Читать книгу The Bright Pavilions - Hugh Walpole - Страница 9

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Robin Herries closed the heavy door behind him and knew, with intense relief, that he had made no sound. From the scented lawn he could hear the boy’s voice singing:

Ah! my heart, ah! What aileth thee

To set so light my liberty,

Making me bond when I was free?

Ah! my heart, ah! What aileth thee?

When thou wert rid from all distress,

Void of all pain and pensiveness,

To choose again a new mistress,

Ah! my heart, ah! What aileth thee?

When thou wert well, thou could not hold;

To turn again, that were too bold.

There’s to renew my sorrows old,

Ah! my heart, ah! What aileth thee?

The voice was like a thin rapier of sharp and margined light cutting across the green lower sky. He could see this lower sky through the open mullioned window that looked out from the passage where he was standing.

They were all seated out there on the lawn to watch the sun sink above the formal clipped hedges. In his mind’s eye he could see it all, so close to him and so dangerous: the oak table with the wine and fruit and comfits, his mother in the high carved chair, the others standing or seated on cushions on the grass—Sir Michael and Henry Herries, their old quarrel now composed, Nicholas, his aunt, Philip Irvine, the scornful Falk, Charles Lacey, Robert Rockage, Edward and Sidney Herries, the unpleasant Phineas, and—Sylvia.

The boy’s voice came again, as though it had some personal message for him:

I hoped full well all had been done,

But now my hope is ta’en and won,

To my torment to yield so soon,

Ah! my heart, ah! What aileth thee?

The voice ceased. There was applause, hand-clapping, laughter.

Robin moved softly to the outer door. He was in the narrow rough-stoned passage that led from the main hall to the buttery. He knew that the servants were busied in the dining-hall preparing for the dancing that would follow when they were weary of sitting on the lawn. Nevertheless at any moment a servant might appear. What was he to do?

Ten minutes ago he had been standing a little back from the table near one of the box-hedges, watching Sylvia Herries, amused by the self-importance of his Uncle Henry, absorbing delightedly the scents from the neighbouring hayfield and the stocks and the pinks, hearing the plash from the fountain falling through the summer air, itself a song, never for an instant losing the sight and movement of his beloved child who sat, with so grave and dignified an air, watching the singer—all this as though a moment of his life had crystallized like a globe of diamond lustre hanging against that perfect sunny evening sky—when he felt his arm touched.

He turned, and there, behind the box-hedge, was a yokel, his clothes soiled, his face grimed with dust and sweat, in a yokel’s large country hat. This man had the countenance of Anthony Pierson. Robin whispered his name. The other nodded and huskily answered: ‘We are in peril. Open the back door for us—by the yard.’

He had glanced at the group preoccupied by the singing, heard, as though it were a farewell, the thin lute and the clear voice, skirted the lawn, entered the house and slipped to the stone passage.

Even then, before he opened the door into the yard, his hand paused. This was the first time ever that Anthony had asked his help. Anthony was his friend for whom he cared more than anyone in the world save Sylvia and Nicholas. But this was his own home, the home of his father and mother, sacred soil. To conceal Catholic priests there would engage them all in the gravest of dangers. They would be liable to the law as he would be. The penalties were fearful. Nor was he himself a Catholic.

They could not have chosen a worse time for their coming. The house was filled with guests. Irvine hated him and his brother; Phineas Thatcher, a Puritan and his uncle’s man, was as mean and spying a creature as you could find. And yet . . . And yet . . . Anthony was his friend and as noble a man as Robin had ever known.

Very, very softly he unlatched the door. Two figures were standing there.

‘Come in,’ Robin whispered. ‘Quickly. Quickly.’ They slipped inside.

He had spent the better part of that afternoon away from the others, not out of sight, ready for any duty, most agreeable and friendly with his eager, rather shy smile, if anyone wanted him—but yet apart.

He had found in himself, ever since that meeting with Sylvia at the masked ball, an increased preoccupation with his own lovely world, the world of Utopia, of the golden-sanded shore beyond the sea, the world of the bright pavilions of God. ‘They acknowledge God to be the author and governor of the world, and the fountain of all the good that they receive: for which they offer up their thanksgivings to Him, and, in particular, they bless Him for His goodness in ordering it so that they are born under a Government that is the happiest in the world and are of a religion that they hope is the truest of all others; but, if they are mistaken, and if there is either a better government or a religion more acceptable to God, they implore His goodness to let them know it, vowing that they resolve to follow Him whithersoever He leads them. . . .’

