With that he clapped his hat on his head and rode away, leaving behind him, on this one occasion, the impression that he was a very noticeable man.
CHAPTER XXVI. At the Escorial
MR GREGORY OF Lyme was far out in his reckoning. For it was only upon the day when he sat with Cynthia in Robin’s garden that Count Giovanni Figliazzi, having concluded the transfer of the Italian ships to the contentment of his duke and of the free city of Genoa, set off from Lisbon on the still more difficult errand of negotiating a loan to Philip from the bankers of Lombardy. He crossed the Tagus by the ferry and slept that night at Setubal, where, in accordance with his plan, an Italian gentleman making the grand tour asked for permission to join him. The Count Figliazzi travelled with a large retinue of gentlemen and pages and servants and a heavy train of baggage, as befitted his high condition. Robin was quickly submerged in the medley and confusion of their journey, and the difficulty of finding lodgings for so large a company left little inclination or leisure for inquisitive questions when progress was interrupted by the coming of night.
They rode through a country of reddish earth made pleasant by the green of young wheat, the fruit on the orange trees, the cork forests and the shade of giant eucalyptus trees overarching the road. They traversed clean, white villages made gay with bands of bright blue paint, and halted for a meal and a stoup of wine at inns which were nothing but long, dark, low-arched tunnels. Spring was warm in the air and bright on the countryside; the company was lively, the gallantries of the evening numerous. But Robin was hardly aware of the vivacious life which bubbled about him or of the beauties of the land through which he passed. He went forward in a dream where hope and fear alternated. Now he climbed the treads of a staircase which never ended and was always empty; now he picked his way through a silent, muffled crowd of outcasts and beggars, peering into their faces but never into the face he longed to see; and now again recognition was instant and escape smooth. Lisbon; Santa Cruz dragging himself along the corridor; the night when, dizzy and numbed, he had clung to the latticework of the balcony with the water breaking on the rocks a hundred and fifty feet below him; the Armada itself — all drifted away from him and became unreal as the images of a dream. If he thought of them at all it was with astonishment that they had printed so faint a page in his book of life.
The company slept at Estremoz, a little white town on the top of a hill, and riding amidst olive trees in a torrent of rain came to Badajoz. Thence their way ran through an open, bare country on the edge of the Sierras; the villages lost the spick-and-span coquetry of Portugal, the road was a morass when it was not a network of ruts.
They halted for the night at Toledo, and the next morning, when they were clear of the town, Figliazzi sent for Robin and rode on with him a little ahead of the troop.
“I had a word some time since,” he said, “from our good friend whom we need not name, that you had some private business at Madrid of a delicate kind.”
“Yes,” answered Robin.
“And that it was important that you should despatch it as quickly as possible.”
“It is for me of the gravest importance.”
“I don’t wish to pry into your affairs, my young friend,” the count continued. “Indeed, the less I know of them the better. But I have a suspicion, which our nameless friend shared with me, that as much secrecy as possible is desired.”
“Otherwise I can look forward to a stake on the Quemadero,” said Robin grimly.
“I did not catch that remark,” Figliazzi answered drily, “and if I did I should not understand it. You know, of course, that statesmen are proverbially ignorant of geography. So, then, despatch and secrecy are needed, and in both those needs a full purse is of great assistance. We shall halt for the night at Illescas, and my treasurer shall advance to you what you require.”
Robin was in truth reaching the end of his resources, and though a credit had been arranged for him at Madrid by his banker at Florence, he was loth to waste a day by applying for it.
“I am very grateful, sir — you have shown me such kindness as I had no right to hope for,” he said warmly.
“Gratitude in the young, Carlo, is a very pretty quality and rather rare,” said Figliazzi with a smile. “I shall not disclaim it, therefore, although I am only fulfilling the wishes of our friend.”
But neither he nor Robin was aware of the immense obligation under which that act of thoughtfulness laid the youth. It would have been an ill day for Carlo Manucci had he sent in his name to his banker at Madrid. But thoughtfulness was not to end its offices even at this point.
