The Last of the Barons — Complete

The queen wrote an order on the officer thus referred to, who was no other than her own father, Lord Rivers; and Alwyn, putting up his goods, was about to withdraw, when the duchess said carelessly, “Good youth, the dealings of our merchants are more with Flanders than with France, is it not so?”

“Surely,” said Alwyn; “the Flemings are good traders and honest folk.”

“It is well known, I trust, in the city of London, that this new alliance with France is the work of their favourite, the Lord Warwick,” said the duchess, scornfully; “but whatever the earl does is right with ye of the hood and cap, even though he were to leave yon river without one merchant-mast.”

“Whatever be our thoughts, puissant lady,” said Alwyn, cautiously, “we give them not vent to the meddling with state affairs.”

“Ay,” persisted Jacquetta, “thine answer is loyal and discreet. But an’ the Lord Warwick had sought alliance with the Count of Charolois, would there have been brighter bonfires than ye will see in Smithfield, when ye hear that business with the Flemings is surrendered for fine words from King Louis the Cunning?”

“We trust too much to our king’s love for the citizens of London to fear that surrender, please your Highness,” answered Alwyn; “our king himself is the first of our merchants, and he hath given a gracious answer to the deputation from our city.”

“You speak wisely, sir,” said the queen; “and your king will yet defend you from the plots of your enemies. You may retire.”

Alwyn, glad to be released from questionings but little to his taste, hastened to depart. At the gate of the royal lodge, he gave his caskets to the servitors who attended him, and passing slowly along the courtyard, thus soliloquized:

“Our neighbours the Scotch say, ‘It is good fishing in muddy waters;’ but he who fishes into the secrets of courts must bait with his head. What mischief doth that crafty queen, the proud duchess, devise? Um! They are thinking still to match the young princess with the hot Count of Charolois. Better for trade, it is true, to be hand in hand with the Flemings; but there are two sides to a loaf. If they play such a trick on the stout earl, he is not a man to sit down and do nothing. More food for the ravens, I fear,—more brown bills and bright lances in the green fields of poor England!—and King Louis is an awful carle to sow flax in his neighbour’s house, when the torches are burning. Um! Where is fair Marmaduke. He looks brave in his gay super-tunic. Well, sir and foster-brother, how fare you at court?”

“My dear Nicholas, a merry welcome and hearty to your sharp, thoughtful face. Ah, man! we shall have a gay time for you venders of gewgaws. There are to be revels and jousts, revels in the Tower and jousts in Smithfield. We gentles are already hard at practice in the tilt-yard.”

“Sham battles are better than real ones, Master Nevile! But what is in the wind?”

“A sail, Nicholas! a sail bound to England! Know that the Count of Charolois has permitted Sir Anthony Count de la Roche, his bastard brother, to come over to London, to cross lances with our own Sir Anthony Lord Scales. It is an old challenge, and right royally will the encounter be held.”

“Um!” muttered Alwyn, “this bastard, then, is the carrier pigeon.—And,” said he, aloud, “is it only to exchange hard blows that Sir Anthony of Burgundy comes over to confer with Sir Anthony of England? Is there no court rumour of other matters between them?”

“Nay. What else? Plague on you craftsmen! You cannot even comprehend the pleasure and pastime two knights take in the storm of the lists!”

“I humbly avow it, Master Nevile. But it seemeth, indeed, strange to me that the Count of Charolois should take this very moment to send envoys of courtesy when so sharp a slight has been put on his pride, and so dangerous a blow struck at his interests, as the alliance between the French prince and the Lady Margaret. Bold Charles has some cunning, I trow, which your kinsman of Warwick is not here to detect.”

“Tush, man! Trade, I see, teaches ye all so to cheat and overreach, that ye suppose a knight’s burgonet is as full of tricks and traps as a citizen’s flat-cap. Would, though, that my kinsman of Warwick were here,” added Marmaduke, in a low whisper, “for the women and the courtiers are doing their best to belie him.”

