"The daughter of debate,
That discord still doth sow,
Shall reap no gain where former rule
Hath taught still peace to grow.
No foreign banish'd wight
Shall anker in this port;
Our realm it brooks no stranger's force:
Let them elsewhere resort."
Qu. Elizabeth. 1569.
And now Amyas is settled quietly at home again; and for the next twelve months little passes worthy of record in these pages. Yeo has installed himself as major domo, with no very definite functions, save those of walking about everywhere at Amyas's heels like a lank gray wolf-hound, and spending his evenings at the fireside, as a true old sailor does with his Bible on his knee, and his hands busy in manufacturing numberless knick-knacks, useful and useless, for every member of the family, and above all for Ayacanora, whom he insults every week by humbly offering some toy only fit for a child; at which she pouts, and is reproved by Mrs. Leigh, and then takes the gift, and puts it away never to look at it again. For her whole soul is set upon being an English maid; and she runs about all day long after Mrs. Leigh, insisting upon learning the mysteries of the kitchen and the stillroom, and, above all, the art of marking clothes for herself, and at last for everybody in Northam. For first, she will be a good housewife, like Mrs. Leigh; and next a new idea has dawned on her; that, of helping others. To the boundless hospitality of the savage she has been of course accustomed: but to give to those who can give nothing in return, is a new thought. She sees Mrs. Leigh spending every spare hour in working for the poor, and visiting them in their cottages. She sees Amyas, after public thanks in church for his safe return, giving away money, food, what not, in Northam, Appledore, and Bideford; buying cottages and making them almshouses for worn-out mariners; and she is told that this is his thank-offering to God. She is puzzled; her notion of a thank-offering was rather that of the Indians, and indeed of the Spaniards,—sacrifices of human victims, and the bedizenment of the Great Spirit's sanctuary with their skulls and bones. Not that Amyas, as a plain old-fashioned churchman, was unmindful of the good old instinctive rule, that something should be given to the Church itself; for the vicar of Northam was soon resplendent with a new surplice, and what was more, the altar with a splendid flagon and salver of plate (lost, I suppose, in the civil wars) which had been taken in the great galleon. Ayacanora could understand that:
