“One of these days,” Humphrey repeated impatiently. “The smallest difference made between us bites and stings me until I can’t sleep for thinking of it. I hate myself almost as much as I hate Robin.”
“Differences?” Mr Stafford asked, pressing him.
“Here’s a visitor tonight who mustn’t be kept waiting,” Humphrey explained sullenly. “For whom? Does any visitor of note ever come to see me? Who is it?” he cried, starting up in a fury. “I’m going to find out. Let him visit the two of us! I’m going to find out.”
But Mr Stafford thrust himself between Humphrey and the door.
“Not yet, Humphrey,” he said. “Listen!”
For a moment they stood over against one another, the tutor and the pupil. Then they heard a door close across the corridor.
CHAPTER III. The Secret Visitor
WHEN ROBIN WENT out from the common room he saw that the door of his study facing him stood open and that a single candle burned upon the mantelshelf. But he did not at once cross the passage. He leaned back against the wall by the side of the common-room door, with the light from the candle on the mantelshelf opposite flickering across his face. He looked so wan and tired that Dakcombe feared he was going to fall and moved to his side to support him. But Robin shook his head. He had been pressed by his tutor’s jeers to the limits of his endurance. He stood breathing deeply like a man who had run a mile. His hands fluttered at his sides. Then he raised them and hid his face in them. He wanted mothering at that moment; but there was no one there but an inarticulate servingman, no one who could understand the poignancy to a boy of little things. After a second or two, however, he dropped his hands.
“Thank you, Dakcombe,” he said gratefully.
He was imagining that Dakcombe, who had served his father before he had served him, had overheard Mr Stafford and had come to his rescue. He did not believe that any visitor had called upon him at ten o’clock of the night, or that Mrs Parker would have admitted him if he had.
He went forward into his study, shut the door and crossed the width of the room to the candle on the mantelshelf. It was a long room of dark panels and sombre curtains, and the solitary candle made one small pool of light in a wide place of shadows. Robin stood staring into the flame unaware that his eyes were fixed on it and lost in some world of his own imagining, until a quiet voice spoke from the seat in the window.
“I should have sought you out, Mr Aubrey, at a more convenient time. But secretaries are not their own masters and must seize occasion as it comes.”
Robin swung round on his heel and stared towards the window. His eyes, blinded by the candle flame, saw nothing but candle flame for a moment, and then through it, as though pushing a pair of tawny curtains apart, stepped that white-faced, black-bearded Italianate man whom the queen had called her Moor.
“You were watching me, sir,” said Robin very directly. He almost accused. He certainly asked for an explanation.
“I was recognizing you, Mr Aubrey,” said the other, advancing to the fireplace.
Robin smiled, and the warmth of his smile was not due to the ready aptness of the reply. He took a taper and lit the remaining three candles upon the mantelshelf; and after a moment’s pause he crossed to the window at the end of the room opposite to that where his visitor had been seated. By this window an old prie-dieu stood, and with the air of one reverently celebrating a great event he lit two other candles on the top ledge of it, between which an ivory crucifix of Italian workmanship hung upon two nails. Then he came back to his visitor, the smile still warm upon his mouth and a great friendliness in his eyes.
“I light all my candles to thank Sir Francis Walsingham for the kind heart which brought him here.”
“You know me, then?”
“I heard you say that you had been my father’s friend.”
Walsingham’s face was naturally cold and grave and harassed, but it lit up now and softened. He became very human, and amusement changed altogether the melancholy of his eyes, the amusement of a man recognizing his own defects.