“Keep thyself clear of them all, Marmaduke,” said Alwyn; “for, by the Lord, I see that the evil days are coming once more, fast and dark, and men like thee will again have to choose between friend and friend, kinsman and king. For my part, I say nothing; for I love not fighting, unless compelled to it. But if ever I do fight, it will not be by thy side, under Warwick’s broad flag.”

“Eh, man?” interrupted Nevile.

“Nay, nay,” continued Nicholas, shaking his head, “I admire the great earl, and were I lord or gentle, the great earl should be my chief. But each to his order; and the trader’s tree grows not out of a baron’s walking-staff. King Edward may be a stern ruler, but he is a friend to the goldsmiths, and has just confirmed our charter. ‘Let every man praise the bridge he goes over,’ as the saw saith. Truce to this talk, Master Nevile. I hear that your young hostess—ehem!—Mistress Sibyll, is greatly marvelled at among the court gallants, is it so?”

Marmaduke’s frank face grew gloomy. “Alas! dear foster-brother,” he said, dropping the somewhat affected tone in which he had before spoken, “I must confess to my shame, that I cannot yet get the damsel out of my thoughts, which is what I consider it a point of manhood and spirit to achieve.”

“How so?”

“Because, when a maiden chooseth steadily to say nay to your wooing, to follow her heels, and whine and beg, is a dog’s duty, not a man’s.”

“What!” exclaimed Alwyn, in a voice of great eagerness, “mean you to say that you have wooed Sibyll Warner as your wife?”

“Verily, yes!”

“And failed?”

“And failed.”

“Poor Marmaduke!”

“There is no ‘poor’ in the matter, Nick Alwyn,” returned Marmaduke, sturdily; “if a girl likes me, well; if not, there are too many others in the wide world for a young fellow to break his heart about one. Yet,” he added, after a short pause, and with a sigh,—“yet, if thou hast not seen her since she came to the court, thou wilt find her wondrously changed.”

“More’s the pity!” said Alwyn, reciprocating his friend’s sigh.

“I mean that she seems all the comelier for the court air. And beshrew me, I think the Lord Hastings, with his dulcet flatteries, hath made it a sort of frenzy for all the gallants to flock round her.”

“I should like to see Master Warner again,” said Alwyn; “where lodges he?”

“Yonder, by the little postern, on the third flight of the turret that flanks the corridor, [This description refers to that part of the Tower called the King’s or Queen’s Lodge, and long since destroyed.] next to Friar Bungey, the magician; but it is broad daylight, and therefore not so dangerous,—not but thou mayest as well patter an ave in going up stairs.”

“Farewell, Master Nevile,” said Alwyn, smiling; “I will seek the mechanician, and if I find there Mistress Sibyll, what shall I say from thee?”

“That young bachelors in the reign of Edward IV. will never want fair feres,” answered the Nevile, debonairly smoothing his lawn partelet.

CHAPTER IV. EXHIBITING THE BENEFITS WHICH ROYAL PATRONAGE CONFERS ON GENIUS,—ALSO THE EARLY LOVES OF THE LORD HASTINGS; WITH OTHER MATTERS EDIFYING AND DELECTABLE

The furnace was still at work, the flame glowed, the bellows heaved; but these were no longer ministering to the service of a mighty and practical invention. The mathematician, the philosopher, had descended to the alchemist. The nature of the TIME had conquered the nature of a GENIUS meant to subdue time. Those studies that had gone so far to forestall the master-triumph of far later ages were exchanged for occupations that played with the toys of infant wisdom. O true Tartarus of Genius, when its energies are misapplied, when the labour but rolls the stone up the mountain, but pours water upon water through the sieve!

There is a sanguineness in men of great intellect which often leads them into follies avoided by the dull. When Adam Warner saw the ruin of his contrivance; when he felt that time and toil and money were necessary to its restoration; and when the gold he lacked was placed before him as a reward for alchemical labours, he at first turned to alchemy as he would have turned to the plough,—as he had turned to conspiracy,—simply as a means to his darling end. But by rapid degrees the fascination which all the elder sages experienced in the grand secret exercised its witchery over his mind. If Roger Bacon, though catching the notion of the steam-engine, devoted himself to the philosopher’s stone; if even in so much more enlightened an age Newton had wasted some precious hours in the transmutation of metals, it was natural that the solitary sage of the reign of Edward IV. should grow, for a while at least, wedded to a pursuit which promised results so august. And the worst of alchemy is, that it always allures on its victims: one gets so near and so near the object,—it seems that so small an addition will complete the sum! So there he was—this great practical genius—hard at work on turning copper into gold!

