Towers in the Mist

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Dreams. . . . That polish was nothing but the reflection of them, a thing as easily destroyed as dew upon the grass or the sheen upon the petal of a flower. When the gleam of their dreaming was rubbed off them would they call their dreams traitors or friends? He looked at them all, and for the death of their dreams he could have flung himself down upon the floor and wept, taking the measure of an unmade grave. . . . And being an Elizabethan he wouldn’t have been ashamed of doing it, either, but the room was crowded and there was no space; and Raleigh had got to his feet to start the verse reading with one of his own poems. For a few moments, as he hunted through a little manuscript book to find the right page, there was a deep silence filled only by the buzzing of a bee and a little shuddering sigh from Philip. Exchanging glances with his nephew the Chancellor discovered that they were thinking the same thing; what would Raleigh do if he did not succeed in concocting his Elixir? What would happen to him if his search for the gold that should remake the world ended in disaster, and death came unawares upon a man who had expected to be always young? What alternative had he for his Great Cordial?

  Raleigh found the place and began to read. He read quietly, his usual vehemence stilled, and in a way that made the poem bite deep into the memories of his hearers, so that when years later he died for his dreams upon the scaffold those who were still alive remembered his room at Oriel, and heard his voice reading as though the summer day were only yesterday.

  Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,

  My staff of faith to walk upon,

  My scrip of joy, immortal diet,

  My bottle of salvation,

  My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,

  And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

  Blood must be my body’s balmer,

  No other balm will there be given,

  Whilst my soul like a quiet palmer

  Travels to the land of heaven,

  Over the silver mountains,

  Where spring the nectar fountains;

  And there I’ll kiss

  The bowl of bliss,

  And drink mine everlasting fill

  On every milken hill.

  My soul will be a-dry before,

  But after it will thirst no more.

  The Chancellor was astonished. So that was Raleigh’s alternative: blood. He would start joyfully upon pilgrimage, gowned in glory, and if he could not realize his dreams he would die for them. And he seemed to have no horror of the blood. It was to be a balm, a thing that would shine upon his body as once his dreams had done. It would be like rain upon the dry earth. Fresh life would spring from it. It was the whole duty of man to work for the golden age, to set himself to build Jerusalem in his own place and his own time. He would never succeed but his failure would be the triumph of his life. The thing was incomprehensible but true. . . . The rest of the verse reading seemed to the Chancellor to go by in a dream.

  6.

  A poem can be like two hands that lift you up and put you down in a new place. You look back with astonishment and find that because you have read a few lines on a printed page, or listened for a couple of minutes to a voice speaking, you have arrived at somewhere quite different.

  Raleigh’s poem had done that for the Earl of Leicester and Cranmer’s prayer had done it for Joyeuce.

  All day she said it to herself. She thought it was one of the finest prayers that had ever been composed by man, and how it was that she had never properly noticed it before she could not conceive. In its quiet insistence on what was important it seemed to still all confusion. And at the same time it was a challenge. It did not ask for ease in trouble or escape from pain, it did not even seem to think these things particularly desirable. In those two words “pass through” its insistence was all the other way. It swung her right back to the mood that had been hers in Saint Michael’s at the North Gate, before Nicolas had plunged her head over heels into fairyland and sent all her values flying to the winds. Its bracing effect was such that by suppertime Joyeuce had decided to turn her back on love and concentrate on duty. Her life had done nothing to develop her sense of humor and she took herself extremely seriously, so it did not strike her as comic that a prayer forged as a weapon by a man who had had to face complications more awful than anything she could conceive of, followed by imprisonment and martyrdom, should be used by her in her own mimic warfare. . . . Not that her own particular trials ever seemed to her small, it took all her strength to carry them and so they seemed to her colossal.

  When the curfew bell was ringing, about the hour of nine, she presented herself before her father in his study, her hands clasped very tightly before her, her head thrown back, her face very white and her blue eyes clouded to gray. Canon Leigh’s heart sank, for this attitude of the tragic muse usually betokened some terrible domestic crisis; the cat had fallen down the well, Diccon had called at the Deanery again without his clothes or Great-Aunt was dead.

  “What is it, Joyeuce?” he asked.

  “I have been very wicked,” she said.

  Her father was so astonished that he dropped his pen and sent the ink spurting all over his tomorrow’s lecture. In all the years that he had known her she had never been wicked. The baby Joyeuce had not screamed when she teethed, only bubbled at the mouth and moaned a little, and as a child she had never stolen the comfits or run away from her lessons. As a girl she had shouldered her responsibilities without wincing and never in all her life had he known her lose her temper or seek a single thing for herself.

  “What have you done, Joyeuce?” he asked in horror.

  Joyeuce took a deep breath and told him. She told him nearly everything; her visit to Bocardo, her lies to Mistress Flowerdew, the meal at the Tavern, the kisses that accompanied it and the magic, moonlit walk in the Meadows. She left nothing out except her love for Nicolas and that she would not tell, because it was easier to renounce it if she did not give it greater substance by telling of it. Her recital went on and on and seemed to her afflicted father to last well into the night. In an agony his mind fixed itself upon the thought that Joyeuce and Nicolas had been in the Meadows at night, on Midsummer Eve in the moonlight. . . . His heart fainted within him. . . . What was Joyeuce trying to tell him? Something she could not put into words? She was silent now and the silence seemed to him full of horror.

  “Is that all, Joyeuce?” he asked hoarsely.

  “All?” inquired Joyeuce, almost outraged. Surely, she thought, she had told him enough to make his hair stand on end for the rest of his life, and he asked her if it were all!

  The worst of her ordeal over her eyes had gone back to their normal blue and were fixed on him with a child’s wonder. With a shock of relief so overwhelming that the room spun round him he realized that she did not know what on earth he was talking about. . . . His respect for Nicolas de Worde, that up till now had been small, owing to the horror of his Greek and the outrage of his Latin, suddenly went up by leaps and bounds. His relief and astonishment were so great that he did not know what to say. Scratching his head in bewilderment he looked appealingly at Joyeuce, but for once she did not seem to know what he ought to say either. The situation was beyond them both. She burst into tears and flung herself into his arms.

  While he patted and soothed her he wondered if she was crying as a child cries, who will soon forget its grief, or as a woman cries who will remember it. Hoping it was the former he treated it as the former and comforted her as he had comforted her when she had broken her doll or fallen full length on the stony path. Never mind, he said, it was over now. She had been a good girl to tell him and he was proud of her for being so brave. She must go to bed now and it would be all right in the morning. He patted her till she had stopped crying, then kissed and blessed her tenderly and took her upstairs to bed.

  But Joyeuce, though she was comforted, only slept brokenly. In her dreams she saw again the figures of Nicolas and Diccon, scarlet
and green, moving through the moonlit trees to the gates of fairyland. “Take me too!” she cried, but they went on and disappeared inside and the gate shut. She stood looking at the fairy gates until the walls of the house of her everyday life towered up around her like precipices and she could not see them any more.

  Meanwhile Canon Leigh in his study did not know what on earth he ought to do; and when he remembered that he had four daughters who each of them might have five love affairs, making twenty all told, before he got them safely steered into the harbor of matrimony—though even then there might be upsets in the harbor—he came out in a cold sweat. Joyeuce had not known what he was talking about. But surely at her age she ought to have known what he was talking about.

  He spent a bad night and in the cold light of dawn sat down and penned a note to Mistress Flowerdew, asking that he might wait upon her and receive her inestimable advice upon a matter of overwhelming importance.

  Chapter 9: Saint Giles’ Fair

  Tell me, my lamb of gold;

  So mayst thou long abide

  The day well fed, the night in faithful fold;

  Canst thou, poor lamb, become another’s lamb,

  Or rather, till thou die,

  Still for thy dam with baa-waymenting cry?

  Earth, brook, flowers, pipe, lamb, dove

  Say all, and I with them,

  Absence is death, or worse, to them that love.

  PHILIP SIDNEY.

  1.

  THE long summer holidays, arranged to suit the harvesting, were upon them. All the scholars must go home, rich and poor alike, to help gather in the corn and the wheat and the barley that were clothing England in a robe of green and gold and orange-tawny that bent before the wind under a sky of burning blue.

  The day when the scholars departed was a great day. Traveling in companies as protection against rogues and vagabonds they passed out north, south, east and west through the gates of the city, singing and laughing and shouting out final insults at the townspeople who thronged the streets to see them go.

  Some evil imps of the town had mounted the belfries and rang out peals of thanksgiving as the companies wended their way past the guardian towers.

  At North Gate and South Gate too Saint Michael guards the way,

  While o’er the East and o’er the West Saint Peter holds his sway.

  Some of the scholars chanted the old rime and looked up at the towers as they passed beneath them; some of them glad to be going, some of them sorry, and some of the older ones heartbroken because their time at Oxford was over and they would never come back again except as the old fogeys of the past.

  The rich scholars, the noblemen and squires’ sons, rode on horseback with their mounted servants clattering behind them; they would put up at the fine houses of friends and relatives and they had their best clothes with them in saddle bags; their friends would give them fresh horses and they would be home in no time. But the poor scholars had to walk, sleeping under hedges if the weather was fine or at the rough inns if it was wet, and it would be a long time before they got to their journey’s end, with their faces brown as berries and their shoes worn through.

  Philip, who was going to London for part of his holidays to stay with Uncle Leicester, rode under the Fast Gate and up the bridle path through the woods to Shotover. He was one of a large and gay company, for a great many of them were going London way. He rode a white horse, and had blue plumes in his hat, but he was sad because every departure from Oxford brought nearer the final departure that he dreaded. On the top of Shotover he reined in his horse and looked down, as Faithful had looked down in the dawn of that spring morning of his arrival, at the towers of Oxford below him in a haze of heat.

  “They are always in a mist,” he said, “like dreams that go away.”

  His face looked like the face of a puppy whose dinner has been removed before it has had time to do more than taste it, and Fulke Greville, beside him on a black horse, hastened to apply bracing treatment.

  “You are coming back, you ass.”

  “Some day,” said Philip, “we shall never come back. . . . Except in dreams.”

  “If everyone who ever loved Oxford comes back to it in dreams,” said Greville, “the streets must be blocked with ghosts. . . . It’s a wonder we living people can get by.”

  They were silent, brooding, their reins lying loose and their horses nosing in the wild thyme for edible bits of grass, until a shout from the others warned them that they were left behind. They turned their horses and cantered away over the springy turf, shouting to their friends, depressing thoughts left behind with the ghosts in the city.

  Raleigh and the west-countrymen rode under South Gate, across the river, up the hill and through the Forest of Bagley. They were the noisiest crowd of all, for they were many of them going back to live within sight and sound of the sea, and they were glad to be going. Thomas Bodley, who rode with them, did nothing to check the row they made, M.A. and Fellow of Merton though he was. . . . In fact he made as much row as any. . . . Raleigh roared out roystering songs in broad Devonshire and they all joined in the choruses in the most unseemly manner. All the way through the flat water meadows beyond the river they sang, and up the hill, and they only fell silent when the great Forest of Bagley gathered them into its darkness. It would have been sacrilege to make a noise just then, for there were singing birds to listen to, and rabbits to watch, and under their feet was spread a carpet of bilberry leaves and green ferns that made the floor of the forest like the strewed presence chamber of a king.

  And Nicolas, who lived in Gloucestershire, rode out through North Gate, in a leaf-green doublet and a bad temper. . . . He did not want to go away because he was leaving Joyeuce behind.

  He had seen her several times since that evening at the Tavern but she was always very difficult and troublesome. When he greeted her in the street or the quadrangle she swept him such swirling curtseys that the wind of them seemed to blow him miles away, and when he tried to talk to her she lowered her lids and turned demure. She wouldn’t go to the Tavern with him again, or for walks round the Meadows, and on the few occasions when she looked at him her blue eyes had faded to the color of rain and were clouded with beseeching. He thought he knew what she wanted. She wanted to be proposed to, of course. She wanted a ring on her finger and pearl drops in her ears and himself in leading strings to be shown off to all her friends. . . . Well, he wasn’t going to propose to her: at least, not yet. . . . He wasn’t going to saddle himself with a wife before he had even tasted the joys of manhood and the sweets of freedom. Joyeuce must wait. Why must she be in such a hurry? Why could she not enjoy, as he did, the fun of a little clandestine love and laughter? Why could she not shelve, as he did, serious things to a more propitious moment?

  He could not know that he was denying to Joyeuce the luxury of proud martyrdom. How could she refuse to marry him when he did not ask her to marry him? She had worked herself up to a high pitch of nobility, even thinking out the beautiful words in which her refusal would be couched, and now the nobility was going sour in her for lack of use. At night she wept angry tears into her pillow. She supposed it was all a mistake and he did not love her at all. She was getting old now, she was sixteen, and no one had wanted to marry her yet. Was she, perhaps, unlovable? This was a thought that dragged her pride down into the dust, for though it may be a painful thing to refuse a proposal it is yet elevating to the pride, while to have none to refuse is a humiliation that Joyeuce at her age found it almost impossible to put up with. She told herself that a really nice girl would have been glad that Nicolas was spared the pain of loving a woman who could not marry, but looking at herself squarely and honestly at one o’clock in the morning she found that she was not a really nice girl. . . . She was always horrified when she took out her true thoughts and looked at them. . . . Laid on top of them to hide them was a beautiful coverlet of the noble sentiments th
at guide a Christian life, underneath, not so beautiful but still quite pretty, were the thoughts that she ought to think and usually thought she was thinking, and under­neath again were her real thoughts, ugly things so utterly at variance with the actions of her life that she seldom dared face them as they were. She supposed that in time, with prayer and fasting, the glorious color of the surface covering would penetrate right down through all the layers of thought until they were all transformed as though wine had been poured into water. But at one o’clock in the morning that lovely unity seemed a goal that she would never reach. She was a poor tormented child dragged in pieces; too unselfish to live for her own pleasure and too selfish to accept frustration thankfully.

  But Nicolas couldn’t possibly be expected to understand all this and as he rode out of North Gate he was merely sore and angry, answering his companions with disagreeable grunts, feeling not the warmth of the sun but the chill of Joyeuce’s cold fingers when she bade him good-by, and seeing no smiling, flowery fields but only Joyeuce’s eyes that were now the color of rain. . . . Tiresome girl. . . . Why had he been such a fool as to fall in love with so serious a maiden, he who liked laughter and the careless heart? He vowed he would forget her. Surely the pain of the heart was a thing that could he controlled by a little abstention from the sight of the beloved face, just as the pain of the stomach could be controlled by a little abstention from food. . . . At the thought of food he cheered up a bit. . . . The lovely little hamlet of Woodstock was coming into sight, with its beautiful cottages sprawling down the hill, and they were to stop at Woodstock and have a good dinner there.