“Listen,” he said, and he threw wide the window. The night was very still. The hooting of an owl in a distant tree of the Park was the only sound to be heard in the deep square well of the great court. Above their heads the stars sailed over a smooth dark sky. “Was there ever such peace, such a promise of fair days? Yet all is in the balance. The liberty of this realm and its people. Whether our Lord Jesus shall rule, or Antichrist. And there’s no hazard in it. We cannot be overthrown if we are actors. We cannot stand if we are onlookers.”
“For my part, Sir, I do not mean to look on,” said Anthony quietly.
“I was sure of it,” Walsingham returned. “I have work for you.”
He rose and took a step towards his big table with its litter of papers. He was all confidence that Anthony would act the part he had chosen for him in this pageant of life and death. Or was he assuming confidence, the more easily to secure his end? Anthony did not stir from the window.
“I have work for myself,” he said, with a note of stubbornness in his voice which brought a shadow to the Secretary’s face. But his back was turned and Anthony only heard the suave and friendly voice.
“Very like it is better than what I had in mind. Let us make a comparison.”
“He outreaches them in his equivocations,” Anthony warned himself. Aloud he said: “I will respectfully reply with a saying of yours to me, Sir Francis. Silence can ask and silence can answer with less embarrassment, at times, than speech.”
Sir Francis raised his head.
“I said that at your house in Cornwall, I think.”
“Yes.”
The older man turned swiftly about. He was skilled in the reading of faces. Anthony, under his scrutiny, flushed and shifted in his chair, with a suspicion in his mind that, somehow, his secret had escaped him. And it had. It was not, after all, so difficult to guess. A taste for adventure, a craving for the new world and the uncharted seas, were not so rare in youths of spirit. Add a father burnt in the Plaza of Valladolid and a disgrace to be wiped out and a lady to be WOfl and a saying remembered — here were finger-posts plain enough for a duller man than Walsingham to read.
“So Drake’s cabin boy will after all be Admiral,” he said, with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Well, after all—” And he fell into some perplexity.
“How many ships?” he asked at length.
Anthony answered frankly. His plan was out and his best course was to enlist the statesman’s help if he could.
“I can fit out two at least. Three perhaps,” and, once he had begun, he could not stop. His story tumbled from his lips like water over a lasher. Drake, with his great heart, would help him. The ships should be armed as none were armed before. The sailing masters should be the best in England. He would have no gentlemen adventurers. They were the ruin of expeditions. He would know but two watchwords, discipline and service.
“Yes, and a fine, loud name for yourself when you return,” said Sir Francis quietly.
Anthony sat back as if he had been struck in the face. Oh, yes, the great name had been in his thoughts. To be of the company of Frobisher and Hawkins, Gilbert and Drake — no doubt the ambition had been burning in him and had popped out in his words. He could pay his visit to Woolbeding with that fine name to warrant his courtship. Because of it Buckhurst would change the more sweetly into Scarr.
“No doubt, Sir,” he admitted.
Yet Sir Francis did not laugh at the lad’s vanity. He looked him in the face, appraising him and setting one plan against the other.
“I am shaken,” he confessed. “I thought to find a youth sunk in despair and ready to my hand.” A smile lit up his face. “I had forgotten you, Mr Scarr.”
He paced the room for a minute. Two good ships, perhaps three, slipping out of a western port — a private venture — the Plate Fleet with its millions of ducats vanishing into air somewhere between San Domingo and the Azores. With Philip unable to raise a penny from the bankers of Genoa, that was not a scheme to be dismissed as a boy’s dream. True, but at the best it only meant postponement and the sooner the great duello came, the better.
“It is my turn to quote your words against you,” he said. “I heard some learned talk between you and Her Grace. In the little towns a man might aim at service and the great name at once. But in Rome and this our England the enterprise was too wide. Wasn’t that how the argument ran? One could only serve and leave chance to throw the hero up.”
