Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  She saw Montague marshalling yet another of the same breed and called him to her side.

  “Nay, my good Lord, I will choose one now for myself. Who is that long lad drowning in melancholy against the wall?”

  Lord Montague followed the glance of those sharp, black eyes and was a trifle disconcerted. There were many important bigwigs shifting from one foot to the other in the hope of a few words to be repeated to their children and their children’s children.

  “That, Your Majesty, is a young gentleman from the Inns of Court.” He meant that it was clearly not worth Her Majesty’s while to waste her time over him. “He is an Oxford friend of my son Henry.”

  “That does not tell me his name.”

  “Anthony Scarr.”

  Someone standing close behind Her Grace’s chair moved quickly. The Queen looked round and saw a sombrely dressed man with a swarthy face looking keenly towards that far corner of the room, with a faint smile which would not smile upon his lips.

  “You know the boy, Sir Francis,” said the Queen.

  Mr Walsingham had grown into Sir Francis just one month after his visit seven years before to The Drove on Helford River.

  “I did know the boy,” he replied, laying a little emphasis on “the boy.” “An odd, lonely boy with the manners of a grandee. I had a thought that, in time, I might use him in Your Majesty’s service.”

  “God’s death, I have a thought that I may use him better,” said Elizabeth. She was not in a good mood with Sir Francis Walsingham that day. He was too much of a Puritan. There had been a troublesome hour when she had come back to the house, all flushed and happy because three fine deer had fallen to the three bolts of her crossbow. And there had stood this diligent Jesuitical Puritan, always wanting to do something — if it was only some mere trifle such as flying at the throat of poor troubled Philip of Spain, who, after all, might be cajoled into harmlessness if only they would leave her alone. But Sir Francis wouldn’t. She might call him a knave and a scoundrel, and all he did was to retire, sick in health, to his big house of Barn Elms, grieving at the incommodity of her temper — until she, poor fool, had to call him back again. No doubt he had plans for this pretty stripling in the corner. She never nursed a dear gazelle but Sir Francis must have him for one of his odious secret purposes. But he mollified her now.

  “I have not seen him for seven years,” he said with his thin smile, “and the fine piece of plumage he is now has soared out of my reach.”

  He bent down and told her some story which set her laughing loudly, like a man in an alehouse.

  “And there he stands, brooding on vacancy” — despairing, no doubt, that he would ever catch her eye. “My Lord” — she turned to Montague— “I should ill repay your hospitality if I should let him pine through my neglect. Bring that long lad to me!”

  But in truth, no one in that crowded room was less despondent than Anthony. For he had Sylvia Buckhurst close at his side. They made a play of being very aloof and distant and unconcerned when people were near, though each of them tingled at the voice or step or look of the other. The pretence gave a special sweetness to the stolen moments when, after the deepest manoeuvres, they found themselves alone. They played their game so well that, though they stood side by side now, he might as well have been alone in the desert of Thebes and she alone on the Steppes of Russia, for all that anyone in the company could see. Until the Queen gave her order.

  Then, with a gasp, Sylvia said under her breath: “The Queen’s sending for you.”

  “She might do worse,” Anthony answered, putting her little cry down to a natural and worthy understanding of his charm. But as he saw his Lordship coming towards him, his knees began to knock and he swallowed with difficulty and his heart became a bird which fluttered and soared and swooped within him in the most distressing fashion.

  “Her Majesty honours you,” said his Lordship.

  Anthony glanced at Sylvia.

  “Help me,” his eyes implored.

  “Don’t forget me!” her eyes answered him.

  He set off behind his Lordship, blushing like a girl and holding himself erect to make the best of the ordeal. There is a drug nowadays which makes an hour of a minute and a parade ground of a three-foot yard. But the stiffest dose of Cannabis Indica could not have made his Lordship’s Great Parlour vaster than it seemed to Anthony, nor the time it took to traverse it longer. He felt himself to be the most awkward clown who ever disfigured a Court. But that was his vanity.

