“That mother's face,
Its grave sweet smile yet wearing in the place
Where so it ever smiled.”
HEMANS.
IT now becomes necessary for us to pass, with the rapidity of thought, from one side of the globe to the other, that we may visit for a little while the shores of "Merrie England"—the England of Queen Elizabeth and the Reformation.
It was a glorious hour in England's day—the hour that followed the sunrise. Everywhere life was awakening—life of the intellect and imagination, and, through God's blessing, that yet higher life which is his best and purest gift. Therefore living works were wrought, of which the memory shall last as long as this earth endures.
But our concern is not now with the brilliant workers of that busy age. We shall not visit the starry court of the maiden Queen, nor allow ourselves to linger fondly over names—such as Raleigh, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare—which have become "music more than any song" to every English ear. Rather shall we glance at the interior of a modest home, where dwelt in those days an English matron, who, though unknown to fame, was truly one of the noble band without whom the England of Elizabeth and the Reformation never could have been.
In the weald of Kent, where the trim hop-gardens flourish now, there stood at that time a half-ruined keep, built in the stormy age of the Wars of the Roses. It was much out of repair, and quite destitute of what were then accounted modern improvements. Its principal apartment was still the great hall, which was heated by a fire on the hearth, strewn with rushes, and furnished with massive, quaintly-carved oaken benches, cupboards, and tables.
But some women have the faculty of transforming any place, however dreary, formal, or comfortless, into a home. Of such was Marion Gray, widow of Walter Gray, a gentleman of Kent, of ancient lineage and good repute.
It is evening; and Marion Gray sits at the center table, an oil lamp illuminating the space around her, but leaving the greater part of the gloomy hall in twilight. She is busy adorning the sleeve of a cambric shirt with very fine "pearling;" her deft fingers moving rapidly, while her eyes are seldom raised from her work, save for a hasty glance at the lamp, which scarcely affords the amount of light needful for such delicate embroidery “Shall I trim it, mother?" asks her companion, a fair boy, who does not seem equally loath to look up from the pages of a great book he has been reading aloud. The volume, “imprinted at London, by John Day and William Seres," consists of the collected theological writings of the Reformer Thomas Becon, and certainly is not just what an ordinary boy would have chosen for his private enjoyment. But Walter Gray is not an ordinary boy; and if he had been, those were days in which young people did the pleasure of their elders, not their own.
“I think it needs not," the mother answered. Then, perhaps surmising that the boy was tired of reading, she asked him, "Dost remember any of thy cousins, Walter?”
“None but George, mother. Do you not mind the year you had the great fever, and my aunt came here to tend you'? How she brought George, a ten years' bairn, with her; for she said he was so masterful, and of such high stomach, none of the maids durst attempt to keep him under? And a proper life we led each other, he and I. The very night he came we fought together. He called me an outlandish imp, and no true Englishman, because I was born at Geneva; and I for answer fetched him a buffet on the cheek.”
“Ill-conditioned boy! Even at seven years old, you should have known better than to strike your little guest.”
“Marry, mother, he paid me, and with usury," laughed Walter. "But if I had had the wit, I might have given him a better answer. I might have said he would have been born at Geneva too, an his father had not thought more of his silks and satins than of his conscience.”
“Therein thou wouldst have shown thine foolishness as well as thy discourtesy. In Queen Mary's days thine Uncle Noble did not yet know the gospel; how then could he go into exile for it? In truth, it was what he saw, in those evil times, of the faith and patience of the saints that, with God's blessing, won him to a better mind. I have heard him say so myself. And as for thy comrade George," she added more lightly, "I daresay his love of fighting stands him in good stead now, when he meets the Dons upon the high seas.”
Walter's face, naturally fair and pale, was overspread in an instant by a crimson flush, telling of some strong hidden feeling suddenly awakened. But it passed as quickly as it came; and he said, in his ordinary tone, "Mother, I pray you, tell me the names of all my cousins. 'Twere as well I knew them, at least after a fashion, ere I saw them.”
“Willingly, my boy. Thine aunt hath said so much of them in her letters, that I almost think I can see the six stalwart lads gathered round her, with the one fair girl they are all so fond and proud of. First, then, there is Thomas, good steady lad, as for old times' sake they call him still, though he must be near his thirtieth year now. He is his father's right hand and faithful helper. Next comes Harry, the soldier; he has volunteered, I told you, in aid of the persecuted Protestants in the Low Countries. Your uncle can send him thither better furnished forth than many a peer's son. Will, the third in age, is 'prentice to Master Nevet, the jeweler.”
