Part 14

He was not greatly shocked when at last Eustace trusted him with his grand secret. “I was not made for crying, ‘What do you lack, my masters?’ or for twisting steel wires and copper filings either,” he said. “My Christmas box is broken and spent long ago, my credit gone, my master turned against me. ’Twere no great matter to break my indentures too, and slip off in the dark next Friday se’nnight to the _English Merchantman_. So Master Nevit would lose a bad ’prentice, and the service would gain a good sailor. And what would you think, Master Walter, of flinging off that pretty scholar’s gown, crying, ‘Ho, for the high seas!’ and joining me!”

“Fie on you, Jenkyns!” cried Walter, turning away half angry, half amused. And yet the shaft hit.

A chain of circumstances, slight, yet strong, had woven itself around him, and by this he was being gradually drawn onwards to a deed from which, if boldly proposed to him at first, he would have turned away in horror. And yet, if his heart had not yielded already to temptation, these circumstances would have been as powerless to draw him as threads of gossamer.

It was quite natural that pretty Cousin Lilias should receive a large share of Master Walter’s attention and admiration. As the time was drawing near when he ought to quit his uncle’s hospitable roof for Oxford, it occurred to him to beg one of the young lady’s top-knots for a keepsake. This was fair enough, since he had spent much more than he should have done upon ribbons and trinkets for her. Happening to find her one evening alone—she was standing in a kind of lobby that had a window, with a balcony outside, overlooking the river—he modestly preferred his important request. At first he played the grown-up cavalier, made her the fairest compliments he could think of, and even indulged in some of the “euphemisms” which were then beginning to become fashionable.

But gradually his boyish nature reasserted itself, and forgetting his assumed manliness, he sprang forward and deftly tried to snatch the precious knot of blue ribbon; which, however, Lilias, for fear of surprise, had already taken from its place, and was holding high above her head. And thus for a minute’s space or so they fenced and parried, laughing lightly at their sport, like the children they really were.

So absorbed were they in their play that George drew near unnoticed. The young sailor was very proud of his sister, and had never been quite cordial with Walter Grey since he observed his attentions to her. He showed, therefore, more indignation than the occasion seemed to demand. “Sister Lilias, you are too old to play with unmannerly boys,” he remarked in an elder-brotherly tone of reproof. “Our mother is asking for you in the parlour.”

Lilias took the hint and vanished; although she did not present herself in the well-lighted parlour until she had cooled her burning cheeks with fresh water. George meanwhile gave Walter the full benefit of his angry scorn.

“You poor little scholar boy!” he cried. “Prithee, keep to your Latin grammar, and leave ladies’ top-knots for those who can win them in something better than child’s play. If you had not been all your life tied to your mother’s apron, you would know by this time that my sister Lilias—”

“At least I know what you, sir, seem to have forgotten—that your sister is a lady,” interrupted the indignant Walter. “How dare you chide her as an ill-conditioned child? And as for myself, though I have the misfortune to be a scholar, I hope at least to show you that I am a man. Will you fight me, sirrah?”

“I’ll put thee in my pocket, and carry thee over the Bridge and along Cheapside, with all the ’prentice lads and serving-lasses to look on and cry Lack-a-day!” returned George, laughing heartily. “Nay, nay,” he added presently, glancing at Walter’s flushed face and lowering brow, “’tis but sailor’s nonsense, Cousin Walter. I mean no harm. There, give me your hand. One must be careful of a girl like Lilias, though.”

But Walter turned haughtily from him, and leaning against the casement, looked out upon the waters of the Thames, gliding peacefully far below.

“The lad is dumpish,” thought George. “Well, I can’t help that. To-morrow I will buy for him that book I saw him eye so lovingly in old Spicer’s booth the other day, to show I bear no malice.” Comforting himself with this resolve, he walked away, carelessly whistling some sailor’s melody.