“In another way I can serve you, at no great loss of time. You are impatient, no doubt, to have done with your hard travail and to be getting you home,” and he saw and smiled at the great wave of longing which swept over Robin, parting his lips and flooding his face with colour, and shining in the eagerness of his eyes. “Yet after all these months, a day more of anxiety and doubt will not add so much to the burden that it’s worth while risking all to save it.”
Robin cast a quick and rather startled look at his companion. The ambassador might disclaim all knowledge of Robin’s private affairs, but he seemed nonetheless to have a shrewd suspicion of them.
“Well, then, I do not enter Madrid today, no, nor the next day. No, I sleep four miles away at Getafe. You can, it is true, ride on with your own baggage and your servant, since your papers are in order. But you will be wise to stay with me. I go from Getafe to Escorial, where King Philip is at his devotions. It would be wise, I think, for Signor Manucci to journey on with me. For from Escorial, since I may be delayed there, I shall send forward my baggage and my household to my lodging in Madrid, and the young Giuseppe Marino might go along with the two Ferrantis. You would pass in without enquiry.”
And again neither of them had a suspicion how far-reaching an effect this small change in Robin’s plans was to have upon the lives and fortunes of all those dear to him. He thanked Figliazzi again.
“So! Will you fall back now: we should not be seen in too long and earnest a conversation. You have only to speak to Giacomo Ferranti and he will charge himself with your baggage tomorrow and wait upon you at Escorial.”
Late at night the next day Count Figliazzi arrived at Escorial and in the morning, with Robin in his train, attended the high mass in the lower choir. He was on the left-hand side of the great church just behind the gallery in which the gilt figures of Charles the Fifth and his wife kneel forever with their faces towards the altar. In front of him the broad steps, carpeted in a dull red, rose to the high altar with its gilded bronze and slabs of rare marble, and across and above those steps Robin could see the small, humble glass door at which Philip was wont to listen to the offices. The door was closed now, but he could not keep his eyes from it. The thunder of the organ, the sweet voices in the alto choro above his head, the gorgeous vestments of the priests, the candles flaming in their jewelled candlesticks, and this little mean door by the side of the altar seized upon Robin’s imagination; and out of the contrast there grew in his thoughts a strange, unsettling shadow of an idea, a confusion of all that he had accepted as beyond question true.
He had come hoping to behold the archenemy of his country, of his faith, of himself, the master of half the width of the known world, whose cruel rule had condemned to misery, if not to the stake, a harmless traveller because he carried the Precepts of Cato in his baggage, and had filled the boyhood of that traveller’s son with bitterness. Robin had expected a figure of arrogance, a flamboyant monarch. All he saw was a little mean glass door which might be the entrance to a hermit’s cell, and indeed that door led to a tiny alcove and a small bedroom which were little better. No curtains draped it. No guard stood beside it. What manner of man hid behind it?
In a little while the door slowly opened inwards and Philip of Spain stood in the doorway. No majestic conqueror, but a plain man of middle age dressed simply in black velvet, with an uninspired and sickly face. The heavy, out-
thrust underlip gave to him a brooding, melancholy look. If he was master of half the world, it was clear that he got no joy of his mastership, and looking at him Robin understood the complaints which Santa Cruz in his bad moods had hurled at him. A conscientious plodder, a narrow annotator of minutes, wearing brain and soul away over the proper work of underlings.
As he stood in the doorway, a little withdrawn so that he could see the high altar and hardly be seen himself, he peeped — the word was Robin’s, for there was no dignity in Philip’s movements — round the side of the door at the alto choro filled with the chanting monks. There was an old story current that Philip had been sitting, as was his custom, in the last row of stalls at the corner of that choir when a messenger, still booted and spurred, had pushed through a panelled door at his side and brought him the news of the victory of Lepanto and the overthrow of the Turks. The story had reached Robin’s ears, and he wondered now whether the memory of that afternoon was in Philip’s thoughts and whether he was brooding over another victory which should establish his faith in the Channel as surely as Lepanto had in the Mediterranean. For more than a moment Philip’s dark eyes lingered on that corner in the high choir, and then clumsily, for he was crippled in a leg, he sank onto his knees.
