Towers in the Mist

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “I can’t, Nicolas,” she gasped.

  “Can’t what?” asked Nicolas.

  “Marry you.”

  “Why ever not?” he demanded indignantly.

  She explained. With her eyes shut so that she could not see his face, so that she could not even see the fair world that would remind her of him, she told him the whole tale; her promise to her dying mother, her father’s dependence on her, the children’s dependence on her, the house and the servants and the animals that would all become disintegrated if her watchful eye were not upon them; when she had finished the sun had gone and a cold mist was rising from the river. She covered her face with her hands and waited for Nicolas’s comment. When it came it was brief.

  “Tomfoolery,” said Nicolas.

  She dropped her hands and opened her eyes in indignant astonishment. Nicolas, though his mouth was very tender, was looking very mocking. His face was almost the face of the old Nicolas. The upward tilt at the corners of his eyebrows was very pronounced and he was smiling so much that his eyes had disappeared into wicked slits.

  “Do you know, Joyeuce,” he asked, “what are the chief failings of the saints?”

  She shook her head hopelessly and he leant forward and took her cold hands in his, rubbing them gently. “An exaggerated sense of their own importance,” he said, “combined with a quite stupid love of martyr­dom for its own sake. Couldn’t Grace step into your shoes? Are you the only woman in the world who can spank a horde of children? If you think you are, you stand convicted of pride, Joyeuce, and pride is one of the seven deadly sins. And why squander your strength in suffering when there is no need for it? That’s waste; another sin. Joyeuce, sweetheart, it seems you are a very wicked woman.”

  Suddenly the mockery went out of his voice and his smile died, for he saw she was not paying the slightest attention to what he said. Her chin was tilted at an obstinate angle and her eyes, feverishly bright, seemed to be looking right through him to something beyond. With a chill of dismay he remembered the stories he had been told of Canon Leigh’s obstinate sufferings for his faith, and remembered that Joyeuce was his daughter. . . . Fanatics, both of them. . . . Impotent anger seized him and he gripped her hands so tightly that she gave a little gasp of pain.

  “And what about me?” he demanded indignantly. “No man ever loved a girl as I love you. I want you and I must have you.”

  Awareness of him was once more in her eyes. . . . She even smiled a little, because in his impetuous anger he was now absolutely the old Nicolas. . . . But there was no relenting in that obstinate chin.

  “I must do my duty, Nicolas,” she said quietly. “You will forget me. There are other pretty girls.”

  But at this Nicolas boiled over into such a rage as she had never yet beheld in anyone, not even in Diccon. His face was turkey-red, his dark eyes shot fire at her and he spluttered so that she could scarcely hear what he said. “You dare say that to me!” was the burden of his remarks. “You know as well as I do that I shall never forget you!”

  She bowed her head at the truth of this and whispered, “I’m sorry.” No, he would not forget her. Between the new grave Nicolas who had held her in his arms a little while ago and the Joyeuce he had seen standing at the window on the night of Giles’s death there was now an unbreakable link. Whatever was eternal in them was united. . . . But there were other bonds beside those of marriage. . . . “We can be friends, Nicolas,” she pleaded.

  “Friends!” snorted Nicolas. What did she think he was made of? Flesh and blood or milk and dough? He was a man, with a man’s hot desire that had already been curbed for her sake, and she expected him to behave like a painted Saint Nicolas in a stained-glass window. Giles’s death and his love for her had stirred unknown depths in him and just at the moment of discovery, when he had felt the spirit in him that he did not know he had, touched to awareness by something beyond that he had not known existed, she dealt him this blow. She seemed to be denying him not only herself but what she stood for. He felt as though he were being thrust back from new knowledge to the old ignorance, that would now be robbed of the old enjoyment because he had progressed beyond it. He had not known it was possible to suffer so deeply. His anger fell from him and he sat as though stunned, only vaguely conscious that Joyeuce was getting up and mechanically shaking out her black skirts.

  “Come, Nicolas,” she whispered. “It is going to rain again.”

  He got up, shivering a little, and looked about him. Every shred of color had gone from the world. The kingfisher had gone home and the willows were hidden in the swathes of gray mist that came rolling up from the river. Without a word he took her hand ceremoniously and led her under the gray ghostly trees towards the gray walls that were her home. At the garden door they stopped and Joyeuce tried to withdraw her hand. “Good-by, Nicolas,” she whispered, and then stopped with a gasp as his arms went round her with such strength and passion that she could hardly get breath enough to protest. “Nicolas! Nicolas!” she moaned.

  But he had no mercy on her. He held her so tightly that she felt as though he were trying to crush her heart into his body and his into hers. “My true love hath my heart and I have his,” she thought, the words of Philip Sidney’s new song that everyone was singing stumbling unbidden into her bewildered mind. “I’m not going to let you go, do you hear?” whispered Nicolas fiercely. “I’ll find some way to get you, Joyeuce. We’ll be together yet.” Then he kissed her, hard and passionately, as she did not know one could be kissed. She cried out, feeling her denial of him a sword piercing her, and the gray mist about her seemed to turn into darkness. She was falling down and down into it, as once before she had fallen in the porch of Saint Michael’s at the North Gate, only this time the darkness seemed like the darkness of death.

  Then she found herself alone in the garden, stumbling towards the house. Nicolas had pushed her in, she supposed, and shut the door and gone away. She reached the house and groped her way through the dark hall towards the stairs. She was so exhausted that she could hardly get up them and dragged herself from step to step like a wounded bird, her wet black skirts clinging forlornly round her ankles. How grave and wise Nicolas had been, how wonderful and yet how childish and passionate and angry. How strange that love, that she had always thought of as so sweet and tender, could tear and bruise like this. Her renunciation was still a sword stuck in her heart, that she thought would stay there till she died. Surely she had died, outside the garden gate, when Nicolas kissed her and she still clung fast to her resolution, had died and come back to earth again a poor bedraggled ghost.

  But yet, ghost or not, bewildered and miserable and bruised as she might be, the words that were singing themselves over and over in her mind were words of triumph.

  My true love hath my heart and I have his,

  By just exchange one for another given;

  I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,

  There never was a better bargain driven.

  My true love hath my heart and I have his.

  His heart in me keeps him and me in one,

  My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;

  He loves my heart, for once it was his own,

  I cherish his, because in me it bides.

  My true love hath my heart and I have his.

  Chapter 12: Christmas Eve

  Come to your heaven, you heavenly choirs!

  Earth hath the heaven of your desires;

  Remove your dwelling to your God,

  A stall is now his best abode;

  Sith men their homage do deny,

  Come, angels, all their fault supply.

  His chilling cold doth heat require,

  Come, seraphins, in lieu of fire;

  His little ark no cover hath,

  Let cherubs’ wings his body swathe;

  Come, Raphael, this Babe must eat,

  P
rovide our little Toby meat.

  Let Gabriel be now his groom,

  That first took up his earthly room;

  Let Michael stand in his defense,

  Whom love hath linked to feeble sense;

  Let graces rock when he doth cry,

  And angels sing his lullaby.

  ROBERT SOUTHWELL.

  1.

  NOT every scholar could go home for Christmas. Rich men who could afford horses, or who had hospitable friends near at hand, could leave Oxford, but for poor men who lived a long way off the journey over roads knee-deep in mire would have been interminable; they would no sooner have got there than they would have had to come back again. And Nicolas, this year, was one of the unhappy ones, for his family went down with the smallpox and he was forbidden to go near them lest the beauty of the son and heir should be tarnished by the pockmarks. . . . He was perfectly miserable. . . . Giles was dead, Faithful was absorbed by the Leighs, and all his other friends, including Philip Sidney, were of the fortunate band who could go home. He had no one to shoot with, no one to gamble with and no one even to curse with, and not being one of those who find pleasure in solitude he wished he were dead.

  And he did not know what to do about Joyeuce. It was no use appealing to her again, he felt, for though good as the angels in heaven, she was at the same time obstinate as the devil himself. She might be stretched upon the rack, as her father had been before her, but she would not change her convictions. Sometimes he thought that he would go straight to Canon Leigh and demand the hand of his daughter in marriage, but then he bethought him of the horror of his Greek and the outrage of his Latin and he suffered from qualms. He was no favorite with Canon Leigh, that he knew well, and he feared that he might be shown the door. Wisdom was required, he felt, and tact and inspiration, and just at the moment he could lay his hands upon none of them. The star that guided his destiny seemed at the moment to have turned its face away from him. He must wait with what patience he could until its gracious beams once more lit his path.

  As the month drew on the thought of the stars was in everyone’s minds, for Christmas was coming in, in the traditional way, with frost and snow upon the ground and such a blaze of constellations in the night sky that it seemed the heavens were hanging low over the earth in most unusual friendliness.

  And certainly the city of Oxford was good to look at, at this time. By day, under a brilliant blue sky, the gabled roofs and tall chimneys, the towers and spires, took on an added brightness from the tracery of sparkling frost that clung to them; and down below them the narrow streets were bright with the bunchy little figures of snowballing children, happy girls and beaming mothers going shopping with baskets on their arms, dressed in their gaudiest because it was Christmas time, and laughing men with sprigs of holly in their caps, and faces as rosy as apples from the potations they had partaken of at the taverns and inns in honor of the festive season. The bad smells of the town had been obliterated by the continual snow showers and the hard frost—it would be a different story when the thaw came, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and delicious festive scents floated out into the streets from open doors and windows; scents of baked meats and roasting apples, of ale and wine, of spices and perfumes and the fragrant wood-smoke from innumerable fires of apple wood and beech logs and resinous pine branches. And at night the city seemed almost as brilliant as the starry sky above. From sheer good will doors were left ajar and windows uncurtained, so that bright beams of light lay aslant across the shadows, and the gay groups that thronged the streets carried lanterns that bobbed like fireflies over the trampled snow. The bells rang out continuously and the laughter and clear voices of the children made unceasing music. . . . And outside the city walls the fields and the low hills lay silent, shrouded in white. The murmur of the streams was hushed by the ice and the willow trees drooped above them without movement.

  2.

  On Christmas Eve, after the sun had set, it all seemed a little intensified; the stars shone yet more brilliantly, the bells rang clearer and sweeter, the firelight seemed ruddier and the laughter and gaiety of the townspeople more contagious. Yet Nicolas, as he strolled idly across Carfax into Cornmarket, felt oddly apart from it all. Used as he was to being always at the center of whatever excitement was afoot this unusual loneliness was a little frightening. It was because he was so unhappy, he thought, that he felt so lonely. It seemed that suffering of any sort made one feel lonely. He had not suffered before and so he had not discovered this before. He wondered why it should be so, for one was not alone in suffering; the whole world suffered. Perhaps this loneliness had some purpose in the scheme of things. Joyeuce would know. He would like to talk about it to Joyeuce.

  With his thoughts so full of her it did not surprise him that he should find himself outside Saint Michael’s at the North Gate. He thought that if left to themselves his feet would always now take him either to where she was, or to some place connected with her, for where she was would now always be home, and it was with a sense of home-coming that he turned into the old porch and sat down on the wooden bench.

  But it was a rather desolate home-coming. On Midsummer Eve it had been warm and balmy, with the scent of flowers coming on the wind, and Joyeuce had been in his arms, and now it was midwinter and dark and he sat alone on the bench, huddled in his cloak against the cold. Why was one lonely? Where do the feet of the lonely take them? As the body turns always homeward at evening when the crowds are gone, so perhaps there is a country of the spirit to which the spirit turns in desolation. Perhaps one needed to be desolate to find that country, for if one were always happy one would not bother to look for it. Sitting with his eyes shut he remembered that Joyeuce had said something like that when they were together in the Meadows. What was that country? . . . Heaven. Fairyland. The land beyond the sunset. The land above the stars where the great multitude which no man can number stand before the throne, clothed with white robes and palms in their hands. The land behind the tree trunks where Queen Mab and her fairies leave the track of their passing in flowers upon the grass. Raleigh’s land, where birds of white and carnation perch in tall cedar trees, where the stones are of gold and silver and rivers fall down crystal mountains with the noise of a thousand bells clanging together. . . . They gave it so many different names but he supposed it was the same place and that the spirits of some lucky people, saints and little children and dreamers like Raleigh, could follow the road of loneliness until they reached their home. . . . But for him, if he opened his eyes, there would be nothing but the darkness of the musty-smelling old porch.

  He opened his eyes and found himself gazing straight at a blazing star. His blood tingled through his veins and he felt himself gripped by a strange excitement. Was this his star, whose face he had thought was turned away from him? Was it at last pointing upon him graciously? It shone so brightly straight into his eyes that for a moment he put up his hand to cover them. It was surely speaking to him. It said, “Come.”

  He got up and looked at it intently. It was hanging low over a gabled roof and beneath it was a tall chimney like a pointing finger. He knew that roof and that chimney. They belonged to the Crosse Inn, next door to Tattleton’s Tavern where he had supped with Joyeuce. . . . Surely once before upon Christmas Eve a star had hung low above the roof of an inn. . . . The young man who stepped out of the porch of Saint Michael’s at the North Gate into the clamor of Cornmarket was no longer lonely and unhappy. His cap was set at an angle and his cloak was flung back from his shoulders as though the wind took him. He was Saint Nicolas, the Christmas saint, come down from heaven, or Oberon king of the fays, or a sailor sailing towards the sunset. He was caught in a fairy tale and the glory of it swept him along as though his feet were winged.

  Yet he was still sufficiently upon the earth to notice that the crowd in Cornmarket had grown considerably while he sat in the porch of Saint Michael’s. And they were all going one way. They were a
ll flowing in under the great archway of the Crosse Inn into its galleried courtyard. They too were bound for the Inn. What was happening at the Inn? “The Players!” cried voices in the crowd. “The Christmas Players! The Players are here!”

  Bands of traveling players still journeyed up and down the country, playing the old Morality Plays in the innyards and at the market crosses, and their coming was still one of the events of the year at Oxford. Scholars were strictly forbidden to attend theatrical performances in inn yards, lest they should catch diseases or have their morals contaminated by the crowd, but this prohibition had never been one to which Nicolas thought it necessary to pay any attention; least of all tonight when he felt himself star-led to his destiny.

  He was only just in time, for as he flung himself into the crowd that streamed in beneath the archway the clear note of a trumpet told him that the performance was about to begin. The rough wooden stage was set up in the middle of the courtyard, as though at the heart of the world, lighted at each corner by lanterns and decked with holly and evergreens, with the gaily dressed trumpeter standing upon it with his trumpet to his lips; and all round it surged the jolly Christmas crowd, fighting to get up to the best seats in the gallery that ran round the courtyard, or failing that a place on the wooden steps that led up to it, or failing that an inch of room in the packed space below. Aldermen and citizens with their fat wives and rosy children were there, apprentices and pretty girls, rogues and vagabonds and dirty little urchins, all pushing and kicking and scrambling, but brimming over with humor and good will. They knew how to enjoy themselves on Christmas Eve, did these people of Oxford, and they were doing it. Nicolas had hard work to gain the spot which he had marked out as his own, a place against the gallery balustrade where he would get the best possible view of the stage, but he got there at last, wedged himself in between two fat citizens and a horde of apprentices and dirty little boys, and settled down to watch.