Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 248
“Why, so it is,” Edward Colman said; and he smiled, for he saw that these two old men were minded to bribe him to be gone; “so it is, for old men that come of King Henry VIII’s day. But I am a young man, and would be frisking it.”
The hill told upon the breath of these two, so he let them be in peace till he came to the door of his house. The key, which was small for those days, was hidden in a nook beneath the paving-stones before his door.
“See you,” he said, “how we of the modern fashion contrive! I warrant you have each two lazy and useless servitors sleeping in your doorways to let you come in. I do send my old nurse to bed, so, with her and a cookmaid and an apprentice, I make mine house seem better than yours, who have ten knaves and wenches each. And my house is bigger than either of yours.”
Nevertheless in the dark entry-hall a pale figure greeted them with a —
“God be thanked, Master Edward;” his old nurse having crept down again and again from her room to see if he were come home, though it was against his most stern commands.
“Get you gone ere I kindle a light,” he said. “I’m come off very well, as you see.”
“Oh, not now,” the aged voice pleaded; “tell me of your adventures;” and when she was but a fading whiteness on the stairs he cried after her —
“Why, old trembler I Dress you, that your teeth may not chatter when I speak. It is too cold for old ones to be out of bed. But I will tell you —
“Aye, and pray for me,” he cried after. “I am bent upon a long journey.”
“She remains a concealed Papist,” he said, whilst he was getting a light for his taper from the wood ashes that still held fire in the grate.
In the upper house, that jutted over the street, he had a great room, where his fathers had done business with pilgrims, taking of them their passage moneys to Compostella, or Rome, or to the Holy Land, according as they were pilgrims, or Romers, or palmers. It backed out upon the town wall, over the harbour, and it fronted the street that runs at the back of the church. His fathers had taken bands of pilgrims from Guildford or Horsham, or as far away as Cirencester, sending with them trusty guides, selling them poultry, and wine, and sweet cakes for the voyage, and sending them all together in little fleets of their ships when the Narrow Seas were perilous on account of pirates. And his nurse could tell that his grandmother had once seen seven hundred pilgrims bargaining in that room upon one day. Now it seldom saw more than five, or at most half-a-score, of Holland or French merchants, so that she had good reason to bewail the sweeping away of the old Faith in that land, since the folk who had gone on pilgrimages had brought great profit to the house of Colman. And now there were no more pilgrims in all England. And even, since the loss of Calais, no more royal princes set sail from Rye for France — though the walls of this great chamber were covered with the armorial bearings of all the princes and queens since Edward I’s day, that, down to Queen Jane Seymour, had set sail for France in good ships hired from the Colmans in the port of Rye. It had been a room to see much grand and lordly company, with always a Colman as rich and as lordly as any; it had seen the Lord High Admirals sitting there, to ask of Colmans their ships to do service in war time. And their ships had fought in many great sea-battles, and Colmans, with the other Barons of the Ports, had done great feats of arms. That was why they were called Barons — for, from the battle of the Spaniards-on-the-Sea, which is called the Victory of Winchelsea, to the days of the Armada itself — in three hundred years — there had been no sea-battle in which the ships of the Five Ports, and those of the Colmans among them, had not been in the vanguard. New ships of war had grown too great to enter that small port; there was hardly enough work for the few ships that Edward Colman had, and not merchandise enough in all those ports to employ the gold that his fathers had hoarded up.
It was not for him, he explained, whilst he talked in this vein to the two old men in the great chamber, dimly lighted by one candle in the midst of the long table that ran down the wall beneath the escutcheons of Queen Jane Seymour, painted on the plasterwork — it was not the life he would lead, to put out his money in usury, like a Jew, or to sit on his gold-sacks and grow fat, as an alderman, whilst the sacks grew lean as a parson’s horse. He was for new land and new merchandise, and for reviving the glories of the port of Rye.
