Wife to Mr. Milton Page 4

  Mun had the name of a wild young fellow, a naughty scapegrace, at the University. His tutor at Magdalen Hall was Mr. Henry Wilkinson, a Puritan and a fiery preacher, brother to Dr. Wilkinson, President of Magdalen College, and Mun and he did not fadge well together. Mun told my brother once: “Dick, my friend, I am all for God and the Church, no man more so, but long unnecessary prayers weary me; and my mind falling asleep, the Devil enters in by the back door.” To circumvent the Devil, Mun would stay away from prayers at the Hall whenever he expected that his presence would not be remarked, and go out to drink and play skittles at the Greyhound Inn. After a term or two, he also grew weary of his studies, which seemed to tend no-whither: the logical problems, sophisms, and disputations, the catechisings, the metaphysical declamations, and such other exercises as he was expected to attend in the College, were unfit, he said, for any man of spirit. He abhorred even to read Aristotle, and absented himself from the lectures of the President of the College, spending his time instead in the company of jolly drunken young noblemen of his acquaintance at the tavern, or at the public bowling green, or at the Dancing and Vaulting School of Will Stokes. To hold their esteem, he must dress and be mounted as well as they were, and game with cards and with dice for stakes as high as theirs, and lay wagers for as great sums; and this though his father, the Knight Marshal, having many other children to provide for, could allow him but £40 a year for his keep.

  Mun’s course of living drew him into great debts, as may be imagined, which he at last despaired of paying and confessed all to his father; who rode down to Oxford to take him away and settle his affairs for him. Sir Edmund was, I believe, more than commonly grieved, for he had a particular affection and partiality for Mun. Mun, alas, had fooled him into believing that he liked both his devout tutor and his difficult studies; and that he was going very attentively about his College exercises; and that when he had kept the necessary terms he would easily attain his Mastership of Arts, with high compliments both from the Principal of the Hall and the President of the College.

  Yet I would say this in Mun’s defence, that he had fallen insensibly into this foolish course, and that the Doctors themselves were much to blame for not having sooner fetched him out of it. Mun was always in hopes that by a lucky wager or suchlike accident he could haul himself out of the mire, and that his father would never discover that he had so much as soiled his boots with it. He rode in horse-matches and wagered high on victory and sometimes won a good sum; but sometimes lost as much or more again. When at last he was stuck thigh-deep, he would rather have died, I believe, than humble himself by begging relief from his noble friends; however, I think he did worse, not knowing where to turn—for he borrowed money from tapsters and College servants and other mean persons who could ill afford to lose even small sums. For myself, I never saw Mun at any disadvantage, for he counted no man a worthy gentleman who, how deeply soever he had drunken, did not show himself as wholly polite and attentive to gentlewomen as if he were stark sober.

  I first made Mun’s acquaintance on an afternoon in March of the year 1637. He was invited to dine with us on the Wednesday, but had mistaken the day, and as it happened all the men of the house were away, hunting with the Tyrrells, and my mother was too busy in the cheese-press to entertain him. The bailiffs wife, who managed the dairy, had that day miscarried, a month before her account, and nobody but she and my mother understood the art of making little slip-coat cheeses—of which that day from the milk of ten cows my mother made 12 lbs. weight, laying them to ripen in flat boxes of wood.

  My mother excused herself to Mun, but when he would have ridden away, she would not suffer it; for that would have been to put an affront upon his family, which she held in esteem. So she says: “Mr. Verney, here is my daughter Marie who, by your leave, will play hostess until I am at greater leisure. Now, as you see, I am wet to my elbows with whey, and the cheese-vats are not yet filled. Marie will show you the library, if you will, and the stables; and you may take tobacco in the hall—but not, I pray, in the parlours—and the servants will bring you whatever drink within reason you command.” Thus it chanced that, the very first time that we met together, I was presented to Mun as a grown woman; and for the honour of the house I entertained him very mannerly and kindly. In so doing, on a sudden, for the very first time in all my life, I was overtaken by love for a man.

