Sir John Constantine | Page 4

brow and
ending in a chin at once delicate and masterful; his nose slightly
aquiline; his hair--and he wore his own, tied with a ribbon--of a shining
white. His cheeks were hollow and would have been cadaverous but for
their hue, a sanguine brown, well tanned by out-of-door living. His
eyes, of an iron-grey colour, were fierce or gentle as you took him, but
as a rule extraordinarily gentle. He would walk you thirty miles any
day without fatigue, and shoot you a woodcock against any man; but as
an angler my uncle Gervase beat him.
He spoke Italian as readily as English; French and the modern Greek
with a little more difficulty; and could read in Greek, Latin, and
Spanish. His books were the "Meditations" of the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, and Dante's "Divine Comedy," with the "Aeneis," Ariosto,
and some old Spanish romances next in order. I do not think he cared
greatly for any English writers but Donne and Izaak Walton, of whose
"Angler" and "Life of Sir Henry Wotton" he was inordinately fond. In
particular he admired the character of this Sir Henry Wotton, singling

him out among "the famous nations of the dead" (as Sir Thomas
Browne calls them) for a kind of posthumous friendship--nay, almost a
passion of memory. To be sure, though with more than a hundred years
between them, both had been bred at Winchester, and both had known
courts and embassies and retired from them upon private life. . . . But
who can explain friendship, even after all the essays written upon it?
Certainly to be friends with a dead man was to my father a feat neither
impossible nor absurd.
Yet he possessed two dear living friends at least in my Uncle Gervase
and Mr. Grylls, and had even dedicated a temple to their friendship. It
stood about half a mile away from the house, at the foot of the old
deer-park: a small Ionic summer-house set on a turfed slope facing
down a dell upon the Helford River. A spring of water, very cold and
pure, rose bubbling a few paces from the porch and tumbled down the
dell with a pretty chatter. Tradition said that it had once been visited
and blessed by St. Swithun, for which cause my father called his
summer-house by the saint's name, and annually on his festival (which
falls on the 15th of July) caused wine and dessert to be carried out
thither, where the three drank to their common pastime and discoursed
of it in the cool of the evening within earshot of the lapsing water. On
many other evenings they met to smoke their pipes here, my father and
Mr. Grylls playing at chequers sometimes, while my uncle wrapped
and bent, till the light failed him, new trout flies for the next day's sport;
but to keep St. Swithun's feast they never omitted, which my father
commemorated with a tablet set against the back wall and bearing these
lines--
"Peace to this house within this little wood, Named of St. Swithun and
his brotherhood That here would meet and punctual on his day Their
heads and hands and hearts together lay. Nor may no years the
mem'ries three untwine Of Grylls W.G. And Arundell G.A. And
Constantine J.C. Anno 1752 Flvmina amem silvasqve inglorivs."
Of these two friends of my father I shall speak in their proper place, but
have given up this first chapter to him alone. My readers maybe will
grumble that it omits to tell what they would first choose to learn: the

reason why he had exchanged fame and the world for a Cornish exile.
But as yet he only--and perhaps my uncle Gervase, who kept the
accounts--held the key to that secret.
CHAPTER II.
I RIDE ON A PILGRIMAGE.
"Heus Rogere! fer caballos; Eja, nunc eamus!" Domum.
At Winchester, which we boys (though we fared hardly) never doubted
to be the first school in the world, as it was the most ancient in England,
we had a song we called Domum: and because our common pride in
her--as the best pride will--belittled itself in speech, I trust that our
song honoured Saint Mary of Winton the more in that it celebrated only
the joys of leaving her.
The tale went, it had been composed (in Latin, too) by a boy detained at
school for a punishment during the summer holidays. Another fable
improved on this by chaining him to a tree. A third imprisoned him in
cloisters whence, through the arcades and from the ossuaries of dead
fellows and scholars, he poured out his soul to the swallows haunting
the green garth--
"Jam repetit domum Daulias advena, Nosque domum repetamus."
Whatever its origin, our custom was to sing it as the holidays--
especially the summer holidays--drew near, and