“'Prentice!" cried Walter in high disdain." O mother! Only think of one of our blood standing at the door of a shop, and crying ' what do ye lack; what do ye lack, my masters?’ as Sir John Carr says the London 'prentices are wont to do.”
Mrs. Gray looked steadily at her son with her clear, soft blue eyes, and said, flushing faintly, "Then what think you, Walter, of one of our blood sitting up whole nights to work English broidery on the robes of a Geneva citizen's dame, carrying them to her with her own hands afterward, and taking thankfully the silver she gave in payment?”
“And did you do that, mother" asked Walter, with softened look. "What dreadful times they must have been!”
“Not dreadful then, for God sent them, and each day had but one day's burden to bear. But sometimes now they seem dreadful to look back upon.—Of whom was I speaking? Of Will? George the sailor comes next in age. And I suspect Master James will never rest till he follows the same way of life,—for all his father's talk of needing his help himself.”
“Has James then told his father that he wants to go to sea?" asked Walter abruptly, and in a tone more blunt and eager than that in which he usually addressed his mother.
“He has spoken of his wishes more than once, I believe; but he obeys his father, as in duty bound.—Take care, Walter; you will spoil my book. Pity lads are not taught to sew, since it is hard to keep idle hands out of mischief.—After James comes the fair maiden Lilias, the pet and pride of all her brave brothers; she will be about thy age, I reckon. Lastly, there is little Ned, the scholar of the family; he was thirteen at Christmas. Be kind to Ned, Walter, and let him look to you as to an elder brother; for I wot his father means to send him to Oxford, and you may be a good friend to him there, being the elder by three years. There,—that is finished, and makes the eighth of your new shirts.—Be very careful, Walter, whom you trust for the washing of them; for cambric and Holland are light to rend and ill to mend.”
“Yes, mother," said Walter, with a sigh.
The next day he was to leave the home of his childhood and to begin a new life amongst strangers. Yet dearly as he loved his mother (and good right he had to love her dearly), it was not the thought of parting that wrung that sigh from the boy's heart. He was thinking of what had just been said about his cousin, James Noble.
Walter Gray's life hitherto had been rather a singular one for a boy. He was born at Geneva, during his parents' exile for conscience' sake; and he barely remembered their departure from that friendly city, and his father's death on the homeward journey. The young widow and her orphan boy were most kindly received in London by the worthy merchant to whom her sister had been induced to give her hand, at a time when everyone thought she sorely disgraced her family by so doing. But now the wheel of Fortune had turned so far that good Master Noble, mercer and warden of his craft, had more to spend on the education of any one of his six sons than sufficed Mistress Marion Gray to maintain the state of a gentlewoman in the home of her husband's ancestors.
It was well that she was not obliged to delegate the important task of her only son's education to any hands but her own. Like many noble women of the sixteenth century, Marion Markham and her sister Lilias had received from their father an excellent classical education. So good a teacher was she, and so apt a pupil did Walter prove, that when at length, distrusting her own powers, she sent him to the vicar of the parish, Sir John Carr, to be examined in Greek and Latin, that worthy gentleman, whose store of learning was not ample, found the scholar of fifteen quite too much for him. He prudently sent him back to his mother with a highly complementary letter, in which he compared her to Minerva, to Cornelia, and, what was more to the purpose, to the sainted "twelve days' queen," her husband's distant relative.
Nor were studies yet more important than Greek and Latin forgotten. Walter was made familiar from his earliest childhood with the Book that his mother held dearer than life, and constant were her prayers that its holy lessons might be written on his heart.
Walter had another teacher, moreover, a stern but very efficient one. In the school of poverty he learned self-denial; and well has it been remarked that "the worst education that teaches self-denial is better than the best that teaches everything else, and leaves that out.”
And yet, in spite of all, there was one defect—only one, but that a great one—in Walter's education. The boy had no boyhood. A truly healthful, happy childhood he had enjoyed in its season; for the child dwells in his own little world, safe as the fairy in her crystal globe from the cares and sorrows and most of the dangers of maturity. Almost all the little child really needs is love. Give him Mat, and no matter how poor and bare and narrow his surroundings may be, imagination will make them a kingdom. But it is otherwise when
“Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Around the growing boy.”
