CHAPTER 6. THE WOOD OF LIFE
The Lady Catherine de Laval, in her own right Countess of Beaumanoir,and mistress of fiefs and manors, rights of chase and warren, mills andhospices, the like of which were not in Picardy, was happy in all thingsbut her family. Her one son had fallen in his youth in an obscure frayin Guienne, leaving two motherless boys who, after her husband's death,were the chief business of life to the Countess Catherine. The elder,Aimery, grew to manhood after the fashion of the men of her own house,a somewhat heavy country gentleman, much set upon rustic sports, slowat learning, and averse alike from camps and cities. The ambition of thegrandmother found nothing to feed upon in the young lord of Beaumanoir.He was kind, virtuous and honest, but dull as a pool on a winter'shighway.
Catherine would fain have had the one youth a soldier and the other asaint, and of the two ambitions she most cherished the latter. The firstmade shipwreck on the rustic Aimery, and therefore the second burnedmore fiercely. She had the promise from the saints that her line had agreat destiny, and the form of it she took to be sanctitude. For, allher married days she had ruled her life according to the canons of God,fasting and praying, cherishing the poor, tending the afflicted, givingof her great wealth bountifully to the Church. She had a name forholiness as far as the coasts of Italy. Surely from the blood ofBeaumanoir one would arise to be in dark times a defender of the Faith,a champion of Christ whom after death the Church should accept among thebeatified. Such a fate she desired for her seed more hungrily than anyEmperor's crown.
In the younger, Philip, there was hope. He had been an odd child, slimand pale while Aimery was large and ruddy, shy where his brother wasbold and bold where he was shy. He was backward in games and unready ina quarrel, but it was observed that he had no fear of the dark, or ofthe Green Lady that haunted the river avenue. Father Ambrose, his tutor,reported him of quick and excellent parts, but marred by a dreaminesswhich might grow into desidia that deadly sin. He had a peculiar graceof body and a silken courtesy of manner which won hearts. His greyeyes, even as a small boy, were serious and wise. But he seemed to dwellaloof, and while his brother's moods were plain for all to read, hehad from early days a self-control which presented a mask to his littleworld. With this stoicism went independence. Philip walked his ownway with a gentle obstinacy. "A saint, maybe," Father Ambrose told hisgrandmother. "But the kind of saint that the Church will ban before itblesses."
To the old dame of Beaumanoir the child was the apple of her eye;and her affection drew from him a tenderness denied to others. But itbrought no confidences. The dreaming boy made his own world, whichwas not, like his grandmother's, one of a dark road visited rarely byangels, with heaven as a shining city at the end of it; or, like hisbrother's, a green place of earthy jollity. It was as if the Bretonblood of the Lavals and Rohans had brought to the solid stock ofBeaumanoir the fairy whimsies of their dim ancestors. While the moorsand woodlands were to Aimery only places to fly a hawk or follow a stag,to Philip they were a wizard land where dreams grew. And the mysteriesof the Church were also food for his gold fancy, which by reshaping themstripped them of all terrors. He was extraordinarily happy, for he hadthe power to make again each fresh experience in a select inner world inwhich he walked as king, since he was its creator.
He was a child of many fancies, but one especially stayed with him. Whenstill very small, he slept in a cot in his grandmother's room, thewalls of which were hung with tapestry from the Arras looms. One picturecaught his eye, for the morning sun struck it, and when he woke earlyit glowed invitingly before him. It represented a little river twiningabout a coppice. There was no figure in the piece, which was boundedon one side by a great armoire, and on the other by the jamb of thechimney; but from extreme corner projected the plume of a helmet andthe tip of a lance. There was someone there; someone riding towards thetrees. It grew upon Philip that that little wood was a happy place, mosthappy and desirable. He fancied himself the knight, and he longed to bemoving up the links of the stream. He followed every step of the way,across the shallow ford, past the sedges of a backwater, between twoclumps of willows, and then over smooth green grass to the edge ofthe wood. But he never tried to picture what lay inside. That wassacred--even from his thoughts.
