The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 27

As her fall was sudden, so was the change it wrought. With it vanished affections, hopes, womanly feelings, memory of the past; nay, methinks therein I err. Memory did yet abide, but linked with hatred; Satan's memory of heaven. From depths to depths she hath sunk, and is now wedded to a mean wretch, the gaoler of her old prison. So rank a hatred hath grown in her against recusants and mostly priests, that it rages like a madness in her soul, which thirsts for their blood. Some months back, about the time I did begin to write this history, news reached me that she had sold the life of that meek saint, that sweet poet, Father Southwell, of which even an enemy, Lord Mountjoy, did say, when he had seen him suffer, "I pray G.o.d, where that man's soul now is, mine may one day be." Her father had concealed him in that house where she had dwelt in her innocent days. None but the family knew the secret of its hiding-place. {176}so will be ready in Ireland She did reveal it, and took gold for her wages! What shall be that woman's death-bed? What trace doth remain on her soul of what was once a share in the divine nature? May one of G.o.d's ministers be nigh unto her in that hour for to bid her not despair! If Judas had repented, Jesus would have pardoned him. Peradventure, misery without hope of relief overthrew her brain. I do pray for her always. 'Tis a vain thought perhaps, but I sometimes wish I might, though I see not how to compa.s.s it, yet once speak with her before she or I die. Methinks I could say such words as should touch some old chord in her dead heart.

G.o.d knoweth! That day I write of, little did I ween what her end would be. But yet it feared me to hear one so young and of so frail an aspect speak so boastfully; and it seemed even then to my inexperienced mind, that my Lady Surrey, who had so humbly erewhile accused herself of cowardice and lamented her weakness, should be in a safer plight, albeit as yet unreconciled.

The visit I have described had lasted some time, when a servant came with a message to her ladyship from Mr. Hubert Rookwood, who craved to be admitted on an urgent matter. She glanced at me somewhat surprised, upon which I made her a sign that she should condescend to his request; for I supposed he had seen Sir Francis Walsingham, and was in haste to confer with me touching that interview; and she ordered him to be admitted. Mrs. Bellamy and her daughter rose to go soon after his entrance; and whilst Lady Surrey conducted them to the door he asked me if her ladyship was privy to the matter in hand. When I had satisfied him thereof, he related what had pa.s.sed in an interview he had with Sir Francis, whom he found ill-disposed at first to stir in the matter, for he said his frequent remonstrances in favor of recusants had been like to bring him into odium with some of the more zealous Protestants, and that he must needs, in every case of that sort, prove it to be his sole object to bring such persons more surely, albeit slowly, by means of toleration, to a rightful conformity; and that with regard to priests he was very loth to interfere.

"I was compelled," quoth Hubert, "to use such arguments as fell in with the scope of his discourse, and to flatter him with the hope of good results in that which he most desired, if he would procure Mr.

Sherwood's release, which I doubt not he hath power to effect. And in the end he consented to lend his aid therein, on condition he should prove on his side so far conformable as to suffer a minister to visit and confer with him touching religion, which would then be a pretext for his release, as if it were supposed he was well disposed toward Protestant religion, and a man more like to embrace the truth when at liberty than if driven to it by stress of confinement. Then he would procure," he added, "an order for his pa.s.sage to France, if he promised not to return, except he should be willing to obey the laws."

"I fear me much," I answered, "my father will not accept these terms which Sir Francis doth offer. Methinks he will consider they do involve some lack of the open profession of his faith."

"It would be madness for one in his plight to refuse them," Hubert exclaimed, and appealed thereon to Lady Surrey, who said she did indeed think as he did, for it was not like any better could be obtained.

It pained me he should refer to her, who from conformity to the times could not well conceive how tender a Catholic conscience should feel at the least approach to dissembling on this point.

"Wherein," he continued, "is the harm for to confer with a minister, or how can it be construed into a denial of a man's faith to listen to his arguments, unless, indeed, he feels himself to be in danger of being shaken by them?"

"You very well know," I exclaimed {177} with some warmth, "that not to be my meaning, or what I suppose his should be. Our priests do constantly crave for public disputations touching religion, albeit they eschew secret ones, which their adversaries make a pretext of to spread reports of their inability to defend their faith, or willingness to abandon it. But heaven forbid I should anyways prejudge this question; and if with a safe conscience--and with no other I am a.s.sured will he do it--my father doth subscribe to this condition, then G.o.d be praised for it!"

"But you will move him to it, Mistress Constance?" he said.

"If I am so happy," I answered, "as to get speech with him, verily I will entreat him not to throw away his life, so precious to others, if so be he can save it without detriment to his conscience."

"Conscience!" Hubert exclaimed, "methinks that word is often misapplied in these days."

"How so?" I asked, investigating his countenance, for I mis...o...b..ed his meaning. Lady Surrey likewise seemed desirous to hear what he should say on that matter.

"Conscience," he answered, "should make persons, and mostly women, careful how they injure others, and cause heedless suffering, by a too great stiffness in refusing conformity to the outward practices which the laws of the country enforce, when it affects not the weightier points of faith, which G.o.d forbid any Catholic should deny. There is often as much of pride as of virtue in such rash obstinacy touching small yieldings as doth involve the ruin of a family, separation of parents and children, and more evils than can be thought of."

"Hubert," I said, fixing mine eyes on him with a searching look he cared not, I ween, to meet, for he cast his on a paper he had in his hand, and raised them not while I spoke, "'sit is by such reasonings first, and then by such small yieldings as you commend, that some have been led two or three times in their lives, yea, oftener perhaps, to profess different religions, and to take such contradictory oaths as have been by turns prescribed to them under different sovereigns, and G.o.d each time called on to witness their perjuries, whereby truth and falsehood in matters of faith shall come in time to be words without any meaning."

Then he: "You do misapprehend me, Mistress Constance, if you think I would counsel a man to utter a falsehood, or feign to believe that which in his heart he thinketh to be false. But, in heaven's name, I pray you, what harm will your father do if he listens to a minister's discourse, and suffers it to be set forth he doth ponder thereon, and in the meantime escapes to France? whereas, if he refuses the loophole now offered to him, he causeth not to himself alone, but to you and his other friends, more pain and sorrow than can be thought of, and deprives the Church of one of her servants, when her need of them is greatest."

I made no reply to this last speech; for albeit I thought my father would not accede to these terms, I did not so far trust mine own judgment thereon as to predict with certainty what his answer should be. And then Hubert said he had an order from Sir Francis that would admit me on the morrow to see my father; and he offered to go with me, and Mistress Ward too, if I listed, to present it, albeit I alone should enter his cell. I thanked him, and fixed the time of our going.

When he had left us, Lady Surrey commended his zeal, and also his moderate spirit, which did charitably allow, she said, for such as conformed to the times for the sake of others which their reconcilement would very much injure.

Before I could reply she changed this discourse, and, putting her hands on my shoulders and kissing my forehead, said,

"My Lady Lumley hath heard so much from her poor niece of one {178} Mistress Constance Sherwood, that she doth greatly wish to see this young gentlewoman and very resolved papist." And then taking me by the arm she led me to that lady's chamber, where I had as kind a welcome as ever I received from any one from her ladyship, who said "her dear Nan's friends should be always as dear to her as her own," and added many fine commendations greatly exceeding my deserts.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

From The London Quarterly Review.

GLEANINGS FROM THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE TROPICS.

ART. VI.--1. _A Narrative Of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, etc._By Alfred R. Wallace. London: 1853.

2. _Himalayan Journals; or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim, and Nepal Himalayas_. By Joseph D. Hooker, M.D., R.N., F.R.S.

London: 1854.

3. _Three Visits to Madagascar during the Years_1853, 1854, 1856, _with Notices of the Natural History of the Country, etc._ By the Rev.

W. Ellis, F.H.S. London: 1859.

4. _The Tropical World: A Popular Scientific Account of the Natural History of the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms._By Dr. G. Hartwig.

London: 1863.

5. _The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, etc., during eleven Years of Travel._ By Henry Walter Bates. London: 1863.

The naturalist will never have to complain, with Alexander, that he has no more worlds to conquer, so inexhaustible is the wide field of nature, and so numerous are the vast areas which as yet have never at all, or only partially, been explored by travellers. What may not be in store for some future adventurer in little known regions; what new and wonderful forms of animals and plants may not reward the zealous traveller, when no less than eight thousand species of animals new to science have been discovered by Mr. Bates during his eleven years'

residence on the Amazons? Nor is it alone new forms of animated nature that await the enterprise of the naturalist; a whole mine of valuable material, the working of which is attended with the greatest pleasure, lies before him in the discovery of new facts with regard to the habits, structure, and local distribution of animals and plants. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance to the philosophic naturalist of such studies in these days of thought and progress. The collector of natural curiosities may be content with the possession of a miscellaneous lot of objects, but the man of science pursues his investigations with a view of discovering, if possible, some of those wonderful laws which govern the organic world, some of the footprints of the Creator in the production of the countless forms of animal and vegetable life with which this beautiful world abounds.