So wrote his beloved Sir Thomas More of the Utopians . . . ‘if there is either a better government or a religion more acceptable to God . . .’ Somewhere, Robin knew, there were both a better government and a better religion—but where? Could Anthony Pierson show it him? Or his young child friend Philip Sidney? Did his uncle and aunt with their complacent common-sense business air know of it? Did his father and mother know of it? Did his beloved Nicholas?

And he realized, as have so many of his kind, before him and after him, that the majority of his fellow-men cared for none of these things—but had enough to do to follow their daily business of work, food and drink, copulation and fighting.

Of the minority who did so care, the most were fanatics, demanding the rack, the thumbscrew, the fire, for all who did not bow to the altar, turn last or not, swear by transubstantiation as they themselves did.

Robin was most certainly not as these. He was a Middleman, a Facing-both-ways in that he wanted a Utopia of friendly happy people, free to worship God as they would, free of speech, free of habit, tolerant and tolerating.

Yet this did not altogether go with the mystical spirit that would never let him quiet. When Anthony Pierson spoke to him with such confidence and certainty, his eyes burning with delight that he could surrender himself so completely to the rules of his Order and be ready to be racked and burned if so commanded, then something stirred in Robin, something fiercer than his longing for any gentle, sweet Utopia. There was a better world just beyond sight and, when he found it, it might order him to a sterner, more violent sacrifice. He did not know. He was increasingly at war with himself.

To all this tapestry his sudden love for Sylvia Herries had only added fresh blazing strands of colour. He had seen her some half-dozen times since that first meeting. Although at seventeen girls were mature and ready for marriage Sylvia was not. She had been kept quietly at home so that, when she did at last make her appearance, all the world might wonder. And so, in this year 1571, all the world did wonder! It was the fashion to admire tall women and Sylvia Herries was not tall. Women must be learned and be able to make fine Latin speeches like their Queen. Sylvia was not clever at books and had a very poor knowledge of Latin and Greek. Young women of fashion must have conceits at their finger-ends, be able to cap verses, at an instant’s notice, with young men like Rockage or Lacey. Sylvia had no power at all for capping verses and did not understand them when capped. Young women of that day to be popular must be coquettish, know everything about men, how to capture them, how to tease them when captured, how to let them go, how to call them back again. Sylvia could not coquette, could not tease, could not dissemble. There was something childish and tender and honest about her that would perhaps never be eradicated.

It was this very simplicity and childlikeness that won her favour. It seemed so queer and unlikely a thing to come out of that money-making sharp advantage-eyed family. It appeared scarcely possible that she was the child of Henry Herries and the half-sister of Edward and Sidney.

‘Mercury,’ Charles Lacey said, ‘having one day nothing better to do picked a daisy to give, on his return to Olympus, to the wife of Jupiter. She is weary of ropes of pearls, thick bars of amethyst and diamonds like hen’s eggs. But, seeing a swan in flight, Mercury pursued it and dropped the daisy, which did not wither and die, as nature intended, but took new life from the tender grasses and the morning dew—so Sylvia was born.’

Very pretty. He told it to Sylvia, who did not understand a word of it. She understood very quickly, however, that her cousin Robin was in love with her.

She had understood it on that first night.

He did not know what she herself felt. She was still such a child that it seemed a wicked thing to press her to any acknowledgment. He felt a perfect happy comradeship when he was with her and he thought that she felt that too when she was with him.

He did not wish to touch her or even to speak to her. There was something in his nature that found things a little more perfect while they were still a way off. He was quite happy, as now, to be lying his length on the grass, listening to the nonsense that Arabella Lacey, Charles’ sister, was saying to Rockage, to watch amusedly Nicholas’ extreme solemnity as the head gardener, a long lanky creature with tow hair (but a marvellous gardener), came and spoke to him (for was not Nicholas bull in his own paddock now?), to listen to the reapers singing from the meadow, to stare, bemusedly, as though all his life he had stared at the shapes of the hedges, the ship, the peacocks, the old man with the beard, the crowing cock.

Then Nicholas came and threw his gigantic bulk on the grass beside him.

‘Well, old lad, of what are you thinking this lovely day?’

