Towers in the Mist

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Pitiful mouth, saith he, that living gavest

  The sweetest comfort that my soul could wish,

  O! be it lawful now, that dead thou havest

  This sorrowing farewell of a dying kiss;

  And you, fair eyes, containers of my bliss,

  Motives of love, born to be matched never,

  Entombed in your sweet circles, sleep forever.

  Ah, how methinks I see death dallying seeks

  To entertain itself in love’s sweet place;

  Decayed roses of discolored cheeks

  Do yet retain dear notes of former grace;

  And ugly death sits fair within her face,

  Sweet remnants resting of vermilion red,

  That death itself doubts whether she be dead.

  Wonder of beauty, O! receive these plaints,

  These obsequies, the last that I shall make thee;

  For lo! my soul that now already faints

  (That loved thee living, dead will not forsake thee)

  Hastens her speedy course to overtake thee.

  I’ll meet my death, and free myself thereby,

  For, ah! what can he do that cannot die?

  But death did not come to him quite as soon as he wanted it. He governed the country he loved for thirty-five years, one of the best kings and most unhappy men who ever sat upon the throne of England. He was fifty-seven years old before he at last lay dead in the Abbey Church of Fontevraud, deserted by his children and robbed by his servants, his dead body stripped of his royal robes and jewels so that he lay on his bier before the altar as simply and penitentially as Rosamond had done when she lay in the nunnery chapel.

  3.

  “I expect this bit of earth looked much the same to them as it does to us now,” said Philip suddenly, “The same river winding through the valley, with the swallows flying beside it, the same fields and the same blue hills. I expect in the end Henry came to love it as much as he loved the woman shut up in the nunnery; perhaps when she died he felt that her spirit had passed into it; and I expect he found rest for his heartache looking at it. . . . One does find peace looking out on the world and recounting its wonders to oneself. . . . That is if one can find the words.”

  He broke off in sudden desperation and Faithful inquired with exquisite tact and sympathy, “Is a poem not going well?” He knew these writers—Giles had been another of them—and the absurd importance that they attached to their literary efforts. . . . Should a poem go badly there was no use in living any longer, but the right word chased and caught flung open the gates of heaven.

  Yet on the whole he thanked his stars he was no poet. The beauty of the world was to Philip his artist’s material; he must always be catching hold of it, re-arranging it, trying to fit the stars and the visiting moon into a lyric and to imprison the glory of the sun in a sonnet. And always the elusiveness of everything seemed to torture him; the sunshine that would not stay in the sonnet, the tail of the comet that got cut off when it was jammed into a lyric, the water that ran away to the sea, the life that escaped from the bodies of birds and butterflies and left behind it a handful of dust to be stamped into the earth. But Faithful, a humble scholar, need not worry either over the uses of beauty or its impermanence. He could just turn it over and over like a picture book and enjoy it.

  Philip groaned.

  “Perhaps,” said Faithful gently, “if you read the poem to me you might see what was wrong with it.”

  “I might,” said Philip doubtfully. “It is about love of England. It seemed all right this morning but now, after archery practice before the Queen, I’m not so sure.”

  “Try it on me,” encouraged Faithful. The phrase “try it on the dog” was not in fashion yet, or he would have felt it to be one that fitted the case.

  Philip sighed, fished up his manuscript from down his back, and read.

  Who hath his fancy pleased

  With fruits of happy sight,

  Let here his eyes be raised

  On nature’s sweetest light;

  A light which doth dissever

  And yet unite the eyes;

  A light which, dying never,

  Is cause the looker dies.

  She never dies, but lasteth

  In life of lover’s heart;

  He ever dies that wasteth

  In love his chiefest part.

  Thus is her life still guarded

  In never-dying faith;

  Thus is his death rewarded,

  Since she lives in his death.

  Faithful felt a little puzzled. He understood, from the gesture of Philip’s hand towards the wide fair landscape in front of them, that the lady of the poem was not Rosamond but the spirit of beauty alive in this country where they lived. . . . But why must they die to keep her alive?

  “A country has no life until men see it and love it,” said Philip dreamily, sitting with his chin cupped in his hand, “and no soul until they die for it. Without them it is just a beautiful picture. But once love it and die for it and it has an immortal spirit. . . . Look at the river silver under the sun, think of the way the grass ripples in summer as though flames were passing over it; there’s something burning there that’s been set alight by men’s love and kept alight by their death.”

  Faithful thought this far-fetched, and said so. “Most men don’t die for anything particular,” he objected. “They die because they are old, or because they catch diseases, or trip over something and fall down.”

  “Not the lovers in life,” said Philip. “What about Christ? What about Socrates? What about the patriots? What about the martyrs? What about Rosamond herself, who died to the world that Henry’s honor might live? If you love anything at all you will have to die that it may live.”

  “Only the great lovers,” said Faithful.

  “The little lovers too,” said Philip. “Even those who don’t know they are doing it. How much of the earth of which England is made, and from which the flowers spring, is made up of the dead bodies of men and women who have been buried in it during centuries? If their bodies make her earth doesn’t something of their spirits make her spirit? And even while physical life lasts there is the daily death to self of the saints who love God. Love and death are birth and rebirth. When God loved there was creation, when God died there was redemption.”

