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 ElizabethKingsley, Charles
History
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
Kingsley, Charles
Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction
“Nor Indians either, I'll warrant the butchers; but, lad, I am promised
to Humphrey; I have a bark fitting out already, and all I have, and
more, adventured in her; so Manoa must wait.”
“It will wait well enough, if the Spaniards prosper no better on the
Amazon than they have done; but must I come with you? To tell the truth,
I am quite shore-sick, and to sea I must go. What will my mother say?”
“I'll manage thy mother,” said Raleigh; and so he did; for, to cut a
long story short, he went back the month after, and he not only took
home letters from Amyas to his mother, but so impressed on that good
lady the enormous profits and honors to be derived from Meta Incognita,
and (which was most true) the advantage to any young man of sailing
with such a general as Humphrey Gilbert, most pious and most learned of
seamen and of cavaliers, beloved and honored above all his compeers by
Queen Elizabeth, that she consented to Amyas's adventuring in the
voyage some two hundred pounds which had come to him as his share of
prize-money, after the ever memorable circumnavigation. For Mrs.
Leigh, be it understood, was no longer at Burrough Court. By Frank's
persuasion, she had let the old place, moved up to London with her
eldest son, and taken for herself a lodging somewhere by Palace Stairs,
which looked out upon the silver Thames (for Thames was silver then),
with its busy ferries and gliding boats, across to the pleasant fields
of Lambeth, and the Archbishop's palace, and the wooded Surrey hills;
and there she spent her peaceful days, close to her Frank and to the
Court. Elizabeth would have had her re-enter it, offering her a small
place in the household: but she declined, saying that she was too old
and heart-weary for aught but prayer. So by prayer she lived, under the
sheltering shadow of the tall minster where she went morn and even to
worship, and to entreat for the two in whom her heart was bound up; and
Frank slipped in every day if but for five minutes, and brought with him
Spenser, or Raleigh, or Dyer, or Budaeus or sometimes Sidney's self: and
there was talk of high and holy things, of which none could speak better
than could she; and each guest went from that hallowed room a humbler
and yet a loftier man. So slipped on the peaceful months, and few
and far between came Irish letters, for Ireland was then farther from
Westminster than is the Black Sea now; but those were days in which
wives and mothers had learned (as they have learned once more, sweet
souls!) to walk by faith and not by sight for those they love: and Mrs.
Leigh was content (though when was she not content?) to hear that Amyas
was winning a good report as a brave and prudent officer, sober, just,
and faithful, beloved and obeyed alike by English soldiers and Irish
kernes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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