This was the worst moment Anthony had known in all his life. That had been his creed, born in him, part of him, a creed unquestioned then and unquestioned now, to which it seemed to him he had been trained before his birth. Service for its own sake, because it was. He tried not to listen to its call. He wanted on some fine day to ride into Sussex with the great name like a banner above his head, to claim his prize.
“What do you want of me?” he asked sullenly, and he added in a low voice: “I am not alone. Remember it!” And there was prayer in his words as of warning.
Walsingham was moved. It needed all the memories of his own devoted life to hold him to his course in the face of this lad’s misery. His body racked with pain, his work flouted, disappointment at every corner, his own private purse emptied that his cause might suffer the less from the parsimony of his Queen. He looked back on the long succession of care-filled days and broken nights — and all to avoid one enormous evil, the stake and the Inquisition and a slavish England under a pall of terror. No, he could not spare Anthony — no, nor that girl either, who, that evening, had been so mishandled. The enterprise was too wide.
“I have work which you alone can do,” he said. “It can never mean the great name. No, never! It may mean quiet honour amongst those who know — honour enough to smooth your way whither your heart is set. We can see to that. But that will be the best of it, and not yet.”
“And the worst of it?”
“Shame, pain, death — perhaps your father’s death.”
Anthony set his elbows upon the table and covered his face with his hands. He was not hesitating because of his father’s death. He was not thinking that he was a mere pawn in the statesman’s hands, that Walsingham could lay an embargo on his ships, even magnify his outburst in the Private Garden until it fetched him to the Tower. His own creed mastered him. He must live upon the troth plighted under the trees of the Closewalks. But the tears ran between his fingers and splashed in big drops upon the table. Walsingham knew that he had won. He touched Anthony gently upon the shoulder.
“Come to the big table! Let us talk.”
Henry Browne fell asleep with his face upon his arms. His candle burned down to the socket. The morning came. He was roused by the opening of his door. He saw his friend standing in the dim light, white of face and with such a look of distress in his eyes as held him dumb.
“I must go, Henry,” said Anthony.
Henry Browne got to his feet.
“You have nothing to tell me?”
“Nothing.”
“No message?”
“Not even that.”
They parted at the gates. At the corner where the London road turns up to the right, Anthony sent his servants on. He himself rode forward to Woolbeding. It was broad daylight when he reached it. The birds were noisy in the trees and on the lawns. The house, with its drawn blinds, was still asleep. For a few minutes Anthony stopped his horse before the hedge. Then he rode after his servants.
It was not he himself after all, who was to hold the needle which embroidered the pattern of his life. Was it Walsingham? Perhaps, he thought. Perhaps, too, it was God.
XXII. AT THE BEACON
In a blue dusk the ship, astern
Uplifts her slender spars
With golden lights that seem to burn
Among the silver stars.
Like fleets along a cloudy shore
The constellations creep.
Like planets on the ocean floor
Our silent course we keep.
— Newbolt
The track from St Anthony-in-Meneage up to Dennis Head was as broad as a road, now. Old men had trampled down the ferns and built a high beacon at the cliff’s edge. Old men, for no others had remained at home. All through this second week of July they had taken up their tobacco pipes and had sat about the beacon, exchanging ancient stories of the sea; or had stood, their eyes straining outwards beyond the Lizard, still as Mussulmans waiting for the rising of the sun.
Dr Morgan Evans was of their company, plucking at a coat of one and peering into the face of another. His own sight, blurred with the print of many books, showed him the world behind veils of mist, and he must use these old fellows as his spy-glass. They were civil enough, but they could never understand what he had to be so anxious about; and they answered him generally with a shake of the head.
Friday came, and on the afternoon of that day about five o’clock Timothy Trewen, without a ripple of the muscles of his leathery, lined face, drawled: “I do believe—” And then he stopped.
There were a dozen of these ancients around the beacon, and they all gathered on the brow of the headland.
“Well, they’ve a fine day for it,” said one, and they watched patiently and restfully. But nothing occurred to relieve their stolidity.
“You du be fancying things, Timothy Trewen. ’Tis your old age makes you ramble.”
Timothy Trewen repelled the slander with heat.
“I saw ‘un, I tell you,” he declared. “Sudden, like a little picter. I know the shape of ‘un. Wasn’t I the first to see the topsails of the Cacafuego off Lima from the crosstrees of the old Pelican? I could feel ‘un if I was blind, even that way off,” and he nodded towards the sea. “But I saw ‘un.”
“But you don’t see it now, Timothy.”
“No, but I will,” he answered stoutly.
“What did you think you saw?” the Reverend Doctor asked and repeated. But no one was going to wear his tongue away by answering such foolish questions. The old men watched and watched. In a little while one of them stirred, and then another swore under his breath, and then a third chuckled and his face showed pleasure. Something was happening out there, after all. The Reverend Doctor plucked and pulled and danced. “Are they coming?” he screamed.
Old Timothy Trewen became aware of the Reverend Doctor and nodded his head.
“They be coming! But I told you,” he answered.
The air was clear and the sun in the west. A serene and golden light lay upon the water. A light wind blew from the southwest. And the horizon was thronged with the square topsails of ships. As the ancients watched, the big hulls climbed over the rim into the circle of the sea. A certain order in their positions became manifest. They spread out until they formed a crescent, seven miles in length from tip to tip. One horn pointed obliquely up the Channel, one pointed toward the Scillies and the Sleeve, and in the hollow at the middle of the curve the biggest ships of all were over against the Lizard. Even Dr Morgan Evans could see them now. He forgot his anxieties.
“Wolves!” he cried in a rage, shaking his clenched fist seawards; and the old men all stared at him as if he were a natural.
“Sheep in wolves’ clothing, old gentleman,” said one of them soothingly. “Don’t ‘ee worry! There’s a sheep dog or two waiting for ‘un up to Plymouth Sound. Go along hidalgos all,” and he waved a hand of invitation to the ships. “Dons you are, doffs you’ll be,” — and the crescent moved slowly on past Falmouth and the Dodman, a city of high castles gay with banners, the Grand Fleet of Spain.
When dusk fell, the beacon on the Head was fired. As its flames rose, others answered it, inland on the high Tors, eastwards on the Dodman and Rame Head, on the Bolt and Prawle Point; on the Start and Berry Head and Lyme Regis; on Portland Bill and the great hills of Dorsetshire; on the Isle of Wight and Beachy Head; on Telegraph Hill whence a semaphore, at a later date, was to announce the victory of Waterloo; on Bignor Hill and Boro’ Hill and Leith Hill where once the Roman road had run; and before eleven o’clock that night the news had leapt to London. They knew of it at Whitehall, whither Her Grace had ridden back from Tilbury after the review of the troops. And a messenger riding in haste knocked upon the door of Sir Francis Walsingham’s house at Barn Elms, where now stands the Clubhouse of Ranelagh.
XXIII. NEWS FROM SPAIN
Now, while he turns down that cool narrow lane
Into the blackness, out of grave Madrid
All fire and shine, abrupt as when there’s slid
The stiff gold blazing pall
From some black coffin-lid.
— Robert Browning
Sir Francis was expecting him. He had, indeed, been expecting him any day these ten years. He rose from his chair at his writing desk, with a gasp of relief that now at last his life’s work was close upon its fulfilment. He said to his butler: “See that the messenger is well bestowed. No man ever brought happier news. Her Ladyship is still up?”
“In the parlour, Sir.”
With a lively step Sir Francis hurried down the corridor. He had no more fear than those old fishermen about the beacon on Dennis Head. He could have danced, but he was too grave. He could have sung, but the song would only have been a croak. Too late now for Her Majesty to practise her diplomacies or disavow her Ministers. The Armada was in the Channel making for the Narrow Seas. At the door of the parlour he recovered his sedateness, but there was a look in his face which brought his wife to her feet and her hand to her heart before he could cross the room to her.
“They are here, then!” she cried.
There were two girls by the open window. They, too, rose quickly.
“They were sighted off the Lizard this afternoon,” said Walsingham. “It’s heave and ho! now.”
