The Story of Francis Cludde

The Story of Francis Cludde
Stanley Weyman

Weyman Stanley John

The Story of Francis Cludde

CHAPTER I

"HÉ, SIRE ANE, HÉ!"

On the boundary line between the two counties of Warwick and Worcester there is a road very famous in those parts, and called the Ridgeway. Father Carey used to say-and no better Latinist could be found for a score of miles round in the times of which I write-that it was made by the Romans. It runs north and south along the narrow spine of the country, which is spread out on either side like a map, or a picture. As you fare southward you see on your right hand the green orchards and pastures of Worcestershire stretching as far as the Malvern Hills. You have in front of you Bredon Hill, which is a wonderful hill, for if a man goes down the Avon by boat it goes with him-now before, and now behind-a whole day's journey-and then stands in the same place. And on the left hand you have the great Forest of Arden, and not much besides, except oak trees, which grow well in Warwickshire.

I describe this road, firstly, because it is a notable one, and forty years ago was the only Queen's highway, to call a highway, in that country. The rest were mere horse-tracks. Secondly, because the chase wall of Coton End runs along the side of it for two good miles; and the Cluddes-I am Francis Cludde-have lived at Coton End by the Ridgeway time out of mind, probably-for the name smacks of the soil-before the Romans made the road. And thirdly, because forty years ago, on a drizzling February day in 1555-second year of Mary, old religion just reestablished-a number of people were collected on this road, forming a group of a score or more, who stood in an ordered kind of disorder about my uncle's gates and looked all one way, as if expecting an arrival, and an arrival of consequence.

First, there was my uncle Sir Anthony, tall and lean. He wore his best black velvet doublet and cloak, and had put them on with an air of huge importance. This increased each time he turned, staff in hand, and surveyed his following, and as regularly gave place to a "Pshaw!" of vexation and a petulant glance when his eye rested on me. Close beside him, looking important too, but anxious and a little frightened as well, stood good Father Carey. The priest wore his silk cassock, and his lips moved from time to time without sound, as though he were trying over a Latin oration-which, indeed, was the fact. At a more respectful distance were ranged Baldwin Moor, the steward, and a dozen servants; while still farther away lounged as many ragamuffins-landless men, who swarmed about every gentleman's door in those times, and took toll of such abbey lands as the king might have given him. Against one of the stone gate-pillars I leaned myself-nineteen years and six months old, and none too wise, though well grown, and as strong as one here and there. And perched on the top of the twin post, with his chin on his knees, and his hands clasped about them, was Martin Luther, the fool.

Martin had chosen this elevated position partly out of curiosity, and partly, perhaps, under a strong sense of duty. He knew that, whether he would or no, he must needs look funny up there. His nose was red, and his eyes were running, and his teeth chattering; and he did look funny. But as he felt the cold most his patience failed first. The steady, silent drizzle, the mist creeping about the stems of the oak trees, the leaden sky proved too much for him in the end. "A watched pot never boils!" he grumbled.

"Silence, sirrah!" commanded my uncle angrily. "This is no time for your fooling. Have a care how you talk in the same breath of pots and my Lord Bishop!"

"Sanctæ ecclesiæ," Father Carey broke out, turning up his eyes in a kind of ecstasy, as though he were knee to knee with the prelate-"te defensorem inclytum atque ardentem-"

"Pottum!" cried I, laughing loudly at my own wit.

It was an ill-mannered word, but I was cold and peevish. I had been forced to this function against my will. I had never seen the guest whom we were expecting, and who was no other than the Queen's Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, but I disliked him as if I had. In truth, he was related to us in a peculiar fashion, which my uncle and I naturally looked at from different standpoints. Sir Anthony viewed with complacence, if not with pride, any connection with the powerful Bishop of Winchester, for the knight knew the world, and could appreciate the value it sets on success, and the blind eyes it has for spots if they do but speckle the risen sun. I could make no such allowance, but, with the pride of youth and family, at once despised the great Bishop for his base blood, and blushed that the shame lay on our side. I hated this parade of doing honor to him, and would fain have hidden at home with Petronilla, my cousin, Sir Anthony's daughter, and awaited our guest there. The knight, however, had not permitted this, and I had been forced out, being in the worst of humors.

So I said "Pottum!" and laughed.

"Silence, boy!" cried Sir Anthony fiercely. He loved an orderly procession, and to arrange things decently. "Silence!" he repeated, darting an angry glance first at me and then at his followers, "or I will warm that jacket of yours, lad! And you, Martin Luther, see to your tongue for the next twenty-four hours, and keep it off my Lord Bishop! And, Father Carey, hold yourself ready-"

"For here Sir Hot-Pot cometh!" cried the undaunted Martin, skipping nimbly down from his post of vantage; "and a dozen of London saucepans with him, or may I never lick the inside of one again!"