Walter stood and gazed—in a listless, unhappy mood, discontented with his lot in life, angry with every one, but most of all with himself. If he could but go away, win gold and glory, and then come back and show his cousins the worth of the “little scholar boy” they despised! What was it that just then shot noiselessly from under the arch of the bridge? A wherry, barely visible through the darkening gloom. But he marked it as it glided past; and he knew its errand well. Had not Eustace Jenkyns told him all? What mattered the details of the plot—how serving men and lasses were bribed, and the suspicions of the city watch laid to rest by a plausible story, accounting for the appearance of the wherry at that unseasonable hour? All he cared to think of was the rapturous joy with which the freed apprentice would set his foot that night on the deck of the _English Merchantman_. And then,—away to the distant West, to the land of gold and glory, of romance and dreams!

Why should Eustace Jenkyns, the goldsmith’s runaway apprentice, taste that joy, and Walter Grey, scholar and gentleman, be shut out from it all? Was not his own life in his hand to do what he pleased with? For one delicious maddening moment he seemed to feel the spicy gales from those distant shores already fanning his cheek. And then his eye rested on the boat, gliding slowly past once more, _two_ men in it now.

Another moment and the opportunity would be gone—gone for ever. There was no time for thought. From the ship he would write to his mother, explain all, and excuse himself—if he could. Now he must act; now or never. He took out a white kerchief, and waved it. The signal was noticed by the men in the wherry—one of them raised his oar to a perpendicular position by way of answer.

Now, what should he do? At this hour the doors would be shut and all the lower windows of the house securely fastened, nor could he open them without attracting attention. But he remembered that George had once descended from the balcony to the river,—a perilous, but practicable feat, which he had heard him describe, with all its circumstances, for the benefit of James and Ned. Walter, naturally brave, was capable in this hour of excitement of the wildest daring. His head was steady, and his limbs were light and agile. In a moment he was out on the balcony, over it, clinging to it with both hands while he sought foothold beneath. He had not, fortunately, to intrust himself to a trim, modern building, smooth as glass from attic to basement. The kitchen window, an old statue of a saint in a niche, uneven stones here and there, tufts of grass, weeds, lastly the bridge buttress, gave him the support he needed, and enabled him at length to drop exhausted, but unhurt, into the dark cold waters beneath. He was soon helped into the boat by the astonished, but admiring Eustace Jenkyns.

And thus Walter Grey, by one egregious act of folly, or rather of madness, falsified the promise of his thoughtful childhood and precocious boyhood, gave the lie to all his past life, and utterly changed all his future.

XXIII.

Where it Led.

“Oh! what a tale to shadow with its gloom That happy home in England. Idle fear! Would the winds tell it?”

HEMANS.

Three years have passed away since Walter Grey so suddenly and strangely forsook his home and his friends. During that time he has had his heart’s desire—in part, at least. He has seen how the sunlight glistens on the waters of the Spanish main, his foot has pressed the flowery shores of unknown islands, and his hand has borne part, not unworthily, in England’s great naval contest with the enemies of her creed and her race.

But for all this he has paid a heavy price. He has taken his own way, and whither has it led him? Haply to an early grave, amongst the shells and sea-weed, fathoms deep below the blue waters he so longed to look upon? Had such been his fate, many might have mourned, but some would have envied him; and certainly, no forebodings of an early, honourable death would have done aught to deter him from the path he had chosen. But the English mariner who in those days dared to invade the Spanish main, the Pope’s gift to his favourite son, had to brave dangers far more terrible. The Holy Inquisition stretched its ghastly arm over half the globe, and with a touch, “cold, strong, passionless, like a dead man’s clasp,” claimed and held every English prisoner that fell into Spanish hands.

Rashly—perhaps too rashly—the _English Merchantman_ measured her strength against a great Spanish galleon and two smaller vessels, with which she fell in off Juan Fernandez. Gallant was the fight maintained by the English ship, but it was too unequal even for that day of marvellous naval achievements. After five hours’ hard fighting she was glad to get away, crippled and sorely raked, yet unconquered. But Walter Grey was reported missing. No man saw his face again, after that first mad rush upon the enemies’ deck in which he had borne his part so bravely.

And could his comrades have seen his face six months afterwards they would not have recognized him. Well would it have been for him had he died of the wound that separated him from his countrymen, and left him a helpless captive in the hands of the Spaniards, and at the mercy of the Holy Inquisition. By that hideous magician the bright-eyed, fair-haired English youth was soon transformed into a gaunt skeleton, old in misery, if still young in years. In pursuance of his sentence at an auto-da-fé in Lima, he took his place on the narrow wooden bench of a Spanish galley, and chained to three other wretches, toiled with them at the task of moving one of its forty great oars.

Here—it is a fellow-sufferer who speaks—his food was a scanty allowance of “coarse black biscuit and water, his lodging was the bare boards and planks of the galley, and hunger, thirst, cold, and stripes he lacked none.”[44]

But, it will be asked, had Walter Grey no alternative? Did men come forth from the gates of that gloomy “Santa Casa,” only to take their places in Spanish galleys? Not always. Some there were who wrestled boldly with the Inquisition fiend and overcame him, finding man’s worst God’s best, and death the gate of glory. But each of these crowned conquerors possessed a talisman, whose marvellous virtue bore them through the fiercest conflict,—even that white stone “wherein is written a new name, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.”

Walter Grey had not this talisman. Yet for the honour of his country, for the remembrance of the lessons learned beside his mother’s knee, he had borne much, and with heroic spirit. He knew that the creed he had been taught in childhood was true. But then he did not know that its promises were true _for him_. Perhaps they were, perhaps they were not; and like far wiser men, Walter Grey found it “hard to die for a perhaps.” So at last his heart failed him. He became a Penitent; and he experienced the tender mercies of the Inquisition towards returning penitents. He was sent to the galleys—for twenty years, or for life. He scarcely knew how the sentence ran; and in fact it did not matter.

Here, at first, he breathed rather than lived. He took no note of time, for “his soul was black, and knew no change of night or day.” His fettered limbs moved at their hateful task like parts of a machine, and thus he suffered little beyond the mere outward bodily miseries of his lot. He might have died thus erelong; and then, his chains loosed at last, he would have been flung into the sea with no more thought or ceremony than a dead hound. But he was roused at last from his torpor by a slight accidental circumstance.

One day the commissary, or overseer of the slaves, was as usual walking up and down the narrow gangway that separated the two tiers of benches on which the rowers sat. Something was amiss with the handle of the great Manita whip he carried in his hand, and he took out a strong knife to mend it. But the blade snapped across near the haft and fell down amongst the slaves, close to the place where Walter sat. He had often, in a vague, dreamy way, wished himself dead and out of his misery. Now the thought flashed across his mind that with this weapon he could kill himself. He snatched it up, and hid it in the sleeve of his tattered red jerkin. As at that moment the attention of the commissary was diverted to something that was taking place on the other side of the vessel, the action passed unobserved, at least by him.

Walter had now a definite purpose, and his mind awoke from its lethargy to deliberate on the best means of executing it. The desire to die actually helped to bring him back to life. He would kill himself, and be done with all this pain; no further did his thoughts travel. But how to do the deed?

It seemed very easy; now that he was provided with a weapon, it might be done at any moment. But he could not dismiss the fear that his ever-watchful enemies might by some means or other bar even _this_ door of escape from their cruelty; indeed, the instinct of a hunted, baited creature was sufficient in itself to make him conceal his movements. So he determined upon waiting until nightfall, when the miserable slaves, bending over their oars, snatched a few hours of comfortless repose.

Night came at last. All was still on board the galley. Walter looked cautiously around him—then took out his weapon. For one moment, and no more, he hesitated: by this time he was naturalized to horrors, and deliberately and of set purpose “his soul chose death rather than life.” But the broken blade hurt his hand; and he lost another moment, in the very act of turning it against his own heart, in trying so to grasp it as to avoid this trifling pain. So ineradicable is the natural instinct of self-preservation.

In that instant his arm was seized somewhat roughly, and the voice of the slave who sat next him whispered in his ear, “Camerado, what are you doing?”

“No harm to you,” answered Walter, who had by this time been schooled by hard necessity in the tongue of the stranger.

“No good to yourself,” rejoined the other; and he wrenched the broken blade from the poor boy’s nerveless hand, and flung it overboard.

“Oh! why did you take it from me?” cried Walter. “It was cruel!—I needed it.” And leaning over his oar, he gave way to a passionate fit of weeping.

Since he came on board the galley, he had not shed a tear. Nor could he have told any one why he wept now. He would have said, if asked, that his tears were for the lost fragment of steel, for which he felt an unreasoning, childish regret.

The weather-beaten slave beside him laid a fettered, bony hand on his. The gesture was friendly, but friendly gestures were so strange to Walter now, that he started and sobbed in his alarm, “Do not betray me.”

“God forbid!” replied the other. “I have not spent fifteen years at the oar for nothing. Do not weep, camerado. Pray God to forgive your sin, and go to sleep.”

“I cannot sleep,” Walter answered. “Would to God I could die!”

“When your time comes, He will call you. Perhaps to-night. The more need you should ask His forgiveness.”

Walter feared to be drawn into any talk about religion, lest he should implicate himself by some unguarded word, and fall again into the cruel hands of the Inquisition. So he only said, rather sullenly, “I am an Englishman.”

“Englishmen pray to God, and He hears them. I once saw two Englishmen die, and I am very sure God was with them.”

“Where was that?” asked Walter, with some faint stirrings of curiosity, and a strange feeling, half pleasure half pain, at the mention of his countrymen.

“At a great auto-da-fé. They were burned alive—”

“Hush!” Walter interrupted with a shudder. “Don’t talk of that.”

“Not if it troubles you, señor.” This fellow-slave of Walter’s knew him to be a gentleman, and addressed him as such; an attention not without its effect on the mind of the unhappy youth. “Yet that was no worse than this,” he added,—“not so bad, as I think sometimes. I was very near proving it too.”

“Why, what have you done?”—Walter had often heard the other slaves talk carelessly, and even boastfully, of their crimes; but he never knew this man to make the slightest allusion to his past history.

“I was thought to have done something which had almost lit the pile for me. I might have shared the fate of those two Englishmen—well if I had shared their hope.”

“Are you not afraid to talk thus?” Walter asked. “Is it not dangerous?”

“You speak of danger!—you, who tried just now to kill yourself! Had you succeeded, where would you be?”

“At least not in the Inquisition,” was Walter’s murmured answer.

“O camerado! don’t you know that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God?”

“I ought to know it,” Walter answered sadly. “Has He not sent me here for my sins?” With a long shuddering sigh he thought of his treason to his mother, and his weak denial of his mother’s faith. And again he wept—wept and sobbed aloud. For after a long drought the rain-clouds are apt to hang heavily; and it is not the first shower or the second that will clear the sky.

“Weep on,” said his comrade. “God has set you two lessons. One—your own sin—you are learning now; the other He will teach you by-and-by.”

But though Walter’s right hand neighbour desired him to weep on, his “oar-fellow,” who sat on the bench above him, was of another mind. This man, who had been captain of a gang of robbers in the wilds of the Sierra Morena, bestowed a hearty kick and curse on his young comrade. “Hold your peace, English heretic,” he said; “else I will call the commissary, and put it to his conscience as a good Catholic, whether it is not penance enough to be beaten all day like a hound, without being kept awake all night like an owl.”

Walter thought it best to take this gentle hint. He rested his weary head upon his oar, the only pillow it had known for months, and tried to sleep.

But sleep would not come to him. Thoughts came instead, crowding thick and fast upon him—thoughts of home, of his mother. No wonder that he wept on still, though noiselessly, lest he should awaken his companions.

At last he raised his head quietly; and through the mild gloom of the tropical night, which was not darkness, he looked cautiously at his right-hand neighbour, or—as in thought he had already begun to call him—his friend.

Doubtful whether the thin gray hair that fell over the oar concealed the face of a sleeper, Walter gently touched the ragged sleeve.

“_Quien va?_” the Spaniard responded, turning to him at once, with a questioning look in his keen dark eyes, where the fire burned still, undimmed by the sorrows that had turned his raven hair to gray, and worn his stalwart frame to a skeleton.

“That _other lesson_? What is it? Tell me, camerado.”

For a minute’s space the galley-slave was silent. Then, in a voice scarcely raised above a whisper, but so clear and distinct that every word stood out as if read by a lightning flash, he repeated,—“‘The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfil the desire of them that fear Him, He also will hear their cry, and will save them.’ Ay, señor, even in the galleys!”

XXIV.

At the Oar.

“Old faces look upon me, Old forms go crowding past.”

AYTOUN.

Walter Grey slept at last; weariness of body gaining the victory over sorrow of heart. He was wakened from a dream of home, more vivid than any he had known for months, by curses and blows and cries of pain, the usual matins of the galley-slave.

He put his stiff and weary limbs into the position necessary for their accustomed toil, and grasped his oar. But he did not escape a rough admonition from his comrade the bandit, seasoned with a couple of oaths.

“Look alive there, Englishman, and take your own share of the pulling; else you are pretty likely to take your own share of the lash by-and-by!”

It happened, however, that they received orders to pull gently. There was no occasion for haste, for the sea was calm, and they were near land. If he pleased, Walter might look about him as he rowed.

And right glorious was the sight that greeted his dim and tearful eyes. The water beneath was a sheet of liquid light, silver and rose; and before him stretched the green and pleasant shore of the Bay of Callao, with the giant Andes towering far above in the distance, the cold of their everlasting snows kindled into flame by the magic of the sunrise.

It was long since the crushed heart of Walter Grey had thrilled to the beauty of earth and sea. But this morning, like the Ancient Mariner, he “blessed them unawares;” and, like him, he felt the blessing return into his own bosom.

“Look, camerado!” he whispered to his friend, taking his right hand from the oar to point to the snowy mountains.

“_Quiton_!” murmured his older and more cautious companion—for the commissary was near. Too late! The cruel lash swung, quivered, descended. Walter’s cry of pain rang through the clear morning air, startling his own ear with its echo, and making him ashamed of his weakness. Next time, he vowed, he would give no sign.

Already a change had begun in him; he was growing gradually more like his former self. And as days passed on, life and feeling returned to him, slowly but surely. It was a fettered hand, like his own, that had plucked him back from the gates of the grave. And that hand had also pointed upwards to a star of hope. Again and again did Walter’s pale lips murmur over those words: “‘He also will hear their cry, and will save them’—even in the galleys.”

But with hope came memory—fast-thronging memories of the past—of his home, his mother, his faith. Sharp, sudden stings of remorse followed. Conscience spoke aloud, and would not be silenced; telling of his home abandoned—his mother wronged and deceived, perhaps heart-broken—his faith forsaken, his God denied. Could there be forgiveness for such as he?

For a considerable time the _San Cristofero_ lay quietly at anchor in the Bay of Callao; so he had leisure enough for thought. Indeed, we are assured by no less an authority than that of Cervantes, that there was “plenty of leisure in the galleys of Spain.”

His look of deep dejection, and the tears that often, at this period, fell silently from his eyes, were not unnoticed by his compassionate comrade. This man went amongst his companions by the name of the “Matador;” for almost all the galley-slaves had quaint _sobriquets_, by which they were distinguished, their real names being rarely known, and still more rarely used. Nor could Walter help remarking that he was singularly unlike the rest. He never joined in the revolting blasphemies with which the rowers’ benches so often resounded; he never tried to evade his share of the work, but rather exerted himself to shield and spare his weaker companions; and neither under the blazing tropical sun nor the drenching rains, neither in toil, in hunger, nor in pain, was he ever heard to murmur. By degrees Walter began to talk with him, to confide in him. And one day he abruptly uttered the substance of many a brooding thought,—

“I hope they think me dead in England!”

“Why hope that, señor?”

“Better dead, than _here_. Better dead twice over, than a slave—and an apostate.” The last word, it need scarcely be said, was breathed in a low and cautious whisper.

“That depends,”—the matador replied, with equal caution. Walter felt sorry he had ventured so far, and held his peace.