  The onlookers saw something quite different. They saw a youth with grey eyes and brown hair, delicate in colour and feature, with long, straight legs and a slender body. He had dressed himself with a fastidious elegance to overwhelm Sylvia. He wore a suit of white velvet, close-fitting and plain, with crystal buttons which flashed in the light, hose of white silk, shoes of white satin. A cape of pale green satin embroidered with gold thread hung from his shoulders, and the scabbard of his rapier was of pale green velvet. A gold chain with an emerald jewel shaped like a tiny ship glistened upon his doublet, the more noticeably because a spark of light enshrined within the stone had been fashioned into a sun; a cambric ruff piped with gold thread encircled his throat; a delicate, faint perfume breathed from his clothes as he walked, and an earring with a single pearl gleamed in the lobe of his left ear.

  Elizabeth watched him with relief. She had no tolerance for slovens, and this trim young exquisite without a wrinkle in his stockings paid her her due homage by his dress. That he had taken so much pains to parade before that cloudy slip of a girl with the big, startled eyes who was destroying him with her tediousness was, of course, unimaginable. It was for her that he was so dapper, and as he dropped upon his knees before her, she gave him graciously her hand to kiss.

  “Walsingham tells me that Drake broke your heart because he wouldn’t take you round the world as his cabin boy,” she said.

  Anthony was sorely inclined to answer: “Sir Francis does me an injustice. It was he who stopped me.” But love taught him prudence in the small matters and courage for the high. Friends in great places made a suitor more desirable to a parent. So he made no enemy of Walsingham.

  “Drake broke it, in truth, Your Majesty” he answered, “but patched it up again three years afterwards.”

  “How?”

  Anthony laughed. He had a pleasant, quiet laugh which did him no harm at this moment.

  “I was to have stood behind his chair wearing a gold chain and an emerald ornament taken from the first galleon God put in our way. When he returned and the world was filled with his name, he remembered enough of my broken heart to send me this plaster for it”; and he touched the chain about his shoulders.

  “A pretty ornament,” she said. The royal fingers played with it as though she must see it close. The royal knuckles touched — perhaps pressed with a trifle of a caress upon his velvet doublet. “I doubt me but Oxford has smoothed you out more seemly than three years of valeting Drake would have done. He’d have you behind his chair, would he?” And suddenly she was annoyed. There was a pretension here she had no taste for. “Like a great noble with his page. God’s life, the man forgets that I can take him down, for all his big name, as easily as I put him up.”

  There was a gleam in her black eyes which fairly startled Anthony. She turned to Walsingham.

  ‘You must bring this boy to Whitehall, Sir Francis, and we ll make him amends for the loss of his brave visions.

  Sir Francis was not altogether pleased. The particular purpose which Anthony Scarr was, on its due occasion, to forward, must find another servant if the royal favour lifted this one to Whitehall.

  “You shall forget Peru and the golden galleons, I promise you,” she resumed to Anthony.

  Anthony was a little troubled. He had no wish to appear to her a greedy adventurer or a hanger-on upon fame, even if it was only the fame of Drake’s cabin boy. Yet how should he correct her without betraying himself a prig? But Walsingham came unintentionally to his rescue. If h
e could introduce some honest drab into these glowing prospects he might still not lose his man.

  “If I remember aright, the boy I talked with thought more of service than of golden galleons and of Your Highness than Peru.”

  “And was that so?” she asked. “Didn’t you dream of starting out a cabin boy and returning a young Achilles, wreathed in bays?”

  Anthony was in a confusion. The adventure — yes. The new lands, too. These were at his heart, as well as service. But fame, no. He spoke out his creed hesitatingly and shyly. Whence that creed came he did not know. Certainly the Reverend Doctor Morgan Evans had never taught it him. Nor could he remember arguing about it. It had been there fixed in his soul from the start, a principle and cause of his existence.