“I owed a great deal to your father, Robin, when I was a Member of Parliament for Lyme and he the great gentleman of Bridport. I make friends with difficulty. It is my fault. I have some barrier of manner, not, I believe, of heart, which stands between me and others. I try to be genial and seem to be false. I make a jest and it has lost its savour before it is told. If I say to a man, ‘I like you,’ I make him ask, ‘Now what aim has he in saying that?’ If I tell a story, however short, I am aware long before I have done that I am winding up some dreary dead thing out of a deep well. I see men who jostle each other by chance in a doorway and go on arm in arm for the rest of their days. I envy such men. Only once has that happened to me, and the other man was your father. We had, to be sure, something in common. He was a great traveller; I spent much of my youth abroad. But in other things he was my opposite and complement, bold and free, with a great laugh which shook the rafters — —”
“Until my mother died,” said Robin.
Sir Francis nodded his head.
“At your birth, Robin,” he added gently. “After that he left Bridport and built Abbot’s Gap in the Purbeck Hills at the other extremity of the county. He became, I am afraid, a restless and unhappy man. You should know better than I. For I saw him but once or twice during those later years. But my love of him has not diminished, and so, since Her Majesty was moved to speak a shrewd word about his son on her return to the castle this afternoon, I pushed my duties aside so that that son might hear what she said from my lips before I return tomorrow to Whitehall.”
Robin was moved by the great secretary’s consideration. He had been wincing through the evening under the disparagements of Mr Stafford, which stung none the less keenly because they were crude. The courtesy of the statesman was by contrast comforting as wine; and that the statesman was stirred by any reasons but kindness and old memories did not occur to him. To thrust his papers to one side and pay a visit to a mere schoolboy at ten o’clock of the night! Kindness and old memories could alone explain it.
The fireplace was set in a shallow recess. Robin set a heavy chair forward.
“No one, sir,” he said with a laugh, “shall charge you with disloyalty if you are comfortably seated before you repeat to me what the Queen’s Grace said. And my study will be honoured.”
Whilst Walsingham seated himself Robin stood back against the panels of the recess, the fireplace on his left hand, the side wall stretching out on his right. Walsingham so turned the chair that he faced Robin.
“Her Majesty said that when she called you out dismay was writ so large upon your face and so sharp an ague set you trembling, your colour so violently flamed and faded that she wondered whether you would ever come to her. Yet you were only the better nerved to play your part well, to say the unrehearsed fit word, to bear yourself as a gallant gentleman before his queen. From such, she was pleased to add, the State and the Prince got always their most fruitful servants.”
Robin drew in a breath. Again it is to be borne in mind all that Elizabeth meant to all that was generous and loyal in the youth of that day. She was forty-seven years old, and if you looked closely enough you might see, no doubt, that she wore a wig, and if your memory for colours was precise you might recognize that it was a trifle redder than the wig she wore a year ago. But youth saw nothing of that. Her figure was young, her eyes bright, her movements stately when she would and swift when she would. She was their inspiration. Years ago she had set herself to win their love. What had once been policy had long since become an impulse from her heart, and therefore a thousand times more puissant and compelling. She was tolerant, she neither taxed nor molested them, nor wasted them in foreign entanglements. Louder and louder was growing the confident sound of her people marching behind her. It is no wonder that Robin was moved by her praise, that his face shone and his heart beat faster.
“The queen said that, sir?” he asked.
“Mark the words, Robin. T
he State and the Prince,” and Sir Francis spoke leaning forward in his chair. “To stand gracefully in the presence chamber! To carry a fan or a prayer book! To drop prettily on a silken knee and say that Her Majesty is served! Service to the Prince — lackey’s service, — but not service to the State. The State and the Prince, Robin.”
As he spoke, the secretary saw the boy’s face change. A wariness crept over it. It was not merely, then, to show a kindness to the son of an old friend that Sir Francis had torn himself from his affairs. Robin was at once upon his guard and the statesman in front of him knew it. But he did not betray his knowledge.
“You learn here the living languages?” he asked easily, as though he were merely interested in the school’s curriculum.
“Yes sir.”
“That is well. Knowledge of the living tongues alone helps one to understand the diversity of men. Your father spoke many. No doubt he grounded you.”
