Ere we were put into Plymouth town again there were eighty of our hundred dead of the smallpox; and I was carried ashore more dead than alive, to be nursed back to health by the Lady Raleigh’s ministering hands.
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CHAPTER VII.—OUR LAST YEARS TOGETHER.
I came out of that illness no longer the youth I had been; for God used the things that had happened me to make a change in my heart. I went very near to death, and I came back to life very grievously disfigured, yea, as though I had been slashed criss-cross with swords, and the sight of one of mine eyes gone. Nevermore should I ruffle it with gallants; and indeed it seemed a bitter and cruel thing to the boy, this ruin of comeliness, so that for long the bitterness was greater than death, yet since then the man has learned to thank the Hand that wielded that most merciful rod.
I was yet but a moping thing, creeping up heavily from death to life, when my lord sailed on that expedition to Cadiz with the Lord Admiral Thomas Howard and his old-time enemy the Lord Essex, which brought such glory to the English name. I think there was but one part of my old self remained alive in me, and that was my love for Sir Walter, which is wrought so inextricably within the chords of my being that nothing shall disentangle it.
I had been sick to death during that time when Sir Walter had wrestled vainly with the Queen for an expedition to Guiana, and been discomfited. For truly her will was brass and iron; nothing for man, however great, to prevail against, and for long her face had been turned away from him, and seemed like to remain so.
I was getting well, with no heart to recover, when the reports came of the Cadiz expedition. It was glorious summer weather, and my Lady Raleigh, whose patience was more than human with me, would have me carried to the lawn under shade of trees; and there laid on my pillows I would listen to her proud recitals of her lord’s heroic deeds.
It was on the 21st of June that the fleet entered Cadiz Harbor. My lord was on board the Water Sprite; and he had no sooner entered than he received the fire of seventeen great galleons. But as though she had been indeed spirit and not body, the Sprite went unharmed. Raleigh blew his trumpets upon them in a great blare of defiance. Near at hand lay the St. Philip and the St. Andrew, the two ships foremost in that attack on the Revenge in which the brave Sir Richard Greville had fallen. “These,” wrote he, “were the marks I shot at, being resolved to be revenged for the Revenge, or to second her with my own life.... Having no hope of my fly-boats to board, and the Earl and my Lord Thomas having both promised to second me, I laid out a way by the side of the Philip to shake hands with her, for with the wind we could not get aboard; which when she and the rest perceived they all let slip and ran aground, tumbling into the sea heaps of soldiers as thick as if coals had been poured out of a sack in many parts at once, some drowned and some sticking in the mud. The Philip burned itself, the St. Andrew and the St. Matthew were recovered by our boats ere they could get out to fire them. The spectacle was very lamentable, for many drowned themselves; many, half-burned, leaped into the water; very many hanging by the rope’s end by the ship’s side, under the water even to the lips; many swimming with grievous wounds, and withal so huge a fire and so great a tearing of ordnance in the great Philip and the rest, when the fire came to them, as if a man had a desire to see Hell itself it was there most lively figured. Ourselves spared the lives of all after the victory, but the Flemings, who did little or nothing in the fight, used merciless slaughter, till they were by myself, and afterwards by the Lord Admiral, beaten off.”
“The poor Spaniards!” cried my Lady Raleigh with tears, even while she was proudest; but as for me, I had no heart to rejoice or to be sorry, being so marred myself, and scarce anything alive in me except my love for her lord, and even that pulsed faintly.
He came home to be hailed with such cheers and shouts by the common people as pleased the Queen but little, for she liked not to be eclipsed by a subject. Besides, the victory gave her little treasure; and she grew more and more miserly. Though my lord was glorious with wounds, she even refused to look upon him, which led me to say, as I have said often since, that the greatness of those Tudors lay chiefly in their hard usage of those who made them great. However, there was to gauge a deeper depth when the Stuart came to England’s throne.