CHAPTER VI.
JOY FOR ADAM, AND HOPE FOR SIBYLL--AND POPULAR FRIAR BUNGEY!
Leaping on his palfrey, Hastings rode back to the Tower, dismounted at
the gate, passed on to the little postern in the inner court, and
paused not till he was in Warner's room. "How now, friend Adam? Thou
art idle."
"Lord Hastings, I am ill."
"And thy child not with thee?"
"She is gone to her grace the duchess, to pray her to grant me leave
to go home, and waste no more life on making gold."
"Home! Go hence! We cannot hear it! The duchess must not grant it.
I will not suffer the king to lose so learned a philosopher."
"Then pray the king to let the philosopher achieve that which is in
the power of labour." He pointed to the Eureka. "Let me be heard in
the king's council, and prove to sufficing judges what this iron can
do for England."
"Is that all? So be it. I will speak to his highness forthwith. But
promise that thou wilt think no more of leaving the king's palace."
"Oh, no, no! If I may enter again into mine own palace, mine own
royalty of craft and hope, the court or the dungeon all one to me!"
"Father," said Sibyll, entering, "be comforted. The duchess forbids
thy departure, but we will yet flee--" She stopped short as she saw
Hastings. He approached her timidly, and with so repentant, so
earnest a respect in his mien and gesture, that she had not the heart
to draw back the fair hand he lifted to his lips.
"No, flee not, sweet donzell; leave not the desert court, without the
flower and the laurel, the beauty and the wisdom, that scent the hour,
and foretype eternity. I have conferred with thy father,--I will
obtain his prayer from the king. His mind shall be free to follow its
own impulse, and thou"--he whispered--"pardon--pardon an offence of
too much love. Never shall it wound again."
Her eyes, swimming with delicious tears, were fixed upon the floor.
Poor child! with so much love, how could she cherish anger? With so
much purity, how distrust herself? And while, at least, he spoke, the
dangerous lover was sincere. So from that hour peace was renewed
between Sibyll and Lord Hastings.--Fatal peace! alas for the girl who
loves--and has no mother!
True to his word, the courtier braved the displeasure of the Duchess
of Bedford, in inducing the king to consider the expediency of
permitting Adam to relinquish alchemy, and repair his model. Edward
summoned a deputation from the London merchants and traders, before
whom Adam appeared and explained his device. But these practical men
at first ridiculed the notion as a madman's fancy, and it required all
the art of Hastings to overcome their contempt, and appeal to the
native acuteness of the king. Edward, however, was only caught by
Adam's incidental allusions to the application of his principle to
ships. The merchant-king suddenly roused himself to attention, when
it was promised to him that his galleys should cross the seas without
sail, and against wind and tide.
"By Saint George!" said he, then, "let the honest man have his whim.
Mend thy model, and every saint in the calendar speed thee! Master
Heyford, tell thy comely wife that I and Hastings will sup with her
to-morrow, for her hippocras is a rare dainty. Good day to you,
worshipful my masters. Hastings, come hither; enough of these
trifles,--I must confer with thee on matters really pressing,--this
damnable marriage of gentle George's!"
And now Adam Warner was restored to his native element of thought; now
the crucible was at rest, and the Eureka began to rise from its ruins.
He knew not the hate that he had acquired in the permission he had
gained; for the London deputies, on their return home, talked of
nothing else for a whole week but the favour the king had shown to a
strange man, half-maniac, half-conjuror, who had undertaken to devise
a something which would throw all the artisans and journeymen out of
work! From merchant to mechanic travelled the news, and many an
honest man cursed the great scholar, as he looked at his young
children, and wished to have one good blow at the head that was
hatching such devilish malice against the poor! The name of Adam
Warner became a byword of scorn and horror. Nothing less than the
deep ditch and strong walls of the Tower could have saved him from the
popular indignation; and these prejudices were skilfully fed by the
jealous enmity of his fellow-student, the terrible Friar Bungey. This
man, though in all matters of true learning and science worthy the
utmost contempt Adam could heap upon him, was by no means of
despicable abilities in the arts of imposing upon men. In his youth
he had been an itinerant mountebank, or, as it was called, tregetour.
