Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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"A pity but what you inherited some of it, then," said Nat, crossly.

"Tell you what, Nat"--I slewed about in my chair--"Come you down to
Cornwall and we'll stick each a rose in our hats and help this Master
Engenio, whoever he is. I've a curiosity to discover him: and if he
be my father--he has not marked the passage, by the way--we'll have
rare fun in smoking him and tracking him unbeknown to the
_rendezvous_. Come, lad; and if I know the Falmouth mob, you shall
have a pretty little turn-up well worth the journey."

But Nat, still staring out of window, shook his head. He was in one
of his perverse moods--and they had been growing frequent of late--
in which nothing I could say or do seemed to content him; and for
this I chiefly accused the cordwainer's daughter, who in fact was a
decent merry girl, fond of strawberries, with no more notion of
falling in love with Nat than of running off with her father's
apprentice. Whatever the cause of it, a cloud had been creeping over
our friendship of late. He sought companions--some of them serious
men--with whom I could not be easy. We kept up the pretence, but
talked no longer with entirely open hearts. Yet I loved him; and now
in a sudden urgent desire to carry him off to Cornwall with me and
clear up all misunderstandings, I caught his arm and haled him down
to our college garden, which lies close within the city wall; and
there, pacing the broken military terrace, plied him with a dozen
reasons why he should come. Still he shook his head to all of them;
and presently, hearing four o'clock strike, pulled up in his walk and
announced that he must be going--he had an engagement.

"And where?" I asked.

He confessed that it was to visit the poor prisoners shut up for debt
in Bocardo.

I pulled a wry mouth, remembering the dismal crew in the Fleet
Prison. But though, the confession being forced from him, he ended
wistfully and as if upon a question, I did not offer to come.
It seemed a mighty dull way to finish a summer's afternoon.
Moreover I was nettled. So I let him go and watched him through the
gate, thinking bitterly that our friendship was sick and drooping by
no fault of mine.

The truth was--or so I tried to excuse him--that beside his plaguey
trick of falling in and out of love he had an overhanging quarrel
with his father, a worthy man, tyrannous when crossed, who meant him
for the law. Nat abhorred the law, and, foreseeing that the tussel
must come, vexed his honest conscience with the thought that while
delaying to declare war he was eating his father's bread.
This thought, working upon the ferment of youth, kept him like a colt
in a fretful lather. He scribbled verses, but never finished so much
as a sonnet; he flung himself into religion, but chiefly, I thought,
to challenge and irritate his undevout friends; and he would drop any
occupation to rail at me and what he was pleased to call my phlegm.

He had some reason too, though at the time I could not discover it.
Now, looking back, I can see into what a stagnant calm I had run.
My boyhood should have been over; in body I had shot up to a great
awkward height; but for the while the man within me drowsed and hung
fire. I lived in the passing day and was content with it.
Nat's gusts of passion amused me, and why a man should want to write
verses or fall in love was a mystery at which I arrived no nearer
than to laugh. For this (strange as it may sound) I believe the
visit to London was partly to blame. Nothing had come of it, except
that the unhappy King Theodore had gained his release and improved
upon it by dying, a few weeks later, in wretched lodgings in Soho;
where, at my father's expense, the church of St. Anne's now bore a
mural tablet to his memory with an epitaph obligingly contributed by
the Hon. Horace Walpole, since Earl of Orford.

Near this place is interred
THEODORE KING OF CORSICA
who died in this parish
Dec. 11, 1756
immediately after leaving
The King's Bench Prison by
the benefit of the Act of Insolvency
in consequence of which
he registered his kingdom of Corsica
for the use of his creditors.

The grave, great teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley slaves and kings;
But Theodore this moral learned ere dead:
Fate poured his lesson on his living head,
Bestow'd a kingdom, and denied him bread.

My father, who copied this out for me, had announced in few words
poor Theodore's fate, but without particular allusion to our
adventure, which, as he made no movement to follow it up, or none
that he confided, I came in time to regard humorously as an escapade
of his, a holiday frolic, a piece of midsummer madness. The serious
part was that he had undoubtedly paid away large sums of money, and
for two years my Uncle Gervase had worn a distracted air which I set
down to the family accounts. By degrees I came to conclude, with the
rest of the world, that my father's brain was more than a little
cracked, and sounded my uncle privately about this--delicately as I
thought; but he met me with a fierce unexpected heat. "Your father,"
said he, "is the best man in the world, and I bid you wait to
understand him better, taking my word that he has great designs for
you." Sure enough, too, my father seemed to hint at this in the
tenor of his conversation with me, which was ever of high politics
and the government of states, or on some point which could be
stretched to bear on these; but of any immediate design he forbore--
as it seemed, carefully--to speak. Thus I found myself at pause and
let my youth wait upon his decision.

