Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “Three deer, my Lord, shall fall.”

  “See to it!”

  A burst of laughter and a great clapping of hands blew faintly through the open window. The Lord Viscount lifted his head and gazed out into the great court. That would be Henry Browne, his fourth son, dressed in armour with a club in one hand and a golden key in the other, rehearsing the fantastical speech with which he was to receive, as porter, Her Majesty at the Gates. It seemed that he had finished his piece and presented his key to the Miracle of Time, Nature’s Glory, Fortune’s Empress, the World’s Wonder. In that case he himself was needed in the Closewalks to practise another entertainment of which Henry’s young friend from Gray’s Inn, Mr Anthony Scarr, was to bear the brunt. He dismissed his gentlemen, and going through the Porch, found the company of his guests assembled. Very seriously he bowed low before Sylvia Buckhurst, a young

  lady who received him with excellent dignity, though her eyes danced and her cheeks were dimpling with quite unseemly smiles. She was the daughter of Mr Rigby Buckhurst, who lived over by Woolbeding, and she had joined Lord Montague’s guests that afternoon.

  “Will Your Grace be pleased to visit my Closewalks?” said my Lord. “There some strange thing may happen for entertainment.”

  “Your Lordship diverts me very pleasantly,” answered the young lady, and indeed she meant what she said. “Let us walk.”

  My Lord, with his hat in his hand, paced beside Her Majesty’s understudy, making such courtly conversation that the girl was half inclined to dub him an Earl on the spot, just to see how he would take it. They paced towards St. Anne’s Hill, where Montague ventured to call attention to the ruins of Bohun’s Castle, and Her Majesty was pleased to remark how times had changed, heigh ho! The sigh was queenly, perhaps, but certainly not tactful. Sylvia, however, had a lovely low voice which transmuted all the small pence of her talk into gold. She had the light heart of her eighteen years, and her little shoes which set themselves so majestically upon the gravel seemed to threaten each moment to break into a dance. Ahead of them a square of dark trees lay like a blot upon the wide emerald of the park. On they paced towards it, the Lord Montague tedious and stately and melancholic, the girl from Woolbeding at his side condescending and gracious, with a ripple of fun upon her face, and behind them the ladies and gentlemen, rather too mute for his Lordship’s taste.

  “We must not be overawed,” he stopped to chide them. “We rejoice in Her Highness’ presence. She is the Sun of our lives. We are happy. We skip.”

  On they went, and within the wood called the Closewalks, Anthony Scarr rehearsed his speech in the worst possible humour. He was dressed as a pilgrim, to begin with, in a ridiculous, long flapping gown of russet velvet, wearing a still more ridiculous hat adorned with scallop shells of cloth of silver. He had a pilgrim’s staff, too, and he must totter along by the help of it, bowed and bent, and so come for the first time into the presence of that great Lady who held England and the hearts of England in her slim and artful hands. Could any prospect be more distressing to a modish young exquisite with a wardrobe of fine new clothes made specially for this great occasion? No one was unaware that a lad, spruce and trim and fairly pleasing to the eye, who happened to arrest the glances of his Queen, found the dangerous gates of Power and Favour swinging open at his step, though, to be sure, they very often led no higher than Tower Hill. But there it was. He was to appear as an ancient, jelly- limbed pilgrim and he must get his tedious speech by heart. So he began thus: “Fairest of all creatures — This hat was made for a hydrocephalist. Vouchsafe to hear a prayer of a pilgrim which shall be short, and the petition which is but reasonable. It will tumble off for certain as I bend my rheumatic knees. God grant the world may end with your life and your life more happy than any in the world. If there is as little grammar in it as that the sooner it ends the better. That is my prayer. I have travelled many countries and in all countries desire antiquities — desire antiquities — yes, exactly, desire antiquities. God help me, there’s a place to get gravelled considering that Her Gracious Majesty is fifty-three if she’s a day. Hard by I saw an oak whose stateliness nailed mine eyes to the branches. Were ever such fustian phrases coined by a sober man? Nailed mine eyes to the branches! — However, let’s not think but speak it out roundly as many an actor has had to do before.”