  “Greece was a land of little wars and little towns. A man might look to serve his people and make a name with the same stroke. But in Your Grace’s realm, as I dare to think it was too in Rome, the enterprise is too wide. So long as a man serves, he can leave chance to throw the hero up.”

  The words were fetched from him by a question here and there.

  “I beg Your Grace’s pardon. I have seemed to preach.”

  “Nay, boy,” she answered softly. “If all my preachers spoke with that throb of passion in their throats, I should interrupt their sermons less often than I do.”

  These dear eager lads, buds of the gorgeous bloom which England was to be if only they would give her time — she loved them — when she was not furious with them! The trouble with them was they were all so plaguily passionate to be up and doing that a poor woman who knew the time was not ripe and that she must hold all off with shifts and evasions and a good round lie when nothing else would serve, was driven half out of her wits. She had but the one leash on them, their devotion to her person. There was some magic in her which blinded them to her blemishes; so that she could send them to the block and they would go crying “Long live the Queen!” and she could shut them up in her prisons and they would fight at the window bars to catch a glimpse of her as she passed by. She made love to them and railed at them, she caught them to her one day and drove them out the next. She was catching young Anthony Scarr to her this evening at Cowdray.

  “You shall stand behind my chair instead of Drake’s, whilst I play cards,” she said, smiling at him as she rose; and she kept him there till morning broke over the Downs and the candles paled.

  XVIII. IN THE CLOSEWALKS

  Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs,

  Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look,

  Does she know? does she not know? saved or lost?

  — Robert Browning

  “Now you cross in front of me! So! But please don’t cling to my hand.”

  “Sweetheart!”

  “It’s a hand, not a glue pot. Let it go — well, one tiny clasp, perhaps, which no Peeping Tom could see, since you are you and I am I. Oh!”

  Sylvia started back in a confusion. On one slim finger shone now a gold band with a sapphire deep as a pool, set about with diamonds.

  “Anthony,” she said in a whisper.

  She held out her arm, spreading her fingers, and watched the stones sparkle in the sunlight. Then, whilst the blood mantled her cheeks, she raised it slowly to her lips and kissed it.

  “Lovely,” she said, and swept him a low curtsey.

  “I’ll ride over and make my call upon your father at Woolbeding tomorrow,” said Anthony.

  “You will not. Three paces forward now! The feet together and bow. Her Majesty goes hawking on the Downs tomorrow and dines at Bignor afterwards. Mr Anthony Scarr must go hawking too.”

  And you.

  Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.

  “I, because I know the Downs, and morning mists may lead strangers astray.”

  “I’ll go the next day, then,” said Anthony stubbornly.

  “You will not. For the next day Her Majesty dines in the Private Garden of Cowdray, and Mr Anthony Scarr figures in a Hey for Her Majesty’s delectation. In which dance he will not delect Her Highness at all unless he gets his steps more trippingly than he is doing now.”

  “Sweetheart!”

  “Oh, we’ll never get it seemly! Three steps to the right, please—” with an imploring emphasis on the “please”— “and don’t pinch my ears. Now set to the oak! So. Three steps to the right, curtsey. Three steps to the left, curtsey! Join hands and a capriole!”

  They sprang, each one clapping the feet together in the air.

  “Good,” said Sylvia. “Now, three paces forward — oh!”

  “I did it very well,” said Anthony stoutly.

  “With the wrong foot.”

  Anthony looked down at his legs.

  “You stepped off with the left foot first,” said Sylvia, lightly chiding him.

  But Anthony took the accusation with a much greater seriousness.

  “I didn’t,” he protested urgently. “Say that I didn’t.”

  I saw you.

  “With the left foot first?”

  “Yes.”

  Anthony frowned. He was still looking down. An odd perplexity possessed him. He felt that he was on the edge of some momentous revelation, but it just eluded him.

  “With my left foot,” he repeated. “Then misfortune threatens us,” and he spoke in a voice so woebegone that Sylvia burst out laughing.

  “And what wise woman told you that?” she asked.

  Anthony shook his head.