He turned towards the girls. One of them was his daughter and the widow of Sir Philip Sidney; the other, Sylvia Buckhurst of Woolbeding. They had other qualities in common besides their beauty — amongst them a quiet courage with which they bore distress. Walsingham addressed himself to Sylvia.
“It is late. Yet I shall ask for your attention for a little time, even at this hour.”
“It is my father,” cried Sylvia, her great eyes fixed in alarm upon the Secretary’s face.
But a smile upon that grave countenance relieved her.
“No, Sylvia,” and there was a pleasant warmth in the pronunciation of her name. He knew all about Mr Rigby Buckhurst’s activities. Mr Buckhurst and Mr Howe, of Selhurst and Sir Arthur Chudd, of Cocking Causeway, had built themselves a pinnace of fifty tons and had armed it with half a dozen culverins and basiliscos and had scraped together a barrel or two of powder and some round shot. They were no doubt jostling and bumping with a score of small ships of the same tonnage in the bottle-neck between the Shingle Shoals and the Needles, each one in a desperate hurry to slip out into open water and sink the Spanish Fleet before someone else got at it. Mr Howe, who was an adept with the arquebus, would be laying his culverins, and Mr Buckhurst at the tiller was probably wondering whether port was left or right and starboard right or left, and Sir Arthur Chudd, his not inconsiderable weight lifted into the crosstrees, was seeing the Armada everywhere, even in the darkness. Sir Francis was not at all disturbed about Mr Buckhurst.
“No,” he said gently. “There is a matter on which I owe you great amends.”
Sylvia looked at him with the big dark eyes which read so much and told so little. But the blood ebbed from her face, leaving her white to her lips’ edge; and for a moment she could not trust her voice. Amends! There was only one matter on which he could owe her great amends, and the wound was still fresh after four years. Henry Browne had told her of the last night at Cowdray; how Anthony, with a sure plan to make all right, had been interrupted by a summons from Sir Francis Walsingham and had returned in the early morning distressed out of recognition and had ridden away without a message. Walsingham had been making her amends ever since. How long after that week was it when the first letter came to her from Lady Walsingham biddi
ng her to Barn Elms? Sylvia had gone. She might have the news she hungered for, and though, until this moment, not a hint was given to her, she found so much good will and love as brought her back again and again until she had found in the house a second home.
“I’ll come with you as far as the ogre’s cave,” said Frances Sidney, the daughter, and she slipped her hand under Sylvia’s arm. They followed Walsingham to his library. At the door Frances Sidney kissed her friend tenderly.
“God be with you, my dear!” she whispered.
She herself had had two years with Philip. Though he, the poet and hero, had died and their child, too, after him, those years were hers. Nothing could take them away. They had been. But her friend?
“If only!” she whispered, with the tears in her eyes, and again: “Who knows?” and so pushed Sylvia into the library and shut the door upon them.
Walsingham led her to a chair at his table and cleared a space in front of her.
“I had no means out of Spain,” he began. “From France, from Italy, from the Netherlands, from Turkey, as much information as I could wish for. But none out of Spain. And nothing was more necessary. There was Her Majesty inclining towards another Majesty and thinking they two could settle their quarrels without the impertinent interference of her Ministers. She could never be persuaded, besides, to read a note longer than one sheet of paper could hold. So all must be true and exact. Else,” and he hazarded a smile, “I ran some risk of getting my ears boxed.”
Oh, it was good news, then, that he had to give her! Not otherwise would he have touched so tender a point. She had starved for four years for any news at all, lost in perplexities and forebodings and sustained only by the completeness of her trust in her lover. And now it was here, and good! No wonder the colour came back to her face and her eyes shone.
“But I had no means out of Spain,” Walsingham repeated. “The talk of the harbours, the reports of the bankers in Genoa and Florence and Frankfort, the gossip picked up by wandering men — to be sure. But I wanted an ear in the Escorial, a mind which could sift what the ear heard, and a hand that could write it down — thus.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 628