“Do you see nothing in it?”
“No,” Robin answered with a shake of the head. “I see one long table and one at each end supporting it. It all seems very usual in a great house.”
Robin was rather inclined to look towards the door. There was to be dancing in the long gallery, and there was a maid up there perhaps — he dared to hope it — wondering with some indignation why he tarried.
“Yet it is a pattern to be remembered, Mr Aubrey, even though you see no mystery in it now,” the other observed. “One of these days I think you will find it used for a different purpose than the convenience of a meal.”
There was no special emphasis laid upon any word, but the words were strange in themselves, and a curious discomfort began to steal over Robin. It could not come from this insignificant person nor from the ambiguity of his speech, nor from the actual arrangement of the tables, he assured himself. Yet he was troubled, so that for the moment he forgot the long gallery and his feet ceased to tingle to be off. He hated mysteries, for they seemed to threaten the secret aim of his life. It seemed to him that the candles burned suddenly dim and the air grew suddenly cold — so cold that he did actually shiver.
“My name is Gregory,” the stranger continued. “I am Arthur Gregory, of Lyme, and I had the honour of knowing both your father and your mother. It is curious that we should meet in this house, being both of us Protestants. But Sir Robert Bannet is a wise man and believes in boiling Protestant and Catholic in the same pot.”
There was a kind of sneer in Mr Gregory’s voice, and Robin answered quickly:
“Well, he has excellent warrant for that, since so Her Majesty has been doing ever since she began to reign.” And with that remark Robin got himself out of the room.
He hurried up the stairs to the long gallery and watched with a cloudy brow Cynthia Norris dancing a pavane with Humphrey Bannet. But she was his partner afterwards in a lavolta, and the touch of her hand in his and the throbbing of her heart against his as he swung her round in the leap lifted him again to the stars. There is a pause in that dance when partner stands opposite to partner with the feet together. During one of these pauses Cynthia chided him, though with a smile in her eyes and a quivering of her lips which denied her anger.
“Will you quarrel with everyone, sir?”
“Nay, I quarrel with none, Andromeda. A fine captain thought to put me down. But that is done with.”
“I am glad. I met you but today, and I should grieve to drop rosemary into your grave before the week’s out. We take two steps to the right.”
Robin took two steps to the right, protesting that nobody under a general should ever kill him so long as he held a place in a corner of her thoughts. At the next pause she said:
“You looked at Humphrey with the moodiest eyes that ever I saw,” and this with a quick glance at him and away again.
“He danced with you.”
“And should he not? This is his father’s house, and I am a guest in it. I have learnt something of natural history today.”
“Share your knowledge with me!”
“There are brown bears in the Purbeck Hills.”
Robin stepped forward to gather her for the leap, but she recoiled in mock terror.
“God ‘a’ mercy, would you eat me, sir?”
“Yes indeed!” said he, as his arms went about her. “Bears eat honey twice a day. It benefits their health.”
He swung around, and their feet flew.
CHAPTER VII. Metamorphosis of Captain Fortescue
FOR THESE TWO a week of enchantment followed.
They lived within a golden mist, each minute bringing its amazement — a chance meeting in the rose garden, a pair of horses which would lag side by side and very close, a discovery that each shared the same miraculous thoughts. After dinner, when the elders smoked in the arbours, there were the rehearsals of the masque in the long gallery. True, Cynthia sat at the virginal and Robin declaimed his part upon the stage, but their eyes met and she would miss a note and he a cue, and in a sweet confusion all must be done again. These unspoken messages which neither had been able to interpret on the afternoon when Perseus broke in upon Andromeda were now as easy to read as the alphabet. Robin had long since explained to her how he had thought to find a little girl practising her scales with a dragon of a governess at her side. There had been destiny in that — and kindness. The household might hoot at him for a miser if it chose, and he would meet it with a smiling face. He had an armour against it — a new sort of armour which had nothing in common with the watchful secrecy of his boyhood. And though odd things were happening during that week at Hilbury Melcombe, they hardly disturbed the dreams of these two infatuates.
But odd things were happening. On the Wednesday, for instance, at dinnertime, Dakcombe, greyer by four more years than when he had waited upon the boy at Eton, brought over a dozen letters which had been delivered at Abbot’s Gap by the carrier. Robin ran upstairs with them and arranged them unopened on a little table by his window. They were letters of great importance to him and would need thought and a very careful perusal. There was no time for that now, with dinner smoking upon the table, and it was more prudent to leave them with their seals unbroken against the time when he would have leisure. But dinner was followed by a rehearsal, and it was not until four o’clock of the afternoon that Robin was free. He went up to his room, but as he reached out his hand to take up the letters he dropped it again at his side. He looked round the room uneasily. Nothing so far as he remembered had been disturbed. He opened a coffer and pulled out one or two drawers. Nothing had been touched. Yet the order of the letters had been changed. The one on the top — he recollected the handwriting quite clearly — was no longer on the top.
He sat down in a chair and for a moment was troubled. Someone had come into the room and handled those letters whilst he was held by the rehearsal in the gallery on the floor below. He turned them over one by one. He carried them to the window. Not a seal had been tampered with, and they were all sealed. But someone had been curious. Who?
Mr Stafford, Sir Robert’s secretary, had been directing the rehearsal. Robin was certain that he had never left the gallery while it continued. Robin ran anxiously over the names of his fellow guests. There was only one whom he could reasonably suspect.
“Captain Fortescue,” he decided.
Fortescue, a braggart, an adventurer, with his loud talk and his flaunting clothes, was a little out of his place in this company. He had boasted of an acquaintance with the Duc de Guise, the hottest of Elizabeth’s enemies in France — aye, and with Bernardino de Mendoza too. Robin, as he recalled Fortescue’s boastings at supper on the first night of his visit, grew more certain and more and more alarmed. After all, this was a Catholic house. Messengers were always travelling backwards and forwards between England and the Continent, plotting the liberation of Mary Queen of Scots and a revolution which would dethrone Elizabeth. Robin remembered that when Sir Robert had led Captain Fortescue away from the supper table he had shown to him a deference rather difficult to understand. Robin examined the seals upon the letters again and with an intense care. They had not been broken — that was certain — and without breaking them no one could have read a word of what the letters held.
Robin read them all now with the door of his room locked. It was well that no Captain Fortescue had read them, he reflected with a gasp of relief, and he burned them all then and there upon his hearth, beating out the flakes until nothing was left but a pile of minute and indecipherable ashes. At supper he watched Captain Fortescue, but not by a glance or a question did the captain betray the slightest interest in Robin’s correspondence.
On the following night the second of these strange events occurred. Robin was waked from his sleep by the clatter of a horse ridden at a gallop. It was Robin’s habit to sleep with his windows flung wide to the air and the curtains open; and out of the quiet of the night the noise broke with a startling urgency. It grew nearer, louder. Someone
was coming to Hilbury Melcombe in desperate haste.
Robin flung back his bedclothes. His room looked out from the front of the house to the left of the great porch. He ran to the window, his heart sinking and fluttering within his breast. All the careful secret plans were ripe now. The ashes in his hearth proved it. Within the next week the dreams would begin to crystallize into actual facts and deeds — unless he was stopped at the last moment as others had been — many others.
The moon was at the full, and the park slept so peacefully in the bright silver light that Robin could hear the fallow deer cropping the grass a hundred yards away; and above that sound the horse’s hooves. A second later he saw the messenger, at the corner of a small copice. He was swaying in the saddle like a drunkard. Yet when he came in sight of the house he plied his whip, as though some strict order that he carried must be delivered out of hand.
“It is for me,” Robin said to himself in despair.
During how many years had he striven and spent and lived to make one dream true? And he was caught now in a trap. A minute and he would hear the messenger’s riding boots ring on the floor outside his door and the order to open which could not be disobeyed.
The rider drew up at the door, flung himself to the ground, passed his arm through the reins and hammered upon the panels like a man out of his wits. Robin drew back a step lest he should be seen. He could hear the man breathing in sobbing gasps, and Robin’s fears were lightened. There was too much of panic in the sound for the bearer of a message. Here was someone with a private trouble, a private terror. Robin approached the window again. He was on the point of crying out that he would come down when the door was opened. He saw Anthony Babington and heard his cry of alarm.
“It’s Barnewell!”
Babington was joined on the drive by John Savage and a moment later by Captain Fortescue. They had slipped dressing clothes over their night clothes, and they clustered about the newcomer. Robin was not the only man that night at Hilbury Melcombe to lie with a quaking heart.
“She spoke to me!” cried the rider whom they called Barnewell. “I was in the garden by the river — choosing a place — when she appeared. Oh, my God! She came straight to me. She knows everything. She said, ‘You see I am unarmed.’ Her eyes beat me down. It’s the death of all of us”; and his voice ran up into a shrill scream.
A little silence followed, and then Babington said:
“All must be put off. I have doubted, as you know, whether we had the right, or whether we should wait until some other did the work for us — —”
John Savage broke in upon him petulantly.
“Oh, debate and philosophy — I’m sick to death of them. The work’s for me to do. I was chosen.”
And just behind Robin’s shoulder someone breathed sharply.
Robin swung round as if he had been struck. Mr Gregory of Lyme was standing in the room with his finger to his lips. He was fully dressed.
“I sleep in the next room,” he whispered. “I was writing a letter when I heard the noise. Was there ever such mad talk? I never did hear the like of it,” and he uttered a low and contemptuous laugh. “The good Barnewell spoke one word of truth, however. Can you guess which it was, Mr Aubrey?” and he laughed again, this time with a passionless cruelty which made Robin’s blood run cold.
Under the window the horse’s hooves rasped on the gravel. Gregory and Robin looked cautiously down. John Savage was leading Barnewell’s horse to the stables, and the others had gone into the house.
“A handful of zanies thinking they’ll convulse the world! Well, wise men draw together by some affinity of nature. Why not addlepates too?” said Mr Gregory.
Below them a step sounded, and the house door was gently closed.
“That’s the God of the Clouds, no doubt, Mr Aubrey, but we have no proof of it, alas!” Gregory resumed rather bitterly. “No Bannet will show his nose tonight where an honest man could see him. The God in the Cloud is a very appropriate character, Mr Aubrey. You are to play a servant, I understand. Shall we see to it that that character is appropriate too?”
This time Mr Gregory spoke on a kindlier note. He was standing opposite to Robin in the moonlit room, swaying back and forth on his heels and his toes. “It’s evident why such as you and I were bidden to this week of entertainment, Mr Aubrey. We are the screen and curtain. It wouldn’t be likely there’d be plotting and conspiracy with the house half full of Protestants.”
“Plotting?” Robin exclaimed. “Come, Mr Gregory. Nobody’s going to plot with a feather head like Captain Fortescue, and he was out in the porch with the others.”
“Captain Fortescue!” said Mr Gregory, laughing again. “Aye, there’s a captain for you. He didn’t seem overpassionate to sing point and counterpoint with you, Mr Aubrey, the other night.”
He broke off abruptly, and again his finger went to his lips. Outside the door the stairs creaked, a foot stumbled and then all was silent again.
“It’s all at an end. We may to our beds ourselves.”
“As if nothing had happened?” exclaimed Robin, and Gregory turned back from the door and stood close by him.
“Just that, Mr Aubrey. As if nothing had happened. Indeed nothing has happened — no, nor will. Put tonight altogether out of your head. It will be wisdom tomorrow if you have slept the sleep of a tired boy through all this clatter.”
Robin was very willing. He did not understand the talk upon the drive or Barnewell’s terror. Mr Gregory’s exclamations were a riddle to him. There were other matters with which he was concerned. Indeed the most perplexing element in the night’s adventure was the inconspicuous Mr Gregory of Lyme. Why was he still up and dressed? How had he crept so silently into the room? Whence did he get the authority with which he had spoken? Was there not, too, a problem about three tables which Mr Gregory had set to him? The problem to be worked out before six o’clock, or there would be two hours detention and a hundred lines of Virgil. . . . Robin fell asleep at that point, and when he woke again the sun was up and the birds noisy in the trees.
But the enigma of Mr Gregory remained with him. The unnoticeable man who suddenly spoke with the command of the Centurion: “I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.” Thus had Mr Gregory of Lyme spoken to Robin the night before, and Robin had obeyed him, wondering. He was to wonder more, however. The day was Friday and the house Catholic, and though no constraint was put upon the guests, a certain sedateness was observed in the entertainment. No field sports were arranged for the morning, and no one danced in the long gallery after supper. For once the household went early to bed. Robin was sound asleep when a hand twitched at his shoulder. He awoke reluctantly to see Mr Gregory at his bedside with a candle in his hand.
“What! Must you be here again?” Robin asked sullenly. “Do you never go to bed?”
“I shall sleep for a fortnight when I am back in my house at Lyme,” said Mr Gregory.
“Well, I wish you were there now,” said Robin, and he turned over in the bed so that the light might not fall upon his eyes. But Mr Gregory of Lyme was not satisfied.
He shook Robin again, laughing softly.
“These boys! They are like dogs. They must run here and there, eat their food and play games, and then in an instant they’re asleep and damn the fellow who wakes them! I have something to show you.”
“I don’t want to see it,” said Robin.
“You will regret it all your life if you don’t, Mr Aubrey.”
“Life is full of regrets, Mr Gregory. Who am I that I should not have my proper share of them? Oh!”
For Mr Gregory had pinched the wick of his candle and the smell which arose from it made Robin sit upright in his bed.
“That’s better,” said Gregory with a grin. “I reckoned that your senses would be delicate. If you will dress I will show you why Captain Fortescue was unwilling to sing point and counterpoint with you in a quiet corner of the garden.”
“Oh, very well. I shall never rid myself of you unless I do.”
Robin rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and smoothed the rumpled waves of brown hair upon his head. What with points to be tied and doublets to be buttoned, dressing was a complicated business in those days.
“Some light shoes, if you please, Mr Aubrey.”
“Well, I am not putting on my riding boots and spurs, am I, Mr Gregory?”
“You are very well now, Mr Aubrey.”
“God be praised,” said Robin.
Willy-nilly, he was thoroughly awake but mutinous.
“The night is for sleep, Mr Gregory,” he grumbled.
“So you tell me, but you must widen your knowledge, Mr Aubrey. As I see it, it’s for plots and treasons, Mr Aubrey, for black hearts and bloody assassinations, Mr Aubrey. And so you shall say before you get into your bed again.”
Gregory spoke quite equably, as one speaking of everyday affairs, priming his candle the while with his forefinger and his thumb. But for the second time he awakened in Robin an eerie kind of uneasiness.
“You are the most uncomfortable man I have ever come across.”
“I hope that others in this house will shortly say the same,” said Gregory. He smiled pleasantly, but he raised his eyes from the candle flame and Robin was shocked by the cruelty which gleamed in them. Gregory opened the door to the width of an inch, peered and listened, and then, taking Robin by the sleeve, he blew out the candle he was carrying.
“You will follow me without a sound.”
Outside the door the big house stretched dark and silent. Mr Gregory flitted ahead, Robin trod upon his heels. At times the corridors were so black that it was only Gregory’s touch upon his sleeve which told Robin that he was there in front of him. At times a shaft of moonlight from a tall window threw a slant of silver across the floor and lit them up for a second as they passed. Robin fancied that they were moving towards the east wing, but he could not be sure. His guide, however, never faltered in his direction of the way. He turned and twisted and went on as though every corner of the house was known to him. At one of these corners Gregory stopped and laid a hand upon the lad’s shoulder. Robin could not see his face, but he felt the grip of the hand tighten.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 667