  “It must have been long ago. I can’t remember.”

  He raised his head, and she saw that he was in earnest. The fear sounding in his voice was printed in his eyes.

  “Anthony!” she cried.

  What? A young man fresh from Oxford and the Inns of Court to be alarmed by some old rustic legend!

  “Because a left foot once went with an accident, shall we shake with terror if we set off with it first? For shame!”

  “Sweetheart!”

  It was a very useful word for a lover. It saved a deal of argument, and a pleasant embrace went with it still more surely than misfortune with a left foot.

  They were practising their steps on that open patch of grass within the Closewalks where they had first come face to face. The sunlight made the air golden about them. The morning was still. They had this sanctuary to themselves. But suddenly Sylvia drew herself back from his arms. The fear which had shone in his eyes had passed into hers.

  “Someone is watching us,” she said in a whisper. She was still looking at him. “Spying upon us — secretly.”

  “Where?”

  Sylvia swung round swiftly. She gazed with her eyes quite scared into the wood which hemmed them in. But under the thick, low foliage it was as dark as a cavern even at that hour, and the boles of the trees stood so close that a dozen spies might have been ambushed there and the spied-upon no wiser.

  “I’ll go see,” said Anthony.

  “Not without me,” said Sylvia, and she caught his hand. Together they ran into the wood.

  “Here,” said Sylvia.

  They looked about them. But peer about them as they might, there was not a movement in the shadows.

  “Listen!” said Anthony.

  They heard nothing but the birds bustling in the branches high overhead and a faint sigh of wind.

  “You imagined it.”

  “I saw the flutter of a red cloak. Then it was gone.”

  She was shaken, now. She could not have laughed again at his presage of misfortune. Last night they had danced in the Great Parlour, first a stately pavane when Lord Montague had led out the Queen, and then a lively galliard when she had chosen Anthony for her partner. She had singled him out these last days. He must be by her side, share her laughter and answer to her provocations. Envied and adulated, no doubt, for the moment. But courtiers were a jealous tribe all the world over, and not one but would pull him down if it could be done. Her Grace brooked no rivals in her philanderings. Her favourite must not have a heartbeat which was not for her. Let a w
ord be whispered into the ear of a lady-in-waiting that her long lad, instead of sighing upon his knees for the hour when he would behold her, was kissing that cloudy slip of a girl in the Closewalks, there would be reason enough for terror.

  “Oh, if only this week were ended and she gone!” cried Sylvia. “That’s what your left foot meant. You’ll to the Tower and I — what will it matter if I lose you?”

  “Sweetheart, who was it laughed at me?” he cried. With a spy to bring to his account, Anthony had lost his fears altogether. Here was a possible, actual person to have his nose tweaked first and be run through the body in a more gentlemanly style afterwards. True, the possible, actual person seemed to have evaporated, but he had left his exhilarating effect behind him.

  “It can’t be that you should lose me nor I you. There’s a thread between your heart and mine which would lead each one to the other, were all the world a maze.”

  So far he had spoken lightly to assuage her fears, holding her at arm’s length and smiling as he spoke. But a change came. He clipped her close to him, and, in a clear and quiet voice which had so much of confidence and certainty that she could not but believe him, he said: “I thank God for you, dearest and dearest. Of this I am sure. Even death could not hold us apart. Where you are I shall be.”

  The girl lay very still within his arms, her hands clasped behind his neck, her face against his shoulder. Her fears had been conjured away. She drew herself free and stood a little way off, her eyes shining. She bent her head once or twice, slowly, in answer to his words. Surely in some dream Anthony had seen her use just that gesture and her eyes dwell upon him with just that tremendous promise. To both of them the little wood became a dim, many-pillared temple, reserved for them, their own, where they celebrated on this still August morning a sacrament which plighted them through life and beyond it.

  They walked back to the sunlit space of grass, conscious of serenity. Neither of them spoke of that hour again.

  XIX. BY BOGNOR HILL