“It is steep here and the track bad,” said Robin as he led the way down a winding track as hard as iron. But before noon they had come to Abbot’s Gap.
CHAPTER IX. The Winged Mercury
THEY STOPPED IN front of a gatehouse which had been built of grey stone but was now weathered to the warm brown colour of all that corner of England. Its walls were buttressed and without a single ornament, and in the middle of it was set a great door strong enough to outstand a battering ram. Robin as a boy used to imagine that it meant by its plainness to surprise you with the beauty of the house within, like an ugly face masking a gracious mind. A high wall of red brick stretched away on its left hand. On the right the home farm and the stables stood back. Robin jumped down from his horse, rang the loud bell at the door and held Cynthia’s bridle whilst she swung herself to the ground. Dakcombe opened the door and stood gaping. Never before had Robin brought so fair a visitor. With a yell he rang the bell again for the groom, and forgetting all his manners he dashed back through the gatehouse. The groom with Robin’s baggage had already arrived, and he came forward now and led off the horses to the stables.
Robin and Cynthia walked through the passage into the court behind, and as she saw the house in front of her the girl uttered a little cry of delight which seemed to Robin the sweetest sound he had ever heard.
“Oh! Lovely!” she cried, clasping her hands.
They were standing on a pavement of flat stones. In front of them a little wall of small grey bricks was almost hidden by roses of white and red-purple phlox and little ferns and oxlips which bloomed from the interstices. On each side of this little wall broad stone steps rose to a stone terrace, itself a wealth of flowers, on which the house stood, a house of gables, with an exquisite oriel thrown out from the hall like a wing. It had high mullioned windows, fluted columns topped by great eagles, and such fine chiselling of stone as made it fit rather to rank with jewels than with buildings. Cynthia was still lost in admiration when an oldish woman came out on the terrace and curtsied low to Cynthia. Robin presented her.
“This was my nurse and is now my housekeeper. Kate, Mistress Norris honours my house by dining here, so the cook must roll up her sleeves and set to work.”
Kate, the housekeeper, hurried off to the kitchen, and coming back to the hall, carried off Cynthia up to the best bedroom. Cynthia was dressed for riding like a boy, in a doublet and short breeches and long brown boots fitting close to the legs and reaching up to her thighs. Kate brushed her and waited upon her whilst she washed with a wistful appeal in her manner which quite went to Cynthia’s heart.
“It is all clean swept, mistress,” she said, “and the furniture polished so that you could see your face in it. And Bedfordshire mats on the floor.”
“It’s beautiful, Kate,” said Cynthia.
“But lackaday, it’s empty, mistress, and that spoils all. May I show you the house?” this cunningly.
“You could show me nothing which I more desire to see,” said Cynthia eagerly.
Where Robin lived, where she was going to live — oh, wonder of wonders, and hardly yet possible to be believed — there was not a corner which she overlooked. She was taken to the long drawing room with one window upon the gatehouse and the court, and the other upon the rose garden behind a big round stone dovecot with a thatched roof, and white doves fluttering and walking stately on the red brick paths.
“The kitchen garden is all set away behind, mistress,” said Kate. “Oh, we keep up with the times. Not a cabbage or an onion to be seen or smelt, although they are here within the reach of our hands.”
She led Cynthia down five steps into a pretty powder closet at the side of the drawing room. That gave a view to the side of the court, where gabled rooms joined the main building to the gatehouse in an odd, pleasing, jumbled fashion.
“There are guest rooms there,” said Kate, pushing back every curtain so that the light shone brightly where they stood. “And other guest rooms in the gate-house. Oh, of course Abbot’s Gap is a small house,” she added with a show of deprecation, but even more clearly declaring that there was not a manor in the county to compare with it.
“It’s a treasure of a small house,” cried Cynthia, and the two looked at one another, and some understanding passed between them on the instant.
“But alackaday, it’s empty,” Kate repeated, but now in a quite different tone, and Cynthia smiled deliciously and blushed so that even her forehead was rosy.
“And Mr Robin?” she asked, dropping her voice as if she had suddenly joined in a conspiracy.
“He sleeps over the other side with his windows on the sea,” said Kate, and her face suddenly became careworn and old. “It’s here, mistress, that he should sleep, looking out upon honest land. The sea calls men to death, and when they’ve heard it in their sleep they can hear nothing else by day.”
Cynthia went down the stairs with a chill at her heart. The sound of her boots upon the oak stairs rang hollow. The house itself seemed to ache from its emptiness.
Robin was waiting for her in the oriel, a small square room with linen-fold panels on the walls and the Aubrey arms painted in dark blue and gold on the upper panes of the great window. He started eagerly forward.
“I heard you go from room to room,” he said.
“I loved it.”
“Ha!” said he in a great contentment. “I knew you must and yet I feared you wouldn’t. Let us dine!”
The dining room had its windows upon a wide bowling green smooth as velvet. It was guarded upon the one side by the high red brick wall and upon the other by a great yew hedge which for height and breadth had not its equal in the county. The cook had roasted a fat chicken and served it up with a salad and green peas. They drank claret and for a second course ate gingerbread, figs and apples. When they had done Robin took Cynthia by the hand.
“Come!” he said, and crossing the hall he led her up the stairs to the library, where two great windows overlooked the valley and the stream which danced down it and the coloured cliffs and yellow beach of Warbarrow Bay. For a little while Cynthia gazed out, the memory of Kate’s words in her thoughts and a mist gathering in her eyes. Then she sat down upon a bench in the window and said:
“Yes, tell me, Robin.”
He told her of his father quietly and simply, yet he made a picture of him stand out vividly before his mistress’ eyes. She heard George Aubrey’s great laugh ring out, saw him bending over his foreign books with his boy, and understood the restlessness which had entered his blood after his wife’s death and drove him from time to time about the world to prevent his companionship with his son becoming sour to him and a burden. “We are not of an age, Robin, pretend as we may. I must go for a while,” he would say, and the next day he would have gone.
“The Precepts of Cato translated by Erasmus! A little harmless book in his baggage. That was all! But the rack came of it, and months in the dark of a dungeon and a broken man dressed up like a clown tottering to a stake in the Quemadero.”
Cynthia watched the colour ebb from her lover’s cheeks, his brown eyes harden, his mouth set and the youth vanish from him altogether; and she shivered. He was at her side in the window the next moment, his voice all gentleness.
“But it couldn’t end like that, sweetheart! With such cruel shame unpunished. What! I to live contentedly in this house which he built, on the land he planted, ride on the hills where we rode together — I should have a ghost at my side driving me down from littleness to littleness until, craven in the big thing, I become craven in all. A mate for you? No, nor for a drab in the stews of a city.”
Cynthia’s heart stood still. The garden of Hilbury, the scented air, the trees whispering to the moon, all the ecstasy and promise which last night had held were dissolving into the torn gossamer of a foolish dream. But she did not argue or dissuade. She laid a hand upon his and claimed her share in his secrets.
“What will you do, Robin?” she asked gently, and in gratitude for her retic
ence Robin kissed her lips and got back a full half of his youth.
“This is what I have dreamed of ever since Richard Brymer of the Catherine told me of what he had seen in the square of San Bernardo, told me down there on the sand of Warbarrow Bay. See!”
He opened a drawer in a great bureau and drew out some scrolls of parchment. He carried them back to the window, and one by one unrolled them on her knees.
“The Expedition, built at Poole, the Admiral, five hundred tons, a tall ship, a hundred and eight feet of keel and over thirty of beam. She carries culverins and demiculverins for her big guns, and a dozen quick-firing minions and falcons in the waist. She’s finished and ready with her stores and ammunition on board. She’ll carry two hundred and fifty men all told and no Gentlemen Adventurers to make trouble.
“Then there’s the Sea Flower, three hundred and fifty tons; she and the Grace of God, her sister ship, were built at Weymouth.
“The Golden Real, one hundred and twenty tons, was built at Falmouth, and the Lyon, my pinnace of sixty-two tons, at Fowey. I had them built privately in little harbours, so that not a whisper of my purpose might get out.”
“And what is your purpose, Robin?”
Cynthia had raised her hand to her head, the hand on Robin’s side, as she bent forward to examine the plans of his ships. But indeed she saw nothing at all, so thick a mist of tears blinded her eyes.
“I mean to celebrate an auto-da-fé of my own,” Robin answered grimly.
He was seeing just as little of the plans as she was at this moment. The very room had fallen away. He was watching a round sea, in shape perfect and bright as one of Sir Robert’s silver platters, and red from sky’s rim to sky’s rim with the red of burning ships.
“Each ship will drop down its river with the tide at night and make for the Scillies. There we shall meet. We shall sail out into the Atlantic, and a thousand miles west of the Azores we shall wait for the gold fleet. Philip’s gold fleet.”
“And all’s ready?”
“To the last rope. Sir John Hawkins has helped. Drake too. Both of them secretly. Burghley and Walsingham would stop me if they knew. Oh, I’ve lived in a fever lest a breath of it should reach their ears. But all’s ready. Dakcombe brought to me at Hilbury on Wednesday a letter from each of my captains. I sail from Poole on the Expedition on Saturday. Now you know why they call me miser. All my fortune’s in these ships. But I’ll come back rich as a Genoa banker, and the crime punished.”
“Hasting home.”
Cynthia repeated the words he had spoken on the high brown hill above the house, but her voice broke as she repeated it; and as he reached forward to gather up the plans of the ships spread out upon her knees a great tear splashed upon his hand.
“Cynthia!”
He took her in his arms and she clung to him. But again she did not try to dissuade him. It was a time when men breathed adventure. It inspired the words they spoke and wrote. It made their dreams turbulent, their hearts high. They went forth from their homes, boys and men, to the White Sea, to the Indies and Cathay, to the Guinea Coast and the Spanish Main. They went for the greater glory of God and the honour of the queen and the filling of their pockets. But so many never came back. . . . It was that thought which filled Cynthia’s heart and overflowed from her eyes. She could not prevent her lover. She would not have him eating out his heart with shame. No, he must go. Since thus throughout his boyhood he had planned, thus he must do.
“You would not have me stay? Like the Mercury in the garden, sandalled and winged, with its service to do and its service never done?” Robin cried. “Bid me go, sweetheart! If I were false to my father how could I be true to you?”
Cynthia nodded her head and spoke through her tears.
“It is so. My tears are traitors, my dear love, and slander me. You must go though my heart break. But oh, come back to me! Else I am a widow before I’m a wife.”
She freed herself from his arms and stood looking out down the little valley to the sea. She tried to see the work all done and him hasting home on a battered ship loaded to the water’s edge with Philip’s gold, but what she did see was a youth white and beautiful as a god washing hither and thither in the green depths of the Atlantic. Robin rose and stood by her side, the edge of his pride quite blunted by the misery of her face.
Cynthia passed her arm under his and pressed it to her side. In a whisper she asked:
“How long, Robin?”
“A year. In a year I shall ride up to your house of Winterborne Hyde with my heart upon a golden plate and cry your name to the skies.”
He tried to make his voice sound very hearty and his words very jaunty, and Cynthia tried to laugh very merrily. But it was too hollow a performance, and both suddenly ceased.
“I should have waited,” Robin said bitterly. “I should have held my fool’s tongue till I returned — —” and Cynthia turned on him with all her heart in her face.
“My dear, you couldn’t, and I thank you because you couldn’t. This one day is ours. More than the day. For last night we were in the garden at Hilbury.”
Again as she spoke Robin saw the bronze Mercury across the pool, his winged sandals on his feet, his cloak raised behind his head, poised for the flight which was never to be taken.
“Never,” she said, “no, not when your heart most fails you, if ever it should, never say to yourself again ‘I should not have told her.’ That would be treason.”
She moved away from him and about the room, touching a quadrant, an astrolabe, a cross-staff, as though each instrument held part of him and she wanted to add to it part of her.
“I want something which belongs to you, Robin,” she said softly. “Something quite small which I can take into the palm of my hand and so call you back to me.”
Robin took a gold sovereign from his purse and a pair of shears from the table and cut the coin in half. One half he kissed and gave to her, the other he put away again in his purse. Then he turned to the prie-dieu against the wall which had once stood in his study at Eton. Above it an ivory crucifix hung upon two nails on a little stand flanked by candles.
“This was my father’s,” he said.
He lifted the crucifix from the nails, and, handing it to her, he dropped on his knees before her.
“Through life and through death I am yours,” he said.
Cynthia took the cross and held it against her heart. With the hand which was free she stroked his hair as he knelt.
“And so God be with us, my dear love,” she said.
He had hardly risen to his feet when the great bell at the gatehouse was loudly rung and rung again. Over Robin’s face there spread a look of anxiety. Few visitors came down from the hill to the young recluse at Abbot’s Gap, and this one came in urgency. Now that his little fleet, in which all his wealth was sunk, waited for nothing but the high spring tides to put to sea, he saw in every strange occurrence a threat to upset all.
“Wait here, Cynthia! I’ll send the fellow away.”
He went quickly from the room. He left Cynthia standing with the ivory cross in her hand and trying to beat down a hope which would clamour at her heart even while she hated herself for her treachery.
CHAPTER X. The Gallows’ Mark
OUTSIDE THE GATEHOUSE Mr Gregory of Lyme sat upon a horse whose flanks were white with sweat. As Robin came to his side he took from a pouch at his girdle a letter folded and sealed but with the seals broken.
“This reached me, Mr Aubrey, at Hilbury some three hours after you had started. You see the mark of the gallows upon it.”
He handed the letter to Robin, who saw the sign marked so ┏┓ in black ink upon the outside.
“You will remember that I called your attention to Sir Robert’s arrangement of his tables in the great chamber. The gallows way, Mr Aubrey,” and Mr Gregory of Lyme laughed — not very pleasantly to Robin’s ears.
Robin’s heart sank a little. It was true, no doubt, that the severe statesmen of Her Grace looked wi
th disfavour on the private expeditions against Spain and called them piracies. But men were not hanged for them. They made their peace by giving Her Grace the lion’s share. Still, men were hanged and Robin had not got so far in his adventure as to be able to offer Her Grace a share. He turned the letter over, and his heart rose again. The superscription showed that the letter was for Mr Gregory at Hilbury Melcombe. So if anyone was going to be hanged it was Mr Gregory of Lyme, and what with his ill-timed visit today and his general interference and a sort of superior know-all air which he had, Robin was sufficiently prepared to see him hanged without too much sorrow.
“The letter is addressed to you, Mr Gregory.”
“And bears the gallows’ mark,” Arthur Gregory continued quite comfortably. “I’ll not say that Sir Francis Walsingham’s wit is of the rapier kind. There are moments indeed when I doubt whether he has any sense of humour at all. If he has it’s of a crude, bludgeoning make. As thus” — and he pointed to the letter. “When Sir Francis is in a great pother and must have his business attended to instanter, he sets the gallows’ mark upon the outside, just as Sir Robert Bannet arranged his dining tables in the great chamber. Now the letter contains an enclosure for you, Mr Aubrey, as you will see if you unfold it. And though I prefer to amble rather than to gallop, the gallows’ mark advised me to make what haste I could after you.”
Robin opened the letter. Within was another and smaller superscribed by the same hand and sealed with the same seal. For a moment he hesitated.
Mr Gregory was watching the boy with a dry smile.
“Needs must read, Mr Aubrey, when the queen’s secretary writes.”
Robin thought:
“Well, I outfaced him once and went my own way, and I a schoolboy!”
He tore open the letter and read:
The Lady who gave you a knot of ribbons bids you bring it back to her, and without delay. I shall look for you tonight at Sydling Court. There is need of heave and ho.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 669