‘I was listening to Arabella’s nonsense’ (her shrill clear voice broke across the air: ‘But that is not enough. If Leda preferred a swan to all other fowl and Ganymede cried for a pricked finger, why, I’ll wager my shoes with the black pearls against your gold chain, Robert, that Jupiter was so vexed at his negligence, that, wearying of Leda, he baked comfits for Ganymede and . . .’), ‘to the pleasant reapers and admiring your own self-importance——’

‘Nothing else?’ Nicholas smiled. ‘It’s pleasant here, but—heigh-ho!—shall I endure it while Grenville is finding pearls like grain in a cornfield and bags of gold under every Spaniard’s bed and——’

Robin broke in—to his own surprise quite hotly. ‘Something is happening to this country. We are growing greedy for money. All these tales of treasure snatched from the Spaniards and cities in America built of gold—our thoughts bite on nothing but these and how much we can take that doesn’t belong to us. Why, the Queen herself——’

Nicholas laid his big brown hand on his brother’s thigh.

‘Hist! Take care of the creeping Thatcher. He has a thousand ears and he hates us.’ He drew nearer to his brother, laying his arm about his neck.

‘There is another thing, Robin. I am in love.’

‘Yes,’ Robin said. ‘Nor for the first time.’

‘But this is different. It is a girl I have seen twice, kissed twice, been with but a quarter of an hour in all.’

‘Had you been with her longer,’ Robin said, ‘you would not now be in love with her.’

‘Maybe,’ Nicholas said.

In all these months he had told his brother nothing of his Northern adventure. He had spoken to no living soul of it. He told Robin now, his face almost in the grass, biting the cold blades between his lips. He did not know what had caught him. He had known a thousand girls. He had ridden south, determining to put it altogether from his mind. She was only one like another. And yet he could not forget her. Something within him was always urging him to ride north and see her again. Perhaps she had bewitched him. Her mother was a witch. Or perhaps the North had bewitched him. There was something there that he could find nowhere else, the stinging air, the moving clouds, the bare fells. . . . He sighed again.

‘I can’t rid my mind of her.’

Robin looked at him with concern. This was unlike Nicholas, who gave no thought to anything save what was happening at the moment.

Nicholas sat up. ‘How I hate him!’ he said. ‘Oh, how I hate him!’

They both looked at Philip Irvine, who was bending over Sylvia and teasing her with a wine-coloured carnation.

Robin considered. ‘It is his vanity,’ he said at last. ‘I have never known any man so vain. His vanity is so deep that it is seated in his spleen. He does verily believe that for wisdom he exceeds Burghley; for charm, our Philip Sidney; for bravery, Hawkins; for audacity, Drake. Touch his vanity and he stings like a snake. And you must touch it if you touch him, for he is all vanity.’

‘He is the only creature in all the world I hate,’ Nicholas said, ‘for he caused me to betray a naked man. But it is earlier than that. It goes back and it stretches forward. It stretches forward, Robin. Bad work will come of it one day.’

Robin smiled. ‘You twist your old head too fiercely. He is not worth your hate, for he is not evil but only vain—and vanity is so easily pricked.’

It was a little after this, when Nicholas left him, that he stood by the hedge and the boy sang and Pierson touched his shoulder.

The two men slipped in. The summer evening light was everywhere, so Robin took them up three steps of the crooked round staircase that they might stand in the shadow of the bend. They stood close to the wall. The man with Pierson was a thin, burning-eyed man, with a jutting, dirty chin. They spoke in whispers.

‘Mr. Anstey,’ Pierson said. Robin bowed. Mr. Anstey raised a bony, grimy hand in blessing.

‘We are in peril of our lives for a bag that Burghley’s men have taken at Salisbury. I have no time for the story now, but can you keep us here till morning, Robin? We rode hoping to be in London by nightfall, but my horse stumbled and fell in the West Road and at last we must take to our legs. We have been disguised from Salisbury and in the early morning we can get to a safe house in Southwark. We were frightened two miles from here at an alehouse where Anstey recognized one of the Government men.’

He drew Robin for a moment close to him. ‘I have always vowed not to bring you into this, Robin, but we dare not go forward for several hours.’

Robin said: ‘What did they find?’

‘Letters from France. Since the Queen’s excommunication everything has been much harder . . .’ He broke off. It seemed that he saw in Robin’s eyes some doubt. He moved a step down.

‘I understand, Robin. You dare not——’

Robin pulled him up the stair again.

‘No, no. It is only that you could not have found a more unhappy moment. The house is filled with people and——’

He drew himself in close against the stone, pushing back Anthony Pierson’s stout body with his hand against the wall. Mr. Anstey silently climbed two more steps and stood above them in the shadow.

Someone was in the stone passage. Robin heard the voice of Mellon, the major-domo, an old, trusted and impertinent servant.

‘Knaves! Knaves and rascals, the lot of them. As though the rats had been at the mulberries. . . .’ With that mystical sentence he began, to Robin’s extreme horror, to climb the stair. Faithful servant he was and devoted to Robin in his own fashion, having swaddled and bathed and slapped him, in the proper time, but he was a chatterer and a gossip and, on his weak day, a wine-bibber. He was old now, a skeleton of a man with bent and cracking knees. So now he began to climb the stairs, singing sotto voce to himself in a strangely whispering, whining, tuneless utterance:

‘Sometimes he would gasp

When he saw a wasp;

A fly or a gnat,

He would fly at that;

And prettily he would pant

When he saw an ant;

Lord, how he would pry

After the butterfly! . . .’

He passed them and then, two steps above Mr. Anstey, paused, blowing.

‘The knaves—the careless bastardy knaves—and my poor knees and all the company after sunset. Ah, Crissy, Crissy, ’tis not here at all but in the buttery. . . . I put it there myself at noon. . . .’ He started down again, breaking once more into his funny croaking wail:

‘And when I said “Phip! Phip!”

Then he would leap and skip,

And take me by the lip——’

Then, most lugubriously:

‘When I saw my sparrow die!’

He stopped for a pause exactly opposite Robin, murmuring: ‘Aye, the buttery. Right-hand second shelf in the buttery,’ and so went down to the stone passage, repeating as he went through the door:

‘When I saw my sparrow die!’

‘Quick! Follow me!’ Robin whispered and dashed up to the stair-head followed by the two priests.

He had the very place, although it increased his own personal responsibility. Off his own bedroom there was in the wall a small closet, larger than a priest’s hole, concealed by the wall-painting of Troilus and Cressida that had hung there ever since he could remember. A bare little place and uncomfortable, but for the occasion it would do.

At the top of the stair a long, narrow passage led to his room, and inside this, at once he lifted the canvas wall-painting, slid the panel and showed them the empty place. Nothing was in it save a large spider-web hanging from the door to the ceiling.

In a drawer he found some bedding. ‘This must do. And here is a candle. It is the most now I can find.’

Pierson kissed him on both cheeks. Suddenly Anstey clutched the door with his hand.

‘Food,’ Pierson whispered. ‘If you could manage something. We have had nothing since last night. We could not stay in the alehouse.’

Robin slid back the panel, dropped the canvas and hurried from the room.

They were coming into the house as Robin entered the buttery. He could see through the window how they formed a sort of procession. They were singing:

‘Pastime with good company

I love, and shall, until I die.’

They made a canon of it, Arabella Lacey and Sylvia leading; Charles Lacey, Rockage and Irvine following; Nicholas lumbering along, carrying a spade in his hand, and occasionally joining in. The old people, his mother, father, uncle and aunt, walked more soberly at a little distance. They made a beautiful picture, for the sun’s clear evening rays stroked gently the lawn; green light with motes dancing in the gold-washed ladders between the hedges. The colours of the clothes shone as though freshly minted: Irvine’s doublet of mulberry purple slashed with silver, Rockage in flaming orange, Arabella in stiff seeded gold and a high white ruff. Even yet the reapers could be heard singing, like the murmurs of a stream, from a distant field.

Very pretty, but he had not time for prettiness. And indeed he had not. For, even as he had in his hands a jug of beer, half a venison pie, a bread loaf, old Mellon with his wand and chain of office was standing in the doorway, staring at him.

‘Why, Master Robin——’

Robin smiled.

‘Mellon, it is for an old man and woman over by the stables. I came on them but now and the old woman has a palsy—she shakes till her head rolls—and the old man but one hand. . . . I’ll bring them some money from my room. . . .’

He brushed past Mellon and ran up the stone staircase, while the old man looked about him muttering: ‘But the venison—the parsley venison.’

It could not be helped, and it was, on the moment, a stupid answer, for the old man might send to the stables to see where the vagrants had got to—the old fool was a garrulous talker and there was always the long-eared, thin, bitter shadow of Phineas Thatcher around the corner. Still, he had not the time to consider. He slid the panel and looked in to find Anthony standing against the wall and the priest Anstey lying on the bedding soaked in sleep.

Anthony eagerly took the food and drink from him, had a draught of the beer, tore a hunch off the pie and the loaf, greedily ate and drank. While he did so he dragged Robin down on to the end of the bedding and, his mouth full, put his arms round Robin’s neck, holding him tightly to him. Then, clasping his hand, he began in a hurried, excited whisper:

‘Oh, forgive me, forgive me. I had no right to come here nor to bring him with me. . . . Hist! What was that? Down! Close—against me!’ They stayed pressed together, scarcely breathing. Someone had come into the room, steps moved, hesitated. Then the whining voice of old Mellon was heard: ‘Master Robin! Master Robin! . . .’ Then the steps died away.

‘Tiresome old fool!’

‘Yes,’ Anthony whispered. ‘I must not keep you or they’ll be up here after you, all of them. Only this, Robin. I’ve longed for you for months. You are the only human thing I love any more. Do you understand that? And you, even you, are against our Orders. No human love, no tenderness, no longing for bodily contact—no love, no love, no love—save of God, and He is our general not our lover. Do you understand that, Robin? That you are a weakness to me, a cause of surrender, something I’m afraid to confess.’

His hand was hot and damp, his eyes restless with some ardent longing.

‘I have gone far since our last meeting. I have cast everything and everyone away save you. That I love you is a sin, but love you I must, and one day you also will see as I see and we will be martyred together. You will see that your Queen is no Queen, for she has been rejected by God and it is the duty of all who serve God to work her destruction . . . There is another Queen, unfortunate, betrayed, imprisoned, God’s servant . . .’

Robin nodded. The rest of Anthony’s talk had been mad and wild, for he was hungry and crazy for lack of sleep. But in this there was something that Robin felt with all the passion of his longing for the beautiful, the unattainable. That lovely, betrayed prisoner who had trusted in friend, brother, lover, sister-queen, and been betrayed by them all. There was something in this picture that moved him to trembling.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Later in the night, when all are in bed. I must go down, Tony. And you must sleep. Wait. Lie down—I’ll make it comfortable for you.’

Anthony’s eyes were haggard for want of sleep: they had that sightless searching stare of the sleepless man. He lay down beside Anstey, who through this time had not stirred. Robin folded a cloak around him and went.

In the hall they were eating and drinking. The candles had not yet been lit and the late sun was streaming through the deep crimsons and dark blues of the high window opposite the gallery.

They all greeted Robin with a shout. ‘Where have you been? What doing? Traitor! Deserter!’ He went over to his mother and, leaning on the arm of her chair, bent forward and kissed her.

‘There were two old vagrants near the stable, mother. I took them some food.’

His mother was a little woman with snow-white hair and a back as straight as a board. She had been born Cicely Goring and her father had been a small impecunious Somerset squire. One of those squires with a few fields, two dogs, a horse, and the Bible in the window-seat. She was not yet sixty, but her hair had been white at forty. She was not beautiful, but her figure was so fine, her skin so delicate that she resembled one of those glass coloured ornaments just then so fashionable everywhere. Her sons and husband adored her. She could always have anything she wanted, but she wanted very little except her family, her garden, her needlework, and a little visiting. Robin thought as, leaning over, his cheek almost touched hers, how royal she seemed, her head crowned with its white hair set so regally in the stiff ruff, beside his blowzy aunt who was covered with jewels. ‘All women,’ he thought, ‘when they marry Herries men become themselves Herries—Herries of the one sort or the other. For we are of two sorts, spirit and flesh—and this conflict in our blood is never resolved.’

He kissed his mother’s cheek and then went to sit down beside Arabella Lacey. Everyone was in tremendous spirits: old Mellon came in, followed by two servants, all bearing the silver candlesticks which they set along the table. The new crisping sparkling flame gave an added lustre to the scene. The wine was passing. Voices were rising, everyone was talking at once.

