Vainglory

“ Well hast thou earned our thanks, my Alain, my gallant squire."
"The Lord of Wallingford will send a troop of horse to scout on the road between Abingdon and Oxford to-morrow night, the Eve of St. Thomas."
"We will meet them if it be possible—if it be in human power."
"The river is free—all other roads are blocked."
"But hast thou considered the difficulties of descent?"
"They are great, lady: it was easy for me to descend by the rope, but for thee, alas, that my queen should need such expedients!"
"It is better than starvation. We are reduced to the bones, as thou seest ”

“ His mistress now stopped her work, and made ready for a long speech, with the usual snap of her lips.
"Know London, Miss Vaughan! I was born in Red Cross Street, and I've never been further out of town than Chalk Farm fair, or Hampstead Waterworks, and, please God, I never will. Bless me, what an awful place the country is, awful! What with the trees, and the ditches, and the sting-nettles, and the black wainscot with skewers on the top--"
"Too bad of you, Mrs. Shelfer, to be frightened at palings--and your husband a gardener, too! But tell me whereabouts is Grove Street?" ”

“ Still the moonlight whisky is made up in the mountains, and still the revenue detectives are shot. The United States troops go up every summer, and—come back again! The wild, beautiful region is not yet conquered.
Wainwright reëntered society; society received him with gladness. A fresh supply of mothers smiled upon him, a fresh supply of daughters filed past him. He made his little compact remarks as before, and appeared unaltered; but he let the lime-light play about him rather more continuously now, and took fewer journeys. He will never swerve from Adelaide again. ”

“ The witch inquisitors had not yet started on their peregrinations, Hopkins had yet to be born, and so the poor crazed nun who had done no one any harm, whom wise men thought mad, and foolish ones inspired, was allowed to burrow at Cwichelm's Hlawe.
And many folk resorted to her, to make inquiries about lost property, lost kinsfolk, the present and the future. [Pg 42] Amongst others, a seneschal of Wallingford, who had lost a valuable signet ring belonging to his lord.
"On your return to the castle seize by the throat the first man you meet after you pass the portals. He will have the ring." ”

“ Ah! if I had only obeyed him, not Lily and Henry, but myself would have been the victim.
We returned as soon as possible to Vendetta tower, and found the good Signor in excellent spirits, delighted to see his sweet daughter again, and still more delighted by hope of a little successor to the gray walls and the olive groves. When this hope was realized, and a lusty young grandson was laid in his arms, he became so wild in his glory, that he went about boasting all over the commune, feasting all who came near him, forgetting the very name of the blood-revenge. ”

“ And Alain appeared.
"My gallant squire, how hast thou fared? I feared for thee."
"They keep bad watch. A rope lowered me to the stream: I crossed, and seeking covered ways, gat me to Iffley, and in like fashion returned. I bear good news, lady! Thy gallant brother of Gloucester, and the Prince, thy son, have landed in England, and will meet thee at Wallingford."
"Thank God!" said Maude. "My Henry, my royal boy, I shall see thee again. With such hope to cheer a mother's heart, I can dare anything. ”

“ Is not this so?”
“I admit the proposition, Henry.”
“Very well. The only way to get right, is to start right. And my dear, dear sir! let me implore you to take immediately the first step in a right direction. Standing outside of the charmed circle of temptation as I do, I can see the right way for your feet to walk in better than you can. Oh, sir! Let me be eyes, and hand, and feet for you if need be; and if it is not too late, I will save you from impending ruin.”
Wallingford took the old man's hand, and grasped it warmly as he spoke. ”

“ Martin Valliant had the whole valley spread before him, all wet and washed with the morning’s dew, the sunlight slanting down on it with the calm beauty of a summer morning. Smoke rose straight and blue from the camp fires; the mere shone like glass; the tower, with its lichen-stained walls, was the color of gold. But if the woods and the valley breathed peace, man plotted war, and all the green hill beyond the water was astir with men running to arms. ”

