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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of By What Authority?, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: By What Authority?
+
+Author: Robert Hugh Benson
+
+Release Date: November 2, 2006 [EBook #19697]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY WHAT AUTHORITY? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geoff Horton and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           WHAT AUTHORITY?
+
+
+
+
+                                  By
+
+                          Robert Hugh Benson
+
+                             _Author of_
+
+           "The Light Invisible," "The King's Achievement,"
+                 "A Book of the Love of Jesus," etc.
+
+
+                           BENIZIGER BROS.
+                 PRINTERS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE,
+                    NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO.
+
+
+
+
+               _I wish to acknowledge a great debt of
+                 gratitude to the Reverend Dom Bede
+              Camm., O.S.B., who kindly read this book
+            in proof, and made many valuable corrections
+                          and suggestions._
+
+                                   ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+
+_Tremans
+  Horsted Keynes
+    October 27, 1904_
+
+
+
+
+                    PENATIBVS · FOCISQVE · CARIS
+
+                    NECNON · TRIBVS · CARIORIBVS
+
+                        APVD · QVAS · SCRIPSI
+
+                     IN · QVARVM · AVRES · LEGI
+
+                  A · QVIBVS · ADMONITVS · EMENDAVI
+
+                            HVNC · LIBRVM
+
+                                  D.
+
+
+
+
+                              CONTENTS
+
+
+                               PART I
+
+
+CHAP.                                                PAGE
+
+   I. The Situation                                     1
+
+  II. The Hall and the House                            8
+
+ III. London Town                                      21
+
+  IV. Mary Corbet                                      37
+
+   V. A Rider From London                              51
+
+  VI. Mr. Stewart                                      64
+
+ VII. The Door in the Garden Wall                      79
+
+VIII. The Taking of Mr. Stewart                        90
+
+  IX. Village Justice                                  99
+
+   X. A Confessor                                     108
+
+  XI. Master Calvin                                   124
+
+ XII. A Winding Up                                    140
+
+
+                               PART II
+
+   I. Anthony in London                               152
+
+  II. Some New Lessons                                168
+
+ III. Hubert's Return                                 183
+
+  IV. A Counter March                                 196
+
+   V. The Coming of the Jesuits                       213
+
+  VI. Some Contrasts                                  235
+
+ VII. A Message From the City                         252
+
+VIII. The Massing-House                               267
+
+  IX. From Fulham to Greenwich                        279
+
+   X. The Appeal to Cæsar                             296
+
+  XI. A Station of the Cross                          313
+
+ XII. A Strife of Tongues                             334
+
+XIII. The Spiritual Exercises                         351
+
+ XIV. Easter Day                                      368
+
+
+                               PART III
+
+   I. The Coming of Spain                             384
+
+  II. Men of War and Peace                            390
+
+ III. Home-Coming                                     404
+
+  IV. Stanfield Place                                 421
+
+   V. Joseph Lackington                               429
+
+  VI. A Departure                                     439
+
+ VII. Northern Religion                               453
+
+VIII. In Stanstead Woods                              468
+
+  IX. The Alarm                                       484
+
+   X. The Passage To the Garden-house                 492
+
+  XI. The Garden-house                                505
+
+ XII. The Night Ride                                  521
+
+XIII. In Prison                                       526
+
+ XIV. An Open Door                                    541
+
+  XV. The Rolling of the Stone                        552
+
+
+
+
+                         BY WHAT AUTHORITY?
+
+
+
+
+                               PART I
+
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                            THE SITUATION
+
+
+To the casual Londoner who lounged, intolerant and impatient, at the
+blacksmith's door while a horse was shod, or a cracked spoke mended,
+Great Keynes seemed but a poor backwater of a place, compared with the
+rush of the Brighton road eight miles to the east from which he had
+turned off, or the whirling cauldron of London City, twenty miles to the
+north, towards which he was travelling.
+
+The triangular green, with its stocks and horse-pond, overlooked by the
+grey benignant church-tower, seemed a tame exchange for seething
+Cheapside and the crowded ways about the Temple or Whitehall; and it was
+strange to think that the solemn-faced rustics who stared respectfully at
+the gorgeous stranger were of the same human race as the quick-eyed,
+voluble townsmen who chattered and laughed and grimaced over the news
+that came up daily from the Continent or the North, and was tossed to and
+fro, embroidered and discredited alternately, all day long.
+
+And yet the great waves and movements that, rising in the hearts of kings
+and politicians, or in the sudden strokes of Divine Providence, swept
+over Europe and England, eventually always rippled up into this placid
+country village; and the lives of Master Musgrave, who had retired upon
+his earnings, and of old Martin, who cobbled the ploughmen's shoes, were
+definitely affected and changed by the plans of far-away Scottish
+gentlemen, and the hopes and fears of the inhabitants of South Europe.
+Through all the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, the menace of the
+Spanish Empire brooded low on the southern horizon, and a responsive
+mutter of storm sounded now and again from the north, where Mary Stuart
+reigned over men's hearts, if not their homes; and lovers of secular
+England shook their heads and were silent as they thought of their tiny
+country, so rent with internal strife, and ringed with danger.
+
+For Great Keynes, however, as for most English villages and towns at this
+time, secular affairs were so deeply and intricately interwoven with
+ecclesiastical matters that none dared decide on the one question without
+considering its relation to the other; and ecclesiastical affairs, too,
+touched them more personally than any other, since every religious change
+scored a record of itself presently within the church that was as
+familiar to them as their own cottages.
+
+On none had the religious changes fallen with more severity than on the
+Maxwell family that lived in the Hall, at the upper and southern end of
+the green. Old Sir Nicholas, though his convictions had survived the
+tempest of unrest and trouble that had swept over England, and he had
+remained a convinced and a stubborn Catholic, yet his spiritual system
+was sore and inflamed within him. To his simple and obstinate soul it was
+an irritating puzzle as to how any man could pass from the old to a new
+faith, and he had been known to lay his whip across the back of a servant
+who had professed a desire to try the new religion.
+
+His wife, a stately lady, a few years younger than himself, did what she
+could to keep her lord quiet, and to save him from incurring by his
+indiscretion any further penalties beyond the enforced journeys before
+the Commission, and the fines inflicted on all who refused to attend
+their parish church. So the old man devoted himself to his estates and
+the further improvement of the house and gardens, and to the inculcation
+of sound religious principles into the minds of his two sons who were
+living at home with their parents; and strove to hold his tongue, and his
+hand, in public.
+
+The elder of these two, Mr. James as he was commonly called, was rather a
+mysterious personage to the village, and to such neighbours as they had.
+He was often in town, and when at home, although extremely pleasant and
+courteous, never talked about himself and seemed to be only very
+moderately interested in the estate and the country-life generally. This,
+coupled with the fact that he would presumably succeed his father, gave
+rise to a good deal of gossip, and even some suspicion.
+
+His younger brother Hubert was very different; passionately attached to
+sport and to outdoor occupations, a fearless rider, and in every way a
+kindly, frank lad of about eighteen years old. The fifth member of the
+family, Lady Maxwell's sister, Mistress Margaret Torridon, was a
+quiet-faced old lady, seldom seen abroad, and round whom, as round her
+eldest nephew, hung a certain air of mystery.
+
+The difficulties of this Catholic family were considerable. Sir Nicholas'
+religious sympathies were, of course, wholly with the spiritual side of
+Spain, and all that that involved, while his intense love of England gave
+him a horror of the Southern Empire that the sturdiest patriot might have
+envied. And so with his attitude towards Mary Stuart and her French
+background. While his whole soul rose in loathing against the crime of
+Darnley's murder, to which many of her enemies proclaimed her accessory,
+it was kindled at the thought that in her or her child lately crowned as
+James VI. of Scotland, lay the hope of a future Catholic succession; and
+this religious sympathy was impassioned by the memory of an interview a
+few years ago, when he had kissed that gracious white hand, and looked
+into those alluring eyes, and, kneeling, stammered out in broken French
+his loyalty and his hopes. Whether it was by her devilish craft as her
+enemies said, or her serene and limpid innocence as her friends said, or
+by a maddening compound of the two, as later students have said--at least
+she had made the heart and confidence of old Sir Nicholas her own.
+
+But there were troubles more practical than these mental struggles; it
+was a misery, beyond describing, to this old man and his wife to see the
+church, where once they had worshipped and received the sacraments, given
+over to what was, in their opinion, a novel heresy, and the charge of a
+schismatic minister. There, in the Maxwell chapel within, lay the bones
+of their Catholic ancestors; and there they had knelt to adore and
+receive their Saviour; and now for them all was gone, and the light was
+gone out in the temple of the Lord. In the days of the previous Rector
+matters were not so desperate; it had been their custom to receive from
+his hands at the altar-rail of the Church hosts previously consecrated at
+the Rectory; for the incumbent had been an old Marian priest who had not
+scrupled so to relieve his Catholic sheep of the burden of recusancy,
+while he fed his Protestant charges with bread and wine from the
+Communion table. But now all that was past, and the entire family was
+compelled year by year to slip off into Hampshire shortly before Easter
+for their annual duties, and the parish church that their forefathers had
+built, endowed and decorated, knew them no more.
+
+But the present Rector, the Reverend George Dent, was far from a bigot;
+and the Papists were more fortunate than perhaps, in their bitterness,
+they recognised; for the minister was one of the rising Anglican school,
+then strange and unfamiliar, but which has now established itself as the
+main representative section of the Church of England. He welcomed the
+effect but not the rise of the Reformation, and rejoiced that the
+incrustations of error had been removed from the lantern of the faith.
+But he no less sincerely deplored the fanaticism of the Puritan and
+Genevan faction. He exulted to see England with a church truly her own at
+last, adapted to her character, and freed from the avarice and tyranny of
+a foreign despot who had assumed prerogatives to which he had no right.
+But he reverenced the Episcopate, he wore the prescribed dress, he used
+the thick singing-cakes for the Communion, and he longed for the time
+when nation and Church should again be one; when the nation should
+worship through a Church of her own shaping, and the Church share the
+glory and influence of her lusty partner and patron.
+
+But Mrs. Dent had little sympathy with her husband's views; she had
+assimilated the fiery doctrines of the Genevan refugees, and to her mind
+her husband was balancing himself to the loss of all dignity and
+consistency in an untenable position between the Popish priesthood on the
+one side and the Gospel ministry on the other. It was an unbearable
+thought to her that through her husband's weak disposition and principles
+his chief parishioners should continue to live within a stone's throw of
+the Rectory in an assured position of honour, and in personal
+friendliness to a minister whose ecclesiastical status and claims they
+disregarded. The Rector's position then was difficult and trying, no less
+in his own house than elsewhere.
+
+The third main family in the village was that of the Norrises, who lived
+in the Dower House, that stood in its own grounds and gardens a few
+hundred yards to the north-west of the village green. The house had
+originally been part of the Hall estate; but it had been sold some fifty
+years before. The present owner, Mr. Henry Norris, a widower, lived there
+with his two children, Isabel and Anthony, and did his best to bring them
+up in his own religious principles. He was a devout and cultivated
+Puritan, who had been affected by the New Learning in his youth, and had
+conformed joyfully to the religious changes that took place in Edward's
+reign. He had suffered both anxiety and hardships in Mary's reign, when
+he had travelled abroad in the Protestant countries, and made the
+acquaintance of many of the foreign reformers--Beza, Calvin, and even the
+great Melancthon himself. It was at this time, too, that he had lost his
+wife. It had been a great joy to him to hear of the accession of
+Elizabeth, and the re-establishment of a religion that was sincerely his
+own; and he had returned immediately to England with his two little
+children, and settled down once more at the Dower House. Here his whole
+time that he could spare from his children was divided between prayer and
+the writing of a book on the Eucharist; and as his children grew up he
+more and more retired into himself and silence and communing with God,
+and devoted himself to his book. It was beginning to be a great happiness
+to him to find that his daughter Isabel, now about seventeen years old,
+was growing up into active sympathy with his principles, and that the
+passion of her soul, as of his, was a tender deep-lying faith towards
+God, which could exist independently of outward symbols and ceremonies.
+But unlike others of his school he was happy too to notice and encourage
+friendly relations between Lady Maxwell and his daughter, since he
+recognised the sincere and loving spirit of the old lady beneath her
+superstitions, and knew very well that her friendship would do for the
+girl what his own love could not.
+
+The other passion of Isabel's life at present lay in her brother Anthony,
+who was about three years younger than herself, and who was just now more
+interested in his falcons and pony than in all the religious systems and
+human relationships in the world, except perhaps in his friendship for
+Hubert, who besides being three or four years older than himself, cared
+for the same things.
+
+And so relations between the Hall and the Dower House were all that they
+should be, and the path that ran through the gardens of the one and the
+yew hedge and orchard of the other was almost as well trodden as if all
+still formed one estate.
+
+As for the village itself, it was exceedingly difficult to gauge
+accurately the theological atmosphere. The Rector despaired of doing so.
+It was true that at Easter the entire population, except the Maxwells and
+their dependents, received communion in the parish church, or at least
+professed their willingness and intention to do so unless prevented by
+some accident of the preceding week; but it was impossible to be blind to
+the fact that many of the old beliefs lingered on, and that there was
+little enthusiasm for the new system. Rumours broke out now and again
+that the Catholics were rising in the north; that Elizabeth contemplated
+a Spanish or French marriage with a return to the old religion; that Mary
+Stuart would yet come to the throne; and with each such report there came
+occasionally a burst of joy in unsuspected quarters. Old Martin, for
+example, had been overheard, so a zealous neighbour reported, blessing
+Our Lady aloud for her mercies when a passing traveller had insisted that
+a religious league was in progress of formation between France and Spain,
+and that it was only a question of months as to when mass should be said
+again in every village church; but then on the following Sunday the
+cobbler's voice had been louder than all in the metrical psalm, and on
+the Monday he had paid a morning visit to the Rectory to satisfy himself
+on the doctrine of Justification, and had gone again, praising God and
+not Our Lady, for the godly advice received.
+
+But again, three years back, just before Mr. Dent had come to the place,
+there had been a solemn burning on the village-green of all such
+muniments of superstition as had not been previously hidden by the priest
+and Sir Nicholas; and in the rejoicings that accompanied this return to
+pure religion practically the whole agricultural population had joined.
+Some Justices had ridden over from East Grinsted to direct this rustic
+reformation, and had reported favourably to the new Rector on his arrival
+of the zeal of his flock. The great Rood, they told him, with SS. Mary
+and John, four great massy angels, the statue of St. Christopher, the
+Vernacle, a brocade set of mass vestments and a purple cope, had perished
+in the flames, and there had been no lack of hands to carry faggots; and
+now the Rector found it difficult to reconcile the zeal of his
+parishioners (which indeed he privately regretted) with the sudden and
+unexpected lapses into superstition, such as was Mr. Martin's gratitude
+to Our Lady, and others of which he had had experience.
+
+As regards the secular politics of the outside world, Great Keynes took
+but little interest. It was far more a matter of concern whether mass or
+morning prayer was performed on Sunday, than whether a German bridegroom
+could be found for Elizabeth, or whether she would marry the Duke of
+Anjou; and more important than either were the infinitesimal details of
+domestic life. Whether Mary was guilty or not, whether her supporters
+were rising, whether the shadow of Spain chilled the hearts of men in
+London whose affair it was to look after such things; yet the cows must
+be milked, and the children washed, and the falcons fed; and it was these
+things that formed the foreground of life, whether the sky were stormy or
+sunlit.
+
+And so, as the autumn of '69 crept over the woods in flame and russet,
+and the sound of the sickle was in folks' ears, the life at Great Keynes
+was far more tranquil than we should fancy who look back on those
+stirring days. The village, lying as it did out of the direct route
+between any larger towns, was not so much affected by the gallop of the
+couriers, or the slow creeping rumours from the Continent, as villages
+that lay on lines of frequent communication. So the simple life went on,
+and Isabel went about her business in Mrs. Carroll's still-room, and
+Anthony rode out with the harriers, and Sir Nicholas told his beads in
+his room--all with nearly as much serenity as if Scotland were fairyland
+and Spain a dream.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                        THE HALL AND THE HOUSE
+
+
+Anthony Norris, who was now about fourteen, went up to King's College,
+Cambridge, in October. He was closeted long with his father the night
+before he left, and received from him much sound religious advice and
+exhortation; and in the morning, after an almost broken-hearted good-bye
+from Isabel, he rode out with his servant following on another horse and
+leading a packhorse on the saddle of which the falcons swayed and
+staggered, and up the curving drive that led round into the village
+green. He was a good-hearted and wholesome-minded boy, and left a real
+ache behind him in the Dower House.
+
+Isabel indeed ran up to his room, after she had seen his feathered cap
+disappear at a trot through the gate, leaving her father in the hall; and
+after shutting and latching the door, threw herself on his bed, and
+sobbed her heart out. They had never been long separated before. For the
+last three years he had gone over to the Rectory morning by morning to be
+instructed by Mr. Dent; but now, although he would never make a great
+scholar, his father thought it well to send him up to Cambridge for two
+or three years, that he might learn to find his own level in the world.
+
+Anthony himself was eager to go. If the truth must be told, he fretted a
+little against the restraints of even such a moderate Puritan household
+as that of his father's. It was a considerable weariness to Anthony to
+kneel in the hall on a fresh morning while his father read, even though
+with fervour and sincerity, long extracts from "Christian Prayers and
+Holy Meditations," collected by the Reverend Henry Bull, when the real
+world, as Anthony knew it, laughed and rippled and twinkled outside in
+the humming summer air of the lawn and orchard; or to have to listen to
+godly discourses, however edifying to elder persons, just at the time
+when the ghost-moth was beginning to glimmer in the dusk, and the heavy
+trout to suck down his supper in the glooming pool in the meadow below
+the house.
+
+His very sports, too, which his father definitely encouraged, were
+obviously displeasing to the grave divines who haunted the house so often
+from Saturday to Monday, and spoke of high doctrinal matters at
+meal-times, when, so Anthony thought, lighter subjects should prevail.
+They were not interested in his horse, and Anthony never felt quite the
+same again towards one good minister who in a moment of severity called
+Eliza, the glorious peregrine that sat on the boy's wrist and shook her
+bells, a "vanity." And so Anthony trotted off happy enough on his way to
+Cambridge, of which he had heard much from Mr. Dent; and where, although
+there too were divines and theology, there were boys as well who acted
+plays, hunted with the hounds, and did not call high-bred hawks
+"vanities."
+
+Isabel was very different. While Anthony was cheerful and active like his
+mother who had died in giving him life, she, on the other hand, was quiet
+and deep like her father. She was growing up, if not into actual beauty,
+at least into grace and dignity: but there were some who thought her
+beautiful. She was pale with dark hair, and the great grey eyes of her
+father; and she loved and lived in Anthony from the very difference
+between them. She frankly could not understand the attraction of sport,
+and the things that pleased her brother; she was afraid of the hawks, and
+liked to stroke a horse and kiss his soft nose better than to ride him.
+But, after all, Anthony liked to watch the towering bird, and to hear and
+indeed increase the thunder of the hoofs across the meadows behind the
+stomping hawk; and so she did her best to like them too; and she was
+often torn two ways by her sympathy for the partridge on the one hand, as
+it sped low and swift across the standing corn with that dread shadow
+following, and her desire, on the other hand, that Anthony should not be
+disappointed.
+
+But in the deeper things of the spirit, too, there was a wide difference
+between them. As Anthony fidgeted and sighed through his chair-back
+morning and evening, Isabel's soul soared up to God on the wings of those
+sounding phrases. She had inherited all her father's tender piety, and
+lived, like him, on the most intimate terms with the spiritual world. And
+though, of course, by training she was Puritan, by character she was
+Puritan too. As a girl of fourteen she had gone with Anthony to see the
+cleansing of the village temple. They had stood together at the west end
+of the church a little timid at the sight of that noisy crowd in the
+quiet house of prayer; but she had felt no disapproval at that fierce
+vindication of truth. Her father had taught her of course that the purest
+worship was that which was only spiritual; and while since childhood she
+had seen Sunday by Sunday the Great Rood overhead, she had never paid it
+any but artistic attention. The men had the ropes round it now, and it
+was swaying violently to and fro; and then, even as the children watched,
+a tie had given, and the great cross with its pathetic wide-armed figure
+had toppled forward towards the nave, and then crashed down on the
+pavement. A fanatic ran out and furiously kicked the thorn-crowned head
+twice, splintering the hair and the features, and cried out on it as an
+idol; and yet Isabel, with all her tenderness, felt nothing more than a
+vague regret that a piece of carving so ancient and so delicate should be
+broken.
+
+But when the work was over, and the crowd and Anthony with them had
+stamped out, directed by the justices, dragging the figures and the old
+vestments with them to the green, she had seen something which touched
+her heart much more. She passed up alone under the screen, which they had
+spared, to see what had been done in the chancel; and as she went she
+heard a sobbing from the corner near the priest's door; and there,
+crouched forward on his face, crying and moaning quietly, was the old
+priest who had been rector of the church for nearly twenty years. He had
+somehow held on in Edward's time in spite of difficulties; had thanked
+God and the Court of Heaven with a full heart for the accession of Mary;
+had prayed and deprecated the divine wrath at the return of the
+Protestant religion with Elizabeth; but yet had somehow managed to keep
+the old faith alight for eight years more, sometimes evading, sometimes
+resisting, and sometimes conforming to the march of events, in hopes of
+better days. But now the blow had fallen, and the old man, too
+ill-instructed to hear the accents of new truth in the shouting of that
+noisy crowd and the crash of his images, was on his knees before the
+altar where he had daily offered the holy sacrifice through all those
+troublous years, faithful to what he believed to be God's truth, now
+bewailing and moaning the horrors of that day, and, it is to be feared,
+unchristianly calling down the vengeance of God upon his faithless flock.
+This shocked and touched Isabel far more than the destruction of the
+images; and she went forward timidly and said something; but the old man
+turned on her a face of such misery and anger that she had run straight
+out of the church, and joined Anthony as he danced on the green.
+
+On the following Sunday the old priest was not there, and a fervent young
+minister from London had taken his place, and preached a stirring sermon
+on the life and times of Josiah; and Isabel had thanked God on her knees
+after the sermon for that He had once more vindicated His awful Name and
+cleansed His House for a pure worship.
+
+But the very centre of Isabel's religion was the love of the Saviour. The
+Puritans of those early days were very far from holding a negative or
+colourless faith. Not only was their belief delicately dogmatic to
+excess; but it all centred round the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
+Isabel had drunk in this faith from her father's lips, and from
+devotional books which he gave her, as far back as she could remember
+anything. Her love for the Saviour was even romantic and passionate. It
+seemed to her that He was as much a part of her life, and of her actual
+experience, as Anthony or her father. Certain places in the lanes about,
+and certain spots in the garden, were sacred and fragrant to her because
+her Lord had met her there. It was indeed a trouble to her sometimes that
+she loved Anthony so much; and to her mind it was a less worthy kind of
+love altogether; it was kindled and quickened by such little external
+details, by the sight of his boyish hand brown with the sun, and scarred
+by small sporting accidents, such as the stroke of his bird's beak or
+talons, or by the very outline of the pillow where his curly head had
+rested only an hour or two ago. Whereas her love for Christ was a deep
+and solemn passion that seemed to well not out of His comeliness or even
+His marred Face or pierced Hands, but out of His wide encompassing love
+that sustained and clasped her at every moment of her conscious attention
+to Him, and that woke her soul to ecstasy at moments of high communion.
+These two loves, then, one so earthly, one so heavenly, but both so
+sweet, every now and then seemed to her to be in slight conflict in her
+heart. And lately a third seemed to be rising up out of the plane of
+sober and quiet affections such as she felt for her father, and still
+further complicating the apparently encountering claims of love to God
+and man.
+
+Isabel grew quieter in a few minutes and lay still, following Anthony
+with her imagination along the lane that led to the London road, and then
+presently she heard her father calling, and went to the door to listen.
+
+"Isabel," he said, "come down. Hubert is in the hall."
+
+She called out that she would be down in a moment; and then going across
+to her own room she washed her face and came downstairs. There was a
+tall, pleasant-faced lad of about her own age standing near the open door
+that led into the garden; and he came forward nervously as she entered.
+
+"I came back last night, Mistress Isabel," he said, "and heard that
+Anthony was going this morning: but I am afraid I am too late."
+
+She told him that Anthony had just gone.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I came to say good-bye; but I came by the orchard, and
+so we missed one another."
+
+Isabel asked a word or two about his visit to the North, and they talked
+for a few minutes about a rumour that Hubert had heard of a rising on
+behalf of Mary: but Hubert was shy and constrained, and Isabel was still
+a little tremulous. At last he said he must be going, and then suddenly
+remembered a message from his mother.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I was forgetting. My mother wants you to come up this
+evening, if you have time. Father is away, and my aunt is unwell and is
+upstairs."
+
+Isabel promised she would come.
+
+"Father is at Chichester," went on Hubert, "before the Commission, but we
+do not expect him back till to-morrow."
+
+A shadow passed across Isabel's face. "I am sorry," she said.
+
+The fact was that Sir Nicholas had again been summoned for recusancy. It
+was an expensive matter to refuse to attend church, and Sir Nicholas
+probably paid not less than £200 or £300 a year for the privilege of
+worshipping as his conscience bade.
+
+In the evening Isabel asked her father's leave to be absent after supper,
+and then drawing on her hood, walked across in the dusk to the Hall.
+Hubert was waiting for her at the boundary door between the two
+properties.
+
+"Father has come back," he said, "but my mother wants you still." They
+went on together, passed round the cloister wing to the south of the
+house: the bell turret over the inner hall and the crowded roofs stood up
+against the stars, as they came up the curving flight of shallow steps
+from the garden to the tall doorway that led into the hall.
+
+It was a pleasant, wide, high room, panelled with fresh oak, and hung
+with a little old tapestry here and there, and a few portraits. A
+staircase rose out of it to the upper story. It had a fret-ceiling, with
+flower-de-luce and rose pendants, and on the walls between the tapestries
+hung a few antlers and pieces of armour, morions and breast-plates, with
+a pair of pikes or halberds here and there. A fire had been lighted in
+the great hearth as the evenings were chilly; and Sir Nicholas was
+standing before it, still in his riding-dress, pouring out resentment and
+fury to his wife, who sat in a tall chair at her embroidery. She turned
+silently and held out a hand to Isabel, who came and stood beside her,
+while Hubert went and sat down near his father. Sir Nicholas scarcely
+seemed to notice their entrance, beyond glancing up for a moment under
+his fierce white eyebrows; but went on growling out his wrath. He was a
+fine rosy man, with grey moustache and pointed beard, and a thick head of
+hair, and he held in his hand his flat riding cap, and his whip with
+which from time to time he cut at his boot.
+
+"It was monstrous, I told the fellow, that a man should be haled from his
+home like this to pay a price for his conscience. The religion of my
+father and his father and all our fathers was good enough for me; and why
+in God's name should the Catholic have to pay who had never changed his
+faith, while every heretic went free? And then to that some stripling of
+a clerk told me that a religion that was good enough for the Queen's
+Grace should be good enough for her loyal subjects too; but my Lord
+silenced him quickly. And then I went at them again; and all my Lord
+would do was to nod his head and smile at me as if I were a child; and
+then he told me that it was a special Commission all for my sake, and Sir
+Arthur's, who was there too, my dear.... Well, well, the end was that I
+had to pay for their cursed religion."
+
+"Sweetheart, sweetheart," said Lady Maxwell, glancing at Isabel.
+
+"Well, I paid," went on Sir Nicholas, "but I showed them, thank God, what
+I was: for as we came out, Sir Arthur and I together, what should we see
+but another party coming in, pursuivant and all; and in the mid of them
+that priest who was with us last July.--Well, well, we'll leave his name
+alone--him that said he was a priest before them all in September; and I
+went down on my knees, thank God, and Sir Arthur went down on his, and we
+asked his blessing before them all, and he gave it us: and oh! my Lord
+was red and white with passion."
+
+"That was not wise, sweetheart," said Lady Maxwell tranquilly, "the
+priest will have suffered for it afterwards."
+
+"Well, well," grumbled Sir Nicholas, "a man cannot always think, but we
+showed them that Catholics were not ashamed of their religion--yes, and
+we got the blessing too."
+
+"Well, but here is supper waiting," said my lady, "and Isabel, too, whom
+you have not spoken to yet."
+
+Sir Nicholas paid no attention.
+
+"Ah! but that was not all," he went on, savagely striking his boot again,
+"at the end of all who should I see but that--that--damned rogue--whom
+God reward!"--and he turned and spat into the fire--"Topcliffe. There he
+was, bowing to my Lord and the Commissioners. When I think of that man,"
+he said, "when I think of that man--" and Sir Nicholas' kindly old
+passionate face grew pale and lowering with fury, and his eyebrows bent
+themselves forward, and his lower lip pushed itself out, and his hand
+closed tremblingly on his whip.
+
+His wife laid down her embroidery and came to him.
+
+"There, sweetheart," she said, taking his cap and whip. "Now sit down and
+have supper, and leave that man to God."
+
+Sir Nicholas grew quiet again; and after a saying a word or two of
+apology to Isabel, left the room to wash before he sat down to supper.
+
+"Mistress Isabel does not know who Topcliffe is," said Hubert.
+
+"Hush, my son," said his mother, "your father does not like his name to
+be spoken."
+
+Presently Sir Nicholas returned, and sat down to supper. Gradually his
+good nature returned, and he told them what he had seen in Chichester,
+and the talk he had heard. How it was reported to his lordship the Bishop
+that the old religion was still the religion of the people's hearts--how,
+for example, at Lindfield they had all the images and the altar furniture
+hidden underground, and at Battle, too; and that the mass could be set up
+again at a few hours' notice: and that the chalices had not been melted
+down into communion cups according to the orders issued, and so on. And
+that at West Grinsted, moreover, the Blessed Sacrament was there
+still--praise God--yes, and was going to remain there. He spoke freely
+before Isabel, and yet he remembered his courtesy too, and did not abuse
+the new-fangled religion, as he thought it, in her presence; or seek in
+any way to trouble her mind. If ever in an excess of anger he was carried
+away in his talk, his wife would always check him gently; and he would
+always respond and apologise to Isabel if he had transgressed good
+manners. In fact, he was just a fiery old man who could not change his
+religion even at the bidding of his monarch, and could not understand how
+what was right twenty years ago was wrong now.
+
+Isabel herself listened with patience and tenderness, and awe too;
+because she loved and honoured this old man in spite of the darkness in
+which he still walked. He also told them in lower tones of a rumour that
+was persistent at Chichester that the Duke of Norfolk had been imprisoned
+by the Queen's orders, and was to be charged with treason; and that he
+was at present at Burnham, in Mr. Wentworth's house, under the guard of
+Sir Henry Neville. If this was true, as indeed it turned out to be later,
+it was another blow to the Catholic cause in England; but Sir Nicholas
+was of a sanguine mind, and pooh-poohed the whole affair even while he
+related it.
+
+And so the evening passed in talk. When Sir Nicholas had finished supper,
+they all went upstairs to my lady's withdrawing-room on the first floor.
+This was always a strange and beautiful room to Isabel. It was panelled
+like the room below, but was more delicately furnished, and a tall harp
+stood near the window to which my lady sang sometimes in a sweet
+tremulous old voice, while Sir Nicholas nodded at the fire. Isabel, too,
+had had some lessons here from the old lady; but even this mild vanity
+troubled her puritan conscience a little sometimes. Then the room, too,
+had curious and attractive things in it. A high niche in the oak over the
+fireplace held a slender image of Mary and her Holy Child, and from the
+Child's fingers hung a pair of beads. Isabel had a strange sense
+sometimes as if this holy couple had taken refuge in that niche when they
+were driven from the church; but it seemed to her in her steadier moods
+that this was a superstitious fancy, and had the nature of sin.
+
+This evening the old lady went to her harp, while Isabel sat down near
+her in the wide window seat and looked out over the dark lawn, where the
+white dial glimmered like a phantom, and thought of Anthony again. Sir
+Nicholas went and stretched himself before the fire, and closed his eyes,
+for he was old, and tired with his long ride; and Hubert sat down in a
+dark corner near him whence he could watch Isabel. After a few rippling
+chords my lady began to sing a song by Sir Thomas Wyatt, whom she and Sir
+Nicholas had known in their youth; and which she had caused to be set to
+music by some foreign chapel master. It was a sorrowful little song, with
+the title, "He seeketh comfort in patience," and possibly she chose it on
+purpose for this evening.
+
+    "Patience! for I have wrong,
+    And dare not shew wherein;
+    Patience shall be my song;
+    Since truth can nothing win.
+    Patience then for this fit;
+    Hereafter comes not yet."
+
+While she sang, she thought no doubt of the foolish brave courtier who
+lacked patience in spite of his singing, and lost his head for it; her
+voice shook once or twice: and old Sir Nicholas shook his drowsy head
+when she had finished, and said "God rest him," and then fell fast
+asleep.
+
+Then he presently awoke as the others talked in whispers, and joined in
+too: and they talked of Anthony, and what he would find at Cambridge; and
+of Alderman Marrett, and his house off Cheapside, where Anthony would lie
+that night; and of such small and tranquil topics, and left fiercer
+questions alone. And so the evening came to an end; and Isabel said
+good-night, and went downstairs with Hubert, and out into the garden
+again.
+
+"I am sorry that Sir Nicholas has been so troubled," she said to Hubert,
+as they turned the corner of the house together. "Why cannot we leave one
+another alone, and each worship God as we think fit?"
+
+Hubert smiled in the darkness to himself.
+
+"I am afraid Queen Mary did not think it could be done, either," he said.
+"But then, Mistress Isabel," he went on, "I am glad that you feel that
+religion should not divide people."
+
+"Surely not," she said, "so long as they love God."
+
+"Then you think--" began Hubert, and then stopped. Isabel turned to him.
+
+"Yes?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing," said Hubert.
+
+They had reached the door in the boundary wall by now, and Isabel would
+not let him come further with her and bade him good-night. But Hubert
+still stood, with his hand on the door, and watched the white figure fade
+into the dusk, and listened to the faint rustle of her skirt over the dry
+leaves; and then, when he heard at last the door of the Dower House open
+and close, he sighed to himself and went home.
+
+Isabel heard her father call from his room as she passed through the
+hall; and went in to him as he sat at his table in his furred gown, with
+his books about him, to bid him good-night and receive his blessing. He
+lifted his hand for a moment to finish the sentence he was writing, and
+she stood watching the quill move and pause and move again over the
+paper, in the candlelight, until he laid the pen down, and rose and stood
+with his back to the fire, smiling down at her. He was a tall, slender
+man, surprisingly upright for his age, with a delicate, bearded,
+scholar's face; the little plain ruff round his neck helped to emphasise
+the fine sensitiveness of his features; and the hands which he stretched
+out to his daughter were thin and veined.
+
+"Well, my daughter," he said, looking down at her with his kindly grey
+eyes so like her own, and holding her hands.
+
+"Have you had a good evening, sir?" she asked.
+
+He nodded briskly.
+
+"And you, child?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir," she said, smiling up at him.
+
+"And was Sir Nicholas there?"
+
+She told him what had passed, and how Sir Nicholas had been fined again
+for his recusancy; and how Lady Maxwell had sung one of Sir Thomas
+Wyatt's songs.
+
+"And was no one else there?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, father, Hubert."
+
+"Ah! And did Hubert come home with you?"
+
+"Only as far as the gate, father. I would not let him come further."
+
+Her father said nothing, but still looked steadily down into her eyes for
+a moment, and then turned and looked away from her into the fire.
+
+"You must take care," he said gently. "Remember he is a Papist, born and
+bred; and that he has a heart to be broken too."
+
+She felt herself steadily flushing; and as he turned again towards her,
+dropped her eyes.
+
+"You will be prudent and tender, I know," he added. "I trust you wholly,
+Isabel."
+
+Then he kissed her on the forehead and laid his hand on her head, and
+looked up, as the Puritan manner was.
+
+"May the God of grace bless you, my daughter; and make you faithful to
+the end." And then he looked into her eyes again, smiled and nodded; and
+she went out, leaving him standing there.
+
+Mr. Norris had begun to fear that the boy loved Isabel, but as yet he did
+not know whether Isabel understood it or even was aware of it. The
+marriage difficulties of Catholics and Protestants were scarcely yet
+existing; and certainly there was no formulated rule of dealing with
+them. Changes of religion were so frequent in those days that
+difficulties, when they did arise, easily adjusted themselves. It was
+considered, for example, by politicians quite possible at one time that
+the Duke of Anjou should conform to the Church of England for the sake of
+marrying the Queen: or that he should attend public services with her,
+and at the same time have mass and the sacraments in his own private
+chapel. Or again, it was open to question whether England as a whole
+would not return to the old religion, and Catholicism be the only
+tolerated faith.
+
+But to really religious minds such solutions would not do. It would have
+been an intolerable thought to this sincere Puritan, with all his
+tolerance, that his daughter should marry a Catholic; such an arrangement
+would mean either that she was indifferent to vital religion, or that she
+was married to a man whose creed she was bound to abhor and anathematise:
+and however willing Mr. Norris might be to meet Papists on terms of
+social friendliness, and however much he might respect their personal
+characters, yet the thought that the life of any one dear to him should
+be irretrievably bound up with all that the Catholic creed involved, was
+simply an impossible one.
+
+Besides all this he had no great opinion of Hubert. He thought he
+detected in him a carelessness and want of principle that would make him
+hesitate to trust his daughter to him, even if the insuperable barrier of
+religion were surmounted. Mr. Norris liked a man to be consistent and
+zealous for his creed, even if that creed were dark and
+superstitious--and this zeal seemed to him lamentably lacking in Hubert.
+More than once he had heard the boy speak of his father with an air of
+easy indulgence, that his own opinion interpreted as contempt.
+
+"I believe my father thinks," he had once said, "that every penny he pays
+in fines goes to swell the accidental glory of God."
+
+And Hubert had been considerably startled and distressed when the elder
+man had told him to hold his tongue unless he could speak respectfully of
+one to whom he owed nothing but love and honour. This had happened,
+however, more than a year ago; and Hubert had forgotten it, no doubt,
+even if Mr. Norris had not.
+
+And as for Isabel.
+
+It is exceedingly difficult to say quite what place Hubert occupied in
+her mind. She certainly did not know herself much more than that she
+liked the boy to be near her; to hear his footsteps coming along the path
+from the Hall. This morning when her father had called up to her that
+Hubert was come, it was not so hard to dry her tears for Anthony's
+departure. The clouds had parted a little when she came and found this
+tall lad smiling shyly at her in the hall. As she had sat in the window
+seat, too, during Lady Maxwell's singing, she was far from unconscious
+that Hubert's face was looking at her from the dark corner. And as they
+walked back together her simplicity was not quite so transparent as the
+boy himself thought.
+
+Again when her father had begun to speak of him just now, although she
+was able to meet his eyes steadily and smilingly, yet it was just an
+effort. She had not mentioned Hubert herself, until her father had named
+him; and in fact it is probably safe to say that during Hubert's visit to
+the north, which had lasted three or four months, he had made greater
+progress towards his goal, and had begun to loom larger than ever in the
+heart of this serene grey-eyed girl, whom he longed for so irresistibly.
+
+And now, as Isabel sat on her bed before kneeling to say her prayers,
+Hubert was in her mind even more than Anthony. She tried to wonder what
+her father meant, and yet only too well she knew that she knew. She had
+forgotten to look into Anthony's room where she had cried so bitterly
+this morning, and now she sat wide-eyed, and self-questioning as to
+whether her heavenly love were as lucid and single as it had been; and
+when at last she went down on her knees she entreated the King of Love to
+bless not only her father, and her brother Anthony who lay under the
+Alderman's roof in far-away London; but Sir Nicholas and Lady Maxwell,
+and Mistress Margaret Hallam, and--and--Hubert--and James Maxwell, his
+brother; and to bring them out of the darkness of Papistry into the
+glorious liberty of the children of the Gospel.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                             LONDON TOWN
+
+
+Isabel's visit to London, which had been arranged to take place the
+Christmas after Anthony's departure to Cambridge, was full of bewildering
+experiences to her. Mr. Norris from time to time had references to look
+up in London, and divines to consult as to difficult points in his book
+on the Eucharist; and this was a favourable opportunity to see Mr.
+Dering, the St. Paul's lecturer; so the two took the opportunity, and
+with a couple of servants drove up to the City one day early in December
+to the house of Alderman Marrett, the wool merchant, and a friend of Mr.
+Norris' father; and for several days both before and after Anthony's
+arrival from Cambridge went every afternoon to see the sights. The maze
+of narrow streets of high black and white houses with their iron-work
+signs, leaning forward as if to whisper to one another, leaving strips of
+sky overhead; the strange play of lights and shades after nightfall; the
+fantastic groups; the incessant roar and rumble of the crowded
+alleys--all the commonplace life of London was like an enchanted picture
+to her, opening a glimpse into an existence of which she had known
+nothing.
+
+To live, too, in the whirl of news that poured in day after day borne by
+splashed riders and panting horses;--this was very different to the slow
+round of country life, with rumours and tales floating in, mellowed by
+doubt and lapse of time, like pensive echoes from another world. For
+example, morning by morning, as she came downstairs to dinner, there was
+the ruddy-faced Alderman with his fresh budget of news of the
+north;--Lords Northumberland and Westmoreland with a Catholic force of
+several thousands, among which were two cousins of Mrs. Marrett
+herself--and the old lady nodded her head dolorously in
+corroboration--had marched southwards under the Banner of the Five
+Wounds, and tramped through Durham City welcomed by hundreds of the
+citizens; the Cathedral had been entered, old Richard Norton with the
+banner leading; the new Communion table had been cast out of doors, the
+English Bible and Prayer-book torn to shreds, the old altar reverently
+carried in from the rubbish heap, the tapers rekindled, and amid
+hysterical enthusiasm Mass had been said once more in the old sanctuary.
+
+Then they had moved south; Lord Sussex was powerless in York; the Queen,
+terrified and irresolute, alternately storming and crying; Spain was
+about to send ships to Hartlepool to help the rebels; Mary Stuart would
+certainly be rescued from her prison at Tutbury. Then Mary had been moved
+to Coventry; then came a last flare of frightening tales: York had
+fallen; Mary had escaped; Elizabeth was preparing to flee.
+
+And then one morning the Alderman's face was brighter: it was all a lie,
+he said. The revolt had crumbled away; my Lord Sussex was impregnably
+fortified in York with guns from Hull; Lord Pembroke was gathering forces
+at Windsor; Lords Clinton, Hereford and Warwick were converging towards
+York to relieve the siege. And as if to show Isabel it was not a mere
+romance, she could see the actual train-bands go by up Cheapside with the
+gleam of steel caps and pike-heads, and the mighty tramp of disciplined
+feet, and the welcoming roar of the swarming crowds.
+
+Then as men's hearts grew lighter the tale of chastisement began to be
+told, and was not finished till long after Isabel was home again. Green
+after green of the windy northern villages was made hideous by the
+hanging bodies of the natives, and children hid their faces and ran by
+lest they should see what her Grace had done to their father.
+
+In spite of the Holy Sacrifice, and the piteous banner, and the call to
+fight for the faith, the Catholics had hung back and hesitated, and the
+catastrophe was complete.
+
+The religion of London, too, was a revelation to this country girl. She
+went one Sunday to St. Paul's Cathedral, pausing with her father before
+they went in to see the new restorations and the truncated steeple struck
+by lightning eight years before, which in spite of the Queen's angry
+urging the citizens had never been able to replace.
+
+There was a good congregation at the early morning prayer; and the organs
+and the singing were to Isabel as the harps and choirs of heaven. The
+canticles were sung to Shephard's setting by the men and children of St.
+Paul's all in surplices: and the dignitaries wore besides their grey fur
+almuces, which had not yet been abolished. The grace and dignity of the
+whole service, though to older people who remembered the unreformed
+worship a bare and miserable affair, and to Mr. Norris, with his sincere
+simplicity and spirituality, a somewhat elaborate and sensuous mode of
+honouring God, yet to Isabel was a first glimpse of what the mystery of
+worship meant. The dim towering arches, through which the dusty
+richly-stained sunbeams poured, the far-away murmurous melodies that
+floated down from the glimmering choir, the high thin pealing organ, all
+combined to give her a sense of the unfathomable depths of the Divine
+Majesty--an element that was lacking in the clear-cut personal Puritan
+creed, in spite of the tender associations that made it fragrant for her,
+and the love of the Saviour that enlightened and warmed it. The sight of
+the crowds outside, too, in the frosty sunlight, gathered round the grey
+stone pulpit on the north-east of the Cathedral, and streaming down every
+alley and lane, the packed galleries, the gesticulating black figure of
+the preacher--this impressed on her an idea of the power of corporate
+religion, that hours at her own prayer-desk, or solitary twilight walks
+under the Hall pines, or the uneventful divisions of the Rector's village
+sermons, had failed to give.
+
+It was this Sunday in London that awakened her quiet soul from the lonely
+companionship of God, to the knowledge of that vast spiritual world of
+men of which she was but one tiny cell. Her father observed her quietly
+and interestedly as they went home together, but said nothing beyond an
+indifferent word or two. He was beginning to realise the serious reality
+of her spiritual life, and to dread anything that would even approximate
+to coming between her soul and her Saviour. The father and daughter
+understood one another, and were content to be silent together.
+
+Her talks with Mrs. Marrett, too, left their traces on her mind. The
+Alderman's wife, for the first time in her life, found her views and
+reminiscences listened to as if they were oracles, and she needed little
+encouragement to pour them out in profusion. She was especially generous
+with her tales of portents and warnings; and the girl was more than once
+considerably alarmed by what she heard while the ladies were alone in the
+dim firelit parlour on the winter afternoons before the candles were
+brought in.
+
+"When you were a little child, my dear," began the old lady one day,
+"there was a great burning made everywhere of all the popish images and
+vestments; all but the copes and the altar-cloths that they made into
+dresses for the ministers' new wives, and bed-quilts to cover them; and
+there were books and banners and sepulchres and even relics. I went out
+to see the burning at Paul's, and though I knew it was proper that the
+old papistry should go, yet I was uneasy at the way it was done.
+
+"Well," went on the old lady, glancing about her, "I was sitting in this
+very room only a few days after, and the air began to grow dark and
+heavy, and all became still. There had been two or three cocks crowing
+and answering one another down by the river, and others at a distance;
+and they all ceased: and there had been birds chirping in the roof, and
+they ceased. And it grew so dark that I laid down my needle and went to
+the window, and there at the end of the street over the houses there was
+coming a great cloud, with wings like a hawk, I thought; but some said
+afterwards that, when they saw it, it had fingers like a man's hand, and
+others said it was like a great tower, with battlements. However that may
+be, it grew nearer and larger, and it was blue and dark like that curtain
+there; and there was no wind to stir it, for the windows had ceased
+rattling, and the dust was quiet in the streets; and still it came on
+quickly, growing as it came; and then there came a far-away sound, like a
+heavy waggon, or, some said, like a deep voice complaining. And I turned
+away from the window afraid; and there was the cat, that had been on a
+chair, down in the corner, with her back up, staring at the cloud: and
+then she began to run round the room like a mad thing, and presently
+whisked out of the door when I opened it. And I went to find Mr. Marrett,
+and he had not come in, and all the yard was quiet. I could only hear a
+horse stamp once or twice in the stable. And then as I saw calling out
+for some one to come, the storm broke, and the sky was all one dark cloud
+from side to side. For three hours it went on, rolling and clapping, and
+the lightning came in through the window that I had darkened and through
+the clothes over my head; for I had gone to my bed and rolled myself
+round under the clothes. And so it went on--and, my dear--" and Mrs.
+Marrett put her head close to Isabel's--"I prayed to our Lady and the
+saints, which I had not done since I was married; and asked them to pray
+God to keep me safe. And then at the end came a clap of thunder and a
+flash of lightning more fearful than all that had gone before; and at
+that very moment, so Mr. Marrett told me when he came in, two of the
+doors in St. Denys' Church in Fanshawe Street were broken in pieces by
+something that crushed them in, and the stone steeple of Allhallow Church
+in Bread Street was broken off short, and a part of it killed a dog that
+was beneath, and overthrew a man that played with the dog."
+
+Isabel could hardly restrain a shiver and a glance round the dark old
+room, so awful were Mrs. Marrett's face and gestures and loud whispering
+tone, as she told this.
+
+"Ah! but, my dear," she went on, "there was worse happened to poor King
+Hal, God rest him--him who began to reform the Church, as they say, and
+destroyed the monasteries. All the money that he left for masses for his
+soul was carried off with the rest at the change of religion; and that
+was bad enough, but this is worse. This is a tale, my dear, that I have
+heard my father tell many a time; and I was a young woman myself when it
+happened. The King's Grace was threatened by a friar, I think of
+Greenwich, that if he laid hands on the monasteries he should be as Ahab
+whose blood was licked by dogs in the very place which he took from a
+man. Well, the friar was hanged for his pains, and the King lived. And
+then at last he died, and was put in a great coffin, and carried through
+London; and they put the coffin in an open space in Sion Abbey, which the
+King had taken. And in the night there came one to view the coffin, and
+to see that all was well. And he came round the corner, and there stood
+the great coffin--(for his Grace was a great stout man, my dear)--on
+trestles in the moonlight, and beneath it a great black dog that lapped
+something: and the dog turned as the man came, and some say, but not my
+father, that the dog's eyes were red as coals, and that his mouth and
+nostrils smoked, and that he cast no shadow; but (however that may be)
+the dog turned and looked and then ran; and the man followed him into a
+yard, but when he reached there, there was no dog. And the man went back
+to the coffin afraid; and he found the coffin was burst open, and--and--"
+
+Mrs. Marrett stopped abruptly. Isabel was white and trembling.
+
+"There, there, my dear. I am a foolish old woman; and I'll tell you no
+more."
+
+Isabel was really terrified, and entreated Mrs. Marrett to tell her
+something pleasant to make her forget these horrors; and so she told her
+old tales of her youth, and the sights of the city, and the great doings
+in Mary's reign; and so the time passed pleasantly till the gentlemen
+came home.
+
+At other times she told her of Elizabeth and the great nobles, and
+Isabel's heart beat high at it, and at the promise that before she left
+she herself should see the Queen, even if she had to go to Greenwich or
+Nonsuch for it.
+
+"God bless her," said Mrs. Marrett loyally, "she's a woman like ourselves
+for all her majesty. And she likes the show and the music too, like us
+all. I declare when I see them all a-going down the water to Greenwich,
+or to the Tower for a bear-baiting, with the horns blowing and the guns
+firing and the banners and the barges and the music, I declare sometimes
+I think that heaven itself can be no better, God forgive me! Ah! but I
+wish her Grace 'd take a husband; there are many that want her; and then
+we could laugh at them all. There's so many against her Grace now who'd
+be for her if she had a son of her own. There's Duke Charles whose
+picture hangs in her bedroom, they say; and Lord Robert Dudley--there's a
+handsome spark, my dear, in his gay coat and his feathers and his ruff,
+and his hand on his hip, and his horse and all. I wish she'd take him and
+have done with it. And then we'd hear no more of the nasty Spaniards.
+There's Don de Silva, for all the world like a monkey with his brown face
+and mincing ways and his grand clothes. I declare when Captain Hawkins
+came home, just four years ago last Michaelmas, and came up to London
+with his men, all laughing and rolling along with the people cheering
+them, I could have kissed the man--to think how he had made the brown men
+dance and curse and show their white teeth! and to think that the Don had
+to ask him to dinner, and grin and chatter as if nought had happened."
+
+And Mrs. Marrett's good-humoured face broke into mirth at the thought of
+the Ambassador's impotence and duplicity.
+
+Anthony's arrival in London a few days before Christmas removed the one
+obstacle to Isabel's satisfaction--that he was not there to share it with
+her. The two went about together most of the day under their father's
+care, when he was not busy at his book, and saw all that was to be seen.
+
+One afternoon as they were just leaving the courtyard of the Tower, which
+they had been visiting with a special order, a slight reddish-haired man,
+who came suddenly out of a doorway of the White Tower, stopped a moment
+irresolutely, and then came towards them, bare-headed and bowing. He had
+sloping shoulders and a serious-looking mouth, with a reddish beard and
+moustache, and had an air of strangely mingled submissiveness and
+capability. His voice too, as he spoke, was at once deferential and
+decided.
+
+"I ask your pardon, Mr. Norris," he said. "Perhaps you do not remember
+me."
+
+"I have seen you before," said the other, puzzled for a moment.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the man, "down at Great Keynes; I was in service at the
+Hall, sir."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Norris, "I remember you perfectly. Lackington, is it
+not?"
+
+The man bowed again.
+
+"I left about eight years ago, sir; and by the blessing of God, have
+gained a little post under the Government. But I wished to tell you, sir,
+that I have been happily led to change my religion. I was a Papist, sir,
+you know."
+
+Mr. Norris congratulated him.
+
+"I thank you, sir," said Lackington.
+
+The two children were looking at him; and he turned to them and bowed
+again.
+
+"Mistress Isabel and Master Anthony, sir, is it not?"
+
+"I remember you," said Isabel a little shyly, "at least, I think so."
+
+Lackington bowed again as if gratified; and turned to their father.
+
+"If you are leaving, Mr. Norris, would you allow me to walk with you a
+few steps? I have much I would like to ask you of my old master and
+mistress."
+
+The four passed out together; the two children in front; and as they went
+Lackington asked most eagerly after the household at the Hall, and
+especially after Mr. James, for whom he seemed to have a special
+affection.
+
+"It is rumoured," said Mr. Norris, "that he is going abroad."
+
+"Indeed, sir," said the servant, with a look of great interest, "I had
+heard it too, sir; but did not know whether to believe it."
+
+Lackington also gave many messages of affection to others of the
+household, to Piers the bailiff, and a couple of the foresters: and
+finished by entreating Mr. Norris to use him as he would, telling him how
+anxious he was to be of service to his friends, and asking to be
+entrusted with any little errands or commissions in London that the
+country gentleman might wish performed.
+
+"I shall count it, sir, a privilege," said the servant, "and you shall
+find me prompt and discreet."
+
+One curious incident took place just as Lackington was taking his leave
+at the turning down into Wharf Street; a man hurrying eastwards almost
+ran against them, and seemed on the point of apologising, but his face
+changed suddenly, and he spat furiously on the ground, mumbling
+something, and hurried on. Lackington seemed to see nothing.
+
+"Why did he do that?" interrupted Mr. Norris, astonished.
+
+"I ask your pardon, sir?" said Lackington interrogatively.
+
+"That fellow! did you not see him spit at me?"
+
+"I did not observe it, sir," said the servant; and presently took his
+leave.
+
+"Why did that man spit at you, father?" asked Isabel, when they had come
+indoors.
+
+"I cannot think, my dear; I have never seen him in my life."
+
+"I think Lackington knew," said Anthony, with a shrewd air.
+
+"Lackington! Why, Lackington did not even see him."
+
+"That was just it," said Anthony.
+
+Anthony's talk about Cambridge during these first evenings in London was
+fascinating to Isabel, if not to their father, too. It concerned of
+course himself and his immediate friends, and dealt with such subjects as
+cock-fighting a good deal; but he spoke also of the public disputations
+and the theological champions who crowed and pecked, not unlike cocks
+themselves, while the theatre rang with applause and hooting. The sport
+was one of the most popular at the universities at this time. But above
+all his tales of the Queen's visit a few years before attracted the girl,
+for was she not to see the Queen with her own eyes?
+
+"Oh! father," said the lad, "I would I had been there five years ago
+when she came. Master Taylor told me of it. They acted the _Aulularia_,
+you know, in King's Chapel on the Sunday evening. Master Taylor took a
+part, I forget what; and he told me how she laughed and clapped. And
+then there was a great disputation before her, one day, in St. Mary's
+Church, and the doctors argued, I forget what about, but Master Taylor
+says that of course the Genevans had the best of it; and the Queen
+spoke, too, in Latin, though she did not wish to, but my lord of Ely
+persuaded her to it; so you see she could not have learned it by heart,
+as some said. And she said she would give some great gift to the
+University; but Master Taylor says they are still waiting for it; but it
+must come soon, you see, because it is the Queen's Grace who has
+promised it; but Master Taylor says he hopes she has forgotten it, but
+he laughs when I ask him what he means, and says it again."
+
+"Who is this Master Taylor?" asked his father.
+
+"Oh! he is a Fellow of King's," said Anthony, "and he told me about the
+Provost too. The Provost is half a Papist, they say: he is very old now,
+and he has buried all the vessels and the vestments of the Chapel, they
+say, somewhere where no one knows; and he hopes the old religion will
+come back again some day; and then he will dig them up. But that is
+Papistry, and no one wants that at Cambridge. And others say that he is
+a Papist altogether, and has a priest in his house sometimes. But I do
+not think he can be a Papist, because he was there when the Queen was
+there, bowing and smiling, says Master Taylor; and looking on the Queen
+so earnestly, as if he worshipped her, says Master Taylor, all the time
+the Chancellor was talking to her before they went into the chapel for
+the _Te Deum_. But they wished they had kept some of the things, like
+the Provost, says Master Taylor, because they were much put to it when
+her Grace came down for stuffs to cover the communion-tables and for
+surplices, for Cecil said she would be displeased if all was bare and
+poor. Is it true, father," asked Anthony, breaking off, "that the Queen
+likes popish things, and has a crucifix and tapers on the table in her
+chapel?"
+
+"Ah! my son," said Mr. Norris, smiling, "you must ask one who knows. And
+what else happened?"
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "the best is to come. They had plays, you know,
+the _Dido_, and one called _Ezechias_, before the Queen. Oh! and she
+sent for one of the boys, they say, and--and kissed him, they say; but I
+think that cannot be true."
+
+"Well, my son, go on!"
+
+"Oh! and some of them thought they would have one more play before she
+went; but she had to go a long journey and left Cambridge before they
+could do it, and they went after her to--to Audley End, I think, where
+she was to sleep, and a room was made ready, and when all was prepared,
+though her Grace was tired, she came in to see the play. Master Taylor
+was not there; he said he would rather not act in that one; but he had
+the story from one who acted, but no one knew, he said, who wrote the
+play. Well, when the Queen's Grace was seated, the actors came on,
+dressed, father, dressed"--and Anthony's eyes began to shine with
+amusement--"as the Catholic Bishops in the Tower. There was Bonner in his
+popish vestments--some they had from St. Benet's--with a staff and his
+tall mitre, and a lamb in his arms; and he stared at it and gnashed his
+teeth at it as he tramped in; and then came the others, all like bishops,
+all in mass-vestments or cloth cut to look like them; and then at the end
+came a dog that belonged to one of them, well-trained, with the Popish
+Host in his mouth, made large and white, so that all could see what it
+was. Well, they thought the Queen would laugh as she was a Protestant,
+but no one laughed; some one said something in the room, and a lady cried
+out; and then the Queen stood up and scolded the actors, and trounced
+them well with her tongue, she did, and said she was displeased; and then
+out she went with all her ladies and gentlemen after her, except one or
+two servants who put out the lights at once without waiting, and broke
+Bonner's staff, and took away the Host, and kicked the dog, and told them
+to be off, for the Queen's Grace was angered with them; and so they had
+to get back to Cambridge in the dark as well as they might."
+
+"Oh! the poor boys!" said Mrs. Marrett, "and they did it all to please
+her Grace, too."
+
+"Yes," said the Alderman, "but the Queen thought it enough, I dare say,
+to put the Bishops in prison, without allowing boys to make a mock of
+them and their faith before her."
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "I thought that was it."
+
+When the Alderman came in a day or two later with the news that Elizabeth
+was to come up from Nonsuch the next day, and to pass down Cheapside on
+her way to Greenwich, the excitement of Isabel and Anthony was
+indescribable.
+
+Cheapside was joyous to see, as the two, with their father behind them
+talking to a minister whose acquaintance he had made, sat at a
+first-floor window soon after mid-day, waiting to see the Queen go by.
+Many of the people had hung carpets or tapestries, some of taffetas and
+cloth-of-gold, out of their balconies and windows, and the very signs
+themselves,--fantastic ironwork, with here and there a grotesque beast
+rampant, or a bright painting, or an escutcheon;--with the gay,
+good-tempered crowds beneath and the strip of frosty blue sky, crossed
+by streamers from side to side, shining above the towering eaves and
+gables of the houses, all combined to make a scene so astonishing that
+it seemed scarcely real to these country children.
+
+It was yet some time before she was expected; but there came a sudden
+stir from the upper end of Cheapside, and then a burst of cheering and
+laughter and hoots. Anthony leaned out to see what was coming, but could
+make out nothing beyond the head of a horse, and a man driving it from
+the seat of a cart, coming slowly down the centre of the road. The
+laughter and noise grew louder as the crowds swayed this way and that to
+make room. Presently it was seen that behind the cart a little space was
+kept, and Anthony made out the grey head of a man at the tail of the
+cart, and the face of another a little way behind; then at last, as the
+cart jolted past, the two children saw a man stripped to the waist, his
+hands tied before him to the cart, his back one red wound; while a
+hangman walked behind whirling his thonged whip about his head and
+bringing it down now and again on the old man's back. At each lash the
+prisoner shrank away, and turned his piteous face, drawn with pain, from
+side to side, while the crowd yelled and laughed.
+
+"What's it for, what's it for?" inquired Anthony, eager and interested.
+
+A boy leaning from the next window answered him.
+
+"He said Jesus Christ was not in heaven."
+
+At that moment a humorist near the cart began to cry out:
+
+"Way for the King's Grace! Way for the King's Grace!" and the crowd took
+the idea instantly: a few men walking with the cart formed lines like
+gentlemen ushers, uncovering their heads and all crying out the same
+words; and one eager player tried to walk backwards until he was tripped
+up. And so the dismal pageant of this red-robed king of anguish went by;
+and the hoots and shouts of his heralds died away. Anthony turned to
+Isabel, exultant and interested.
+
+"Why, Isabel," he said, "you look all white. What is it? You know he's a
+blasphemer."
+
+"I know, I know," said Isabel.
+
+Then suddenly, far away, came the sound of trumpets, and gusts of distant
+cheering, like the sound of the wind in thick foliage. Anthony leaned out
+again, and an excited murmur broke out once more, as all faces turned
+westwards. A moment more, and Anthony caught a flash of colour from the
+corner near St. Paul's Churchyard; then the shrill trumpets sounded
+nearer, and the cheering broke out at the end, and ran down the street
+like a wave of noise. From every window faces leaned out; even on the
+roofs and between the high chimney pots were swaying figures.
+
+Masses of colour now began to emerge, with the glitter of steel, round
+the bend of the street, where the winter sunshine fell; and the crowds
+began to surge back, and against the houses. At first Anthony could make
+out little but two moving rippling lines of light, coming parallel,
+pressing the people back; and it was not until they had come opposite the
+window that he could make out the steel caps and pikeheads of men in
+half-armour, who, marching two and two with a space between them, led the
+procession and kept the crowds back. There they went, with immovable
+disciplined faces, grounding their pike-butts sharply now and again,
+caring nothing for the yelp of pain that sometimes followed. Immediately
+behind them came the aldermen in scarlet, on black horses that tossed
+their jingling heads as they walked. Anthony watched the solemn faces of
+the old gentlemen with a good deal of awe, and presently made out his
+friend, Mr. Marrett, who rode near the end, but who was too much
+engrossed in the management of his horse to notice the two children who
+cried out to him and waved. The serjeants-of-arms followed, and then two
+lines again of gentlemen-pensioners walking, bare-headed, carrying wands,
+in short cloaks and elaborate ruffs. But the lad saw little of them, for
+the splendour of the lords and knights that followed eclipsed them
+altogether. The knights came first, in steel armour with raised vizors,
+the horses too in armour, moving sedately with a splendid clash of steel,
+and twinkling fiercely in the sunshine; and then, after them (and Anthony
+drew his breath swiftly) came a blaze of colour and jewels as the great
+lords in their cloaks and feathered caps, metal-clasped and gemmed, came
+on their splendid long-maned horses; the crowd yelled and cheered, and
+great names were tossed to and fro, as the owners passed on, each talking
+to his fellow as if unconscious of the tumult and even of the presence of
+these shouting thousands. The cry of the trumpets rang out again high and
+shattering, as the trumpeters and heralds in rich coat-armour came next;
+and Anthony looked a moment, fascinated by the lions and lilies, and the
+brightness of the eloquent horns, before he turned his head to see the
+Lord Mayor himself, mounted on a great stately white horse, that needed
+no management, while his rider bore on a cushion the sceptre. Ah! she was
+coming near now. The two saw nothing of the next rider who carried aloft
+the glittering Sword of State, for their eyes were fixed on the six
+plumed heads of the horses, with grooms and footmen in cassock-coats and
+venetian hose, and the great gilt open carriage behind that swayed and
+jolted over the cobbles. She was here; she was here; and the loyal crowds
+yelled and surged to and fro, and cloths and handkerchiefs flapped and
+waved, and caps tossed up and down, as at last the great creaking
+carriage came under the window.
+
+This is what they saw in it.
+
+A figure of extraordinary dignity, sitting upright and stiff like a pagan
+idol, dressed in a magnificent and fantastic purple robe, with a great
+double ruff, like a huge collar, behind her head; a long taper waist,
+voluminous skirts spread all over the cushions, embroidered with curious
+figures and creatures. Over her shoulders, but opened in front so as to
+show the ropes of pearls and the blaze of jewels on the stomacher, was a
+purple velvet mantle lined with ermine, with pearls sewn into it here and
+there. Set far back on her head, over a pile of reddish-yellow hair drawn
+tightly back from the forehead, was a hat with curled brims, elaborately
+embroidered, with the jewelled outline of a little crown in front, and a
+high feather topping all.
+
+And her face--a long oval, pale and transparent in complexion, with a
+sharp chin, and a high forehead; high arched eyebrows, auburn, but a
+little darker than her hair; her mouth was small, rising at the corners,
+with thin curved lips tightly shut; and her eyes, which were clear in
+colour, looked incessantly about her with great liveliness and
+good-humour.
+
+There was something overpowering to these two children who looked, too
+awed to cheer, in this formidable figure in the barbaric dress, the
+gorgeous climax of a gorgeous pageant. Apart from the physical splendour,
+this solitary glittering creature represented so much--it was the
+incarnate genius of the laughing, brutal, wanton English nation, that sat
+here in the gilded carriage and smiled and glanced with tight lips and
+clear eyes. She was like some emblematic giant, moving in a processional
+car, as fantastic as itself, dominant and serene above the heads of the
+maddened crowds, on to some mysterious destiny. A sovereign, however
+personally inglorious, has such a dignity in some measure; and Elizabeth
+added to this an exceptional majesty of her own. Henry would not have
+been ashamed for this daughter of his. What wonder then that these crowds
+were delirious with love and loyalty and an exultant fear, as this
+overwhelming personality went by:--this pale-faced tranquil virgin Queen,
+passionate, wanton, outspoken and absolutely fearless; with a sufficient
+reserve of will to be fickle without weakness; and sufficient grasp of
+her aims to be indifferent to her policy; untouched by vital religion;
+financially shrewd; inordinately vain. And when this strange dominant
+creature, royal by character as by birth, as strong as her father and as
+wanton as her mother, sat in ermine and velvet and pearls in a royal
+carriage, with shrewd-faced wits, and bright-eyed lovers, and solemn
+statesmen, and great nobles, vacuous and gallant, glittering and jingling
+before her; and troops of tall ladies in ruff and crimson mantle riding
+on white horses behind; and when the fanfares went shattering down the
+street, vibrating through the continuous roar of the crowd and the shrill
+cries of children and the mellow thunder of church-bells rocking
+overhead, and the endless tramp of a thousand feet below; and when the
+whole was framed in this fantastic twisted street, blazing with
+tapestries and arched with gables and banners, all bathed in glory by the
+clear frosty sunshine--it is little wonder that for a few minutes at
+least this country boy felt that here at last was the incarnation of his
+dreams; and that his heart should exult, with an enthusiasm he could not
+interpret, for the cause of a people who could produce such a queen, and
+of a queen who could rule such a people; and that his imagination should
+be fired with a sudden sense that these were causes for which the
+sacrifice of a life would be counted cheap, if they might thereby be
+furthered.
+
+Yet, in this very moment, by one of those mysterious suggestions that
+rise from the depth of a soul, the image sprang into his mind, and poised
+itself there for an instant, of the grey-haired man who had passed half
+an hour ago, sobbing and shrinking at the cart's tail.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER IV
+
+                            MARY CORBET
+
+
+The spring that followed the visit to London passed uneventfully at Great
+Keynes to all outward appearances; and yet for Isabel they were
+significant months. In spite of herself and of the word of warning from
+her father, her relations with Hubert continued to draw closer. For one
+thing, he had been the first to awaken in her the consciousness that she
+was lovable in herself, and the mirror that first tells that to a soul
+always has something of the glow of the discovery resting upon it.
+
+Then again his deference and his chivalrous air had a strange charm. When
+Isabel rode out alone with Anthony, she often had to catch the swinging
+gate as he rode through after opening it, and do such little things for
+herself; but when Hubert was with them there was nothing of that kind.
+
+And, once more, he appealed to her pity; and this was the most subtle
+element of all. There was no doubt that Hubert's relations with his fiery
+old father became strained sometimes, and it was extraordinarily sweet to
+Isabel to be made a confidant. And yet Hubert never went beyond a certain
+point; his wooing was very skilful: and he seemed to be conscious of her
+uneasiness almost before she was conscious of it herself, and to relapse
+in a moment into frank and brotherly relations again.
+
+He came in one night after supper, flushed and bright-eyed, and found her
+alone in the hall: and broke out immediately, striding up and down as she
+sat and watched him.
+
+"I cannot bear it; there is Mr. Bailey who has been with us all Lent; he
+is always interfering in my affairs. And he has no charity. I know I am a
+Catholic and that; but when he and my father talk against the
+Protestants, Mistress Isabel, I cannot bear it. They were abusing the
+Queen to-night--at least," he added, for he had no intention to
+exaggerate, "they were saying she was a true daughter of her father; and
+sneers of that kind. And I am an Englishman, and her subject; and I said
+so; and Mr. Bailey snapped out, 'And you are also a Catholic, my son,'
+and then--and then I lost my temper, and said that the Catholic religion
+seemed no better than any other for the good it did people; and that the
+Rector and Mr. Norris seemed to me as good men as any one; and of course
+I meant him and he knew it; and then he told me, before the servants,
+that I was speaking against the faith; and then I said I would sooner
+speak against the faith than against good Christians; and then he flamed
+up scarlet, and I saw I had touched him; and then my father got scarlet
+too, and my mother looked at me, and my father told me to leave the table
+for an insolent puppy; and I knocked over my chair and stamped out--and
+oh! Mistress Isabel, I came straight here."
+
+And he flung down astride of a chair with his arms on the back, and
+dropped his head on to them.
+
+It would have been difficult for Hubert, even if he had been very clever
+indeed, to have made any speech which would have touched Isabel more than
+this. There was the subtle suggestion that he had defended the
+Protestants for her sake; and there was the open defence of her father,
+and defiance of the priests whom she feared and distrusted; there was a
+warm generosity and frankness running through it all; and lastly, there
+was the sweet flattering implication that he had come to her to be
+understood and quieted and comforted.
+
+Then, when she tried to show her disapproval of his quick temper, and had
+succeeded in showing a poorly disguised sympathy instead, he had flung
+away again, saying that she had brought him to his senses as usual, and
+that he would ask the priest's pardon for his insolence at once; and
+Isabel was left standing and looking at the fire, fearing that she was
+being wooed, and yet not certain, though she loved it. And then, too,
+there was the secret hope that it might be through her that he might
+escape from his superstitions, and--and then--and she closed her eyes and
+bit her lip for joy and terror.
+
+She did not know that a few weeks later Hubert had an interview with his
+father, of which she was the occasion. Lady Maxwell had gone to her
+husband after a good deal of thought and anxiety, and told him what she
+feared; asking him to say a word to Hubert. Sir Nicholas had been
+startled and furious. It was all the lad's conceit, he said; he had no
+real heart at all; he only flattered his vanity in making love; he had no
+love for his parents or his faith, and so on. She took his old hand in
+her own and held it while she spoke.
+
+"Sweetheart," she said, "how old were you when you used to come riding to
+Overfield? I forget." And there came peace into his angry, puzzled old
+eyes, and a gleam of humour.
+
+"Mistress," he said, "you have not forgotten." For he had been just
+eighteen, too. And he took her face in his hands delicately, and kissed
+her on the lips.
+
+"Well, well," he said, "it is hard on the boy; but it must not go on.
+Send him to me. Oh! I will be easy with him."
+
+But the interview was not as simple as he hoped; for Hubert was irritable
+and shamefaced; and spoke lightly of the Religion again.
+
+"After all," he burst out, "there are plenty of good men who have left
+the faith. It brings nothing but misery."
+
+Sir Nicholas' hands began to shake, and his fingers to clench themselves;
+but he remembered the lad was in love.
+
+"My son," he said, "you do not know what you say."
+
+"I know well enough," said Hubert, with his foot tapping sharply. "I say
+that the Catholic religion is a religion of misery and death everywhere.
+Look at the Low Countries, sir."
+
+"I cannot speak of that," said his father; and his son sneered visibly;
+"you and I are but laymen; but this I know, and have a right to say, that
+to threaten me like that is the act of a--is not worthy of my son. My
+dear boy," he said, coming nearer, "you are angry; and, God forgive me!
+so am I; but I promised your mother," and again he broke off, "and we
+cannot go on with this now. Come again this evening."
+
+Hubert stood turned away, with his head against the high oak mantelpiece;
+and there was silence.
+
+"Father," he said at last, turning round, "I ask your pardon."
+
+Sir Nicholas stepped nearer, his eyes suddenly bright with tears, and his
+mouth twitching, and held out his hand, which Hubert took.
+
+"And I was a coward to speak like that--but, but--I will try," went on
+the boy. "And I promise to say nothing to her yet, at any rate. Will that
+do? And I will go away for a while."
+
+The father threw his arms round him.
+
+As the summer drew on and began to fill the gardens and meadows with
+wealth, the little Italian garden to the south-west of the Hall was
+where my lady spent most of the day. Here she would cause chairs to be
+brought out for Mistress Margaret and herself, and a small selection of
+devotional books, an orange leather volume powdered all over with
+pierced hearts, filled with extracts in a clear brown ink, another book
+called _Le Chappellet de Jésus_, while from her girdle beside her
+pocket-mirror there always hung an olive-coloured "Hours of the Blessed
+Virgin," fastened by a long strip of leather prolonged from the binding.
+Here the two old sisters would sit, in the shadow of the yew hedge,
+taking it by turns to read and embroider, or talking a little now and
+then in quiet voices, with long silences broken only by the hum of
+insects in the hot air, or the quick flight of a bird in the tall trees
+behind the hedge.
+
+Here too Isabel often came, also bringing her embroidery; and sat and
+talked and watched the wrinkled tranquil faces of the two old ladies, and
+envied their peace. Hubert had gone, as he had promised his father, on a
+long visit, and was not expected home until at least the autumn.
+
+"James will be here to-morrow," said Lady Maxwell, suddenly, one hot
+afternoon. Isabel looked up in surprise; he had not been at home for so
+long; but the thought of his coming was very pleasant to her.
+
+"And Mary Corbet, too," went on the old lady, "will be here to-morrow or
+the day after."
+
+Isabel asked who this was.
+
+"She is one of the Queen's ladies, my dear; and a great talker."
+
+"She is very amusing sometimes," said Mistress Margaret's clear little
+voice.
+
+"And Mr. James will be here to-morrow?" said Isabel.
+
+"Yes, my child. They always suit one another; and we have known Mary for
+years."
+
+"And is Miss Corbet a Catholic?"
+
+"Yes, my dear; her Grace seems to like them about her."
+
+When Isabel went up again to the Hall in the evening, a couple of days
+later, she found Mr. James sitting with his mother and aunt in the same
+part of the garden. Mr. James, who rose as she came through the yew
+archway, and stood waiting to greet her, was a tall, pleasant,
+brown-faced man. Isabel noticed as she came up his strong friendly face,
+that had something of Hubert's look in it, and felt an immediate sense of
+relief from her timidity at meeting this man, whose name, it was said,
+was beginning to be known among the poets, and about whom the still more
+formidable fact was being repeated, that he was a rising man at Court and
+had attracted the Queen's favour.
+
+As they sat down again together, she noticed, too, his strong delicate
+hand in its snowy ruff, for he was always perfectly dressed, as it lay on
+his knee; and again thought of Hubert's browner and squarer hand.
+
+"We were talking, Mistress Isabel, about the play, and the new theatres.
+I was at the Blackfriars' only last week. Ah! and I met Buxton there," he
+went on, turning to his mother.
+
+"Dear Henry," said Lady Maxwell. "He told me when I last saw him that he
+could never go to London again; his religion was too expensive, he said."
+
+Mr. James' white teeth glimmered in a smile.
+
+"He told me he was going to prison next time, instead of paying the fine.
+It would be cheaper, he thought."
+
+"I hear her Grace loves the play," said Mistress Margaret.
+
+"Indeed she does. I saw her at Whitehall the other day, when the children
+of the Chapel Royal were acting; she clapped and called out with delight.
+But Mistress Corbet can tell you more than I can--Ah! here she is."
+
+Isabel looked up, and saw a wonderful figure coming briskly along the
+terrace and down the steps that led from the house. Miss Corbet was
+dressed with what she herself would have said was a milkmaid's plainness;
+but Isabel looked in astonishment at the elaborate ruff and wings of
+muslin and lace, the shining peacock gown, the high-piled coils of black
+hair, and the twinkling buckled feet. She had a lively bright face, a
+little pale, with a high forehead, and black arched brows and dancing
+eyes, and a little scarlet mouth that twitched humorously now and then
+after speaking. She rustled up, flicking her handkerchief, and exclaiming
+against the heat. Isabel was presented to her; she sat down on a settle
+Mr. James drew forward for her, with the handkerchief still whisking at
+the flies.
+
+"I am ashamed to come out like this," she began. "Mistress Plesse would
+break her heart at my lace. You country ladies have far more sense. I am
+the slave of my habits. What were you talking of, that you look so
+gravely at me?"
+
+Mr. James told her.
+
+"Oh, her Grace!" said Miss Corbet. "Indeed, I think sometimes she is
+never off the stage herself. Ah! and what art and passion she shows too!"
+
+"We are all loyal subjects here," said Mr. James; "tell us what you
+mean."
+
+"I mean what I say," she said. "Never was there one who loved play-acting
+more and to occupy the centre of the stage, too. And the throne too, if
+there be one," she added.
+
+Miss Corbet talked always at her audience; she hardly ever looked
+directly at any one, but up or down, or even shut her eyes and tilted her
+face forward while she talked; and all the while she kept an incessant
+movement of her lips or handkerchief, or tapped her foot, or shifted her
+position a little. Isabel thought she had never seen any one so restless.
+
+Then she went on to tell them of the Queen. She was so startlingly frank
+that Lady Maxwell again and again looked up as if to interrupt; but she
+always came off the thin ice in time. It was abominable gossip; but she
+talked with such a genial air of loyal good humour, that it was very
+difficult to find fault. Miss Corbet was plainly accustomed to act as
+Court Circular, or even as lecturer and show-woman on the most popular
+subject in England.
+
+"But her Grace surpassed herself in acting the tyrant last January; you
+would have sworn her really angry. This was how it fell out. I was in the
+anteroom one day, waiting for her Grace, when I thought I heard her call.
+So I tapped; I got no clear answer, but I heard her voice within, so I
+entered. And there was her Majesty, sitting a little apart in a chair by
+herself, with the Secretary--poor rat--white-faced at the table, writing
+what she bade him, and looking at her, quick and side-ways, like a child
+at a lifted rod; and there was her Grace: she had kicked her stool over,
+and one shoe had fallen; and she was striking the arm of her chair as she
+spoke, and her rings rapped as loud as a drunken watchman. And her face
+was all white, and her eyes glaring"--and Mary began to glare and raise
+her voice too--"and she was crying out, 'By God's Son, sir, I will have
+them hanged. Tell the----' (but I dare not say what she called my Lord
+Sussex, but few would have recognised him from what she said)--'tell him
+that I will have my will done. These--' (and she called the rebels a name
+I dare not tell you)--'these men have risen against me these two months;
+and yet they are not hanged. Hang them in their own villages, that their
+children may see what treason brings.' All this while I was standing at
+the open door, thinking she had called me; but she was as if she saw
+nought but the gallows and hell-fire beyond; and I spoke softly to her,
+asking what she wished; and she sprang up and ran at me, and struck
+me--yes; again and again across the face with her open hand, rings and
+all--and I ran out in tears. Yes," went on Miss Corbet in a moment,
+dropping her voice, and pensively looking up at nothing, "yes; you would
+have said she was really angry, so quick and natural were her movements
+and so loud her voice."
+
+Mr. James' face wrinkled up silently in amusement; and Lady Maxwell
+seemed on the point of speaking; but Miss Corbet began again:
+
+"And to see her Grace act the lover. It was a miracle. You would have
+said that our Artemis repented of her coldness; if you had not known it
+was but play-acting; or let us say perhaps a rehearsal--if you had seen
+what I once saw at Nonsuch. It was on a summer evening; and we were all
+on the bowling green, and her Grace was within doors, not to be
+disturbed. My Lord Leicester was to come, but we thought had not arrived.
+Then I had occasion to go to my room to get a little book I had promised
+to show to Caroline; and, thinking no harm, I ran through into the court,
+and there stood a horse, his legs apart, all steaming and blowing. Some
+courier, said I to myself, and never thought to look at the trappings;
+and so I ran upstairs to go to the gallery, across which lay my chamber;
+and I came up, and just began to push open the door, when I heard her
+Grace's voice beyond, and, by the mercy of God, I stopped; and dared not
+close the door again nor go downstairs for fear I should be heard. And
+there were two walking within the gallery, her Grace and my lord, and my
+lord was all disordered with hard riding, and nearly as spent as his poor
+beast below. And her Grace had her arm round his neck, for I saw them
+through the chink; and she fondled and pinched his ear, and said over and
+over again, 'Robin, my sweet Robin,' and then crooned and moaned at him;
+and he, whenever he could fetch a breath--and oh! I promise you he did
+blow--murmured back, calling her his queen, which indeed she was, and his
+sweetheart and his moon and his star--which she was not: but 'twas all in
+the play. Well, again by the favour of God, they did not see how the door
+was open and I couched behind it, for the sun was shining level through
+the west window in their eyes; but why they did not hear me as I ran
+upstairs and opened the door, He only knows--unless my lord was too
+sorely out of breath and her Grace too intent upon her play-acting. Well,
+I promise you, the acting was so good--he so spent and she so
+tender--that I nearly cried out Brava as I saw them; but that I
+remembered in time 'twas meant to be a private rehearsal. But I have seen
+her Grace act near as passionate a part before the whole company
+sometimes."
+
+The two old ladies seemed not greatly pleased with all this talk; and as
+for Isabel she sat silent and overwhelmed. Mary Corbet glanced quickly at
+their faces when she had done, and turned a little in her seat.
+
+"Ah! look at that peacock," she cried out, as a stately bird stepped
+delicately out of the shrubbery on to the low wall a little way off, and
+stood balancing himself. "He is loyal too, and has come to hear news of
+his Queen."
+
+"He has come to see his cousin from town," said Mr. James, looking at
+Miss Corbet's glowing dress, "and to learn of the London fashions."
+
+Mary got up and curtseyed to the astonished bird, who looked at her with
+his head lowered, as he took a high step or two, and then paused again,
+with his burnished breast swaying a little from side to side.
+
+"He invites you to a dance," went on Mr. James gravely, "a pavane."
+
+Miss Corbet sat down again.
+
+"I dare not dance a pavane," she said, "with a real peacock."
+
+"Surely," said Mr. James, with a courtier's air, "you are too pitiful for
+him, and too pitiless for us."
+
+"I dare not," she said again, "for he never ceases to practise."
+
+"In hopes," said Mr. James, "that one day you will dance it with him."
+
+And then the two went off into the splendid fantastic nonsense that the
+wits loved to talk; that grotesque, exaggerated phrasing made fashionable
+by Lyly. It was like a kind of impromptu sword-exercise in an assault of
+arms, where the rhythm and the flash and the graceful turns are of more
+importance than the actual thrusts received. The two old ladies
+embroidered on in silence, but their eyes twinkled, and little wrinkles
+flickered about the corners of their lips. But poor Isabel sat
+bewildered. It was so elaborate, so empty; she had almost said, so wicked
+to take the solemn gift of speech and make it dance this wild fandango;
+and as absurdity climbed and capered in a shower of sparks and gleams on
+the shoulders of absurdity, and was itself surmounted; and the names of
+heathen gods and nymphs and demi-gods and loose-living classical women
+whisked across the stage, and were tossed higher and higher, until the
+whole mad erection blazed up and went out in a shower of stars and gems
+of allusions and phrases, like a flight of rockets, bright and
+bewildering at the moment, but leaving a barren darkness and dazzled eyes
+behind--the poor little Puritan country child almost cried with
+perplexity and annoyance. If the two talkers had looked at one another
+and burst into laughter at the end, she would have understood it to be a
+joke, though, to her mind, but a poor one. But when they had ended, and
+Mary Corbet had risen and then swept down to the ground in a great silent
+curtsey, and Mr. James, the grave, sensible gentleman, had solemnly bowed
+with his hand on his heart, and his heels together like a Monsieur, and
+then she had rustled off in her peacock dress to the house, with her
+muslin wings bulging behind her; and no one had laughed or reproved or
+explained; it was almost too much, and she looked across to Lady Maxwell
+with an appeal in her eyes.
+
+Mr. James saw it and his face relaxed.
+
+"You must not take us too seriously, Mistress Isabel," he said in his
+kindly way. "It is all part of the game."
+
+"The game?" she said piteously.
+
+"Yes," said Mistress Margaret, intent on her embroidery, "the game of
+playing at kings and queens and courtiers and ruffs and high-stepping."
+
+Mr. James' face again broke into his silent laugh.
+
+"You are acid, dear aunt," he said.
+
+"But----" began Isabel again.
+
+"But it is wrong, you think," he interrupted, "to talk such nonsense.
+Well, Mistress Isabel, I am not sure you are not right." And the dancing
+light in his eyes went out.
+
+"No, no, no," she cried, distressed. "I did not mean that. Only I did not
+understand."
+
+"I know, I know; and please God you never will." And he looked at her
+with such a tender gravity that her eyes fell.
+
+"Isabel is right," went on Mistress Margaret, in her singularly sweet old
+voice; "and you know it, my nephew. It is very well as a pastime, but
+some folks make it their business; and that is nothing less than fooling
+with the gifts of the good God."
+
+"Well, aunt Margaret," said James softly, "I shall not have much more of
+it. You need not fear for me."
+
+Lady Maxwell looked quickly at her son for a moment, and down again. He
+made an almost imperceptible movement with his head, Mistress Margaret
+looked across at him with her tender eyes beaming love and sorrow; and
+there fell a little eloquent silence; while Isabel glanced shyly from one
+to the other, and wondered what it was all about.
+
+Miss Mary Corbet stayed a few weeks, as the custom was when travelling
+meant so much; but Isabel was scarcely nearer understanding her. She
+accepted her, as simple clean souls so often have to accept riddles in
+this world, as a mystery that no doubt had a significance, though she
+could not recognise it. So she did not exactly dislike or distrust her,
+but regarded her silently out of her own candid soul, as one would say a
+small fearless bird in a nest must regard the man who thrusts his strange
+hot face into her green pleasant world, and tries to make endearing
+sounds. For Isabel was very fascinating to Mary Corbet. She had scarcely
+ever before been thrown so close to any one so serenely pure. She would
+come down to the Dower House again and again at all hours of the day,
+rustling along in her silk, and seize upon Isabel in the little upstairs
+parlour, or her bedroom, and question her minutely about her ways and
+ideas; and she would look at her silently for a minute or two together;
+and then suddenly laugh and kiss her--Isabel's transparency was almost as
+great a riddle to her as her own obscurity to Isabel. And sometimes she
+would throw herself on Isabel's bed, and lie there with her arms behind
+her head, to the deplorable ruin of her ruff; with her buckled feet
+twitching and tapping; and go on and on talking like a running stream in
+the sun that runs for the sheer glitter and tinkle of it, and
+accomplishes nothing. But she was more respectful to Isabel's simplicity
+than at first, and avoided dangerous edges and treacherous ground in a
+manner that surprised herself, telling her of the pageants at Court and
+fair exterior of it all, and little about the poisonous conversations and
+jests and the corrupt souls that engaged in them.
+
+She was immensely interested in Isabel's religion.
+
+"Tell me, child," she said one day, "I cannot understand such a religion.
+It is not like the Protestant religion at Court at all. All that the
+Protestants do there is to hear sermons--it is all so dismal and noisy.
+But here, with you, you have a proper soul. It seems to me that you are
+like a little herb-garden, very prim and plain, but living and wholesome
+and pleasant to walk in at sunset. And these Protestants that I know are
+more like a paved court at noon--all hot and hard and glaring. They give
+me the headache. Tell me all about it."
+
+Of course Isabel could not, though she tried again and again. Her
+definitions were as barren as any others.
+
+"I see," said Mary Corbet one day, sitting up straight and looking at
+Isabel. "It is not your religion but you; your religion is as dull as all
+the rest. But your soul is sweet, my dear, and the wilderness blossoms
+where you set your feet. There is nothing to blush about. It's no credit
+to you, but to God."
+
+Isabel hated this sort of thing. It seemed to her as if her soul was
+being dragged out of a cool thicket from the green shadow and the
+flowers, and set, stripped, in the high road.
+
+Another time Miss Corbet spoke yet more plainly.
+
+"You are a Catholic at heart, my dear; or you would be if you knew what
+the Religion was. But your father, good man, has never understood it
+himself; and so you don't know it either. What you think about us, my
+dear, is as much like the truth as--as--I am like a saint, or you like a
+sinner. I'll be bound now that you think us all idolaters!"
+
+Isabel had to confess that she did think something of the sort.
+
+"There, now, what did I say? Why haven't either of those two old nuns at
+the Hall taught you any better?"
+
+"They--they don't talk to me about religion."
+
+"Ah! I see; or the Puritan father would withdraw his lamb from the
+wolves. But if they are wolves, my dear, you must confess that they have
+the decency to wear sheep's clothing, and that the disguise is
+excellent."
+
+And so it gradually came about that Isabel began to learn an immense deal
+about what the Catholics really believed--far more than she had ever
+learnt in all her life before from the ladies at the Hall, who were
+unwilling to teach her, and her father, who was unable.
+
+About half-way through Miss Corbet's visit, Anthony came home. At first
+he pronounced against her inexorably, dismissing her as nonsense, and as
+a fine lady--terms to him interchangeable. Then his condemnation began to
+falter, then ceased; then acquittal, and at last commendation succeeded.
+For Miss Corbet asked his advice about the dogs, and how to get that
+wonderful gloss on their coats that his had; and she asked his help, too,
+once or twice and praised his skill, and once asked to feel his muscle.
+
+And then she was so gallant in ways that appealed to him. She was not in
+the least afraid of Eliza. She kissed that ferocious head in spite of the
+glare of that steady yellow eye; and yet all with an air of trusting to
+Anthony's protection. She tore her silk stocking across the instep in a
+bramble and scratched her foot, without even drawing attention to it, as
+she followed him along one of his short cuts through the copse; and it
+was only by chance that he saw it. And then this gallant girl, so simple
+and ignorant as she seemed out of doors, was like a splendid queen
+indoors, and was able to hold her own, or rather to soar above all these
+elders who were so apt to look over Anthony's head on grave occasions;
+and they all had to listen while she talked. In fact, the first time he
+saw her at the Hall in all her splendour, he could hardly realise it was
+the same girl, till she laughed up at him, and nodded, and said how much
+she had enjoyed the afternoon's stroll, and how much she would have to
+tell when she got back to Court. In short, so incessant were her poses
+and so skilful her manner and tone, and so foolish this poor boy, that in
+a very few days, after he had pronounced her to be nonsense, Anthony was
+at her feet, hopelessly fascinated by the combination of the glitter and
+friendliness of this fine Court lady. To do her justice, she would have
+behaved exactly the same to a statue, or even to nothing at all, as a
+peacock dances and postures and vibrates his plumes to a kitten; and had
+no more deliberate intention of giving pain to anybody than a nightshade
+has of poisoning a silly sheep.
+
+The sublime conceit of a boy of fifteen made him of course think that she
+had detected in him a nobility that others overlooked, and so Anthony
+began a gorgeous course of day-dreaming, in which he moved as a kind of
+king, worshipped and reverenced by this splendid creature, who after a
+disillusionment from the empty vanities of a Court life and a Queen's
+favour, found at last the lord of her heart in a simple manly young
+countryman. These dreams, however, he had the grace and modesty to keep
+wholly to himself.
+
+Mary came down one day and found the two in the garden together.
+
+"Come, my child," she said, "and you too, Master Anthony, if you can
+spare time to escort us; and take me to the church. I want to see it."
+
+"The church!" said Isabel, "that is locked: we must go to the Rectory."
+
+"Locked!" exclaimed Mary, "and is that part of the blessed Reformation?
+Well, come, at any rate."
+
+They all went across to the village and down the green towards the
+Rectory, whose garden adjoined the churchyard on the south side of the
+church. Anthony walked with something of an air in front of the two
+ladies. Isabel told her as they went about the Rector and his views. Mary
+nodded and smiled and seemed to understand.
+
+"We will tap at the window," said Anthony, "it is the quickest way."
+
+They came up towards the study window that looked on to the drive; when
+Anthony, who was in front, suddenly recoiled and then laughed.
+
+"They are at it again," he said.
+
+The next moment Mary was looking through the window too. The Rector was
+sitting in his chair opposite, a small dark, clean-shaven man, but his
+face was set with a look of distressed determination, and his lower lip
+was sucked in; his eyes were fixed firmly on a tall, slender woman whose
+back was turned to the window and who seemed to be declaiming, with
+outstretched hand. The Rector suddenly saw the faces at the window.
+
+"We seem to be interrupting," said Mary coolly, as she turned away.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                         A RIDER FROM LONDON
+
+
+"We will walk on, Master Anthony," said Mistress Corbet. "Will you bring
+the keys when the Rector and his lady have done?"
+
+She spoke with a vehement bitterness that made Isabel look at her in
+amazement, as the two walked on by the private path to the churchyard
+gate. Mary's face was set in a kind of fury, and she went forward with
+her chin thrust disdainfully out, biting her lip. Isabel said nothing.
+
+As they reached the gate they heard steps behind them; and turning saw
+the minister and Anthony hastening together. Mr. Dent was in his cassock
+and gown and square cap, and carried the keys. His little scholarly face,
+with a sharp curved nose like a beak, and dark eyes set rather too close
+together, was not unlike a bird's; and a way he had of sudden sharp
+movements of his head increased the likeness. Mary looked at him with
+scarcely veiled contempt. He glanced at her sharply and uneasily.
+
+"Mistress Mary Corbet?" he said, interrogatively.
+
+Mary bowed to him.
+
+"May we see the church, sir; your church, I should say perhaps; that is,
+if we are not disturbing you."
+
+Mr. Dent made a polite inclination, and opened the gate for them to go
+through. Then Mary changed her tactics; and a genial, good-humoured look
+came over her face; but Isabel, who glanced at her now and again as they
+went round to the porch at the west-end, still felt uneasy.
+
+As the Rector was unlocking the porch door, Mary surveyed him with a
+pleased smile.
+
+"Why, you look quite like a priest," she said. "Do your bishops, or
+whatever you call them, allow that dress? I thought you had done away
+with it all."
+
+Mr. Dent looked at her, but seeing nothing but geniality and interest in
+her face, explained elaborately in the porch that he was a Catholic
+priest, practically; though the word minister was more commonly used; and
+that it was the old Church still, only cleansed from superstitions. Mary
+shook her head at him cheerfully, smiling like a happy, puzzled child.
+
+"It is all too difficult for me," she said. "It cannot be the same
+Church, or why should we poor Catholics be so much abused and persecuted?
+Besides, what of the Pope?"
+
+Mr. Dent explained that the Pope was one of the superstitions in
+question.
+
+"Ah! I see you are too sharp for me," said Mary, beaming at him.
+
+Then they entered the church; and Mary began immediately on a running
+comment.
+
+"How sad that little niche looks," she said. "I suppose Our Lady is in
+pieces somewhere on a dunghill. Surely, father--I beg your pardon, Mr.
+Dent--it cannot be the same religion if you have knocked Our Lady to
+pieces. But then I suppose you would say that she was a superstition,
+too. And where is the old altar? Is that broken, too? And is that a
+superstition, too? What a number there must have been! And the holy
+water, too, I see. But that looks a very nice table up there you have
+instead. Ah! And I see you read the new prayers from a new desk outside
+the screen, and not from the priest's stall. Was that a superstition too?
+And the mass vestments? Has your wife had any of them made up to be
+useful? The stoles are no good, I fear; but you could make charming
+stomachers out of the chasubles."
+
+They were walking slowly up the centre aisle now. Mr. Dent had to explain
+that the vestments had been burnt on the green.
+
+"Ah! yes; I see," she said, "and do you wear a surplice, or do you not
+like them? I see the chancel roof is all broken--were there angels there
+once? I suppose so. But how strange to break them all! Unless they are
+superstitions, too? I thought Protestants believed in them; but I see I
+was wrong. What _do_ you believe in, Mr. Dent?" she asked, turning large,
+bright, perplexed eyes upon him for a moment: but she gave him no time
+to answer.
+
+"Ah!" she cried suddenly, and her voice rang with pain, "there is the
+altar-stone." And she went down on her knees at the chancel entrance,
+bending down, it seemed, in an agony of devout sorrow and shame; and
+kissed with a gentle, lingering reverence the great slab with its five
+crosses, set in the ground at the destruction of the altar to show there
+was no sanctity attached to it.
+
+She knelt there a moment or two, her lips moving, and her black eyes cast
+up at the great east window, cracked and flawed with stones and poles.
+The Puritan boy and girl looked at her with astonishment; they had not
+seen this side of her before.
+
+When she rose from her knees, her eyes seemed bright with tears, and her
+voice was tender.
+
+"Forgive me, Mr. Dent," she said, with a kind of pathetic dignity,
+putting out a slender be-ringed hand to him, "but--but you know--for I
+think perhaps you have some sympathy for us poor Catholics--you know what
+all this means to me."
+
+She went up into the chancel and looked about her in silence.
+
+"This was the piscina, Mistress Corbet," said the Rector.
+
+She nodded her head regretfully, as at some relic of a dead friend; but
+said nothing. They came out again presently, and turned through the old
+iron gates into what had been the Maxwell chapel. The centre was occupied
+by an altar-tomb with Sir Nicholas' parents lying in black stone upon it.
+Old Sir James held his right gauntlet in his left hand, and with his
+right hand held the right hand of his wife, which was crossed over to
+meet it; and the two steady faces gazed upon the disfigured roof. The
+altar, where a weekly requiem had been said for them, was gone, and the
+footpace and piscina alone showed where it had stood.
+
+"This was a chantry, of course?" said Mistress Corbet.
+
+The Rector confessed that it had been so.
+
+"Ah!" she said mournfully, "the altar is cast out and the priest gone;
+but--but--forgive me, sir, the money is here still? But then," she added,
+"I suppose the money is not a superstition."
+
+When they reached the west entrance again she turned and looked up the
+aisle again.
+
+"And the Rood!" she said. "Even Christ crucified is gone. Then, in God's
+name what is left?" And her eyes turned fiercely for a moment on the
+Rector.
+
+"At least courtesy and Christian kindness is left, madam," he said
+sternly.
+
+She dropped her eyes and went out; and Isabel and Anthony followed,
+startled and ashamed. But Mary had recovered herself as she came on to
+the head of the stone stairs, beside which the stump of the churchyard
+cross stood; standing there was the same tall, slender woman whose back
+they had seen through the window, and who now stood eyeing Mary with
+half-dropped lids. Her face was very white, with hard lines from nose to
+mouth, and thin, tightly compressed lips. Mary swept her with one look,
+and then passed on and down the steps, followed by Isabel and Anthony, as
+the Rector came out, locking the church door again behind him.
+
+As they went up the green, a shrill thin voice began to scold from over
+the churchyard wall, and they heard the lower, determined voice of the
+minister answering.
+
+"They are at it again," said Anthony, once more.
+
+"And what do you mean by that, Master Anthony?" said Mistress Corbet, who
+seemed herself again now.
+
+"She is just a scold," said the lad, "the village-folk hate her."
+
+"You seem not to love her," said Mary, smiling.
+
+"Oh! Mistress Corbet, do you know what she said--" and then he broke off,
+crimson-faced.
+
+"She is no friend to Catholics, I suppose," said Mary, seeming to notice
+nothing.
+
+"She is always making mischief," he went on eagerly. "The Rector would be
+well enough but for her. He is a good fellow, really."
+
+"There, there," said Mary, "and you think me a scold, too, I daresay.
+Well, you know I cannot bear to see these old churches--well, perhaps I
+was--" and then she broke off again, and was silent.
+
+The brother and sister presently turned back to the Dower House; and Mary
+went on, and through the Hall straight into the Italian garden where
+Mistress Margaret was sitting alone at her embroidery.
+
+"My sister has been called away by the housekeeper," she explained, "but
+she will be back presently."
+
+Mary sat down and took up the little tawny book that lay by Lady
+Maxwell's chair, and began to turn it over idly while she talked. The old
+lady by her seemed to invite confidences.
+
+"I have been to see the church," said Mary. "The Rector showed it to me.
+What a beautiful place it must have been."
+
+"Ah!" said Mistress Margaret "I only came to live here a few years ago;
+so I have never known or loved it like my sister or her husband. They can
+hardly bear to enter it now. You know that Sir Nicholas' father and
+grandfather are buried in the Maxwell chapel; and it was his father who
+gave the furniture of the sanctuary, and the images of Our Lady and Saint
+Christopher that they burned on the green."
+
+"It is terrible," said Mary, a little absently, as she turned the pages
+of the book.
+
+Mistress Margaret looked up.
+
+"Ah! you have one of my books there," she said. "It is a little
+collection I made."
+
+Miss Corbet turned to the beginning, but only found a seal with an
+inscription.
+
+"But this belonged to a nunnery," she said.
+
+"Yes," said Mistress Margaret, tranquilly, "and I am a nun."
+
+Mary looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"But, but," she began.
+
+"Yes, Mistress Corbet; we were dispersed in '38; some entered the other
+nunneries; and some went to France; but, at last, under circumstances
+that I need not trouble you with, I came here under spiritual direction,
+and have observed my obligations ever since."
+
+"And have you always said your offices?" Mary asked astonished.
+
+"Yes, my dear; by the mercy of God I have never failed yet. I tell you
+this of course because you are one of us, and because you have a faithful
+heart." Mistress Margaret lifted her great eyes and looked at Mary
+tenderly and penetratingly.
+
+"And this is one of your books?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, my dear. I was allowed at least to take it away with me. My sister
+here is very fond of it."
+
+Mary opened it again, and began to turn the pages.
+
+"Is it all in your handwriting, Mistress Torridon?"
+
+"Yes, my child; I continued writing in it ever since I first entered
+religion in 1534; so you see the handwriting changes a little," and she
+smiled to herself.
+
+"Oh, but this is charming," cried Mary, intent on the book.
+
+"Read it, my dear, aloud."
+
+Mary read:
+
+    "Let me not rest, O Lord, nor have quiet,
+      But fill my soul with spiritual travail,
+    To sing and say, O mercy, Jesu sweet;
+      Thou my protection art in the battail.
+      Set thou aside all other apparail;
+        Let me in thee feel all my affiance.
+    Treasure of treasures, thou dost most avail.
+        Grant ere I die shrift, pardon, repentance."
+
+Her voice trembled a little and ceased.
+
+"That is from some verses of Dan John Lydgate, I think," said Mistress
+Margaret.
+
+"Here is another," said Mary in a moment or two.
+
+    "Jesu, at thy will, I pray that I may be,
+    All my heart fulfil with perfect love to thee:
+    That I have done ill, Jesu forgive thou me:
+    And suffer me never to spill, Jesu for thy pity."
+
+"The nuns of Hampole gave me that," said Mistress Margaret. "It is by
+Richard Rolle, the hermit."
+
+"Tell me a little," said Mary Corbet, suddenly laying down the book,
+"about the nunnery."
+
+"Oh, my dear, that is too much to ask; but how happy we were. All was so
+still; it used to seem sometimes as if earth were just a dream; and that
+we walked in Paradise. Sometimes in the Greater Silence, when we had
+spoken no word nor heard one except in God's praise, it used to seem that
+if we could but be silent a little longer, and a little more deeply, in
+our hearts as well, we should hear them talking in heaven, and the harps;
+and the Saviour's soft footsteps. But it was not always like that."
+
+"You mean," said Mary softly, "that, that--" and she stopped.
+
+"Oh, it was hard sometimes; but not often. God is so good. But He used
+to allow such trouble and darkness and noise to be in our hearts
+sometimes--at least in mine. But then of course I was always very wicked.
+But sitting in the nymph-hay sometimes on a day like this, as we were
+allowed to do; with just tall thin trees like poplars and cypresses round
+us: and the stream running through the long grass; and the birds, and the
+soft sky and the little breeze; and then peace in our hearts; and the
+love of the Saviour round us--it seemed, it seemed as if God had nothing
+more to give; or, I should say, as if our hearts had no more space."
+
+Mary was strangely subdued and quiet. Her little restless movements were
+still for once; and her quick, vivacious face was tranquil and a little
+awed.
+
+"Oh, Mistress Margaret, I love to hear you talk like that. Tell me more."
+
+"Well, my dear, we thought too much about ourselves, I think; and too
+little about God and His poor children who were not so happy as we were;
+so then the troubles began; and they got nearer and nearer; and at last
+the Visitor came. He--he was my brother, my dear, which made it harder;
+but he made a good end. I will tell you his story another time. He took
+away our great crucifix and our jewelled cope that old Mr. Wickham used
+to wear on the Great Festivals; and left us. He turned me out, too; and
+another who asked to go, but I went back for a while. And then, my dear,
+although we offered everything; our cows and our orchard and our hens,
+and all we had, you know how it ended; and one morning in May old Mr.
+Wickham said mass for us quite early, before the sun was risen, for the
+last time; and,--and he cried, my dear, at the elevation; and--and we
+were all crying too I think, and we all received communion together for
+the last time--and,--and, then we all went away, leaving just old Dame
+Agnes to keep the house until the Commissioner came. And oh, my dear, I
+don't think the house ever looked so dear as it did that morning, just as
+the sun rose over the roofs, and we were passing out through the meadow
+door where we had sat so often, to where the horses were waiting to take
+us away."
+
+Miss Corbet's own eyes were full of tears as the old lady finished: and
+she put out her white slender hand, which Mistress Torridon took and
+stroked for a moment.
+
+"Well," she said, "I haven't talked like this for a long while; but I
+knew you would understand. My dear, I have watched you while you have
+been here this time."
+
+Mary Corbet smiled a little uneasily.
+
+"And you have found me out?" she answered smiling.
+
+"No, no; but I think our Saviour has found you out--or at least He is
+drawing very near."
+
+A slight discomfort made itself felt in Mary's heart. This nun then was
+like all the rest, always trying to turn the whole world into monks and
+nuns by hints and pretended intuitions into the unseen.
+
+"And you think I should be a nun too?" she asked, with just a shade of
+coolness in her tone.
+
+"I should suppose not," said Mistress Margaret, tranquilly. "You do not
+seem to have a vocation for that, but I should think that our Lord means
+you to serve Him where you are. Who knows what you may not accomplish?"
+
+This was a little disconcerting to Mary Corbet; it was not at all what
+she had expected. She did not know what to say; and took up the leather
+book again and began to turn over the pages. Mistress Margaret went on
+serenely with her embroidery, which she had neglected during the last
+sentence or two; and there was silence.
+
+"Tell me a little more about the nunnery," said Mary in a minute or two,
+leaning back in her chair, with the book on her knees.
+
+"Well, my dear, I scarcely know what to say. It is all far off now like a
+childhood. We talked very little; not at all until recreation; except by
+signs, and we used to spend a good deal of our time in embroidery. That
+is where I learnt this," and she held out her work to Mary for a moment.
+It was an exquisite piece of needlework, representing a stag running
+open-mouthed through thickets of green twining branches that wrapped
+themselves about his horns and feet. Mary had never seen anything quite
+like it before.
+
+"What does it mean?" she asked, looking at it curiously.
+
+"_Quemadmodum cervus_,"--began Mistress Margaret; "as the hart brayeth
+after the waterbrooks,"--and she took the embroidery and began to go on
+with it.--"It is the soul, you see, desiring and fleeing to God, while
+the things of the world hold her back. Well, you see, it is difficult to
+talk about it; for it is the inner life that is the real history of a
+convent; the outer things are all plain and simple like all else."
+
+"Well," said Mary, "is it really true that you were happy?"
+
+The old lady stopped working a moment and looked up at her.
+
+"My dear, there is no happiness in the world like it," she said simply.
+"I dream sometimes that we are all back there together, and I wake crying
+for joy. The other night I dreamed that we were all in the chapel again,
+and that it was a spring morning, with the dawn beginning to show the
+painted windows, and that all the tapers were burning; and that mass was
+beginning. Not one stall was empty; not even old Dame Gertrude, who died
+when I was a novice, was lacking, and Mr. Wickham made us a sermon after
+the creed, and showed us the crucifix back in its place again; and told
+us that we were all good children, and that Our Lord had only sent us
+away to see if we would be patient; and that He was now pleased with us,
+and had let us come home again; and that we should never have to go away
+again; not even when we died; and then I understood that we were in
+heaven, and that it was all over; and I burst out into tears in my stall
+for happiness; and then I awoke and found myself in bed; but my cheeks
+were really wet.--Well, well, perhaps, by the mercy of God it may all
+come true some day."
+
+She spoke so simply that Mary Corbet was amazed; she had always fancied
+that the Religious Life was a bitter struggle, worth, indeed, living for
+those who could bear it, for the sake of the eternal reward; but it had
+scarcely even occurred to her that it was so full of joy in itself; and
+she looked up under her brows at the old lady, whose needle had stopped
+for a moment.
+
+A moment after and Lady Maxwell appeared coming down the steps into the
+garden; and at her side Anthony, who was dressed ready for riding.
+
+Old Mistress Margaret had, as she said, been watching Mary Corbet those
+last few weeks; and had determined to speak to her plainly. Her instinct
+had told her that beneath this flippancy and glitter there was something
+that would respond; and she was anxious to leave nothing undone by which
+Mary might be awakened to the inner world that was in such danger of
+extinction in her soul. It cost the old lady a great effort to break
+through her ordinary reserve, but she judged that Mary could only be
+reached on her human side, and that there were not many of her friends
+whose human sympathy would draw her in the right direction. It is
+strange, sometimes, to find that some silent old lady has a power for
+sounding human character, which far shrewder persons lack; and this quiet
+old nun, so ignorant, one would have said, of the world and of the
+motives from which ordinary people act, had managed somehow to touch
+springs in this girl's heart that had never been reached before.
+
+And now as Miss Corbet and Lady Maxwell talked, and Anthony lolled
+embarrassed beside them, attempting now and then to join in the
+conversation, Mistress Margaret, as she sat a little apart and worked
+away at the panting stag dreamed away, smiling quietly to herself, of all
+the old scenes that her own conversation had called up into clearer
+consciousness; of the pleasant little meadow of the Sussex priory, with
+the old apple-trees and the straight box-lined path called the nun's walk
+from time immemorial; all lighted with the pleasant afternoon glow, as it
+streamed from the west, throwing the slender poplar shadows across the
+grass; and of the quiet chatter of the brook as it over-flowed from the
+fish ponds at the end of the field and ran through the meadows beyond the
+hedge. The cooing of the pigeons as they sunned themselves round the dial
+in the centre of this Italian garden and on the roof of the hall helped
+on her reminiscences, for there had been a dovecote at the priory. Where
+were all her sisters now, those who had sat with her in the same sombre
+habits in the garth, with the same sunshine in their hearts? Some she
+knew, and thanked God for it, were safe in glory; others were old like
+her, but still safe in Holy Religion in France where as yet there was
+peace and sanctuary for the servants of the Most High; one or two--and
+for these she lifted up her heart in petition as she sat--one or two had
+gone back to the world, relinquished everything, and died to grace. Then
+the old faces one by one passed before her; old Dame Agnes with her
+mumbling lips and her rosy cheeks like wrinkled apples, looking so fresh
+and wholesome in the white linen about her face; and then the others one
+by one--that white-faced, large-eyed sister who had shown such passionate
+devotion at first that they all thought that God was going to raise up a
+saint amongst them--ah! God help her--she had sunk back at the
+dissolution, from those heights of sanctity towards whose summits she had
+set her face, down into the muddy torrent of the world that went roaring
+down to the abyss--and who was responsible? There was Dame Avice, the
+Sacristan, with her businesslike movements going about the garden,
+gathering flowers for the altar, with her queer pursed lips as she
+arranged them in her hands with her head a little on one side; how
+annoying she used to be sometimes; but how good and tender at heart--God
+rest her soul! And there was Mr. Wickham, the old priest who had been
+their chaplain for so many years, and who lived in the village parsonage,
+waited upon by Tom Downe, that served at the altar too--he who had got
+the horses ready when the nuns had to go at last on that far-off May
+morning, and had stood there, holding the bridles and trying to hide his
+wet face behind the horses; where was Tom now? And Mr. Wickham too--he
+had gone to France with some of the nuns; but he had never settled down
+there--he couldn't bear the French ways--and besides he had left his
+heart behind him buried in the little Sussex priory among the meadows.
+
+And so the old lady sat, musing; while the light and shadow of
+reminiscence moved across her face; and her lips quivered or her eyes
+wrinkled up with humour, at the thought of all those old folks with their
+faces and their movements and their ways of doing and speaking. Ah! well,
+please God, some day her dream would really come true; and they shall all
+be gathered again from France and England with their broken hearts mended
+and their tears wiped away, and Mr. Wickham himself shall minister to
+them and make them sermons, and Tom Downe too shall be there to minister
+to him--all in one of the many mansions of which the Saviour spoke.
+
+And so she heard nothing of the talk of the others; though her sister
+looked at her tenderly once or twice; and Mary Corbet chattered and
+twitched her buckles in the sun, and Anthony sat embarrassed in the midst
+of Paradise; and she knew nothing of where she was nor of what was
+happening round her, until Mary Corbet said that it was time for the
+horses to be round, and that she must go and get ready and not keep Mr.
+James and Mr. Anthony waiting. Then, as she and Anthony went towards the
+house, the old lady looked up from the braying stag and found herself
+alone with her sister.
+
+Mistress Margaret waited until the other two disappeared up the steps,
+and then spoke.
+
+"I have told her all, sister," she said, "she can be trusted."
+
+Lady Maxwell nodded gently.
+
+"She has a good heart," went on the other, "and our Lord no doubt will
+find some work for her to do at Court."
+
+There was silence again; broken by the gentle little sound of the silk
+being drawn through the stuff.
+
+"You know best, Margaret," said Lady Maxwell.
+
+Even as she spoke there was the sound of a door thrown violently open and
+old Sir Nicholas appeared on the top of the steps, hatless and plainly in
+a state of great agitation; beside him stood a courier, covered with the
+dust of the white roads, and his face crimson with hard riding. Sir
+Nicholas stood there as if dazed, and Lady Maxwell sprang up quickly to
+go to him. But a moment after there appeared behind him a little group,
+his son James, Miss Corbet and a servant or two; while Anthony hung back;
+and Mr. James came up quickly, and took his father by the arm; and
+together the little company came down the steps into the still and sunny
+garden.
+
+"What is it?" cried Lady Maxwell, trying to keep her voice under control;
+while Mistress Margaret laid her work quietly down, and stood up too.
+
+"Tell my lady," said Sir Nicholas to the courier, who stood a little
+apart.
+
+"If you please, my lady," he said, as if repeating a lesson, "a Bull of
+the Holy Father has been found nailed to the door of the Bishop of
+London's palace, deposing Elizabeth and releasing all her subjects from
+their allegiance."
+
+Lady Maxwell went to her husband and took him by the arm gently.
+
+"What does it mean, sweetheart?" she asked.
+
+"It means that Catholics must choose between their sovereign and their
+God."
+
+"God have mercy," said a servant behind.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VI
+
+                            MR. STEWART
+
+
+Sir Nicholas' exclamatory sentence was no exaggeration. That terrible
+choice of which he spoke, with his old eyes shining with the desire to
+make it, did not indeed come so immediately as he anticipated; but it
+came none the less. From every point of view the Bull was unfortunate,
+though it may have been a necessity; for it marked the declaration of war
+between England and the Catholic Church. A gentle appeal had been tried
+before; Elizabeth, who, it must be remembered had been crowned during
+mass with Catholic ceremonial, and had received the Blessed Sacrament,
+had been entreated by the Pope as his "dear daughter in Christ" to return
+to the Fold; and now there seemed to him no possibility left but this
+ultimatum.
+
+It is indeed difficult to see what else, from his point of view, he could
+have done. To continue to pretend that Elizabeth was his "dear daughter"
+would have discredited his fatherly authority in the eyes of the whole
+Christian world. He had patiently made an advance towards his wayward
+child; and she had repudiated and scorned him. Nothing was left but to
+recognise and treat her as an enemy of the Faith, an usurper of spiritual
+prerogatives, and an apostate spoiler of churches; to do this might
+certainly bring trouble upon others of his less distinguished but more
+obedient children, who were in her power; but to pretend that the
+suffering thus brought down upon Catholics was unnecessary, and that the
+Pope alone was responsible for their persecution, is to be blind to the
+fact that Elizabeth had already openly defied and repudiated his
+authority, and had begun to do her utmost to coax and compel his children
+to be disobedient to their father.
+
+The shock of the Bull to Elizabeth was considerable; she had not expected
+this extreme measure; and it was commonly reported too that France and
+Spain were likely now to unite on a religious basis against England; and
+that at least one of these Powers had sanctioned the issue of the Bull.
+This of course helped greatly to complicate further the already
+complicated political position. Steps were taken immediately to
+strengthen England's position against Scotland with whom it was now, more
+than ever, to be feared that France would co-operate; and the Channel
+Fleet was reinforced under Lord Clinton, and placed with respect to
+France in what was almost a state of war, while it was already in an
+informal state of war with Spain. There was fierce confusion in the Privy
+Council. Elizabeth, who at once began to vacillate under the combined
+threats of La Mothe, the French ambassador, and the arguments of the
+friend of Catholics, Lord Arundel, was counter-threatened with ruin by
+Lord Keeper Bacon unless she would throw in her lot finally with the
+Protestants and continue her hostility and resistance to the Catholic
+Scotch party. But in spite of Bacon Elizabeth's heart failed her, and if
+it had not been for the rashness of Mary Stuart's friends, Lord
+Southampton and the Bishop of Ross, the Queen might have been induced to
+substitute conciliation for severity towards Mary and the Catholic party
+generally. Southampton was arrested, and again there followed the further
+encouragement of the Protestant camp by the rising fortunes of the
+Huguenots and the temporary reverses to French Catholicism; so the
+pendulum swung this way and that. Elizabeth's policy changed almost from
+day to day. She was tormented with temporal fears of a continental
+crusade against her, and by the spiritual terrors of the Pope's Bull; and
+her unfathomable fickleness was the despair of her servants.
+
+Meanwhile in the religious world a furious paper war broke out; and
+volleys from both sides followed the solemn roar and crash of _Regnans
+in Excelsis_.
+
+But while the war of words went on, and the theological assaults and
+charges were given and received, repulsed or avoided, something practical
+must, it was felt, be done immediately; and search was made high and low
+for other copies of the Bull. The lawyers in the previous year had fallen
+under suspicion of religious unsoundness; judges could not be trusted to
+convict Catholics accused of their religion; and counsel was unwilling to
+prosecute them; therefore the first inquisition was made in the Inns of
+Court; and almost immediately a copy of the Bull was found in the room of
+a student in Lincoln's Inn, who upon the rack in the Tower confessed that
+he had received it from one John Felton, a Catholic gentleman who lived
+upon his property in Southwark. Upon Felton's arrest (for he had not
+attempted to escape) he confessed immediately, without pressure, that he
+had affixed the Bull to the Bishop of London's gate; but although he was
+racked repeatedly he would not incriminate a single person besides
+himself; but at his trial would only assert with a joyous confidence that
+he was not alone; and that twenty-five peers, six hundred gentlemen, and
+thirty thousand commoners were ready to die in the Holy Father's quarrel.
+He behaved with astonishing gallantry throughout, and after his
+condemnation had been pronounced upon the fourth of August at the
+Guildhall, on the charge of high-treason, he sent a diamond ring from his
+own finger, of the value of £400, to the Queen to show that he bore her
+no personal ill-will. He had been always a steadfast Catholic; his wife
+had been maid of honour to Mary and a friend of Elizabeth's. On August
+the eighth he suffered the abominable punishment prescribed; he was drawn
+on a hurdle to the gate of the Bishop's palace in S. Paul's Churchyard,
+where he had affixed the Bull, hanged upon a new gallows, cut down before
+he was unconscious, disembowelled and quartered. His name has since been
+placed on the roll of the Blessed by the Apostolic See in whose quarrel
+he so cheerfully laid down his life.
+
+News of these and such events continued of course to be eagerly sought
+after by the Papists all over the kingdom; and the Maxwells down at Great
+Keynes kept in as close touch with the heart of affairs as almost any
+private persons in the kingdom out of town. Sir Nicholas was one of those
+fiery natures to whom opposition or pressure is as oil to flame. He began
+at once to organise his forces and prepare for the struggle that was
+bound to come. He established first a kind of private post to London and
+to other Catholic houses round; for purposes however of defence rather
+than offence, so that if any steps were threatened, he and his friends
+might be aware of the danger in time. There was great sorrow at the news
+of John Felton's death; and mass was said for his soul almost immediately
+in the little oratory at Maxwell Court by one of the concealed priests
+who went chiefly between Hampshire and Sussex ministering to the
+Catholics of those districts. Mistress Margaret spent longer than ever at
+her prayers; Lady Maxwell had all she could do to keep her husband from
+some furious act of fanatical retaliation for John Felton's death--some
+useless provocation of the authorities; the children at the Dower House
+began to come to the Hall less often, not because they were less
+welcomed, but because there was a constraint in the air. All seemed
+preoccupied; conversations ceased abruptly on their entrance, and fits of
+abstraction would fall from time to time upon their kindly hosts. In the
+meanwhile, too, the preparations for James Maxwell's departure, which had
+already begun to show themselves, were now pushed forward rapidly; and
+one morning in the late summer, when Isabel came up to the Hall, she
+found that Lady Maxwell was confined to her room and could not be seen
+that day; she caught a glimpse of Sir Nicholas' face as he quickly
+crossed the entrance hall, that made her draw back from daring to intrude
+on such grief; and on inquiry found that Mr. James had ridden away that
+morning, and that the servants did not know when to expect him back, nor
+what was his destination.
+
+In other ways also at this time did Sir Nicholas actively help on his
+party. Great Keynes was in a convenient position and circumstances for
+agents who came across from the Continent. It was sufficiently near
+London, yet not so near to the highroad or to London itself as to make
+disturbance probable; and its very quietness under the spiritual care of
+a moderate minister like Mr. Dent, and its serenity, owing to the secret
+sympathy of many of the villagers and neighbours, as well as from the
+personal friendship between Sir Nicholas and the master of the Dower
+House--an undoubted Protestant--all these circumstances combined to make
+Maxwell Hall a favourite halting-place for priests and agents from the
+Continent. Strangers on horseback or in carriages, and sometimes even on
+foot, would arrive there after nightfall, and leave in a day or two for
+London. Its nearness to London enabled them to enter the city at any hour
+they thought best after ten or eleven in the forenoon. They came on very
+various businesses; some priests even stayed there and made the Hall a
+centre for their spiritual ministrations for miles round; others came
+with despatches from abroad, some of which were even addressed to great
+personages at Court and at the Embassies where much was being done by the
+Ambassadors at this time to aid their comrades in the Faith, and to other
+leading Catholics; and others again came with pamphlets printed abroad
+for distribution in England, some of them indeed seditious, but many of
+them purely controversial and hortatory, and with other devotional
+articles and books such as it was difficult to obtain in England, and
+might not be exposed for public sale in booksellers' shops: Agnus Deis,
+beads, hallowed incense and crosses were being sent in large numbers from
+abroad, and were eagerly sought after by the Papists in all directions.
+It was remarkable that while threatening clouds appeared to be gathering
+on all sides over the Catholic cause, yet the deepening peril was
+accompanied by a great outburst of religious zeal. It was reported to the
+Archbishop that "massing" was greatly on the increase in Kent; and was
+attributed, singularly enough, to the Northern Rebellion, which had ended
+in disaster for the Papists; but the very fact that such a movement could
+take place at all probably heartened many secret sympathisers, who had
+hitherto considered themselves almost alone in a heretic population.
+
+Sir Nicholas came in one day to dinner in a state of great fury. One of
+his couriers had just arrived with news from London; and the old man came
+in fuming and resentful.
+
+"What hypocrisy!" he cried out to Lady Maxwell and Mistress Margaret, who
+were seated at table. "Not content with persecuting Catholics, they will
+not even allow us to say we are persecuted for the faith. Here is the
+Lord Keeper declaring in the Star Chamber that no man is to be persecuted
+for his private faith, but only for his public acts, and that the Queen's
+Grace desires nothing so little as to meddle with any man's conscience.
+Then I suppose they would say that hearing mass was a public act and
+therefore unlawful; but then how if a man's private faith bids him to
+hear mass? Is not that meddling with his private conscience to forbid him
+to go to mass? What folly is this? And yet my Lord Keeper and her Grace
+are no fools! Then are they worse than fools?"
+
+Lady Maxwell tried to quiet the old man, for the servants were not out of
+the room; and it was terribly rash to speak like that before them; but he
+would not be still nor sit down, but raged up and down before the hearth,
+growling and breaking out now and again. What especially he could not get
+off his mind was that this was the Old Religion that was prescribed. That
+England for generations had held the Faith, and that then the Faith and
+all that it involved had been declared unlawful, was to him iniquity
+unfathomable. He could well understand some new upstart sect being
+persecuted, but not the old Religion. He kept on returning to this.
+
+"Have they so far forgotten the Old Faith as to think it can be held in a
+man's private conscience without appearing in his life, like their
+miserable damnable new fangled Justification by faith without works? Or
+that a man can believe in the blessed sacrament of the altar and yet not
+desire to receive it; or in penance and yet not be absolved; or in Peter
+and yet not say so, nor be reconciled. You may believe, say they, of
+their clemency, what you like; be justified by that; that is enough!
+Bah!"
+
+However mere declaiming against the Government was barren work, and Sir
+Nicholas soon saw that; and instead, threw himself with more vigour than
+ever into entertaining and forwarding the foreign emissaries.
+
+Mary Corbet had returned to London by the middle of July; and Hubert was
+not yet returned; so Sir Nicholas and the two ladies had the Hall to
+themselves. Now it must be confessed that the old man had neither the
+nature nor the training for the _rôle_ of a conspirator, even of the
+mildest description. He was so exceedingly impulsive, unsuspicious and
+passionate that it would have been the height of folly to entrust him
+with any weighty secret, if it was possible to dispense with him; but the
+Catholics over the water needed stationary agents so grievously; and Sir
+Nicholas' name commanded such respect, and his house such conveniences,
+that they overlooked the risk involved in making him their confidant,
+again and again; besides it need not be said that his honour and fidelity
+was beyond reproach; and those qualities after all balance favourably
+against a good deal of shrewdness and discretion. He, of course, was
+serenely unable to distinguish between sedition and religion; and
+entertained political meddlers and ordinary priests with an equal
+enthusiasm. It was pathetic to Lady Maxwell to see her simple old husband
+shuffling away his papers, and puzzling over cyphers and perpetually
+leaving the key of them lying about, and betraying again and again when
+he least intended it, by his mysterious becks and nods and glances and
+oracular sayings, that some scheme was afoot. She could have helped him
+considerably if he had allowed her; but he had an idea that the
+capacities of ladies in general went no further than their harps, their
+embroidery and their devotions; and besides, he was chivalrously
+unwilling that his wife should be in any way privy to business that
+involved such risks as this.
+
+One sunny morning in August he came into her room early just as she was
+finishing her prayers, and announced the arrival of an emissary from
+abroad.
+
+"Sweetheart," he said, "will you prepare the east chamber for a young man
+whom we will call Mr. Stewart, if you please, who will arrive to-night.
+He hopes to be with us until after dusk to-morrow when he will leave; and
+I shall be obliged if you will---- No, no, my dear. I will order the
+horses myself."
+
+The old man then bustled off to the stableyard and ordered a saddle-horse
+to be taken at once to Cuckfield, accompanied by a groom on another
+horse. These were to arrive at the inn and await orders from a stranger
+"whom you will call Mr. Stewart, if you please." Mr. Stewart was to
+change horses there, and ride on to Maxwell Hall, and Sir Nicholas
+further ordered the same two horses and the same groom to be ready the
+following evening at about nine o'clock, and to be at "Mr. Stewart's"
+orders again as before.
+
+This behaviour of Sir Nicholas' was of course most culpably indiscreet. A
+child could not but have suspected something, and the grooms, who were of
+course Catholics, winked merrily at one another when the conspirator's
+back was turned, and he had hastened in a transport of zeal and
+preoccupation back again to the house to interrupt his wife in her
+preparations for the guest.
+
+That evening "Mr. Stewart" arrived according to arrangements. He was a
+slim red-haired man, not above thirty years of age, the kind of man his
+enemies would call foxy, with a very courteous and deliberate manner, and
+he spoke with a slight Scotch accent. He had the air of doing everything
+on purpose. He let his riding-whip fall as he greeted Lady Maxwell in the
+entrance hall; but picked it up with such a dignified grace that you
+would have sworn he had let it fall for some wise reason of his own. He
+had a couple of saddle-bags with him, which he did not let out of his
+sight for a moment; even keeping his eye upon them as he met the ladies
+and saluted them. They were carried up to the east chamber directly,
+their owner following; where supper had been prepared. There was no real
+reason, since he arrived with such publicity, why he should not have
+supped downstairs, but Sir Nicholas had been peremptory. It was by his
+directions also that the arrival had been accomplished in the manner it
+had.
+
+After he had supped, Sir Nicholas receiving the dishes from the servants'
+hands at the door of the room with the same air of secrecy and despatch,
+his host suggested that he should come to Lady Maxwell's drawing-room, as
+the ladies were anxious to see him. Mr. Stewart asked leave to bring a
+little valise with him that had travelled in one of the bags, and then
+followed his host who preceded him with a shaded light along the gallery.
+
+When he entered he bowed again profoundly, with a slightly French air, to
+the ladies and to the image over the fire; and then seated himself, and
+asked leave to open his valise. He did so with their permission, and
+displayed to them the numerous devotional articles and books that it
+contained. The ladies and Sir Nicholas were delighted, and set aside at
+once some new books of devotion, and then they fell to talk. The
+Netherlands, from which Mr. Stewart had arrived two days before, on the
+east coast, were full at this time of Catholic refugees, under the Duke
+of Alva's protection. Here they had been living, some of them even from
+Elizabeth's accession, and Sir Nicholas and his ladies had many inquiries
+to make about their acquaintances, many of which Mr. Stewart was able to
+satisfy, for, from his conversation he was plainly one in the confidence
+of Catholics both at home and abroad. And so the evening passed away
+quietly. It was thought better by Sir Nicholas that Mr. Stewart should
+not be present at the evening devotions that he always conducted for the
+household in the dining-hall, unless indeed a priest were present to take
+his place; so Mr. Stewart was again conducted with the same secrecy to
+the East Chamber; and Sir Nicholas promised at his request to look in on
+him again after prayers. When prayers were over, Sir Nicholas went up to
+his guest's room, and found him awaiting him in a state of evident
+excitement, very unlike the quiet vivacity and good humour he had shown
+when with the ladies.
+
+"Sir Nicholas," he said, standing up, as his host came in, "I have not
+told you all my news." And when they were both seated he proceeded:
+
+"You spoke a few minutes ago, Sir Nicholas, of Dr. Storey; he has been
+caught."
+
+The old man exclaimed with dismay. Mr. Stewart went on:
+
+"When I left Antwerp, Sir Nicholas, Dr. Storey was in the town. I saw him
+myself in the street by the Cathedral only a few hours before I embarked.
+He is very old, you know, and lame, worn out with good works, and he was
+hobbling down the street on the arm of a young man. When I arrived at
+Yarmouth I went out into the streets about a little business I had with a
+bookseller, before taking horse. I heard a great commotion down near the
+docks, at the entrance of Bridge Street; and hastened down there; and
+there I saw pursuivants and seamen and officers all gathered about a
+carriage, and keeping back the crowd that was pressing and crying out to
+know who the man was; and presently the carriage drove by me, scattering
+the crowd, and I could see within; and there sat old Dr. Storey, very
+white and ill-looking, but steady and cheerful, whom I had seen the very
+day before in Antwerp. Now this is very grievous for Dr. Storey; and I
+pray God to deliver him; but surely the Duke and the King of Spain must
+move now. They cannot leave him in Cecil's hands; and then, Sir Nicholas,
+we must all be ready, for who knows what may happen."
+
+Sir Nicholas was greatly moved. There was one of the perplexities which
+so much harassed all the Papists at this time. It seemed certain that Mr.
+Stewart's prediction must be fulfilled. Dr. Storey was a naturalised
+subject of King Philip and in the employment of Alva, and he had been
+carried off forcibly by the English Government. It afterwards came out
+how it had been done. He had been lured away from Antwerp and enticed on
+board a trader at Bergen-op-Zoom, by Cecil's agents with the help of a
+traitor named Parker, on pretext of finding heretical books there
+arriving from England; and as soon as he had set foot on deck he was
+hurried below and carried straight off to Yarmouth. Here then was Sir
+Nicholas' perplexity. To welcome Spain when she intervened and to work
+actively for her, was treason against his country; to act against Spain
+was to delay the re-establishment of the Religion--something that
+appeared to him very like treason against his faith. Was the dreadful
+choice between his sovereign and his God, he wondered as he paced up and
+down and questioned Mr. Stewart, even now imminent?
+
+The whole affair, too, was so formidable and so mysterious that the
+hearts of these Catholics and of others in England when they heard the
+tale began to fail them. Had the Government then so long an arm and so
+keen an eye? And if it was able to hale a man from the shadow of the
+Cathedral at Antwerp and the protection of the Duke of Alva into the
+hands of pursuivants at Yarmouth within the space of a few hours, who
+then was safe?
+
+And so the two sat late that night in the East Chamber; and laid schemes
+and discussed movements and probabilities and the like, until the dawn
+began to glimmer through the cracks of the shutters and the birds to
+chirp in the eaves; and Sir Nicholas at last carried to bed with him an
+anxious and a heavy heart. Mr. Stewart, however, did not seem so greatly
+disturbed; possibly because on the one side he had not others dearer to
+him than his own life involved in these complex issues: and partly
+because he at any rate has not the weight of suspense and indecision that
+so drew his host two ways at once, for Mr. Stewart was whole-heartedly
+committed already, and knew well how he would act should the choice
+present itself between Elizabeth and Philip.
+
+The following morning Sir Nicholas still would not allow his guest to
+come downstairs, and insisted that all his meals should be served in the
+East Chamber, while he himself, as before, received the food at the door
+and set it before Mr. Stewart. Mr. Stewart was greatly impressed and
+touched by the kindness of the old man, although not by his capacity for
+conspiracy. He had intended indeed to tell his host far more than he had
+done of the movements of political and religious events, for he could not
+but believe, before his arrival, that a Catholic so prominent and
+influential as Sir Nicholas was becoming by reputation among the refugees
+abroad, was a proper person to be entrusted even with the highest
+secrets; but after a very little conversation with him the night before,
+he had seen how ingenuous the old man was, with his laughable attempts at
+secrecy and his lamentable lack of discretion; and so he had contented
+himself with general information and gossip, and had really told Sir
+Nicholas very little indeed of any importance.
+
+After dinner Sir Nicholas again conducted his guest to the drawing-room,
+where the ladies were ready to receive him. He had obtained Mr. Stewart's
+permission the night before to tell his wife and sister-in-law the news
+about Dr. Storey; and the four sat for several hours together discussing
+the situation. Mr. Stewart was able to tell them too, in greater detail,
+the story of Lord Sussex's punitive raid into Scotland in the preceding
+April. They had heard of course the main outline of the story with the
+kind of embroideries attached that were usual in those days of inaccurate
+reporting; but their guest was a Scotchman himself and had had the
+stories first-hand in some cases from those rendered homeless by the
+raid, who had fled to the Netherlands where he had met them. Briefly the
+raid was undertaken on the pretended plea of an invitation from the
+"King's men" or adherents of the infant James; but in reality to chastise
+Scotland and reduce it to servility. Sussex and Lord Hunsdon in the east,
+Lord Scrope on the west, had harried, burnt, and destroyed in the whole
+countryside about the Borders. Especially had Tiviotdale suffered.
+Altogether it was calculated that Sussex had burned three hundred
+villages and blown up fifty castles, and forty more "strong houses," some
+of these latter, however, being little more than border peels. Mr.
+Stewart's accounts were the more moving in that he spoke in a quiet
+delicate tone, and used little picturesque phrases in his speech.
+
+"Twelve years ago," said Mr. Stewart, "I was at Branxholme myself. It was
+a pleasant house, well furnished and appointed; fortified, too, as all
+need to be in that country, with sheaves of pikes in all the lower rooms,
+and Sir Walter Scott gave me a warm welcome, for I was there on a
+business that pleased him. He showed me the gardens and orchards, all
+green and sweet, like these of yours, Lady Maxwell. And it seemed to me a
+home where a man might be content to spend all his days. Well, my Lord
+Sussex has been a visitor there now; and what he has left of the house
+would not shelter a cow, nor what is left of the pleasant gardens sustain
+her. At least, so one of the Scots told me whom I met in the Netherlands
+in June."
+
+He talked, too, of the extraordinary scenes of romance and chivalry in
+which Mary Queen of Scots moved during her captivity under Lord Scrope's
+care at Bolton Castle in the previous year. He had met in his travels in
+France one of her undistinguished adherents who had managed to get a
+position in the castle during her detention there.
+
+"The country was alive with her worshippers," said Mr. Stewart. "They
+swarmed like bees round a hive. In the night voices would be heard crying
+out to her Grace out of the darkness round the castle; and when the
+guards rode out they would find no man but maybe hear just a laugh or
+two. Her men would lie out at night and watch her window (for she would
+never go to rest till late), and pray towards it as if it were a light
+before the blessed sacrament. When she rode out a-hunting, with her
+guards of course about her, and my Lord Scrope or Sir Francis Knollys
+never far away, a beggar maybe would be sitting out on the road and ask
+an alms; and cry out 'God save your Grace'; but he would be a beggar who
+was accustomed to wear silk next his skin except when he went a-begging.
+Many young gentlemen there were, yes and old ones too, who would thank
+God for a blow or a curse from some foul English trooper for his meat, if
+only he might have a look from the Queen's eyes for his grace before
+meat. Oh! they would plot too, and scheme and lie awake half the night
+spinning their webs, not to catch her Grace indeed, but to get her away
+from that old Spider Scrope; and many's the word and the scrap of paper
+that would go in to her Grace, right under the very noses of my Lord
+Scrope and Sir Francis themselves, as they sat at their chess in the
+Queen's chamber. It's a long game of chess that the two Queens are
+playing; but thank our Lady and the Saints it's not mate yet--not mate
+yet; and the White Queen will win, please God, before the board's
+over-turned."
+
+And he told them, too, of the failure of the Northern Rebellion, and the
+wretchedness of the fugitives.
+
+"They rode over the moors to Liddisdale," he said, "ladies and all, in
+bitter weather, wind and snow, day after day, with stories of Clinton's
+troopers all about them, and scarcely time for bite or sup or sleep. My
+lady Northumberland was so overcome with weariness and sickness that she
+could ride no more at last, and had to be left at John-of-the-Side's
+house, where she had a little chamber where the snow came in at one
+corner, and the rats ran over my lady's face as she lay. My Lords
+Northumberland and Westmoreland were in worse case, and spent their
+Christmas with no roof over them but what they could find out in the
+braes and woods about Harlaw, and no clothes but the foul rags that some
+beggar had thrown away, and no food but a bird or a rabbit that they
+could pick up here and there, or what their friends could get to them now
+and again privately. And then my Lord Northumberland's little daughters
+whom he was forced to leave behind at Topcliff--a sweet Christmas they
+had! Their money and food was soon spent; they could have scarcely a fire
+in that bitter hard season; and God who feeds the ravens alone knows how
+they were sustained; and for entertainment to make the time pass merrily,
+all they had was to see the hanging of their own servants in scores about
+the house, who had served them and their father well; and all their music
+at night was the howling of the wind in those heavily laden
+Christmas-trees, and the noise of the chains in which the men were
+hanged."
+
+Mr. Stewart's narratives were engrossing to the two ladies and Sir
+Nicholas. They had never come so close to the struggles of the Catholics
+in the north before; and although the Northern Rebellion had ended so
+disastrously, yet it was encouraging, although heartbreaking too, to hear
+that delicate women and children were ready gladly to suffer such
+miseries if the religious cause that was so dear to them could be thereby
+helped. Sir Nicholas, as has been said, was in two minds as to the
+lawfulness of rising against a temporal sovereign in defence of religious
+liberties. His whole English nature revolted against it, and yet so many
+spiritual persons seemed to favour it. His simple conscience was
+perplexed. But none the less he could listen with the most intense
+interest and sympathy to these tales of these co-religionists of his own,
+who were so clearly convinced of their right to rebel in defence of their
+faith.
+
+And so with such stories the August afternoon passed away. It was a
+thundery day, which it would have been pleasanter to spend in the garden,
+but that, Sir Nicholas said, under the circumstances was not to be
+thought of; so they threw the windows wide to catch the least breath of
+air; and the smell of the flower-garden came sweetly up and flooded the
+low cool room; and so they sat engrossed until the evening.
+
+Supper was ordered for Mr. Stewart at half-past seven o'clock; and this
+meal Sir Nicholas had consented should be laid downstairs in his own
+private room opening out of the hall, and that he and his ladies should
+sit down to table at the same time. Mr. Stewart went to his room an hour
+before to dress for riding, and to superintend the packing of his
+saddle-bags; and at half-past seven he was conducted downstairs by Sir
+Nicholas who insisted on carrying the saddle-bags with his own hands, and
+they found the two ladies waiting for them in the panelled study that had
+one window giving upon the terrace that ran along the south of the house
+above the garden. When supper had been brought in by Sir Nicholas' own
+body-servant, Mr. Boyd, they sat down to supper after a grace from Sir
+Nicholas. The horses were ordered for nine o'clock.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                     THE DOOR IN THE GARDEN-WALL
+
+
+On the morning of the day after Mr. Stewart's secret arrival at Maxwell
+Hall, the Rector was walking up and down the lawn that adjoined the
+churchyard.
+
+He had never yet wholly recovered from the sneers of Mistress Corbet; the
+wounds had healed but had not ceased to smart. How blind these Papists
+were, he thought! how prejudiced for the old trifling details of worship!
+how ignorant of the vital principles still retained! The old realities of
+God and the faith and the Church were with them still, in this village,
+he reminded himself; it was only the incrustations of error that had been
+removed. Of course the transition was difficult and hearts were sore; but
+the Eternal God can be patient. But then, if the discontent of the
+Papists smouldered on one side, the fanatical and irresponsible zeal of
+the Puritans flared on the other. How difficult, he thought, to steer the
+safe middle course! How much cool faith and clearsightedness it needed!
+He reminded himself of Archbishop Parker who now held the rudder, and
+comforted himself with the thought of his wise moderation in dealing with
+excesses, his patient pertinacity among the whirling gusts of passion,
+that enabled him to wait upon events to push his schemes, and his tender
+knowledge of human nature.
+
+But in spite of these reassuring facts Mr. Dent was anxious. What could
+even the Archbishop do when his suffragans were such poor creatures; and
+when Leicester, the strongest man at Court, was a violent Puritan
+partisan? The Rector would have been content to bear the troubles of his
+own flock and household if he had been confident of the larger cause; but
+the vagaries of the Puritans threatened all with ruin. That morning only
+he had received a long account from a Fellow of his own college of Corpus
+Christi, Cambridge, and a man of the same views as himself, of the
+violent controversy raging there at that time.
+
+"The Professor," wrote his friend, referring to Thomas Cartwright, "is
+plastering us all with his Genevan ways. We are all Papists, it seems!
+He would have neither bishop nor priest nor archbishop nor dean nor
+archdeacon, nor dignitaries at all, but just the plain Godly Minister, as
+he names it. Or if he has the bishop and the deacon they are to be the
+_Episcopos_ and the _Diaconos_ of the Scripture, and not the Papish
+counterfeits! Then it seems that the minister is to be made not by God
+but by man--that the people are to make him, not the bishop (as if the
+sheep should make the shepherd). Then it appears we are Papists too for
+kneeling at the Communion; this he names a 'feeble superstition.' Then he
+would have all men reside in their benefices or vacate them; and all that
+do not so, it appears, are no better than thieves or robbers.
+
+"And so he rages on, breathing out this smoky stuff, and all the young
+men do run after him, as if he were the very Pillar of Fire to lead them
+to Canaan. One day he says there shall be no bishop--and my Lord of Ely
+rides through Petty Cury with scarce a man found to doff cap and say 'my
+lord' save foolish 'Papists' like myself! Another day he will have no
+distinction of apparel; and the young sparks straight dress like
+ministers, and the ministers like young sparks. On another he likes not
+Saint Peter his day, and none will go to church. He would have us all to
+be little Master Calvins, if he could have his way with us. But the
+Master of Trinity has sent a complaint to the Council with charges
+against him, and has preached against him too. But no word hath yet come
+from the Council; and we fear nought will be done; to the sore injury of
+Christ His holy Church and the Protestant Religion; and the triumphing of
+their pestilent heresies."
+
+So the caustic divine wrote, and the Rector of Great Keynes was
+heavy-hearted as he walked up and down and read. Everywhere it was the
+same story; the extreme precisians openly flouted the religion of the
+Church of England; submitted to episcopal ordination as a legal necessity
+and then mocked at it; refused to wear the prescribed dress, and
+repudiated all other distinctions too in meats and days as Judaic
+remnants; denounced all forms of worship except those directly sanctioned
+by Scripture; in short, they remained in the Church of England and drew
+her pay while they scouted her orders and derided her claims. Further,
+they cried out as persecuted martyrs whenever it was proposed to insist
+that they should observe their obligations. But worse than all, for such
+conscientious clergymen as Mr. Dent, was the fact that bishops preferred
+such men to livings, and at the same time were energetic against the
+Papist party. It was not that there was not an abundance of disciplinary
+machinery ready at the bishop's disposal or that the Queen was opposed to
+coercion--rather she was always urging them to insist upon conformity;
+but it seemed rather to such sober men as the Rector that the principle
+of authority had been lost with the rejection of the Papacy, and that
+anarchy rather than liberty had prevailed in the National Church. In
+darker moments it seemed to him and his friends as if any wild fancy was
+tolerated, so long as it did not approximate too closely to the Old
+Religion; and they grew sick at heart.
+
+It was all the more difficult for the Rector, as he had so little
+sympathy in the place; his wife did all she could to destroy friendly
+relations between the Hall and the Rectory, and openly derided her
+husband's prelatical leanings; the Maxwells themselves disregarded his
+priestly claims, and the villagers thought of him as an official paid to
+promulgate the new State religion. The only house where he found sympathy
+and help was the Dower House; and as he paced up and down his garden now,
+his little perplexed determined face grew brighter as he made up his mind
+to see Mr. Norris again in the afternoon.
+
+During his meditations he heard, and saw indistinctly, through the
+shrubbery that fenced the lawn from the drive, a mounted man ride up to
+the Rectory door. He supposed it was some message, and held himself in
+readiness to be called into the house, but after a minute or two he heard
+the man ride off again down the drive into the village. At dinner he
+mentioned it to his wife, who answered rather shortly that it was a
+message for her; and he let the matter drop for fear of giving offence;
+he was terrified at the thought of provoking more quarrels than were
+absolutely necessary.
+
+Soon after dinner he put on his cap and gown, and to his wife's inquiries
+told her where he was going, and that after he had seen Mr. Norris he
+would step on down to Comber's, where was a sick body or two, and that
+she might expect him back not earlier than five o'clock. She nodded
+without speaking, and he went out. She watched him down the drive from
+the dining-room window and then went back to her business with an odd
+expression.
+
+Mr. Norris, whom he found already seated at his books again after dinner,
+took him out when he had heard his errand, and the two began to walk up
+and down together on the raised walk that ran along under a line of pines
+a little way from the house.
+
+The Rector had seldom found his friend more sympathetic and tender; he
+knew very well that their intellectual and doctrinal standpoints were
+different, but he had not come for anything less than spiritual help, and
+that he found. He told him all his heart, and then waited, while the
+other, with his thin hands clasped behind his back, and his great grey
+eyes cast up at the heavy pines and the tender sky beyond, began to
+comfort the minister.
+
+"You are troubled, my friend," he said, "and I do not wonder at it, by
+the turbulence of these times. On all sides are fightings and fears. Of
+course I cannot, as you know, regard these matters you have spoken
+of--episcopacy, ceremonies at the Communion and the like--in the grave
+light in which you see them; but I take it, if I understand you rightly,
+that it is the confusion and lack of any authority or respect for
+antiquity that is troubling you more. You feel yourself in a sad plight
+between these raging waves; tossed to and fro, battered upon by both
+sides, forsaken and despised and disregarded. Now, indeed, although I do
+not stand quite where you do, yet I see how great the stress must be;
+but, if I may say so to a minister, it is just what you regard as your
+shame that I regard as your glory. It is the mark of the cross that is on
+your life. When our Saviour went to his passion, he went in the same
+plight as that in which you go; both Jew and Gentile were against him on
+this side and that; his claims were disallowed, his royalty denied; he
+was despised and rejected of men. He did not go to his passion as to a
+splendid triumph, bearing his pain like some solemn and mysterious
+dignity at which the world wondered and was silent; but he went battered
+and spat upon, with the sweat and the blood and the spittle running down
+his face, contemned by the contemptible, hated by the hateful, rejected
+by the outcast, barked upon by the curs; and it was that that made his
+passion so bitter. To go to death, however painful, with honour and
+applause, or at least with the silence of respect, were easy; it is not
+hard to die upon a throne; but to live on a dunghill with Job, that is
+bitterness. Now again I must protest that I have no right to speak like
+this to a minister, but since you have come to me I must needs say what I
+think; and it is this that some wise man once said, 'Fear honour, for
+shame is not far off. Covet shame, for honour is surely to follow.' If
+that be true of the philosopher, how much more true is it of the
+Christian minister whose profession it is to follow the Saviour and to be
+made like unto him."
+
+He said much more of the same kind; and his soft balmy faith soothed the
+minister's wounds, and braced his will. The Rector could not help half
+envying his friend, living, as it seemed, in this still retreat, apart
+from wrangles and controversy, with the peaceful music and sweet
+fragrance of the pines, and the Love of God about him.
+
+When he had finished he asked the Rector to step indoors with him; and
+there in his own room took down and read to him a few extracts from the
+German mystics that he thought bore upon his case. Finally, to put him at
+his ease again, for it seemed an odd reversal that he should be coming
+for comfort to his parishioners, Mr. Norris told him about his two
+children, and in his turn asked his advice.
+
+"About Anthony," he said, "I am not at all anxious. I know that the boy
+fancies himself in love; and goes sighing about when he is at home; but
+he sleeps and eats heartily, for I have observed him; and I think
+Mistress Corbet has a good heart and means no harm to him. But about my
+daughter I am less satisfied, for I have been watching her closely. She
+is quiet and good, and, above all, she loves the Saviour; but how do I
+know that her heart is not bleeding within? She has been taught to hold
+herself in, and not to show her feelings; and that, I think, is as much a
+drawback sometimes as wearing the heart upon the sleeve."
+
+Mr. Dent suggested sending her away for a visit for a month or two. His
+host mused a moment and then said that he himself had thought of that;
+and now that his minister said so too, probably, under God, that was what
+was needed. The fact that Hubert was expected home soon was an additional
+reason; and he had friends in Northampton, he said, to whom he could send
+her. "They hold strongly by the Genevan theology there," he said smiling,
+"but I think that will do her no harm as a balance to the Popery at
+Maxwell Hall."
+
+They talked a few minutes more, and when the minister rose to take his
+leave, Mr. Norris slipped down on his knees as if it was the natural
+thing to do and as if the minister were expecting it; and asked his guest
+to engage in prayer. It was the first time he had ever done so; probably
+because this talk had brought them nearer together spiritually than ever
+before. The minister was taken aback, and repeated a collect or two from
+the Prayer-book; then they said the Lord's Prayer together, and then Mr.
+Norris without any affectation engaged in a short extempore prayer,
+asking for light in these dark times and peace in the storm; and begging
+the blessing of God upon the village and "upon their shepherd to whom
+Thou hast given to drink of the Cup of thy Passion," and upon his own
+children, and lastly upon himself, "the chief of sinners and the least of
+thy servants that is not worthy to be called thy friend." It touched Mr.
+Dent exceedingly, and he was yet more touched and reconciled to the
+incident when his host said simply, remaining on his knees, with eyes
+closed and his clear cut tranquil face upturned:
+
+"I ask your blessing, sir."
+
+The Rector's voice trembled a little as he gave it. And then with real
+gratitude and a good deal of sincere emotion he shook his friend's hand,
+and rustled out from the cool house into the sunlit garden, greeting
+Isabel who was walking up and down outside a little pensively, and took
+the field-path that led towards the hamlet where his sick folk were
+expecting him.
+
+As he walked back about five o'clock towards the village he noticed there
+was thunder in the air, and was aware of a physical oppression, but in
+his heart it was morning and the birds singing. The talk earlier in the
+afternoon had shown him how, in the midst of the bitterness of the Cup,
+to find the fragrance where the Saviour's lips had rested and that was
+joy to him. And again, his true pastor's heart had been gladdened by the
+way his ministrations had been received that afternoon. A sour old man
+who had always scowled at him for an upstart, in his foolish old desire
+to be loyal to the priest who had held the benefice before him, had
+melted at last and asked his pardon and God's for having treated him so
+ill; and he had prepared the old man for death with great contentment to
+them both, and had left him at peace with God and man. On looking back on
+it all afterwards he was convinced that God had thus strengthened him for
+the trouble that was awaiting him at home.
+
+He had hardly come into his study when his wife entered with a strange
+look, breathing quick and short; she closed the door, and stood near it,
+looking at him apprehensively.
+
+"George," she said, rather sharply and nervously, "you must not be vexed
+with me, but----"
+
+"Well?" he said heavily, and the warmth died out of his heart. He knew
+something terrible impended.
+
+"I have done it for the best," she said, and obstinacy and a kind of
+impatient tenderness strove in her eyes as she looked at him. "You must
+show yourself a man; it is not fitting that loose ladies of the Court
+should mock--" He got up; and his eyes were determined too.
+
+"Tell me what you have done, woman," he cried.
+
+She put out her hand as if to hold him still, and her voice rang hard and
+thin.
+
+"I will say my say," she said. "It is not for that that I have done it.
+But you are a Gospel-minister, and must be faithful. The Justice is here.
+I sent for him."
+
+"The Justice?" he said blankly; but his heart was beating heavily in his
+throat.
+
+"Mr. Frankland from East Grinsted, with a couple of pursuivants and a
+company of servants. There is a popish agent at the Hall, and they are
+come to take him."
+
+The Rector swallowed with difficulty once or twice, and then tried to
+speak, but she went on. "And I have promised that you shall take them in
+by the side door."
+
+"I will not!" he cried.
+
+She held up her hand again for silence, and glanced round at the door.
+
+"I have given him the key," she said.
+
+This was the private key, possessed by the incumbent for generations
+past, and Sir Nicholas had not withdrawn it from the Protestant Rector.
+
+"There is no choice," she said. "Oh! George, be a man!" Then she turned
+and slipped out.
+
+He stood perfectly still for a moment; his pulses were racing; he could
+not think. He sat down and buried his face in his hands; and gradually
+his brain cleared and quieted. Then he realised what it meant, and his
+soul rose in blind furious resentment. This was the last straw; it was
+the woman's devilish jealousy. But what could he do? The Justice was
+here. Could he warn his friends? He clenched his fingers into his hair as
+the situation came out clear and hard before his brain. Dear God, what
+could he do?
+
+There were footsteps in the flagged hall, and he raised his head as the
+door opened and a portly gentleman in riding-dress came in, followed by
+Mrs. Dent. The Rector rose confusedly, but could not speak, and his eyes
+wandered round to his wife again and again as she took a chair in the
+shadow and sat down. But the magistrate noticed nothing.
+
+"Aha!" he said, beaming, "You have a wife, sir, that is a jewel. Solomon
+never spoke a truer word; an ornament to her husband, he said, I think;
+but you as a minister should know better than I, a mere layman"; and his
+face creased with mirth.
+
+What did the red-faced fool mean? thought the Rector. If only he would
+not talk so loud! He must think, he must think. What could he do?
+
+"She was very brisk, sir," the magistrate went on, sitting down, and the
+Rector followed his example, sitting too with his back to the window and
+his hand to his head.
+
+Then Mr. Frankland went on with his talk; and the man sat there, still
+glancing from time to time mechanically towards his wife, who was there
+in the shadow with steady white face and hands in her lap, watching the
+two men. The magistrate's voice seemed to the bewildered man to roll on
+like a wheel over stones; interminable, grinding, stupefying. What was he
+saying? What was that about his wife? She had sent to him the day before,
+had she, and told him of the popish agent's coming?--Ah! A dangerous man
+was he, a spreader of seditious pamphlets? At least they supposed he was
+the man.--Yes, yes, he understood; these fly-by-nights were threateners
+of the whole commonwealth; they must be hunted out like vermin--just so;
+and he as a minister of the Gospel should be the first to assist.--Just
+so, he agreed with all his heart, as a minister of the Gospel. (Yes, but,
+dear Lord, what was he to do? This fat man with the face of a butcher
+must not be allowed to--) Ah! what was that? He had missed that. Would
+Mr. Frankland be so good as to say it again? Yes, yes, he understood now;
+the men were posted already. No one suspected anything; they had come by
+the bridle path.--Every door? Did he understand that every door of the
+Hall was watched? Ah! that was prudent; there was no chance then of any
+one sending a warning in? Oh, no, no, he did not dream for a moment that
+there was any concealed Catholic who would be likely to do such a thing.
+But he only wondered.--Yes, yes, the magistrate was right; one could not
+be too careful. Because--ah!--What was that about Sir Nicholas? Yes, yes,
+indeed he was a good landlord, and very popular in the village.--Ah! just
+so; it had better be done quietly, at the side door. Yes, that was the
+one which the key fitted. But, but, he thought perhaps, he had better not
+come in, because Sir Nicholas was his friend, and there was no use in
+making bad blood.--Oh! not to the house; very well, then, he would come
+as far as the yew hedge at--at what time did the magistrate say? At
+half-past eight; yes, that would be best as Mr. Frankland said, because
+Sir Nicholas had ordered the horses for nine o'clock; so they would come
+upon them just at the right time.--How many men, did Mr. Frankland say?
+Eight? Oh yes, eight and himself, and--he did not quite follow the plan.
+Ah! through the yew hedge on to the terrace and through the south door
+into the hall; then if they bolted--they? Surely he had understood the
+magistrate to say there was only one? Oh! he had not understood that. Sir
+Nicholas too? But why, why? Good God, as a harbourer of priests?--No, but
+this fellow was an agent, surely. Well, if the magistrate said so, of
+course he was right; but he would have thought himself that Sir Nicholas
+might have been left--ah! Well, he would say no more. He quite saw the
+magistrate's point now.--No, no, he was no favourer; God forbid! his wife
+would speak for him as to that; Marion would bear witness.--Well, well,
+he thanked the magistrate for his compliments, and would he proceed with
+the plan? By the south door, he was saying, yes, into the hall.--Yes, the
+East room was Sir Nicholas' study; or of course they might be supping
+upstairs. But it made no difference; no, the magistrate was right about
+that. So long as they held the main staircase, and had all the other
+doors watched, they were safe to have him.--No, no, the cloister wing
+would not be used; they might leave that out of their calculations.
+Besides, did not the magistrate say that Marion had seen the lights in
+the East wing last night? Yes, well, that settled it.--And the signal?
+Oh, he had not caught that; the church bell, was it to be? But what for?
+Why did they need a signal? Ah! he understood, for the advance at
+half-past eight.--Just so, he would send Thomas up to ring it. Would
+Marion kindly see to that?--Yes, indeed, his wife was a woman to be proud
+of; such a faithful Protestant; no patience with these seditious rogues
+at all. Well, was that all? Was there anything else?--Yes, how dark it
+was getting; it must be close on eight o'clock. Thomas had gone, had he?
+That was all right.--And had the men everything they wanted?--Well, yes;
+although the village did go to bed early it would perhaps be better to
+have no lights; because there was no need to rouse suspicion.--Oh! very
+well; perhaps it would be better for Mr. Frankland to go and sit with the
+men and keep them quiet. And his wife would go, too, just to make sure
+they had all they wanted.--Very well, yes; he would wait here in the dark
+until he was called. Not more than a quarter of an hour? Thank you,
+yes.--
+
+Then the door had closed; and the man, left alone, flung himself down in
+his chair, and buried his face again in his arms.
+
+Ah! what was to be done? Nothing, nothing, nothing. And there they were
+at the Hall, his neighbours and friends. The kind old Catholic and his
+ladies! How would he ever dare to meet their eyes again? But what could
+be done? Nothing!
+
+How far away the afternoon seems; that quiet sunny walk beneath the
+pines. His friend is at his books, no doubt, with the silver candles, and
+the open pages, and his own neat manuscript growing under his white
+scholarly fingers. And Isabel; at her needlework before the fire.--How
+peaceful and harmless and sweet it all is! And down there, not fifty
+yards away, is the village; every light out by now; and the children and
+parents, too, asleep.--Ah! what will the news be when they wake
+to-morrow?--And that strange talk this afternoon, of the Saviour and His
+Cup of pain, and the squalor and indignity of the Passion! Ah! yes, he
+could suffer with Jesus on the Cross, so gladly, on that Tree of
+Life--but not with Judas on the Tree of Death!
+
+And the minister dropped his face lower, over the edge of his desk; and
+the hot tears of misery and self-reproach and impotence began to run.
+There was no help, no help anywhere. All were against him--even his wife
+herself; and his Lord.
+
+Then with a moan he lifted his hot face into the dusk.
+
+"Jesus," he cried in his soul, "Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest
+that I love Thee."
+
+There came a tapping on the door; and the door opened an inch.
+
+"It is time," whispered his wife's voice.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VIII
+
+                      THE TAKING OF MR. STEWART
+
+
+They were still sitting over the supper-table at the Hall. The sun had
+set about the time they had begun, and the twilight had deepened into
+dark; but they had not cared to close the shutters as they were to move
+so soon. The four candles shone out through the windows, and there still
+hung a pale glimmer outside owing to the refraction of light from the
+white stones of the terrace. Beyond on the left there sloped away a high
+black wall of impenetrable darkness where the yew hedge stood; over that
+was the starless sky. Sir Nicholas' study was bright with candlelight,
+and the lace and jewels of Lady Maxwell (for her sister wore none) added
+a vague pleasant sense of beauty to Mr. Stewart's mind; for he was one
+who often fared coarsely and slept hard. He sighed a little to himself as
+he looked out over this shining supper-table past the genial smiling face
+of Sir Nicholas to the dark outside; and thought how in less than an hour
+he would have left the comfort of this house for the grey road and its
+hardships again. It was extraordinarily sweet to him (for he was a man of
+taste and a natural inclination to luxury) to stay a day or two now and
+again at a house like this and mix again with his own equals, instead of
+with the rough company of the village inn, or the curious foreign
+conspirators with their absence of educated perception and their doubtful
+cleanliness. He was a man of domestic instincts and good birth and
+breeding, and would have been perfectly at his ease as the master of some
+household such as this; with a chapel and a library and a pleasant garden
+and estate; spending his days in great leisure and good deeds. And
+instead of all this, scarcely by his own choice but by what he would have
+called his vocation, he was partly an exile living from hand to mouth in
+lodgings and inns, and when he was in his own fatherland, a hunted
+fugitive lurking about in unattractive disguises. He sighed again once or
+twice. There was silence a moment or two.
+
+There sounded one note from the church tower a couple of hundred yards
+away. Lady Maxwell heard it, and looked suddenly up; she scarcely knew
+why, and caught her sister's eyes glancing at her. There was a shade of
+uneasiness in them.
+
+"It is thundery to-night," said Sir Nicholas. Mr. Stewart did not speak.
+Lady Maxwell looked up quickly at him as he sat on her right facing the
+window; and saw an expression of slight disturbance cross his face. He
+was staring out on to the quickly darkening terrace, past Sir Nicholas,
+who with pursed lips and a little frown was stripping off his grapes from
+the stalk. The look of uneasiness deepened, and the young man half rose
+from his chair, and sat down again.
+
+"What is it, Mr. Stewart?" said Lady Maxwell, and her voice had a ring of
+terror in it. Sir Nicholas looked up quickly.
+
+"Eh, eh?"--he began.
+
+The young man rose up and recoiled a step, still staring out.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "but I have just seen several men pass the
+window."
+
+There was a rush of footsteps and a jangle of voices outside in the hall;
+and as the four rose up from table, looking at one another, there was a
+rattle at the handle outside, the door flew open, and a ruddy
+strongly-built man stood there, with a slightly apprehensive air, and
+holding a loaded cane a little ostentatiously in his hand; the faces of
+several men looked over his shoulder.
+
+Sir Nicholas' ruddy face had paled, his mouth was half open with dismay,
+and he stared almost unintelligently at the magistrate. Mr. Stewart's
+hand closed on the handle of a knife that lay beside his plate.
+
+"In the Queen's name," said Mr. Frankland, and looked from the knife to
+the young man's white determined face, and down again. A little sobbing
+broke from Lady Maxwell.
+
+"It is useless, sir," said the magistrate; "Sir Nicholas, persuade your
+guest not to make a useless resistance; we are ten to one; the house has
+been watched for hours."
+
+Sir Nicholas took a step forward, his mouth closed and opened again. Lady
+Maxwell took a swift rustling step from behind the table, and threw her
+arm round the old man's neck. Still none of them spoke.
+
+"Come in," said the magistrate, turning a little. The men outside filed
+in, to the number of half a dozen, and two or three more were left in the
+hall. All were armed. Mistress Margaret who had stood up with the rest,
+sat down again, and rested her head on her hand; apparently completely at
+her ease.
+
+"I must beg pardon, Lady Maxwell," he went on, "but my duty leaves me no
+choice." He turned to the young man, who, on seeing the officers had laid
+the knife down again, and now stood, with one hand on the table, rather
+pale, but apparently completely self-controlled, looking a little
+disdainfully at the magistrate.
+
+Then Sir Nicholas made a great effort; but his face twitched as he spoke,
+and the hand that he lifted to his wife's arm shook with nervousness, and
+his voice was cracked and unnatural.
+
+"Sit down, my dear, sit down.--What is all this?--I do not
+understand.--Mr. Frankland, sir, what do you want of me?--And who are all
+these gentlemen?--Won't you sit down, Mr. Frankland and take a glass of
+wine. Let me make Mr. Stewart known to you." And he lifted a shaking hand
+as if to introduce them.
+
+The magistrate smiled a little on one side of his mouth.
+
+"It is no use, Sir Nicholas," he said, "this gentleman, I fear, is well
+known to some of us already.--No, no, sir," he cried sharply, "the window
+is guarded."
+
+Mr. Stewart, who had looked swiftly and sideways across at the window,
+faced the magistrate again.
+
+"I do not know what you mean, sir," he said. "It was a lad who passed the
+window."
+
+There was a movement outside in the hall; and the magistrate stepped to
+the door.
+
+"Who is there?" he cried out sharply.
+
+There was a scuffle, and a cry of a boy's voice; and a man appeared,
+holding Anthony by the arm.
+
+Mistress Margaret turned round in her seat; and said in a perfectly
+natural voice, "Why, Anthony, my lad!"
+
+There was a murmur from one or two of the men.
+
+"Silence," called out the magistrate. "We will finish the other affair
+first," and he made a motion to hold Anthony for a moment.--"Now then, do
+any of you men know this gentleman?"
+
+A pursuivant stepped out.
+
+"Mr. Frankland, sir; I know him under two names--Mr. Chapman and Mr.
+Wode. He is a popish agent. I saw him in the company of Dr. Storey in
+Antwerp, four months ago."
+
+Mr. Stewart blew out his lips sharply and contemptuously.
+
+"Pooh," he said; and then turned to the man and bowed ironically.
+
+"I congratulate you, my man," he said, in a tone of bitter triumph. "In
+April I was in France. Kindly remember this man's words, Mr. Frankland;
+they will tell in my favour. For I presume you mean to take me."
+
+"I will remember them," said the magistrate.
+
+Mr. Stewart bowed to him; he had completely regained his composure. Then
+he turned to Sir Nicholas and Lady Maxwell, who had been watching in a
+bewildered silence.
+
+"I am exceedingly sorry," he said, "for having brought this annoyance on
+you, Lady Maxwell; but these men are so sharp that they see nothing but
+guilt everywhere. I do not know yet what my crime is. But that can wait.
+Sir Nicholas, we should have parted anyhow in half an hour. We shall only
+say good-bye here, instead of at the door."
+
+The magistrate smiled again as before; and half put up his hand to hide
+it.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Chapman; but you need not part from Sir Nicholas
+yet. I fear, Sir Nicholas, that I shall have to trouble you to come with
+us."
+
+Lady Maxwell drew a quick hissing breath; her sister got up swiftly and
+went to her, as she sat down in Sir Nicholas' chair, still holding the
+old man's hand.
+
+Sir Nicholas turned to his guest; and his voice broke again and again as
+he spoke.
+
+"Mr. Stewart," he said, "I am sorry that any guest of mine should be
+subject to these insults. However, I am glad that I shall have the
+pleasure of your company after all. I suppose we ride to East Grinsted,"
+he added harshly to the magistrate, who bowed to him.--"Then may I have
+my servant, sir?"
+
+"Presently," said Mr. Frankland, and then turned to Anthony, who had been
+staring wild-eyed at the scene, "Now who is this?"
+
+A man answered from the rank.
+
+"That is Master Anthony Norris, sir."
+
+"Ah! and who is Master Anthony Norris? A Papist, too?"
+
+"No, sir," said the man again, "a good Protestant; and the son of Mr.
+Norris at the Dower House."
+
+"Ah!" said the magistrate again, judicially. "And what might you be
+wanting here, Master Anthony Norris?"
+
+Anthony explained that he often came up in the evening, and that he
+wanted nothing. The magistrate eyed him a moment or two.
+
+"Well, I have nothing against you, young gentleman. But I cannot let you
+go, till I am safely set out. You might rouse the village. Take him out
+till we start," he added to the man who guarded him.
+
+"Come this way, sir," said the officer; and Anthony presently found
+himself sitting on the long oak bench that ran across the western end of
+the hall, at the foot of the stairs, and just opposite the door of Sir
+Nicholas' room where he had just witnessed that curious startling scene.
+
+The man who had charge of him stood a little distance off, and did not
+trouble him further, and Anthony watched in silence.
+
+The hall was still dark, except for one candle that had been lighted by
+the magistrate's party, and it looked sombre and suggestive of tragedy.
+Floor walls and ceiling were all dark oak, and the corners were full of
+shadows. A streak of light came out of the slightly opened door opposite,
+and a murmur of voices. The rest of the house was quiet; it had all been
+arranged and carried out without disturbance.
+
+Anthony had a very fair idea of what was going forward; he knew of course
+that the Catholics were always under suspicion, and now understood
+plainly enough from the conversation he had heard that the reddish-haired
+young man, standing so alert and cheerful by the table in there, had
+somehow precipitated matters. Anthony himself had come up on some
+trifling errand, and had run straight into this affair; and now he sat
+and wondered resentfully, with his eyes and ears wide open.
+
+There were men at all the inner doors now; they had slipped in from the
+outer entrances as soon as word had reached them that the prisoners were
+secured, and only a couple were left outside to prevent the alarm being
+raised in the village. These inner sentinels stood motionless at the foot
+of the stairs that rose up into the unlighted lobby overhead, at the door
+that led to the inner hall and the servants' quarters, and at those that
+led to the cloister wing and the garden respectively.
+
+The murmur of voices went on in the room opposite; and presently a man
+slipped out and passed through the sentinels to the door leading to the
+kitchens and pantry; he carried a pike in his hand, and was armed with a
+steel cap and breast-piece. In a minute he had returned followed by Mr.
+Boyd, Sir Nicholas' body-servant; the two passed into the study--and a
+moment later the dark inner hall was full of moving figures and rustlings
+and whisperings, as the alarmed servants poured up from downstairs.
+
+Then the study door opened again, and Anthony caught a glimpse of the
+lighted room; the two ladies with Sir Nicholas and his guest were seated
+at table; there was the figure of an armed man behind Mr. Stewart's
+chair, and another behind Lady Maxwell's; then the door closed again as
+Mr. Boyd with the magistrate and a constable carrying a candle came out.
+
+"This way, sir," said the servant; and the three crossed the hall, and
+passing close by Anthony, went up the broad oak staircase that led to the
+upper rooms. Then the minutes passed away; from upstairs came the noise
+of doors opening and shutting, and footsteps passing overhead; from the
+inner hall the sound of low talking, and a few sobs now and again from a
+frightened maid; from Sir Nicholas' room all was quiet except once when
+Mr. Stewart's laugh, high and natural, rang out. Anthony thought of that
+strong brisk face he had seen in the candlelight; and wondered how he
+could laugh, with death so imminent--and worse than death; and a warmth
+of admiration and respect glowed at the lad's heart. The man by Anthony
+sighed and shifted his feet.
+
+"What is it for?" whispered the lad at last.
+
+"I mustn't speak to you, sir," said the man.
+
+At last the footsteps overhead came to the top of the stairs. The
+magistrate's voice called out sharply and impatiently:
+
+"Come along, come along"; and the three, all carrying bags and valises
+came downstairs again and crossed the hall. Again the door opened as they
+went in, leaving the luggage on the floor; and Anthony caught another
+glimpse of the four still seated round the table; but Sir Nicholas' head
+was bowed upon his hands.
+
+Then again the door closed; and there was silence.
+
+Once more it was flung open, and Anthony saw the interior of the room
+plainly. The four were standing up, Mr. Stewart was bowing to Lady
+Maxwell; the magistrate stood close beside him; then a couple of men
+stepped up to the young man's side as he turned away, and the three came
+out into the hall and stood waiting by the little heap of luggage. Mr.
+Frankland came next, with the man-servant close beside him, and the rest
+of the men behind; and the last closed the door and stood by it. There
+was a dead silence; Anthony sprang to his feet in uncontrollable
+excitement. What was happening? Again the door opened, and the men made
+room as Mistress Margaret came out, and the door shut.
+
+She came swiftly across, with her little air of dignity and confidence,
+towards Anthony, who was standing forward.
+
+"Why, Master Anthony," she said, "dear lad; I did not know they had kept
+you," and she took his hand.
+
+"What is it, what is it?" he whispered sharply.
+
+"Hush," she said; and the two stood together in silence.
+
+The moments passed; Anthony could hear the quick thumping beat of his own
+heart, and the breathing of Mistress Margaret; but the hall was perfectly
+quiet, where the magistrate with the prisoner and his men stood in an
+irregular dark group with the candle behind them; and no sound came from
+the room beyond.
+
+Then the handle turned, and a crack of light showed; but no further
+sound; then the door opened wide, a flood of light poured out and Sir
+Nicholas tottered into the hall.
+
+"Margaret, Margaret," he cried. "Where are you? Go to her."
+
+There was a strange moaning sound from the brightly lighted room. The old
+lady dropped Anthony's hand and moved swiftly and unfalteringly across,
+and once more the door closed behind her.
+
+There was a sharp word of command from the magistrate, and the sentries
+from every door left their posts, and joined the group which, with Sir
+Nicholas and his guest and Mr. Boyd in the centre, now passed out through
+the garden door.
+
+The magistrate paused as he saw Anthony standing there alone.
+
+"I can trust you, young gentleman," he said, "not to give the alarm till
+we are gone?"
+
+Anthony nodded, and the magistrate passed briskly out on to the terrace,
+shutting the door behind him; there was a rush of footsteps and a murmur
+of voices and the hall was filled with the watching servants.
+
+As the chorus of exclamations and inquiries broke out, Anthony ran
+straight through the crowd to the garden door, and on to the terrace.
+They had gone to the left, he supposed, but he hesitated a moment to
+listen; then he heard the stamp of horses' feet and the jingle of
+saddlery, and saw the glare of torches through the yew hedge; and he
+turned quickly and ran along the terrace, past the flood of light that
+poured out from the supper room, and down the path that led to the
+side-door opposite the Rectory. It was very dark, and he stumbled once or
+twice; then he came to the two or three stairs that led down to the door
+in the wall, and turned off among the bushes, creeping on hands and feet
+till he reached the wall, low on this side, but deep on the other; and
+looked over.
+
+The pursuivants with their men had formed a circle round the two
+prisoners, who were already mounted and who sat looking about them as the
+luggage was being strapped to their saddles before and behind; the
+bridles were lifted forward over the horses' heads, and a couple of the
+guard held each rein. The groom who had brought round the two horses for
+Mr. Stewart and himself stood white-faced and staring, with his back to
+the Rectory wall. The magistrate was just mounting at a little distance
+his own horse, which was held by the Rectory boy. Mr. Boyd, it seemed,
+was to walk with the men. Two or three torches were burning by now, and
+every detail was distinct to Anthony, as he crouched among the dry leaves
+and peered down on to the group just beneath.
+
+Sir Nicholas' face was turned away from him; but his head was sunk on his
+breast, and he did not stir or lift it as his horse stamped at the
+strapping on of the valise Mr. Boyd had packed for him. Mr. Stewart sat
+erect and motionless, and his face as Anthony saw it was confident and
+fearless.
+
+Then suddenly the door in the Rectory wall opposite was flung open, and a
+figure in flying black skirts, but hatless, rushed out and through the
+guard straight up to the old man's knee. There was a shout from the men
+and a movement to pull him off, but the magistrate who was on his horse
+and just outside the circle spoke sharply, and the men fell back.
+
+"Oh, Sir Nicholas, Sir Nicholas," sobbed the minister, his face half
+buried in the saddle. Anthony saw his shoulders shaking, and his hands
+clutching at the old man's knee. "Forgive me, forgive me."
+
+There was no answer from Sir Nicholas; he still sat unmoved, his chin on
+his breast, as the Rector sobbed and moaned at his stirrup.
+
+"There, there," said the magistrate decidedly, over the heads of the
+guard, "that is enough, Mr. Dent"; and he made a motion with his hand.
+
+A couple of men took the minister by the shoulders and drew him, still
+crying out to Sir Nicholas, outside the group; and he stood there dazed
+and groping with his hands. There was a word of command; and the guard
+moved off at a sharp walk, with the horses in the centre, and as they
+turned, the lad saw in the torchlight the old man's face drawn and
+wrinkled with sorrow, and great tears running down it.
+
+The Rector leaned against his own wall, with his hands over his face; and
+Anthony looked at him with growing suspicion and terror as the flare of
+the torches on the trees faded, and the noise of the troop died away
+round the corner.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX
+
+                           VILLAGE JUSTICE
+
+
+The village had never known such an awakening as on the morning that
+followed Sir Nicholas' arrest. Before seven o'clock every house knew it,
+and children ran half-dressed to the outlying hamlets to tell the story.
+Very little work was done that day, for the estate was disorganised; and
+the men had little heart for work; and there were groups all day on the
+green, which formed and re-formed and drifted here and there and
+discussed and sifted the evidence. It was soon known that the Rectory
+household had had a foremost hand in the affair. The groom, who had been
+present at the actual departure of the prisoners had told the story of
+the black figure that ran out of the door, and of what was cried at the
+old man's knee; and how he had not moved nor spoken in answer; and
+Thomas, the Rectory boy, was stopped as he went across the green in the
+evening and threatened and encouraged until he told of the stroke on the
+church-bell, and the Rectory key, and the little company that had sat all
+the afternoon in the kitchen over their ale. He told too how a couple of
+hours ago he had been sent across with a note to Lady Maxwell, and that
+it had been returned immediately unopened.
+
+So as night fell, indignation had begun to smoulder fiercely against the
+minister, who had not been seen all day; and after dark had fallen the
+name "Judas" was cried in at the Rectory door half a dozen times, and a
+stone or two from the direction of the churchyard had crashed on the
+tiles of the house.
+
+Mr. Norris had been up all day at the Hall, but he was the only visitor
+admitted. All day long the gate-house was kept closed, and the same
+message was given to the few horsemen and carriages that came to inquire
+after the truth of the report from the Catholic houses round, to the
+effect that it was true that Sir Nicholas and a friend had been taken off
+to London by the Justice from East Grinsted; and that Lady Maxwell begged
+the prayers of her friends for her husband's safe return.
+
+Anthony had ridden off early with a servant, at his father's wish, to
+follow Sir Nicholas and learn any news of him that was possible, to do
+him any service he was able, and to return or send a message the next day
+down to Great Keynes; and early in the afternoon he returned with the
+information that Sir Nicholas was at the Marshalsea, that he was well and
+happy, that he sent his wife his dear love, and that she should have a
+letter from him before nightfall. He rode straight to the Hall with the
+news, full of chastened delight at his official importance, just pausing
+to tell a group that was gathered on the green that all was well so far,
+and was shown up to Lady Maxwell's own parlour, where he found her, very
+quiet and self-controlled, and extremely grateful for his kindness in
+riding up to London and back on her account. Anthony explained too that
+he had been able to get Sir Nicholas one or two comforts that the prison
+did not provide, a pillow and an extra coverlet and some fruit; and he
+left her full of gratitude.
+
+His father had been up to see the ladies two or three times, and in spite
+of the difference in religion had prayed with them, and talked a little;
+and Lady Maxwell had asked that Isabel might come up to supper and spend
+the evening. Mr. Norris promised to send her up, and then added:
+
+"I am a little anxious, Lady Maxwell, lest the people may show their
+anger against the Rector or his wife, about what has happened."
+
+Lady Maxwell looked startled.
+
+"They have been speaking of it all day long," he said, "they know
+everything; and it seems the Rector is not so much to blame as his wife.
+It was she who sent for the magistrate and gave him the key and arranged
+it all; he was only brought into it too late to interfere or refuse."
+
+"Have you seen him?" asked the old lady.
+
+"I have been both days," he said, "but he will not see me; he is in his
+study, locked in."
+
+"I may have treated him hardly," she said, "I would not open his note;
+but at least he consented to help them against his friend." And her old
+eyes filled with tears.
+
+"I fear that is so," said the other sadly.
+
+"But speak to the people," she said, "I think they love my husband, and
+would do nothing to grieve us; tell them that nothing would pain either
+of us more than that any should suffer for this. Tell them they must do
+nothing, but be patient and pray."
+
+There was a group still on the green near the pond as Isabel came up to
+supper that evening about six o'clock. Her father, who had given Lady
+Maxwell's message to the people an hour or two before, had asked her to
+go that way and send down a message to him immediately if there seemed to
+be any disturbance or threatening of it; but the men were very quiet. Mr.
+Musgrave was there, she saw, sitting with his pipe, on the stocks, and
+Piers, the young Irish bailiff, was standing near; they all were silent
+as the girl came up, and saluted her respectfully as usual; and she saw
+no signs of any dangerous element. There were one or two older women with
+the men, and others were standing at their open doors on all sides as she
+went up. The Rectory gate was locked, and no one was to be seen within.
+
+Supper was laid in Sir Nicholas' room, as it generally was, and as it had
+been two nights ago; and it was very strange to Isabel to know that it
+was here that the arrest had taken place; the floor, too, she noticed as
+she came in, all about the threshold was scratched and dented by rough
+boots.
+
+Lady Maxwell was very silent and distracted during supper; she made
+efforts to talk again and again, and her sister did her best to interest
+her and keep her talking; but she always relapsed after a minute or two
+into silence again, with long glances round the room, at the Vernacle
+over the fireplace, the prie-dieu with the shield of the Five Wounds
+above it, and all the things that spoke so keenly of her husband.
+
+What a strange room it was, too, thought Isabel, with its odd mingling of
+the two worlds, with the tapestry of the hawking scene and the stiff
+herons and ladies on horseback on one side, and the little shelf of
+devotional books on the other; and yet how characteristic of its owner
+who fingered his cross-bow or the reins of his horse all day, and his
+beads in the evening; and how strange that an old man like Sir Nicholas,
+who knew the world, and had as much sense apparently as any one else,
+should be willing to sacrifice home and property and even life itself,
+for these so plainly empty superstitious things that could not please a
+God that was Spirit and Truth! So Isabel thought to herself, with no
+bitterness or contempt, but just a simple wonder and amazement, as she
+looked at the painted tokens and trinkets.
+
+It was still daylight when they went upstairs to Lady Maxwell's room
+about seven, but the clear southern sky over the yew hedges and the tall
+elms where the rooks were circling, was beginning to be flushed with deep
+amber and rose. Isabel sat down in the window seat with the sweet air
+pouring in and looked out on to the garden with its tiled paths and its
+cool green squares of lawn, and the glowing beds at the sides. Over to
+her right the cloister court ran out, with its two rows of windows,
+bedrooms above with galleries beyond, as she knew, and parlours and
+cloisters below; the pleasant tinkle of the fountain in the court came
+faintly to her ears across the caw of the rooks about the elms and the
+low sounds from the stables and the kitchen behind the house. Otherwise
+the evening was very still; the two old ladies were sitting near the
+fireplace; Lady Maxwell had taken up her embroidery, and was looking at
+it listlessly, and Mistress Margaret had one of her devotional books and
+was turning the pages, pausing here and there as she did so.
+
+Presently she began to read, without a word of introduction, one of the
+musings of the old monk John Audeley in his sickness, and as the tender
+lines stepped on, that restless jewelled hand grew still.
+
+    "As I lay sick in my languor
+      In an abbey here by west;
+    This book I made with great dolour,
+      When I might not sleep nor rest.
+    Oft with my prayers my soul I blest,
+      And said aloud to Heaven's King,
+    'I know, O Lord, it is the best
+      Meekly to take thy visiting.
+    Else well I wot that I were lorn
+    (High above all lords be he blest!)
+      All that thou dost is for the best;
+    By fault of Thee was no man lost,
+      That is here of woman born.'"
+
+And then she read some of Rolle's verses to Jesus, the "friend of all
+sick and sorrowful souls," and a meditation of his on the Passion, and
+the tranquil thoughts and tender fragrant sorrows soothed the torn
+throbbing soul; and Isabel saw the old wrinkled hand rise to her
+forehead, and the embroidery, with the needle still in it slipped to the
+ground; as the holy Name "like ointment poured forth" gradually brought
+its endless miracle and made all sweet and healthful again.
+
+Outside the daylight was fading; the luminous vault overhead was
+deepening to a glowing blue as the sunset contracted on the western
+horizon to a few vivid streaks of glory; the room was growing darker
+every moment; and Mistress Margaret's voice began to stumble over words.
+
+The great gilt harp in the corner only gleamed here and there now in
+single lines of clear gold where the dying daylight fell on the strings.
+The room was full of shadows and the image of the Holy Mother and Child
+had darkened into obscurity in their niche. The world was silent now too;
+the rooks were gone home and the stir of the household below had ceased;
+and in a moment more Mistress Margaret's voice had ceased too, as she
+laid the book down.
+
+Then, as if the world outside had waited for silence before speaking,
+there came a murmur of sound from the further side of the house. Isabel
+started up; surely there was anger in that low roar from the village; was
+it this that her father had feared? Had she been remiss? Lady Maxwell too
+sprang up and faced the window with wide large eyes.
+
+"The letter!" she said; and took a quick step towards the door; but
+Mistress Margaret was with her instantly, with her arm about her.
+
+"Sit down, Mary," she said, "they will bring it at once"; and her sister
+obeyed; and she sat waiting and looking towards the door, clasping and
+unclasping her hands as they lay on her lap; and Mistress Margaret stood
+by her, waiting and watching too. Isabel still stood by the window
+listening. Had she been mistaken then? The roar had sunk into silence for
+a moment; and there came back the quick beat of a horse's hoofs outside
+on the short drive between the gatehouse and the Hall. They were right,
+then; and even as she thought it, and as the wife that waited for news of
+her husband drew a quick breath and half rose in her seat at the sound of
+that shod messenger that bore them, again the roar swelled up louder than
+ever; and Isabel sprang down from the low step of the window-seat into
+the dusky room where the two sisters waited.
+
+"What is that? What is that?" she whispered sharply.
+
+There was a sound of opening doors, and of feet that ran in the house
+below; and Lady Maxwell rose up and put out her hand, as a man-servant
+dashed in with a letter.
+
+"My lady," he said panting, and giving it to her, "they are attacking the
+Rectory."
+
+Lady Maxwell, who was half-way to the window now, for light to read her
+husband's letter, paused at that.
+
+"The Rectory?" she said. "Why--Margaret----" then she stopped, and Isabel
+close beside her, saw her turn resolutely from the great sealed letter in
+her hand to the door, and back again.
+
+"Jervis told us, my lady; none saw him as he rode through--they were
+breaking down the gate."
+
+Then Lady Maxwell, with a quick movement, lifted the letter to her lips
+and kissed it, and thrust it down somewhere out of sight in the folds of
+her dress.
+
+"Come, Margaret," she said.
+
+Isabel followed them down the stairs and out through the hall-door; and
+there, as they came out on to the steps that savage snarling roar swelled
+up from the green. There was laughter and hooting mixed with that growl
+of anger; but even the laughter was fierce. The gatehouse stood up black
+against the glare of torches, and the towers threw great swinging shadows
+on the ground and the steps of the Hall.
+
+Isabel followed the two grey glimmering figures, and was astonished at
+the speed with which she had to go. The hoofs of the courier's horse rang
+on the cobbles of the stable-yard as they came down towards the
+gatehouse, and the two wings of the door were wide-open through which he
+had passed just now; but the porter was gone.
+
+Ah! there was the crowd; but not at the Rectory. On the right the Rectory
+gate lay wide open, and a flood of light poured out from the house-door
+at the end of the drive. Before them lay the dark turf, swarming with
+black figures towards the lower end; and a ceaseless roar came from them.
+There were half a dozen torches down there, tossing to and fro; Isabel
+saw that the crowd was still moving down towards the stocks and the pond.
+
+Now the two ladies in front of her were just coming up with the skirts of
+the crowd; and there was an exclamation or two of astonishment as the
+women and children saw who it was that was coming. Then there came the
+furious scream of a man, and the crowd parted, as three men came reeling
+out together, two of them trying with all their power to restrain a
+fighting, kicking, plunging man in long black skirts, who tore and beat
+with his hands. The three ladies stopped for a moment, close together;
+and simultaneously the struggling man broke free and dashed back into the
+crowd, screaming with anger and misery.
+
+"Marion, Marion--I am coming--O God!"
+
+And Isabel saw with a shock of horror that sent her crouching and clinging
+close to Mistress Margaret, that it was the Rector. But the two men were
+after him and caught him by the shoulders as he disappeared; and as they
+turned they faced Lady Maxwell.
+
+"My lady, my lady," stammered one, "we mean him no harm. We----" But his
+voice stopped, as there came a sudden silence, rent by a high terrible
+shriek and a splash; followed in a moment by a yell of laughter and
+shouting; and Lady Maxwell threw herself into the crowd in front.
+
+There were a few moments of jostling in the dark, with the reek and press
+of the crowd about her; and Isabel found herself on the brink of the
+black pond, with Lady Maxwell on one side, and Piers on the other keeping
+the crowd back, and a dripping figure moaning and sobbing in the trampled
+mud at Lady Maxwell's feet. There was silence enough now, and the ring of
+faces opposite stared astonished and open-mouthed at the tall old lady
+with her grey veiled head upraised, as she stood there in the torchlight
+and rated them in her fearless indignant voice.
+
+"I am ashamed, ashamed!" cried Lady Maxwell. "I thought you were men. I
+thought you loved my husband; and--and me." Her voice broke, and then
+once more she cried again. "I am ashamed, ashamed of my village."
+
+And then she stooped to that heaving figure that had crawled up, and laid
+hold tenderly of the arms that were writhed about her feet.
+
+"Come home, my dear," Isabel heard her whisper.
+
+It was a strange procession homeward up the trampled turf. The crowd had
+broken into groups, and the people were awed and silent as they watched
+the four women go back together. Isabel walked a little behind with her
+father and Anthony, who had at last been able to come forward through the
+press and join them; and a couple of the torchbearers escorted them. In
+front went the three, on one side Lady Maxwell, her lace and silk
+splashed and spattered with mud, and her white hands black with it, and
+on the other the old nun, each with an arm thrown round the woman in the
+centre who staggered and sobbed and leaned against them as she went, with
+her long hair and her draggled clothes streaming with liquid mud every
+step she took. Once they stopped, at a group of three men. The Rector was
+sitting up, in his torn dusty cassock, and Isabel saw that one of his
+buckled shoes was gone, as he sat on the grass with his feet before him,
+but quiet now, with his hands before him, and a dazed stupid look in his
+little black eyes that blinked at the light of the torch that was held
+over him; he said nothing as he looked at his wife between the two
+ladies, but his lips moved, and his eyes wandered for a moment to Lady
+Maxwell's face, and then back to his wife.
+
+"Take him home presently," she said to the men who were with him--and
+then passed on again.
+
+As they got through the gatehouse, Isabel stepped forward to Mistress
+Margaret's side.
+
+"Shall I come?" she whispered; and the nun shook her head; so she with
+her father and brother stood there to watch, with the crowd silent and
+ashamed behind. The two torchbearers went on and stood by the steps as
+the three ladies ascended, leaving black footmarks as they went. The door
+was open and faces of servants peeped out, and hands were thrust out to
+take the burden from their mistress, but she shook her head, and the
+three came in together, and the door closed.
+
+As the Norrises went back silently, the Rector passed them, with a little
+group accompanying him too; he, too, could hardly walk alone, so
+exhausted was he with his furious struggles to rescue his wife.
+
+"Take your sister home," said Mr. Norris to Anthony; and they saw him
+slip off and pass his arm through the Rector's, and bend down his
+handsome kindly face to the minister's staring eyes and moving lips as he
+too led him homewards.
+
+Even Anthony was hushed and impressed, and hardly spoke a word until he
+and Isabel turned off down the little dark lane to the Dower House.
+
+"We could do nothing," he said, "father and I--until Lady Maxwell came."
+
+"No," said Isabel softly, "she only could have done it."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                             A CONFESSOR
+
+
+Sir Nicholas and the party were lodged at East Grinsted the night of
+their arrest, in the magistrate's house. Although he was allowed privacy
+in his room, after he had given his word of honour not to attempt an
+escape, yet he was allowed no conversation with Mr. Stewart or his own
+servant except in the presence of the magistrate or one of the
+pursuivants; and Mr. Stewart, since he was personally unknown to the
+magistrate, and since the charge against him was graver, was not on any
+account allowed to be alone for a moment, even in the room in which he
+slept. The following day they all rode on to London, and the two
+prisoners were lodged in the Marshalsea. This had been for a long while
+the place where Bishop Bonner was confined; and where Catholic prisoners
+were often sent immediately after their arrest; and Sir Nicholas at any
+rate found to his joy that he had several old friends among the
+prisoners. He was confined in a separate room; but by the kindness of his
+gaoler whom he bribed profusely as the custom was, through his servant,
+he had many opportunities of meeting the others; and even of approaching
+the sacraments and hearing mass now and then.
+
+He began a letter to his wife on the day of his arrival and finished it
+the next day which was Saturday, and it was taken down immediately by the
+courier who had heard the news and had called at the prison. In fact, he
+was allowed a good deal of liberty; although he was watched and his
+conversation listened to, a good deal more than he was aware. Mr.
+Stewart, however, as he still called himself, was in a much harder case.
+The saddle-bags had been opened on his arrival, and incriminating
+documents found. Besides the "popish trinkets" they were found to contain
+a number of "seditious pamphlets," printed abroad for distribution in
+England; for at this time the College at Douai, under its founder Dr.
+William Allen, late Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, was active in
+the production of literature; these were chiefly commentaries on the
+Bull; as well as exhortations to the Catholics to stand firm and to
+persevere in recusancy, and to the schismatic Catholics, as they were
+called, to give over attending the services in the parish churches. There
+were letters also from Dr. Storey himself, whom the authorities already
+had in person under lock and key at the Tower. These were quite
+sufficient to make Mr. Stewart a prize; and he also was very shortly
+afterwards removed to the Tower.
+
+Sir Nicholas wrote a letter at least once a week to his wife; but writing
+was something of a labour to him; it was exceedingly doubtful to his mind
+whether his letters were not opened and read before being handed to the
+courier, and as his seal was taken from him his wife could not tell
+either. However they seemed to arrive regularly; plainly therefore the
+authorities were either satisfied with their contents or else did not
+think them worth opening or suppressing. He was quite peremptory that his
+wife should not come up to London; it would only increase his distress,
+he said; and he liked to think of her at Maxwell Hall; there were other
+reasons too that he was prudent enough not to commit to paper, and which
+she was prudent enough to guess at, the principal of which was, of
+course, that she ought to be there for the entertaining and helping of
+other agents or priests who might be in need of shelter.
+
+The old man got into good spirits again very soon. It pleased him to
+think that God had honoured him by imprisonment; and he said as much once
+or twice in his letters to his wife. He was also pleased with a sense of
+the part he was playing in the _rôle_ of a conspirator; and he underlined
+and put signs and exclamation marks all over his letters of which he
+thought his wife would understand the significance, but no one else;
+whereas in reality the old lady was sorely puzzled by them, and the
+authorities who opened the letters generally read them of course like a
+printed book.
+
+One morning about ten days after his arrival the Governor of the prison
+looked in with the gaoler, and announced to Sir Nicholas, after greeting
+him, that he was to appear before the Council that very day. This, of
+course, was what Sir Nicholas desired, and he thanked the Governor
+cordially for his good news.
+
+"They will probably keep you at the Tower, Sir Nicholas," said the
+Governor, "and we shall lose you. However, sir, I hope you will be more
+comfortable there than we have been able to make you."
+
+The knight thanked the Governor again, and said good-day to him with
+great warmth; for they had been on the best of terms with one another
+during his short detention at the Marshalsea.
+
+The following day Sir Nicholas wrote a long letter to his wife describing
+his examination.
+
+"We are in _royal lodgings_ here at last, sweetheart; Mr. Boyd brought my
+luggage over yesterday; and I am settled _for the present_ in a room of
+my own in the White Tower; with a prospect over the Court. I was had
+before my lords yesterday in the Council-room; we drove hither from the
+Marshalsea. There was a bay window in the room. I promise you they got
+little enough from me. There was my namesake, Sir Nicholas Bacon, my
+lords Leicester and Pembroke, and Mr. Secretary Cecil; Sir James Crofts,
+the Controller of the Household, and one or two more; but these were the
+principal. I was set before the table on a chair alone with none to guard
+me; but with men at the doors I knew very well. My lords were very
+courteous to me; though they laughed more than was seemly at such grave
+times. They questioned me much as to my religion. Was I a papist? If they
+meant by that a _Catholic_, that I was, and thanked God for it every
+day--(those nicknames like me not). Was I then a recusant? If by that
+they meant, Did I go to their Genevan Hotch-Potch? That I did not nor
+never would. I thought to have said a word here about St. Cyprian his
+work _De Unitate Ecclesiae_, as F----r X. told me, but they would not let
+me speak. Did I know Mr. Chapman? If by that they meant Mr. Stewart, that
+I did, and for a courteous God-fearing gentleman too. Was he a Papist, or
+a Catholic if I would have it so? That I would not tell them; let them
+find that out with their pursuivants and that crew. Did I think
+Protestants to be fearers of God? That I did not; they feared nought but
+the Queen's Majesty, so it seemed to me. Then they all laughed at once--I
+know not why. Then they grew grave; and Mr. Secretary began to ask me
+questions, sharp and hard; but I would not be put upon, and answered him
+again as he asked. Did I know ought of Dr. Storey? Nothing, said I, save
+that he is a good Catholic, and that they had taken him. _He is a
+seditious rogue_, said my Lord Pembroke. _That he is not_, said I. Then
+they asked me what I thought of the Pope and his Bull, and whether he can
+depose princes. I said I thought him to be the Vicar of Christ; and as to
+his power to depose princes, that I supposed he could do, if he said so.
+Then two or three cried out on me that I had not answered honestly; and
+at that I got wrath; and then they laughed again, at least I saw Sir
+James Crofts at it. And Mr. Secretary, looking very hard at me asked
+whether if Philip sent an armament against Elizabeth to depose her, I
+would fight for him or her grace. For neither, said I: I am too old. _For
+which then would you pray?_ said they. _For the Queen's Grace_, said I,
+_for that she was my sovereign_. This seemed to content them; and they
+talked a little among themselves. They had asked me other questions too
+as to my way of living; whether I went to mass. They asked me too a
+little more about Mr. Stewart. Did I know him to be a seditious rascal?
+That I did not, said I. _Then how_, asked they, _did you come to receive
+him and his pamphlets?_ Of his pamphlets, said I, I know nothing; I saw
+nothing in his bags save beads and a few holy books and such things. (You
+see, sweetheart, I did him no injury by saying so, because I knew that
+they had his bags themselves.) And I said I had received him because he
+was recommended to me by some good friends of mine abroad, and I told
+them their names too; for they are safe in Flanders now.
+
+"And when they had done their questions they talked again for a while; and
+I was sent out to the antechamber to refresh myself; and Mr. Secretary
+sent a man with me to see that I had all I needed; and we talked together
+a little, and he said the Council were in good humour at the taking of
+Dr. Storey; and he had never seen them so merry. Then I was had back
+again presently; and Mr. Secretary said I was to stay in the Tower; and
+that Mr. Boyd was gone already to bring my things. And so after that I
+went by water to the Tower, and here I am, sweetheart, well and cheerful,
+praise God....
+
+"My dearest, I send you my heart's best love. God have you in his holy
+keeping."
+
+The Council treated the old knight very tenderly. They were shrewd enough
+to see his character very plainly; and that he was a simple man who knew
+nothing of sedition, but only had harboured agents thinking them to be as
+guileless as himself. As a matter of fact, Mr. Stewart was an agent of
+Dr. Storey's; and was therefore implicated in a number of very grave
+charges. This of course was a very serious matter; but both in the
+examination of the Council, and in papers in Mr. Stewart's bags, nothing
+could be found to implicate Sir Nicholas in any political intrigue at
+all. The authorities were unwilling too to put such a man to the torture.
+There was always a possibility of public resentment against the torture
+of a man for his religion alone; and they were desirous not to arouse
+this, since they had many prisoners who would be more productive subjects
+of the rack than a plainly simple and loyal old man whose only crime was
+his religion. They determined, however, to make an attempt to get a
+little more out of Sir Nicholas by a device which would excite no
+resentment if it ever transpired, and one which was more suited to the
+old man's nature and years.
+
+Sir Nicholas thus described it to his wife.
+
+"Last night, my dearest, I had a great honour and consolation. I was
+awakened suddenly towards two o'clock in the morning by the door of my
+room opening and a man coming in. It was somewhat dark, and I could not
+see the man plainly, but I could see that he limped and walked with a
+stick, and he breathed hard as he entered. I sat up and demanded of him
+who he was and what he wanted; and telling me to be still, he said that
+he was Dr. Storey. You may be sure, sweetheart, that I sprang up at that;
+but he would not let me rise; and himself sat down beside me. He said
+that by the _kindness_ of a gaoler he had been allowed to come; and that
+he must not stay with me long; that he had heard of me from his good
+friend Mr. Stewart. I asked him how he did, for I heard that he had been
+racked; and he said yes, it was true; but that by the mercy of God and
+the prayers of the saints he had held his peace and they knew nothing
+from him. Then he asked me a great number of questions about the _men I
+had entertained_, and where they were now; and he knew many of their
+names. Some of them were friends of his own, he said; especially the
+priests. We talked a good while, till the morning light began; and then
+he said he must be gone or the head gaoler would know of his visit, and
+so he went. I wish I could have seen his face, sweetheart, for I think
+him a great servant of God; but it was still too dark when he went, and
+we dared not have a light for fear it should be seen."
+
+This was as a matter of fact a ruse of the authorities. It was not Dr.
+Storey at all who was admitted to Sir Nicholas' prison, but Parker, who
+had betrayed him at Antwerp. It was so successful, for Sir Nicholas told
+him all that he knew (which was really nothing at all) that it was
+repeated a few months later with richer results; when the conspirator
+Baily, hysterical and almost beside himself with the pain of the rack,
+under similar circumstances gave up a cypher which was necessary to the
+Council in dealing with the correspondence of Mary Stuart. However, Sir
+Nicholas never knew the deception, and to the end of his days was proud
+that he had actually met the famous Dr. Storey, when they were both
+imprisoned in the Tower together, and told his friends of it with
+reverent pride when the doctor was hanged a year later.
