Chapter 2 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
THE LOVER
Mr. Crosby's bearing was marked upon his departure from Arwenack by none of that exultation proper to the setting out of a young man who regards the world as his oyster. Too much that he valued was being left behind unsecured; and the earl, he could not help admitting to himself, had not been encouraging. But what youth desires it believes that it will ultimately possess. His confidence in himself and in his star was restored and his natural buoyancy re-established long before the journey was accomplished.
Travelling by roads which were obstacles to, rather than means of progress, Sir John Killigrew and his young cousin reached London exactly a week after setting out. There no time was lost. Sir John was a person of considerable consequence, wielding great influence in the West and therefore to be well-received at Court. Moreover some personal friendship existed between himself and the Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham. To the Admiral he took his young cousin. The Admiral was disposed to be friendly. Recruits for the navy at such a time, especially if they happened to be gentlemen of family, were more than welcome. The difficulty was to find immediate employment for Mr. Crosby. The Admiral took the young man to Deptford and presented him to the manager of her majesty's dockyards, that old-time slaver and hardy seaman Sir John Hawkins Sir John talked to the lad, liked him, admired his clean length of limb and read promise in his resolute young countenance and frank steady blue eyes. If he was in haste for adventure, Sir John thought he could put him in the way of it. He gave him a letter to his young kinsman, Sir Francis Drake, who was about to put to sea from Plymouth, though on the object of that seagoing Sir John seemed singularly—perhaps wilfully—ignorant.
Back to the West went Gervase, once more in the charge of Killigrew. At Plymouth they sought and duly found Sir Francis. He paid heed to the strong recommendation of Hawkins' letter, still greater heed to the personality of the tall lad who stood before him, some heed also, no doubt, to the fact that the lad was a kinsman of Sir John Killigrew, who was a considerable power in Cornwall. Young Crosby was obviously eager and intelligent, knew already at least enough of the sea to be able to sail a fore-and-aft rig, and was fired by a proper righteous indignation at the evil deeds of Spain.
Drake offered him employment, the scope of which he could not disclose. A fleet of twenty-five privateers was about to sail. They had no royal warrant, and in what they went to do they might afterwards be disowned. It was dangerous work, but it was righteous. Gervase accepted the offer without seeking to know more, took leave of his kinsman, and went on board Drake's own ship. That was on the loth September. Four mornings later Drake's maintop was flying the signal "up anchor and away."
If none knew, perhaps not even Drake himself, exactly what he went to do, at the least all England, simmering just then with indignation, knew why he went to do it, whatever it might prove to be. There was a bitter wrong to be avenged, and private hands must do the work since the hands of authority were bound by too many political considerations.
In the North of Spain that year the harvest had failed and there was famine. Despite the hostile undercurrent between Spain and England, which at any moment might blaze into open war, despite Spanish intrigues in which Philip II was spurred on by the Pope to exert the secular arm against the excommunicate bastard heretic who occupied the English throne, yet officially at least, on the surface, there was peace between the two nations. England had more corn than she required for her own consumption and was willing to trade it to the famine-stricken Galician districts. But because of certain recent barbarous activities of the Holy Office upon English seamen seized in Spanish ports, no merchant ships would venture into Spanish waters without guarantees. These guarantees had ultimately been forthcoming in the shape of a special undertaking from King Philip that the crews of the grain ships should suffer no molestation.
Into the Northern harbours of Corunna, Bilbao and Santander sailed the ships of the English corn-fleet, there to be seized, in despite of the royal safe-conduct, their cargoes confiscated, their crews imprisoned. The pretext was that England was lending aid to the Netherlands then in rebellion against Spain.
Diplomatic representations were of no avail. King Philip disclaimed responsibility. The English seamen, he said, were no longer in his hands. As heretics they had been claimed by the Holy Office. To purge them of their heresy, some were left to languish in prison, some sent as slaves to the galleys, and some were burnt in fools' coats at the autos-de-fé.
To rescue even those who survived from the talons of the Holy Office was beyond hope. It remained only to avenge them, to read Spain a punitive lesson which she should remember, a lesson which, it was hoped, would teach her to curb in future her zeal of salvation where English heretics were concerned.
The Queen could not act in her own name. For all her high stomach and for all the indignation which it is not to be doubted now consumed her, prudence still dictated that she should avoid with mighty Spain an open war for which England could not account herself prepared. But she was willing enough to give a free hand to adventurers, whom at need she could afterwards disown.
That was the reason of Drake's setting forth with his twenty-five privateer ships. That was the voyage on which Gervase Crosby went to win his spurs in this new order of chivalry whose tilting-yard was the wide ocean. It was a voyage that lasted ten months; but so eventful, adventurous and instructive did it prove that not in as many years of ordinary sailing could it have offered a man a more generous schooling in fighting seamanship.
They sailed first of all into the beautiful Galician port of Vigo at a time when the grapes were being gathered for the vintage, labours which their sudden appearance interrupted. And here Drake published, as it were, his cartel; he made known, inferentially at least, the aim and purpose of that imposing fleet of his. Of the Governor, who sent in alarm to know who and what they were who came thus in force and what they sought at Vigo, Drake asked to be informed whether the King of Spain was at war with the Queen of England. When he was fearfully assured that this was not the case, he asked further to be informed how it happened, then, that English ships which had sailed into Spanish harbour under the safe-conduct of King Philip's word had been seized and their owners, officers and crews imprisoned, maltreated and slain. To this he received no proper answer. He did not press for one unduly; he contented himself with inviting the Governor to consider that English seamen could not suffer that such things should happen to their brethren. After that he demanded water and fresh provisions. There was also a little plundering, a mere ensample this of what might be done. Whereafter with re-furnished ships, Sir Francis sailed away, leaving Spain to conjecture in dismay and rage whither he was going and to concert measures for forestalling and destroying so endemonized an Englishman—inglez tan endemoniado.
November saw him at Cape Verde, where he missed the plate fleet upon which no doubt he had intentions. Its capture would have indemnified England for the loss of the confiscated corn. He turned his attention, instead, to the handsome town of Santiago, possessed it, sacked it, and might have been content with that but for the barbarous murder and mutilation of a poor ship-boy, which revived memories of some Plymouth sailors lately murdered there. The town was fired, and Sir Francis sailed away, leaving behind him a heap of ashes to show King Philip that barbarity was not the prerogative of Spain and that talion law existed upon earth and always would exist as long as there were men to enforce it. Let his Most Catholic Majesty learn that Christianity, whose particular champion he accounted himself, had for corner-stone the precept that men should do unto their neighbours as they would have their neighbours do unto them, and, conversely, not do unto their neighbours what was detestable when suffered in their own persons. Lest this King, who was so passionately concerned in the eternal salvation of others, should himself miss salvation through an inadequate appreciation of that great principle, Sir Francis meant to bring it strongly to his notice by further illustration.
The fleet spent Christmas at St. Kitts, and having there refreshed itself, went to pay its respects to San Domingo, that magnificent city of Hispaniola, where as a monument to the greatness of Spain the grandeurs of the old world were reproduced in palaces, castles and cathedrals. Here things, without being difficult, were not quite so easy as at Santiago. The Spaniards turned out horse and foot to resist the landing of the English. There was some fighting; some cannonading, in the course of which the Spaniards killed the officer commanding the particular landing-party of which Gervase Crosby was a member. Gervase, eager and audacious, acting upon impulse and without any sort of authority, took his place, and skilfully brought up his men to join the vanguard under Christopher Carlile which carried the gate and cut its way into the town.
For his part in this Gervase was afterwards commended by Carlile to Drake, and by Drake confirmed in the command which he had so opportunely usurped.
The castle meanwhile had surrendered, and the English put the city to ransom. Its treasure had already been removed out of it, and all that Drake could extract from the Governor was twenty-five thousand ducats, nor did he succeed in extracting this until he had reduced nearly all its marble splendours to ruins.
After San Domingo came Cartagena, where a tougher resistance was encountered, but subdued, and where again young Gervase Crosby showed his mettle when he led the men of his recent command to scale the parapets and engage the Spanish infantry at point of pike. The captured city saved itself from the fate of Santiago and San Domingo by a promptly forthcoming ransom of thirty thousand ducats.
That was enough for the purpose; enough to show King Philip that the activities of the Holy Office were not meekly to be suffered by English seamen. Destroying in passing a Spanish fort in Florida, Drake's fleet set sail for home and was back in Plymouth by the end of July, having proved to all humanity that the mightiest empire of the world was by no means invulnerable, and having apparently made war inevitable by throwing down a gauntlet which the hesitating King of Spain could hardly ignore.
The Gervase Crosby who came back to Arwenack was a very different person from the Gervase Crosby who had gone forth a year ago. Adventure and experience had ripened him, dangers faced and conquered, and an increase of general knowledge, which included a fair command of Spanish, had given him a calmer self-assurance. Also he was bronzed and bearded. He came in confidence to Trevanion Chase, conceiving that the capture of the Lady Margaret would prove now a trifling matter to one who had been at the capturing of Spanish cities. But the Lady Margaret manifested no enthusiasm for his deeds, when, for her benefit and in her presence he recounted them to the earl, who had no wish to hear them. When his lordship had heard them despite himself, he curtly pronounced Drake a shameless pirate, and, in the matter of the hanging of some monks at San Domingo, a murderer. His daughter agreeing with him, Master Gervase departed in a dudgeon too deep for expression that his glorious deeds upon the Spanish Main should be so contemptuously dismissed.