When he grew older and was allowed to prowl about in the scriptorium ofthe Abbey of Montmirail which lay by the Canche side, he found his woodagain. It was in a Psaltery on which a hundred years before some Flemishmonk had lavished his gold and vermilion. Opposite the verse of Psalmxxiii., "In loco pascuae," was a picture almost the same as that in thebedroom arras. There were the river, the meadows, and the little wood,painted in colours far brighter than the tapestry. Never was such bloomof green or such depth of blue. But there was a difference. No lance orplume projected from the corner. The traveller had emerged fromcover, and was walking waist-deep in the lush grasses. He was a thin,nondescript pilgrim, without arms save a great staff like the crozierof a Bishop. Philip was disappointed in him and preferred the invisibleknight, but the wood was all he had desired. It was indeed a blessedplace, and the old scribe had known it, for a scroll of gold hung aboveit with the words "Sylva Vitae."
At the age of ten the boy had passed far beyond Father Ambrose, and wassucking the Abbey dry of its learning, like some second Abelard. Inthe cloisters of Montmirail were men who had a smattering of the NewKnowledge, about which Italy had gone mad, and, by the munificence ofthe Countess Catherine, copies had been made by the Italian stationariiof some of the old books of Rome which the world had long forgotten.In the Abbey library, among a waste of antiphonaries and homilies andmonkish chronicles, were to be found texts of Livy and Lucretius and theletters of Cicero. Philip was already a master of Latin, writing it withan elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine. At fourteen he entered thecollege of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholasticpedantry. But in the capital he learned the Greek tongue from aByzantine, the elder Lascaris, and copied with his own hand a great partof Plato and Aristotle. His thirst grew with every draught of the newvintage. To Pavia he went and sat at the feet of Lorenzo Vallo. Thecompany of Pico della Mirandola at Florence sealed him of the Platonicschool, and like his master he dallied with mysteries and had a Jew inhis house to teach him Hebrew that he might find a way of reconcilingthe Scriptures and the classics, the Jew and the Greek. From the verseswhich he wrote at this time, beautifully turned hexameters with acertain Lucretian cadence, it is clear that his mind was like Pico's,hovering about the borderland of human knowledge, clutching at theeternally evasive. Plato's Banquet was his gospel, where the quest oftruth did not lack the warmth of desire. Only a fragment remains now ofthe best of his poems, that which earned the praise of Ficino and thegreat Lorenzo, and it is significant that the name of the piece was "TheWood of Life."
At twenty Philip returned to Beaumanoir after long wanderings. He wasthe perfect scholar who had toiled at books and not less at the studyof mankind. But his well-knit body and clear eyes showed no marks ofbookishness, and Italy had made him a swordsman. A somewhat austereyoung man, he had kept himself unspotted in the rotting life of theItalian courts, and though he had learned from them suavity had not losthis simplicity. But he was more aloof than ever. There was little warmthin the grace of his courtesy, and his eyes were graver than before. Itseemed that they had found much, but had had no joy of it, and thatthey were still craving. It was a disease of the time and men called itaegritudo. "No saint," the aged Ambrose told the Countess. "Virtuous,indeed, but not with the virtue of the religious. He will never enterthe Church. He has drunk at headier streams." The Countess was nearingher end. All her days, for a saint, she had been a shrewd observer oflife, but with the weakening of her body's strength she had sunkinto the ghostly world which the Church devised as an ante-room toimmortality. Her chamber was thronged with lean friars like shadows. Toher came the Bishop of Beauvais, once a star of the Court, but now inhis age a grim watch-dog of the Truth. To him she spoke of her hopes forPhilip.
"An Italianate s
cholar!" cried the old man. "None such shall pollute theChurch with my will. They are beguiled by such baubles as the holy SaintGregory denounced, poetarum figmenta sive deliramenta. If your grandson,madame, is to enter the service of God he must renounce these paganfollies."