  Mun was not of large body, but had a most graceful and upright carriage; his brow was broad, and below it stood a strong, noble nose that made compensation for his pale slenderness of cheek. His eyes were a little over-tinctured with melancholy and his hair thick, silky and fine, falling to below his shoulders with a constant undulation of dark curls. He was dressed in a red cloth hunting suit, with buttons of silver and pearl, and a Spanish montero cap; and he carried a little riding whip with a stock curiously inlaid with pieces of shell. Sitting a-straddle on a thrum chair with this whip in his hand, he could each time, with the tip of the lash, strike a pea or bean laid upon the floor at three or four paces from him and send it spinning across the hall.

  He had ridden up from the University in a dismal mood, which his careless mistaking of the day did nothing to lighten; but somehow my innocent presence so worked upon him that, after a few words spoken on each side upon indifferent matters, his face suddenly grew bright and he was good enough to say: “Mistress Marie, you have a very fine head of hair; upon my word, I never saw one that I liked better. It shines in that sunbeam like thin-drawn gold wire.”

  I thanked him and said that I wished my features matched my hair, which I knew was good of its kind; but, truly, my mother’s glass told me I was ill-featured, especially as to the nose.

  “Your mother’s glass is jealous, I do not doubt,” he says, “for upon my soul I think that, nose and all, you have a face like a fairy’s.”

  “And did you ever see a fairy?” I asked, teasingly. “For, unless you did, how can you cast the comparison?”

  He paused before his answer. “To come to think of it, I never did,” he said, “though they have been credibly reported, some years since, from as near to here as the two Hinkseys, not above a mile from Oxford, which have a southern aspect and many gardens and coppices. Fairies, it is said, choose to frequent the warm southern slopes of hills; and secreta amant, fugiunt aperta: that is to say “they love close nooks, and open ground they loathe.” Old Dr. Corbett, who was Bishop here before he was translated to Norwich, has written that these pretty ladies danced often under the moon in our grandmothers’ days:

  Witness those rings and roundelays

  Of theirs which yet remain,

  Were footed in Queen Mary’s days

  On many a grassy plain:

  But since of late Elizabeth

  And later James came in,

  They never danced on any heath

  As when the time hath bin.

  “Dr. Corbett judges from this that the fairies are of the old profession of religion and that, when Queen Mary was dead, most of them flitted overseas in the same ship with the Queen’s confessor, and with the other priests.”

  I told him that, as I had heard, these angelic creatures might yet be invocated to appear. Old Dr. Simon Forman had so written, who though a rogue in some matters was a man of credit in all that touched his art; indeed, the spirits were so thick upon his staircase that one might hear them rustle by, like owls, as one went up to knock at his door. “But,” said I, “Dr. Forman told my father once that it is not for every one, or every person, that these creatures will appear, though he repeat the proper call over and over.”

  “What is that call?” Mun asked me.

  I answered that it began with “O beati Fauni proles, turba dulcis pygmæorum”—“O pygmies sweet, children of blessed Faun”—but confessed that I knew no more of it, for Dr. Forman would not sell the secret to my father for a farthing less than £200, which he either would not or could not pay. However, he told my father that neatness and cleanliness in apparel, a strict diet, an upright lif
e and fervent prayers to God are a necessity to those who would invocate the fairies, and especially Queen Micol, their sovereign.

  “Then shall I never see any one of them,” said Mun, “for, to deal freely with you, my diet is by no means strict, either in eating or drinking; nor is my life at all upright; nor are my prayers to God fervent, for of late a sort of mist hangs between Him and me, through which I cannot pierce. Nevertheless, I have to-day seen a sight, although without invocation or hardship, which makes me very well content: for though you be not a fairy, you are the nearest creature to one that ever I saw; and, to my eye, not much more substantial.” He spoke earnestly and without the least smile; then he sighed and cast down his eyes, as one who repents his foolish course of life. I gazed in admiration at him, while with a knife he scraped the mud from his boot-heel.

