Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (295 page)

“
Coelo in es qui noster pater.”

Then having risen and three times bowed, she said the “Hail!” which is a prayer to Belcabrae the wife of Satan. The tears choked her throat so that she must begin twice the
oderc;
but, when she came to where she must stab the point of her breast, she drove the bodkin into the soft flesh and smiled.

She asperged the candles smiling, and still she smiled whilst she melted the wax in the crock about the fire and poured in the blood from the little basin.

She grew very hot over the fire, and she took off her jacket and bodice and let down her black hair about her shoulders. When she came away from the fire with her ball of wax she shivered; but, with her little silver meat knife and her bodkin she set to her work, muttering the backward fragments of Latin prayers of the old faith that were all that there remained for the most part in England. And, shivering, sobbing, her teeth chattering and furiously brushing the black hair from her eyes and sometimes waiting till her breast should have done heaving, she went to her work. When she came to modelling Edward Colman’s face she was very still; she turned the little doll round and round in her hands, and then with a bodkin pricked in the place of the eyes. And then suddenly she thought she heard Edward Colman say —

“It is too dark. Cast anchor till the dawn!”

It was a full, clear sound, his voice; it seemed to come from beside the fireplace, “It is too dark. Cast anchor till the dawn!”

Her eyes distended wildly; she gazed into the shadows of the chimney. And then her face was full of triumph and a fearful malice. For she remembered that, if you make a waxen image of a man with intent to sweat it and so to cause his fading away and sickness and death — if the image
 
be made with all the true prayers and spells, it is a sign that the work is well done if you hear suddenly the voice of the man speaking sensible words. And, at that time, Edward Colman was upon the sea and it was very dark. So raising her eyes to the plume of dusty feathers that, like an owl, nodded in the darkness above the canopy of the bed, duskily in the highest point of the room—”God of Heaven,” she said, the last prayer of that spell, “send that none thine angel intercede between this man and me.”

She looked upon the little image in her hand; as the fire flickered it seemed that the smile was about Edward Colman’s mouth, and she shuddered all over her being.

And suddenly a faint, clear, shrill sound fell upon her ears. It was cockcrow.

She laid herself down upon the bed with the little image pressed to her breast. According, as she believed, some of Edward Colman’s life was gone from him and into that homunculus that had her own blood mingled with its being. And as, after fourteen days, she would sweat it and melt it before slow fires, so maladies and sinkings would beset him, until, with the last dripping away of the wax and blood, his life would pass out miserably. Her eyes closed slowly; she muttered once —

“He is upon the sea.” Her eyes opened and she gazed into the room where the fire was gone down to grey ashes. “How dark!” she whispered.

Then she had him in her arms and, whilst the grey dawn crept in at the window, she was in a sunny room and heard him talking of how he had sailed the world round and come back to her. It was considered that if, during the waking hours, witches and wizards and the like suffered the tortures of the damned, they had, when they slept, the property of dreaming that what they most desired had come to pass. So that Edward Colman toyed with her hair and spoke of sailing upon the seas from which he had come back.

She rode next day beside the young cornet, over the Kentish border, in the midst of her little troop of horse. The Earl Dalgarno rode ahead in a sort of Scottish dignity and gloom that made him little beloved by his men, who deemed themselves as great as he, and were far better horsemen. At times she laughed, at times she even answered the cornet’s questions, so that he began again to have some opinion of her wit. When he spoke of his exploits in gaining for her the wax torches she smiled in a very absent manner. Kent is a fairer county than Sussex, it has fields more open and drier and greener, and the sun shone out when they went across. It is difficult for a young thing to believe that she has parted for ever from a man she loves, so difficult that, at times, when the sun shines and there are green fields, she will forget the parting and laugh as if it were not yet come. It was thus that Anne Jeal laughed, though when she remembered that the wind was in the south-west and that Edward Colman, upon the sea, must be nearing the coasts of Holland she grew grave or reckless in her speech. When she was absent it was when she was thinking that she had the waxen image in her pocket. For fourteen days she might not sweat it till, that is to say, the new moon came in. And if, in that time, Edward Colman took the communion her spells would be powerless. At the thought that he might do so she became sorrowful; but at the thought that, to be efficacious in saving him, it must be the communion of the Old Faith she became again serene. Edward Colman was little likely to have truck with papists. He had too much of disbelief and liked to laugh.

Once, when the cornet asked her what she muttered of, she said that she was thinking of an enemy she had. Actually she had said —

“Aye, Edward Colman, on the fourteenth day of March your pains will begin. Very slowly you shall sweat and die and be mine.” And once she laughed, and the cornet felt flattered and more gay; but she was thinking it was odd that she should love a man and yet desire his death.

CHAPTER V
.

IT was upon the 14th day of March that Henry Hudson the navigator came in the evening — and he had his wife with him — to tell Edward Colman that the English agent knew he was in Amsterdam. Hudson had gone before the Lord Scroop to get his leave of liberty to be out of England for one year; and whilst, because he was so famous a navigator, the agent had been talking with him of his voyage, there had come in Sir H. Wotton, the envoy who lay for so long under disgrace because he wrote in a Dutch lady’s album that an ambassador is a man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country. This Sir Henry had stayed also for a long time talking to Hudson, and in the middle of his laughing talk he had asked the navigator if by chance he had come across one Edward Colman in that city. Hudson had answered that, aye, he knew him very well....

Edward Colman was considering of the armour that the Dutch Company had found for him on his voyage. He was troubled because the Dutchmen should hand it to him there at his lodgings, and not on board the
Half Moon.
He might not wear armour in going to his ship, because the putting on of war-harness was forbidden in the city. Then he must find a boy to carry it for him, and the

Dutch boys were very thievish. When Hudson uttered the words he had said to Sir H. Wotton, Colman let out a sudden “Oh, woe!” and sat down upon the bed that was in a space in the wall. He kept his hand to his head, and, in the light of the tallow dip that stood also in a hollow of the wall, Hudson eyed him very narrowly.

“Why,” he said, “you think me a very traitor to have said this. But I was minded to hear the worst that might be said against you, for do we not sail tomorrow? and I have little knowledge of what is in your past.”

Edward Colman moved his stockinged feet as he sat on the floor; the navigator’s wife gazed at him very anxiously from her one eye, her head being upon one side.

“Edward Colman,” she said, and her voice was filled with concern, “why speak you not? This is an evil sign of guilt, that you do not speak.”

She had at that date knitted for him such a woollen cap as her husband should wear, and it gave her a pang at her heart to think that Edward Colman might be a very guilty man, because she had from the first thought that she would wish her eldest son to grow up like him — docile, smiling, and alert, too, for her days with Hudson were a little troublesome; he was such a loud man.

Edward Colman shuffled again his legs on the floor, and said — his voice was very stifled —

“What heard you of Sir Henry?”

“Why,” Hudson answered, “this envoy says that very evil things have been said of you in London by a woman that is witness before the King’s Council.”

Edward Colman muttered —

“Oh, well! oh, well!” and loosened the jacket round his neck.

The three eyes of the married couple were upon him very sharply; he leaned his head against the side wall of the bed.

“Why,” Hudson said, “I perceive that these are things against you that Sir H. Wotton did not know.
‘For,’
says this goodly knight, ‘a
certain Scots lord and the King himself cry out very loudly upon this man of Rye. He is said to be not only an illicit seller of wool and an Anabaptist, but one that foments great treacheries against the King’s peace.... But,’
says Sir H. Wotton, ‘
I did see this woman myself, and I have a house in Sussex, and have had this many years. So that I think there is little in the story of treason. But for owling, no doubt it is true. And be it as it will, I am very strictly enjoined by the President of the Council — a Scots lord — to tell here my Lord Scroop that he must diligently seek after this man and take him. For
,’ said my Lord President, ‘
there have been too many men, outlaws, that escape out of Amsterdam
.’”

Edward Colman gave a great cry; he sprang from the bed and stretched out his hand towards the black table, where there was a carafe of water. But he fell upon his knees, with his hands to the air.

“Lord Jesu, pity me!” he cried.

Mrs. Hudson turned to a deadly pallor.

“Oh, Heaven be thanked,” she said, “that thus his guilt is unmasked, and he shall not sail with thee!”

Hudson stroked his beard.

“Woman,” he said, “I believe you are over careful of me. I think this is not guilt, but the Dutch fever.”

Edward Colman gazed at Hudson; his eyes rolled in his head; he pointed to his mouth and to his throat.

“Fire here!” he mumbled pitifully.

Hudson strode to the table; he filled a glass masterfully with wine; he held it to Edward Colman’s lips; it clittered and clattered, and the wine gushed to the floor from his clenched teeth. Hudson bent to set his arm under the shoulders of the young man; he lifted him right up with one arm, so strong he was, and dropped him gently upon the bed.

“Undo his shirt,” he said to his wife; “feel of his heart, how it beats.”

She approached the man with repulsion; she slid her hand down between his shirt and his skin.

“It goes flutter, and then stops, and then beats mightily,” she said.

Hudson slapped his swordhilt with a heavy triumph.

“Why, it is a Dutch fever,” he repeated. “When you have been as often in Amsterdam as I you will know the signs.”

She looked round upon him anxiously.

“Do not take this man with you,” she said. “His heart has nearly stopped.”

“Dame,” Hudson said angrily, “it will vanish when he is two days at sea. I will take him the more because of this.”

“You do not think of what will befall me if he mutiny,” she reproached him. “Shall I be widowed?”

“Woman,” he said, for such speeches angered him very much, “it is because I think of you and your children that I will take him. For this is a disease of sober men; it comes of drinking water, and it is your wine-bibbers that are the first to mutiny.”

She kept her hand still in its place.

“Why, his heart stirs again,” she said.

