St. George and St. Michael

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With all her devotion to the king, and all her hatred and contempt
of the parliament and the puritans, Dorothy could not help a doubt
whether such independence might be altogether good either for the
king himself or the people thus subjected to his will. But the
farther doubt did not occur to her whether a pre-eminence gained
chiefly by wealth was one to be on any grounds desired for the
nation, or, setting that aside, was one which carried a single
element favourable to perpetuity.

All this time they had been standing on the top of the keep, with
the moonlight around them, and in their ears the noise of the water
flowing from the dungeon well into the sky-roofed cistern. But now
it came in diminished flow.

'It is the earth that fails in giving, not my engine in taking,'
said lord Herbert as he turned to lead the way down the winding
stair. Ever as they went, the noise of the water grew fainter and
the noise of the engine grew louder, but just as they stepped from
the stair, it gave a failing stroke or two, and ceased. A dense
white cloud met them as they entered the vault.

'Stopped for the night, Caspar?' said his lordship.

'Yes, my lord; the well is nearly out.'

'Let it sleep,' returned his master; 'like a man's heart it will
fill in the night. Thank God for the night and darkness and sleep,
in which good things draw nigh like God's thieves, and steal
themselves in--water into wells, and peace and hope and courage into
the minds of men. Is it not so, my cousin?'

Dorothy did not answer in words, but she looked up in his face with
a reverence in her eyes that showed she understood him. And this was
one of the idolatrous catholics! It was neither the first nor the
last of many lessons she had to receive, in order to learn that a
man may be right although the creed for which he is and ought to be
ready to die, may contain much that is wrong. Alas! that so few,
even of such men, ever reflect, that it is the element common to all
the creeds which gives its central value to each.

'I cannot show you the working of the engine to-night,' said lord
Herbert. 'Caspar has decreed otherwise.'

'I can soon set her agoing again, my lord,' said Caspar.

'No, no. We must to the powder-mill, Caspar. Mistress Dorothy will
come again to-morrow, and you must yourself explain to her the
working and management of it, for I shall be away. And do not fear
to trust my cousin, Caspar, although she be a soft-handed lady. Let
her have the brute's halter in her own hold.'

Filled with gratitude for the trust he reposed in her, Dorothy took
her leave, and the two workmen immediately abandoned their shop for
the night, leaving the door wide open behind them to let out the
vapours of the fire-engine, in the confidence that no unlicensed
foot would dare to cross the threshold, and betook themselves to the
powder-mill, where they continued at work the greater part of the
night.

His lordship was unfavourable to the storing of powder because of
the danger, seeing they could, on his calculation, from the
materials lying ready for mixing, in one week prepare enough to keep
all the ordnance on the castle walls busy for two. But indeed he had
not such a high opinion of gunpowder but that he believed engines
for projection, more powerful as well as less expensive, could be
constructed, after the fashion of ballista or catapult, by the use
of a mode he had discovered of immeasurably increasing the strength
of springs, so that stones of a hundredweight might be thrown into a
city from a quarter of a mile's distance without any noise audible
to those within. It was this device he was brooding over when
Dorothy came upon him by the arblast. Nor did the conviction arise
from any prejudice against fire-arms, for he had, among many other
wonderful things of the sort, in cannons, sakers, harquebusses,
muskets, musquetoons, and all kinds, invented a pistol to discharge
a dozen times with one loading, and without so much as new priming
being once requisite, or the possessor having to change it out of
one hand into the other, or stop his horse.

One who had happened to see lord Herbert as he went about within his
father's walls, busy yet unhasting, earnest yet cheerful, rapid in
all his movements yet perfectly composed, would hardly have imagined
that a day at a time, or perhaps two, was all he was now able to
spend there, days which were to him as breathing-holes in the ice
to the wintered fishes. For not merely did he give himself to the
enlisting of large numbers of men, but commanded both horse and
foot, meeting all expenses from his own pocket, or with the
assistance of his father. A few months before the period at which my
story has arrived, he had in eight days raised six regiments,
fortified Monmouth and Chepstow, and garrisoned half-a-dozen smaller
but yet important places. About a hundred noblemen and gentlemen
whom he had enrolled as a troop of life-guards, he furnished with
the horses and arms which they were unable to provide with
sufficient haste for themselves. So prominenf indeed were his
services on behalf of the king, that his father was uneasy because
of the jealousy and hate it would certainly rouse in the minds of
some of his majesty's well-wishers--a just presentiment, as his son
had too good reason to acknowledge after he had spent a million of
money, besides the labour and thought and dangerous endeavour of
years, in the king's service.

CHAPTER XVIII.

MOONLIGHT AND APPLE-BLOSSOMS.

The next morning, immediately after breakfast, lord Herbert set out
for Chepstow first and then Monmouth, both which places belonged to
his father, and were principal sources of his great wealth.

Still, amid the rush of the changeful tides of war around them, and
the rumour of battle filling the air, all was peaceful within the
defences of Raglan, and its towers looked abroad over a quiet
country, where the cattle fed and the green wheat grew. On the far
outskirts of vision, indeed, a smoke might be seen at times from the
watch-tower, and across the air would come the dull boom of a great
gun from one of the fortresses, at which lady Margaret's cheek would
turn pale; but, although every day something was done to strengthen
the castle, although masons were at work here and there about the
walls like bees, and Caspar Kaltoff was busy in all directions, now
mounting fresh guns, now repairing steel cross-bows, now getting out
of the armoury the queerest oldest-fashioned engines to place
wherever available points could be found, there was no hurry and no
confusion, and indeed so little appearance of unusual activity, that
an unmilitary stranger might have passed a week in the castle
without discovering that preparations for defence were actively
going on. All around them the buds were creeping out, uncurling,
spreading abroad, straightening themselves, smoothing out the
creases of their unfolding, and breathing the air of heaven--in some
way very pleasant to creatures with roots as well as to creatures
with legs. The apple-blossoms came out, and the orchard was lovely
as with an upward-driven storm of roseate snow. Ladies were oftener
seen passing through the gates and walking in the gardens--where
the fountains had begun to play, and the swans and ducks on the
lakes felt the return of spring in every fibre of their webby feet
and cold scaly legs.

And Dorothy sat as it were at the spring-head of the waters, for,
through her dominion over the fire-engine, she had become the naiad
of Raglan. The same hour in which lord Herbert departed she went to
Kaltoff, and was by him instructed in its mysteries. On the third
day after, so entirely was the Dutchman satisfied with her
understanding and management of it, that he gave up to her the whole
water-business. And now, as I say, she sat at the source of all the
streams and fountains of the place, and governed them all. The horse
of marble spouted and ceased at her will, but in general she let the
stream from his mouth flow all day long. Every water-cock on the
great tower was subject to her. From the urn of her pleasure the
cistern was daily filled, and from the summit of defence her flood
went pouring into the moat around its feet, until it mantled to the
brim, turning the weeds into a cold shadowy pavement of green for a
foil to its pellucid depth. She understood all the secrets of the
aqueous catapult, at which its contriver had little more than hinted
on that memorable night when he disclosed so much, and believed she
could arrange it for action without assistance. At the same time her
new responsibilities required but a portion of her leisure, and lady
Margaret was not the less pleased with the wise-headed girl, whose
manners and mental ways were such a contrast to her own, that her
husband considered her fit to be put in charge of his darling
invention. But Dorothy kept silence concerning the trust to all but
her mistress, who, on her part, was prudent enough to avoid any
allusion which might raise yet higher the jealousy of her
associates, by whom she was already regarded as supplanting them in
the favour of their mistress.

One lovely evening in May, the moon at the full, the air warm yet
fresh, the apple-blossoms at their largest, with as yet no spot upon
their fair skin, and the nightingales singing out of their very
bones, the season, the hour, the blossoms, and the moon had invaded
every chamber in the castle, seized every heart of both man and
beast, and turned all into one congregation of which the
nightingales were the priests. The cocks were crowing as if it had
been the dawn itself instead of its ghost they saw; the dogs were
howling, but whether that was from love or hate of the moon, I
cannot tell; the pigeons were cooing; the peacock had turned his
train into a paralune, understanding well that the carnival could
not be complete without him and his; and the wild beasts were
restless, uttering a short yell now and then, at least aware that
something was going on. All the inhabitants of the castle were out
of doors, the ladies and gentlemen in groups here and there about
the gardens and lawns and islands, and the domestics, and such of
the garrison as were not on duty, wandering hither and thither where
they pleased, careful only not to intrude on their superiors.

Lady Margaret was walking with her step-son Henry on a lawn under
the northern window of the picture-gallery, and there the ladies
Elizabeth and Anne joined them--the former a cheerful woman, endowed
with a large share of her father's genial temperament; joke or jest
would moult no feather in lady Elizabeth's keeping; the latter
quiet, sincere, and reverent. The marquis himself, notwithstanding a
slight attack of the gout, had hobbled on his stick to a chair set
for him on the same lawn. Beside him sat lady Mary, younger than the
other two, and specially devoted to her father.

Their gentlewomen were also out, flitting in groups that now and
then mingled and changed. Rowland Scudamore joined lady Margaret's
people, and in a moment lady Broughton was laughing merrily. But
mistress Doughty walked on with straight neck, as if there were
nobody but herself in heaven or on the earth, although mortals were
merry by her side, and nightingales singing themselves to death over
her head. Behind them came Amanda Serafina, with her eyes on her
feet, and the corners of her pretty mouth drawn down in contempt of
nobody in particular. Now and then Scudamore, when satisfied with
his own pretty wit, would throw a glance behind him, and she,
somehow or other, would, without change of muscle, let him know that
she had heard him. This group sauntered into the orchard.

After them came Dorothy with Dr Bayly, talking of their common
friend Mr. Matthew Herbert, and following them into the orchard,
wandered about among the trees, under the curdled moonlight of the
apple-blossoms, amid the challenges and responses of five or six
nightingales, that sang as if their bodies had dwindled under the
sublimating influences of music, until, with more than cherubic
denudation, their sum of being was reduced to a soul and a throat.

Moonlight, apple-blossoms, nightingales, with the souls of men and
women for mirrors and reflectors! The picture is for the musician
not the painter, either him of words or him of colours. It was like
a lovely show in the land of dreams, even to the living souls that
moved in and made part of it. The earth is older now, colder at the
heart, a little nearer to the fate of cold-hearted things, which is
to be slaves and serve without love; but she has still the same
moonlight, the same apple-blossoms, the same nightingales, and we
have the same hearts, and so can understand it. But, alas! how
differently should we come in amongst the accessories of such a
picture! For we men at least are all but given over to ugliness,
and, artistically considered, even vulgarity, in the matter of
dress, wherein they, of all generations of English men and women,
were too easily supreme both as to form and colour. Hence, while
they are an admiration to us, we shall be but a laughter to those
that come behind us, and that whether their fashions be better than
ours or no, for nothing is so ridiculous as ugliness out of date.
The glimmer of gold and silver, the glitter of polished steel, the
flashing of jewels, and the flowing of plumes, went well. But, so
canopied with loveliness, so besung with winged passion, so clothed
that even with the heavenly delicacies enrounding them they blended
harmoniously, their moonlit orchard was an island beat by the waves
of war, its air would quiver and throb by fits, shaken with the roar
of cannon, and might soon gleam around them with the whirring sweep
of the troopers' broad blades; while all throughout the land, the
hateful demon of party spirit tore wide into gashes the wounds first
made by conscience in the best, and by prejudice in the good.

The elder ladies had floated away together between the mossy stems,
under the canopies of blossoms; Rowland had fallen behind and joined
the waiting Amanda, and the two were now flitting about like moths
in the moonshine; Dorothy and Dr. Bayly had halted in an open spot,
like a moonlight impluvium, the divine talking eagerly to the
maiden, and the maiden looking up at the moon, and heeding the
nightingales more than the divine.

'CAN they be English nightingales?' said Dorothy thoughtfully.

The doctor was bewildered for a moment. He had been talking about
himself, not the nightingales, but he recovered himself like a
gentleman.

'Assuredly, mistress Dorothy,' he replied; 'this is the land of
their birth. Hither they come again when the winter is over.'

'Yes; they take no part in our troubles. They will not sing to
comfort our hearts in the cold; but give them warmth enough, and
they sing as careless of battle-fields and dead men as if they were
but moonlight and apple-blossoms.'

'Is it not better so?' returned the divine after a moment's thought.
'How would it be if everything in nature but re-echoed our moan?'

Dorothy looked at the little man, and was in her turn a moment
silent.

'Then,' she said, 'we must see in these birds and blossoms, and that
great blossom in the sky, so many prophets of a peaceful time and a
better country, sent to remind us that we pass away and go to them.'

'Nay, my dear mistress Dorothy!' returned the all but obsequious
doctor; 'such thoughts do not well befit your age, or rather, I
would say, your youth. Life is before you, and life is good. These
evil times will go by, the king shall have his own again, the
fanatics will be scourged as they deserve, and the church will rise
like the phoenix from the ashes of her purification.'

'But how many will lie out in the fields all the year long, yet
never see blossoms or hear nightingales more!' said Dorothy.

'Such will have died martyrs,' rejoined the doctor.

'On both sides?' suggested Dorothy.

Again for a moment the good man stood checked. He had not even
thought of the dead on the other side.

'That cannot be,' he said. And Dorothy looked up again at the moon.

But she listened no more to the songs of the nightingales, and they
left the orchard together in silence.

'Come, Rowland, we must not be found here alone,' said Amanda, who
saw them go. 'But tell me one thing first: is mistress Dorothy
Vaughan indeed your cousin?'

'She is indeed. Her mother and mine were cousins german--sisters'
children.'

'I thought it could not be a near cousinship. You are not alike at
all. Hear me, Rowland, but let it die in your ear--I love not
mistress Dorothy.'

'And the reason, lovely hater? "Is not the maiden fair to see?" as
the old song says. I do not mean that she is fair as some are fair,
but she will pass; she offends not.'

'She is fair enough--not beautiful, not even pleasing; but, to be
just, the demure look she puts on may bear the fault of that.
Rowland, I would not speak evil of any one, but your cousin is a
hypocrite. She is false at heart, and she hates me. Trust me, she
but bides her time to let me know it--and you too, my Rowland.'

'I am sure you mistake her, Amanda,' said Scudamore. 'Her looks are
but modest, and her words but shy, for she came hither from a lonely
house. I believe she is honest and good.'

'Seest thou not then how that she makes friends with none but her
betters? Already hath she wound herself around my lady's heart,
forsooth! and now she pays her court to the puffing chaplain! Hast
thou never observed, my Rowland, how oft she crosses the bridge to
the yellow tower? What seeks she there? Old Kaltoff, the Dutchman,
it can hardly be. I know she thinks to curry with my lord by
pretending to love locks and screws and pistols and such like. "But
why should she haunt the place when my lord is not there?" you will
ask. Her pretence will hold the better for it, no doubt, and Caspar
will report concerning her. And if she pleases my lord well, who
knows but he may give her a pair of watches to hang at her ears, or
a box that Paracelsus himself could not open without the secret as
well as the key? I have heard of both such. They say my lord hath
twenty cartloads of quite as wonderful things in that vault he calls
his workshop. Hast thou never marked the huge cabinet of black
inlaid with silver, that stands by the wall--fitter indeed for my
lady's chamber than such a foul place?'

'I have seen it,' answered Scudamore.

'I warrant me it hath store of gewgaws fit for a duchess.'

'Like enough,' assented Rowland.

'If mistress Dorothy were to find the way through my lord's favour
into that cabinet--truly it were nothing to thee or me, Rowland.'

'Assuredly not. It would be my lord's own business.'

'Once upon a time I was sent to carry my young lady Raven
thither--to see my lord earn his bread, as said my lady: and what
should my lord but give her no less than a ball of silver which,
thrown into a vessel of water at any moment would plainly tell by
how much it rose above the top, the very hour and minute of the day
or night, as well and truly as the castle-clock itself. Tell me
not, Rowland, that the damsel hath no design in it. Her looks
betoken a better wisdom. Doth she not, I ask your honesty, far more
resemble a nose-pinched puritan than a loyal maiden?'

Thus amongst the apple-blossoms talked Amanda Serafina.

'Prithee, be not too severe with my cousin, Amanda,' pleaded
Scudamore. 'She is much too sober to please my fancy, but wherefore
should I for that hate her? And if she hath something the look of a
long-faced fanatic, thou must think, she hath but now, as it were,
lost her mother.'

'But now! And I never knew mine! Ah, Rowland, how lonely is the
world!'

'Lovely Amanda!' said Rowland.

So they passed from the orchard and parted, fearful of being missed.

How should such a pair do, but after its kind? Life was dull without
love-making, so they made it. And the more they made, the more they
wanted to make, until casual encounters would no longer serve their
turn.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE ENCHANTED CHAIR.