“Well, Master Warner,” said the young goldsmith, entering the student’s chamber, “methinks you scarcely remember your friend and visitor, Nicholas Alwyn?”

“Remember, oh, certes! doubtless one of the gentlemen present when they proposed to put me to the brake [the old word for rack]. Please to stand a little on this side—what is your will?”

“I am not a gentleman, and I should have been loth to stand idly by when the torture was talked of for a free-born Englishman, let alone a scholar. And where is your fair daughter, Master Warner? I suppose you see but little of her now she is the great dame’s waiting-damsel?”

“And why so, Master Alwyn?” asked a charming voice; and Alwyn for the first time perceived the young form of Sibyll, by the embrasure of a window, from which might be seen in the court below a gay group of lords and courtiers, with the plain, dark dress of Hastings, contrasting their gaudy surcoats, glittering with cloth-of-gold. Alwyn’s tongue clove to his mouth; all he had to say was forgotten in a certain bashful and indescribable emotion.

The alchemist had returned to his furnace, and the young man and the girl were as much alone as if Adam Warner had been in heaven.

“And why should the daughter forsake the sire more in a court, where love is rare, than in the humbler home, where they may need each other less?”

“I thank thee for the rebuke, mistress,” said Alwyn, delighted with her speech; “for I should have been sorry to see thy heart spoiled by the vanities that kill most natures.” Scarcely had he uttered these words, than they seemed to him overbold and presuming; for his eye now took in the great change of which Marmaduke had spoken. Sibyll’s dress beseemed the new rank which she held: the corset, fringed with gold, and made of the finest thread, showed the exquisite contour of the throat and neck, whose ivory it concealed. The kirtle of rich blue became the fair complexion and dark chestnut hair; and over all she wore that most graceful robe, called the sasquenice, of which the old French poet sang,—

“Car nulie robe n’est si belle
A dame ne a demoiselle.”

This garment, worn over the rest of the dress, had perhaps a classical origin, and with slight variations may be seen on the Etruscan vases; it was long and loose, of the whitest and finest linen, with hanging sleeves, and open at the sides. But it was not the mere dress that had embellished the young maiden’s form and aspect,—it was rather an indefinable alteration in the expression and the bearing. She looked as if born to the airs of courts; still modest indeed, and simple, but with a consciousness of dignity, and almost of power; and in fact the woman had been taught the power that womanhood possesses. She had been admired, followed, flattered; she had learned the authority of beauty. Her accomplishments, uncommon in that age among her sex, had aided her charm of person; her natural pride, which, though hitherto latent, was high and ardent, fed her heart with sweet hopes; a bright career seemed to extend before her; and, at peace as to her father’s safety, relieved from the drudging cares of poverty, her fancy was free to follow the phantasms of sanguine youth through the airy land of dreams. And therefore it was that the maid was changed!

At the sight of the delicate beauty, the self-possessed expression, the courtly dress, the noble air of Sibyll, Nicholas Alwyn recoiled and turned pale; he no longer marvelled at her rejection of Marmaduke, and he started at the remembrance of the bold thoughts which he had dared himself to indulge.

The girl smiled at the young man’s confusion.

“It is not prosperity that spoils the heart,” she said touchingly, “unless it be mean indeed. Thou rememberest, Master Alwyn, that when God tried His saint, it was by adversity and affliction.”

“May thy trial in these last be over,” answered Alwyn; “but the humble must console their state by thinking that the great have their trials too; and, as our homely adage hath it, ‘That is not always good in the maw which is sweet in the mouth.’ Thou seest much of my gentle foster-brother, Mistress Sibyll?”