  Now, the eye has a sort of power, like a cold fire, of which the person gazed upon will often become suddenly sensible. It has happened to me many a time and oft, that while I sit in a crowded assembly, I say to myself: “Someone is gazing very closely at my face from the left side,” or “Someone at my back is doting upon my hair.” I turn my head sharply about and always discover the fact, the person who gazed at me then looking away in confusion. Yet there are two unlike manners in which a woman—for here I can write only of woman—may become aware of a glance directed at her: either with a gross disgust as though someone were taking liberty with her body, or, it may be, with a deep delight as though the eye conferred a lasting benefit upon her, so that, were she a cat, she could cry “purr, purr.” I cannot say in what manner Mun felt the power of my glance, yet he looked up sharply and left off scraping his boot, though he had not near finished. Then he smiled full in my face, saying nothing. Nor did I say anything, but continued unabashedly gazing upon him.

  I know not how long we thus sat, but at last I remembered myself, and looked away through the glass of a window. After awhile I asked him soberly, how came it that he yet carried such fine long tresses, when at the King’s Visitation of Oxford, in the August before, every undergraduate was ordered to cut his hair to the tips of his ears, on pain of expulsion from the University?

  “O,” said he, “I avoided it, with the help of my loving father. There was a Proctor put in each house while the King continued there, and observing that the chiefest thing that they would have amended for His Majesty’s pleasure was the wearing of long hair, I wrote to my father begging him that he would send for me immediately, before I lost mine. I knew that this severity of the Proctors would last but a week, and so it proved. After His Majesty’s departure I could laugh at them and flaunt my tresses in their faces—though why His Majesty should have played the Puritan, in this matter of long hair, passes my comprehension.”

  “And mine too,” I cried, “though my mother says that long hair often harbours ill cattle.”

  “Well, well,” said he, rising from his chair, “what say you? Shall we go out and gather primroses together to present them to your mother? A primrose or two is nothing, but a bowl full of them will refresh a fusty room most sweetly.”

  His offer pleased me, for it was my task to find flowers for the house, and the children either would not help me or plucked off the heads only. I led him out into the coppice behind the stables, where the primroses have long stalks and one may gather nine or ten at a single wrench, they grow so thick. We passed across a little field, where the turf was sodden with rain and hissed under our feet.

  “This is a very good field for dancing,” said I, “when it is well dried by the sun.”

  “Command me here in July,” he answered. “You will find me a nimble dancer.”

  We came to the hedge, beyond which was the coppice, and he gave me his hand to help me over; it was firm and steady, but my own trembled. Then we set to work among the flowers. I observed that when he gathered his primroses he laid them very orderly in the basket, in several nosegays, each of them wound loosely about with withered grass, and that in each nosegay he put five or six narrow green leaves to set off the pale hue of the flowers. We conversed, stooping together under the trees, with our minds intent upon the task, yet with our fancies free to bandy nonsense. Then, though we had been perfect strangers a short hour before, it seemed to me that we had been acquainted a lifetime, and ingenuously I told him so.

  “Nay,” said he, “not a lifetime, but an age.”

  With that, by an unspoken accord, we left off gathering primroses, though each had a nosegay half finished: and Mun took mine and bound it to his own, first adding to it several of the large violets, peculiar to our woods and coppices, which have hairy leaves and white rays upon the pale blue flowers, but no scent.

  “This nosegay is for your own chamber, my dear,” said he.

  We sat down together side by side upon the stock of a fallen tree and Mun asked me: “Have you ever heard speak of Pythagoras the Greek?”

  “That I have,” I assured him. “My brother James now studies the books of Euclid, in the first of which is a proposition which yesterday he demonstrated to me in the yard. James laid down triangles and square figures in the muck with sticks and, said he, ‘Now is this not a pretty proposition, Sister? It was found for Euclid by one Pythagoras.’”

  “And did you find it pretty?” Mun asked me, smiling.

