CHAPTER I.

THE TWO BEGIN THEIR JOURNEY.

"O guide me through this life's uncertain wild!
And for aught else beneath the circling sun,
So Thou in Thine own bosom keep Thy child,
Father! Thy will be done!"

That every baby enters the world with a spoon of some metal in its mouth, is an old saying which is easy of interpretation. And in the ancient town of Usk, in Monmouthshire, on the first day of September, 1373, were born two babies, not many yards apart, whose spoons were made of exceedingly diverse metal.

The baby who was born in the morning of that day, in the Castle of Usk, brought with him a spoon of gold, beautifully embossed, and exquisite in shape. He found the world—as represented by the mantle in which his nurse enveloped him—soft, rich, velvety, and fur-lined. If he cried, the sound won immediate attention; and the faintest sign of illness on his part struck despair into hearts which beat with the bluest blood.

The baby who was born in the evening, in a squalid mud hovel, one of a dozen which nestled close under the Castle wall, was accompanied by a battered old spoon of the very rustiest iron. His world was a sheepskin, extremely dirty, and not particularly fragrant. His cries were answered—when they were answered—by a rough toss in the arms of his eldest sister, a slipshod, shock-headed girl of eleven years; and the possibility of his early death neither dismayed nor grieved any one, for even his mother was of opinion that he was one too many in the hovel, which could scarcely find room for the nine persons who occupied it.

Baby Number One was baptized in the chapel of the Castle, borne in his velvet wrapper by a lady of title, with the accompaniment of sweet music and joyous bells. His sponsors were a bishop, an abbot, and a prioress. He received the family name of Roger; for a hundred and fifty years back, the heirs of that family had been Rogers and Edmunds alternately, and it was the turn for the former. Roger Mortimer—an ominous name! For this boy was the heir of the earldom of March, one of the proudest coronets of England; and his mother, a fair girl of eighteen, was a Princess of the Blood.

Baby Number Two was christened in the parish church, one of a batch of ten, and might not have been christened at all if the curate had not been one who looked sharply after his baptismal fees. He received the name of Lawrence, which was the first that occurred to his parents. Very naturally protesting in his baby style against a sprinkling with cold water, he was tumbled with no particular care into the thin arms of Mariot, who rewarded him with a private shake for his vocal performance, the only music which accompanied the ceremony. As to surname, he could not be said to have any. What did the son of a serf want with a surname? As he grew older, however, some distinction between him and other Lawrences being felt desirable, his neighbours took to calling him Lawrence Madison, or son of Maud,—his mother being a woman with a tongue, and as such a more prominent character than her quiet and silent husband.

The family physician, Master Gilbert Besseford, carefully drew out the horoscope of the young Lord. It appeared from this elaborate document that he was to be a highly accomplished and intellectual youth, since Mercury was busy about him; that he would be most fortunate in wedlock, for Venus was doing something; that he would rise to the highest honours of the State, and might possibly achieve a crown, as Jupiter was most benevolently disposed to him. At any rate, something was to happen about his twenty-fifth birthday, which would place him in a position that none of his fathers had equalled. He would have a long life and a happy one.

Two items of the horoscope were true. He was to be indeed an intellectual and accomplished youth: and in his twenty-fifth year a crown was to be his, to which few of his fathers had attained. But those around him thought of a corruptible crown, and that which God had prepared for him was an incorruptible. And the happy wedlock, and the long life, and the rise to worldly honour, were not the portion of Roger Mortimer, but of Lawrence Madison in the hovel below.

That Roger should exercise in the future considerable influence over the fortunes of Lawrence, was extremely probable; since they would some day stand to each other in the relations of master and vassal, and the former possessed absolute power over the latter. But the idea that Lawrence could in any sense sway the fortunes of Roger would have been laughed to scorn by the household at the Castle. Yet this was to be.

In a small, but very prettily furnished boudoir in one of the Castle turrets, sat the Countess Dowager of March. She was considered an elderly woman, though we should think her only middle-aged; for in the days of our shorter-lived forefathers, who looked upon fifty as old age, and sixty as advanced senility, a woman of forty was some way down the hill. From a father whose character stood high both as warrior and statesman, and a mother whose remarkable wisdom and good sense were a proverb among her contemporaries, Philippa Montacute had inherited a character of unusual power, moral and mental. Her energy was tempered by her prudence, while warm affections and shrewd common sense held sway together over her actions. The character was not transmitted, except in the affections, to that handsome, eloquent, amiable young man of one-and-twenty, who was the only one left living of her four children: but it was to be reproduced in every point save one, in the baby grandson for whose birth the chapel bells were ringing melodiously, and in whose honour all the thralls were to have a holiday the next day. Alas, that the omitted item was the one which should have been a girdle to all the rest! Warm-hearted, energetic to impulsiveness, with plenty of good sense and fine understanding, the gifts bestowed on little Roger did not include prudence.

The Countess sat alone in her bower in the September twilight, and took "blind man's holiday," her imagination and memory scanning both the future and the past.

It was not quite dark when the door of the bower opened, and a woman of some thirty years came forward, dropping a courtesy as she approached her mistress.

"Come in, Wenteline," said the Countess; for thus the medieval English pronounced the old British name, Guenllian. "Is David yet back from his errand?"

"An't please your Ladyship, he came but now, and he brings tidings, agreeably to your Ladyship's pleasure, that among the thralls be two babes to-day born. Maud, the wife of Nicholas in the huts, hath a man-child; and your Ladyship's god-daughter, Philippa, wife of Blumond the fishmonger, a maid-child."

"Good," answered the Countess, feeling for the gold and ivory tablet which hung by a silver chain from her girdle, that she might therein enter the information for which she had sent. "Then, as born on the birthday of the heir, they shall be allowed some privileges. What names are the babes christened by?"

"Please it your Ladyship, the little maid is Beatrice—so baptized by Dan Robesart this afternoon. For the knave, being born but an hour back, he is not yet baptized; but they think to call him Lawrence."

Both names went down on the Countess's tablet, after Guenllian had lighted a candle for that purpose.

"Did David give the thralls to wit of the games and rejoicings allowed to-morrow?"

"Ay, my Lady: and he saith one and all were greatly gladded thereby. My young Lord shall be right welcome to all his vassals some day to be."

The Countess drew a long breath of semi-apprehension. "May he be none the less desired, God grant, when they shall lay his head beneath the mould! O my maid, how great and awesome a thing is the life of a man on earth!"

"Madam, I heard once the parson of Ludgarshal, Dan John, to say"——

"Have on. A good man is Dan John. What said he?"

"That our Lord bound Him to care for the childer of them that feared Him; and that no prayer so made should ever be lost."

"But how answered?" was the low-toned reply. "Wenteline, our prayers be sometimes heard in a manner that crusheth the heart of him that prayed them. If the babe were to die!"

"Very dear Lady, it might be, elsewise, that a twenty years' space hereafter, you should heartily wish that he had died the sooner. Surely it can be no evil thing for a little child to go right to God, while he is yet lapped about with the white robes of his chrisom."

"I have buried three, Wenteline: and of them one went so. The other were pretty little childer that prattled at my knee. And it was like burying a piece of mine own heart to part with every one."

"Yet now, my Lady—would you have them back now?"

"Know I what I would? Surely it is better for them. And may God's will be done. Only to-night, Wenteline—to-night, holding that little babe, the thought came sorrowfully of my Roger, and how he faded from me like a white flower of the earth, or a star that goes out in the sky. Hand me yonder French Bible, Wenteline. Let me read a little touching the City where my childer dwell, and the King unto whose presence they be gone. May be it shall still my yearning when I think of them as there, and not here."

There were no Bibles at that date but in French or Latin; seven years were yet to elapse before John Wycliffe, to whom Guenllian had just referred, was to begin the translation of the first English Bible. But French Bibles and Latin Psalters were no unusual possession of noble families. Those families who were not noble were expected to get to heaven without any; for one of the most singular medieval ideas was that which restricted all intellect to those of noble blood. Blood and brains went together. If a man had not the former, it was out of all calculation that he should possess the latter.

Guenllian reached down from a high shelf the French Bible, bound in dark green velvet, with golden rims and embossed corners, and amethysts gleaming from every corner. The Countess unfastened the clasps, and turned to the last chapters of the book. She read, to herself and Guenllian, of the Golden City and the River of Gladness and the Tree of Life, until the world seemed to grow small and dim, and the world's conventionalities to become very poor and worthless. And then, turning a little further back, she read of the Good Shepherd who calleth His flock by name, and leadeth them out; and they know His voice, and follow Him. Then the golden clasps were closed, and the lady sat in silence for a few moments.

"Wenteline," she said, "we have tried to follow the Shepherd, thou and I, in the sunlit plains. Thinkest thou thy feet would fail if we come by-and-by to the arid slopes of the stony hills?"

Guenllian looked down, and nervously played with her chatelaine. "I cannot tell, an' it like my Lady. You look not for such troubles, Madam?"

"They that be sure of Satan's enmity had best look for trouble," was the pithy answer. "It is not here—yet. But it may be."

And it was to be. But it came not until Philippa Montacute was safe in the shelter of the Golden City, and under the shade of the Tree of Life. Then it broke fiercely on the unsheltered heads of those on the stony slope, and the baby that lay that day in the velvet wrapper came in for some drops of the thunderstorm.

The children in the Castle and in the hovel grew and thrived. They were both pretty, but had Lawrence Madison been kept as clean and dressed as nicely as the little Lord, he would have been the prettier of the two. As he grew old enough to take note of things, to tumble about on the sheepskin at the door, while his mother and Mariot attended to their duties within, and to listen and talk, a great ambition arose in his young heart. He did not envy the young heir at the Castle: an idea so lofty and preposterous never suggested itself for an instant. Lawrence would as soon have thought of grumbling because he was not an archangel, as because he was not my Lord Roger of March. But he did indescribably admire and envy the fishmonger across the street. He had a whole coat, and a clean apron; he looked like a man who always had plenty of nice things to eat, and a fire to warm himself by in cold weather. And the fishes were so beautiful! Lawrence had crept across the street and looked up at their lovely prismatic scales, as they lay in the baskets level with his head. He had seen Blumond's wife as she came to the door with her child in her arms. Little Beatrice was kept cleaner and nicer than he was. Why did not Mother give him nice things to wear like hers? And why, that evening when she and Father were talking about something—what were they talking about?—did Father look across at Lawrence, and say, with a lowered brow and a sulky tone quite unusual with him, something about letting a freeman manage for himself, and not be beholden to a villein? Now that he thought about it—and Lawrence was given to thinking about things—Father did seem more cross with him than the others. What had he done?

After many long cogitations on this and other puzzles, of which nobody knew, since he kept them all to himself, Lawrence finished by astounding his world.

Lawrence's world was very small, for it was bounded by a few yards of the street at its widest extent. The inner circle of this sphere, namely, the hovel, was built of mud and wooden laths, and was about fifteen feet in longitude. Separate rooms were an unimaginable luxury. Nine persons—Lawrence's father, mother, and grandmother, his two brothers, three sisters, and himself—ate, slept, and mostly worked, in the one chamber which formed the whole of the hut. There were also additional inhabitants in the shape of two cats, three hens, and a small and lively pig. It was not easy to move without falling over somebody or something which was apt to resent it in a way not suggestive of polished society. Perhaps it was quite as well, considering these circumstances, that the space was not cumbered with much furniture. Alike of bedsteads, chairs, and tables, the hut was entirely guiltless, and the inhabitants would scarcely have known what to do with them. A bundle of straw littered down in a corner, with a sheepskin thrown over it, was their idea of the utmost luxury in the way of sleeping accommodation—a luxury which they could rarely attain: and the ordinary bed was one of dry leaves from the neighbouring forest, which, when they were able to reach such a pitch of comfort, were stuffed into a sack. A long form, set against the wall, represented the chair element, and was reserved for the elders, the children squatting on the mud floor with the pig, cats, and hens. The minds of the inhabitants had not reached the table idea.

Nicholas, the father of Lawrence, was by trade a tanner—not a master-tanner by any means. He worked for a man who in his turn worked under another, and all were serfs, at the Earl's tan-pits, a mile from the city. Maud, his wife, was the daughter of another serf, the blacksmith who shoed the Earl's horses. To all these the Lord of Usk was a sort of minor divinity, almost too far above them to be thought of as a human creature like themselves, and much too inaccessible for any complaints or requests to reach him, except through the medium of a dozen persons at least. People of this kind were not expected to have any manners, beyond the indispensable one of making the most obsequious reverences to the meanest dweller in the Castle, or to a priest. The sailor's pithy description of the savages with whom he met—"Manners, none; customs, nasty"—were in most cases only too descriptive of the medieval villein.