The explanation lies in the fact that the Earl of Garth had been brought up in the Catholic Faith. He had long since ceased to practise the Christian religion in any of its forms. The narrow intolerance of priestcraft of whatever denomination had revolted him, and study and brooding, and Plato in particular, had brought him to demand a nobler and wider conception of God than he could discover in any creed alleged to have been revealed. But underneath his philosophic outlook there lingered ineradically an affection for the faith of his youth and of his fathers. It was purely sentimental, but it vitiated his judgment on those rare occasions when he permitted himself at all to turn his attention to the problems that were afflicting England. Unconsciously, imperceptibly, this had created at Trevanion Chase, the atmosphere in which Margaret had been reared. In addition to this, and probably in common with the majority of the gentry of her day—certainly so if we are to believe those who kept King Philip informed of the state of public opinion in England—she could not exclude from her heart a certain sympathy with the Queen of Scots now languishing in an English prison and in peril of her life. The Lady Margaret might be imbued with some of the widespread English antipathy to Spain and resentment of its operations against men of her own English blood; she might shudder at the tales of the activities of the Holy Office; but all this was tempered in her by a disposition to regard King Philip as a Spanish Perseus intent upon the deliverance of the Scottish Andromeda.
Gervase's angrily silent departure she observed with a smile. Afterwards she grew thoughtful. Could the wound be so deep that he would not come again, she wondered. She confessed frankly to herself that she would be sorry if that were so. They had been good friends, Gervase and she; and it was far from her wish that their friendship should end like this. Apparently it was also far from Gervase's wish. He was back again in two days' time, his indignation having cooled, and when she hailed his appearance with a "Give you welcome, Master Pirate!" he had enough good sense to laugh, realising that she no more than rallied him. He would have kissed her according to the fraternal custom which had grown up between them, but this she denied him on the score of his beard. She could not suffer to be kissed by a hairy man; she would as soon be hugged by a bear.
As a consequence of this assertion, he appeared before her on the morrow shaved like a puritan, which sent her into such an ecstasy of mirth that he lost his temper, laid rough hands upon her and kissed her forcibly and repeatedly in pure anger and just to show her that he was master, and man enough to take what he lacked.
At last he let her go, and was prepared to be merry in his turn. Not so the lady. She stood tense and quivering, breathing hard, her face white, save for a red spot on each cheek-bone, her red-gold hair in disorder, and flames in her vivid blue eyes. For a long moment those eyes pondered him in silent fury. This and the outraged dignity which he read in every line of her tall supple figure abashed him a little, rendered him conscious that he had behaved like an oaf.
"Faith!" she said at last with ominous composure of voice, "you must think yourself still in San Domingo."
"In San Domingo?" quoth he, labouring to discover the inference.
"Where you no doubt learnt to mishandle women in this fashion."
"I?" He was scandalised. "Margaret, I vow to God..."
She, however, cared nothing for his vows and interrupted them. "But this is Trevanion Chase, not a city conquered by pirates; and I am the Lady Margaret Trevanion, not some unfortunate Spanish victim of your raid."
He was wounded and indignant. "Margaret how can you suppose that I...that I..." He became inarticulate. Indeed, there were no words for it that a lady could tolerate. And she, perceiving that she had found the heel of her Achilles, turned the arrow in the wound to avenge herself.
"Such ready expertness argues abundant practice, sir. I am glad to know, even at the cost of the indignity, the quality of those adventures which were left out of your brave narrative to my father. As you boasted, sir, you've learnt a deal on the Spanish Main. But in your place I shouldn't practise in England what you learnt there."
He read in her tone, as she intended that he should, a depth of conviction against which he felt that protestations and arguments would be idle. It would need evidence to dispel it, and where should he find evidence? Moreover she was no longer there to listen to arguments. She had departed whilst he was still deep in his dumb bewildered mortification. Useless to go after her in her present mood, he assured himself. And so he went home to Arwenack, trusting dejectedly that time would efface the bad impression he had made and modify the terrible assumptions to which he had given rise.