Robin’s heart was beating with fright. He thought that he had never been truly frightened before. At any moment the officers, in pursuit of the priests, might arrive at the house and demand a search. He might himself at once be under suspicion, for it had long been known that he was a friend of Pierson. He would keep them as long as he could from his own room, but his very effort to hinder them would make them suspect him. Old Mellon had seen him with the food. There might be somebody who, under interrogation, would admit to having seen the priests in the yard. His mind flew then to the discovery—Pierson and Anstey dragged from their hiding, the family exposed and charged. . . . At that he looked at his mother, his father with his white stiff beard, the kindly lines about his eyes, the cordial hospitable smile, and then at Nicholas, whom he loved so dearly, who at the moment was fixing an apple with the end of his rapier and handing it, with a deep bow, to Sylvia, Nicholas who hated the Catholics, who perhaps would never forgive his brother. . . . Oh, if there was a discovery this would be ruin for all whom he loved. How Uncle Henry would hate him for thus injuring his social prospects, and if his uncle hated him what of Sylvia?

Behind all these things lay a terror of physical pain. Robin was not of the unimaginative confident courage of Nicholas. His more spiritual visionary nature showed him horrors and distresses long before they arrived. He was very young and, as with every young man of his day, the rack and thumbscrew and, worst of all, the ‘peine forte et dure’ were so close to everyday life as to be part of it. He saw everything: the capture, the cell, the grim interrogation, the stripping, the ropes, the first turn of the engine. . . .

‘Robin,’ Arabella was crying, ‘you heard nothing of what I was saying. I shall punish you. You are condemned’—she bent a little closer, whispering—‘to spend an evening alone with Mr. Thatcher a hundred miles from anywhere.’

But there was the other side. Anthony had spoken of Mary of Scots and, at that, a wild unreasoned longing had leapt within him. She was imprisoned, desolate, cut off from her baby, her friends. She was brave, still royal, a woman, he was sure, whom he could serve to any bitter end.

Why did he feel this about her? What connection had he with her? Why was she mixed in his mind with everything that was to him holy, worshipful, beautiful?

He had risen: the servants were clearing the tables: they were going to dance. Should he slip up to his room and make sure that all was safe? It had been madly risky to leave them there, so that any servant could push aside the panel and find them there. Anthony would be sleeping now. . . . But no one had slid that panel for years and years. The servants for the most part did not know that there was a room at all.

Then he saw that Thatcher, standing alone in the window embrasure, was watching him. That man was for ever watching something. It was his penalty that, because he was Henry Herries’ man, he must be always doing things that he loathed: attending dancing that he disliked, plays that he abhorred, chambering and wantoning at which even his very soul was sick. But is it me that he is watching, Robin wondered. He hates Nicholas, but myself he has always flattered. Does he suspect anything? Has he had private information? Is he one of Burghley’s men?

To his enchanted delight he heard Sylvia speaking to him.

‘Cousin Robin, I have something to say to you.’

He heard his aunt close to him talking with that mysterious, wheezing, frog-like croaking that was so especially hers, about her fear of the plague and a wonderful remedy that she had, something to do with snake’s spittle and the urine of a goat. Something you drank apparently. ‘I’d rather have the plague,’ he thought.

But he was walking down the pleached alley with Sylvia. The sun had sunk—there was no moon—and so over the garden there lay that warm star-shine shadow of the summer evening. So drowsy was the air that when in the faint breeze the flowers wavered ever so slightly it seemed that they nodded their heads in sleep. From the very heart of the splashing fountain—Neptune riding a whale—came the carnation-thyme-dark corn scent as of crushed flowers drenched with sun. She leant over and stirred her hand in the fountain. Then they moved on to where, between the posts of the hedges, they could see the broad cornfield and the snakeskin-shadowed hill beyond.

‘You have paid me very little attention this evening,’ Sylvia said.

The one thing he had determined was that he would not be drawn away from the house. What was happening while he was away? Who knew but that Phineas Thatcher was not that moment quietly opening the door of his room? Tony Pierson or Anstey might well be snoring. . . . Or, impatient of confinement or for some natural reason, might slide the panel, slip into his room and find Thatcher there waiting for them. . . . Or, worst of all, they might think it his step they heard and call out his name! A thousand alarms fired his blood while the carnation scent was in his nostril and a late bird called in a broken drunken whirl across the corn. So, terrified, excited, loving, a child, a man, he drew Sylvia into his arms and kissed her.

