Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 929 pages of information about Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth.

Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 929 pages of information about Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth.

“Spoiling the Egyptians,” said Yeo as comment.

“And what have you done with the man?”

“Hove him over the bank, sir; he pitched into a big furze-bush, and for aught I know, there he’ll bide.”

“You rascal, have you killed him?

“Never fear, sir,” said Yeo, in his cool fashion.  “A Jesuit has as many lives as a cat, and, I believe, rides broomsticks post, like a witch.  He would be at Lydford now before us, if his master Satan had any business for him there.”

Leaving on their left Lydford and its ill-omened castle (which, a century after, was one of the principal scenes of Judge Jeffreys’s cruelty), Amyas and his party trudged on through the mire toward Okehampton till sunrise; and ere the vapors had lifted from the mountain tops, they were descending the long slopes from Sourton down, while Yestor and Amicombe slept steep and black beneath their misty pall; and roaring far below unseen,

     “Ockment leapt from crag and cloud
     Down her cataracts, laughing loud.”

The voice of the stream recalled these words to Amyas’s mind.  The nymph of Torridge had spoken them upon the day of his triumph.  He recollected, too, his vexation on that day at not seeing Rose Salterne.  Why, he had never seen her since.  Never seen her now for six years and more!  Of her ripened beauty he knew only by hearsay; she was still to him the lovely fifteen years’ girl for whose sake he had smitten the Barnstaple draper over the quay.  What a chain of petty accidents had kept them from meeting, though so often within a mile of each other!  “And what a lucky one!” said practical old Amyas to himself.  “If I had seen her as she is now, I might have loved her as Frank does—­poor Frank! what will he say?  What does he say, for he must know it already?  And what ought I to say—­to do rather, for talking is no use on this side the grave, nor on the other either, I expect!” And then he asked himself whether his old oath meant nothing or something; whether it was a mere tavern frolic, or a sacred duty.  And he held, the more that he looked at it, that it meant the latter.

But what could he do?  He had nothing on earth but his sword, so he could not travel to find her.  After all, she might not be gone far.  Perhaps not gone at all.  It might be a mistake, an exaggerated scandal.  He would hope so.  And yet it was evident that there had been some passages between her and Don Guzman.  Eustace’s mysterious words about the promise at Lundy proved that.  The villain!  He had felt all along that he was a villain; but just the one to win a woman’s heart, too.  Frank had been away—­all the Brotherhood away.  What a fool he had been, to turn the wolf loose into the sheepfold!  And yet who would have dreamed of it? . . .

“At all events,” said Amyas, trying to comfort himself, “I need not complain.  I have lost nothing.  I stood no more chance of her against Frank than I should have stood against the Don.  So there is no use for me to cry about the matter.”  And he tried to hum a tune concerning the general frailty of women, but nevertheless, like Sir Hugh, felt that “he had a great disposition to cry.”

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Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.