Come Rack, Come Rope

by Robert Hugh Benson

  “Now, my man,” said Mr. John. “Do you eat and drink while I do the talking. I understand you are a man of your hands, and that you have business elsewhere.”

  “I must be in Lancashire by the end of the week, sir.”

  “Very well, then. We have business enough for you, God knows! This is Mistress Manners, whom you may have heard of. And after you have looked at the places we have here—you understand me?—Mistress Manners wants you at her house at Booth’s Edge.… You have any papers?”

  Owen leaned back and drew out a paper from his bag of tools.

  “This is from Mr. Fenton, sir.”

  Mr. John glanced at the address; then he turned it over and broke the seal. He stared for a moment at the open sheet.

  “Why, it is blank!” he said.

  Owen smiled. He was a grave-looking lad of eighteen or nineteen years old; and his face lighted up very pleasantly.

  “I have had that trick played on me before, sir, in my travels. I understand that Catholic gentlemen do so sometimes to try the fidelity of the messenger.”

  The other laughed out loud, throwing back his head.

  “Why, that is a poor compliment!” he said. “You shall have a better one from us, I have no doubt.”

  Mr. Thomas leaned over the table and took the paper. He examined it very carefully; then he handed it back. His father laughed again as he took it.

  “You are very cautious, my son,” he said. “But it is wise enough.… Well, then,” he went on to the carpenter, “you are willing to do this work for us? And as for payment——”

  “I ask only my food and lodging,” said the lad quietly; “and enough to carry me on to the next place.”

  “Why——” began the other in a protest.

  “No, sir; no more than that.…” He paused an instant. “I hope to be admitted to the Society of Jesus this year or next.”

  There was a pause of astonishment. And then old Sir Thomas’ deep voice broke in.

  “You do very well, sir. I heartily congratulate you. And I would I were twenty years younger myself.…”

  II

  After supper that night the entire party went upstairs to the chapel.

  Young Hugh Owen even already was beginning to be known among Catholics, for his extraordinary skill in constructing hiding-holes. Up to the present not much more had been attempted than little secret recesses where the vessels of the altar and the vestments might be concealed. But the young carpenter had been ingenious enough in two or three houses to which he had been called, to enlarge these so considerably that even two or three men might be sheltered in them; and, now that it seemed as if the persecution of recusants was to break out again, the idea began to spread. Mr. John FitzHerbert while in London had heard of his skill, and had taken means to get at the young man, for his own house at Padley.

  Owen was already at work when the party came upstairs. He had supped alone, and, with a servant to guide him, had made the round of the house, taking measurements in every possible place. He was seated on the floor as they came in; three or four panels lay on the ground beside him, and a heap of plaster and stones.

  He looked up as they came in.

  “This will take me all night, sir,” he said. “And the fire must be put out below.”

  He explained his plan. The old hiding-place was but a poor affair; it consisted of a space large enough for only one man, and was contrived by a section of the wall having been removed, all but the outer row of stones made thin for the purpose; the entrance to it was through a tall sliding panel on the inside of the chapel. Its extreme weakness as a hiding-hole lay in the fact that anyone striking on the panel could not fail to hear how hollow it rang. This he proposed to do away with, unless, indeed, he left a small space for the altar vessels; and to construct instead a little chamber in the chimney of the hall that was built against this wall; he would contrive it so that an entrance was still from the chapel, as well as one that he would make over the hearth below; and that the smoke should be conducted round the little enclosed space, passing afterwards up the usual vent. The chamber would be large enough, he thought, for at least two men. He explained, too, his method of deadening the hollowness of the sound if the panel were knocked upon, by placing pads of felt on struts of wood that would be set against the panel-door.

  “Why, that is very shrewd!” cried Mr. John. He looked round the faces for approval.

  For an hour or so, the party sat and watched him at his work. They talked in low voices; for the shadow was on all their hearts. It had been possible almost to this very year to hope that the misery would be a passing one; but the time for hope was gone. It remained only to bear what came, to multiply priests, and, if necessary, martyrs, and meantime to take such pains for protection as they could.

  “He will be a clever pursuivant who finds this one out,” said Mr. John.

  The carpenter looked up from his work.

  “But a clever one will find it,” he said.

  Mr. Thomas was heard to sigh.

  III

  It was on the afternoon of the following day that Marjorie rode up to her house with Janet beside her, and Hugh Owen walking by her horse.

  He had finished his work at Padley an hour or two after dawn—for he worked at night when he could, and had then gone to rest. But he had been waiting for her when her horses were brought, and asked if he might walk with her; he had asked it simply and easily, saying that it might save his losing his way, and time was precious to him.

  Marjorie felt very much interested by this lad, for he was no more than that. In appearance he was like any of his kind, with a countryman’s face, in a working-dress: she might have seen him by chance a hundred times and not known him again. But his manner was remarkable, so wholly simple and wellbred: he was courteous always, as suited his degree; but he had something of the same assurance that she had noticed so plainly in Father Campion. (He talked with a plain, Northern dialect.)