Yet I had sense enough to feel less than satisfied with myself,
albeit sorer with Nat as I watched the dear lad go from me across
the turf and out at the garden gate. Nor will I swear that my eyes
did not smart a little. I was but a boy, and had set my heart on our
travelling down to Cornwall together.

To Cornwall I rode down alone, a week later, and fell to work to idle
my vacation away; fishing a little, but oftener sailing my boat;
sometimes alone, sometimes with Billy Priske for company.
Billy--whose duties as butler were what he called a _sine qua non_,
pronounced as "shiny Canaan" and meaning a sinecure--had spent some
part of term time in netting me a trammel, of which he was
inordinately proud, and with this we amused ourselves, sailing or
rowing down to the river's mouth every evening at nightfall to set
it, and, again, soon after daybreak, to haul it, and usually
returning with good store of fish for breakfast--soles, dories,
plaice, and the red mullet for which Helford is famous above all
streams.

Now, during these lazy weeks I had not forgotten Eugenio's
advertisement, which, on returning to my rooms that evening after
Nat's rebuff, I had clipped from the newspaper and since kept in my
pocket. For the fun of it, and to find out who this Eugenio might
be--I had given over suspecting my father--my mind was made up to
ride over to Falmouth on the 16th of July; but whether with or
without a rose in my hat I had not determined. Therefore on the
morning of the 15th, when Billy, after hauling the trammel, began to
lay our plans for the morrow, I cut him short, telling him that
to-morrow I should not fish.

"What's matter with 'ee to-all?" he asked, smashing a spider-crab and
picking it out piecemeal from the net. "Pretty fair catch to-day,
id'n-a? spite of all the weed; an' no harm done by these varmints
that a man can't put to rights afore evenin'."

I took the paddles without answering and pulled towards the river's
mouth, while he sat and smoked his pipe over the business of clearing
the net of weed. Around his feet on the bottom boards lay our
morning's catch--half a dozen soles and twice the number of plaice, a
brace of edible crabs, six or seven red mullet, besides a number of
gurnard and wrass worth no man's eating, an ugly-looking monkfish and
a bream of wonderful rainbow hues. A fog lay over the sea, so dense
that in places we could see but a few yards; but over it the tops of
the tall cliffs stood out clear, and the sun was mounting. A faint
breeze blew from the southward. All promised a hot still day.

The tide was making, too, and with wind and tide to help I pulled
over the river bar and towards the creek where daily, after hauling
the trammel, I bathed from the boat; a delectable corner in the eye
of the morning sunshine, paved fathoms deep with round, white
pebbles, one of which, from the gunwale, I selected to dive for.

The sun broke through the sea-fog around us while I stripped; it
shone, as I balanced myself for the plunge, on the broad wings of a
heron flapping out from the wood's blue shadow; it shone on the
scales of the fish struggling and gasping under the thwarts.
Divine the river was, divine the morning, divine the moment--the last
of my boyhood.

Souse I plunged and deep, with wide-open eyes, chose out and grasped
my pebble, and rose to the surface holding it high as though it had
been a gem. The sound of the splash was in my ears and the echo of
my own laugh, but with it there mingled a cry from Billy Priske, and
shaking the water out of my eyes I saw him erect in the stern-sheets
and astare at a vision parting the fog--the vision of a tall
fore-and-aft sail, golden-grey against the sunlight, and above the
sail a foot or two of a stout pole-mast, and above the mast a gilded
truck and weather-vane with a tail of scarlet bunting. So closely
the fog hung about her that for a second I took her to be a cutter;
and then a second sail crept through the curtain, and I recognized
her for the _Gauntlet_ ketch, Port of Falmouth, Captain Jo Pomery,
returned from six months' foreign. I announced her to Billy with a
shout.

"As if a man couldn' tell that!" answered Billy, removing his cap and
rubbing the back of his head. "What brings her in here, that's what
I'm askin'."

"Belike," said I, scrambling over the gunwale, "the man has lost his
bearings in this fog, and mistakes Helford for Falmouth entrance."

"Lost his bearin's! Jo Pomery lost his bearin's!" Billy regarded me
between pity and reproach. "And him sailing her in from Blackhead
close round the Manacles, in half a capful o' wind an' the tides
lookin' fifty ways for Sunday! That's what he've a-done, for the
weather lifted while we was hauling trammel--anyways east of south a
man could see clear for three mile and more, an' not a vessel in
sight there. There's maybe three men in the world besides Jo Pomery
could ha' done it--the Lord knows how, unless 'tis by sense o' smell.
And he've a-lost his bearin's, says you!"

