“If we prosper,” he said, “we shall sail for Guiana, and found there, who knows, another Virginia. The spoil of half a dozen fat galleons and a new country. These are things that even Gloriana need not disdain. Yet Essex hath all her ear, and Essex is mine enemy.”
“If you succeed, my lord—” I began.
“If I succeed I shall send for you. If I am sent to the Tower there are certain matters concerning you to which Master Richard Boyle is privy, and which he will impart to you. But it may be I shall be sent back to rot here; if so, there is nothing more to be said.”
So on a certain day of lusty summer my lord sailed away in the Bon Aventure, with Master Edmund Spenser, whose company had so greatly lightened his exile. The same carried with him two books of his poem, The Faëry Queen, which he designed to have printed in London. He was bound to return, whether my lord came or not, for he had left at his Castle of Kilcohnour his lady whom he had married at Cork, and his young son. The same lady he made famous forever by the most beautiful of marriage-songs, which thing I had come to know, young as I was, for my lord would have me a scholar as well as a soldier, and I was become a very excellent scribe, so that the fair copying of Master Spenser’s poems came to me.
I remember my last glimpse of them ere the Bon Aventure sunk over the rim of ocean, and evening seemed all at once to settle on the world. My lord was wearing a suit of black velvet over white, very finely embroidered with seed-pearls. The plume of his hat was held in its place by a clasp of diamonds. Beside him Master Spenser, in his black, looked over-grave. But when did Sir Walter—whom I call here “my lord” out of the love and loyalty I bore him—fail to shine before all the world by the splendor of his apparel as well as by his manly beauty and the greatness of his deeds?
After they had gone, set in the endless dusk of summer evening, I grew tired of wandering about the gardens, so strange and sad without their master. So I went within doors, where some one had set a starveling rushlight in the chamber that was my lord’s dining-hall, and there I sat me down with my Latin grammar and the Virgil my lord had given me. At this time I sat daily on the wooden benches of the College School at Youghall, and had my learning of an old clerk Sir Walter had summoned here from Devonshire to take the place of the doctors and singing-men who had gone with the Desmonds. But my heart was heavy, and my head, and I had pushed away from me untasted the supper a serving-wench had carried to me.
Now all was very still in the house, so that the tap-tapping of a twig by the window-pane seemed to me a little frightful, although I was a boy of spirit. Outside was the black of an early summer night before the moon has risen, and going to the window upon the tapping I could see no star for the myrtle boughs. Yet sure I was that were I outside the purple would be pierced by innumerable eyes of light, and I was greatly tempted to return to the garden. Indeed, out in the night there would be companionship, although every bird slept well within the boughs. It is the houses men build that breed these phantoms of the brain, and not the free air. But disregarding the temptation I went back to my book, knowing full well the pleasure it would give my lord to learn that I had been diligent in his absence. Wonderful it was that he was hardly less in love with learning than with adventure. Indeed a man of such parts was this knight and master of mine that there seemed to be nothing admirable in which he did not excel. And if I am blind to his faults, even to this day when I repent me of certain share of mine in his adventures, let that be forgiven me, for surely I owed him all love and loyalty.
As the night went I heard the scullions who had been disporting themselves in the town return one by one, and the bolting and barring of doors. The songs of the sailors which came up from the shipping in the bay fell off and ceased. Silence fell on the town, a silence as unbroken as that of the sleepers yon in St. Mary’s yard, and presently drowsiness overcoming me I too slept.
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