Sir Isumbras at the Ford by D K Broster

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Title: Sir Isumbras at the Ford

Author: D. K. Broster

Release Date: April 10, 2021 [eBook #65039]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR ISUMBRAS AT THE FORD ***

SIR ISUMBRAS AT THE FORD

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

IN COLLABORATION WITH

G. W. TAYLOR

CHANTEMERLE

THE VISION SPLENDID

SIR ISUMBRAS AT THE FORD

By D. K. BROSTER

LONDON:

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1918

TO

BARBARA AND HER SON PHILIP

"And als he wente by a woodë schawe,
Thare mette he with a lytille knave

Came rynnande him agayne—

'Gramercy, faire Syr Isumbras,
Have pitie on us in this case,
And lifte us uppe for Marie's grace!'

N'as never childe so fayne.

Theretoe of a mayden he was ware,
That over floude ne mighte not fare,
Sir Ysumbras stoopède him thare

And uppe ahent hem twayne."

Metrical Romance of Sir Ysumbras.

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

THE ROAD TO FRANCE

CHAP.
PAGE

I. Anne-Hilarion gets out of Bed
3

II. And is put back again
10

III. Purchase of a Goldfish, and other Important Matters
19

IV. Visit to Two Fairy Godmothers
26

V. Thomas the Rhymer
37

VI. "A Little Boy Lost"
45

VII. The Chevalier de la Vireville meets "Monsieur Augustin"
54

BOOK TWO

THE ROAD TO ENGLAND

CHAP.
PAGE

VIII. Some Results of Listening to Poetry
69

IX. The Trois Frères of Caen
82

X. Happenings in a Postchaise
90

XI. "Fifty Fathoms deep"
103

XII. Introducing Grain d'Orge
115

XIII. Far in the Forest
124

XIV. Cæsarea the Green
134

XV. Cavendish Square once more
145

XVI. The Agent de la Correspondance
151

XVII. Strange Conduct of the Agent
160

XVIII. Equally surprising Conduct of "Monsieur Augustin" 168

XIX. La Porte du Manoir
179

XX. Sea-Holly
188

XXI. How Anne-Hilarion fed the Ducks
203

BOOK THREE

THE ROAD THAT FEW RETURNED ON

CHAP.
PAGE

XXII. "To Noroway, to Noroway"
217

XXIII. Displeasure of "Monsieur Augustin"
226

XXIV. Creeping Fate
231

XXV. History of a Scar
242

XXVI. Ste. Barbe—and Afterwards
250

XXVII. La Vireville breaks his Sword
261

XXVIII. Mr. Tollemache as an Archangel
272

XXIX. Væ Victis!
286

XXX. Atropos
294

XXXI. The Paying of the Score
302

XXXII. Dead Leaves
309

XXXIII. The Man she would have Married
318

XXXIV. Monseigneur's Guest
324

XXXV. Mr. Tollemache as a Linguist
335

XXXVI. Anne-Hilarion makes a Plan, and the Bishop a Revelation 345

XXXVII. The Child unlocks the Door
354

BOOK FOUR

THE OLDEST ROAD OF ALL

CHAP.
PAGE

XXXVIII. Flower of the Gorse 365

XXXIX. Flower of the Foam 375

BOOK ONE

THE ROAD TO FRANCE

"But, Thomas, ye sall haud your tongue,

Whatever ye may hear or see;

For speak ye word in Elflyn-land,

Ye'll ne'er win back to your ain countrie."

Thomas the Rhymer.

CHAPTER I

Anne-Hilarion gets out of Bed

(1)

"And well ye ken, Maister Anne, ye should hae been asleep lang syne!" said Elspeth severely.

Master Anne—M. le Comte Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny—gave a little sigh from the bed. "I have tried . . . if you would

say 'Noroway,' perhaps? . . . Say 'Noroway-over-the-foam,' Elspeth, je vous en prie!"

"Dinna be using ony of yer French havers tae me, wean!" exclaimed the elderly woman thus addressed, still more

threateningly. "Aweel then. . . . Ye're no' for 'True Thomas' the nicht?"

The silky brown head on the pillow was shaken. "No, please. I like well enough the Queen of Elfland, but best of all

'Noroway-over-the-foam' and the shoes with cork heels."