We purpose in this article to bring before the reader's notice a few gleanings from the natural history of the tropics, merely surmising that we shall linger with more than ordinary pleasure over the productions of tropical {179} South America, of which Mr. Bates has charmingly and most instructively written in his recently published work, whose t.i.tle is given at the head of this article; we shall pause to admire, with Dr. Hooker, some of the productions of the mighty Himalayan mountains; and we may also visit Madagascar in company with so trustworthy a traveller as Mr. Ellis.

The ancients, before the time of Alexander's Indian expedition, were unacquainted with any tropical forms of plants, and great was their astonishment when they first beheld them:

"Gigantic forms of plants and animals," as Humboldt says, "filled the imagination with exciting imagery. Writers from whose severe and scientific style any degree of inspiration is elsewhere entirely absent, become poetical when describing the habits of the elephant,--the height of the trees, 'to the summit of which an arrow cannot reach, and whose leaves are broader then the shields of infantry,'--the bamboo, a light, feathery, arborescent gra.s.s, of which single joints (_internodia_) served as four-oared boats,--and the Indian fig-tree, whose pendant branches take root around the parent stem, which attains a diameter of twenty-eight feet, 'forming,' as Onesicritus expresses himself with great truth to nature, 'a leafy canopy similar to a many-pillared tent.'" [Footnote 24]

[Footnote 24: "Cosmos," vol. ii., p. 155. Sabine's translation ]

It is not possible for language to describe the glory of the forests of the Amazon, and yet the silence and gloom of the Brazilian forests, so often mentioned by travellers, are striking realities. Let us read Mr. Bates's impressions of the interior of a primeval forest:

"The silence and gloom," he says, "are realities, and the impression deepens on a longer acquaintance. The few sounds of birds are of that pensive and mysterious character which intensifies the feeling of solitude rather than imparts a sense of life and cheerfulness.

Sometimes in the midst of the stillness a sudden yell or scream will startle one; this comes from some defenceless fruit-eating animal which is pounced upon by a tiger-cat or stealthy boa-constrictor.

Morning and evening the howling monkeys make a most fearful and harrowing noise, under which it is difficult to keep up one's buoyancy of spirit. The feeling of inhospitable wildness which the forest is calculated to inspire is increased tenfold under this fearful uproar.

Often even in the still hours of mid-day a sudden crash will be heard resounding afar through the wilderness, as some great bough or entire tree falls to the ground. There are beside many sounds which it is impossible to account for. I found the natives generally as much at a loss in this respect as myself. Sometimes a sound is heard like the clang of an iron bar against a hard hollow tree, or a piercing cry rends the air; these are not repeated, and the succeeding silence tends to heighten the unpleasant impression which they make on the mind. With the natives it is always the curupira, the wild man, or spirit of the forest, which produces all noises they are unable to explain."

Mr. Bates has some exceedingly interesting observations on the tendency of animals and plants of the Brazilian forests to become climbers. Speaking of a swampy forest of Para he says:

"The leafy crowns of the trees, scarcely two of which could be seen together of the same kind, were now far away above us, in another world as it were. We could only see at times, where there was a break above, the tracery of the foliage against the clear blue sky.

Sometimes the leaves were palmate, at others finely cut or feathery like the leaves of mimosae. Below, the tree trunks were everywhere linked together by sipos; the woody, flexible stems of climbing and creeping trees, whose foliage is far away above, mingled with that of the latter {180} independent trees. Some were twisted in strands like cables, others had thick stems contorted in every variety of shape, entwining snake-like round the tree-trunks, or forming gigantic loops and coils among the larger branches; others again were of zigzag shape or indented like the steps of a staircase, sweeping from the ground to a giddy height."

Of these climbing plants he adds:

"It interested me much afterward to find these climbing trees do not form any particular family or genus. There is no order of plants whose especial habit is to climb, but species of many of the most diverse families, the bulk of whose members are not climbers, seem to have been driven by circ.u.mstances to adopt this habit. The orders Leguminosae, Guttifenae, Bignoniaceae, Moraceae, and others, furnish the greater number. There is even a climbing genus of palms (_Desmoncus_), the species of which are called in the Tupi language Jacitara. These have slender, thickly-spined, and flexuous stems, which twine about the latter trees from one to the other, and grow to an incredible length. The leaves, which have the ordinary pinnate shape characteristic of the family, are emitted from the stems at long intervals, instead of being collected into a dense crown, and have at their tips a number of long recurved spines. These structures are excellent contrivances to enable the trees to secure themselves by in climbing, but they are a great nuisance to the traveller, for they sometimes hang over the pathway and catch the hat or clothes, dragging off the one or tearing the other as he pa.s.ses. The number and variety of climbing trees in the Amazon forests are interesting, taken in connection with the fact of the very general tendency of the animals also to become climbers."