"Well then," I ventured, "perhaps he has a fancy to land part of his
cargo duty-free."

"That's likelier," Billy assented. "I don't say 'tis the truth, mind
you: for if 'tis truth, why should the man choose to fetch land by
daylight? Fog? A man like Jo Pomery isn' one to mistake a little
pride-o'-the-mornin' for proper thick weather--the more by token it's
been liftin' this hour and more. But 'tis a likelier guess anyway,
the _Gauntlet_ being from foreign. 'Lost his bearin's,' says you,
and come, as you might say, slap through the Manacles; an' by
accident, as you might say! Luck has a broad back, my son, but be
careful how you dance 'pon it."

"Where does she come from?" I asked.

"Mediterranean; that's all I know. Four months and more she must ha'
took on this trip. Iss; sailed out o' Falmouth back-along in the
tail-end o' February, and her cargo muskets and other combustibles."

"Muskets?"

"Muskets; and you may leave askin' me who wants muskets out there,
for in the first place I don't know, an' a still tongue makes a wise
head."

I had slipped on shirt and breeches. "We'll give him a hail,
anyway," said I, "and if there's sport on hand he may happen to let
us join it."

The ketch by this time was pushing her nose past the spit of rock
hiding our creek from seaward. As she came by with both large sails
boomed out to starboard and sheets alternately sagging loose and
tautening with a jerk, I caught sight of two of her crew in the bows,
the one looking on while the other very deliberately unlashed the
anchor, and aft by the wheel a third man, whom I made out to be
Captain Pomery himself.

"_Gauntlet_ ahoy!" I shouted, standing on the thwart and making a
trumpet of my hands.

Captain Pomery turned, cast a glance towards us over his left
shoulder and lifted a hand. A moment later he called an order
forward, and the two men left the anchor and ran to haul in sheets.
Here was a plain invitation to pull alongside. I seized a paddle,
and was working the boat's nose round, to pursue, when another figure
showed above the _Gauntlet's_ bulwarks: a tall figure in an
orange-russet garment like a dressing-gown; a monk, to all
appearance, for the sun played on his tonsured scalp as he leaned
forward and watched our approach.

CHAPTER V.

THE SILENT MEN.

"Seamen, seamen, whence come ye?
_Pardonnez moy, je vous en prie_."
_Old Song_.

A monk he was too. A second and third look over my shoulder left me
no doubt of it. He gravely handed us a rope as we overtook the ketch
and ran alongside, and as gravely bowed when I leapt upon deck; but
he gave us no other welcome.

His russet gown reached almost to his feet, which were bare; and he
stood amid the strangest litter of a deck-cargo, consisting mainly--
or so at first glance it seemed to me--of pot-plants and rude
agricultural implements: spades, flails, forks, mattocks, picks,
hoes, dibbles, rakes, lashed in bundles; sieves, buckets, kegs, bins,
milk-pails, seed-hods, troughs, mangers, a wired dovecote, and a
score of hen-coops filled with poultry. Forward of the mainmast
stood a cart with shafts, upright and lashed to the mast, that the
headsails might work clear. The space between the masts was occupied
by enormous open hatchways through which came the lowing of oxen, and
through these, peering down into the hold, I saw the backs of cattle
and horses moving in its gloom, and the bodies of men stretched in
the straw at their feet.

So much of the _Gauntlet's_ hugger-mugger I managed to discern before
Captain Pomery left the helm and hurried forward to give us welcome
on board.

"Mornin', Squire Prosper! Mornin', Billy! You know _me_, sir--Cap'n
Jo Pomery--which is short for Job, and 'tis the luckiest chance, sir,
you hailed me, for you'm nearabouts the first man I wanted to see.
Faith, now, and I wonder how your father (God bless him) will take
it?"

"Why, what's the matter?" asked I, with a glance at the monk, who had
drawn back a pace and stood, still silent, fingering his rosary.

"The matter? Good Lord! isn't _this_ matter enough?" Captain Jo waved
an arm to include all the deck-cargo. "See them pot-plants, there,
and what they'm teeled [1] in?"

"Drinking-troughs?" said I. "Or . . . is it coffins?"

"Coffins it is. I'd feel easier in mind if you could tell me what
your father (God bless him) will say to it."

"But what has all this to do with my father?" I demanded, and,
seeking Billy's eyes, found them as frankly full of amaze as my own.