And with that a change came over Robin. The fire of his hatred burned lower than it ever had since Richard Brymer, the sea captain, poured out his tale with the tears rolling down his face on the beach of Warbarrow Bay. Robin had come to imagine Philip as a primitive savage, finding a sensual joy in the infliction of pain and covering a limitless ambition with the pretence that he served his God. But there was no joy in this sombre creature kneeling in the doorway of his alcove, and there was no pretence in his humble devotions.
The unexpected scene, following upon the drawn-out tension of the long months at Lisbon and the curbed excitement which had grown upon him each day as he neared Madrid, threw Robin into a curious trance of which only long afterwards he understood the meaning. A mist gathered before his eyes, dimming the magnificence of the altar, the red colour of the carpeted steps and the shining vestments of the officiating priests. White and red, gold and purple blended in a screen behind which the actual ceremony of the mass seemed to move farther and farther away into the distance. At the same time the music of voice and organ diminished in his ears, as though that too moved out beyond the church, beyond the monastery, into the Guadarrama hills and was lost among the valleys.
Robin watched the coloured mist with a throbbing heart and an intense expectation of he knew not what. It began to thin, and he was suddenly aware of a complete silence about him, as though all the world down to the smallest stream was hushed. And in the midst of that silence the mist parted. Altar, steps, priests, the low glass door, Philip of Spain, all had vanished, and in their place rose a huge cross of brown wood on which hung the naked figure of Christ crucified. How long the silence lasted and how long the vision remained before his eyes, Robin could not tell. But it vanished as swiftly as a shadow upon a mirror, and the music of a chant was soaring to the roof above his head.
There had been a message for his eyes, for his ears. Robin was sure of it, but he could not interpret the message. Someday and when it was needed the interpretation would be vouchsafed too. Robin had no less doubt of that. Meanwhile he stored it away in his memory with just this odd conviction in his mind: that the message was uttered for him by the Man upon the Cross rather than by the God.
CHAPTER XXVII. The Beggar on the Church Steps
IN THE LODGING of Giovanni Figliazzi Robin woke with the sunrise. He had come to the last day of his search. One way or another, on this day when it was already sunrise in Madrid all the perplexities were to be resolved, the horrible torment in which he swung between hope and fear would come to an end. Either Richard Brymer was right and George Aubrey had died at the stake, or Walsingham was right and George Aubrey starved in a squalid and miserable bondage; or there was a little truth in both their stories, and he had died since.
“In two hours I shall know,” Robin said to himself, and he dallied purposely as he dressed.
Beggars and cripples did not creep from their hovels till the sun was warm and the charitable were abroad in the streets; and when he went out upon his errand he must not loiter. He made sure that his sword was loose in his scabbard and his dagger in his belt. He was dressed in a plain suit of grey velvet with a falling collar of white lace, which, he hoped, would neither by any singularity of meanness or extravagance call any attention to himself. Giacomo Ferranti buttoned a short cloak — that too of grey velvet — upon his shoulders. He set upon his head a cap of dark-blue satin without brooch or any ornament.
“It is time for me to start,” he said with a prayer at his heart. “Yes, it is time.”
For at this last moment his feet faltered and his knees were as water.
“God be with you, signore,” said Giacomo gravely.
He knew nothing of the search upon which Robin was set, but he was aware that Robin had gone to his first meeting with Santa Cruz with a greater valiance and a less troubled face than he took out with him into the streets of Madrid.
Outside the door Robin regained his courage. The day was still fresh, there was a balm in the air, the sun rode in an unclouded sky. It must end as serenely as it began.
