Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.

MEMOIRS OF HIS ADVENTURES AT HOME AND ABROAD AND PARTICULARLY IN
THE ISLAND OF CORSICA: BEGINNING WITH THE YEAR 1756.

WRITTEN BY HIS SON PROSPER PALEOLOGUS OTHERWISE CONSTANTINE AND
EDITED BY "Q" (A. T. QUILLER-COUCH).

"For knighthood is not in the feats of warre,
As for to fight in quarrel right or wrong,
But in a cause which truth can not defarre
He ought himself for to make sure and strong
Justice to keep mixt with mercy among:
And no quarrell a knight ought to take
But for a truth, or for a woman's sake."

TO THE READER

A hundred and fifty episodes, two sermons, and a number of moral
digressions, have been omitted from this story.

The late ingenious Mr. Fett (whose acquaintance you will make in the
following pages), having been commissioned by Mr. Dodsley, the
publisher, to write a conspectus of the Present State of the Arts in
Italy at two guineas the folio--a fair price for that class of work--
had delivered close upon two hundred folios before Mr. Dodsley
interposed, professing unbounded admiration of the work, its style,
and matter, but desiring to know when he might expect the end:
"For," said he, "I have other enterprises which will soon be
demanding attention, and, as a business-man, I like to make my
arrangements in good time." To this Mr. Fett replied, that he, for
his part, being well content with the rate of remuneration, did not
propose to end the work at all!--and, the agreement, having
unaccountably failed to stipulate for any such thing as a conclusion,
Mr. Dodsley had to compound for one at a crippling price.

So this story had, in Browning's phrase, "grown old along with me,"
but for the forethought of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., in limiting
its serial flow to twelve numbers of _The Cornhill Magazine_
As it is, I have added a few chapters; but a hundred and fifty
episodes remain unwritten, with the courtships of Mr. Priske, and the
funeral oration spoken by the Rev. Mr. Grylls over the cenotaph Of
Sir John Constantine in Constantine Parish Church. These omissions,
however, may be remedied if you will ask the publishers for another
edition.

Now, if it be objected against some of the adventures of Sir John
Constantine that they are extravagant, or against some of his notions
that they are fantastic, I answer that this book attempts to describe
a man and not one of these calculable little super men who, of late,
have been taking up so much more of your attention than they deserve.
Students who engage in psychical research, as it is called, often
confess themselves puzzled by the behaviour of ghosts, it appears to
them wayward and trivial. How much more likely are ghosts to be
puzzled by the actions of real men? And we are surely ghosts if we
keep nothing of the blood which sent our fathers like schoolboys to
the crusades.

Lastly, my friend, if you would know anything of the writer who has
so often addressed you under an initial, you may find as much of him
here as in any of his books. Here is interred part, at any rate, of
the soul of the Bachelor Q, in a book which, though it tell of
adventures, I would ask you not to disdain, though you be a boy no
longer. An acquaintance of mine near the Land's End had a
remarkably fine tree of apples--to be precise, of Cox's Orange
Pippins--and one night was robbed of the whole of them. But what,
think you, had the thief left behind him, at the foot of the tree?
Why, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.

ARTHUR T. QUILLER-COUCH.

THE HAVEN, FOWEY, October 1st, 1906.

CONTENTS

Chapter.