Elspeth Saunders grunted, for there was something highly congenial to her Calvinistic soul in that verse of 'Thomas the

Rhymer' which deals with the Path of Wickedness—'Yon braid, braid road that lies across the lily leven,' and she was
accustomed to render it with unction. However, she sat down, took up her knitting, and began:

"'The king sat in Dunfermline toun

Drinking the blude-red wine,'"

and the little Franco-Scottish boy in the curtained bed closed his eyes, that he might seem to be composing himself to
slumber. In reality he was seeing the pictures which are set in that most vivid of all ballads—Sir Patrick Spens receiving the
King's letter as he walked on the seashore, the sailor telling of the new moon with the old in her arms (a phenomenon never
quite clear to the Comte de Flavigny), the storm and shipwreck, and the ladies with their fans, the maidens with their
golden combs, waiting for those who would never come back again.

"'And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens

Wi' the Scots lords at his feet,'"

finished Elspeth. The knitting needles proceeded a little with their tale, then they too stopped.

"Losh! the bairn's asleep already!" thought Mrs. Saunders, looking over her spectacles. She tiptoed from the room.

Yet although Anne-Hilarion's long lashes lay quietly on his cheeks he was not by any means asleep, and under those

dark curtains he watched, not without a certain drowsiness, the gigantic shadow of his attendant vanish from the wall. The
night-light shed a very faint gleam on the vast mahogany wardrobe, whose polished doors reflected darkly much that
passed without, and suggested, to a lively imagination, all kinds of secret happenings within. It also illumined Anne's minute
garments, neatly folded on a chair, his high-waisted blue kerseymere pantaloons on the top of the pile, and the small coat,
into which Elspeth had been sewing a fresh ruffle, over the back. This much of his apartment could Anne see between the
chintz curtains, figured with many a long-tailed tropic bird, which hung tent-like from the short pole fixed in the wall above
his pillow. But he could not see Mme. d'Aulnoy's fairy-tales, in their original French, which were lying face downwards on
the floor not very far away (and which he would be scolded for having left about, when they were found to-morrow); nor
the figure of Notre Dame de Pontmain, in her star-decked robe of blue and her long black veil, holding in her hands not
her Son but a crucifix—the figure which M. l'Abbé, being of Laval, her country, had given to the little boy. For this image
had a knack of disappearing entirely when Anne's father the Marquis was away, since, as may readily be supposed, it
found no favour in the eyes of Mrs. Saunders, and was an even more violent irritant than all 'the bairn's Popish exercises,'
to which she would so much have liked to put an end. That she might see as little as possible of the heathen idol she had
banished it, with its bracket, to an obscure corner of the room, over the discarded high nursery-chair in which Anne, at six
years old, no longer took his meals. The fact of the image's being in the room at all just now showed that the Marquis was
at home . . . for to him, as to his small son, in this April of the year 1795, the solid Cavendish Square house was home,
though it belonged to neither of them. Anne-Hilarion, for his part, could remember no other.

(2)

The unusual presence of a statue of the Virgin, and of Mme. d'Aulnoy's Contes de fées on the second floor this

London house, was, naturally, but a consequence of that same series of events which had brought thither their small owner.
Seven years before, the only daughter of James Elphinstone of Glenauchtie, a retired official of high standing in the service
of John Company, had lost her heart to a young Frenchman, the Marquis René de Flavigny, whom she had met on a visit
to Paris. Although the necessary separation from his daughter was very bitter to him, Mr. Elphinstone could find no real
objection to the match, and so the Scotch girl and the Frenchman were married, lived happily on de Flavigny's estate in the
Nivernais, and were joined there in due time by a son.

But Anne-Hilarion had not chosen well the date of his entry into this world. On the very July day that René and Janet

de Flavigny and all their tenants were celebrating the admirable prowess displayed by M. le Comte in attaining, without

accident or illness—without flying back to heaven, as his nurse had it—the age of one year, the people of Paris also were
keeping a festival, the first anniversary of the day when the bloody head of the governor of the Bastille had swung along the
streets at the end of a pike. Before that summer was out the Marquis de Flavigny, urged by his father-in-law, had decided
to place his wife and child in safety, and so, bidding the most reluctant of good-byes to the tourelles and the swans which
had witnessed their two short years of happiness, they left France for England. Perhaps they would have fared no worse
had they remained there. For Janet de Flavigny caught on the journey a chill from which she never recovered, and died,
after a few months, leaving to her little son not even a memory, and to these two men who had passionately loved her a
remembrance only too poignant.

