Still, quite characteristically, the agents were not forborne, but in proportion as the preparations advanced, became more daring and insistent—but not more trustworthy in their reports. Allen, a polemical Jesuit of Rheims, and the founder of the English College at Douay, was responsible for the despatch to his native land of a number of proselytising scouts, secret emissaries deputed to test popular feeling, and sow wherever they could the seeds of disaffection. They did little, however, but inflame the national obduracy; for by this time the country was determinedly Protestant, and the knowledge of these agents provocateurs let loose in its midst only agitated and angered it. Now and again one, being caught, would pay the penalty of his temerity to the severe enactments passed against his kind; now and again one would fall a victim to popular fury. But still they came, and still misread and misreported—but not always, as the sequel will show, in the pure interests of their mission. There was one, at least, who, whatever his original motive, converted the opportunity given him to some profitable dealing on his own account. But knavish methods will ever attract knavish instruments, and undercut, in all the history of trading, cut undercut.
In 1584, a Jesuit, having in his possession a plan for the invasion of England and the destruction of its Queen, was captured at sea. The news roused public indignation to boiling pitch, and led indirectly to an association being formed, with Leicester at its head, to punish with death any attempt upon the royal life, and to exclude from the throne all who should authorize such an attempt, or design in any way to profit by it—another big nail driven into poor Mary’s coffin. Brion heard of this league, and was vaguely troubled—not because of its object, but because of the temper it revealed and fomented, and to which, in some possible local ebullition of itself, he dreaded his Uncle might come to fall a victim. He knew that the neighbourhood had long looked darkly askance upon the ex-judge as a backslider and idolater, who practised, in secret, rites which might bring him to the stake if avowed. He knew—but he knew also what rumour did not; that it was a ruined and dethroned intellect which had reverted to its ancient creed, not from re-established conviction, but from simple loss of memory. To senility early impressions are the most remembered things; and for Quentin Bagott—though senile only in the sense of one beggared by his habits of life’s best maturity—the years of his conversion were become a vague shadow, full of strange terrors and menacing shapes. His conspiring was a myth; he had no power of will or mind left in him to plot a sparrow’s downfall. Any sympathy he might appear to show with designs subversive to the State was the mere chuckling echo of long-forgotten moods, when his own dark destiny had wrought in him the passions of a rebel. Yet all this, though true enough, had no appeal in it for brute instincts, if once let loose in the name of superstition; nor would the fact of the utter seclusion in which the suspect buried himself, and with himself all indications of his real thoughts and habits, save him from a predetermined fate. Religion has hung more men on circumstantial evidence than all the lay tribunals in the world.
However, this was in very truth a meeting of trouble half way, since no sign whatever of threatened disturbance had arisen so far to justify in Brion any particular apprehension. Moreover, there was the extenuating fact to consider that he himself was locally popular enough, and that he and the household of the Grange, its master excepted, were regular in their orthodox observances. So he put the thought from him as a mere bugbear of his fancy, and trusted to his own unexceptionable attitude for public absolution.
His life during these, for him, uneventful years, had recorded little of interest but the growth of will and tissue, the intelligent, and often excited, watching of affairs, and the ever increasing desire to take some part in the great happenings which were stirring men’s imaginations the world over. As to those, he was at the last solemnly bound and pledged to an enterprise of which he only awaited with impatience the fruition to put his dreams into action. In the meantime he observed with envious admiration how England, for all her distractions, domestic and political, did not stand still, in scared irresolution, before the storms which menaced her, but continued her practices of daring and adventure over all the troubled waters of the globe, even, after her way, snatching immense booty from the very preparations being organised for her destruction. The names of Fox, Cabot, Gilbert, Drake, Frobisher, and other stalwart rovers of the main, rang in his, as in everybody’s ears, and fired him with an enthusiasm to be up and doing, in his own little sphere, what they had so magnificently ensampled in their greater. And he was sworn, as has been said, to his part, if only the plans which were to give him scope for action would come to a head; which at length, towards the close of 1584, they did.
Brion was then in London, with Clerivault, for the second time since that visit first recorded. He was staying, as Raleigh’s guest, at Durham House in the Strand—a former ‘Inn’ of the Bishops of Durham, presented by the young Edward VI to his sweet ‘sister Temperance,’ and afterwards by her to her much favoured courtier. It was an austere but imposing building on the riverside, involving such expenditure in its maintenance that, to enable its owner to live there in a state befitting its character, his accommodating sovereign had conferred upon him a patent to license the vending of wines throughout the kingdom—a sinecure so rich in emoluments as to make him, with his other properties, a wealthy man; though it may be said for him that he spent his fortune magnificently, and often much of it in the public interest. Yet still dissatisfied, it seemed, with these tokens of her royal regard, her Majesty continued to heap benefits on that lucky recipient, confirming his election as Knight of the Shire of Devon, and further, about this time or a little later, appointing him Seneschal of the Duchies of Cornwall and Exeter, and Lord Warden of the Stannaries in Devon and Cornwall, besides bestowing upon him some twelve thousand acres of forfeited land in Cork and Waterford, with other signal marks of her attachment. So that, it would seem, the ‘pack of small accomplishments’ had been exploited to rare effect, with the result that its owner had become one of the most envied and courted men in the Kingdom.
Sir Walter’s good fortune, however, had not turned his head, nor in the least diverted him from the main cherished ambition of his life, which was to wrest the empire of the New World from the Spaniard, and lay it, with all its potentialities for colonisation, at his brave England’s feet. During the year before he had partly financed the unfortunate expedition in which Sir Humphrey Gilbert perished; during this he had associated himself with an enterprise for the discovery of the North-West passage. In the meantime, having obtained from the Queen a patent of liberty to discover and seize, if might be, ‘any remote heathen and barbarous lands not actually possessed by any Christian Prince, nor inhabited by Christian people,’ with licence to inhabit and fortify the same, and leave to carry with him ‘such of our subjects’ as, in short, cared to go, he set to preparing joyfully for the venture so long projected, and at last come within the sphere of practical policy. He first, however, despatched a provisional expedition of two vessels, fitted at his own expense, which going and returning in safety, and reporting favourably upon the country and their reception therein, the main business was forthwith put definitely in hand, and arrangements made for a fleet of seven sail to start from Plymouth in the following April. And it was to this expedition that Brion had positively committed himself, and to discuss which he had accepted his friend’s invitation to a meeting in London.
He was sorry to discover at the outset that Raleigh himself—being too greatly engaged over matters of divers import, and perhaps fearing that his enemies might take advantage of his absence to bring about his overthrow—was not to accompany his own enterprise; and still more so to learn that the command thereof was to be entrusted to Sir Richard Grenville, about whom he retained no very cordial memories, and who, indeed, as he had heard, possessed the reputation for being a rough and violent leader, much feared and hated by his own men. However, he had given his undertaking, from which, as a gentleman, he could not recede; and so he must make the best of it, and that was all the matter. And, indeed, when he came, as he did, to renew at Durham House the acquaintance of the obstreperous Sheriff, he found himself in some measure called on to revise his estimate of him, so inexplicably, if gruffly, genial did he find the great man to be with him—an attitude for which he could find no explanation but in Raleigh’s friendship, though in truth it was a testimony to the way in which, on that first occasion, he had prepossessed the surly visitor in his favour.
Some others destined to the expedition he also met on this occasion, of whom one or two were captains and skilful mariners selected for the sub-commands, a few assistants for counsel and direction in the voyage, and others mere gentlemen adventurers like himself, whose acquaintance thus happily begun he was as happily to renew in after days. And with that the matter ended for him for the time being, and he returned into the country.
He went, glowing with anticipation, and concerned only for the months which still lay between him and action: he went, with some valedictory words of Raleigh’s still sounding inspiringly in his brain:—
‘Press on! Would I could follow thee—I, a poor impositioned schoolboy left at his task while all his shouting playmates go bounding for the fields. To voyage—there’s a magic in the word: to quit inglorious bondage, custom’s dull round, and be a man and free; to wake from mean small cares to visions of great seas, and waves that lift us, as nurses lift their charges, to spy over the tossing heads some wondrous sight; to greet upon our faces sweetest-laden winds, breathing like amorous sighs from lands that court their own rifling; to see strange monsters, big as ships, rolling in their feather-beds of foam. O, could I go, and share with thee the peril and the joy, and the joy in peril—two wandering champions of our dear lady-land! But, since I cannot, press on, press on, and if over the sheer cliff of the world, the stars they hang beyond, bright shrouds to climb to topmast heaven withal. That’s the way of Death, the happy way. Why do we for ever paint him as a grim old man, that follows on our heels waiting his chance to strike? He pursues us not, but bides to be discovered, a laughing child hiding behind a bush. He is not age, but youth, eternal youth; a beauteous boy, who smiles to close our eyes on years and sorrow; who comes with oblivion in his hand, bidding us drink and forget; who is the only friend that never fails us. Press on—take thy life in thy hand like a tempered sword, and so thou use it knightly in good cause, be careless whether it hold or break, thou hast made the most of it in honour. This world! is it so worth thy soul’s attachment?—a world where the great is ever at the mercy of the little, the high the low; where nobility eternally wastes itself, striving to kill the beast in man that cannot die; where beauty is but painfully achieved one day to be despoiled the next—a grievous world, a world so bad ’tis odds but any change from it must mean for better. Yet as thou strivest in it so shall be thy qualification for another. There’s its purpose. In truth it is but the jellied spawn of lovelier spheres, the egg on the leaf, a transient bubble blown in thick starlight, and jewelled with a thousand seeds of worlds to be. Make light of it, then, press on in steadfast probity, and leave to Heaven thine accompt.’