The Courtship of Morrice Buckler: A Romance

AT Rotterdam I was fortunate enough to light upon a Dutch skipper whose ship was anchored in the Texel, and who purposed sailing that very night for the Port of London. For a while, indeed, he scrupled to set me over, my lack of equipment—for I had not so much with me as a clean shirt— and my great haste to be quit of the country firing his suspicions. However, I sold Swasfield’s horse to the keeper of a tavern by the waterside, and adding the money I got thereby to what I held in my pockets, I presently persuaded him; and a light wind springing up about midnight, we weighed anchor and stood out for the sea.

That my purse was now empty occasioned me no great concern, since my cousin, Lord Elmscott, lived at Lon don, in a fine house in Monmouth Square, and I doubted not but what I could instantly procure from him the means to enable me to continue my journey. I was, in truth, infinitely more distressed by the tardiness of our voyage, for towards sunrise the wind utterly died away, and during the next two days we lay becalmed, rocking lazily upon the swell. On the afternoon of the third, being the seventeenth day of the mouth, a breeze filled our sheets, and we made some progress, although our vessel, which was a ketch and heavily loaded, was a slow sailer at the best. But during the night the breeze quickened into a storm, and, blowing for twelve hours without intermission or abatement, drove us clean from our course, so that on the morning of the eighteenth we were scurrying northwards before it along the coast of Essex.

The last misadventure cast me into the very bottom of despair. I knew that if I were to prove of timely help in Juhan’s deliverance, I must needs reach Bristol before his trial commenced, the which seemed now plainly impossible; and, atop of this piece of knowledge, my ignorance of the nature of his calamity, and of the service he desired of me, worked in my blood like a fever.

For Julian and myself were linked together in a very sweet and intimate love. I could not, an I tried, point to its beginning. It seemed to have been native within us from our births. We took it from our fathers before us, and when they died we counted it no small part of our inheritance. Our estates, you should know, lay in contiguous valleys of the remote county of Cumberland, and thus we lived out our boyhood in a secluded comradeship. Seldom a day passed but we found a way to meet. Mostly Julian would come swinging across the fells, his otter-dogs yapping at his heels, and all the fresh morning in his voice. Together we would ramble over the slopes, bathe in the tarns and kelds, hunt, climb, argue, ay, and fight too, when we were gravelled for lack of arguments; so that even now, each time that I turn my feet homewards after a period of absence, and catch the first glimpse of these brown hill-sides, they become bright and populous with the rich pageantry of our boyish fancies.