CHAPTER VII.

THE INSTINCT OF A BRUTE DOG.

Jasper Oglander and his son were up betimes on the following morning, and had come down to the lower rooms while yet the housemaids were sweeping up the rushes from the floors and dusting the furniture. Seeing one of the serving-men coming from the buttery Jasper called out to him, commanding him to bring two stoups of small ale. The man was waiting to take the emptied vessels, when the sound of a loud bell clanged through the house. At this Philip Oglander bowed his head and crossed himself; whereupon his father trod upon his toe and frowned at him.

"Thou fool!" said Jasper when the man had left them. "Dost want to betray us so soon? Did I not warn thee an hundred times that these people are all of the Protestant faith--heretics and Lutherans who would but despise us and regard us as enemies did they know that we are of the Holy Church? By the Rood, boy, thy forgetfulness hath nearly cost us dearly, for look at who cometh behind thee--thy cousin Drusilla, a saucy maid, by her favour, and it may be a dangerous."

Drusilla was at the moment descending the broad staircase, carrying a little basket of apples in her one hand, and with the other drawing the hood of her mulberry-coloured cloak over her fair hair. She curtsied low and bade them a good-morrow when she came before them into the front hall.

"Art going abroad so early?" asked her uncle, returning her greeting, and taking up his wide-brimmed hat from the bench where he had dropped it when drinking his cup of small ale. "If so, we would go with thee, for I am fain to show thy cousin what manner of home he hath come to. To have such escort as thine will make our inspection doubly agreeable."

"I was but going to the stables to give these apples to my brother's favourite horse," answered Drusilla. "But if ye would see the grounds I will willingly bear you company."

"And how fares Master Gilbert, prithee?" inquired Jasper, leading the way out into the porchway, and standing there a moment looking out across the terrace and the wide expanse of lawn to the misty woodlands beyond.

"The wound in his arm hath troubled him but little," she answered, "but his sprained ankle hath swollen greatly and is very painful. I fear me it will be many days ere he can leave his bed."

"'Tis a pity the rascals who thus assailed him cannot be caught and brought to a speedy justice," remarked Philip with seeming sympathy in his tone, albeit with an unkindly curl of his upper lip. "Was your brother unarmed that he thus allowed a vagabond gypsy to overcome him?" he added.

"Nay, for who would go unarmed in these days?" returned Drusilla. "But even the skilfullest swordsman may sometimes be taken at a disadvantage. Gilbert's foot slipped upon the snow, and his adversary did thrust at him even as he fell. Timothy Trollope knew not of the matter until the three robbers had fled, or else I am very sure they should not have got away so easily."

"And, prithee, who may be this Timothy of whom you speak, cousin?" pursued Philip.

Drusilla answered:

"He is Gilbert's good and faithful servant--the same who brought him in yesternight. He is the son of Master Peter Trollope, the barber-surgeon of Plymouth town."

"Ah! methought I had seen him once before," observed Jasper. "He was even in his father's shop whilst I was there having my beard trimmed. And now--let us to the stables first, Mistress Drusilla, and then when we have made the round of the mansion and had a peep at the hawks in the mews and the deer in the chase, we shall haply go within again and introduce ourselves to your brother. Fortunate Gilbert, to be the heir to such vast and valuable estates as these!" he added covetously, as, standing at the end of the terrace where a spacious flight of stone steps led down to the lawn, he glanced towards the avenues of tall old trees that opened out before him. "Were I their owner, however, I should hew down those unsightly trees; they do but interrupt the view, and so much stout oak is but wasted while there be battle-ships to be built--to say naught of the price one might get in exchange for the timber withal."

Drusilla conducted her new-found relatives over the stables. They had a distant sight of the farm buildings, where the cows, having been newly milked, were wandering out through the gates in slow and irregular procession towards the pasture lands. Then they went round to the kennels and looked at the hounds, and to the mews, where Hawksworth and his fellows were feeding the falcons. Thence through the orchard, now bare of fruit, and the kitchen-garden, where Lord Champernoun, at the instance of his friend Sir Walter Raleigh, had in the last season grown a wondrous crop of potatoes and other vegetable products of the New World. Then round into the park to where a herd of deer, browsing in the wet grass, started off, alarmed at their approach, and ran with great fleetness to a misty hollow among the trees.

At first Drusilla had been strangely shy with her two companions; but they showed such interest in the home of her childhood and treated her with such graceful courtesy that she soon became familiar with them, and answered their many questions freely and eagerly. She pointed out the old oak-tree in the middle of the park under whose spreading branches the village children had crowned her as Queen of the May in the last spring-time. She took them to the side of the lake where Gilbert and she had been wont to sail their boats, and where Gilbert only a week ago had caught a pike. And then, coming back by the front of the house, she pointed out the little latticed window of her chamber, half-hidden among the clambering ivy. From where they were they could see the full extent of the great baronial mansion, with its abutting wings end many gables flanking the tall central turret,--on which the gilt weather-vane shone bright in the morning sunlight,--its stone-shafted oriel windows, and its curiously-twisted chimneys. It was all very magnificent, albeit Drusilla thought less of it for this fact than for the reason that it was sanctified as the residence of so many of her ancestors.

"Ah, 'tis in truth a palace fit for a king!" declared Jasper Oglander aside to his son. "I marvel that I ever had the foolishness to leave it. What wouldst thou say, Phil, an thy father were the owner and master of the place? Nay, do not smile, boy; less likely things than this have come to pass; and remember there be but two frail lives between me and it--your grandfather, poor addle-pated pantaloon, and this stripling Gilbert as they call him, touching whom I should have been by no means sorry had his assailant of yesternight done his work more completely. Mark you, Phil," he reiterated with emphasis, "I had not been sorry--nay, why boggle the matter?--I had in truth been exceeding glad had the wound you wot of been a span nearer to his heart."

Whatever Philip might have said in reply to this cruel remark was cut short by the return of Drusilla, who had but ran forward a few paces to greet Nero, the bloodhound, at the entrance of the courtyard. The dog as it approached the father and son hung down his furrowed head and growled ominously--which was a habit quite unusual with him, in spite of his aspect of ferocity.

"Come, Brutus--Hector--Pompey--what is thy name? Come, good dog," said Jasper Oglander caressingly, snapping his finger and thumb together in invitation to the dog. But Nero still hung his head, and growlingly sniffed about the man's feet, coming finally to Philip and growling yet again. "Ah! he doth well discern that we are strangers to him," continued Jasper, "or else he doth smell the brine about our clothes. Such dogs, I have observed, have a natural aversion to seamen."

"Indeed, uncle, it can scarce be so with Nero," remarked Drusilla, "for he hath a marvellous fondness for Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Francis is a seaman in all conscience."

"Ay, plague on the man," muttered Jasper to himself. And presently he followed Drusilla across the courtyard and into the house.

Timothy Trollope had been for the longer half of the night in his young master's room--a small chamber in the west wing of the house, with very simple furniture, but being crowded with a variety of toy ships, bows and arrows, kites, whips, spurs, morions, corselets, rapiers, foreign shells, snakes bottled in oil, skins of rare animals and birds, and other curious and boyish gear. In front of the fireplace there was a large Polar bear skin, with the head still attached, given to Gilbert by his friend Sir Martin Frobisher. A small casement window in a corner of the room was fitted like a ship's port-hole, with a demi-culverin made of brass pointing outward towards a strip of blue sea that could be discerned far away in the distance beyond the promontory of Rame Head. Gilbert had once fired this cannon from this same place, loading it with stone-shot and aiming at a certain chestnut-tree in the park. The cannon had rebounded even to the farther end of the room, smashing into a cupboard, much to the damage thereof. The report had alarmed the household, nay, even the whole country-side for a mile round; it had come nigh to the deafening of Gilbert himself, for his ears tingled for many days. Fortunately no one had suffered any hurt; fortunately, also, the splendid mansion was too well built to suffer from so unwonted a shock. The lad had fallen into disgrace for a week afterwards and was forbidden to bring gunpowder into the house again. He regretted the foolish freak, but in his regret, and despite of the chastisement he received by order of his stern and offended grandfather, there was still a sort of boyish satisfaction in his heart--a satisfaction which arose from the fact that his shot had hit its intended mark.

Lady Betty smiled as, sitting by her son's bedside in view of the cannon, she remembered this long-past incident. She had come into the room in the early morning, and had dismissed Timothy Trollope, bidding him go and get some sleep and return when the household had risen. Gilbert had slumbered during the whole time that she had been present with him, but at the sound of the opening of the door he had awakened, to find Timothy again at his side and his mother silently retreating on tiptoe.

"Ah, she hath gone, and I had hardly known she was here!" sighed Gilbert. "Go, summon her back, Tim--yet, no; let her not know that I am awake. 'Twill comfort her to think that I am still asleep. But I am sorry that she hath gone. I had meant to question her concerning this Uncle Jasper and his son. For what my mother doth say of them and think of them is certain to be true and just, whether her judgment be favourable or the reverse. Didst mark her demeanour towards them yesternight, Tim? Didst mark if she greeted them in friendly wise?"