Of this tendency amongst animals Mr. Bates thus writes:

"All the Amazonian, and in fact all South American monkeys, are climbers. There is no group answering to the baboons of the old world, which live on the ground. The gallinaceous birds of the country, the representatives of the fowls and pheasants of Asia and Africa, are all adapted by the position of the toes to perch on trees, and it is only on trees, at a great height, that they are to be seen. A genus of Plantigrade Carnivora, allied to the bears (_Cercoleptes_), found only in the Amazonian forests, is entirely arboreal, and has a long flexible tail like that of certain monkeys.

Many other similar instances could be enumerated, but I will mention only the Geodephaga, or carnivorous ground beetles, a great proportion of whose genera and species in these forest regions are, by the structure of their feet, fitted to live exclusively on the branches and leaves of trees."

Strange to the European must be the appearance of the numerous woody lianas, or air-roots of the parasitic plants of the family _Araceae_ of which the well-known cuckoo-pint, or _Arum maculatum_, of this country is a non-epiphytous member, which sit on the branches of the trees above, and "hang down straight as plumb-lines," some singly, others in leashes; some reaching half-way to the ground, others touching it, and taking root in the ground. Here, too, in these forests of Para, beside palms of various species, "some twenty to thirty feet high, others small and delicate, with stems no thicker than a finger," of the genus _Bactris_, producing bunches of fruit with grape-like juice, ma.s.ses of a species of banana (_Urania Amizonica_), a beautiful plant with leaves "like broad sword-blades," eight feet long, and one foot broad, add fresh interest to the scene. These leaves rise straight upward alternately from the top of a stem five or six feet high. Various kinds of Marants, a family of plants rich in amylaceous qualities (of which the _Maranta arundinacea_, though not an American plant, yields the best arrowroot of commerce), clothe the ground, conspicuous for their {181} broad glossy leaves. Ferns of beautiful and varied forms decorate the tree-trunks, together with the large fleshy heart-shaped leaves of the Pothos plant. Gigantic gra.s.ses, such as bamboos, form arches over the pathways. "The appearance of this part of the forest was strange in the extreme, description can convey no adequate idea of it. The reader who has visited Kew, may form some notion by conceiving a vegetation like that in the great palm-house spread over a large tract of swampy ground, but he must fancy it mingled with large exogenous trees, similar to our oaks and elms, covered with creepers and parasites, and figure to himself the ground enc.u.mbered with fallen and rotting trunks, branches, and leaves, the whole illuminated by a glowing vertical sun, and reeking with moisture!" Amid these "swampy shades" numerous b.u.t.terflies delight to flit. An entomologist in England is proud, indeed, when he succeeds in capturing the beautiful and scarce Camberwell beauty (_Vanessa antiopa_) or the splendid purple emperor (_Apatura iris_), but these fine species do not exceed three inches in expanse of wing, while the glossy blue-and-black _Morpho Achilles_ measure six inches or more. The velvety black _Papiloio Sesostris_, with a large silky green patch on its wings, and other species of this genus, are almost exclusively inhabitants of the moist shades of the forest.

The beautiful _Epicalea ancea_, "one of the most richly colored of the whole tribe of b.u.t.terflies, being black, decorated with broad stripes of pale blue and orange, delights to settle on the broad leaves of the Uraniae and other similar plants." But like many other natural beauties, it is difficult to gain possession of, darting off with lightning speed when approached. Mr. Bates tells us that it is the males only of the different species which are brilliantly colored, the females being plainer and often so utterly unlike their partners that they are generally held to be different species until proved to be the same. The observations of this admirable naturalist on other points in the history of the b.u.t.terflies of the Amazons, are highly important and deeply interesting. We must recur to this subject by-and-by.

We cannot yet tear ourselves away from these forests of Para. We can well understand the intense interest with which Mr. Bates visited these different scenes month after month, in different seasons, so as to obtain something like a fair notion of their animal and vegetable productions. It is enough to make a naturalist's mouth water for a week together to think of the many successful strolls which Mr. Bates took amid the shades of these forests. For several months, he tells us, he used to visit this district two or three days every week, and never failed to obtain some species new to him of bird, reptile, or insect: