Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (285 page)

“What are you,” she asked again, “that have done this thing to me?”

Edward Colman started a little forward; the apprentice had suddenly, from behind, clasped one black arm round Anne Jeal’s chest and a long hand over her mouth. And in a second, shifting his arm down, he had lifted up her little figure; she was borne across the room, a struggling mass of white things. She was in the clothes-press and the door was shut upon her swiftly-drowned cry before ever the knocking grew loud. It came, indeed — three hard knocks, and then ceased; but other knocks began on the door of the clothes-press. The apprentice stood with his back against it; his lank, black locks were in confusion; he breathed short.

The Pastor, from beside the door, turned all of one piece upon Edward Colman; he held his long pipe still in his hand. Magdalena stood before the door that went into the hind-house; she had her key-basket still at her waist.

“Edward Colman,” the Pastor uttered, “I think I may save thy life for three hours, during which you may debate upon how you shall escape. I will do this upon two conditions, the Lord aiding me.”

He spoke slowly and deliberately, with a little trace of Dutch in his tone. The knocking grew louder from the house door.

Edward Colman looked at the slate on the table.

“I think,” he said, with the smile still about his lips, “that they will break down the door or ever you have had time to make your conditions, father.”

“I think, Edward Colman,” the Dutchman said,’ they will break down no door of mine. For the sound of these blows already will have brought my congregation into the street. They will wait till I open my door.”

And, indeed, the knocking, if it were loud, was not prolonged, and was made with something small — not with a pike or an axe.

Edward Colman, whose mind worked slowly, spoke again.

“Before we come to conditions,” he said, “it were well to be certain that Anne Jeal have not lied, and that these be truly come to take my person.”

The Pastor, who had never moved, answered —

“If they be not come to take your person, Edward Colman, you shall walk free of this house, as well you know, for the need of conditions will not be there—”

The knocking, after this interval, came again, but still the sound was rather of men intent on awakening sleepers than of men minded to break down the door.

“Then let me hear your conditions,” Edward Colman said.

The Pastor moved his hand, with the white, long pipe in it, forward, to give weight to his words.

“If,” he said, “I shall ensure you four hours in which to devise an escape, for the first thing, you shall now, at once, marry my daughter Magdalena; for the second thing, you shall set your name to a will, that if you die, shall leave all your goods and gear, after my daughter Magdalena, to the Church of the Saints on Earth.”

Edward Colman looked up at Magdalena; she looked down upon him from the doorway; her large blue eyes were upon his face, apparently passionless and unreflecting. And, whilst he wrinkled his brows to think, she spoke slowly —

“I have not asked my father to make these conditions!”

“Well I know it,” Edward Colman said. He continued to look at his slate, and was about to speak when the knocking on the door and on the door of the clothes-press made him pause. He looked up, however, at the Pastor with the untroubled and calculating gaze from his grey eyes that he would have given to a merchant asking him to lade wool for Amsterdam.

“First,” he said, in the new silence, “it was ever my pure intent and only will to marry your daughter Magdalena, since I had first known her two months, to tell her disposition, which I do love best in the world. You shall wed me this hour if you will, and I will thank you.” He paused, and tapped the table with his little fingers.

“But for your Church of the Saints — I have heard much of it that is for and against it, and I do neither love nor despise it. That you have heard me say once or twice. I hate Papists and the Alva-men who harried you; but I am minded to leave my wealth to my wife and her children, as is the English custom.”

The Pastor said —

“Aye; but after her and them to the Church of the Saints.”

Edward Colman said —

“After her, if she have no child by me, it shall go even where she wills it.”

The Pastor considered these words for some time. There came from outside the house a loud hail, as if several voices continued together to attempt awakening the inmates. Edward Colman leaned forward above the table.

“Father,” he said firmly, as one who has made his last offer, “I do take it that my life is not so endangered as Anne Jeal doth think; betwixt the hand of the officer and the rope of the hangman are byeways one may’ scape from. But it is certain that I may the better bargain with an angry, if clement, sovereign, from a foreign country. I will marry your daughter, for that is to my taste; but my money and my gear shall be hers to do as she will with, if, when I be dead, the laws do leave her them.”

The clergyman motioned with his pipe towards the inglenook.

“Sit you here, where you may not be seen from the window,” he said. “I will adventure what I may do, if the Lord give me skill.”

Edward Colman slid round the side of the table, and set himself in the long settle between the fire and the ingle wall. Magdalena came to sit at his side; and though the hand that she set in his did not tremble, and though, in the dim light of the taper, she had no apparent pallor, nevertheless her arm started suddenly when her father, with a slow deliberation, set to removing the bars from behind the board in the window.

