Читать книгу Rogue Herries - Hugh Walpole - Страница 6

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Pomfret Herries lived at this time in one of the most beautiful houses in Keswick. It was beautiful, not by his own taste or fancy, but because he wished to have a better house than any one of his neighbours.

This has always been a habit with certain of the Herries. Desiring this, he chose for architect that strange, saturnine hermit, old John Westaway, known in Keswick for a madman and the best architect in the North, a desperate traveller who knew Italy as you might know Skiddaw, who had been invited again and again to London, but preferred to live in his little house above the river, seeing no one, liking no one, buried in his books and art treasures. All over the North Westaway’s fame ran. He was an old man now, had been, it was said, in his youth the friend and intimate of Chesterman and Van der Vaart and Vanbrugh, a curmudgeon, a surly bachelor, in league, some whispered, with the Devil himself, pottering about that house, with its pictures and statuary, and his dark Italian servant—a devil, but the finest architect, it might be, in England.

He had made Pomfret pay for his fancy, and when it was done Pomfret had grumbled so that you might hear him from John o’ Groat’s to Land’s End—but it was a beautiful house. People came from Kendal and Carlisle and Penrith to look at it, so that at the last Pomfret and his wife had grown proud of it and spoke of it as entirely their doing.

In fine proportion, its roof covered with red tiles, the wrought ironwork across its front showing like lace against the stone, the house was oblong without gables. The windows were for their period most modern. They were sash windows, a great rarity, and they were beautifully spaced. The doorway had fluted columns and over it there was a charming and delicate fanlight.

The house was outside the town near to Crosthwaite Church, and the gardens ran down to the weeds and rushes of the lake-end. The garden held lime trees and the lawn was bordered with tubs of orange and bay trees. There was a little terrace and a rosy wall of red brick, and beyond the formal garden a meadow, the lake and the rising hills. To the right some greenhouses, a flower garden and a kitchen garden.

Inside, the house was wide, spacious and full of light. First a pillared hall, on the right the parlour, on the left a fine, wide staircase opening into a splendid saloon. Beyond the parlour a large bedroom leading to a greenhouse. On the upper floor other bedrooms.

Pomfret’s chief pride was the saloon, the decoration of which Westaway had designed and executed—the subject was Paris awarding the apple. Lady Herries had been disturbed by the naked goddesses until it was seen that no one else minded.

In this fine house Pomfret inhabited only one room, a dusky apartment crowded with guns, stuffed animals and fishing-rods. Here he drank merrily with his friends.

Lady Herries’ home was the parlour, where she read her medicine books, scolded the maids, suffered in a bitter silence that ancient lady, Pomfret’s aunt, fed a screaming macaw, and gave her neighbours tea and chocolate. The three children had their own room far away at the top of the house.

There was a great array of domestics, from Mrs. Bellamy the housekeeper to little Peter the black boy, who had been purchased in London, shivered in the cold, and stole everything that he, with safety, might.

Mrs. Bellamy was of the family of Mrs. Slipslop, and made all the mischief both in the house and in the neighbourhood that time and talents permitted her.

They could scarcely be called a united family, for they were never together. Pomfret diced, drank, rode, hunted with his masculine friends, who liked his company because he was stupid enough for them to rob him at will. Jannice, his wife, bullied him when she was with him, forgot him when she was not. She loved him only when he was ill, and this was often enough, for his intemperate habits and his swinish feeding caused him constant attacks of biliousness and vertigo. There was nothing that Jannice Herries loved like a medical treatise; her familiar and, after Mrs. Bellamy, most constant companion was old Dr. Ellis, who would discuss with her by the hour the whole works of that excellent practical physician, Dr. Thomas Sydenham!

She experimented on her staff, her family and any neighbours who would permit her. Little Peter, who was sick every other day from stealing confitures from the store-room, was her most unhappy patient. And yet, of course, this is not all that can be said about Pomfret and his lady. At heart they were kindly and well-dispositioned. Only they had no imagination, and had been covered with a thin skin of wealth that, like a rash upon their souls, discomforted them, made them uneasy, suspicious, unhappily proud.

Pomfret loved his children, but did not know how to approach them. He cuffed them and spoiled them and cuffed them again. He was generous-natured and desired that his friends should be happy, but he suspected that they laughed at him, and so was pompous and grand when he wished to be easy and familiar.

His money he had made, as he well knew, from his obedience to the advice of a London friend, Hartwell, who, at a certain moment, had directed his affairs.

Although his companions robbed him he had wisdom sufficient to leave his affairs in Hartwell’s hands. He pretended to a knowledge of commerce and exchange; it was, as he knew in his heart, a bare pretence. He did nothing well, rode badly, shot badly, fished badly. He knew moments of great unhappiness.

Jannice Herries was also without imagination. She was acrimonious and bitter, but she knew that this was not her real life. Somewhere real feeling was hidden, but day succeeded day and nothing was done. She knew that she was unpopular among the ladies of Keswick, but she swallowed every compliment that Mrs. Bellamy gave her, and at the end was more lonely than before.

After her interest in medicine her most active passion was her hatred for Pomfret’s Aunt Maria, that very ancient lady, who, born in 1645 and for a time in the fashionable world, was now a hideous remnant of a dead and musty past. She longed for this old lady to die, and would have poisoned her ere this, but alone of the household Aunt Maria refused all of her niece’s drugs. She was now eighty-five years of age.

Finally with both Pomfret and his lady there remained a constant uneasiness about their wealth. It had come so oddly, without any true justification. It might go as oddly again. They had witnessed in the last twenty years a series of financial panics. Now with the abominable French ready for any villainy, all this new-fangled independence of servants and labourers, who knew what the next event might be? The Catholics were listening at every window. Why, here was Francis Herries coming to live in the neighbourhood and bringing with him quite openly a rascally priest. Although Walpole and the Whigs were in, who knew how strong was their power?

Jannice Herries’ favourite remark to Mrs. Bellamy was: ‘Things are not as they were.’

To which Mrs. Bellamy with a shudder would reply: ‘No, my lady. If I know my own mind there was never a truer word spoken.’

‘And what will you do, Bellamy, if your master is ruined?’

‘Heaven strike me dead if I ever desert you, my lady! Marry come up, don’t I know a virtuous place when I see one?’

But Bellamy had been lining her pocket for many a year, and being Mrs. Bellamy only by courtesy had her eye on a handsome victualler in Kendal, whose hearth and home she proposed to encompass and govern on the first signs of distress in the Herries country.

The three children, Anabel, Raiseley and Judith, lived in their own world. They, like their father, were Herries of the unimaginative, matter-of-fact breed. They took things as they came, and each, in his or her own fashion, worked quietly and obstinately for personal profit. Anabel was good-natured, plump and easy. Raiseley was clever. It would not be true of him to say that he was without imagination, but it was imagination of an educational kind.

He was studious, priggish, aloof and cold, rarely roused to anger but unforgetful of the slightest injury. He had the wise, calculating side of the Herries blood; he was studious, honest to chilliness, and despised both his father and his mother. Judith would be beautiful; she was dark and slender and already cherished her beauty as her most important asset.

These three were all typical Herries on the stony side of the family character. They saw everything in front of their noses and nothing beyond. They did not mind in the least their social isolation. They might contemn one another, but united at once in condemnation of all other children.

They were waiting now in their high, chilly room for the visit that their cousin in Borrowdale was to pay them. Only the little boy, they understood, was coming with his father and mother. They had already gathered from the conversation of their elders that Uncle Francis was a disgrace.

Of the three of them at this time it may be said that Raiseley and Judith held out no hope of later humanity; for Anabel, because of her good-nature and a certain carelessness that went with it, there were possibilities.

On this afternoon the three children were in their chill room quietly busy. Judith was seated motionless in a high chair, a collar round her neck, a board tied to her back. This was for her figure. She was watching the grandfather clock in the corner. Five minutes of her daily half-hour remained. This half-hour was valued greatly by her, because she knew that this discipline was for the benefit of her beauty. She was only nine years of age, but had already a grave and considered air. Anabel, who was thirteen, was curled up in the window-seat looking at the pictures of some chap-books, Babes in the Wood, Bluebeard, Little Tom Thumb. But she was not reading. She knew the old stories by heart. She was wondering what her little cousin would be like.

She, unlike her brother and sister, was sometimes lonely. She confessed it to no one, but she loved parties and fun. Maybe this little boy would be agreeable.

Raiseley was yawning over his Virgil. Mr. Montgomery, who came every day to teach him Latin and Greek, had but just now gone.

‘Jam pater Aeneas ...’ murmured Raiseley, and fingered a little box in which he had a cocoon concealed. He hid this from his parents and Mr. Montgomery, because they would disapprove if they knew. But soon the cocoon would be liberated. No one told him any of the things that he wanted to know about animals, about the stars. Now, when he thought of these things, a new expression came into his eyes. He was suddenly alive with a questioning, investigating alertness. His cold, pale, pointed features gained an interesting sharpness. The book fell from his hand. There were many things that he would know one day; they should not stop him pursuing his knowledge. Mr. Montgomery with his sing-song voice, his perpetual cold at the nose, his eagerness to please, how Raiseley despised him!

He would like to see Mr. Montgomery whipped as little Peter was whipped, or standing as the man they had seen one day in the pillory in the market, his face smeared with the mud and the yellow of the eggs that people had thrown at him. And, as he thought of these things, his face achieved an added sharpness, coldly, intellectually speculative—‘Jam pater Aeneas....’

He looked at the little pile of books beside him—A Guide to the English Tongue, by Thomas Dyche, schoolmaster in London; Paul’s Scholars’ Copy-Book, by John Raynor; The Use of the Globes.

He did not look at them resentfully. He would extract from them everything that they had to give him.

‘Judith,’ he said, ‘I should know more than Mr. Montgomery knows in a year or two. I would think it fine to see him in the pillory as a week back we saw that man.’

Judith, motionless, her eyes on the clock, answered: ‘We are to go downstairs when our uncle and aunt come. I am to wear the grey-blue.’

Anabel, from the window, said: ‘I like David for a boy’s name.’

‘I heard them say,’ went on Raiseley, ‘that Uncle Francis is always drunken and beats Aunt Margaret.’

‘But he is very handsome,’ said Judith. ‘He was wearing such fine clothes the other day that father was shabby beside him.’

‘Fine clothes,’ said Raiseley scornfully, ‘and they living in mud and dirt up to their elbows! They say that Borrowdale is full of witches and giants—wolves too. I would like mightily to see a wolf. I shall ask Uncle Francis to take me.’

The clock struck the half-hour. Judith very carefully separated herself from her board and collar. At that same moment the door opened. They were told that it was time for them to dress.

David and his mother had indeed already arrived.

Poor Margaret Herries had been for weeks dreading this visit. It was now a month since they had come to Herries, and the weather had been so terrible that the ride to Keswick had been impossible. It had rained and rained; not as it rained in Doncaster, with gusts and flurries and pauses and whispering, but in a drenching flood, falling from the grey, lowering sky like sheets of steel.

And the mountains had crept closer and closer, and the cold stolen into the very webbing of the sheets, the torn tapestries beating against the wall, and the mice boldly running for comfort to the peat fire. A horrible month it had been, but with all the courage at her command she had faced the rain, the isolation, her loathing for Alice Press, gathered her children round her as she might and made what she could out of the situation.

Oddly enough she had not been unhappy. Francis had been ever close at hand. He did not go off for nights at a time as he had done at Doncaster. That might come later—but at present it was as though the place cast a spell upon him. He pottered about the house, rode out to Stye Head, walked up Glaramara and the neighbouring hills, wandered along the lake by Manesty and Cat Bells, made himself known to some of the neighbouring yeomen, was silent often enough, drunken at times, angry once and again, but on the whole more her companion than he had been since their first marriage year.

And so there had increased in her heart her ever-constant loyalty to him. What she had suffered watching the degradation of his reputation during these past years no one would ever know. She would never tell. Here it was as though he had begun a new life. Stories long commonplace round Doncaster would here not be known. He would start again, and she would do everything in her power to assist him. Only his brother’s family could spoil this fair beginning; she had seen and heard enough already to feel that Pomfret and his wife were Francis’ detractors and would from the first take care to be dissociated from any scandal.

She was as fiercely prepared to fight her brother- and sister-in-law as any lioness in defence of her cubs, but her trouble was that she was not a lioness. She was a coward; while she was riding pillion behind her husband and her son, she was aware that at the first sight of Jannice in her own domain she would lose courage, she would tremble, she would show faint-heartedness. Francis had things that he must do in Keswick. He would come later to his brother’s house to fetch her. She must face Pomfret and Jannice alone.

So she stood, David at her side, in the little hall with its rounded pillars, its stone floor in black and white squares, its fine picture of an Italian scene, with dim greys and purple for colour, hanging on the right of the staircase.

They were ushered into the parlour. It was lit with candles, and David had never seen such a room. But before he could examine the room he must be startled by the persons in it, by his aunt Jannice, who was dressed superbly in a high wig mounted over a cushion and decorated with roses and daisies, her hoop spread about her, the outer skirt of crimson velvet and the front of her dress white and silver. On one brown cheek she wore a black patch. She was grander than any lady that he had ever seen; no one who came to their house in Doncaster had dressed like that. Young though he was, he realised that her thin, meagre figure and brown complexion ill suited such finery.

But his childish attention was soon drawn from his aunt to the terrific figure who sat in a high chair under the window. This was his great-aunt Maria.

He would never have believed, had he not seen it with his own eyes, that any person could be so old and yet live. Her wig of a bright brown colour was arranged in a fashion of fifty years ago, falling about her strange mask of a powdered, painted face in long curled ringlets. Over one eye was a black patch. Her green bodice was peaked, and her full, open sleeves were caught together with jewelled clasps. Her wide skirt was of purple satin. Her fingers, so thin that they were like the ivory sticks of a fan, were loaded with jewels.

On her lap was a small King Charles spaniel.

She appeared a painted image. Except for her one visible eye nothing in her face moved. David was a polite little boy, but again and again he had to stare. Here was a portent, a revelation in his young life.

The little black boy was standing behind Lady Herries’ chair, and as soon as greetings had been exchanged they all sat down. The little black boy handed chocolate; a bright purple macaw in a gilt cage by the window screamed.

For a little while there was a terrible silence. The room was very hot; there was a large log fire. The sky beyond the window was bright with a silver glow.

When the talk had started David could look more easily about him.

He was indeed enchanted with the softness and beauty of everything. Beyond the wide window he could see the trim hedges, the paved path, the fountain with a strange stone bird, long-necked and violent-beaked, rising out of it, and beyond the fountain the line of trees guarding the waters of the lake.

Within the room there were countless objects that he longed to examine more closely, a screen worked in gold thread, a silver casket, a clock with the sun, moon and stars on its face. But more than these, the terrible old woman with her strange ringlets, her painted face, the cascades of her bright purple dress, the sharp-pointed fingers weighted with flashing jewellery....

‘Indeed,’ his aunt was saying, ‘I wonder at Mr. Flammery. ’Tis a poor child that doesn’t know its own father, and there’s a multitude of his own poor children must be in a fine confusion.’

This puzzled David, who, looking first at his aunt and then at his flustered mother sweating in the face with the heat of the room and the agitation of this her first so important visit, wondered how it could be that any child should not know its own father. He of a certainty knew his well enough.

‘Yes, indeed,’ his aunt continued, looking, as he was even now old enough to discern, with an odd mixture of curiosity and contempt at his mother. ‘You must be well aware, Margaret, of the world into which you have come. In winter I doubt that you’ll be able to move a step. You live in the heart of savages, and when the lake is too wild for passage and the roads all of a muck to your armpits the civilised world will be as distant from you as the Indies.’

‘I don’t doubt,’ said Margaret, flushing and perspiring the more, for she knew that it was at her own abandoned Francis that these remarks were made, ‘but that the days will pass. There’s sufficient to do about the house to take a month of winters....’

David then was aware that his great-aunt’s eye had turned in his direction. He was fixed by it as a rabbit by the eye of a snake.... It was as though he, sitting on the edge of his chair, and this very ancient lady, both of them motionless, were holding some strange secret communication. Then he was aware of something further—that his great-aunt was about to speak.

In an odd, cracked but exceedingly piercing tone she said: ‘God save His Gracious Majesty.’

The worst had happened. The old woman was silent often enough for days together, and this was well, because she was a burning fanatical Jacobite. The terrors into which her dangerous political opinions had again and again plunged Pomfret and his wife were both ludicrous and tragic. Sometimes for weeks she kept to her room, and on every occasion that saw her enter that sanctuary everyone about her breathed the hope that it would be for the last time, but her powers of revival were incredible, and down once more she would come to sit and watch and await her awful moment.

She had been born on the 14th of June 1645, the day of the battle of Naseby, but her great days had been during the last years of Queen Anne, when she had known Godolphin and Marlborough and been received by Lady Masham, having her feet planted in both camps.

But she had been nevertheless, heart and soul, Jacobite, and, it was said, played some part in the intrigues of those last dramatic months. The Elector of Hanover had been for her the Devil himself, and when his cause had been definitely won she had retired from London, professed openly her Jacobite sentiments and chattered and prayed for the coming of the Day.

No one had much regarded her; she had lived in a small house in Winchester, until, her brain softening, Pomfret, driven by one of the kindest and gentlest impulses of his life, had given her shelter and protection.

How many thousands of times since then he had longed for her decease was a secret between himself and his Maker.

Now with terror and dismay Jannice Herries heard her speak. Here was their skeleton clattering straight out from the cupboard and before that fool Margaret Herries. But Margaret was too deeply buried in the warmth of her confusion to pay much regard. Only the little boy felt the power of those few cracked words; something spoke in his heart, some strange sympathy that he suddenly felt, to which he quite blindly and unknowingly responded. He was to remember at a later time this queer muffled moment.

The situation was immediately saved for Jannice Herries by the entrance of her children. The children had beautiful manners. Mrs. Bellamy in black silk, her hands folded across her stomach, stood behind them—the boy bowed, the little girls curtsied. Anabel’s eyes smiled at David. He was quick enough at once to perceive that the other girl was thinking of her own looks. She was like his own sister Mary in that.

And then the eyes of the two boys met, and they knew one another at once for foes. David had as friendly a heart as any boy in the kingdom, but he realised an enemy when he saw one. One straight look at Raiseley’s cold reserve and proud consequence and something within him said: ‘I hate my cousin.’ Just as the cracked voice of the old woman speaking to him five minutes before out of an ancient past was to return to him with significance in years to come, so that first glance exchanged with Raiseley was to influence the Herries family fortunes for many future generations.

Looking at Anabel, David thought to himself: ‘That’s a friendly girl.’ He was uncomfortable among these grown-up persons, and hoped that it would be suggested that he should go with his cousins to see the garden or their toys. He would like finely to inspect more closely that fountain of the beaked bird or to hunt among the reeds at the water’s edge.

But no suggestion was made. He too was standing now, his hands stiffly at his side as his father had taught him. The room grew ever hotter and hotter, and with every moment he felt more indignantly Raiseley’s scornful eyes upon him.

Margaret Herries must talk to her nephew and nieces. She was never at her ease with children.

‘Fine children,’ she said nervously to her sister-in-law, ‘and seemingly in grand health.’

The word ‘health’ was the trumpet to sound the charge to Jannice Herries, who answered proudly: ‘Fine and sound they are, sister. Six months last sennight Judith here was sorely threatened with the Falling Sickness—hast thou heard of the Antepileptic Crow, sister?’

‘I fear not,’ said Margaret timidly.

‘’Tis a perfect cure for the Falling Sickness. Judith was cured by the crow. Deplume and eviscerate a large crow, casting away its Feet and Bill; put into its Belly the Heart, Liver, Lungs, Bladder of the Gall, with Galangal and Aniseeds; bake it in a new Earthen Vessel well shut or closed in an Oven with Household Bread; after it is cooled, separate the Flesh from the Sides or Bones, and repeat this Operation of baking the second or third time, but taking great care that it may not be burnt, then reduce it into a fine powder.’ She recited this in a high sing-song as though it were poetry, her eyes almost closed. Opening them she saw that Margaret was gazing at her with great humility and reverence. Maybe the woman was not such a fool after all. She would make, it might happen, something of a companion. A kindliness stole about Jannice Herries’ heart. It would be something to have a friendly creature near her whom she could patronise and gratify and instruct. The days in truth were lonely enough....

‘You must come and see us at Herries,’ Margaret went on to the children.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Raiseley answered, gravely bowing. ‘It is said that there are wolves in Borrowdale. I would gladly see a wolf.’

Margaret smiled timidly. ‘David shall show you the wolves. He has been already in the mountains. Have you not, David?’

Judith, who, since the Falling Sickness had passed as a topic, felt perhaps that she was not receiving sufficient attention, smiled her prettiest smile, so that her aunt, thinking how beautiful a child she was, said, speaking directly to her:

‘My little girls, Mary and Deborah, will wish to show you their toys and babies.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Judith in her softest, gentlest voice, so that her aunt looking at her loved her.

Once more they were interrupted, and this time it was the two men of the family. David waited for his father’s entrance. First there was Uncle Pomfret, red-faced, noisy, with his: ‘Well, then—here’s all the family! Haste away! Haste away!’ and then a sudden look of almost childish discomfort and unease. Quietly behind him David’s father, kindly to-day and, for David, so handsome in his dark suit and lace ruffles that all the colour in the room went out before him, dimmed to abasement.

Yes, his father was in good humour to-day, coming forward and kissing the old lady’s hand, saluting his sister-in-law’s brown cheek, turning then to the children, pinching the cheeks of the girls, tapping Raiseley on his shoulder.... How proud of him David was and how ardently longing for the moment to come when he would catch that glance and, perhaps, that smile. But for a while he did not. His father paid him no attention. The parlour was overcrowded with figures and the sound of Uncle Pomfret’s demonstrations. Now he was being jolly with his children: ‘You will be the death of your poor father ... I promised your mother to give up half the afternoon to your entertainment, and wasn’t I to show you the best pack of dogs in England? But no, Mr. Montgomery don’t allow. Pox on Mr. Montgomery—and here’s your uncle and little cousin come to visit us—yes, and your aunt too. ... Pleased to see you, sister ... and there’s no Mr. Montgomery to stop a family welcome, odrabbit it! I am determined upon your being good children now and welcoming your little cousin ... a fine boy, brother Francis. He shall come a-hunting. Canst ride, boy?’

‘Yes, uncle,’ said David, ‘a little.’

‘That’s more than thy cousin Raiseley can do then. Put him on a horse and he’s like the Witch of Endor on a broomstick.... Wilt thou learn to ride then, Raiseley, to please thy father?’

This public mockery was anguish to Raiseley, nor did he fail to ledger it in the account against his young cousin. But his pale face did not alter; no shadow of a change was upon it. Looking his father in the face, he answered steadily:

‘I will learn, sir, an you wish it.’

‘An I wish it!’ His father broke into a roar of laughter—‘Hark to that now! An I wish it! Have I wished, then, to have a milksop for a son? ’Tis all your Montgomerys and their Latin grammars that have spoilt thee, boy—Here,’ catching David suddenly by his breeches and raising him in the air, ‘here’s the spit of a tree! Here’s a lad knows a dog when he sees ’un, that I’ll wager! Wilt come with thy uncle hunting, David?’

But he waited not for an answer. He was aware that his wife thought him foolish and noisy. He turned confusedly to chatter to his sister-in-law.

It was then that David had a word with his father. They were standing a little back from the others. ‘David, you are to go now. Your mother will ride home with me. You will find Father Roche to the left along the road. He is waiting now at the turn to Crosthwaite Church. You will ride back with him.’

At once David obeyed. He turned, bowed to his great-aunt, kissed his aunt’s hand, heard above his head the excuses for his departure, smiled at his girl cousins, exchanged one look with Raiseley and was gone.

How proud he was to be treated thus—as though he were already a man!

He pushed open the heavy house-door, stepped through the courtyard, between the high gates and into the dusky road. It was almost dark; shadows lay about the broad path and little winds ran whispering about his feet.

A great sense of adventure possessed him. Behind him was the lighted town, near him the warm house with its fires and talking company, and outside the house the garden with the bird fountain and all its ordered discipline running to the wild edge of the lake with the clustered reeds. Young though he was, he yet felt the humanity and safety of this world crowded with all its persons so diverse as the ancient lady and little Peter and Cousin Raiseley, his enemy. All this within firelit walls, but, outside, the long road running, as though on a secret purpose, below the mountain that seemed to him huge in the night air, Skiddaw; by now he knew its name. But here, also, there was a church, and men might ride with ease, and at short distance all the traffic of the town. But away from it the road ran on, curving at the lake’s end, running up the hill, then above the lake’s side until at last it reached that little bridge and the high rocks behind it that were the barrier of his own dark country. There was danger, there, romance and adventure. Cousin Raiseley had said that there were wolves there. He did not know how that might be, but a month’s living there had shown him how strange and removed a world it was, and already it was beginning to pull at his boy’s heart, so that he was ready to defend it and feel that he was citizen of it. Yes, he would know every tree, every rock, every corner of it before long; he would push his way into every one of the mysteries....

He had been walking swiftly down the road, a little afraid, although he would not have owned it to anyone, of the sound of his own footsteps, when he saw at the parting of the two ways a horse and a figure standing beside it.

The figure came to meet him, and at first he did not recognise it, because Father Roche was dressed as an ordinary gentleman in plain riding clothes.

‘Father Roche,’ he whispered. He had not intended to whisper, but the silence and loneliness of the road commanded him.

He was taken up and in another moment was seated in the front of the saddle. They started off.

‘Not Father Roche any more,’ the figure behind him murmured. ‘Mr. Roche ... the times move, and we must move with them.’

His voice had to-night more than ever before the power to move David. He was himself already excited and stirred, and, as they moved over Derwent Hill, through the village of Portinscale and then up over Swinside Hill, with every step they seemed to be moving into some mysterious country, and it was Father Roche’s power and spirit that was leading them. Was he then no longer a priest? Could you at one moment be a priest and then, at the next moment, not? Was it at his father’s orders that he had ceased to be a priest? But for the moment he was too deeply excited by his own experiences. ‘Uncle Pomfret’s house is very grand. It is grander than ours at Doncaster. There is a garden with a fountain that is a bird’s head, and a clock with the sun and moon on its face. My great-aunt Maria is a very old lady—she looks a hundred years. She has long hair falling about her face. My cousins were present, and my cousin Raiseley is very grave as though he thought well of himself....’ He paused, then added: ‘We will fight one day. And I shall win.’ His little back straightened and his short legs tightened about the horse’s neck. ‘Uncle Pomfret always speaks at the top of his voice. He lifted me by my breeches and said that I should go hunting with him. Will my father permit me, think you?’

‘Yes, David, when you are older.’

David sighed. ‘It is always when I am older. My cousin Raiseley asked whether there were wolves in Borrowdale. He said that he wished to see one, but I doubt it. I think he does not care for dogs and horses and wild animals.’

They were going more slowly now, climbing the hill. It was bitterly cold, even a little snow was falling, and a few stars were like points of ice in the sky. They were climbing to high ground. There were three paths on this farther side of the lake, but as Father Roche had been warned in Keswick only one was passable for a horse and that the highest.

‘My great-aunt Maria,’ David went on, drawing a little back on Father Roche for greater warmth, ‘said once “God save His Gracious Majesty.” Aunt Jannice was vexed, so that I knew that it could not be the King in London. It is forbidden, is it not, to speak of the other King in Rome?’

Father Roche drew the boy closer to him. The time had come, then, to speak. The boy was now of a sufficient age. For years now he had been waiting for this moment, and he was well pleased that it should be at this instant, cold and sharp under the winter night sky, with the world so silent on every side of them. It had been the lesson of his life that he should have no human passions, and he had learnt it well, but in spite of all his lessons human feeling had grown in his heart for this boy and this boy’s father. There were many other plans and schemes in his life that went far beyond his momentary relations with the Herries family. He stayed with them only because it suited his larger purposes to do so, but growing up in his heart in these last years had been the longing to turn this boy on to his own paths. During these weeks since coming to Borrowdale David seemed to have grown in mind and perception. He was already wise in some things beyond his years.

‘David, will you listen a little as we ride? I have wished for some time past to speak to you. You are of an age enough now to understand.’

David nodded his head proudly. The only sound in all the world was the clap-clap of the horse’s hoofs on the frozen ground.

Father Roche went on: ‘There was a King in England once who was a martyr. Wicked men in the malice of their hearts slew him, and so interfered with one of God’s most holy laws—the Divine Right that He hath given to those whom He has appointed as His rulers on this earth. This martyr, King Charles of blessed memory, was, perhaps more than any other man on this earth, near in his sufferings to our Saviour Himself. When Christ suffered there was darkness over all the land, and so when King Charles was under trial there were mighty wonders in the sky. You have read of the centurion who was assured that He was the Son of God, and his servant was healed; so with the Blessed Martyr, one of his guards was driven by conviction of sin to repentance. Did they not part our Sovereign’s garments among them? Even so have they taken his houses, his possessions, his very garments from our master.... And in his life, in his gentleness, his courtesy, his love of his fellow-men, did King Charles approach most closely that blessed prototype.’

Father Roche paused. The road ran now over Cat Bells and Brandelhow; from its bend the land dropped straight to the lake, which could be seen now like a dark mirror of jet below hills that were faintly silver. The horse’s breath rose in front of them in clouds of steam; facing them was the hump, black as ebony, of the Castle Crag, and, more gently grey, the hills behind it. For young David, to whom this view was to become one of life’s eternal symbols, he was to hear always, when he beheld it, the beautiful, melodious voice of the priest and to see again the scattered steely points of the stars in the velvet sky.

‘His was an unrenounced right of sovereignty. None could take it from him. He had been placed there by God, and man had no voice in that choice and circumstance. He was murdered and betrayed by the sons of the Devil....’

A thrill of sympathy touched David’s heart. Oh, had he been there, he would have died for that King!

‘Even as Christ did, so could he work miracles. Have you ever heard how, being taken by his captors through the town of Winchester, an inn-keeper of that city, who was grievously ill and suffocating, flung himself on his knees before His Majesty, crying “God save the King!”, and the King said: “Friend, God grant thee thy desire,” and the tumours and sores disappeared, and the man was made whole? And the kerchiefs dipped in the King’s blood after his death had also this miraculous property.

‘His son had also this virtue, and, it is said, touched one hundred thousand persons to cure them.... Since this family appointed by God to rule over England have been in exile God’s face has been turned away from us. Nothing is so sure and certain in this world as that our beloved country shall not again prosper until our rightful King returns to us. Do you understand what I have been saying to you, David?’

‘Yes, sir,’ answered David in an awed voice.

They clattered through the little village of Grange. Some woman came to a lighted door to watch them pass. Under the stone bridge the river, flooded with the recent rains, rushed to the lake. They turned into their valley under the dark rocks. ‘The time may come, David, when every true man will be challenged. Under which King, God’s or man’s? What will thy answer be, boy?’

‘Under God’s King, sir,’ answered David.

‘Keep silence about what I have said even to your father, but talk to me when you have a mind. Wonder at nothing that you may see me do. I shall come and be gone again, but wherever I may be I shall know that I can trust thee....’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You will not be afraid if a day should come ...’

‘No, sir. Only my father ...’ It was not for him then to know how little in later harsh fact this picture of God’s King would affect him.

‘Your father is my friend. He knows me.’

‘Yes, sir.... Will he, too, be ready when the day comes?’

Roche hesitated—

‘Every true man who loves his God and his country will be ready.’

‘Yes, sir,’ answered David again, suddenly sleepy and very cold. Loyalties? He now had many. To his father, to Deborah, to this King in Rome. Life was beginning to be filled with great adventure. There was his father in his dark suit with the silver cuffs, there was the old lady a thousand years old, Cousin Raiseley, whom he would one day fight, his uncle who would take him out hunting, the King in Rome who made people well by touching them, Father Roche who was now no more a priest, his mother whom he loved and Mrs. Press whom he hated, and the old woman in Herries who was a witch, and the hill with the caves, and the more distant hills, where one day he would make great discoveries.

They turned to the house, black and cold under the scattered stars. But it was home, and there would be fire and something to eat, and then falling asleep in the room where his father would afterwards come ... and then the King in Rome ...

He was shivering with cold when Father Roche lifted him down from the horse and carried him in.