Her death forced both their lives into fresh channels. Mr. Elphinstone left Scotland and settled in London, where, to

distract himself from his grief, he began to write those long-planned memoirs of his Indian career which, after more than
four years, still absorbed him. As for the Marquis de Flavigny, having once emigrated, he could not now return to France
even had he wished it. He therefore threw himself heart and soul into the schemes of French Royalism, at first for the
rescue of the Royal Family from their quasi-imprisonment in their own palace, and—now that King and Queen alike were
done to death, their children captives and a Republic in being—into all the hopes that centred round the stubborn loyalists
of Brittany, Maine, and Vendée, round du Boisguy or Stofflet or Charette. And though the rightful little King might be close
prisoner in the Temple, his uncles—the Comte de Provence (Regent in name of France) and the Comte d'Artois—were
still at large, as exiles, in Europe, and it was to one or other of these princes that Royalist émigrés looked, and under their
ægis that they plotted and fought. Not many of them, impoverished as they were by the Revolution, had the good fortune
to possess, like René de Flavigny, a British father-in-law who put money and house at his son-in-law's disposal, welcomed
his friends, and strove to bear his absences on Royalist business with equanimity.

The fact was that the young Frenchman had become very dear to Mr. Elphinstone, not only for Janet's sake but also

for his own. He had liked de Flavigny from the first moment that he met him; it was only during the shock of finding that
Janet wished to marry him that his feelings had temporarily cooled. Indeed, René de Flavigny's character and disposition
were not ill summed up in the word 'lovable.' He had little of the traditional French gaiety—and still less after his wife's
death—just as Mr. Elphinstone had little of the traditional Scotch dourness. And the old man knew how happy his
daughter was with him. Afterwards, their common bereavement drew the two more than ever together. Mr. Elphinstone
discovered in his son-in-law tastes and sympathies more akin to his own than he had imagined, and sometimes, though he
would not have had him settle down, at thirty-two, into a bookworm like himself, he regretted the political activities in
which the Marquis was immersed, for he knew him to be of too fine a temper to take pleasure in the plottings and intrigues
which almost of necessity accompany the attempts to reinstate a dispossessed dynasty. And while not, perhaps, taking
those plottings over-seriously, he realised that his son-in-law's tact and ability made him a very useful person to his own
party and a person proportionately obnoxious to the other. The game he was engaged in playing against the French
Republic was not without danger; that adversary across the Channel was known to have hidden agents in England, and if
these had the opportunity as well as the orders, it was not scruples that would hold them back from actual violence. Still,
that was a contingency sufficiently remote, although the thought of it sometimes caused Mr. Elphinstone to feel, during his
son-in-law's absences, a certain uneasiness for his safety as well as regret at the loss of his society.

(3)

Anne-Hilarion was quite aware, in a general way, of his father's occupations. In fact, as he lay now in his bed, looking

through the curtains at the wardrobe doors, he was meditating on the important meeting which Papa was having with his
friends this very evening in the dining-room. He did not know exactly what they were discussing, but from something which
Papa had said in his hearing he believed that there was some question of going over to France—in ships, of course, since
there was sea (he did not know how much) between England and that country. And because his mind was full of Sir
Patrick Spens and his shipwreck, this undertaking seemed to him terribly dangerous, and he much wished that Papa were
not thinking of it.

"To Noroway, to Noroway,

To Noroway o'er the faem,"

the words lilted in his head like the rocking of a boat. They would be going over the foam to that land which he did not
remember:

"Half owre, half owre, to Aberdour,

'Tis fifty fathoms deep. . . ."

Anne had no idea what fifty fathoms might mean, but it sounded terrifying. Suppose Papa were to be drowned like that—
suppose he too were obliged to stuff 'silken cloth' into the hole of the ship to keep out the water which would not be kept
out! . . .

Anne-Hilarion sat up suddenly in bed and threw back the clothes. A very strong impulse, and by no means a righteous,

was upon him, but he was ridden by an agonising fear, and there was nothing for it save to go down and ascertain the truth.
He slipped out of bed and pattered on to the landing.

The stairs were steep, there was little light upon the road, the balusters looked like rows of brown, square-faced

soldiers. Not now, however, was there room for thoughts of Barbe Bleue, that French ogre, who was possibly hanging the
last but one of his wives at that moment in the linen-press, nor of the terrible Kelpie of the Flow, which might that evening
have left its Scottish loch and be looking in, with its horse face, at the staircase window. No, the chief terror was really
Elspeth, who would certainly snatch him swiftly back to bed, not comprehending (nor he either, for that matter) how it was
she who had started him on the path of this fear. So he went down as quickly as one foot at a time permitted, knowing that
Grandpapa would be safe and busy in his study, and that Baptiste, his father's old body-servant, was, if met, more likely to
forward him in his journey than to hinder him. He would, in fact, have been rather glad to encounter that elderly slave of his
as he made his solitary way down to the dining-room, past the descending row of antlers and dirks and lairds of
Glenauchtie in their wigs and tartan.

