nd signing by both parties of a document setting forth the
several terms and conditions of the agreement. After this George Saint
Leger departed for home with a light step and a still lighter heart, to
tell his mother the good news. And she, poor soul, listened to him with
strangely mingled feelings; for on the one hand her heart was racked and
torn with anxiety and fear for her elder son, a captive in the hands of
men whose cruelties to enemies, and especially to so-called heretics,
were even then sending thrills of horror and dismay through the
Protestant world, while her nights were rendered sleepless by the
visions of awful torments, conjured up by her too vivid imagination,
which that son might even then be enduring. No wonder was it that,
under such circumstances, the one great and paramount desire that
possessed her, to the exclusion of all other things, was the deliverance
of Hubert from the fate which she pictured for him. Yet, when it came
to the point of consenting to the going of her second son to the rescue
of her first, her very soul sickened within her lest George, instead of
effecting his brother's deliverance, should himself fall into the toils.
For she, like those merchants whom the lad had unavailingly approached,
was convinced that the lad was altogether too young, too immature, too
inexperienced to undertake the responsibility of leading such an
expedition, and if he should fail, her last state would be worse than
her first. And what hope of success for him dared she entertain at the
very moment when all England was being profoundly stirred at the news of
Hawkins' and Drake's disastrous failure? If they, seasoned and
experienced mariners as they were, found themselves unable to stand
against the might of Spain, what chance, she constantly asked herself,
would such a mere boy as her George have? Thus she was swayed by first
one form of terror and then the other until her reason threatened to
give way altogether under the strain, and in sheer desperation she
sought, quite unavailingly, to find distraction in preparing George's
wardrobe for the voyage. As for George, he saw the terrible struggle
through which his beloved mother was passing, read her every thought,
realised her every fear, and when he was not engaged at the shipyard
with old Radlett, devoted himself strenuously to the almost superhuman
task of allaying those fears, driving them out, and infusing some
measure of hopefulness in thei