Time, however, was denied him. Before the month was out there came a summons from Sir Francis recalling him to Plymouth. If he was a clumsy lover, there is no doubt that he was a very promising seaman, as Drake had observed, and Drake had urgent need of all such men. War was coming. That was now beyond all doubt. A great fleet was building in the Spanish dockyards, and in Flanders the Prince of Parma was assembling a mighty army of the finest troops in Europe for the invasion of England so soon as the fleet should be ready to cover his passage.
Gervase went to take his leave of Margaret and her father. Lord Garth he found as usual in his library, his gaunt spare frame wrapped in a bedgown, his head covered by a black velvet cap with ear-flaps, his mind fathoms deep in scholarly speculation. The fiddling of Nero during the burning of Rome seemed to Gervase a reasonable, pardonable trifle of conduct, compared with the Earl of Garth's absorption at such a time in the works of men who had been dead a thousand years and more. To startle him out of this unpatriotic lethargy, Master Crosby talked of the Spanish invasion as if it were already taking place. His lordship was not startled. A man who is obsessed by the platonic theory that the earth, the sun, the moon and all the visible heavenly bodies are so much sediment in the ether, with a more or less clear perception of all that this connotes, cannot be expected to concern himself deeply with the fortunes of such ephemeral things as empires.
The traditions and duties of gentility imposed it upon him to dissemble his impatience at the unwelcome interruption of his studies and to utter a courteous Godspeed which should straightly put an end to it.
From his lordship, Gervase went in quest of her ladyship. It was a fine Autumn day, and he found her taking the air in the garden with a company of gallants. There was that handsome fribble Lionel Tressilian who was too much at Trevanion Chase these days for Gervase's peace of mind. There was young Peter Godolphin, a kinsman of Margaret's, it is true, but not of such near kinship that he might not aspire to make it nearer. And there were a half-dozen other beribboned lute-tinklers, stiffly corseted in modish narrow-waisted doublets, their trunks puffed out with Spanish bombast. He descended upon them with his news, hoping to dismay them out of their airy complacency as he had hoped to dismay the earl.
Ignoring them, he flung his bombshell at the feet of Margaret.
"I come to take my leave. I am summoned by the admiral. The Prince of Parma is about to invade England."
It made some little stir, and might have made more but for the flippancy of young Godolphin.
"The Prince of Parma cannot have heard that Mr. Crosby is with the admiral."
It raised a general laugh, in which however Margaret did not join. It may have been this little fact that lent Gervase the wit to answer.
"But he shall, sir. If you have messages for him, you gentlemen who stay at home, I will do my best to bear them."
He would gladly have quarrelled with any or all of them. But they would not indulge him. They were smooth and sleek, whilst Margaret's presence made him set limits on his display of the scorn they aroused in him.
When presently he departed, Margaret went with him through the house. In the cool grey hall she paused, and he stood to take his final leave of her. Her eyes were very grave and solemn as she raised them to his face.
"Is it war indeed, Gervase?"
"That is what I gather from the letters I have had and the urgency of this summons. I am to leave at once, the admiral bids me. Every man is needed."
She laid a hand upon his arm, a beautiful tapering hand it was, looking oddly white on the dark crimson velvet of his sleeve.
"God keep you, Gervase, and bring you safely back," she said.
It was a commonplace enough thing to say in the circumstances. But the tone she used was a tone he had never heard in her voice before. It should have heartened him, who normally was bold enough, and upon occasion, as we have seen, almost overbold. He might have kissed her then and had no reproach for it. But he couldn't guess it, any more than he could guess that not to take the advantages a woman offers is an even worse offence than to take advantages which she does not offer. So while his heart beat fast with hope at that gentle tone and liquid gaze, it beat also with trepidation.
He gulped and stammered: "You...You'll wait, Margaret?"
"What else? Would you have me follow after you?"
"I mean...You'll wait for me; for my return?"
She smiled up at him. "I think it's very likely, sir."
"Likely? Not certain, Margaret?"
"Oh, certain enough." She had not the heart to rally him. He was going on a business from which he might never return, and the thought made her very tender, gave her almost a foretaste of the sorrow that would be hers if he should be counted among the fallen. So she took pity on his halting, and generously gave him the answer he lacked the courage to demand. "It is not likely that I shall marry anyone else, Gervase."
His heart bounded.
"Margaret," he cried.
And then Peter Godolphin came mincing into the hall to inquire what it was that kept her ladyship from her guests.
Gervase, wishing him in hell, was forced to cut short his leave-taking. But he was content enough. He took the slim hand that lay upon his sleeve and kissed it reverently.
"Those words, Margaret, shall be as a cuirass to me."
Upon which poetical assertion, almost as if ashamed of it, he abruptly departed.