  Presently she opened on that very point; for she could talk freely before Janet.

  “Did you ever know Father Campion?” she asked.

  “I have never spoken with him, mistress. I have heard him preach. It was that which put it in my heart to join the company.”

  “You heard him preach?”

  “Yes, mistress; three or four times in Essex and Hertfordshire. I heard him preach upon the young man who came to our Saviour.”

  “Tell me,” she said, looking down at what she could see of his face.

  “It was liker an angel than a man,” he said quietly. “I could not take my eyes off him from his first word to the last. And all were the same that were there.”

  “Was he eloquent?”

  “Aye; you might call it that. But I thought it to be the Spirit of God.”

  “And it was then you made up your mind to join the Society?”

  “There was no rest for me till I did. ‘And Christ also went away sorrowful,’ were his last words. And I could not bear to think that.”

  Marjorie was silent through pure sympathy. This young man spoke a language she understood better than that which some of her friends used—Mr. Babington, for instance. It was the Person of Jesus Christ that was all her religion to her; it was for this that she was devout, that she went to Mass and the sacraments when she could. And, above all, it was for this that she had sacrificed Robin: she could not bear that he should not serve Him as a priest, if he might. But the other talk that she had heard sometimes—of the place of religion in politics, and the justification of this or that course of public action—well, she knew that these things must be so; yet it was not the manner of her own most intimate thought, and the language of it was not hers.

  The two went together so a few paces, without speaking. Then she had a sudden impulse.

  “And do you ever think of what may come upon you?” she asked. “Do you ever think of the end?”

  “Aye,” he said.

  “And what do you think the end will be?”

 
She saw him raise his eyes to her an instant.

  “I think,” he said, “that I shall die for my faith some day.”

  That same strange shiver that passed over her at her mother’s bedside, passed over her again, as if material things grew thin about her. There was a tone in his voice that made it absolutely clear to her that he was not speaking of a fancy, but of some certain knowledge that he had. Yet she dared not ask him, and she was a middle-aged woman before the news came to her of his death upon the rack.

  IV

  It was a sleepy-eyed young man who came into the kitchen early next morning, where the ladies and the maids were hard at work all together upon the business of baking. Marjorie turned to him, with her arms floured to the elbow.

  “Well?” she said, smiling.

  “I have done, mistress. Will it please you to see it before I go and sleep?”

  They had examined the house carefully last night, measuring and sounding in the deep and thin walls alike, for there was at present no convenience at all for a hunted man. Owen had obtained her consent to two or three alternative proposals, and she had then left him to himself. From her bed, that she had had prepared, with Alice Babington’s, in a loft—turning out for the night the farm-men who had usually slept there, she had heard more than once the sound of distant hammering from the main front of the house where her own room lay, that had been once her mother’s as well.

  He took her first into the parlour, where years ago Robin had talked with her in the wintry sunshine. The open chimney was on the right as they entered, and though she knew that somewhere on that same side would be one of the two entrances that had been arranged, all the difference she could see was that a piece of the wall-hanging that had been between the window and the fire was gone, and that there hung in its place an old picture painted on a panel. She looked at this without speaking: the wall was wainscoted in oak, as it had always been, six feet up from the floor. Then an idea came to her: she tilted the picture on one side. But there was no more to be seen than a cracked panel, which, it seemed to her, had once been nearer the door. She rapped upon this, but it gave back the dull sound as of wood against stone.

  She turned to the young man, smiling. He smiled back.

  “Come into the bedroom, mistress.”

  He led her in there, through the passage outside into which the two doors opened at the head of the outside stairs; but here, too, all that she could see was that a tall press that had once stood between the windows now stood against the wall immediately opposite to the painted panel on the other side of the wall. She opened the doors of the press, but it was as it had always been: there even hung there the three or four dresses that she had taken from it last night and laid on the bed.

  She laughed outright, and, turning, saw Mistress Alice Babington beaming tranquilly from the door of the room.

  “Come in, Alice,” she said, “and see this miracle.”

  Then he began to explain it.

  The back of the press had been removed, and then replaced, in such a manner that it would slide out about eighteen inches towards the window, but only when the doors of the press were closed; when they were opened, they drew out simultaneously a slip of wood on either side that pulled the sliding door tight and immovable. Behind the back of the press, thus removed, a corresponding part of the wainscot slid in the same way, giving a narrow doorway into the cell which he had excavated between the double beams of the thick wall. Next, when the person that had taken refuge was inside, with the two sliding doors closed behind him, it was possible for him, by an extremely simple device, to turn a wooden button and thus release a little wooden machinery which controlled a further opening into the parlour, and which, at the same time, as braced against the hollow panelling and one of the higher beams in such a manner as to give it, when knocked upon, the dullness of sound the girl had noticed just now. But this door could only be opened from within. Neither a fugitive nor a pursuer could make any entrance from the parlour side, unless the wainscoting itself were torn off. Lastly, the crack in the woodwork, corresponding with two minute holes bored in the painted panel, afforded, when the picture was hung exactly straight, a view of the parlour that commanded nearly all the room.

