Yes, God is setting this man’s secret sins in the light of His countenance. If he has been ambitious, his ambition has punished itself now. If he has cared more for his own honour than for his wife and children, that sin too has punished itself. If he has (which I affirm not) tampered with truth for the sake of what seemed to him noble and just ends, that too has punished itself; for his men do not trust him. If he has (which I affirm not) done any wrong in that matter of Cobham, that too has punished itself: for his men, counting him as non ens in law, will not respect or obey him. If he has spoken, after his old fashion, rash and exaggerated words, and goes on speaking them, even though it be through the pressure of despair, that too shall punish itself; and for every idle word that he shall say, God will bring him into judgment. And why, but because he is noble? Why, but because he is nearer to God by a whole heaven than others whom God lets fatten on their own sins, having no understanding, because they are in honour, and having children at their hearts’ desire, and leaving the rest of their substance to their babes? Not so does God deal with His elect when they will try to worship at once self and Him; He requires truth in the inward parts, and will purge them till they are true, and single-eyed, and full of light.
Keymis returns with the wreck of his party. The scene between him and Raleigh may be guessed. Keymis has excuse on excuse. He could not get obeyed after young Raleigh’s death: he expected to find that Sir Walter was either dead of his sickness or of grief for his son, and had no wish ‘to enrich a company of rascals who made no account of him.’ He dare not go up to the mine because (and here Raleigh thinks his excuse fair) the fugitive Spaniards lay in the craggy woods through which he would have to pass, and that he had not men enough even to hold the town securely. If he reached the mine and left a company there, he had no provisions for them; and he dared not send backward and forward to the town while the Spaniards were in the woods. The warnings sent by Gondomar had undone all, and James’s treachery had done its work. So Keymis, ‘thinking it a greater error, so he said, to discover the mine to the Spaniards than to excuse himself to the Company, said that he could not find it.’ From all which one thing at least is evident, that Keymis believed in the existence of the mine.
Raleigh ‘rejects these fancies’; tells him before divers gentlemen that ‘a blind man might find it by the marks which Keymis himself had set down under his hand’: that ‘his case of losing so many men in the woods’ was a mere pretence: after Walter was slain, he knew that Keymis had no care of any man’s surviving. ‘You have undone me, wounded my credit with the King past recovery. As you have followed your own advice, and not mine, you must satisfy his Majesty. It shall be glad if you can do it: but I cannot.’ There is no use dwelling on such vain regrets and reproaches. Raleigh perhaps is bitter, unjust. As he himself writes twice, to his wife and Sir Ralph Winwood, his ‘brains are broken.’ He writes to them both, and re-opens the letters to add long postscripts, at his wits’ end. Keymis goes off; spends a few miserable days; and then enters Raleigh’s cabin. He has written his apology to Lord Arundel, and begs Raleigh to allow of it. ‘No. You have undone me by your obstinacy. I will not favour or colour your former folly.’ ‘Is that your resolution, sir?’ ‘It is.’ ‘I know not then, sir, what course to take.’ And so he goes out, and into his own cabin overhead. A minute after a pistol-shot is heard. Raleigh sends up a boy to know the reason. Keymis answers from within that he has fired it off because it had been long charged; and all is quiet.
Half an hour after the boy goes into the cabin. Keymis is lying on his bed, the pistol by him. The boy moves him. The pistol-shot has broken a rib, and gone no further; but as the corpse is turned over, a long knife is buried in that desperate heart. Another of the old heroes is gone to his wild account.
Gradually drops of explanation ooze out. The ‘Sergeant-major, Raleigh’s nephew, and others, confess that Keymis told them that he could have brought them in two hours to the mine: but as the young heir was slain, and his father was unpardoned and not like to live, he had no reason to open the mine, either for the Spaniard or the King.’ Those latter words are significant. What cared the old Elizabethan seaman for the weal of such a king? And, indeed, what good to such a king would all the mines in Guiana be? They answered that the King, nevertheless, had ‘granted Raleigh his heart’s desire under the great seal.’ He replied that ‘the grant to Raleigh was to a man non ens in law, and therefore of no force.’ Here, too, James’s policy has worked well. How could men dare or persevere under such a cloud?
How, indeed, could they have found heart to sail at all? The only answer is that they knew Raleigh well enough to have utter faith in him, and that Keymis himself knew of the mine.
Puppies at home in England gave out that he had killed himself from remorse at having deceived so many gentlemen with an imaginary phantom. Every one, of course, according to his measure of charity, has power and liberty to assume any motive which he will. Mine is simply the one which shows upon the face of the documents; that the old follower, devoted alike to the dead son and to the doomed father, feeling that he had, he scarce knew how, failed in the hour of need, frittered away the last chance of a mighty enterprise which had been his fixed idea for years, and ruined the man whom he adored, avenged upon himself the fault of having disobeyed orders, given peremptorily, and to be peremptorily executed.
Here, perhaps, my tale should end; for all beyond is but the waking of the corpse. The last death-struggle of the Elizabethan heroism is over, and all its remains vanish slowly in an undignified, sickening way. All epics end so. After the war of Troy, Achilles must die by coward Paris’s arrow, in some mysterious, confused, pitiful fashion; and stately Hecuba must rail herself into a very dog, and bark for ever shamefully around lonely Cynossema. Young David ends as a dotard—Solomon as worse. Glorious Alexander must die, half of fever, half of drunkenness, as the fool dieth. Charles the Fifth, having thrown all away but his follies, ends in a convent, a superstitious imbecile; Napoleon squabbles to the last with Sir Hudson Lowe about champagne. It must be so; and the glory must be God’s alone. For in great men, and great times, there is nothing good or vital but what is of God, and not of man’s self; and when He taketh away that divine breath they die, and return again to their dust. But the earth does not lose; for when He sendeth forth His Spirit they live, and renew the face of the earth. A new generation arises, with clearer sight, with fuller experience, sometimes with nobler aims; and
‘The old order changeth, giveth place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways.
The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon. There was no more life left in it; and God had something better in store for England. Raleigh’s ideal was a noble one: but God’s was nobler far. Raleigh would have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed her very vitals by that gold, as Spain was destroyed. And all the while the great and good God was looking steadfastly upon that little struggling Virginian village, Raleigh’s first-born, forgotten in his new mighty dreams, and saying, ‘Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.’ There, and not in Guiana; upon the simple tillers of the soil, not among wild reckless gold-hunters, would His blessing rest. The very coming darkness would bring brighter light. The evil age itself would be the parent of new good, and drive across the seas steadfast Pilgrim Fathers and generous Royalist Cavaliers, to be the parents of a mightier nation than has ever yet possessed the earth. Verily, God’s ways are wonderful, and His counsels in the great deep.