I. OF THE LINEAGE AND CONDITION OF SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.

II. I RIDE ON A PILGRIMAGE.

III. I ACQUIRE A KINGDOM.

IV. LONG VACATION.

V. THE SILENT MEN.

VI. HOW MY FATHER OUT OF NOTHING BUILT AN ARMY, AND IN FIVE
MINUTES PLANNED AN INVASION.

VII. THE COMPANY OF THE ROSE.

VIII. TRIBULATIONS OF A MAYOR.

IX. I ENLIST AN ARMY.

X. OF THE DISCOURSE HELD ON BOARD THE "GAUNTLET".

XI. WE FALL IN WITH A SALLEE ROVER.

XII. HOW WE LANDED ON THE ISLAND.

XIII. HOW, WITHOUT FIGHTING, OUR ARMY WASTED BY ENCHANTMENT.

XIV. HOW BY MEANS OF HER WINE I CAME TO CIRCE.

XV. I BECOME HOSTAGE TO PRINCESS CAMILLA.

XVI. THE FOREST HUT.

XVII. THE FIRST CHALLENGE.

XVIII. THE TENDER MERCIES OF PRINCE CAMILLO.

XIX. HOW MARC'ANTONIO NURESD ME AND GAVE ME COUNSEL.

XX. I LEARN OF LIBERTY, AND AM RESTORED TO IT.

XXI. OF MY FATHER'S ANABASIS; AND THE DIFFERENT TEMPERS OF AN
ENGLISH GENTLEMAN AND A WILD SHEEP OF CORSICA.

XXII. THE GREAT ADVENTURE.

XXIII. ORDEAL AND CHOOSING.

XXIV. THE WOOING OF PRINCESS CAMILLA.

XXV. MY WEDDING DAY.

XXVI. THE FLAME AND THE ALTAR.

XXVII. MY MISTRESS RE-ENLISTS ME.

XXVIII. GENOA.

XXIX. VENDETTA.

XXX. THE SUMMIT AND THE STARS.

POSTSCRIPT.

SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.

CHAPTER I.

OF THE LINEAGE AND CONDITION OF SIR JOHN CONSTANTINE.

"I have laboured to make a covenant with myself, that affection
may not press upon judgment: for I suppose there is no man,
that hath any apprehension of gentry or nobleness, but his
affection stands to a continuance of a noble name and house,
and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to uphold it: and
yet time hath his revolution, there must be a period and an end
of all temporal things, _finis rerum_, an end of names and
dignities and whatsoever is terrene. . . . For where is Bohun?
Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more
and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are intombed in the
urns and sepulchres of mortality."--_Lord Chief Justice Crewe_.

My father, Sir John Constantine of Constantine, in the county of
Cornwall, was a gentleman of ample but impoverished estates, who by
renouncing the world had come to be pretty generally reputed a
madman. This did not affect him one jot, since he held precisely the
same opinion of his neighbours--with whom, moreover, he continued on
excellent terms. He kept six saddle horses in a stable large enough
for a regiment of cavalry; a brace of setters and an infirm spaniel
in kennels which had sometime held twenty couples of hounds; and
himself and his household in a wing of his great mansion, locking off
the rest, with its portraits and tapestries, cases of books, and
stands of antique arms, to be a barrack for the mice. This household
consisted of his brother-in-law, Gervase (a bachelor of punctual
habits but a rambling head); a butler, Billy Priske; a cook, Mrs.
Nance, who also looked after the housekeeping; two serving-maids;
and, during his holidays, the present writer. My mother (an Arundell
of Trerice) had died within a year after giving me birth; and after a
childhood which lacked playmates, indeed, but was by no means
neglected or unhappy, my father took me to Winchester College, his
old school, to be improved in those classical studies which I had
hitherto followed desultorily under our vicar, Mr. Grylls, and there
entered me as a Commoner in the house of Dr. Burton, Head-master.
I had spent almost four years at Winchester at the date (Midsummer,
1756) when this story begins.

To return to my father. He was, as the world goes, a mass of
contrarieties. A thorough Englishman in the virtues for which
foreigners admire us, and in the extravagance at which they smile, he
had never even affected an interest in the politics over which
Englishmen grow red in the face; and this in his youth had commended
him to Walpole, who had taken him up and advanced him as well for his
abilities, address, and singularly fine presence as because his
estate then seemed adequate to maintain him in any preferment.
Again Walpole's policy abroad--which really treated warfare as the
evil it appears in other men's professions--condemned my father, a
born soldier, to seek his line in diplomacy; wherein he had no sooner
built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts
than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he
suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into
Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and practise fishing for trout.

The reason of it none knew, or how his estate had come to be
impoverished, as beyond doubt it was. Here again he showed himself
unlike the rest of men, in that he let the stress of poverty fall
first upon himself, next upon his household, last of all upon his
tenants and other dependants. After my mother's death he cut down
his own charges (the cellar only excepted) to the last penny, shut
himself off in a couple of rooms, slept in a camp bed, wore an old
velveteen coat in winter and in summer a fisherman's smock, ate
frugally, and would have drunk beer or even water had not his stomach
abhorred them both. Of wine he drank in moderation--that is to say,
for him, since his temperance would have sent nine men out of ten
under the table--and of the best. He had indeed a large and
obstinate dignity in his drinking. It betrayed, even as his carriage
betrayed beneath his old coat, a king in exile.