+
+Hubert, who had been sent for to take charge of the estate, had come to
+London soon after his father's arrival at the Tower; and was allowed an
+interview with him in the presence of the Lieutenant. Hubert was greatly
+affected; though he could not look upon the imprisonment with the same
+solemn exultation as that which his father had; but it made a real
+impression upon him to find that he took so patiently this separation
+from home and family for the sake of religion. Hubert received
+instructions from Sir Nicholas as to the management of the estate, for it
+was becoming plain that his father would have to remain in the Tower for
+the present; not any longer on a really grave charge, but chiefly because
+he was an obstinate recusant and would promise nothing. The law and its
+administration at this time were very far apart; the authorities were not
+very anxious to search out and punish those who were merely recusants or
+refused to take the oath of supremacy; and so Hubert and Mr. Boyd and
+other Catholics were able to come and go under the very nose of justice
+without any real risk to themselves; but it was another matter to let a
+sturdy recusant go from prison who stoutly refused to give any sort of
+promise or understanding as to future behaviour.
+
+Sir Nicholas was had down more than once to further examination before
+the Lords Commissioners in the Lieutenant's house; but it was a very tame
+and even an amusing affair for all save Sir Nicholas. It was so easy to
+provoke him; he was so simple and passionate that they could get almost
+anything they wanted out of him by a little adroit baiting; and more than
+once his examination formed a welcome and humorous entr'acte between two
+real tragedies. Sir Nicholas, of course, never suspected for a moment
+that he was affording any amusement to any one. He thought their weary
+laughter to be sardonic and ironical, and he looked upon himself as a
+very desperate fellow indeed; and wrote glowing accounts of it all to his
+wife, full of apostrophic praises to God and the saints, in a hand that
+shook with excitement and awe at the thought of the important scenes in
+which he played so prominent a part.
+
+But there was no atmosphere of humour about Mr. Stewart. He had
+disappeared from Sir Nicholas' sight on their arrival at the Marshalsea,
+and they had not set eyes on one another since; nor could all the
+knight's persuasion and offer of bribes make his gaoler consent to take
+any message or scrap of paper between them. He would not even answer more
+than the simplest inquiries about him,--that he was alive and in the
+Tower, and so forth; and Sir Nicholas prayed often and earnestly for that
+deliberate and vivacious young man who had so charmed and interested them
+all down at Great Keynes, and who had been so mysteriously engulfed by
+the sombre majesty of the law.
+
+"I fear," he wrote to Lady Maxwell, "I fear that _our friend_ must be
+sick or dying. But I can hear no news of him; when I am allowed sometimes
+to walk in the court or on the leads he is never there. My _attendant_
+Mr. Jakes looks glum and says nothing when I ask him how my friend does.
+My dearest, do not forget him in your prayers nor your old loving husband
+either."
+
+One evening late in October Mr. Jakes did not come as usual to bring Sir
+Nicholas his supper at five o'clock; the time passed and still he did not
+come. This was very unusual. Presently Mrs. Jakes appeared instead,
+carrying the food which she set down at the door while she turned the key
+behind her. Sir Nicholas rallied her on having turned gaoler; but she
+turned on him a face with red eyes and lined with weeping.
+
+"O Sir Nicholas," she said, for these two were good friends, "what a
+wicked place this is! God forgive me for saying so; but they've had that
+young man down there since two o'clock; and Jakes is with them to help;
+and he told me to come up to you, Sir Nicholas, with your supper, if they
+weren't done by five; and if the young gentleman hadn't said what they
+wanted."
+
+Sir Nicholas felt sick.
+
+"Who is it?" he asked.
+
+"Why, who but Mr. Stewart?" she said; and then fell weeping again, and
+went out forgetting to lock the door behind her in her grief. Sir
+Nicholas sat still a moment, sick and shaken; he knew what it meant; but
+it had never come so close to him before. He got up presently and went to
+the door to listen for he knew not what. But there was no sound but the
+moan of the wind up the draughty staircase, and the sound of a prisoner
+singing somewhere above him a snatch of a song. He looked out presently,
+but there was nothing but the dark well of the staircase disappearing
+round to the left, and the glimmer of an oil lamp somewhere from the
+depths below him, with wavering shadows as the light was blown about by
+the gusts that came up from outside. There was nothing to be done of
+course; he closed the door, went back and prayed with all his might for
+the young man who was somewhere in this huge building, in his agony.
+
+Mr. Jakes came up himself within half an hour to see if all was well; but
+said nothing of his dreadful employment or of Mr. Stewart; and Sir
+Nicholas did not like to ask for fear of getting Mrs. Jakes into trouble.
+The gaoler took away the supper things, wished him good-night, went out
+and locked the door, apparently without noticing it had been left undone
+before. Possibly his mind was too much occupied with what he had been
+seeing and doing. And the faithful account of all this went down in due
+time to Great Keynes.
+
+The arrival of the courier at the Hall on Wednesday and Saturday was a
+great affair both to the household and to the village. Sir Nicholas sent
+his letter generally by the Saturday courier, and the other brought a
+kind of bulletin from Mr. Boyd, with sometimes a message or two from his
+master. These letters were taken by the ladies first to the study, as if
+to an oratory, and Lady Maxwell would read them slowly over to her
+sister. And in the evening, when Isabel generally came up for an hour or
+two, the girl would be asked to read them slowly all over again to the
+two ladies who sat over their embroidery on either side of her, and who
+interrupted for the sheer joy of prolonging it. And they would discuss
+together the exact significance of all his marks of emphasis and irony;
+and the girl would have all she could do sometimes not to feel a disloyal
+amusement at the transparency of the devices and the simplicity of the
+loving hearts that marvelled at the writer's depth and ingenuity. But she
+was none the less deeply impressed by his courageous cheerfulness, and by
+the power of a religion that in spite of its obvious weaknesses and
+improbabilities yet inspired an old man like Sir Nicholas with so much
+fortitude.
+
+At first, too, a kind of bulletin was always issued on the Sunday and
+Thursday mornings, and nailed upon the outside of the gatehouse, so that
+any who pleased could come there and get first-hand information; and an
+interpreter stood there sometimes, one of the educated younger sons of
+Mr. Piers, and read out to the groups from Lady Maxwell's sprawling old
+handwriting, news of the master.
+
+"Sir Nicholas has been had before the Council," he read out one day in a
+high complacent voice to the awed listeners, "and has been sent to the
+Tower of London." This caused consternation in the village, as it was
+supposed by the country-folk, not without excuse, that the Tower was the
+antechamber of death; but confidence was restored by the further
+announcement a few lines down that "he was well and cheerful."
+
+Great interest, too, was aroused by more domestic matters.
+
+"Sir Nicholas," it was proclaimed, "is in a little separate chamber of
+his own. Mr. Jakes, his gaoler, seems an honest fellow. Sir Nicholas hath
+a little mattress from a friend that Mr. Boyd fetched for him. He has
+dinner at eleven and supper at five. Sir Nicholas hopes that all are well
+in the village."
+
+But other changes had followed the old knight's arrest. The furious
+indignation in the village against the part that the Rectory had played
+in the matter, made it impossible for the Dents to remain there. That the
+minister's wife should have been publicly ducked, and that not by a few
+blackguards but by the solid fathers and sons with the applause of the
+wives and daughters, made her husband's position intolerable, and further
+evidence was forthcoming in the behaviour of the people towards the
+Rector himself; some boys had guffawed during his sermon on the following
+Sunday, when he had ventured on a word or two of penitence as to his
+share in the matter, and he was shouted after on his way home.
+
+Mrs. Dent seemed strangely changed and broken during her stay at the
+Hall. She had received a terrible shock, and it was not safe to move her
+back to her own house. For the first two or three nights, she would start
+from sleep again and again screaming for help and mercy and nothing would
+quiet her till she was wide awake and saw in the fire-light the curtained
+windows and the bolted door, and the kindly face of an old servant or
+Mistress Margaret with her beads in her hand. Isabel, who came up to see
+her two or three times, was both startled and affected by the change in
+her; and by the extraordinary mood of humility which seemed to have taken
+possession of the hard self-righteous Puritan.
+
+"I begged pardon," she whispered to the girl one evening, sitting up in
+bed and staring at her with wide, hard eyes, "I begged pardon of Lady
+Maxwell, though I am not fit to speak to her. Do you think she can ever
+forgive me? Do you think she can? It was I, you know, who wrought all the
+mischief, as I have wrought all the mischief in the village all these
+years. She said she did, and she kissed me, and said that our Saviour had
+forgiven her much more. But--but do you think she has forgiven me?" And
+then again, another night, a day or two before they left the place, she
+spoke to Isabel again.
+
+"Look after the poor bodies," she said, "teach them a little charity; I
+have taught them nought but bitterness and malice, so they have but given
+me my own back again. I have reaped what I have sown."
+
+So the Dents slipped off early one morning before the folk were up; and
+by the following Sunday, young Mr. Bodder, of whom the Bishop entertained
+a high opinion, occupied the little desk outside the chancel arch; and
+Great Keynes once more had to thank God and the diocesan that it
+possessed a proper minister of its own, and not a mere unordained reader,
+which was all that many parishes could obtain.
+
+Towards the end of September further hints began to arrive, very much
+underlined, in the knight's letters, of Mr. Stewart and his sufferings.
+
+"You remember _our friend_," Isabel read out one Saturday evening, "_not_
+Mr. Stewart." (This puzzled the old ladies sorely till Isabel explained
+their lord's artfulness.) "My dearest, I fear the worst for him. I do not
+mean apostacy, thank God. But I fear that these _wolves_ have torn him
+sadly, in their _dens_." Then followed the story of Mrs. Jakes, with all
+its horror, all the greater from the obscurity of the details.
+
+Isabel put the paper down trembling, as she sat on the rug before the
+fire in the parlour upstairs, and thought of the bright-eyed, red-haired
+man with his steady mouth and low laugh whom Anthony had described to
+her.
+
+Lady Maxwell posted upon the gatehouse:
+
+"Sir Nicholas fears that a _friend_ is in sore trouble; he hopes he may
+not _yield_."
+
+Then, after a few days more, a brief notice with a black-line drawn round
+it, that ran, in Mr. Bodder's despite:
+
+"Our _friend_ has passed away. Pray for his soul."
+
+Sir Nicholas had written in great agitation to this effect.
+
+"My sweetheart, I have heavy news to-day. There was a great company of
+folks below my window to-day, in the Inner Ward, where the road runs up
+below the Bloody Tower. It was about nine of the clock. And there was a
+horse there whose head I could see; and presently from the Beauchamp
+Tower came, as I thought, an old man between two warders; and then I
+could not very well see; the men were in my way; but soon the horse went
+off, and the men after him; and I could hear the groaning of the crowd
+that were waiting for them outside. And when Mr. Jakes brought me my
+dinner at eleven of the clock, he told me it was our friend--(think of
+it, my dearest--him whom I thought an old man!)--that had been taken off
+to Tyburn. And now I need say no more, but bid you pray for his soul."
+
+Isabel could hardly finish reading it; for she heard a quick sobbing
+breath behind her, and felt a wrinkled old hand caressing her hair and
+cheek as her voice faltered.
+
+Meanwhile Hubert was in town. Sir Nicholas had at first intended him to
+go down at once and take charge of the estate; but Piers was very
+competent, and so his father consented that he should remain in London
+until the beginning of October; and this too better suited Mr. Norris'
+plans who wished to send Isabel off about the same time to Northampton.
+
+When Hubert at last did arrive, he soon showed himself extremely capable
+and apt for the work. He was out on the estate from morning till night on
+his cob, and there was not a man under him from Piers downwards who had
+anything but praise for his insight and industry.
+
+There was in Hubert, too, as there so often is in country-boys who love
+and understand the life of the woods and fields, a balancing quality of a
+deep vein of sentiment; and this was now consecrated to Isabel Norris. He
+had pleasant dreams as he rode home in the autumn evening, under the
+sweet keen sky where the harvest moon rose large and yellow over the
+hills to his left and shed a strange mystical light that blended in a
+kind of chord with the dying daylight. It was at times like that, when
+the air was fragrant with the scent of dying leaves, with perhaps a touch
+of frost in it, and the cottages one by one opened red glowing eyes in
+the dusk, that the boy began to dream of a home of his own and pleasant
+domestic joys; of burning logs on the hearth and lighted candles, and a
+dear slender figure moving about the room. He used to rehearse to himself
+little meetings and partings; look at the roofs of the Dower House
+against the primrose sky as he rode up the fields homewards; identify her
+window, dark now as she was away; and long for Christmas when she would
+be back again. The only shadow over these delightful pictures was the
+uncertainty as to the future. Where after all would the home be? For he
+was a younger son. He thought about James very often. When he came back
+would he live at home? Would it all be James' at his father's death,
+these woods and fields and farms and stately house? Would it ever come to
+him? And, meanwhile where should he and Isabel live, when the religious
+difficulty had been surmounted, as he had no doubt that it would be
+sooner or later?
+
+When he thought of his father now, it was with a continually increasing
+respect. He had been inclined to despise him sometimes before, as one of
+a simple and uneventful life; but now the red shadow of the Law conferred
+dignity. To have been imprisoned in the Tower was a patent of nobility,
+adding distinction and gravity to the commonplace. Something of the glory
+even rested on Hubert himself as he rode and hawked with other Catholic
+boys, whose fathers maybe were equally zealous for the Faith, but less
+distinguished by suffering for it.
+
+Before Anthony went back to Cambridge, he and Hubert went out nearly
+every day together with or without their hawks. Anthony was about three
+years the younger, and Hubert's additional responsibility for the estate
+made the younger boy more in awe of him than the difference in their ages
+warranted. Besides, Hubert knew quite as much about sport, and had more
+opportunities for indulging his taste for it. There was no heronry at
+hand; besides, it was not the breeding time which is the proper season
+for this particular sport; so they did not trouble to ride out to one;
+but the partridges and hares and rabbits that abounded in the Maxwell
+estate gave them plenty of quarreys. They preferred to go out generally
+without the falconer, a Dutchman, who had been taken into the service of
+Sir Nicholas thirty years before when things had been more prosperous; it
+was less embarrassing so; but they would have a lad to carry the "cadge,"
+and a pony following them to carry the game. They added to the excitement
+of the sport by making it a competition between their birds; and flying
+them one after another, or sometimes at the same quarry, as in coursing;
+but this often led to the birds' crabbing.
+
+Anthony's peregrine Eliza was almost unapproachable; and the lad was the
+more proud of her as he had "made" her himself, as an "eyess" or young
+falcon captured as a nestling. But, on the other hand, Hubert's goshawk
+Margaret, a fiery little creature, named inappropriately enough after his
+tranquil aunt, as a rule did better than Anthony's Isabel, and brought
+the scores level again.
+
+There was one superb day that survived long in Anthony's memory and
+conversation; when he had done exceptionally well, when Eliza had
+surpassed herself, and even Isabel had acquitted herself with credit. It
+was one of those glorious days of wind and sun that occasionally fall in
+early October, with a pale turquoise sky overhead, and air that seems to
+sparkle and intoxicate like wine. They went out together after dinner
+about noon; their ponies and spaniels danced with the joy of life; Lady
+Maxwell cried to them from the north terrace to be careful, and pointed
+out to Mr. Norris who had dined with them what a graceful seat Hubert
+had; and then added politely, but as an obvious afterthought, that
+Anthony seemed to manage his pony with great address. The boys turned off
+through the village, and soon got on to high ground to the west of the
+village and all among the stubble and mustard, with tracts of rich sunlit
+country, of meadows and russet woodland below them on every side. Then
+the sport began. It seemed as if Eliza could not make a mistake. There
+rose a solitary partridge forty yards away with a whirl of wings; (the
+coveys were being well broken up by now) Anthony unhooded his bird and
+"cast off," with the falconer's cry "Hoo-ha, ha, ha, ha," and up soared
+Eliza with the tinkle of bells, on great strokes of those mighty wings,
+up, up, behind the partridge that fled low down the wind for his life.
+The two ponies were put to the gallop as the peregrine began to "stoop";
+and then down like a plummet she fell with closed wings, "raked" the
+quarry with her talons as she passed; recovered herself, and as Anthony
+came up holding out the _tabur-stycke_, returned to him and was hooded
+and leashed again; and sat there on his gloved wrist with wet claws, just
+shivering slightly from her nerves, like the aristocrat she was; while
+her master stroked her ashy back and the boy picked up the quarry,
+admiring the deep rent before he threw it into the pannier.
+
+Then Hubert had the next turn; but his falcon missed his first stoop, and
+did not strike the quarry till the second attempt, thus scoring one to
+Anthony's account. Then the peregrines were put back on the cadge as the
+boys got near to a wide meadow in a hollow where the rabbits used to
+feed; and the goshawks Margaret and Isabel were taken, each in turn
+sitting unhooded on her master's wrist, while they all watched the long
+thin grass for the quick movement that marked the passage of a
+rabbit;--and then in a moment the bird was cast off. The goshawk would
+rise just high enough to see the quarry in the grass, then fly straight
+with arched wings and pounces stretched out as she came over the quarry;
+then striking him between the shoulders would close with him; and her
+master would come up and take her off, throw the rabbit to the
+game-carrier; and the other would have the next attempt.
+
+And so they went on for three or four hours, encouraging their birds,
+whooping the death of the quarry, watching with all the sportsman's
+keenness the soaring and stooping of the peregrines, the raking off of
+the goshawks; listening to the thrilling tinkle of the bells, and taking
+back their birds to sit triumphant and complacent on their master's
+wrists, when the quarry had been fairly struck, and furious and sullen
+when it had eluded them two or three times till their breath left them in
+the dizzy rushes, and they "canceliered" or even returned disheartened
+and would fly no more till they had forgotten--till at last the shadows
+grew long, and the game more wary, and the hawks and ponies tired; and
+the boys put up the birds on the cadge, and leashed them to it securely;
+and jogged slowly homewards together up the valley road that led to the
+village, talking in technical terms of how the merlin's feather must be
+"imped" to-morrow; and of the relative merits of the "varvels" or little
+silver rings at the end of the jesses through which the leash ran, and
+the Dutch swivel that Squire Blackett always used.
+
+As they got nearer home and the red roofs of the Dower House began to
+glow in the ruddy sunlight above the meadows, Hubert began to shift the
+conversation round to Isabel, and inquire when she was coming home.
+Anthony was rather bored at this turn of the talk; but thought she would
+be back by Christmas at the latest; and said that she was at
+Northampton--and had Hubert ever seen such courage as Eliza's? But Hubert
+would not be put off; but led the talk back again to the girl; and at
+last told Anthony under promise of secrecy that he was fond of Isabel,
+and wished to make her his wife;--and oh! did Anthony think she cared
+really for him. Anthony stared and wondered and had no opinion at all on
+the subject; but presently fell in love with the idea that Hubert should
+be his brother-in-law and go hawking with him every day; and he added a
+private romance of his own in which he and Mary Corbet should be at the
+Dower House, with Hubert and Isabel at the Hall; while the elders, his
+own father, Sir Nicholas, Mr. James, Lady Maxwell, and Mistress Torridon
+had all taken up submissive and complacent attitudes in the middle
+distance.
+
+He was so pensive that evening that his father asked him at supper
+whether he had not had a good day; which diverted his thoughts from
+Mistress Corbet, and led him away from sentiment on a stream of his own
+talk with long backwaters of description of this and that stoop, and of
+exactly the points in which he thought the Maxwells' falconer had failed
+in the training of Hubert's Jane.
+
+Hubert found a long letter waiting from his father which Lady Maxwell
+gave him to read, with messages to himself in it about the estate, which
+brought him down again from the treading of rosy cloud-castles with a
+phantom Isabel whither his hawks and the shouting wind and the happy day
+had wafted him, down to questions of barns and farm-servants and the
+sober realities of harvest.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XI
+
+                            MASTER CALVIN
+
+
+Isabel reached Northampton a day or two before Hubert came back to Great
+Keynes. She travelled down with two combined parties going to Leicester
+and Nottingham, sleeping at Leighton Buzzard on the way; and on the
+evening of the second day reached the house of her father's friend Dr.
+Carrington, that stood in the Market Square.
+
+Her father's intention in sending her to this particular town and
+household was to show her how Puritanism, when carried to its extreme,
+was as orderly and disciplined a system, and was able to control the
+lives of its adherents, as well as the Catholicism whose influence on her
+character he found himself beginning to fear. But he wished also that she
+should be repelled to some extent by the merciless rigidity she would
+find at Northampton, and thus, after an oscillation or two come to rest
+in the quiet eclecticism of that middle position which he occupied
+himself.
+
+The town indeed was at this time a miniature Geneva. There was something
+in the temper of its inhabitants that made it especially susceptible to
+the wave of Puritanism that was sweeping over England. Lollardy had
+flourished among them so far back as the reign of Richard II; when the
+mayor, as folks told one another with pride, had plucked a mass-priest by
+the vestment on the way to the altar in All Saints' Church, and had made
+him give over his mummery till the preacher had finished his sermon.
+
+Dr. Carrington, too, a clean-shaven, blue-eyed, grey-haired man,
+churchwarden of Saint Sepulchre's, was a representative of the straitest
+views, and desperately in earnest. For him the world ranged itself into
+the redeemed and the damned; these two companies were the pivots of life
+for him; and every subject of mind or desire was significant only so far
+as it bore relations to be immutable decrees of God. But his fierce and
+merciless theological insistence was disguised by a real human tenderness
+and a marked courtesy of manner; and Isabel found him a kindly and
+thoughtful host.
+
+Yet the mechanical strictness of the household, and the overpowering
+sense of the weightiness of life that it conveyed, was a revelation to
+Isabel. Dr. Carrington at family prayers was a tremendous figure, as he
+kneeled upright at the head of the table in the sombre dining-room; and
+it seemed to Isabel in her place that the pitiless all-seeing Presence
+that kept such terrifying silence as the Doctor cried on Jehovah, was
+almost a different God to that whom she knew in the morning parlour at
+home, to whom her father prayed with more familiarity but no less
+romance, and who answered in the sunshine that lay on the carpet, and the
+shadows of boughs that moved across it, and the chirp of the birds under
+the eaves. And all day long she thought she noticed the same difference;
+at Great Keynes life was made up of many parts, the love of family, the
+country doings, the worship of God, the garden, and the company of the
+Hall ladies; and the Presence of God interpenetrated all like light or
+fragrance; but here life was lived under the glare of His eye, and
+absorption in any detail apart from the consciousness of that
+encompassing Presence had the nature of sin.
+
+On the Saturday after her arrival, as she was walking by the Nen with
+Kate Carrington, one of the two girls, she asked her about the crowd of
+ministers she had seen in the streets that morning.
+
+"They have been to the Prophesyings," said Kate. "My father says that
+there is no exercise that sanctifies a godly young minister so quickly."
+
+Kate went on to describe them further. The ministers assembled each
+Saturday at nine o'clock, and one of their number gave a short
+Bible-reading or lecture. Then all present were invited to join in the
+discussion; the less instructed would ask questions, the more experienced
+would answer, and debate would run high. Such a method Kate explained,
+who herself was a zealous and well instructed Calvinist, was the surest
+and swiftest road to truth, for every one held the open Scriptures in his
+hand, and interpreted and checked the speakers by the aid of that
+infallible guide.
+
+"But if a man's judgment lead him wrong?" asked Isabel, who professedly
+admitted authority to have some place in matters of faith.
+
+"All must hold the Apostles' Creed first of all," said Kate, "and must
+set his name to a paper declaring the Pope to be antichrist, with other
+truths upon it."
+
+Isabel was puzzled; for it seemed now as if Private Judgment were not
+supreme among its professors; but she did not care to question further.
+It began to dawn upon her presently, however, why the Queen was so fierce
+against Prophesyings; for she saw that they exercised that spirit of
+exclusiveness, the property of Papist and Puritan alike; which, since it
+was the antithesis of the tolerant comprehensiveness of the Church of
+England, was also the enemy of the theological peace that Elizabeth was
+seeking to impose upon the country; and that it was for that reason that
+Papist and Puritan, sundered so far in theology, were united in suffering
+for conscience' sake.
+
+On the Sunday morning Isabel went with Mrs. Carrington and the two girls
+to the round Templars' Church of Saint Sepulchre, for the Morning Prayer
+at eight o'clock, and then on to St. Peter's for the sermon. It was the
+latter function that was important in Puritan eyes; for the word preached
+was considered to have an almost sacramental force in the application of
+truth and grace to the soul; and crowds of people, with downcast eyes and
+in sombre dress, were pouring down the narrow streets from all the
+churches round, while the great bell beat out its summons from the Norman
+tower. The church was filled from end to end as they came in, meeting Dr.
+Carrington at the door, and they all passed up together to the pew
+reserved for the churchwarden, close beneath the pulpit.
+
+As Isabel looked round her, it came upon her very forcibly what she had
+begun to notice even at Great Keynes, that the religion preached there
+did not fit the church in which it was set forth; and that, though great
+efforts had been made to conform the building to the worship. There had
+been no half measures at Northampton, for the Puritans had a loathing of
+what they called a "mingle-mangle." Altars, footpaces, and piscinæ had
+been swept away and all marks of them removed, as well as the rood-loft
+and every image in the building; the stained windows had been replaced by
+plain glass painted white; the walls had been whitewashed from roof to
+floor, and every suspicion of colour erased except where texts of
+Scripture ran rigidly across the open wall spaces: "We are not under the
+Law, but under Grace," Isabel read opposite her, beneath the clerestory
+windows. And, above all, the point to which all lines and eyes converged,
+was occupied no longer by the Table but by the tribunal of the Lord. Yet
+underneath the disguise the old religion triumphed still. Beneath the
+great plain orderly scheme, without depth of shadows, dominated by the
+towering place of Proclamation where the crimson-faced herald waited to
+begin, the round arches and the elaborate mouldings, and the cool depths
+beyond the pillars, all declared that in the God for whom that temple was
+built, there was mystery as well as revelation, Love as well as Justice,
+condescension as well as Majesty, beauty as well as awfulness,
+invitations as well as eternal decrees.
+
+Isabel looked up presently, as the people still streamed in, and watched
+the minister in his rustling Genevan gown, leaning with his elbows on the
+Bible that rested open on the great tasselled velvet cushion before him.
+Everything about him was on the grand scale; his great hands were clasped
+and protruded over the edge of the Book; and his heavy dark face looked
+menacingly round on the crowded church; he had the air of a melancholy
+giant about to engage in some tragic pleasure. But Isabel's instinctive
+dislike began to pass into positive terror so soon as he began to preach.
+
+When the last comers had found a place, and the talking had stopped, he
+presently gave out his text, in a slow thunderous voice, that silenced
+the last whispers:
+
+"What shall we then say to these things? If God be on our side, who can
+be against us?"
+
+There were a few slow sentences, in a deep resonant voice, uttering each
+syllable deliberately like the explosion of a far-off gun, and in a
+minute or two he was in the thick of Calvin's smoky gospel. Doctrine,
+voice, and man were alike terrible and overpowering.
+
+There lay the great scheme in a few minutes, seen by Isabel as though
+through the door of hell, illumined by the glare of the eternal embers.
+The huge merciless Will of God stood there before her, disclosed in all
+its awfulness, armed with thunders, moving on mighty wheels. The
+foreknowledge of God closed the question henceforth, and, if proof were
+needed, made predestination plain. There was man's destiny, irrevocably
+fixed, iron-bound, changeless and immovable as the laws of God's own
+being. Yet over the rigid and awful Face of God, flickered a faint light,
+named mercy; and this mercy vindicated its existence by demanding that
+some souls should escape the final and endless doom that was the due
+reward of every soul conceived and born in enmity against God and under
+the frown of His Justice.
+
+Then, heralded too by wrath, the figure of Jesus began to glimmer through
+the thunderclouds; and Isabel lifted her eyes, to look in hope. But He
+was not as she had known him in His graciousness, and as He had revealed
+Himself to her in tender communion, and among the flowers and under the
+clear skies of Sussex. Here, in this echoing world of wrath He stood,
+pale and rigid, with lightning in His eyes, and the grim and crimson
+Cross behind him; and as powerless as His own Father Himself to save one
+poor timid despairing hoping soul against whom the Eternal Decree had
+gone forth. Jesus was stern and forbidding here, with the red glare of
+wrath on His Face too, instead of the rosy crown of Love upon His
+forehead; His mouth was closed with compressed lips which surely would
+only open to condemn; not that mouth, quivering and human, that had
+smiled and trembled and bent down from the Cross to kiss poor souls that
+could not hope, nor help themselves, that had smiled upon Isabel ever
+since she had known Him. It was appalling to this gentle maiden soul that
+had bloomed and rejoiced so long in the shadow of His healing, to be torn
+out of her retreat and set thus under the consuming noonday of the
+Justice of this Sun of white-hot Righteousness.
+
+For, as she listened, it was all so miserably convincing; her own little
+essays of intellect and flights of hopeful imagination were caught up and
+whirled away in the strong rush of this man's argument; her timid
+expectancy that God was really Love, as she understood the word in the
+vision of her Saviour's Person,--this was dashed aside as a childish
+fancy; the vision of the Father of the Everlasting Arms receded into the
+realm of dreams; and instead there lowered overhead in this furious
+tempest of wrath a monstrous God with a stony Face and a stonier Heart,
+who was eternally either her torment or salvation; and Isabel thought,
+and trembled at the blasphemy, that if God were such as this, the one
+would be no less agony than the other. Was this man bearing false
+witness, not only against his neighbour, but far more awfully, against
+his God? But it was too convincing; it was built up on an iron hammered
+framework of a great man's intellect and made white hot with another
+great man's burning eloquence. But it seemed to Isabel now and again as
+if a thunder-voiced virile devil were proclaiming the Gospel of
+Everlasting shame. There he bent over the pulpit with flaming face and
+great compelling gestures that swayed the congregation, eliciting the
+emotions he desired, as the conductor's baton draws out the music (for
+the man was a great orator), and he stormed and roared and seemed to
+marshal the very powers of the world to come, compelling them by his nod,
+and interpreting them by his voice; and below him sat this poor child,
+tossed along on his eloquence, like a straw on a flood; and yet hating
+and resenting it and struggling to detach herself and disbelieve every
+word he spoke.
+
+As the last sands were running out in his hour-glass, he came to harbour
+from this raging sea; and in a few deep resonant sentences, like those
+with which he began, he pictured the peace of the ransomed soul, that
+knows itself safe in the arms of God; that rejoices, even in this world,
+in the Light of His Face and the ecstasy of His embrace; that dwells by
+waters of comfort and lies down in the green pastures of the Heavenly
+Love; while, round this little island of salvation in an ocean of terror,
+the thunders of wrath sound only as the noise of surge on a far-off reef.
+
+The effect on Isabel was very great. It was far more startling than her
+visit to London; there her quiet religion had received high sanction in
+the mystery of S. Paul's. But here it was the plainest Calvinism preached
+with immense power. The preacher's last words of peace were no peace to
+her. If it was necessary to pass those bellowing breakers of wrath to
+reach the Happy Country, then she had never reached it yet; she had lived
+so far in an illusion; her life had been spent in a fool's paradise,
+where the light and warmth and flowers were but artificial after all; and
+she knew that she had not the heart to set out again. Though she
+recognised dimly the compelling power of this religion, and that it was
+one which, if sincerely embraced, would make the smallest details of life
+momentous with eternal weight, yet she knew that her soul could never
+respond to it, and whether saved or damned that it could only cower in
+miserable despair under a Deity that was so sovereign as this.
+
+So her heart was low and her eyes sad as she followed Mrs. Carrington out
+of church. Was this then really the Revelation of the Love of God in the
+Person of Jesus Christ? Had all that she knew as the Gospel melted down
+into this fiery lump?
+
+The rest of the day did not alter the impression made on her mind. There
+was little talk, or evidence of any human fellowship, in the Carrington
+household on the Lord's Day; there was a word or two of grave
+commendation on the sermon during dinner; and in the afternoon there was
+the Evening Prayer to be attended in St. Sepulchre's followed by an
+exposition, and a public catechising on Calvin's questions and answers.
+Here the same awful doctrines reappeared, condensed with an icy reality,
+even more paralysing than the burning presentation of them in the
+morning's sermon. She was spared questions herself, as she was a
+stranger; and sat to hear girls of her own age and older men and women
+who looked as soft-hearted as herself, utter definitions of the method of
+salvation and the being and character of God that compelled the assent of
+her intellect, while they jarred with her spiritual experience as
+fiercely as brazen trumpets out of tune.
+
+In the evening there followed further religious exercises in the dark
+dining-room, at the close of which Dr. Carrington read one of Mr.
+Calvin's Genevan discourses, from his tall chair at the head of the
+table. She looked at him at first, and wondered in her heart whether that
+man, with his clear gentle voice, and his pleasant old face crowned with
+iron-grey hair seen in the mellow candlelight, really believed in the
+terrible gospel of the morning; for she heard nothing of the academic
+discourse that he was reading now, and presently her eyes wandered away
+out of the windows to the pale night sky. There still glimmered a faint
+streak of light in the west across the Market Square; it seemed to her as
+a kind of mirror of her soul at this moment; the tender daylight had
+faded, though she could still discern the token of its presence far away,
+and as from behind the bars of a cage; but the night of God's wrath was
+fast blotting out the last touch of radiance from her despairing soul.
+
+Dr. Carrington looked at her with courteous anxiety, but with approval
+too, as he held her hand for a moment as she said good-night to him.
+There were shadows of weariness and depression under her eyes, and the
+corners of her mouth drooped a little; and the doctor's heart stirred
+with hope that the Word of God had reached at last this lamb of His who
+had been fed too long on milk, and sheltered from the sun; but who was
+now coming out, driven it might be, and unhappy, but still on its way to
+the plain and wholesome pastures of the Word that lay in the glow of the
+unveiled glory of God.
+
+Isabel in her dark room upstairs was miserable; she stood long at her
+window her face pressed against the glass, and looked at the sky, from
+which the last streak of light had now died, and longed with all her
+might for her own oak room at home, with her prie-dieu and the familiar
+things about her; and the pines rustling outside in the sweet night-wind.
+It seemed to her as if an irresistible hand had plucked her out from
+those loved things and places, and that a penetrating eye were examining
+every corner of her soul. In one sense she believed herself nearer to God
+than ever before, but it was heartbreaking to find Him like this. She
+went to sleep with the same sense of a burdening Presence resting on her
+spirit.
+
+The next morning Dr. Carrington saw her privately and explained to her a
+notice that she had not understood when it had been given out in church
+the day before. It was to the effect that the quarterly communion would
+be administered on the following Sunday, having been transferred that
+year from the Sunday after Michaelmas Day, and that she must hold herself
+in readiness on the Wednesday afternoon to undergo the examination that
+was enforced in every household in Northampton, at the hands of the
+Minister and Churchwardens.
+
+"But you need not fear it, Mistress Norris," he said kindly, seeing her
+alarm. "My daughter Kate will tell you all that is needful."
+
+Kate too told her it would be little more than formal in her case.
+
+"The minister will not ask you much," she said, "for you are a stranger,
+and my father will vouch for you. He will ask you of irresistible grace,
+and of the Sacrament." And she gave her a couple of books from which she
+might summarise the answers; especially directing her attention to
+Calvin's Catechism, telling her that that was the book with which all the
+servants and apprentices were obliged to be familiar.
+
+When Wednesday afternoon came, one by one the members of the household
+went before the inquisition that held its court in the dining-room; and
+last of all Isabel's turn came. The three gentlemen who sat in the middle
+of the long side of the table, with their backs to the light, half rose
+and bowed to her as she entered; and requested her to sit opposite to
+them. To her relief it was the Minister of St. Sepulchre's who was to
+examine her--he who had read the service and discoursed on the Catechism,
+not the morning preacher. He was a man who seemed a little ill at ease
+himself; he had none of the superb confidence of the preacher; but
+appeared to be one to whose natural character this stern _rôle_ was not
+altogether congenial. He asked a few very simple questions; as to when
+she had last taken the Sacrament; how she would interpret the words,
+"This is my Body"; and looked almost grateful when she answered quietly
+and without heat. He asked her too three or four of the simpler questions
+which Kate had indicated to her; all of which she answered satisfactorily;
+and then desired to know whether she was in charity with all men; and
+whether she looked to Jesus Christ alone as her one Saviour. Finally he
+turned to Dr. Carrington, and wished to know whether Mistress Norris
+would come to the sacrament at five or nine o'clock, and Dr. Carrington
+answered that she would no doubt wish to come with his own wife and
+daughters at nine o'clock; which was the hour for the folks who were
+better to do. And so the inquisition ended much to Isabel's relief.
+
+But this was a very extraordinary experience to her; it gave her a first
+glimpse into the rigid discipline that the extreme Puritans wished to see
+enforced everywhere; and with it a sense of corporate responsibility that
+she had not appreciated before; the congregation meant something to her
+now; she was no longer alone with her Lord individually, but understood
+that she was part of a body with various functions, and that the care of
+her soul was not merely a personal matter for herself, but involved her
+minister and the officers of the Church as well. It astonished her to
+think that this process was carried out on every individual who lived in
+the town in preparation for the sacrament on the following Sunday.
+
+Isabel, and indeed the whole household, spent the Friday and Saturday in
+rigid and severe preparation. No flesh food was eaten on either of the
+days; and all the members of the family were supposed to spend several
+hours in their own rooms in prayer and meditation. She did not find this
+difficult, as she was well practised in solitude and prayer, and she
+scarcely left her room all Saturday except for meals.
+
+"O Lord," Isabel repeated each morning and evening at her bedside during
+this week, "the blind dulness of our corrupt nature will not suffer us
+sufficiently to weigh these thy most ample benefits, yet, nevertheless,
+at the commandment of Jesus Christ our Lord, we present ourselves to this
+His table, which He hath left to be used in remembrance of His death
+until His coming again, to declare and witness before the world, that by
+Him alone we have received liberty and life; that by Him alone dost thou
+acknowledge us to be thy children and heirs; that by Him alone we have
+entrance to the throne of thy grace; that by Him alone we are possessed
+in our spiritual kingdom, to eat and drink at His table, with whom we
+have our conversation presently in heaven, and by whom our bodies shall
+be raised up again from the dust, and shall be placed with Him in that
+endless joy, which Thou, O Father of mercy, hast prepared for thine
+elect, before the foundation of the world was laid."
+
+And so she prepared herself for that tryst with her Beloved in a foreign
+land where all was strange and unfamiliar about her: yet He was hourly
+drawing nearer, and she cried to Him day by day in these words so
+redolent to her with associations of past communions, and of moments of
+great spiritual elevation. The very use of the prayer this week was like
+a breeze of flowers to one in a wilderness.
+
+On the Saturday night she ceremoniously washed her feet as her father had
+taught her; and lay down happier than she had been for days past, for
+to-morrow would bring the Lover of her soul.
+
+On the Sunday all the household was astir early at their prayers, and
+about half-past eight o'clock all, including the servants who had just
+returned from the five o'clock service, assembled in the dining-room; the
+noise of the feet of those returning from church had ceased on the
+pavement of the square outside, and all was quiet except for the solemn
+sound of the bells, as Dr. Carrington offered extempore prayer for all
+who were fulfilling the Lord's ordinance on that day. And Isabel once
+more felt her heart yearn to a God who seemed Love after all.
+
+St. Sepulchre's was nearly full when they arrived. The mahogany table had
+been brought down from the eastern wall to beneath the cupola, and stood
+there with a large white cloth, descending almost to the ground on every
+side; and a row of silver vessels, flat plates and tall new Communion
+cups and flagons, shone upon it. Isabel buried her face in her hands, and
+tried to withdraw into the solitude of her own soul; but the noise of the
+feet coming and going, and the talking on all sides of her, were terribly
+distracting. Presently four ministers entered and Isabel was startled to
+see, as she raised her face at the sudden silence, that none of them wore
+the prescribed surplice; for she had not been accustomed to the views of
+the extreme Puritans to whom this was a remnant of Popery; an indifferent
+thing indeed in itself, as they so often maintained; but far from
+indifferent when it was imposed by authority. One entered the pulpit; the
+other three took their places at the Holy Table; and after a metrical
+Psalm sung in the Genevan fashion, the service began. At the proper place
+the minister in the pulpit delivered an hour's sermon of the type to
+which Isabel was being now introduced for the first time; but bearing
+again and again on the point that the sacrament was a confession to the
+world of faith in Christ; it was in no sense a sacrificial act towards
+God, "as the Papists vainly taught"; this part of the sermon was spoiled,
+to Isabel's ears at least, by a flood of disagreeable words poured out
+against the popish doctrine; and the end of the sermon consisted of a
+searching exhortation to those who contemplated sin, who bore malice, who
+were in any way holding aloof from God, "to cast themselves mightily upon
+the love of the Redeemer, bewailing their sinful lives, and purposing to
+amend them." This act, wrought out in the silence of the soul even now
+would transfer the sinner from death unto life; and turn what threatened
+to be poison into a "lively and healthful food." Then he turned to those
+who came prepared and repentant, hungering and thirsting after the Bread
+of Life and the Wine that the Lord had mingled; and congratulated them on
+their possession of grace, and on the rich access of sanctification that
+would be theirs by a faithful reception of this comfortable sacrament;
+and then in half a dozen concluding sentences he preached Christ, as
+"food to the hungry; a stream to the thirsty; a rest for the weary. It is
+He alone, our dear Redeemer, who openeth the Kingdom of Heaven, to which
+may He vouchsafe to bring us for His Name's sake."
+
+Isabel was astonished to see that the preacher did not descend from the
+pulpit after the sermon, but that as soon as he had announced that the
+mayor would sit at the Town Hall with the ministers and churchwardens on
+the following Thursday to inquire into the cases of all who had not
+presented themselves for Communion, he turned and began to busy himself
+with the great Bible that lay on the cushion. The service went on, and
+the conducting of it was shared among the three ministers standing, one
+at the centre of the table which was placed endways, and the others at
+the two ends. As the Prayer of Consecration was begun, Isabel hid her
+face as she was accustomed to do, for she believed it to be the principal
+part of the service, and waited for the silence that in her experience
+generally followed the Amen. But a voice immediately began from the
+pulpit, and she looked up, startled and distracted.
+
+"Then Jesus said unto them," pealed out the preacher's voice, "All ye
+shall be offended by me this night, for it is written, I will smite the
+shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered. But after I am risen, I will
+go into Galilee before you."
+
+Ah! why would not the man stop? Isabel did not want the past Saviour but
+the present now; not a dead record but a living experience; above all,
+not the minister but the great High Priest Himself.
+
+"He began to be troubled and in great heaviness, and said unto them, My
+soul is very heavy, even unto the death; tarry here and watch."
+
+The three ministers had communicated by now; and there was a rustle and
+clatter of feet as the empty seats in front, hung with houselling cloths,
+began to be filled. The murmur of the three voices below as the ministers
+passed along with the vessels were drowned by the tale of the Passion
+that rang out overhead.
+
+"Couldest thou not watch one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into
+temptation. The spirit indeed is ready, but the flesh is weak."
+
+It was coming near to Isabel's turn; the Carringtons already were
+beginning to move; and in a moment or two she rose and followed them out.
+The people were pressing up the aisles; and as she stood waiting her turn
+to pass into the white-hung seat, she could not help noticing the
+disorder that prevailed; some knelt devoutly, some stood, some sat to
+receive the sacred elements; and all the while louder and louder, above
+the rustling and the loud whispering of the ministers and the shuffling
+of feet, the tale rose and fell on the cadences of the preacher's voice.
+Now it was her turn; she was kneeling with palms outstretched and closed
+eyes. Ah! would he not be silent for one moment? Could not the reality
+speak for itself, and its interpreter be still? Surely the King of Love
+needed no herald when Himself was here.
+
+"And anon in the dawning, the high Priests held a Council with Elders and
+the Scribes and the whole Council, and bound Jesus and led Him away." ...
+
+And so it was over presently, and she was back again in her seat,
+distracted and miserable; trying to pray, forcing herself to attend now
+to the reader, now to her Saviour with whom she believed herself in
+intimate union, and finding nothing but dryness and distraction
+everywhere. How interminable it was! She opened her eyes, and what she
+saw amazed and absorbed her for a few moments; some were sitting back and
+talking; some looking cheerfully about them as if at a public
+entertainment; one man especially overwhelmed her imagination; with a
+great red face and neck like a butcher, animal and brutal, with a heavy
+hanging jowl and little narrow lack-lustre eyes--how bored and depressed
+he was by this long obligatory ceremony! Then once more she closed her
+eyes in self-reproach at her distractions; here were her lips still
+fragrant with the Wine of God, the pressure of her Beloved's arm still
+about her; and these were her thoughts, settling like flies, on
+everything....
+
+When she opened them again the last footsteps were passing down the
+aisle, the dripping Cups were being replaced by the ministers, and
+covered with napkins, and the tale of Easter was in telling from the
+pulpit like the promise of a brighter day.
+
+"And they said one to another, Who shall roll us away the stone from the
+door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was
+rolled away (for it was a very great one)."
+
+So read the minister and closed the book; and _Our Father_ began.
+
+In the evening, when all was over, and the prayers said and the
+expounding and catechising finished, in a kind of despair she slipped
+away alone, and walked a little by herself in the deepening twilight
+beside the river; and again she made effort after effort to catch some
+consciousness of grace from this Sacrament Sunday, so rare and so
+precious; but an oppression seemed to dwell in the very air. The low
+rain-clouds hung over the city, leaden and chill, the path where she
+walked was rank with the smell of dead leaves, and the trees and grass
+dripped with lifeless moisture. As she goaded and allured alternately her
+own fainting soul, it writhed and struggled but could not rise; there was
+no pungency of bitterness in her self-reproach, no thrill of joy in her
+aspiration; for the hand of Calvin's God lay heavy on the delicate
+languid thing.
+
+She walked back at last in despair over the wet cobblestones of the empty
+market square; but as she came near the house, she saw that the square
+was not quite empty. A horse stood blowing and steaming before Dr.
+Carrington's door, and her own maid and Kate were standing hatless in the
+doorway looking up and down the street. Isabel's heart began to beat, and
+she walked quicker. In a moment Kate saw her, and began to beckon and
+call; and the maid ran to meet her.
+
+"Mistress Isabel, Mistress Isabel," she cried, "make haste."
+
+"What is it?" asked the girl, in sick foreboding.
+
+"There is a man come from Great Keynes," began the maid, but Kate stopped
+her.
+
+"Come in, Mistress Isabel," she said, "my father is waiting for you."
+
+Dr. Carrington met her at the dining-room door; and his face was tender
+and full of emotion.
+
+"What is it?" whispered the girl sharply. "Anthony?"
+
+"Dear child," he said, "come in, and be brave."
+
+There was a man standing in the room with cap and whip in hand, spurred
+and splashed from head to foot; Isabel recognised one of the grooms from
+the Hall.
+
+"What is it?" she said again with a piteous sharpness.
+
+Dr. Carrington laid his hands gently on her shoulders, and looked into
+her eyes.
+
+"It is news of your father," he said, "from Lady Maxwell."
+
+He paused, and the steady gleam of his eyes strengthened and quieted her,
+then he went on deliberately, "The Lord hath given and the Lord hath
+taken it."
+
+He paused as if for an answer, but no answer came; Isabel was staring
+white-faced with parted lips into those strong blue eyes of his: and he
+finished:
+
+"Blessed be the name of the Lord."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                             A WINDING-UP
+
+
+The curtained windows on the ground-floor of the Dower House shone red
+from within as Isabel and Dr. Carrington, with three or four servants
+behind, rode round the curving drive in front late on the Monday evening.
+A face peeped from Mrs. Carroll's window as the horse's hoofs sounded on
+the gravel, and by the time that Isabel, pale, wet, and worn-out with her
+seventy miles' ride, was dismounted, Mistress Margaret herself was at the
+door, with Anthony's face at her shoulder, and Mrs. Carroll looking over
+the banisters.
+
+Isabel was not allowed to see her father's body that night, but after she
+was in bed, Lady Maxwell herself, who had been sent for when he lay
+dying, came down from the Hall, and told her what there was to tell;
+while Mistress Margaret and Anthony entertained Dr. Carrington below.
+
+"Dear child," said the old lady, leaning with her elbow on the bed, and
+holding the girl's hand tenderly as she talked, "it was all over in an
+hour or two. It was the heart, you know. Mrs. Carroll sent for me
+suddenly, on Saturday morning; and by the time I reached him he could not
+speak. They had carried him upstairs from his study, where they had found
+him; and laid him down on his bed, and--yes, yes--he was in pain, but he
+was conscious, and he was praying I think; his lips moved. And I knelt
+down by the bed and prayed aloud; he only spoke twice; and, my dear, it
+was your name the first time, and the name of His Saviour the second
+time. He looked at me, and I could see he was trying to speak; and then
+on a sudden he spoke 'Isabel.' And I think he was asking me to take care
+of you. And I nodded and said that I would do what I could, and he seemed
+satisfied and shut his eyes again. And then presently Mr. Bodder began a
+prayer--he had come in a moment before; they could not find him at
+first--and then, and then your dear father moved a little and raised his
+hand, and the minister stayed; and he was looking up as if he saw
+something; and then he said once, 'Jesus' clear and loud; and, and--that
+was all, dear child."
+
+The next morning she and Anthony, with the two old ladies, one of whom
+was always with them during these days, went into the darkened oak room
+on the first floor, where he had died and now rested. The red curtains
+made a pleasant rosy light, and it seemed to the children impossible to
+believe that that serene face, scarcely more serene than in life, with
+its wide closed lids under the delicate eyebrows, and contented clean-cut
+mouth, and the scholarly hands closed on the breast, all in a wealth of
+autumn flowers and dark copper-coloured beech leaves, were not the face
+and hands of a sleeping man.
+
+But Isabel did not utterly break down till she saw his study. She drew
+the curtains aside herself, and there stood his table; his chair was
+beside it, pushed back and sideways as if he had that moment left it; and
+on the table itself the books she knew so well.
+
+In the centre of the table stood his inlaid desk, with the papers lying
+upon it, and his quill beside them, as if just laid down; even the
+ink-pot was uncovered just as he had left it, as the agony began to lay
+its hand upon his heart. She stooped and read the last sentence.
+
+"This is the great fruit, that unspeakable benefit that they do eat and
+drink of that labour and are burden, and come--" and there it stopped;
+and the blinding tears rushed into the girl's eyes, as she stooped to
+kiss the curved knob of the chair-arm where his dear hand had last
+rested.
+
+When all was over a day or two later the two went up to stay at the Hall,
+while the housekeeper was left in charge of the Dower House. Lady Maxwell
+and Mistress Margaret had been present at the parish church on the
+occasion of the funeral, for the first time ever since the old Marian
+priest had left; and had assisted too at the opening of the will, which
+was found, tied up and docketed in one of the inner drawers of the inlaid
+desk; and before its instructions were complied with, Lady Maxwell wished
+to have a word or two with Isabel and Anthony.
+
+She made an opportunity on the morning of Anthony's departure for
+Cambridge, two days after the funeral, when Mistress Margaret was out of
+the room, and Hubert had ridden off as usual with Piers, on the affairs
+of the estate.
+
+"My child," said she to Isabel, who was lying back passive and listless
+on the window-seat. "What do you think your cousin will direct to be
+done? He will scarcely wish you to leave home altogether, to stay with
+him. And yet, you understand, he is your guardian."
+
+Isabel shook her head.
+
+"We know nothing of him," she said, wearily, "he has never been here."
+
+"If you have a suggestion to make to him you should decide at once," the
+other went on, "the courier is to go on Monday, is he not, Anthony?"
+
+The boy nodded.
+
+"But will he not allow us," he said, "to stay at home as usual?
+Surely----"
+
+Lady Maxwell shook her head.
+
+"And Isabel?" she asked, "who will look after her when you are away?"
+
+"Mrs. Carroll?" he said interrogatively.
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+"He would never consent," she said, "it would not be right."
+
+Isabel looked up suddenly, and her eyes brightened a little.
+
+"Lady Maxwell--" she began, and then stopped, embarrassed.
+
+"Well, my dear?"
+
+"What is it, Isabel?" asked Anthony.
+
+"If it were possible--but, but I could not ask it."
+
+"If you mean Margaret, my dear"; said the old lady serenely, drawing her
+needle carefully through, "it was what I thought myself; but I did not
+know if you would care for that. Is that what you meant?"
+
+"Oh, Lady Maxwell," said the girl, her face lighting up.
+
+Then the old lady explained that it was not possible to ask them to live
+permanently at the Hall, although of course Isabel must do so until an
+arrangement had been made; because their father would scarcely have
+wished them to be actually inmates of a Catholic house; but that he
+plainly had encouraged close relations between the two houses, and
+indeed, Lady Maxwell interpreted his mention of his daughter's name, and
+his look as he said it, in the sense that he wished those relations to
+continue. She thought therefore that there was no reason why their new
+guardian's consent should not be asked to Mistress Margaret's coming over
+to the Dower House to take charge of Isabel, if the girl wished it. He
+had no particular interest in them; he lived a couple of hundred miles
+away, and the arrangement would probably save him a great deal of trouble
+and inconvenience.
+
+"But you, Lady Maxwell," Isabel burst out, her face kindled with hope,
+for she had dreaded the removal terribly, "you will be lonely here."
+
+"Dear child," said the old lady, laying down her embroidery, "God has
+been gracious to me; and my husband is coming back to me; you need not
+fear for me." And she told them, with her old eyes full of happy tears,
+how she had had a private word, which they must not repeat, from a
+Catholic friend at Court, that all had been decided for Sir Nicholas'
+release, though he did not know it himself yet, and that he would be at
+home again for Advent. The prison fever was beginning to cause alarm, and
+it seemed that a good fine would meet the old knight's case better than
+any other execution of justice.
+
+So then, it was decided; and as Isabel walked out to the gatehouse after
+dinner beside Anthony, with her hand on his horse's neck, and as she
+watched him at last ride down the village green and disappear round
+behind the church, half her sorrow at losing him was swallowed up in the
+practical certainty that they would meet again before Christmas in their
+old home, and not in a stranger's house in the bleak North country.
+
+On the following Thursday, Sir Nicholas' weekly letter showed evidence
+that the good news of his release had begun to penetrate to him; his wife
+longed to tell him all she had heard, but so many jealous eyes were on
+the watch for favouritism that she had been strictly forbidden to pass on
+her information. However there was little need.
+
+"I am in hopes," he wrote, "of keeping Christmas in a merrier place than
+prison. I do not mean _heaven_," he hastened to add, for fear of alarming
+his wife. "Good Mr. Jakes tells me that Sir John is ill to-day, and that
+he fears the gaol-fever; and if it is the gaol-fever, sweetheart, which
+pray God it may not be _for Sir John's sake_, it will be the fourteenth
+case in the Tower; and folks say that we shall all be let home again; but
+with another good fine, they say, to keep us poor and humble, and mindful
+of the Queen's Majesty her laws. However, dearest, I would gladly pay a
+thousand pounds, if I had them, to be home again."
+
+But there was news at the end of the letter that caused consternation in
+one or two hearts, and sent Hubert across, storming and almost crying, to
+Isabel, who was taking a turn in the dusk at sunset. She heard his step
+beyond the hedge, quick and impatient, and stopped short, hesitating and
+wondering.
+
+He had behaved to her with extraordinary tact and consideration, and she
+was very conscious of it. Since her sudden return ten days before from
+the visit which had been meant to separate them, he had not spoken a word
+to her privately, except a shy sentence or two of condolence, stammered
+out with downcast eyes, but which from the simplicity and shortness of
+the words had brought up a sob from her heart. She guessed that he knew
+why she had been sent to Northampton, and had determined not to take
+advantage in any way of her sorrow. Every morning he had disappeared
+before she came down, and did not come back till supper, where he sat
+silent and apart, and yet, when an occasion offered itself, behaved with
+a quick attentive deference that showed her where his thoughts had been.
+
+Now she stood, wondering and timid, at that hurried insistent step on the
+other side of the hedge. As she hesitated, he came quickly through the
+doorway and stopped short.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said, with all his reserve gone, and looking at her
+imploringly, but with the old familiar air that she loved, "have you
+heard? I am to go as soon as my father comes back. Oh! it is a shame!"
+
+His voice was full of tears, and his eyes were bright and angry. Her
+heart leapt up once and then seemed to cease beating.
+
+"Go?" she said; and even as she spoke knew from her own dismay how dear
+that quiet chivalrous presence was to her.
+
+"Yes," he went on in the same voice. "Oh! I know I should not speak;
+and--and especially now at all times; but I could not bear it; nor that
+you should think it was my will to go."
+
+She stood still looking at him.
+
+"May I walk with you a little," he said, "but--I must not say much--I
+promised my father."
+
+And then as they walked he began to pour it out.
+
+"It is some old man in Durham," he said, "and I am to see to his estates.
+My father will not want me here when he comes back, and, and it is to be
+soon. He has had the offer for me; and has written to tell me. There is
+no choice."
+
+She had turned instinctively towards the house, and the high roofs and
+chimneys were before them, dark against the luminous sky.
+
+"No, no," said Hubert, laying his hand on her arm; and at the touch she
+thrilled so much that she knew she must not stay, and went forward
+resolutely up the steps of the terrace.
+
+"Ah! let me speak," he said; "I have not troubled you much, Mistress
+Isabel."
+
+She hesitated again a moment.
+
+"In my father's room," he went on, "and I will bring the letter."
+
+She nodded and passed into the hall without speaking, and turned to Sir
+Nicholas' study; while Hubert's steps dashed up the stairs to his
+mother's room. Isabel went in and stood on the hearth in the firelight
+that glowed and wavered round the room on the tapestry and the prie-dieu
+and the table where Hubert had been sitting and the tall shuttered
+windows, leaning her head against the mantelpiece, doubtful and
+miserable.
+
+"Listen," said Hubert, bursting into the room a moment later with the
+sheet open in his hand.
+
+"'Tell Hubert that Lord Arncliffe needs a gentleman to take charge of his
+estates; he is too old now himself, and has none to help him. I have had
+the offer for Hubert, and have accepted it; he must go as soon as I have
+returned. I am sorry to lose the lad, but since James----'" and Hubert
+broke off. "I must not read that," he said.
+
+Isabel still stood, stretching her hands out to the fire, turned a little
+away from him.
+
+"But what can I say?" went on the lad passionately, "I must go; and--and
+God knows for how long, five or six years maybe; and I shall come back
+and find you--and find you----" and a sob rose up and silenced him.
+
+"Hubert," she said, turning and looking with a kind of wavering
+steadiness into his shadowed eyes, and even then noticing the clean-cut
+features and the smooth curve of his jaw with the firelight on it, "you
+ought not----"
+
+"I know, I know; I promised my father; but there are some things I cannot
+bear. Of course I do not want you to promise anything; but I thought that
+if perhaps you could tell me that you thought--that you thought there
+would be no one else; and that when I came back----"
+
+"Hubert," she said again, resolutely, "it is impossible: our
+religions----"
+
+"But I would do anything, I think. Besides, in five years so much may
+happen. You might become a Catholic--or--or, I might come to see that the
+Protestant Religion was nearly the same, or as true at least--or--or--so
+much might happen.--Can you not tell me anything before I go?"
+
+A keen ray of hope had pierced her heart as he spoke; and she scarcely
+knew what she said.
+
+"But, Hubert, even if I were to say----"
+
+He seized her hands and kissed them again and again.
+
+"Oh! God bless you, Isabel! Now I can go so happily. And I will not speak
+of it again; you can trust me; it will not be hard for you."
+
+She tried to draw her hands away, but he still held them tightly in his
+own strong hands, and looked into her face. His eyes were shining.
+
+"Yes, yes, I know you have promised nothing. I hold you to nothing. You
+are as free as ever to do what you will with me. But,"--and he lifted her
+hands once more and kissed them, and dropped them; seized his cap and was
+gone.
+
+Isabel was left alone in a tumult of thought and emotion. He had taken
+her by storm; she had not guessed how desperately weak she was towards
+him, until he had come to her like this in a whirlwind of passion and
+stood trembling and almost crying, with the ruddy firelight on his face,
+and his eyes burning out of shadow. She felt fascinated still by that
+mingling of a boy's weakness and sentiment and of a man's fire and
+purpose; and she sank down on her knees before the hearth and looked
+wonderingly at her hands which he had kissed so ardently, now transparent
+and flaming against the light as if with love. Then as she looked at the
+red heart of the fire the sudden leaping of her heart quieted, and there
+crept on her a glow of steady desire to lean on the power of this tall
+young lover of hers; she was so utterly alone without him it seemed as if
+there were no choice left; he had come and claimed her in virtue of the
+master-law, and she--how much had she yielded? She had not promised; but
+she had shown evidently her real heart in those half dozen words; and he
+had interpreted them for her; and she dared not in honesty repudiate his
+interpretation. And so she knelt there, clasping and unclasping her
+hands, in a whirl of delight and trembling; all the bounds of that sober
+inner life seemed for the moment swept away; she almost began to despise
+its old coldnesses and limitations. How shadowy after all was the love of
+God, compared with this burning tide that was bearing her along on its
+bosom!...
+
+She sank lower and lower into herself among the black draperies, clasping
+those slender hands tightly across her breast.
+
+Suddenly a great log fell with a crash, the red glow turned into leaping
+flames; the whole dark room seemed alive with shadows that fled to and
+fro, and she knelt upright quickly and looked round her, terrified and
+ashamed.--What was she doing here? Was it so soon then that she was
+setting aside the will of her father, who trusted and loved her so well,
+and who lay out there in the chancel vault? Ah! she had no right here in
+this room--Hubert's room now, with his cap and whip lying across the
+papers and the estate-book, and his knife and the broken jesses on the
+seat of the chair beside her. There was his step overhead again. She must
+be gone before he came back.
+
+There was high excitement on the estate and in the village a week or two
+later when the rumour of Sir Nicholas' return was established, and the
+paper had been pinned up to the gatehouse stating, in Lady Maxwell's own
+handwriting, that he would be back sometime in the week before Advent
+Sunday. Reminiscences were exchanged of the glorious day when the old
+knight came of age, over forty years ago; of the sports on the green, of
+the quintain-tilting for the gentlefolks, and the archery in the meadow
+behind the church for the vulgar; of the high mass and the dinner that
+followed it. It was rumoured that Mr. Hubert and Mr. Piers had already
+selected the ox that was to be roasted whole, and that materials for the
+bonfire were in process of collection in the woodyard of the home farm.
+
+Sir Nicholas' letters became more and more emphatically underlined and
+incoherent as the days went on, and Lady Maxwell less and less willing
+for Isabel to read them; but the girl often found the old lady hastily
+putting away the thin sheets which she had just taken out to read to
+herself once again, on which her dear lord had scrawled down his very
+heart itself, as if his courting of her were all to do again.
+
+It was not until the Saturday morning that the courier rode in through
+the gatehouse with the news that Sir Nicholas was to be released that
+day, and would be down if possible before nightfall. All the men on the
+estate were immediately called in and sent home to dress themselves; and
+an escort of a dozen grooms and servants led by Hubert and Piers rode out
+at once on the north road, with torches ready for kindling, to meet the
+party and bring them home; and all other preparations were set forward at
+once.
+
+Towards eight o'clock Lady Maxwell was so anxious and restless that
+Isabel slipped out and went down to the gatehouse to look out for herself
+if there were any signs of the approach of the party. She went up to one
+of the little octagonal towers, and looked out towards the green.
+
+It was a clear starlight night, but towards the village all was bathed in
+the dancing ruddy light of the bonfire. It was burning on a little mound
+at the upper end of the green, just below where Isabel stood, and a heavy
+curtain of smoke drifted westwards. As she looked down on it she saw
+against it the tall black posts of the gigantic jack and the slowly
+revolving carcass of the ox; and round about the stirring crowd of the
+village folk, their figures black on this side, luminous on that. She
+could even make out the cassock and square cap of Mr. Bodder as he moved
+among his flock. The rows of houses on either side, bright and clear at
+this end, melted away into darkness at the lower end of the green, where
+on the right the church tower rose up, blotting out the stars, itself
+just touched with ruddy light, and on the top of which, like a large star
+itself, burned the torch of the watcher who was looking out towards the
+north road. There was a ceaseless hum of noise from the green, pierced by
+the shrill cries of the children round the glowing mass of the bonfire,
+but there was no disorder, as the barrels that had been rolled out of the
+Hall cellars that afternoon still stood untouched beneath the Rectory
+garden-wall. Isabel contrasted in her mind this pleasant human tumult
+with the angry roaring she had heard from these same country-folk a few
+months before, when she had followed Lady Maxwell out to the rescue of
+the woman who had injured her; and she wondered at these strange souls,
+who attended a Protestant service, but were so fierce and so genial in
+their defence and welcome of a Catholic squire.
+
+As she thought, there was a sudden movement of the light on the church
+tower; it tossed violently up and down, and a moment later the jubilant
+clangour of the bells broke out. There was a sudden stir in the figures
+on the green, and a burst of cheering rose. Isabel strained her eyes
+northwards, but the road took a turn beyond the church and she could see
+nothing but darkness and low-hung stars and one glimmering window. She
+turned instinctively to the house behind her, and there was the door
+flung wide, and she could make out the figures of the two ladies against
+the brightly lit hall beyond, wrapped like herself, in cloak and hood,
+for the night was frosty and cold.
+
+As she turned once more she heard the clear rattle of trotting hoofs on
+the hard road, and a glow began to be visible at the lower dark end of
+the village. The cheering rose higher, and the bells were all clashing
+together in melodious discord, as in the angle of the road a group of
+tossing torches appeared. Then she could make out the horsemen; three
+riding together, and the others as escort round them. The crowd had
+poured off the grass on to the road by now, and the horses were coming up
+between two shouting gesticulating lines which closed after them as they
+went. Now she could make out the white hair of Sir Nicholas, as he bowed
+bare-headed right and left; and Hubert's feathered cap, on one side of
+him, and Mr. Boyd's black hat on the other. They had passed the bonfire
+now, and were coming up the avenue, the crowds still streaming after
+them, and the church tower bellowing rough music overhead. Isabel leaned
+out over the battlements, and saw beneath her the two old ladies waiting
+just outside the gate by the horse-block; and then she drew back, her
+eyes full of tears, for she saw Sir Nicholas' face as he caught sight of
+his wife.
+
+There was a sudden silence as the horses drew up; and the crowds ceased
+shouting, and when Isabel leaned over again Sir Nicholas was on the
+horse-block, the two ladies immediately behind him, and the people
+pressing forward to hear his voice. It was a very short speech; and
+Isabel overhead could not catch more than detached phrases of it, "for
+the faith"--"my wife and you all"--"home again"--"my son Hubert
+here"--"you and your families"--"the Catholic religion"--"the Queen's
+grace"--"God save her Majesty."
+
+Then again the cheering broke out; and Isabel crossed over to see them
+pass up to the house and to the bright door set wide for them, and even
+as she watched them go up the steps, and Hubert's figure close behind,
+she suddenly dropped her forehead on to the cold battlement, and drew a
+sharp breath or two, for she remembered again what it all meant to him
+and to herself.
+
+
+
+
+                               PART II
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                          ANTHONY IN LONDON
+
+
+The development of a nation is strangely paralleled by the development of
+an individual. There comes in both a period of adolescence, of the
+stirring of new powers, of an increase of strength, of the dawn of new
+ideals, of the awaking of self-consciousness; contours become defined and
+abrupt, awkward and hasty movements succeed to the grace of childhood;
+and there is a curious mingling of refinement and brutality, stupidity
+and tenderness; the will is subject to whims; it is easily roused and not
+so easily quieted. Yet in spite of the attendant discomforts the whole
+period is undeniably one of growth.
+
+The reign of Elizabeth coincided with this stage in the development of
+England. The young vigour was beginning to stir--and Hawkins and Drake
+taught the world that it was so, and that when England stretched herself
+catastrophe abroad must follow. She loved finery and feathers and velvet,
+and to see herself on the dramatic stage and to sing her love-songs
+there, as a growing maid dresses up and leans on her hand and looks into
+her own eyes in the mirror--and Marlowe and Greene and Shakespeare are
+witnesses to it. Yet she loved to hang over the arena too and watch the
+bear-baiting and see the blood and foam and listen to the snarl of the
+hounds, as a lad loves sport and things that minister death. Her policy,
+too, under Elizabeth as her genius, was awkward and ill-considered and
+capricious, and yet strong and successful in the end, as a growing lad,
+while he is clumsier, yet manages to leap higher than a year ago.
+
+And once more, to carry the parallel still further, during the middle
+period of the reign, while the balance of parties and powers remained
+much the same, principles and tendencies began to assert themselves more
+definitely, just as muscles and sinews begin to appear through the round
+contour of the limbs of a growing child.
+
+Thus, from 1571 to 1577, while there was no startling reversal of
+elements in the affairs of England, the entire situation became more
+defined. The various parties, though they scarcely changed in their
+mutual relations, yet continued to develop swiftly along their respective
+lines, growing more pronounced and less inclined to compromise; foreign
+enmities and expectations became more acute; plots against the Queen's
+life more frequent and serious, and the countermining of them under
+Walsingham more patient and skilful; competition and enterprise in trade
+more strenuous; Scottish affairs more complicated; movements of revolt
+and repression in Ireland more violent.
+
+What was true of politics was also true of religious matters, for the two
+were inextricably mingled. The Puritans daily became more clamorous and
+intolerant; their "Exercises" more turbulent, and their demands more
+unreasonable and one-sided. The Papists became at once more numerous and
+more strict; and the Government measures more stern in consequence. The
+act of '71 made it no less a crime than High Treason to reconcile or be
+reconciled to the Church of Rome, to give effect to a Papal Bull, to be
+in possession of any muniments of superstition, or to declare the Queen a
+heretic or schismatic. The Church of England, too, under the wise
+guidance of Parker, had begun to shape her course more and more
+resolutely along the lines of inclusiveness and moderation; to realise
+herself as representing the religious voice of a nation that was widely
+divided on matters of faith; and to attempt to include within her fold
+every individual that was not an absolute fanatic in the Papist or
+Puritan direction.
+
+Thus, in every department, in home and foreign politics, in art and
+literature, and in religious independence, England was rising and shaking
+herself free; the last threads that bound her to the Continent were
+snapped by the Reformation, and she was standing with her soul, as she
+thought, awake and free at last, conscious of her beauty and her
+strength, ready to step out at last before the world, as a dominant and
+imperious power.
+
+Anthony Norris had been arrested, like so many others, by the vision of
+this young country of his, his mother and mistress, who stood there,
+waiting to be served. He had left Cambridge in '73, and for three years
+had led a somewhat aimless life; for his guardian allowed him a generous
+income out of his father's fortune. He had stayed with Hubert in the
+north, had yawned and stretched himself at Great Keynes, had gone to and
+fro among friends' houses, and had at last come to the conclusion, to
+which he was aided by a chorus of advisers, that he was wasting his time.
+
+He had begun then to look round him for some occupation, and in the final
+choice of it his early religious training had formed a large element. It
+had kept alive in him a certain sense of the supernatural, that his
+exuberance of physical life might otherwise have crushed; and now as he
+looked about to see how he could serve his country, he became aware that
+her ecclesiastical character had a certain attraction for him; he had had
+indeed an idea of taking Orders; but he had relinquished this by now,
+though he still desired if he might to serve the National Church in some
+other capacity. There was much in the Church of England to appeal to her
+sons; if there was a lack of unity in her faith and policy, yet that was
+largely out of sight, and her bearing was gallant and impressive. She had
+great wealth, great power and great dignity. The ancient buildings and
+revenues were hers; the civil power was at her disposal, and the Queen
+was eager to further her influence, and to protect her bishops from the
+encroaching power of Parliament, claiming only for the crown the right to
+be the point of union for both the secular and ecclesiastical sections of
+the nation, and to stamp by her royal approval or annul by her veto the
+acts of Parliament and Convocation alike. It seemed then to Anthony's
+eyes that the Church of England had a tremendous destiny before her, as
+the religious voice of the nation that was beginning to make itself so
+dominant in the council of the world, and that there was no limit to the
+influence she might exercise by disciplining the exuberant strength of
+England, and counteracting by her soberness and self-restraint the
+passionate fanaticism of the Latin nations. So little by little in place
+of the shadowy individualism that was all that he knew of religion, there
+rose before him the vision of a living church, who came forth terrible as
+an army with banners, surrounded by all the loyalty that nationalism
+could give her, with the Queen herself as her guardian, and great princes
+and prelates as her supporters, while at the wheels of her splendid car
+walked her hot-blooded chivalrous sons, who served her and spread her
+glories by land and sea, not perhaps chiefly for the sake of her
+spiritual claims, but because she was bone of their bone; and was no less
+zealous than themselves for the name and character of England.
+
+When, therefore, towards the end of '76, Anthony received the offer of a
+position in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury, through the
+recommendation of the father of one of his Cambridge friends, he accepted
+it with real gratitude and enthusiasm.
+
+The post to which he was appointed was that of Gentleman of the Horse.
+His actual duties were not very arduous owing to the special
+circumstances of Archbishop Grindal; and he had a good deal of time to
+himself. Briefly, they were as follows--He had to superintend the Yeoman
+of the Horse, and see that he kept full accounts of all the horses in
+stable or at pasture, and of all the carriages and harness and the like.
+Every morning he had to present himself to the Archbishop and receive
+stable-orders for the day, and to receive from the yeoman accounts of the
+stables. Every month he examined the books of the yeoman before passing
+them on to the steward. His permission too was necessary before any
+guest's or stranger's horse might be cared for in the Lambeth stables.
+
+He was responsible also for all the men and boys connected with the
+stable; to engage them, watch their morals and even the performance of
+their religious duties, and if necessary report them for dismissal to the
+steward of the household. In Archbishop Parker's time this had been a
+busy post, as the state observed at Lambeth and Croydon was very
+considerable; but Grindal was of a more retiring nature, disliking as was
+said, "lordliness"; and although still the household was an immense
+affair, in its elaborateness and splendour beyond almost any but royal
+households of the present day, still Anthony's duties were far from
+heavy. The Archbishop indeed at first dispensed with this office
+altogether, and concentrated all the supervision of the stable on the
+yeoman, and Anthony was the first and only Gentleman of the Horse that
+Archbishop Grindal employed. The disgrace and punishment under which the
+Archbishop fell so early in his archiepiscopate made this particular post
+easier than it would even otherwise have been; as fewer equipages were
+required when the Archbishop was confined to his house, and the
+establishment was yet further reduced.
+
+Ordinarily then his duties were over by eleven o'clock, except when
+special arrangements were to be made. He rose early, waited upon the
+Archbishop by eight o'clock, and received his orders for the day; then
+interviewed the yeoman; sometimes visited the stables to receive
+complaints, and was ready by half-past ten to go to the chapel for the
+morning prayers with the rest of the household. At eleven he dined at the
+Steward's table in the great hall, with the other principal officers of
+the household, the chaplain, the secretaries, and the gentlemen ushers,
+with guests of lesser degree. This great hall with its two entrances at
+the lower end near the gateway, its magnificent hammer-beam roof, its
+daïs, its stained glass, was a worthy place of entertainment, and had
+been the scene of many great feasts and royal visits in the times of
+previous archbishops in favour with the sovereign, and of a splendid
+banquet at the beginning of Grindal's occupancy of the see. Now, however,
+things were changed. There were seldom many distinguished persons to dine
+with the disgraced prelate; and he himself preferred too to entertain
+those who could not repay him again, after the precept of the gospel; and
+besides the provision for the numerous less important guests who dined
+daily at Lambeth, a great tub was set at the lower end of the hall as it
+had been in Parker's time, and every day after dinner under the steward's
+direction was filled with food from the tables, which was afterwards
+distributed at the gate to poor people of the neighbourhood.
+
+After dinner Anthony's time was often his own, until the evening prayers
+at six, followed by supper again spread in the hall. It was necessary for
+him always to sleep in the house, unless leave was obtained from the
+steward. This gentleman, Mr. John Scot, an Esquire, took a fancy to
+Anthony, and was indulgent to him in many ways; and Anthony had, as a
+matter of fact, little difficulty in coming and going as he pleased so
+soon as his morning duties were done.
+
+Lambeth House had been lately restored by Parker, and was now a very
+beautiful and well-kept place. Among other repairs and buildings he had
+re-roofed the great hall that stood just within Morton's gateway; he had
+built a long pier into the Thames where the barge could be entered easily
+even at low tide; he had rebuilt the famous summerhouse of Cranmer's in
+the garden, besides doing many sanitary alterations and repairs; and the
+house was well kept up in Grindal's time.
+
+Anthony soon added a great affection and tenderness to the awe that he
+felt for the Archbishop, who was almost from the first a pathetic and
+touching figure. When Anthony first entered on his duties in November
+'76, he found the Archbishop in his last days of freedom and good favour
+with the Queen. Elizabeth, he soon learnt from the gossip of the
+household, was as determined to put down the Puritan "prophesyings" as
+the popish services; for both alike tended to injure the peace she was
+resolved to maintain. Rumours were flying to and fro; the Archbishop was
+continually going across the water to confer with his friends and the
+Lords of the Council, and messengers came and went all day; and it was
+soon evident that the Archbishop did not mean to yield. It was said that
+his Grace had sent a letter to her Majesty bidding her not to meddle with
+what did not concern her, telling her that she, too, would one day have
+to render account before Christ's tribunal, and warning her of God's
+anger if she persisted.
+
+Her Majesty had sworn like a trooper, a royal page said one day as he
+lounged over the fire in the guard-room, and had declared that if she was
+like Ozeas and Ahab and the rest, as Grindal had said she was, she would
+take care that he, at least, should be like Micaiah the son of Imlah,
+before she had done with him. Then it began to leak out that Elizabeth
+was sending her commands to the bishops direct instead of through their
+Metropolitan; and, as the days went by, it became more and more evident
+that disgrace was beginning to shadow Lambeth. The barges that drew up at
+the watergate were fewer as summer went on, and the long tables in hall
+were more and more deserted; even the Archbishop himself seemed silent
+and cast down. Anthony used to watch him from his window going up and
+down the little walled garden that looked upon the river, with his hands
+clasped behind him and his black habit gathered up in them, and his chin
+on his breast. He would be longer than ever too in chapel after the
+morning prayer, and the company would wait and wonder in the anteroom
+till his Grace came in and gave the signal for dinner. And at last the
+blow fell.
+
+On one day in June, Anthony, who had been on a visit to Isabel at Great
+Keynes, returned to Lambeth in time for morning prayer and dinner just
+before the gates were shut by the porter, having ridden up early with a
+couple of grooms. There seemed to him to be an air of constraint abroad
+as the guests and members of the household gathered for dinner. There
+were no guests of high dignity that day, and the Archbishop sat at his
+own table silent and apart. Anthony, from his place at the steward's
+table, noticed that he ate very sparingly, and that he appeared even more
+preoccupied and distressed than usual. His short-sighted eyes, kind and
+brown, surrounded by wrinkles from his habit of peering closely at
+everything, seemed full of sadness and perplexity, and his hand fumbled
+with his bread continually. Anthony did not like to ask anything of his
+neighbours, as there were one or two strangers dining at the steward's
+table that day; and the moment dinner was over, and grace had been said
+and the Archbishop retired with his little procession preceded by a white
+wand, an usher came running back to tell Master Norris that his Grace
+desired to see him at once in the inner cloister.
+
+Anthony hastened round through the court between the hall and the river,
+and found the Archbishop walking up and down in his black habit with the
+round flapped cap, that, as a Puritan, he preferred to the square
+head-dress of the more ecclesiastically-minded clergy, still looking
+troubled and cast down, continually stroking his dark forked beard, and
+talking to one of his secretaries. Anthony stood at a little distance at
+the open side of the court near the river, cap in hand, waiting till the
+Archbishop should beckon him. The two went up and down in the shade in
+the open court outside the cloisters, where the pump stood, and where the
+pulpit had been erected for the Queen's famous visit to his predecessor;
+when she had sat in a gallery over the cloister and heard the chaplain's
+sermon. On the north rose up the roof of the chapel. The cloisters
+themselves were poor buildings--little more than passages with a
+continuous row of square windows running along them the height of a man's
+head.
+
+After a few minutes the secretary left the Archbishop with an obeisance,
+and hastened into the house through the cloister, and presently the
+Archbishop, after a turn or two more with the same grave air, peered
+towards Anthony and then called him.
+
+Anthony immediately came towards him and received orders that half a
+dozen horses with grooms should be ready as soon as possible, who were to
+receive orders from Mr. Richard Frampton, the secretary; and that three
+or four horses more were to be kept saddled till seven o'clock that
+evening in case further messages were wanted.
+
+"And I desire you, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop, "to let the men
+under your charge know that their master is in trouble with the Queen's
+Grace; and that they can serve him best by being prompt and obedient."
+
+Anthony bowed to the Archbishop, and was going to withdraw, but the
+Archbishop went on:
+
+"I will tell you," he said, "for your private ear only at present, that I
+have received an order this day from my Lords of the Council, bidding me
+to keep to my house for six months; and telling me that I am sequestered
+by the Queen's desire. I know not how this will end, but the cause is
+that I will not do her Grace's will in the matter of the Exercises, as I
+wrote to tell her so; and I am determined, by God's grace, not to yield
+in this thing; but to govern the charge committed to me as He gives me
+light. That is all, Mr. Norris."
+
+The whole household was cast into real sorrow by the blow that had fallen
+at last on the master; he was "loving and grateful to servants"; and was
+free and liberal in domestic matters, and it needed only a hint that he
+was in trouble, for his officers and servants to do their utmost for him.
+
+Anthony's sympathy was further aroused by the knowledge that the Papists,
+too, hated the old man, and longed to injure him. There had been a great
+increase of Catholics this year; the Archbishop of York had reported that
+"a more stiff-necked, wilful, or obstinate people did he never hear of";
+and from Hereford had come a lament that conformity itself was a mockery,
+as even the Papists that attended church were a distraction when they got
+there, and John Hareley was instanced as "reading so loud upon his Latin
+popish primer (that he understands not) that he troubles both minister
+and people." In November matters were so serious that the Archbishop felt
+himself obliged to take steps to chastise the recusants; and in December
+came the news of the execution of Cuthbert Maine at Launceston in
+Cornwall.
+
+How much the Catholics resented this against the Archbishop was brought
+to Anthony's notice a day or two later. He was riding back for morning
+prayer after an errand in Battersea, one frosty day, and had just come in
+sight of Morton's Gateway, when he observed a man standing by it, who
+turned and ran, on hearing the horse's footsteps, past Lambeth Church and
+disappeared in the direction of the meadows behind Essex House. Anthony
+checked his horse, doubtful whether to follow or not, but decided to see
+what it was that the man had left pinned to the door. He rode up and
+detached it, and found it was a violent and scurrilous attack upon the
+Archbishop for his supposed share in the death of the two Papists. It
+denounced him as a "bloody pseudo-minister," compared him to Pilate, and
+bade him "look to his congregation of lewd and profane persons that he
+named the Church of England," for that God would avenge the blood of his
+saints speedily upon their murderers.
+
+Anthony carried it into the hall, and after showing it to Mr. Scot, put
+it indignantly into the fire. The steward raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Why so, Master Norris?" he asked.
+
+"Why," said Anthony sharply, "you would not have me frame it, and show to
+my lord."
+
+"I am not sure," said the other, "if you desire to injure the Papists.
+Such foul nonsense is their best condemnation. It is best to keep
+evidence against a traitor, not destroy it. Besides, we might have caught
+the knave, and now we cannot," he added, looking at the black shrivelling
+sheet half regretfully.
+
+"It is a mystery to me," said Anthony, "how there can be Papists."
+
+"Why, they hate England," said the steward, briefly, as the bell rang for
+morning prayer. As Anthony followed him along the gallery, he thought
+half guiltily of Sir Nicholas and his lady, and wondered whether that was
+true of them. But he had no doubt that it was true of Catholics as a
+class; they had ceased to be English; the cause of the Pope and the Queen
+were irreconcilable; and so the whole incident added more fuel to the hot
+flame of patriotism and loyalty that burnt so bright in the lad's soul.
+
+But it was fanned yet higher by a glimpse he had of Court-life; and he
+owed it to Mary Corbet whom he had only seen momentarily in public once
+or twice, and never to speak to since her visit to Great Keynes over six
+years ago. He had blushed privately and bitten his lip a good many times
+in the interval, when he thought of his astonishing infatuation, and yet
+the glamour had never wholly faded; and his heart quickened perceptibly
+when he opened a note one day, brought by a royal groom, that asked him
+to come that very afternoon if he could, to Whitehall Palace, where
+Mistress Corbet would be delighted to see him and renew their
+acquaintance.
+
+As he came, punctual to the moment, into the gallery overlooking the
+tilt-yard, the afternoon sun was pouring in through the oriel window, and
+the yard beyond seemed all a haze of golden light and dust. He heard an
+exclamation, as he paused, dazzled, and the servant closed the door
+behind him; and there came forward to him in the flood of glory, the same
+resplendent figure, all muslin and jewels, that he remembered so well,
+with the radiant face, looking scarcely older, with the same dancing eyes
+and scarlet lips. All the old charm seemed to envelop him in a moment as
+he saluted her with all the courtesy of which he was capable.
+
+"Ah!" she cried, "how happy I am to see you again--those dear days at
+Great Keynes!" And she took both his hands with such ardour that poor
+Anthony was almost forced to think that he had never been out of her
+thoughts since.
+
+"How can I serve you, Mistress Corbet?" he asked.
+
+"Serve me? Why, by talking to me, and telling me of the country. What
+does the lad mean? Come and sit here," she said, and she drew him to the
+window seat.
+
+Anthony looked out into the shining haze of the tilt-yard. Some one with
+a long pole was struggling violently on the back of a horse, jerking the
+reins and cursing audibly.
+
+"Look at that fool," said Mary, "he thinks his horse as great a dolt as
+himself. Chris, Chris," she screamed through her hands--"you sodden ass;
+be quieter with the poor beast--soothe him, soothe him. He doesn't know
+what you want of him with your foul temper and your pole going like a
+windmill about his ears."
+
+The cursing and jerking ceased, and a red furious face with thick black
+beard and hair looked up. But before the rider could speak, Mary went on
+again:
+
+"There now, Chris, he is as quiet as a sheep again. Now take him at it."
+
+"What does he want?" asked Anthony. "I can scarcely see for the dust."
+
+"Why, he's practising at the quintain;--ah! ah!" she cried out again, as
+the quintain was missed and swung round with a hard buffet on the man's
+back as he tore past. "Going to market, Chris? You've got a sturdy
+shepherd behind you. Baa, baa, black sheep."
+
+"Who's that?" asked Anthony, as the tall horseman, as if driven by the
+storm of contumely from the window, disappeared towards the stable.
+
+"Why that's Chris Hatton--whom the Queen calls her sheep, and he's as
+silly as one, too, with his fool's face and his bleat and his great eyes.
+He trots about after her Grace, too, like a pet lamb. Bah! I'm sick of
+him. That's enough of the ass; tell me about Isabel."
+
+Then they fell to talking about Isabel; and Mary eyed him as he answered
+her questions.
+
+"Then she isn't a Papist, yet?" she asked.
+
+Anthony's face showed such consternation that she burst out laughing.
+
+"There, there, there!" she cried. "No harm's done. Then that tall lad,
+who was away last time I was there--well, I suppose he's not turned
+Protestant?"
+
+Anthony's face was still more bewildered.
+
+"Why, my dear lad," she said, "where are your eyes?"
+
+"Mistress Corbet," he burst out at last, "I do not know what you mean.
+Hubert has been in Durham for years. There is no talk----" and he
+stopped.
+
+Mary's face became sedate again.
+
+"Well, well," she said, "I always was a tattler. It seems I am wrong
+again. Forgive me, Master Anthony."
+
+Anthony was indeed astonished at her fantastic idea. Of course he knew
+that Hubert had once been fond of Isabel, but that was years ago, when
+they had been all children together. Why, he reflected, he too had been
+foolish once--and he blushed a little.
+
+Then they went on to talk of Great Keynes, Sir Nicholas, and Mr.
+Stewart's arrest and death; and Mary asked Anthony to excuse her interest
+in such matters, but Papistry had always been her religion, and what
+could a poor girl do but believe what she was taught? Then they went on
+to speak of more recent affairs, and Mary made him describe to her his
+life at Lambeth, and everything he did from the moment he got up to the
+moment he went to bed again; and whether the Archbishop was a kind
+master, and how long they spent at prayers, and how many courses they had
+at dinner; and Anthony grew more and more animated and confidential--she
+was so friendly and interested and pretty, as she leaned towards him and
+questioned and listened, and the faint scent of violet from her dress
+awakened his old memories of her.
+
+And then at last she approached the subject on which she had chiefly
+wished to see him--which was that he should speak to the steward at
+Lambeth on behalf of a young man who was to be dismissed, it seemed, from
+the Archbishop's service, because his sister had lately turned Papist and
+fled to a convent abroad. It was a small matter; and Anthony readily
+promised to do his best, and, if necessary, to approach the Archbishop
+himself: and Mistress Corbet was profusely grateful.
+
+They had hardly done talking of the matter, when a trumpet blew suddenly
+somewhere away behind the building they were in. Mary held up a white
+finger and put her head on one side.
+
+"That will be the Ambassador," she said.
+
+Anthony looked at her interrogatively.
+
+"Why, you country lad!" she said, "come and see."
+
+She jumped up, and he followed her down the gallery, and along through
+interminable corridors and ante-chambers, and up and down the stairs of
+this enormous palace; and Anthony grew bewildered and astonished as he
+went at the doors on all sides, and the roofs that ranged themselves
+every way as he looked out. And at last Mary stopped at a window, and
+pointed out.
+
+The courtyard beneath was alive with colour and movement. In front of the
+entrance opposite waited the great gilded state carriage, and another was
+just driving away. On one side a dozen ladies on grey horses were drawn
+up, to follow behind the Queen when she should come out; and a double row
+of liveried servants were standing bare-headed round the empty carriage.
+The rest of the court was filled with Spanish and English nobles,
+mounted, with their servants on foot; all alike in splendid costumes--the
+Spaniards with rich chains about their necks, and tall broad-brimmed hats
+decked with stones and pearls, and the Englishmen in feathered buckled
+caps and short cloaks thrown back. Two or three trumpeters stood on the
+steps of the porch. Anthony did not see much state at Lambeth, and the
+splendour and gaiety of this seething courtyard exhilarated him, and he
+stared down at it all, fascinated, while Mary Corbet poured out a caustic
+commentary:
+
+"There is the fat fool Chris again, all red with his tilting. I would
+like to baa at him again, but I dare not with all these foreign folk.
+There is Leicester, that tall man with a bald forehead in the cap with
+the red feather, on the white horse behind the carriage--he always keeps
+close to the Queen. He is the enemy of your prelate, Master Anthony, you
+know.... That is Oxford, just behind him on the chestnut. Yes, look well
+at him. He is the prince of the tilt-yard; none can stand against him.
+You would say he was at his nine-pins, when he rides against them all....
+And he can do more than tilt. These sweet-washed gloves"--and she flapped
+an embroidered pair before Anthony--"these he brought to England. God
+bless and reward him for it!" she added fervently.... "I do not see
+Burghley. Eh! but he is old and gouty these days; and loves a cushion and
+a chair and a bit of flannel better than to kneel before her Grace. You
+know, she allows him to sit when he confers with her. But then, she is
+ever prone to show mercy to bearded persons.... Ah! there is dear Sidney;
+that is a sweet soul. But what does he do here among the stones and
+mortar when he has the beeches of Penshurst to walk beneath. He is not so
+wise as I thought him.... But I must say I grow weary of his nymphs and
+his airs of Olympus. And for myself, I do not see that Flora and
+Phoebus and Maia and the rest are a great gain, instead of Our Lady and
+Saint Christopher and the court of heaven. But then I am a Papist and not
+a heathen, and therefore blind and superstitious. Is that not so, Master
+Anthony?... And there is Maitland beside him, with the black velvet cap
+and the white feather, and his cross eyes and mouth. Now I wish he were
+at Penshurst, or Bath--or better still, at Jericho, for it is further
+off. I cannot bear that fellow.... Why, Sussex is going on the water,
+too, I see. Now what brings him here? I should have thought his affairs
+gave him enough to think of.... There he is, with his groom behind him,
+on the other chestnut. I am astonished at him. He is all for this French
+marriage, you know. So you may figure to yourself Mendoza's love for him!
+They will be like two cats together on the barge; spitting and snarling
+softly at one another. Her Grace loves to balance folk like that; first
+one stretches his claws, and then the other; then one arches his back and
+snarls, and the other scratches his face for him; and then when all is
+flying fur and blasphemy, off slips her Grace and does what she will."
+
+It was an astonishing experience for Anthony. He had stepped out from his
+workaday life among the grooms and officers and occasional glimpses of
+his lonely old master, into an enchanted region, where great personages
+whose very names were luminous with fame, now lived and breathed and
+looked cheerful or sullen before his very eyes; and one who knew them in
+their daily life stood by him and commented and interpreted them for him.
+He listened and stared, dazed with the strangeness of it all.
+
+Mistress Corbet was proceeding to express her views upon the foreign
+element that formed half the pageant, when the shrill music broke out
+again in the palace, and the trumpeters on the steps took it up; and a
+stir and bustle began. Then out of the porch began to stream a
+procession, like a river of colour and jewels, pouring from the foot of
+the carved and windowed wall, and eddying in a tumbled pool about the
+great gilt carriage;--ushers and footmen and nobles and ladies and pages
+in bewildering succession. Anthony pressed his forehead to the glass as
+he watched, with little exclamations, and Mary watched him, amused and
+interested by his enthusiasm.
+
+And last moved the great canopy bending and swaying under the doorway,
+and beneath it, like two gorgeous butterflies, at the sight of whom all
+the standing world fell on its knees, came the pale Elizabeth with her
+auburn hair, and the brown-faced Mendoza, side by side; and entered the
+carriage with the five plumes atop and the caparisoned horses that
+stamped and tossed their jingling heads. The yard was already emptying
+fast, _en route_ for Chelsea Stairs; and as soon as the two were seated,
+the shrill trumpets blew again, and the halberdiers moved off with the
+carriage in the midst, the great nobles going before, and the ladies
+behind. The later comers mounted as quickly as possible, as their horses
+were brought in from the stable entrance, and clattered away, and in five
+minutes the yard was empty, except for a few sentries at their posts, and
+a servant or two lounging at the doorway; and as Anthony still stared at
+the empty pavement and the carpeted steps, far away from the direction of
+the Abbey came the clear call of the horns to tell the loyal folk that
+the Queen was coming.
+
+It was a great inspiration for Anthony. He had seen world-powers
+incarnate below him in the glittering rustling figure of the Queen, and
+the dark-eyed courtly Ambassador in his orders and jewels at her side.
+There they had sat together in one carriage; the huge fiery realm of the
+south, whose very name was redolent with passion and adventure and
+boundless wealth; and the little self-contained northern kingdom, now
+beginning to stretch its hands, and quiver all along its tingling sinews
+and veins with fresh adolescent life. And Anthony knew that he was one of
+the cells of this young organism; and that in him as well as in Elizabeth
+and this sparkling creature at his side ran the fresh red blood of
+England. They were all one in the possession of a common life; and his
+heart burned as he thought of it.
+
+After he had parted from Mary he rode back to Westminster, and crossed
+the river by the horse-ferry that plied there. And even as he landed and
+got his beast, with a deal of stamping and blowing, off the echoing
+boards on to the clean gravel again, there came down the reaches of the
+river the mellow sound of music across a mile of water, mingled with the
+deep rattle of oars, and sparkles of steel and colour glittered from the
+far-away royal barges in the autumn sunshine; and the lad thought with
+wonder how the two great powers so savagely at war upon the salt sea,
+were at peace here, sitting side by side on silken cushions and listening
+to the same trumpets of peace upon the flowing river.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER II
+
+                          SOME NEW LESSONS
+
+
+The six years that followed Sir Nicholas' return and Hubert's departure
+for the North had passed uneventfully at Great Keynes. The old knight had
+been profoundly shocked that any Catholic, especially an agent so
+valuable as Mr. Stewart, should have found his house a death-trap; and
+although he continued receiving his friends and succouring them, he did
+so with more real caution and less ostentation of it. His religious zeal
+and discretion were further increased by the secret return to the "Old
+Religion" of several of his villagers during the period; and a very fair
+congregation attended Mass so often as it was said in the cloister wing
+of the Hall. The new rector, like his predecessor, was content to let the
+squire alone; and unlike him had no wife to make trouble.
+
+Then, suddenly, in the summer of '77, catastrophes began, headed by the
+unexpected return of Hubert, impatient of waiting, and with new plans in
+his mind.
+
+Isabel had been out with Mistress Margaret walking in the dusk one August
+evening after supper, on the raised terrace beneath the yews. They had
+been listening to the loud snoring of the young owls in the ivy on the
+chimney-stack opposite, and had watched the fierce bird slide silently
+out of the gloom, white against the blackness, and disappear down among
+the meadows. Once Isabel had seen him pause, too, on one of his return
+journeys, suspicious of the dim figures beneath, silhouetted on a branch
+against the luminous green western sky, with the outline of a mouse with
+its hanging tail plain in his crooked claws, before he glided to his nest
+again. As Isabel waited she heard the bang of the garden-door, but gave
+it no thought, and a moment after Mistress Margaret asked her to fetch a
+couple of wraps from the house for them both, as the air had a touch of
+chill in it. She came down the lichened steps, crossed the lawn, and
+passed into the unlighted hall. As she entered, the door opposite opened,
+and for a moment she saw the silhouette of a man's figure against the
+bright passage beyond. Her heart suddenly leapt, and stood still.
+
+"Anthony!" she whispered, in a hush of suspense.
+
+There was a vibration and a step beside her.
+
+"Isabel!" said Hubert's voice. And then his arms closed round her for the
+first time in her life. She struggled and panted a moment as she felt his
+breath on her face; and he released her. She recoiled to the door, and
+stood there silent and panting.
+
+"Oh! Isabel!" he whispered; and again, "Isabel!"
+
+She put out her hand and grasped the door-post behind her.
+
+"Oh! Hubert! Why have you come?"
+
+He came a step nearer and she could see the faint whiteness of his face
+in the western glimmer.
+
+"I cannot wait," he said, "I have been nearly beside myself. I have left
+the north--and I cannot wait so long."
+
+"Well?" she said; and he heard the note of entreaty and anxiety in her
+voice.
+
+"I have my plans," he answered; "I will tell you to-morrow. Where is my
+aunt?"
+
+Isabel heard a step on the gravel outside.
+
+"She is coming," she said sharply. Hubert melted into the dark, and she
+saw the opposite door open and let him out.
+
+The next day Hubert announced his plans to Sir Nicholas, and a conflict
+followed.
+
+"I cannot go on, sir," he said, "I cannot wait for ever. I am treated
+like a servant, too; and you know how miserably I am paid, I have obeyed
+you for six years, sir; and now I have thrown up the post and told my
+lord to his face that I can bear with him no longer."
+
+Sir Nicholas' face, as he sat in his upright chair opposite the boy, grew
+flushed with passion.
+
+"It is your accursed temper, sir," he said violently. "I know you of old.
+Wait? For what? For the Protestant girl? I told you to put that from your
+mind, sir."
+
+Hubert did not propose as yet to let his father into all his plans.
+
+"I have not spoken her name, sir, I think. I say I cannot wait for my
+fortune; I may be impatient, sir--I do not deny it."
+
+"Then how do you propose to better it?" sneered his father.
+
+"In November," said Hubert steadily, looking his father in the eyes, "I
+sail with Mr. Drake."
+
+Sir Nicholas' face grew terrific. He rose, and struck the table twice
+with his clenched fist.
+
+"Then, by God, sir, Mr. Drake may have you now."
+
+Hubert's face grew white with anger; but he had his temper under control.
+
+"Then I wish you good-day, sir," and he left the room.
+
+When the boy had left the house again for London, as he did the same
+afternoon, Lady Maxwell tried to soothe the old man. It was impossible,
+even for her, to approach him before.
+
+"Sweetheart," she said tranquilly, as he sat and glowered at his plate
+when supper was over and the men had left the room, "sweetheart, we must
+have Hubert down here again. He must not sail with Mr. Drake."
+
+The old man's face flared up again in anger.
+
+"He may follow his own devices," he cried. "I care not what he does. He
+has given up the post that I asked for him; and he comes striding and
+ruffling home with his hat cocked and--and----"; his voice became
+inarticulate.
+
+"He is only a boy, sweetheart; with a boy's hot blood--you would sooner
+have him like that than a milk-sop. Besides--he is our boy."
+
+The old man growled. His wife went on:
+
+"And now that James cannot have the estate, he must have it, as you know,
+and carry on the old name."
+
+"He has disgraced it," burst out the angry old man, "and he is going now
+with that damned Protestant to harry Catholics. By the grace of God I
+love my country, and would serve her Grace with my heart's blood--but
+that my boy should go with Drake----!" and again his voice failed.
+
+It was a couple of days before she could obtain her husband's leave to
+write a conciliatory letter, giving leave to Hubert to go with Drake, if
+he had made any positive engagement (because, as she represented to Sir
+Nicholas, there was nothing actually wrong or disloyal to the Faith in
+it)--but entreating him with much pathos not to leave his old parents so
+bitterly.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"Oh, my dear son," the end of the letter ran, "your father is old; and
+God, in whose hand are our days, alone knows how long he will live; and
+I, too, my son, am old. So come back to us and be our dear child again.
+You must not think too hardly of your father's words to you; he is quick
+and hot, as you are, too--but indeed we love you dearly. Your room here
+is ready for you; and Piers wants a firm hand now over him, as your
+father is so old. So come back, my darling, and make our old hearts glad
+again."
+
+But the weeks passed by, and no answer came, and the old people's hearts
+grew sick with suspense; and then, at last, in September the courier
+brought a letter, written from Plymouth, which told the mother that it
+was too late; that he had in fact engaged himself to Mr. Drake in August
+before he had come to Great Keynes at all; and that in honour he must
+keep his engagement. He asked pardon of his father for his hastiness; but
+it seemed a cold and half-hearted sorrow; and the letter ended by
+announcing that the little fleet would sail in November; and that at
+present they were busy fitting the ships and engaging the men; and that
+there would be no opportunity for him to return to wish them good-bye
+before he sailed. It was plain that the lad was angry still.
+
+Sir Nicholas did not say much; but a silence fell on the house. Lady
+Maxwell sent for Isabel, and they had a long interview. The old lady was
+astonished at the girl's quietness and resignation.
+
+Yes, she said, she loved Hubert with all her heart. She had loved him for
+a long while. No, she was not angry, only startled. What would she do
+about the difference in religion? Could she marry him while one was a
+Catholic and the other a Protestant? No, they would never be happy like
+that; and she did not know what she would do. She supposed she would wait
+and see. Yes, she would wait and see; that was all that could be
+done.--And then had come a silent burst of tears, and the girl had sunk
+down on her knees and hidden her face in the old lady's lap, and the
+wrinkled jewelled old hand passed quietly over the girl's black hair; but
+no more had been said, and Isabel presently got up and went home to the
+Dower House.
+
+The autumn went by, and November came, and there was no further word from
+Hubert. Then towards the end of November a report reached them from
+Anthony at Lambeth that the fleet had sailed; but had put back into
+Falmouth after a terrible storm in the Channel. And hope just raised its
+head.