“Men do not die often of this,” her husband answered. “It is a disease of such as drink the foul waters of the canals here. You may not drink any water in this city of canals, for it is more costly than wine. If it is potable, it is brought from springs away in Gelderland. He will revive again in five minutes’ time, and then for the
Half Moon!”

She withdrew her hand from Edward Colman’s heart.

“I do think,” she said, “that if this be not guilt it is witchcraft. Do not take this man with you I’’

He laughed at her aloud.

“Why, I have seen a dozen men struck with Dutch fever. Saw you ever one that was bewitched? It is an old wife’s tale.”

“My brother’s wife’s uncle,” she answered him, “wronged a woman; he was taken with such a sweating as this — and there was an old woman ducked and drowned for bewitching him.”

“Why, he lived in Chidrock Quagmire,” Hudson laughed; “this is all a folly of witchcraft.”

“Aye,” she said; “but I have heard you often speak of spells, and sorceries, and corpse-lights upon the sea.”

“Woman,” he said, “this is not upon the sea, where, for certain, there are witches.”

“Henry,” she shook her head at him, “see how he sweats. I have seen my uncle so.”

“In a minute,” he said, “he will be well. That is ever the way with the Dutch fever.”

“Aye,” she answered, “in a minute he will be well. That is because the witch no longer makes her spells, for fear he die at once and be no more tortured.”

She paused.

“Henry,” she said, “that stripling hath wronged a woman. One that hath wronged a woman will wrong a man.”

“In a first place,” he answered, “that is folly. In a second, I asked Sir H. Wotton if he had wronged this woman that betrayed him. And Sir. H. Wotton said very expressly he had questioned her, and she said no, but she did it out of love for the King.” Edward Colman sat up suddenly and laughed; the sweat was in great beads upon his forehead, and one side of his face had the appearance of being shrunken, but the smile had come back to the corners of his little foxy moustache. “My pains are gone!” he cried out.

Hudson turned upon his wife.

“Did I not say so it would be?” he said. “The pains and fever abate when the sweat comes,”

His wife turned upon him and uttered —

“Did I not say so it would be? The pains and fever abate when the witches cease their spells.” Edward Colman looked at them wide-eyed.

“Ye were speaking of my crimes,” he said. “I have done none save owling, which is none.”

The good wife looked upon him with a great earnestness from her one eye.

“Have you never wronged a woman?” she asked. “It is a very strong crime.”

Edward Colman laughed at her, only the side of his face went a little awry, like the waning of the full moon.

“As I hope to enter heaven, none,” he said, “unless it be when, as a magistrate, I have sent scolds to the cucking-stool. That may not be justice, but it is so deemed in the customals.”

It was only then that he heard that Anne Jeal had got to London town, and he stopped to think about it, whilst husband and wife fell into a long wrangle about what should be done for him. Hudson, who believed only in Dutch fever, said that being upon the ship and in the air of the sea was his most certain cure; his wife said that the only remedy was to be bathed from head to foot in the holy water of the old faith. And as there was a Papist church not very far off, she was minded to go herself at” once in their boat along the canals and fetch the idolaters’ fluid. Hudson forbade it, she was on the point of doing it, and each rehearsed how they had foretold that so his fit would end as it had ended. Edward Colman sat upon the bedside, looking upon the ground and swinging his stockinged feet, whilst Mrs. Hudson’s voice rose higher and higher, till it resembled the sound that a hen makes when it leaves the nest. Suddenly Edward Colman sprang on to the floor. He had finished his meditations, and was certain that it was good that Anne Jeal was in London, since Magdalena was in Rye. Anne Jeal might move the King’s ministers in London town, but she could not — and that was his fear — use her knife to Magdalena if she were not in Rye town. The King’s ministers he did not fear so much; it was well that they should see Anne Jeal, for then they would the less believe her.

So he spoke to the old woman —

“Why, as for holy water, I like it not, for I am no Papist; and as for witchcraft, though the King doth bid us believe it, I hold little with it nowadays. If what comes from Papists alone can cure it, then, say I, God, who is good, did send it out of our land when He cleansed them of Papists. Besides, know ye not it is of evil omen to begin upon a voyage with these mummings of anti-Christ? If it would cure me, yet would I not do it, and spoil a fair voyage for my mates; I had rather bear pains.”

“Now, by God,” Henry Hudson said, “though thou hadst done ail the crimes of the Duke of Alva, that harried through Holland and slew many poor women, yet would I take you for that fine speech.” The good wife shook her head and mumbled her lips; she did not speak any more, for she would have let the young man suffer the tortures of death ere he should imperil her husband’s voyage.

“Why, then, to the
Half Moon!”
Hudson cried out.

Edward Colman looked upon the steel breastplate, upon the heavy thigh-greaves of steel and leather, and upon the steel cap, with its flap far in front and its little bar of steel that came down before the mouth.

“I would willingly,” he said, “but how shall I get these to the ship? — for I may not wear them in the streets of this town.”

“Why, we will take boat to the ship along the canal,” Hudson said, “and they with us.”