  “I do not pretend that it is a fortress,” said the young man, smiling gravely. “But it may serve to keep out a country constable. And, indeed, it is the best I can contrive in this house.”

  CHAPTER VII

  I

  MARJORIE FOUND it curious, even to herself, how the press that faced the foot of the two beds where she and Alice slept side by side became associated in her mind with the thought of Robin; and she began to perceive that it was largely with the thought of him in her intention that the idea had first presented itself of having the cell constructed at all. It was not that in her deliberate mind she conceived that he would be hunted, that he would fly here, that she would save him; but rather in that strange realm of consciousness which is called sometimes the Imagination, and sometimes by other names—that inner shadow-show on which move figures cast by the two worlds—she perceived him in this place.…

  It was in the following winter that she was reminded of him by other means than those of his letters.

  She and Alice, with Janet and a man riding behind, were on their way back from Derby, where they had gone for their monthly shopping. They had slept at Dethick, and had had news there of Mr. Anthony, who was again in the south on one of his mysterious missions, and started again soon after dawn next day to reach home, if they could, for dinner.

  She knew Alice now for what she was—a woman of astounding dullness, of sterling character, and of a complete inability to understand any shades or tones of character or thought that were not her own, and yet a friend in a thousand, of an immovable stability and loyalty, one of no words at all, who dwelt in the midst of a steady kind of light which knew no dawn nor sunset. The girl entertained herself sometimes with conceiving of her friend confronted with the rack, let us say, or the gallows; and perceived that she knew with exactness what her behaviour would be: She would do all that was required of her without speeches or protest; she would place herself in the required positions, with a faint smile, unwavering; she would suffer or die with the same tranquil steadiness as that in which she lived; and, best of all, she would not be aware, even for an instant, that anything in her behaviour was in the least admirable or exceptional.

  As they came towards Matstead, and, at last, rode up the street, naturally enough Marjorie again began to think of Robin. Near the churchyard wall, where once Robin had watched, himself unseen, the three riders go by, she had to attend to her horse, who slipped once or twice on the paved causeway. Then as she lifted her head again, she saw, not three yards from her, and on a level with her own face, the face of the squire looking at her from over the wall.

  She had not seen him, except once in Derby, a year or two before, and that at a distance, since Robin had left England; and at the sight she started so violently, in some manner jerking the reins that she held, that her horse, tired with the long ride of the day before, slipped once again, and came down all asprawl on the stones, fortunately throwing her clear of his struggling feet. She was up in a moment, but again sank down, aware that her foot was in some way bruised or twisted.

  There was a clatter of hoofs behind her as the servants rode up; a child or two ran up the street, and when, at last, on Janet’s arm, she rose again to her feet, it was to see the squire staring at her, with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Bring the ladies up to the house,” he said abruptly to the man; and then, taking the rein of the girl’s horse that had struggled up again, he led the way, without another word, without even turning his head, round to the way that ran up to his gates.

  II

  It was not with any want of emotion that Marjorie found herself presently meekly seated upon Alice’s horse, and riding up at a foot’s-pace beneath the gatehouse of the Hall. Rather it was the balance of emotions that made her so
meek and so obedient to her friend’s tranquil assumption that she must come in as the squire said. She was aware of a strong resentment to his brusque order, as well as to the thought that it was to the house of an apostate that she was going; yet there was a no less strong emotion within her that he had a sort of right to command her. These feelings, working upon her, dazed as she was by the sudden sharpness of her fall, and the pain in her foot, combined to drive her along in a kind of resignation in the wake of the squire.

  Still confused, yet with a rapid series of these same emotions running before her mind, she limped up the steps, supported by Alice and her maid, and sat down on a bench at the end of the hall. The squire, who had shouted an order or two to a peeping domestic, as he passed up the court, came to her immediately with a cup in his hand.

  “You must drink this at once, mistress.”

  She took it at once, drank and set it down, aware of the keen, angry-looking face that watched her.

  “You will dine here, too, mistress——” he began, still with a sharp kindness.… And then, on a sudden, all grew dark about her; there was a roaring in her ears, and she fainted.

  The three women dined together. There was no escape from the pressure of circumstance. It was unfortunate that such an accident should have fallen out here, in the one place in all the world where it should not; but the fact was a fact. Meanwhile, it was not only resentment that Marjorie felt: it was a strange sort of terror as well—a terror of sitting in the house of an apostate—of one who had freely and deliberately renounced that faith for which she herself lived so completely; and that it was the father of one whom she knew as she knew Robin—with whose fate, indeed, her own had been so intimately entwined—this combined to increase that indefinable fear that rested on her as she stared round the walls, and sat over the food and drink that this man provided.

  The climax came as they were finishing dinner: for the door from the hall opened abruptly, and the squire came in. He bowed to the ladies, as the manner was, straightening his trim, tight figure again defiantly; asked a civil question or two; directed a servant behind him to bring the horses to the parlour door in half an hour’s time; and then snapped out the sentence which he was, plainly, impatient to speak.