+
+Then one evening after supper Sir Nicholas complained of fever and
+restlessness, and went early to bed. In the night he was delirious.
+Mistress Margaret hastened up at midnight from the Dower House, and a
+groom galloped off to Lindfield before morning to fetch the doctor, and
+another to fetch Mr. Barnes, the priest, from Cuckfield. Sir Nicholas was
+bled to reduce the fever of the pneumonia that had attacked him. All day
+long he was sinking. About eleven o'clock that night he fell asleep,
+apparently, and Lady Maxwell, who had watched incessantly, was persuaded
+to lie down; but at three o'clock in the morning, on the first of
+December, Mistress Margaret awakened her, and together they knelt by the
+bedside of the old man. The priest, who had anointed him on the previous
+evening, knelt behind, repeating the prayers for the dying.
+
+Sir Nicholas lay on his back, supported by pillows, under the gloom of
+the black old four-posted bed. A wood-fire glowed on the hearth, and the
+air was fragrant with the scent of the burning cedar-logs. A crucifix was
+in the old man's hands; but his eyes were bright with fever, and his
+fingers every now and then relaxed, and then tightened their hold again
+on the cool silver of the figure of the crucified Saviour. His lips were
+moving tremulously, and his ruddy old face was pale now.
+
+The priest's voice went on steadily; the struggle was beginning.
+
+"_Proficiscere, anima christiana, de hoc mundo_.--Go forth, Christian
+soul, from this world in the name of God the Father Almighty, who created
+thee; in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who suffered
+for thee; in the name of the Holy Ghost, who was shed forth upon thee; In
+the name of Angels and Archangels; in the name of Thrones and Dominions;
+in the name of Principalities and Powers----"
+
+Suddenly the old man, whose head had been slowly turning from side to
+side, ceased his movement, and his open mouth closed; he was looking
+steadily at his wife, and a look of recognition came back to his eyes.
+
+"Sweetheart," he said; and smiled, and died.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Isabel did not see much of Mistress Margaret for the next few days; she
+was constantly with her sister, and when she came to the Dower House now
+and then, said little to the girl. There were curious rumours in the
+village; strangers came and went continually, and there was a vast
+congregation at the funeral, when the body of the old knight was laid to
+rest in the Maxwell chapel. The following day the air of mystery
+deepened; and young Mrs. Melton whispered to Isabel, with many glances
+and becks, that she and her man had seen lights through the chapel
+windows at three o'clock that morning. Isabel went into the chapel
+presently to visit the grave, and there was a new smear of black on the
+east wall as if a taper had been set too near.
+
+The courier who had been despatched to announce to Hubert that his father
+had died and left him master of the Hall and estate, with certain
+conditions, returned at the end of the month with the news that the fleet
+had sailed again on the thirteenth, and that Hubert was gone with it; so
+Lady Maxwell, now more silent and retired than ever, for the present
+retained her old position and Mr. Piers took charge of the estate.
+
+Although Isabel outwardly was very little changed in the last six years,
+great movements had been taking place in her soul, and if Hubert had only
+known the state of the case, possibly he would not have gone so hastily
+with Mr. Drake.
+
+The close companionship of such an one as Mistress Margaret was doing its
+almost inevitable work; and the girl had been learning that behind the
+brilliant and even crude surface of the Catholic practice, there lay
+still and beautiful depths of devotion which she had scarcely dreamed of.
+The old nun's life was a revelation to Isabel; she heard from her bed in
+the black winter mornings her footsteps in the next room, and soon learnt
+that Mistress Margaret spent at least two hours in prayer before she
+appeared at all. Two or three times in the day she knew that she retired
+again for the same purpose, and again an hour after she was in bed, there
+were the same gentle movements next door. She began to discover, too,
+that for the Catholic, as well as for the Puritan, the Person of the
+Saviour was the very heart of religion; that her own devotion to Christ
+was a very languid flame by the side of the ardent inarticulate passion
+of this soul who believed herself His wedded spouse; and that the worship
+of the saints and the Blessed Mother instead of distracting the love of
+the Christian soul rather seemed to augment it. The King of Love stood,
+as she fancied sometimes, to Catholic eyes, in a glow of ineffable
+splendour; and the faces of His adoring Court reflected the ruddy glory
+on all sides; thus refracting the light of their central Sun, instead of,
+as she had thought, obscuring it.
+
+Other difficulties, too, began to seem oddly unreal and intangible, when
+she had looked at them in the light of Mistress Margaret's clear old eyes
+and candid face. It was a real event in her inner life when she first
+began to understand what the rosary meant to Catholics. Mistress Corbet
+had told her what was the actual use of the beads; and how the mysteries
+of Christ's life and death were to be pondered over as the various
+prayers were said; but it had hitherto seemed to Isabel as if this method
+were an elaborate and superstitious substitute for reading the inspired
+record of the New Testament.
+
+She had been sitting out in the little walled garden in front of the
+Dower House one morning on an early summer day after her father's death,
+and Mistress Margaret had come out in her black dress and stood for a
+moment looking at her irresolutely, framed in the dark doorway. Then she
+had come slowly across the grass, and Isabel had seen for the first time
+in her fingers a string of ivory beads. Mistress Margaret sat down on a
+garden chair a little way from her, and let her hands sink into her lap,
+still holding the beads. Isabel said nothing, but went on reading.
+Presently she looked up again, and the old lady's eyes were half-closed,
+and her lips just moving; and the beads passing slowly through her
+fingers. She looked almost like a child dreaming, in spite of her
+wrinkles and her snowy hair; the pale light of a serene soul lay on her
+face. This did not look like the mechanical performance that Isabel had
+always associated with the idea of beads. So the minutes passed away;
+every time that Isabel looked up there was the little white face with the
+long lashes lying on the cheek, and the crown of snowy hair and lace, and
+the luminous look of a soul in conscious communion with the unseen.
+
+When the old lady had finished, she twisted the beads about her fingers
+and opened her eyes. Isabel had an impulse to speak.
+
+"Mistress Margaret," she said, "may I ask you something?"
+
+"Of course, my darling," the old lady said.
+
+"I have never seen you use those before--I cannot understand them."
+
+"What is it," asked the old lady, "that you don't understand?"
+
+"How can prayers said over and over again like that be any good?"
+
+Mistress Margaret was silent for a moment.
+
+"I saw young Mrs. Martin last week," she said, "with her little girl in
+her lap. Amy had her arms round her mother's neck, and was being rocked
+to and fro; and every time she rocked she said 'Oh, mother.'"
+
+"But then," said Isabel, after a moment's silence, "she was only a
+child."
+
+"'Except ye become like little children--'" quoted Mistress Margaret
+softly--"you see, my Isabel, we are nothing more than children with God
+and His Blessed Mother. To say 'Hail Mary, Hail Mary,' is the best way of
+telling her how much we love her. And then this string of beads is like
+Our Lady's girdle, and her children love to finger it, and whisper to
+her. And then we say our paternosters, too; and all the while we are
+talking she is shewing us pictures of her dear Child, and we look at all
+the great things He did for us, one by one; and then we turn the page and
+begin again."
+
+"I see," said Isabel; and after a moment or two's silence Mistress
+Margaret got up and went into the house.
+
+The girl sat still with her hands clasped round her knee. How strange and
+different this religion was to the fiery gospel she had heard last year
+at Northampton from the harsh stern preacher, at whose voice a veil
+seemed to rend and show a red-hot heaven behind! How tender and simple
+this was--like a blue summer's sky with drifting clouds! If only it was
+true! If only there were a great Mother whose girdle was of beads strung
+together, which dangled into every Christian's hands; whose face bent
+down over every Christian's bed; and whose mighty and tender arms that
+had held her Son and God were still stretched out beneath her other
+children. And Isabel, whose soul yearned for a mother, sighed as she
+reminded herself that there was but "one Mediator between God and
+man--the man, Christ Jesus."
+
+And so the time went by, like an outgoing tide, silent and steady. The
+old nun did not talk much to the girl about dogmatic religion, for she
+was in a difficult position. She was timid certainly of betraying her
+faith by silence, but she was also timid of betraying her trust by
+speech. Sometimes she felt she had gone too far, sometimes not far
+enough; but on the whole her practice was never to suggest questions, but
+only to answer them when Isabel asked; and to occupy herself with
+affirmative rather than with destructive criticism. More than this she
+hesitated to do out of honour for the dead; less than this she dared not
+do out of love for God and Isabel. But there were three or four
+conversations that she felt were worth waiting for; and the look on
+Isabel's face afterwards, and the sudden questions she would ask
+sometimes after a fit of silence, made her friend's heart quicken towards
+her, and her prayers more fervent.
+
+The two were sitting together one December day in Isabel's upstairs room
+and the girl, who had just come in from a solitary walk, was half
+kneeling on the window-seat and drumming her fingers softly on the panes
+as she looked out at the red western sky.
+
+"I used to think," she said, "that Catholics had no spiritual life; but
+now it seems to me that in comparison we Puritans have none. You know so
+much about the soul, as to what is from God and what from the Evil One;
+and we have to grope for ourselves. And yet our Saviour said that His
+sheep should know His voice. I do not understand it." And she turned
+towards Mistress Margaret who had laid down her work and was listening.
+
+"Dear child," she said, "if you mean our priests and spiritual writers,
+it is because they study it. We believe in the science of the soul; and
+we consult our spiritual guides for our soul's health, as the leech for
+our body's health."
+
+"But why must you ask the priest, if the Lord speaks to all alike?"
+
+"He speaks through the priest, my dear, as He does through the
+physician."
+
+"But why should the priest know better than the people?" pursued Isabel,
+intent on her point.
+
+"Because he tells us what the Church says," said the other smiling, "it
+is his business. He need not be any better or cleverer in other respects.
+The baker may be a thief or a foolish fellow; but his bread is good."
+
+"But how do you know," went on Isabel, who thought Mistress Margaret a
+little slow to see her point--"how do you know that the Church is right?"
+
+The old nun considered a moment, and then lifted her embroidery again.
+
+"Why do you think," she asked, beginning to sew, "that each single soul
+that asks God's guidance is right?"
+
+"Because the Holy Ghost is promised to such," said Isabel wondering.
+
+"Then is it not likely," went on the other still stitching, "that the
+millions of souls who form Holy Church are right, when they all agree
+together?" Isabel moved a little impatiently.
+
+"You see," went on Mistress Margaret, "that is what we Catholics believe
+our Saviour meant when He said that the gates of hell should not prevail
+against His Church."
+
+But Isabel was not content. She broke in:
+
+"But why are not the Scriptures sufficient? They are God's Word."
+
+The other put down her embroidery again, and smiled up into the girl's
+puzzled eyes.
+
+"Well, my child," she said, "do they seem sufficient, when you look at
+Christendom now? If they are so clear, how is it that you have the
+Lutherans, and the Anabaptists, and the Family of Love, and the
+Calvinists, and the Church of England, all saying they hold to the
+Scriptures alone. Nay, nay; the Scriptures are the grammar, and the
+Church is the dame that teaches out of it, and she knows so well much
+that is not in the grammar, and we name that tradition. But where there
+is no dame to teach, the children soon fall a-fighting about the book and
+the meaning of it."
+
+Isabel looked at Mistress Margaret a moment, and then turned back again
+to the window in silence.
+
+At another time they had a word or two about Peter's prerogatives.
+
+"Surely," said Isabel suddenly, as they walked together in the garden,
+"Christ is the one Foundation of the Church, St. Paul tells us so
+expressly."
+
+"Yes, my dear," said the nun, "but then Christ our Lord said: 'Thou art
+Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.' So he who is the only
+Good Shepherd, said to Peter, 'Feed My sheep'; and He that is _Clavis
+David_ and that openeth and none shutteth said to him, 'I will give
+thee the keys, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in
+heaven.' That is why we call Peter the Vicar of Christ."
+
+Isabel raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Surely, surely----" she began.
+
+"Yes, my child," said Mistress Margaret, "I know it is new and strange to
+you; but it was not to your grandfather or his forbears: to them, as to
+me, it is the plain meaning of the words. We Catholics are a simple folk.
+We hold that what our Saviour said simply He meant simply: as we do in
+the sacred mystery of His Body and Blood. To us, you know," she went on,
+smiling, with a hand on the girl's arm, "it seems as if you Protestants
+twisted the Word of God against all justice."
+
+Isabel smiled back at her; but she was puzzled. The point of view was new
+to her. And yet again in the garden, a few months later, as they sat out
+together on the lawn, the girl opened the same subject.
+
+"Mistress Margaret," she said, "I have been thinking a great deal; and it
+seems very plain when you talk. But you know our great divines could
+answer you, though I cannot. My father was no Papist; and Dr. Grindal and
+the Bishops are all wise men. How do you answer that?"
+
+The nun looked silently down at the grass a moment or two.
+
+"It is the old tale," she said at last, looking up; "we cannot believe
+that the babes and sucklings are as likely to be right in such matters as
+the wise and prudent--even more likely, if our Saviour's words are to be
+believed. Dear child, do you not see that our Lord came to save all men,
+and call all men into His Church; and that therefore He must have marked
+His Church in such a manner that the most ignorant may perceive it as
+easily as the most learned? Learning is very well, and it is the gift of
+God; but salvation and grace cannot depend upon it. It needs an architect
+to understand why Paul's Church is strong and beautiful, and what makes
+it so; but any child or foolish fellow can see that it is so."
+
+"I do not understand," said Isabel, wrinkling her forehead.
+
+"Why this--that you are as likely to know the Catholic Church when you
+see it, as Dr. Grindal or Dr. Freake, or your dear father himself. Only a
+divine can explain about it and understand it, but you and I are as fit
+to see it and walk into it, as any of them."
+
+"But then why are they not all Catholics?" asked Isabel, still
+bewildered.
+
+"Ah!" said the nun, softly, "God alone knows, who reads hearts and calls
+whom He will. But learning, at least, has nought to do with it."
+
+Conversations of this kind that took place now and then between the two
+were sufficient to show Mistress Margaret, like tiny bubbles on the
+surface of a clear stream, the swift movement of this limpid soul that
+she loved so well. But on the other hand, all the girl's past life, and
+most sacred and dear associations, were in conflict with this movement;
+the memory of her quiet, wise father rose and reproached her sometimes;
+Anthony's enthusiastic talk, when he came down from Lambeth, on the
+glorious destinies of the Church of England, of her gallant protest
+against the corruptions of the West, and of her future unique position in
+Christendom as the National Church of the most progressive country--all
+this caused her to shrink back terrified from the bourne to which she was
+drifting, and from the breach that must follow with her brother. But
+above all else that caused her pain was the shocking suspicion that her
+love for Hubert perhaps was influencing her, and that she was living in
+gross self-deception as to the sincerity of her motives.
+
+This culminated at last in a scene that seriously startled the old nun;
+it took place one summer night after Hubert's departure in Mr. Drake's
+expedition. Mistress Margaret had seen Isabel to her room, and an hour
+later had finished her night-office and was thinking of preparing herself
+to bed, when there was a hurried tap at the door, and Isabel came quickly
+in, her face pale and miserable, her great grey eyes full of trouble and
+distraction, and her hair on her shoulders.
+
+"My dear child," said the nun, "what is it?"
+
+Isabel closed the door and stood looking at her, with her lips parted.
+
+"How can I know, Mistress Margaret," she said, in the voice of a
+sleep-walker, "whether this is the voice of God or of my own wicked self?
+No, no," she went on, as the other came towards her, frightened, "let me
+tell you. I must speak."
+
+"Yes, my child, you shall; but come and sit down first," and she drew her
+to a chair and set her in it, and threw a wrap over her knees and feet;
+and sat down beside her, and took one of her hands, and held it between
+her own.
+
+"Now then, Isabel, what is it?"
+
+"I have been thinking over it all so long," began the girl, in the same
+tremulous voice, with her eyes fixed on the nun's face, "and to-night in
+bed I could not bear it any longer. You see, I love Hubert, and I used to
+think I loved our Saviour too; but now I do not know. It seems as if He
+was leading me to the Catholic Church; all is so much more plain and easy
+there--it seems--it seems--to make sense in the Catholic Church; and all
+the rest of us are wandering in the dark. But if I become a Catholic, you
+see, I can marry Hubert then; and I cannot help thinking of that; and
+wanting to marry him. But then perhaps that is the reason that I think I
+see it all so plainly; just because I want to see it plainly. And what am
+I to do? Why will not our Lord shew me my own heart and what is His
+Will?"
+
+Mistress Margaret shook her head gently.
+
+"Dear child," she said, "our Saviour loves you and wishes to make you
+happy. Do you not think that perhaps He is helping you and making it easy
+in this way, by drawing you to His Church through Hubert. Why should not
+both be His Will? that you should become a Catholic and marry Hubert as
+well?"
+
+"Yes," said Isabel, "but how can I tell?"
+
+"There is only one thing to be done," went on the old lady, "be quite
+simple and quiet. Whenever your soul begins to be disturbed and anxious,
+put yourself in His Hands, and refuse to decide for yourself. It is so
+easy, so easy."
+
+"But why should I be so anxious and disturbed, if it were not our Lord
+speaking and warning me?"
+
+"In the Catholic Church," said Mistress Margaret, "we know well about all
+those movements of the soul; and we call them scruples. You must resist
+them, dear child, like temptations. We are told that if a soul is in
+grace and desires to serve God, then whenever our Lord speaks it is to
+bring sweetness with Him; and when it is the evil one, he brings
+disturbance. And that is why I am sure that these questionings are not
+from God. You feel stifled, is it not so, when you try to pray? and all
+seems empty of God; the waves and storms are going over you. But lie
+still and be content; and refuse to be disturbed; and you will soon be at
+peace again and see the light clearly."
+
+Mistress Margaret found herself speaking simply in short words and
+sentences as to a child. She had seen that for a long while past the
+clouds had been gathering over Isabel, and that her soul was at present
+completely overcast and unable to perceive or decide anything clearly;
+and so she gave her this simple advice, and did her utmost to soothe her,
+knowing that such a clean soul would not be kept long in the dark.
+
+She knelt down with Isabel presently and prayed aloud with her, in a
+quiet even voice; a patch of moonlight lay on the floor, and something of
+its white serenity seemed to be in the old nun's tones as she entreated
+the merciful Lord to bid peace again to this anxious soul, and let her
+see light again through the dark.
+
+And when she had taken Isabel back again to her own room at last, and had
+seen her safely into bed, and kissed her good-night, already the girl's
+face was quieter as it lay on the pillow, and the lines were smoothed out
+of her forehead.
+
+"God bless you!" said Mistress Margaret.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                           HUBERT'S RETURN
+
+
+After the sailing of Mr. Drake's expedition, the friends of the adventurers
+had to wait in patience for several months before news arrived. Then the
+_Elizabeth_, under the command of Mr. Winter, which had been separated
+from Mr. Drake's _Pelican_ in a gale off the south-west coast of America,
+returned to England, bringing the news of Mr. Doughty's execution for
+desertion; but of the _Pelican_ herself there was no further news until
+complaints arrived from the Viceroy of New Spain of Mr. Drake's ravages
+up the west coast. Then silence again fell for eighteen months.
+
+Anthony had followed the fortunes of the _Pelican_, in which Hubert had
+sailed, with a great deal of interest: and it was with real relief that
+after the burst of joy in London at the news of her safe return to
+Plymouth with an incalculable amount of plunder, he had word from Lady
+Maxwell that she hoped he would come down at once to Great Keynes, and
+help to welcome Hubert home. He was not able to go at once, for his
+duties detained him; but a couple of days after the Hall had welcomed its
+new master, Anthony was at the Dower House again with Isabel. He found
+her extraordinarily bright and vivacious, and was delighted at the
+change, for he had been troubled the last time he had seen her a few
+months before, at her silence and listlessness; but her face was radiant
+now, as she threw herself into his arms at the door, and told him that
+they were all to go to supper that night at the Hall; and that Hubert had
+been keeping his best stories on purpose for his return. She showed him,
+when they got up to his room at last, little things Hubert had given
+her--carved nuts, a Spanish coin or two, and an ingot of gold--but of
+which she would say nothing, but only laugh and nod her head.
+
+Hubert, too, when he saw him that evening seemed full of the same sort of
+half-suppressed happiness that shone out now and again suddenly. There he
+sat, for hours after supper that night, broader and more sunburnt than
+ever, with his brilliant eyes glancing round as he talked, and his sinewy
+man's hand, in the delicate creamy ruff, making little explanatory
+movements, and drawing a map once or twice in spilled wine on the
+polished oak; the three ladies sat forward and watched him breathlessly,
+or leaned back and sighed as each tale ended, and Anthony found himself,
+too, carried away with enthusiasm again and again, as he looked at this
+gallant sea-dog in his gold chain and satin and jewels, and listened to
+his stories.
+
+"It was bitter cold," said Hubert in his strong voice, telling them of
+Mr. Doughty's death, "on the morning itself: and snow lay on the decks
+when we rose. Mr. Fletcher had prepared a table in the poop-cabin, with a
+white cloth and bread and wine; and at nine of the clock we were all
+assembled where we might see into the cabin: and Mr. Fletcher said the
+Communion service, and Mr. Drake and Mr. Doughty received the sacrament
+there at his hands. Some of Mr. Doughty's men had all they could do to
+keep back their tears; for you know, mother, they were good friends. And
+then when it was done, we made two lines down the deck to where the block
+stood by the main-mast; and the two came down together; and they kissed
+one another there. And Mr. Doughty spoke to the men, and bade them pray
+for the Queen's Grace with him; and they did. And then he and Mr. Drake
+put off their doublets, and Mr. Doughty knelt at the block, and said
+another prayer or two, and then laid his head down, and he was shivering
+a little with cold, and then, when he gave the sign, Mr. Drake----" and
+Hubert brought the edge of his hand down sharply, and the glasses rang,
+and the ladies drew quick hissing breaths; and Lady Maxwell put her hand
+on her son's arm, as he looked round on all their faces.
+
+Then he told them of the expedition up the west coast, and of the towns
+they sacked; and the opulent names rolled oddly off his tongue, and
+seemed to bring a whiff of southern scent into this panelled English
+room,--Valparaiso, Tarapaca, and Arica--; and of the capture of the
+_Cacafuego_ off Quibdo; and of the enormous treasure they took, the
+great golden crucifix with emeralds of the size of pigeon's eggs, and the
+chests of pearls, and the twenty-six tons of silver, and the wedges of
+pure gold from the Peruvian galleon, and of the golden falcon from the
+Chinese trader that they captured south of Guatulco. And he described the
+search up the coast for the passage eastwards that never existed; and of
+Drake's superb resolve to return westwards instead, by the Moluccas; and
+how they stayed at Ternate, south of Celebes, and coasted along Java
+seeking a passage, and found it in the Sunda straits, and broke out from
+the treacherous islands into the open sea; crossed to Africa, rounded the
+Cape of Good Hope; came up the west coast, touching at Sierra Leone, and
+so home again along the Spanish and French coasts, to Plymouth Sound and
+the pealing of Plymouth bells.
+
+And he broke out into something very like eloquence when he spoke of
+Drake.
+
+"Never was such a captain," he cried, "with his little stiff beard and
+his obstinate eyes. I have seen him stand on the poop, when the arrows
+were like hail on the deck, with one finger in the ring round his
+neck,--so": and Hubert thrust a tanned finger into a link of his chain,
+and lifted his chin, "just making little signs to the steersman, with his
+hand behind his back, to bring the ship nearer to the Spaniard; as cool,
+I tell you, as cool as if he were playing merelles. Oh! and then when we
+boarded, out came his finger from his ring; and there was none that
+struck so true and fierce; and all in silence too, without an oath or a
+cry or a word; except maybe to give an order. But he was very sharp with
+all that angered him. When we sighted the _Madre di Dios_, I ran into
+his cabin to tell him of it, without saluting, so full was my head of
+the chase. And he looked at me like ice; and then roared at me to know
+where my manners were, and bade me go out and enter again properly,
+before he would hear my news; and then I heard him rating the man that
+stood at his door for letting me pass in that state. At his dinner, too,
+which he took alone, there were always trumpets to blow, as when her
+Grace dines. When he laughed it seemed as if he did it with a grave face.
+There was a piece of grand fooling when we got out from among those weary
+Indian islands; where the great crabs be, and flies that burn in the
+dark, as I told you. Mr. Fletcher, the minister, played the coward one
+night when we ran aground; and bade us think of our sins and our immortal
+souls, instead of urging us to be smart about the ship; and he did it,
+too, not as Mr. Drake might do, but in such a melancholy voice as if we
+were all at our last hour; so when we were free of our trouble, and out
+on the main again, we were all called by the drum to the forecastle, and
+there Mr. Drake sat on a sea-chest as solemn as a judge, so that not a
+man durst laugh, with a pair of pantoufles in his hand; and Mr. Fletcher
+was brought before him, trying to smile as if 'twas a jest for him too,
+between two guards; and there he was arraigned; and the witnesses were
+called; and Tom Moore said how he was tapped on the shoulder by Mr.
+Fletcher as he was getting a pick from the hold; and how he was as white
+as a ghost and bade him think on Mr. Doughty, how there was no mercy for
+him when he needed it, and so there would be none for us--and then other
+witnesses came, and then Mr. Fletcher tried to make his defence, saying
+how it was the part of a minister to bid men think on their souls; but
+'twas no good. Mr. Drake declared him guilty; and sentenced him to be
+kept in irons till he repented of that his cowardice; and then, which was
+the cream of the joke, since the prisoner was a minister, Mr. Drake
+declared him excommunicate, and cut off from the Church of God, and given
+over to the devil. And he was put in irons, too, for a while; so 'twas
+not all a joke."
+
+"And what is Mr. Drake doing now?" asked Lady Maxwell.
+
+"Oh! Drake is in London," said Hubert. "Ah! yes, and you must all come to
+Deptford when her Grace is going to be there. Anthony, lad, you'll come?"
+
+Anthony said he would certainly do his best; and Isabel put out her hand
+to her brother, and beamed at him; and then turned to look at Hubert
+again.
+
+"And what are you to do next?" asked Mistress Margaret.
+
+"Well," he said, "I am to go to Plymouth again presently, to help to get
+the treasure out of the ships; and I must be there, too, for the spring
+and summer, for Drake wants me to help him with his new expedition."
+
+"But you are not going with him again, my son?" said his mother quickly.
+
+Hubert put out his hand to her.
+
+"No, no," he said, "I have written to tell him I cannot. I must take my
+father's place here. He will understand"; and he gave one swift glance at
+Isabel, and her eyes fell.
+
+Anthony was obliged to return to Lambeth after a day or two, and he
+carried with him a heart full of admiration and enthusiasm for his
+friend. He had wondered once or twice, too, as his eyes fell on Isabel,
+whether there was anything in what Mistress Corbet had said; but he dared
+not speak to her, and still less to Hubert, unless his confidence was
+first sought.
+
+The visit to Deptford, which took place a week or two later, gave an
+additional spurt to Anthony's nationalism. London was all on fire at the
+return of the buccaneers, and as Anthony rode down the south bank of the
+river from Lambeth to join the others at the inn, the three miles of
+river beyond London Bridge were an inspiriting sight in the bright winter
+sunshine, crowded with craft of all kinds, bright with bunting, that were
+making their way down to the naval triumph. The road, too, was thick with
+vehicles and pedestrians.
+
+It was still early when he met his party at the inn, and Hubert took them
+immediately to see the _Pelican_ that was drawn up in a little creek on
+the south bank. Mistress Margaret had not come, so the four went together
+all over the ship that had been for these years the perilous home of this
+sunburnt lad they all loved so well. Hubert pointed out Drake's own cabin
+at the poop, with its stern-windows, where the last sacrament of the two
+friends had been celebrated; and where Drake himself had eaten in royal
+fashion to the sound of trumpets and slept with all-night sentries at his
+door. He showed them too his own cabin, where he had lived with three
+more officers, and the upper poop-deck where Drake would sit hour after
+hour with his spy-glass, ranging the horizons for treasure-ships. And he
+showed them, too, the high forecastle, and the men's quarters; and Isabel
+fingered delicately the touch-holes of the very guns that had roared and
+snapped so fiercely at the Dons; and they peered down into the dark empty
+hold where the treasure-chests had lain, and up at the three masts and
+the rigging that had borne so long the swift wings of the _Pelican_. And
+they heard the hiss and rattle of the ropes as Hubert ordered a man to
+run up a flag to show them how it was done; and they smelled the strange
+tarry briny smell of a sea-going ship.
+
+"You are not tired?" Anthony said to his sister, as they walked back to
+the inn from which they were to see the spectacle. She shook her head
+happily; and Anthony, looking at her, once more questioned himself
+whether Mistress Corbet were right or not.
+
+When they had settled down at last to their window, the crowds were
+gathering thicker every moment about the entrance to the ship, which lay
+in the creek perhaps a hundred yards from the inn, and on the road along
+which the Queen was to come from Greenwich. Anthony felt his whole heart
+go out in sympathy to these joyous shouting folk beneath, who were here
+to celebrate the gallant pluck of a little bearded man and his followers,
+who for the moment stood for England, and in whose presence just now the
+Queen herself must take second place. Even the quacks and salesmen who
+were busy in their booths all round used patriotism to push their
+bargains.
+
+"Spanish ointment, Spanish ointment!" bellowed a red-faced herbalist in a
+doctor's gown, just below the window. "The Dons know what's best for
+wounds and knocks after Frankie Drake's visit"; and the crowd laughed and
+bought up his boxes. And another drove a roaring business in green glass
+beads, reported to be the exact size of the emeralds taken from the
+_Cacafuego_; and others sold little models of the _Pelican_, warranted to
+frighten away Dons and all other kinds of devils from the house that
+possessed one. Isabel laughed with pleasure, and sent Anthony down to buy
+one for her.
+
+But perhaps more than all else the sight of the seamen themselves stirred
+his heart. Most of them, officers as well as men, were dressed with
+absurd extravagance, for the prize-money, even after the deduction of the
+Queen's lion-share, had been immense, but beneath their plumed and
+jewel-buckled caps, brown faces looked out, alert and capable, with tight
+lips and bright, puckered eyes, with something of the terrier in their
+expression. There they swaggered along with a slight roll in their walk,
+by ones or twos, through the crowd that formed lanes to let them pass,
+and surged along in their wake, shouting after them and clapping them on
+the back. Anthony watched them eagerly as they made their way from all
+directions to where the _Pelican_ lay; for it was close on noon. Then
+from far away came the boom of the Tower guns, and then the nearer crash
+of those that guarded the dockyard; and last the deafening roar of the
+_Pelican_ broadside; and then the smoke rose and drifted in a heavy veil
+in the keen frosty air over the cheering crowds. When it lifted again,
+there was the flash of gold and colour from the Greenwich road, and the
+high braying of the trumpets pierced the roaring welcome of the people.
+But the watchers at the windows could see no more over the heads of the
+crowd than the plumes of the royal carriage, as the Queen dismounted, and
+a momentary glimpse of her figure and the group round her as she passed
+on to the deck of the _Pelican_ and went immediately below to the
+banquet, while the parish church bells pealed a welcome.
+
+Lady Maxwell insisted that Isabel should now dine, as there would be no
+more to be seen till the Queen should come up on deck again.
+
+Of the actual ceremony of the knighting of Mr. Drake they had a very fair
+view, though the figures were little and far away. The first intimation
+they had that the banquet was over was the sight of the scarlet-clad
+yeomen emerging one by one up the little hatchway that led below. The
+halberdiers lined the decks already, with their weapons flashing in long
+curved lines; and by the time that the trumpets began to sound to show
+that the Queen was on her way from below, the decks were one dense mass
+of colour and steel, with a lane left to the foot of the poop-stairs by
+which she would ascend. Then at last the two figures appeared, the Queen
+radiant in cloth of gold, and Mr. Drake, alert and brisk, in his Court
+suit and sword. There was silence from the crowd as the adventurer knelt
+before the Queen, and Anthony held his breath with excitement as he
+caught the flash of the slender sword that an officer had put into the
+Queen's hand; and then an inconceivable noise broke out as Sir Francis
+Drake stood up. The crowd was one open mouth, shouting, the church bells
+burst into peals overhead, answered by the roll of drums from the deck
+and the blare of trumpets; and then the whole din sank into nothingness
+for a moment under the heart-shaking crash of the ship's broadside,
+echoed instantly by the deeper roar of the dockyard guns, and answered
+after a moment or two from far away by the dull boom from the Tower. And
+Anthony leaned yet further from the window and added his voice to the
+tumult.
+
+As he rode back alone to Lambeth, after parting with the others at London
+Bridge, for they intended to go down home again that night, he was
+glowing with national zeal. He had seen not only royalty and magnificence
+but an apotheosis of character that day. There in the little trim figure
+with the curly hair kneeling before the Queen was England at its
+best--England that sent two ships against an empire; and it was the
+Church that claimed Sir Francis Drake as a son, and indeed a devoted one,
+in a sense, that Anthony himself was serving here at Lambeth, and for
+which he felt a real and fervent enthusiasm.
+
+He was surprised a couple of days later to receive a note in Lady
+Maxwell's handwriting, brought up by a special messenger from the Hall.
+
+"There is a friend of mine," she wrote, "to come to Lambeth House
+presently, he tells me, to be kept a day or two in ward before he is sent
+to Wisbeach. He is a Catholic, named Mr. Henry Buxton, who showed me
+great love during the sorrow of my dear husband's death; and I write to
+you to show kindness to him, and to get him a good bed, and all that may
+comfort him: for I know not whether Lambeth Prison is easy or hard; but I
+hope perhaps that since my Lord Archbishop is a prisoner himself he has
+pity on such as are so too; and so my pains be in vain. However, if you
+will see Mr. Buxton at least, and have some talk with him, and show him
+this letter, it will cheer him perhaps to see a friend's face."
+
+Anthony of course made inquiries at once, and found that Mr. Buxton was
+to arrive on the following afternoon. It was the custom to send prisoners
+occasionally to Lambeth, more particularly those more distinguished, or
+who, it was hoped, could be persuaded to friendly conference. Mr. Buxton,
+however, was thought to be incorrigible, and was only sent there because
+there was some delay in the preparations for his reception at Wisbeach,
+which since the previous year had been used as an overflow prison for
+Papists.
+
+On the evening of the next day, which was Friday, Anthony went straight
+out from the Hall after supper to the gateway prison, and found Mr.
+Buxton at a fish supper in the little prison in the outer part of the
+eastern tower. He introduced himself, but found it necessary to show Lady
+Maxwell's letter before the prisoner was satisfied as to his identity.
+
+"You must pardon me, Mr. Norris," he said, when he had read the letter
+and asked a question or two, "but we poor Papists are bound to be shy.
+Why, in this very room," he went on, pointing to the inner corner away
+from the door, and smiling, "for aught I know a man sits now to hear us."
+
+Anthony was considerably astonished to see this stranger point so
+confidently to the hiding-hole, where indeed the warder used to sit
+sometimes behind a brick partition, to listen to the talk of the
+prisoners; and showed his surprise.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Norris," the other said, "we Papists are bound to be well
+informed; or else where were our lives? But come, sir, let us sit down."
+
+Anthony apologised for interrupting him at his supper, and offered to
+come again, but Mr. Buxton begged him not to leave, as he had nearly
+finished. So Anthony sat down, and observed the prison and the prisoner.
+It was fairly well provided with necessaries: a good straw bed lay in one
+corner on trestles; and washing utensils stood at the further wall; and
+there was an oil lamp that hung high up from an iron pin. The prisoner's
+luggage lay still half unpacked on the floor, and a row of pegs held a
+hat and a cloak. Mr. Buxton himself was a dark-haired man with a short
+beard and merry bright eyes; and was dressed soberly as a gentleman; and
+behaved himself with courtesy and assurance. But it was a queer place
+with this flickering lamp, thought Anthony, for a gentleman to be eating
+his supper in. When Mr. Buxton had finished his dish of roach and a
+tankard of ale, he looked up at Anthony, smiling.
+
+"My lord knows the ways of Catholics, then," he said, pointing to the
+bones on his plate.
+
+Anthony explained that the Protestants observed the Friday abstinence,
+too.
+
+"Ah yes," said the other, "I was forgetting the Queen's late injunctions.
+Let us see; how did it run? 'The same is not required for any liking of
+Papish Superstitions or Ceremonies (is it?) hitherto used, which utterly
+are to be detested of all Christian folk'; (no, the last word or two is a
+gloss), 'but only to maintain the mariners in this land, and to set men
+a-fishing.' That is the sense of it, is it not, sir? You fast, that is,
+not for heavenly reasons, which were a foolish and Papish thing to do;
+but for earthly reasons, which is a reasonable and Protestant thing to
+do."
+
+Anthony might have taken this assault a little amiss, if he had not seen
+a laughing light in his companion's eyes; and remembered, too, that
+imprisonment is apt to breed a little bitterness. So he smiled back at
+him. Then soon they fell to talking of Lady Maxwell and Great Keynes,
+where it seemed that Mr. Buxton had stayed more than once.
+
+"I knew Sir Nicholas well," he said, "God rest his soul. It seems to me
+he is one of those whose life continually gave the lie to men who say
+that a Catholic can be no true Englishman. There never beat a more loyal
+heart than his."
+
+Anthony agreed; but asked if it were not true that Catholics were in
+difficulties sometimes as to the proper authority to be obeyed--the Pope
+or the Prince.
+
+"It is true," said the other, "or it might be. Yet the principle is
+clear, _Date Cæsari quae sunt Cæsaris_. The difficulty lies but in the
+application of the maxim."
+
+"But with us," said Anthony--"Church of England folk,--there hardly can
+be ever any such difficulty; for the Prince of the State is the Governor
+of the Church as well."
+
+"I take your point," said Mr. Buxton. "You mean that a National Church is
+better, for that spiritual and temporal authorities are then at one."
+
+"Just so," said Anthony, beginning to warm to his favourite theme. "The
+Church is the nation regarded as religious. When England wars on land it
+is through her army, which is herself under arms; when on sea she embarks
+in the navy; and in the warfare with spiritual powers, it is through her
+Church. And surely in this way the Church must always be the Church of
+the people. The Englishman and the Spaniard are like cat and dog; they
+like not the same food nor the same kind of coat; I hear that their
+buildings are not like ours; their language, nay, their faces and minds,
+are not like ours. Then why should be their prayers and their religion? I
+quarrel with no foreigner's faith; it is God who made us so."
+
+Anthony stopped, breathless with his unusual eloquence; but it was the
+subject that lay nearest to his heart at present, and he found no lack of
+words. The prisoner had watched him with twinkling eyes, nodding his head
+as if in agreement; and when he had finished his little speech, nodded
+again in meditative silence.
+
+"It is complete," he answered, "complete. And as a theory would be
+convincing; and I envy you, Master Norris, for you stand on the top of
+the wave. That is what England holds. But, my dear sir, Christ our Lord
+refused such a kingdom as that. My kingdom, He said, is not of this
+world--is not, that is, ruled by the world's divisions and systems. You
+have described Babel,--every nation with its own language. But it was to
+undo Babel and to build one spiritual city that our Saviour came down,
+and sent the Holy Ghost to make the Church at Pentecost out of Arabians
+and Medes and Elamites--to break down the partition-walls, as the apostle
+tells us,--that there be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor
+Scythian--and to establish one vast kingdom (which for that very reason
+we name Catholic), to destroy differences between nation and nation, by
+lifting each to be of the People of God--to pull down Babel, the City of
+Confusion, and build Jerusalem the City of Peace. Dear God!" cried Mr.
+Buxton, rising in his excitement, and standing over Anthony, who looked
+at him astonished and bewildered. "You and your England would parcel out
+the Kingdom of heaven into national Churches, as you name them--among all
+the kingdoms of the world; and yet you call yourselves the servants of
+Him who came to do just the opposite--yes, and who will do it, in spite
+of you, and make the kingdoms of this world, instead, the Kingdom of our
+Lord and of His Christ. Why, if each nation is to have her Church, why
+not each county and each town--yes, and each separate soul, too; for all
+are different! Nay, nay, Master Norris, you are blinded by the Prince of
+this world. He is shewing you even now from an high mountain the kingdoms
+of this world and the glory of them: lift your eyes, dear lad, to the
+hills from whence cometh your help; those hills higher than the mountain
+where you stand; and see the new Jerusalem, and the glory of her, coming
+down from God to dwell with men."
+
+Mr. Buxton stood, his eyes blazing, plainly carried away wholly by
+enthusiasm; and Anthony, in spite of himself, could not be angry. He
+moistened his lips once or twice.
+
+"Well, sir; of course I hold with what you say, in one sense; but it is
+not come yet; and never will, till our Lord comes back to make all
+plain."
+
+"Not come yet?" cried the other, "Not come yet! Why, what is the one Holy
+Catholic and Apostolic Church but that? There you have one visible
+kingdom, gathered out of every nation and tongue and people, as the
+apostle said. I have a little estate in France, Master Norris, where I go
+sometimes; and there are folk in their wooden shoes, talking a different
+human tongue to me, but, thank God! the same divine one--of contrition
+and adoration and prayer. There we have the same mass, the same
+priesthood, the same blessed sacrament and the same Faith, as in my own
+little oratory at Stanfield. Go to Spain, Africa, Rome, India; wherever
+Christ is preached; there is the Church as it is here--the City of Peace.
+And as for you and your Church! with whom do you hold communion?"
+
+This stung Anthony, and he answered impulsively.
+
+"In Geneva and Frankfort, at least, there are folk who speak the same
+divine tongue, as you call it, as we do; they and we are agreed in
+matters of faith."
+
+"Indeed," said Mr. Burton sharply, "then what becomes of your
+Nationalism, and the varied temperaments that you told me God had made?"
+
+Anthony bit his lip; he had overshot his mark. But the other swept on;
+and as he talked began to step up and down the little room, in a kind of
+rhapsody.
+
+"Is it possible?" he cried, "that men should be so blind as to prefer the
+little divided companies they name National Churches--all confusion and
+denial--to that glorious kingdom that Christ bought with his own dear
+blood, and has built upon Peter, against which the gates of hell shall
+not prevail. Yes, I know it is a flattering and a pleasant thought that
+this little nation should have her own Church; and it is humbling and
+bitter that England should be called to submit to a foreign potentate in
+the affairs of faith--Nay, cry they like the Jews of old, not Christ but
+Barabbas--we will not have this Man to reign over us. And yet this is
+God's will and not that. Mark me, Mr. Norris, what you hope will never
+come to be--the Liar will not keep his word--you shall not have that
+National Church that you desire: as you have dealt, so will it be dealt
+to you: as you have rejected, so will you be rejected. England herself
+will cast you off: your religious folk will break into a hundred
+divisions. Even now your Puritans mock at your prelates--so soon! And if
+they do thus now, what will they do hereafter? You have cast away
+Authority, and authority shall forsake you. Behold your house is left
+unto you desolate."
+
+"Forgive me, Mr. Norris," he added after a pause, "if I have been
+discourteous, and have forgotten my manners; but--but I would, as the
+apostle said, that you were altogether as I am, except these bonds."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IV
+
+                           A COUNTER-MARCH
+
+
+Isabel was sitting out alone in the Italian garden at the Hall, one
+afternoon in the summer following the visit to Deptford. Hubert was down
+at Plymouth, assisting in the preparations for the expedition that Drake
+hoped to conduct against Spain. The two countries were technically at
+peace, but the object with which he was going out, with the moral and
+financial support of the Queen, was a corporate demonstration against
+Spain, of French, Portuguese, and English ships under the main command of
+Don Antonio, the Portuguese pretender; it was proposed to occupy Terceira
+in the Azores; and Drake and Hawkins entertained the highest hopes of
+laying their hands on further plunder.
+
+She was leaning back in her seat, with her hands behind her head,
+thinking over her relations with Hubert. When he had been at home at the
+end of the previous year, he had apparently taken it for granted that the
+marriage would be celebrated; he had given her the gold nugget, that she
+had showed Anthony, telling her he had brought it home for the
+wedding-ring; and she understood that he was to come for his final answer
+as soon as his work at Plymouth was over. But not a word of explanation
+had passed between them on the religious difficulty. He had silenced her
+emphatically and kindly once when she had approached it; and she gathered
+from his manner that he suspected the direction in which her mind was
+turning and was generously unwilling for her to commit herself an inch
+further than she saw. Else whence came his assurance? And, for herself,
+things were indeed becoming plain: she wondered why she had hesitated so
+long, why she was still hesitating; the cup was brimming above the edge;
+it needed but a faint touch of stimulus to precipitate all.
+
+And so Isabel lay back and pondered, with a touch of happy impatience at
+the workings of her own soul; for she dared not act without the final
+touch of conviction. Mistress Margaret had taught her that the swiftest
+flight of the soul was when there was least movement, when the soul knew
+how to throw itself with that supreme effort of cessation into the Hands
+of God, that He might bear it along: when, after informing the intellect
+and seeking by prayer for God's bounty, the humble client of Heaven
+waited with uplifted eyes and ready heart until God should answer. And so
+she waited, knowing that the gift was at hand, yet not daring to snatch
+it. But, in the meanwhile, her imagination at least might act without
+restraint; so she sent it out, like a bird from the Ark, to bring her the
+earnest of peace. There, in the cloister-wing, somewhere, lay the chapel,
+where she and Hubert would kneel together;--somewhere beneath that grey
+roof. That was the terrace where she would walk one day as one who has a
+right there. Which of these windows would be hers? Not Lady Maxwell's, of
+course; she must keep that.... Ah! how good God was!
+
+The tall door on to the terrace opened, and Mistress Margaret peered out
+with a letter in her hand. Isabel called to her; and the old nun came
+down the steps into the garden. Why did she walk so falteringly, the girl
+wondered, as if she could not see? What was it? What was it?
+
+Isabel rose to her feet, startled, as the nun with bent head came up the
+path. "What is it, Mistress Margaret?"
+
+The other tried to smile at her, but her lips were trembling too much;
+and the girl saw that her eyes were brimming with tears. She put the
+letter into her hand.
+
+Isabel lifted it in an agony of suspense; and saw her name, in Hubert's
+handwriting.
+
+"What is it?" she said again, white to the lips.
+
+The old lady as she turned away glanced at her; and Isabel saw that her
+face was all twitching with the effort to keep back her tears. The girl
+had never seen her like that before, even at Sir Nicholas' death. Was
+there anything, she wondered as she looked, worse than death? But she was
+too dazed by the sight to speak, and Mistress Margaret went slowly back
+to the house unquestioned.
+
+Isabel turned the letter over once or twice; and then sat down and opened
+it. It was all in Hubert's sprawling handwriting, and was dated from
+Plymouth.
+
+It gave her news first about the squadron; saying how Don Antonio had
+left London for Plymouth, and was expected daily; and then followed this
+paragraph:
+
+"And now, dearest Isabel, I have such good news to give you. _I have
+turned Protestant_; and there is no reason why we should not be married
+as soon as I return. I know this will make you happy to think that our
+religions are no longer different. I have thought of this so long; but
+would not tell you before for fear of disappointing you. Sir Francis
+Drake's religion seems to me the best; it is the religion of all the
+'sea-dogs' as they name us; and of the Queen's Grace, and it will be soon
+of all England; and more than all it is the religion of my dearest
+mistress and love. I do not, of course, know very much of it as yet; but
+good Mr. Collins here has shown me the superstitions of Popery; and I
+hope now to be justified by faith without works as the gospel teaches. I
+fear that my mother and aunt will be much distressed by this news; I have
+written, too, to tell them of it. You must comfort them, dear love; and
+perhaps some day they, too, will see as we do." Then followed a few
+messages, and loving phrases, and the letter ended.
+
+Isabel laid it down beside her on the low stone wall; and looked round
+her with eyes that saw nothing. There was the grey old house before her,
+and the terrace, and the cloister-wing to the left, and the hot sunshine
+lay on it all, and drew out scents and colours from the flower-beds, and
+joy from the insects that danced in the trembling air; and it all meant
+nothing to her; like a picture when the page is turned over it. Five
+minutes ago she was regarding her life and seeing how the Grace of God
+was slowly sorting out its elements from chaos to order--the road was
+unwinding itself before her eyes as she trod on it day by day--now a hand
+had swept all back into disorder, and the path was hidden by the ruins.
+
+Then gradually one thought detached itself, and burned before her, vivid
+and startling; and in all its terrible reality slipped between her and
+the visible world on which she was staring. It was this: to embrace the
+Catholic Faith meant the renouncing of Hubert. As a Protestant she might
+conceivably have married a Catholic; as a Catholic it was inconceivable
+that she should marry an apostate.
+
+Then she read the letter through again carefully and slowly; and was
+astonished at the unreality of Hubert's words about Romish superstition
+and gospel simplicity. She tried hard to silence her thoughts; but two
+reasons for Hubert's change of religion rose up and insisted on making
+themselves felt; it was that he might be more in unity with the
+buccaneers whom he admired; second, that there might be no obstacle to
+their marriage. And what then, she asked, was the quality of the heart he
+had given her?
+
+Then, in a flash of intuition, she perceived that a struggle lay before
+her, compared with which all her previous spiritual conflicts were as
+child's play; and that there was no avoiding it. The vision passed, and
+she rose and went indoors to find the desolate mother whose boy had lost
+the Faith.
+
+A month or two of misery went by. For Lady Maxwell they passed with
+recurring gusts of heart-broken sorrow and of agonies of prayer for her
+apostate son. Mistress Margaret was at the Hall all day, soothing,
+encouraging, even distracting her sister by all the means in her power.
+The mother wrote one passionate wail to her son, appealing to all that
+she thought he held dear, even yet to return to the Faith for which his
+father had suffered and in which he had died; but a short answer only
+returned, saying it was impossible to make his defence in a letter, and
+expressing pious hopes that she, too, one day would be as he was; the
+same courier brought a letter to Isabel, in which he expressed his wonder
+that she had not answered his former one.
+
+And as for Isabel, she had to pass through this valley of darkness alone.
+Anthony was in London; and even if he had been with her could not have
+helped her under these circumstances; her father was dead--she thanked
+God for that now--and Mistress Margaret seemed absorbed in her sister's
+grief. And so the girl fought with devils alone. The arguments for
+Catholicism burned pitilessly clear now; every line and feature in them
+stood out distinct and hard. Catholicism, it appeared to her, alone had
+the marks of the Bride, visible unity, visible Catholicity, visible
+Apostolicity, visible Sanctity;--there they were, the seals of the most
+High God. She flung herself back furiously into the Protestantism from
+which she had been emerging; there burned in the dark before her the
+marks of the Beast, visible disunion, visible nationalism, visible
+Erastianism, visible gulfs where holiness should be: that system in which
+now she could never find rest again glared at her in all its unconvincing
+incoherence, its lack of spirituality, its adulterous union with the
+civil power instead of the pure wedlock of the Spouse of Christ. She
+wondered once more how she dared to have hesitated so long; or dared to
+hesitate still.
+
+On the theological side intellectual arguments of this kind started out,
+strong and irrefutable; her emotional drawings towards Catholicism for
+the present retired. Feelings might have been disregarded or discredited
+by a strong effort of the will; these apparently cold phenomena that
+presented themselves to her intellect, could not be thus dealt with. Yet,
+strangely enough, even now she would not throw herself resolutely into
+Catholicism: the fierce stimulus instead of precipitating the crisis,
+petrified it. More than once she started up from her knees in her own
+dark room, resolved to awaken the nun and tell her she would wait no
+longer, but would turn Catholic at once and have finished with the misery
+of suspense: and even as she moved to the door her will found itself
+against an impenetrable wall.
+
+And then on the other side all her human nature cried out for
+Hubert--Hubert--Hubert. There he stood by her in fancy, day and night,
+that chivalrous, courteous lad, who had been loyal to her so long; had
+waited so patiently; had run to her with such dear impatience; who was so
+wholesome, so strong, so humble to her; so quick to understand her wants,
+so eager to fulfil them; so bound to her by associations; so fit a mate
+for the very differences between them. And now these two claims were no
+longer compatible; in his very love for her he had ended that
+possibility. All those old dreams; the little scenes she had rehearsed,
+of their first mass, their first communion together; their walks in the
+twilight; their rides over the hills; the new ties that were to draw the
+old ladies at the Hall and herself so close together--all this was
+changed; some of those dreams were now for ever impossible, others only
+possible on terms that she trembled even to think of. Perhaps it was
+worst of all to reflect that she was in some measure responsible for his
+change of religion; she fancied that it was through her slowness to
+respond to light, her delaying to confide in him, that he had been driven
+through impatience to take this step. And so week after week went by and
+she dared not answer his letter.
+
+The old ladies, too, were sorely puzzled at her. It was impossible for
+them to know how far her religion was changing. She had kept up the same
+reserve towards them lately as towards Hubert, chiefly because she feared
+to disappoint them; and so after an attempt to tell each other a little
+of their mutual sympathy, the three women were silent on the subject of
+the lad who was so much to them all.
+
+She began to show her state a little in her movements and appearance. She
+was languid, soon tired and dispirited; she would go for short, lonely
+walks, and fall asleep in her chair worn out when she came in. Her grey
+eyes looked longer and darker; her eyelids and the corners of her mouth
+began to droop a little.
+
+Then in October he came home.
+
+Isabel had been out a long afternoon walk by herself through the
+reddening woods. They had never, since the first awakening of the
+consciousness of beauty in her, meant so little to her as now. It
+appeared as if that keen unity of a life common to her and all living
+things had been broken or obscured; and that she walked in an isolation
+all the more terrible in that she was surrounded by the dumb presence of
+what she loved. Last year the quick chattering cry of the blackbird, the
+evening mists over the meadows, the stir of the fading life of the woods,
+the rustling scamper of the rabbit over the dead leaves, the solemn call
+of the homing rooks--all this, only last year, went to make up the sweet
+natural atmosphere in which her spirit moved and breathed at ease. Now
+she was excommunicate from that pleasant friendship, banned by nature and
+forgotten by the God who made it and was immanent within it. Her
+relations to the Saviour, who only such a short time ago had been the
+Person round whom all the joys of life had centred, from whom they
+radiated, and to whom she referred them all--these relations had begun to
+be obscured by her love for Hubert, and now had vanished altogether. She
+had regarded her earthly and her heavenly lover as two persons, each of
+whom had certain claims upon her heart, and each of whom she had hoped to
+satisfy in different ways; instead of identifying the two, and serving
+each not apart from, but in the other. And it now seemed to her that she
+was making experience of a Divine jealousy that would suffer her to be
+satisfied neither with God nor man. Her soul was exhausted by internal
+conflict, by the swift alternations of attraction and repulsion between
+the poles of her supernatural and natural life; so that when it turned
+wearily from self to what lay outside, it was not even capable, as
+before, of making that supreme effort of cessation of effort which was
+necessary to its peace. It seemed to her that she was self-poised in
+emptiness, and could neither touch heaven or earth--crucified so high
+that she could not rest on earth, so low that she could not reach to
+heaven.
+
+She came in weary and dispirited as the candles were being lighted in her
+sitting-room upstairs; but she saw the gleam of them from the garden with
+no sense of a welcoming brightness. She passed from the garden into the
+door of the hall which was still dark, as the fire had nearly burned
+itself out. As she entered the door opposite opened, and once more she
+saw the silhouette of a man's figure against the lighted passage beyond;
+and again she stopped frightened, and whispered "Anthony."
+
+There was a momentary pause as the door closed and all was dark again;
+and then she heard Hubert's voice say her name; and felt herself wrapped
+once more in his arms. For a moment she clung to him with furious
+longing. Ah! this is a tangible thing, she felt, this clasp; the faint
+cleanly smell of his rough frieze dress refreshed her like wine, and she
+kissed his sleeve passionately. And the wide gulf between them yawned
+again; and her spirit sickened at the sight of it.
+
+"Oh! Hubert, Hubert!" she said.
+
+She felt herself half carried to a high chair beside the fire-place and
+set down there; then he re-arranged the logs on the hearth, so that the
+flames began to leap again, showing his strong hands and keen clear-cut
+face; then he turned on his knees, seized her two hands in his own, and
+lifted them to his lips; then laid them down again on her knee, still
+holding them; and so remained.
+
+"Oh! Isabel," he said, "why did you not write?"
+
+She was silent as one who stares fascinated down a precipice.
+
+"It is all over," he went on in a moment, "with the expedition. The
+Queen's Grace has finally refused us leave to go--and I have come back to
+you, Isabel."
+
+How strong and pleasant he looked in this leaping fire-light! how real!
+and she was hesitating between this warm human reality and the chilly
+possibilities of an invisible truth. Her hands tightened instinctively
+within his, and then relaxed.
+
+"I have been so wretched," she said piteously.
+
+"Ah! my dear," and he threw an arm round her neck and drew her face down
+to his, "but that is over now." She sat back again; and then an access of
+purpose poured into her and braced her will to an effort.
+
+"No, no," she began, "I must tell you. I was afraid to write. Hubert, I
+must wait a little longer. I--I do not know what I believe."
+
+He looked at her, puzzled.
+
+"What do you mean, dearest?'
+
+"I have been so much puzzled lately--thinking so much--and--and--I am
+sorry you have become a Protestant. It makes all so hard."
+
+"My dear, this is--I do not understand."
+
+"I have been thinking," went on Isabel bravely, "whether perhaps the
+Catholic Church is not right after all."
+
+Hubert loosed her hands and stood up. She crouched into the shadow of the
+interior of the high chair, and looked up at him, terrified. His cheek
+twitched a little.
+
+"Isabel, this is foolishness. I know what the Catholic faith is. It is
+not true; I have been through it all."
+
+He was speaking nervously and abruptly. She said nothing. Then he
+suddenly dropped on his knees himself.
+
+"My dearest, I understand. You were doing this for me. I quite
+understand. It is what I too----" and then he stopped.
+
+"I know, I know," she cried piteously. "It is just what I have feared so
+terribly--that--that our love has been blinding us both. And yet, what
+are we to do, what are we to do? Oh! God--Hubert, help me."
+
+Then he began to speak in a low emphatic voice, holding her hands,
+delicately stroking one of them now and again, and playing with her
+fingers. She watched his curly head in the firelight as he talked, and
+his keen face as he looked up.
+
+"It is all plain to me," he said, caressingly. "You have been living here
+with my aunt, a dear old saint; and she has been talking and telling you
+all about the Catholic religion, and making it seem all true and good.
+And you, my dear child, have been thinking of me sometimes, and loving me
+a little, is it not so? and longing that religion should not separate us;
+and so you began to wish it was true; and then to hope it was; and at
+last you have begun to think it is. But it is not your true sweet self
+that believes it. Ah! you know in your heart of hearts, as I have known
+so long, that it is not true; that it is made up by priests and nuns; and
+it is very beautiful, I know, my dearest, but it is only a lovely tale;
+and you must not spoil all for the sake of a tale. And I have been
+gradually led to the light; it was your--" and his voice faltered--"your
+prayers that helped me to it. I have longed to understand what it was
+that made you so sweet and so happy; and now I know; it is your own
+simple pure religion; and--and--it is so much more sensible, so much more
+likely to be true than the Catholic religion. It is all in the Bible you
+see; so plain, as Mr. Collins has showed me. And so, my dear love, I have
+come to believe it too; and you must put all these fancies out of your
+head, these dreams; though I love you, I love you," and he kissed her
+hand again, "for wishing to believe them for my sake--and--and we will be
+married before Christmas; and we will have our own fairy-tale, but it
+shall be a true one."
+
+This was terrible to Isabel. It seemed as if her own haunting thought
+that she was sacrificing a dream to reality had become incarnate in her
+lover and was speaking through his lips. And yet in its very incarnation,
+it seemed to reveal its weakness rather than its strength. As a dark
+suggestion the thought was mighty; embodied in actual language it seemed
+to shrink a little. But then, on the other hand--and so the interior
+conflict began to rage again.
+
+She made a movement as if to stand up; but he pressed her back into the
+chair.
+
+"No, my dearest, you shall be a prisoner until you give your parole."
+
+Twice Isabel made an effort to speak; but no sound came. It seemed as if
+the raging strife of thoughts deafened and paralysed her.
+
+"Now, Isabel," said Hubert.
+
+"I cannot, I cannot," she cried desperately, "you must give me time. It
+is too sudden, your returning like this. You must give me time. I do not
+know what I believe. Oh, dear God, help me."
+
+"Isabel, promise! promise! Before Christmas! I thought it was all to be
+so happy, when I came in through the garden just now. My mother will
+hardly speak to me; and I came to you, Isabel, as I always did; I felt so
+sure you would be good to me; and tell me that you would always love me,
+now that I had given up my religion for love of you. And now----" and
+Hubert's voice ended in a sob.
+
+Her heart seemed rent across, and she drew a sobbing sigh. Hubert heard
+it, and caught at her hands again as he knelt.
+
+"Isabel, promise, promise."
+
+Then there came that gust of purpose into her heart again; she made a
+determined effort and stood up; and Hubert rose and stood opposite her.
+
+"You must not ask me," she said, bravely. "It would be wicked to decide
+yet. I cannot see anything clearly. I do not know what I believe, nor
+where I stand. You must give me time."
+
+There was a dead silence. His face was so much in shadow that she could
+not tell what he was thinking. He was standing perfectly still.
+
+"Then that is all the answer you will give me?" he said, in a perfectly
+even voice.
+
+Isabel bowed her head.
+
+"Then--then I wish you good-night, Mistress Norris," and he bowed to her,
+caught up his cap and went out.
+
+She could not believe it for a moment, and caught her breath to cry out
+after him as the door closed; but she heard his step on the stone
+pavement outside, the crunch of the gravel, and he was gone. Then she
+went and leaned her head against the curved mantelshelf and stared into
+the logs that his hands had piled together.
+
+This, then, she thought, was the work of religion; the end of all her
+aspirations and efforts, that God should mock them by bringing love into
+their life, and then when they caught at it and thanked him for it, it
+was whisked away again, and left their hands empty. Was this the Father
+of Love in whom she had been taught to believe, who treated His children
+like this? And so the bitter thoughts went on; and yet she knew in her
+heart that she was powerless; that she could not go to the door and call
+Hubert and promise what he asked. A great Force had laid hold of her, it
+might be benevolent or not--at this moment she thought not--but it was
+irresistible; and she must bow her head and obey.
+
+And even as she thought that, the door opened again, and there was
+Hubert. He came in two quick steps across the room to her, and then
+stopped suddenly.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he asked, "can you forgive me? I was a brute just now.
+I do not ask for your promise. I leave it all in your hands. Do with me
+what you will. But--but, if you could tell me how long you think it will
+be before you know----"
+
+He had touched the right note. Isabel's heart gave a leap of sorrow and
+sympathy. "Oh, Hubert," she said brokenly, "I am so sorry; but I promise
+I will tell you--by Easter?" and her tone was interrogative.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Hubert. He looked at her in silence, and she saw strange
+lines quivering at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes large and
+brilliant in the firelight. Then the two drew together, and he took her
+in his arms strongly and passionately.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was a scene that night between the mother and son. Mistress
+Margaret had gone back to the Dower House for supper; and Lady Maxwell
+and Hubert were supping in Sir Nicholas' old study that would soon be
+arranged for Hubert now that he had returned for good. They had been very
+silent during the meal, while the servants were in the room, talking only
+of little village affairs and of the estate, and of the cancelling of the
+proposed expedition. Hubert had explained to his mother that it was
+generally believed that Elizabeth had never seriously intended the
+English ships to sail, but that she only wished to draw Spain's attention
+off herself by setting up complications between that country and France;
+and when she had succeeded in this by managing to get the French squadron
+safe at Terceira, she then withdrew her permission to Drake and Hawkins,
+and thus escaped from the quarrel altogether. But it was a poor makeshift
+for conversation.
+
+When the servants had withdrawn, a silence fell. Presently Hubert looked
+across the table between the silver branched candlesticks.
+
+"Mother," he said, "of course I know what you are thinking. But I cannot
+consent to go through all the arguments; I am weary of them. Neither will
+I see Mr. Barnes to-morrow at Cuckfield or here. I am satisfied with my
+position."
+
+"My son," said Lady Maxwell with dignity, "I do not think I have spoken
+that priest's name; or indeed any."
+
+"Well," said Hubert, impatiently, "at any rate I will not see him. But I
+wish to say a few words about this house. We must have our positions
+clear. My father left to your use, did he not, the whole of the
+cloister-wing? I am delighted, dear mother, that he did so. You will be
+happy there I know; and of course I need not say that I hope you will
+keep your old room overhead as well; and, indeed, use the whole house as
+you have always done. I shall be grateful if you will superintend it all,
+as before--at least, until a new mistress comes."
+
+"Thank you, my son."
+
+"I will speak of that in a moment," he went on, looking steadily at the
+table-cloth; "but there was a word I wished to say first. I am now a
+loyal subject of her Grace in all things; in religion as in all else.
+And--and I fear I cannot continue to entertain seminary priests as my
+father used to do. My--my conscience will not allow that. But of course,
+mother, I need not say that you are at perfect liberty to do what you
+will in the cloister-wing; I shall ask no questions; and I shall set no
+traps or spies. But I must ask that the priests do not come into this
+part of the house, nor walk in the garden. Fortunately you have a lawn in
+the cloister; so that they need not lack fresh air or exercise."
+
+"You need not fear, Hubert," said his mother, "I will not embarrass you.
+You shall be in no danger."
+
+"I think you need not have said that, mother; I am not usually thought a
+coward."
+
+Lady Maxwell flushed a little, and began to finger her silver knife.
+
+"However," Hubert went on, "I thought it best to say that. The chapel,
+you see, is in that wing; and you have that lawn; and--and I do not think
+I am treating you hardly."
+
+"And is your brother James not to come?" asked his mother.
+
+"I have thought much over that," said Hubert; "and although it is hard to
+say it, I think he had better not come to my part of the house--at least
+not when I am here; I must know nothing of it. You must do what you think
+well when I am away, about him and others too. It is very difficult for
+me, mother; please do not add to the difficulty."
+
+"You need not fear," said Lady Maxwell steadily; "you shall not be
+troubled with any Catholics besides ourselves."
+
+"Then that is arranged," said the lad. "And now there is a word more.
+What have you been doing to Isabel?" And he looked sharply across the
+table. His mother's eyes met his fearlessly.
+
+"I do not understand you," she said.
+
+"Mother, you must know what I mean. You have seen her continually."
+
+"I have told you, my son, that I do not know."
+
+"Why," burst out Hubert, "she is half a Catholic."
+
+"Thank God," said his mother.
+
+"Ah! yes; you thank God, I know; but whom am I to thank for it?"
+
+"I would that you could thank Him too."
+
+Hubert made a sharp sound of disgust.
+
+"Ah! yes," he said scornfully, "I knew it; _Non nobis Domine_, and the
+rest."
+
+"Hubert," said Lady Maxwell, "I do not think you mean to insult me in
+this house; but either that is an insult, or else I misunderstood you
+wholly, and must ask your pardon for it."
+
+"Well," he said, in a harsh voice, "I will make myself plain. I believe
+that it is through the influence of you and Aunt Margaret that this has
+been brought about."
+
+At the moment he spoke the door opened.
+
+"Come in, Margaret," said her sister, "this concerns you."
+
+The old nun came across to Hubert with her anxious sweet face; and put
+her old hand tenderly on his black satin sleeve as he sat and wrenched at
+a nut between his fingers.
+
+"Hubert, dear boy," she said, "what is all this? Will you tell me?"
+
+Hubert rose, a little ashamed of himself, and went to the door and closed
+it; and then drew out a chair for his aunt, and put a wine-glass for her.
+
+"Sit down, aunt," he said, and pushed the decanter towards her.
+
+"I have just left Isabel," she said, "she is very unhappy about
+something. You saw her this evening, dear lad?"
+
+"Yes," said Hubert, heavily, looking down at the table and taking up
+another nut, "and it is of that that I have been speaking. Who has made
+her unhappy?"
+
+"I had hoped you would tell us that," said Mistress Margaret; "I came up
+to ask you."
+
+"My son has done us--me--the honour----" began Lady Maxwell; but Hubert
+broke in:
+
+"I left Isabel here last Christmas happy and a Protestant. I have come
+back here now to find her unhappy and half a Catholic, if not
+more--and----"
+
+"Oh! are you sure?" asked Mistress Margaret, her eyes shining. "Thank
+God, if it be so!"
+
+"Sure?" said Hubert, "why she will not marry me; at least not yet."
+
+"Oh, poor lad," she said tenderly, "to have lost both God and Isabel."
+
+Hubert turned on her savagely. But the old nun's eyes were steady and
+serene.
+
+"Poor lad!" she said again.
+
+Hubert looked down again; his lip wrinkled up in a little sneer.
+
+"As far as I am concerned," he said, "I can understand your not caring,
+but I am astonished at this response of yours to her father's
+confidence!"
+
+Lady Maxwell grew white to the lips.
+
+"I have told you," she began--"but you do not seem to believe it--that I
+have had nothing to do, so far as I know, with her conversion,
+which"--and she raised her voice bravely--"I pray God to accomplish. She
+has, of course, asked me questions now and then; and I have answered
+them--that is all."
+
+"And I," said Mistress Margaret, "plead guilty to the same charge, and to
+no other. You are not yourself, dear boy, at present; and indeed I do not
+wonder at it; and I pray God to help you; but you are not yourself, or
+you would not speak like this to your mother."
+
+Hubert rose to his feet; his face was white under the tan, and the ruffle
+round his wrist trembled as he leaned heavily with his fingers on the
+table.
+
+"I am only a plain Protestant now," he said bitterly, "and I have been
+with Protestants so long that I have forgotten Catholic ways; but----"
+
+"Stay, Hubert," said his mother, "do not finish that. You will be sorry
+for it presently, if you do. Come, Margaret." And she moved towards the
+door; her son went quickly past and opened it.
+
+"Nay, nay," said the nun. "Do you be going, Mary. Let me stay with the
+lad, and we will come to you presently." Lady Maxwell bowed her head and
+passed out, and Hubert closed the door.
+
+Mistress Margaret looked down on the table.
+
+"You have given me a glass, dear boy; but no wine in it."
+
+Hubert took a couple of quick steps back, and faced her.
+
+"It is no use, it is no use," he burst out, and his voice was broken with
+emotion, "you cannot turn me like that. Oh, what have you done with my
+Isabel?" He put out his hand and seized her arm. "Give her back to me,
+Aunt Margaret; give her back to me."
+
+He dropped into his seat and hid his face on his arm; and there was a sob
+or two.
+
+"Sit up and be a man, Hubert," broke in Mistress Margaret's voice, clear
+and cool.
+
+He looked up in amazement with wet indignant eyes. She was looking at
+him, smiling tenderly.
+
+"And now, for the second time, give me half a glass of wine, dear boy."
+
+He poured it out, bewildered at her self-control.
+
+"For a man that has been round the world," she said, "you are but a
+foolish child."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Have you never thought of a way of yet winning Isabel," she asked.
+
+"What do you mean?" he repeated.
+
+"Why, come back to the Church, dear lad; and make your mother and me
+happy again, and marry Isabel, and save your own soul."
+
+"Aunt Margaret," he cried, "it is impossible. I have truly lost my faith
+in the Catholic religion; and--and--you would not have me a hypocrite."
+
+"Ah! ah!" said the nun, "you cannot tell yet. Please God it may come
+back. Oh! dear boy, in your heart you know it is true."
+
+"Before God, in my heart I know that it is not true."
+
+"No, no, no," she said; but the light died out of her eyes, and she
+stretched a tremulous hand.
+
+"Yes, Aunt Margaret, it is so. For years and years I have been doubting;
+but I kept on just because it seemed to me the best religion; and--and I
+would not be driven out of it by her Grace's laws against my will, like a
+dog stoned from his kennel."
+
+"But you are only a lad still," she said piteously. He laughed a little.
+
+"But I have had the gift of reason and discretion nearly twenty years, a
+priest would tell me. Besides, Aunt Margaret, I could not be such a--a
+cur--as to come back without believing. I could never look Isabel in the
+eyes again."
+
+"Well, well," said the old lady, "let us wait and see. Do you intend to
+be here now for a while?"
+
+"Not while Isabel is like this," he said. "I could not. I must go away
+for a while, and then come back and ask her again."
+
+"When will she decide?"
+
+"She told me by next Easter," said Hubert. "Oh, Aunt Margaret, pray for
+us both."
+
+The light began to glimmer again in her eyes.
+
+"There, dear boy," she said, "you see you believe in prayer still."
+
+"But, aunt," said Hubert, "why should I not? Protestants pray."
+
+"Well, well," said the old nun again. "Now you must come to your mother;
+and--and be good to her."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                      THE COMING OF THE JESUITS
+
+
+The effect on Anthony of Mr. Buxton's conversation was very considerable.
+He had managed to keep his temper very well during the actual interview;
+but he broke out alone afterwards, at first with an angry contempt. The
+absurd arrogance of the man made him furious--the arrogance that had
+puffed away England and its ambitions and its vigour--palpable evidences
+of life and reality, and further of God's blessing--in favour of a
+miserable Latin nation which had the presumption to claim the possession
+of Peter's Chair and of the person of the Vicar of Christ! Test it, said
+the young man to himself, by the ancient Fathers and Councils that Dr.
+Jewel quoted so learnedly, and the preposterous claim crumbled to dust.
+Test it, yet again, by the finger of Providence; and God Himself
+proclaimed that the pretensions of the spiritual kingdom, of which the
+prisoner in the cell had bragged, are but a blasphemous fable. And
+Anthony reminded himself of the events of the previous year.
+
+Three great assaults had been made by the Papists to win back England to
+the old Religion. Dr. William Allen, the founder of Douai College, had
+already for the last seven or eight years been pouring seminary priests
+into England, and over a hundred and twenty were at work among their
+countrymen, preparing the grand attack. This was made in three quarters
+at once.
+
+In Scotland it was chiefly political, and Anthony thought, with a bitter
+contempt, of the Count d'Aubigny, Esmé Stuart, who was supposed to be an
+emissary of the Jesuits; how he had plotted with ecclesiastics and
+nobles, and professed Protestantism to further his ends; and of all the
+stories of his duplicity and evil-living, told round the guard-room fire.
+
+In Ireland the attempt was little else than ludicrous. Anthony laughed
+fiercely to himself as he pictured the landing of the treacherous fools
+at Dingle, of Sir James FitzMaurice and his lady, very wretched and giddy
+after their voyage, and the barefooted friars, and Dr. Sanders, and the
+banner so solemnly consecrated; and of the sands of Smerwick, when all
+was over a year later, and the six hundred bodies, men and women who had
+preferred Mr. Buxton's spiritual kingdom to Elizabeth's kindly rule,
+stripped and laid out in rows, like dead game, for Lord Grey de Wilton to
+reckon them by.
+
+But his heart sank a little as he remembered the third method of attack,
+and of the coming of the Jesuits. By last July all London knew that they
+were here, and men's hearts were shaken with apprehension. They reminded
+one another of the April earthquake that had tolled the great Westminster
+bell, and thrown down stones from the churches. One of the Lambeth
+guards, a native of Blunsdon, in Wiltshire, had told Anthony himself that
+a pack of hell-hounds had been heard there, in full cry after a ghostly
+quarry. Phantom ships had been seen from Bodmin attacking a phantom
+castle that rode over the waves off the Cornish coast. An old woman of
+Blasedon had given birth to a huge-headed monster with the mouth of a
+mouse, eight legs, and a tail; and, worse than all, it was whispered in
+the Somersetshire inns that three companies of black-robed men, sixty in
+number, had been seen, coming and going overhead in the gloom. These two
+strange emissaries, Fathers Persons and Campion--how they appealed to the
+imagination, lurking under a hundred disguises, now of servants, now of
+gentlemen of means and position! It was known that they were still in
+England, going about doing good, their friends said who knew them;
+stirring up the people, their enemies said who were searching for them.
+Anthony had seen with his own eyes some of the papers connected with
+their presence--that containing a statement of their objects in coming,
+namely, that they were spiritual not political agents, seeking recruits
+for Christ and for none else; Campion's "Challenge and Brag," offering to
+meet any English Divine on equal terms in a public disputation; besides
+one or two of the controversial pamphlets, purporting to be printed at
+Douai, but really emanating from a private printing-press in England, as
+the Government experts had discovered from an examination of the
+water-marks of the paper employed.
+
+Yet as the weeks went by, and his first resentment cooled, Mr. Buxton's
+arguments more and more sank home, for they had touched the very point
+where Anthony had reckoned that his own strength lay. He had never before
+heard Nationalism and Catholicism placed in such flat antithesis. In
+fact, he had never before really heard the statement of the Catholic
+position; and his fierce contempt gradually melted into respect. Both
+theories had a concrete air of reality about them; his own imaged itself
+under the symbols of England's power; the National Church appealed to him
+so far as it represented the spiritual side of the English people; and
+Mr. Buxton's conception appealed to him from its very audacity. This
+great spiritual kingdom, striding on its way, trampling down the barriers
+of temperament and nationality, disregarding all earthly limitations and
+artificial restraints, imperiously dominating the world in spite of the
+world's struggles and resentment--this, after all, as he thought over it,
+was--well--was a new aspect of affairs. The coming of the Jesuits, too,
+emphasised the appeal: here were two men, as the world itself confessed,
+of exceptional ability--for Campion had been a famous Oxford orator, and
+Persons a Fellow of Balliol--choosing, under a free-will obedience, first
+a life of exile, and then one of daily peril and apprehension, the very
+thought of which burdened the imagination with horror; hunted like
+vermin, sleeping and faring hard, their very names detested by the
+majority of their countrymen, with the shadow of the gallows moving with
+them, and the reek of the hangman's cauldron continually in their
+nostrils--and for what? For Mr. Buxton's spiritual kingdom! Well, Anthony
+thought to himself as the weeks went by and his new thoughts sank deeper,
+if it is all a superstitious dream, at least it is a noble one!
+
+What, too, was the answer, he asked himself, that England gave to Father
+Campion's challenge, and the defence that the Government was preparing
+against the spiritual weapons of the Jesuits? New prisons at Framingham
+and Battersea; new penalties enacted by Parliament; and, above all, the
+unanswerable argument of the rack, and the gallows finally to close the
+discussion. And what of the army that was being set in array against the
+priests, and that was even now beginning to scour the country round
+Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and London? Anthony had to confess to himself
+that they were queer allies for the servants of Christ; for traitors,
+liars, and informers were among the most trusted Government agents.
+
+In short, as the spring drew on, Anthony was not wholly happy. Again and
+again in his own room he studied a little manuscript translation of
+Father Campion's "Ten Reasons," that had been taken from a popish
+prisoner, and that a friend had given him; and as he read its exultant
+rhetoric, he wondered whether the writer was indeed as insincere and
+treacherous as Mr. Scot declared. There seemed in the paper a reckless
+outspokenness, calculated rather to irritate than deceive.
+
+"I turn to the Sacraments," he read, "none, none, not two, not one, O
+holy Christ, have they left. Their very bread is poison. Their baptism,
+though it be true, yet in their judgment is nothing. It is not the saving
+water! It is not the channel of Grace! It brings not Christ's merits to
+us! It is but a sign of salvation!" And again the writer cried to
+Elizabeth to return to the ancient Religion, and to be in truth what she
+was in name, the Defender of the Faith.
+
+"'Kings shall be thy nursing fathers,' thus Isaiah sang, 'and Queens thy
+nursing mothers.' Listen, Elizabeth, most Mighty Queen! To thee the great
+Prophet sings! He teaches thee thy part. Join then thyself to these
+princes!... O Elizabeth, a day, a day shall come that shall show thee
+clearly which have loved thee the better, the Society of Jesus or Luther's
+brood!"
+
+What arrogance, thought Anthony to himself, and what assurance too!
+
+Meanwhile in the outer world things were not reassuring to the friends of
+the Government: it was true that half a dozen priests had been captured
+and examined by torture, and that Sir George Peckham himself, who was
+known to have harboured Campion, had been committed to the Marshalsea;
+but yet the Jesuits' influence was steadily on the increase. More and
+more severe penalties had been lately enacted; it was now declared to be
+high treason to reconcile or be reconciled to the Church of Rome;
+overwhelming losses in fortune as well as liberty were threatened against
+all who said or heard Mass or refused to attend the services of the
+Establishment; but, as was discovered from papers that fell from time to
+time into the hands of the Government agents, the only answer of the
+priests was to inveigh more strenuously against even occasional
+conformity, declaring it to be the mortal sin of schism, if not of
+apostasy, to put in an appearance under any circumstances, except those
+of actual physical compulsion, at the worship in the parish churches.
+Worse than all, too, was the fact that this severe gospel began to
+prevail; recusancy was reported to be on the increase in all parts of the
+country; and many of the old aristocracy began to return to the faith of
+their fathers: Lords Arundel, Oxford, Vaux, Henry Howard, and Sir Francis
+Southwell were all beginning to fall under the suspicion of the shrewdest
+Government spies.
+
+The excitement at Lambeth ran higher day by day as the summer drew on;
+the net was being gradually contracted in the home counties; spies were
+reported to be everywhere, in inns, in the servants' quarters of
+gentlemen's houses, lounging at cross roads and on village greens.
+Campion's name was in every mouth. Now they were on his footsteps, it was
+said; now he was taken; now he was gone back to France; now he was in
+London; now in Lancashire; and each rumour in turn corrected its
+predecessor.
+
+Anthony shared to the full in the excitement; the figure of the quarry,
+after which so many hawks were abroad, appealed to his imagination. He
+dreamed of him at night, once as a crafty-looking man with narrow eyes
+and stooping shoulders, that skulked and ran from shadow to shadow across
+a moonlit country; once as a ruddy-faced middle-aged gentleman riding
+down a crowded street; and several times as a kind of double of Mr.
+Stewart, whom he had never forgotten, since he had watched him in the
+little room of Maxwell Hall, gallant and alert among his enemies.
+
+At last one day in July, as it drew on towards evening, and as Anthony
+was looking over the stable-accounts in his little office beyond the
+Presence Chamber, a buzz of talk and footsteps broke out in the court
+below; and a moment later the Archbishop's body-servant ran in to say
+that his Grace wished to see Mr. Norris at once in the gallery that
+opened out of the guard-room.
+
+"And I think it is about the Jesuits, sir," added the man, evidently
+excited.
+
+Anthony ran down at once and found his master pacing up and down, with a
+courier waiting near the steps at the lower end that led to Chichele's
+tower. The Archbishop stopped by a window, emblazoned with Cardinal
+Pole's emblem, and beckoned to him.
+
+"See here, Master Norris," he said, "I have received news that Campion is
+at last taken: it may well be false, as so often before; but take horse,
+if you please, and ride into the city and find the truth for me. I will
+not send a groom; they believe the maddest tales. You are at liberty?" he
+added courteously.
+
+"Yes, your Grace, I will ride immediately."
+
+As he rode down the river-bank towards London Bridge ten minutes later,
+he could not help feeling some dismay as well as excitement at the news
+he was to verify. And yet what other end was possible? But what a doom
+for the brilliant Oxford orator, even though he had counted the cost!
+
+Streams of excited people were pouring across the bridge into the city;
+Campion's name was on every tongue; and Anthony, as he passed under the
+high gate, noticed a man point up at the grim spiked heads above it, and
+laugh to his companion. There seemed little doubt, from the unanimity of
+those whom he questioned, that the rumour was true; and some even said
+that the Jesuit was actually passing down Cheapside on his way to the
+Tower. When at last Anthony came to the thoroughfare the crowd was as
+dense as for a royal progress. He checked his horse at the door of an
+inn-yard, and asked an ostler that stood there what it was all about.
+
+"It is Campion, the Jesuit, sir," said the man. "He has been taken at
+Lyford, and is passing here presently."
+
+The man had hardly finished speaking when a yell came from the end of the
+street, and groans and hoots ran down the crowd. Anthony turned in his
+saddle, and saw a great stir and movement, and then horses' and men's
+heads moving slowly down over the seething surface of the crowd, as if
+swimming in a rough sea. He could make little out, as the company came
+towards him, but the faces of the officers and pursuivants who rode in
+the front rank, four or five abreast; then followed the faces of three or
+four others, also riding between guards, and Anthony looked eagerly at
+them; but they were simple faces enough, a little pale and quiet; one was
+like a farmer's, ruddy and bearded;--surely Campion could not be among
+those! Then more and more, riding two and two, with a couple of armed
+guards with each pair; some looked like country-men or servants, some
+like gentlemen, and one or two might be priests; but the crowd seemed to
+pay them no attention beyond a glance or two. Ah! what was this coming
+behind?
+
+There was a space behind the last row of guards, and then came a separate
+troop riding all together, of half a dozen men at least, and one in the
+centre, with something white in his hat. The ferment round this group was
+tremendous; men were leaping up and yelling, like hounds round a carted
+stag; clubs shot up menacingly, and a storm of ceaseless execration raged
+outside the compact square of guards who sat alert and ready to beat off
+an attack. Once a horse kicked fiercely as a man sprang to his
+hind-quarters, and there was a scream of pain and a burst of laughing.
+
+Anthony sat trembling with excitement as the first group had passed, and
+this second began to come opposite the entrance where he sat. This then
+was the man!
+
+The rider in the centre sat his horse somewhat stiffly, and Anthony saw
+that his elbows were bound behind his back, and his hands in front; the
+reins were drawn over his horse's head and a pursuivant held them on
+either side. The man was dressed as a layman, in a plumed hat and a buff
+jerkin, such as soldiers or plain country-gentlemen might use; and in the
+hat was a great paper with an inscription. Anthony spelt it out.
+
+"Campion, the Seditious Jesuit."
+
+Then he looked at the man's face.
+
+It was a comely refined face, a little pale but perfectly serene: his
+pointed dark brown beard and moustache were carefully trimmed; and his
+large passionate eyes looked cheerfully about him. Anthony stared at him,
+wholly fascinated; for above the romance that hung about the hunted
+priest and the glamour of the dreaded Society which he represented, there
+was a chivalrous fearless look in his face that drew the heart of the
+young man almost irresistibly. At least he did not look like the skulking
+knave at whom all the world was sneering, and of whom Anthony had dreamt
+so vividly a few nights before.
+
+The storm of execration from the faces below, and the faces crowding at
+the windows, seemed to affect him not at all; and he looked from side to
+side as if they were cheering him rather than crying against him. Once
+his eyes met Anthony's and rested on them for a moment; and a strange
+thrill ran through him and he shivered sharply.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+And yet he felt, too, a distinct and irresistible movement of attraction
+towards this felon who was riding towards his agony and passion; and he
+was conscious at the same time of that curious touch of wonder that he
+had felt years before towards the man whipped at the cart's tail, as to
+whether the solitary criminal were not in the right, and the clamorous
+accusers in the wrong. Campion in a moment had passed on and turned his
+head.
+
+In that moment, too, Anthony caught a sudden clear instantaneous
+impression of a group of faces in the window opposite. There were a
+couple of men in front, stout city personages no doubt, with crimson
+faces and open mouths cursing the traitorous Papist and the crafty
+vagrant fox trapped at last; but between them, looking over their
+shoulders, was a woman's face in which Anthony saw the most intense
+struggle of emotions. The face was quite white, the lips parted, the eyes
+straining, and sorrow and compassion were in every line, as she watched
+the cheerful priest among his warders; and yet there rested on it, too, a
+strange light as of triumph. It was the face of one who sees victory even
+at the hour of supremest failure. In an instant more the face had
+withdrawn itself into the darkness of the room.
+
+When the crowds had surged down the street in the direction of the Tower,
+yelling in derision as Campion saluted the lately defaced Cheapside
+Cross, Anthony guided his horse out through the dispersing groups,
+realising as he did so, with a touch of astonishment at the coincidence,
+that he had been standing almost immediately under the window whence he
+and Isabel had leaned out so many years before.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The sun was going down behind the Abbey as he rode up towards Lambeth,
+and the sky above and the river beneath were as molten gold. The Abbey
+itself, with Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament below, stood
+up like mystical palaces against the sunset; and it seemed to Anthony as
+he rode, as if God Himself were illustrating in glorious illumination the
+closing pages of that human life of which a glimpse had opened to him in
+Cheapside. It did not appear to him as it had done in the days of his
+boyish love as if heaven and earth were a stage for himself to walk and
+pose upon; but he felt intensely now the dominating power of the
+personality of the priest; and that he himself was no more than a
+spectator of this act of a tragedy of which the priest was both hero and
+victim, and for which this evening glory formed so radiant a scene. The
+old intellectual arguments against the cause that the priest represented
+for the moment were drowned in this flood of splendour. When he arrived
+at Lambeth and had reached the Archbishop's presence, he told him the
+news briefly, and went to his room full of thought and perplexity.
+
+In a few days the story of Campion's arrest was known far and wide. It
+had been made possible by the folly of one Catholic and the treachery of
+another; and when Anthony heard it, he was stirred still more by the
+contrast between the Jesuit and his pursuers. The priest had returned to
+the moated grange at Lyford, after having already paid as long a visit
+there as was prudent, owing to the solicitations of a number of gentlemen
+who had ridden after him and his companion, and who wished to hear his
+eloquence. He had returned there again, said mass on the Sunday morning,
+and preached afterwards, from a chair set before the altar, a sermon on
+the tears of the Saviour over apostate Jerusalem. But a false disciple
+had been present who had come in search of one Payne; and this man, known
+afterwards by the Catholics as Judas Eliot or Eliot Iscariot, had
+gathered a number of constables and placed them about the manor-house;
+and before the sermon was over he went out quickly from the table of the
+Lord, the house was immediately surrounded, and the alarm was raised by a
+watcher placed in one of the turrets after Eliot's suspicious departure.
+The three priests present, Campion and two others, were hurried into a
+hiding-hole over the stairs. The officers entered, searched, and found
+nothing; and were actually retiring, when Eliot succeeded in persuading
+them to try again; they searched again till dark, and still found
+nothing. Mrs. Yate encouraged them to stay the night in the house, and
+entertained them with ale; and then when all was quiet, insisted on
+hearing some parting words from her eloquent guest. He came out into the
+room where she had chosen to spend the night until the officers were
+gone; and the rest of the Catholics, some Brigittine nuns and others, met
+there through private passages and listened to him for the last time. As
+the company was dispersing one of the priests stumbled and fell, making a
+noise that roused the sentry outside. Again the house was searched, and
+again with no success. In despair they were leaving it, when Jenkins,
+Eliot's companion, who was coming downstairs with a servant of the house,
+beat with his stick on the wall, saying that they had not searched there.
+It was noticed that the servant showed signs of agitation; and men were
+fetched to the spot; the wall was beaten in and the three priests were
+found together, having mutually shriven one another, and made themselves
+ready for death.
+
+Campion was taken out and sent first to the Sheriff of Berkshire, and
+then on towards London on the following day.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The summer days went by, and every day brought its fresh rumour about
+Campion. Sir Owen Hopton, Governor of the Tower, who at first had
+committed his prisoner to Little-Ease, now began to treat him with more
+honour; he talked, too, mysteriously, of secret interviews and promises
+and understandings; and gradually it began to get about that Campion was
+yielding to kindness; that he had seen the Queen; that he was to recant
+at Paul's Cross; and even that he was to have the See of Canterbury. This
+last rumour caused great indignation at Lambeth, and Anthony was more
+pressed than ever to get what authentic news he could of the Jesuit. Then
+at the beginning of August came a burst of new tales; he had been racked,
+it was said, and had given up a number of names; and as the month went by
+more and more details, authentic and otherwise, were published. Those
+favourably inclined to the Catholics were divided in opinion; some feared
+that he had indeed yielded to an excess of agony; others, and these
+proved to be in the right when the truth came out, that he had only given
+up names which were already known to the authorities; though even for
+this he asked public pardon on the scaffold.
+
+Towards the end of August the Archbishop again sent expressly for Anthony
+and bade him accompany his chaplain on the following day to the Tower, to
+be present at the public disputation that was to take place between
+English divines and the Jesuit.
+
+"Now he will have the chance he craved for," said Grindal. "He hath
+bragged that he would meet any and all in dispute, and now the Queen's
+clemency hath granted it him."
+
+On the following day in the early morning sunshine the minister and
+Anthony rode down together to the Tower, where they arrived a few minutes
+before eight o'clock, and were passed through up the stairs into St.
+John's chapel to the seats reserved for them.
+
+It was indeed true that the authorities had determined to give Campion
+his chance, but they had also determined to make it as small as possible.
+He was not even told that the discussion was to take place until the
+morning of its occasion, and he was allowed no opportunity for developing
+his own theological position; the entire conduct of the debate was in the
+hands of his adversaries; he might only parry, seldom riposte, and never
+attack.
+
+When Anthony found himself in his seat he looked round the chapel. Almost
+immediately opposite him, on a raised platform against a pillar, stood
+two high seats occupied by Deans Nowell and Day, who were to conduct the
+disputation, and who were now talking with their heads together while a
+secretary was arranging a great heap of books on the table before them.
+On either side, east and west, stretched chairs for the divines that were
+to support them in debate, should they need it; and the platform on which
+Anthony himself had a chair was filled with a crowd of clergy and
+courtiers laughing and chatting together. A little table, also heaped
+with books, with seats for the notaries, stood in the centre of the nave,
+and not far from it were a number of little wooden stools which the
+prisoners were to occupy. Plainly they were to be allowed no advisers and
+no books; even the physical support of table and chairs was denied to
+them in spite of their weary racked bodies. The chapel, bright with the
+morning sunlight that streamed in through the east windows of the bare
+Norman sanctuary, hummed with the talk and laughter of those who had come
+to see the priest-baiting and the vindication of the Protestant Religion;
+though, as Anthony looked round, he saw here and there an anxious or a
+downcast face of some unknown friend of the Papists.
+
+He himself was far from easy in his mind. He had been studying Campion's
+"Ten Reasons" more earnestly than ever, and was amazed to find that the
+very authorities to which Dr. Jewel deferred, namely, the Scriptures
+interpreted by Fathers and Councils and illustrated by History, were
+exactly Campion's authorities, too; and that the Jesuit's appeal to them
+was no less confident than the Protestant's. That fact had, of course,
+suggested the thought that if there were no further living authority in
+existence to decide between these two scholars, Christendom was in a poor
+position. When doctors differed, where was the layman to turn? To his own
+private judgment, said the Protestant. But then Campion's private
+judgment led him to submit to the Catholic claim! This then at present
+weighed heavily on Anthony's mind. Was there or was there not an
+authority on earth capable of declaring to him the Revelation of God? For
+the first time he was beginning to feel a logical and spiritual necessity
+for an infallible external Judge in matters of faith; and that the
+Catholic Church was the only system that professed to supply it. The
+question of the existence of such an authority was, with the doctrine of
+justification, one of those subjects continually in men's minds and
+conversations, and to Anthony, unlike others, it appeared more
+fundamental even than its companion. All else seemed secondary.
+Indulgences, the Mass, Absolution, the Worship of Mary and the
+Saints--all these must stand or fall on God's authority made known to
+man. The one question for him was, Where was that authority to be
+certainly found?
+
+There came the ringing tramp of footsteps; the buzz of talk ceased and
+then broke out again, as the prisoners, with all eyes bent upon them,
+surrounded by a strong guard of pikemen, were seen advancing up the
+chapel from the north-west door towards the stools set ready for them.
+Anthony had no eyes but for Campion who limped in front, supported on
+either side by a warder. He could scarcely believe at first that this was
+the same priest who had ridden so bravely down Cheapside. Now he was
+bent, and walked like an old broken man; his face was deathly pale, with
+shadows and lines about his eyes, and his head trembled a little. There
+were one or two exclamations of pity, for all knew what had caused the
+change; and Anthony heard an undertone moan of sorrow and anger from some
+one in a seat behind him.
+
+The prisoners sat down; and the guards went to their places. Campion took
+his seat in front, and turned immediately from side to side, running his
+dark eyes along the faces to see where were his adversaries; and once
+more Anthony met his eyes, and thrilled at it. Through the pallor and
+pain of his face, the same chivalrous spirit looked out and called for
+homage and love, that years ago at Oxford had made young men, mockingly
+nicknamed after their leader, to desire his praise more passionately than
+anything on earth, and even to imitate his manners and dress and gait,
+for very loyalty and devotion. Anthony could not take his eyes off him;
+he watched the clear-cut profile of his face thrown fearlessly forward,
+waited in tense expectation to hear him speak, and paid no attention to
+the whisperings of the chaplain beside him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Presently the debate began. It was opened by Dean Nowell from his high
+seat, who assured Father Campion of the disinterested motives of himself
+and his reverend friends in holding this disputation. It was, after all,
+only what the priest had demanded; and they trusted by God's grace that
+they would do him good and help him to see the truth. There was no
+unfairness, said the Dean, who seemed to think that some apology was
+needed, in taking him thus unprepared, since the subject of debate would
+be none other than Campion's own book. The Jesuit looked up, nodded his
+head, and smiled.
+
+"I thank you, Mr. Dean," he said, in his deep resonant voice, and there
+fell a dead hush as he spoke. "I thank you for desiring to do me good,
+and to take up my challenge; but I must say that I would I had understood
+of your coming, that I might have made myself ready."
+
+Campion's voice thrilled strangely through Anthony, as the glance from
+his eyes had done. It was so assured, so strong and delicate an
+instrument, and so supremely at its owner's command, that it was hardly
+less persuasive than his personality and his learning that made
+themselves apparent during the day. And Anthony was not alone in his
+impressions of the Jesuit. Lord Arundel afterwards attributed his
+conversion to Campion's share in the discussions. Again and again during
+the day a murmur of applause followed some of the priest's clean-cut
+speeches and arguments, and a murmur of disapproval the fierce thrusts
+and taunts of his opponents; and by the end of the day's debate, so
+marked was the change of attitude of the crowd that had come to triumph
+over the Papist, and so manifest their sympathy with the prisoners, that
+it was thought advisable to exclude the public from the subsequent
+discussions.
+
+On this first day, all manner of subjects were touched upon, such as the
+comparative leniency of Catholic and Protestant governments, the position
+of Luther with regard to the Epistle of St. James, and other matters
+comparatively unimportant, in the discussion of which a great deal of
+time was wasted. Campion entreated his opponents to leave such minor
+questions alone, and to come to doctrinal matters; but they preferred to
+keep to details rather than to principles, and the priest had scarcely
+any opportunity to state his positive position at all. The only doctrinal
+matter seriously touched upon was that of Justification by Faith; and
+texts were flung to and fro without any great result. "We are justified
+by faith," cried one side. "Though I have all faith and have not charity,
+I am nothing," cried the other. The effect on Anthony of this day's
+debate arose rather from the victorious personality of the priest than
+from his arguments. His gaiety, too, was in strange contrast to the
+solemn Puritanism of his enemies. For instance, he was on the point that
+Councils might err in matters of fact, but that the Scriptures could not.
+
+"As for example," he said, his eyes twinkling out of his drawn face, "I
+am bound under pain of damnation to believe that Toby's dog had a tail,
+because it is written, he wagged it."
+
+The Deans looked sternly at him, as the audience laughed.
+
+"Now, now," said one of them, "it becomes not to deal so triflingly with
+matters of weight."
+
+Campion dropped his eyes, demurely, as if reproved.
+
+"Why, then," he said, "if this example like you not, take another. I must
+believe that Saint Paul had a cloak, because he willeth Timothy to bring
+it with him."
+
+Again the crowd laughed; and Anthony laughed, too, with a strange sob in
+his throat at the gallant foolery, which, after all, was as much to the
+point as a deal that the Deans were saying.
+
+But the second day's debate, held in Hopton's Hall, was on more vital
+matters; and Anthony again and again found himself leaning forward
+breathlessly, as Drs. Goode and Fulke on the one side, and Campion on the
+other, respectively attacked and defended the Doctrine of the Visible
+Church; for this, for Anthony, was one of the crucial points of the
+dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism. Anthony believed already
+that the Church was one; and if it was visible, surely, he thought to
+himself, it must be visibly one; and in that case, it is evident where
+that Church is to be found. But if it is invisible, it may be invisibly
+one, and then as far as that matter is concerned, he may rest in the
+Church of England. If not--and then he recoiled from the gulf that
+opened.
+
+"It must be an essential mark of the Church," said Campion, "and such a
+quality as is inseparable. It must be visible, as fire is hot, and water
+moist."
+
+Goode answered that when Christ was taken and the Apostles fled, then at
+least the Church was invisible; and if then, why not always?
+
+"It was a Church inchoate," answered the priest, "beginning, not
+perfect."
+
+But Goode continued to insist that the true Church is known only to God,
+and therefore invisible.
+
+"There are many wolves within," he said, "and many sheep without."
+
+"I know not who is elect," retorted Campion, "but I know who is a
+Catholic."
+
+"Only the elect are of the Church," said Goode.
+
+"I say that both good and evil are of the visible Church," answered the
+other.
+
+"To be elect or true members of Christ is one thing," went on Goode, "and
+to be in the visible Church is another."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As the talk went on, Anthony began to see where the confusion lay. The
+Protestants were anxious to prove that membership in a visible body did
+not ensure salvation but then the Catholics never claimed that it did;
+the question was: Did or did not Christ intend there to be a visible
+Church, membership in which should be the normal though not the
+infallible means of salvation?
+
+They presently got on to the _a priori_ point as to whether a visible
+Church would seem to be a necessity.
+
+"There is a perpetual commandment," said the priest, "in Matthew
+eighteen--'Tell the Church'; but that cannot be unless the Church is
+visible; _ergo_, the visibility of the Church is continual."
+
+"When there is an established Church," said Goode, "this remedy is to be
+sought for. But this cannot be always had."
+
+"The disease is continual," answered Campion; "_ergo_ the remedy must be
+continual." Then he left the _a priori_ ground and entered theirs. "To
+whom should I have gone," he cried, "before Luther's time? What prelates
+should I have made my complaint unto in those days? Where was your Church
+nine hundred years ago? Whose were John Huss, Jerome of Prague, the
+Waldenses? Were they yours?" Then he turned scornfully to Fulke, "Help
+him, Master Doctor."
+
+And Fulke repeated Goode's assertion, that valuable as the remedy is, it
+cannot always be had.
+
+Anthony sat back, puzzled. Both sides seemed right. Persecution must
+often hinder the full privileges of Church membership and the exercise of
+discipline. Yet the question was, What was Christ's intention? Was it
+that the Church should be visible? It seemed that even the ministers
+allowed that, now. And if so, why then the Catholic's claim that Christ's
+intention had never been wholly frustrated, but that a visible unity was
+to be found amongst themselves--surely this was easier to believe than
+the Protestant theory that the Church which had been visible for fifteen
+centuries was not really the Church at all; but that the true Church had
+been invisible--in spite of Christ's intention--during all that period,
+and was now to be found only in small separated bodies scattered here and
+there. How of the prevailing of the gates of hell, if that were allowed
+to be true?
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+At two o'clock they reassembled for the afternoon conference; and now
+they got even closer to the heart of the matter, for the subject was to
+be, whether the Church could err?
+
+Fulke asserted that it could, and did; and made a syllogism:
+
+"Whatsoever error is incident to every member, is incident to the whole.
+But it is incident to every member to err; _ergo_, to the whole."
+
+"I deny both _major_ and _minor_," said Campion quietly. "Every man may
+err, but not the whole gathered together; for the whole hath a promise,
+but so hath not every particular man."