“ The drive to Vaucluse is of about three quarters of an hour; and though the river, as I say, was promising, the big pale hills, as the road winds into them, did not look as if their slopes of stone and shrub were a nestling-place for superior scenery. It is a part of the merit of Vaucluse, indeed, that it is as much as possible a surprise. The place has a right to its name, for the valley appears impenetrable until you get fairly into it. One perverse twist follows another, until the omnibus suddenly deposits you in front of the "cabinet" of Petrarch. ”

“ The position of privileged people, either servants or freeholders, must be discussed by itself, as an exceptional case. And, lastly, the question will have to be put—to what extent were all these elements welded together in the village community, and under the sway of the manorial court?
Field systems.
The chief features of the field-system which was in operation in England during the middle ages have been sufficiently cleared up by modern scholars, especially by Nasse, Thorold Rogers, and Seebohm, and there is no need for dwelling at length on the subject. ”

“ The forester told all that he knew concerning Mellis and her championing by Martin Valliant.
The round-headed man was not pleased.
“Beelzebub—what a beginning! A blackguard monk is a pretty stormcock to open the hurly-burly for us. Fools are superstitious, and I am one of the fools.”
Chapter XXXIII The Forest had sounded its war-horn, and the woods and heaths and leaf-hidden hamlets gave up their men. They gathered in Woodmere valley, foresters, laborers, charcoal burners, breeders of horses, swineherds, and a scattering of broken men. ”

“ THE TRUTH ABOUT VIGNOLLES IS there any better place than London on a fine May morning, and is there any better spot in it than a tuppenny seat looking out on the Row? If there is, I have yet to find it. You sit at your ease and watch the world go by; and sometimes—almost always—there arrives a friend that you have lost, the ending of a story, or the beginnings of a new one. It is Vignolles who has set me going and who has brought about these cursory reflections. ”

“ The Abbot was astonished; as well he might be.
"Go, my Osric, to the hospitium; let me speak to my lord Abbot alone."
And Brian told his story, not without strong emotion.
"What wilt thou do now, my Lord of Wallingford?"
"He shall fulfil his vow, for himself and for me. But, my lord, my sins have come home to me. What shall I do? Would I could go with him! but my duties, my plighted faith to my Queen, restrain me. Even to-morrow the leaders of our cause meet at Wallingford Castle."
"Into politics we enter not here. But thy sin, if thou hast sinned, God hath left the means of forgiveness. ”

“ We discovered Wainfleet to be a sleepy little market-town, and a decayed seaport—a town with some quaint buildings of past days, not exactly a picturesque place but certainly an interesting one. Wainfleet is a spot where the hand of Time seems not only to be stayed but put back long years; it should be dear to the heart of an antiquary, for it looks so genuinely ancient, so far removed from the modern world and{273} all its rush, bustle, and advantages! ”

“ Not till he had crawled to the edge of the beech wood did Martin Valliant realize what the valley held. A broad mere lay in a grassy hollow, shaded toward the north by willows, and ringed about with yellow flags and water herbs. An island seemed to float upon the water, all white with old fruit trees in bloom. A gray turret and the bare stone gable-ends of a house showed above the apple blossom. There was a little gate-house close to the water, but its roof was gone, and the bridge that had led to it ruinous. ”

“ If thou canst persuade the lady to descend from the tower, and cross the stream at the midnight after to-morrow, we will have a troop on the outskirts of Bagley wood, to escort the precious freight to Wallingford, in spite of all her foes, or we will die in her defence. ”

“ Off, and harangue the people. I will get the best of the burghers together.’ We parted. All the city was astir. As I made my way from house to house, I sent the people I met off to the market place to hear Zwinger. I could hear their shouts, summons enough now, without any other. When I got back to the Roland’s pillar, I found that his plain, home-thrust speech had wrought the multitude to what we would, and no more. ”

“ We'd chosen our places under a spreading tree that made a pool of shadow. We were alone and yet not alone, as one often is in London. To Vignolles, who had wandered so far and forever been much of a spectator, if not an actual outsider, there was always a certain grim enjoyment to be found in any place like this. I remember he began by telling me about a maiden aunt of his who'd died and left him five hundred pounds. ”