“He did.”
Robin’s face was a mask now, his voice a level monotone. Of hours in the library gilded with the romance of some old poet of France or Italy, of days in the saddle on the crest of the Purbeck Hills, or in a fishing boat on the sunlit water of Warbarrow Bay when George Aubrey and he, friends of an age rather than tutor and pupil or father and son, had played at being foreigners — of all these memories not a trace showed in him. His father had grounded him, yes, but during the last five solitary years Robin had schooled himself.
“You speak French, then?”
“I can make a shift with it.”
“Italian?”
“Passably well, perhaps.”
“And Spanish?”
“With the accent of Italy.”
Sir Francis was silent for a moment. Then:
“That is no great matter.”
He stretched out his legs and leaned back in his chair.
“I have no news out of Spain,” he said indifferently. “From France, from Italy, all that I need. But from Spain and the Portugals none.”
Robin did not answer. The wary look had passed from his face, as the time for wariness had passed. He had discovered his opponent’s game.
“The Holy Inquisition has seen to it.”
Sir Francis shot the words out suddenly and bitterly with his eyes on the boy’s face. Surely now he would see it quiver, its set obstinacy dissolve. The same fury which burned in his eyes would leap into the boy’s. One movement Robin made and one alone. His right hand rose to the breast of his doublet and fingered something hidden beneath it. Doubtless, thought Walsingham, that flimsy knot of ribbons which was as like as not to become the lad’s undoing. But with the gesture Robin answered calmly and reasonably:
“No doubt, sir, if the need should come, you will find the means under your hand.”
Walsingham was a patient man. He had to be with so changeful and elusive a mistress as Elizabeth. But he was almost at the end of his patience. Robin wasn’t the idiot his remark made him out to be. Even if the wide-spaced eyes and the sensitive features were unreliable, his conduct this afternoon in the courtyard before the lower school was evidence enough. Robin was holding out against him with a purpose; very likely a trumpery purpose such as to taste the colour of romance at a court with a queen at the head of it; but nevertheless a purpose sufficiently definite and strong to harass Sir Francis Walsingham. He took another way.
“I have something to tell you which concerns your father. A secret which he and I shared alone, and after tonight you and I will share alone. Nay, I am practising no cheat upon you. Lay your suspicions aside and listen to me. On a night in May eleven years ago —— We cannot be overheard? There are those in this house who must not overhear us — —” And Walsingham drew back in his chair with a gasp. “You think I am play-acting! I am not.”
Was there such another exasperating boy in the world? Walsingham laughed suddenly and quite humanly at the absurdity of his position. He with his ear against the panel and his eye at the keyhole of all the council chambers in Europe except Spain — he, Her Majesty’s principal secretary, he, Burghley’s right-hand man, to be questioned at every turn and borne down by an obstinate schoolboy! Comic! Maddening but comic.
That laugh, however, served his turn. Robin relaxed and answered with a smile.
“I beg your pardon, sir, we shall not be overheard. Dakcombe will be standing at the door. On a night in May eleven years ago . . .”
“Mark the date well! On the afternoon of May the twelfth, 1570, a messenger of mine brought a prayer for help to your father, George Aubrey. George Aubrey left Abbot’s Gap at nightfall, and riding by the great heath and Cerne Abbas he crossed the shoulder of the down to my house at Sydling St Nicholas. I sent my servants early to their beds. I set open the gates and went down to the broken cross where the road turns up to my house; and in the dark of the morning I heard the clatter of his horse.”
Sir Francis was leaning forward and speaking in a low voice. He was making his story as romantic and vivid as he could, that it might strike with the more lively force upon the imagination of the boy propped against the wall in front of him. But it gained upon him too as he told it so that it rang true.