+
+Fulke denied this stoutly, and beat on the table.
+
+"Every member hath the spirit of Christ," he said, "which is the spirit
+of truth; and therefore hath the same promise that the whole hath."
+
+"Why, then," said Campion, smiling, "there should be no heretics."
+
+"Yes," answered Fulke, "heretics may be within the Church, but not of the
+Church."
+
+And so they found themselves back again where they started from.
+
+Anthony sat back on the oak bench and sighed, and glanced round at the
+interested faces of the theologians and the yawns of the amateurs, as the
+debate rolled on over the old ground, and touched on free will, and
+grace, and infant baptism; until the Lieutenant interposed:
+
+"Master Doctors," he said, with a judicial air, "the question that was
+appointed before dinner was, whether the visible Church may err"--to
+which Goode retorted that the digressions were all Campion's fault.
+
+Then the debate took the form of contradictions.
+
+"Whatsoever congregation doth err in matters of faith," said Goode, "is
+not the true Church; but the Church of Rome erreth in matters of faith;
+_ergo_, it is not the true Church."
+
+"I deny your _minor_," said Campion, "the Church of Rome hath not erred."
+Then the same process was repeated over the Council of Trent; and the
+debate whirled off once more into details and irrelevancies about imputed
+righteousness, and the denial of the Cup to the laity.
+
+Again the audience grew restless. They had not come there, most of them,
+to listen to theological minutiæ, but to see sport; and this interminable
+chopping of words that resulted in nothing bored them profoundly. A
+murmur of conversation began to buzz on all sides.
+
+Campion was in despair.
+
+"Thus shall we run into all questions," he cried hopelessly, "and then we
+shall have done this time twelve months."
+
+But Fulke would not let him be; but pressed on a question about the
+Council of Nice.
+
+"Now we shall have the matter of images," sighed Campion.
+
+"You are _nimis acutus_," retorted Fulke, "you will leap over the stile
+or ever you come to it. I mean not to speak of images."
+
+And so with a few more irrelevancies the debate ended.
+
+The third debate in September (on the twenty-third), at which Anthony was
+again present, was on the subject of the Real Presence in the Blessed
+Sacrament.
+
+Fulke was in an evil temper, since it was common talk that Campion had
+had the best of the argument on the eighteenth.
+
+"The other day," he said, "when we had some hope of your conversion, we
+forbare you much, and suffered you to discourse; but now that we see you
+are an obstinate heretic, and seek to cover the light of the truth with
+multitude of words, we mean not to allow you such large discourses as we
+did."
+
+"You are very imperious to-day," answered Campion serenely, "whatsoever
+the matter is. I am the Queen's prisoner, and none of yours."
+
+"Not a whit imperious," said Fulke angrily,--"though I will exact of you
+to keep the right order of disputation."
+
+Then the argument began. It soon became plain to Anthony that it was
+possible to take the Scripture in two senses, literally and
+metaphorically. The sacrament either was literally Christ's body, or it
+was not. Who then was to decide? Father Campion said it meant the one;
+Dr. Fulke the other. Could it be possible that Christ should leave His
+people in doubt as to such a thing? Surely not, thought Anthony. Well,
+then, where is the arbiter? Father Campion says, The Church; Dr. Fulke
+says, The Scripture. But that is a circular argument, for the question to
+be decided is: What does the Scripture mean? for it may mean at least two
+things, at least so it would seem. Here then he found himself face to
+face with the claims of the Church of Rome to be that arbiter; and his
+heart began to grow sick with apprehension as he saw how that Church
+supplied exactly what was demanded by the circumstances of the case--that
+is, an infallible living guide as to the meaning of God's Revelation. The
+simplicity of her claim appalled him.
+
+He did not follow the argument closely, since it seemed to him but a
+secondary question now; though he heard one or two sentences. At one
+point Campion was explaining what the Church meant by substance. It was
+that which transcended the senses.
+
+"Are you not Dr. Fulke?" he said. "And yet I see nothing but your colour
+and exterior form. The substance of Dr. Fulke cannot be seen."
+
+"I will not vouchsafe to reply upon this answer," snarled Fulke, whose
+temper had not been improved by the debate--"too childish for a
+sophister!"
+
+Then followed interminable syllogisms, of which Campion would not accept
+the premises; and no real progress was made. The Jesuit tried to explain
+the doctrine that the wicked may be said not to eat the Body in the
+Sacrament, because they receive not the virtue of It, though they receive
+the Thing; but Fulke would not hear him. The distinction was new to
+Anthony, with his puritan training, and he sat pondering it while the
+debate passed on.
+
+The afternoon discussion, too, was to little purpose. More and more
+Anthony, and others with him, began to see that the heart of the matter
+was the authority of the Church; and that unless that was settled, all
+other debate was beside the point; and the importance of this was brought
+out for him more clearly than ever on the 27th of the month, when the
+fourth and last debate took place, and on the subject of the sufficiency
+of the Scriptures unto salvation.
+
+Mr. Charke, who had now succeeded as disputant, began with extempore
+prayer, in which as usual the priest refused to join, praying and
+crossing himself apart.
+
+Mr. Walker then opened the disputation with a pompous and insolent speech
+about "one Campion," an "unnatural man to his country, degenerated from
+an Englishman, an apostate in religion, a fugitive from this realm,
+unloyal to his prince." Campion sat with his eyes cast down, until the
+minister had done.
+
+Then the discussion began. The priest pointed out that Protestants were
+not even decided as to what were Scriptures and what were not, since
+Luther rejected three epistles in the New Testament; therefore, he
+argued, the Church is necessary as a guide, first of all, to tell men
+what is Scripture. Walker evaded by saying he was not a Lutheran but a
+Christian; and then the talk turned on to apocryphal books. But it was
+not possible to evade long, and the Jesuit soon touched his opponent.
+
+"To leave a door to traditions," he said, "which the Holy Ghost may
+deliver to the true Church, is both manifest and seen: as in the Baptism
+of infants, the Holy Ghost proceeding from Father to Son, and such other
+things mentioned, which are delivered by tradition. Prove these directly
+by the Scripture if you can!"
+
+Charke answered by the analogy of circumcision which infants received,
+and by quoting Christ's words as to "sending" of the Comforter; and they
+were soon deep in detailed argument; but once more Anthony saw that it
+was all a question of the interpretation of Scripture; and, therefore,
+that it would seem that an authoritative interpreter was necessary--and
+where could such be found save in an infallible living Voice? And once
+more a question of Campion's drove the point home.
+
+"Was all Scripture written when the Apostles first taught?" And Charke
+dared not answer yes.
+
+The afternoon's debate concerned justification by faith, and this, more
+than ever, seemed to Anthony a secondary matter, now that he was
+realising what the claim of a living authority meant; and he sat back,
+only interested in watching the priest's face, so controlled yet so
+transparent in its simplicity and steadfastness, as he listened to the
+ministers' brutal taunts and insolence, and dealt his quiet skilful
+parries and ripostes to their incessant assaults. At last the Lieutenant
+struck the table with his hand, and intimated that the time was past, and
+after a long prayer by Mr. Walker, the prisoners were led back to their
+cells.
+
+As Anthony rode back alone in the evening sunlight, he was as one who
+was seeing a vision. There was indeed a vision before him, that had
+been taking shape gradually, detail by detail, during these last months,
+and ousting the old one; and which now, terribly emphasised by Campion's
+arguments and illuminated by the fire of his personality, towered up
+imperious, consistent, dominating--and across her brow her title, The
+Catholic Church. Far above all the melting cloudland of theory she
+moved, a stupendous fact; living, in contrast with the dead past to
+which her enemies cried in vain; eloquent when other systems were dumb;
+authoritative when they hesitated; steady when they reeled and fell.
+About her throne dwelt her children, from every race and age, secure in
+her protection, and wise with her knowledge, when other men faltered and
+questioned and doubted: and as Anthony looked up and saw her for the
+first time, he recognised her as the Mistress and Mother of his soul; and
+although the blinding clouds of argument and theory and self-distrust
+rushed down on him again and filled his eyes with dust, yet he knew he
+had seen her face in very truth, and that the memory of that vision could
+never again wholly leave him.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VI
+
+                           SOME CONTRASTS
+
+
+In the Lambeth household the autumn passed by uneventfully. The rigour of
+the Archbishop's confinement had been mitigated, and he had been allowed
+now and again to visit his palace at Croydon; but his inactivity still
+continued as the sequestration was not removed; Elizabeth had refused to
+listen to the petition of Convocation in '80 for his reinstatement.
+Anthony went down to the old palace once or twice with him; and was
+brought closer to him in many ways; and his affection and tenderness
+towards his master continually increased. Grindal was a pathetic figure
+at this time, with few friends, in poor health, out of favour with the
+Queen, who had disregarded his existence; and now his afflictions were
+rendered more heavy than ever by the blindness that was creeping over
+him. The Archbishop, too, in his loneliness and sorrow, was drawn closer
+to his young officer than ever before; and gradually got to rely upon him
+in many little ways. He would often walk with Anthony in the gardens at
+Lambeth, leaning upon his arm, talking to him of his beloved flowers and
+herbs which he was now almost too blind to see; telling him queer facts
+about the properties of plants; and even attempting to teach him a little
+irrelevant botany now and then.
+
+They were walking up and down together, soon after Campion's arrest, one
+August morning before prayers in a little walled garden on the river that
+Grindal had laid out with great care in earlier years.
+
+"Ah," said the old man, "I am too blind to see my flowers now, Mr.
+Norris; but I love them none the less; and I know their places. Now
+there," he went on, pointing with his stick, "there I think grows my
+mastick or marum; perhaps I smell it, however. What is that flower like,
+Mr. Norris?"
+
+Anthony looked at it, and described its little white flower and its
+leaves.
+
+"That is it," said the Archbishop, "I thought my memory served me. It is
+a kind of marjoram, and it has many virtues, against cramps, convulsions
+and venomous bites--so Galen tells us." Then he went on to talk of the
+simple old plants that he loved best; of the two kinds of basil that he
+always had in his garden; and how good it was mixed in sack against the
+headache; and the male penny-royal, and how well it had served him once
+when he had great internal trouble.
+
+"Mr. Gerrard was here a week or two ago, Mr. Norris, when you were down
+at Croydon for me. He is my Lord Burghley's man; he oversees his gardens
+at Wimbledon House, and in the country. He was telling me of a rascal he
+had seen at a fair, who burned henbane and made folks with the toothache
+breathe in the fumes; and then feigned to draw a worm forth from the
+aching tooth; but it was no worm at all, but a lute string that he held
+ready in his hand. There are sad rascals abroad, Mr. Norris."
+
+The old man waxed eloquent when they came to the iris bed.
+
+"Ah! Mr. Norris, the flowers-de-luce are over by now, I fear; but what
+wonderful creatures of God they are, with their great handsome heads and
+their cool flags. I love to hear a bed of them rustle all together and
+shake their spears and nod their banners like an army in array. And then
+they are not only for show. Apuleius says that they are good against the
+gout. I asked Mr. Gerrard whether my lord had tried them; but he said no,
+he would not."
+
+At the violet bed he was yet more emphatic.
+
+"I think, Mr. Norris, I love these the best of all. They are lowly
+creatures; but how sweet! and like other lowly creatures exalted by their
+Maker to do great things as his handmaidens. The leaves are good against
+inflammations, and the flowers against ague and hoarseness as well. And
+then there is oil-of-violets, as you know; and violet-syrup and
+sugar-violet; then they are good for blisters; garlands of them were an
+ancient cure for the headache, as I think Dioscorides tells us. And they
+are the best of all cures for some children's ailments."
+
+And so they walked up and down together; the Archbishop talking quietly
+on and on; and helping quite unknown to himself by his tender irrelevant
+old man's talk to soothe the fever of unrest and anxiety that was
+beginning to torment Anthony so much now. His conversation, like the very
+flowers he loved to speak of, was "good against inflammations."
+
+Anthony came to him one morning, thinking to please him, and brought him
+a root that he had bought from a travelling pedlar just outside the
+gateway.
+
+"This is a mandrake root, your Grace; I heard you speak of it the other
+day."
+
+The Archbishop took it, smiling, felt it carefully, peered at it a minute
+or two. "No, my son," he said, "I fear you have met a knave. This is
+briony-root carved like a mandrake into the shape of a man's legs. It is
+worthless, I fear; but I thank you for the kind thought, Mr. Norris," and
+he gave the root back to him. "And the stories we hear of the mandrake, I
+fear, are fables, too. Some say that they only grow beneath gallows from
+that which falls there; that the male grows from the corruption of a
+man's body; and the female from that of a woman's; but that is surely a
+lie, and a foul one, too. And then folks say that to draw it up means
+death; and that the mandrake screams terribly as it comes up; and so they
+bid us tie a dog to it, and then drive the dog from it so as to draw it
+up so. I asked Mr. Baker, the chirurgeon in the household of my Lord
+Oxford, the other day, about that; and he said that such tales be but
+doltish dreams and old wives' fables. But the true mandrake is a clean
+and wholesome plant. The true ointment Populeon should have the juice of
+the leaves in it; and the root boiled and strained causes drowsiness. It
+hath a predominate cold faculty, Galen saith; but its true home is not in
+England at all. It comes from Mount Garganus in Apulia."
+
+It was pathetic, Anthony thought sometimes, that this old prelate should
+be living so far from the movements of the time, owing to no fault of his
+own. During these months the great tragedy of Campion's passion was
+proceeding a couple of miles away; but the Archbishop thought less of it
+than of the death of an old tree. The only thing from the outside world
+that seemed to ruffle him was the behaviour of the Puritans. Anthony was
+passing through "le velvet-room" one afternoon when he heard voices in
+the Presence Chamber beyond; and almost immediately heard the Archbishop,
+who had recognised his step, call his name. He went in and found him with
+a stranger in a dark sober dress.
+
+"Take this gentleman to Mr. Scot," he said, "and ask him to give him some
+refreshment; for that he must be gone directly."
+
+When Anthony had taken the gentleman to the steward, he returned to the
+Archbishop for any further instructions about him.
+
+"No, Mr. Norris, my business is done with him. He comes from my lord of
+Norwich, and must be returning this evening. If you are not occupied, Mr.
+Norris, will you give me your arm into the garden?"
+
+They went out by the vestry-door into the little cloisters, and skirting
+the end of the creek that ran up by Chichele's water-tower began to pace
+up and down the part of the garden that looked over the river.
+
+"My lord has sent to know if I know aught of one Robert Browne, with whom
+he is having trouble. This Mr. Browne has lately come from Cambridge, and
+so my lord thought I might know something of him; but I do not. This
+gentleman has been saying some wild and foolish things, I fear; and
+desires that every church should be free of all others; and should
+appoint its own minister, and rule its own affairs without interference,
+and that prophesyings should be without restraint. Now, you know, Mr.
+Norris, I have always tried to serve that party, and support them in
+their gospel religion; but this goes too far. Where were any governance
+at all, if all this were to come about? where were the Rule of Faith? the
+power of discipline? Nay, where were the unity for which our Saviour
+prayed? It liketh me not. Good Dr. Freake, as his messenger tells me,
+feels as I do about this; and desires to restrain Mr. Browne, but he is
+so hot he will not be restrained; and besides, he is some kin to my Lord
+Burghley, so I fear his mouth will be hard to stop."
+
+Anthony could not help thinking of Mr. Buxton's prediction that the
+Church of England had so repudiated authority, that in turn her own would
+one day be repudiated.
+
+"A Papist prisoner, your Grace," he said, "said to me the other day that
+this would be sure to come: that the whole principle of Church authority
+had been destroyed in England; and that the Church of England would more
+and more be deserted by her children; for that there was no necessary
+centre of unity left, now that Peter was denied."
+
+"It is what a Papist is bound to say," replied the Archbishop; "but it is
+easy to prophesy, when fulfilment may be far away. Indeed, I think we
+shall have trouble with some of these zealous men; and the Queen's Grace
+was surely right in desiring some restraint to be put upon the Exercises.
+But it is mere angry raving to say that the Church of England will lose
+the allegiance of her children."
+
+Anthony could not feel convinced that events bore out the Archbishop's
+assertion. Everywhere the Puritans were becoming more outrageously
+disloyal. There were everywhere signs of disaffection and revolt against
+the authorities of the Establishment, even on the part of the most
+sincere and earnest men, many of whom were looking forward to the day
+when the last rags of popery should be cast away, and formal
+Presbyterianism inaugurated in the Church of England. Episcopal
+Ordination was more and more being regarded as a merely civil
+requirement, but conveying no ministerial commission; recognition by the
+congregation with the laying on of the hands of the presbyterate was the
+only ordination they allowed as apostolic.
+
+Anthony said a word to the Archbishop about this.
+
+"You must not be too strict," said the old man. "Both views can be
+supported by the Scriptures; and although the Church of England at
+present recognises only Episcopal Ordination within her own borders, she
+does not dare to deny, as the Papists fondly do, that other rites may not
+be as efficacious as her own. That, surely, Master Norris, is in
+accordance with the mind of Christ that hath the spirit of liberty."
+
+Much as Anthony loved the old man and his gentle charity, this doctrinal
+position as stated by the chief pastor of the Church of England scarcely
+served to establish his troubled allegiance.
+
+During these autumn months, too, both between and after the disputations
+in the Tower, the image of Campion had been much in his thoughts.
+Everywhere, except among the irreconcilables, the Jesuit was being well
+spoken of: his eloquence, his humour, and his apparent sincerity were
+being greatly commented on in London and elsewhere. Anthony, as has been
+seen, was being deeply affected on both sides of his nature; the shrewd
+wit of the other was in conflict with his own intellectual convictions,
+and this magnetic personality was laying siege to his heart. And now the
+last scene of the tragedy, more affecting than all, was close at hand.
+
+Anthony was present first at the trial in Westminster Hall, which took
+place during November, and was more than ever moved by what he saw and
+heard there. The priest, as even his opponents confessed, had by now "won
+a marvellously good report, to be such a man as his like was not to be
+found, either for life, learning, or any other quality which might
+beautify a man." And now here he stood at the bar, paler than ever, so
+numbed with racking that he could not lift his hand to plead--that supple
+musician's hand of his, once so skilful on the lute--so that Mr. Sherwin
+had to lift it for him out of the furred cuff in which he had wrapped it,
+kissing it tenderly as he did so, in reverence for its sufferings; and he
+saw, too, the sleek face of Eliot, in his red yeoman's coat, as he stood
+chatting at the back, like another Barabbas whom the people preferred to
+the servant of the Crucified. And, above all, he heard Campion's stirring
+defence, spoken in that same resonant sweet voice, though it broke now
+and then through weakness, in spite of the unconquerable purpose and
+cheerfulness that showed in his great brown eyes, and round his delicate
+humorous mouth. It was indeed an astonishing combination of sincerity and
+eloquence, and even humour, that was brought to bear on the jury, and all
+in vain, during those days.
+
+"If you want to dispute as though you were in the schools," cried one of
+the court, when he found himself out of his depth, "you are only proving
+yourself a fool."
+
+"I pray God," said Campion, while his eyes twinkled, "I pray God make us
+both sages." And, in spite of the tragedy of the day, a little hum of
+laughter ran round the audience.
+
+"If a sheep were stolen," he argued again, in answer to the presupposition
+that since some Catholics were traitors, therefore these were--"and a
+whole family called in question for the same, were it good manner of
+proceeding for the accusers to say 'Your great grandfathers and fathers
+and sisters and kinsfolk all loved mutton; _ergo_, you have stolen the
+sheep'?"
+
+Again, in answer to the charge that he and his companions had conspired
+abroad, he said,
+
+"As for the accusation that we plotted treason at Rheims, reflect, my
+lords, how just this charge is! For see! First we never met there at all;
+then, many of us have never been at Rheims at all; finally, we were never
+in our lives all together, except at this hour and in prison."
+
+Anthony heard, too, Campion expose the attempt that was made to shift the
+charge from religion to treason.
+
+"There was offer made to us," he cried indignantly, "that if we would
+come to the church to hear sermons and the word preached, we should be
+set at large and at liberty; so Pascall and Nicholls"--(two apostates)
+"otherwise as culpable in all offences as we, upon coming to church were
+received to grace and had their pardon granted; whereas, if they had been
+so happy as to have persevered to the end, they had been partakers of our
+calamities. So that our religion was cause of our imprisonment, and _ex
+consequenti_, of our condemnation."
+
+The Queen's Counsel tried to make out that certain secrets that Campion,
+in an intercepted letter, had sworn not to reveal, must be treasonable or
+he would not so greatly fear their publication. To this the priest made a
+stately defence of his office, and declaration of his staunchness. He
+showed how by his calling as a priest he was bound to secrecy in matters
+heard in confession, and that these secret matters were of this nature.
+
+"These were the hidden matters," he said, "these were the secrets, to the
+revealing whereof I cannot nor will not be brought, come rack, come
+rope!"
+
+And again, when Sergeant Anderson interpreted a phrase of Campion's
+referring to the great day to which he looked forward, as meaning the day
+of a foreign papal invasion, the prisoner cried in a loud voice:
+
+"O Judas, Judas! No other day was in my mind, I protest, than that
+wherein it should please God to make a restitution of faith and religion.
+Whereupon, as in every pulpit every Protestant doth, I pronounced a great
+day, not wherein any temporal potentate should minister, but wherein the
+terrible Judge should reveal all men's consciences, and try every man of
+each kind of religion. This is the day of change, this is the great day
+which I threatened; comfortable to the well-behaving, and terrible to all
+heretics. Any other day but this, God knows I meant not."
+
+Then, after the other prisoners had pleaded, Campion delivered a final
+defence to the jury, with a solemnity that seemed to belong to a judge
+rather than a criminal. The babble of tongues that had continued most of
+the day was hushed to a profound silence in court as he stood and spoke,
+for the sincerity and simplicity of the priest were evident to all, and
+combined with his eloquence and his strange attractive personality,
+dominated all but those whose minds were already made up before entering
+the court.
+
+"What charge this day you sustain," began the priest, in a steady low
+voice, with his searching eyes bent on the faces before him, "and what
+account you are to render at the dreadful Day of Judgment, whereof I
+could wish this also were a mirror, I trust there is not one of you but
+knoweth. I doubt not but in like manner you forecast how dear the
+innocent is to God, and at what price He holdeth man's blood. Here we are
+accused and impleaded to the death,"--he began to raise his voice a
+little--"here you do receive our lives into your custody; here must be
+your device, either to restore them or condemn them. We have no whither
+to appeal but to your consciences; we have no friends to make there but
+your heeds and discretions." Then he touched briefly on the evidence,
+showing how faulty and circumstantial it was, and urged them to remember
+that a man's life by the very constitution of the realm must not be
+sacrificed to mere probabilities or presumptions; then he showed the
+untrustworthiness of his accusers, how one had confessed himself a
+murderer, and how another was an atheist. Then he ended with a word or
+two of appeal.
+
+"God give you grace," he cried, "to weigh our causes aright, and have
+respect to your own consciences; and so I will keep the jury no longer. I
+commit the rest to God, and our convictions to your good discretions."
+
+When the jury had retired, and all the judges but one had left the bench
+until the jury should return, Anthony sat back in his place, his heart
+beating and his eyes looking restlessly now on the prisoners, now on the
+door where the jury had gone out, and now on Judge Ayloff, whom he knew a
+little, and who sat only a few feet away from him on one side. He could
+hear the lawyers sitting below the judge talking among themselves; and
+presently one of them leaned over to him.
+
+"Good-day, Mr. Norris," he said, "you have come to see an acquittal, I
+doubt not. No man can be in two minds after what we have heard; at least
+concerning Mr. Campion. We all think so, here, at any rate."
+
+The lawyer was going on to say a word or two more as to the priest's
+eloquence, when there was a sharp exclamation from the judge. Anthony
+looked up and saw Judge Ayloff staring at his hand, turning it over while
+he held his glove in the other; and Anthony saw to his surprise that the
+fingers were all blood-stained. One or two gentlemen near him turned and
+looked, too, as the judge, still staring and growing a little pale, wiped
+the blood quickly away with the glove; but the fingers grew crimson again
+immediately.
+
+"'S'Body!" said Ayloff, half to himself; "'tis strange, there is no
+wound." A moment later, looking up, he saw many of his neighbours
+glancing curiously at his hand and his pale face, and hastily thrust on
+his glove again; and immediately after the jury returned, and the judges
+filed in to take their places. Anthony's attention was drawn off again,
+and the buzz of talk in the court was followed again by a deep silence.
+
+The verdict of _Guilty_ was uttered, as had been pre-arranged, and the
+Queen's Counsel demanded sentence.
+
+"Campion and the rest," said Chief Justice Wray, "What can you say why
+you should not die?"
+
+Then Campion, still steady and resolute, made his last useless appeal.
+
+"It was not our death that ever we feared. But we knew that we were not
+lords of our own lives, and therefore for want of answer would not be
+guilty of our own deaths. The only thing that we have now to say is, that
+if our religion do make us traitors, we are worthy to be condemned; but
+otherwise are and have been true subjects as ever the Queen had. In
+condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors," and as he said this,
+his voice began to rise, and he glanced steadily and mournfully round at
+the staring faces about him, "all the ancient priests, bishops, and
+kings--all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and
+the most devoted child of the See of Peter." Then, as he went on, he
+flung out his wrenched hands, and his voice rang with indignant defiance.
+"For what have we taught," he cried, "however you may qualify it with the
+odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach? To be
+condemned with these old lights--not of England only, but of the
+world--by their degenerate descendants, is both gladness and glory to
+us." Then, with a superb gesture, he sent his voice pealing through the
+hall: "God lives, posterity will live; their judgment is not so liable to
+corruption as that of those who are now about to sentence us to death."
+
+There was a burst of murmurous applause as he ended, which stilled
+immediately, as the Chief Justice began to deliver sentence. But when the
+horrible details of his execution had been enumerated, and the formula
+had ended, it was the prisoner's turn to applaud:--
+
+"_Te Deum laudamus!_" cried Campion; "_Te Dominum confitemur._"
+
+"_Haec est dies_," shouted Sherwin, "_quam fecit Dominus; exultemus et
+laetemur in illâ_": and so with the thanksgiving and joy of the condemned
+criminals, the mock-trial ended.
+
+When Anthony rode down silently and alone in the rain that December
+morning a few days later, to see the end, he found a vast silent crowd
+assembled on Tower Hill and round the gateway, where the four horses were
+waiting, each pair harnessed to a hurdle laid flat on the ground. He
+would not go in, for he could scarcely trust himself to speak, so great
+was his horror of the crime that was to be committed; so he backed his
+horse against the wall, and waited over an hour in silence, scarcely
+hearing the murmurs of impatience that rolled round the great crowd from
+time to time, absorbed in his own thoughts. Here was the climax of these
+days of misery and self-questioning that had passed since the trial in
+Westminster Hall. It was no use, he argued to himself, to pretend
+otherwise. These three men of God were to die for their religion--and a
+religion too which was gradually detaching itself to his view from the
+mists and clouds that hid it, as the one great reality and truth of God's
+Revelation to man. He had come, he knew, to see not an execution but a
+martyrdom.
+
+There was a trampling from within, the bolts creaked, and the gate rolled
+back; a company of halberdiers emerged, and in their midst the three
+priests in laymen's dress; behind followed a few men on horseback, with a
+little company of ministers, bible in hand; and then a rabble of officers
+and pursuivants. Anthony edged his horse in among the others, as the
+crowd fell back, and took up his place in the second rank of riders
+between a gentleman of his acquaintance who made room for him on the one
+side, and Sir Francis Knowles on the other, and behind the Tower
+officials.
+
+Then, once more he heard that ringing bass voice whose first sound
+silenced the murmurs of the surging excited crowd.
+
+"God save you all, gentlemen! God bless you and make you all good
+Catholics."
+
+Then, as the priest turned to kneel towards the east, he saw his face
+paler than ever now, after his long fast in preparation for death. The
+rain was still falling as Campion in his frieze gown knelt in the mud.
+There was silence as he prayed, and as he ended aloud by commending his
+soul to God.
+
+"_In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum._"
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The three were secured to the hurdles, Briant and Sherwin on the one,
+Campion on the other, all lying on their backs, with their feet towards
+the horse's heels. The word to start was given by Sir Owen Hopton who
+rode with Charke, the preacher of Gray's Inn, in the front rank; the
+lashed horses plunged forward, with the jolting hurdles spattering mud
+behind them; and the dismal pageant began to move forward through the
+crowd on that way of sorrows. There was a ceaseless roar and babble of
+voices as they went. Charke, in his minister's dress, able now to declaim
+without fear of reply, was hardly silent for a moment from mocking and
+rebuking the prisoners, and making pompous speeches to the people.
+
+"See here," he cried, "these rogueing popish priests, laid by the
+heels--aye, by the heels--at last; in spite of their tricks and turns.
+See this fellow in his frieze gown, dead to the world as he brags; and
+know how he skulked and hid in his disguises till her Majesty's servants
+plucked him forth! We will disguise him, we will disguise him, ere we
+have done with him, that his own mother should not know him. Ha, now!
+Campion, do you hear me?"
+
+And so the harsh voice rang out over the crowd that tramped alongside,
+and up to the faces that filled every window; while the ministers below
+kept up a ceaseless murmur of adjuration and entreaty and threatening,
+with a turning of leaves of their bibles, and bursts of prayer, over the
+three heads that jolted and rocked at their feet over the cobblestones
+and through the mud. The friends of the prisoners walked as near to them
+as they dared, and their lips moved continually in prayer.
+
+Every now and then as Anthony craned his head, he could see Campion's
+face, with closed eyes and moving lips that smiled again and again, all
+spattered and dripping with filth; and once he saw a gentleman walking
+beside him fearlessly stoop down and wipe the priest's face with a
+handkerchief. Presently they had passed up Cheapside and reached Newgate;
+in a niche in the archway itself stood a figure of the Mother of God
+looking compassionately down; and as Campion's hurdle passed beneath it,
+her servant wrenched himself a few inches up in his bonds and bowed to
+his glorious Queen; and then laid himself down quietly again, as a chorus
+of lament rose from the ministers over his superstition and obstinate
+idolatry that seemed as if it would last even to death; and Charke too,
+who had become somewhat more silent, broke out again into revilings.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The crowd at Tyburn was vast beyond all reckoning. Outside the gate it
+stretched on every side, under the elms, a few were even in the branches,
+along the sides of the stream; everywhere was a sea of heads, out of
+which, on a little eminence like another Calvary, rose up the tall posts
+of the three-cornered gallows, on which the martyrs were to suffer. As
+the hurdles came slowly under the gate, the sun broke out for the first
+time; and as the horses that drew the hurdles came round towards the
+carts that stood near the gallows and the platform on which the
+quartering block stood, a murmur began that ran through the crowd from
+those nearest the martyrs.--"But they are laughing, they are laughing!"
+
+The crowd gave a surge to and fro as the horses drew up, and Anthony
+reined his own beast back among the people, so that he was just opposite
+the beam on which the three new ropes were already hanging, and beneath
+which was standing a cart with the back taken out. In the cart waited a
+dreadful figure in a tight-fitting dress, sinewy arms bare to the
+shoulder, and a butcher's knife at his leather girdle. A little distance
+away stood the hateful cauldron, bubbling fiercely, with black smoke
+pouring from under it: the platform with the block and quartering-axe
+stood beneath the gallows; and round this now stood the officers, with
+Norton the rack-master, and Sir Owen Hopton and the rest, and the three
+priests, with the soldiers forming a circle to keep the crowd back.
+
+The hangman stooped as Anthony looked, and a moment later Campion stood
+beside him on the cart, pale, mud-splashed, but with the same serene
+smile; his great brown eyes shone as they looked out over the wide
+heaving sea of heads, from which a deep heart-shaking murmur rose as the
+famous priest appeared. Anthony could see every detail of what went on;
+the hangman took the noose that hung from above, and slipped it over the
+prisoner's head, and drew it close round his neck; and then himself
+slipped down from the cart, and stood with the others, still well above
+the heads of the crowd, but leaving the priest standing higher yet on the
+cart, silhouetted, rope and all, framed in the posts and cross-beam, from
+which two more ropes hung dangling against the driving clouds and blue
+sky over London city.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Campion waited perfectly motionless for the murmur of innumerable voices
+to die down; and Anthony, fascinated and afraid beneath that overpowering
+serenity, watched him turn his head slowly from side to side with a
+"majestical countenance," as his enemies confessed, as if he were on the
+point of speaking. Silence seemed to radiate out from him, spreading like
+a ripple, outwards, until the furthest outskirts of that huge crowd was
+motionless and quiet; and then without apparent effort, his voice began
+to peal out.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"'_Spectaculum facti sumus Deo, angelis et hominibus._' These are the
+words of Saint Paul, Englished thus, 'We are made a spectacle or sight
+unto God, unto His angels, and unto men';--verified this day in me, who
+am here a spectacle unto my Lord God, a spectacle unto His angels, and
+unto you men, satisfying myself to die as becometh a true Christian and
+Catholic man."
+
+He was interrupted by cries from the gentlemen beneath, and turned a
+little, looking down to see what they wished.
+
+"You are not here to preach to the people," said Sir Francis Knowles,
+angrily, "but to confess yourself a traitor."
+
+Campion smiled and shook his head.
+
+"No, no," he said: and then looking up and raising his voice,--"as to the
+treasons which have been laid to my charge, and for which I am come here
+to suffer, I desire you all to bear witness with me, that I am thereof
+altogether innocent."
+
+There was a chorus of anger from the gentlemen, and one of them called up
+something that Anthony could not hear. Campion raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Well, my lord," he cried aloud, and his voice instantly silenced again
+the noisy buzz of talk, "I am a Catholic man and a priest: in that faith
+have I lived, and in that faith do I intend to die. If you esteem my
+religion treason, then am I guilty; as for other treason, I never
+committed any, God is my judge. But you have now what you desire. I
+beseech you to have patience, and suffer me to speak a word or two for
+discharge of my conscience."
+
+There was a furious burst of refusals from the officers.
+
+"Well," said Campion, at last, looking straight out over the crowd, "it
+seems I may not speak; but this only will I say; that I am wholly
+innocent of all treason and conspiracy, as God is my judge; and I beseech
+you to credit me, for it is my last answer upon my death and soul. As for
+the jury I do not blame them, for they were ignorant men and easily
+deceived. I forgive all who have compassed my death or wronged me in any
+whit, as I hope to be forgiven; and I ask the forgiveness of all those
+whose names I spoke upon the rack."
+
+Then he said a word or two more of explanation, such as he had said
+during his trial, for the sake of those Catholics whom this a concession
+of his had scandalised, telling them that he had had the promise of the
+Council that no harm should come to those whose names he revealed; and
+then was silent again, closing his eyes; and Anthony, as he watched him,
+saw his lips moving once more in prayer.
+
+Then a harsh loud voice from behind the cart began to proclaim that the
+Queen punished no man for religion but only for treason. A fierce murmur
+of disagreement and protest began to rise from the crowd; and Anthony
+turning saw the faces of many near him frowning and pursing their lips,
+and there was a shout or two of denial here and there. The harsh voice
+ceased, and another began:
+
+"Now, Mr. Campion," it cried, "tell us, What of the Pope? Do you renounce
+him?"
+
+Campion opened his eyes and looked round.
+
+"I am a Catholic," he said simply; and closed his eyes again for prayer,
+as the voice cried brutally:
+
+"In your Catholicism all treason is contained."
+
+Again a murmur from the crowd.
+
+Then a new voice from the black group of ministers called out:
+
+"Mr. Campion, Mr. Campion, leave that popish stuff, and say, 'Christ have
+mercy on me.'"
+
+Again the priest opened his eyes.
+
+"You and I are not one in religion, sir, wherefore I pray you content
+yourself. I bar none of prayer, but I only desire them of the household
+of faith to pray with me; and in mine agony to say one creed."
+
+Again he closed his eyes.
+
+"_Pater noster qui es in cælis._"...
+
+"Pray in English, pray in English!" shouted a voice from the minister's
+group.
+
+Once more the priest opened his eyes; and, in spite of the badgering, his
+eyes shone with humour and his mouth broke into smiles, so that a great
+sob of pity and love broke from Anthony.
+
+"I will pray to God in a language that both He and I well understand."
+
+"Ask her Grace's forgiveness, Mr. Campion, and pray for her, if you be
+her true subject."
+
+"Wherein have I offended her? In this I am innocent. This is my last
+speech; in this give me credit--I have and do pray for her."
+
+"Aha! but which queen?--for Elizabeth?"
+
+"Ay, for Elizabeth, your queen and my queen, unto whom I wish a long
+quiet reign with all prosperity."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was the crack of a whip, the scuffle of a horse's feet, a rippling
+movement over the crowd, and a great murmured roar, like the roar of the
+waves on a pebbly beach, as the horse's head began to move forward; and
+the priest's figure to sway and stagger on the jolting cart. Anthony shut
+his eyes, and the murmur and cries of the crowd grew louder and louder.
+Once more the deep sweet voice rang out, loud and penetrating:
+
+"I die a true Catholic...."
+
+Anthony kept his eyes closed, and his head bent, as great sobs began to
+break up out of his heart....
+
+Ah! he was in his agony now! that sudden cry and silence from the crowd
+showed it. What was it he had asked? one creed?--
+
+"I believe in God the Father Almighty." ...
+
+The soft heavy murmur of the crowd rose and fell. Catholics were praying
+all round him, reckless with love and pity:
+
+"Jesu, Jesu, save him! Be to him a Jesus!"...
+
+"Mary pray! Mary pray!"...
+
+"_Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem._"...
+
+"_Passus sub Pontio Pilato._"...
+
+"Crucified dead and buried."...
+
+"The forgiveness of sins."...
+
+"And the Life Everlasting."...
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony dropped his face forward on to his horse's mane.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                       A MESSAGE FROM THE CITY
+
+
+Sir Francis Walsingham sat in his private room a month after Father
+Campion's death.
+
+He had settled down again now to his work which had been so grievously
+interrupted by his mission to France in connection with a new treaty
+between that country and England in the previous year. The secret
+detective service that he had inaugurated in England chiefly for the
+protection of the Queen's person was a vast and complicated business, and
+the superintendence of this, in addition to the other affairs of his
+office, made him an exceedingly busy man. England was honeycombed with
+mines and countermines both in the political and the religious world, and
+it needed all this man's brilliant and trained faculties to keep abreast
+with them. His spies and agents were everywhere; and not only in England:
+they circled round Mary of Scotland like flies round a wounded creature,
+seeking to settle and penetrate wherever an opening showed itself. These
+Scottish troubles would have been enough for any ordinary man; but
+Walsingham was indefatigable, and his agents were in every prison,
+lurking round corridors in private houses, found alike in thieves'
+kitchens and at gentlemen's tables.
+
+Just at present Walsingham was anxious to give all the attention he could
+to Scottish affairs; and on this wet dreary Thursday morning in January
+as he sat before his bureau, he was meditating how to deal with an affair
+that had come to him from the heart of London, and how if possible to
+shift the conduct of it on to other shoulders.
+
+He sat and drummed his fingers on the desk, and stared meditatively at
+the pigeon-holes before him. His was an interesting face, with large,
+melancholy, and almost fanatical eyes, and a poet's mouth and forehead;
+but it was probably exactly his imaginative faculties that enabled him to
+picture public affairs from the points of view of the very various
+persons concerned in them; and thereby to cope with the complications
+arising out of these conflicting interests.
+
+He stroked his pointed beard once or twice, and then struck a hand-bell
+at his side; and a servant entered.
+
+"If Mr. Lackington is below," he said, "show him here immediately," and
+the servant went out.
+
+Lackington, sometime servant to Sir Nicholas Maxwell, had entered Sir
+Francis' service instead, at the same time that he had exchanged the
+Catholic for the Protestant religion; and he was now one of his most
+trusted agents. But he had been in so many matters connected with
+recusancy, that a large number of the papists in London were beginning to
+know him by sight; and the affairs were becoming more and more scarce in
+which he could be employed among Catholics with any hope of success. It
+was his custom to call morning by morning at Sir Francis' office and
+receive his instructions; and just now he had returned from business in
+the country. Presently he entered, closing the door behind him, and bowed
+profoundly to his master.
+
+"I have a matter on hand, Lackington," said Sir Francis, without looking
+at him, and without any salutation beyond a glance and a nod as he
+entered,--"a matter which I have not leisure to look into, as it is not,
+I think, anything more than mere religion; but which might, I think,
+repay you for your trouble, if you can manage it in any way. But it is a
+troublesome business. These are the facts.
+
+"No. 3 Newman's Court, in the City, has been a suspected house for some
+while. I have had it watched, and there is no doubt that the papists use
+it. I thought at first that the Scots were mixed up with it; but that is
+not so. Yesterday, a boy of twelve years old, left the house in the
+afternoon, and was followed to a number of houses, of which I will give
+you the list presently; and was finally arrested in Paul's Churchyard and
+brought here. I frightened him with talk of the rack; and I think I have
+the truth out of him now; I have tested him in the usual ways--and all
+that I can find is that the house is used for mass now and then; and that
+he was going to the papists' houses yesterday to bid them come for next
+Sunday morning. But he was stopped too soon: he had not yet told the
+priest to come. Now unless the priest is told to-night by one whom he
+trusts, there will be no mass on Sunday, and the nest of papists will
+escape us. It is of no use to send the boy; as he will betray all by his
+behaviour, even if we frighten him into saying what we wish to the
+priest. I suppose it is of no use your going to the priest and feigning
+to be a Catholic messenger; and I cannot at this moment see what is to be
+done. If there were anything beyond mere religion in this, I would spare
+no pains to hunt them out; but it is not worth my while. Yet there is the
+reward; and if you think that you can do anything, you can have it for
+your pains. I can spare you till Monday, and of course you shall have
+what men you will to surround the house and take them at mass, if you can
+but get the priest there."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Lackington deferentially. "Have I your honour's
+leave to see the boy in your presence?"
+
+Walsingham struck the bell again.
+
+"Bring the lad that is locked in the steward's parlour," he said, when
+the servant appeared.--"Sit down, Lackington, and examine him when he
+comes."
+
+And Sir Francis took down some papers from a pigeon-hole, sorted out one
+or two, and saying, "Here are his statements," handed them to the agent;
+who began to glance through them at once. Walsingham then turned to his
+table again and began to go on with his letters.
+
+In a moment or two the door opened, and a little lad of twelve years old,
+came in, followed by the servant.
+
+"That will do," said Walsingham, without looking up; "You can leave him
+here," and the servant went out. The boy stood back against the wall by
+the door, his face was white and his eyes full of horror, and he looked
+in a dazed way at the two men.
+
+"What is your name, boy?" began Lackington in a sharp, judicial tone.
+
+"John Belton," said the lad in a tremulous voice.
+
+"And you are a little papist?" asked the agent.
+
+"No sir; a Protestant."
+
+"Then how is it that you go on errands for papists?"
+
+"I am a servant, sir," said the boy imploringly.
+
+Lackington turned the papers over for a moment or two.
+
+"Now you know," he began again in a threatening voice, "that this
+gentleman has power to put you on the rack; you know what that is?"
+
+The boy nodded in mute white-faced terror.
+
+"Well, now, he will hear all you say; and will know whether you say the
+truth or not. Now tell me if you still hold to what you said yesterday."
+
+And then Lackington with the aid of the papers ran quickly over the story
+that Sir Francis had related. "Now do you mean to tell me, John Belton,"
+he added, "that you, a Protestant, and a lad of twelve, are employed on
+this work by papists, to gather them for mass?"
+
+The boy looked at him with the same earnest horror.
+
+"Yes, sir, yes, sir," he said, and there was a piteous sob in his voice.
+"Indeed it is all true: but I do not often go on these messages for my
+master. Mr. Roger generally goes: but he is sick."
+
+"Oho!" said Lackington, "you did not say that yesterday."
+
+The boy was terrified.
+
+"No, sir," he cried out miserably, "the gentleman did not ask me."
+
+"Well, who is Mr. Roger? What is he like?"
+
+"He is my master's servant, sir; and he wears a patch over his eye; and
+stutters a little in his speech."
+
+These kinds of details were plainly beyond a frightened lad's power of
+invention, and Lackington was more satisfied.
+
+"And what was the message that you were to give to the folk and the
+priest?"
+
+"Please, sir, 'Come, for all things are now ready.'"
+
+This was such a queer answer that Lackington gave an incredulous
+exclamation.
+
+"It is probably true," said Sir Francis, without looking up from his
+letters; "I have come across the same kind of cypher, at least once
+before."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said the agent. "And now, my boy, tell me this. How did
+you know what it meant?"
+
+"Please, sir," said the lad, a little encouraged by the kinder tone, "I
+have noticed that twice before when Mr. Roger could not go, and I was
+sent with the same message, all the folks and the priest came on the next
+Sunday; and I think that it means that all is safe, and that they can
+come."
+
+"You are a sharp lad," said the spy approvingly. "I am satisfied with
+you."
+
+"Then, sir, may I go home?" asked the boy with hopeful entreaty in his
+voice.
+
+"Nay, nay," said the other, "I have not done with you yet. Answer me some
+more questions. Why did you not go to the priest first?"
+
+"Because I was bidden to go to him last," said the boy. "If I had been to
+all the other houses by five o'clock last night, then I was to meet the
+priest at Papists' Corner in Paul's Church. But if I had not done
+them--as I had not,--then I was to see the priest to-night at the same
+place."
+
+Lackington mused a moment.
+
+"What is the priest's name?" he asked.
+
+"Please, sir, Mr. Arthur Oldham."
+
+The agent gave a sudden start and a keen glance at the boy, and then
+smiled to himself; then he meditated, and bit his nails once or twice.
+
+"And when was Mr. Roger taken ill?"
+
+"He slipped down at the door of his lodging and hurt his foot, at
+dinner-time yesterday; and he could not walk."
+
+"His lodging? Then he does not sleep in the house?"
+
+"No sir; he sleeps in Stafford Alley, round the corner."
+
+"And where do you live?"
+
+"Please, sir, I go home to my mother nearly every night; but not always."
+
+"And where does your mother live?"
+
+"Please, sir, at 4 Bell's Lane."
+
+Lackington remained deep in thought, and looked at the boy steadily for a
+minute or two.
+
+"Now, sir; may I go?" he asked eagerly.
+
+Lackington paid no attention, and he repeated his question. The agent
+still did not seem to hear him, but turned to Sir Francis, who was still
+at his letters.
+
+"That is all, sir, for the present," he said. "May the boy be kept here
+till Monday?"
+
+The lad broke out into wailing; but Lackington turned on him a face so
+savage that his whimpers died away into horror-stricken silence.
+
+"As you will," said Sir Francis, pausing for a moment in his writing, and
+striking the bell again; and, on the servant's appearance, gave orders
+that John Belton should be taken again to the steward's parlour until
+further directions were received. The boy went sobbing out and down the
+passage again under the servant's charge, and the door closed.
+
+"And the mother?" asked Walsingham abruptly, pausing with pen upraised.
+
+"With your permission, sir, I will tell her that her boy is in trouble,
+and that if his master sends to inquire for him, she is to say he is sick
+upstairs."
+
+"And you will report to me on Monday?"
+
+"Yes, sir; by then I shall hope to have taken the crew."
+
+Sir Francis nodded his head sharply, and the pen began to fly over the
+paper again; as Lackington slipped out.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony Norris was passing through the court of Lambeth House in the
+afternoon of the same day, when the porter came to him and said there was
+a child waiting in the Lodge with a note for him; and would Master Norris
+kindly come to see her. He found a little girl on the bench by the gate,
+who stood up and curtseyed as the grand gentleman came striding in; and
+handed him a note which he opened at once and read.
+
+"For the love of God," the note ran, "come and aid one who can be of
+service to a friend: follow the little maid Master Norris, and she will
+bring you to me. If you have any friends at _Great Keynes_, for the love
+you bear to them, come quickly."
+
+Anthony turned the note over; it was unsigned, and undated. On his
+inquiry further from the little girl, she said she knew nothing about the
+writer; but that a gentleman had given her the note and told her to bring
+it to Master Anthony Norris at Lambeth House; and that she was to take
+him to a house that she knew in the city; she did not know the name of
+the house, she said.
+
+It was all very strange, thought Anthony, but evidently here was some one
+who knew about him; the reference to Great Keynes made him think uneasily
+of Isabel and wonder whether any harm had happened to her, or whether any
+danger threatened. He stood musing with the note between his fingers, and
+then told the child to go straight down to Paul's Cross and await him
+there, and he would follow immediately. The child ran off, and Anthony
+went round to the stables to get his horse. He rode straight down to the
+city and put up his horse in the Bishop's stables, and then went round
+with his riding-whip in his hand to Paul's Cross.
+
+It was a dull miserable afternoon, beginning to close in with a fine rain
+falling, and very few people were about; and he found the child crouched
+up against the pulpit in an attempt to keep dry.
+
+"Come," he said kindly, "I am ready; show me the way."
+
+The child led him along by the Cathedral through the churchyard, and then
+by winding passages, where Anthony kept a good look-out at the corners;
+for a stab in the back was no uncommon thing for a well-dressed gentleman
+off his guard. The houses overhead leaned so nearly together that the
+darkening sky disappeared altogether now and then; at one spot Anthony
+caught a glimpse high up of Bow Church spire; and after a corner or two
+the child stopped before a doorway in a little flagged court.
+
+"It is here," she said; and before Anthony could stop her she had slipped
+away and disappeared through a passage. He looked at the house. It was a
+tumble-down place; the door was heavily studded with nails, and gave a
+most respectable air to the house: the leaded windows were just over his
+head, and tightly closed. There was an air of mute discretion and silence
+about the place that roused a vague discomfort in Anthony's mind; he
+slipped his right hand into his belt and satisfied himself that the hilt
+of his knife was within reach. Overhead the hanging windows and eaves
+bulged out on all sides; but there was no one to be seen; it seemed a
+place that had slipped into a backwater of the humming stream of the
+city. The fine rain still falling added to the dismal aspect of the
+little court. He looked round once more; and then rapped sharply at the
+door to which the child had pointed.
+
+There was silence for at least a minute; then as he was about to knock
+again there was a faint sound overhead, and he looked up in time to see a
+face swiftly withdrawn from one of the windows. Evidently an occupant of
+the house had been examining the visitor. Then shuffling footsteps came
+along a passage within, and a light shone under the door. There was a
+noise of bolts being withdrawn, and the rattle of a chain; and then the
+handle turned and the door opened slowly inwards, and an old woman stood
+there holding an oil lamp over her head. This was not very formidable at
+any rate.
+
+"I have been bidden to come here," he said, "by a letter delivered to me
+an hour ago."
+
+"Ah," said the old woman, and looked at him peeringly, "then you are for
+Mr. Roger?"
+
+"I daresay," said Anthony, a little sharply. He was not accustomed to be
+treated like this. The old woman still looked at him suspiciously; and
+then, as Anthony made a movement of impatience, she stepped back.
+
+"Come in, sir," she said.
+
+He stepped in, and she closed and fastened the door again behind him; and
+then, holding the oil-lamp high over her head, she advanced in her
+slippers towards the staircase, and Anthony followed. On the stairs she
+turned once to see if he was coming, and beckoned him on with a movement
+of her head. Anthony looked about him as he went up: there was nothing
+remarkable or suspicious about the house in any way. It was cleaner than
+he had been led to expect by its outside aspect; wainscoted to the
+ceiling with oak; and the stairs were strong and well made. It was
+plainly a very tolerably respectable place; and Anthony began to think
+from its appearance that he had been admitted at the back door of some
+well-to-do house off Cheapside. The banisters were carved with some
+distinction; and there were the rudimentary elements of linen-pattern
+design on the panels that lined the opposite walls up to the height of
+the banisters. The woman went up and up, slowly, panting a little; at
+each landing she turned and glanced back to see that her companion was
+following: all the doors that they passed were discreetly shut; and the
+house was perfectly dark except for the flickering light of the woman's
+lamp, and silent except for the noise of the footsteps and the rush of a
+mouse now and then behind the woodwork.
+
+At the third landing she stopped, and came close up to Anthony.
+
+"That is the door," she whispered hoarsely; and pointed with her thumb
+towards a doorway that was opposite the staircase. "Ask for Master
+Roger."
+
+And then without saying any more, she set the lamp down on the flat head
+of the top banister and herself began to shuffle downstairs again into
+the dark house.
+
+Anthony stood still a moment, his heart beating a little. What was this
+strange errand? and Isabel! what had she to do with this house buried
+away in the courts of the great city? As he waited he heard a door close
+somewhere behind him, and the shuffling footsteps had ceased. He touched
+the hilt of his knife once again to give himself courage; and then walked
+slowly across and rapped on the door. Instantly a voice full of trembling
+expectancy, cried to him to come in; he turned the handle and stepped
+into the fire-lit room.
+
+It was extremely poorly furnished; a rickety table stood in the centre
+with a book or two and a basin with a plate, a saucepan hissed and
+bubbled on the fire; in the corner near the window stood a poor bed; and
+to this Anthony's attention was immediately directed by a voice that
+called out hoarsely:
+
+"Thank God, sir, thank God, sir, you have come! I feared you would not."
+
+Anthony stepped towards it wondering and expectant, but reassured. Lying
+in the bed, with clothes drawn up to the chin was the figure of a man.
+There was no light in the room, save that given by the leaping flames on
+the hearth; and Anthony could only make out the face of a man with a
+patch over one eye; the man stretched a hand over the bed clothes as he
+came near, and Anthony took it, a little astonished, and received a
+strong trembling grip of apparent excitement and relief: "Thank God,
+sir!" the man said again, "but there is not too much time."
+
+"How can I serve you?" said Anthony, sitting on a chair near the bedside.
+"Your letter spoke of friends at Great Keynes. What did you mean by
+that?"
+
+"Is the d-door closed, sir?" asked the man anxiously; stuttering a little
+as he spoke.
+
+Anthony stepped up and closed it firmly; and then came back and sat down
+again.
+
+"Well then, sir; I believe you are a friend of the priest Mr.
+M-Maxwell's."
+
+Anthony shook his head.
+
+"There is no priest of that name that I know."
+
+"Ah," cried the man, and his voice shook, "have I said too much? You are
+Mr. Anthony Norris of the Dower House, and of the Archbishop's
+household?"...
+
+"I am," said Anthony, "but yet----"
+
+"Well, well," said the man, "I must go forward now. He whom you know as
+Mr. James Maxwell is a Catholic p-priest, known to many under the name of
+Mr. Arthur Oldham. He is in sore d-danger."
+
+Anthony was silent through sheer astonishment. This then was the secret
+of the mystery that had hung round Mr. James so long. The few times he
+had met him in town since his return, it had been on the tip of his
+tongue to ask what he did there, and why Hubert was to be master of the
+Hall; but there was something in Mr. James' manner that made the asking
+of such a question appear an impossible liberty; and it had remained
+unasked.
+
+"Well," said the man in bed, in anxious terror, "there is no mistake, is
+there?"
+
+"I said nothing," said Anthony, "for astonishment; I had no idea that he
+was a priest. And how can I serve him?"
+
+"He is in sore danger," said the man, and again and again there came the
+stutter. "Now I am a Catholic: you see how much I t-trust you sir. I am
+the only one in this house. I was entrusted with a m-message to Mr.
+Maxwell to put him on his guard against a danger that threatens him. I
+was to meet him this very evening at five of the clock; and this
+afternoon as I left my room, I slipped and so hurt my foot that I cannot
+put it to the ground. I dared not send a l-letter to Mr. Maxwell, for
+fear the child should be followed; I dared not send to another Catholic;
+nor indeed did I know where to find one whom Mr. M-Maxwell would know and
+trust, as he is new to us here; but I had heard him speak of his friend
+Mr. Anthony Norris, who was at Lambeth House; and I determined, sir, to
+send the child to you; and ask you to do this service for your friend;
+for an officer of the Archbishop's household is beyond suspicion. N-now,
+sir, will you do this service? If you do it not, I know not where to turn
+for help."
+
+Anthony was silent. He felt a little uneasy. Supposing that there was
+sedition mixed up in this! How could he trust the man's story? How could
+he be certain in fact that he was a Catholic at all? He looked at him
+keenly in the fire-light. The man's one eye shone in deep anxiety, and
+his forehead was wrinkled; and he passed his hand nervously over his
+mouth again and again.
+
+"How can I tell," said Anthony, "that all this is true?"
+
+The man with an impatient movement unfastened his shirt at the neck and
+drew up on a string that was round his neck a little leather case.
+
+"Th-there, sir," he stammered, drawing the string over his head. "T-take
+that to the fire and see what it is."
+
+Anthony took it curiously, and holding it close to the fire drew off the
+little case; there was the wax medal stamped with the lamb, called
+_Agnus Dei_.
+
+"Th-there," cried the man from the bed, "now I have p-put myself in your
+hands--and if more is w-wanted----" and as Anthony came back holding the
+medal, the man fumbled beneath the pillow and drew out a rosary.
+
+"N-now, sir, do you believe me?"
+
+It was felony to possess these things and Anthony had no more doubts.
+
+"Yes," he said, "and I ask your pardon." And he gave back the _Agnus
+Dei_. "But there is no sedition in this?"
+
+"N-none, sir, I give you my word," said the man, apparently greatly
+relieved, and sinking back on his pillow. "I will tell you all, and you
+can judge for yourself; but you will promise to be secret." And when
+Anthony had given his word, he went on.
+
+"M-Mass was to have been said in Newman's Court on Sunday, at number 3,
+but that c-cursed spy Walsingham, hath had wind of it. His men have been
+lurking round there; and it is not safe. However, there is no need to say
+that to Mr. Maxwell; he will understand enough if you will give him a
+message of half a dozen words from me,--Mr. Roger. You can tell him that
+you saw me, if you wish to. But ah! sir, you give me your word to say no
+more to any one, not even to Mr. Maxwell himself, for it is in a public
+place. And then I will tell you the p-place and the m-message; but we
+must be swift, because the time is near; it is at five of the clock that
+he will look for a messenger."
+
+"I give you my word," said Anthony.
+
+"Well, sir, the place is Papists' Corner in the Cathedral, and the words
+are these, 'Come, for all things are now ready.' You know sir, that we
+Catholics go in fear of our lives, and like the poor hares have to double
+and turn if we would escape. If any overhears that message, he will never
+know it to be a warning. And it was for that that I asked your word to
+say no more than your message, with just the word that you had seen me
+yourself. You may tell him, of course sir, that Mr. Roger had a patch
+over his eye and st-stuttered a little in his speech; and he will know it
+is from me then. Now, sir, will you tell me what the message is, and the
+place, to be sure that you know them; and then, sir, it will be time to
+go; and God bless you, sir. God bless you for your kindness to us poor
+papists!"
+
+The man seized Anthony's gloved hand and kissed it fervently once or
+twice.
+
+Anthony repeated his instructions carefully. He was more touched than he
+cared to show by the evident gratitude and relief of this poor terrified
+Catholic.
+
+"Th-that is right, sir; that is right; and now, sir, if you please, be
+gone at once; or the Father will have left the Cathedral. The child will
+be in the court below to show you the way out to the churchyard. God
+bless you, sir; and reward you for your kindness!"
+
+And as Anthony went out of the room he heard benedictions mingled with
+sobs following him. The woman was nowhere to be seen; so he took the
+oil-lamp from the landing, and found his way downstairs again, unfastened
+the front door, and went out, leaving the lamp on the floor. The child
+was leaning against the wall opposite; he could just see the glimmer of
+her face in the heavy dusk.
+
+"Come, my child," he said, "show me the way to the churchyard."
+
+She came forward, and he began to follow her out of the little flagged
+court. He turned round as he left the court and saw high up against the
+blackness overhead a square of window lighted with a glow from within;
+and simultaneously there came the sound of bolts being shut in the door
+that he had just left. Evidently the old woman had been on the watch, and
+was now barring the door behind him.
+
+It wanted courage to do as Anthony was doing, but he was not lacking in
+that; it was not a small matter to go to Papists' Corner and give a
+warning to a Catholic priest: but firstly, James Maxwell was his friend,
+and in danger: secondly, Anthony had no sympathy with religious
+persecution; and thirdly, as has been seen, the last year had made a
+really deep impression upon him: he was more favourably inclined to the
+Catholic cause than he had ever imagined to be possible.
+
+As he followed the child through the labyrinth of passages, passing every
+now and then the lighted front of a house, or a little group of idlers
+(for the rain had now ceased) who stared to see this gentleman in such
+company, his head was whirling with questions and conjectures. Was it not
+after all a dishonourable act to the Archbishop in whose service he was,
+thus to take the side of the Papists? But that it was too late to
+consider now.--How strange that James Maxwell was a priest! That of
+course accounted at once for his long absence, no doubt in the seminary
+abroad, and his ultimate return, and for Hubert's inheriting the estates.
+And then he passed on to reflect as he had done a hundred times before on
+this wonderful Religion that allured men from home and wealth and
+friends, and sent them rejoicing to penury, suspicion, hatred, peril, and
+death itself, for the kingdom of heaven's sake.
+
+Suddenly he found himself in the open space opposite the Cathedral--the
+child had again disappeared.
+
+It was less dark here; the leaden sky overhead still glimmered with a
+pale sunset light; and many house-windows shone out from within. He
+passed round the south side of the Cathedral, and entered the western
+door. The building was full of deep gloom only pricked here and there by
+an oil-lamp or two that would presently be extinguished when the
+Cathedral was closed. The air was full of a faint sound, made up from
+echoes of the outside world and the footsteps of a few people who still
+lingered in groups here and there in the aisles, and talked among
+themselves. The columns rose up in slender bundles and faded into the
+pale gloom overhead; as he crossed the nave on the way to Papists' Corner
+far away to the east rose the dark carving of the stalls against the
+glimmering stone beyond. It was like some vast hall of the dead; the
+noise of the footsteps seemed like an insolent intrusion on this temple
+of silence; and the religious stillness had an active and sombre
+character of its own more eloquent and impressive than all the tumult
+that man could make.
+
+As Anthony came to Papists' Corner he saw a very tall solitary figure
+passing slowly from east to west; it was too dark to distinguish faces;
+so he went towards it, so that at the next turn they would meet face to
+face. When he was within two or three steps the man before him turned
+abruptly; and Anthony immediately put out his hand smiling.
+
+"Mr. Arthur Oldham," he said.
+
+The man started and peered curiously through the gloom at him.
+
+"Why Anthony!" he exclaimed, and took his hand, "what is your business
+here?" And they began slowly to walk westwards together.
+
+"I am come to meet Mr. Oldham," he said, "and to give him a message; and
+this is it, 'Come, for all things are now ready!'"
+
+"My dear boy," said James, stopping short, "you must forgive me; but what
+in the world do you mean by that?"
+
+"I come from Mr. Roger," said Anthony, "you need not be afraid. He has
+had an accident and sent for me."
+
+"Mr. Roger?" said James interrogatively.
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "he hath a patch over one eye; and stutters
+somewhat."
+
+James gave a sigh of relief.
+
+"My dear boy," he said, "I cannot thank you enough. You know what it
+means then?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Anthony.
+
+"And you a Protestant, and in the Archbishop's household?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Anthony, "and a Christian and your friend."
+
+"God bless you, Anthony," said the priest; and took his hand and pressed
+it.
+
+They were passing out now under the west door, and stood together for a
+moment looking at the lights down Ludgate Hill. The houses about Amen
+Court stood up against the sky to their right.
+
+"I must not stay," said Anthony, "I must fetch my horse and be back at
+Lambeth for evening prayers at six. He is stabled at the Palace here."
+
+"Well, well," said the priest, "I thank God that there are true hearts
+like yours. God bless you again my dear boy--and--and make you one of us
+some day!"
+
+Anthony smiled at him a little tremulously, for the gratitude and the
+blessing of this man was dear to him; and after another hand grasp, he
+turned away to the right, leaving the priest still half under the shadow
+of the door looking after him.
+
+He had done his errand promptly and discreetly.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII
+
+                          THE MASSING-HOUSE
+
+
+Newman's Court lay dark and silent under the stars on Sunday morning a
+little after four o'clock. The gloomy weather of the last three or four
+days had passed off in heavy battalions of sullen sunset clouds on the
+preceding evening, and the air was full of frost. By midnight thin ice
+was lying everywhere; pendants of it were beginning to form on the
+overhanging eaves; and streaks of it between the cobble-stones that paved
+the court. The great city lay in a frosty stillness as of death.
+
+The patrol passed along Cheapside forty yards away from the entrance of
+the court, a little after three o'clock; and a watchman had cried out
+half an hour later, that it was a clear night; and then he too had gone
+his way. The court itself was a little rectangular enclosure with two
+entrances, one to the north beneath the arch of a stable that gave on to
+Newman's Passage, which in its turn opened on to St. Giles' Lane that led
+to Cheapside; the other, at the further end of the long right-hand side,
+led by a labyrinth of passages down in the direction of the wharfs to the
+west of London Bridge. There were three houses to the left of the
+entrance from Newman's Passage; the back of a ware-house faced them on
+the other long side with the door beyond; and the other two sides were
+respectively formed by the archway of the stable with a loft over it, and
+a blank high wall at the opposite end.
+
+A few minutes after four o'clock the figure of a woman suddenly appeared
+soundlessly in the arch under the stables; and after standing there a
+moment advanced along the front of the houses till she reached the third
+door. She stood here a moment in silence, listening and looking towards
+the doorway opposite, and then rapped gently with her finger-nail eleven
+or twelve times. Almost immediately the door opened, showing only
+darkness within; she stepped in, and it closed silently behind her. Then
+the minutes slipped away again in undisturbed silence. At about twenty
+minutes to five the figure of a very tall man dressed as a layman slipped
+in through the door that led towards the river, and advanced to the door
+where he tapped in the same manner as the woman before him, and was
+admitted at once. After that people began to come more frequently, some
+hesitating and looking about them as they entered the court, some
+slipping straight through without a pause, and going to the door, which
+opened and shut noiselessly as each tapped and was admitted. Sometimes
+two or three would come together, sometimes singly; but by five o'clock
+about twenty or thirty persons had come and been engulfed by the
+blackness that showed each time the door opened; while no glimmer of
+light from any of the windows betrayed the presence of any living soul
+within. At five o'clock the stream stopped. The little court lay as
+silent under the stars again as an hour before. It was a night of
+breathless stillness; there was no dripping from the eaves; no sound of
+wheels or hoofs from the city; only once or twice came the long howl of a
+dog across the roofs.
+
+Ten minutes passed away.
+
+Then without a sound a face appeared like a pale floating patch in the
+dark door that opened on to the court. It remained hung like a mask in
+the darkness for at least a minute; and then a man stepped through on to
+the cobblestones. Something on his head glimmered sharply in the
+starlight; and there was the same sparkle at the end of a pole that he
+carried in his hand; he turned and nodded; and three or four men appeared
+behind him.
+
+Then out of the darkness of the archway at the other end of the court
+appeared a similar group. Once a man slipped on the frozen stones and
+cursed under his breath, and the leader turned on him with a fierce
+indrawing of his breath; but no word was spoken.
+
+Then through both entrances streamed dark figures, each with a steely
+glitter on head and breast, and with something that shone in their hands;
+till the little court seemed half full of armed men; but the silence was
+still formidable in its depth.
+
+The two leaders came together to the door of the third house, and their
+heads were together; and a few sibilant consonants escaped them. The
+breath of the men that stood out under the starlight went up like smoke
+in the air. It was now a quarter-past five.
+
+Three notes of a hand-bell sounded behind the house; and then, without
+any further attempt at silence, the man who had entered the court first
+advanced to the door and struck three or four thundering blows on it with
+a mace, and shouted in a resonant voice:
+
+"Open in the Queen's Name."
+
+The men relaxed their cautious attitudes, and some grounded their
+weapons; others began to talk in low voices; a small party advanced
+nearer their leaders with weapons, axes and halberds, uplifted.
+
+By now the blows were thundering on the door; and the same shattering
+voice cried again and again:
+
+"Open in the Queen's name; open in the Queen's name!"
+
+The middle house of the three was unoccupied; but the windows of the
+house next the stable, and the windows in the loft over the archway,
+where the stable-boys slept, suddenly were illuminated; latches were
+lifted, the windows thrust open and heads out of them.
+
+Then one or two more pursuivants came up the dark passage bearing flaming
+torches with them. A figure appeared on the top of the blank wall at the
+end, and pointed and shouted. The stable-boys in a moment more appeared
+in their archway, and one or two persons came out of the house next the
+stable, queerly habited in cloaks and hats over their night-attire.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The din was now tremendous; the questions and answers shouted to and fro
+were scarcely audible under the thunder that pealed from the battered
+door; a party had advanced to it and were raining blows upon the lock and
+hinges. The court was full of a ruddy glare that blazed on the
+half-armour and pikes of the men, and the bellowing and the crashes and
+the smoke together went up into the night air as from the infernal pit.
+It was a hellish transformation from the deathly stillness of a few
+minutes--a massacre of the sweet night silence. And yet the house where
+the little silent stream of dark figures had been swallowed up rose up
+high above the smoky cauldron, black, dark, and irresponsive.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There rose a shrill howling from behind the house, and the figure on the
+top of the wall capered and gesticulated again. Then footsteps came
+running up the passage, and a pursuivant thrust his way through to the
+leaders; and, in a moment or two, above the din a sharp word was given,
+and three or four men hurried out through the doorway by which the man
+had come. Almost at the same moment the hinges of the door gave way, the
+whole crashed inwards, and the attacking party poured into the dark
+entrance hall beyond. By this time the noise had wakened many in the
+houses round, and lights were beginning to shine from the high windows
+invisible before, and a concourse of people to press in from all sides.
+The approaches had all been guarded, but at the crash of the door some of
+the sentries round the nearer corners hurried into the court, and the
+crowd poured after them; and by the time that the officers and men had
+disappeared into the house, their places had been filled by the
+spectators, and the little court was again full of a swaying, seething,
+shouting mass of men, with a few women with hoods and cloaks among
+them--inquiries and information were yelled to and fro.
+
+"It was a nest of papists--a wasp's nest was being smoked out--what harm
+had they done?--It was a murder; two women had had their throats
+cut.--No, no; it was a papists' den--a massing-house.--Well, God save her
+Grace and rid her of her enemies. With these damned Spaniards everywhere,
+England was going to ruin.--They had escaped at the back. No; they tried
+that way, but it was guarded.--There were over fifty papists, some said,
+in that house.--It was a plot. Mary was mixed up in it. The Queen was to
+be blown up with powder, like poor Darnley. The barrels were all stored
+there.--No, no, no! it was nothing but a massing-house.--Who was the
+priest?--Well, they would see him at Tyburn on a hurdle; and serve him
+right with his treasonable mummery.--No, no! they had had enough of
+blood.--Campion had died like a man; and an Englishman too--praying for
+his Queen."--The incessant battle and roar went up.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Meanwhile lights were beginning to shine everywhere in the dark house. A
+man with a torch was standing in a smoky glare half way up the stairs
+seen through the door, and the interior of the plain hall was
+illuminated. Then the leaded panes overhead were beginning to shine out.
+Steel caps moved to and fro; gigantic shadows wavered; the shadow of a
+halberd head went across a curtain at one of the lower windows.
+
+A crimson-faced man threw open a window and shouted instructions to the
+sentry left at the door, who in answer shook his head and pointed to the
+bellowing crowd; the man at the window made a furious gesture and
+disappeared. The illumination began to climb higher and higher as the
+searchers mounted from floor to floor; thin smoke began to go up from one
+or two of the chimneys in the frosty air;--they were lighting straw to
+bring down any fugitives concealed in the chimneys. Then the sound of
+heavy blows began to ring out; they were testing the walls everywhere for
+hiding-holes; there was a sound of rending wood as the flooring was torn
+up. Then over the parapet against the stairs looked a steel-crowned face
+of a pursuivant. The crowd below yelled and pointed at first, thinking he
+was a fugitive; but he grinned down at them and disappeared.
+
+Then at last came an exultant shout; then a breathless silence; then the
+crowd began to question and answer again.
+
+"They had caught the priest!--No, the priest had escaped,--damn him!--It
+was half a dozen women. No, no! they had had the women ten minutes ago in
+a room at the back.--What fools these pursuivants were!--They had found
+the chapel and the altar.--What a show it would all make at the
+trial!--Ah! ah! it was the priest after all."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Those nearest the door saw the man with the torch on the stairs stand
+back a little; and then a dismal little procession began to appear round
+the turn.
+
+First came a couple of armed men, looking behind them every now and then;
+then a group of half a dozen women, whom they had found almost
+immediately, but had been keeping for the last few minutes in a room
+upstairs; then a couple more men. Then there was a little space; and then
+more constables and more prisoners. Each male prisoner was guarded by two
+men; the women were in groups. All these came out to the court. The crowd
+began to sway back against the walls, pointing and crying out; and a lane
+with living walls was formed towards the archway that opened into
+Newman's Passage.
+
+When the last pursuivants who brought up the rear had reached the door,
+an officer, who had been leaning from a first-floor window with the pale
+face of Lackington peering over his shoulder, gave a sharp order; and the
+procession halted. The women, numbering fourteen or fifteen, were placed
+in a group with some eight men in hollow square round them; then came a
+dozen men, each with a pursuivant on either side. But plainly they were
+not all come; they were still waiting for something; the officer and
+Lackington disappeared from the window; and for a moment too, the crowd
+was quiet.
+
+A murmur of excitement began to rise again, as another group was seen
+descending the stairs within. The officer came first, looking back and
+talking as he came; then followed two pursuivants with halberds, and
+immediately behind them, followed by yet two men, walked James Maxwell in
+crimson vestments all disordered, with his hands behind him, and his
+comely head towering above the heads of the guard. The crowd surged
+forward, yelling; and the men at the door grounded their halberds sharply
+on the feet of the front row of spectators. As the priest reached the
+door, a shrill cry either from a boy or a woman pierced the roaring of
+the mob. "God bless you, father," and as he heard it he turned and smiled
+serenely. His face was white, and there was a little trickle of blood run
+down across it from some wound in his head. The rest of the prisoners
+turned towards him as he came out; and again he smiled and nodded at
+them. And so the Catholics with their priest stood a moment in that
+deafening tumult of revilings, before the officer gave the word to
+advance.
+
+Then the procession set forward through the archway; the crowd pressing
+back before them, like the recoil of a wave, and surging after them again
+in the wake. High over the heads of all moved the steel halberds, shining
+like grim emblems of power; the torches tossed up and down and threw
+monstrous stalking shadows on the walls as they passed; the steel caps
+edged the procession like an impenetrable hedge; and last moved the
+crimson-clad priest, as if in some church function, but with a bristling
+barrier about him; then came the mob, pouring along the narrow passages,
+jostling, cursing, reviling, swelled every moment by new arrivals dashing
+down the alleys and courts that gave on the thoroughfare; and so with
+tramp and ring of steel the pageant went forward on its way of sorrows.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Before six o'clock Newman's Court was empty again, except for one armed
+figure that stood before the shattered door of No. 3 to guard it. Inside
+the house was dark again except in one room high up where the altar had
+stood. Here the thick curtains against the glass had been torn down, and
+the window was illuminated; every now and again the shadows on the
+ceiling stirred a little as if the candle was being moved; and once the
+window opened and a pale smooth face looked out for a moment, and then
+withdrew again. Then the light disappeared altogether; and presently
+shone out in another room on the same floor; then again after an half an
+hour or so it was darkened; and again reappeared on the floor below. And
+so it went on from room to room; until the noises of the waking city
+began, and the stars paled and expired. Over the smokeless town the sky
+began to glow clear and brilliant. The crowing of cocks awoke here and
+there; a church bell or two began to sound far away over the roofs. The
+pale blue overhead grew more and more luminous; the candle went out on
+the first floor; the steel-clad man stretched himself and looked at the
+growing dawn.
+
+A step was heard on the stairs, and Lackington came down, carrying a
+small valise apparently full to bursting. He looked paler than usual; and
+a little hollow-eyed for want of sleep. He came out and stood by the
+soldier, and looked about him. Everywhere the court showed signs of the
+night's tumult. Crumbled ice from broken icicles and trampled frozen
+pools lay powdered on the stones. Here and there on the walls were great
+smears of black from the torches, and even one or two torn bits of stuff
+and a crushed hat marked where the pressure had been fiercest. Most
+eloquent of all was the splintered door behind him, still held fast by
+one stout bolt, but leaning crookedly against the dinted wall of the
+interior.
+
+"A good night's work, friend," said Lackington to the man. "Another hive
+taken, and here"--and he tapped his valise--"here I bear the best of the
+honey."
+
+The soldier looked heavily at the bag. He was tired too; and he did not
+care for this kind of work.
+
+"Well," said Lackington again, "I must be getting home safe. Keep the
+door; you shall be relieved in one hour."
+
+The soldier nodded at him; but still said nothing; and Lackington lifted
+the valise and went off too under the archway.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+That same morning Lady Maxwell in her room in the Hall at Great Keynes
+awoke early before dawn with a start. She had had a dream but could not
+remember what it was, except that her son James was in it, and seemed to
+be in trouble. He was calling on her to save him, she thought, and awoke
+at the sound of his voice. She often dreamt of him at this time; for the
+life of a seminary priest was laid with snares and dangers. But this
+dream seemed worse than all.
+
+She struck a light, and looked timidly round the room; it seemed still
+ringing with his voice. A great tapestry in a frame hung over the
+mantelpiece, Actæon followed by his hounds; the hunter panted as he ran,
+and was looking back over his shoulder; and the long-jawed dogs streamed
+behind him down a little hill.
+
+So strong was the dream upon the old lady that she felt restless, and
+presently got up and went to the window and opened a shutter to look out.
+A white statue or two beyond the terrace glimmered in the dusk, and the
+stars were bright in the clear frosty night overhead. She closed the
+shutter and went back again to bed; but could not sleep. Again and again
+as she was dozing off, something would startle her wide awake again:
+sometimes it was a glimpse of James' face; sometimes he seemed to be
+hurrying away from her down an endless passage with closed doors; he was
+dressed in something crimson. She tried to cry out, her voice would not
+rise above a whisper. Sometimes it was the dream of his voice; and once
+she started up crying out, "I am coming, my son." Then at last she awoke
+again at the sound of footsteps coming along the corridor outside; and
+stared fearfully at the door to see what would enter. But it was only the
+maid come to call her mistress. Lady Maxwell watched her as she opened
+the shutters that now glimmered through their cracks, and let a great
+flood of light into the room from the clear shining morning outside.
+
+"It is a frosty morning, my lady," said the maid.
+
+"Send one of the men down to Mistress Torridon," said Lady Maxwell, "and
+ask her to come here as soon as it is convenient. Say I am well; but
+would like to see her when she can come."
+
+There was no priest in the house that Sunday, so there could be no mass;
+and on these occasions Mistress Margaret usually stayed at the Dower
+House until after dinner; but this morning she came up within half an
+hour of receiving the message.
+
+She did not pretend to despise her sister's terror, or call it
+superstitious.
+
+"Mary," she said, taking her sister's jewelled old fingers into her own
+two hands, "we must leave all this to the good God. It may mean much, or
+little, or nothing. He only knows; but at least we may pray. Let me tell
+Isabel; a child's prayers are mighty with Him; and she has the soul of a
+little child still."
+
+So Isabel was told; and after church she came up to dine at the Hall and
+spend the day there; for Lady Maxwell was thoroughly nervous and upset:
+she trembled at the sound of footsteps, and cried out when one of the men
+came into the room suddenly.
+
+Isabel went again to evening prayer at three o'clock; but could not keep
+her thoughts off the strange nervous horror at the Hall, though it seemed
+to rest on no better foundation than the waking dreams of an old
+lady--and her mind strayed away continually from the darkening chapel in
+which she sat, so near where Sir Nicholas himself lay, to the upstairs
+parlour where the widow sat shaken and trembling at her own curious
+fancies about her dear son.
+
+Mr. Bodder's sermon came to an end at last; and Isabel was able to get
+away, and hurry back to the Hall. She found the old ladies as she had
+left them in the little drawing-room, Lady Maxwell sitting on the
+window-seat near the harp, preoccupied and apparently listening for
+something she knew not what. Mistress Margaret was sitting in a tall
+padded porter's chair reading aloud from an old English mystic, but her
+sister was paying no attention, and looked strangely at the girl as she
+came in. Isabel sat down near the fire and listened; and as she listened
+the memory of that other day, years ago, came to her when she sat once
+before with these two ladies in the same room, and Mistress Margaret read
+to them, and the letter came from Sir Nicholas; and then the sudden
+clamour from the village. So now she sat with terror darkening over her,
+glancing now and again at that white expectant face, and herself
+listening for the first far-away rumour of the dreadful interruption that
+she now knew must come.
+
+"The Goodness of God," read the old nun, "is the highest prayer, and it
+cometh down to the lowest part of our need. It quickeneth our soul and
+bringeth it on life, and maketh it for to waxen in grace and virtue. It
+is nearest in nature; and readiest in grace: for it is the same grace
+that the soul seeketh, and ever shall seek till we know verily that He
+hath us all in Himself enclosed. For he hath no despite of that He hath
+made, nor hath He any disdain to serve us at the simplest office that to
+our body belongeth in nature, for love of the soul that He hath made to
+His own likeness. For as the body is clad in the clothes, and the flesh
+in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so
+are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed. Yea,
+and more homely; for all these may waste and wear away, but the Goodness
+of God is ever whole; and more near to us without any likeness; for truly
+our Lover desireth that our soul cleave to Him with all its might, and
+that we be evermore cleaving to His goodness. For of all things that
+heart may think, this most pleaseth God, and soonest speedeth us. For our
+soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest, that it overpasseth
+the knowing of all creatures----"
+
+"Hush," said Lady Maxwell suddenly, on her feet, with a lifted hand.
+
+There was a breathless silence in the room; Isabel's heart beat thick and
+heavy and her eyes grew large with expectancy; it was a windless frosty
+night again, and the ivy outside on the wall, and the laurels in the
+garden seemed to be silently listening too.
+
+"Mary, Mary," began her sister, "you----;" but the old lady lifted her
+hand a little higher; and silence fell again.
+
+Then far away in the direction of the London road came the clear beat of
+the hoofs of a galloping horse.
+
+Lady Maxwell bowed her head, and her hand slowly sank to her side. The
+other two stood up and remained still while the beat of the hoofs grew
+and grew in intensity on the frozen road.
+
+"The front door," said Lady Maxwell.
+
+Mistress Margaret slipped from the room and went downstairs; Isabel took
+a step or two forward, but was checked by the old lady's uplifted hand
+again. And again there was a breathless silence, save for the beat of the
+hoofs now close and imminent.
+
+A moment later the front door was opened, and a great flood of cold air
+swept up the passages; the portrait of Sir Nicholas in the hall
+downstairs, lifted and rattled against the wall. Then came the clatter on
+the paved court; and the sound of a horse suddenly checked with the
+slipping up of hoofs and the jingle and rattle of chains and stirrups.
+There were voices in the hall below, and a man's deep tones; then came
+steps ascending.
+
+Lady Maxwell still stood perfectly rigid by the window, waiting, and
+Isabel stared with white face and great open eyes at the door; outside,
+the flame of a lamp on the wall was blowing about furiously in the
+draught.
+
+Then a stranger stepped into the room; evidently a gentleman; he bowed to
+the two ladies, and stood, with the rime on his boots and a whip in his
+hand, a little exhausted and disordered by hard riding.
+
+"Lady Maxwell?" he said.
+
+Lady Maxwell bowed a little.
+
+"I come with news of your son, madam, the priest; he is alive and well;
+but he is in trouble. He was taken this morning in his mass-vestments;
+and is in the Marshalsea."
+
+Lady Maxwell's lips moved a little; but no sound came.
+
+"He was betrayed, madam, by a friend. He and thirty other Catholics were
+taken all together at mass."
+
+Then Lady Maxwell spoke; and her voice was dead and hard.
+
+"The friend, sir! What was his name?"
+
+"The traitor's name, madam, is Anthony Norris."
+
+The room turned suddenly dark to Isabel's eyes; and she put up her hand
+and tore at the collar round her throat.
+
+"Oh no, no, no, no!" she cried, and tottered a step or two forward and
+stood swaying.
+
+Lady Maxwell looked from one to another with eyes that seemed to see
+nothing; and her lips stirred again.
+
+Mistress Margaret who had followed the stranger up, and who stood now
+behind him at the door, came forward to Isabel with a little cry, with
+her hands trembling before her. But before she could reach her, Lady
+Maxwell herself came swiftly forward, her head thrown back, and her arms
+stretched out towards the girl, who still stood dazed and swaying more
+and more.
+
+"My poor, poor child!" said Lady Maxwell; and caught her as she fell.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IX
+
+                      FROM FULHAM TO GREENWICH
+
+
+Anthony in London, strangely enough, heard nothing of the arrest on the
+Sunday, except a rumour at supper that some Papists had been taken. It
+had sufficient effect on his mind to make him congratulate himself that
+he had been able to warn his friend last week.
+
+At dinner on Monday there were a few guests; and among them, one Sir
+Richard Barkley, afterwards Lieutenant of the Tower. He sat at the
+Archbishop's table, but Anthony's place, on the steward's left hand,
+brought him very close to the end of the first table where Sir Richard
+sat. Dinner was half way through, when Mr. Scot who was talking to
+Anthony, was suddenly silent and lifted his hand as if to check the
+conversation a moment.
+
+"I saw them myself," said Sir Richard's voice just behind.
+
+"What is it?" whispered Anthony.
+
+"The Catholics," answered the steward.
+
+"They were taken in Newman's Court, off Cheapside," went on the voice,
+"nearly thirty, with one of their priests, at mass, in his trinkets
+too--Oldham his name is."
+
+There was a sudden crash of a chair fallen backwards, and Anthony was
+standing by the officer.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Sir Richard Barkley," he said;--and a dead silence
+fell in the hall.--"But is that the name of the priest that was taken
+yesterday?"
+
+Sir Richard looked astonished at the apparent insolence of this young
+official.
+
+"Yes, sir," he said shortly.
+
+"Then, then,----" began Anthony; but stopped; bowed low to the Archbishop
+and went straight out of the hall.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mr. Scot was waiting for him in the hall when he returned late that
+night. Anthony's face was white and distracted; he came in and stood by
+the fire, and stared at him with a dazed air.
+
+"You are to come to his Grace," said the steward, looking at him in
+silence.
+
+Anthony nodded without speaking, and turned away.
+
+"Then you cannot tell me anything?" said Mr. Scot. The other shook his
+head impatiently, and walked towards the inner door.
+
+The Archbishop was sincerely shocked at the sight of his young officer,
+as he came in and stood before the table, staring with bewildered eyes,
+with his dress splashed and disordered, and his hands still holding the
+whip and gloves. He made him sit down at once, and after Anthony had
+drunk a glass of wine, he made him tell his story and what he had done
+that day.
+
+He had been to the Marshalsea; it was true Mr. Oldham was there, and had
+been examined. Mr. Young had conducted it.--The house at Newman's Court
+was guarded: the house behind Bow Church was barred and shut up, and the
+people seemed gone away.--He could not get a word through to Mr. Oldham,
+though he had tried heavy bribery.--And that was all.
+
+Anthony spoke with the same dazed air, in short broken sentences; but
+became more himself as the wine and the fire warmed him; and by the time
+he had finished he had recovered himself enough to entreat the Archbishop
+to help him.
+
+"It is useless," said the old man. "What can I do? I have no power.
+And--and he is a popish priest! How can I interfere?"
+
+"My lord," cried Anthony desperately, flushed and entreating, "all has
+been done through treachery. Do you not see it? I have been a brainless
+fool. That man behind Bow Church was a spy. For Christ's sake help us,
+my lord!"
+
+Grindal looked into the lad's great bright eyes; sighed; and threw out
+his hands despairingly.
+
+"It is useless; indeed it is useless, Mr. Norris. But I will tell you all
+that I can do. I will give you to-morrow a letter to Sir Francis
+Walsingham. I was with him abroad as you know, in the popish times of
+Mary: and he is still in some sort a friend of mine--but you must
+remember that he is a strong Protestant; and I do not suppose that he
+will help you. Now go to bed, dear lad; you are worn out."
+
+Anthony knelt for the old man's blessing, and left the room.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The interview next day was more formidable than he had expected. He was
+at the Secretary's house by ten o'clock, and waited below while the
+Archbishop's letter was taken up. The servant came back in a few minutes,
+and asked him to follow; and in an agony of anxiety, but with a clear
+head again this morning, and every faculty tense, he went upstairs after
+him, and was ushered into the room where Walsingham sat at a table.
+
+There was silence as the two bowed, but Sir Francis did not offer to
+rise, but sat with the Archbishop's letter in his hand, glancing through
+it again, as the other stood and waited.
+
+"I understand," said the Secretary at last, and his voice was dry and
+unsympathetic,--"I understand, from his Grace's letter, that you desire
+to aid a popish priest called Oldham or Maxwell, arrested at mass on
+Sunday morning in Newman's Court. If you will be so good as to tell me in
+what way you desire to aid him, I can be more plain in my answer. You do
+not desire, I hope, Mr. Norris, anything but justice and a fair trial for
+your friend?"
+
+Anthony cleared his throat before answering.
+
+"I--he is my friend, as you say, Sir Francis; and--and he hath been
+caught by foul means. I myself was used, as I have little doubt, in his
+capture. Surely there is no justice, sir, in betraying a man by means of
+his friend." And Anthony described the ruse that had brought it all
+about.
+
+Sir Francis listened to him coldly; but there came the faintest spark of
+amusement into his large sad eyes.
+
+"Surely, Mr. Norris," he said, "it was somewhat simple; and I have no
+doubt at all that it all is as you say; and that the poor stuttering
+cripple with a patch was as sound and had as good sight and power of
+speech as you and I; but the plan was, it seems, if you will forgive me,
+not so simple as yourself. It would be passing strange, surely that the
+man, if a friend of the priest's, could find no Catholic to take his
+message; but not at all strange if he were his enemy. I do not think
+sincerely, sir, that it would have deceived me. But that is not now the
+point. He is taken now, fairly or foully, and--what was it you wished me
+to do?"
+
+"I hoped," said Anthony, in rising indignation at this insolence, "that
+you would help me in some way to undo this foul unjustice. Surely, sir,
+it cannot be right to take advantage of such knavish tricks."
+
+"Good Mr. Norris," said the Secretary, "we are not playing a game, with
+rules that must not be broken, but we are trying to serve justice"--his
+voice rose a little in sincere enthusiasm--"and to put down all false
+practices, whether in religion or state, against God or the prince.
+Surely the point for you and me is not, ought this gentleman to have been
+taken in the manner he was; but being taken, is he innocent or guilty?"
+
+"Then you will not help me?"
+
+"I will certainly not help you to defeat justice," said the other. "Mr.
+Norris, you are a young man; and while your friendship does your heart
+credit, your manner of forwarding its claims does not equally commend
+your head. I counsel you to be wary in your speech and actions; or they
+may bring you into trouble some day yourself. After all, as no doubt your
+friends have told you, you played what, as a minister of the Crown, I
+must call a knave's part in attempting to save this popish traitor,
+although by God's Providence, you were frustrated. But it is indeed going
+too far to beg me to assist you. I have never heard of such audacity!"
+
+Anthony left the house in a fury. It was true, as the Archbishop had
+said, that Sir Francis Walsingham was a convinced Protestant; but he had
+expected to find in him some indignation at the methods by which the
+priest had been captured; and some desire to make compensation for it.
+
+He went again to the Marshalsea; and now heard that James had been
+removed to the Tower, with one or two of the Catholics who had been in
+trouble before. This was serious news; for to be transferred to the Tower
+was often but the prelude to torture or death. He went on there, however,
+and tried again to gain admittance, but it was refused, and the
+doorkeeper would not even consent to take a message in. Mr. Oldham, he
+said, was being straitly kept, and it would be as much as his place was
+worth to admit any communication to him without an order from the
+Council.
+
+When Anthony got back to Lambeth after this fruitless day, he found an
+imploring note from Isabel awaiting him; and one of the grooms from the
+Hall to take his answer back.
+
+"Write back at once, dear Anthony," she wrote, "and explain this terrible
+thing, for I know well that you could not do what has been told us of
+you. But tell us what has happened, that we may know what to think. Poor
+Lady Maxwell is in the distress you may imagine; not knowing what will
+come to Mr. James. She will come to London, I think, this week. Write at
+once now, my Anthony, and tell us all."
+
+Anthony scribbled a few lines, saying how he had been deceived; and
+asking her to explain the circumstances to Lady Maxwell, who no doubt
+would communicate them to her son as soon as was possible; he added that
+he had so far failed to get a message through the gaoler. He gave the
+note himself to the groom; telling him to deliver it straight into
+Isabel's hands, and then went to bed.
+
+In the morning he reported to the Archbishop what had taken place.
+
+"I feared it would be so," Grindal said. "There is nothing to be done but
+to commit your friend into God's hands, and leave him there."
+
+"My Lord," said Anthony, "I cannot leave it like that. I will go and see
+my lord bishop to-day; and then, if he can do nothing to help, I will
+even see the Queen's Grace herself."
+
+Grindal threw up his hands with a gesture of dismay.
+
+"That will ruin all," he said. "An officer of mine could do nothing but
+anger her Grace."
+
+"I must do my best," said Anthony; "it was through my folly he is in
+prison, and I could never rest if I left one single thing undone."
+
+Just as Anthony was leaving the house, a servant in the royal livery
+dashed up to the gate; and the porter ran out after Anthony to call him
+back. The man delivered to him a letter which he opened then and there.
+It was from Mistress Corbet.
+
+"What can be done," the letter ran, "for poor Mr. James? I have heard a
+tale of you from a Catholic, which I know is a black lie. I am sure that
+even now you will be doing all you can to save your friend. I told the
+man that told me, that he lied and that I knew you for an honest
+gentleman. But come, dear Mr. Anthony; and we will do what we can between
+us. Her Grace noticed this morning that I had been weeping; I put her off
+with excuses that she knows to be excuses; and she is so curious that she
+will not rest till she knows the cause. Come after dinner to-day; we are
+at Greenwich now; and we will see what may be done. It may even be
+needful for you to see her Grace yourself, and tell her the story. Your
+loving friend, Mary Corbet."
+
+Anthony gave a message to the royal groom, to tell Mistress Corbet that
+he would do as she said, and then rode off immediately to the city. There
+was another disappointing delay as the Bishop was at Fulham; and thither
+he rode directly through the frosty streets under the keen morning
+sunshine, fretting at the further delay.
+
+He had often had occasion to see the Bishop before, and Aylmer had taken
+something of a liking to this staunch young churchman; and now as the
+young man came hurrying across the grass under the elms, the Bishop, who
+was walking in his garden in his furs and flapped cap, noticed his
+anxious eyes and troubled face, and smiled at him kindly, wondering what
+he had come about. The two began to walk up and down together. The
+sunshine was beginning to melt the surface of the ground, and the birds
+were busy with breakfast-hunting.
+
+"Look at that little fellow!" cried the Bishop, pointing to a thrush on
+the lawn, "he knows his craft."
+
+The thrush had just rapped several times with his beak at a worm's earth,
+and was waiting with his head sideways watching.
+
+"Aha!" cried the Bishop again, "he has him." The thrush had seized the
+worm who had come up to investigate the noise, and was now staggering
+backwards, bracing himself, and tugging at the poor worm, who, in a
+moment more was dragged out and swallowed.
+
+"My lord," said Anthony, "I came to ask your pity for one who was
+betrayed by like treachery."
+
+The Bishop looked astonished, and asked for the story; but when he heard
+who it was that had been taken, and under what circumstances, the
+kindliness died out of his eyes. He shook his head severely when Anthony
+had done.
+
+"It is useless coming to me, sir," he said. "You know what I think. To be
+ordained beyond the seas and to exercise priestly functions in England is
+now a crime. It is useless to pretend anything else. It is revolt against
+the Queen's Grace and the peace of the realm. And I must confess I am
+astonished at you, Mr. Norris, thinking that anything ought to be done to
+shield a criminal, and still more astonished that you should think I
+would aid you in that. I tell you plainly that I am glad that the fellow
+is caught, for that I think there will be presently one less fire-brand
+in England. I know it is easy to cry out against persecution and
+injustice; that is ever the shallow cry of the mob; but this is not a
+religious persecution, as you yourself very well know. It is because the
+Roman Church interferes with the peace of the realm and the Queen's
+authority that its ordinances are forbidden; we do not seek to touch a
+man's private opinions. However, you know all that as well as I."
+
+Anthony was raging now with anger.
+
+"I am not so sure, my lord, as I was," he said. "I had hoped from your
+lordship at any rate to find sympathy for the base trick whereby my
+friend was snared; and I find it now hard to trust the judgment of any
+who do not feel as I do about it."
+
+"That is insolence, Mr. Norris," said Aylmer, stopping in his walk and
+turning upon him his cold half-shut eyes, "and I will not suffer it."
+
+"Then, my lord, I had better begone to her Grace at once."
+
+"To her Grace!" exclaimed the Bishop.
+
+"_Appello Cæsarem_," said Anthony, and was gone again.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As Anthony came into the courtyard of Greenwich Palace an hour or two
+later he found it humming with movement and noise. Cooks were going to
+and fro with dishes, as dinner was only just ending; servants in the
+royal livery were dashing across with messages; a few great hounds for
+the afternoon's baiting were in a group near one of the gateways,
+snuffing the smell of cookery, and howling hungrily now and again.
+
+Anthony stopped one of the men, and sent him with a message to Mistress
+Corbet; and the servant presently returned, saying that the Court was
+just rising from dinner, and Mistress Corbet would see him in a parlour
+directly, if the gentleman would kindly follow him. A groom took his
+horse off to the stable, and Anthony himself followed the servant to a
+little oak-parlour looking on to a lawn with a yew hedge and a dial. He
+felt as one moving in a dream, bewildered by the rush of interviews, and
+oppressed by the awful burden that he bore at his heart. Nothing any
+longer seemed strange; and he scarcely gave a thought to what it meant
+when he heard the sound of trumpets in the court, as the Queen left the
+Hall. In five minutes more Mistress Corbet burst into the room; and her
+anxious look broke into tenderness at the sight of the misery in the
+lad's face.
+
+"Oh, Master Anthony," she cried, seizing his hand, "thank God you are
+here. And now what is to be done for him?"
+
+They sat down together in the window-seat. Mary was dressed in an
+elaborate rose-coloured costume; but her pretty lips were pale, and her
+eyes looked distressed and heavy.
+
+"I have hardly slept," she said, "since Saturday night. Tell me all that
+you know."
+
+Anthony told her the whole story, mechanically and miserably.
+
+"Ah," she said, "that was how it was. I understand it now. And what can
+we do? You know, of course, that he has been questioned in the Tower."
+
+Anthony turned suddenly white and sick.
+
+"Not the--not the----" he began, falteringly.
+
+She nodded at him mutely with large eyes and compressed lips.
+
+"Oh, my God," said Anthony; and then again, "O God."
+
+She took up one of his brown young hands and pressed it gently between
+her white slender ones.
+
+"I know," she said, "I know; he is a gallant gentleman."
+
+Anthony stood up shaking; and sat down again. The horror had goaded him
+into clearer consciousness.
+
+"Ah! what can we do?" he said brokenly. "Let me see the Queen. She will
+be merciful."
+
+"You must trust to me in this," said Mary, "I know her; and I know that
+to go to her now would be madness. She is in a fury with Pinart to-day at
+something that has passed about the Duke. You know Monsieur is here; she
+kissed him the other day, and the Lord only knows whether she will marry
+him or not. You must wait a day or two; and be ready when I tell you."
+
+"But," stammered Anthony, "every hour we wait, he suffers."
+
+"Oh, you cannot tell that," said Mary, "they give them a long rest
+sometimes; and it was only yesterday that he was questioned."
+
+Anthony sat silently staring out on the fresh lawn; there was still a
+patch of frost under the shadow of the hedge he noticed.
+
+"Wait here a moment," said Mary, looking at him; and she got up and went
+out.
+
+Anthony still sat staring and thinking of the horror. Presently Mary was
+at his side again with a tall venetian wine-glass brimming with white
+wine.
+
+"Here," she said, "drink this,"--and then--"have you dined to-day?"
+
+"There was not time," said Anthony.
+
+She frowned at him almost fiercely.
+
+"And you come here fasting," she said, "to face the Queen! You foolish
+boy; you know nothing. Wait here," she added imperiously, and again she
+left the room.
+
+Anthony still stared out of doors, twisting the empty glass in his hand;
+until again came her step and the rustle of her dress. She took the glass
+from him and put it down. A servant had followed her back into the room
+in a minute or two with a dish of meat and some bread; he set it on the
+table, and went out.
+
+"Now," said Mary, "sit down and eat before you speak another word." And
+Anthony obeyed. The servant presently returned with some fruit, and again
+left them. All the while Anthony was eating, Mary sat by him and told him
+how she had heard the whole story from another Catholic at court; and how
+the Queen had questioned her closely the night before, as to what the
+marks of tears meant on her cheeks.
+
+"It was when I heard of the racking," explained Mary, "I could not help
+it. I went up to my room and cried and cried. But I would not tell her
+Grace that: it would have been of no use; so I said I had a headache;
+but I said it in such a way as to prepare her for more. She has not
+questioned me again to-day; she is too full of anger and of the
+bear-baiting; but she will--she will. She never forgets; and then Mr.
+Anthony, it must be you to tell her. You are a pleasant-faced young man,
+sir, and she likes such as that. And you must be both forward and modest
+with her. She loves boldness, but hates rudeness. That is why Chris is so
+beloved by her. He is a fool, but he is a handsome fool, and a forward
+fool, and withal a tender fool; and sighs and cries, and calls her his
+Goddess; and says how he takes to his bed when she is not there, which of
+course is true. The other day he came to her, white-faced, sobbing like
+a frightened child, about the ring she had given Monsieur _le petit
+grenouille_. And oh, she was so tender with him. And so, Mr. Anthony, you
+must not be just forward with her, and frown at her and call her Jezebel
+and tyrant, as you would like to do; but you must call her Cleopatra, and
+Diana as well. Forward and backward all in one; that is the way she loves
+to be wooed. She is a woman, remember that."
+
+"I must just let my heart speak," said Anthony, "I cannot twist and
+turn."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mary, "that is what I mean; but mind that it is your
+heart."
+
+They went on talking a little longer; when suddenly the trumpets pealed
+out again. Mary rose with a look of consternation.
+
+"I must fly," she said, "her Grace will be starting for the pit directly;
+and I must be there. Do you follow, Mr. Anthony; I will speak to a
+servant in the court about you." And in a moment she was gone.