The Bishop went, but his words remained. In the hour of her extremitythe vision of Catherine was narrowed to a dreadful antagonism of lightand darkness--God and Antichrist--the narrow way of salvation and a lostworld. She was obsessed by the peril of her darling. Her last act mustbe to pluck him from his temptress. Her mood was fanned by the monks whosurrounded her, narrow men whose honesty made them potent.
The wan face on the bed moved Philip deeply. Tenderness filled hisheart, and a great sense of alienation, for the dying woman spoke atongue he had forgotten. Their two worlds were divided by a gulf whichaffection could not bridge. She spoke not with her own voice but withthat of her confessors when she pled with him to do her wishes.
"I have lived long," she said, "and know that the bread of this world isashes. There is no peace but in God. You have always been the child ofmy heart, Philip, and I cannot die at ease till I am assured of yoursalvation.... I have the prevision that from me a saint shall be born.It is God's plain commandment to you. Obey, and I go to Him with a quietsoul."
For a moment he was tempted. Surely it was a little thing this, togladden the dying. The rich Abbey of Montmirail was his for the taking,and where would a scholar's life be more happily lived than among itscool cloisters? A year ago, when he had been in the mood of seeing allcontraries but as degrees in an ultimate truth, he might have assented.But in that dim chamber, with burning faces around him and the shadowof death overhead, he discovered in himself a new scrupulousness. Itwas the case of Esau; he was bidden sell his birthright for pottage, andaffection could not gloze over the bargain.
"I have no vocation," he said sadly. "I would fain do the will of God,but God must speak His will to each heart, and He does not speak thus tome."
There was that in the words which woke a far-away memory of hergirlhood. Once another in a forest inn had spoken thus to her. Shestretched out her hand to him, and he covered it with kisses.
But in the night the priests stirred her fears again, and next morningthere was another tragic pleading, from which Philip fled almost intears. Presently he found himself denied her chamber, unless he couldgive assurance of a changed mind. And so the uneasy days went on, tillin a dawn of wind amid a great praying and chanting the soul of theCountess Catherine passed, and Aimery reigned in Beaumanoir.
The place had grown hateful to Philip and he made ready to go. For himin his recalcitrancy there was only a younger son's portion, the littleseigneury of Eaucourt, which had been his mother's. The good Aimerywould have increased the inheritance, but Philip would have none of it.He had made his choice, and to ease his conscience must abide strictlyby the consequences. Those days at Beaumanoir had plucked him fromhis moorings. For the moment the ardour of his quest for knowledge hadburned low. He stifled in the air of the north, which was heavy withthe fog of a furious ignorance. But his mind did not turn happily to thetrifling of his Italian friends. There was a tragic greatness aboutsuch as his grandmother, a salt of nobility which was lacking among themellow Florentines. Truth, it seemed to him, lay neither with the oldChurch nor the New Learning, and not by either way could he reach thedesire of his heart.
Aimery bade him a reluctant farewell. "If you will not keep me companyhere, I go to the wars. At Beaumanoir I grow fat. Ugh, this business ofdying chills me." And then with a very red face he held out a goldring. "Take it, Philip. She cherished it, and you were her favourite andshould wear it. God knows I have enough."
Likewise he presented him with a little vellum-bound book. "I found thisyesterday, and you being the scholar among us should have it. See, thegrandmother's name is written within."
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It was a bright May morning when Philip, attended by only two lackeysas became a poor man, rode over the bridge of Canche with eyes turnedsouthward. In the green singing world the pall lifted from his spirits.The earth which God had made was assuredly bigger and better than man'sphilosophies. "It would appear," he told himself, "that like the youngerson in the tale, I am setting out to look for fortune."
At an inn in the city of Orleans he examined his brother's gift. It wasa volume of careful manuscript, entitled Imago Mundi, and bearing thename of one Pierre d'Ailly, who had been Bishop of Cambray whenthe Countess Catherine was a child. He opened it and read of manymarvels--how that the world was round, as Pythagoras held, so that ifa man travelled west he would come in time to Asia where the sun rose.Philip brooded over the queer pages, letting his fancy run free, forhe had been so wrapped up in the mysteries of man's soul that he hadforgotten the mysteries of the earth which is that soul's place ofpilgrimage. He read of cities with silver walls and golden towerswaiting on the discoverer, and of a river on whose banks "virescit sylvavitae." And at that phrase he fell to dreaming of his childhood, and apleasant unrest stirred in his heart. "Aimery has given me a preciousviaticum," he said.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He travelled by slow stages into Italy, for he had no cause for haste.At Pavia he wandered listlessly among the lecture halls. What had onceseemed to him the fine gold of eloquence was now only leaden rhetoric.In his lodging at Florence he handled once again his treasures--hisbooks from Ficino's press; his manuscripts, some from Byzantium yellowwith age, some on clean white vellum new copied by his order; his bustsand gems and intaglios. What had become of that fervour with which hehad been used to gaze on them? What of that delicious world into which,with drawn curtains and a clear lamp, he could retire at will? Thebrightness had died in the air.
He found his friends very full of quarrels. There was a mighty feudbetween two of them on the respective merits of Cicero and Quintilianas lawgivers in grammar, and the air was thick with libels. Another pairwrangled in public over the pre-eminence of Scipio and Julius Caesar;others on narrow points of Latinity. There was a feud among thePlatonists on a matter of interpretation, in which alreadystilettos had been drawn. More bitter still was the strife aboutmistresses--kitchen-wenches and courtesans, where one scholar stoleshamelessly from the other and decked with names like Leshia andErinna.... Philip sickened at what he had before tolerated, for he hadbrought back with him from the north a quickened sense of sin. Maybethe Bishop of Beauvais had been right. What virtue was there in this newknowledge if its prophets were apes and satyrs! Not here grew the Woodof Life. Priapus did not haunt its green fringes.
His mind turned towards Venice. There the sea was, and there men dweltwith eyes turned to spacious and honourable quests, not to monkish hellsand heavens or inward to unclean hearts. And in Venice in a tavern offthe Merceria he spoke with destiny.
It was a warm evening, and, having dined early, he sought the balconywhich overlooked the canal. It was empty but for one man who sat ata table with a spread of papers before him on which he was intentlyengaged. Philip bade him good evening, and a face was raised whichpromptly took his fancy. The stranger wore a shabby grey doublet, but hehad no air of poverty, for round his neck hung a massive chain of gold,and his broad belt held a richly chased dagger. He had unbuckled hissword, and it lay on the table holding down certain vagrant papers whichfluttered in the evening wind. His face was hard and red like sandstone,and around his eyes were a multitude of fine wrinkles. It was theseeyes that arrested Philip. They were of a pale brown as if bleached byweather and gazing over vast spaces; cool and quiet and friendly, butwith a fire burning at the back of them. The man assessed Philip ata glance, and then, as if liking what he found in him, smiled so thatwhite furrows appeared in his tanned cheeks. With a motion of his handhe swept aside his papers and beckoned the other to sit with him. Hecalled on the drawer to bring a flask of Cyprus.
"I was about to have my evening draught," he said. "Will you honour mewith your company, sir?"
; The voice was so pleasant that Philip, who was in a mood to shun talk,could not refuse. He sat down by the board, and moved aside a paper tomake room for the wine. He noticed that it was a map.
The Bishop of Cambray had made him curious about such things. He drewit to him, and saw that it was a copy of Andrea Bianco's chart, drawnnearly half a century before, showing the Atlantic Sea with a maze ofislands stretching westwards.
The other shook his head. "A poor thing and out of date. Here," and heplucked a sheet from below the rest, "here is a better, which Fra Mauroof this city drew for the great prince, Henry of Portugal."
Philip looked at the map, which showed a misshapen sprawling Africa, butwith a clear ocean way round the south of it. His interest quickened. Hepeered at the queer shapes in the dimming light.
"Then there is a way to the Indies by sea?"
"Beyond doubt. I myself have turned the butt of Africa.... If thesematters interest you? But the thought of that dry land has given me anAfrican thirst. He, drawer!"
He filled his glass from a fresh bottle. "'Twas in June four years back.I was in command of a caravel in the expedition of Diaz. The courtof Lisbon had a fit of cold ague and we sailed with little goodwill;therefore it was our business to confound the doubters or perish.Already our seamen had reached the mouth of that mighty river theycalled the Congo, and clearly the butt of Africa could not be distant.We had the course of Cam and Behaim to guide us thus far, but after thatwas the darkness."
The man's face had the intent look of one who remembers with passion.He told of the struggle to cross the Guinea Deep instead of huggingthe shore; of blue idle days of calm when magic fish flew aboard andLeviathan wallowed so near that the caravels were all but overwhelmedby the wave of him; of a storm which swept the decks and washed away theVirgin on the bows of the Admiral's ship; of landfall at last in a placewhere the forests were knee deep in a muddy sea, strange forests wherethe branches twined like snakes; of a going ashore at a river mouth fullof toothed serpents and giant apes, and of a fight with Behemoth amongthe reeds. Then a second storm blowing from the east had flung themseaward, and for weeks they were out of sight of land, steering bystrange stars. They had their magnets and astrolabes, but it was a newworld they had entered, and they trusted God rather than their wits. Atlast they turned eastward.
"What distance before the turn?" Philip asked.
"I know not. We were far from land and no man can measure a course onwater."
"Nay, but the ancients could," Philip cried, and he explained how theRomans had wheels of a certain diameter fixed to their ships' sideswhich the water turned in its passing, and which flung for eachrevolution a pebble into a tally-box.
The other's eyes widened. "A master device! I would hear more of it.What a thing it is to have learning. We had only the hour-glass andguesswork."
Then he told how on a certain day the crews would go no farther, beingworn out by storms, for in those seas the tides were like cataracts andthe waves were mountains. The admiral, Bartholomew Diaz, was forced toput about with a heavy heart, for he believed that a little way to theeast he should find the southern cape of Africa. He steered west bynorth, looking for no land till Guinea was sighted. "But on the secondmorning we saw land to the northward, and following it westward came toa mighty cape so high that the top was in the clouds. There was sucha gale from the east that we could do no more than gaze on it as wescudded past. Presently, still keeping land in sight, we were able tobend north again, and when we came into calm waters we captains wentaboard the admiral's ship and knelt and gave thanks to God for Hismercies. For we, the first of mortals, had rounded the butt of Africaand prepared the sea-road to the Indies."
"A vision maybe."
"Nay, it was no vision. I returned there under mild skies, when it wasno longer a misty rock, but a green mountain. We landed, and set up across and ate the fruits and drank the water of the land. Likewise wechanged its name from the Cape of Storms, as Diaz had dubbed it, to theBona Esperanza, for indeed it seemed to us the hope of the world."
"And beyond it?"
"Beyond it we found a pleasant country, and would doubtless have madethe Indies, if our ships had not grown foul and our crews mutinous fromfear of the unknown. It is clear to me that we must establish a port ofvictualling in that southern Africa before we can sail the last stage toCathay."
The man spoke modestly and simply as if he were talking of a littlejourney from one village to another. Something in his serious calmpowerfully caught Philip's fancy. In all his days he had never met sucha one.
"I have not your name, Signor," he said.
"They call me Battista de Cosca, a citizen of Genoa, but these manyyears a wanderer. And yours?"
Philip gave it and the stranger bowed. The de Lavals were known as agreat house far beyond the confines of France.
"You contemplate another voyage?"
The brown man nodded. "I am here on the quest of maps, for theseVenetians are the princes of mapmaking. Then I sail again."
"To Cathay?"
A sudden longing had taken Philip. It was as if a bright strange worldhad been spread before him compared with which the old was tarnished anddingy.
Battista shook his head. "Not Cathay. To go there would be only to makeassurance of that which we already know. I have shown the road: letothers plan its details and build hostelries. For myself I am for abolder venture."
The balcony was filling up. A noisy group of young men were chatteringat one table, and at others some of the merchants from the Merceria wereat wine. But where the two sat it was quiet and dusky, though without onthe canal the sky made a golden mirror. Philip could see his companion'sface in the reflected light, and it reminded him of the friars who hadfilled the chamber of his dying grandmother. It was strained with asteadfast ardour.
Battista leaned his elbows on the board and his eyes searched theother's.
"I am minded to open my heart to you," he said. "You are young and ofa noble stock. Likewise you are a scholar. I am on a mission, SirPhilip--the loftiest, I think, since Moses led Israel over the deserts.I am seeking a promised land. Not Cathay, but a greater. I sailpresently, not the African seas, but the Sea of Darkness, the MareAtlanticum." He nodded towards Bianco's map. "I am going beyond theUltimate Islands."
"Listen," he went on, and his voice fell very low and deep. "I take itwe live in these latter days of which the prophets spoke. I remember amonk in Genoa who said that the Blessed Trinity ruled in turn, and thatthe reign of the Father was accomplished and that of the Son nearingits close; and that now the reign of the Spirit was at hand. It may havebeen heresy--I am no scholar--but he pointed a good moral. For, said he,the old things pass away and the boundaries of the world are shifting.Here in Europe we have come to knowledge of salvation, and brought thesoul and mind of man to an edge and brightness like a sword. Havingperfected the weapon, it is now God's will that we enter into possessionof the new earth which He has kept hidden against this day, and He hassent His Spirit like a wind to blow us into those happy spaces....Now, mark you, sir, this earth is not a flat plain surrounded by outerdarkness, but a sphere hung in the heavens and sustained by God's hand.Therefore if a man travel east or west he will, if God prosper him,return in time to his starting-point."
The speaker looked at Philip as if to invite contradiction, but theother nodded.
"It is the belief of the best sailors," Battista went on; "it is thebelief of the great Paolo Toscanelli in this very land of Italy."
"It was the belief of a greater than he. The ancients--"
"Ay, what of your ancients?" Battista asked eagerly.
Philip responded with a scholar's zest. "Four centuries before ourLord's birth Aristotle taught the doctrine, from observing indifferent places the rise and setting of the heavenly bodies. The sagesEratosthenes, Hipparchus and Ptolemy amplified the teaching. It is foundin the poetry of Manilius and Seneca, and it was a common thought in theminds of Virgil and Ovid and Pliny. You will find it in St. Augustine,and St.
Isidore and Beda, and in many of the moderns. I myself havelittle knowledge of such things, but on the appeal to high authorityyour doctrine succeeds.'
"What a thing is learning!" Battista exclaimed with reverence. "Herehave I and such as I been fumbling in the dark when the great ones ofold saw clearly!... It follows, then, that a voyage westward will bringa man to Cathay?"
"Assuredly. But how will he return? If the earth is a sphere, his coursewill be a descent, and on his way back he will have to climb a greatsteep of waters."
"It is not so," said Battista vigorously. "Though why it is not so Icannot tell. Travelling eastward by land there is no such descent, andin this Mediterranean sea of ours one can sail as easily from Cadiz toEgypt as from Egypt to Cadiz. There is a divine alchemy in it which Icannot fathom, but the fact stands."
"Then you would reach Cathay by the west?"
"Not Cathay." The man's voice was very earnest. "There is a land betweenus and Cathay, a great islandland beyond the Seven Cities of Antillia."
"Cipango," said Philip, who had read Marco Polo's book in the Latinversion published a year or two before.
"Nay, not Cipango. On this side Cipango. Of Cipango the Venetians havetold us much, but the land I seek is not Cipango."
