Robin realized that he could no longer say the right word, so far had they, who were wont to speak forthright to each other from the heart, drifted apart with the years of their separation. For his father’s eyes dropped, he looked from side to side, there was shame — it could be nothing else — in the shrinking and contraction of his body.
“I should,” he said in so low and husky a voice that Robin could hardly catch the words. “I should kneel to you, Robin,” and, flinging out his arms in a gesture of despair: “There’s a hue and cry for you, Robin.”
Robin was startled for a moment. Then he smiled his disbelief. An excuse so that he might be persuaded to go without the burden of his father.
“For me? Wouldn’t that be strange?”
“For Carlo Manucci, boy,” and the old man shook Robin’s sleeve with a petulance at his stupidity. “The youth who speaks Spanish with the accent of Italy. Did you never write those words, Robin?”
Robin’s smile died from his face. Had he so written? Carlo Manucci, who speaks Spanish with the accent of Italy? Yes, once.
“I wrote to Walsingham.”
“The letter was read, Robin.”
“I sent it by a sure hand.”
“Yet it was read. It was read in England.”
“By whom?”
“A neighbour. I know no more.”
“No need to know more,” said Robin.
He was very grave and quiet now. Bannet, of course. Father or son or father and son. Somehow — no matter how — they had seen the letter. George Aubrey was making no excuse, no distracted needless sacrifice of himself. But he was nonetheless premature in his calculations of danger. In a few days — even tomorrow — someone might get wind of Carlo Manucci; there might be a risk of discovery. But for tonight they were safe, and tomorrow they would be amongst the mountains.
“You see, I only reached Madrid last night, my Father. And I reached it without question, under another name. No one knows that Carlo Manucci is here except three men who have held my life in their hands these many months.”
Figliazzi, Andrea Ferranti, Giacomo Ferranti — those three. Not one of them had betrayed him.
“The Inquisition knows,” said George Aubrey in a whisper; and now for the first time some hint of the truth flashed upon Robin, blinding him like lightning and making him reel. How did this beggar, flung out on the steps of a church, know the hue and cry was out for Carlo Manucci? Yet he did know. Was he set to look for him — to look for a youth who spoke Spanish with the accent of Italy? Whence did he get that phrase? With those questions forming themselves, asking themselves insistently, he saw his companion crouching in the most utter abasement and shame before him, not daring to look at him, shivering, abject.
“It was you, my Father, who betrayed me,” he said.
There was a note of horror in his voice, not of horror of the man, but of the fact that in this world such a thing could have happened. And there was more of wonder than horror.
“So you see, Robin, you must go. You must go before they come for you, before they come here. You must kill me first and go.”
“No, no,” Robin insisted. He could not go, not understanding. If they were coming, they must come. But he must understand. It was more important than life that he should understand. For what would life be worth unless he did?
“Why? My Father, why did you betray me and betray us both?”
The old man would have sunk again upon his knees before his son, had Robin allowed it. But he held him so that he could not, and suddenly the father clung to him piteously.
“You couldn’t understand, Robin, what pain can bring one to. Even a strong man, and I was strong once — you know, you remember. See me now! Pain brought me to this state, to this shame. I didn’t know, Robin, it was you they wanted. And I didn’t dare to face it again — oh!” And with a moan he fell to whimpering like a broken child.
“Years underground in the dark, the iron collar so that you could never bend your head, the rack, the threat of fire and the rack again. They made me walk with the penitents to the stake, and when I steeled myself to endure it, made me watch the agony — the slow, dreadful agony of the others as their feet and their thighs and their loins were consumed and they still lived, screaming. Such pain! Such pain! God send you never understand it, Robin! They flung me out onto the church steps in the end — to—” he could hardly breathe the word, short enough though it was, it was so full of shame— “to spy. A man on the steps of a church — he sees much, he hears much, he can be useful, Robin. I lived on sufferance. The collar and the rack and the stake — day by day I was threatened with them. . . . And then Carlo Manucci came — the youth I was bidden to look for. . . . Perhaps I could gain release. God, if they had only let me die — as you must let me, Robin, before you go. I can’t go back to the dungeon, Robin.”