+
+When Anthony had finished the fruit and wine, he felt considerably
+refreshed; and after waiting a few minutes, went out into the court
+again, which he found almost deserted, except for a servant or two. One
+of these came up to him, and said respectfully that Mistress Corbet had
+left instructions that Mr. Norris was to be taken to the bear-pit; so
+Anthony followed him through the palace to the back.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was a startlingly beautiful sight that his eyes fell upon when he came
+up the wooden stairs on to the stage that ran round the arena where the
+sport was just beginning. It was an amphitheatre, perhaps forty yards
+across; and the seats round it were filled with the most brilliant
+costumes, many of which blazed with jewels. Hanging over the top of the
+palisade were rich stuffs and tapestries. The Queen herself no doubt with
+Alençon was seated somewhere to the right, as Anthony could see by the
+canopy, with the arms of England and France embroidered upon its front;
+but he was too near to her to be able to catch even a glimpse of her face
+or figure. The awning overhead was furled, as the day was so fine, and
+the winter sunshine poured down on the dresses and jewels. All the Court
+was there; and Anthony recognised many great nobles here and there in the
+specially reserved seats. A ceaseless clangour of trumpets and cymbals
+filled the air, and drowned not only the conversation but the terrific
+noise from the arena where half a dozen great dogs, furious with hunger
+and excited as much by the crowds and the brazen music overhead as by the
+presence of their fierce adversary, were baiting a huge bear chained to a
+ring in the centre of the sand.
+
+Anthony's heart sank a little as he noticed the ladies of the Court
+applauding and laughing at the abominable scene below, no doubt in
+imitation of their mistress who loved this fierce sport; and as he
+thought of the kind of heart to which he would have to appeal presently.
+
+So through the winter afternoon the bouts went on; the band answered with
+harsh chords the death of the dogs one by one, and welcomed the collapse
+of the bear with a strident bellowing passage on the great horns and
+drums; and by the time it was over and the spectators rose to their feet,
+Anthony's hopes were lower than ever. Can there be any compassion left,
+he wondered, in a woman to whom such an afternoon was nothing more than a
+charming entertainment?
+
+By the time he was able to get out of his seat and return to the
+courtyard, the procession had again disappeared, but he was escorted by
+the same servant to the parlour again, where Mistress Corbet presently
+rustled in.
+
+"You must stay to-night," she said, "as late as possible. I wish you
+could sleep here; but we are so crowded with these Frenchmen and
+Hollanders that there is not a bed empty. The Queen is in better humour,
+and if the play goes well, it may be that a word said even to-night might
+reach her heart. I will tell you when it is over. You must be present. I
+will send you supper here directly."
+
+Anthony inquired as to his dress.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Mistress Corbet, "that will do very well; it is sober
+and quiet, and a little splashed: it will appear that you came in such
+haste that you could not change it. Her Grace likes to see a man hot and
+in a hurry sometimes; and not always like a peacock in the shade.--And,
+Master Anthony, it suits you very well."
+
+He asked what time the play would be over, and that his horse might be
+saddled ready for him when he should want it; and Mary promised to see to
+it.
+
+He felt much more himself as he supped alone in the parlour. The
+bewilderment had passed; the courage and spirit of Mary had infected his
+own, and the stirring strange life of the palace had distracted him from
+that dreadful brooding into which he had at first sunk.
+
+When he had finished supper he sat in the window seat, pondering and
+praying too that the fierce heart of the Queen might be melted, and that
+God would give him words to say.
+
+There was much else too that he thought over, as he sat and watched the
+illuminated windows round the little lawn on which his own looked, and
+heard the distant clash of music from the Hall where the Queen was
+supping in state. He thought of Mary and of her gay and tender nature;
+and of his own boyish love for her. That indeed had gone, or rather had
+been transfigured into a brotherly honour and respect. Both she and he,
+he was beginning to feel, had a more majestic task before them than
+marrying and giving in marriage. The religion which made this woman what
+she was, pure and upright in a luxurious and treacherous Court, tender
+among hard hearts, sympathetic in the midst of selfish lives--this
+Religion was beginning to draw this young man with almost irresistible
+power. Mary herself was doing her part bravely, witnessing in a
+Protestant Court to the power of the Catholic Faith in her own life; and
+he, what was he doing? These last three days were working miracles in
+him. The way he had been received by Walsingham and Aylmer, their
+apparent inability to see his point of view on this foul bit of
+treachery, the whole method of the Government of the day;--and above all
+the picture that was floating now before his eyes over the dark lawn, of
+the little cell in the Tower and the silent wrenched figure lying upon
+the straw--the "gallant gentleman" as Mary had called him, who had
+reckoned all this price up before he embarked on the life of a priest,
+and was even now paying it gladly and thankfully, no doubt--all this
+deepened the previous impressions that Anthony's mind had received; and
+as he sat here amid the stir of the royal palace, again and again a
+vision moved before him, of himself as a Catholic, and perhaps---- But
+Isabel! What of Isabel? And at the thought of her he rose and walked to
+and fro.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Presently the servant came again to take Anthony to the Presence Chamber,
+where the play was to take place.
+
+"I understand, sir, from Mistress Corbet," said the man, closing the door
+of the parlour a moment, "that you are come about Mr. Maxwell. I am a
+Catholic, too, sir, and may I say, sir, God bless and prosper you in
+this.--I--I beg your pardon, sir, will you follow me?"
+
+The room was full at the lower end where Anthony had to stand, as he was
+not in Court dress; and he could see really nothing of the play, and hear
+very little either. The children of Paul's were acting some classical
+play which he did not know: all he could do was to catch a glimpse now
+and again of the protruding stage, with the curtains at the back, and the
+glitter of the armour that the boys wore; and hear the songs that were
+accompanied by a little string band, and the clash of the brass at the
+more martial moments. The Queen and the Duke, he could see, sat together
+immediately opposite the stage, on raised seats under a canopy; a group
+of halberdiers guarded them, and another small company of them was ranged
+at the sides of the stage. Anthony could see little more than this, and
+could hear only isolated sentences here and there, so broken was the
+piece by the talking and laughing around him. But he did not like to move
+as Mistress Corbet had told him to be present, so he stood there
+listening to the undertone talk about him, and watching the faces. What
+he did see of the play did not rouse him to any great enthusiasm. His
+heart was too heavy with his errand, and it seemed to him that the
+occasional glimpses he caught of the stage showed him a very tiresome
+hero, dressed in velvet doubled and hose and steel cap, strangely
+unconvincing, who spoke his lines pompously, and was as unsatisfactory as
+the slender shrill-voiced boy who, representing a woman of marvellous
+beauty and allurement, was supposed to fire the conqueror's blood with
+passion.
+
+At last it ended; and an "orator" in apparel of cloth of gold, spoke a
+kind of special epilogue in rhyming metre in praise of the Virgin Queen,
+and then retired bowing.
+
+Immediately there was a general movement; the brass instruments began to
+blare out, and an usher at the door desired those who were blocking the
+way to step aside to make way for the Queen's procession, which would
+shortly pass out. Anthony himself went outside with one or two more, and
+then stood aside waiting.
+
+There was a pause and then a hush; and the sound of a high rating woman's
+voice, followed by a murmur of laughter.
+
+In a moment more the door was flung open again, and to Anthony's surprise
+Mistress Corbet came rustling out, as the people stepped back to make
+room. Her eyes fell on Anthony near the door, and she beckoned him to
+follow, and he went down the corridor after her, followed her silently
+along a passage or two, wondering why she did not speak, and then came
+after her into the same little oak parlour where he had supped. A servant
+followed them immediately with lighted candles which he set down and
+retired.
+
+Anthony looked at Mistress Corbet, and saw all across her pale cheek the
+fiery mark of the five fingers of a hand, and saw too that her eyes were
+full of tears, and that her breath came unevenly.
+
+"It is no use to-night," she said, with a sob in her voice; "her Grace is
+angry with me."
+
+"And, and----" began Anthony in amazement.
+
+"And she struck me," said Mary, struggling bravely to smile. "It was all
+my fault,"--and a bright tear or two ran down on to her delicate lace. "I
+was sitting near her Grace, and I could not keep my mind off poor James
+Maxwell; and I suppose I looked grave, because when the play was over,
+she beckoned me up, and--and asked how I liked it, and why I looked so
+solemn--for she would know--was it for _Scipio Africanus_, or some other
+man? And--and I was silent; and Alençon, that little frog-man burst out
+laughing and said to her Grace something--something shameful--in
+French--but I understood, and gave him a look; and her Grace saw it, and,
+and struck me here, before all the Court, and bade me begone."
+
+"Oh! it is shameful," said Anthony, furiously, his own eyes bright too,
+at the sight of this gallant girl and her humiliation.
+
+"You cannot stay here, Mistress Corbet. This is the second time at least,
+is it not?"
+
+"Ah! but I must stay," she said, "or who will speak for the Catholics?
+But now it is useless to think of seeing her Grace to-night. Yet
+to-morrow, maybe, she will be sorry,--she often is--and will want to make
+amends; and then will be our time, so you must be here to-morrow by
+dinner-time at least."
+
+"Oh, Mistress Corbet," said the boy, "I wish I could do something."
+
+"You dear lad!" said Mary, and then indeed the tears ran down.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony rode back to Lambeth under the stars, anxious and dispirited, and
+all night long dreamed of pageants and progresses that blocked the street
+down which he must ride to rescue James. The brazen trumpets rang out
+whenever he called for help or tried to explain his errand; and Elizabeth
+rode by, bowing and smiling to all save him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The next day he was at Greenwich again by dinner-time, and again dined by
+himself in the oak parlour, waited upon by the Catholic servant. He was
+just finishing his meal when in sailed Mary, beaming.
+
+"I told you so," she said delightedly, "the Queen is sorry. She pinched
+my ear just now, and smiled at me, and bade me come to her in her private
+parlour in half an hour; and I shall put my petition then; so be ready,
+Master Anthony, be ready and of a good courage; for, please God, we shall
+save him yet."
+
+Anthony looked at her, white and scared.
+
+"What shall I say?" he said.
+
+"Speak from your heart, sir, as you did to me yesterday. Be bold, yet not
+overbold. Tell her plainly that he is your friend; and that it was
+through your action he was betrayed. Say that you love the man. She likes
+loyalty.--Say he is a fine upstanding fellow, over six feet in height,
+with a good leg. She likes a good leg.--Say that he has not a wife, and
+will never have one. Wives and husbands like her not--in spite of _le
+petit grenouille_.--And look straight in her face, Master Anthony, as you
+looked in mine yesterday when I was a cry-baby. She likes men to do
+that.--And then look away as if dazzled by her radiancy. She likes that
+even more."
+
+Anthony looked so bewildered by these instructions that Mary laughed in
+his face.
+
+"Here then, poor lad," she said, "I will tell you in a word. Tell the
+truth and be a man;--a man! She likes that best of all; though she likes
+sheep too, such as Chris Hatton, and frogs like the Duke, and apes like
+the little Spaniard, and chattering dancing monkeys like the
+Frenchman--and--and devils, like Walshingham. But do you be a man and
+risk it. I know you can manage that." And Mary smiled at him so
+cheerfully, that Anthony felt heartened.
+
+"There," she said, "now you look like one. But you must have some more
+wine first, I will send it in as I go. And now I must go. Wait here for
+the message." She gave him her hand, and he kissed it, and she went out,
+nodding and smiling over her shoulder.
+
+Anthony sat miserably on the window-seat.
+
+Ah! so much depended on him now. The Queen was in a good humour, and such
+a chance might never occur again;--and meantime James Maxwell waited in
+the Tower.
+
+The minutes passed; steps came and went in the passage outside; and
+Anthony's heart leaped into his mouth at each sound. Once the door
+opened, and Anthony sprang to his feet trembling. But it was only the
+servant with the wine. Anthony took it--a fiery Italian wine, and drew a
+long draught that sent his blood coursing through his veins, and set his
+heart a-beating strongly again. And even as he set the cup down, the door
+was open again, and a bowing page was there.
+
+"May it please you, sir, the Queen's Grace has sent me for you."
+
+Anthony got up, swallowed in his throat once or twice, and motioned to
+go; the boy went out and Anthony followed.
+
+They went down a corridor or two, passing a sentry who let the well-known
+page and the gentleman pass without challenging; ascended a twisted oak
+staircase, went along a gallery, with stained glass of heraldic emblems
+in the windows, and paused before a door. The page, before knocking,
+turned and looked meaningly at Anthony, who stood with every pulse in his
+body racing; then the boy knocked, opened the door; Anthony entered, and
+the door closed behind him.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                         THE APPEAL TO CÆSAR
+
+
+The room was full of sunshine that poured in through two tall windows
+opposite, upon a motionless figure that sat in a high carved chair by the
+table, and watched the door. This figure dominated the whole room: the
+lad as he dropped on his knees, was conscious of eyes watching him from
+behind the chair, of tapestried walls, and a lute that lay on the table,
+but all those things were but trifling accessories to that scarlet
+central figure with a burnished halo of auburn hair round a shadowed
+face.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was complete silence for a moment or two; a hound bayed in the
+court outside, and there came a far-away bang of a door somewhere in the
+palace. There was a rustle of silk that set every nerve of his body
+thrilling, and then a clear hard penetrating voice spoke two words.
+
+"Well, sir?"
+
+Anthony drew a breath, and swallowed in his throat.
+
+"Your Grace," he said, and lifted his eyes for a moment, and dropped them
+again. But in the glimpse every detail stamped itself clear on his
+imagination. There she sat in vivid scarlet and cloth of gold, radiating
+light; with high puffed sleeves; an immense ruff fringed with lace. The
+narrow eyes were fixed on him, and as he now waited again, he knew that
+they were running up and down his figure, his dark splashed hose and his
+tumbled doublet and ruff.
+
+"You come strangely dressed."
+
+Anthony drew a quick breath again.
+
+"My heart is sick," he said.
+
+There was another slight movement.
+
+"Well, sir," the voice said again, "you have not told us why you are
+here."
+
+"For justice from my queen," he said, and stopped. "And for mercy from a
+woman," he added, scarcely knowing what he said.
+
+Again Elizabeth stirred in her chair.
+
+"You taught him that, you wicked girl," she said.
+
+"No, madam," came Mary's voice from behind, subdued and entreating, "it
+is his heart that speaks."
+
+"Enough, sir," said Elizabeth; "now tell us plainly what you want of us."
+
+Then Anthony thought it time to be bold. He made a great effort, and the
+sense of constraint relaxed a little.
+
+"I have been, your Grace, to Sir Francis Walsingham, and my lord Bishop
+of London, and I can get neither justice nor mercy from either; and so I
+come to your Grace, who are their mistress, to teach them manners."
+
+"Stay," said Elizabeth, "that is insolence to my ministers."
+
+"So my lord said," answered Anthony frankly, looking into that hard clear
+face that was beginning to be lined with age. And he saw that Elizabeth
+smiled, and that the face behind the chair nodded at him encouragingly.
+
+"Well, insolence, go on."
+
+"It is on behalf of one who has been pronounced a felon and a traitor by
+your Grace's laws, that I am pleading; but one who is a very gallant
+Christian gentleman as well."
+
+"Your friend lacks not courage," interrupted Elizabeth to Mary.
+
+"No, your Grace," said the other, "that has never been considered his
+failing."
+
+Anthony waited, and then the voice spoke again harshly.
+
+"Go on with the tale, sir. I cannot be here all day."
+
+"He is a popish priest, your Majesty; and he was taken at mass in his
+vestments, and is now in the Tower; and he hath been questioned on the
+rack. And, madam, it is piteous to think of it. He is but a young man
+still, but passing strong and tall."
+
+"What has this to do with me, sir?" interrupted the Queen harshly. "I
+cannot pardon every proper young priest in the kingdom. What else is
+there to be said for him?"
+
+"He was taken through the foul treachery of a spy, who imposed upon me,
+his friend, and caused me all unknowing to say the very words that
+brought him into the net."
+
+And then, more and more, Anthony began to lose his self-consciousness,
+and poured out the story from the beginning; telling how he had been
+brought up in the same village with James Maxwell; and what a loyal
+gentleman he was; and then the story of the trick by which he had been
+deceived. As he spoke his whole appearance seemed to change; instead of
+the shy and rather clumsy manner with which he had begun, he was now
+natural and free; he moved his hands in slight gestures; his blue eyes
+looked the Queen fairly in the face; he moved a little forward on his
+knees as he pleaded, and he spoke with a passion that astonished both
+Mary and himself afterwards when he thought of it, in spite of his short
+and broken sentences. He was conscious all the while of an intense
+external strain and pressure, as if he were pleading for his life, and
+the time was short. Elizabeth relaxed her rigid attitude, and leaned her
+chin on her hand and her elbow on the table and watched him, her thin
+lips parted, the pearl rope and crown on her head, and the pearl pendants
+in her ears moving slightly as she nodded at points in his story.
+
+"Ah! your Grace," he cried, lifting his open hands towards her a little,
+"you have a woman's heart; all your people say so. You cannot allow this
+man to be so trapped to his death! Treachery never helped a cause yet. If
+your men cannot catch these priests fairly, then a-God's name, let them
+not catch them at all! But to use a friend, and make a Judas of him; to
+make the very lips that have spoken friendly, speak traitorously; to bait
+the trap like that--it is devilish. Let him go, let him go, madam! One
+priest more or less cannot overthrow the realm; but one more foul crime
+done in the name of justice can bring God's wrath down on the nation. I
+hold that a trick like that is far worse than all the disobedience in the
+world; nay--how can we cry out against the Jesuits and the plotters, if
+we do worse ourselves? Madam, madam, let him go! Oh! I know I cannot
+speak as well in this good cause, as some can in a bad cause, but let the
+cause speak for itself. I cannot speak, I know."
+
+"Nay, nay," said Elizabeth softly, "you wrong yourself. You have an
+honest face, sir; and that is the best recommendation to me.
+
+"And so, Minnie," she went on, turning to Mary, "this was your petition,
+was it; and this your advocate? Well, you have not chosen badly. Now, you
+speak yourself."
+
+Mary stood a moment silent, and then with a swift movement came round the
+arm of the Queen's chair, and threw herself on her knees, with her hands
+upon the Queen's left hand as it lay upon the carved boss, and her voice
+was as Anthony had never yet heard it, vibrant and full of tears.
+
+"Oh! madam, madam; this poor lad cannot speak, as he says; and yet his
+sad honest face, as your Grace said, is more eloquent than all words. And
+think of the silence of the little cell upstairs in the Tower; where a
+gallant gentleman lies, all rent and torn with the rack; and,--and how he
+listens for the footsteps outside of the tormentors who come to drag him
+down again, all aching and heavy with pain, down to that fierce engine in
+the dark. And think of his gallant heart, your Grace, how brave it is;
+and how he will not yield nor let one name escape him. Ah! not because he
+loves not your Grace nor desires to serve you; but because he serves your
+Grace best by serving and loving his God first of all.--And think how he
+cannot help a sob now and again; and whispers the name of his Saviour, as
+the pulleys begin to wrench and twist.--And,--and,--do not forget his
+mother, your Grace, down in the country; how she sits and listens and
+prays for her dear son; and cannot sleep, and dreams of him when at last
+she sleeps, and wakes screaming and crying at the thought of the boy she
+bore and nursed in the hands of those harsh devils. And--and, you can
+stop it all, your Grace, with one little word; and make that mother's
+heart bless your name and pray for you night and morning till she
+dies;--and let that gallant son go free, and save his racked body before
+it be torn asunder;--and you can make this honest lad's heart happy again
+with the thought that he has saved his friend instead of slaying him.
+Look you, madam, he has come confessing his fault; saying bravely to your
+Grace that he did try to do his friend a service in spite of the laws,
+for that he held love to be the highest law. Ah! how many happy souls you
+can make with a word; because you are a Queen.--What is it to be a
+Queen!--to be able to do all that!--Oh! madam, be pitiful then, and show
+mercy as one day you hope to find it."
+
+Mary spoke with an intense feeling; her voice was one long straining sob
+of appeal; and as she ended her tears were beginning to rain down on the
+hand she held between her own; she lifted it to her streaming face and
+kissed it again and again; and then dropped her forehead upon it, and so
+rested in dead silence.
+
+Elizabeth swallowed in her throat once or twice; and then spoke, and her
+voice was a little choked.
+
+"Well, well, you silly girl.--You plead too well."
+
+Anthony irresistibly threw his hands out as he knelt.
+
+"Oh! God bless your Grace!" he said; and then gave a sob or two himself.
+
+"There, there, you are a pair of children," she said; for Mary was
+kissing her hand again and again. "And you are a pretty pair, too," she
+added. "Now, now, that is enough, stand up."
+
+Anthony rose to his feet again and stood there; and Mary went round again
+behind the chair.
+
+"Now, now, you have put me in a sore strait," said Elizabeth; "between
+you I scarcely know how to keep my word. They call me fickle enough
+already. But Frank Walsingham shall do it for me. He is certainly at the
+back of it all, and he shall manage it. It shall be done at once. Call a
+page, Minnie."
+
+Mary Corbet went to the back of the room into the shadow, opened a door
+that Anthony had not noticed, and beckoned sharply; in a moment or two a
+page was bowing before Elizabeth.
+
+"Is Sir Francis Walsingham in the palace?" she asked,--"then bring him
+here," she ended, as the boy bowed again.
+
+"And you too," she went on, "shall hear that I keep my word,"--she
+pointed towards the door whence the page had come.--"Stand there," she
+said, "and leave the door ajar."
+
+Mary gave Anthony her hand and a radiant smile as they went together.
+
+"Aha!" said Elizabeth, "not in my presence."
+
+Anthony flushed with fury in spite of his joy.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+They went in through the door, and found themselves in a tiny panelled
+room with a little slit of a window; it was used to place a sentry or a
+page within it. There were a couple of chairs, and the two sat down to
+wait.
+
+"Oh, thank God!" whispered Anthony.
+
+Again the harsh voice rang out from the open door.
+
+"Now, now, no love-making within there!"
+
+Mary smiled and laid her finger on her lips. Then there came the ripple
+of a lute from the outer room, played not unskilfully. Mary smiled again
+and nodded at Anthony. Then, a metallic voice, but clear enough and
+tuneful, began to sing a verse of the little love-song of Harrington's,
+_Whence comes my love?_
+
+It suddenly ceased in the middle of the line, and the voice cried to some
+one to come in.
+
+Anthony could hear the door open and close again, and a movement or two,
+which doubtless represented Walsingham's obeisance. Then the Queen's
+voice began again, low, thin, and distinct. The two in the inner room
+listened breathlessly.
+
+"I wish a prisoner in the Tower to be released, Sir Francis; without any
+talk or to-do. And I desire you to do it for me."
+
+There was silence, and then Walsingham's deep tones.
+
+"Your Grace has but to command."
+
+"His name is James Maxwell, and he is a popish priest."
+
+A longer silence followed.
+
+"I do not know if your Grace knows all the circumstances."
+
+"I do, sir, or I should not interfere."
+
+"The feeling of the people was very strong."
+
+"Well, and what of that?"
+
+"It will be a risk of your Grace's favour with them."
+
+"Have I not said that my name was not to appear in the matter? And do you
+think I fear my people's wrath?"
+
+There was silence again.
+
+"Well, Sir Francis, why do you not speak?"
+
+"I have nothing to say, your Grace."
+
+"Then it will be done?"
+
+"I do not see at present how it can be done, but doubtless there is a
+way."
+
+"Then you will find it, sir, immediately," rang out the Queen's metallic
+tones.
+
+(Mary turned and nodded solemnly at Anthony, with pursed lips.)
+
+"He was questioned on the rack two days ago, your Grace."
+
+"Have I not said I know all the circumstances? Do you wish me to say it
+again?"
+
+The Queen was plainly getting angry.
+
+"I ask your pardon, madam; but I only meant that he could not travel
+probably, yet awhile. He was on the rack for four hours, I understand."
+
+(Anthony felt that strange sickness rise again; but Mary laid her cool
+hand on his and smiled at him.)
+
+"Well, well," rasped out Elizabeth, "I do not ask impossibilities."
+
+"They would cease to be so, madam, if you did."
+
+(Mary within the little room put her lips to Anthony's ear:
+
+"Butter!" she whispered.)
+
+"Well, sir," went on the Queen, "you shall see that he has a physician,
+and leave to travel as soon as he will."
+
+"It shall be done, your Grace."
+
+"Very well, see to it."
+
+"I beg your Grace's pardon; but what----"
+
+"Well, what is it now?"
+
+"I would wish to know your Grace's pleasure as to the future for Mr.
+Maxwell. Is no pledge of good behaviour to be exacted from him?"
+
+"Of course he says mass again at his peril. Either he must take the oath
+at once, or he shall be allowed forty-eight hours' safe-conduct with his
+papers for the Continent."
+
+"Your Grace, indeed I must remonstrate----"
+
+Then the Queen's wrath burst out; they heard a swift movement, and the
+rap of her high heels as she sprang to her feet.
+
+"By God's Son," she screamed, "am I Queen or not? I have had enough of
+your counsel. You presume, sir--" her ringed hand came heavily down on
+the table and they heard the lute leap and fall again.--"You presume on
+your position, sir. I made you, and I can unmake you, and by God I will,
+if I have another word of your counselling. Be gone, and see that it be
+done; I will not bid twice."
+
+There was silence again; and they heard the outer door open and close.
+
+Anthony's heart was beating wildly. He had sprung to his feet in a
+trembling excitement as the Queen had sprung to hers. The mere ring of
+that furious royal voice, even without the sight of her pale wrathful
+face and blazing eyes that Walsingham looked upon as he backed out from
+the presence, was enough to make this lad's whole frame shiver. Mary
+apparently was accustomed to this; for she looked up at Anthony, laughing
+silently, and shrugged her shoulders.
+
+Then they heard the Queen's silk draperies rustle and her pearls chink
+together as she sank down again and took up her lute and struck the
+strings. Then the metallic voice began again, with a little tremor in it,
+like the ground-swell after a storm; and she sang the verse through in
+which she had been interrupted:
+
+    "Why thus, my love, so kind bespeak
+    Sweet eye, sweet lip, sweet blushing cheek--
+    Yet not a heart to save my pain;
+    O Venus, take thy gifts again!
+    Make not so fair to cause our moan,
+    Or make a heart that's like your own."
+
+The lute rippled away into silence.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary rose quietly to her feet and nodded to Anthony.
+
+"Come back, you two!" cried the Queen.
+
+Mary stepped straight through, the lad behind her.
+
+"Well," said the Queen, turning to them and showing her black teeth in a
+smile. "Have I kept my word?"
+
+"Ah! your Grace," said Mary, curtseying to the ground, "you have made
+some simple loving hearts very happy to-day--I do not mean Sir Francis'."
+
+The Queen laughed.
+
+"Come here, child," she said, holding out her glittering hand, "down
+here," and Mary sank down on the Queen's footstool, and leaned against
+her knee like a child, smiling up into her face; while Elizabeth put her
+hand under her chin and kissed her twice on the forehead.
+
+"There, there," she said caressingly, "have I made amends? Am I a hard
+mistress?"
+
+And she threw her left hand round the girl's neck and began to play with
+the diamond pendant in her ear, and to stroke the smooth curve of her
+cheek with her flashing fingers.
+
+Anthony, a little on one side, stood watching and wondering at this silky
+tigress who raged so fiercely just now.
+
+Elizabeth looked up in a moment and saw him.
+
+"Why, here is the tall lad here still," she said, "eyeing us as if we
+were monsters. Have you never yet seen two maidens loving one another,
+that you stare so with your great eyes? Aha! Minnie; he would like to be
+sitting where I am--is it not so, sir?"
+
+"I would sooner stand where I am, madam," said Anthony, by a sudden
+inspiration, "and look upon your Grace."
+
+"Why, he is a courtier already," said the Queen. "You have been giving
+him lessons, Minnie, you sly girl."
+
+"A loyal heart makes the best courtier, madam," said Mary, taking the
+Queen's hand delicately in her own.
+
+"And next to looking upon my Grace, Mr. Norris," said Elizabeth, "what do
+you best love?"
+
+"Listening to your Grace," said Anthony, promptly.
+
+Mary turned and flashed all her teeth upon him in a smile, and her eyes
+danced in her head.
+
+Elizabeth laughed outright.
+
+"He is an apt pupil," she said to Mary.
+
+"--You mean the lute, sir?" she added.
+
+"I mean your Grace's voice, madam. I had forgotten the lute."
+
+"Ah, a little clumsy!" said the Queen; "not so true a thrust as the
+others."
+
+"It was not for lack of good-will," said poor Anthony blushing a little.
+He felt in a kind of dream, fencing in language with this strange mighty
+creature in scarlet and pearls, who sat up in her chair and darted
+remarks at him, as with a rapier.
+
+"Aha!" said the Queen, "he is blushing! Look, Minnie!" Mary looked at him
+deliberately. Anthony became scarlet at once; and tried a desperate
+escape.
+
+"It is your livery, madam," he said.
+
+Mary clapped her hands, and glanced at the Queen.
+
+"Yes, Minnie; he does his mistress credit."
+
+"Yes, your Grace; but he can do other things besides talk," explained
+Mary.
+
+Anthony felt like a horse being shown off by a skilful dealer, but he was
+more at his ease too after his blush.
+
+"Extend your mercy, madam," he said, "and bid Mistress Corbet hold her
+tongue and spare my shame."
+
+"Silence, sir!" said the Queen. "Go on, Minnie; what else can he do?"
+
+"Ah! your Grace, he can hawk. Oh! you should see his peregrine;--named
+after your Majesty. That shows his loyal heart."
+
+"I am not sure of the compliment," said the Queen; "hawks are fierce
+creatures."
+
+"It was not for her fierceness," put in Anthony, "that I named her after
+your Grace."
+
+"Why, then, Mr. Norris?"
+
+"For that she soars so high above all other creatures," said the lad,
+"and--and that she never stoops but to conquer."
+
+Mary gave a sudden triumphant laugh, and glanced up, and Elizabeth tapped
+her on the cheek sharply.
+
+"Be still, bad girl," she said. "You must not prompt during the lesson."
+
+And so the talk went on. Anthony really acquitted himself with great
+credit, considering the extreme strangeness of his position; but such an
+intense weight had been lifted off his mind by the Queen's pardon of
+James Maxwell, that his nature was alight with a kind of intoxication.
+
+All his sharpness, such as it was, rose to the surface; and Mary too was
+amazed at some of his replies. Elizabeth took it as a matter of course;
+she was accustomed to this kind of word-fencing; she did not do it very
+well herself: her royalty gave her many advantages which she often
+availed herself of; and her address was not to be compared for a moment
+with that of some of her courtiers and ladies. But still she was amused
+by this slender honest lad who stood there before her in his graceful
+splashed dress, and blushed and laughed and parried, and delivered his
+point with force, even if not with any extraordinary skill.
+
+But at last she began to show signs of weariness; and Mary managed to
+convey to Anthony that it was time to be off. So he began to make his
+adieux.
+
+"Well," said Elizabeth, "let us see you at supper to-night; and in the
+parlours afterwards.--Ah!" she cried, suddenly, "neither of you must say
+a word as to how your friend was released. It must remain the act of the
+Council. My name must not appear; Walsingham will see to that, and you
+must see to it too."
+
+They both promised sincerely.
+
+"Well, then, lad," said Elizabeth, and stretched out her hand; and Mary
+rose and stood by her. Anthony came up and knelt on the cushion and
+received the slender scented ringed hand on his own, and kissed it
+ardently in his gratitude. As he released it, it cuffed him gently on the
+cheek.
+
+"There, there!" said Elizabeth, "Minnie has taught you too much, it
+seems."
+
+Anthony backed out of the presence, smiling; and his last glimpse was
+once more of the great scarlet-clad figure with the slender waist, and
+the priceless pearls, and the haze of muslin behind that crowned auburn
+head, and the pale oval face smiling at him with narrow eyes--and all in
+a glory of sunshine.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He did not see Mary Corbet again until evening as she was with the Queen
+all the afternoon. Anthony would have wished to return to Lambeth; but it
+was impossible, after the command to remain to supper; so he wandered
+down along the river bank, rejoicing in the success of his petition; and
+wondering whether James had heard of his release yet.
+
+Of course it was just a fly in the ointment that his own agency in the
+matter could never be known. It would have been at least some sort of
+compensation for his innocent share in the whole matter of the arrest.
+However, he was too happy to feel the sting of it. He felt, of course,
+greatly drawn to the Queen for her ready clemency; and yet there was
+something repellent about her too in spite of it. He felt in his heart
+that it was just a caprice, like her blows and caresses; and then the
+assumption of youth sat very ill upon this lean middle-aged woman. He
+would have preferred less lute-playing and sprightly innuendo, and more
+tenderness and gravity.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary had arranged that a proper Court-suit should be at his disposal for
+supper, and a room to himself; so after he had returned at sunset, he
+changed his clothes. The white silk suit with the high hosen, the
+embroidered doublet with great puffed and slashed sleeves, the short
+green-lined cloak, the white cap and feather, and the slender sword with
+the jewelled hilt, all became him very well; and he found too that Mary
+had provided him with two great emerald brooches of her own, that he
+pinned on, one at the fastening of the crisp ruff and the other on his
+cap.
+
+He went to the private chapel for the evening prayer at half-past six;
+which was read by one of the chaplains; but there were very few persons
+present, and none of any distinction. Religion, except as a department of
+politics, was no integral part of Court life. The Queen only occasionally
+attended evening-prayer on week days; and just now she was too busy with
+the affair of the Duke of Alençon to spend unnecessary time in that
+manner.
+
+When the evening prayer was over he followed the little company into the
+long gallery that led towards the hall, through which the Queen's
+procession would pass to supper; and there he attached himself to a group
+of gentlemen, some of whom he had met at Lambeth. While they were
+talking, the clang of trumpets suddenly broke out from the direction of
+the Queen's apartments; and all threw themselves on their knees and
+remained there. The doors were flung open by servants stationed behind
+them; and the wands advanced leading the procession; then came the
+trumpeters blowing mightily, with a drum or two beating the step; and
+then in endless profusion, servants and guards; gentlemen pensioners
+magnificently habited, for they were continually about the Queen's
+person; and at last, after an official or two bearing swords, came the
+Queen and Alençon together; she in a superb purple toilet with brocaded
+underskirt and high-heeled twinkling shoes, and breathing out essences as
+she swept by smiling; and he, a pathetic little brown man, pockmarked,
+with an ill-shapen nose and a head too large for his undersized body, in
+a rich velvet suit sparkling all over with diamonds.
+
+As they passed Anthony he heard the Duke making some French compliment in
+his croaking harsh voice. Behind came the crowd of ladies, nodding,
+chattering, rustling; and Anthony had a swift glance of pleasure from
+Mistress Corbet as she went by, talking at the top of her voice.
+
+The company followed on to the hall, behind the distant trumpets, and
+Anthony found himself still with his friends somewhere at the lower
+end--away from the Queen's table, who sat with Alençon at her side on a
+daïs, with the great folks about her. All through supper the most
+astonishing noise went on. Everyone was talking loudly; the servants ran
+to and fro over the paved floor; there was the loud clatter over the
+plates of four hundred persons; and, to crown all, a band in the
+musicians' gallery overhead made brazen music all supper-time. Anthony
+had enough entertainment himself in looking about the great
+banqueting-hall, so magnificently adorned with tapestries and armour and
+antlers from the park; and above all by the blaze of gold and silver
+plate both on the tables and on the sideboards; and by watching the army
+of liveried servants running to and fro incessantly; and the glowing
+colours of the dresses of the guests.
+
+Supper was over at last; and a Latin grace was exquisitely sung in four
+parts by boys and men stationed in the musicians' gallery; and then the
+Queen's procession went out with the same ceremony as that with which it
+had entered. Anthony followed behind, as he had been bidden by the Queen
+to the private parlours afterwards; but he presently found his way barred
+by a page at the foot of the stairs leading to the Queen's apartments.
+
+It was in vain that he pleaded his invitation; it was useless, as the
+young gentleman had not been informed of it. Anthony asked if he might
+see Mistress Corbet. No, that too was impossible; she was gone upstairs
+with the Queen's Grace and might not be disturbed. Anthony, in despair,
+not however unmixed with relief at escaping a further ordeal, was about
+to turn away, leaving the officious young gentleman swaggering on the
+stairs like a peacock, when down came Mistress Corbet herself, sailing
+down in her splendour, to see what was become of the gentleman of the
+Archbishop's house.
+
+"Why, here you are!" she cried from the landing as she came down, "and
+why have you not obeyed the Queen's command?"
+
+"This young gentleman," said Anthony, indicating the astonished page,
+"would not let me proceed."
+
+"It is unusual, Mistress Corbet," said the boy, "for her Grace's guests
+to come without my having received instructions, unless they are great
+folk."
+
+Mistress Corbet came down the last six steps like a stooping hawk, her
+wings bulged behind her; and she caught the boy one clean light cuff on
+the side of the head.
+
+"You imp!" she said, "daring to doubt the word of this gentleman. And the
+Queen's Grace's own special guest!"
+
+The boy tried still to stand on his dignity and bar the way, but it was
+difficult to be dignified with a ringing head and a scarlet ear.
+
+"Stand aside," said Mary, stamping her little buckled foot, "this
+instant; unless you would be dragged by your red ear before the Queen's
+Grace. Come, Master Anthony."
+
+So the two went upstairs together, and the lad called up after them
+bitterly:
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mistress; I did not recognise he was your gallant."
+
+"You shall pay for that," hissed Mary over the banisters.
+
+They went along a passage or two, and the sound of a voice singing to a
+virginal began to ring nearer as they went, followed by a burst of
+applause.
+
+"Lady Leicester," whispered Mary; and then she opened the door and they
+went in.
+
+There were three rooms opening on one another with wide entrances, so
+that really one long room was the result. They were all three fairly
+full; that into which they entered, the first in the row, was occupied by
+some gentlemen-pensioners and ladies talking and laughing; some playing
+shove-groat, and some of them still applauding the song that had just
+ended. The middle room was much the same; and the third, which was a step
+higher than the others, was that in which was the Queen, with Lady
+Leicester and a few more. Lady Leicester had just finished a song, and
+was laying her virginal down. There was a great fire burning in the
+middle room, with seats about it, and here Mary Corbet brought Anthony.
+Those near him eyed him a little; but his companion was sufficient
+warrant of his respectability; and they soon got into talk, which was
+suddenly interrupted by the Queen's voice from the next room.
+
+"Minnie, Minnie, if you can spare a moment from your lad, come and help
+us at a dance."
+
+The Queen was plainly in high good-humour; and Mary got up and went into
+the Queen's room. Those round the fire stood up and pushed the seats
+back, and the games ceased in the third room; as her Grace needed
+spectators and applause.
+
+Then there arose the rippling of lutes from the ladies in the next room,
+in slow swaying measure, with the gentle tap of a drum now and again; and
+the _pavane_ began--a stately dignified dance; and among all the ladies
+moved the great Queen herself, swaying and bending with much grace and
+dignity. It was the strangest thing for Anthony to find himself here, a
+raven among all these peacocks, and birds of paradise; and he wondered
+at himself and at the strange humour of Providence, as he watched the
+shimmer of the dresses and the sparkle of the shoes and jewels, and the
+soft clouds of muslin and lace that shivered and rustled as the ladies
+stepped; the firelight shone through the wide doorway on this glowing
+movement, and groups of candles in sconces within the room increased and
+steadied the soft intensity of the light. The soft tingling instruments,
+with the slow tap-tap marking the measure like a step, seemed a
+translation into chord and melody of this stately tender exercise. And so
+this glorious flower-bed, loaded too with a wealth of essences in the
+dresses and the sweet-washed gloves, swayed under the wind of the music,
+bending and rising together in slow waves and ripples. Then it ceased;
+and the silence was broken by a quick storm of applause; while the
+dancers waited for the lutes. Then all the instruments broke out together
+in quick triple time; the stringed instruments supplying a hasty
+throbbing accompaniment, while the shrill flutes began to whistle and the
+drums to gallop;--there was yet a pause in the dance, till the Queen made
+the first movement;--and then the whole whirled off on the wings of a
+_coranto_.
+
+It was bewildering to Anthony, who had never even dreamed of such a dance
+before. He watched first the lower line of the shoes; and the whole
+floor, in reality above, and in the mirror of the polished boards below,
+seemed scintillating in lines of diamond light; the heavy underskirts of
+brocade, puffed satin, and cloth of gold, with glimpses of foamy lace
+beneath, whirled and tossed above these flashing vibrations. Then he
+looked at the higher strata, and there was a tossing sea of faces and
+white throats, borne up as it seemed--now revealed, now hidden--on clouds
+of undulating muslin and lace, with sparkles of precious stones set in
+ruff and wings and on high piled hair.
+
+He watched, fascinated, the faces as they appeared and vanished; there
+was every imaginable expression; the serious looks of one who took
+dancing as a solemn task, and marked her position and considered her
+steps; the wild gaiety of another, all white teeth and dimples and eyes,
+intoxicated by movement and music and colour, as men are by wine, and
+guided and sustained by the furious genius of the dance, rather than by
+intention of any kind. There was the courtly self-restraint of one tall
+beauty, who danced as a pleasant duty and loved it, but never lost
+control of her own bending, slender grace; ah! and there was the oval
+face crowned with auburn hair and pearls, the lower lip drawn up under
+the black teeth with an effort, till it appeared to snarl, and the ropes
+of pearls leaping wildly on her lean purple stomacher. And over all the
+grave oak walls and the bright sconces and the taper flames blown about
+by the eddying gusts from the whirlpool beneath.
+
+As Anthony went down the square winding staircase, an hour later when the
+evening was over, and the keen winter air poured up to meet him, his
+brain was throbbing with the madness of dance and music and whirling
+colour. Here, it seemed to him, lay the secret of life. For a few minutes
+his old day-dreams came back but in more intoxicating dress. The figure
+of Mary Corbet in her rose-coloured silk and her clouds of black hair,
+and her jewels and her laughing eyes and scarlet mouth, and her violet
+fragrance and her fire--this dominated the boy. As he walked towards the
+stables across the starlit court, she seemed to move before him, to hold
+out her hands to him, to call him her own dear lad; to invite him out of
+the drab-coloured life that lay on all sides, behind and before, up into
+a mystic region of jewelled romance, where she and he would live and be
+one in the endless music of rippling strings and shrill flutes and the
+maddening tap of a little hidden drum.
+
+But the familiar touch of his own sober suit and the creaking saddle as
+he rode home to Lambeth, and the icy wind that sang in the river sedges,
+and the wholesome smell of the horse and the touch of the coarse hair at
+the shoulder, talked and breathed the old Puritan common sense back to
+him again. That warm-painted, melodious world he had left was gaudy
+nonsense; and dancing was not the same as living; and Mary Corbet was not
+just a rainbow on the foam that would die when the sun went in; but both
+she and he together were human souls, redeemed by the death of the
+Saviour, with His work to do and no time or energy for folly; and James
+Maxwell in the Tower--(thank God, however, not for long!)--James Maxwell
+with his wrenched joints and forehead and lips wet with agony, was in the
+right; and that lean bitter furious woman in the purple and pearls, who
+supped to the blare of trumpets, and danced to the ripple of lutes,
+wholly and utterly and eternally in the wrong.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI
+
+                        A STATION OF THE CROSS
+
+
+Philosophers tell us that the value of existence lies not in the objects
+perceived, but in the powers of perception. The tragedy of a child over a
+broken doll is not less poignant than the anguish of a worshipper over a
+broken idol, or of a king over a ruined realm. Thus the conflict of
+Isabel during those past autumn and winter months was no less august than
+the pain of the priest on the rack, or the struggle of his innocent
+betrayer to rescue him, or the misery of Lady Maxwell over the sorrows
+that came to her in such different ways through her two sons.
+
+Isabel's soul was tender above most souls; and the powers of feeling pain
+and of sustaining it were also respectively both acute and strong. The
+sense of pressure, or rather of disruption, became intolerable. She was
+indeed a soul on the rack; if she had been less conscientious she would
+have silenced the voice of Divine Love that seemed to call to her from
+the Catholic Church; if she had been less natural and feminine she would
+have trampled out of her soul the appeal of the human love of Hubert. As
+it was, she was wrenched both ways. Now the cords at one end or the other
+would relax a little, and the corresponding relief was almost a shock;
+but when she tried to stir and taste the freedom of decision that now
+seemed in her reach, they would tighten again with a snap; and she would
+find herself back on the torture. To herself she seemed powerless; it
+appeared to her, when she reflected on it consciously, that it was merely
+a question as to which part of her soul would tear first, as to which
+ultimately retained her. She began to be terrified at solitude; the
+thought of the coming night, with its long hours of questioning and
+torment until the dawn, haunted her during the day. She would read in her
+room, or remain at her prayers, in the hopes of distracting herself from
+the struggle, until sleep seemed the supreme necessity: then, when she
+lay down, sleep would flap its wings in mockery and flit away, leaving
+her wide-awake staring at the darkness of the room or of her own eyelids,
+until the windows began to glimmer and the cocks to crow from farm
+buildings.
+
+In spite of her first resolve to fight the battle alone, she soon found
+herself obliged to tell Mistress Margaret all that was possible; but she
+felt that to express her sheer need of Hubert, as she thought it, was
+beyond her altogether. How could a nun understand?
+
+"My darling," said the old lady, "it would not be Calvary without the
+darkness; and you cannot have Christ without Calvary. Remember that the
+Light of the World makes darkness His secret place; and so you see that
+if you were able to feel that any human soul really understood, it would
+mean that the darkness was over. I have suffered that Night twice myself;
+the third time I think, will be in the valley of death."
+
+Isabel only half understood her; but it was something to know that others
+had tasted the cup too; and that what was so bitter was not necessarily
+poisonous.
+
+At another time as the two were walking together under the pines one
+evening, and the girl had again tried to show to the nun the burning
+desolation of her soul, Mistress Margaret had suddenly turned.
+
+"Listen, dear child," she said, "I will tell you a secret. Over there,"
+and she pointed out to where the sunset glowed behind the tree trunks and
+the slope beyond, "over there, in West Grinsted, rests our dear Lord in
+the blessed sacrament. His Body lies lonely, neglected and forgotten by
+all but half a dozen souls; while twenty years ago all England reverenced
+It. Behold and see if there be any sorrow--" and then the nun stopped, as
+she saw Isabel's amazed eyes staring at her.
+
+But it haunted the girl and comforted her now and then. Yet in the
+fierceness of her pain she asked herself again and again, was it
+true--was it true? Was she sacrificing her life for a dream, a
+fairy-story? or was it true that there the body, that had hung on the
+cross fifteen hundred years ago, now rested alone, hidden in a silver
+pyx, within locked doors for fear of the Jews.--Oh! dear Lord, was it
+true?
+
+Hubert had kept his word, and left the place almost immediately after his
+last interview; and was to return at Easter for his final answer.
+Christmas had come and gone; and it seemed to her as if even the
+tenderest mysteries of the Christian Religion had no touch with her now.
+She walked once more in the realm of grace, as in the realm of nature, an
+exile from its spirit. All her sensitive powers seemed so absorbed in
+interior pain that there was nothing in her to respond to or appreciate
+the most keen external impressions. As she awoke and looked up on
+Christmas morning early, and saw the frosted panes and the snow lying
+like wool on the cross-bars, and heard the Christmas bells peal out in
+the listening air; as she came downstairs and the old pleasant acrid
+smell of the evergreens met her, and she saw the red berries over each
+picture, and the red heart of the wood-fire; nay, as she knelt at the
+chancel rails, and tried in her heart to adore the rosy Child in the
+manger, and received the sacred symbols of His Flesh and Blood, and
+entreated Him to remember His loving-kindness that brought Him down from
+heaven--yet the whole was far less real, less intimate to her, than the
+sound of Hubert's voice as he had said good-bye two months ago; less real
+than one of those darting pangs of thought that fell on her heart all day
+like a shower of arrows.
+
+And then, when the sensitive strings of her soul were stretched to
+anguish, a hand dashed across them, striking a wailing discord, and they
+did not break. The news of Anthony's treachery, and still more his
+silence, performed the incredible, and doubled her pain without breaking
+her heart.
+
+On the Tuesday morning early Lady Maxwell had sent her note by a courier;
+bidding him return at once with the answer. The evening had come, and he
+had not appeared. The night passed and the morning came; and it was not
+till noon that the man at last arrived, saying he had seen Mr. Norris on
+the previous evening, and that he had read the note through there and
+then, and had said there was no answer. Surely there could be but one
+explanation of that--that no answer was possible.
+
+It could not be said that Isabel actively considered the question and
+chose to doubt Anthony rather than to trust him. She was so nearly
+passive now, with the struggle she had gone through, that this blow came
+on her with the overwhelming effect of an hypnotic suggestion. Her will
+did not really accept it, any more than her intellect really weighed it;
+but she succumbed to it; and did not even write again, nor question the
+man further. Had she done this she might perhaps have found out the
+truth, that the man, a stupid rustic with enough shrewdness to lie, but
+not enough to lie cleverly, had had his foolish head turned by the buzz
+of London town and the splendour of Lambeth stables and the friendliness
+of the grooms there, and had got heavily drunk on leaving Anthony; that
+the answer which he had put into his hat had very naturally fallen out
+and been lost; and that when at last he returned to the country already
+eight hours after his time, and found the note was missing, he had
+stalwartly lied, hoping that the note was unimportant and that things
+would adjust themselves or be forgotten before a day of reckoning should
+arrive.
+
+And so Isabel's power of resistance collapsed under this last blow; and
+her soul lay still at last, almost too much tormented to feel. Her last
+hope was gone; Anthony had betrayed his friend.
+
+The week crept by, and Saturday came. She went out soon after dinner to
+see a sick body or two in an outlying hamlet; for she had never forgotten
+Mrs. Dent's charge, and, with the present minister's approval, still
+visited the sick one or two days a week at least. Then towards sunset she
+came homewards over some high ground on the outskirts of Ashdown Forest.
+The snow that had fallen before Christmas, had melted a week or two ago;
+and the frost had broken up; it was a heavy leaden evening, with an angry
+glow shining, as through chinks of a wall, from the west towards which
+she was going. The village lay before her in the gloom; and lights were
+beginning to glimmer here and there. She contrasted in a lifeless way
+that pleasant group of warm houses with their suggestions of love and
+homeliness with her own desolate self. She passed up through the village
+towards the Hall, whither she was going to report on the invalids to Lady
+Maxwell; and in the appearance of the houses on either side she thought
+there was an unaccustomed air. Several doors stood wide open with the
+brightness shining out into the twilight, as if the inhabitants had
+suddenly deserted their homes. Others were still dark and cold, although
+the evening was drawing on. There was not a moving creature to be seen.
+She passed up, wondering a little, through the gatehouse, and turned into
+the gravel sweep; and there stopped short at the sight of a great crowd
+of men and women and children, assembled in dead silence. Some one was
+standing at the entrance-steps, with his head bent as if he were talking
+to those nearest him in a low voice.
+
+As she came up there ran a whisper of her name; the people drew back to
+let her through, and she passed, sick with suspense, to the man on the
+steps, whom she now recognised as Mr. James' body-servant. His face
+looked odd and drawn, she thought.
+
+"What is it?" she asked in a sharp whisper.
+
+"Mr. James is here, madam; he is with Lady Maxwell in the cloister-wing.
+Will you please to go up?"
+
+"Mr. James! It is no news about Mr. Anthony--or--or Mr. Hubert!"
+
+"No, madam." The man hesitated. "Mr. James has been racked, madam."
+
+The man's voice broke in a great sob as he ended.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+She reeled against the post; a man behind caught her and steadied her;
+and there was a quick breath of pity from the crowd.
+
+"Ah, poor thing!" said a woman's voice behind her.
+
+"I beg your pardon, madam," said the servant. "I should not have----"
+
+"And--and he is upstairs?"
+
+"He and my lady are together, madam."
+
+She looked at him a moment, dazed with the horror of it; and then going
+past him, pushed open the door and went through into the inner hall. Here
+again she stopped suddenly: it was half full of people, silent and
+expectant--the men, the grooms, the maid-servants, and even two or three
+farm-men. She heard the rustle of her name from the white faces that
+looked at her from the gloom; but none moved; and she crossed the hall
+alone, and turned down the lower corridor that led to the cloister-wing.
+
+At the foot of the staircase she stopped again; her heart drummed in her
+ears, as she listened intently with parted lips. There was a profound
+silence; the lamp on the stairs had not been lighted, and the terrace
+window only let in a pale glimmer.
+
+It was horrible to her! this secret presence of incarnate pain that
+brooded somewhere in the house, this silence of living anguish, worse
+than death a thousand times!
+
+Where was he? What would it look like? Even a scream somewhere would have
+relieved her, and snapped the tension of the listening stillness that lay
+on her like a shocking nightmare. This lobby with its well-known
+doors--the banister on which her fingers rested--the well of the
+staircase up which she stared with dilated eyes--all was familiar; and
+yet, somewhere in the shadows overhead lurked this formidable Presence of
+pain, mute, anguished, terrifying....
+
+She longed to run back, to shriek for help; but she dared not: and stood
+panting. She went up a couple of steps--stopped, listened to the sick
+thumping of her heart--took another step and stopped again; and so,
+listening, peering, hesitating, came to the head of the stairs.
+
+Ah! there was the door, with a line of light beneath it. It was there
+that the horror dwelt. She stared at the thin bright line; waited and
+listened again for even a moan or a sigh from within, but none came.
+
+Then with a great effort she stepped forward and tapped.
+
+There was no answer; but as she listened she heard from within the gentle
+tinkle of some liquid running into a bowl, rhythmically, and with pauses.
+Then again she tapped, nervously and rapidly, and there was a murmur from
+the room; she opened the door softly, pushed it, and took a step into the
+room, half closing it behind her.
+
+There were two candles burning on a table in the middle of the room, and
+on the near side of it was a group of three persons....
+
+Isabel had seen in one of Mistress Margaret's prayer-books an engraving
+of an old Flemish Pietà--a group of the Blessed Mother holding in her
+arms the body of her Crucified Son, with the Magdalen on one side,
+supporting one of the dead Saviour's hands. Isabel now caught her breath
+in a sudden gasp; for here was the scene reproduced before her.
+
+Lady Maxwell was on a low seat bending forwards; the white cap and ruff
+seemed like a veil thrown all about her head and beneath her chin; she
+was holding in her arms the body of her son, who seemed to have fainted
+as he sat beside her; his head had fallen back against her breast, and
+his pointed beard and dark hair and her black dress beyond emphasised the
+deathly whiteness of his face on which the candlelight fell; his mouth
+was open, like a dead man's. Mistress Margaret was kneeling by his left
+hand, holding it over a basin and delicately sponging it; and the whole
+air was fragrant and aromatic with some ointment in the water; a long
+bandage or two lay on the ground beside the basin. The evening light over
+the opposite roofs through the window beyond mingled with the light of
+the tapers, throwing a strange radiance over the group. The table on
+which the tapers stood looked to Isabel like a stripped altar.
+
+She stood by the door, her lips parted, motionless; looking with great
+eyes from face to face. It was as if the door had given access to another
+world where the passion of Christ was being re-enacted.
+
+Then she sank on her knees, still watching. There was no sound but the
+faint ripple of the water into the basin and the quiet breathing of the
+three. Lady Maxwell now and then lifted a handkerchief in silence and
+passed it across her son's face. Isabel, still staring with great wide
+eyes, began to sigh gently to herself.
+
+"Anthony, Anthony, Anthony!" she whispered.
+
+"Oh, no, no, no!" she whispered again under her breath. "No, Anthony! you
+could not, you could not!"
+
+Then from the man there came one or two long sighs, ending in a moan that
+quavered into silence; he stirred slightly in his mother's arms; and then
+in a piteous high voice came the words "_Jesu ... Jesu ... esto mihi
+... Jesus_."
+
+Consciousness was coming back. He fancied himself still on the rack.
+
+Lady Maxwell said nothing, but gathered him a little closer, and bent her
+face lower over him.
+
+Then again came a long sobbing indrawn breath; James struggled for a
+moment; then opened his eyes and saw his mother's face.
+
+Mistress Margaret had finished with the water; and was now swiftly
+manipulating a long strip of white linen. Isabel still sunk on her knees
+watched the bandage winding in and out round his wrist, and between his
+thumb and forefinger.
+
+Then he turned his head sharply towards her with a gasp as if in pain;
+and his eyes fell on Isabel.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said; and his voice was broken and untuneful.
+
+Mistress Margaret turned; and smiled at her; and at the sight the
+intolerable compression on the girl's heart relaxed.
+
+"Come, child," she said, "come and help me with his hand. No, no, lie
+still," she added; for James was making a movement as if to rise.
+
+James smiled at her as she came forward; and she saw that his face had a
+strange look as if after a long illness.
+
+"You see, Mistress Isabel," he said, in the same cracked voice, and with
+an infinitely pathetic courtesy, "I may not rise."
+
+Isabel's eyes filled with sudden tears, his attempt at his old manner was
+more touching than all else; and she came and knelt beside the old nun.
+
+"Hold the fingers," she said; and the familiar old voice brought the girl
+a stage nearer her normal consciousness again.
+
+Isabel took the priest's fingers and saw that they were limp and swollen.
+The sleeve fell back a little as Mistress Margaret manipulated the
+bandage; and the girl saw that the forearm looked shapeless and
+discoloured.
+
+She glanced up in swift terror at his face, but he was looking at his
+mother, whose eyes were bent on his; Isabel looked quickly down again.
+
+"There," said Mistress Margaret, tying the last knot, "it is done."
+
+Mr. James looked his thanks over his shoulder at her, as she nodded and
+smiled before turning to leave the room.
+
+Isabel sat slowly down and watched them.
+
+"This is but a flying visit, Mistress Isabel," said James. "I must leave
+to-morrow again."
+
+He had sat up now, and settled himself in his seat, though his mother's
+arm was still round him. The voice and the pitiful attempt were terrible
+to Isabel. Slowly the consciousness was filtering into her mind of what
+all this implied; what it must have been that had turned this tall
+self-contained man into this weak creature who lay in his mother's arms,
+and fainted at a touch and sobbed. She could say nothing; but could only
+look, and breathe, and look.
+
+Then it suddenly came to her mind that Lady Maxwell had not spoken a
+word. She looked at her; that old wrinkled face with its white crown of
+hair and lace had a new and tremendous dignity. There was no anxiety in
+it; scarcely even grief; but only a still and awful anguish, towering
+above ordinary griefs like a mountain above the world; and there was the
+supreme peace too that can only accompany a supreme emotion--she seemed
+conscious of nothing but her son.
+
+Isabel could not answer James; and he seemed not to expect it; he had
+turned back to his mother again, and they were looking at one another.
+Then in a moment Mistress Margaret came back with a glass that she put to
+James' lips; and he drank it without a word. She stood looking at the
+group an instant or two, and then turned to Isabel.
+
+"Come downstairs with me, my darling; there is nothing more that we can
+do."
+
+They went out of the room together; the mother and son had not stirred
+again; and Mistress Margaret slipped her arm quickly round the girl's
+waist, as they went downstairs.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+In the cloister beneath was a pleasant little oak parlour looking out on
+to the garden and the long south side of the house. Mistress Margaret
+took the little hand-lamp that burned in the cloister itself as they
+passed along silently together, and guided the girl through into the
+parlour on the left-hand side. There was a tall chair standing before the
+hearth, and as Mistress Margaret sat down, drawing the girl with her,
+Isabel sank down on the footstool at her feet, and hid her face on the
+old nun's knees.
+
+There was silence for a minute or two. Mistress Margaret set down the
+lamp on the table beside her, and passed her hands caressingly over the
+girl's hands and hair; but said nothing, until Isabel's whole body heaved
+up convulsively once or twice, before she burst into a torrent of
+weeping.
+
+"My darling," said the old lady in a quiet steady voice, "we should thank
+God instead of grieving. To think that this house should have given two
+confessors to the Church, father and son! Yes, yes, dear child, I know
+what you are thinking of, the two dear lads we both love; well, well, we
+do not know, we must trust them both to God. It may not be true of
+Anthony; and even if it be true--well, he must have thought he was
+serving his Queen. And for Hubert----"
+
+Isabel lifted her face and looked with a dreadful questioning stare.
+
+"Dear child," said the nun, "do not look like that. Nothing is so bad as
+not trusting God."
+
+"Anthony, Anthony!"... whispered the girl.
+
+"James told us the same story as the gentleman on Sunday," went on the
+nun. "But he said no hard word, and he does not condemn. I know his
+heart. He does not know why he is released, nor by whose order: but an
+order came to let him go, and his papers with it: and he must be out of
+England by Monday morning: so he leaves here to-morrow in the litter in
+which he came. He is to say mass to-morrow, if he is able."
+
+"Mass? Here?" said the girl, in the same sharp whisper; and her sobbing
+ceased abruptly.
+
+"Yes, dear; if he is able to stand and use his hands enough. They have
+settled it upstairs."
+
+Isabel continued to look up in her face wildly.
+
+"Ah!" said the old nun again. "You must not look like that. Remember that
+he thinks those wounds the most precious things in the world--yes--and
+his mother too!"
+
+"I must be at mass," said Isabel; "God means it."
+
+"Now, now," said Mistress Margaret soothingly, "you do not know what you
+are saying."
+
+"I mean it," said Isabel, with sharp emphasis; "God means it."
+
+Mistress Margaret took the girl's face between her hands, and looked
+steadily down into her wet eyes. Isabel returned the look as steadily.
+
+"Yes, yes," she said, "as God sees us."
+
+Then she broke into talk, at first broken and incoherent in language, but
+definite and orderly in ideas, and in her interpretations of these last
+months.
+
+Kneeling beside her with her hands clasped on the nun's knee, Isabel told
+her all her struggles; disentangling at last in a way that she had never
+been able to do before, all the complicated strands of self-will and
+guidance and blindness that had so knotted and twisted themselves into
+her life. The nun was amazed at the spiritual instinct of this Puritan
+child, who ranged her motives so unerringly; dismissing this as of self,
+marking this as of God's inspiration, accepting this and rejecting that
+element of the circumstances of her life; steering confidently between
+the shoals of scrupulous judgment and conscience on the one side, and the
+hidden rocks of presumption and despair on the other--these very dangers
+that had baffled and perplexed her so long--and tracing out through them
+all the clear deep safe channel of God's intention, who had allowed her
+to emerge at last from the tortuous and baffling intricacies of character
+and circumstance into the wide open sea of His own sovereign Will.
+
+It seemed to the nun, as Isabel talked, as if it needed just a final
+touch of supreme tragedy to loosen and resolve all the complications; and
+that this had been supplied by the vision upstairs. There she had seen a
+triumphant trophy of another's sorrow and conquest. There was hardly an
+element in her own troubles that was not present in that human Pietà
+upstairs--treachery--loneliness--sympathy--bereavement--and above all the
+supreme sacrificial act of human love subordinated to divine--human love,
+purified and transfigured and rendered invincible and immortal by the
+very immolation of it at the feet of God--all this that the son and
+mother in their welcome of pain had accomplished in the crucifixion of
+one and the heart-piercing of the other--this was light opened to the
+perplexed, tormented soul of the girl--a radiance poured out of the
+darkness of their sorrow and made her way plain before her face.
+
+"My Isabel," said the old nun, when the girl had finished and was hiding
+her face again, "this is of God. Glory to His Name! I must ask James'
+leave; and then you must sleep here to-night, for the mass to-morrow."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The chapel at Maxwell Hall was in the cloister wing; but a stranger
+visiting the house would never have suspected it. Opening out of Lady
+Maxwell's new sitting-room was a little lobby or landing, about four
+yards square, lighted from above; at the further end of it was the door
+into her bedroom. This lobby was scarcely more than a broad passage; and
+would attract no attention from any passing through it. The only piece of
+furniture in it was a great tall old chest as high as a table, that stood
+against the inner wall beyond which was the long gallery that looked down
+upon the cloister garden. The lobby appeared to be practically as broad
+as the two rooms on either side of it; but this was effected by the outer
+wall being made to bulge a little; and the inner wall being thinner than
+inside the two living-rooms. The deception was further increased by the
+two living-rooms being first wainscoted and then hung with thick
+tapestry; while the lobby was bare. A curious person who should look in
+the chest would find there only an old dress and a few pieces of stuff.
+This lobby, however, was the chapel; and through the chest was the
+entrance to one of the priest's hiding holes, where also the altar-stone
+and the ornaments and the vestments were kept. The bottom of the chest
+was in reality hinged in such a way that it would fall, on the proper
+pressure being applied in two places at once, sufficiently to allow the
+side of the chest against the wall to be pushed aside, which in turn gave
+entrance to a little space some two yards long by a yard wide; and here
+were kept all the necessaries for divine worship; with room besides for a
+couple of men at least to be hidden away. There was also a way from this
+hole on to the roof, but it was a difficult and dangerous way; and was
+only to be used in case of extreme necessity.
+
+It was in this lobby that Isabel found herself the next morning kneeling
+and waiting for mass. She had been awakened by Mistress Margaret shortly
+before four o'clock and told in a whisper to dress herself in the dark;
+for it was impossible under the circumstances to tell whether the house
+was not watched; and a light seen from outside might conceivably cause
+trouble and disturbance. So she had dressed herself and come down from
+her room along the passages, so familiar during the day, so sombre and
+suggestive now in the black morning with but one shaded light placed at
+the angles. Other figures were stealing along too; but she could not tell
+who they were in the gloom. Then she had come through the little
+sitting-room where the scene of last night had taken place and into the
+lobby beyond.
+
+But the whole place was transformed.
+
+Over the old chest now hung a picture, that usually was in Lady Maxwell's
+room, of the Blessed Mother and her holy Child, in a great carved frame
+of some black wood. The chest had become an altar: Isabel could see the
+slight elevation in the middle of the long white linen cloth where the
+altar-stone lay, and upon that again, at the left corner, a pile of linen
+and silk. Upon the altar at the back stood two slender silver
+candlesticks with burning tapers in them; and a silver crucifix between
+them. The carved wooden panels, representing the sacrifice of Isaac on
+the one half and the offering of Melchisedech on the other, served
+instead of an embroidered altar-frontal. Against the side wall stood a
+little white-covered folding table with the cruets and other necessaries
+upon it.
+
+There were two or three benches across the rest of the lobby; and at
+these were kneeling a dozen or more persons, motionless, their faces
+downcast. There was a little wind such as blows before the dawn moaning
+gently outside; and within was a slight draught that made the taper
+flames lean over now and then.
+
+Isabel took her place beside Mistress Margaret at the front bench; and as
+she knelt forward she noticed a space left beyond her for Lady Maxwell. A
+moment later there came slow and painful steps through the sitting-room,
+and Lady Maxwell came in very slowly with her son leaning on her arm and
+on a stick. There was a silence so profound that it seemed to Isabel as
+if all had stopped breathing. She could only hear the slow plunging pulse
+of her own heart.
+
+James took his mother across the altar to her place, and left her there,
+bowing to her; and then went up to the altar to vest. As he reached it
+and paused, a servant slipped out and received the stick from him. The
+priest made the sign of the cross, and took up the amice from the
+vestments that lay folded on the altar. He was already in his cassock.
+
+Isabel watched each movement with a deep agonising interest; he was so
+frail and broken, so bent in his figure, so slow and feeble in his
+movements. He made an attempt to raise the amice but could not, and
+turned slightly; and the man from behind stepped up again and lifted it
+for him. Then he helped him with each of the vestments, lifted the alb
+over his head and tenderly drew the bandaged hands through the sleeves;
+knit the girdle round him; gave him the stole to kiss and then placed it
+over his neck and crossed the ends beneath the girdle and adjusted the
+amice; then he placed the maniple on his left arm, but so tenderly! and
+lastly, lifted the great red chasuble and dropped it over his head and
+straightened it--and there stood the priest as he had stood last Sunday,
+in crimson vestments again; but bowed and thin-faced now.
+
+Then he began the preparation with the servant who knelt beside him in
+his ordinary livery, as server; and Isabel heard the murmur of the Latin
+words for the first time. Then he stepped up to the altar, bent slowly
+and kissed it and the mass began.
+
+Isabel had a missal, lent to her by Mistress Margaret; but she hardly
+looked at it; so intent was she on that crimson figure and his strange
+movements and his low broken voice. It was unlike anything that she had
+ever imagined worship to be. Public worship to her had meant hitherto one
+of two things--either sitting under a minister and having the word
+applied to her soul in the sacrament of the pulpit; or else the saying of
+prayers by the minister aloud and distinctly and with expression, so that
+the intellect could follow the words, and assent with a hearty Amen. The
+minister was a minister to man of the Word of God, an interpreter of His
+gospel to man.
+
+But here was a worship unlike all this in almost every detail. The priest
+was addressing God, not man; therefore he did so in a low voice, and in a
+tongue as Campion had said on the scaffold "that they both understood."
+It was comparatively unimportant whether man followed it word for word,
+for (and here the second radical difference lay) the point of the worship
+for the people lay, not in an intellectual apprehension of the words, but
+in a voluntary assent to and participation in the supreme act to which
+the words were indeed necessary but subordinate. It was the thing that
+was done; not the words that were said, that was mighty with God. Here,
+as these Catholics round Isabel at any rate understood it, and as she too
+began to perceive it too, though dimly and obscurely, was the sublime
+mystery of the Cross presented to God. As He looked down well pleased
+into the silence and darkness of Calvary, and saw there the act
+accomplished by which the world was redeemed, so here (this handful of
+disciples believed), He looked down into the silence and twilight of this
+little lobby, and saw that same mystery accomplished at the hands of one
+who in virtue of his participation in the priesthood of the Son of God
+was empowered to pronounce these heart-shaking words by which the Body
+that hung on Calvary, and the Blood that dripped from it there, were
+again spread before His eyes, under the forms of bread and wine.
+
+Much of this faith of course was still dark to Isabel; but yet she
+understood enough; and when the murmur of the priest died to a throbbing
+silence, and the worshippers sank in yet more profound adoration, and
+then with terrible effort and a quick gasp or two of pain, those wrenched
+bandaged hands rose trembling in the air with Something that glimmered
+white between them; the Puritan girl too drooped her head, and lifted up
+her heart, and entreated the Most High and most Merciful to look down on
+the Mystery of Redemption accomplished on earth; and for the sake of the
+Well-Beloved to send down His Grace on the Catholic Church; to strengthen
+and save the living; to give rest and peace to the dead; and especially
+to remember her dear brother Anthony, and Hubert whom she loved; and
+Mistress Margaret and Lady Maxwell, and this faithful household: and the
+poor battered man before her, who, not only as a priest was made like to
+the Eternal Priest, but as a victim too had hung upon a prostrate cross,
+fastened by hands and feet; thus bearing on his body for all to see the
+marks of the Lord Jesus.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Lady Maxwell and Mistress Margaret both rose and stepped forward after
+the Priest's Communion, and received from those wounded hands the Broken
+Body of the Lord.
+
+And then the mass was presently over; and the server stepped forward
+again to assist the priest to unvest, himself lifting each vestment off,
+for Father Maxwell was terribly exhausted by now, and laying it on the
+altar. Then he helped him to a little footstool in front of him, for him
+to kneel and make his thanksgiving. Isabel looked with an odd wonder at
+the server; he was the man that she knew so well, who opened the door for
+her, and waited at table; but now a strange dignity rested on him as he
+moved confidently and reverently about the awful altar, and touched the
+vestments that even to her Puritan eyes shone with new sanctity. It
+startled her to think of the hidden Catholic life of this house--of these
+servants who loved and were familiar with mysteries that she had been
+taught to dread and distrust, but before which she too now was to bow her
+being in faith and adoration.
+
+After a minute or two, Mistress Margaret touched Isabel on the arm and
+beckoned to her to come up to the altar, which she began immediately to
+strip of its ornaments and cloth, having first lit another candle on one
+of the benches. Isabel helped her in this with a trembling dread, as all
+the others except Lady Maxwell and her son were now gone out silently;
+and presently the picture was down, and leaning against the wall; the
+ornaments and sacred vessels packed away in their box, with the vestments
+and linen in another. Then together they lifted off the heavy altar
+stone. Mistress Margaret next laid back the lid of the chest; and put her
+hands within, and presently Isabel saw the back of the chest fall back,
+apparently into the wall. Mistress Margaret then beckoned to Isabel to
+climb into the chest and go through; she did so without much difficulty,
+and found herself in the little room behind. There was a stool or two and
+some shelves against the wall, with a plate or two upon them and one or
+two tools. She received the boxes handed through, and followed Mistress
+Margaret's instructions as to where to place them; and when all was done,
+she slipped back again through the chest into the lobby.
+
+The priest and his mother were still in their places, motionless.
+Mistress Margaret closed the chest inside and out, beckoned Isabel into
+the sitting-room and closed the door behind them. Then she threw her arms
+round the girl and kissed her again and again.
+
+"My own darling," said the nun, with tears in her eyes. "God bless
+you--your first mass. Oh! I have prayed for this. And you know all our
+secrets now. Now go to your room, and to bed again. It is only a little
+after five. You shall see him--James--before he goes. God bless you, my
+dear!"
+
+She watched Isabel down the passage; and then turned back again to where
+the other two were still kneeling, to make her own thanksgiving.
+
+Isabel went to her room as one in a dream. She was soon in bed again, but
+could not sleep; the vision of that strange worship she had assisted at;
+the pictorial details of it, the glow of the two candles on the shoulders
+of the crimson chasuble as the priest bent to kiss the altar or to adore;
+the bowed head of the server at his side; the picture overhead with the
+Mother and her downcast eyes, and the radiant Child stepping from her
+knees to bless the world--all this burned on the darkness. With the least
+effort of imagination too she could recall the steady murmur of the
+unfamiliar words; hear the rustle of the silken vestment; the stirrings
+and breathings of the worshippers in the little room.
+
+Then in endless course the intellectual side of it all began to present
+itself. She had assisted at what the Government called a crime; it was
+for that--that collection of strange but surely at least innocent
+things--actions, words, material objects--that men and women of the same
+flesh and blood as herself were ready to die; and for which others
+equally of one nature with herself were ready to put them to death. It
+was the mass--the mass--she had seen--she repeated the word to herself,
+so sinister, so suggestive, so mighty. Then she began to think again--if
+indeed it is possible to say that she had ever ceased to think of him--of
+Anthony, who would be so much horrified if he knew; of Hubert, who had
+renounced this wonderful worship, and all, she feared, for love of
+her--and above all of her father, who had regarded it with such
+repugnance:--yes, thought Isabel, but he knows all now. Then she thought
+of Mistress Margaret again. After all, the nun had a spiritual life which
+in intensity and purity surpassed any she had ever experienced or even
+imagined; and yet the heart of it all was the mass. She thought of the
+old wrinkled quiet face when she came back to breakfast at the Dower
+House: she had soon learnt to read from that face whether mass had been
+said that morning or not at the Hall. And Mistress Margaret was only one
+of thousands to whom this little set of actions half seen and words half
+heard, wrought and said by a man in a curious dress, were more precious
+than all meditation and prayer put together. Could the vast
+superstructure of prayer and effort and aspiration rest upon a piece of
+empty folly such as children or savages might invent?
+
+Then very naturally, as she began now to get quieter and less excited,
+she passed on to the spiritual side of it.
+
+Had that indeed happened that Mistress Margaret believed--that the very
+Body and Blood of her own dear Saviour, Jesus Christ, had in virtue of
+His own clear promise--His own clear promise!--become present there under
+the hands of His priest? Was it, indeed,--this half-hour action,--the
+most august mystery of time, the Lamb eternally slain, presenting Himself
+and His Death before the Throne in a tremendous and bloodless
+Sacrifice--so august that the very angels can only worship it afar off
+and cannot perform it; or was it all a merely childish piece of
+blasphemous mummery, as she had been brought up to believe? And then this
+Puritan girl, who was beginning to taste the joys of release from her
+misery now that she had taken this step, and united a whole-hearted
+offering of herself to the perfect Offering of her Lord--now her soul
+made its first trembling movement towards a real external authority. "I
+believe," she rehearsed to herself, "not because my spiritual experience
+tells me that the Mass is true, for it does not; not because the Bible
+says so, because it is possible to interpret that in more than one way;
+but because that Society which I now propose to treat as Divine--the
+Representative of the Incarnate Word--nay, His very mystical Body--tells
+me so: and I rely upon that, and rest in her arms, which are the Arms of
+the Everlasting, and hang upon her lips, through which the Infallible
+Word speaks."
+
+And so Isabel, in a timid peace at last, from her first act of Catholic
+faith, fell asleep.
+
+She awoke to find the winter sun streaming into her room, and Mistress
+Margaret by her bedside.
+
+"Dear child," said the old lady, "I would not wake you earlier; you have
+had such a short night; but James leaves in an hour's time; and it is
+just nine o'clock, and I know you wish to see him."
+
+When she came down half an hour later she found Mistress Margaret waiting
+for her outside Lady Maxwell's room.
+
+"He is in there," she said. "I will tell Mary"; and she slipped in.
+Isabel outside heard the murmur of voices, and in a moment more was
+beckoned in by the nun.
+
+James Maxwell was sitting back in a great chair, looking exhausted and
+white. His mother, with something of the same look of supreme suffering
+and triumph, was standing behind his chair. She smiled gravely and
+sweetly at Isabel, as if to encourage her; and went out at the further
+door, followed by her sister.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," said the priest, without any introductory words, in
+his broken voice, and motioning her to a seat, "I cannot tell you what
+joy it was to see you at mass. Is it too much to hope that you will seek
+admission presently to the Catholic Church?"
+
+Isabel sat with downcast eyes. His tone was a little startling to her. It
+was as courteous as ever, but less courtly: there was just the faintest
+ring in it, in spite of its weakness, as of one who spoke with authority.
+
+"I--I thank you, Mr. James," she said. "I wish to hear more at any rate."
+
+"Yes, Mistress Isabel; and I thank God for it. Mr. Barnes will be the
+proper person. My mother will let him know; and I have no doubt that he
+will receive you by Easter, and that you can make your First Communion on
+that day."
+
+She bowed her head, wondering a little at his assurance.
+
+"You will forgive me, I know, if I seem discourteous," went on the
+priest, "but I trust you understand the terms on which you come. You come
+as a little child, to learn; is it not so? Simply that?"
+
+She bowed her head again.
+
+"Then I need not keep you. If you will kneel, I will give you my
+blessing."
+
+She knelt down at once before him, and he blessed her, lifting his
+wrenched hand with difficulty and letting it sink quickly down again.
+
+By an impulse she could not resist she leaned forward on her knees and
+took it gently into her two soft hands and kissed it.
+
+"Oh! forgive him, Mr. Maxwell; I am sure he did not know." And then her
+tears poured down.
+
+"My child," said his voice tenderly, "in any case I not only forgive him,
+but I thank him. How could I not? He has brought me love-tokens from my
+Lord."
+
+She kissed his hand again, and stood up; her eyes were blinded with
+tears; but they were not all for grief.
+
+Then Mistress Margaret came in from the inner room, and led the girl out;
+and the mother came in once more to her son for the ten minutes before he
+was to leave her.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                         A STRIFE OF TONGUES
+
+
+Anthony now settled down rather drearily to the study of religious
+controversy. The continual contrasts that seemed forced upon him by the
+rival systems of England and Rome (so far as England might be said to
+have a coherent system at this time), all tended to show him that there
+were these two sharply-divided schemes, each claiming to represent
+Christ's Institution, and each exclusive of the other. Was it of Christ's
+institution that His Church should be a department of the National Life;
+and that the civil prince should be its final arbiter and ruler, however
+little he might interfere in its ordinary administration? This was
+Elizabeth's idea. Or was the Church, as Mr. Buxton had explained it, a
+huge unnational Society, dependent, it must of course be, to some extent
+on local circumstances, but essentially unrestricted by limit of
+nationality or of racial tendencies? This was the claim of Rome. Of
+course an immense number of other arguments circled round this--in fact,
+most of the arguments that are familiar to controversialists at the
+present day; but the centre of all, to Anthony's mind, as indeed it was
+to the mind of the civil and religious authorities of the time, was the
+question of supremacy--Elizabeth or Gregory?
+
+He read a certain number of books; and it will be remembered that he had
+followed, with a good deal of intelligence, Campion's arguments. Anthony
+was no theologian, and therefore missed perhaps the deep, subtle
+arguments; but he had a normal mind, and was able to appreciate and
+remember some salient points.
+
+For example, he was impressed greatly by the negative character of
+Protestantism in such books as Nicholl's "Pilgrimage." In this work a man
+was held up as a type to be imitated whose whole religion to all
+appearances consisted of holding the Pope to be Antichrist, and his
+Church the synagogue of Satan, of disliking the doctrines of merit and of
+justification by works, of denying the Real Presence, and of holding
+nothing but what could be proved to his own satisfaction by the
+Scriptures.
+
+Then he read as much as he could of the great Jewell controversy. This
+Bishop of Salisbury, who had, however, recanted his Protestant opinions
+under Mary, and resumed them under Elizabeth, had published in 1562 his
+"Apology of the Church of England," a work of vast research and learning.
+Mr. Harding, who had also had the advantage of having been on both sides,
+had answered it; and then the battle was arrayed. It was of course mostly
+above Anthony's head; but he gained from what he was able to read of it a
+very fair estimate of the conflicting theses, though he probably could
+not have stated them intelligibly. He also made acquaintance with another
+writer against Jewell,--Rastall; and with one or two of Mr. Willet's
+books, the author of "Synopsis Papismi" and "Tretrastylon Papisticum."
+
+Even more than by paper controversy, however, he was influenced by
+history that was so rapidly forming before his eyes. The fact and the
+significance of the supremacy of the Queen in religion was impressed upon
+him more vividly by her suspension of Grindal than by all the books he
+ever read: here was the first ecclesiastic of the realm, a devout, humble
+and earnest man, restrained from exercising his great qualities as ruler
+and shepherd of his people, by a woman whose religious character
+certainly commanded no one's respect, even if her moral life were free
+from scandal; and that, not because the Archbishop had been guilty of any
+crime or heresy, or was obviously unfitted for his post, but because his
+conscientious judgment on a point of Church discipline and liberty
+differed from hers; and this state of things was made possible not by an
+usurpation of power, but by the deliberately ordered system of the Church
+of England. Anthony had at least sufficient penetration to see that this,
+as a fundamental principle of religion, however obscured it might be by
+subsequent developments, was yet fraught with dangers compared with which
+those of papal interference were comparatively trifling--dangers that is,
+not so much to earthly peace and prosperity, as to the whole spiritual
+nature of the nation's Christianity.
+
+Yet another argument had begun to suggest itself, bearing upon the same
+point, of the relative advantages and dangers of Nationalism. When he had
+first entered the Archbishop's service he had been inspired by the
+thought that the Church would share in the rising splendour of England;
+now he began to wonder whether she could have strength to resist the
+rising worldliness that was bound to accompany it. It is scarcely likely
+that men on fire with success, whether military or commercial, will be
+patient of the restraints of religion. If the Church is independent of
+the nation, she can protest and denounce freely; if she is knit closely
+to the nation, such rebuke is almost impossible.
+
+A conversation that Anthony had on this subject at the beginning of
+February helped somewhat to clear up this point.
+
+He was astonished after dinner one day to hear that Mr. Henry Buxton was
+at the porter's lodge desiring to see him, and on going out he found that
+it was indeed his old acquaintance, the prisoner.
+
+"Good-day, Master Norris," said the gentleman, with his eyes twinkling;
+"you see the mouse has escaped, and is come to call upon the cat."
+
+Anthony inquired further as to the details of his release.
+
+"Well, you see," said Mr. Buxton, "they grew a-weary of me. I talked so
+loud at them all for one thing; and then you see I was neither priest nor
+agent nor conspirator, but only a plain country gentleman: so they took
+some hundred or two pounds off me, to make me still plainer; and let me
+go. Now, Mr. Norris, will you come and dine with me, and resume our
+conversation that was so rudely interrupted by my journey last time? But
+then you see her Majesty would take no denial."
+
+"I have just dined," said Anthony, "but----"
+
+"Well, I will not ask you to see me dine again, as you did last time; but
+will you then sup with me? I am at the 'Running Horse,' Fleet Street,
+until to-morrow."
+
+Anthony accepted gladly; for he had been greatly taken with Mr. Buxton;
+and at six o'clock that evening presented himself at the "Running Horse,"
+and was shown up to a private parlour.
+
+He found Mr. Buxton in the highest good-humour; he was even now on his
+way from Wisbeach, home again to Tonbridge, and was only staying in
+London to finish a little business he had.
+
+Before supper was over, Anthony had laid his difficulties before him.
+
+"My dear friend," said the other, and his manner became at once sober and
+tender, "I thank you deeply for your confidence. After being thought
+midway between a knave and a fool for over a year, it is a comfort to be
+treated as an honest gentleman again. I hold very strongly with what you
+say; it is that, under God, that has kept me steady. As I said to you
+last time, Christ's Kingdom is not of this world. Can you imagine, for
+example, Saint Peter preaching religious obedience to Nero to be a
+Christian's duty? I do not say (God forbid) that her Grace is a Nero, or
+even a Poppæa; but there is no particular reason why some successor of
+hers should not be. However, Nero or not, the principle is the same. I do
+not deny that a National Church may be immensely powerful, may convert
+thousands, may number zealous and holy men among her ministers and
+adherents--but yet her foundation is insecure. What when the tempest of
+God's searching judgments begins to blow?
+
+"Or, to put it plainer, in a parable, you have seen, I doubt not, a
+gallant and his mistress together. So long as she is being wooed by him,
+she can command; he sighs and yearns and runs on errands--in short, she
+rules him. But when they are wedded--ah me! It is she--if he turns out a
+brute, that is--she that stands while my lord plucks off his boots--she
+who runs to fetch the tobacco-pipe and lights it and kneels by him. Now I
+hold that to wed the body spiritual to the body civil, is to wed a
+delicate dame to a brute. He may dress her well, give her jewels, clap
+her kindly on the head--but she is under him and no free woman. Ah!"--and
+then Mr. Buxton's eyes began to shine as Anthony remembered they had done
+before, and his voice to grow solemn,--"and when the spouse is the Bride
+of Christ, purchased by His death, what then would be the sin to wed her
+to a carnal nation, who shall favour her, it may be, while she looks
+young and fair; but when his mood changes, or her appearance, then she is
+his slave and his drudge! His will and his whims are her laws; as he
+changes, so must she. She has to do his foul work; as she had to do for
+King Henry, as she is doing it now for Queen Bess; and as she will always
+have to do, God help her, so long as she is wedded to the nation, instead
+of being free as the handmaiden and spouse of Christ alone. My faith
+would be lost, Mr. Norris, and my heart broken quite, if I were forced to
+think the Church of England to be the Church of Christ."
+
+They talked late that evening in the private baize-curtained parlour on
+the third floor. Anthony produced his difficulties one by one, and Mr.
+Buxton did his best to deal with them. For example, Anthony remarked on
+the fact that there had been no breach of succession as to the edifices
+and endowments of the Church; that the sees had been canonically filled,
+and even the benefices; and that therefore, like it or not, the Church of
+England now was identical with the Pre-Reformation Church.
+
+"_Distinguo_," said his friend. "Of course she is the successor in one
+sense: what you say is very true. It is impossible to put your finger
+all along the line of separation. It is a serrated line. The affairs of a
+Church and a nation are so vast that that is sure to be so; although if
+you insist, I will point to the Supremacy Act of 1559 and the Uniformity
+Act of the same year as very clear evidences of a breach with the ancient
+order; in the former the governance is shifted from its original owner,
+the Vicar of Christ, and placed on Elizabeth; it was that that the
+Carthusian Fathers and Sir Thomas More and many others died sooner than
+allow: and the latter Act sweeps away all the ancient forms of worship in
+favour of a modern one. But I am not careful to insist upon those points;
+if you deny or disprove them,--though I do not envy any who attempts
+that--yet even then my principle remains, that all that to which the
+Church of England has succeeded is the edifices and the endowments; but
+that her spirit is wholly new. If a highwayman knocks me down to-morrow,
+strips me, clothes himself with my clothes, and rides my horse, he is
+certainly my successor in one sense; yet he will be rash if he presents
+himself to my wife and sons--though I have none, by the way--as the
+proper owner of my house and name."
+
+"But there is no knocking down in the question," said Anthony. "The
+bishops and clergy, or the greater part of them, consented to the
+change."
+
+Mr. Buxton smiled.
+
+"Very well," he said; "yet the case is not greatly different if the
+gentleman threatens me with torture instead, if I do not voluntarily give
+him my clothes and my horse. If I were weak and yielded to him, yes, and
+made promises of all kinds in my cowardice--yet he would be no nearer
+being the true successor of my name and fortune. And if you read her
+Grace's Acts, and King Henry's too, you will find that that was precisely
+what took place. My dear sir," Mr. Buxton went on, "if you will pardon my
+saying it, I am astounded at the effrontery of your authorities who claim
+that there was no breach. Your Puritans are wiser; they at least frankly
+say that the old was Anti-Christian; that His Holiness (God forgive me
+for saying it!), was an usurper: and that the new Genevan theology is the
+old gospel brought to light again. That I can understand; and indeed most
+of your churchmen think so too; and that there was a new beginning made
+with Protestantism. But when her Grace calls herself a Catholic, and
+tells the poor Frenchmen that it is the old religion here still: and your
+bishops, or one or two of them rather, like Cheyney, I suppose, say so
+too--then I am rendered dumb--(if that were possible). If it is the same,
+then why, a-God's name, were the altars dragged down, and the screens
+burned, and the vestments and the images and the stoups and the pictures
+and the ornaments, all swept out? Why, a-God's name, was the old mass
+blotted out and this new mingle-mangle brought in, if it be all one? And
+for the last time, a-God's name, why is it death to say mass now, if it
+be all one? Go, go: Such talk is foolishness, and worse."
+
+Mr. Buxton was silent for a moment as Anthony eyed him; and then burst
+out again.
+
+"Ah! but worse than all are the folks that stand with one leg on either
+stool. We are the old Church, say they;--standing with the Protestant leg
+in the air,--therefore let us have the money and the buildings: they are
+our right. And then when a poor Catholic says, Then let us have the old
+mass, and the old penance and the old images: Nay, nay, nay, they say,
+lifting up the Catholic leg and standing on the other, those are Popery;
+and we are Protestants; we have made away with all such mummery and
+muniments of superstition. And so they go see-sawing to and fro. When you
+run at one leg they rest them on the other, and you know not where to
+take them."
+
+And so the talk went on. When the evening was over, and Anthony was
+rising to return to Lambeth, Mr. Buxton put his hand on his arm.
+
+"Good Mr. Norris," he said, "you have been very patient with me. I have
+clacked this night like an old wife, and you have borne with me: and now
+I ask your pardon again. But I do pray God that He may show you light and
+bring you to the true Church; for there is no rest elsewhere."
+
+Anthony thanked him for his good wishes.
+
+"Indeed," he said, too, "I am grateful for all that you have said. You
+have shown me light, I think, on some things, and I ask your prayers."
+
+"I go to Stanfield to-morrow," said Mr. Buxton; "it is a pleasant house,
+though its master says so, not far from Sir Philip Sidney's: if you would
+but come and see me there!"
+
+"I am getting greatly perplexed," said Anthony, "and I think that in good
+faith I cannot stay long with the Archbishop; and if I leave him how
+gladly will I come to you for a few days; but it must not be till then."
+
+"Ah! if you would but make the Spiritual Exercises in my house; I will
+provide a conductor; and there is nothing that would resolve your doubts
+so quickly."
+
+Anthony was interested in this; and asked further details as to what
+these were.
+
+"It is too late," said Mr. Buxton, "to tell you to-night. I will write
+from Stanfield."
+
+Mr. Buxton came downstairs with Anthony to see him on to his horse, and
+they parted with much good-will; and Anthony rode home with a heavy and
+perplexed heart to Lambeth.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He spent a few days more pondering; and then determined to lay his
+difficulties before the Archbishop; and resign his position if Grindal
+thought it well.
+
+He asked for an interview, and the Archbishop appointed an hour in the
+afternoon at which he would see him in Cranmer's parlour, the room above
+the vestry which formed part of the tower that Archbishop Cranmer had
+added to Lambeth House.
+
+Anthony, walking up and down in the little tiled cloisters by the creek,
+a few minutes before the hour fixed, heard organ-music rolling out of the
+chapel windows; and went in to see who was playing. He came in through
+the vestry, and looking to the west end gallery saw there the back of old
+Dr. Tallis, seated at the little positive organ that the late Archbishop
+had left in his chapel, and which the present Archbishop had gladly
+retained, for he was a great patron of music, and befriended many
+musicians when they needed help--Dr. Tallis, as well as Byrd, Morley and
+Tye. There were a few persons in the chapel listening, the Reverend Mr.
+Wilson, one of the chaplains, being among them; and Anthony thought that
+he could not do better than sit here a little and quiet his thoughts,
+which were nervous and distracted at the prospect of his coming
+interview. He heard voices from overhead, which showed that the
+Archbishop was engaged; so he spoke to an usher stationed in the vestry,
+telling him that he was ready as soon as the Archbishop could receive
+him, and that he would wait in the chapel; and then made his way down to
+one of the return stalls at the west end, against the screen, and took
+his seat there.
+
+This February afternoon was growing dark, and the only lights in the
+chapel were those in the organ loft; but there was still enough daylight
+outside to make the windows visible--those famous windows of Morton's,
+which, like those in King's Chapel, Cambridge, combined and interpreted
+the Old and New Testaments by an ingenious system of types and antitypes,
+in the manner of the "Biblia Pauperum." There was then only a single
+subject in each light; and Anthony let his eyes wander musingly to and
+fro in the east window from the central figure of the Crucified to the
+types on either side, especially to a touching group of the unconscious
+Isaac carrying the wood for his own death, as Christ His Cross. Beneath,
+instead of the old stately altar glowing with stuffs and precious metals
+and jewels which had once been the heart of this beautiful shrine, there
+stood now a plain solid wooden table that the Archbishop used for the
+Communion. Anthony looked at it, and sighed a little to himself. Did the
+altar and the table then mean the same thing?
+
+Meanwhile the glorious music was rolling overhead in the high vaulted
+roof. The old man was extemporising; but his manner was evident even in
+that; there was a simple solemn phrase that formed his theme, and round
+this adorning and enriching it moved the grave chords. On and on
+travelled the melody, like the flow of a broad river; now sliding
+steadily through a smiling land of simple harmonies, where dwelt a people
+of plain tastes and solid virtues; now passing over shallows where the
+sun glanced and played in the brown water among the stones, as light
+arpeggio chords rippled up and vanished round about the melody; now
+entering a land of mighty stones and caverns where the echoes rang hollow
+and resonant, as the counterpoint began to rumble and trip like boulders
+far down out of sight, in subaqueous gloom; now rolling out again and
+widening, fuller and deeper as it went, moving in great masses towards
+the edge of the cataract that lies like a line across the landscape: it
+is inevitable now, the crash must come;--a chord or two
+pausing,--pausing;--and then the crash, stupendous and sonorous.
+
+Then on again through elaborate cities where the wits and courtiers
+dwell, and stately palaces slide past upon the banks, and barges move
+upon its breast, on to the sea--that final full close that embraces and
+engulfs all music, all effort, all doubts and questionings, whether in
+art or theology, all life of intellect, heart or will--that fathomless
+eternal deep from which all comes and to which all returns, that men call
+the Love of God.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony stirred in his seat; he had been here ten minutes, proposing to
+take his restless thoughts in hand and quiet them; and, lo! it had been
+done for him by the master who sat overhead. Here he, for the moment,
+remained, ready for anything--glad to take up the wood and bear it to the
+Mount of Sacrifice--content to be carried on in that river of God's Will
+to the repose of God's Heart--content to dwell meantime in the echoing
+caverns of doubt--in the glancing shadows and lights of an active
+life--in his own simple sunlit life in the country--or even to plunge
+over the cataract down into the fierce tormented pools in the dark--for
+after all the sea lay beyond; and he who commits himself to the river is
+bound to reach it.
+
+He heard a step, and the usher stood by him.
+
+"His Grace is ready, Master Norris."
+
+Anthony rose and followed him.
+
+The Archbishop received him with the greatest kindness. As Anthony came
+in he half rose, peering with his half-blind eyes, and smiling and
+holding out his hands.
+
+"Come, Master Norris," he said, "you are always welcome. Sit down;" and
+he placed him in a chair at the table close by his own.
+
+"Now, what is it?" he said kindly; for the old man's heart was a little
+anxious at this formal interview that had been requested by this
+favourite young officer of his.
+
+Then Anthony, without any reserve, told him all; tracing out the long
+tale of doubt by landmarks that he remembered; mentioning the effect
+produced on his mind by the Queen's suspension of the Archbishop,
+especially dwelling on the arrest, the examination and the death of
+Campion, that had made such a profound impression upon him; upon his own
+reading and trains of thought, and the conversations with Mr. Buxton,
+though of course he did not mention his name; he ended by saying that he
+had little doubt that sooner or later he would be compelled to leave the
+communion of the Church of England for that of Rome; and by placing his
+resignation in the Archbishop's hands, with many expressions of gratitude
+for the unceasing kindness and consideration that he had always received
+at his hands.
+
+There was silence when he had finished. A sliding panel in the wall near
+the chapel had been pushed back, and the mellow music of Dr. Tallis
+pealed softly in, giving a sweet and melodious background, scarcely
+perceived consciously by either of them, and yet probably mellowing and
+softening their modes of expression during the whole of the interview.
+
+"Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop at last, "I first thank you for the
+generous confidence you have shown towards me: and I shall put myself
+under a further obligation to you by accepting your resignation: and this
+I do for both our sakes. For yours, because, as you confess, this action
+of the Queen's--(I neither condemn nor excuse it myself)--this action has
+influenced your thoughts: therefore you had best be removed from it to a
+place where you can judge more quietly. And I accept it for my own sake
+too; for several reasons that I need not trouble you with. But in doing
+this, I desire you, Mr. Norris, to continue to draw your salary until
+Midsummer:--nay, nay, you must let me have my say. You are at liberty to
+withdraw as soon as you have wound up your arrangements with Mr.
+Somerdine; he will now, as Yeoman of the Horse, have your duties as well
+as his own; for I do not intend to have another Gentleman of the Horse.
+As regards an increase of salary for him, that can wait until I see him
+myself. In any case, Mr. Norris, I think you had better withdraw before
+Mid-Lent Sunday.
+
+"And now for your trouble. I know very well that I cannot be of much
+service to you. I am no controversialist. But I must bear my witness.
+This Papist with whom you have had talk seems a very plausible fellow.
+His arguments sound very plain and good; and yet I think you could prove
+anything by them. They seem to me like that openwork embroidery such as
+you see on Communion linen sometimes, in which the pattern is formed by
+withdrawing certain threads. He has cleverly omitted just those points
+that would ruin his argument; and he has made a pretty design. But any
+skilful advocate could make any other design by the same methods. He has
+not thought fit to deal with such words of our Saviour as what He says on
+Tradition; with what the Scriptures say against the worshipping of
+angels; with what St. Paul says in his Epistle to the Colossians, in the
+second chapter, concerning all those carnal ordinances which were done
+away by Christ, but which have been restored by the Pope in his despite;
+he does not deal with those terrible words concerning the man of sin and
+the mystery of iniquity. In fact, he takes just one word that Christ let
+fall about His Kingdom, and builds this great edifice upon it. You might
+retort to him in a thousand ways such as these. Bishop Jewell, in his
+book, as you know, deals with these questions and many more; far more
+fully than it is possible for you and me even to dream of doing. Nay, Mr.
+Norris; the only argument I can lay before you is this. There are
+difficulties and troubles everywhere; that there are such in the Church
+of England, who would care to deny? that there are equally such, aye, and
+far more, in the Church of Rome, who would care to deny, either?
+Meanwhile, the Providence of God has set you here and not there. Whatever
+your difficulties are here, are not of your choosing; but if you fly
+there (and I pray God you will not) there they will be. Be content,
+Master Norris; indeed you have a goodly heritage; be content with it;
+lest losing that you lose all."
+
+Anthony was greatly touched by this moderate and courteous line that the
+Archbishop was taking. He knew well in his heart that the Church of Rome
+was, in the eyes of this old man, a false and deceitful body, for whom
+there was really nothing to be said. Grindal, in his travels abroad
+during the Marian troubles, had been deeply attracted by the Genevan
+theology, with whose professors he had never wholly lost touch; and
+Anthony guessed what an effort it was costing him, and what a strain it
+was on his conscience, thus to combine courtesy with faithfulness to what
+he believed to be true.
+
+Grindal apparently feared he had sacrificed his convictions, for he
+presently added: "You know, Mr. Norris, that I think very much worse of
+Papistry than I have expressed; but I have refrained because I think that
+would not help you; and I desire to do that more than to relieve myself."
+
+Anthony thanked him for his gentleness; saying that he quite understood
+his motives in speaking as he had done, and was deeply obliged to him for
+it.
+
+The Archbishop, however, as indeed were most of the English Divines of
+the time, was far more deeply versed in destructive than constructive
+theology; and, to Anthony's regret, was presently beginning in that
+direction.
+
+"It is beyond my imagination. Mr. Norris," he said, "that any who have
+known the simple Gospel should return to the darkness. See here," he went
+on, rising, and fumbling among his books, "I have somewhere here what
+they call an Indulgence."
+
+He searched for a few minutes, and presently shook out of the leaves of
+Jewell's book a paper which he peered at, and then pushed over to
+Anthony.
+
+It was a little rectangular paper, some four or five inches long; bearing
+a figure of Christ, wounded, with His hands bound together before Him,
+and the Cross with the superscription rising behind. In compartments on
+either side were instruments of the Passion, the spear, and the reed with
+the sponge, with other figures and emblems. Anthony spelt out the
+inscription.
+
+"Read it aloud, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop.
+
+"'To them,'" read Anthony, "'that before this image of pity devoutly say
+five paternosters, five aves and a credo, piteously beholding these arms
+of Christ's Passion, are granted thirty-two thousand seven hundred and
+fifty-five years of pardon.'"
+
+"Now, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop, "have you considered that it is
+to that kind of religion that you are attracted? I will not comment on
+it; there is no need."
+
+"Your Grace," said Anthony slowly, laying the paper down, "I need not
+say, I think, that this kind of thing is deeply distasteful to me too.
+Your Grace cannot dislike it more than I do. But then I do not understand
+it; I do not know what indulgences mean; I only know that were they as
+mad and foolish as we Protestants think them, no truthful or good man
+could remain a Papist for a day; but then there are many thoughtful and
+good men Papists; and I conclude from that that what we think the
+indulgences to be, cannot be what they really are. There must be some
+other explanation.
+
+"And again, my lord, may I add this? If I were a Turk I should find many
+things in the Christian religion quite as repellent to me; for example,
+how can it be just, I should ask, that the death of an innocent man, such
+as Christ was, should be my salvation? How, again, is it just that faith
+should save? Surely one who has sinned greatly ought to do something
+towards his forgiveness, and not merely trust to another. But you, my
+lord, would tell me that there are explanations of these difficulties,
+and of many more too, of which I should gradually understand more and
+more after I was a Christian. Or again, it appears to me even now,
+Christian as I am, judging as a plain man, that predestination
+contradicts free-will; and no explanation can make them both reasonable.
