“Would that be very brave?” Cynthia asked in a meek small voice.
Robin threw back his head.
“It would be comfortable.”
“No doubt,” she answered. “But must you be comfortable?”
Robin swung round to her.
“Do you believe this slander?”
“No.”
“Then I shall stay,” said he.
“It is a matter entirely for you to decide,” Cynthia replied sedately.
“It is, and I have decided,” said Robin firmly.
He needed no advice from anyone, thank you, on a subject so personal. He would outface the winks and nudges of the whole county. Was he a coward that he should run away from them? Not he! But let them beware how they spoke — good Mr Ferret above all.
“So it is Mr Stafford who is composing this masque,” he said.
“With your good help,” said she.
Suddenly he turned to her.
“And I am to play a part in it?”
“Most important. You lead all into the great hall.”
“A herald?”
“Well,” Cynthia drawled out the word. “A kind of herald. A herald in a manner of speaking.”
“A servant, then!”
“Yes.”
“I knew it.”
Robin rose to his feet petulantly and sat down again.
“I wear a leather jerkin and linen galligaskins,” he exclaimed indignantly.
Cynthia’s lips twitched. “Boy Robin,” she murmured under her breath. Aloud she said:
“If they can be made in time.”
“Carlo Manucci,” said Robin.
“Carlo Manucci?” and Cynthia repeated the name. This queer little scene was to live in Cynthia’s memories so that each word that was spoken from the moment when Robin broke into the room stood out, each movement which the pair of them made fell into its place. She was laughing at the boy now and at his woeful face because for an evening his fine clothes must be laid aside. She was to remember it with a wistful amusement and with it that name of Carlo Manucci, so that great harm was done and great perils incurred. She would have given very much to let the name pass without a question and slip altogether from her recollections. But she dwelled upon it.
“Carlo Manucci? Who is he?”
“A servant in another play. I played him, and Mr Stafford arranged that I should. I played him abominably.”
“In a leather jerkin and linen galligaskins?” Cynthia asked demurely.
Robin nodded his head gloomily.
“And Humphrey is to be the Prince of Padua, no doubt.”
“Oh, no, no,” Cynthia returned. “This is a masque. There are the Virtues in it, and allegories. Humphrey is the God in a Cloud.”
“Better still!”
“He comes down to earth and marries the Golden Nymph.”
Robin swung round towards the girl impetuously.
“If Stafford thinks that the servant — —”
“. . . In his leather jerkin and linen galligaskins,” said Cynthia.
“. . . Is going to stand humbly aside whilst —— No!” He clenched his fist, and then he checked himself. “I get hot for nothing. You are playing the virginal.”
At this point Cynthia should no doubt have rated Robin for his impudence or sailed majestically from the room. But in truth there was no impudence at all in Robin’s outburst. Sincerity and passion rang in his voice, and Cynthia, hearing them, feeling the chords of her own heart vibrating to them, sat still and silent, now pale, now red. She had adored it when Robin broke in upon her scales with his look of romance and his debonair humour. But — but — would not the passage of this week have been easier and smoother if he had stayed outside that door? Not even in the pretence and imagery of a masque was Humphrey Bannet to marry her. So the young hothead at her side. Not five minutes ago he had been speculating whether he should stay or leave some excuse and rush off before the party returned from the day’s hawking. A word from her and he would have gone.
“But it would have been a false word,” she reflected, “and I stopped him from going.”
She stole a glance at him as he sat at her side, his face thrust forward mutinous and sulky above his ruff. But even so she must smile. “Boy Robin,” she said to herself and knew that even now she would stop him again, if word of hers could and he threatened again to go.
“Humphrey shall be the God in the Cloud. It is very well. And I shall be the servant. That is very well too. But to quote Sir Francis Walsingham, ‘We shall see what we shall see,’ ” he said portentously.
What they did see was the God in the Cloud. Humphrey Bannet burst into the room, his long riding boots bespattered and the dust upon his clothes.
“Cynthia!” he cried and saw the pair of them sitting side by side. He paused for a second.
“Ah, Robin!” as Robin got up without any haste. “You are very welcome. My father is changing his dress, but he will be coming down in a few minutes.”
He took Robin’s hand. It was coldly said and coldly done. It was not known by Robin that in the Norris family and the Bannet, though the one was Protestant and the other Catholic, there was serious talk of a marriage between Humphrey and Cynthia.
CHAPTER VI. Robin Dines in Strange Company
SIR ROBERT BANNET greeted Robin warmly in the hall as the party assembled there before supper.
“I am very glad to see you in my house, Mr Aubrey,” he said, and taking his young guest by the arm he made him known to a group of people here and there.
Sir Robert was a soft white wily man between fifty and sixty years of age who so far had walked carefully and safely in times which were not too easy for men of his belief. He was a declared schismatic, willing to pay his fine for absenting himself on Sundays from the parish church when called upon to do so. And this was seldom, until later in this very year 1586. Elizabeth was no crusader. Tolerant by nature and tolerant by policy, she could wink her eyes even at treason, if to wink would help the commonwealth and do even a little to obliterate the cursed line of creed which split the kingdom like a deep fissure in a fair surface. Sir Robert was left to walk his wary path untroubled. A traveller caught by the night might haply, looking down into the valley, see the old chapel of Hilbury Melcombe brightly lit by many candles and hear the organ rolling out upon the darkness the solemn music of a mass. But if on arriving at Dorchester or Wareham he laid an information, he would be sharply told to mind his business and not meddle in matters which needed better brains than his. Sir Robert, sleek and smiling, made friends with all, and Robin noticed that a fair proportion of the forty guests assembled in the hall was like himself of the Protestant faith.
He noticed too that the story about himself was widely known. He was received with something of the same incredulity which had been shown by Cynthia Norris. No one expected the miser of Abbot’s Gap to wear the look of this young court gallant. Nudges and winks there were too, and when Sir Robert was called to other civilities Robin found himself alone, his cheeks burning with shame. A voice behind him said clearly:
“Well, well, it is quite in nature. The prettiest butterflies were once grubs, though to be sure I never believed it of robins.”
Robin did not turn round, but he had a hope that he would remember that voice. Mr Stafford slipped up to his side and trusted that his old pupil had not forgotten his tutor.
“I have the liveliest recollections of Mr Stafford,” said Robin.
“There is to be a masque,” said Mr Stafford. “A simple, foolish affair which we shall eke out with country songs. A few words each of us will write. The God of the Cloud, which is of course rain, marries the Golden Nymph, which is of course the earth, and prosperity comes of it. You are to act in it, Mr Aubrey, if you will be so obliging.”
Robin nodded his head.
“I am to be the servant who brings all in.”
“Yes, most important. We shall make our own dresses,” said Mr Stafford.
“Y
ou need not trouble about mine,” said Robin. “I have one which will do very well. I wear it on my thrifty days, so you may be confident that it suits my mean condition and is sufficiently threadbare.”
Robin spoke loudly so that as many as stood near might hear, and in a voice of extreme friendliness. For the first time since he had entered the hall Robin heard one or two laugh with him instead of at him. Mr Stafford stepped back a pace, at a loss how to take the words, and with a look of fear in his eyes. A pretty girl to whom Sir Robert had presented him but whose name he had not caught stepped to his side.
“That was well said, Mr Aubrey,” she cried in a clear and pleasant voice, and as the others fell away she continued in a lower key, whilst a smile dimpled her face, “I am Cynthia’s cousin, Olivia Cheveril.”
“You are to be the Golden Nymph,” said Robin.
“For the moment I am bidden — but I shall not tell you by whom — to be a shepherdess. But on my faith,” and her smile broadened into a laugh, “I never saw a lamb which stood in such little need of shepherding.”
At that moment the doors of the great chamber were thrown open and supper was announced. The meal was served at three tables set in the form of a crossbeam and two uprights laid on its side on the ground. Robin found himself with Olivia Cheveril at his side at one of the side tables. He looked eagerly about him for Cynthia and found her at the chief table with Humphrey Bannet at her elbow. Humphrey Bannet was talking to her, but her eyes were wandering a trifle anxiously over the guests. They found Robin after a while, and so sweet a smile lit up her face that it set his heart throbbing, and the colour reddening and paling in his face. It needed his companion’s voice to call him down to earth.
“And now that we have trod down the stars,” said Olivia drily, “shall we nibble?”
Course succeeded course. Fish, plaice, conger and whiting with cunning sauces of saffron and ambergris; pasties of fallow deer, wild fowl and capons, garnished with green peas, and salads and sweet potatoes and artichokes; great joints of beef and mutton, were served upon Sir Robert’s silver plate. Sir Robert Bannet kept abreast of the times in his great house. The guests ate with the newfangled silver forks, and drank beer and muscadine and Rhenish wine from the new Venice glasses, and finished the meal with sugar meats and apricots and bumpers of charneco. Robin hardly knew what he ate and hardly was aware of his neighbours, though from time to time he regarded them vaguely with kindness and a great pity. Olivia talked of the masque and wondered how in the world they were going to present it.
“We have but the six days to write, learn and rehearse it, to make the dresses and paint the scenery. There are to be clouds solid enough to support Gods and Virtues, and therefore solid enough to break the heads of us poor humans below.”
At that a soldierly youth with a frank and open face leaned over the table from a place a little lower down.
“Nay, Mistress Olivia, never fear for the clouds. I shall hang them up and fix the ropes. Trust to John Savage. I have fought in the Low Countries, where we were put to such shifts that nothing comes amiss now. Your clouds shall stand firm as earth itself and then swing to the floor as lightly as a feather.”
“We shall be much beholden to you,” said Olivia.
“Put your faith in John Savage,” said the other, and he turned back to his corner of the table.
“Faith, John,” said a pale, contemplative young man who sat next to Savage, “is of two kinds. It may be a private, independent judgment, or a compulsion of religion. Now which is yours?”
The soldier turned eyes of reverence upon the speaker.
“You shall tell me, Anthony,” he said, and he listened with the humility due to an oracle whilst Anthony, with divisions and subdivisions, expounded these high themes.
“I love to hear you talk,” John Savage exclaimed in admiration, “though when you’ve done I don’t know whether I am standing on my head or my heels!”
Anthony, whose family name Robin was in a moment to hear, smiled in a faded sort of way, and a third man, older than the other two, broke in upon them noisily:
“My good Babington, was this the sort of talk which occupied my Lady Shrewsbury’s table when you were a page in her household? I remember my dear friend, the Count of Aremberg, saying to me over a posset: ‘I love you, Captain Fortescue, for you never mix your wine with philosophy.’ The Duke d’Alençon made a third at our little gathering, and he patted me on the shoulder and agreed.”
The three names of Babington, Savage and Fortescue were to be known all over England within the month. Robin knew nothing of them at this time, but he was amazed to see three men so dissimilar brought together in so close a conjunction. The plain soldier, a man of his hands, the dilettante philosopher with his meticulous arguments, and the flamboyant Captain Fortescue. The last indeed was the oddest of the three, and Robin wondered how in the world he came to find himself a guest at Hilbury Melcombe. Never had he heard so many great names dragged into the conversation and flung together, with Captain Fortescue as bosom friend of them all. He was as fleering and boastful a talker as a captain of fortune on Hounslow Heath. He was dressed to match his words, in a slashed satin honey-coloured doublet, a grey cloak plastered with gold lace, and breeches of blue velvet.
“We are to have a masque here, are we?” he cried. “When I dined with His Grace the Duke of Guise in Paris we had the players from the King’s Theatre to entertain us. I never saw such company. Bernardino de Mendoza was amongst the least of ’em.”
Mr Babington jogged Captain Fortescue’s elbow. The name of Mendoza had rung out in Captain Fortescue’s high, feverish voice, and it had reached to the head table. It was not a lucky name to be heard in an English house. For not one of those present but knew that Bernardino de Mendoza, Spanish ambassador, had been drummed incontinently out of the kingdom two years before for complicity in Throckmorton’s conspiracy. Sir Robert himself caught the name and glanced indignantly at the offender. Captain Fortescue, however, was not abashed.
“As I say,” he continued, “the fellow was of no account. He’s the Spanish ambassador to France nowadays and therefore one can’t but meet him, if you live hand-in-glove with the gentility. An alarming fellow, Mr Babington! He said things — I’ll warrant there’s no truth in them” — and he lowered his voice — but Robin heard a whisper of “sixty thousand men, sir, with Parma at their head.”
He heard no more, however, for Sir Robert, whether from fear of the indiscretions of Captain Fortescue or because the meal had come to its end, rose from his chair in the centre of the long table. He said a word or two to his neighbours and was making a circuit of the tables when his musician, Mr Nicholas Bools, a small, round, consequential man, went up to Robin.
“There will be singing tomorrow, Mr Aubrey, in preparation for the masque. We shall meet after supper in the long gallery. You sing a part at first sight, of course?”
Robin agreed. It was the ordinary accomplishment of a gentleman, and he had not neglected it.
“As well as another, I hope. I have not the gamut of a blackbird, but I have more notes than a cuckoo.”
“And all crotchets, Mr Aubrey, I’ll be bound.”
Captain Fortescue was standing opposite to Robin and bending forward with both his hands upon the table amongst the silver plates and the shining glass. His eyes, hostile and cunning, gloated; his round, fattish face was flushed. He was laughing a little to himself with a sort of watch-me leer towards Savage and Anthony Babington. It would have been obvious a mile away that he was going to be very sharp and witty at Robin’s expense. Olivia Cheveril gasped at Robin’s side.
“Very crotchety singing, Mr Aubrey, and a great economy of music, I’ll be bound. Music’s a golden thing, so we may be sure you’ll not squander it. A few crotchets, no doubt — —”
“But no quavers, Captain Fortescue,” Robin answered quietly, and he laughed easily and naturally. “I will sing you point and counterpoint, the two of us alone, in a quiet corner of the par
k tomorrow before breakfast, and we’ll find out if your singing is less clumsy than your wit.”
Captain Fortescue drew back, astonished and disturbed. He had thought to put this boy down, to see him shrink in confusion and himself to sail off with a flirt of his embroidered cape. And here the boy was quietly bidding him to a duel. But before he could think of an answer John Savage drew him back.
“I am the man to do the singing for you, Captain Fortescue. At five in the morning, good Mr Fire-eater,” he said hotly to Robin Aubrey. “I know the prettiest place for a singing match — —”
“No, no!”
A suave voice spoke, and Sir Robert thrust himself smoothly between Savage and Captain Fortescue.
“Mr Savage is ready for everything, from clouds in the great hall to a singing match in the park. But we shall sing only after supper in the long gallery, each one taking up his part in great amity. Tonight the ladies bid us dance there, and that too in great amity and friendship.”
White and soft and smiling, Sir Robert led off Captain Fortescue and John Savage, and Robin noticed with surprise that he seemed to pay a special deference to the ridiculous captain. What in the world could Sir Robert Bannet of Hilbury Melcombe have in common with so flighty a person? He turned round to put the question to Olivia and discovered that she had gone from his side. In her place stood a man of middle age and middle height plainly dressed in a suit of a mulberry colour, with the most unnoticeable face. The nose was a nose, the mouth a mouth, the eyes a dull grey or a dull green, whichever you choose, the complexion neither tanned by the weather nor pale with an indoor life but just leaden, and even his voice had no individual tone by which it could be remembered.
“I sat upon your other side at the table, Mr Aubrey,” said this man. “You were not aware of it. No, I beg you not to excuse yourself. I am not conspicuous and I prefer it so. I ask you to observe the arrangement of these tables.”
They were alone now in the great chamber. Robin looked at the tables. He could see nothing odd in the way they were set, but his companion was looking at him with a sharp birdlike glance as though he should.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 666