A jest on the sauciness of London serving-men was sure to tell with the crowd, and there was a great laugh at this, especially among the landless men, who were on the skirts of the party, and well sheltered from Sir Anthony's eye. He glared about him, provoked to find at this critical moment smiles where there should have been looks of deference, and a ring round a fool where he had marshaled a procession. Unluckily, he chose to visit his displeasure upon me. "You won't behave, won't you, you puppy!" he cried. "You won't, won't you!" and stepping forward he aimed a blow at my shoulders, which would have made me rub myself if it had reached me. But I was too quick. I stepped back, the stick swung idly, and the crowd laughed.

And there the matter would have ended, for the Bishop's party were now close upon us, had not my foot slipped on the wet grass and I fallen backward. Seeing me thus at his mercy, the temptation proved too much for the knight. He forgot his love of seemliness and even that his visitors were at his elbow-and, stooping a moment to plant home a couple of shrewd cuts, cried, "Take that! Take that, my lad!" in a voice that rang as crisply as his thwacks.

I was up in an instant; not that the pain was anything, and before our own people I should have thought as little of shame, for if the old may not lay hand to the young, being related, where is to be any obedience? Now, however, my first glance met the grinning faces of strange lackeys, and while my shoulders still smarted, the laughter of a couple of soberly-clad pages stung a hundred times more sharply. I glared furiously round, and my eyes fell on one face-a face long remembered. It was that of a man who neither smiled nor laughed; a man whom I recognized immediately, not by his sleek hackney or his purple cassock, which a riding-coat partially concealed, or even by his jeweled hand, but by the keen glance of power which passed over me, took me in, and did not acknowledge me; which saw my humiliation without interest or amusement. The look hurt me beyond smarting of shoulders, for it conveyed to me in the twentieth part of a second how very small a person Francis Cludde was, and how very great a personage was Stephen Gardiner, whom in my thoughts I had presumed to belittle.

I stood irresolute a moment, shifting my feet and glowering at him, my face on fire. But when he raised his hand to give the Benediction, and the more devout, or those with mended hose, fell on their knees in the mud, I turned my back abruptly, and, climbing the wall, flung away across the chase.

"What, Sir Anthony!" I heard him say as I stalked off, his voice ringing clear and incisive amid the reverential silence which followed the Latin words; "have we a heretic here, cousin? How is this? So near home too!"

"It is my nephew, my Lord Bishop," I could hear Sir Anthony answer, apology in his tone; "and a willful boy at times. You know of him; he has queer notions of his own, put into his head long ago."

I caught no more, my angry strides carrying me out of earshot. Fuming, I hurried across the long damp grass, avoiding here and there the fallen limb of an elm or a huge round of holly. I wanted to get out of the way, and be out of the way; and made such haste that before the slowly moving cavalcade had traversed one-half of the interval between the road and the house I had reached the bridge which crossed the moat, and, pushing my way impatiently through the maids and scullions who had flocked to it to see the show, had passed into the courtyard.

The light was failing, and the place looked dark and gloomy in spite of the warm glow of burning logs which poured from the lower windows, and some show of green boughs which had been placed over the doorways in honor of the occasion. I glanced up at a lattice in one of the gables-the window of Petronilla's little parlor. There was no face at it, and I turned fretfully into the hall-and yes, there she was, perched up in one of the high window-seats. She was looking out on the chase, as the maids were doing.

Yes, as the maids were doing. She too was watching for his High Mightiness, I muttered, and that angered me afresh. I crossed the rushes in silence, and climbed up beside her.

"Well," I said ungraciously, as she started, hearing me at her shoulder, "well, have you seen enough of him yet, cousin? You will, I warrant you, before he leaves. A little of him goes far."

"A little of whom, Francis?" she asked simply.

Though her voice betrayed some wonder at my rough tone, she was so much engaged with the show that she did not look at me immediately. This of course kept my anger warm, and I began to feel that she was in the conspiracy against me.

"Of my Lord of Winchester, of course," I answered, laughing rudely; "of Sir Hot-Pot!"

"Why do you call him that?" she remonstrated in gentle wonder. And then she did turn her soft dark eyes upon me. She was a slender, willowy girl in those days, with a complexion clear yet pale-a maiden all bending and gracefulness, yet with a great store of secret firmness, as I was to learn. "He seems as handsome an old man," she continued, "as I have ever met, and stately and benevolent, too, as I see him at this distance. What is the matter with you, Francis? What has put you out?"

"Put me out!" I retorted angrily. "Who said anything had put me out?"