+Yet, by the grace of God, I believe all these doctrines and many more,
+not because I understand them, for I do not; but because I believe that
+they are part of the Revelation of God. It is just so, too, with the
+Roman Catholic Church. I must not take this or that doctrine by itself;
+but I must make up my mind whether or no it is the one only Catholic
+Church, and then I shall believe all that she teaches, because she
+teaches it, and not because I understand it. You must forgive my dulness,
+my lord; but I am but a layman, and can only say what I think in simple
+words."
+
+"But we must judge of a Christian body by what that body teaches," said
+the Archbishop. "On what other grounds are you drawn to the Papists,
+except by what they teach?"
+
+"Yes, your Grace," said Anthony, "I do judge of the general body of
+doctrine, and of the effect upon the soul as a whole; but that is not the
+same as taking each small part, and making all hang upon that."
+
+"Well, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop, "I do not think we can talk much
+more now. It is new to me that these difficulties are upon you. But I
+entreat you to talk to me again as often as you will; and to others
+also--Dr. Redmayn, Mr. Chambers and others will be happy if they can be
+of any service to you in these matters: for few things indeed would
+grieve me more than that you should turn Papist."
+
+Anthony thanked the Archbishop very cordially for his kindness, and,
+after receiving his blessing, left his presence. He had two or three more
+talks with him before he left, but his difficulties were in no way
+resolved. The Archbishop had an essentially Puritan mind, and could not
+enter into Anthony's point of view at all. It may be roughly said that
+from Grindal's standpoint all turned on the position and responsibility
+of the individual towards the body to which he belonged: and that Anthony
+rather looked at the corporate side first and the individual second.
+Grindal considered, for example, the details of the Catholic religion in
+reference to the individual, asking whether he could accept this or that:
+Anthony's tendency was rather to consider the general question first, and
+to take the difficulties in his stride afterwards. Anthony also had
+interviews with the Archdeacon and chaplain whom Grindal had recommended;
+but these were of even less service to him, as Dr. Redmayn was so frankly
+contemptuous, and Mr. Chambers so ignorant, of the Romish religion that
+Anthony felt he could not trust their judgment at all.
+
+In the meanwhile, during this last fortnight of Anthony's Lambeth life,
+he received a letter from Mr. Buxton, explaining what were the Spiritual
+Exercises to which he had referred, and entreating Anthony to come and
+stay with him at Stanfield.
+
+"Now come, dear Mr. Norris," he wrote, "as soon as you leave the
+Archbishop's service; I will place three or four rooms at your disposal,
+if you wish for quiet; for I have more rooms than I know what to do with;
+and you shall make the Exercises if you will with some good priest. They
+are a wonderful method of meditation and prayer, designed by Ignatius
+Loyola (one day doubtless to be declared saint), for the bringing about a
+resolution of all doubts and scruples, and so clearing the eye of the
+soul that she discerns God's Will, and so strengthening her that she
+gladly embraces it. And that surely is what you need just now in your
+perplexity."
+
+The letter went on to describe briefly the method followed, and ended by
+entreating him again to come and see him. Anthony answered this by
+telling him of his resignation of his post at Lambeth, and accepting his
+invitation; and he arranged to spend the last three weeks before Easter
+at Stanfield, and to go down there immediately upon leaving Lambeth. He
+determined not to go to Great Keynes first, or to see Isabel, lest his
+resolution should be weakened. Already, he thought, his motives were
+sufficiently mixed and perverted without his further aggravating their
+earthly constituents.
+
+He wrote to his sister, however, telling her of his decision to leave
+Lambeth; and adding that he was going to stay with a friend until Easter,
+when he hoped to return to the Dower House, and take up his abode there
+for the present. He received what he thought a very strange letter in
+return, written apparently under excitement strongly restrained. He read
+in it a very real affection for himself, but a certain reserve in it too,
+and even something of compassion; and there was a sentence in it that
+above all others astonished him.
+
+"J. M. has been here, and is now gone to Douai. Oh! dear brother, some
+time no doubt you will tell us all. I feel so certain that there is much
+to explain."
+
+Had she then guessed his part in the priest's release? Anthony wondered;
+but at any rate he knew, after his promise to the Queen, that he must not
+give her any clue. He was also surprised to hear that James had been to
+Great Keynes. He had inquired for him at the Tower on the Monday after
+his visit to Greenwich, and had heard that Mr. Maxwell was already gone
+out of England. He had not then troubled to write again, as he had no
+doubt but that his message to Lady Maxwell, which he had sent in his note
+to Isabel, had reached her; and that certainly she, and probably James
+too, now knew that he had been an entirely unconscious and innocent
+instrument in the priest's arrest. But that note, as has been seen, never
+reached its destination. Lady Maxwell did not care to write to the
+betrayer of her son; and Isabel on the one hand hoped and believed now
+that there was some explanation, but on the other did not wish to ask for
+it again, since her first request had been met by silence.
+
+As the last days of his life at Lambeth were coming to an end, Anthony
+began to send off his belongings on pack-horses to Great Keynes; and by
+the time that the Saturday before Mid-Lent Sunday arrived, on which he
+was to leave, all had gone except his own couple of horses and the bags
+containing his personal luggage.
+
+His last interview with the Archbishop affected him very greatly.
+
+He found the old man waiting for him, walking up and down Cranmer's
+parlour in an empty part of the room, where there was no danger of his
+falling. He peered anxiously at Anthony as he entered.
+
+"Mr. Norris," he said, "you are greatly on my mind. I fear I have not
+done my duty to you. My God has taken away the great charge he called me
+to years ago, to see if I were fit or not for the smaller charge of mine
+own household, and not even that have I ruled well."
+
+Anthony was deeply moved.
+
+"My lord," he said, "if I may speak plainly to you, I would say that to
+my mind the strongest argument for the Church of England is that she
+brings forth piety and goodness such as I have seen here. If it were not
+for that, I should no longer be perplexed."
+
+Grindal held up a deprecating hand.
+
+"Do not speak so, Mr. Norris. That grieves me. However, I beseech you to
+forgive me for all my remissness towards you, and I wish to tell you
+that, whatever happens, you shall never cease to have an old man's
+prayers. You have been a good and courteous servant to me always--more
+than that, you have been my loving friend--I might almost say my son: and
+that, in a world that has cast me off and forgotten me, I shall not
+easily forget. God bless you, my dear son, and give you His light and
+grace."
+
+When Anthony rode out of the gateway half an hour later, with his servant
+and luggage behind him, it was only with the greatest difficulty that he
+could keep from tears as he thought of the blind old man, living in
+loneliness and undeserved disgrace, whom he was leaving behind him.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII
+
+                       THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
+
+
+Anthony found that Mr. Buxton had seriously underestimated himself in
+describing his position as that of a plain country gentleman. Stanfield
+was one of the most beautiful houses that he had ever seen. On the day
+after his arrival, his host took him all over the house, at his earnest
+request, and told him its story; and as they passed from room to room,
+again and again Anthony found himself involuntarily exclaiming at the new
+and extraordinary beauties of architecture and furniture that revealed
+themselves.
+
+The house itself had been all built in the present reign, before its
+owner had got into trouble; and had been fitted throughout on the most
+lavish scale, with furniture of German as well as of English manufacture.
+Mr. Buxton was a collector of pictures and other objects of art; and his
+house contained some of the very finest specimens of painting, bronzes,
+enamels, plate and woodwork procurable from the Continent.
+
+The house was divided into two sections; the chief living rooms were in a
+long suite looking to the south on to the gardens, with a corridor on the
+north side running the whole length of the house on the ground-floor,
+from which a staircase rose to a similar corridor or gallery on the first
+floor. The second section of the house was a block of some half-dozen
+smallish rooms, with a private staircase of their own, and a private
+entrance and little walled garden as well in front. The house was mostly
+panelled throughout, and here and there hung pieces of magnificent
+tapestry and cloth of arras. All was kept, too, with a care that was
+unusual in those days--the finest woodwork was brought to a high polish,
+as well as all the brass utensils and steel fire-plates and dogs and such
+things. No two rooms were alike; each possessed some marked
+characteristic of its own--one bedroom, for example, was distinguished by
+its fourpost bed with its paintings on the canopy and head--another, by
+its little two-light high window with Adam and Eve in stained glass;
+another with a little square-window containing a crucifix, which was
+generally concealed by a sliding panel; another by two secret cupboards
+over the fire-place, and its recess fitted as an oratory; another by a
+magnificent piece of tapestry representing Saint Clara and Saint Thomas
+of Aquin, each holding a monstrance, with a third great monstrance in the
+centre, supported by angels.
+
+Downstairs the rooms were on the same scale of magnificence. The
+drawing-room had an exquisite wooden ceiling with great pendants
+elaborately carved; the dining-room was distinguished by its glass,
+containing a collection of coats-of-arms of many of Mr. Buxton's friends
+who had paid him visits; the hall by its vast fire-place and the
+tapestries that hung round it.
+
+The exterior premises were scarcely less remarkable; a fine row of
+stables, and kennels where greyhounds were kept, stood to the north and
+the east of the house; but the wonder of the country was the gardens to
+the south. Anthony hardly knew what to say for admiration as he went
+slowly through these with his host, on the bright spring morning, after
+visiting the house. These were elaborately laid out, and under Mr.
+Buxton's personal direction, for he was one of the few people in England
+at this time who really understood or cared for the art. His avenue of
+small clipped limes running down the main walk of the garden, his
+yew-hedges fashioned with battlements and towers; his great garden house
+with its vane; his fantastic dial in the fashion of a tall striped pole
+surmounted by a dragon;--these were the astonishment of visitors; and it
+was freely said that had not Mr. Buxton been exceedingly adroit he would
+have paid the penalty of his magnificence and originality by being forced
+to receive a royal visit--a favour that would have gone far to
+impoverish, if not to ruin him. The chancel of the parish-church
+overlooked the west end of his lime-avenue, while the east end of the
+garden terminated in a great gateway, of stone posts and wrought iron
+gates that looked out to the meadows and farm buildings of the estate,
+and up to which some day no doubt a broad carriage drive would be laid
+down. But at present the sweep of the meadows was unbroken.
+
+It was to this beautiful place that Anthony found himself welcomed. His
+host took him at once on the evening of his arrival to the west block,
+and showed him his bedroom--that with the little cupboards and the
+oratory recess; and then, taking him downstairs again, showed him a
+charming little oak parlour, which he told him would be altogether at his
+private service.
+
+"And you see," added Mr. Buxton, "in this walled garden in front you can
+have complete privacy, and thus can take the air without ever coming to
+the rest of the house; to which there is this one entrance on the ground
+floor." And then he showed him how the lower end of the long corridor
+communicated with the block.
+
+"The only partners of this west block," he added, "will be the two
+priests--Mr. Blake, my chaplain, and Mr. Robert, who is staying with me a
+week or two; and who, I hope, will conduct you through the Exercises, as
+he is very familiar with them. You will meet them both at supper: of
+course they will be both dressed as laymen. The Protestants blamed poor
+Campion for that, you know; but had he not gone in disguise, they would
+only have hanged him all the sooner. I like not hypocrisy."
+
+Anthony was greatly impressed by Father Robert when he met him at supper.
+He was a tall and big man, who seemed about forty years of age, with a
+long square-jawed face, a pointed beard and moustache, and shrewd
+penetrating eyes. He seemed to be a man in advance of his time; he was
+full of reforms and schemes that seemed to Anthony remarkably to the
+point; and they were reforms too quite apart from ecclesiasticism, but
+rather such as would be classed in our days under the title of Christian
+Socialism.
+
+For example, he showed a great sympathy for the condition of the poor and
+outcast and criminals; and had a number of very practical schemes for
+their benefit.
+
+"Two things," he said, in answer to a question of Anthony's, "I would do
+to-morrow if I had the power. First I would allow of long leases for
+fifty and a hundred years. Everywhere the soil is becoming impoverished;
+each man squeezes out of it as much as he can, and troubles not to feed
+the land or to care for it beyond his time. Long leases, I hold, would
+remedy this. It would encourage the farmer to look before him and think
+of his sons and his sons' sons. And second, I would establish banks for
+poor men. There is many a man now a-begging who would be living still in
+his own house, if there had been some honest man whom he could have
+trusted to keep his money for him, and, maybe, give him something for the
+loan of it: for in these days, when there is so much enterprise, money
+has become, as it were, a living thing that grows; or at the least a tool
+that can be used; and therefore, when it is lent, it is right that the
+borrower should pay a little for it. This is not the same as the usury
+that Holy Church so rightly condemns: at least, I hold not, though some,
+I know, differ from me."
+
+After supper the talk turned on education: here, too, the priest had his
+views.
+
+"But you are weary of hearing me!" he said, in smiling apology. "You will
+think me a schoolmaster."
+
+"And I pray you to consider me your pupil," said Mr. Buxton. The priest
+made a little deprecating gesture.
+
+"First, then," he said, "I would have a great increase of grammar
+schools. It is grievous to think of England as she will be when this
+generation grows up: the schooling was not much before; but now she has
+lost first the schools that were kept by Religious, and now the teaching
+that the chantry-priests used to give. But this perhaps may turn to
+advantage; for when the Catholic Religion is re-established in these
+realms, she will find how sad her condition is; and, I hope, will remedy
+it by a better state of things than before--first, by a great number of
+grammar schools where the lads can be well taught for small fees, and
+where many scholarships will be endowed; and then, so great will be the
+increase of learning, as I hope, that we shall need to have a third
+university, to which I should join a third Archbishoprick, for the
+greater dignity of both; and all this I should set in the north
+somewhere, Durham or Newcastle, maybe."
+
+He spoke, too, with a good deal of shrewdness of the increase of highway
+robbery, and the remedies for it; remarking that, although in other
+respects the laws were too severe, in this matter their administration
+was too lax; since robbers of gentle birth could generally rely on
+pardon. He spoke of the Holy Brotherhood in Spain (with which country he
+seemed familiar), and its good results in the putting down of violence.
+
+Anthony grew more and more impressed by this man's practical sense and
+ability; but less drawn to him in consequence as his spiritual guide. He
+fancied that true spirituality could scarcely exist in this intensely
+practical nature. When supper was over, and the priests had gone back to
+their rooms, and his host and he were seated before a wide blazing hearth
+in Mr. Buxton's own little room downstairs, he hinted something of the
+sort. Mr. Buxton laughed outright.
+
+"My dear friend," he said, "you do not know these Jesuits (for of course
+you have guessed that he is one); their training and efficiency is beyond
+all imagining. In a week from now you will be considering how ever Father
+Robert can have the heart to eat his dinner or say 'good-day' with such a
+spiritual vision and insight as he has. You need not fear. Like the angel
+in the Revelation, he will call you up to heaven, hale you to the abyss
+and show you things to come. And, though you may not believe it, it is
+the man's intense and simple piety that makes him so clear-sighted and
+practical; he lives so close to God that God's works and methods, so
+perplexing to you and me, are plain to him."
+
+They went on talking together for a while. Mr. Buxton said that Father
+Robert had thought it best for Anthony not to enter Retreat until the
+Monday evening; by which time he could have sufficiently familiarised
+himself with his new surroundings, so as not to find them a distraction
+during his spiritual treatment. Anthony agreed to this. Then they talked
+of all kinds of things. His host told him of his neighbours; and
+explained how it was that he enjoyed such liberty as he did.
+
+"You noticed the church, Mr. Norris, did you not, at your arrival,
+overlooking the garden? It is a great advantage to me to have it so
+close. I can sit in my own garden and hear the Genevan thunders from
+within. He preaches so loud that I might, if I wished, hear sermons, and
+thus satisfy the law and his Reverence; and at the same time not go
+inside an heretical meeting-house, and thus satisfy my own conscience and
+His Holiness. But I fear that would not have saved me, had I not the ear
+of his Reverence. I will tell you how it was. When the laws began to be
+enforced hereabouts, his Reverence came to see me; and sat in that very
+chair that you now occupy.
+
+"'I hear,' said he, cocking his eye at me, 'that her Grace is becoming
+strict, and more careful for the souls of her subjects.'
+
+"I agreed with him, and said I had heard as much.
+
+"'The fine is twenty pounds a month,' says he, 'for recusancy,' and then
+he looks at me again."
+
+"At first I did not catch his meaning; for, as you have noticed, Mr.
+Norris, I am but a dull man in dealing with these sharp and subtle
+Protestants: and then all at once it flashed across me.
+
+"'Yes, your Reverence,' I said, 'and it will be the end of poor gentlemen
+like me, unless some kind friend has pity on them. How happy I am in
+having you!' I said, 'I have never yet shown my appreciation as I should:
+and I propose now to give you, to be applied to what purposes you will,
+whether the sustenance of the minister or anything else, the sum of ten
+pounds a month; so long as I am not troubled by the Council. Of course,
+if I should be fined by the Council, I shall have to drop my appreciation
+for six months or so.'
+
+"Well, Mr. Norris, you will hardly believe it, but the old doctor opened
+his mouth and gulped and rolled his eyes, like a trout taking a fly; and
+I was never troubled until fifteen months ago, when they got at me in
+spite of him. But he has lost, you see, a matter of one hundred and fifty
+pounds while I have been at Wisbeach; and I shall not begin to appreciate
+him again for another six months; so I do not think I shall be troubled
+again."
+
+Anthony was amazed, and said so.
+
+"Well," said the other, "I was astonished too; and should never have
+dreamt of appreciating him in such a manner unless he had proposed it. I
+had a little difficulty with Mr. Blake, who told me that it was a
+_libellum_, and that I should be ashamed to pay hush money. But I told
+him that he might call it what he pleased, but that I would sooner pay
+ten pounds a month and be in peace, than twenty pounds a month and be
+perpetually harassed: and Father Robert agrees with me, and so the other
+is content now."
+
+The next day, which was Sunday, passed quietly. Mass was no doubt said
+somewhere in the house; though Anthony saw no signs of it. He himself
+attended the reverend doctor's ministrations in the morning; and found
+him to be what he had been led to expect.
+
+In the afternoon he walked up and down the lime avenue with Father
+Robert, while the evening prayer and sermon rumbled forth through the
+broken chancel window; and they talked of the Retreat and the
+arrangements.
+
+"You no doubt think, Mr. Norris," said the priest, "that I shall preach
+at you in this Retreat, and endeavour to force you into the Catholic
+Church; but I shall do nothing of the kind. The whole object of the
+Exercises is to clear away the false motives that darken the soul; to
+place the Figure of our Redeemer before the soul as her dear and adorable
+Lover and King; and then to kindle and inspire the soul to choose her
+course through the grace of God, for the only true final motive of all
+perfect action,--that is, the pure Love of God. Of course I believe, with
+the consent of my whole being, that the Catholic Church is in the right;
+but I shall not for a moment attempt to compel you to accept her. The
+final choice, as indeed the Retreat too, must be your free action, not
+mine."
+
+They arranged too the details of the Retreat; and Anthony was shown the
+little room beyond Father Robert's bedroom, where the Exercises would be
+given; and informed that another gentleman who lived in the neighbourhood
+would come in every day for them too, but that he would have his meals
+separately, and that Anthony himself would have his own room and the room
+beneath entirely at his private disposal, as well as the little walled
+garden to walk in.
+
+The next day Mr. Buxton took Anthony a long ride, to invigorate him for
+the Retreat that would begin after supper. Anthony learned to his
+astonishment and delight that Mary Corbet was a great friend of Mr.
+Buxton's.
+
+"Why, of course I know her," he said. "I have known her since she was a
+tiny girl, and threw her mass-book at the minister's face the first time
+he read the morning prayer. God only knows why she was so wroth with the
+man for differing from herself on a point that has perplexed the wisest
+heads: but at any rate, wroth she was, and bang went her book. I had to
+take her out, and she was spitting like a kitten all down the aisle when
+the dog puts his head into the basket.
+
+"'What's that man doing here?' she screamed out; 'where's the altar and
+the priest?' And then at the door, as luck would have had it, she saw
+that Saint Christopher was gone; and she began bewailing and bemoaning
+him until you'd have thought he'd have been bound to come down from
+heaven, as he did once across the dark river, and see what in the world
+the crying child wanted with him."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+They came about half-way in their ride through the village of Penshurst;
+and on reaching the Park turned off under the beeches towards the house.
+
+"We have not time to go in," said Mr. Buxton, "but I hope you will see
+the house sometime; it is a pattern of what a house should be; and has a
+pattern master."
+
+As they came up to the Edwardine Gate-house, a pleasant-faced,
+quietly-dressed gentleman came riding out alone.
+
+"Why, here he is!" said Mr. Buxton, and greeted him with great warmth,
+and made Anthony known to him.
+
+"I am delighted to know Mr. Norris," said Sidney, with that keen friendly
+look that was so characteristic of him. "I have heard of him from many
+quarters."
+
+He entreated them to come in; but Mr. Buxton said they had not time; but
+would if they might just glance into the great court. So Sidney took them
+through the gate-house and pointed out one or two things of interest from
+the entrance, the roof of the Great Hall built by Sir John de Pulteney,
+the rare tracery in its windows and the fine living-rooms at one side.
+
+"I thank God for it every day," said Sidney gravely. "I cannot imagine
+why He should have given it me. I hope I am not fool enough to disparage
+His gifts, and pretend they are nothing: indeed, I love it with all my
+heart. I would as soon think of calling my wife ugly or a shrew."
+
+"That is a good man and a gentleman," said Mr. Buxton, as they rode away
+at last in the direction of Leigh after leaving Sidney to branch off
+towards Charket, "and I do not know why he is not a Catholic. And he is a
+critic and a poet, men say, too."
+
+"Have you read anything of his?" asked Anthony.
+
+"Well," said the other, "to tell the truth, I have tried to read some
+sheets of his that he wrote for his sister, Lady Pembroke. He calls it
+'Arcadia'; I do not know whether it is finished or ever will be. But it
+seemed to me wondrous dull. It was full of shepherds and swains and
+nymphs, who are perpetually eating collations which Phoebus or sunburnt
+Autumn, and the like, provides of his bounty; or any one but God
+Almighty; or else they are bathing and surprising one another all day
+long. It is all very sweet and exquisite, I know; and the Greece, where
+they all live and love one another, must be a very delightful country, as
+unlike this world as it is possible to imagine; but it wearies me. I like
+plain England and plain folk and plain religion and plain fare; but then
+I am a plain man, as I tell you so often."
+
+As the afternoon sun drew near setting, they came through Tonbridge.
+
+"Now, what can a man ask more," said Mr. Buxton, as they rode through it,
+"than a good town like this? It is not a great place, I know, with solemn
+buildings and wide streets; neither is it a glade or a dell; but it is a
+good clean English town; and I would not exchange it for Arcadia or
+Athens either."
+
+Stanfield lay about two miles to the west; and on their way out, Mr.
+Buxton talked on about the country and its joys and its usefulness.
+
+"Over there," he said, pointing towards Eridge, "was the first cannon
+made in England. I do not know if that is altogether to its credit, but
+it at least shows that we are not quite idle and loutish in the country.
+Then all about here is the iron; the very stirrups you ride in, Mr.
+Norris, most likely came from the ground beneath your feet; but it is sad
+to see all the woods cut down for the smelting of it. All these places
+for miles about here, and about Great Keynes too, are all named after the
+things of forestry and hunting. Buckhurst, Hartfield, Sevenoaks, Forest
+Row, and the like, all tell of the country, and will do so long after we
+are dead and gone."
+
+They reached Stanfield, rode past the green and the large piece of water
+there, and up the long village street, and turned into the iron gates
+beyond the church, just as the dusk fell.
+
+That evening after supper the Retreat began. The conduct of the Spiritual
+Exercises had not reached the elaboration to which they have been
+perfected since; nor, in Anthony's case, a layman and a young man, did
+Father Robert think fit to apply it even in all the details in which it
+would be used for a priest or for one far advanced in the spiritual life;
+but it was severe enough.
+
+Every evening Father Robert indicated the subject of the following day's
+meditation; and then after private prayer Anthony retired to his room. He
+rose about seven o'clock in the morning, and took a little food at eight;
+then shortly before nine the first meditation was given elaborately. The
+first examination of conscience was made at eleven; followed by dinner at
+half-past. From half-past twelve to half-past one Anthony rested in his
+room; then until three he was encouraged to walk in the garden; at three
+the meditation was to be recalled point by point in the chapel, followed
+by spiritual reading; at five o'clock supper was served; and at half-past
+six the meditation was repeated with tremendous emphasis and fervent acts
+of devotion; at half-past eight a slight collation was laid in his room;
+and at half-past nine the meditation for the following day was given.
+Father Robert in his previous talks with Anthony had given him
+instructions as to how to occupy his own time, to keep his thoughts fixed
+and so forth. He had thought it wise too not to extend the Retreat for
+longer than a fortnight; so that it was proposed to end it on Palm
+Sunday. Two or three times in the week Anthony rode out by himself; and
+Father Robert was always at his service, besides himself coming sometimes
+to talk to him when he thought the strain or the monotony was getting too
+heavy.
+
+As for the Exercises themselves, the effect of them on Anthony was beyond
+all description. First the circumstances under which they were given were
+of the greatest assistance to their effectiveness. There was every aid
+that romance and mystery could give. Then it was in a strange and
+beautiful house where everything tended to caress the mind out of all
+self-consciousness. The little panelled room in which the exercises were
+given looked out over the quiet garden, and no sound penetrated there but
+the far-off muffled noises of the peaceful village life, the rustle of
+the wind in the evergreens, and the occasional coo or soft flapping
+flight of a pigeon from the cote in the garden. The room itself was
+furnished with two or three faldstools and upright wooden arm-chairs of
+tolerable comfort; a table was placed at the further end, on which stood
+a realistic Spanish crucifix with two tapers always burning before it;
+and a little jar of fragrant herbs. Then there was the continual sense of
+slight personal danger that is such a spur to refined natures; here was a
+Catholic house, of which every member was strictly subject to penalties,
+and above all one of that mysterious Society of Jesus, the very vanguard
+of the Catholic army, and of which every member was a picked and trained
+champion. Then there was the amazing enthusiasm, experience, and skill of
+Father Robert, as he called himself; who knew human nature as an
+anatomist knows the structure of the human body; to whom the bewildering
+tangle of motives, good, bad and indifferent, in the soul, was as plain
+as paths in a garden; who knew what human nature needed, what it could
+dispense with, what was its power of resistance; and who had at his
+disposal for the storming of the soul an armoury of weapons and engines,
+every specimen of which he had tested and wielded over and over again.
+Little as Anthony knew it, Father Robert, during the first two days after
+his arrival, had occupied himself with sounding and probing the lad's
+soul, trying his intellect by questions that scarcely seemed to be so,
+taking the temperature of his emotional nature by tales and adroit
+remarks, and watching the effect of them; in short, with studying the
+soul who had come for his treatment as a careful doctor examines the
+health of a new patient before he issues his prescription. And then,
+lastly, there were the Exercises themselves, a mighty weapon in any
+hands; and all but irresistible when directed by the skill, and inspired
+by the enthusiasm and sincere piety of such a man as Father Robert.
+
+The Exercises fell into three parts, each averaging in Anthony's case
+about five days. First came the Purgative Exercises: the object of these
+was to cleanse and search out the very recesses of the soul; as fire
+separates gold from alloy.
+
+As Anthony knelt in the little room before the Crucifix day by day, it
+seemed to him as if the old conventional limitations and motives of
+action and control were rolling back, revealing the realities of the
+spiritual world. The Exercises began with an elaborate exposition of the
+End of man--which may be roughly defined as the Glory of God attained
+through the saving and sanctifying of the individual. Every creature of
+God, then, that the soul encounters must be tested by this rule, How far
+does the use of it serve for the final end? For it must be used so far,
+and no farther. Here then was a diagram of the Exercises, given in
+miniature at the beginning.
+
+Then the great facts that practically all men acknowledge, and upon which
+so few act, were brought into play. Hell, Judgment and Death in turn
+began to work upon the lad's soul--these monstrous elemental Truths that
+underlie all things. As Father Robert's deep vibrating voice spoke, it
+appeared to Anthony as if the room, the walls, the house, the world, all
+shrank to filmy nothingness before the appalling realities of these
+things. In that strange and profound "Exercise of the senses" he heard
+the moaning and the blasphemies of the damned, of those rebellious free
+wills that have enslaved themselves into eternal bondage by a deliberate
+rejection of God--he put out his finger and tasted the bitterness of
+their furious tears--the very reek of sin came to his nostrils, of that
+corruption that is in existence through sin; nay, he saw the very flaming
+hells red with man's wrath against his Maker.
+
+Then he traced back, under the priest's direction, the Judgment through
+which every soul must pass; he saw the dead, great and small, stand
+before God; the books, black with blotted shame, were borne forth by the
+recording angels and spread before the tribunal. His ears tingled with
+that condemning silence of the Judge beyond Whom there is no appeal, from
+whose sentence there is no respite, and from whose prison there is no
+discharge; and rang with that pealing death-sentence at which the angels
+hide their faces, but to which the conscience of the criminal assents
+that it is just. His soul looked out at those whirling hosts on either
+side, that black cloud going down to despair, that radiant company
+hastening to rise to the Uncreated Light in whom there is no darkness at
+all--and cried in piteous suspense to know on which side she herself one
+day would be.
+
+Then he came yet one step further back still, and told himself the story
+of his death. He saw the little room where he would lie, his bed in one
+corner; he saw Isabel beside the bed; he saw himself, white, gasping,
+convulsed, upon it--the shadows of the doctor and the priest were upon
+the wall--he heard his own quick sobbing breath, he put out his finger
+and touched his own forehead wet with the death-dew--he tasted and smelt
+the faint sickly atmosphere that hangs about a death chamber; and he
+watched the grey shadow of Azrael's wing creep across his face. Then he
+saw the sheet and the stiff form beneath it; and knew that they were his
+features that were hidden; and that they were his feet that stood up
+stark below the covering. Then he visited his own grave, and saw the
+month-old grass blowing upon it, and the little cross at the head; then
+he dug down through the soil, swept away the earth from his coffin-plate;
+drew the screws and lifted the lid....
+
+Then he placed sin beneath the white light; dissected it, analysed it,
+weighed it and calculated its worth, watched its development in the
+congenial surroundings of an innocent soul, that is rich in grace and
+leisure and gifts, and saw the astonishing reversal of God's primal law
+illustrated in the process of corruption--the fair, sweet, fragrant
+creature passing into foulness. He looked carefully at the stages and
+modes of sin--venial sins, those tiny ulcers that weaken, poison and
+spoil the soul, even if they do not slay it--lukewarmness, that deathly
+slumber that engulfs the living thing into gradual death--and, finally,
+mortal sin, that one and only wholly hideous thing. He saw the
+indescribable sight of a naked soul in mortal sin; he saw how the earth
+shrank from it, how nature grew silent at it, how the sun darkened at it,
+how hell yelled at it, and the Love of God sickened at it.
+
+And so, as the purgative days went by, these tempests poured over his
+soul, sifted through it, as the sea through a hanging weed, till all that
+was not organically part of his life was swept away, and he was left a
+simple soul alone with God. Then the second process began.
+
+To change the metaphor, the canvas was now prepared, scoured, bleached
+and stretched. What is the image to be painted upon it? It is the image
+of Christ.
+
+Now Father Robert laid aside his knives and his hammer, and took up his
+soft brushes, and began stroke by stroke, with colours beyond imagining,
+to lay upon the eager canvas the likeness of an adorable Lover and King.
+Anthony watched the portrait grow day by day with increasing wonder. Was
+this indeed the Jesus of Nazareth of whom he had read in the Gospels? he
+rubbed his eyes and looked; and yet there was no possibility of
+mistake,--line for line it was the same.
+
+But this portrait grew and breathed and moved, and passed through all the
+stages of man's life. First it was the Eternal Word in the bosom of the
+Father, the Beloved Son who looked in compassion upon the warring world
+beneath; and offered Himself to the Father who gave Him through the
+Energy of the Blessed Spirit.
+
+Then it was a silent Maid that he saw waiting upon God, offering herself
+with her lily beside her; and in answer on a sudden came the lightning of
+Gabriel's appearing, and, lo! the Eternal Word stole upon her down a ray
+of glory. And then at last he saw the dear Child born; and as he looked
+he was invited to enter the stable; and again he put out his hand and
+touched the coarse straw that lay in the manger, and fingered the rough
+brown cord that hung from Mary's waist, and smelled the sweet breath of
+the cattle, and the burning oil of Joseph's lantern hung against the
+wall, and shivered as the night wind shrilled under the ill-fitting door
+and awoke the tender Child.
+
+Then he watched Him grow to boyhood, increasing in wisdom and stature,
+Him who was uncreated Wisdom, and in whose Hands are the worlds--followed
+Him, loving Him more at every step, to and from the well at Nazareth with
+the pitcher on His head: saw Him with blistered hands and aching back in
+the carpenter's shop; then at last went south with Him to Jordan;
+listened with Him, hungering, to the jackals in the wilderness; rocked
+with Him on the high Temple spire; stared with Him at the Empires of all
+time, and refused them as a gift. Then he went with Him from miracle to
+miracle, laughed with joy at the leper's new skin; wept in sorrow and joy
+with the mother at Nain, and the two sisters at Bethany; knelt with Mary
+and kissed His feet; went home with Matthew and Zaccheus, and sat at meat
+with the merry sinners; and at last began to follow silent and amazed
+with face set towards Jerusalem, up the long lonely road from Jericho.
+
+Then, with love that almost burned his heart, he crouched at the moonlit
+door outside and watched the Supper begin. Judas pushed by him,
+muttering, and vanished in the shadows of the street. He heard the hush
+fall as the Bread was broken and the Red Wine uplifted; and he hid his
+face, for he dared not yet look with John upon a glory whose veils were
+so thin. Then he followed the silent company through the overhung streets
+to the Temple Courts, and down across the white bridge to the garden
+door. Then, bolder, he drew near, left the eight and the three and knelt
+close to the single Figure, who sobbed and trembled and sweated blood.
+Then he heard the clash of weapons and saw the glare of the torches, and
+longed to warn Him but could not; saw the bitter shame of the kiss and
+the arrest and the flight; and followed to Caiaphas' house; heard the
+stinging slap; ran to Pilate's house; saw that polished gentleman yawn
+and sneer; saw the clinging thongs and the splashed floor when the
+scourging was over; followed on to Calvary; saw the great Cross rise up
+at last over the heads of the crowd, and heard the storm of hoots and
+laughter and the dry sobs of the few women. Then over his head the sun
+grew dull, and the earth rocked and split, as the crosses reeled with
+their swinging burdens. Then, as the light came back, and the earth ended
+her long shudder, he saw in the evening glow that his Lord was dead. Then
+he followed to the tomb; saw the stone set and sealed and the watch
+appointed; and went home with Mary and John, and waited.
+
+Then on Easter morning, wherever his Lord was, he was there too; with
+Mary in that unrecorded visit; with the women, with the Apostles; on the
+road to Emmaus; on the lake of Galilee; and his heart burned with Christ
+at his side, on lake and road and mountain.
+
+Then at last he stood with the Twelve and saw that end that was so
+glorious a beginning; saw that tender sky overhead generate its strange
+cloud that was the door of heaven; heard far away the trumpets cry, and
+the harps begin to ripple for the new song that the harpers had learned
+at last; and then followed with his eyes the Lord whom he had now learned
+to know and love as never before, as He passed smiling and blessing into
+the heaven from which one day He will return....
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There, then, as Anthony looked on the canvas, was that living, moving
+face and figure. What more could He have done that He did not do? What
+perfection could be dreamed of that was not already a thousand times His?
+
+And when the likeness was finished, and Father Robert stepped aside from
+the portrait that he had painted with such tender skill and love, it is
+little wonder that this lad threw himself down before that eloquent
+vision and cried with Thomas, My Lord and my God!
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then, very gently, Father Robert led him through those last steps; up
+from the Illuminative to the Unitive; from the Incarnate Life with its
+warm human interests to that Ineffable Light that seems so chill and
+unreal to those who only see it through the clouds of earth, into that
+keen icy stillness, where only favoured and long-trained souls can
+breathe, up the piercing air of the slopes that lead to the Throne, and
+there in the listening silence of heaven, where the voice of adoration
+itself is silent through sheer intensity, where all colours return to
+whiteness and all sounds to stillness, all forms to essence and all
+creation to the Creator, there he let him fall in self-forgetting love
+and wonder, breathe out his soul in one ardent all-containing act, and
+make his choice.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIV
+
+                             EASTER DAY
+
+
+Holy Week passed for Anthony like one of those strange dreams in which
+the sleeper awakes to find tears on his face, and does not know whether
+they are for joy or sorrow. At the end of the Retreat that closed on Palm
+Sunday evening, Anthony had made his choice, and told Father Robert.
+
+It was not the Exercises themselves that were the direct agent, any more
+than were the books he had read: the books had cleared away intellectual
+difficulties, and the Retreat moral obstacles, and left his soul desiring
+the highest, keen to see it, and free to embrace it. The thought that he
+would have to tell Isabel appeared to him of course painful and
+difficult; but it was swallowed up in the joy of his conversion. He made
+an arrangement with Father Robert to be received at Cuckfield on Easter
+Eve; so that he might have an opportunity of telling Isabel before he
+took the actual step. The priest told him he would give him a letter to
+Mr. Barnes, so that he might be received immediately upon his arrival.
+
+Holy Week, then, was occupied for Anthony in receiving instruction each
+morning in the little oak parlour from Father Robert; and in attending
+the devotions in the evening with the rest of the household. He also
+heard mass each day.
+
+It was impossible, of course, to carry out the special devotions of the
+season with the splendour and elaboration that belonged to them; but
+Anthony was greatly impressed by what he saw. The tender reverence with
+which the Catholics loved to linger over the details of the Passion, and
+to set them like precious jewels in magnificent liturgical settings, and
+then to perform these stately heart-broken approaches to God with all the
+dignity and solemnity possible, appealed to him in strong contrast to the
+cold and loveless services, as he now thought them, of the Established
+Church that he had left.
+
+On the Good Friday evening he was long in the parlour with Father Robert.
+
+"I am deeply thankful, my son," he said kindly, "that you have been able
+to come to a decision. Of course I could have wished you to enter the
+Society; but God has not given you a vocation to that apparently.
+However, you can do great work for Him as a seminary priest; and I am
+exceedingly glad that you will be going to Douai so soon."
+
+"I must just put my affairs in order at home," he said, "and see what
+arrangements my sister will wish to make; and by Midsummer at the latest
+I shall hope to be gone."
+
+"I must be off early to-morrow," said the priest. "I have to be far from
+here by to-morrow night, in a house where I shall hope to stay until I,
+too, go abroad again. Possibly we may meet at Douai in the autumn. Well,
+my son, pray for me."
+
+Anthony knelt for his blessing, and the priest was gone.
+
+Presently Mr. Buxton came in and sat down. He was full of delight at the
+result of his scheme; and said so again and again.
+
+"Who could have predicted it?" he cried. "To think that you were visiting
+me in prison fifteen months ago; and now this has come about in my house!
+Truly the Gospel blessing on your action has not been long on the way!
+And that you will be a priest, too! You must come and be my chaplain some
+day; if we are both alive and escape the gallows so long. Old Mr. Blake
+is sore displeased with me. I am a trial to him, I know. He will hardly
+speak to me in my own house; I declare I tremble when I meet him in the
+gallery; for fear he will rate me before my servants. I forget what his
+last grievance is; but I think it is something to do with a saint that he
+wishes me to be devout to; and I do not like her. Of course I do not
+doubt her sanctity; but Mr. Blake always confuses veneration and liking.
+I yield to none in my veneration for Saint What's-her-name; but I do not
+like her; and that is an end of the matter."
+
+After a little more talk, Mr. Buxton looked at Anthony curiously a moment
+or two; and then said:
+
+"I wonder you have not guessed yet who Father Robert is; for I am sure
+you know that that cannot be his real name."
+
+Anthony looked at him wonderingly.
+
+"Well, he is in bed now; and will be off early to-morrow; and I have his
+leave to tell you. He is Father Persons, of whom you may have heard."
+
+Anthony stared.
+
+"Yes," said his host, "the companion of Campion. All the world supposes
+him to be in Rome; and I think that not half-a-dozen persons besides
+ourselves know where he is; but at this moment, I assure you, Father
+Robert Persons, of the Society of Jesus, is asleep (or awake, as the case
+may be) in the little tapestry chamber overhead."
+
+"Now," went on Mr. Buxton, "that you are one of us, I will tell you quite
+plainly that Father Robert, as we will continue to call him, is in my
+opinion one of the most devout priests that ever said mass; and also one
+of the most shrewd men that ever drew breath; but I cannot follow him
+everywhere. You will find, Mr. Anthony, that the Catholics in England are
+of two kinds: those who seem to have as their motto the text I quoted to
+you in Lambeth prison; and who count their duty to Cæsar as scarcely less
+important than their direct duty to God. I am one of these: I sincerely
+desire above all things to serve her Grace, and I would not, for all the
+world, join in any confederacy to dethrone her, for I hold she is my
+lawful and true Prince. Then there is another party who would not
+hesitate for a moment to take part against their Prince, though I do not
+say to the slaying of her, if thereby the Catholic Religion could be
+established again in these realms. It is an exceedingly difficult point;
+and I understand well how honest and good men can hold that view: for
+they say, and rightly, that the Kingdom of God is the first thing in the
+world, and while they may not commit sin of course to further it, yet in
+things indifferent they must sacrifice all for it; and, they add, it is
+indifferent as to who sits on the throne of England; therefore one Prince
+may be pushed off it, so long as no crime is committed in the doing of
+it, and another seated there; if thereby the Religion may be so
+established again. You see the point, Mr. Anthony, no doubt; and how fine
+and delicate it is. Well, Father Robert is, I think, of that party; and
+so are many of the authorities abroad. Now I tell you all this, and on
+this sacred day too, because I may have no other opportunity; and I do
+not wish you to be startled or offended after you have become a Catholic.
+And I entreat you to be warm and kindly to those who take other views
+than your own; for I fear that many troubles lie in front of us of our
+own causing: for there are divisions amongst us already: although not at
+all of course (for which I thank God) on any of the saving truths of the
+Faith."
+
+Anthony's excitement on hearing Father Robert's real name was very great.
+As he lay in bed that night the thought of it all would hardly let him
+sleep. He turned to and fro, trying to realise that there, within a dozen
+yards of him, lay the famous Jesuit for whose blood all Protestant
+England was clamouring. The name of Persons was still sinister and
+terrible even to this convert; and he could scarcely associate in his
+thoughts all its suggestiveness with that kindly fervent lover of Jesus
+Christ who had led him with such skill and tenderness along the way of
+the Gospel. Others in England were similarly astonished in later years to
+learn that a famous Puritan book of devotions was scarcely other than a
+reprint of Father Persons' "Christian Directory."
+
+The following day about noon, after an affectionate good-bye to his host
+and Mr. Blake, Anthony rode out of the iron-wrought gates and down the
+village street in the direction of Great Keynes.
+
+It was a perfect spring-day. Overhead there was a soft blue sky with
+translucent clouds floating in it; underfoot and on all sides the mystery
+of life was beginning to stir and manifest itself. The last touch of
+bitterness had passed from the breeze, and all living growth was making
+haste out into the air. The hedges were green with open buds, and
+bubbling with the laughter and ecstasy of the birds; the high sloping
+overhung Sussex lanes were sweet with violets and primroses; and here and
+there under the boughs Anthony saw the blue carpet of bell-flowers
+spread. Rabbits whisked in and out of the roots, superintending and
+provisioning the crowded nurseries underground; and as Anthony came out,
+now and again on the higher and open spaces larks vanished up their airy
+spirals of song into the illimitable blue; or hung, visible musical
+specks against a fleecy cloud, pouring down their thin cataract of
+melody. And as he rode, for every note of music and every glimpse of
+colour round him, his own heart poured out pulse after pulse of that
+spiritual essence that lies beneath all beauty, and from which all beauty
+is formed, to the Maker of all this and the Saviour of himself. There
+were set wide before him now the gates of a kingdom, compared to which
+this realm of material life round about was but a cramped and wintry
+prison after all.
+
+How long he had lived in the cold and the dark! he thought; kept alive by
+the refracted light that stole down the steps to where he sat in the
+shadow of death; saved from freezing by the warmth of grace that managed
+to survive the chill about him; and all the while the Catholic Church was
+glowing and pulsating with grace, close to him and yet unseen; that great
+realm full of heavenly sunlight, that was the life of all its
+members--that sunlight that had poured down so steadily ever since the
+winter had rolled away on Calvary; and that ever since then had been
+elaborating and developing into a thousand intricate forms all that was
+capable of absorbing it. One by one the great arts had been drawn into
+that Kingdom, transformed and immortalised by the vital and miraculous
+sap of grace; philosophies, languages, sciences, all in turn were taken
+up and sanctified; and now this Puritan soul, thirsty for knowledge and
+grace, and so long starved and imprisoned, was entering at last into her
+heritage.
+
+All this was of course but dimly felt in the direct perceptions of
+Anthony; but Father Robert had said enough to open something of the
+vision, and he himself had sufficient apprehension to make him feel that
+the old meagre life was passing away, and a new life of unfathomed
+possibilities beginning. As he rode the wilderness appeared to rejoice
+and blossom like the rose, as the spring of nature and grace stirred
+about and within him; and only an hour or two's ride away lay the very
+hills and streams of the Promised Land.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+About half-past three he crossed the London road, and before four o'clock
+he rode round to the door of the Dower House, dismounted, telling the
+groom to keep his horse saddled.
+
+He went straight through the hall, calling Isabel as he went, and into
+the garden, carrying his flat cap and whip and gloves: and as he came out
+beneath the holly tree, there she stood before him on the top of the old
+stone garden steps, that rose up between earthen flower-jars to the
+yew-walk on the north of the house. He went across the grass smiling, and
+as he came saw her face grow whiter and whiter. She was in a dark serge
+dress with a plain ruff, and a hood behind it, and her hair was coiled in
+great masses on her head. She stood trembling, and he came up and took
+her in his arms tenderly and kissed her, for his news would be heavy
+presently.
+
+"Why, Isabel," he said, "you look astonished to see me. But I could not
+well send a man, as I had only Geoffrey with me."
+
+She tried to speak, but could not; and looked so overwhelmed and
+terrified that Anthony grew frightened; he saw he must be very gentle.
+
+"Sit down," he said, drawing her to a seat beside the path at the head of
+the steps: "and tell me the news."
+
+By a great effort she regained her self-control.
+
+"I did not know when you were coming," she said tremulously. "I was
+startled."
+
+He talked of his journey for a few minutes; and of the kindness of the
+friend with whom he had been staying, and the beauty of the house and
+grounds, and so on; until she seemed herself again; and the piteous
+startled look had died out of her eyes: and then he forced himself to
+approach his point; for the horse was waiting saddled; and he must get to
+Cuckfield and back by supper if possible.
+
+He took her hand and played with it gently as he spoke, turning over her
+rings.
+
+"Isabel," he said, "I have news to tell you. It is not bad news--at least
+I think not--it is the best thing that has ever come to me yet, by the
+grace of God, and so you need not be anxious or frightened. But I am
+afraid you may think it bad news. It--it is about religion, Isabel."
+
+He glanced at her, and saw that terrified look again in her face: she was
+staring at him, and her hand in his began to twitch and tremble.
+
+"Nay, nay," he said, "there is no need to look like that. I have not lost
+my faith in God. Rather, I have gained it. Isabel, I am going to be a
+Catholic."
+
+A curious sound broke from her lips; and a look so strange came into her
+face that he threw his arm round her, thinking she was going to faint:
+and he spoke sharply.
+
+"Isabel, Isabel, what is there to fear? Look at me!"
+
+Then a cry broke from her white lips, and she struggled to stand up.
+
+"No, no, no! you are mocking me. Oh! Anthony, what have I done, that you
+should treat me like this?"
+
+"Mocking!" he said, "before God I am not. My horse is waiting to take me
+to the priest."
+
+"But--but--" she began again. "Oh! then what have you done to James
+Maxwell?"
+
+"James Maxwell! Why? What do you mean? You got my note!"
+
+"No--no. There was no answer, he said."
+
+Anthony stared.
+
+"Why, I wrote--and then Lady Maxwell! Does she not know, and James
+himself?"
+
+Isabel shook her head and looked at him wildly.
+
+"Well, well, that must wait; one thing at a time," he said. "I _cannot_
+wait now. I must go to Cuckfield. Ah! Isabel, say you understand."
+
+Once or twice she began to speak, but failed; and sat panting and staring
+at him.
+
+"My darling," he said, "do not look like that: we are both Christians
+still: we at least serve the same God. Surely you will not cast me off
+for this?"
+
+"Cast you off?" she said; and she laughed piteously and sharply; and then
+was grave again. Then she suddenly cried,
+
+"Oh, Anthony, swear to me you are not mocking me."
+
+"My darling," he said, "why should I mock you? I have made the Exercises,
+and have been instructed; and I have here a letter to Mr. Barnes from the
+priest who has taught me; so that I may be received to-night, and make my
+Easter duties: and Geoffrey is still at the door holding Roland to take
+me to Cuckfield to-night."
+
+"To Cuckfield!" she said. "You will not find Mr. Barnes there."
+
+"Not there! why not? Where shall I find him? How do you know?"
+
+"Because he is here," she went on in the same strange voice, "at the
+Hall."
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "that saves me a journey. Why is he here?"
+
+"He is here to say mass to-morrow."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And--and----"
+
+"What is it, Isabel?"
+
+"And--to receive me into the Church to-night."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The brother and sister walked up and down that soft spring evening after
+supper, on the yew-walk; with the whispers and caresses of the scented
+breeze about them, the shy dewy eyes of the stars looking down at them
+between the tall spires of the evergreens overhead; and in their hearts
+the joy of lovers on a wedding-night.
+
+Anthony had soon told the tale of James Maxwell and Isabel had nearly
+knelt to ask her brother's pardon for having ever allowed even the shadow
+of a suspicion to darken her heart. Lady Maxwell, too, who had come down
+with her sister to see Isabel about some small arrangement, was told; and
+she too had been nearly overwhelmed with the joy of knowing that the lad
+was innocent, and the grief of having dreamed he could be otherwise, and
+at the wholly unexpected news of his conversion; but she had gone at last
+back to the Hall to make all ready for the double ceremony of that night,
+and the Paschal Feast on the next day. Mistress Margaret was in Isabel's
+room, moving about with a candle, and every time that the two reached the
+turn at the top of the steps they saw her light glimmering.
+
+Then Anthony, as they walked under the stars, told Isabel of his great
+hope that he, too, one day would be a priest, and serve God and his
+countrymen that way.
+
+"Oh, Anthony," she whispered, and clung to that dear arm that held her
+own; terrified for the moment at the memory of what had been the price of
+priesthood to James Maxwell.
+
+"And where shall you be trained for it?" she asked.
+
+"At Douai: and--Isabel--I think I must go this summer."
+
+"This summer!" she said. "Why----" and she was silent.
+
+"Anthony," she went on, "I would like to tell you about Hubert."
+
+And then the story of the past months came out; she turned away her face
+as she talked; and at last she told him how Hubert had come for his
+answer, a week before his time.
+
+"It was on Monday," she said. "I heard him on the stairs, and stood up as
+he came in; and he stopped at the door in silence, and I could not bear
+to look at him. I could hear him breathing quickly; and then I could not
+bear to--think of it all; and I dropped down into my chair again, and hid
+my face in my arm and burst into crying. And still he said nothing, but I
+felt him come close up to me and kneel down by me; and he put his hand
+over mine, and held them tight; and then he whispered in a kind of quick
+way:
+
+"'I will be what you please; Catholic or Protestant, or what you will';
+and I lifted my head and looked at him, because it was dreadful to hear
+him--Hubert--say that: and he was whiter than I had ever seen him; and
+then--then he began to wrinkle his mouth--you know the way he does when
+his horse is pulling or kicking: and then he began to say all kinds of
+things: and oh! I was so sorry; because he had behaved so well till
+then."
+
+"What did he say?" asked Anthony quickly.
+
+"Ah! I have tried to forget," said Isabel. "I do not want to think of him
+as he was when he was angry and disappointed. At last he flung out of the
+room and down the stairs, and I have not seen him since. But Lady Maxwell
+sent for me the same evening an hour later; and told me that she could
+not live there any longer. She said that Hubert had ridden off to London;
+and would not be down again till Whitsuntide; but that she must be gone
+before then. So I am afraid that he said things he ought not; but of
+course she did not tell me one word. And she asked me to go with her.
+And, and--Anthony, I did not know what to say; because I did not know
+what you would do when you heard that I was a Catholic; I was waiting to
+tell you when you came home--but now--but now----Oh, Anthony, my
+darling!"
+
+At last the two came indoors. Mistress Margaret met them in the hall. She
+looked for a moment at the two; at Anthony in his satin and lace and his
+smiling face over his ruff and his steady brown eyes; and Isabel on his
+arm, with her clear pale face and bosom and black high-piled hair, and
+her velvet and lace, and a rope of pearls.
+
+"Why," said the old nun, smiling, "you look a pair of lovers."
+
+Then presently the three went together up to the Hall.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+An hour or two passed away; the Paschal moon was rising high over the
+tall yew hedge behind the Italian garden; and the Hall lay beneath it
+with silver roofs and vane; and black shadows under the eaves and in the
+angles. The tall oriel window of the Hall looking on to the terrace shone
+out with candlelight; and the armorial coats of the Maxwells and the
+families they had married with glimmered in the upper panes. From the
+cloister wing there shone out above the curtains lines of light in Lady
+Maxwell's suite of rooms, and the little oak parlour beneath, as well as
+from one or two other rooms; but the rest of the house, with the
+exception of the great hall and the servants' quarters, was all dark. It
+was as if the interior life had shifted westwards, leaving the remainder
+desolate. The gardens to the south were silent, for the night breeze had
+dropped; and the faint ripple of the fountain within the cloister-court
+was the only sound that broke the stillness. And once or twice the sleepy
+chirp of a bird nestling by his mate in the deep shrubberies showed that
+the life of the spring was beating out of sight.
+
+And then at last the door in the west angle of the terrace, between the
+cloister wing and the front of the house, opened, and a flood of mellow
+light poured out on to the flat pavement. A group stood within the little
+oaken red-tiled lobby; Lady Maxwell and her sister, slender and dignified
+in their dark evening dresses and ruffs; Anthony holding his cap, and
+Isabel with a lace shawl over her head, and at the back the white hair
+and ruddy face of old Mr. Barnes in his cassock at the bottom of the
+stairs.
+
+As Mistress Margaret opened the door and looked out, Lady Maxwell took
+Isabel in her arms and kissed her again and again. Then Anthony took the
+old lady's hand and kissed it, but she threw her other hand round him and
+kissed him too on the forehead. Then without another word the brother and
+sister came out into the moonlight, passed down the side of the cloister
+wing, and turning once to salute the group who waited, framed and bathed
+in golden light, they turned the corner to the Dower House. Then the door
+closed; the oriel window suddenly darkened, and an hour after the lights
+in the wing went out, and Maxwell Hall lay silver and grey again in the
+moonlight.
+
+The night passed on. Once Isabel awoke, and saw her windows blue and
+mystical and her room full of a dim radiance from the bright night
+outside. It was irresistible, and she sprang out of bed and went to the
+window across the cool polished oak floor, and leaned with her elbows on
+the sill, looking out at the square of lawn and the low ivied wall
+beneath, and the tall trees rising beyond ashen-grey and olive-black in
+the brilliant glory that poured down from almost directly overhead, for
+the Paschal moon was at its height above the house.
+
+And then suddenly the breathing silence was broken by a ripple of melody,
+and another joined and another; and Isabel looked and wondered and
+listened, for she had never heard before the music of the mysterious
+night-flight of the larks all soaring and singing together when the rest
+of the world is asleep. And she listened and wondered as the stream of
+song poured down from the wonderful spaces of the sky, rising to far-off
+ecstasies as the wheeling world sank yet further with its sleeping
+meadows and woods beneath the whirling singers; and then the earth for a
+moment turned in its sleep as Isabel listened, and the trees stirred as
+one deep breath came across the woods, and a thrush murmured a note or
+two beside the drive, and a rabbit suddenly awoke in the field and ran on
+to the lawn and sat up and looked at the white figure at the window; and
+far away from the direction of Lindfield a stag brayed.
+
+"So longeth my soul," whispered Isabel to herself.
+
+Then all grew still again; the trees hushed; the torrent of music, more
+tumultuous as it neared the earth, suddenly ceased; and Isabel at the
+window leaned further out and held her hands in the bath of light; and
+spoke softly into the night:
+
+"Oh, Lord Jesus, how kind Thou art to me!"
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then at last the morning came, and Christ was risen beyond a doubt.
+
+Just before the sun came up, when all the sky was luminous to meet him,
+the two again passed up and round the corner, and into the little door in
+the angle. There was the same shaded candle or two, for the house was yet
+dark within; and they passed up and on together through the sitting-room
+into the chapel where each had made a First Confession the night before,
+and had together been received into the Catholic Church. Now it was all
+fragrant with flowers and herbs; a pair of tall lilies leaned their
+delicate heads towards the altar, as if to listen for the soundless
+Coming in the Name of the Lord; underfoot all about the altar lay sprigs
+of sweet herbs, rosemary, thyme, lavender, bay-leaves; with white
+blossoms scattered over them--a soft carpet for the Pierced Feet; not
+like those rustling palm-swords over which He rode to death last week.
+The black oak chest that supported the altar-stone was glorious in its
+vesture of cloth-of-gold; and against the white-hung wall at the back,
+behind the silver candlesticks, leaned the gold plate of the house, to do
+honour to the King. And presently there stood there the radiant rustling
+figure of the Priest, his personality sheathed and obliterated beneath
+the splendid symbolism of his vestments, stiff and chinking with jewels
+as he moved.
+
+The glorious Mass of Easter Day began.
+
+"_Immolatus est Christus. Itaque epulemur_," Saint Paul cried from the
+south corner of the altar to the two converts. "Christ our Passover is
+sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast, but not with the old
+leaven."
+
+"_Quis revolvet nobis lapidem?_" wailed the women. "Who shall roll us
+away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?"
+
+"And when they looked," cried the triumphant Evangelist, "they saw that
+the stone was rolled away; for it was very great"--"_erat quippe magnus
+valde_."
+
+Here then they knelt at last, these two come home together, these who had
+followed their several paths so resolutely in the dark, not knowing that
+the other was near, yet each seeking a hidden Lord, and finding both Him
+and one another now in the full and visible glory of His Face--_orto jam
+sole_--for the Sun of Righteousness had dawned, and there was healing for
+all sorrows in His Wings.
+
+"_Et credo in unam sanctam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam_"--their
+hearts cried all together. "I believe at last in a Catholic Church; one,
+for it is built on one and its faith is one; holy, for it is the Daughter
+of God and the Mother of Saints; Apostolic, for it is guided by the
+Prince of Apostles and very Vicar of Christ."
+
+"_Et exspecto vitam venturi saeculi._" "I look for the life of the world
+to come; and I count all things but loss, houses and brethren and sisters
+and father and mother and wife and children and lands, when I look to
+that everlasting life, and Him Who is the Way to it. _Amen._"
+
+So from step to step the liturgy moved on with its sonorous and exultant
+tramp, and the crowding thoughts forgot themselves, and watched as the
+splendid heralds went by; the triumphant trumpets of _Gloria in excelsis_
+had long died away; the proclamation of the names and titles of the Prince
+had been made. _Unum Dominum Jesum Christum_; _Filium Dei Unigenitum_;
+_Ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula_; _Deum de Deo_; _Lumen de Lumine_;
+_Deum Verum de Deo Vero_; _Genitum non factum_; _Consubstantialem Patri._
+
+Then His first achievement had been declared; "_Per quem omnia facta
+sunt._"
+
+Then his great and later triumphs; how He had ridden out alone from the
+Palace and come down the steep of heaven in quest of His Love; how He had
+disguised Himself for her sake; and by the crowning miracle of love, the
+mightiest work that Almighty God has ever wrought, He was made man; and
+the herald hushed his voice in awe as he declared it, and the people
+threw themselves prostrate in honour of this high and lowly Prince; then
+was recounted the tale of those victories that looked so bitterly like
+failures, and the people held their breath and whispered it too; then in
+rising step after step His last conquests were told; how the Black Knight
+was overthrown, his castle stormed and his prison burst; and the story of
+the triumph of the return and of the Coronation and the Enthronement at
+the Father's Right Hand on high.
+
+The heralds passed on; and mysterious figures came next, bearing
+Melchisedech's gifts; shadowing the tremendous event that follows on
+behind.
+
+After a space or two came the first lines of the bodyguard, the heavenly
+creatures dimly seen moving through clouds of glory, Angels, Dominations,
+Powers, Heavens, Virtues, and blessed Seraphim, all crying out together
+to heaven and earth to welcome Him Who comes after in the bright shadow
+of the Name of the Lord; and the trumpets peal out for the last time,
+"Hosanna in the highest."
+
+Then a hush fell, and presently in the stillness came riding the great
+Personages who stand in heaven about the Throne; first, the Queen Mother
+herself, glorious within and without, moving in clothing of wrought gold,
+high above all others; then, the great Princes of the Blood Royal, who
+are admitted to drink of the King's own Cup, and sit beside Him on their
+thrones, Peter and Paul and the rest, with rugged faces and scarred
+hands; and with them great mitred figures, Linus, Cletus and Clement,
+with their companions.
+
+And then another space and a tingling silence; the crowds bow down like
+corn before the wind, the far-off trumpets are silent; and He comes--He
+comes!
+
+On He moves, treading under foot the laws He has made, yet borne up by
+them as on the Sea of Galilee; He Who inhabits eternity at an instant is
+made present; He Who transcends space is immanent in material kind; He
+Who never leaves the Father's side rests on His white linen carpet, held
+yet unconfined; in the midst of the little gold things and embroidery and
+candle-flames and lilies, while the fragrance of the herbs rises about
+Him. There rests the gracious King, before this bending group; the rest
+of the pageant dies into silence and nothingness outside the radiant
+circle of His Presence. There is His immediate priest-herald, who has
+marked out this halting-place for the Prince, bowing before Him, striving
+by gestures to interpret and fulfil the silence that words must always
+leave empty; here behind are the adoring human hearts, each looking with
+closed eyes into the Face of the Fairest of the children of men, each
+crying silently words of adoration, welcome and utter love.
+
+The moments pass; the court ceremonies are performed. The Virgins that
+follow the Lamb, Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha and the rest step forward
+smiling, and take their part; the Eternal Father is invoked again in the
+Son's own words; and at length the King, descending yet one further step
+of infinite humility, flings back the last vesture of His outward Royalty
+and casts Himself in a passion of haste and desire into the still and
+invisible depths of these two quivering hearts, made in His own Image,
+that lift themselves in an agony of love to meet Him....
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Meanwhile the Easter morning is deepening outside; the sun is rising
+above the yew hedge, and the dew flashes drop by drop into a diamond and
+vanishes; the thrush that stirred and murmured last night is pouring out
+his song; and the larks that rose into the moonlight are running to and
+fro in the long meadow grass. The tall slender lilies that have not been
+chosen to grace the sacramental Presence-Chamber, are at least in the
+King's own garden, where He walks morning and evening in the cool of the
+day; and waiting for those who will have seen Him face to face....
+
+And presently they come, the tall lad and his sister, silent and
+together, out into the radiant sunlight; and the joy of the morning and
+the singing thrush and the jewels of dew and the sweet swaying lilies are
+shamed and put to silence by the joy upon their faces and in their
+hearts.
+
+
+
+
+                               PART III
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                         THE COMING OF SPAIN
+
+
+The conflict between the Old Faith and the lusty young Nation went
+steadily forward after the Jesuit invasion; more and more priests poured
+into England; more and more were banished, imprisoned and put to death.
+The advent of Father Holt, the Jesuit, to Scotland in 1583 was a signal
+for a new outburst of Catholic feeling, which manifested itself not only
+in greater devotion to Religion, but, among the ill-instructed and
+impatient, in very questionable proceedings. In fact, from this time
+onward the Catholic cause suffered greatly from the division of its
+supporters into two groups; the religious and the political, as they may
+be named. The former entirely repudiated any desire or willingness to
+meddle with civil matters; its members desired to be both Catholics and
+Englishmen; serving the Pope in matters of Faith and Elizabeth in matters
+of civil life; but they suffered greatly from the indiscretions and
+fanaticism of the political group. The members of that party frankly
+regarded themselves as at war with an usurper and an heretic; and used
+warlike methods to gain their ends; plots against the Queen's life were
+set on foot; and their promoters were willing enough to die in defence of
+the cause. But the civil Government made the fatal mistake of not
+distinguishing between the two groups; again and again loyal Englishmen
+were tortured and hanged as traitors, because they shared their faith
+with conspirators.
+
+There was one question, however, that was indeed on the borderline,
+exceedingly difficult to answer in words, especially for scrupulous
+consciences; and that was whether they believed in the Pope's deposing
+power; and this question was adroitly and deliberately used by the
+Government in doubtful cases to ensure a conviction. But whether or not
+it was possible to frame a satisfactory answer in words, yet the accused
+were plain enough in their deeds; and when the Armada at length was
+launched in '88, there were no more loyal defenders of England than the
+persecuted Catholics. Even before this, however, there had appeared signs
+of reaction among the Protestants, especially against the torture and
+death of Campion and his fellows; and Lord Burghley in '83 attempted to
+quiet the people's resentment by his anonymous pamphlet, "Execution of
+Justice in England," to which Cardinal Allen presently replied.
+
+Ireland, which had been profoundly stirred by the military expedition
+from the continent in '80, at length was beaten and slashed into
+submission again; and the torture and execution of Hurley by martial law,
+which Elizabeth directed on account of his appointment to the See of
+Cashel, when the judges had pronounced there to be no case against him;
+and a massacre on the banks of the Moy in '86 of Scots who had come
+across as reinforcements to the Irish;--these were incidents in the black
+list of barbarities by which at last a sort of temporary quiet was
+brought to Ireland.
+
+In Scottish affairs, the tangle, unravelled even still, of which Mary
+Stuart was the centre, led at last to her death. Walsingham, with
+extraordinary skill, managed to tempt her into a dangerous
+correspondence, all of which he tapped on the way: he supplied to her in
+fact the very instrument--an ingeniously made beer-barrel--through which
+the correspondence was made possible, and, after reading all the letters,
+forwarded them to their several destinations. When all was ripe he
+brought his hand down on a group of zealots, to whose designs Mary was
+supposed to be privy; and after their execution, finally succeeded, in
+'87, in obtaining Elizabeth's signature to her cousin's death-warrant.
+The storm already raging against Elizabeth on the Continent, but fanned
+to fury by this execution, ultimately broke in the Spanish Armada in the
+following year.
+
+Meanwhile, at home, the affairs of the Church of England were far from
+prosperous. Puritanism was rampant; and a wail of dismay was evoked by
+the new demands of a Commission under Whitgift's guidance, in '82,
+whereby the Puritan divines were now called upon to assent to the Queen's
+Supremacy, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Prayer Book. In spite of the
+opposition, however, of Burghley and the Commons, Whitgift, who had by
+this time succeeded to Canterbury upon Grindal's death, remained firm;
+and a long and dreary dispute began, embittered further by the execution
+of Mr. Copping and Mr. Thacker in '83 for issuing seditious books in the
+Puritan cause. A characteristic action in this campaign was the issuing
+of a Puritan manifesto in '84, consisting of a brief, well-written
+pamphlet of a hundred and fifty pages under the title "A Learned
+Discourse of Ecclesiastical Government," making the inconsistent claim of
+desiring a return to the Primitive and Scriptural model, and at the same
+time of advocating an original scheme, "one not yet handled." It was
+practically a demand for the Presbyterian system of pastorate and
+government. To this Dr. Bridges replies with a tremendous tome of over
+fourteen hundred pages, discharged after three years of laborious toil;
+and dealing, as the custom then was, line by line, with the Puritan
+attack. To this in the following year an anonymous Puritan, under the
+name of Martin Marprelate, retorts with a brilliant and sparkling riposte
+addressed to "The right puissant and terrible priests, my clergy-masters
+of the Convocation-house," in which he mocks bitterly at the prelates,
+accusing them of Sabbath-breaking, time-serving, and popery,--calling one
+"dumb and duncetical," another "the veriest coxcomb that ever wore velvet
+cap," and summing them up generally as "wainscot-faced bishops," "proud,
+popish, presumptuous, profane paltry, pestilent, and pernicious
+prelates."
+
+The Archbishop had indeed a difficult team to drive; especially as his
+coadjutors were not wholly proof against Martin's jibes. In '84 his
+brother of York had been mixed up in a shocking scandal; in '85 the
+Bishop of Lichfield was accused of simony; Bishop Aylmer was continually
+under suspicion of avarice, dishonesty, vanity and swearing; and the
+Bench as a whole was universally reprobated as covetous, stingy and weak.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+In civil matters, England's relation with Spain was her most important
+concern. Bitter feeling had been growing steadily between the two
+countries ever since Drake's piracies in the Spanish dominions in
+America; and a gradually increasing fleet at Cadiz was the outward sign
+of it. Now the bitterness was deepened by the arrest of English ships in
+the Spanish ports in the early summer of '85, and the swift reprisals of
+Drake in the autumn; who intimidated and robbed important towns on the
+coast, such as Vigo, where his men behaved with revolting irreverence in
+the churches, and Santiago; and then proceeded to visit and spoil S.
+Domingo and Carthagena in the Indies.
+
+Again in '87 Drake obtained the leave of the Queen to harass Spain once
+more, and after robbing and burning all the vessels in Cadiz harbour, he
+stormed the forts at Faro, destroyed Armada stores at Corunna, and
+captured the great treasure-ship _San Felipe_.
+
+Elizabeth was no doubt encouraged in her apparent recklessness by the
+belief that with the Netherlands, which she had been compelled at last to
+assist, in a state of revolt, Spain would have little energy for
+reprisals upon England; but she grew more and more uneasy when news
+continued to arrive in England of the growing preparations for the
+Armada; France, too, was now so much involved with internal struggles, as
+the Protestant Henry of Navarre was now the heir to her Catholic throne,
+that efficacious intervention could no longer be looked for from that
+quarter, and it seemed at last as if the gigantic Southern power was
+about to inflict punishment upon the little northern kingdom which had
+insulted her with impunity so long.
+
+In the October of '87 certain news arrived in England of the gigantic
+preparations being made in Spain and elsewhere: and hearts began to beat,
+and tongues to clack, and couriers to gallop. Then as the months went by,
+and tidings sifted in, there was something very like consternation in the
+country. Men told one another of the huge armament that was on its way,
+the vast ships and guns--all bearing down on tiny England, like a bull on
+a terrier. They spoke of the religious fervour, like that of a crusade,
+that inspired the invasion, and was bringing the flower of the Spanish
+nobility against them: the superstitious contrasted their own _Lion_,
+_Revenge_, and _Elizabeth Jonas_ with the Spanish _San Felipe_, _San
+Matteo_, and _Our Lady of the Rosary_: the more practical thought with
+even deeper gloom of the dismal parsimony of the Queen, who dribbled out
+stores and powder so reluctantly, and dismissed her seamen at the least
+hint of delay.
+
+Yet, little by little, as midsummer came and went, beacons were gathering
+on every hill, ships were approaching efficiency, and troops assembling
+at Tilbury under the supremely incompetent command of Lord Leicester.
+
+Among the smaller seaports on the south coast, Rye was one of the most
+active and enthusiastic; the broad shallow bay was alive with
+fishing-boats, and the steep cobbled streets of the town were filled all
+day with a chattering exultant crowd, cheering every group of seamen that
+passed, and that spent long hours at the quay watching the busy life of
+the ships, and predicting the great things that should fall when the
+Spaniards encountered the townsfolk, should the Armada survive Drake's
+onslaught further west.
+
+About July the twentieth more definite news began to arrive. At least
+once a day a courier dashed in through the south-west gate, with news
+that all must hold themselves ready to meet the enemy by the end of the
+month; labour grew more incessant and excitement more feverish.
+
+About six o'clock on the evening of the twenty-ninth, as a long row of
+powder barrels was in process of shipping down on the quay, the men who
+were rolling them suddenly stopped and listened; the line of onlookers
+paused in their comments, and turned round. From the town above came an
+outburst of cries, followed by the crash of the alarm from the
+church-tower. In two minutes the quay was empty. Out of every passage
+that gave on to the main street poured excited men and women, some
+hysterically laughing, some swearing, some silent and white as they ran.
+For across the bay westwards, on a point beyond Winchelsea, in the still
+evening air rose up a stream of smoke shaped like a pine-tree, with a red
+smouldering root; and immediately afterwards in answer the Ypres tower
+behind the town was pouring out a thick drifting cloud that told to the
+watchers on Folkestone cliffs that the dreaded and longed-for foe was in
+sight of England.
+
+Then the solemn hours of waiting began to pass. Every day and night there
+were watchers, straining their eyes westwards in case the Armada should
+attempt to coast along England to force a landing anywhere, and
+southwards in case they should pass nearer the French coast on their way
+to join the Prince of Parma; but there was little to be seen over that
+wide ring of blue sea except single vessels, or now and again
+half-a-dozen in company, appearing and fading again on some unknown
+quest. The couriers that came in daily could not tell them much; only
+that there had been indecisive engagements; that the Spaniards had not
+yet attempted a landing anywhere; and that it was supposed that they
+would not do so until a union with the force in Flanders had been
+effected.
+
+And so four days of the following week passed; then on Thursday, August
+the fourth, within an hour or two after sunrise, the solemn booming of
+guns began far away to the south-west; but the hours passed; and before
+nightfall all was silent again.
+
+The suspense was terrible; all night long there were groups parading the
+streets, anxiously conjecturing, now despondently, now cheerfully.
+
+Then once again on the Friday morning a sudden clamour broke out in the
+town, and almost simultaneously a pinnace slipped out, spreading her
+wings and making for the open sea. A squadron of English ships had been
+sighted flying eastwards; and the pinnace was gone to get news. The ships
+were watched anxiously by thousands of eyes, and boats put out all along
+the coast to inquire; and within two or three hours the pinnace was back
+again in Rye harbour, with news that set bells ringing and men shouting.
+On Wednesday, the skipper reported, there had been an indecisive
+engagement during the dead calm that had prevailed in the Channel; a
+couple of Spanish store-vessels had been taken on the following morning,
+and a general action had followed, which again had been indecisive; but
+in which the English had hardly suffered at all, while it was supposed
+that great havoc had been wrought upon the enemy.
+
+But the best of the news was that the Rye contingent was to set sail at
+once, and unite with the English fleet westward of Calais by mid-day on
+Saturday. The squadron that had passed was under the command of the
+Admiral himself, who was going to Dover for provisions and ammunition,
+and would return to his fleet before evening.
+
+Before many hours were passed, Rye harbour was almost empty, and hundreds
+of eyes were watching the ships that carried their husbands and sons and
+lovers out into the pale summer haze that hung over the coast of France;
+while a few sharp-eyed old mariners on points of vantage muttered to one
+another that in the haze there was a patch of white specks to be seen
+which betokened the presence of some vast fleet.
+
+That night the sun set yellow and stormy, and by morning the
+cobble-stones of Rye were wet and dripping with storm-showers, and a
+swell was beginning to lap and sob against the harbour walls.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                         MEN OF WAR AND PEACE
+
+
+The following days passed in terrible suspense for all left behind at
+Rye. Every morning all the points of vantage were crowded; the Ypres
+tower itself was never deserted day or night; and all the sharpest eyes
+in the town were bent continually out over that leaden rolling sea that
+faded into haze and storm-cloud in the direction of the French coast. But
+there was nothing to be seen on that waste of waters but the single boats
+that flew up channel or laboured down it against the squally west wind,
+far out at sea. Once or twice fishing-boats put in at Rye; but their
+reports were so contradictory and uncertain that they increased rather
+than allayed the suspense and misery. Now it was a French boat that
+reported the destruction of the _Triumph_; now an Englishman that swore
+to having seen Drake kill Medina-Sidonia with his own hand on his poop;
+but whatever the news might be, the unrest and excitement ran higher and
+higher. St. Clare's chapel in the old parish church of St. Nicholas was
+crowded every morning at five o'clock by an excited congregation of
+women, who came to beg God's protection on their dear ones struggling out
+there somewhere towards the dawn with those cruel Southern monsters.
+Especially great was the crowd on the Tuesday morning following the
+departure of the ships; for all day on Monday from time to time came a
+far-off rolling noise from the direction of Calais; which many declared
+to be thunder, with an angry emphasis that betrayed their real opinion.
+
+When they came out of church that morning, and were streaming down to the
+quay as usual to see if any news had come in during the night, a seaman
+called to them from a window that a French vessel was just entering the
+harbour.
+
+When the women arrived at the water's edge they found a good crowd
+already assembled on the quay, watching the ship beat in against the
+north-west wind, which had now set in; but she aroused no particular
+comment as she was a well-known boat plying between Boulogne and Rye; and
+by seven o'clock she was made fast to the quay.
+
+There were the usual formalities, stricter than usual during war, to be
+gone through before the few passengers were allowed to land: but all was
+in order; the officers left the boat, and the passengers came up the
+plank, the crowd pressing forward as they came, and questioning them
+eagerly. No, there was no certain news, said an Englishman at last, who
+looked like a lawyer; it was said at Boulogne the night before that there
+had been an engagement further up beyond the Straits; they had all heard
+guns; and it was reported by the last cruiser who came in before the boat
+left that a Spanish galleasse had run aground and had been claimed by M.
+Gourdain, the governor of Calais; but probably, added the shrewd-eyed
+man, that was just a piece of their dirty French pride. The crowd smiled
+ruefully; and a French officer of the boat who was standing by the
+gangway scowled savagely, as the lawyer passed on with a demure face.
+
+Then there was a pause in the little stream of passengers; and then, out
+of the tiny door that led below decks, walking swiftly, and carrying a
+long cloak over her arm, came Isabel Norris, in a grey travelling dress,
+followed by Anthony and a couple of servants. The crowd fell back for the
+lady, who passed straight up through them; but one or two of the men
+called out for news to Anthony. He shook his head cheerfully at them.
+
+"I know no more than that gentleman," he said, nodding towards the
+lawyer; and then followed Isabel; and together they made their way up to
+the inn.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony was a good deal changed in the last six years; his beard and
+moustache were well grown; and he had a new look of gravity in his brown
+eyes; when he had smiled and shaken his head at the eager crowd just now,
+showing his white regular teeth, he looked as young as ever; but the
+serious look fell on his face again, as he followed Isabel up the steep
+little cobbled slope in his buff dress and plumed hat.
+
+There was not so much apparent change in Isabel; she was a shade graver
+too, her walk a little slower and more dignified, and her lips, a little
+thinner, had a line of strength in them that was new; and even now as she
+was treading English ground again for the first time for six years, the
+look of slight abstraction in her eyes that is often the sign of a strong
+inner life, was just a touch deeper than it used to be.
+
+They went up together with scarcely a word; and asked for a private room
+and dinner in two hours' time; and a carriage and horses for the servants
+to be ready at noon. The landlord, who had met them at the door, shook
+his head.
+
+"The private room, sir, and the dinner--yes, sir--but the horses----" and
+he spread his hands out deprecatingly. "There is not one in the stall,"
+he added.
+
+Anthony considered a moment.
+
+"Well, what do you propose? We are willing to stay a day or two, if you
+think that by then----"
+
+"Ah," said the landlord, "to-morrow is another matter. I expect two of my
+carriages home to-night, sir, from London; but the horses will not be
+able to travel till noon to-morrow."
+
+"That will do," said Anthony; and he followed Isabel upstairs.
+
+It was very strange to them both to be back in England after so long.
+They had settled down at Douai with the Maxwells; but, almost immediately
+on their arrival, Mistress Margaret was sent for by her Superior to the
+house of her Order at Brussels; and Lady Maxwell was left alone with
+Isabel in a house in the town; for Anthony was in the seminary.
+
+Then, in '86 Lady Maxwell had died, quite suddenly. Isabel herself had
+found her at her prie-dieu in the morning, still in her evening dress;
+she was leaning partly against the wall; her wrinkled old hands were
+clasped tightly together on a little ivory crucifix, on the top of the
+desk; and her snow-white head, with the lace drooping from it like a
+bridal veil, was bowed below them. Isabel, who had not dared to move her,
+had sent instantly for a little French doctor, who had thrown up his
+hands in a kind of devout ecstasy at that wonderful old figure, rigid in
+an eternal prayer. The two tall tapers she had lighted eight hours before
+were still just alight beside her, and looked strange in the morning
+sunshine.
+
+"Pendant ses oraisons! pendant ses oraisons!" he murmured over and over
+again; and then had fallen on his knees and kissed the drooping lace of
+her sleeve.
+
+"Priez pour moi, madame," he whispered to the motionless figure.
+
+And so the old Catholic who had suffered so much had gone to her rest.
+The fact that her son James had been living in the College during her
+four years' stay at Douai had been perhaps the greatest possible
+consolation to her for being obliged to be out of England; for she saw
+him almost daily; and it was he who sang her Requiem. Isabel had then
+gone to live with other friends in Douai, until Anthony had been ordained
+priest in the June of '88, and was ready to take her to England; and now
+the two were bound for Stanfield, where Anthony was to act as chaplain
+for the present, as Mr. Buxton had predicted so long before. Old Mr.
+Blake had died in the spring of the year, still disapproving of his
+patron's liberal notions, and Mr. Buxton had immediately sent a special
+messenger all the way to Douai to secure Anthony's services; and had
+insisted moreover that Isabel should accompany her brother. They intended
+however to call at the Dower House on the way, which had been left under
+the charge of old Mrs. Carroll; and renew the memories of their own dear
+home.
+
+They talked little at dinner; and only of general matters, their journey,
+the Armada, their joy at getting home again; for they had been expressly
+warned by their friends abroad against any indiscreet talk even when they
+thought themselves alone, and especially in the seaports, where so
+constant a watch was kept for seminary priests. The presence of Isabel,
+however, was the greatest protection to Anthony; as it was almost unknown
+that a priest should travel with any but male companions.
+
+Then suddenly, as they were ending dinner, a great clamour broke out in
+the town below them; a gun was fired somewhere; and footsteps began to
+rush along the narrow street outside. Anthony ran to the window and
+called to know what was the matter; but no one paid any attention to him;
+and he presently sat down again in despair, and with one or two wistful
+looks.
+
+"I will go immediately," he said to Isabel, "and bring you word."
+
+A moment after a servant burst into the room.
+
+"It is a Spanish ship, sir," he said, "a prize--rounding Dungeness."
+
+In the afternoon, when the first fierce excitement was over, Anthony went
+down to the quay. He did not particularly wish to attract attention, and
+so he kept himself in the background somewhat; but he had a good view of
+her as she lay moored just off the quay, especially when one of the town
+guard who had charge of the ropes that kept the crowd back, seeing a
+gentleman in the crowd, beckoned him through.
+
+"Your honour will wish to see the prize?" he said, in hopes of a trifle
+for himself; "make way there for the gentleman."
+
+Anthony thought it better under these circumstances to accept the
+invitation, so he gave the man something, and slipped through. On the
+quay was a pile of plunder from the ship: a dozen chests carved and
+steel-clamped stood together; half-a-dozen barrels of powder; the ship's
+bell rested amid a heap of rich clothes and hangings; a silver crucifix
+and a couple of lamps with their chains lay tumbled on one side; and a
+parson was examining a finely carved mahogany table that stood near.
+
+He looked up at Anthony.
+
+"For the church, sir," he said cheerfully. "I shall make application to
+her Grace."
+
+Anthony smiled at him.
+
+"A holy revenge, sir," he said.
+
+The ship herself had once been a merchantman brig; so much Anthony could
+tell, though he knew little of seamanship; but she had been armed heavily
+with deep bulwarks of timber, pierced for a dozen guns on each broadside.
+Now, however, she was in a terrible condition. The solid bulwarks were
+rent and shattered, as indeed was her whole hull; near the waterline were
+nailed sheets of lead, plainly in order to keep the water from entering
+the shot-holes; she had only one mast; and that was splintered in more
+than one place; a spar had been rigged up on to the stump of the
+bowsprit. The high poop such as distinguished the Spanish vessels was in
+the same deplorable condition; as well as the figure-head, which
+represented a beardless man with a halo behind his head, and which bore
+the marks of fierce hacks as well as of shot.
+
+Anthony read the name,--the _San Juan da Cabellas_.
+
+From the high quay too he could see down on to the middle decks, and
+there was the most shocking sight of all, for the boards and the
+mast-stumps and the bulwarks and the ship's furniture were all alike
+splashed with blood, some of the deeper pools not even yet dry. It was
+evident that the _San Juan_ had not yielded easily.
+
+Presently Anthony saw an officer approaching, and not wishing to be led
+into conversation slipped away again through the crowd to take Isabel the
+news.
+
+The two remained quietly upstairs the rest of the afternoon, listening to
+the singing and the shouting in the streets, and watching from their
+window the groups that swung and danced to and fro in joy at Rye's
+contribution to the defeat of the invaders. When the dusk fell the noise
+was louder than ever as the men began to drink more deep, and torches
+were continually tossing up and down the steep cobbled streets; the din
+reached its climax about half-past nine, when the main body of the
+revellers passed up towards the inn, and, as Anthony saw from the window,
+finally entered through the archway below; and then all grew tolerably
+quiet. Presently Isabel said that she would go to bed, but just before
+she left the room, the servant again came in.
+
+"If you please, sir, Lieutenant Raxham, of the _Seahorse_, is telling the
+tale of the capture of the Spanish ship; and the landlord bid me come and
+tell you."
+
+Anthony glanced at Isabel, who nodded at him.
+
+"Yes; go," she said, "and come up and tell me the news afterwards, if it
+is not very late."
+
+When Anthony came downstairs he found to his annoyance that the place of
+honour had been reserved for him in a tall chair next to the landlord's
+at the head of the table. The landlord rose to meet his guest.
+
+"Sit here, sir," he said. "I am glad you have come. And now, Mr.
+Raxham----"
+
+Anthony looked about him with some dismay at this extreme publicity. The
+room was full from end to end. They were chiefly soldiers who sat at the
+table--heavy-looking rustics from Hawkhurst, Cranbrook and Appledore, in
+brigantines and steel caps, who had been sent in by the magistrates to
+the nearest seaport to assist in the defence of the coast--a few of them
+wore corselets with almain rivets and carried swords, while the
+pike-heads of the others rose up here and there above the crowd. The rest
+of the room was filled with the townsmen of Rye--those who had been
+retained for the defence of the coast, as well as others who for any
+physical reason could not serve by sea or land. There was an air of
+extraordinary excitement in the room. The faces of the most stolid were
+transfigured, for they were gathered to hear of the struggle their own
+dear England was making; the sickening pause of those months of waiting
+had ended at last; the huge southern monster had risen up over the edge
+of the sea, and the panting little country had flown at his throat and
+grappled him; and now they were hearing the tale of how deep her fangs
+had sunk.
+
+The crowd laughed and applauded and drew its breath sharply, as one man;
+and the silence now and then was startling as the young officer told his
+story; although he had few gifts of rhetoric, except a certain vivid
+vocabulary. He himself was a lad of eighteen or so, with a pleasant
+reckless face, now flushed with drink and excitement, and sparkling eyes;
+he was seated in a chair upon the further end of the table, so that all
+could hear his story; and he had a cup of huff-cup in his left hand as he
+talked, leaving his right hand free to emphasise his points and slap his
+leg in a clumsy sort of oratory. His tale was full of little similes, at
+which his audience nodded their heads now and then, approvingly. He had
+apparently already begun his story, for when Anthony had taken his seat
+and silence had been obtained, he went straight on without any further
+introduction.
+
+The landlord leaned over to Anthony. "The _San Juan_," he whispered
+behind his hot hairy hand, and nodded at him with meaning eyes.
+
+"And every time they fired over us," went on the lieutenant, "and we
+fired into them; and the only damage they did us was their muskets in the
+tops. They killed Tom Dane like that"--there was a swift hiss of breath
+from the room; but the officer went straight on--"shot him through the
+back as he bent over his gun; and wounded old Harry and a score more; but
+all the while, lads, we were a-pounding at them with the broadsides as we
+came round, and raking them with the demi-cannon in the poop,
+until--well; go you and see the craft as she lies at the quay if you
+would know what we did. I tell you, as we came at her once towards the
+end, I saw that she was bleeding through her scuppers like a pig, from
+the middle deck. They were all packed up there together--sailors and
+soldiers and a priest or two; and scarce a ball could pass between the
+poop and the forecastle without touching flesh."
+
+The lad stopped a moment and took a pull at his cup, and a murmur of talk
+broke out in the room. Anthony was surprised at his accent and manner of
+speaking, and heard afterwards that he was the son of the parson at one
+of the inland villages, and had had an education. In a moment he went on.
+
+"Well--it would be about noon, just before the Admiral came up from
+Calais, that the old _Seahorse_ was lost. We came at the dons again as we
+had done before, only closer than ever; and just as the captain gave the
+word to put her about, a ball from one of their guns which they had
+trained down on us, cut old Dick Kemp in half at the helm, and broke the
+tiller to splinters."
+
+"Old Dick?" said a man's voice out of the reeking crowd, "Old Dick?"
+
+There was a murmur round him, bidding him hold his tongue; and the lad
+went on.
+
+"Well, we drifted nearer and nearer. There was nought to do but to bang
+at them; and that we did, by God--and to board her if we touched. Well, I
+worked my saker, and saw little else--for the smoke was like a black
+sea-fog; and the noise fit to crack your ears. Mine sing yet with it; the
+captain was bawling from the poop, and there were a dozen pikemen ready
+below; and then on a sudden came the crash; and I looked up and there was
+the Spaniards' decks above us, and the poop like a tower, with a grinning
+don or two looking down; and there was I looking up the muzzle of a
+culverin. I skipped towards the poop, shouting to the men; and the dons
+fired their broadside as I went.--God save us from that din! But I knew
+the old _Seahorse_ was done this time--the old ship lurched and shook as
+the balls tore through her and broke her back; and there was such a yell
+as you'll never hear this side of hell. Well--I was on the poop by now,
+and the men after me; for you see the poop of the _Seahorse_ was as high
+as the middle deck of the Spaniard, and we must board from there or not
+at all. Well, lads, there was the captain before me. He had fought cool
+till then, as cool as a parson among his roses, with never an oath from
+his mouth--but now he was as scarlet as a poppy, and his eyes were like
+blue fire, and his mouth jabbered and foamed; he was so hot, you see, at
+the loss of his ship. He was dancing to and fro waiting while the poop
+swung round on the tide; and the old craft plunged deeper in every wave
+that lifted her, but he cared no more for that nor for the musket-balls
+from the tops, nor for the brown grinning devils who shook their pikes at
+him from the decks, than--than a mad dog cares for a shower of leaves;
+but he stamped there and cursed them and damned them as they laughed at
+him; and then in a moment the poop touched.
+
+"Well, lads--" and the lieutenant set his cup down on the table, clapped
+his hands on his knees, laughed shortly and nervously once or twice, and
+looked round. "Well, lads, I have never seen the like. The captain went
+for them like a wild cat; one step on the rail and the next among them;
+and was gone like a stone into water"--and the lad clapped his hand on
+his thigh. "I saw one face slit up from chin to eye; and another split
+across like an apple; and then we were after him. The men were mad,
+too--what was left of us; and we poured up on to the decks and left the
+old _Seahorse_ to die. Well, we had our work before us--but it was no
+good. The dons could do nothing; I was after the captain as he went
+through the pack and came out just behind him; there were half a dozen of
+them down now; and the noise and the foreign oaths went up like smoke;
+and the captain himself was bleeding down one side of his face and
+grunting as he cut and stabbed; and I had had a knife through the arm;
+but he went up on to the poop; and as I followed, the Spaniards broke and
+threw down their arms--they saw 'twas no use, you see. When we reached
+the poop-stairs an officer in a blue coat came forward jabbering some
+jargon; but the captain would have no parley with him, but flung his dag
+clean into the man's face, and over he went backwards--with his damned
+high heels in the air."
+
+There was a sudden murmur of laughter from the room; Anthony glanced off
+the lieutenant's grinning ruddy face for a moment, and saw the rows of
+listening faces all wrinkled with mirth.
+
+"Well," went on the lad, "up went the captain, and I after him. Then
+there came across the deck, very slow and stately, the Spanish captain
+himself, in a fine laced coat and a plumed hat, and he was holding out
+his sword by the blade and bowed as we ran towards him, and began some
+damned foreign nonsense, with his _Señor_--but the captain would have
+none o' that, I tell you he was like Tom o' Bedlam now--so as the Señor
+grinned at him with his monkey face and bowed and wagged, the captain
+fetched him a slash across the cheek with his sword that cut up into his
+head; and that don went spinning across the poop like a morris-man and
+brought up against the rail, and then down he came," and the lad dashed
+his hand on his thigh again--"as dead as mutton."
+
+Again came a louder gust of laughter from the room. Anthony half rose in
+his chair, and then sat down again.
+
+"Well," said the lad, "and that was not all. Down he raged again to the
+decks and I behind him--I tell you, it was like a butcher's shop--but it
+was quieter now--the fighting was over--and the Spaniards were all run
+below, except half-a-dozen in the tops; looking down like young rooks at
+an archer. There had been a popish priest too with his crucifix in one
+hand and his god-almighty in the other, over a dying man as we came up;
+but as we came down there he lay in his black gown with a hole through
+his heart and his crucifix gone. One of the lads had got it no doubt.
+Well, the captain brought up at the main mast. 'God's blood,' he bawled,
+'where are the brown devils got to?' Some one told him, and pointed down
+the hatch. Well, then I turned sick with my wound and the smell of the
+place and all; and I knew nothing more till I found myself sitting on a
+dead don, with the captain holding me up and pouring a cordial down my
+throat."
+
+Then talk and laughter broke out in the audience; but the landlord held
+up his hand for silence.
+
+"And what of the others?" he shouted.
+
+"Dead meat too," said the lad--"the captain went down with a dozen or
+more and hunted them out and finished them. There was one, Dick told me
+afterwards," and the lieutenant gave a cackle of mirth, "that they hunted
+twice round the ship before he jumped over yelling to some popish saint
+to help him; but it seems he was deaf, like the old Baal that parson
+tells of o' Sundays. The dirty swine to run like that! Well, he's got his
+bellyful now of the salt water that he came so far to see. And then the
+captain with his own hands trained a robinet that was on the poop on to
+the tops; and down the birds came, one by one; for their powder up there
+was all shot off."
+
+"And the _Seahorse_?" said the landlord again.
+
+There fell a dead silence: all in the room knew that the ship was lost,
+but it was terrible to hear it again. The lad's face broke into lines of
+grief, and he spoke huskily.
+
+"Gone down with the dead and wounded; and the rest of the fleet a mile
+away."
+
+Then the lieutenant went on to describe how he himself had been deputed
+to bring the _San Juan_ into port with the wounded on board, while the
+captain and the rest of the crew by Drake's orders attached themselves to
+various vessels that were short-handed, and how the English fleet had
+followed what was left of the Spaniards when the fight ended at sunset,
+up towards the North Sea.
+
+When he finished his story there was a tremendous outburst of cheering
+and hammering upon the table, and the feet and the pike-butts thundered
+on the floor, and a name was cried again and again as the cups were
+emptied.
+
+"God save her Grace and old England!" yelled a slim smooth-faced archer
+from Appledore.
+
+"God send the dons and all her foes to hell!" roared a burly pikeman with
+his cup in the air. Then the room shook again as the toasts were drunk
+with applauding feet and hands.
+
+Anthony turned to the landlord, who had just ceased thumping with his
+great red fists on the table.
+
+"What was the captain's name?" he asked, when a slight lull came.
+
+"Maxwell," said the crimson-faced man. "Hubert Maxwell--one of Drake's
+own men."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When Anthony came upstairs he heard his name called through the door, and
+went in to Isabel's room to find her sitting up in bed in the gloom of
+the summer night; the party below had broken up, and all was quiet except
+for the far-off shouts and hoots of cheerful laughter from the dispersing
+groups down among the narrow streets.
+
+"Well?" she said, as he came in and stood in the doorway.
+
+"It is just the story of the prize," he said, "and it seems that Hubert
+had the taking of it."
+
+There was silence a moment. Anthony could see her face, a motionless pale
+outline, and her arms clasped round her knees as she sat up in bed.
+
+"Hubert?" she asked in an even voice.
+
+"Yes, Hubert."
+
+There was silence a moment.
+
+"Well?" she said again.
+
+"He is safe," said Anthony, "and fought gallantly. I will tell you more
+to-morrow."
+
+"Ah!" said Isabel softly; and then lay down again.
+
+"Good-night, Anthony."
+
+"Good-night."
+
+But Anthony dared not tell her the details next day, after all.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was still a difficulty about the horses; they had not arrived until
+the Wednesday morning, and were greatly exhausted by a long and
+troublesome journey; so the travellers consented to postpone their
+journey for yet one more day. The weather, which had been thickening,
+grew heavier still in the afternoon, and great banks of clouds were
+rising out of the west. Anthony started out about four o'clock for a walk
+along the coast; and, making a long round in the direction of Lydd, did
+not finally return until about seven. As he came in at the north-east of
+the town he noticed how empty the streets were, and passed on down in the
+direction of the quay. As he turned down the steep street into the
+harbour groups began to pour up past him, laughing and exclaiming; and in
+a moment more came Isabel walking alone. He looked at her anxiously, for
+he saw something had happened. Her quiet face was lit up with some
+interior emotion, and her mouth was trembling.
+
+"The Armada is routed," she said; "and I have seen Hubert."
+
+The two turned back together and walked silently up to the inn. There she
+told him the story. She had been told that Captain Maxwell was come in
+the _Elizabeth_, for provisions for Lord Howard Seymour's squadron, to
+which his new command was attached; and that he was even now in harbour.
+At that she had gone straight down alone.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" she cried, "you know how it is with me. I could not help
+it. I am not ashamed of it. God Almighty knows all, and is not wrath with
+me. So I went down and was in the crowd as he came down again with the
+mayor, Mr. Hamon; we all made way for them, and the men cheered
+themselves scarlet; but he came down cool and quiet; you know his
+way--with his eyes half shut; and--and--he was so brown; and he looks
+sad--and he had a great plaister on the left temple. And then he saw me."
+
+Isabel sprang up, and came up to Anthony and took his hands. "Oh!
+Anthony; I was very happy then; because he took off his cap and bowed;
+and his face was all lighted; and he took my hand and kissed it--and then
+made Mr. Hamon known to me. The crowd laughed and said things--but I did
+not care; and he soon silenced them, he looked round so fiercely; and
+then I went on board with him--he would have it so--and he showed us
+everything--and we sat a little in the cabin; and he told me of his wife
+and child. She is the daughter of a Plymouth minister; he knew her when
+he was with Drake; and he told me all about her, so you see----" Isabel
+broke off; and sat down in the high window seat. "And then he asked me
+about you; and I said you were here; and that we were going to stay a
+little while with Mr. Buxton of Stanfield--you see I knew we could trust
+him; and Mr. Hamon was in the passage just then looking at the guns; and
+then a sailor came in to say that all was ready; and so we came away. But
+it was so good to see him again; and to know that he was so happy."
+
+Anthony looked at his sister in astonishment; her quiet manner was gone,
+and she was talking again almost like an excited child; and so happily.
+It was very strange, he thought. He sat down beside her.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" she said, "do you understand? I love him dearly still; and
+his wife and child too. God bless them all and keep them!"
+
+The mystery was still deep to him; and he feared to say what he should
+not; so he kissed Isabel silently; and the two sat there together and
+looked out over the crowding red roofs to the glowing western sky across
+the bay below them.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                             HOME-COMING
+
+
+It was a stormy summer evening as the brother and sister rode up between
+the last long hills that led to Great Keynes. A south-west wind had been
+rising all day, that same wind that was now driving the ruined Armada up
+into the fierce North Sea, with the fiercer men behind to bar the return.
+But here, twenty miles inland, with the high south-downs to break the
+gale, the riders were in comparative quiet, though the great trees
+overhead tossed their heavy rustling heads as the gusts struck them now
+and again.
+
+The party had turned off, as the dusk was falling, from the main-road
+into bridle-paths that they knew well, and were now approaching the
+village through the water meadows on the south-east side along a ride
+that would bring them, round the village, direct to the Dower House. In
+the gloom Anthony could make out the tall reeds, and the loosestrife and
+willowherb against them, that marked the course of the stream where he
+had caught trout, as a boy; and against the western sky, as he turned in
+his saddle, rose up the high windy hills where he had hawked with Hubert
+so many years before. It was a strange thought to him as he rode along
+that his very presence here in his own country was an act of high treason
+by the law lately passed, and that every day he lived here must be a day
+of danger.
+
+For Isabel, too, it was strange to be riding up again towards the
+battlefield of her desires--that battlefield where she had lived for
+years in such childish faith and peace without a suspicion of the forces
+that were lurking beneath her own quiet nature. But to both of them the
+sense of home-coming was stronger than all else--that strange passion for
+a particular set of inanimate things--or, at the most, for an association
+of ideas--that has no parallel in human emotions; and as they rode up the
+darkening valley and the lights of the high windows of the Hall began to
+show over the trees on their right, Anthony forgot his treason and Isabel
+her conflicts, and both felt a lump rise in the throat, and their hearts
+begin to beat quicker with a strange pleasurable pulse, and to Isabel's
+eyes at least there rose up great tears of happiness and content; neither
+dared speak, but both looked eagerly about at the pool where the Mayflies
+used to dance, at the knoll where the pigeons nested, at the little low
+bridge beneath which their inch-long boats used to slide sideways into
+darkness, and the broad marshy flats where the gorgeous irises grew.
+
+"How the trees have grown!" said Anthony at last, with an effort; "I
+cannot see the lights from the house."
+
+"Mrs. Carroll will have made ready the first-floor rooms then, on the
+south."
+
+"I am sorry they are not our own," said Anthony.
+
+"Ah, look! there is the dovecote," cried Isabel.
+
+They were passing up now behind the farm buildings; and directly
+afterwards came round in front of the little walled garden to the west of
+the house.
+
+There was a sudden exclamation from Anthony; and Isabel stared in silent
+dismay. The old house rose up before them with its rows of square windows
+against the night sky, dark. There was not a glimmer anywhere; even Mrs.
+Carroll's own room on the south was dark. They reined their horses in and
+stood a moment.
+
+"Oh, Anthony, Anthony!" cried Isabel suddenly, "what is it? Is there no
+one there?"
+
+Anthony shook his head; and then put his tired beast to a shambling trot
+with Isabel silent again with weariness and disappointment behind him.
+They passed along outside the low wall, turned the corner of the house
+and drew up at the odd little doorway in the angle at the back of the
+house. The servants had drawn up behind them, and now pressed up to hold
+their horses; and the brother and sister slipped off and went towards the
+door. Anthony passed under the little open porch and put his hand out to
+the door; it was quite dark underneath the porch, and he felt further and
+further, and yet there was no door; his foot struck the step. He felt his
+way to the doorposts and groped for the door; but still there was none;
+he could feel the panelling of the lobby inside the doorway, and that was
+all. He drew back, as one would draw back from a dead face on which one
+had laid a hand in the dark.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" said Isabel again, "what is it?" She was still outside.
