Sir John Constantine | Page 3

a camp bed, wore an old velveteen coat in winter and in
summer a fisherman's smock, ate frugally, and would have drunk beer
or even water had not his stomach abhorred them both. Of wine he
drank in moderation--that is to say, for him, since his temperance
would have sent nine men out of ten under the table--and of the best.
He had indeed a large and obstinate dignity in his drinking. It betrayed,
even as his carriage betrayed beneath his old coat, a king in exile.
Yet while he pinched himself with these economies, he drew no
strings--or drew them tenderly--upon the expenses and charities of a
good landlord. The fences rotted around his own park and
pleasure-grounds, but his tenants' fences, walls, roofs stood in more
than moderate repair, nor (although my uncle Gervase groaned over the
accounts) would an abatement of rent be denied, the appeal having
been weighed and found to be reasonable. The rain--which falls alike
upon the just and the unjust--beat through his own roof, but never
through the labourer's thatch; and Mrs. Nance, the cook, who hated
beggars, might not without art and secrecy dismiss a single beggar
unfed. His religion he told to no man, but believed the practice of

worship to be good for all men, and regularly encouraged it by
attending church on Sundays and festivals. He and the vicar ruled our
parish together in amity, as fellow-Christians and rival anglers.
Now, all these apparent contrarieties in my father flowed in fact from a
very rare simplicity, and this simplicity again had its origin in his
lineage, which was something more than royal.
On the Cornish shore of the Tamar River, which divides Cornwall from
Devon, and a little above Saltash, stands the country church of
Landulph, so close by the water that the high tides wash by its
graveyard wall. Within the church you will find a mural tablet of brass
thus inscribed--
"Here lyeth the body of Theodoro Paleologvs of Pesaro in Italye,
descended from ye Imperyall lyne of ye last Christian Emperors of
Greece being the sonne of Camilio ye sonne of Prosper the sonne of
Theodoro the sonne of John ye sonne of Thomas second brother to
Constantine Paleologvs, the 8th of that name and last of yt lyne yt
raygned in Constantinople vntill svbdewed by the Tvrks who married
with Mary ye davghter of William Balls of Hadlye in Svffolke gent &
had issve 5 children Theodoro John Ferdinando Maria & Dorothy &
dep'ted this life at Clyfton ye 21th of Ianvary 1636"
Above these words the tablet bears an eagle engraved with two heads,
and its talons resting upon two gates of Rome and Constantinople, with
(for difference) a crescent between the gates, and over all an imperial
crown. In truth this exile buried by Tamar drew his blood direct from
the loins of the great Byzantine emperors, through that Thomas of
whom Mahomet II. said, "I have found many slaves in Peloponnesus,
but this man only:" and from Theodore, through his second son John,
came the Constantines of Constantine--albeit with a bar sinister, of
which my father made small account. I believe he held privately that a
Constantine, de stirpe imperatorum, had no call to concern himself
with petty ceremonies of this or that of the Church's offshoots to
legitimize his blood. At any rate no bar sinister appeared on the
imperial escutcheon repeated, with quarterings of Arundel, Mohun,
Grenville, Nevile, Archdeckne, Courtney, and, again, Arundel, on the

wainscots and in the windows of Constantine, usually with the legend
Dabit Devs His Qvoqve Finem, but twice or thrice with a hopefuller
one, Generis revocemvs honores.
Knowing him to be thus descended, you could recognize in all my
father said or did a large simplicity as of the earlier gods, and a dignity
proper to a king as to a beggar, but to no third and mean state. A child
might beard him, but no man might venture a liberty with him or abide
the rare explosions of his anger. You might even, upon long
acquaintance, take him for a great, though mad, Englishman, and trust
him as an Englishman to the end; but the soil of his nature was that
which grows the vine--volcanic, breathing through its pores a hidden
heat to answer the sun's. Whether or no there be in man a faith to
remove mountains, there is in him (and it may come to the same thing)
a fire to split them, and anon to clothe the bare rock with tendrils and
soft-scented blooms.
In person my father stood six feet five inches tall, and his shoulders
filled a doorway. His head was large and shapely, and he carried it with
a very noble poise; his face a fine oval, broad across the