Does not this manner of life among the lower orders, five hundred years ago, account for much of the power obtained by the priesthood, and the blind obedience with which the people followed the clergy? The priest was something more to the masses than he was to the aristocracy. To the latter, he was the man who stood between them and God: to the former, he was also the mediator between man and man. He was the only person among the upper ranks who treated these poor down-trodden creatures, not as machines out of which so much profit was to be ground, but as men and women with human sins and sorrows.

The children saw very little of their father. He went to work as soon as it was light, and often did not return before they were fast asleep on the leaves. They saw only too much of their mother, whose tongue was never still when awake, and was governed by a cross temper and a discontented mind. The grandmother was an old woman bent by rheumatism, and enfeebled by years of hard work and hard usage. The girls, Mariot, Emmot, and Joan, had nothing to look forward to but similar lives, and after them—they hardly knew what. They had a dim notion that there was a pleasant place where some people went at death, and where nobody did any work: this was derived from the priests. They had also a notion, dug up out of the natural soil of the human heart, that having met with very little comfort in this life, it was sure to be waiting for them in the next. Of God their principal idea was that He was a very great and rich man, above even my Lord, and was in some mysterious manner connected with hearing mass. The boys might expect the serf's usual life—hard work and many blows, with such intervals of pleasure as an animal would be capable of appreciating, chiefly connected with eating and drinking, an occasional dance or game on the village green on saints' days, and any rough horse-play among themselves.

They were not badly off in respect of food, for their master fed them, and it was to his profit that they should be in good bodily condition. They had therefore, plenty of food of the coarsest kind, and sufficient clothing of the same quality, which they had about as much notion of keeping clean as a monkey has of writing letters. Wages, of course, were never heard of between master and serf. Whatever they needed had to be reported to their superior in office, and they received it if and when he found it convenient.

Is it not a singular fact that the less a man has, the more contented he is often found to be? The majority of these serfs, thus comfortlessly situated, were more contented men than their descendants, who have privileges and possessions of which they never dreamed, and many of whom are never satisfied with them.

These were the circumstances in which Lawrence was placed, and such were the persons whom he astonished when his time came to do so.

"Get out of the way, childer!" said Mariot one night, not crossly, but like the tired girl she was, as she came and threw herself down on the sheepskin among them at the door. "I am weary as a dog. There never is any pleasure in life—our lives, anywise. Simon, have done!—and Emmot, give o'er pushing. Let a body have a bit of rest, do!"

And rolling one corner of the sheepskin into a bolster, Mariot made herself comfortable—as much so, that is, as the circumstances admitted.

"Mariot, what is a villein?"

"What's what?" exclaimed Mariot, her head coming up in astonishment. "Lo' you now, if Slow-o'-Words hasn't found his tongue!"

"What's a villein, Mariot?"

"What we all are—saving thee, little plague o' my life."

"Why amn't I like you?" said Lawrence, opening his eyes wide.

"The deer knows!" replied Simon grumpily.

"Well, but I know beside the deer," said Mariot. "Well, what for but by reason thou wert born on the same day as the young Lord up yonder,—thou and Blumond's Beattie—and ye were both made free therefor."

"What's free, Mariot?"

"It means, do what you will."

"Does it so? May I have one of those fishes, then?"

"Oh, well—it means not, do ill and thieve. Wait a bit, Lolly, till thou art grown bigger, and thou wilt know what free means—better than ever we are like to know it."

"Why isn't everybody free, Mariot?"

"What wot I? They aren't."

"Is Beattie free too?"

"Ay."

"But we were made free. Is nobody free that isn't made?"

"Lots of folks."

"Then why isn't everybody?" repeated little Lawrence meditatively.

"Oh, give o'er, and reive not my head!" cried Mariot. "Loll, if thou goest about to ask questions that none can answer, I shall want thee dumb again I promise thee."

"Can't nobody answer them? Couldn't the parson?"

"The parson, in good sooth! The like of thee to ask questions at the parson! Shut thine eyes, and go to sleep: I'm as sleepy as a squirrel in winter."

Lawrence crept on his hands and knees to the edge of the sheepskin, avoiding his brother Simon, who lay on his face in the middle of it, amusing himself by kicks up at the atmosphere: and looking out into the still summer evening, saw Blumond's wife Philippa carrying in the baskets of fish, and little Beatrice trotting beside her. Prettiest of the three children was Beatrice, with dainty little ways which woke Lawrence's admiration, and made her a perpetual attraction to him. In fact, he hardly knew which he liked best, Beatrice or the fishes!

As to the magnificent people in the Castle, Lawrence barely presumed to lift his eyes to them. Now and then, as he sat on the sheepskin, some squire on horseback or messenger on foot would flash past in the Earl's livery—blue and gold, guarded with white—who was to the children in the huts as good as a show at Whitsuntide Fair. But before Lawrence was quite two years old, the Castle was deserted, and the Earl and all his family had removed to Ludlow. Thence came rumours from time to time of their doings. A daughter was born, in honour of whom a holiday was given to the villeins; and two years later, a son, for whom they had a great feast. But immediately after that came sadder news, for the royal mother, yet only twenty-two, survived her boy's birth scarcely six weeks. All the bells of Usk tolled in mourning, catafalques of black and silver were in every church, and the chant of doleful litanies for the dead floated through the perfumed aisles. And after the death of the young Countess, the Earl and Countess Dowager returned no more to Usk; for two years later, the Earl was made Viceroy of Ireland, and removed thither, while his mother and children remained at Wigmore.

The connection between England and Ireland had hitherto been disastrous to both parties. Had the Pope intended by his gift of that island to punish all the royal dynasty for their sins, past and future, he could not have succeeded better; and had he desired to visit on the Green Isle the penalty for all her crimes, he could scarcely have devised a sorer punishment than the infliction of such rulers as England sent her for several hundred years. The conquerors and the conquered understood each other as little as Celt and Teuton commonly do: and what was still worse, they did not try to do so. The English notion of governing was first to kill off the Irish chieftains, and then to divide the land among a quantity of Norman adventurers whose capacity for "land-hunger" was something remarkable. When Earl Edmund of March assumed the government, it was only seventeen years since the passing of the Statute of Kilkenny, which forbade marriage between the English and the Irish, and commanded the use of the English language and customs on pain of death. Even Lionel, Duke of Clarence, who was considered one of the gentlest of men, had, as his first step on landing in Ireland, forbidden any Irishman to approach his camp. His son-in-law was a wiser man. There was Irish blood in his own veins—in small proportion to the English, it is true; still, he was the descendant of an Irish King, and the pedigree-loving Celts were not likely to forget it. He began by showing a strong hand upon the reins, and in six months had Ireland at his feet. Then he laid aside whip and spur, and permitted his natural character to take its course. The result was that he became exceedingly popular, as a ruler usually is in Celtic nations who ordinarily exhibits himself in an amiable light, and yet shows that he has power, and can use it when required. Earl Edmund shut himself up from no one. Any Irishman who pleased could have access to him at any time, and his native eloquence recommended him strongly to their easily touched feelings. But his beneficent reign did not last long, and perhaps his short tenure of power was quite as well for his popularity. Human nature, in all countries, is apt to become accustomed to kindness, and to take advantage of it. And doubtless the Earl's popularity was partly due to the fact that he succeeded rulers harsher and less attractive than himself.

One great disadvantage on the part of England was that while she realised to the full the inferior civilisation of the Irish, she failed to discover that they possessed a faith purer than her own. The true old and Catholic religion implanted by St. Patrick and others of his type had received far less corruption from Rome than the religion of England. But the English were much more concerned in improving the manners of the Irish nobles than in improving their own spirituality. That an Irish king wore no trousers, and that his attendant minstrel shared his plate and glass, struck them infinitely more than the condition of his morals. When once they had satisfied themselves that the Irish believed in the Triune God, and had heard of the existence of a Bishop at Rome who was the Pontiff of Western Christendom—points apparently of equal importance to them—they gave themselves no further trouble on the religious question. Political and social questions came nearer and pressed more heavily.

With the usual individuality of our race, they resented the use of a separate language, to which the Irish, as individual in their way, clung as for very life. If, instead of trying to suppress the venerable and beloved tongue, England had given Ireland an open Bible in it—if she had insisted on the study of Holy Writ, and had left the manners to take care of themselves under its influence, what a different future there might have been!

Are we still as blind as five hundred years ago, or shall we some day see that peace for Ireland, as for every other land and soul, must come through the teaching of the Spirit, and the blood of the Cross?