Then, in proportion as his wants increase, his dangers multiply. His animal nature grows and expands, while imagination pales and fades, leaving him very dependent on the common world that surrounds him, often very curious about it, asking a great deal from it, and influenced by it in ten thousand ways. Through this stage he must needs pass, if he is to prove hereafter a complete and well-developed man.
Walter Gray, however, was expected to grow at once, and without any interval, from the thoughtful child into the thoughtful man. Boyhood, with "its unchecked, unbidden joy, its dread of books and love of fun," was not for him. Instead of sharing the sports of merry schoolmates, this boy shared his mother's cares and anxieties as her friend and confidant, sometimes even already her counselor. Instead of planning victories at prisoner's base and trap ball, and raids upon orchards and nut-woods, he planned how to find bread and beer enough for their household, and still to have somewhat over to give to him that needed. Virgil and Plato were to him what "The Seven Champions of Christendom" were to other boys. It is true that he was taught to ride, and to shoot with the bow and arrow, and he could do these as well as any lad of his years; but he did them, as he did everything else, gravely and with a purpose. They were part of his education.
It is not easy to defraud Nature of her due. Often, for the time, she seems to acquiesce,—at least she takes it patiently, and makes no sign. But she silently keeps account of every debt; and it is well if some day she does not suddenly present a bill for the sum total, and demand an acquittal, admitting of no denial.
Late that night Walter sat in thoughtful mood upon his trestle bed. His chest, packed by his mother's careful hand in readiness for the morrow's journey, lay so near, that his feet, as he swung them back and forwards, sometimes touched it. His doublet was off; his fair hair, tumbled by his restless hands, fell in disorder over his neat Holland shirt. There was no light in the room, save what the moonbeams shed through the narrow, unglazed slit that served for a window.
The boy was asking himself a question, often well-nigh the most important a boy can ask, "Shall I tell my mother?" He asked it the more sincerely and earnestly because he had just been repeating the evening prayer his mother taught him, and not without some simple additions, the promptings of his own heart. And now he had a great mind to delay no longer, but to step softly to the door of his mother's room (where he well knew the light would still be burning), to seek admittance, to kneel down beside her chair—just as he knelt when he learned his first prayer—and to tell her all.
But what was that "all"? What had he to tell?—As well to find that out first. And really it was difficult to find out;—it perplexed him. There he sat, feeling as though some weighty, half-guilty secret lay upon his heart, something that he was almost acting a traitor's part in keeping hidden there, and carrying away with him un-confessed. Yet, when he sought for words in which to tell it, what had he to say? Only that upon every excuse (and often indeed without excuse), he used to loiter about the stall of the village blacksmith—once a seaman, and sharer in some of old John Hawkins' most desperate enterprises;—that he was never tired of listening to his wonderful tales of daring deeds wrought by English hearts and hands upon the high seas, where the small, slight vessels of English merchantmen so often measured their strength against the stately caraques of the Don;—that he cared little to ride anywhere save to the crest of the hill, whence he could see the far-off waters sparkle in the sunlight, and sometimes watch a white sail gliding slowly by, wondering if it was bound for that great mysterious West, the land of his romance and enchantment. That was all he could find to say; and what was there in that to trouble his mother with at midnight?
But beneath there was a blind, dumb instinct, a great passionate longing, for which he had no words. Perhaps it was a heritage from some far-off Viking ancestor, whose slender, snake-like galley had pushed its prow into unknown seas in search of fame and plunder. Walter had no names for the thoughts and feelings that for more than a year had been troubling him so strangely, growing every day more frequent and more keen. He only knew that he would have given all the world to change his fine cloth and velvet for a pea-jacket, his Holland shirt for a Jersey, his scholar's pen for a stout cutlass. But what use in crying for the moon? Work of a different sort was cut out for him. Tomorrow he must go to London, to visit his kinsfolk in the city; and after that to Oxford, to study hard (he liked study well enough, when ships were not sailing away westward before his mind's eye), to win honor, fame, and wealth, and at last—perhaps— if God willed and made him worthy—to take holy orders and preach, like Sir John Carr.
What folly he had been thinking! He felt quite ashamed of himself. He would go to bed, sleep, and forget it all. The sooner the better, for the nights were cold (it was early March); he should freeze if he sat there much longer. He must rise before daybreak; but he was sure old Dickon would call him in good time; he was never late.
So Walter Gray paid the tribute of a sigh to his boyish dreams; then he went to bed and to sleep, nevertheless he did not forget them all.