  There was a rough-hewed ruffian who stood in the Pilgrim’s way and boxed him. Also a forward lady who talked him to a standstill. But if only Her Majesty would view the oak — where all the escutcheons of the noblemen and gentlemen of Sussex were nailed in addition to the Pilgrim’s eyes — then: “Haply Your Majesty shall find some content. And I more antiquities.”

  Anthony had come to the end of his hyperbolical apostrophe when the sound of voices reached his ears. He hid behind the trunk of a tree, and as the voices grew louder and the procession emerged into a square open space in the middle of the little wood, he settled his hat upon his own brown hair and tottered out.

  “Ha! And who is this aged and way-worn palmer?” cried his Lordship, simulating extreme surprise. “It seems that he has a petition to make. Will Your Majesty hear him or shall I have him chased hence as a Golypragmion?”

  At this Her Majesty should have graciously replied that she would hear the petition. Unfortunately the overlarge hat adorned with the scallop shells of cloth of silver chose this very moment to slip forward over the Pilgrim’s right eye and hang there precariously, hiding his face from the company and the company from his view. Instead, therefore, of hearing the condescending words which were his cue, Anthony heard only a gurgle of rather mischievous laughter.

  He took it very ill. Let him hear one male voice echo that giggling girl and he would talk with that male voice later on. But the others of the company exercised a more seasonable restraint, and even Her Majesty’s understudy subdued her mirth sufficiently to bid him proceed.

  Some quality in her voice moved him unexpectedly like music. For a moment he stood stock-still, and neither from anger nor petulance nor any forgetfulness of his words. Indeed, anger had died within him altogether. An odd suspense possessed him, something of which his memory held no record. Yet it had possessed him once before in the library of The Drove when he had traced upon the map the line of the old road to Regnum and the tip of his finger had rested so long upon one spot. But that day was seven years old and buried long ago.

  He took a hold upon himself and began. He used the senile accent to which he had schooled his tongue, though underneath it there ran a throb of passion which surprised even the speaker.

  “Fairest of all creatures,” he began, his body bent with age and wanderings, his big flat bonnet flopping above his face. The cracked voice meandered on, embroidering the dreary conceit. The mimic Court listened and duly admired. But Anthony, even whilst he subdued himself to the utterance of his speech, was aware that this odd expectancy persisted in his mind. He came to: “I thought there were more ways to the wood than one,” and though the words flowed smoothly, he had a fancy that the wood, too, was waiting like him, with leaves carved out of metal, for some new strange thing to storm the world.

  “Haply Your Majesty shall find some content. I, more antiquities.” It was his cue to advance. He did so with faltering step, leaning on his oak staff, when the worst disgrace befell him. His hat toppled off his head altogether and betrayed the brown curls of a boy. But before a single titter was heard, Anthony suddenly stood erect, his face a little flushed with shame, no anger in his eyes but a curious appeal. The transformation was so swift and so unexpected that the company gasped and then broke into applause.

  “If that could happen when Her Majesty comes!” cried one.

  “But it won’t,” said my Lord. Only such costly things as Queen’s visits repeated themselves in this world of anxieties. “However, for us nothing could have been more aptly done.” And he, too, joined in the clapping and congratulations.

  But Anthony heard none of them. He stood erect and for the first time saw.
In front of him, but a few paces off, stood a girl with a crown of dark hair neatly dressed and lustrous as a raven’s wing, a broad, low, white forehead and big dark eyes set wide apart, a delicately shaped fine nose and red lips parted. It was not merely the beauty of her face which held him, but the wonder and perplexity of her eyes. For a moment she looked straight at him, a tremendous question in the look, and then suddenly she shut her eyes tight. And she kept them so. When she opened them again they seemed to say: “Are you still there?… Was I dreaming?… Are you You?”

  But Anthony’s part was not yet played out. He advanced. He held out a hand. Hesitatingly — oh, not royally at all — a small, slim hand was laid in his — and his fingers closed upon it as though they held the world’s one prize and would never let it go.