  He floated off into a dream, then woke up suddenly to say, “I don’t understand men like Walter Raleigh, who want to give their lives to exploring the land beyond the sunset. What do they want with eccentric carnation-colored birds sitting about in gloomy cedar trees, and noisy cataracts tall as church towers? Isn’t there beauty enough in this England to love and die for? There are fair hills here, with stately trees on their proud heights, like those over there on Rats and Mice Hill, and many valleys like this one comforted by silver rivers, and meadows and gardens full of flowers that must be the loveliest in the world; and I would rather have one of our little well-tuned brown birds singing of spring in a may-bush than a hundred carnation colored creatures squawking in cedar trees. I tell you I would rather die for this country than live to explore a hundred new ones.”

  “You’re talking like an idiot!” said Faithful, suddenly angry. “Why talk about death on a day like this? Why not talk about life?”

  Philip laughed. “It was Rosamond,” he said, “who made me think of death and talk like an idiot.” He jumped up and stretched his arms above his head. “I mean to live,” he shouted. “Live and be famous.”

  “What for?” asked the literal Faithful.

  “For a perfect poem,” said Philip promptly. “I would rather be a great poet than anything else on earth.” He picked up his bow and fingered it thoughtfully. “They say if you shoot an arrow into the air at random you find your fortune where you find your arrow. Let’s tell mine. An arrow­head is in my coat of arms, so
it ought to be able to tell me the truth.”

  He took an arrow from Faithful, fitted it into place, laid his body upon the bow and shot. The arrow went far and fast, gliding through the air and disappearing into the sunshine as though it were a part of it.

  “Now we shall never find it,” grumbled Faithful. “And we shall be late back trying to find it. And if we do find it how can it possibly tell you anything?”

  “If it’s sticking in the ground with the barb hidden and only the feathers showing,” laughed Philip, “then I shall be what I want to be, a scholar and poet whose only weapon is a quill pen. But if it’s lying flat with the barb showing then I shall have to be what my father wants me to be, a soldier as well.” And handing his bow to Faithful he ran off along the bank of the stream, following the flight of his arrow towards Oxford.

  “Don’t you want to be a soldier?” panted Faithful, struggling after with the impedimenta.

  “No!” Philip cried vehemently, his voice borne backwards by the wind. “I hate wounds and ugliness and stink and death.”

  Faithful forbore to point out that he had just been glorifying death. There is always a discrepancy, he had noticed, between what we think when in a moment of vision we have got free from the body and what we think when the body is once more in a position to make life unpleasant for us.

  It seemed that the arrow meant to be found. They followed along the bank of the stream, pushing their way through the undergrowth, and came upon it quite suddenly, transfixing the speckled breast of a dead thrush.

  “I’ve shot it!” said Philip in horror. “One of those well-tuned brown birds who sing of spring in a may-bush!”

  “And it’s a young one!” cried Faithful pitifully.

  A cold fear fell upon both boys, making them white to the lips. Philip picked up the thrush, pulled out the arrow and stood holding the limp mass of bloody feathers in his hands.

  “A dead singer,” he said.

  “And a young one,” repeated Faithful. His own delight in life was so great that the death of even a young bird seemed to him the greatest of tragedies.

  Philip laid the thrush down, wiped the blood off his hand on the grass, broke the arrow in pieces, the cruel gray goose that had killed a singer, and flung it in the stream.

  “Anybody would think they feathered arrows from the wings of geese on purpose, just to lay stress upon the idiocy of killing,” he said somberly. “Well, now I know. I shall be famous for my death.”

  “You don’t know at all,” growled Faithful. “There’s nothing in omens. You’re talking more like an idiot than ever.”

  “I am,” agreed Philip with sudden cheerfulness. “A sentimental, conceited idiot. All the trumpet blowing and cheering on Beaumont Fields churned me up.”

  “Look at the sun,” said Faithful. “It’s late. If we’re to be back in time for the feast in hall we must run.”

  They ran, their resilient spirits leaping up at every bound. At the sight of Oxford, rising grandly before them against the blue sky, and at the thought of the feast that awaited them at Christ Church, they shouted for joy.

  “It’s a good city,” said Philip, “and a good country, this of ours that we will love and die for,” and he began triumphantly singing the last verse of his song.

  Look, then, and die; the pleasure

  Doth answer well the pain;

  Small loss of mortal treasure

  Who may immortal gain.

  Immortal be her graces,

  Immortal is her mind;

  They, fit for heavenly places;

  This, heaven in it doth bind.

  But who hath fancies pleased

  With fruits of happy sight

  Let here his eyes be raised

  On Nature’s sweetest light!

  Chapter 17: Farewell

  Every month hath his flower and every season his contentment.

  BESS THROGMORTON.

  1.

  JOYEUCE remembered that last evening as being the best of all, a never-to-be-forgotten evening that was one of the highlights of her life. There was a great feast in hall at which the Queen and her Court were entertained by the whole College, and afterwards there was music and dancing until the stars paled in the sky, and the birds, twittering under the eaves, made of their morning song a lullaby for sleepy revelers staggering home to bed.