“We tied up his horse in the big barn at the side of Sydling Court, and I brought your father secretly into the house. There I besought his help. Pope Pius the Fifth, the good man, had excommunicated Her Majesty in February of that year. The bull freed all Catholic subjects of Her Majesty from their allegiance. But it did more, Mr Aubrey. It made her assassination a godly act, a deed which conferred money in this world and paradise in the next. But the assassination of a prince is not to other princes a politic proceeding. Elizabeth gone that way, it would be ‘whose turn next?’ The Valois, Philip of Spain, the Emperor Charles would have none of it. The bull was not published. But I, Mr Aubrey, wanted it published.”
“You, sir?”
“Yes, I. The queen walks unguarded. Through her palace at Whitehall runs a public road. Her garden at Richmond is free to whoso wills to wander there. Never lived a woman so careless of her safety as Her Grace.”
“But if the bull was not published?”
“It was nonetheless known to every traitor in the realm, the reward and the sure place amongst the saints. Well, I wanted it known to the honest people too, so that in her own despite Her Majesty should be saved. A dagger in the dark is more dangerous than a dagger in the daylight. And I was right. For when the bull was published there broke out such a cry of wrath in this country as rang a tocsin at every corner of Europe. I talked to your father that night.”
“How was he concerned?” Robin asked.
“I had a copy of the bull. George Aubrey was a loyal Protestant, a country gentleman never seen at court, a man of a high spirit. He rode away that night with my copy of the bull in his pocket, and he rode towards London. He reached London on the morning of the fifteenth, and at six o’clock that morning the bull was posted on the door of the Bishop of London’s palace. It was posted there by a Catholic, who suffered the extreme penalty; but if it had not been, your father would have nailed it the next night on St. Paul’s cross itself.”
He spoke with a rising voice, sitting erect, his eyes burning and a gloomy passion in his face. He repeated his words, making of them a challenge to the son:
“Your father would have nailed it the next night on St Paul’s cross itself.”
“And suffered the extreme penalty too,” said Robin.
Walsingham did not flinch from that rejoinder.
“Very like,” he said quietly. “It had the look of treachery. We should have been hard put to it to prove it loyalty. He did the great service to the realm, the service which earns no honours — nay, which may stain a name with ignominy until that name be borne by no one on the earth.”
Walsingham’s spiritual home was Geneva. A kindly father, a domesticated householder, a munificent patron of letters, a scholar with the new Italian taste for clipped and geometrical gardens, all these characters he was, but they did not make h
is strength. He got that from his faith. He was of the creed of Calvin. He would have poured out the money of the realm for it. He would have drawn his sword for it any time these last ten years since he had been Her Majesty’s principal secretary. He would have forced Elizabeth to draw hers and ruined England but for her nimbler mind, which would not have her people taxed and delighted in windings and twistings which left her secretary dizzy. He sat with the fire of a fanatic burning in his deep and gloomy eyes, watching the boy against the wall. George Aubrey was his best friend. But he had reckoned up his qualities and used them without a qualm, even though they might have brought him to the hazard of shame and the executioner’s disembowelling knife.
“Why, sir, do you tell me this secret?” Robin asked, and again the answer came:
“I have no news out of Spain and in a few years must have.”
Robin shook his head. By chance or by design — and which it was Robin never knew — Walsingham had pressed him into this corner between the fireplace and the side wall of the recess. He could not escape without the appearance of flight. He was held at a disadvantage which confused him. Yet he must stand firm, using clear words but keeping his purpose still hidden within his heart, his own secret treasure.
“What!” cried the secretary, torn betwixt anger and scorn. “You will hold out against me, will you? I must keep my vigil night and day at a grip with great matters of the realm, and I am to be baffled by a schoolboy! What thought burns in you?”
“My father died in Spain,” Robin answered simply.
An excuse? Or a reason? Or a fear that the like fate should happen to him? Walsingham could not tell. There was not the quiver of a muscle in the boy’s face, not a break in his voice. The voice was pitched in a higher note, but that was all.
“I heard so.”
“But you know.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 663