  The procession fell in behind them. He led her to the Oak. Thereupon the Wild Man Clad in Ivy dashed out and had a good deal to say about the Oak, how high it was, so that Envy could not reach her, and so deeply rooted that Treachery could not discover its windings. And thereupon a cornet sounded and the procession returned to supper. All of it except the Pilgrim and the Queen.

  They had fallen behind and, when the others had reached the open park, were still pacing slowly amongst the trees, silent but without unease in their silence. The little wood was noisy with the birds busy upon settling themselves for the night in good time before darkness came, and the sunlight still lay in great amber shafts along the walk. It was Sylvia who broke the silence first.

  “You must have thought me a rustic beyond hope when I stared so.”

  “And shut your eyes tight,” Anthony added with a smile. “No, I thought you were kind.”

  “How so?”

  “You would not blind me.”

  “And so you blamed my conceit and not my manners,” she returned, lightly. “Now, which censure should I prefer?”

  “I blamed neither,” he began, in her tone. But he stopped abruptly and stood in her path. His face was very serious, his eyes steady upon hers. She did not draw back, nor did her eyes fall from his, but her hand fluttered up to her heart and stayed there.

  “I’ll not fence with you,” he said gently.

  For his mere friends the artifices of talk. Between him and her were they not the waste of irrecoverable time?

  “Why did you shut your eyes so close?”

  “Does so much hang upon so small a thing?” she asked, trying to keep him off and defend the heart her hand so ill defended. But she could not.

  “Nothing that you do, I think, can be a small thing to me.”

  “I shall tell you, then, though I never thought to so soon,” she answered gravely and slowly.

  “But in the end — yes?”

  “In the end, yes. I was sure at once that I knew you well. I could not tell where I had known you. But when the hat fell—” and the recollection brought no more amusement into her face than had its actual fall— “when I saw you straight and young like someone fresh-risen from out of the earth, I was sure of it. I was troubled — yes, troubled — and yet—” the colour mounted over her slim, white throat into her cheeks, and the word came in a clear whisper— “glad. But it could not be that I had known you. I should have remembered if I had. I shut my eyes close. If some trick of light or vision had cheated me, I must have known the truth at once. For safety’s sake. If, when I opened my eyes again, I saw a stranger — there was still perhaps time.”

  She was speaking quite simply, and Anthony Scarr accepted her words as simply. There was at this moment neither coquetry in her nor coxcombry in him. They were trying to understand the overwhelming change which an unexpected moment had wrought in them.

  They walked on together for a few steps in silence. “It was your voice which was your herald to me,” he in his turn acknowledged. “I could not see you. But your voice took me like an enchantment — a melody from the stars composed for me. A message that what was needed for — let me find the word! — for my fulfilment, and for yours, too, was at hand for us to seize. A threat, almost, that if we didn’t seize it both our lives were marred.” He looked at her and smiled.

  “Then I saw you.”

  He took her by the elbow and slid his fingers down to her wrist and took her hand. The trees were thinning in front of them. They walked on, hand in hand.

  “Suppose that you had never come to Cowdray,” Anthony cried in a sort of panic.

  “You wouldn’t have minded. For you wouldn’t have known that there was anything to mind.”

  Anthony stopped to contemplate that amazing truth. So great a need unfulfilled and he not troubled so much as by a headache!

  “But we must have met,” he cried. “It was so ordained. Else why should we each have known and thought with the same thought in a lightning’s flash?”

  Sylvia had no answer. For no argument could have been more reasonable to her. If it had been ordained that they should be so close, why then recognition was everything and, perhaps, just to make very sure, she had been vouchsafed that gift of recognition a second or so before her voice imparted it to him. It was all very simple, very clear, and to be paid for with praise and gratitude throughout the days of their one life. She said: “On the night before the Queen goes—”

  “A week!” said Anthony. “Would she stayed a month!”

  Sylvia laughed.

  “Breathe that prayer in my Lord’s ear and watch his face as he piously repeats it!”

  “Well, in a week?”