CHAPTER IV
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The knocking which had at last become insistent, stayed when the window with the removal of the shutters let out cracks of light. When the window itself opened beneath the Pastor’s heavy fingers, there came into the room the noise of several voices speaking at once — for, as he had forecast, the sound of knocking had brought into the dim street a great crowd of his congregation and of other Dutchmen. But they stilled to let a peremptory voice come in —

“Open your door, Pastor, in King James’s name!” and, in the ingle nook, Magdalena clutched now at Colman’s arm.

“It is true they seek you,” she whispered; “if she have lied all her life else she told truth in this.”

But the Pastor, standing before the window, said —

“Show me your warrant if you be a King’s man!”

There came up to the window in the dark the black shadow of a man in a little, bowl-like hat.

“Old Knipperdolling,” he said, “here is my warrant.”

The Pastor took from without a paper or a parchment; it had hanging from it two seals that dangled on a green ribbon. He took it to the taper to read by, bending his head down and grunting a little.

“I see here a warrant to take the body of one Edward Colman,” he said, when he handed it again through the window.

“And then?” the officer asked, and he answered blankly —

“And then?”

“Open then thy door, knave Dutchman,” the officer cried out.

“Show me your warrant, man of wrath,” the Pastor answered.

“Oh, Knipperdolling that thou art,” the officer said, “is the warrant not enow?”

“Oh, officer of the temporal power that endureth but for a little while,” the Pastor answered, without a rise in his tone, “oh man clothed in a little brief authority, earthborn and soon to pass; I see a warrant to take a child of wrath; I see none that bids me open the door of my house, that is also the conventicle of the children of grace.”

The officer laughed before the window.

“Open, old Socrates, old heathen, or I will break thy doors. The man is here.”

“Sir,” the Pastor answered, “have ye witness of what ye speak?”

The officer called back among the dusky crowd at his rear, “Ho! Who hath seen one Edward Colman enter here?” But there came no answer either from Dutch or townsmen.

“What witness have you?” the Pastor repeated slowly.

“Have a care, Knipperdolling,’’ the officer answered,” the times grow evil for such as you. This King that we have loveth not a church that hath no bishops. Let us in to search thy house.”

“Oh child of a great wrath,” the Pastor answered, and he spoke as one who has before him all time till eternity, “if your powers afflict us, the Saints on Earth shall gird up their loins and seek land in new worlds—”

“Little Jan o’ Leyden,” the officer said, “let us search thy house for this man. You have prated enough.”

“Man of the Laws,” the Pastor answered, “search thy Scriptures, for even in evil versions you shall read of what befell them that called out upon Elijah; and, if no bears come to eat thee nor no worms consume thy flesh till thou die — if the day of the Lord not being yet come, thou escape these disasters, I, who am a stranger and a sojourner in the land, do know its laws. Show me your warrant to search my house, for assuredly you have one.”

“Nay, I have none,” the officer answered.

“Assuredly you have one,” the Pastor said gravely, “for better you must know your laws than to come thus without warrant to my doors and thus to incur the penalty of such as — by the statute of the late Queen, that gave us leave here to dwell — without warrant shall attack the conventicles or the houses of incomers from the Seven United Provinces being Protestant. This my house is the house of God: those who brawl before it, spit or strike upon its panels, or seek entry, not being of the congregation or having a mind to conversion—”

He paused, and said seriously —

“But it may be you seek to be of the Saints of God?”

“God forbid,” the officer said, “at least before my time.”

“Then take notice,” the Pastor said, “that by striking upon that door, which is the door at once of a pastor of the Faith and of a conventicle where Protestant worship is held, by statute of the Realm of England, and by laws of the Liberties of the Cinque Ports, since this house lieth within bowshot of the gate of Rye town, you have incurred the penalty of sacrilege — which by the Statute Law of England is to stand in the pillory, you and each of your men, for three days a week during three months, and by the enactment of the Ports to lose each one ear and one half your goods.”

The officer bit his glove points; he was acquainted little with the law of the realm and less with the enactments of the Liberties of the Ports; he had no wish to come within the law’s clutches, for the law loved forfeitures.

“I must have Edward Colman,” he said.

“Officer of the Law,” the Pastor answered, “if God wills it, you shall have Edward Colman. Of that I know nought. But, if you will enter my doors you must have a warrant sealed by the Lord Lieutenant, for that this house is without the walls of Rye, and sealed again by the Lord Warden, for that it is within bowshot of Rye Gate.”

