‘Or I thee, for thyself. It shall take shape in no long time. ’Tis such as thou I’ll need, dear lad. And the patriot—above all the immense patriot.’
Brion laughed, and they parted. That same afternoon he and Clerivault started on their long journey homeward.
CHAPTER XXIV.
COMMITTED
The three or four years immediately succeeding that of Brion’s first visit to London were ominous years for England—a fact which she did not fail to appreciate.
‘There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.’
The Irish rebellion—that vanward cloud of Philip’s brewing, first step towards the conquest of our little hated Island and the extirpation of the Reformed religion—had been thrown back and defeated, but only to swell the enormous reserves of fanaticism which still accumulated behind, waiting to burst in the last devastating tempest of the Armada. And in the meantime the preparations, material and moral, went on. The dour King’s emissaries were busy while his ships were building; his secret agents were everywhere, spying, reporting, seeking to corrupt. But, as in more recent days—one people’s psychology being incomprehensible by another, and the disadvantage always lying to the race too dense in its blundering vanity to grasp that simple proposition—many of the conclusions drawn from evidence collected by these informers proved false, and, through being thought true, helped to demoralize the very cause they were designed to advance. Such, for instance, was the belief, common in Spain, that the English Catholic nobility was, as a body, disaffected towards the usurping ‘bastard’ calling herself its Queen, and was to be depended on, in the event of an invasion, to join the enemy. It was a belief having a curious parallel with one cherished, though in a different direction, in our own time, and owed itself to exactly the same inability on the part of an arrogant and humourless people, thinking itself the salt of the earth, to understand that national pride, when tested, is found a stronger thing than dogma, and will combine to resist the imposition on it of any other people’s ideas, whether religious or political. A few traitor exceptions there were, no doubt—men who still nursed the hope of deposing Elizabeth, establishing Scotch Mary on the throne, and restoring the true faith; but these were never more than enough to ruffle the surface of the steadfast deeps of popular opinion, and to keep pretty active and alert the general resolve to fall on and stamp out such symptoms wherever they were detected. Here and there, by misfortune, a patch of the disease did escape discovery, and, a little spreading through its immunity, came to imposthumate in an abortive rising like the Babington conspiracy—another little ‘psychologic’ mistake of Philip’s, since its only effects were to shock some waverers into loyalty, and to hasten on the execution of the unhappy lady upon whom he had founded his hopes. But, with these indifferent qualifications, England remained England still, sound to the national core, and one in its determination to resist dictation by any power, temporal or spiritual.