“ A man came down the path carrying a tray full of tinkling glasses. There was nothing in his size or general outline to suggest that he was other than the butler who had served earlier in the evening, and it was too dark to see his face. Wainwright arose and strolled over to where his hostess sat breathless.
"What on earth!" she whispered. "Who is he?"
"Give it up! I believe he's the cook's cousin's son-in-law—that woman of yours is a jewel. Lady Bob!—and the clothes belong to Jerry Stranahan, if you know who he is. I don't, but he's a friend and a brother," he chuckled. ”

“ Livy darling, we sailed from St. Pierre de Boef six hours ago, and are now approaching Tournon, where we shall not stop, but go on and make Valence, a City Of 25,000 people. It's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness. Some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it is so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. We get abundance of grapes and peaches for next to nothing. ”

“ The last morning—I remember it very well—Vignolles was peculiarly silent as we rode on together; for, out of the depot, we usually left the men and camels to their reises and bash-reises and enjoyed our freedom and the soft, clear air. Sometimes quite frankly we played the ass, putting our ponies at any obstacle we met, a jump or a hillock, or racing the little beggars over broken ground. ”

“ Immediately opposite Valence, on the farther side of the Rhone, rises a bold scarp of sandstone cliff, crowned with the ruined castle of Crussol above the village of S. Peray at its feet, where is made a very capital sparkling wine, not at all inferior to champagne. ”

“ And though what Sir Walter says of the country surgeon is too true, that he is worse fed and harder wrought than any one else in the parish, except it be his horse; still, to a man like Vaughan, to whom the love of nature and its scrutiny was a constant passion, few occupations could have furnished ampler and more exquisite manifestations of her magnificence and beauty. Many of his finest descriptions give us quite the notion of their having been composed when going his rounds on his Welsh pony among the glens and hills, and their unspeakable solitudes. ”

“ Vaughan seems to have led a wandering life, and to have fallen ‘often into great perplexities and dangers from the mere suspicion that he possessed extraordinary secrets.’ The suspicion, I should say, was abundantly justified, since he made gold at will, and knew the composition of the wonderful elixir! ”

“ Into that mad devotion to wit which was the snare of all his compeers, Vauvenargues never fell. He worshipped at the shrine of a diviner goddess called Truth. There is not a single example—even in his maxims, when the temptation would naturally be strongest—of his sacrificing fidelity to smartness. ”

“ We stopped at Wallingford for our mid-day meal; of course, all signs of squalor and poverty had disappeared from the streets of the ancient town, and many ugly houses had been taken down and many pretty new ones built, but I thought it curious, that the town still looked like the old place I remembered so well; for indeed it looked like that ought to have looked.
At dinner we fell in with an old, but very bright and intelligent man, who seemed in a country way to be another edition of old Hammond. ”

“ We think of that gracious touch in Bacon's picture of the father of Solomon's House, that 'he had an aspect as though he pitied men.' If we reproach France in the eighteenth century with its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness, because it produced such men as the rather brutish Duclos, we ought to remember that this was also the century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender, lofty, cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists. ”

“ And the Wallingford men charged the incendiaries as one man. Like a thunderbolt, slaying, hewing, hacking, chopping, cleaving heads and limbs from trunks, with all the more deadly facility as their more numerous antagonists lacked armour, having only come out to slay lepers.
The Baron of Hanwell Castle was a corpse; so was the knight of Cropredy Towers; so was the young lord of Southam; others were writhing in mortal agony, but within a quarter of an hour more, only the dead and dying disputed the field with the Wallingford men. ”

“ It was intensely foolish and unmanly, the more foolish and unmanly inasmuch as the great lady of Gillingham never allowed the comparatively lowly born rector to forget his place. If kindly-natured, charitable George Wallingford did in his heart believe the well-sounding axiom that “’tis only noble to be good,” the flattering unction was not laid so soothingly to his soul as to enable him to act, as regarded pretty Rhoda Vavasour, on the cheering conviction. ”