Yet while he pinched himself with these economies, he drew no
strings--or drew them tenderly--upon the expenses and charities of a
good landlord. The fences rotted around his own park and
pleasure-grounds, but his tenants' fences, walls, roofs stood in more
than moderate repair, nor (although my uncle Gervase groaned over the
accounts) would an abatement of rent be denied, the appeal having
been weighed and found to be reasonable. The rain--which falls alike
upon the just and the unjust--beat through his own roof, but never
through the labourer's thatch; and Mrs. Nance, the cook, who hated
beggars, might not without art and secrecy dismiss a single beggar
unfed. His religion he told to no man, but believed the practice of
worship to be good for all men, and regularly encouraged it by
attending church on Sundays and festivals. He and the vicar ruled
our parish together in amity, as fellow-Christians and rival anglers.

Now, all these apparent contrarieties in my father flowed in fact
from a very rare simplicity, and this simplicity again had its origin
in his lineage, which was something more than royal.

On the Cornish shore of the Tamar River, which divides Cornwall from
Devon, and a little above Saltash, stands the country church of
Landulph, so close by the water that the high tides wash by its
graveyard wall. Within the church you will find a mural tablet of
brass thus inscribed--

"Here lyeth the body of Theodoro Paleologvs of Pesaro in
Italye, descended from ye Imperyall lyne of ye last Christian
Emperors of Greece being the sonne of Camilio ye sonne of
Prosper the sonne of Theodoro the sonne of John ye sonne of
Thomas second brother to Constantine Paleologvs, the 8th of
that name and last of yt lyne yt raygned in Constantinople
vntill svbdewed by the Tvrks who married with Mary ye davghter
of William Balls of Hadlye in Svffolke gent & had issve 5
children Theodoro John Ferdinando Maria & Dorothy & dep'ted
this life at Clyfton ye 21th of Ianvary 1636"

Above these words the tablet bears an eagle engraved with two heads,
and its talons resting upon two gates of Rome and Constantinople,
with (for difference) a crescent between the gates, and over all an
imperial crown. In truth this exile buried by Tamar drew his blood
direct from the loins of the great Byzantine emperors, through that
Thomas of whom Mahomet II. said, "I have found many slaves in
Peloponnesus, but this man only:" and from Theodore, through his
second son John, came the Constantines of Constantine--albeit with a
bar sinister, of which my father made small account. I believe he
held privately that a Constantine, _de stirpe imperatorum_, had no
call to concern himself with petty ceremonies of this or that of the
Church's offshoots to legitimize his blood. At any rate no bar
sinister appeared on the imperial escutcheon repeated, with
quarterings of Arundel, Mohun, Grenville, Nevile, Archdeckne,
Courtney, and, again, Arundel, on the wainscots and in the windows of
Constantine, usually with the legend _Dabit Devs His Qvoqve Finem_,
but twice or thrice with a hopefuller one, _Generis revocemvs
honores_.

Knowing him to be thus descended, you could recognize in all my
father said or did a large simplicity as of the earlier gods, and a
dignity proper to a king as to a beggar, but to no third and mean
state. A child might beard him, but no man might venture a liberty
with him or abide the rare explosions of his anger. You might even,
upon long acquaintance, take him for a great, though mad, Englishman,
and trust him as an Englishman to the end; but the soil of his nature
was that which grows the vine--volcanic, breathing through its pores
a hidden heat to answer the sun's. Whether or no there be in man a
faith to remove mountains, there is in him (and it may come to the
same thing) a fire to split them, and anon to clothe the bare rock
with tendrils and soft-scented blooms.

In person my father stood six feet five inches tall, and his
shoulders filled a doorway. His head was large and shapely, and he
carried it with a very noble poise; his face a fine oval, broad
across the brow and ending in a chin at once delicate and masterful;
his nose slightly aquiline; his hair--and he wore his own, tied with
a ribbon--of a shining white. His cheeks were hollow and would have
been cadaverous but for their hue, a sanguine brown, well tanned by
out-of-door living. His eyes, of an iron-grey colour, were fierce or
gentle as you took him, but as a rule extraordinarily gentle.
He would walk you thirty miles any day without fatigue, and shoot you
a woodcock against any man; but as an angler my uncle Gervase beat
him.

He spoke Italian as readily as English; French and the modern Greek
with a little more difficulty; and could read in Greek, Latin, and
Spanish. His books were the "Meditations" of the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, and Dante's "Divine Comedy," with the "Aeneis," Ariosto,
and some old Spanish romances next in order. I do not think he cared
greatly for any English writers but Donne and Izaak Walton, of whose
"Angler" and "Life of Sir Henry Wotton" he was inordinately fond.
In particular he admired the character of this Sir Henry Wotton,
singling him out among "the famous nations of the dead" (as Sir
Thomas Browne calls them) for a kind of posthumous friendship--nay,
almost a passion of memory. To be sure, though with more than a
hundred years between them, both had been bred at Winchester, and
both had known courts and embassies and retired from them upon
private life. . . . But who can explain friendship, even after all
the essays written upon it? Certainly to be friends with a dead man
was to my father a feat neither impossible nor absurd.