  “There is to be a country dance presented to her in the Private Gardens. I am set down for it.”

  “Good!” said Anthony. “I dance with you, then.”

  “I would have it so,” she replied. “With all my heart! But” — and she fell to despondency and gloom— “it is planned that it should be performed by Sussex people.”

  Anthony waved the objection aside.

  “See what a fine thing it is to have a lineage as short as a thieving tailor’s yard. I have a house in Cornwall, but I am not Cornish-born. I have a house, too, I believe, by London Wall, though I have never slept a night in it, and I reckon my good grandfather, rest his bones, was some honest London man. But what of his father? Was he not born in Sussex? Let them gainsay me at their peril. I am a Sussex man. Henry Browne is my good friend. He shall bear me out. I dance with you.”

  The blood mantled again in Sylvia’s face. She was no more than eighteen. It was very important to her that, when she danced before the Queen, Anthony should partner her. At each parting and each meeting, as their hands touched, there would be the little delicious shock, a quickening of the heart’s beat, perhaps a tiny whisper heard but by those two. It would be a sort of consecration. Yes, they must dance together.

  “I use my Lord’s words,” she said, her checks dimpling. “See to it.”

  They had come to the edge of the trees. Before them stretched the open verdure of the Park, and the great House raised its cupola and towers within their view. But so were they within view of it. Gently she pulled at her hand, but Anthony would not let it go. Laughing, with her other hand, she loosed his fingers.

  “Humans may be watching us. We must walk sedately,” she warned him.

  Sweetheart, said he, and she lifted her shoulders with a little shake of pleasure.

  Suddenly he tripped. Suddenly he was aware that all this while he had been disfiguring himself in his pilgrim’s russet gown. He stripped it off and flung it across his arm. Sylvia drew a breath as she looked at him. She adored him thus. Anthony, the coxcomb now, cried to himself~

  “Let her wait till she sees me really tricked out and dressed. In a week’s time, for instance, when we dance together before Her Grace. Sussex, yes, but yokel, no! Definitely no!”

  So they passed out from the Closewalks into the glamorous sunset of the August evening, bringing their own glamour with them.

  XVII. THE LONG LAD

  NURSE: NAY, HE’S aflower; in faith a very flower.

  — Romeo and Juliet

  The
next evening at eight o’clock the Queen, with her shining cavalcade behind her, rode amidst cheers and music to the gates of Cowdray. In spite of the long journey from Farnham she sat her horse erect as a girl in her teens. She accepted the golden key very graciously from Henry Browne and, turning about, made a much better speech than Henry Browne’s, straight from her heart to the villagers gathered in field and road.

  “My people! It warms my heart to see myself so loved and desired by you. You may have a greater Prince but you shall never have one more loving. So I bid you goodnight and shall bear you in my prayers. For I am a poor weak woman and can hold out no longer than a strong man.

  So with a laugh and a jest she rode along the straight level road to the porch, dismounted there and, after embracing Lady Montague who bedewed the royal bosom with her joyful tears, she walked, under the stone vault with its crown of pomegranates and the anchors in the corners, to her own lodging. This she kept the next day, being Sunday. On Monday morning, from her bower in the great Park, she shot three fat deer with her crossbow, amidst cries of amazement at her prowess. In the afternoon she saw fifteen bucks coursed by Henry Browne’s hounds, and so to the Closewalks where the famous hat with the scallop shells did not fall off from Anthony Scarr’s brown curls. She endured the conceits of the Pilgrim and the Wild Man without a yawn, being inured against such soporifics by the habit of the times. And so back again across the grass to supper. Add a few hours of holding off her Ministers from doing anything undeniable anywhere, and it seems a day long enough to satisfy the indefatigable. But she had not come to the end of it. To the music of violas and pandoras played softly in the Gallery she held a Court after supper in the Great Parlour. She was dressed statelily in cloth of gold and gave an audience to the County notables. One after another they were brought to the throne and Elizabeth, whilst she talked, let her eyes rove over the room for something more comely and delicate than these sturdy red-faced squires of the chase.