacrifices.
They had not been many hours under Dame Dutton’s roof again, ere Edith took her good hostess aside, to ask from her the further details of her mother’s history. She feared to mention it again to her father, at the risk of renewing the agony which she had seen in Hampstead.
“And is she dead?” said Dame Dutton; “is she dead, sayst thou, yonder proud lady? and in the plague, with only thee to be merciful to her? Ah! dost mind, Mistress Edith, how I, a sinful woman as I am, marveled that she got leave to bide in all her grandeur, who had done so cruel a wrong? But it hath found her out. And she called thee angel, sweetheart? and so she might, I warrant her, and thy mother before thee. Truly, I fear there be few angels whither she hath gone.”
“Hush, Dame Dutton! say not so,” said Edith; “it is not our part to give doom.”
“Nay, truly, Mistress Edith, I’ll do naught to anger thee; but, forsooth, what came upon yonder Lady Dacre was meet; that thou shouldst go to succor her—thou, and no other; for, thou seest, she was mistress of all this land of her own right, and was a Dacre born, and wedded a kinsman—she could not help but wed him—it was none of her choosing, I trow, to wed a poor knight. And thy mother was of kin to them both—cousin-german to her, and a distant kinswoman to him also, which made it the greater sin. Ah, Mistress Edith! I do so well remember the sweet, white face that lay down on that pillow to die! and to think that they had shut the door on her, who were of her own blood!”
Edith was thinking of all these things sadly; her own young mother, and yonder gentle Mary—and contrasting their dim lot with the flashes of youthful hope, the bright vistas of sunny life which now and then through these last painful months had opened to herself. Might these not be all illusions—shadows and mists destined only to condense into darker gloom?
“Thou wouldst see yonder cavalier, I reckon, while thou wert in London?” said Dame Dutton, inquisitively. “Truly I did marvel within myself what the omen might be that ye were both journeying on one morrow—and they tell me he is a gracious youth, yonder Sir Philip, and hath a savor of godliness. He do begin to make the old house liker a dwelling for living folk, ’tis certain; for if spirits came back—I know not, Mistress Edith—the Word saith naught of whether they may—yonder dark rooms were most like a place for them; and he is a good master to his serving folk, and has a kind hand to the poor. How sayest thou of this gallant, sweetheart? thou hast marked him, I wot.”
“Nay I know not, Dame Dutton,” said Edith, blushing. “He did well among the sick, and served them; but in sooth no man, methinks, could have held back when he saw their misery.”
“Ay, ye have done wonderful, truly, for young folk,” said Dame Dutton, “a strange beginning I trow—but an it be to a good lot, Mistress Edith, never think more of the evil say I, for if it were ever so bad, it be past now, and should e’en be forgotten. But it glads me that thou dost like this gentleman—for all men speak kindly of him.”
“Nay, Dame Dutton,” said Edith eagerly, “I said not I liked him, more than it be needful. I like all who serve the one Lord—and as he is my kinsman—”
“Yea, sweatheart, did I trouble thee?” answered the Dame. “What didst think I meant, truly? and thou wouldst not hate the gentleman sure—why shouldst thou?”
But Dame Dutton went about her household work thereafter with smiles and secret whispers—and Edith standing at the cottage door with a tremulous gladness about her heart, to look out upon the far stretching slopes of those blue hills of Cumberland, retreated to her own chamber, with a nervous haste, for which she could not very well account, when she saw her kinsman, Sir Philip Dacre, ascending the narrow pathway over the hills.
And so it came to pass ere long, that a second Edith Dacre entered the old halls of Thornleigh to be lady and mistress there, where her mother’s clouded youth had past. A dim beginning—yonder sad time of the plague in London, was indeed the dawning of a pleasant day.
And there followed sunny years—years of household quietness, of growing wisdom, and of such generous labor, full of all bounties and kindnesses, as doth become so well those gentlefolk of God’s appointing, whose errand is to bind together the different circles of His earth in the wide sympathies of one humanity. Never houseless man again sat vainly at the gate of Thornleigh, waiting the issue of his wearied wife’s petition, as he did once, whose manly head began to whiten within, under the snow of peaceful years. Never wayfarer sought shelter vainly—never poor turned without hope or help away. Gentle alms—deeds, and charities—gentler words of brotherhood and kindness—gentlest and highest, merciful teachings of the Gospel, fell pleasantly like summer dew about the old house of Thornleigh!
With his full share of the troubles of the times, imprisoned and fined for the Gospel he would not cease to preach, the Puritan minister yet lived on until the dawn of brighter days; and ere he closed his eyes in the third William’s lawful reign, saw both the blessings promised to the good man by the old Hebrew King and Poet—his children’s children, and peace upon Israel.
And brightening the dead array of olden titles in the ancestry of the house of Thornleigh stands pleasantly the gentle name of that Lady Edith whose time was the time of the plague; whose girlish valor does still communicate a generous youthful radiance to the old record, and whose fathers were of a stock of grave chivalry, nobler and of higher honor than those cavaliers of Worcester, and of Naseby, to whom alone we give the name. The haughty Lady Dacre, and all her pride and wealth, and greatness lie buried long ago in the grave of superficial things; but radiant in its purity of wisdom, godliness, and courage, the name of the youthful Puritan holds its place like a star, in the pedigree of those Dacres who dwell on the Border.
The End