He drew closer to Philip and spoke low. "There was a Frenchman, aRochellois--he is dead these ten years--but I have spoken with him. Hewas whirled west by storms far beyond Antillia, and was gripped by agreat ocean stream and carried to land. What think you it was? No lessthan Hy-Brasil. There he found men, broad-faced dusky men, with gentlesouls, and saw such miracles as have never been vouchsafed to mortals.'Twas not Cipango or Cathay' for there were no Emperors or cities, buta peaceful race dwelling in innocence. The land was like Eden, bringingforth five harvests in the year, and vines and all manner of fruits grewwithout tillage. Tortorel was the man's name, and some thought him mad,but I judged differently. I have talked with him and I have copied hischarts. I go to find those Fortunate Islands."
"Alone?"
"I have friends. There is a man of my own city--Cristoforo Colombo, theycall him. He is a hard man and a bitter, but a master seaman, and thereis a fire in him that will not be put out. And there may be others."
His steadfast burning eyes held Philip's.
"And you--what do you seek?" he asked.
Philip was aware that he had come to a cross roads in life. The easypath he had planned for himself was barred by his own nature. Somethingof his grandmother's blood clamoured within him for a sharper airthan the well-warmed chamber of the scholar. This man, chance met in atavern, had revealed to him his own heart.
"I am looking for the Wood of Life," he said simply and was amazed athis words.
Battista stared at him with open mouth, and then plucked feverishly athis doublet. From an inner pocket he produced a packet rolled in fineleather, and shook papers on the table. One of these was a soiled andworn slip of parchment, covered with an odd design. "Look," he saidhoarsely. "Tortorel's map!"
It showed a stretch of country, apparently a broad valley running eastto a seashore. Through it twined a river and on both sides were hillsdotted with trees. The centre seemed to be meadows, sown with villagesand gardens. In one crook of the stream lay a little coppice on whichmany roads converged, and above it was written the words "Sylva Vitae."
"It is the finger of God," said Battista. "Will you join me and searchout this Wood of Life?"
At that moment there was a bustle at the door giving on the main roomof the tavern. Lights were being brought in and a new company wereentering. They talked in high-pitched affected voices and giggled likebona-robas. There were young men with them, dressed in the height of thefashion; a woman or two, and a man who from the richness of his dressseemed to be one of the princely merchants who played Maecenas to theNew Learning. But what caught Philip's sight was a little groupof Byzantines who were the guests of honour. They wore fantasticheaddresses and long female robes, above which their flowing dyed beardsand their painted eyebrows looked like masks of Carnival time. AfterBattista's gravity their vain eyes and simpering tones seemed anindecent folly. These were the folk he had called friends, this the lifehe had once cherished. Assuredly he was well rid of it.
He grasped Battista's hand.
"I will go with you," he said, "over the edge of the world."
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As it happened Philip de Laval did not sail with Columbus in that firstvoyage which brought him to San Salvador in the Bahamas. But he andBattista were in the second expedition, when the ship under the commandof the latter was separated by a storm from her consorts, and driven ona westerly course when the others had turned south. It was believed tobe lost, and for two years nothing was heard of its fate. At the end ofthat time a tattered little vessel reached Bordeaux, and Philip landedon the soil of Franc. He had a strange story to tell. The ship had beencaught up by a current which had borne it north for the space of fifteendays till landfall was made on the coast of what we now call SouthCarolina. There it had been beached in an estuary, while the crewadventured inland. The land was rich enough, but the tribes were not thegentle race of Battista's imagining. There had been a savage strugglefor mastery, till the strangers made alliances and were grantedterritory between the mountains and the sea. But they were only ahandful and Philip was sent back for further colonists and for a cargoof arms and seeds and implements.
The French court was in no humour for his tale, being much involved inits own wars. It may be that he was not believed; anyhow he got no helpfrom his king. At his own cost and with the aid of friends he fitted outhis ship for the return. After that the curtain falls. It would appearthat the colony did not prosper, for it is on record that Philip in theyear 1521 was living at his house at Eaucourt, a married man, occupiedwith books and the affairs of his little seigneury. A portrait of himstill extant by an Italian artist shows a deeply furrowed face and sternbrows, as of one who had endured much, but the eyes are happy. It isbelieved that in his last years he was one of the first of the gentlemenof Picardy to adhere to the Reformed faith.