“I shall find him,” Robin thought. “By the time the roses are out at Abbot’s Gap he will be there amongst them, playing bowls with Cynthia on the lawn or taking his ease with his pipe in his arbour,” and the picture so enheartened him that he stepped out and now had much ado not to run.
But he must saunter like any gentleman of leisure, gazing into the shop windows as he went, yet not stopping overlong before any one of them. The streets were already full. Men of business in sober clothes hurrying on their affairs, poor people in rusty black, women of fashion clacking on their high wooden heels with their maids behind them, girls with mantillas on their heads and duennas at their sides, priests, hidalgos, horsemen. Robin hoped to slip through the throng unnoticed, but the modesty of his dress had rather enhanced than obscured the attractions of his person. His slim straight figure, his brown glossy hair under the blue-satin cap, the beauty of his face, which had had its curiously spiritual quality increased by the loneliness and anxieties of his life, and above all his radiant youth, caused many faces to turn to him and many a maiden’s eyes to linger on him with a smile. Robin had been prudent enough to make Giacomo Ferranti trace for him the route to the Church of the Virgin of Almudena, so that he was not forced to stop and make enquiries.
Of that old Madrid through which he passed not a trace remains today. It was a medley of squalor and magnificence. Small, mean houses jostled palaces, dirty runnels of water ran through the centre of the roadways, and narrow streets of tall, blackened houses were dark as deep chasms even at noonday. It was into one of these that Robin turned. At the far end the sun blazed down upon an open square which, by contrast with the gloom and chill of this long cleft, glowed like molten metal. In that square stood the great Church of the Virgin of Almudena.
“In ten minutes I shall know,” said Robin.
All his boyhood, all his early youth, had been a long preparation for the one minute which was to follow upon the ten. His heart beat with a suffocating force as a corner of the church came into view. He quickened his pace and emerged suddenly into a blinding sunlight.
The great building was surrounded by a wide and open space, and Robin skirted it until he came to the western end and saw a high flight of broad shallow steps rising to the great doors. So many people were climbing them, so many descending, that Robin could get no clear view. Every now and then a lane opened and showed him nothing but the empty treads and closed again. Beggars there were in plenty at the foot of the steps, blind men led by children, women and children exposing their sores, but where he was told to look — no one. He walked with a sinking heart along the front of the steps, and then he stopped. To the left of the three doors — on the edge of
the river of people, he saw a faggot of old ragged clothes, a great bundle flung down there and left. But the bundle moved.
Robin’s first reaction to that movement was a feeling of physical sickness, a refusal to accept anything so shocking as the tale which it told. That was not George Aubrey, his good friend of the great laugh and the Purbeck Hills. No! With a shiver of the shoulders he turned away from the steps. Robin was still little more than a boy in years, and such degradation as that crawling heap of rags implied was a horror which youth refused to contemplate. “Death, yes,” cried youth, that had never had a taste of it in his bones, “but such shame — no. If it were possible — why then God was guilty.”
So he turned away, and having taken a few steps, his cheeks burned with his cowardice. Since it was not possible that that abject creature crouched upon the steps there was his father, why should he shrink from giving him alms — and condemn himself for the rest of his life to an aching fear, an embittering self-reproach?
“What sort of life then for Cynthia and me with that worm of conscience gnawing at the roots of my heart?”
He found himself on the steps mounting slowly in a sort of zigzag course which at every tread brought him nearer to the figure of misery.
A hood was drawn over its head to shade it from the sun and the face hidden, but a skeleton’s hand at the end of a wasted arm was thrust out and a quavering thin voice wailed:
“Alms for the love of the Virgin. Alms, young gentleman, for the poor and starving. Alms!”
With a cry of joy, so great was his relief, Robin snatched his purse from the pouch at his belt. In that piping voice there was none of George Aubrey’s heartiness.
“Alms you shall have, old man,” he said.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 682