  Joyeuce had her own special part to play at this entertainment. She had to arrive as soon as the feasting was over bringing with her Diccon and Joseph attired as cupids, that they might present to the Queen a heart composed of crimson roses as a token of the devotion of the College. It was the Chancellor’s idea and he thought it was a pretty conceit. Canon Leigh thought it was outrageous. The little boys, he considered, were far too small to make such an exhibition of themselves at such a late hour of the evening; and the affair was doubly trying as it meant that all the other children had to go too, at a time when they should have been in bed, because neither he nor they considered it fair that they should be excluded from an entertainment at which the babies of the family were to be present. . . . But he was inclined to look upon the whole performance as an invention of the devil and feared the effect upon the children’s character was bound to be deleterious.

  The children, with no thought at all for their characters, were in wild excitement when Joyeuce and Grace dressed them in Mistress Calfhill’s big front bedroom. One of the ladies of the Court, let into the secret, had helped Joyeuce and Grace to make for the little boys exquisite but exceedingly skimpy garments of white feathers sewn upon a shell-pink foundation, worn with little feather wings secured across their chests with crossed golden ribbons, golden fillets round their heads and golden bows and arrows clasped in their hands. Their fat little legs and arms were bare and what their father would say when he saw the scantiness of their attire Joyeuce was sure she didn’t know. . . . But they looked adorable.

  The twins wore their new dresses of daffodil-yellow. They had pleaded for yellow dresses, real grown-up dresses with the kirtles of a deeper yellow than the farthingales “because the daffodils wear them like that, and when we wear them in Christ Church hall we shall be grown up.”

  “But you won’t,” Joyeuce had answered. “Even though you wear grown-up dresses you will still only be little girls, allowed to go and watch a grown-up party for a great treat.”

  But the twins had only squeaked at this, and shaken their heads very wisely. They knew better. They remembered that day so long ago, the May-Day when Faithful had come, when they had run out into the garden and seen the late daffodils dancing in the wind. They had known then that when the candles were burning in Christ Church hall, and they in their yellow dresses were dancing to the music of the viols, that then they would be grown up. To be grown up, they had thought, would be like being born again.

  “We shall be born again,” said Meg, as Joyeuce slipped her yellow kirtle over her head. “We shall do no more lessons with Great-Aunt.”

  “Born again,” echoed Joan, and squeaked in joyous anticipation.

  “Silly little poppets!” laughed Joyeuce, but the words chimed in her mind as though a merry bell were ringing.

  Grace meanwhile was cleaning the nails of Will and Thomas, slapping their hair into something like order with forceful applications of a brush dipped in cold water, seeing that their new green doublets and hose were got into the right way round, and tweaking their starched ruffs into the correct position. “Ow!” they protested, writhing. “Stop it, Grace! It’s effeminate to have clean nails. You should have seen my Lord of Rutland’s nails; black as ink; we particularly noticed when he passed by in the procession. And my Lord of Oxford—”

  “That’s enough!” said Grace firmly, and knitting her brows and pursing her lips into a round obstinate rosebud she set to work upon Will’s left hand with a deftness and determination that in ten minutes had achieved a r
esult of such striking artistry that Joyeuce gasped when she beheld it. . . . Her father was right. . . . Grace’s domestic commence was undoubtedly a gift of God.

  So it was with a happy but very humble heart that Joyeuce left Grace to keep her eye on the children and dress herself at the same time—a feat that Joyeuce would never even have attempted, let alone accomplished with complete success—and gave all her attention to her own appearance. . . . For this was her betrothal night. . . . Before he led her out to dance tonight, so Nicolas had whispered to her, he would give her his ring. Tonight their friends, who had all been told their secret in great confidence, would smile upon them openly and wish them God-speed. Nicolas’s career at Christ Church, after a lamentable failure at the spring examinations which had in no way disturbed him, was over now and he was free to marry; in a few weeks they would be husband and wife, riding away from the Fair Gate to an unknown life together, leaving Grace to bear with ease the load that had seemed so heavy to Joyeuce.

  Suddenly, as she stood before her glass brushing out her lovely honey-colored hair, her eyes were blinded by tears. . . . Her heavy load. . . . But was it really as heavy as she had thought? In laying it down she would be losing this home that she adored, set in this incomparable city, her father who so tenderly loved her, the little children who had been to her like her own. She put down her brush and pressed her hands over her eyes, fighting her tears. How could she leave them? Until this moment she had not realized how deeply she loved them. Why must sorrow and joy always be twined together like this? She had won her desire, and at the heart of it there was this pain. Why? Why? . . . Born again. . . . Once more the twins’ words rang in her mind like a little bell to comfort her. Every fresh beginning was a new birth and must have its pain as well as its joy, and without these fresh beginnings there could be no life, without them we should turn sour like stagnant water in a pond. And always, Joyeuce thought, the joy of a fresh beginning lures us on, outweighing the pain, dancing before us like a flame, so that hurrying to catch it the life in us keeps fresh and clear as a running stream. She wiped her eyes and picked up her brush with a smile. . . . In a few minutes now she would be running to meet Nicolas.