Yet he possessed two dear living friends at least in my Uncle Gervase
and Mr. Grylls, and had even dedicated a temple to their friendship.
It stood about half a mile away from the house, at the foot of the
old deer-park: a small Ionic summer-house set on a turfed slope
facing down a dell upon the Helford River. A spring of water, very
cold and pure, rose bubbling a few paces from the porch and tumbled
down the dell with a pretty chatter. Tradition said that it had once
been visited and blessed by St. Swithun, for which cause my father
called his summer-house by the saint's name, and annually on his
festival (which falls on the 15th of July) caused wine and dessert to
be carried out thither, where the three drank to their common pastime
and discoursed of it in the cool of the evening within earshot of the
lapsing water. On many other evenings they met to smoke their pipes
here, my father and Mr. Grylls playing at chequers sometimes, while
my uncle wrapped and bent, till the light failed him, new trout flies
for the next day's sport; but to keep St. Swithun's feast they never
omitted, which my father commemorated with a tablet set against the
back wall and bearing these lines--

"Peace to this house within this little wood,
Named of St. Swithun and his brotherhood
That here would meet and punctual on his day
Their heads and hands and hearts together lay.
Nor may no years the mem'ries three untwine
Of Grylls W.G.
And Arundell G.A.
And Constantine J.C. Anno 1752
Flvmina amem silvasqve inglorivs."

Of these two friends of my father I shall speak in their proper
place, but have given up this first chapter to him alone. My readers
maybe will grumble that it omits to tell what they would first choose
to learn: the reason why he had exchanged fame and the world for a
Cornish exile. But as yet he only--and perhaps my uncle Gervase, who
kept the accounts--held the key to that secret.

CHAPTER II.

I RIDE ON A PILGRIMAGE.

"_Heus Rogere! fer caballos; Eja, nunc eamus!"
Domum.

At Winchester, which we boys (though we fared hardly) never doubted
to be the first school in the world, as it was the most ancient in
England, we had a song we called _Domum_: and because our common
pride in her--as the best pride will--belittled itself in speech, I
trust that our song honoured Saint Mary of Winton the more in that it
celebrated only the joys of leaving her.

The tale went, it had been composed (in Latin, too) by a boy detained
at school for a punishment during the summer holidays. Another fable
improved on this by chaining him to a tree. A third imprisoned him
in cloisters whence, through the arcades and from the ossuaries of
dead fellows and scholars, he poured out his soul to the swallows
haunting the green garth--

"Jam repetit domum
Daulias advena,
Nosque domum repetamus."

Whatever its origin, our custom was to sing it as the holidays--
especially the summer holidays--drew near, and to repeat it as they
drew nearer, until every voice was hoarse. As I remember, we kept up
this custom with no decrease of fervour through the heats of June
1756, though they were such that our _hostiarius_ Dr. Warton, then a
new broom, swept us out of school and for a fortnight heard our books
(as the old practice had been) in cloisters, where we sat upon cool
stone and in the cool airs, and between our tasks watched the
swallows at play. Nevertheless we panted, until evening released us
to wander forth along the water-meadows by Itchen and bathe, and,
having bathed, to lie naked amid the mints and grasses for a while
before returning in the twilight.

This bathing went on, not in one or two great crowds, but in groups,
and often in pairs only, scattered along the river-bank almost all
the way to Hills; it being our custom again at Winchester (and I
believe it still continues) to _socius_ or walk with one companion;
and only at one or two favoured pools would several of these couples
meet together for the sport. On the evening of which I am to tell,
my companion was a boy named Fiennes, of about my own age, and we
bathed alone, though not far away to right and left the bank teemed
with outcries and laughter and naked boys running all silvery as
their voices in the dusk.

With all this uproar the trout of Itchen, as you may suppose, had
gone into hiding; but doubtless some fine fellows lay snug under the
stones, and--the stream running shallow after the heats--as we
stretched ourselves on the grass Fiennes challenged me to tickle for
one; it may be because he had heard me boast of my angling feats at
home. There seemed a likely pool under the farther bank; convenient,
except that to take up the best position beside it I must get the
level sun full in my face. I crept across, however, Fiennes keeping
silence, laid myself flat on my belly, and peered down into the pool,
shading my eyes with one hand. For a long while I saw no fish, until
the sun-rays, striking aslant, touched the edge of a golden fin very
prettily bestowed in a hole of the bank and well within an overlap of
green weed. Now and again the fin quivered, but for the most part my
gentleman lay quiet as a stone, head to stream, and waited for relief
from these noisy Wykehamists. Experience, perhaps, had taught him to
despise them; at any rate, when gently--very gently--I lowered my
hand and began to tickle, he showed neither alarm nor resentment.

"Is it a trout?" demanded Fiennes, in an excited whisper from the
farther shore. But of course I made no answer, and presently I
supposed that he must have crept off to his clothes, for some way up
the stream I heard the Second Master's voice warning the bathers to
dress and return, and with his usual formula, _Ite domum saturae,
venit Hesperus, ite capelloe! Being short-sighted, he missed to spy
me, and I felt, rather than saw or heard, him pass on; for with one
hand I yet shaded my eyes while with the other I tickled.

Yet another two minutes went by, and then with a jerk I had my trout,
my thumb and forefinger deep under his gills; brought down my other
clutch upon him and, lifting, flung him back over me among the meadow
grass, my posture being such that I could neither hold him struggling
nor recover my own balance save by rolling sideways over on my
shoulder-pin; which I did, and, running to him where he gleamed and
doubled, flipping the grasses, caught him in both hands and held him
aloft.

But other voices than Fiennes' answered my shout over the river--
voices that I knew, though they belonged not to this hour nor to this
place; and blinking against the sun, now sinning level across
Lavender Meads, I was aware of two tall figures standing dark against
it, and of a third and shorter one between whose legs it poured in
gold as through a natural arch. Sure no second man in England wore
Billy Priske's legs!

Then, and while I stood amazed, my father's voice and my Uncle
Gervase's called to me together: and gulping down all wonder,
possessed with love only and a wild joy--but yet grasping my fish--
I splashed across the shallows and up the bank, and let my father
take me naked to his heart.

"So, lad," said he, after a moment, thrusting me a little back by the
shoulders (while I could only sob), and holding me so that the sun
fell full on me, "Dost truly love me so much?"

"Clivver boy, clivver boy!" said the voice of Billy Priske.
"Lord, now, what things they do teach here beside the Latin!"

The rogue said it, as I knew, to turn my father's suspicion, having
himself taught me the poacher's trick. But my uncle Gervase, whose
mind moved as slowly as it was easily diverted, answered with
gravity--

"It is hard knowing what may or may not be useful in after life,
seeing that God in His wisdom hides what that life is to be."

"Very true," agreed my father, with a twinkle, and took snuff.

"But--but what brings you here?" cried I, with a catch of the breath,
ignoring all this.

"Nevertheless, such comely lads as they be," my uncle continued,
"God will doubtless bring them to good. Comelier lads, brother, I
never saw, nor, I think, the sun never shined on; yet there was one,
at the bowls yonder, was swearing so it grieved me to the heart."

"Put on your clothes, boy," said my father, answering me. "We have
ridden far, but we bring no ill news; and to-morrow--I have the
Head-master's leave for it--you ride on with us to London."

"To London!" My heart gave another great leap, as every boy's must
on hearing that he is to see London for the first time. But here we
all turned at a cry from Billy Priske, between whose planted ankles
Master Fiennes had mischievously crept and was measuring the span
between with extended thumb and little finger. My father stooped,
haled him to his feet by the collar, and demanded what he did.

"Why, sir, he's a Colossus!" quoted that nimble youth;

"'and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peer about--'"

"And will find yourself a dishonourable grave," my father capped him.
"What's your name, boy?"

"Fiennes, sir; Nathaniel Fiennes." The lad saluted.

My father lifted his hat in answer. "Founder's kin?"

"I am here on that condition, sir."

"Then you are kinsman, as well as namesake, of him who saved our
Wykeham's tomb in the Parliament troubles. I felicitate you, sir,
and retract my words, for by that action of your kinsman's shall the
graves of all his race and name be honoured."

Young Fiennes bowed. "Compliments fly, sir, when gentlemen meet.
But"--and he glanced over his shoulder and rubbed the small of his
back expressively, "as a Wykehamist, you will not have me late at
names-calling."

"Go, boy, and answer to yours; they can call no better one."
My father dipped a hand in his pocket. "I may not invite you to
breakfast with us to-morrow, for we start early; and you will excuse
me if I sin against custom. . . . It was esteemed a laudable practice
in my time." A gold coin passed.

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