The old men grew very tired; Jeal solemnly and Keymer owlishly blinked at the light, and his speeches and action alike dismayed and amazed them. They were used to be in bed by nine of the clock; they were used to let their minds revolve around two thoughts every day — one before dinner and one before supper — or three thoughts at the most on a Friday, when the laws prescribed fasting. So that, though they resented, they did not well understand his thoughts, and made him no answer at all. And they blinked at his actions in the dim light.
He pulled open presses where, to prove his words, there reclined, brown and faded, the old printed “Directions for Pilgrims,” in hundreds of broadsheets. His fathers had bought them in that number the year before all pilgrimages had been forbidden by law in Henry VIII’s day, and there they lay still. They were of no use; they never would again be of use: they were like the old privileges of the Ports, the old customs, the old faiths. They must get them new ones — either from the New World or from elsewhere, he said. They must cut their coats according to newer cloths.
He pulled two parchment sheets from a lower shelf and stood before them.
“Here I stand, Edward Colman, a young man and proper, going into outlawry because all that I could find to spend my time on was a trade that is against the law. Is it not silly to keep up an old law that would prevent the export of fleeces and the coming in of gold to this realm? Yet that is all that you and I — and all of us — can find to do in the ancient town!”
He turned a sheet of parchment in front of each of his elders, and cried —
“Write each of you a bill of a thousand pounds upon the merchants of Amsterdam!”
And whilst a sudden comprehension of that, at least — and a sudden protest — came into each face together, he said —
“What! You will not write to save the town of Rye?”
He put a leaden inkpot, with goose-quill pens, between them, and started to cut a pen with a little knife.
“Sir,’’ he said to Jeal,” you are a master ironworker; you have many furnaces and ironpits; you earn two thousand pounds by the year, yet you will not give a thousand pounds of a bill to save your town.”
And: “Brother Baron,” he said to the wrinkled Solomon Keymer, “you are of yourself the richest man of his town, with much gold made with former trade to Bordeaux. You are said to be worth 17,000 in gold. Where are your brave words now? And remember you, for both of you I have carried cargoes of wool into Holland. Much good shall not remain to you if I tell what I can to the King’s Council. You had best aid me to be gone!”
Solomon Keymer whimpered —
“Five hundred — between the two of us — five hundred in Dutch gold.”
The old nurse came into the room; she was turned of seventy, yet she was thin and limber, and dressed in brown linsey-woolsey, without any farthingale to swell round her waist, and with a tailed, flat hood such as had been worn in the days of Henry VIII. She came to him swiftly, with both her hands stretched out to stroke his; he cried over his shoulder to the two old men—”Two thousand pounds, paid in Dutch gold in Amsterdam, I will have bills for;” and went with her to a place in the wall beside the high fireplace where they were hidden by a great post that upheld the dim ceiling. There they might not see him, and he pulled out from the wall what seemed to be a solid panel of plastering, but it fell back on hinges that the old woman had greased once a week for fifty years. The voice of the sea-springs, that there ran far into the land, came up to them whispering from deep below. Many years before this had been a well in the town wall — four hundred years before, at the least, it had been made. But the well-sinkers had found only salt water, and when the Colmans had built their house against the wall they had come to using this well as a place for hiding such things as they would hide. At low tide its bottom now was dry, and they could go down to it by a rope ladder; but for the most part it was filled, deep down, with salt water, that came oozing from the sea through the sandbanks and the shingle.
There may have been folk in the town that had known, or had forgotten, that there was this old well in the Colmans’ house, but no one knew there what it held save Edward Colman and this old nurse of his.
He gave her his news in between his lamentations; there was something merciless in his telling her that he must go beyond the seas, since he was almost like her very grandchild, and she came of times when “over-the-seas” had meant a world of dragons, devils, Saracens, cut-throat Frenchmen, stabbing Spaniards, evil women, and fell robbers. He could not bring to her mind in that short time that over the seas he would find streets, and clean towns, and honest Dutch faith. So that whilst he worked and she aided him, he could do no more than direct her what she should do whilst he was away. She was so acquainted with his way and his merchanting that, if only she lived till he came back, he could leave his house to her and to Magdalena, who, he had advised with himself, should come there to live, out of the perils of Rye Foreign.