In the castle things went on much the same, nor did the gathering
tumult without wake more than an echo within. Yet a cloud slowly
deepened upon the brow of the marquis, and a look of disquiet, to be
explained neither by the more frequent returns of his gout, nor by
the more lengthened absences of his favourite son. In his judgment
the king was losing ground, not only in England but in the deeper
England of its men. Lady Margaret also, for all her natural good
spirits and light-heartedness, showed a more continuous anxiety
than was to be accounted for by her lord's absences and the dangers
he had to encounter: little Molly, the treasure of her heart next to
her lord, had never been other than a delicate child, but now had
begun to show signs of worse than weakness of constitution, and the
heart of the mother was perpetually brooding over the ever-present
idea of her sickly darling.

But she always did her endeavour to clear the sky of her countenance
before sitting down with her father-in-law at the dinner-table,
where still the marquis had his jest almost as regularly as his
claret, although varying more in quality and quantity both--now
teasing his son Charles about the holes in his pasteboard, as he
styled the castle walls; now his daughter Anne about a design, he
and no one else attributed to her, of turning protestant and
marrying Dr. Bayly; now Dr. Bayly about his having been discovered
blowing the organ in the chapel at high mass, as he said; for when
no new joke was at hand he was fain to content himself with falling
back upon old ones. The first of these mentioned was founded on the
fact, as undeniable as deplorable, of the weakness of many portions
of the defences, to remedy which, as far as might be, was for the
present lord Charles's chief endeavour, wherein he had the best
possible adviser, engineer, superintendent, and workman, all in the
person of Caspar Kaltoff. The second jest of the marquis was a pure
invention upon the liking of lady Anne for the company and
conversation of the worthy chaplain. The last mentioned was but an
exaggeration of the following fact.

One evening the doctor came upon young Delaware, loitering about the
door of the chapel, with as disconsolate a look as his lovely
sightless face was ever seen to wear, and, inquiring what was amiss
with him, learned that he could find no one to blow the organ
bellows for him. The youth had for years, boy as he still was, found
the main solace of his blindness in the chapel-organ, upon which he
would have played from morning to night could he have got any one to
blow as long. The doctor, then, finding the poor boy panting for
music like the hart for the water-brooks, but with no Jacob to roll
the stone from the well's mouth that he might water the flocks of
his thirsty thoughts, made willing proffer of his own exertions to
blow the bellows of the organ, so long as the somewhat wheezy
bellows of his body would submit to the task.

By degrees however the good doctor had become so absorbed in the
sounds that rushed, now wailing, now jubilant, now tender as a
twilight wind, now imperious as the voice of the war-tempest, from
the fingers of the raptured boy, that the reading of the first
vesper-psalm had commenced while he was yet watching the slow rising
index, in the expectation that the organist was about to resume. The
voice of his Irish brother-chaplain, Sir Toby Mathews, roused him
from his reverie of delight, and as one ashamed he stole away
through the door that led from the little organ loft into the
minstrel's gallery in the great hall, and so escaped the catholic
service, but not the marquis's roasting. Whether the music had any
share in the fact that the good man died a good catholic at last, I
leave to the speculation of who list.

Lady Margaret continued unchangingly kind to Dorothy; and the
tireless efforts of the girl to amuse and please poor little Molly,
whom the growing warmth of the season seemed to have no power to
revive, awoke the deep gratitude of a mother. This, as well as her
husband's absences, may have had something to do with the interest
she began to take in the engine of which Dorothy had assumed the
charge, for which she had always hitherto expressed a special
dislike, professing to regard it as her rival in the affections of
her husband, but after which she would now inquire as Dorothy's
baby, and even listen with patience to her expositions of its
wonderful construction and capabilities. Ere long Dorothy had a tale
to tell her in connection with the engine, which, although simple
and uneventful enough, she yet found considerably more interesting,
as involving a good deal of at least mental adventure on the part of
her young cousin.

One evening, after playing with little Molly for an hour, then
putting her to bed and standing by her crib until she fell asleep,
Dorothy ran to see to her other baby; for the cistern had fallen
rather lower than she thought well, and she was going to fill it.
She found Caspar had lighted the furnace as she had requested; she
set the engine going, and it soon warmed to its work.

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