"Not but what," continued Captain Jo, "they've behaved well, though
dog-sick to a man from the time we left port. Look at 'em!"--he
caught me by the arm and, drawing me to the hatchway, pointed down to
the hold. "A round score and eight, and all well paid for as
passengers; but for the return journey I won't answer. It depends on
your father, and that"--with a jerk of his thumb towards the tall
monk--"I stippilated when I shipped 'em. 'Never you mind,' was the
answer I got; 'take 'em to England to Sir John Constantine.'
And here they be!"

"But who on earth are they?" I cried, staring down into the gloom,
where presently I made out that the men stretched in the straw at the
horses' feet were monks all, and habited like the monk on the deck
behind me. To him next I turned, to find his eyes, which were dark
and quick, searching me curiously; and as I turned he made a step
forward, put out a hand as if to touch me on the shirt-sleeve, and
anon drew it back, yet still continued to regard me.

"You are a son, signor, of Sir John Constantine?" he asked, in soft
Italian.

"I am his only son, sir," I answered him in the same language.

"Ah! You speak my tongue?" A gleam of joy passed over his grave
features. "And you are his son? So! I should have guessed it at
once, for you bear great likeness to him."

"You know my father, sir?"

"Years ago." His hands, which he used expressively, seemed to grope
in a far past. "I come to him also from one who knew him years ago."

"Upon what business, sir!--if I am allowed to ask."

"I bring a message."

"You bring a tolerably full one, then," said I, glancing first at the
disorder on deck and from that down to the recumbent figures in the
hold.

"I speak for them," he went on, having followed the glance.
"It is most necessary that they keep silence; but I speak for all."

"Then, sir, as it seems to me, you have much to say."

"No," he answered slowly; "very little, I think; very little, as you
will see."

Here Captain Jo interrupted us. He had stepped back to steady the
wheel, but I fancy that the word _silenzio_ must have reached him,
and that, small Italian though he knew, with this particular word the
voyage had made him bitterly acquainted.

"Dumb!" he shouted. "Dumb as gutted haddocks!"

"Dumb!" I echoed, while the two seamen forward heard and laughed.

"It is their vow," said the monk, gravely, and seemed on the point to
say more.

But at this moment Captain Pomery sang out "Gybe-O!" At the warning
we ducked our heads together as the boom swung over and the
_Gauntlet_, heeling gently for a moment, rounded the river-bend in
view of the great house of Constantine, set high and gazing over the
folded woods. A house more magnificently placed, with forest, park,
and great stone terraces rising in successive tiers from the water's
edge, I do not believe our England in those days could show; and it
deserved its site, being amply classical in design, with a facade
that, discarding mere ornament, expressed its proportion and symmetry
in bold straight lines, prolonged by the terraces on which tall rows
of pointed yews stood sentinel. Right English though it was, it bore
(as my father used to say of our best English poetry) the stamp of
great Italian descent, and I saw the monk give a start as he lifted
his eyes to it.

"We have not these river-creeks in Italy," said he, "nor these woods,
nor these green lawns; and yet, if those trees, aloft there, were but
cypresses--" He broke off. "Our voyage has a good ending," he
added, half to himself.

The _Gauntlet_ being in ballast, and the tide high, Captain Pomery
found plenty of Water in the winding channel, every curve of which he
knew to a hair, and steered for at its due moment, winking cheerfully
at Billy and me, who stood ready to correct his pilotage. He had
taken in his mainsail, and carried steerage way with mizzen and jib
only; and thus, for close upon a mile, we rode up on the tide,
scaring the herons and curlews before us, until drawing within sight
of a grass-grown quay he let run down his remaining canvas and laid
the ketch alongside, so gently that one of the seamen, who had cast a
stout fender overside, stepped ashore, and with a slow pull on her
main rigging checked and brought her to a standstill.

"_Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum_," said the monk at my shoulder quietly;
and, as I stared at him, "Ah, to be sure, this is your Tarentum, is
it not? Yet the words came to me for the sound's sake only and their
so gentle close. Our voyage has even such an ending."

"I had best run on," I suggested, "and warn my father of your
coming."

"It is not necessary."

"Nevertheless," I urged, "they can be preparing breakfast for you,
up at the house, while you and your friends are making ready to come
ashore."

"We have broken our fast," he answered; "and we are quite ready, if
you will be so good as to guide us."