But I reddened under her eyes; I was longing to tell her all, and be comforted, while at the same time I shrank with a man's shame from saying to her that I had been beaten.

"I can see that something is the matter," she said sagely, with her head on one side, and that air of being the elder which she often assumed with me, though she was really the younger by two years. "Why did you not wait for the others? Why have you come home alone? Francis," [with sudden conviction] "you have vexed my father! That is it!"

"He has beaten me like a dog!" I blurted out passionately; "and before them all! Before those strangers he flogged me!"

She had her back to the window, and some faint gleam of wintry sunshine, passing through the gules of the shield blazoned behind her, cast a red stain on her dark hair and shapely head. She was silent, probably through pity or consternation; but I could not see her face, and misread her. I thought her hard, and, resenting this, bragged on with a lad's empty violence.

"He did; but I will not stand it! I give you warning, I won't stand it, Petronilla!" and I stamped, young bully that I was, until the dust sprang out of the boards, and the hounds by the distant hearth jumped up and whined. "No! not for all the base bishops in England!" I continued, taking a step this way and that. "He had better not do it again! If he does, I tell you it will be the worse for some one!"

"Francis," she exclaimed abruptly, "you must not speak in that way!"

But I was too angry to be silenced, though instinctively I changed my ground.

"Stephen Gardiner!" I cried furiously. "Who is Stephen Gardiner, I should like to know? He has no right to call himself Gardiner at all! Dr. Stephens he used to call himself, I have heard. A child with no name but his godfather's; that is what he is, for all his airs and his bishopric! Who is he to look on and see a Cludde beaten? If my uncle does not take care-"

"Francis!" she cried again, cutting me short ruthlessly. "Be silent, sir!" [and this time I was silent], "You unmanly boy," she continued, her face glowing with indignation, "to threaten my father before my face! How dare you, sir? How dare you? And who are you, you poor child," she exclaimed, with a startling change from invective to sarcasm-"who are you to talk of bishops, I should like to know?"

"One," I said sullenly, "who thinks less of cardinals and bishops than some folk, Mistress Petronilla!"

"Ay, I know," she retorted scathingly-"I know that you are a kind of half-hearted Protestant-neither fish, flesh, nor fowl!"

"I am what my father made me!" I muttered.

"At any rate," she replied, "you do not see how small you are, or you would not talk of bishops. Heaven help us! That a boy who has done nothing and seen nothing, should talk of the Queen's Chancellor! Go! Go on, you foolish boy, and rule a country, or cut off heads, and then you may talk of such men-men who could unmake you and yours with a stroke of the pen! You, to talk so of Stephen Gardiner! Fie, fie, I say! For shame!"

I looked at her, dazed and bewildered, and had long afterward in my mind a picture of her as she stood above me, in the window bay, her back to the light, her slender figure drawn to its full height, her hand extended toward me. I could scarcely understand or believe that this was my gentle cousin. I turned without a word and stole away, not looking behind me. I was cowed.

It happened that the servants came hurrying in at the moment with a clatter of dishes and knives, and the noise covered my retreat. I had a fancy afterward that, as I moved away, Petronilla called to me. But at the time, what with the confusion and my own disorder, I paid no heed to her, but got myself blindly out of the hall, and away to my own attic.

It was a sharp lesson. But my feelings when, being alone, I had time to feel, need not be set down. After events made them of no moment, for I was even then on the verge of a change so great that all the threats and misgivings, the fevers and agues, of that afternoon, real as they seemed at the time, became in a few hours as immaterial as the dew which fell before yesterday's thunderstorm.

The way the change began to come about was this. I crept in late to supper, facing the din and lights, the rows of guests and the hurrying servants, with a mixture of shame and sullenness. I was sitting down with a scowl next the Bishop's pages-my place was beside them, half-way down the table, and I was not too careful to keep my feet clear of their clothing-when my uncle's voice, raised in a harsher tone than was usual with him, even when he was displeased, summoned me.

"Come here, sirrah!" he cried roundly. "Come here, Master Francis! I have a word to speak to you!"

I went slowly, dragging my feet, while all looked up, and there was a partial silence. I was conscious of this, and it nerved me. For a moment indeed, as I stepped on to the dais I had a vision of scores of candles and rushlights floating in mist, and of innumerable bodiless faces all turned up to me. But the vision and the mistiness passed away, and left only my uncle's long, thin face inflamed with anger, and beside it, in the same ring of light, the watchful eyes and stern, impassive features of Stephen Gardiner. The Bishop's face and his eyes were all I saw then; the same face, the same eyes, I remembered, which had looked unyielding into those of the relentless Cromwell and had scarce dropped before the frown of a Tudor. His purple cap and cassock, the lace and rich fur, the chain of office, I remembered afterward.