"I marked little of anything, so much was I concerned as to your hurts, dear master," returned Timothy; "but in so far as I could see, her ladyship seemed to regard your uncle rather with annoyance than friendship, and to avoid his near presence as if she misliked his intrusion."

"And yet, if I mind aright, my mother hath ofttimes spoken of him as though she had known him passing well," observed Gilbert, as he half-raised himself upon his uninjured arm.

Timothy strode slowly towards the window and looked out into the park.

"She knew him ere yet she was wedded," he said in a quiet decisive tone, "so at least my father hath told me. But peradventure 'twas only idle gossip."

"Gossip?" repeated Gilbert reprovingly. "Gossip about my mother? Prithee, what said your father? Come, tell me, Tim."

"Nay, be not alarmed," said Timothy, turning for amoment from the window and looking his young master in the face. "'Twas only this, that when my lady was at Her Majesty's court in Richmond as one of Her Majesty's ladies-in-waiting, Jasper Oglander did woo her in the hope that she would wed him, and so cut out his brother, of whom, as thou knowest, he was bitterly jealous. My lady chose the better man to be her husband, and Master Jasper departed across the seas to forget his disappointment in foreign lands."

"Tut! There is naught in that," rejoined Gilbert with a light laugh. "'Tis in no wise surprising that Jasper Oglander or any other man should admire my mother. Doth not all England admire her? Have not a full score of our best poets penned sonnets in her praise? Out upon thee, Timothy, out upon thee!"

"Well, howsoever it be," said Timothy as he gave his head a careless toss and stood with his thumbs in his belt at the window; "howsoever it be, I like not the man myself. He is a braggart, of that I am sure, and there is a look in his eyes that doth betoken deceitfulness."

"Thy opinion in the matter of people's characters is seldom to be depended upon, Tim," remarked Gilbert, assuming the gravity of worldly wisdom. "Thou dost trust overmuch to instinct and too little to a knowledge of the world. 'Tis a brute dog's method."

Timothy strode to the bedside and sat down on the chair that Lady Betty had lately left. He crossed his legs and was silent for a few moments.

"'Tis true I have not travelled as thou hast done, Master Gilbert, nor been to a great public school to learn Latin and Greek as thou hast been. But methinks a brute dog's instinct may yet sometimes be trusted; and I have even known the dog Nero to be right in his discernment of men when thou and I have failed. Howbeit, 'tis not for me, who am but a servant, to say ought in disparagement of your worshipful uncle, who may, after all, be a very proper gentleman; and I do humbly beseech your pardon, sir, for having said so much as I have already done."

There was a light knock at the door. Tim started to his feet.

"Wilt let us enter, Gilbert?" asked Drusilla in a half-whisper as though she feared to disturb her brother. "Uncle Jasper and Cousin Philip are here, and they would be better known to thee."

Timothy opened the door and they entered.

"I fear that we disturb thee, Master Gilbert," began Jasper Oglander in a soft, tender voice, when the greetings had been exchanged. "But we were anxious, as thou mayest be sure, to make thy good acquaintance, as we have already made that of thy sweet sister."

"Thou art right welcome, Uncle Jasper; and thou too, Cousin Philip," said Gilbert with hearty candour. "Ay, sit you upon the bed, Drusilla," he added, turning to Drusilla. "But see you come not too near to my lame foot, for 'tis easily hurt. I am like our grandfather now, when he is troubled with his gout."

"Ah! doth the old gentleman suffer much with that complaint, then?" said Jasper in a tone of sympathetic interest; and, without pausing for an answer, he went on: "'Tis old age creeping upon him, I doubt. Let me see--ay--he must be well upon threescore years and ten. But he hath led a busy life, what with wars, and parliaments, and missions of state, and religious controversy; 'tis little wonder that his hairs are silvered. But I thank God and the saints that I find him looking so hale and well."

"_The saints_, Uncle Jasper?" cried Drusilla, noticing this slip of the tongue. "Is it not enough to thank God alone?"

"Nay, I meant not that, of course," said Jasper, growing very red in the face, yet passing the matter off with a careless laugh. "You see, in my travels in foreign countries I have come so much in contact with Spaniards and others of the Romish faith that I have, as it were, acquired insensibly their habit of mentioning the saints, to whom they do so constantly appeal."

"Yes, I have heard them oftentimes," said Gilbert; "for there be many Spanish Papists at this present time in Plymouth. Prisoners of war they are--although it seemeth vain to call them prisoners, for they do go about the streets with freedom, and are little different from other men saving that they are not permitted to carry arms."

"They would speedily find that they were prisoners indeed, if they did but attempt to escape from our shores, however," interposed Timothy Trollope.