  “Oh,” said I, “I told James it was wonderful pretty. But then old Marten the Woodman passes by, and sees the faggots, and addresses him very earnestly, with ‘Young Master, if I may make so bold, his Worship your father would take it very ill as he knew you were laying these heathenish spells in his own wood-yard.’ And he says: ‘Should Brown-back chance to set her hoof upon this figure, she would cast her calf before her time. Have a care, young Master, have a care!’”

  “Well, to be sure,” says Mun, “that was the same Pythagoras of whom I would speak to you. He also propounded what he named Metempsychosis. This is a notion that the soul, when a man or woman dies, passes not into Purgatory or Limbo or any such place, but into the body of another person, or indeed sometimes (as a punishment for mis-doing) into the body of a hog or a lion or a wolf, and continues in his passage from body to body until the Day of Judgment, when the score is reckoned up. They say that Pythagoras hit on this notion by a recollection of his own past lives, two or three. Now, therefore, that you and I think to have known each other so long is perhaps no idle fancy, but the very truth. Yes, indeed, I cannot say whether you were my sister in Aristotle’s Athens, or my wife in Cæsar’s Rome, or a dear she-friend at King Arthur’s Court whose glove I wore as mantling to my morion.”

  “Nevertheless, it is a very strange and lovely notion,” said I.

  We went slowly back together, with not another word said, and as he helped me again over the fence I could not help but weep a little, for joy.

  Whether he was aware or no of the deep impression that he had made upon the young wax of my affections I cannot say, but he kissed my hand and told me that he had not spent so happy an hour all the while he had been at the University. Even as he spoke, there came shouts and a clatter from the road and up trotted my father and my brother Richard, with James following about a bow-shot behind. I slipped off into the house, covertly kissing my nosegay, and had no occasion to speak another word to Mun that day; nor he to me.

  As now I lay sick in my chamber, with Trunco waiting upon me, I went back in mind a score of times at least to that day, muttering over to myself the words that Mun had said to me, and the words I had used in answer; and once in my fancy I went for a lover’s journey with him into our field at Lusher’s Farm, and the piece called Pilfrance, making it June weather just before the hay is cut, when the grass is speckled silver and gold with the buttercups and the great daisies; and he kissed me full upon the lips and called me his honey; and I put these words into his mouth, “Next month is July, when we shall dance together along the turf behind the stables, after the hay is cut And you shall be my dear darling.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Sight of Roya
lty, and of Another

  When a young gentlewoman loves herself so well that she can be at pains to write down small particulars of her life, as I now did in my new vellum book, she begins always, I dare say, by spying and prying and toting at herself in a glass and making the image as it were a frontispiece to her history. With a young gentleman it is otherwise: who naturally begins with a record of his illustrious ancestors and how nobly they conducted themselves in ancient battles and sieges. Or if his father should happen to be a novus homo, as we slightingly call mushroom gentlemen, who have made their fortune by merchandizing, then he will begin with his grandfather (a God-fearing yeoman of such and such a place, respectable to his neighbours) and write of him as related by blood to a certain great house; yet he will slip in for his own comfort and honour, that this grandfather was of the elder line of the aforesaid great house, which in the Civil Wars of York and Lancaster favoured the Lancastrians and lost all on Bosworth Field—whereupon they prudently changed their name from de Bolton or de Manny or de Lancaster to plain Hogman or Henman.

  When I spied at myself in my hand-mirror, I saw eyes between grey and blue, a narrow forehead, a face more pointed than round, a straight nose, lips that pouted out, two gaps only where rear teeth were missing from my mouth, long narrow ears. My hands contented me when I gazed down on them, as being small and long and regularly formed; and now, after I had lain ten days in bed, they were as smooth and lovely, from idleness, as though they had been washed every day in milk and rose-water. As for my hair—I write not in my own praise, for the growth is natural—this was the wonder of all who saw it, being so long it reached to my girdlestead and so thick it cost me half an hour every morning to comb it well through. Zara had no love for my hair, for hers was of rat-colour, lank, thin, and not over-long.