He knew well all the curious tricks of juggling that then amazed the
vulgar, and, we fear, are lost to the craft of our modern
necromancers. He could clothe a wall with seeming vines, that
vanished as you approached; he could conjure up in his quiet cell the
likeness of a castle manned with soldiers, or a forest tenanted by
deer. [See Chaucer, House of Time, Book III.; also the account given
by Baptista Porta, of his own Magical Delusions, of which an extract
may be seen in the "Curiosities of Literature" Art., Dreams at the
Dawn of Philosophy.] Besides these illusions, probably produced by
more powerful magic lanterns than are now used, the friar had stumbled
upon the wondrous effects of animal magnetism, which was then
unconsciously practised by the alchemists and cultivators of white or
sacred magic. He was an adept in the craft of fortune-telling; and
his intimate acquaintance with all noted characters in the metropolis,
their previous history and present circumstances, enabled his natural
shrewdness to hit the mark, at least now and then, in his oracular
predictions. He had taken, for safety and for bread, the friar's
robes, and had long enjoyed the confidence of the Duchess of Bedford,
the traditional descendant of the serpent-witch, Melusina. Moreover,
and in this the friar especially valued himself, Bungey had, in the
course of his hardy, vagrant early life, studied, as shepherds and
mariners do now, the signs of the weather; and as weather-glasses were
then unknown, nothing could be more convenient to the royal planners
of a summer chase or a hawking company than the neighbourhood of a
skilful predictor of storm and sunshine. In fact, there was no part
in the lore of magic which the popular seers found so useful and
studied so much as that which enabled them to prognosticate the
humours of the sky, at a period when the lives of all men were
principally spent in the open air.
The fame of Friar Bungey had travelled much farther than the repute of
Adam Warner: it was known in the distant provinces: and many a
northern peasant grew pale as he related to his gaping listeners the
tales he had heard of the Duchess Jacquetta's dread magician.
And yet, though the friar was an atrocious knave and a ludicrous
impostor, on the whole he was by no means unpopular, especially in the
metropolis, for he was naturally a jolly, social fellow; he often
ventured boldly forth into the different hostelries and reunions of
the populace, and enjoyed the admiration he there excited, and
pocketed the groats he there collected. He had no pride,--none in the
least, this Friar Bungey!--and was as affable as a magician could be
to the meanest mechanic who crossed his broad horn palm. A vulgar man
is never unpopular with the vulgar. Moreover, the friar, who was a
very cunning person, wished to keep well with the mob: he was fond of
his own impudent, cheating, burly carcass, and had the prudence to
foresee that a time might come when his royal patrons might forsake
him, and a mob might be a terrible monster to meet in his path;
therefore he always affected to love the poor, often told their
fortunes gratis, now and then gave them something to drink, and was
esteemed a man exceedingly good-natured, because he did not always
have the devil at his back.
Now Friar Bungey had naturally enough evinced from the first a great
distaste and jealousy of Adam Warner; but occasionally profiting by
the science of the latter, he suffered his resentment to sleep latent
till it was roused into fury by learning the express favour shown to
Adam by the king, and the marvellous results expected from his
contrivance. His envy, then, forbade all tolerance and mercy; the
world was not large enough to contain two such giants,--Bungey and
Warner, the genius and the quack. To the best of our experience, the
quacks have the same creed to our own day. He vowed deep vengeance
upon his associate, and spared no arts to foment the popular hatred
against him. Friar Bungey would have been a great critic in our day!
But besides his jealousy, the fat friar had another motive for
desiring poor Adam's destruction; he coveted his model! True, he
despised the model, he jeered the model, he abhorred the model; but,
nevertheless, for the model every string in his bowels fondly yearned.
He believed that if that model were once repaired, and in his
possession, he could do--what he knew not, but certainly all that was
wanting to complete his glory, and to bubble the public.
Unconscious of all that was at work against him, Adam threw his whole
heart and soul into his labour; and happy in his happiness, Sibyll
once more smiled gratefully upon Hastings, from whom the rapture came.