‘Sylvia—Sylvia—I love you.’

‘And I love you, Robin.’

‘Oh, Sylvia!’

‘Oh, Robin!’

‘Don’t move—don’t speak.’

The bird called again and again. The lights blazed from the house. An owl hooted. A little bird gave its death-cry.

‘I will ask Uncle Henry this very night——’

She drew back and he saw that she was frightened.

‘Oh no—no. You must not say a word, Robin.’

She looked now a discovered nervous child who was to be punished for some sin.

‘But why——?’

‘They want me to make a fine marriage. My father says that everything for him hangs on it. Edward and Sidney are always pressing me. They say it must be someone fine and wealthy.’

‘But I——’

‘You are not wealthy, Robin, and you are just our cousin. My father wants something finer than our family.’

He felt a disgust. If his uncle had been there he would have told him . . .

‘And you——?’

She stopped suddenly in the path and, with the sweetest, most childlike gesture, stood on the toes of her silver shoes, put her hands on his breast and kissed him.

‘I loved you from that first night in our house—the moment I saw you. I always will. But you must say nothing to anyone as yet. Promise me.’

‘Oh, I promise you.’ She was wearing the ridiculous little ship in her hair. He felt in his doublet and produced the tiny jewel that had fallen from the ship on the night of the ball.

‘I carry this always next to my heart.’

She started away from him. Her eyes stared with fear.

‘There is Mr. Thatcher,’ she said.

He was standing in the doorway, the lights flaring behind him.

‘Your mother is looking for you.’

She walked past him, her head in the air. Mr. Thatcher said nothing to Robin at all.

But now he felt bold enough to face all the Thatchers, the Queen’s officers, the secret judges in the world. He showed himself for a moment and watched the dancing. He looked up at the gallery and saw the second gardener, his father’s manservant, and a young man, Mellon’s son, playing for their life on two fiddles and a flute, and excellently they played. He smiled because they were dressed in green velvet and gilt buttons with the Herries crest on their sleeve—the only little attempt at false grandeur his father ever made.

Then he quietly left the hall and started for his room. As he reached the top of the winding staircase, someone mounted behind him and caught his arm. It was Philip Irvine.

Robin stopped at the stair-head and turned smiling with his charming nervous boyish friendliness.

‘Well—good night.’

Irvine looked at him, also smiling.

‘You are early.’

‘Yes. I am gruesomely weary.’

He started towards his room, thinking to shake Irvine off, but down the passage they went.

Robin, terrified, baffled, opened his door. Irvine entered with him. Did he know, suspect? Was he playing with him? Irvine’s eyes went at once to the painted cloth of Troilus and Cressida.

‘Cressida is no beauty there,’ he said, pointing and laughing. ‘Her nose is crooked.’

‘That has been there ever since I can remember.’

‘Does it conceal a door?’

Robin had taken off his doublet and unfastened his points. He stretched his arms now, yawning. Irvine stood there, swaying a little on his legs. He was carrying in his hand a spice-ball at which he sniffed once and again. Round his neck hung a superb chain of garnets. His vanity was apparent in every breath and movement, but there was something charming, even innocent as well. Robin, sitting on the bed-edge, listening for every sound, trying not to stare at Troilus and his fat golden-painted hound, with desperation tried to catch Irvine’s words, for they reached over a kind of murmuring water-music that played in his ears.

‘Your brother hates me. He is quite foolish about it, for I bear him no malice. It was about some wretched fellow whom my dogs destroyed in the Northern Rebellion. I did but my duty. . . . But I do not like your brother. He is a blundering oafish fellow. I say that to annoy you because I like to see you start and a flush come from your heart. Were I like Paulton or Havering, I would make love to you, but I am not of that kind. Woman was made for me, arranged and perfected for proper intercourse. Boys are clumsy, sweating, ill-fashioned. But I like you, Robin. May I call you so? You are both gentle and intelligent—not at all like your big clumsy brother, whom I will kill one day if he is not careful. . . .’

Then he went into a long, extremely egotistic discourse about his ambitions, disappointments, friends and enemies. He sought for no reply. He saw only his own figure, as though repeated in mirror after mirror into infinite distance.