There was a yearning for a swift, clean death in George Aubrey’s prayer which cut Robin to the heart, which almost persuaded him. But he could not yield to it. He did not argue; he was too certain that here was the one stroke forbidden him.
“There’s someone in England to whom I couldn’t go back and say, ‘I killed my father. So I am here — safe.’ ”
A curious change came into the old man’s manner, a furtiveness, which Robin did not understand. He lowered his face, and it seemed to Robin that a sly smile parted his lips, a little, sly, happy smile, as though he had found a way out of their desperate case. And he had. He could not hope to draw Robin’s hanger from its scabbard before he was prevented. But something at Robin’s belt sparkled in the candlelight — the jewelled cross hilt of a dagger slung in a velvet sheath. But he must be clever — clever and cunning! Robin felt his father’s hands suddenly grip the open edge of his doublet whence he had taken the ring and chain, and heard his father’s voice in a startled whisper:
“Hush, Robin! Listen!”
It was the oldest trick in the world, but ninety times out of a hundred it succeeds.
Robin turned his head towards the door, and the old man snatched the dagger from its sheath. He flung Robin from him with passionate violence. He stood up. For a second the hunched back straightened, the crippled limbs stood straight, the great laugh rang out. At the moment of his death it was granted to his son that he should see George Aubrey again.
“Now you must go, Robin. I’m going first.”
He drove the dagger into his heart and stumbled and fell.
Robin laid him out gently upon his pallet. No roses, then, were to bloom red for him in the garden of his pleasure house of Abbot’s Gap. Here in this hovel, amidst its squalor and dirt, his pain and misery had ended. But since death had come, what did the dirt and squalor matter?
Robin knelt at his side and very reverently drew the dagger from his heart. The blade was wet and red, and Robin eased it gently into its sheath, stained as it was. It came into his thoughts that there was a place waiting for that dagger and that he must be quick and set it there. He had in the most unexpected way a vision of the Escorial, and the lights and the ornaments fading, and the huge crucifix looming up against darkness; and again stirred within him the whisper of a message from the Man upon the Cross, a message still not understood. But it was not for nothing that at this sacred moment the mystery of that hour should again be vivid in his thoughts. There would surely come a time when its meaning would be made known to him.
“Good-bye, just for a little while,” he said aloud and, bending, kissed his father upon the forehead.
As he stood up there was a loud knocking upon the door, and a voice cried:
“Open!”
CHAPTER XXIX. Old Tricks are Good Tricks
ROBIN WAS COOL now. Immediate danger had made him a creature of steel and ice once before in the high lodging of Santa Cruz. He had had time to plan then; he did step by step what in those circumstances he had prepared to do. Now he must act on the instant; but, to set against the want of preparation, there was his cold and bitter rage. He drew his sword from its sheath and plac
ed it standing against the wall by the door. He took the stool and placed it near the sword. Then, seizing the candle in his left hand, he shuffled noisily towards the door and stood with his back against the outer wall of the hut. The door was just at his right hand and, as he remembered, it opened inwards. He reached out his hand and again the order came, harsh and violent:
“Open!”
Robin laughed, not very loudly, not so loudly that he could be heard, but he laughed and all his body tingled. He reached across the door with his right hand and unlocked it. As the key grated in the lock hands thrust against the panels. The stout bar bent in its socket, but it did not break.
“Open!”
There were no oaths, there was no abuse. It was authority speaking, certain of itself.
“Aye, but I’ll open too soon for you,” Robin said to himself.