“Ah!” the old woman grizzled softly; “I must have a Knipperdolling mistress!” And she crossed herself in the shadow.
There were, below the inner wall of the well, so low down that Edward Colman must bend to reach them, a number of hooks, out of sight, in the cavity. On each hook there hung a ring, and from each ring there depended downwards a chain, painted, so that it might not rust. These rings Edward Colman took one by one and set them on the bucket-hook, that still hung from a rope over a wheel in the roof of the well-chamber. They laid hold of the rope-end and silently and methodically pulled together. Each time there came up at last a wet, green-slimed, chain-bound, and heavy little case of wood.
And whilst he pulled, in between the rattling of the chain on the wheel and the hollow, continual dripping sound of the water, he directed her as to what she was to do. She might, he said, if she would, argue with her new mistress upon points of doctrine — Magdalena was no very hot Knipperdolling; but betwixt her pulling one way and the old woman’s pulling the other, Magdalena, or both of them, might very well come to be of the Church of England, which, as seemed likely, would remain the Church of that realm for many years. But she was to leave Magdalena to do what polishing and cleansing her heart yearned after in the house; the rushes off the floor should go, and sand take its place; the sconces of iron might be replaced by sconces of brass; what Magdalena would have, that she should have. And the old woman was to instruct Magdalena in the details of what small trade should, in his absence, come to his house; she was, he said, of a swift and steady capacity to learn. He had tried her.
“I will,” he said, “that if it prove that you die ere I come back, this my house — if God grant me an heir — shall have at its head this wife of mine instructed in my ways and able to instruct mine heir. And I know of no woman that better can do it than you. I will enjoin upon her in a letter I shall write her before I go that in those things she shall be subject to you for instruction.”
She said, “Ah! ah!” but in a tone of mollification and consolement.
At last they had fourteen wet boxes on the floor beside them; the old man panted very much and Edward Colman. de when he turned back into the long room and went to the two old men.
“Sirs,” he said, “have you written me those bills?”
Each of them looked at the other to speak, till he put in, with a great laugh —
“Why, I had forgotten,” he said, “ye can neither of ye write!” and he called into the shadows, “Nurse Janet, come ye and write two bills of a thousand pound upon such merchants of Amsterdam as their worships shall advise you of.” And whilst, with her lips working over a difficult - writing that, nevertheless, she had by heart, having been schooled thereto by Edward Colman’s father, Edward himself went back and forth between the dark corner and the lit table, bearing each time a heavy box, wet with salt water and green with slime. He had himself to take a breathing space at the fourteenth journey, and after that he spoke.
“Sirs,” he said, “are ye well minded to set your marks, esteemed and known in Amsterdam, to these bills of a thousand pounds?”
Solomon Keymer answered, “Aye!” and nudged Jeal till he, too, answered, “Aye!”
“Then,” said Edward Colman, with the green slime of his boxes on his hands, his arms, and his thighs, “I take back much of what I have said against this ancient town. For, for sure, much of good it must have in it if it breed old men that so love its customs. For old age breeds avarice, and in few places will you find old men to do this much.”
“Why,” Solomon Keymer said, “the Corporation of the Five Ports is an ancient and honourable estate.”