He stepped to the hatchways and called down, announcing simply that
the voyage was ended: and in the dusk there I saw monk after monk
upheave himself from the straw and come clambering up the ladder;
tall monks and short, old monks and young and middle-aged, lean monks
and thickset--but the most of them cadaverous, and all of them yellow
with sea-sickness; twenty-eight monks, all barefoot, all tolerably
dirty, and all blinking in the fresh sunshine. When they were
gathered, at a sign from one of them--by dress not distinguishable
from his fellows--all knelt and gave silent thanks for the voyage
accomplished.

I could see that Billy Priske was frightened: for, arising, they
rolled their eyes about them like wild animals turned loose in an
unfamiliar country, and the whites of their eyes were yellow (so to
speak) with seafaring, and their pupils glassy with fever and from
the sea's glare. But the monk their spokesman touched my arm and
motioned me to lead; and, when I obeyed, one by one the whole troop
fell into line and followed at his heels.

Thus we went--I leading, with him and the rest in single file after
me--up by the footpath through the woods, and forth into sunshine
again upon the green dewy bracken of the deer-park. Here my
companion spoke for the first time since disembarking.

"Your father, sir," said he, looking about him and seeming to sniff
the morning air, "must be a very rich signor."

"On the contrary," I answered, "I have some reason to believe him a
poor man."

He stared down for a moment at his bare feet, and the skirts of his
gown wet to the knees with the grasses.

"Ah? Well, it will make no difference," he said; and we resumed our
way.

As we climbed the last slope under the terraces of the house, I
caught sight of my father leaning by a balustrade high above us, at
the head of a double flight of broad stone steps, and splicing the
top joint of a trout-rod he had broken the day before. He must have
caught sight of us almost at the moment when we emerged from the
woods.

He showed no surprise at all. Only as I led my guests up the steps
he set down his work and, raising a hand, bent to them in a very
courteous welcome.

"Good morning, lad! And good morning to those you bring,
whencesoever they come."

"They come, sir," I answered "in Jo Pomery's ketch _Gauntlet_, I
believe from Italy; and with a message for you."

"My father turned his gaze from me to the spokesman at my elbow.
His eyebrows lifted with surprise and sudden pleasure.

"Hey?" he exclaimed. "Is it my old friend--"

But the other, before his name could be uttered, lifted a hand.

"My name is the Brother Basilio now, Sir John: no other am I
permitted to remember. The peace of God be with you, and upon your
house!"

"And with you, Brother Basilio, since you will have it so: and with
all your company! You bear a message for me? But first you must
break your fast." He turned to lead the way to the house.

"We have eaten already, Sir John. As soon as your leisure serves, we
would deliver our message."

My father called to Billy Priske--who hung in the rear of the monks--
bidding him fetch my uncle Gervase in from the stables to the State
Room, and so, without another word, motioned to his visitors to
follow. To this day I can hear the shuffle of their bare feet on the
steps and slabs of the terrace as they hurried after him to keep up
with his long strides.

In the great entrance-hall he paused to lift a bunch of rusty keys
off their hook, and, choosing the largest, unlocked the door of the
State Room. The lock had been kept well oiled, for Billy Priske
entered it twice daily; in the morning, to open a window or two, and
at sunset, to close them. But it is a fact that I had not crossed
its threshold a score of times in my life, though I ran by it, maybe,
as many times a day; nor (as I believe) had my father entered it for
years. Yet it was the noblest room in the house, in length
seventy-five feet, panelled high in dark oak and cedar and adorned
around each panel with carvings of Grinling Gibbons--festoons and
crowns and cherub-faces and intricate baskets of flowers. Each panel
held a portrait, and over every panel, in faded gilt against the
morning sun, shone an imperial crown. The windows were draped with
hangings of rotten velvet. At the far end on a dais stood a porphyry
table, and behind it, facing down the room, a single chair, or
throne, also of porphyry and rudely carved. For the rest the room
held nothing but dust--dust so thick that our visitors' naked feet
left imprints upon it as they huddled after their leader to the dais,
where my father took his seat, after beckoning me forward to stand on
his right.

But of all bewildered faces there was never a blanker, I believe,
since the world began than my uncle Gervase's; who now appeared in
the doorway, a bucket in his hand, straight from the stables where he
had been giving my father's roan horse a drench. Billy's summons
must have hurried him, for he had not even waited to turn down his
shirt-sleeves: but as plainly it had given him no sort of notion why
he was wanted and in the State Room. I guessed indeed that on his
way he had caught up the bucket supposing that the house was afire.
At sight of the monks he set it down slowly, gently, staring at them
the while, and seemed in act of inverting it to sit upon, when my
father addressed him from the dais over the shaven heads of the
audience.

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