He dropped the candle on the floor and set his foot on it. The hovel was in darkness. Through the small, high window a star shone. Robin waved a hand to it. Who knew but what Cynthia at this moment was watching that same star from the window of her room at Winterborne Hyde. Robin grasped the wooden stool by one of its three legs with his left hand and raised it high. He felt for the hilt of his sword with his right. It stood ready by his right thigh, its point in a board of the floor. Then, leaning over again, he wrenched the bar from its socket, dropped it on the floor and grasped the sword.
His father had played an old trick on him, and it had succeeded. He was going to play another on these officers of the Inquisition; and that was going to succeed too. As soon as the bar clattered on the ground the door was pushed open and back upon Robin, sheltering him. Then entered in single file — there was no room for two to pass abreast — two men, cloaked and hooded in black. The first carried a torch in his left hand, a drawn sword in his right; the man behind him carried a pike.
“And that’s how you keep your promise,” said the first man grimly to the corpse upon the pallet, thinking that he slept. But he had not finished his words before the stool came thundering down upon his head and felled him to the ground. He rolled against the soldier with the pike as he fell, and thrust him against the side wall, twisting him round. That man had just time to see Robin by the light of the torch flaming upon the floor. He lowered his pike, but the butt of it knocked against the wall, so that the point still aimed above Robin’s head. He was cramped in too narrow a space for so long a weapon. Moreover, he had not the time to use it. Even as the butt knocked, Robin’s sword flashed in the torchlight, cut through the soft flesh of his belly and pinned him to the wall.
Robin let the sword go and slammed the door. A third man fell back from it, bruised and cursing, and a fourth cried:
“What has happened?”
Robin picked up the torch. For a second he watched with a face of stone the soldier still clasping his pike in the agony of death, wriggling on the sword like a dancing doll, beating a tattoo on the floor with his feet, and praying with gasping breath for a reprieve from his pain.
“Yes, my good master of pain, you know now what pain is,” said Robin.
He plucked the sword free, and the soldier slid down the wall and the pike crashed upon the boards. Robin turned quickly to the door, but the two men outside were in doubt. Robin could hear them debating, and at times they stopped to listen. Robin kept very still.
“They mustn’t go for help,” he reflected. “Not one of them! I must have tonight free, or as much of it as I can.”
They would be waiting outside with their pikes levelled. Or perhaps one of them would wait and the other go for help.
“I must be quick,” said Robin. He turned to the man who had carried the torch. He had not moved since he had fallen. Robin rolled him over. The stool had smashed his head in, and he was dead. Robin propped the torch against the broken fragment of the stool, tore the cloak from his body and put it on. Then he felt the dead man’s belt and found in it a dirk. With a little smile of satisfaction he drew it out. His own, with his father’s blood upon it, was dedicated to another service. For nothing in the world would he have stained it in the body of any of these. Why, his father’s blood would shrink upon the blade from so vile a contact. He stood up, planning his next move.
He must take a desperate chance with those two men outside. There they were, standing outside the door, wondering what had happened and what was happening in that silent hut, whispering with hushed voices. He must make a little play upon their fears and superstitions, and then set all upon a quick surprise. His sword would hamper him, and it would be no match for a levelled halberd. He set it against the wall, driving the point into the floor again so that it should stand. Then he stubbed out the torch against the boards, and, but for that one gleaming star, the hut was now as dark as it was still.
Robin felt his spirits rising. It was another old trick that he was minded to use. If it succeeded! Had there been a light in the hut and someone to see, he would have seen a smile of amusement on Robin’s face.
Robin faced the door and unlatched it silently. Then very slowly, inch by inch, he drew it open. Against the glimmer of the night he could just make out the figures of the two men standing alert, their pikes presented.
But they would see nothing of him, shrouded as he was, even to his face, in the black hooded cloak. Without a sound, and slowly as though Death itself held the handle and invited their entrance, he drew the door wide open. He heard one of the men gasp and draw back and the other whisper a prayer to a saint. Then in the darkness Robin uttered a groan — just one — from the depths of the hut, and was silent again.
“We must go in,” said one of the two guards.