“I have heard that said afore now,” Edward Colman answered him; “yet bethink you of the motto of this port of ours. I do think you know how it runs: ‘God save England and the town of Rye’ ? Well, then, hear me speak this: in fourteen boxes repose the sum of seven thousand pounds in gold coins. And I do take it that in your breasts repose two hearts of honour, that are more precious than ten thousand weight each of gold. This gold I had of my ancestors in better times; your, goodly hearts you had of the same origin. These seven thousand pounds I deliver into your hands. Two of the thousand shall be yours against the bills ye have given me.” Solomon Keymer scratched his head and the Mayor held his beard at these words. “The other five thousands you shall safeguard for me, dispensing of them such coins as my young wife shall need till I come back, accounting for them to me then, or to her and her heirs if that I do die. Sirs, you have been my neighbours and the neighbours of my father, and your fathers of my fathers, through countless years withouten tale or number. Such deeds of trust as this of mine were done in the old days by our fathers, and because of such unity and trust our town grew great. Now it is a little town amongst the cities, but because I believe in the honorability in the hearts of you, I shall get me forth from this shelter with a better courage. For, for sure, ye be barons at heart, and the corporation of the Five Ports is an ancient and honourable estate still. And whilst there remain here old men, as I am sure, of approved honour, and young men of, as I do hope, courage and adventure, there shall not yet be need to call out in despair, ‘God save England and the town of Rye.’”
He spoke this long speech well and without halting, because he had been well trained in Latin, and reading, and rhetoric at the Grammar School of King Edward, and had been many times chosen to speak for the town upon great occasions. But the two old men came of King Henry’s time, and were slow witted, so that they hardly understood more than the drift of his context. Old Jeal, indeed, had some tears in his eyes, because of a shame that he felt; but Solomon Keymer had it still in him to say —
“I perceive that you have jested till now, Edward Colman, and if I little like your jesting I will, for the sake of your sensible speech, make you a good wish, and the oath of a Baron of the Five Ports, to observe your trust as you were my son and your wife my good daughter. For the Corporation of the Cinque Ports is an ancient and honourable estate.”
When he had nearly got them from the room, Edward Colman had yet to suffer a measure of apologies and condolences from the Mayor.
“I am to blame,” he wept. “I — I — because I have begotten the daughter that has made this bother.”
“Oh aye,” Edward Colman answered; “but you will have to pay for it when your daughter learns I am come off with the Dutch ship. And for your daughter, it is not for begetting her that you are to blame; it is for having beaten her so little.”
“Aye; but,” the Mayor said, “these be newer times. Beatings be out of fashion for maidens.”
“Sir,” Edward Colman answered him, “here is a great medley of new and old. Let us keep what is good and salutary of the old. The great Queen Eliza was well beaten, as we have read, so she grew to be a virtuous and a virgin queen — the greatest that ever was. Because you had not the stern heart of the older days you did not beat your daughter; therefore she is a shrew, and hath betrayed us all. For me, I was long since minded to see other lands and learn of other ports how this of ours may be amended. Therefore, if I go now — since I am wedded to my wife — I have little to clamour at; and though somewhat you have injured me, yet I pardon it very willingly, and pray God to keep and save you.”
He spoke a little negligently, pushing the old man towards the dark opening of the stairway.
“Why, you are my godfather,” he added more earnestly. “I have much to do and but an hour to do it in. Pray you give your blessing before you go — to me, and this house, and my new enterprise.”
The old woman, with her head on the table, beside the candle, in the dim room, whimpered, “Ah! ah!”
PART II. GOING ABROAD.
CHAPTER I.
“SIRS,” Henry Hudson said, “the Ancients have spoken of setting up monuments of brass, or monuments of good verses. But we do set now-a-days our names upon the hills that are more lasting than brass, and upon broad rivers that shall flow when all libraries be burned.”
He was a man of a great girth, heavy upon his feet, with a square and curly beard of an iron grey and deep-set eyes of a shining black. He had in his air something of the overbearing, something of the masterly, something of the gasconading and something of the heavy and the trustworthy. He was rather a man of the last age — of Henry’s or Elizabeth’s day — than of that year of a new century when men were less lusty than he, when men were more prone to question, more prone to sneer and apt to grin in cabals behind a leader’s back, to form cabals, mutinies and obstinate knots and to question the divine right of pastors and kings.