‘I am no madman. I have no expectation beyond my deserts, but I fancy that there is no injustice in my supposing that I am of better birth, better mind, handsomer appearance than many. I would not say this to any, save an old friend like yourself.’ (His egotism swallowed acquaintance and disgorged it as friendship within a minute or two.) ‘I flatter myself that I have a just view of myself. I am no Narcissus, although Narcissus himself had no more reason to fear Echo than I have. I am exactly the man of my time and position for a place at Court. I have asked Sir Francis Etheredge——’

Then began a long detailed summary of all the intrigues and plottings to keep him out of Court circles. You would fancy, to listen, that the London world of fashion had no business in life except to keep Philip Irvine from Court. And yet, if you listened and were fair, you must admit to a certain pathos of ingenuous youth in Irvine’s own picture of himself. He would always be one of those egotists who can see no one right but themselves; who, in later years, will slip behind the times and make themselves fools because they do not know that time, weather, habit, philosophy and religion have all changed while they were blustering. For Irvine, as with all vain men, had cruelty born of fear, and despotism born of self-insecurity, in his nature. He explained that he must marry, and marry money. He had already someone in his eye. And then with money, his position at Court . . .

He broke off.

‘I swear that you have not listened to a syllable.’

‘Of course. Of course,’ Robin said.

Irvine came over and tapped his cheek. ‘Yes, if I were of another mind I could make love to you,’ he said affably.

Robin, mad, poor boy, with apprehension, yet a native resentment rising in him, drew back.

‘Have no fear,’ Irvine said, laughing. ‘Only when all women are eliminated with the plague perhaps——’

He followed Robin’s eyes.

‘How you gaze at the picture! I swear Cressida is your love, with her swollen pink nose and a lip that a wasp must have stung.’ He went over to it.

‘You have some girl hidden behind it, I daresay.’ He raised it. Robin did not speak.

‘No. . . . There is nothing.’ He came back and stood staring almost sullenly into Robin’s face.

‘Why is it that I feel a kind of horror of you? As though we are mixed in some dreadful misfortune. . . . And yet I like you.’

Robin stared up at him. And, as the two men looked into one another’s face, to both of them came a choking almost suffocating beating of the heart, as though a vial had been unstoppered and an acrid grey smoke plugged their nostrils.

‘Well’—Irvine swaggered to the door—‘Robin, my pretty Adonis, I shall be innocent at least of your raping. But your large, swaggering brother—bid him beware. Let him scowl once too often and his liver shall be split. Good night.’

Robin waited until the steps had quite died away. Now he could hear, only as the singing of a distant humming-top, the playing of the music from the great hall. He must not undress—yet he must seem natural if by any chance someone should knock on his door. Above all, he must not sleep. He was infinitely weary. The agitations of the evening, Anthony Pierson and his love for him, his far greater love for Sylvia (it was this, above all, that had exhausted him. She stood on her toes, reached up to him, placed her hands on his breast . . .), and through all this, behind it and belonging to it, the picture of the imprisoned Queen that Pierson had stirred in his imagination. Ah, what a tangle life was! These strands, so different, meeting to form his history, and influencing through that history the lives of so many yet unborn! It was as though, in his own slender inexperienced being, he had the fates of all the Herries yet to come. And Irvine? Why, as he looked into his face, had he been aware of that sick foreboding? And why had he liked him better than he could ever have supposed?

His head was flaming. He went to the window and threw it back and looked over the dark garden to the quiet eternal line of the gentle Downs! How brief was man’s life in comparison with that steady permanence! His sons would look on them, and his sons’ sons when he was long forgotten, as though he had never been. Where then were God’s Bright Pavilions, and dare he, so insignificant and brief a creature, ever hope to find them? And yet there was no passion, not even his love for Sylvia, that lay so deep within him.

He put on his bed-gown and lay down on his bed. For a while perhaps he slept. At least he was in another world, travelling with Anthony over mountains, and Anthony pointed, crying: ‘They are there! I see them! At last! At last!’

He opened his eyes to find Pierson and the silent Anstey beside his bed. He realized, at the same moment, that the house was quiet, there was no music.

‘We must be on our way,’ Anthony whispered. He went with them to the stair-head and listened. In the dark yard Anthony kissed him. Then, without a word, the two shadows slipped into the shadow.

Robin softly re-entered the house. He stood listening, for he had fancied that there was a step on the stair. He moved forward and listened again. There was no one there. The house was as silent as death.