“Certainly we must go in,” returned the other.
But one voice shook a little, and there was doubt in both of them; and neither of the men moved except to draw back yet a step farther from that black, open doorway.
Robin reckoned that the time was ripe. He moved towards the door.
“Madre de Dios,” he wailed, and in the doorway he stood and leaned his head against the jamb, like one overcome and spent.
“Madre de Dios! What a horror!” he repeated, his voice muffled in his hood.
One of the pikemen stepped forward.
“Señor Capitán, what has happened?” he asked, and his halberd was upright.
“This, man, this.”
Robin whipped about as he spoke and drove his dagger into the man’s breast. As he fell, his companion turned and fled. Robin flung off his cloak and followed. It would never do to let the man reach the houses in the mouth of the alley. Robin was the younger and the fleeter of the two. In a few yards he was upon the fugitive’s heels, and with a loud screech of despair the soldier turned. He let fall his pike and tugged at the short sword which he carried at his hip. But before he could draw it, Robin leaped upon him, and leaped high. He pinned his enemy’s arms to his side with his legs, he seized his neck with his hands, and then, alas! he behaved as no young Italian gentleman should have behaved, whether he spoke Spanish with the accent of Italy or not. He bent his head, and with the top of it he butted his enemy in the face. He butted him with the abandon of primitive man, and he heard the bones of the nose smash with a primitive joy.
But the man must not live; and as they fell to the ground Robin thrust back his head and stabbed him in the throat.
He had, he judged, a few minutes to spare. The affray had caused some hubbub. There had been a clash of arms, a torch flashing, a loud scream, and officers of the Inquisition. If any were awake in the houses within earshot, the heads would be under the bedclothes. In a little while, when quietude had returned, the curious would steal out, a small crowd would gather. But not yet! Robin took the soldier with the gaping throat by the shoulders and, dragging him to the door of the hovel, flung him in. He treated the body of the soldier who had addressed him as Señor Capitán in the same way. He took the big key from the inside of the door. He was still primitive man, stripped of all the graces of youth and learning and courtesy. He stood
listening savagely, his sword again in his hand, lest in the darkness a breath, a sign, a groan should show that one of them still lived. But all was still as the grave. He thought of them as some old Egyptian might have thought. There lay four slaves killed to serve his father on the last journey across the river of death. He shut the door, locked it from the outside and removed the key.
He took a step or two away and was tempted sorely enough to stop. All through the years of his boyhood he had dreamed of an auto-da-fé which, in vengeance for George Aubrey, should redden the sky from rim to rim. He was tempted to go back, light that half-burnt torch and set a funeral pyre blazing here, instead of in the far Atlantic, which should be remembered with awe for many a day.
One thing restrained him — the thought of a good friend, Giovanni Figliazzi, who had served him without question and taken perhaps some risk in the service. He made his way across the gardens to the corner of the road to Segovia. Giacomo Ferranti was awaiting him with the two horses and the mule.
“Our plans are changed, Giacomo,” he said as he swung himself up into the saddle.
“We must go back, quickly, but not too quickly”; and as they trotted along the riverbank Robin threw the key of the hovel far into the water. There were few people abroad, and no one challenged them. But as they drew near to Figliazzi’s lodging, which stood in a street where now the palace gardens run, they were aware of a great noise and flashing lights and a throng of people. For a moment Robin reined in with his heart in his mouth.
“It is His Excellency’s arrival from Escorial,” said Giacomo.
“To be sure.”
It was impossible, of course, that the affray in the Calle des Forcas should be discovered so soon or measures taken to avenge it so quickly.
“Giacomo, you will take the horses to the stable, rub them down, and make sure there’s not a sign they have been out tonight. Then bring the mule back with the baggage and the money.”
He dismounted and, wrapping his cloak about him, pressed through the throng to the door. Andrea, in the doorway, would have stopped him, but he moved his cloak aside from his face and passed in and up the stairs.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 684