CHAPTER II

And is put back again

(1)

But on the dining-room wall it was Janet Elphinstone, a fair-haired child of ten, in a long white dress girt with a blue sash,
her arm over the neck of a deerhound, who looked down at the guests assembled round her father's table. Not one was of
her own nationality, for Mr. Elphinstone himself had withdrawn after supper, following his custom on similar occasions, and
was by now very tolerably engrossed, as usual, with his memoirs. His national shrewdness made him perfectly aware that
some of his friends, and probably all of his domestics except Baptiste, esteemed that in his unfailing hospitality to his son-
in-law's unfortunate compatriots he was allowing himself to be victimised by a pack of starveling adventurers, as he had
once heard them called; but he considered that his conduct in this regard was no one's affair but his own, and for several of
the Marquis's friends he had a great respect—they bore misfortune so gallantly. So he scratched away contentedly in the
library, while in the dining-room René talked to his companions.

For though it was not primarily the personal attraction of the Marquis de Flavigny which bound together this evening's

visitors, but rather devotion to a common cause, they were all his friends, from the old Abbé with the kindly, humorous
mouth and the snuffy rabat to the tall, lean man with a scar on his cheek who, at the end of the table, was lazily drawing
devices on a map spread before him on the mahogany, among the empty glasses. They were talking of the intrigues and
counter-intrigues which ate like a canker into the heart of the Royalist cause, dividing that never very stable house against
itself, setting the party of the Comte de Provence against that of his younger brother, the Comte d'Artois, and filling the
clear-minded or the generous with mingled sorrow and disgust.

"I declare," said the gentleman with the scar at the end of the table, without lifting his eyes from his occupation, "that the

behaviour of the Abbé Brottier, when I think of it, renders me the prey of indigestion. So I try not to think of it."

"Perhaps you remember, my son," interposed the old priest, "what Cardinal Maury is reported to have said of him—

that he would bring disunion into the very host of heaven. And we émigrés, alas, are not angels."

"M. de la Vireville's disgust is natural," observed a middle-aged, thin-featured man on the other side of the Abbé. "I

have no doubt he finds the atmosphere of London stifling, and is longing to be back in the broom of Brittany with his
Chouans."

"It is my desire, de Soucy," confessed he with the map, briefly. "But even there one is not safe from the meddling of

that intriguer and the agence de Paris. However, this does seem a chance of moving, for once, without it, for I understand
you to say, René, that Mr. Windham seriously suggests your going personally to Verona to see the Regent?"

"He thinks it advisable," answered de Flavigny. "For my part, I would much rather not put my finger between the trunk

and the bark, but it has been quite clear since last November that the agence de Paris is trying to get Spanish help instead
of accepting that of England, and therefore someone not under the Abbé Brottier's influence ought to lay before the Comte
de Provence what the English Government is inclined to do for us—and lay it before him directly, without the intervention
of the Duc de la Vauguyon, who, as you know, is also a partisan of Madrid. Let me read to you, if I may, the notes of my
conversation with Mr. Windham this morning."

He began to read out what had passed between him and that cultured, high-minded English gentleman, now Secretary

for War, to whom the French émigrés in general owed so much. But he had not proceeded very far before the Chevalier
de la Vireville, his bright, bold eyes fixed attentively on him, gave an exclamation:

"Messieurs, a new recruit! Welcome, small conspirator! Come in—but shut the door!"

And all the rest turned on the instant to look at the little figure, clad only in a nightshirt, which was visible in the

doorway, behind René de Flavigny's back.

"Anne!" exclaimed the latter. "Whatever are you doing here—and in that costume!"

A trifle daunted, the child hung back, clutching the door handle, though he knew all the company, and one of them—he

who had hailed him—had his especial favour. Then he made a dash for his father.

"Papa," he burst out, clinging to him, "do not go to Noroway-over-the-foam! You know what it says, how the feather-

beds floated about in the waves, and they lost their shoes, and the sea came in, and they were all drowned fifty fathoms
deep!"

"My child," said the young man gently, putting his arm round him, "what on earth are you talking about? I think you

must be walking in your sleep. Nobody is going to Noroway, so nobody will be drowned. And you must not interrupt
these gentlemen. You see, we are busy. You must go back to bed, my little one. La Vireville, have the goodness to ring the
bell, will you?"

The tall Chouan leader rose at once from his place, but, instead of obeying, he snatched the cloth off a neighbouring