England and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

King Galen. There are many kinds of majesty and rebellion. We were but boys, Ned, when the Armada closed upon our shores, but would we not have rallied round our monarch? Rally, I say! We were more than half the age we have now when Ralegh’s head was severed from his body. Did we not then both feel not a little of the sharpness of the axe that smote him? There were many of your party for whom that day, I dare say, marked a severance. It was their beginning, their pretext. So it was with you. It was the beginning, I dare say, of our own severance.
    Yet did we not feel also, if we are truthful, that there is a motion, a fluctuation—may not I use such terms?—in the fortunes of men, an ebb and flow, a rise and fall, beyond all issue of government or justice; and that it is into these unrestrained tides—we knew it by then—we enter as we enter the world? We set our little skiffs upon them, as Ralegh set many a fine vessel upon the waters of his ambition. Should I have stepped in, Ned, to bid my former master James withhold his warrant upon so worthy a head? I was but his physician, not his counsellor, and had been hardly a year in his service. And Ralegh went to his death bravely and nobly, as did, but these seven days past, my other late master Charles.
    Is that what we must call him now, only Charles? Is that the ordinance? As you and I may still call each other—or so I trust—but Ned and Will, boys who once played at knucklebones and did battle with the wooden swords of our rulers at Canterbury. And quaked in our shoes, no doubt, at the wrath of our masters, or spoke impudence about them, behind our hands, when their gowned backs were turned. They were only our schoolmasters, but it was all our world. Such tyranny, such subjection. Such fledgling revolt. Such nursing of our destinies. And it was the
King
’s School, mark you. Though it was still the reign, long to continue, of, as we would call her, even in our prayers, Our Sovereign Lady Elizabeth.
    What times, Ned, what times. ‘That one might read the book of fate and see the revolution of the times’—do I have it correctly? Is it not King Henry IV, deposer himself of kings? But it was you who attended the playhouses and, if I know you as I knew you in your youth, no doubt other houses as well, while I attended my lectures at Padua. You who are now of God’s militia, while I, to pass the hours, read more of the poets than I read of the Bible. Is that to speak treason?
    That, surely, was our first parting, though we would write much to each other. You were for the law, I was for physic. You were for the Middle Temple, I was for Padua. Was it not indeed the seed of all our future differences and of future offices we would hold as then undiscovered to us? Yet that common seed, that common stirring of the blood—quite so!—was ambition. Should we deny it? I was for anatomy, you, with your lawyer’s trenchancy, were for the bones of human contention. It was always in you, Ned, though it was your profession then to fight but with words. You had the mark of a swordsman. One day you might draw a true sword. I had only a scalpel. Even with your wooden ruler you were more often than not, as I recall, the victor. Now I must own again that you, and those of your kind, are my victor. Nay, my ruler! Truly I live now under your rule.
    How does it go, Ned? ‘If this were seen, the happiest youth, viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue.’ I am an old man. I read by a winter fire. But I freely admit I was ambitious too. My cause was the advancement of learning, but it was also the advancement of myself. Did I marry my late wife because I wished her to be my wife or because I wished to be the husband of the daughter of the late Queen’s physician? It opened more doors than my laurels from Padua. Yet how I miss her, my dear Liz. My late Liz. Late! It is the only word now for us, now we have passed our three score and ten. All is late. Though