Jasper Oglander seemed to take a lively interest in this particular subject.

"Prithee, what is their number, and how came they to be prisoners in England?" he asked of his nephew.

"I know not truly how many there be," answered Gilbert; "a good two score, I should say. They were taken on board of the Spanish galleon _Nuestra Señora del Rosario_, the flagship of Don Pedro de Valdes, who surrendered to Francis Drake at the time of the Armada fight. Many of their companions were sent back to Spain, but these remain in Plymouth, for I know not what reason other than that Queen Elizabeth hath not chosen to liberate them."

Having learned so much, Jasper hastened to change the subject.

"I have been told," he said, "that you received your injuries yesternight in rescuing one Jacob Hartop, an aged mariner who, as it chanceth, came home with us from the Indies. Was he, too, wounded in this encounter?"

Gilbert turned to Timothy, and Timothy answered:

"No, your worship; he was but robbed."

"H'm! the thieves can have gained but sorry booty from so impoverished a prey," remarked Jasper, with a derisive sneer. "Poor crazed creature, he was scarce worth the room he occupied aboard our ship! And, indeed, we should never have consented to bring him but that we were short-handed, and he so earnestly craved for his passage back to England, and so we gave him a berth out of mere compassionate charity."

"Haply, too, you had been acquainted with the man in former years?" suggested Gilbert.

Jasper glanced in quick apprehension at his nephew, as if questioning whether the lad spoke from knowledge or only at random.

"No, faith, no," he answered, with seeming indifference. "I have but known him during our late voyage."

Then Timothy Trollope--remembering how Philip had made inquiry of him concerning Hartop; remembering, too, how speedily the attack upon the old seafarer had followed upon his own meeting with Philip Oglander in the town--ventured to address the two visitors thus:

"I have been thinking," said he, looking from Jasper to Philip and back again to Jasper, "that 'tis passing strange you neither saw nor heard aught of this encounter. You set out from Plymouth at close upon five o'clock, or only a brief time before my master and I started for home. You could scarce have arrived at the manor-house very much in advance of us. 'Tis plain, therefore, that you were at no great distance from Beddington Dingle at the moment when this thing befell. And yet it seemeth that you knew naught of the matter until Master Gilbert was carried wounded into the dining-hall."

While Timothy spoke Jasper's fingers were idly playing with the fringe of Gilbert's counterpane. He glanced upward with a composure which at once dispelled all Timothy's doubts, and remarked with so much seeming candour that there was no gainsaying the truth of his statement:

"That same question hath already occurred to me," said he; "and, indeed, had we chanced to come by that same road I doubt not that we should certainly have passed your robbers by the way. Peradventure we might even have been near enough at hand to render you some timely aid in overcoming the rascals. But it so happened that we journeyed by the longer way of the main road instead of taking the short cut by the Beddington Lane."

"Would that you had indeed been near, uncle!" said Drusilla, as she sat at the foot of the bed, her two hands stretched out clasping the carved oak rail against which her back was resting. "For apart from yourself, who are, as it seemeth, a man of war, I am well assured that Cousin Philip is a master of fence. I saw his long rapier yesternight. 'Tis such a weapon as surely none but the skilfullest swordsman could handle."

"Ay, 'tis a pretty enough blade," returned Jasper carelessly; "but more for ornament, I do assure you, than for use, Mistress Drusilla. As for Philip, he is a sorry hand at such matters. In fencing, as in many other arts that I have wished him to exercise, he is in truth a very dullard and bungler."

Philip Oglander smiled, with his tongue in his cheek.

"Marry, father, but thou art giving me an over-true character," said he, modestly hanging his head. "My cousins will think me a dunce indeed if you herald me thus. But when Cousin Gilbert hath recovered from his injuries, as I do pray that he speedily may, I will ask him to give me a few lessons in the use of the rapier."

"That will I most gladly do," returned Gilbert. "Although, for the matter of that, Timothy Trollope here would prove a likelier and a skilfuller teacher than I, for I am still but his pupil."

"I thank you," said Philip, with a curious lift of his eyebrows as he glanced across at Timothy. "But so please you, I had rather take my lessons from a gentleman."

Timothy winced under the reproach to his lowly birth, and moved away, busying himself by putting aside some books that his young master had left lying on the window-shelf.

"Was not I right, Tim?" remarked Gilbert, some few minutes afterwards, when Drusilla with her uncle and cousin had departed. "Are not they good worthy folk, these relatives of mine?"

"It would ill become me to differ from you, Master Gilbert," answered Timothy. "My instincts may be at fault."