The officer looked round upon the crowd. He had with him four men; he was near the gatehouse in the town wall, where he might drink a bottle of wine with the wardens of the gate; to break down that door with no axes, or to find axes, and possibly to fight with a hostile crowd might be a matter of an hour or more. To send a man to Udimore for a warrant would be at most a matter of three or four hours. He had no hurry, he had no wish to fight; he had even a distaste for taking Edward Colman, since, up Lewes way his brother had land that fed many sheep, and owling helped the price of wool. He must take Edward Colman if he could, but he had no will to break laws in the taking. He could leave three men at the Pastor’s door; he could send another to Udimore for the warrants; he could sit himself and watch within Rye gatehouse if perchance Edward Colman should prove to have gone elsewhere than to the Pastor’s house — for it was impossible to tell from the old man’s stolid tone whether or no the man was there.

“Pastor,” he said good-humouredly, “I shall send for warrants to search.”

The Pastor did not speak.

“But,” the officer called into the room, “if you be there, Edward Colman, think not to come off, for men shall watch this door all night.”

Magdalena shivered — with dread and with relief.

“Why,” Edward Colman whispered in the ingle, “that is Gilmour’s voice. If ever I should tell all I know I could hang his brother; he has sent me many cargoes of fleeces from his farm near Lewes.” And he added to comfort Magdalena, “Sweetheart, I think the King shall not easily hang me, for there are few gentlemen and lords of these parts — and several in the Shires — that shall not come offering to save my neck if they may buy my silence about them that send wool abroad.”

And truly, going back through the crowd, and the mud, in the blue and gusty February night, between the mud walls of the Dutchmen’s cottages, the young officer reflected that, had the Lord Lieutenant been a Sussex lord and not this pestilent Scotsman, better he would do to let Edward Colman escape back into the town of Rye.

“If I take him,” he said, “the odds will be that my brother Gilmour will feel the rope. But, with this plaguey Northern King, it is certain that my brother Gilmour’s lands will fall to him and not to me his heir!”

The apprentice opened a little grating that served the better to air the linen in the great press, where Anne Jeal sat upon a little stool. But they were forced to close it again, so dreadful were the imprecations that she uttered when through the grille she saw the Pastor marry his daughter to Edward Colman.

Magdalena Koop was tall, fair and rosy, all through the High Dutch service that lasted an interminable half-hour; only, when the Anabaptist rite required that she should kneel to her bridegroom and set both her hands between his, she said slowly that she liked the English manner better, for no kneeling could make her better minded to serve him. She had better have saved her words, for the Pastor interrupted his homilies to set in another in which he said that having been baptized with the rites of Satan — which were those of the English Church — she was, it was evident, not yet purged, cleansed, broken, annealed and rendered by fire whole again. But the deacon standing with his lustreless eyes agog in witness of the ceremony, and the old man, with a hand on each of their heads, having administered, as the rite had it, the paternal blessing of the father himself, he dismissed them both to the upper floor where were the looms and the sleeping-rooms. He bade them devise an escape, and bade especially Magdalena to think upon how often he had told her Cornelius Van Vos escaped from the watchers of Philip the Accursed’s Inquisitors in 1572.

Left to himself with the deacon apprentice, he had the fire relit, the window rebolted, the taper stand refilled and the door undone, all save its last fastening, but so noiselessly that no sound came through to the soldiers on the threshold. Then he bade set loose Anne Jeal. She came from the cupboard at once, pale, heated, and heaving with her whole body; but before she could do more than call upon the Pastor’s house the vengeance of the abolished Saints of Papist days, the lank apprentice had her by the elbows, near the door. The Pastor had it opened and closed with a swift and deliberate turn of the arms and she was in the cold street, cursing at a soldier that laid hands upon her.

The deacon gazed upon the Pastor with melancholy, puzzled eyes.

“Man of God,” he said, “I marvel that you have let her go to tell our news.”

“Tribulation,” his superior answered, “where the half-elect marvel, the elect walk surely. For two things we need: that she shall bear witness to our late marrying so that the gold of my son-in-law be secured to my daughter and the faith. In her passions she shall reveal that, crying it out to many men, who, if she had time for reflection, might conceal or deny it. And the second is that, if my son-in-law shall escape, the guards must watch closely by the door. Therefore they must know that he is within.”

“That he may escape by another issue?” the apprentice asked.

“Sure, Tribulation,” the Pastor answered, “God that hath given thee such great faith as to be a marvel hath yet not given thee understanding worth consideration in the ways of man. They shall watch the more closely at the door that my son-in-law may the more surely escape from it, and thus shall be made the more manifest the miracle of is and is not. For I would have you mark the five and-fiftieth verse—”

The deacon folded his lean hands before him and stood silhouetted against the fire, the black hair falling from his crown beneath his high hat in thin locks.