+
+"Have you a light?" said Anthony hoarsely to the servants.
+
+The man nearest him bent and fumbled in the saddle-bags, and after what
+seemed an interminable while kindled a little bent taper and handed it to
+him. As he went towards the porch shading it with his hand, Isabel sprang
+past him and went before; and then, as the light fell through the
+doorway, stopped in dead and bewildered silence.
+
+The door was lying on the floor within, shattered and splintered.
+
+Anthony stepped beside her, and she turned and clung to his arm, and a
+sob or two made itself heard. Then they looked about them. The banisters
+above them were smashed, and like a cataract, down the stairs lay a
+confused heap of crockery, torn embroidery and clothes, books, and broken
+furniture.
+
+Anthony's hand shook so much that the shadows of the broken banisters
+waved on the wall above like thin exulting dancers.
+
+Suddenly Anthony started.
+
+"Mrs. Carroll," he exclaimed, and he darted upstairs past the ruins into
+her two rooms halfway up the flight; and in a minute or two was back with
+Isabel.
+
+"She has escaped," he said in a low voice; and then the two stood looking
+about them silently again. The door leading to the cellars on the left
+was broken too; and fragments of casks and bottles lay about the steps;
+the white wall was splashed with drink, and there was a smell of spirits
+in the air. Evidently the stormers had thought themselves worthy of their
+hire.
+
+"Come," he said again; and leaving the entrance lobby, the two passed to
+the hall-door and pushed that open and looked. There was the same furious
+confusion there; the tapestry was lying tumbled and rent on the
+floor--the high oak mantelpiece was shattered, and doleful cracks and
+splinters in the panelling all round showed how mad the attack had been;
+one of the pillars of the further archway was broken clean off, and the
+brickwork showed behind; the pictures had been smashed and added to the
+heap of wrecked furniture and broken glass in the middle.
+
+"Come," he said once more; and the two passed silently through the broken
+archway, and going up the other flight of stairs, gradually made the
+round of the house. Everywhere it was the same, except in the servants'
+attics, where, apparently, the mob had not thought it worth while to go.
+
+Isabel's own room was the most pitiable of all; the windows had only the
+leaden frames left, and those bent and battered; the delicate panelling
+was scarred and split by the shower of stones that had poured in through
+the window and that now lay in all parts of the room. A painting of her
+mother that had hung over her bed was now lying face downwards on the
+floor. Isabel turned it over silently; a stone had gone through the face;
+and it had been apparently slit too by some sharp instrument. Even the
+slender oak bed was smashed in the centre, as if half a dozen men had
+jumped upon it at once; and the little prie-dieu near the window had been
+deliberately hacked in half. Isabel looked at it all with wide startled
+eyes and parted lips; and then suddenly sank down on the wrecked bed
+where she had hoped to sleep that night, and began to sob like a child.
+
+"Ah! I did think--I did think----" she began.
+
+Anthony stooped and tried to lift her.
+
+"Come, my darling," he said, "is not this a high honour? _Qui relinquit
+domos!_"
+
+"Oh! why have they done it?" sobbed Isabel. "What harm have we done
+them?" and she began to wail. She was thoroughly over-tired and
+over-wrought; and Anthony could not find it in his heart to blame her;
+but he spoke again bravely.
+
+"We are Catholics," he said; "that is why they have done it. Do not throw
+away this grace that our Lord has given us; embrace it and make it
+yours."
+
+It was the priest that was speaking now; and Isabel turned her face and
+looked at him; and then got up and hid her face on his shoulder.
+
+"Oh, Anthony, help me!" she said; and so stood there, quiet.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He came down presently to the servants, while Isabel went upstairs to
+prepare the rooms in the attics; for it was impossible for them to ride
+further that night; so they settled to sleep there, and stable the
+horses; and to ride on early the next day, and be out of the village
+before the folks were about. Anthony gave directions to the servants, who
+were Catholics too, and explained in a word or two what had happened; and
+bade them come up to the house as soon as they had fed and watered the
+beasts; meanwhile he took the saddle-bags indoors and spread out their
+remaining provisions in one of the downstairs rooms; and soon Isabel
+joined him.
+
+"I have made up five beds," she said, and her voice and lips were steady,
+and her eyes grave and serene again.
+
+The five supped together in the wrecked kitchen, a fine room on the east
+of the house, supported by a great oak pillar to which the horses of
+guests were sometimes attached when the stable was full.
+
+Isabel managed to make a fire and to boil some soup; but they hung thick
+curtains across the shattered windows, and quenched the fire as soon as
+the soup was made, for fear that either the light or the smoke from the
+chimney should arouse attention.
+
+When supper was over, and the two men-servants and Isabel's French maid
+were washing up in the scullery, Isabel suddenly turned to Anthony as
+they sat together near the fireplace.
+
+"I had forgotten," she said, "what we arranged as we rode up. I must go
+and tell her still."
+
+Anthony looked at her steadily a moment.
+
+"God keep you," he said.
+
+She kissed him and took her riding-cloak, drew the hood over her head,
+and went out into the dark.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was with the keenest relief that, half an hour later, Anthony heard
+her footstep again in the red-tiled hall outside. The servants were gone
+upstairs by now, and the house was quiet. She came in, and sat by him
+again and took his hand.
+
+"Thank God I went," she said. "I have left her so happy."
+
+"Tell me all," said Anthony.
+
+"I went through the garden," said Isabel, "but came round to the front of
+the house so that they might not think I came from here. When the servant
+came to the door--he was a stranger, and a Protestant no doubt--I said at
+once that I brought news of Mr. Maxwell from Rye; and he took me straight
+in and asked me to come in while he fetched her woman. Then her woman
+came out and took me upstairs, up into Lady Maxwell's old room; and there
+she was lying in bed under the great canopy. Oh, Anthony, she is so
+pretty! her golden hair was lying out all over the pillow, and her face
+is so sweet. She cried out when I came in, and lifted herself on her
+elbow; so I just said at once, 'He is safe and well'; and then she went
+off into sobs and laughter; so that I had to go and soothe her--her woman
+was so foolish and helpless; and very soon she was quiet: and then she
+called me her darling, and she kissed me again and again; and told the
+woman to go and leave us together; and then she lifted the sheet; and
+showed me the face of a little child. Oh Anthony; Hubert's child and
+hers, the second, born on Tuesday--only think of that. 'Mercy, I was
+going to call her,' she said, 'if I had not heard by to-morrow, but now I
+shall call her Victory.'"
+
+Anthony looked quickly at his sister, with a faint smile in his eyes.
+
+"And what did you say?" he asked.
+
+Isabel smiled outright; but her eyes were bright with tears too.
+
+"'You have guessed,' she said. 'Yes,' I said, 'call her Mercy all the
+same,' and she kissed me again, and cried, and said that she would. And
+then I told her all about Hubert; and about his little wound; and how
+well he looked; and how all the fighting was most likely over; and what
+his cabin looked like. And then she suddenly guessed who I was, and asked
+me; and I could not deny it, you know; but she promised not to tell. Then
+she told me all about the house here; and how she was afraid Hubert had
+said something impatient about people who go to foreign parts and leave
+their country to be attacked, 'But you know he did not really mean it,'
+she said; and of course he did not. Well, the people had remembered that,
+and it spread and spread; and when the news of the Armada came last week,
+a mob came over from East Grinsted, and they sat drinking and drinking in
+the village; and of course Grace could not go out to them; and all the
+old people are gone, and the Catholics on the estate--and so at last they
+all came out roaring and shouting down the drive, and Mrs. Carroll was
+warned and slipped out to the Hall; and she is now gone to Stanfield to
+wait for us--and then the crowd broke into the house--but, oh Anthony,
+Grace was so sorry, and cried sore to think of us here; and asked us to
+come and stay there; but of course I told her we could not: and then I
+said a prayer for her; and we kissed one another again; and then I came
+away."
+
+Anthony looked at his sister, and there was honour and pride of her in
+his eyes.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The ride to Stanfield next day was a long affair, at a foot's-pace all
+the way: the horses were thoroughly tired with their journey, and they
+were obliged to start soon after three o'clock in the morning after a
+very insufficient rest; they did not reach Groombridge till nearly ten
+o'clock, when they dined, and then rode on towards Tonbridge about noon.
+There were heavy hearts to be carried as well. The attempt to welcome the
+misery of their home-coming was a bitter effort; all the more bitter for
+that it was an entirely unexpected call upon them. During those six years
+abroad probably not a day had passed without visions of Great Keynes, and
+the pleasant and familiar rooms and garden of their own house, and mental
+rehearsals of their return. The shock of the night before too had been
+emphasised by the horror of the cold morning light creeping through the
+empty windows on to the cruel heaps within. The garden too, seen in the
+dim morning, with its trampled lawns and wrecked flower-beds heaped with
+withered sunflowers, bell-blossoms and all the rich August growth, with
+the earthen flower-bowls smashed, the stone balls on the gate overturned,
+and the laurels at the corner uprooted--all this was a horrible pain to
+Isabel, to whom the garden was very near as dear and familiar as her own
+room. So it was a silent and sorrowful ride; and Anthony's heart rose in
+relief as at last up the grey village-street he saw the crowded roofs of
+Stanfield Place rise over the churchyard wall.
+
+Their welcome from Mr. Buxton went far to compensate for all.
+
+"My dear boy," he said, "or, my dear father, as I should call you in
+private, you do not know what happiness is mine to-day. It is a great
+thing to have a priest again; but, if you will allow me to say so, it is
+a greater to have my friend--and what a sister you have upstairs!"
+
+They were in Mr. Buxton's own little room on the ground-floor, and Isabel
+had gone to rest until supper.
+
+Anthony told him of the grim surprise that had awaited them at Great
+Keynes. "So you must forgive my sister if she is a little sad."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Buxton, "I had heard from Mrs. Carroll last night
+when she arrived here. But there was no time to warn you. I had expected
+you to-day, though Mrs. Carroll did not."
+
+(Anthony had sent a man straight from Rye to Stanfield.)
+
+"But Mistress Isabel, as I shall venture to call her, must do what she
+can with this house and garden. I need not say how wholly it is hers. And
+I shall call you Anthony," he added--"in public, at least. And, for
+strangers, you are just here as my guest; and you shall be called
+Capell--a sound name; and you shall be Catholics too; though you are no
+priest, of course, in public--and you have returned from the Continent. I
+hold it is no use to lie when you can be found out. I do not know what
+your conscience is, Father Anthony; but, for myself, I count us Catholics
+to be _in statu belli_ now; and therefore I shall lie frankly and fully
+when there is need; and you may do as you please. Old Mr. Blake used to
+bid me prevaricate instead; but that always seemed to me two lies instead
+of one--one to the questioning party and the other to myself; and so I
+always said to him, but he would not have it so. I wondered he did not
+tell me that two negatives made an affirmative; but he was not clever
+enough, the good father. So my own custom is to tell one plain lie when
+needed, and shame the devil."
+
+It was pleasant to Anthony to hear his friend talk again, and he said so.
+His host's face softened into a great tenderness.
+
+"Dear lad, I know what you mean. Please God you may find this a happy
+home."
+
+A couple of hours later, when Anthony and Isabel came down together from
+their rooms in the old wing, they found Mr. Buxton in his black satin and
+lace in the beautiful withdrawing-room on the ground-floor. It was
+already past the supper-hour, but their host showed no signs of going
+into the hall. At last he apologised.
+
+"I ask your pardon, Mistress Isabel; but I have a guest come to stay with
+me, who only arrived an hour ago; and she is a great lady and must have
+her time. Ah! here she is."
+
+The door was flung open and a radiant vision appeared. The door was a
+little way off, and there were no candles near it; but there swelled and
+rustled into the room a figure all in blue and gold, with a white
+delicate ruff; and diamond buckles shone beneath the rich brocaded
+petticoat. Above rose a white bosom and throat scintillating with
+diamonds, and a flushed face with scarlet lips, all crowned by piles of
+black hair, with black dancing eyes beneath. Still a little in the shadow
+this splendid figure swept down with a great curtsey, which Isabel met by
+another, while the two gentlemen bowed low; and then, as the stranger
+swayed up again into the full light of the sconces, Anthony recognised
+Mary Corbet.
+
+He stood irresolute with happy hesitation; and she came up smiling
+brilliantly; and before he could stay her dropped down on one knee and
+took his hand and kissed it; just as the man left the room.
+
+"God bless you, Father Anthony!" she said; and as he looked at her, as
+she glanced up, he could not tell whether her eyes shone with tears or
+laughter.
+
+"This is very charming and proper, Mistress Corbet, and like a true
+daughter of the Church," put in Mr. Buxton, "but I shall be obliged to
+you if you will not in future kiss priests' hands nor call them Father in
+the presence of the servants--at least not in my house."
+
+"Ah!" she said, "you were always prudent. Have you seen his secret
+doors?" she went on to Anthony. "The entire Catholic Church might play
+hare and hounds with the Holy Father as huntsman and the Cardinals as the
+whips, through Mr. Buxton's secret labyrinths."
+
+"Wait until you are hare, and it is other than Holy Church that is
+a-hunting," said Mr. Buxton, "and you will thank God for my labyrinths,
+as you call them."
+
+Then she greeted Isabel with great warmth.
+
+"Why, my dear," she said, "you are not the little Puritan maiden any
+longer. We must have a long talk to-night; and you shall tell me
+everything."
+
+"Mistress Mary is not so greatly changed," said Isabel, smiling. "She
+always would be told everything."
+
+It was strange to Anthony to meet Mary again after so long, and to find
+her so little changed, as Isabel had said truly. He himself had passed
+through so much since they had last met at Greenwich over six years
+ago--his conversion, his foreign sojourn, and, above all, the bewildering
+and intoxicating sweetness of his ordination and priestly life. And yet
+he felt as close to Mary as ever, knit in a bond of wonderful good
+fellowship and brotherhood such as he had never felt to any other in just
+that kind and degree. He watched her, warm and content, as she talked
+across the polished oak and beneath the gleam of the candles; and
+listened, charmed by her air and her talk.
+
+"There is not so much news of her Grace," she said, "save that she is
+turning soldier in her old age. She rode out to Tilbury, you know, the
+other day, in steel cuirass and scarlet; out to see her dear Robin and
+the army; and her royal face was all smiles and becks, and lord! how the
+soldiers cheered! But if you had seen her as I did, in her room when she
+first buckled on her armour, and the joints did not fit--yes, and heard
+her! there were no smiles to spare then. She lodged at Mr. Rich's, you
+know, two nights; but he would be Mr. Poor, I should suppose, by the time
+her Grace left him; for he will not see the worth of a shoelace again of
+all that he expended on her."
+
+"You see," remarked Mr. Buxton to Isabel, "how fortunate we are in having
+such a friend of her Grace's with us. We hear all the cream of the news,
+even though it be a trifle sour sometimes."
+
+"A lover of her Grace," said Mary, "loves the truth about her, however
+bitter. But then I have no secret passages where I may hide from my
+sovereign!"
+
+"The cream can scarce be but sour," said Anthony, "near her Grace: there
+is so much thunder in the air."
+
+"Yes, but the sun came out when you were there, Anthony," put in Isabel,
+smiling.
+
+"But even the light of her glorious countenance is trying," said Mary.
+"She is overpowering in thunder and sunshine alike."
+
+"We have had enough of that metaphor," observed Mr. Buxton.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then Anthony had to talk, and tell all the foreign news of Douai and Rome
+and Cardinal Allen; and of Father Persons' scheme for a college at
+Valladolid.
+
+"Father Robert is a superb beggar--as he is superb in all things," said
+Mr. Buxton. "I dare not think how much he got from me for his college;
+and then I do not even approve of his college. His principles are too
+logical for me. I have ever had a weakness for the _non sequitur_."
+
+This led on to the Armada; Anthony told his experience of it; how he had
+seen at least the sails of Lord Howard's squadron far away against the
+dawn; and this led on again to a sharp discussion when the servants had
+left the room.
+
+"I do not know," said Mary at last; "it is difficult--is not the choice
+between God and Elizabeth? If I were a man, why should I not take up arms
+to defend my religion? Since I am a woman, why should I not pray for
+Philip's success? It is a bitter hard choice, I know; but why need I
+prefer my country to my faith? Tell me that, Father Anthony."
+
+"I can only tell you my private opinion," said Anthony, "and that is,
+that both duties may be done. As Mr. Buxton here used to tell me, the
+duty to Cæsar is as real as the duty to God. A man is bound to both; for
+each has its proper bounds. When either oversteps them it must be
+resisted. When Elizabeth bids me deny my faith, I tell her I would sooner
+die. When a priest bids me deny my country, I tell him I would sooner be
+damned."
+
+Mary clapped her hands.
+
+"I like to hear a man talk like that," she cried. "But what of the Holy
+Father and his excommunication of her Grace?"
+
+Anthony looked up at her sharply, and then smiled; Isabel watched him
+with a troubled face.
+
+"Aquinas holds," he said, "that an excommunication of sovereign and
+people in a lump is invalid. And until the Holy Father tells me himself
+that Aquinas is wrong, I shall continue to think he is right."
+
+"God-a-mercy!" burst in Mr. Buxton, "what a to-do! Leave it alone until
+the choice must be made; and meanwhile say your prayers for Pope and
+Queen too, and hear mass and tell your beads and hold your tongue: that
+is what I say to myself. Mistress Mary, I will not have my chaplain
+heckled; here is his lady sister all a-tremble between heresy and
+treason."
+
+They sat long over the supper-table, talking over the last six years and
+the times generally. More than once Mary showed a strange bitterness
+against the Queen. At last Mr. Buxton showed his astonishment plainly.
+
+"I do not understand you," he said. "I know that at heart you are loyal;
+and yet one might say you meditated her murder."
+
+Mary's face grew white with passion and her eyes blazed.
+
+"Ah!" she hissed, "you do not understand, you say? Then where is your
+heart? But then you did not see Mary Stuart die."
+
+Anthony looked at her, amazed.
+
+"And you did, Mistress Mary?" he asked.
+
+Mary bowed, with her lips set tight to check their trembling.
+
+"I will tell you," she said, "if our host permits"; and she glanced at
+him.
+
+"Then come this way," he said, and they rose from table.
+
+They went back again to the withdrawing-room; a little cedar-fire had
+been kindled under the wide chimney; and the room was full of dancing
+shadows. The great plaster-pendants, the roses, the crowns, and the
+portcullises on the ceiling seemed to waver in the firelight, for Mr.
+Buxton at a sign from Mary blew out the four tapers that were burning in
+the sconces. They all sat down in the chairs that were set round the
+fire, Mary in a tall porter's chair with flaps that threw a shadow on her
+face when she leaned back; and she took a fan in her hand to keep the
+fire, or her friends' eyes, from her face should she need it.
+
+She first told them very briefly of the last months of Mary's life, of
+the web that was spun round her by Walsingham's tactics, and her own
+friends' efforts, until it was difficult for her to stir hand or foot
+without treason, real or pretended, being set in motion somewhere. Then
+she described how at Christmas '86 Elizabeth had sent her--Mary
+Corbet--as a Catholic, up to the Queen of the Scots at Fotheringay, on a
+private mission to attempt to win the prisoner's confidence, and to
+persuade her to confess to having been privy to Babington's conspiracy;
+and how the Scottish Queen had utterly denied it, even in the most
+intimate conversations. Sentence had been already passed, but the warrant
+had not been signed; and it never would have been signed, said Mistress
+Corbet, if Mary had owned to the crime of which she was accused.
+
+"Ah! how they insulted her!" cried Mary Corbet indignantly. "She showed
+me one day the room where her throne had stood. Now the cloth of state
+had been torn down by Sir Amyas Paulet's men, and he himself dared to sit
+with his hat on his head in the sovereign's presence! The insolence of
+the hound! But the Queen showed me how she had hung a crucifix where her
+royal arms used to hang. 'J'appelle,' she said to me, 'de la reine au roi
+des rois.'"
+
+Mistress Corbet went on to tell of the arrival of Walsingham's
+brother-in-law, Mr. Beale, with the death-warrant on that February Sunday
+evening.
+
+"I saw his foxy face look sideways up at the windows as he got off his
+horse in the courtyard; and I knew that our foes had triumphed. Then the
+other bloodhounds began to arrive; my lord of Kent on the Monday and
+Shrewsbury on the Tuesday. Then they came in to us after dinner; and they
+told her Grace it was to be for next day. I was behind her chair and saw
+her hand on the boss of the arm, and it did not stir nor clench; she said
+it could not be. She could not believe it of Elizabeth.
+
+"When she did at last believe it, there was no wild weeping or crying for
+mercy; but she set her affairs in order, queenly, and yet sedately too.
+She first thought of her soul, and desired that M. de Preau might come to
+her and hear her confession; but they would not permit it. They offered
+her Dr. Fletcher instead, 'a godly man,' as my lord of Kent called him.
+'Je ne m'en doute pas,' she said, smiling. But it was hard not to have a
+priest.
+
+"Then she set her earthly affairs in order when she had examined her soul
+and made confession to God without the Dean's assistance. We all supped
+together when it was growing late; and I thought, Father Anthony--indeed
+I did--of another Supper long ago. Then M. Gorion was sent for to arrange
+some messages and gifts; and until two of the clock in the morning we
+watched with her or served her as she wrote and gave orders. The court
+outside was full of comings and goings. As I passed down the passage I
+saw the torches of the visitors that were come to see the end; and once I
+heard a hammering from the great hall. Then she went to her bed; and I
+think few lay as quiet as she in the castle that night. I was with her
+ladies when they waked her before dawn; and it was hard to see that sweet
+face on the pillow open its eyes again to what was before her.
+
+"Then when she was dressed I went in again, and we all went to the
+oratory, where she received our Saviour from the golden pyx which the
+Holy Father had sent her; for, you see, they would allow no priest to
+come near her....
+
+"Presently the gentlemen knocked. When we tried to follow we were
+prevented; they wished her to die alone among her enemies; but at last
+two of the ladies were allowed to go with her.
+
+"I ran out another way, and sent a message to my Lord Shrewsbury, who
+knew me at court. As I waited in the courtyard, the musicians there were
+playing 'The Witches' Dirge,' as is done at the burnings--and all to mock
+at my queen! At last a halberdier was sent to bring me in."
+
+Mary Corbet was silent a moment or two and leaned back in her chair; and
+the others dared not speak. The strange emotion of her voice and the
+stillness of that sparkling figure in the porter's chair affected them
+profoundly. Her face was now completely shaded by a fan.
+
+"It was in the hall, where a great fire was burning on the hearth. The
+stage stood at the upper end; all was black. The crowd of gentlemen
+filled the hall and all were still and reverent except--except a devil
+who laughed as my queen came in, all in black. She was smiling and brave,
+and went up the steps and sat on her black throne and looked about her.
+The--the _things_ were just in front of her.
+
+"Then the warrant was read by Beale, and I saw the lords glance at her as
+it ended; but there was nought but joyous hope in her face. She looked
+now and again gently on the ivory crucifix in her hand, as she listened;
+and her lips moved to--to--Him who was delivered to death for her."
+
+Mary Corbet gave one quick sob, and was silent again for an instant. Then
+she went on in a yet lower voice.
+
+"Dr. Fletcher tried to address her, but he stammered and paused three or
+four times; and the queen smiled on him and bade him not trouble himself,
+for that she lived and died a Catholic. But they would not let her be; so
+she looked on her crucifix and was silent; and even then my lord of Kent
+badgered her and told her Christ crucified in her hand would not save
+her, except He was engraved on her heart.
+
+"Then she knelt at her chair and tried to pray softly to herself; but
+Fletcher would not have that, and prayed himself, aloud, and all the
+gentlemen in the hall began to pray aloud with him. But Mary prayed on in
+Latin and English aloud, and prevailed, for all were silent at the end
+but she.
+
+"And at last she kissed the crucifix and cried in a sweet piercing voice,
+'As thine arms, O Jesus, were spread upon the Cross, so receive me into
+Thy mercy and forgive me my sins!'"
+
+Again Mistress Corbet was silent; and Anthony drew a long sobbing breath
+of pure pity, and Isabel was crying quietly to herself.
+
+"When the headsmen offered to assist her," went on the low voice, "the
+queen smiled at the gentlemen and said that she had never had such grooms
+before; and then they let the ladies come up. When they began to help her
+with her dress I covered my face--I could not help it. There was such a
+stillness now that I could hear her beads chink at her girdle. When I
+looked again, she was ready, with her sweet neck uncovered: all round her
+was black but the headsman, who wore a white apron over his velvet, and
+she, in her beauty, and oh! her face was so fair and delicate and her
+eyes so tender and joyous. And as her ladies looked at her, they sobbed
+piteously. 'Ne criez vous,' said she.
+
+"Then she knelt down, and Mistress Mowbray bound her eyes. She smiled
+again under the handkerchief. 'Adieu,' she said, and then, 'Au revoir.'
+
+"Then she said once more a Latin psalm, and then laid her head down, as
+on a pillow.
+
+"'In manus tuas, Domine,' she said."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary Corbet stopped, and leaned forward a little, putting her hand into
+her bosom; Anthony looked at her as she drew up a thin silk cord with a
+ruby ring attached to it.
+
+"This was hers," she said simply, and held it out. Each of the Catholics
+took it and kissed it reverently, and Mary replaced it.
+
+"When they lifted her," she added, "a little dog sprang out from her
+clothes and yelped. And at that the man near me, who had laughed as she
+came in, wept."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then the four sat silent in the firelight.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IV
+
+                           STANFIELD PLACE
+
+
+Life at Stanfield Place was wonderfully sweet to Anthony and Isabel after
+their exile abroad, for both of them had an intense love of England and
+of English ways. The very sight of fair-faced children, and the noise of
+their shrill familiar voices from the village street, the depths of the
+August woods round them, the English manners of living--all this was
+alive with a full deliberate joy to these two. Besides, there was the
+unfailing tenderness and gaiety of Mr. Buxton; and at first there was the
+pleasant company of Mary Corbet as well.
+
+There was little or no anxiety resting on any of them. "God was served,"
+as the celebration of mass was called, each morning in the little room
+where Anthony had made the exercises, and the three others were always
+present. It was seldom that the room was not filled to over-flowing on
+Sundays and holy-days with the household and the neighbouring Catholics.
+
+Everything was, of course, perfection in the little chapel when it was
+furnished; as was all that Mr. Buxton possessed. There was a wonderful
+golden crucifix by an unknown artist, that he had picked up in his
+travels, that stood upon the altar, with the bird-types of the Saviour at
+each of the four ends; a pelican at the top, an eagle on the right
+supporting its young which were raising their wings for a flight, on the
+left a phoenix amid flames, and at the foot a hen gathering her
+chickens under her wings--all the birds had tiny emerald eyes; the figure
+on the cross was beautifully wrought, and had rubies in hands and feet
+and side. There were also two silver altar-candlesticks designed by
+Marrina for the Piccolomini chapel in the church of St. Francis in Siena;
+and two more, plainer, for the Elevation. The vestments were exquisite;
+those for high festivals were cloth of gold; and the other white ones
+were beautifully worked with seed pearls, and jewelled crosses on the
+stole and maniple. The other colours, too, were well represented, and
+were the work of a famous convent in the south of France. All the other
+articles, too, were of silver: the lavabo basin, the bell, the thurible,
+the boat and spoon, and the cruets. It was a joy to all the Catholics who
+came to see the worship of God carried on with such splendour, when in so
+many places even necessaries were scarcely forthcoming.
+
+There was a little hiding-hole between the chapel and the priest's room,
+just of a size to hold the altar furniture and the priests in case of a
+sudden alarm; and there were several others in the house too, which Mr.
+Buxton had showed to Anthony with a good deal of satisfaction, on the
+morning after his arrival.
+
+"I dared not show them to you the last time you were here," he said, "and
+there was no need; but now there must be no delay. I have lately made
+some more, too. Now here is one," he said, stopping before the great
+carved mantelpiece in the hall.
+
+He looked round to see that no servant was in the room, and then,
+standing on a settee before the fire, touched something above, and a
+circular hole large enough for a man to clamber through appeared in the
+midst of the tracery.
+
+"There," he said, "and you will find some cured ham and a candle, with a
+few dates within, should you ever have need to step up there--which, pray
+God, you may not."
+
+"What is the secret?" asked Anthony, as the tracery swung back into
+place, and his host stepped down.
+
+"Pull the third roebuck's ears in the coat of arms, or rather push them.
+It closes with a spring, and is provided with a bolt. But I do not
+recommend that refuge unless it is necessary. In winter it is too hot,
+for the chimney passes behind it; and in summer it is too oppressive, for
+there is not too much air."
+
+At the end of the corridor that led in the direction of the little old
+rooms where Anthony had slept in his visit, Mr. Buxton stopped before the
+portrait of a kindly-looking old gentleman that hung on the wall.
+
+"Now there is an upright old man you would say; and indeed he was, for he
+was my own uncle, and made a godly end of it last year. But now see what
+a liar I have made of him!"
+
+Mr. Buxton put his hand behind the frame, and the whole picture opened
+like a door showing a space within where three or four could stand.
+Anthony stepped inside and his friend followed him, and after showing him
+some clothes hanging against the wall closed the picture after them,
+leaving them in the dark.
+
+"Now see what a sharp-eyed old fellow he is too," whispered his host.
+Anthony looked where he was guided, and perceived two pinholes through
+which he could see the whole length of the corridor.
+
+"Through the centre of each eye," whispered his friend. "Is he not shrewd
+and secret? And now turn this way."
+
+Anthony turned round and saw the opposite wall slowly opening; and in a
+moment more he stepped out and found himself in the lobby outside the
+little room where he had made the exercises six years ago. He heard a
+door close softly as he looked about him in astonishment, and on turning
+round saw only an innocent-looking set of shelves with a couple of books
+and a little pile of paper and packet of quills upon them.
+
+"There," said Mr. Buxton, "who would suspect Tacitus his history and
+Juvenal his satires of guarding the passage of a Christian ecclesiastic
+fleeing for his life?"
+
+Then he showed him the secret, how one shelf had to be drawn out
+steadily, and the nail in another pressed simultaneously, and how then
+the entire set of shelves swung open.
+
+Then they went back and he showed him the spring behind the frame of the
+picture.
+
+"You see the advantage of this," he went on: "on the one side you may
+flee upstairs, a treasonable skulking cassocked jack-priest with the
+lords and the commons and the Queen's Majesty barking at your heels; and
+on the other side you may saunter down the gallery without your beard and
+in a murrey doublet, a friend of Mr. Buxton's, taking the air and
+wondering what the devil all the clamouring be about."
+
+Then he took him downstairs again and showed him finally the escape of
+which he was most proud--the entrance, designed in the cellar-staircase,
+to an underground passage from the cellars, which led, he told him,
+across to the garden-house beyond the lime-avenue.
+
+"That is the pride of my heart," he said, "and maybe will be useful some
+day; though I pray not. Ah! her Grace and her honest Council are right.
+We Papists are a crafty and deceitful folk, Father Anthony."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The four grew very intimate during those few weeks; they had many
+memories and associations in common on which to build up friendship, and
+the aid of a common faith and a common peril with which to cement it. The
+gracious beauty of the house and the life at Stanfield, too, gilded it
+all with a very charming romance. They were all astonished at the easy
+intimacy with which they behaved, one to another.
+
+Mary Corbet was obliged to return to her duties at Court at the beginning
+of September; and she had something of an ache at her heart as the time
+drew on; for she had fallen once more seriously in love with Isabel. She
+said a word of it to Mr. Buxton. They were walking in the lime-avenue
+together after dinner on the last day of Mary's visit.
+
+"You have a good chaplain," she said; "what an honest lad he is! and how
+serious and recollected! Please God he at least may escape their claws!"
+
+"It is often so," said Mr. Buxton, "with those wholesome out-of-door
+boys; they grow up into such simple men of God."
+
+"And Isabel!" said Mary, rustling round upon him as she walked. "What a
+great dame she is become! I used to lie on her bed and kick my heels and
+laugh at her; but now I would like to say my prayers to her. She is
+somewhat like our Lady herself, so grave and serious, and yet so warm and
+tender."
+
+Mr. Buxton nodded sharply.
+
+"I felt sure you would feel it," he said.
+
+"Ah! but I knew her when she was just a child; so simple that I loved to
+startle her. But now--but now--those two ladies have done wonders with
+her. She has all the splendour of Mary Maxwell, and all the softness of
+Margaret."
+
+"Yes," said the other meditatively; "the two ladies have done it--or, the
+grace of God."
+
+Mary looked at him sideways and her lips twitched a little.
+
+"Yes--or the grace of God, as you say."
+
+The two laughed into each other's eyes, for they understood one another
+well. Presently Mary went on:
+
+"When you and I fence together at table, she does not turn frigid like so
+many holy folk--or peevish and bewildered like stupid folk--but she just
+looks at us, and laughs far down in those deep grey eyes of hers. Oh! I
+love her!" ended Mary.
+
+They walked in silence a minute or two.
+
+"And I think I do," said Mr. Buxton softly.
+
+"Eh?" exclaimed Mary, "you do what?" She had quite forgotten her last
+sentence.
+
+"It is no matter," he said yet more softly; and would say no more.
+
+Presently the talk fell on the Maxwells; and came round to Hubert.
+
+"They say he would be a favourite at Court," said Mary, "had he not a
+wife. But her Grace likes not married men. She looked kindly upon him at
+Deptford, I know; and I have seen him at Greenwich. You know, of course,
+about Isabel?"
+
+Mr. Buxton shook his head.
+
+"Why, it was common talk that they would have been man and wife years
+ago, had not the fool apostatised."
+
+Her companion questioned her further, and soon had the whole story out of
+her. "But I am thankful," ended Mary, "that it has so ended."
+
+The next day she went back to Court; and it was with real grief that the
+three watched her wonderful plumed riding-hat trot along behind the top
+of the churchyard wall, with her woman beside her, and her little
+liveried troop of men following at a distance.
+
+The days passed by, bringing strange tidings to Stanfield. News continued
+to reach the Catholics of the good confessions witnessed here and there
+in England by priests and laity. At the end of July, three priests,
+Garlick, Ludlam and Sympson, had been executed at Derby, and at the end
+of August the defeat of the Armada seemed to encourage Elizabeth yet
+further, and Mr. Leigh, a priest, with four laymen and Mistress Margaret
+Ward, died for their religion at Tyburn.
+
+By the end of September the news of the hopeless defeat and disappearance
+of the Armada had by now been certified over and over again. Terrible
+stories had come in during August of that northward flight of all that
+was left of the fleet over the plunging North Sea up into the stormy
+coast of Scotland; then rumours began of the miseries that were falling
+on the Spaniards off Ireland--Catholic Ireland from which they had hoped
+so much. There was scarcely a bay or a cape along the west coast where
+some ship had not put in, with piteous entreaties for water and aid--and
+scarcely a bay or a cape that was not blood-guilty. Along the straight
+coast from Sligo Bay westwards, down the west coast, Clew Bay, Connemara,
+and haunted Dingle itself, where the Catholic religion under arms had
+been so grievously chastened eight years ago--everywhere half-drowned or
+half-starved Spaniards, piteously entreating, were stripped and put to
+the sword either by the Irish savages or the English gentlemen. The
+church-bells were rung in Stanfield and in every English village, and the
+flame of national pride and loyalty burned fiercer and higher than ever.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+On the last day of September Isabel, just before dinner in her room,
+heard the trot of a couple of horses coming up the short drive, and on
+going downstairs almost ran against Hubert as he came from the corridor
+into the hall, as the servant ushered him in.
+
+The two stopped and looked at one another in silence.
+
+Hubert was flushed with hard riding and looked excited; Isabel's face
+showed nothing but pleasure and surprise. The servant too stopped,
+hesitating.
+
+Then Isabel put out her hand, smiling; and her voice was natural and
+controlled.
+
+"Why, Mr. Hubert," she said, "it is you! Come through this way"; and she
+nodded to the servant, who went forward and opened the door of the little
+parlour and stood back, as Isabel swept by him.
+
+When the door was closed, and the servant's footsteps had died away,
+Hubert, as he stood facing Isabel, spoke at last.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said almost imploringly, "what can I say to you?
+Your home has been wrecked; and partly through those wild and foolish
+words of mine; and you repay it by that act of kindness to my wife! I am
+come to ask your pardon, and to thank you. I only reached home last
+night."
+
+"Ah! that was nothing," said Isabel gently; "and as for the house----"
+
+"As for the house," he said, "I was not master of myself when I said
+those words that Grace told you of; and I entreat you to let me repair
+the damage."
+
+"No, no," she said, "Anthony has given orders; that will all be done."
+
+"But what can I do then?" he cried passionately; "if you but knew my
+sorrow--and--and--more than that, my----"
+
+Isabel had raised her grave eyes and was looking him full in the face
+now; and he stopped abashed.
+
+"How is Grace, and Mercy?" she asked in perfectly even tones.
+
+"Oh! Isabel----" he began; and again she looked at him, and then went to
+the door.
+
+"I hear Mr. Buxton," she said; and steps came along through the hall; she
+opened the door as he came up. Mr. Buxton stopped abruptly, and the two
+men drew themselves up and seemed to stiffen, ever so slightly. A shade
+of aggressive contempt came on Hubert's keen brown face that towered up
+so near the low oak ceiling; while Mr. Buxton's eyelids just drooped, and
+his features seemed to sharpen. There was an unpleasant silence: Isabel
+broke it.
+
+"You remember Master Hubert Maxwell?" she said almost entreatingly. He
+smiled kindly at her, but his face hardened again as he turned once more
+to Hubert.
+
+"I remember the gentleman perfectly," he said, "and he no doubt knows me,
+and why I cannot ask him to remain and dine with us."
+
+Hubert smiled brutally.
+
+"It is the old story of course, the Faith! I must ask your pardon, sir,
+for intruding. The difficulty never came into my mind. The truth is that
+I have lived so long now among Protestants that I had quite forgotten
+what Catholic charity is like!"
+
+He said this with such extreme bitterness and fury that Isabel put out
+her hand instinctively to Mr. Buxton, who smiled at her once more, and
+pressed it in his own. Hubert laughed again sharply; his face grew white
+under the tan, and his lips wrinkled back once or twice.
+
+"So, if you can spare me room to pass," he went on in the same tone, "I
+will begone to the inn."
+
+Mr. Buxton stepped aside from the door, and Hubert bowed to Isabel so low
+that it was almost an insult in itself, and strode out, his spurs ringing
+on the oak boards.
+
+When he half turned outside the front door to beckon to his groom to
+bring up the horses, he became aware that Isabel was beside him.
+
+"Hubert," she said, "Hubert, I cannot bear this."
+
+There were tears in her voice, and he could not help turning and looking
+at her. Her face, more grave and transparent than ever, was raised to
+his; her red down-turned lips were trembling, and her eyes were full of a
+great emotion. He turned away again sharply.
+
+"Hubert," she said again, "I was not born a Catholic, and I do not feel
+like Mr. Buxton. And--and I do thank you for coming; and for your desire
+to repair the house; and--and will you give my love to Grace?"
+
+Then he suddenly turned to her with such passion in his eyes that she
+shrank back. At the same moment the groom brought up the horses; he
+turned and mounted without a word, but his eyes were dim with love and
+anger and jealousy. Then he drove his spurs into his great grey mare, and
+Isabel watched him dash between the iron gates, with his groom only half
+mounted holding back his own plunging horse. Then she went within doors
+again.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                          JOSEPH LACKINGTON
+
+
+It was a bitter ride back to Great Keynes for Hubert. He had just
+returned from watching the fifty vessels, which were all that were left
+of the Great Armada, pass the Blaskets, still under the nominal command
+of Medina Sidonia, on their miserable return to Spain; and he had come
+back as fast as sails could carry him, round the stormy Land's-End up
+along the south coast to Rye, where on his arrival he had been almost
+worshipped by the rejoicing townsfolk. Yet all through his voyage and
+adventures, at any rate since his interview with her at Rye, it had been
+the face of Isabel there, and not of Grace, that had glimmered to him in
+the dark, and led him from peril to peril. Then, at last, on his arrival
+at home, he had heard of the disaster to the Dower House, and his own
+unintended share in it; and of Isabel's generous visit to his wife; and
+at that he had ordered his horse abruptly over-night and ridden off
+without a word of explanation to Grace on the following morning. And he
+had been met by a sneering man who would not sit at table with him, and
+who was the protector and friend of Isabel.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He rode up through the village just after dark and in through the
+gatehouse up to the steps. A man ran to open the door, and as Hubert came
+through told him that a stranger had ridden down from London and had
+arrived at mid-day, and that he had been waiting ever since.
+
+"I gave the gentleman dinner in the cloister parlour, sir; and he is at
+supper now," added the man.
+
+Hubert nodded and pushed through the hall. He heard his name called
+timidly from upstairs, and looking up saw his wife's golden head over the
+banisters.
+
+"Well!" he said.
+
+"Ah, it is you. I am so glad."
+
+"Who else should it be?" said Hubert, and passed through towards the
+cloister wing, and opened the door of the little parlour where Isabel and
+Mistress Margaret had sat together years before, the night of Mr. James'
+return, and of the girl's decision.
+
+A stranger rose up hastily as he came in, and bowed with great deference.
+Hubert knew his face, but could not remember his name.
+
+"I ask your pardon, Mr. Maxwell; but your man would take no denial," and
+he indicated the supper-table with a steaming dish and a glass jug of
+wine ruddy in the candlelight. Hubert looked at him curiously.
+
+"I know you, sir," he said, "but I cannot put a name to your face."
+
+"Lackington," said the man with a half smile; "Joseph Lackington."
+
+Hubert still stared; and then suddenly burst into a short laugh.
+
+"Why, yes," he said; "I know now. My father's servant."
+
+The man bowed.
+
+"Formerly, sir; and now agent to Sir Francis Walsingham," he said, with
+something of dignity in his manner.
+
+Hubert saw the hint, but could not resist a small sneer.
+
+"Why, I am pleased to see you," he said. "You have come to see your
+old--home?" and he threw himself into a chair and stretched his legs to
+the blaze, for he was stiff with riding. Lackington instantly sat down
+too, for his pride was touched.
+
+"It was not for that, Mr. Maxwell," he said almost in the tone of an
+equal, "but on a mission for Sir Francis."
+
+Hubert looked at him a moment as he sat there in the candlelight, with
+his arm resting easily on the table. He was plainly prosperous, and was
+even dressed with some distinction; his reddish beard was trimmed to a
+point; his high forehead was respectably white and bald; and his seals
+hung from his belt beside his dagger with an air of ease and solidity.
+Perhaps he was of some importance; at any rate, Sir Francis Walsingham
+was. Hubert sat up a little.
+
+"A mission to me?" he said.
+
+Lackington nodded.
+
+"A few questions on a matter of state."
+
+He drew from his pouch a paper signed by Sir Francis authorising him as
+an agent, for one month, and dated three days back; and handed it to
+Hubert.
+
+"I obtained that from Sir Francis on Monday, as you will see. You can
+trust me implicitly."
+
+"Will the business take long?" asked Hubert, handing the paper back.
+
+"No, Mr. Maxwell; and I must be gone in an hour in any case. I have to be
+at Rye at noon to-morrow; and I must sleep at Mayfield to-night."
+
+"At Rye," said Hubert, "why I came from there yesterday."
+
+Lackington bowed again, as if he were quite aware of this; but said
+nothing.
+
+"Then I will sup here," went on Hubert, "and we will talk meantime."
+
+When a place had been laid for him, he drew his chair round to the table
+and began to eat.
+
+"May I begin at once?" asked Lackington, who had finished.
+
+Hubert nodded.
+
+"Then first I believe it to be a fact that you spoke with Mistress Isabel
+Morris on board the _Elizabeth_ at Rye on the tenth of August last."
+
+Hubert had started violently at her name; but did his utmost to gain
+outward command of himself again immediately.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+--"And with Master Anthony Norris, lately made a priest beyond the seas."
+
+"That is a lie," said Hubert.
+
+Lackington politely lifted his eyebrows.
+
+"Indeed?" he said. "That he was made a priest, or that you spoke with
+him?"
+
+"That I know aught of him," said Hubert. His heart was beating furiously.
+
+Lackington made a note rather ostentatiously; he could see that Hubert
+was frightened, and thought that it was because of a possible accusation
+of having dealings with a traitor.
+
+"And as regards Mistress Norris," he said judicially, with his pencil
+raised, "you deny having spoken with her?"
+
+Hubert was thinking furiously. Then he saw that Lackington knew too much
+for its being worth his own while to deny it.
+
+"No, I never denied that," he said, lifting his fork to his mouth; and he
+went on eating with a deliberate ease as Lackington again made a note.
+
+The next question was a home-thrust.
+
+"Where are they both now?" asked Lackington, looking at him. Hubert's
+mind laboured like a mill.
+
+"I do not know," he said.
+
+"You swear it?"
+
+"I swear it."
+
+"Then Mistress Norris has changed her plans?" said Lackington swiftly.
+
+"What do you mean by that?"
+
+"Why she told you where they were going when you met?" said the other in
+a remonstrating tone.
+
+Hubert suddenly saw the game. If the authorities really knew that, it
+would have been a useless question. He stared at Lackington with an
+admirable vacancy.
+
+"Indeed she did not," he said. "For aught I know, they--she is in France
+again."
+
+"They?" said Lackington shrewdly. "Then you do know somewhat of the
+priest?"
+
+But Hubert was again too sharp.
+
+"Only what you told me just now, when you said he was at Rye. I supposed
+you were telling the truth."
+
+Lackington passed his hand smoothly over his mouth and beard, and smiled.
+Either Hubert was very sharp or else he had told everything; and he did
+not believe him sharp.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Maxwell," he said, with a complete dropping of his
+judicial manner. "I will not pretend not to be disappointed; but I
+believe what you say about France is true; and that it is no use looking
+for him further."
+
+Hubert experienced an extraordinary relief. He had saved Isabel. He drank
+off a glass of claret. "Tell me everything," he said.
+
+"Well," said Lackington, "Mr. Thomas Hamon is my informant. He sent up to
+Sir Francis the message that a lady of the name of Norris had been
+introduced to him at Rye; because he thought he remembered some stir in
+the county several years ago about some reconciliations to Rome connected
+with that name. Of course we knew everything about that: and we have our
+agents at the seminaries too; so we concluded that she was one of our
+birds; the rest, of course, was guesswork. Mr. Norris has certainly left
+Douai for England; and he may possibly even now be in England; but from
+your information and others', I now believe that Mistress Isabel came
+across first, and that she found the country too hot, what with the
+Spaniards and all; and that she returned to France at once. Of course
+during that dreadful week, Mr. Maxwell, we could not be certain of all
+vessels that came and went; so I think she just slipped across again; and
+that they are both waiting in France. We shall keep good watch now at the
+ports, I can promise you."
+
+Hubert's emotions were varied during this speech. First shame at having
+entirely forgotten the mayor of Rye and his own introduction of Isabel to
+him; then astonishment at the methods of Walsingham's agents; and lastly
+intense triumph and relief at having put them off Isabel's track. For
+Anthony, too, he had nothing but kindly feelings; so, on the whole, he
+thought he had done well for his friends.
+
+The two talked a little longer; Lackington was a stimulating companion
+from both his personality and his position; and Hubert found himself
+almost sorry when his companion said he must be riding on to Mayfield. As
+he walked out with him to the front door, he suddenly thought of Mr.
+Buxton again and his reception in the afternoon. They had wandered in
+their conversation so far from the Norrises by now that he felt sure he
+could speak of him without doing them any harm. So, as they stood on the
+steps together, waiting for Lackington's horse to come round, he suddenly
+said:
+
+"Do you know aught of one Buxton, who lives somewhere near Tonbridge, I
+think?"
+
+"Buxton, Buxton?" said the other.
+
+"I met him in town once," went on Hubert smoothly; "a little man, dark,
+with large eyes, and looks somewhat like a Frenchman."
+
+"Buxton, Buxton?" said the other again. "A Papist, is he not?"
+
+"Yes," said Hubert, hoping to get some information against him.
+
+"A friend?" asked Lackington.
+
+"No," said Hubert with such vehemence that Lackington looked at him.
+
+"I remember him," he said in a moment; "he was imprisoned at Wisbeach six
+or seven years ago. But I do not think he has been in trouble since. You
+wish, you wish----?" he went on interrogatively.
+
+"Nothing," said Hubert; but Lackington saw the hatred in his eyes.
+
+The horses came round at this moment; and Lackington said good-bye to
+Hubert with a touch of the old deference again, and mounted. Hubert
+watched him out under the gatehouse-lamp into the night beyond, and then
+he went in again, pondering.
+
+His wife was waiting for him in the hall now--a delicate golden-haired
+figure, with pathetic blue eyes turned up to him. She ran to him and took
+his arm timidly in her two hands.
+
+"Oh! I am glad that man has gone, Hubert."
+
+He looked down at her almost contemptuously.
+
+"Why, you know nothing of him!" he said.
+
+"Not much," she said, "but he asked me so many questions."
+
+Hubert started and looked suddenly at her, in terror.
+
+"Oh, Hubert!" she said, shrinking back frightened.
+
+"Questions!" he said, seizing her hands. "Questions of whom?"
+
+"Of--of--Mistress Isabel Norris," she said, almost crying.
+
+"And--and--what did you say? Did you tell him?"
+
+"Oh, Hubert!--I am so sorry--ah! do not look like that."
+
+"What did you say? What did you say?" he said between his teeth.
+
+"I--I--told a lie, Hubert; I said I had never seen her."
+
+Hubert took his wife suddenly in his two arms and kissed her three or
+four times.
+
+"You darling, you darling!" he said; and then stooped and picked her up,
+and carried her upstairs, with her head against his cheek, and her tears
+running down because he was pleased with her, instead of angry.
+
+They went upstairs and he set her down softly outside the nursery door.
+
+"Hush," she said, smiling up at him; and then softly opened the door and
+listened, her finger on her lip; there was no sound from within; then she
+pushed the door open gently, and the wife and husband went in.
+
+There was a shaded taper still burning in a high bracket where an image
+of the Mother of God had stood in the Catholic days of the house. Hubert
+glanced up at it and remembered it, with just a touch at his heart.
+Beneath it was a little oak cot, where his four-year-old boy lay
+sleeping; the mother went across and bent over it, and Hubert leaned his
+brown sinewy hands on the end of the cot and watched him. There his son
+lay, with tangled curls on the pillow; his finger was on his lips as if
+he bade silence even to thought. Hubert looked up, and just above the
+bed, where the crucifix used to hang when he himself had slept in this
+nursery, probably on the very same nail, he thought to himself, was a
+rusty Spanish spur that he himself had found in a sea-chest of the _San
+Juan_. The boy had hung up with a tarry bit of string this emblem of his
+father's victory, as a protection while he slept.
+
+The child stirred in his sleep and murmured as the two watched him.
+
+"Father's home again," whispered the mother. "It is all well. Go to sleep
+again."
+
+When she looked up again to her husband, he was gone.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was not often that Hubert had regrets for the Faith he had lost; but
+to-night things had conspired to prick him. There was his rebuff from Mr.
+Buxton; there was the sight of Isabel in the dignified grace that he had
+noticed so plainly before; there had been the interview with the
+ex-Catholic servant, now a spy of the Government, and a remorseless enemy
+of all Catholics; and lastly there were the two little external reminders
+of the niche and the nail over his son's bed.
+
+He sat long before the fire in Sir Nicholas' old room, now his own study.
+As he lay back and looked about him, how different this all was, too! The
+mantelpiece was almost unaltered; the Maxwell devices, two-headed eagles,
+hurcheons and saltires, on crowded shields, interlaced with the motto
+_Reviresco_, all newly gilded since his own accession to the estate, rose
+up in deep shadow and relief; but over it, instead of the little old
+picture of the Vernacle that he remembered as a child, hung his own
+sword. Was that a sign of progress? he wondered. The tapestry on the east
+wall was the same, a hawking scene with herons and ladies in immense
+headdresses that he had marvelled at as a boy. But then the books on the
+shelves to the right of the door, they were different; there had been old
+devotional books in his father's time, mingled strangely with small works
+on country life and sports; now the latter only remained, and the nearest
+to a devotional book was a volume of a mystical herbalist who identified
+plants with virtues, strangely and ingeniously. Then the prie-dieu, where
+the beads had hung and the little wooden shield with the Five Wounds
+painted upon it--that was gone; and in its place hung a cupboard where he
+kept a crossbow and a few tools for it; and old hawk-lures and jesses and
+the like.
+
+Then he lay back again, and thought.
+
+Had he then behaved unworthily? This old Faith that had been handed down
+from father and son for generations; that had been handed to him too as
+the most precious heirloom of all--for which his father had so gladly
+suffered fines and imprisonment, and risked death--he had thrown it over,
+and for what? For Isabel, he confessed to himself; and then the--the
+Power that stands behind the visible had cheated him and withdrawn that
+for which he had paid over that great price. Was that a reckless and
+brutal bargain on his side--to throw over this strange delicate thing
+called the Faith for which so many millions had lived and died, all for a
+woman's love? A curious kind of family pride in the Faith began to prick
+him. After all, was not honour in a manner bound up with it too; and most
+of all when such heavy penalties attached themselves to the profession of
+it? Was that the moment when he should be the first of his line to
+abandon it?
+
+_Reviresco_--"I renew my springtide." But was not this a strange
+grafting--a spur for a crucifix, a crossbow for a place of prayer?
+_Reviresco_--There was sap indeed in the old tree; but from what soil did
+it draw its strength?
+
+His heart began to burn with something like shame, as it had burned now
+and again at intervals during these past years. Here he lay back in his
+father's chair, in his father's room, the first Protestant of the
+Maxwells. Then he passed on to a memory.
+
+As he closed his eyes, he could see even now the chapel upstairs, with
+the tapers alight and the stiff figure of the priest in the midst of the
+glow; he could smell the flowers on the altar, the June roses strewn on
+the floor in the old manner, and their fresh dewy scent mingled with the
+fragrance of the rich incense in an intoxicating chord; he could hear the
+rustle that emphasised the silence, as his mother rose from his side and
+went up for communion, and the breathing of the servants behind him.
+
+Then for contrast he remembered the whitewashed church where he attended
+now with his wife, Sunday by Sunday, the pulpit occupied by the black
+figure of the virtuous Mr. Bodder pronouncing his discourse, the great
+texts that stood out in their new paint from the walls, the table that
+stood out unashamed and sideways in the midst of the chancel. And which
+of the two worships was most like God?...
+
+Then he compared the worshippers in either mode. Well, Drake, his hero,
+was a convinced Protestant; the bravest man he had ever met or dreamed
+of--fiery, pertinacious, gloriously insolent. He thought of his sailors,
+on whom a portion of Drake's spirit fell, their gallantry, their
+fearlessness of death and of all that comes after; of Mr. Bodder, who was
+now growing middle-aged in the Vicarage--yes, indeed, they were all
+admirable in various ways, but were they like Christ?
+
+On the other hand, his father, in spite of his quick temper, his mother,
+brother, aunt, the priests who came and went by night, Isabel--and at
+that he stopped: and like a deep voice in his ear rose up the last
+tremendous question, What if the Catholic Religion be true after all? And
+at that the supernatural began to assert itself. It seemed as if the
+empty air were full of this question, rising in intensity and emphasis.
+What if it is true? What if it is true? _What if it is true?_
+
+He sat bolt upright and looked sharply round the room; the candles burned
+steadily in the sconce near the door. The tapestry lifted and dropped
+noiselessly in the draught; the dark corners beyond the press and in the
+window recesses suggested presences that waited; the wide chimney sighed
+suddenly once.
+
+Was that a voice in his ear just now, or only in his heart? But in either
+case----
+
+He made an effort to command himself, and looked again steadily round the
+room; but there seemed no one there. But what if the old tale be true? In
+that case he is not alone in this little oak room, for there is no such
+thing as loneliness. In that case he is sitting in full sight of Almighty
+God, whom he has insulted; and of the saints whose power he has
+repudiated; and of the angels good and bad who have---- Ah! what was
+that? There had seemed to come a long sigh somewhere behind him; on his
+left surely.--What was it? Some wandering soul? Was it, could it be the
+soul of one who had loved him and desired to warn him before it was too
+late? Could it have been----and then it came again; and the hair prickled
+on his head.
+
+How deathly still it is, and how cold! Ah! was that a rustle outside; a
+tap?... In God's name, who can that be?...
+
+And then Hubert licked his dry lips and brought them together and smiled
+at Grace, who had come down, opening the doors as she came, to see why he
+had not come to bed.
+
+Bah! what a superstitious fool he was, after all!
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VI
+
+                             A DEPARTURE
+
+
+The months went by happily at Stanfield; and, however ill went the
+fortunes of the Church elsewhere, here at least were peace and
+prosperity. Most discouraging news indeed did reach them from time to
+time. The severe penalties now enacted against the practice of the
+Catholic Religion were being enforced with great vigour, and the weak
+members of the body began to fail. Two priests had apostatised at
+Chichester earlier in the year, one of them actually at the scaffold on
+Broyle Heath; and then in December there were two more recantations at
+Paul's Cross. Those Catholics too who threw up the Faith generally became
+the most aggressive among the persecutors, to testify to their own
+consciences, as well to the Protestants, of the sincerity of their
+conversion.
+
+But in Stanfield the Church flourished, and Anthony had the great
+happiness of receiving his first convert in the person of Mr. Rowe, the
+young owner of a house called East Maskells, separated from Stanfield
+Place by a field-path of under a mile in length, though the road round
+was over two; and the comings and goings were frequent now between the
+two houses. Mr. Rowe was at present unmarried, and had his aunt to keep
+house for him, a tolerant old maiden lady who had conformed placidly to
+the Reformed Religion thirty years before, and was now grown content with
+it. Several "schismatics" too--as those Catholics were called who
+attended their parish church--had waxed bolder, and given up their
+conformity to the Establishment; so it was a happy and courageous flock
+that gathered Sunday by Sunday at Stanfield Place.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Just before Christmas, Anthony received a long and affectionate letter
+from James Maxwell, who was still at Douai.
+
+"The Rector will still have me here," he wrote, "and shows me to the
+young men as if I were a kind of warrior; which is bad for pride; but
+then he humbles me again by telling me I am of more use here as an
+example, than I should be in England; and that humbles me again. So I am
+content to stay. It is a humbling thing, too, to find young men who can
+tell me the history of my arms and legs better than I know it myself. But
+the truth is, I can never walk well again--yet _laudetur Jesus
+Christus_."
+
+Then James Maxwell wrote a little about his grief for Hubert; gave a
+little news of foreign movements among the Catholics; and finally ended
+as follows:
+
+"At last I understand who your friend was behind Bow Church, who
+stuttered and played the Catholic so well. It was our old servant
+Lackington; who turned Protestant and entered Walsingham's service. I
+hear all this from one P. lately in the same affairs, but now turned to
+Christ his service instead; and who has entered here as a student. So
+beware of him; he has a pointed beard now, and a bald forehead. I hear,
+too, from the same source that he was on your track when you landed, but
+now thinks you to be in France. However, he knows of you; so I counsel
+you not to abide over long in one place. Perhaps you may go to
+Lancashire; that is like heaven itself for Catholics. Their zeal and
+piety there are beyond praise; but I hear they somewhat lack priests. God
+keep you always, my dear Brother; and may the Queen of Heaven intercede
+for you. Pray for me."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Soon after the New Year, Mary Corbet was able to get away from Court and
+come down again to her friends for a month or two at Stanfield.
+
+During her stay they all had an adventure together at East Maskells. They
+had been out a long expedition into the woods one clear frosty day and
+rode in just at sunset for an early supper with Mr. Rowe and his aunt.
+
+They had left their horses at the stable and come in round the back of
+the house; so that they missed the servant Miss Rowe had placed at the
+front door to warn them, and came straight into the winter-parlour, where
+they found Miss Rowe in conversation with an ecclesiastic. There was no
+time to retreat; and Anthony in a moment more found himself being
+introduced to a minister he had met at Lambeth more than once--the
+Reverend Robert Carr, who had held the odd title of "Archbishop's Curate"
+and the position of minister in charge of the once collegiate church of
+All Saints', Maidstone, ever since the year '59. He had ridden up from
+Maidstone for supper and lodging, and was on his way to town.
+
+Anthony managed to interrupt Miss Rowe before she came to his assumed
+name Capell, and remarked rather loudly that he had met Mr. Carr before;
+who recognised him too, and greeted him by his real name.
+
+It was an uncomfortable situation, as Mr. Carr was quite unaware of the
+religion of five out of six of those present, and very soon began to give
+voice to his views on Papistry. He was an oldish man by now, and of some
+importance in Maidstone, where he had been appointed Jurat by the
+Corporation, and was a very popular and influential man.
+
+"The voice of the people," he said in the midst of a conversation on the
+national feeling towards Spain, "that is what we must hearken to. Even
+sovereigns themselves must come to that some day. They must rule by
+obeying; as man does with God's laws in nature."
+
+"Would you say that, sir, of her Grace?" asked Mary Corbet meekly.
+
+"I should, madam; though I fear she has injured her power by her
+behaviour this year. It was her people who saved her.--Hawkins, who is
+now ruined as he says; my lord Howard, who has paid from his own purse
+for the meat and drink of her Grace's soldiers, and those who fought with
+them; and not her Grace, who saved them; or Leicester, now gone to his
+account, who sat at Tilbury and did the bowing and the prancing and the
+talking while Hawkins and the rest did the fighting. No, madam, it is the
+voice of the people to which we must hearken."
+
+This was rather confused and dangerous talking too; but here was plainly
+a man to be humoured; he looked round him with a suffused face and the
+eye of a cock, and a little white plume on his forehead increased his
+appearance of pugnacity.
+
+"It is the same in religion," he said, when all preserved a deferential
+silence; "it is that that lies at the root of papist errors. As you know
+very well," he went on, turning suddenly on Anthony, "our bishops do
+nothing to guide men's minds; they only seem to: they ride atop like the
+figure on a cock-horse, but it is the legs beneath that do the work and
+the guiding too: now that is right and good; and the Church of England
+will prosper so long as she goes like that. But if the bishops try to
+rule they will find their mistake. Now the Popish Church is not like
+that; she holds that power comes from above, that the Pope guides the
+bishops, the bishops the priests, and the priests the people."
+
+"And the Holy Ghost the Pope; is it not so, sir?" asked Mr. Buxton.
+
+Mr. Carr turned an eye on him.
+
+"So they hold, sir," he said after a pause.
+
+"They think then, sir, that the shepherds guide the sheep?" asked Anthony
+humbly.
+
+Mary Corbet gave a yelp of laughter; but when Mr. Carr looked at her she
+was grave and deferential again. Miss Rowe looked entreatingly from face
+to face. The minister did not notice Anthony's remark; but swept on again
+on what was plainly his favourite theme,--the infallibility of the
+people. It was a doctrine that was hardly held yet by any; but the next
+century was to see its gradual rise until it reached its climax in the
+Puritanism of the Stuart times. It was true, as Mr. Carr said, that
+Elizabeth had ruled by obeying; and that the people of England,
+encouraged by success in resisting foreign domination, were about to pass
+on to the second position of resisting any domination at all.
+
+Presently he pulled out of his pocket a small printed sheet, and was soon
+declaiming from it. It was not very much to the point, except as
+illustrating the national spirit which he believed so divine. It was a
+ballad describing the tortures which the Spaniards had intended to
+inflict upon the heretic English, and began:
+
+    "All you that list to look and see
+      What profit comes from Spain,
+    And what the Pope and Spaniards both
+      Prepared for our gain.
+    Then turn your eyes and lend your ears
+      And you shall hear and see
+    What courteous minds, what gentle hearts,
+      They bear to thee and me!
+
+And it ended in the same spirit:
+
+    "Be these the men that are so mild
+      Whom some so holy call!
+    The Lord defend our noble Queen
+      And country from them all!"
+
+"There!" the minister cried when he had done, "that is what the Papists
+are like! Trust me; I know them. I should know one in a moment if he
+ventured into this room, by his crafty face. But the Lord will defend His
+own Englishmen; nay! He has done so. 'God blew and they were scattered,'"
+he ended, quoting from the Armada medal.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As the four rode home by pairs across the field-path in the frosty
+moonlight Mr. Buxton lamented to Anthony the effect of the Armada.
+
+"The national spirit is higher than ever," he said, "and it will be the
+death of Catholicism here for the present. Our country squires, I fear,
+faithful Catholics to this time, are beginning to wonder and question.
+When will our Catholic kings learn that Christ His Kingdom is not of this
+world? Philip has smitten the Faith in England with the weapon which he
+drew in its defence, as he thought."
+
+"I was once of that national spirit myself," said Anthony.
+
+"I remember you were," said Mr. Buxton, smiling; "and what grace has done
+to you it may do to others."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The spring went by, and in the week after Easter, James' news about
+Lancashire was verified by a letter from a friend of Mr. Buxton's, a Mr.
+Norreys, the owner of one of the staunch Catholic houses, Speke Hall, on
+the bank of the Mersey.
+
+"Here," he wrote, "by the mercy of God there is no lack of priests,
+though there be none to spare; my own chaplain says mass by dispensation
+thrice on Sunday; but on the moors the sheep look up and are not fed; and
+such patient sheep! I heard but last week of a church where the folk
+resort, priest or no, each Sunday to the number of two hundred, and are
+led by a lector in devotion, ending with an act of spiritual communion
+made all together. These damnable heresies of which the apostle wrote
+have not poisoned the springs of sound doctrine; some of us here know
+naught yet of Elizabeth and her supremacy, or even of seven-wived Harry
+his reformation. Send us then, dear friend, a priest, or at least the
+promise of one; lest we perish quite."
+
+Mr. Buxton had a sore struggle with himself over this letter; but at last
+he carried it to Anthony.
+
+"Read that," he said; and stood waiting.
+
+Anthony looked up when he had done.
+
+"I am your chaplain," he said, "but I am God's priest first."
+
+"Yes, dear lad," said his friend, "I feared you would say so; and I will
+say so to Norreys"; and he left the room at once.
+
+And so at last it came to be arranged that Anthony should leave for
+Lancashire at the end of July; and that after his departure Stanfield
+should be served occasionally by the priest who lived on the outskirts of
+Tonbridge; but the daily mass would have to cease, and that was a sore
+trouble to Mr. Buxton. No definite decision could be made as to when
+Anthony could return; that must wait until he saw the needs of
+Lancashire; but he hoped to be able at least to pay a visit to Stanfield
+again in the spring of the following year.
+
+It was arranged also, of course, that Isabel should accompany her
+brother. They were both of large independent means, and could travel in
+some dignity; and her presence would be under these circumstances a
+protection as well as a comfort to Anthony. It would need very great
+sharpness to detect the seminary priest under Anthony's disguise, and
+amid the surroundings of his cavalcade of four or five armed servants, a
+French maid, and a distinguished-looking lady.
+
+Yet, in spite of this, Mr. Buxton resolved to do his utmost to prevent
+Isabel from going to Lancashire; partly, of course, he disliked the
+thought of the dangers and hardships that she was certain to encounter;
+but the real motive was that he had fallen very deeply in love with her.
+It was her exceptional serenity that seemed to him her greatest charm;
+her movements, her face, her grey eyes, the very folds of her dress
+seemed to breathe with it; and to one of Mr. Buxton's temperament such a
+presence was cool and sweet and strangely fascinating.
+
+It was now April, and he resolved to devote the next month or two to
+preparing her for his proposal; and he wrote frankly to Mary Corbet
+telling her how matters stood, entreating her to come down for July and
+counsel him. Mary wrote back at once, rather briefly, promising to come;
+but not encouraging him greatly.
+
+"I would I could cheer you more," she wrote; "of course I have not seen
+Isabel since January; but, unless she has changed, I do not think she
+will marry you. I am writing plainly you see, as you ask in your letter.
+But I can still say, God prosper you."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As the spring went by and the summer came on, Isabel grew yet more
+silent. As the evenings began to lengthen out she used to spend much time
+before and after supper in walking up and down the clipped lime avenue
+between the east end of the church and the great gates that looked over
+the meadows across which the stream and the field-path ran towards East
+Maskells. Mr. Buxton would watch her sometimes from an upstairs window,
+himself unseen, and occasionally would go out and talk with her; but he
+found it harder than he used to get on to intimate relations; and he
+began to suspect that he had displeased her in some way, and that Mary
+Corbet was right. In the afternoon she and Anthony would generally ride
+out together, once or twice going round by Penshurst, and their host
+would torture himself by his own indecision as regards accompanying them;
+sometimes doing so, sometimes refraining, and regretting whichever he
+did. More and more he began to look forward to Mary's coming and the
+benefit of her advice; and at last, at the end of June, she came.
+
+Their first evening together was delightful for them all. She was happy
+at her escape from Court; her host was happy at the prospect of her
+counsel; and all four were happy at being together again.
+
+They did not meet till supper, and even that was put off an hour, because
+Mary had not come, and when she did arrive she was full of excitement.
+
+"I will tell you all at supper," she said to her host, whom she met in
+the hall. "Oh! how late I am!" and she whirled past him and upstairs
+without another word.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"I will first give you the news in brief," she said, when Anthony had
+said grace and they were seated, all four of them as before; and the
+trumpet-flourish was silent that had announced the approach of the
+venison.
+
+"Mutton's new chaplain, Dr. Bancroft, will be in trouble soon; he hath
+been saying favourable things for some of us poor papists, and hath rated
+the Precisians soundly. Sir Francis Knollys is wroth with him; but that
+is no matter.--Her Grace played at cards till two of the clock this
+morning, and that is why I am so desperate sleepy to-night, for I had to
+sit up too; and that is a great matter.--Drake and Norris, 'tis said,
+have whipped the dons again at Corunna; and the Queen has sworn to pull
+my lord Essex his ears for going with them and adventuring his precious
+self; and that is no matter at all, but will do him good.--George
+Luttrell hath put up a coat of arms in his hall at Dunster, which is a
+great matter to him, but to none else;--and I have robbed a highwayman
+this day in the beech woods this side of Groombridge."
+
+"Dear lady," said Mr. Buxton resignedly, as the others looked up
+startled, "you are too swift for our dull rustic ears; we will begin at
+the end, if you please. Is it true you have robbed an highwayman?"
+
+"It is perfectly true," she said, and unlatched a ruby brooch, made
+heart-shape, from her dress. "There is the plunder," and she held it out
+for inspection.
+
+"Then tell us the tale," said Anthony.
+
+"It would be five of the clock," said Mary, "as we came through
+Groombridge, and then into the woods beyond. I had bidden my knaves ride
+on before with my woman; I came down into a dingle where there was a
+stream; and, to tell the truth, I had my head down and was a-nodding,
+when my horse stopped; and I looked up of a sudden and there was a man on
+a bay mare, with a mask to his mouth, a gay green suit, a brown beard
+turning grey, and this ruby brooch at his throat; and he had caught my
+bridle. I saw him start when I lifted my head, as if he were taken aback.
+I said nothing, but he led my horse off the road down among the trees
+with a deep little thicket where none could see us. As we went I was
+thinking like a windmill; for I knew I had seen the little red brooch
+before.
+
+"When we reached the little open space, I asked him what he wished with
+me.
+
+"'Your purse, madam,' said he.
+
+"'My woman hath it,' said I.
+
+"'Your jewels then, madam,' said he.
+
+"'My woman hath them,' said I, 'save this paste buckle in my hat, to
+which you are welcome.' It was diamonds, you know; but I knew he would
+not know that.
+
+"'What a mistake,' I said, 'to stop the mistress and let the maid go
+free!'
+
+"'Nay,' he said, 'I am glad of it; for at least I will have a dance with
+the mistress; and I could not with the maid.'
+
+"'You are welcome to that,' I said, and I slipped off my horse, to humour
+him, and even as I slipped off I knew who he was, for although many have
+red brooches, and many brown beards turning grey, few have both together;
+but I said nothing. And there--will you believe it?--we danced under the
+beech-trees like Phyllis and Corydon, or whoever they are that Sidney is
+always prating of; or like two fools, I would sooner say. Then when we
+had done, I made him a curtsey.
+
+"'Now you must help me up,' said I, and he mounted me without a word, for
+he was a stoutish gallant and somewhat out of breath. And then what did
+the fool do but try to kiss me, and as he lifted his arm I snatched the
+brooch and put spur to my horse, and as we went up the bank I screamed at
+him, 'Claude, you fool, go home to your wife and take shame to yourself.'
+And when I was near the road I looked back, and he still stood there all
+agape."
+
+"And what was his name?" asked Anthony.
+
+"Nay, nay, I have mocked him enough. And I know four Claudes, so you need
+not try to guess."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When supper was over, Mr. Buxton and Mary walked up and down the south
+path of the garden between the yews, while the other two sat just outside
+the hall window on a seat placed on the tiled terrace that ran round the
+house.
+
+"How I have longed for you to come, Mistress Mary," he said, "and counsel
+me of the matter we wrote about. Tell me what to do."
+
+Mary looked meditatively out to the strip of moon that was rising out to
+the east in the June sky. Then she looked tenderly at her friend.
+
+"I hate to pain you," she said, "but cannot you see that it is
+impossible? I may be wrong; but I think her heart is so given to our
+Saviour that there is no love of that sort left."
+
+"Ah, how can you say that?" he cried; "the love of the Saviour does not
+hinder earthly love; it purifies and transfigures it."
+
+"Yes," said Mary gravely, "it is often so--but the love of the true
+spouse of Christ is different. That leaves no room for an earthly
+bridegroom."
+
+Mr. Buxton was silent a moment or two.
+
+"You mean it is the love of the consecrated soul?"
+
+Mary bowed her head. "But I cannot be sure," she added.
+
+"Then what shall I do?" he said again, almost piteously; and Mary could
+see even in the faint moonlight that his pleasant face was all broken up
+and quivering. She laid her hand gently on his arm, and her rings
+flashed.
+
+"You must be very patient," she said, "very full of deference--and grave.
+You must not be ardent nor impetuous, but speak slowly and reverently to
+her, but at no great length; be plain with her; do not look in her face,
+and do not show anxiety or despair or hope. You need not fear that your
+love will not be plain to her. Indeed, I think she knows it already."
+
+"Why, I have not----" he began.
+
+"I know you have not spoken to her; but I saw that she only looked at you
+once during supper, and that was when your face was turned from her; she
+does not wish to look you in the eyes."
+
+"Ah, she hates me," he sighed.
+
+"Do not be foolish," said Mary, "she honours you, and loves you, and is
+grieved for your grief; but I do not think she will marry you."
+
+"And when shall I speak?" he asked.
+
+"You must wait; God will make the opportunity--in any case. You must not
+attempt to make it. That would terrify her."
+
+"And you will speak for me."
+
+Mary smiled at him.
+
+"Dear friend," she said, "sometimes I think you do not know us at all. Do
+you not see that Isabel is greater than all that? What she knows, she
+knows. I could tell her nothing."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The days passed on; the days of the last month of the Norrises' stay at
+Stanfield. Half-way through the month came the news of the Oxford
+executions.
+
+"Ah! listen to this," cried Mr. Buxton, coming out to them one evening in
+the garden with a letter in his hand. "'Humphrey Prichard,'" he read,
+"'made a good end. He protested he was condemned for the Catholic Faith;
+that he willingly died for it; that he was a Catholic. One of their
+ministers laughed at him, saying he was a poor ignorant fellow who knew
+not what it was to be a Catholic. 'I know very well;' said Humphrey,
+'though I cannot say it in proper divinity language.' There is the
+Religion for you!" went on Mr. Buxton; "all meet there, wise and simple
+alike. There is no difference; no scholarship is needed for faith. 'I
+know what it is,' cried Humphrey, 'though I cannot explain it!'"
+
+The news came to Anthony just when he needed it; he felt he had done so
+little to teach his flock now he was to leave them; but if he had only
+done something to keep alive the fire of faith, he had not lost his time;
+and so he went about his spiritual affairs with new heart, encouraging
+the wavering, whom he was to leave, warning the over-confident, urging
+the hesitating, and saying good-bye to them all. Isabel went with him
+sometimes; or sometimes walked or rode with Mary, and was silent for the
+most part in public. The master of the house himself did his affairs, and
+carried a heavier heart each day. And at last the opportunity came which
+Mary had predicted.
+
+He had come in one evening after a hot ride alone over to Tonbridge on
+some business with the priest there; and had dressed for supper
+immediately on coming in.
+
+As there was still nearly an hour before supper, he went out to walk up
+and down the same yew-alley near the garden-house where he had walked
+with Mary. Anthony and Isabel had returned a little later from East
+Maskells, and they too had dressed early. Isabel threw a lace shawl over
+her head, and betook herself too to the alley; and there she turned a
+corner and almost ran into her host.
+
+It was, as Mary had said, a God-made opportunity. Neither time nor place
+could have been improved. If externals were of any value to this
+courtship, all that could have helped was there. The setting of the
+picture was perfect; a tall yew-hedge ran down the northern side of the
+walk, cut, as Bacon recommended, not fantastically but "with some pretty
+pyramids"; a strip of turf separated it from the walk, giving a sense
+both of privacy and space; on the south side ran flower-beds in the turf,
+with yews and cypresses planted here and there, and an oak paling beyond;
+to the east lay the "fair mount," again recommended by the same
+authority, but not so high, and with but one ascent; to the west the path
+darkened under trees, and over all rose up against the sunset sky the
+tall grotesque towers and vanes of the garden-house. The flowers burned
+with that ember-like glow which may be seen on summer evenings, and
+poured out their scent; the air was sweet and cool, and white moths were
+beginning to poise and stir among the blossoms. The two actors on this
+scene too were not unworthy of it; his dark velvet and lace with the
+glimmer of diamonds here and there, and his delicate bearded clean-cut
+face, a little tanned, thrown into relief by the spotless crisp ruff
+beneath, and above all his air of strength and refinement and
+self-possession--all combined to make him a formidable stormer of a
+girl's heart. And as he looked on her--on her clear almost luminous face
+and great eyes, shrined in the drooping lace shawl, through which a jewel
+or two in her black hair glimmered, her upright slender figure in its
+dark sheath, and the hand, white and cool, that held her shawl together
+over her breast--he had a pang of hope and despair at once, at the sudden
+sense of need of this splendid creature of God to be one with him, and
+reign with him over these fair possessions; and of hopelessness at the
+thought that anything so perfect could be accomplished in this imperfect
+world.
+
+He turned immediately and walked beside her, and they both knew, in the
+silence that followed, that the crisis had come.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said, still looking down as he spoke, and his voice
+sounded odd to her ears, "I wonder if you know what I would say to you."
+
+There came no sound from her, but the rustle of her dress.
+
+"But I must say it," he went on, "follow what may. It is this. I love you
+dearly."
+
+Her walk faltered beside him, and it seemed as if she would stand still.
+
+"A moment," he said, and he lifted his white restrained face. "I ask you
+to be patient with me. Perhaps I need not say that I have never said this
+to any woman before; but more, I have never even thought it. I do not
+know how to speak, nor what I should say; beyond this, that since I first
+met you at the door across there, a year ago, you have taught me ever
+since what love means; and now I am come to you, as to my dear mistress,
+with my lesson learnt."
+
+They were standing together now; he was still turned a little away from
+her, and dared not lift his eyes to her face again. Then of a sudden he
+felt her hand on his arm for a moment, and he looked up, and saw her eyes
+all swimming with sorrow.
+
+"Dear friend," she said quite simply, "it is impossible--Ah! what can I
+say?"
+
+"Give me a moment more," he said; and they walked on slowly. "I know what
+presumption this is; but I will not spin phrases about that. Nor do I ask
+what is impossible; but I will only ask leave to teach you in my turn
+what love means."
+
+"Oh! that is the hardest of all to say," she said, "but I know already."
+
+He did not quite understand, and glanced at her a moment.
+
+"I once loved too," she whispered. He drew a sharp breath.
+
+"Forgive me," he said, "I forced that from you."
+
+"You are never anything but courteous and kind," she said, "and that
+makes this harder than all."
+
+They walked in silence half a dozen steps.
+
+"Have I distressed you?" he asked, glancing at her again.
+
+Then she looked full in his face, and her eyes were overflowing.
+
+"I am grieved for your sorrow," she said, "and at my own unworthiness,
+you know that?"
+
+"I know that you are now and always will be my dear mistress and queen."
+
+His voice broke altogether as he ended, and he bent and took her hand
+delicately in his own, as if it were royal, and kissed it. Then she gave
+a great sob and slipped away through the opening in the clipped hedge;
+and he was left alone with the dusk and his sorrow.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+A week later Anthony and Isabel were saying good-bye to him in the early
+summer morning: the pack-horses had started on before, and there were
+just the two saddle-horses at the low oak door, with the servants'
+behind. When Mr. Buxton had put Isabel into the saddle, he held her hand
+for a moment; Anthony was mounting behind.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he whispered; "forgive me; but I find I cannot take
+your answer; you will remember that."
+
+She shook her head without speaking, but dared not even look into his
+eyes; though she turned her head as she rode out of the gates for a last
+look at the peaked gables and low windows of the house where she had been
+so happy. There was still the dark figure motionless against the pale oak
+door.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" she whispered brokenly, "our Lord asks very much."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                          NORTHERN RELIGION
+
+
+The Northern counties were distinguished among all in England for their
+loyalty to the old Faith; and this was owing, no doubt, to the characters
+of both the country and the inhabitants;--it was difficult for the
+officers of justice to penetrate to the high moorland and deep ravines,
+and yet more difficult to prevail with the persons who lived there.
+Twenty-two years before the famous Lancashire League had been formed,
+under the encouragement of Dr. Allen, afterwards the Cardinal, whose
+members pledged themselves to determined recusancy; with the result that
+here and there church-doors were closed, and the Book of Common Prayer
+utterly refused. Owing partly to Bishop Downman's laxity towards the
+recusants, the principles of the League had retained their hold
+throughout the county, ever since '68, when ten obstinate Lancastrians
+had been haled before the Council, of whom one, the famous Sir John
+Southworth himself, suffered imprisonment more than once.
+
+Anthony and Isabel then found their life in the North very different to
+that which they had been living at Stanfield. Near the towns, of course,
+precaution was as necessary as anywhere else in England, but once they
+had passed up on to the higher moorlands they were able to throw off all
+anxiety, as much as if the penal laws of England were not in force there.
+
+It was pleasant, too, to go, as they did, from great house to great
+house, and find the old pre-Reformation life of England in full vigour;
+the whole family present at mass so often as it was said, desirous of the
+sacraments, and thankful for the opportunities of grace that the arrival
+of the priest afforded. Isabel would often stay at such houses a week or
+two together, while Anthony made rounds into the valleys and to the
+moorland villages round-about; and then the two would travel on together
+with their servants to the next village. Anthony's ecclesiastical outfit
+was very simple. Among Isabel's dresses lay a brocade vestment that might
+easily pass notice if the luggage was searched; and Anthony carried in
+his own luggage a little altar-stone, a case with the holy oils, a tiny
+chalice and paten, singing-cakes, and a thin vellum-bound Missal and
+Ritual in one volume, containing the order of mass, a few votive masses,
+and the usual benedictions for holy-water, rue and the like, and the
+occasional offices.
+
+In this manner they first visited many of the famous old Lancashire
+houses, some of which still stand, Borwick Hall, Hall-i'-the-Wood,
+Lydiate Hall, Thurnham, Blainscow, where Campion had once been so nearly
+taken, and others, all of which were provided with secret hiding-places
+for the escape of the priest, should a sudden alarm be raised. In none of
+them, however, did he find the same elaboration of device as at Stanfield
+Place.
+
+First, however, they went to Speke Hall, the home of Mr. Norreys, on the
+banks of the Mersey, a beautiful house of magpie architecture, and
+furnished with a remarkable underground passage to the shore of the
+Mersey, the scene of Richard Brittain's escape.
+
+Here they received a very warm welcome.
+
+"It is as I wrote to Mr. Buxton," said his host on the evening of their
+arrival, "in many places in this country any religion other than the
+Catholic is unknown. The belief of the Protestant is as strange as that
+of the Turk, both utterly detested. I was in Cumberland a few months
+back; there in more than one village the old worship goes on as it has
+done since Christianity first came to this island. But I hope you will go
+up there, now that you have come so far. You would do a great work for
+Christ his Church."
+
+He told him, too, a number of stories of the zeal and constancy shown on
+behalf of the Religion; of small squires who were completely ruined by
+the fines laid upon them; of old halls that were falling to pieces
+through the ruin brought upon their staunch owners; and above all of the
+priests that Lancashire had added to the roll of the martyrs--Anderton,
+Marsden, and Thompson among others--and of the joy shown when the
+glorious news of their victory over death reached the place where they
+had been born or where they had ministered.
+
+"At Preston," he said, "when the news of Mr. Greenaway's death reached
+them, they tolled the bells for sorrow. But his old mother ran from her
+house to the street when they had broken the news to her: 'Peal them,
+peal them!' she cried, 'for I have borne a martyr to God.'"
+
+He talked, too, of Campion, of his sermons on "The King who went a
+journey," and the "Hail, Mary"; and told him of the escape at Blainscow
+Hall, where the servant-girl, seeing the pursuivants at hand, pushed the
+Jesuit, with quick wit and courage, into the duck-pond, so that he came
+out disguised indeed--in green mud--and was mocked at by the very
+officers as a clumsy suitor of maidens.
+
+Anthony's heart warmed within him as he sat and listened to these tales
+of patience and gallantry.
+
+"I would lay down my life to serve such folk," he said; and Isabel looked
+with deep-kindled eyes from the one to the other.
+
+They did not stay more than a day or two at Speke Hall, for, as Mr.
+Norreys said, the necessaries of salvation were to be had there already;
+but they moved on almost at once northwards, always arriving at some
+central point for Saturdays and Sundays, so that the Catholics round
+could come in for shrift and housel. In this manner they passed up
+through Lancashire, and pushed still northwards, hearing that a priest
+was sorely needed, through the corner of Westmoreland, up the Lake
+country, through into Cumberland itself. At Kendal, where they stayed two
+nights, Anthony received a message that determined him, after
+consultation with Isabel, to push on as far as Skiddaw, and to make that
+the extreme limit of his journey. He sent the messenger, a wild-looking
+North-countryman, back with a verbal answer to that effect, and named a
+date when they would arrive.
+
+It was already dark, two weeks later, when they arrived at the point
+where the guide was to meet them, as they had lost their way more than
+once already. Here were a couple of men with torches, waiting for them
+behind a rock, who had come down from the village, a mile farther on, to
+bring them up the difficult stony path that was the only means of access
+to it. The track went up a ravine, with a rock-wall rising on their left,
+on which the light of the torches shone, and tumbled ground, covered with
+heather, falling rapidly away on their right down to a gulf of darkness
+whence they could hear the sound of the torrent far below; the path was
+uneven, with great stones here and there, and sharp corners in it, and as
+they went it was all they could do to keep their tired horses from
+stumbling, for a slip would have been dangerous under the circumstances.
+The men who led them said little, as it was impossible for a horse and a
+man to walk abreast, but Anthony was astonished to see again and again,
+as they turned a corner, another man with a torch and some weapon, a
+pike, or a sword, start up and salute him, or sometimes a group, with
+barefooted boys, and then attach themselves to the procession either
+before or behind; until in a short while there was an escort of some
+thirty or forty accompanying the cavalcade. At last, as they turned a
+corner, the lighted windows of a belfry showed against the dark moor
+beyond, and in a moment more, as if there were a watcher set there to
+look out for the torches, a peal of five bells clashed out from the
+tower; then, as they rose yet higher, the path took a sudden turn and a
+dip between two towering rocks, and the whole village lay beneath them,
+with lights in every window to welcome the priest, the first that they
+had seen for eight months, when the old Marian rector, the elder brother
+of the squire, had died.
+
+It was now late, so Anthony and Isabel were conducted immediately to the
+Hall, an old house immediately adjoining the churchyard; and here, too,
+the windows were blazing with welcome, and the tall squire, Mr. Brian,
+with his wife and children behind, was standing before the bright
+hall-door at the top of the steps. The men and boys that had brought them
+so far, and were standing in the little court with their torches
+uplifted, now threw themselves on their knees to receive the priest's
+blessing, before they went home; and Anthony blessed them and thanked
+them, and went indoors with his sister, strangely moved and uplifted.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The two following days were full of hard work and delight for Anthony. He
+was to say mass at half-past six next morning, and came out of the house
+a little after six o'clock; the sun was just rising to his right over a
+shoulder of Skiddaw, which dominated the eastern horizon; and all round
+him, stretched against the sky in all directions, were the high purple
+moors in the strange dawn-light. Immediately in front of him, not thirty
+yards away, stood the church, with its tower, two aisles, and a chapel on
+a little promontory of rock which jutted out over the bed of the torrent
+along which he had climbed the night before; and to his left lay the
+straggling street of the village. All was perfectly still except for the
+dash of the stream over the rocks; but from one or two houses a thin
+skein of smoke was rising straight into the air. Anthony stood rapt in
+delight, and drew long breaths of the cool morning air, laden with
+freshness and fragrant with the mellow scent of the heather and the
+autumnal smells.
+
+He was completely taken by surprise when he entered the church, for, for
+the first time since he could remember, he saw an English church in its
+true glory. It had been built for a priory-church of Holm-Cultram, but
+for some reason had never been used as that, and had become simply the
+parish church of the village. Across the centre and the northern aisle
+ran an elaborate screen, painted in rich colours, and the southern
+chapel, which ran eastwards of the porch, was separated in a similar way
+from the rest of the church. Over the central screen was the great rood,
+with its attendant figures, exquisitely carved and painted; in every
+direction, as Anthony looked beyond the screens, gleamed rich windows,
+with figures and armorial bearings; here and there tattered banners hung
+on the walls; St. Christopher stood on the north wall opposite the door,
+to guard from violence all who looked upon him day by day; a little
+painting of the Baptist hung on a pillar over against the font, and a
+Vernacle by the pulpit; and all round the walls hung little pictures,
+that the poor and unlearned might read the story of redemption there. But
+the chief glory of all was the solemn high altar, with its riddells
+surmounted by taper-bearing gilded angels, with its brocade cloth, and
+its painted halpas behind; and above it, before the rich window which
+smouldered against the dawn, hung the awful pyx, covered by the white
+silk cloth, but empty; waiting for the priest to come and bid the
+Shechinah of the Lord to brood there again over this gorgeous throne
+beneath, against the brilliant halo of the painted glass behind.
+
+Anthony knelt a moment and thanked God for bringing him here, and then
+passed up into the north aisle, where the image of the Mother of God
+presided, as she had done for three hundred years, over her little altar
+against the wall. Anthony said his preparation and vested at the altar;
+and was astonished to find at least thirty people to hear mass: none, of
+course, made their communion, but Anthony, when he had ended, placed the
+Body of the Lord once more in the hanging pyx and lit the lamp before it.
+
+Then all day he sat in the north chapel, with the dash and loud thunder
+of the mountain stream entering through the opened panes of the east
+window, and the stained sunlight, in gorgeous colours, creeping across
+the red tiles at his feet, glowing and fading as the clouds moved over
+the sun, while the people came and were shriven; with the exception of an
+hour in the middle of the day and half an hour for supper in the evening,
+he was incessantly occupied until nine o'clock at night. From the upland
+dales all round they streamed in, at news of the priest, and those who
+had come from far and were fasting he communicated at once from the
+Reserved Sacrament. At last, tired out, but intensely happy, he went back
+to the Hall.
+
+But the next morning was yet more startling. Mass was at eight o'clock,
+and by the time Anthony entered the church he found a congregation of
+nearly two hundred souls; the village itself did not number above
+seventy, but many came in from the country round, and some had stayed all
+night in the church-porch. Then, too, he heard the North-country singing
+in the old way; all the mass music was sung in three parts, except the
+unchanging melody of the creed, which, like the tremendous and unchanging
+words themselves, at one time had united the whole of England; but what
+stirred Anthony more than all were the ancient hymns sung here and there
+during the service, some in Latin, which a few picked voices rendered,
+and some in English, to the old lilting tunes which were as much the
+growth of the north-country as the heather itself. The "Ave Verum Corpus"
+was sung after the Elevation, and Anthony felt that his heart would break
+for very joy; as he bent before the Body of his Lord, and the voices
+behind him rose and exulted up the aisles, the women's and children's
+voices soaring passionately up in the melody, the mellow men's voices
+establishing, as it seemed, these ecstatic pinnacles of song on mighty
+and immovable foundations.
+
+Vespers were said at three o'clock, after baptisms and more confessions;
+and Anthony was astonished at the number of folk who could answer the
+priest. After vespers he made a short sermon, and told the people
+something of what he had seen in the South, of the martyrdoms at Tyburn,
+and of the constancy of the confessors.
+
+"'Be thou faithful unto death,'" he said. "So our Saviour bids us, and He
+gives us a promise too: 'I will give thee a crown of life.' Beloved, some
+day the tide of heresy will creep up these valleys too; and it will bear
+many things with it, the scaffold and the gallows and the knife maybe.
+And then our Lord will see which are His; then will be the time that
+grace will triumph--that those who have used the sacraments with
+devotion; that have been careful and penitent with their sins, that have
+hungered for the Bread of Life--the Lord shall stand by them and save
+them, as He stood by Mr. Sherwin on the rack, and Father Campion on the
+scaffold, and Mistress Ward and many more, of whom I have not had time to
+tell you. He who bids us be faithful, Himself will be faithful; and He
+who wore the crown of thorns will bestow upon us the crown of life."
+
+Then they sang a hymn to our Lady:
+
+    "Hail be thou, Mary, the mother of Christ,"
+
+and the old swaying tune rocked like a cradle, and the people looked up
+towards their Mother's altar as they sang--their Mother who had ruled
+them so sweetly and so long--and entreated her in their hearts, who stood
+by her Son's Cross, to stand by theirs too should God ever call them to
+die upon one.
+
+The next day Mr. Brian took Anthony a long walk as soon as dinner was
+over, across the moors towards the north side of Skiddaw. Anthony found
+the old man a delightful and garrulous companion, full of tales of the
+countryside, historical, religious, naturalistic, and supernatural. As
+they stood on a little eminence and looked back to where the church-tower
+pricked out of the deep crack in the moors where it stood, he told him
+the tale of the coming of the pursuivants.
+
+"They first troubled us in '72," he said; "they had not thought it worth
+while before to disturb themselves for one old man like my brother, who
+was like to die soon; but in April of that year they first sent up their
+men. But it was only a pair of pursuivants, for they knew nothing of
+the people; they came up, the poor men, to take my brother down to
+Cockermouth to answer on his religion to some bench of ministers that sat
+there. Well, they met him, in his cassock and square cap, coming out of
+the church, where he had just replaced the Most Holy Sacrament after
+giving communion to a dying body. 'Heh! are you the minister?' say they.
+
+"'Heh! I am the priest, if that is what you mean,' he answers back. (He
+was a large man, like myself, was my brother.)
+
+"'Well, come, old man,' say they, 'we must help you down to Cockermouth.'
+
+"Well, a few words passed; and the end was that he called out to Tim, who
+lived just against the church; and told them what was forward.
+
+"Well, the pursuivants got back to Cockermouth with their lives, but not
+much else; and reported to the magistrates that the wild Irish themselves
+were little piminy maids compared to the folk they had visited that day.
+
+"So there was a great to-do, and a deal of talk; and in the next month
+they sent up thirty pikemen with an officer and a dozen pursuivants, and
+all to take one old priest and his brother. I had been in Kendal in April
+when they first came--but they put it all down to me.
+
+"Well, we were ready for them this time; the bells had been ringing to
+call in the folk since six of the clock in the morning; and by
+dinner-time, when the soldiers were expected, there was a matter of two
+hundred men, I should say, some with scythes and sickles, and some with
+staves or shepherds' crooks; the children had been sent down sooner to
+stone the men all the way up the path; and by the time that they had
+reached the churchyard gate there was not a man of them but had a cut or
+a bruise upon him. Then, when they turned the corner, black with wrath,
+there were the lads gathered about the church-porch each with his weapon,
+and each white and silent, waiting for what should fall.
+
+"Now you wonder where we were. We were in the church, my brother and I;
+for our people had put us there against our will, to keep us safe, they
+said. Eh! but I was wroth when Olroyd and the rest pushed me through the
+door. However, there we were, locked in; I was up in one window, and my
+brother was in the belfry as I thought, each trying to see what was
+forward. I saw the two crowds of them, silent and wrathful, with not
+twenty yards between them, and a few stones still sailing among the
+soldiers now and again; the pikes were being set in array, and our lads
+were opening out to let the scythes have free play, when on a sudden I
+heard the tinkle of a bell round the outside of the tower, and I climbed
+down from my place, and up again to one of the west windows; there was a
+fearsome hush outside now, and I could see some of the soldiers in front
+were uneasy; they had their eyes off the lads and round the side of the
+tower. And then I saw little Dickie Olroyd in his surplice ringing a bell
+and bearing a candle, and behind him came my brother, in a purple cope I
+had never set eyes on before, with his square cap and a great book, and
+his eyes shining out of his head, and his lips opening and mouthing out
+Latin; and then he stopped, laid the book reverently on a tombstone,
+lifted both hands, and brought them down with the fingers out, and his
+eyes larger than ever. I could see the soldiers were ready to break and
+scatter, for some were Catholics no doubt, and many more feared the
+priest; and then on a sudden my brother caught the candle out of Dickie's
+hand, blew it out with a great puff, while Dickie rattled upon the bell,
+and then he dashed the smoking candle among the soldiers. The soldiers
+broke and fled like hares, out of the churchyard, down the street and
+down the path to Cockermouth; the officer tried to stay them, but 'twas
+no use; the fear of the Church was upon them, and her Grace herself could
+not have prevailed with them. Well, when they let us out, the lads were
+all a-trembling too; for my brother's face, they said, was like the
+destroying angel; and I was somewhat queer myself, and I was astonished
+too; for he was kind-hearted, was my brother, and would not hurt a fly's
+body; much less damn his soul; and, after all, the poor soldiers were not
+to blame; and 'twas a queer cursing, I thought too, to be done like that;
+but maybe 'twas a new papal method. I went round to the north chapel, and
+there he was taking off his cope.
+
+"'Well,' he said to me, 'how did I do it?'
+
+"'Do it?' I said; 'do it? Why, you've damned those poor lads' souls
+eternally. The hand of the Lord was with you,' I said.
+
+"'Damned them?' said he; 'nonsense! 'Twas only your old herbal that I
+read at them; and the cope too, 'twas inside out.'"
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then the old man told Anthony other stories of his earlier life, how he
+had been educated at the university and been at Court in King Henry's
+reign and Queen Mary's, but that he had lost heart at Elizabeth's
+accession, and retired to his hills, where he could serve God according
+to his conscience, and study God's works too, for he was a keen
+naturalist. He told Anthony many stories about the deer, and the herds of
+wild white hornless cattle that were now practically extinct on the
+hills, and of a curious breed of four-horned sheep, skulls of all of
+which species hung in his hall, and of the odd drinking-horns that
+Anthony had admired the day before. There was one especially that he
+talked much of, a buffalo horn on three silver feet fashioned like the
+legs of an armed man; round the centre was a filleting inscribed, "_Qui
+pugnat contra tres perdet duos_," and there was a cross patée on the
+horn, and two other inscriptions, "_Nolite extollere cornu in altu'_" and
+"_Qui bibat me adhuc siti'_." Mr. Brian told him it had been brought from
+Italy by his grandfather.
+
+They put up a quantity of grouse and several hares as they walked across
+the moor; one of the hares, which had a curious patch of white between
+his ears like a little night-cap, startled Mr. Brian so much that he
+exclaimed aloud, crossed himself, and stood, a little pale, watching the
+hare's head as it bobbed and swerved among the heather.
+
+"I like it not," he said to Anthony, who inquired what was the matter.
+"Satan hath appeared under some such form to many in history. Joachimus
+Camerarius, who wrote _de natura dæmonum_, tells, I think, a story of
+a hare followed by a fox that ran across the path of a young man who
+was riding on a horse, and who started in pursuit. Up and down hills and
+dales they went, and soon the fox was no longer there, and the hare grew
+larger and blacker as it went; and the young man presently saw that he
+was in a country that he knew not; it was all barren and desolate round
+him, and the sky grew dark. Then he spurred his horse more furiously, and
+he drew nearer and nearer to the great hare that now skipped along like a
+stag before him; and then, as he put out his hand to cut the hare down,
+the creature sprang into the air and vanished, and the horse fell dead;
+and the man was found in his own meadow by his friends, in a swound, with
+his horse dead beside him, and trampled marks round and round the field,
+and the pug-marks of what seemed like a great tiger beside him, where the
+beast had sprung into the air."
+
+When Mr. Brian found that Anthony was interested in such stories, he told
+him plenty of them; especially tales that seemed to join in a strange
+unity of life, demons, beasts and men. It was partly, no doubt, his
+studies as a naturalist that led him to insist upon points that united
+rather than divided the orders of creation; and he told him stories first
+from such writers as Michael Verdunus and Petrus Burgottus, who relate
+among other marvels how there are ointments by the use of which shepherds
+have been known to change themselves into wolves and tear the sheep that
+they should have protected; and he quoted to him St. Augustine's own
+testimony, to the belief that in Italy certain women were able to change
+themselves into heifers through the power of witchcraft. Finally, he told
+him one or two tales of his own experience.
+
+"In the year '63," he said, "before my marriage, I was living alone in
+the Hall; I was a young man, and did my best to fear nought but deadly
+sin. I was coming back late from Threlkeld, round the south of Skiddaw
+that you see over there; and was going with a lantern, for it would be
+ten o'clock at night, and the time of year was autumn. I was still a mile
+or two from the house, and was saying my beads as I came, for I hold that
+is a great protection; when I heard a strange whistling noise, with a
+murmur in it, high up overhead in the night. 'It is the birds going
+south,' I said to myself, for you know that great flocks fly by night
+when the cold begins to set in; but the sound grew louder and more
+distinct, and at last I could hear the sound as of words gabbled in a
+foreign tongue; and I knew they were no birds, though maybe they had
+wings like them. But I knew that a Christened soul in grace has nought to
+fear from hell; so I crossed myself and said my beads, and kept my eyes
+on the ground, and presently I saw my lights burning in the house, and
+heard the roar of the stream, and the gabbling above me ceased, as the
+sound of the running water began. But that night I awoke again and again;
+and the night seemed hot and close each time, as if a storm was near, but
+there was no thunder. Each time I heard the roar of the stream below the
+house, and no more. At last, towards the morning, I set my window wide
+that looks towards the stream, and leaned out; and there beneath me,
+crowded against the wall of the house, as I could see in the growing
+light, was a great flock of sheep, with all their heads together towards
+the house, as close as a score of dogs could pack them, and they were all
+still as death, and their backs were dripping wet; for they had come down
+the hills and swum the stream, in order to be near a Christened man and
+away from what was abroad that night.
+
+"My shepherds told me the same that day, that everywhere the sheep had
+come down to the houses, as if terrified near to death; and at Keswick,
+whither I went the next market-day, they told me the same tale, and that
+two men had each found a sheep that could not travel; one had a broken
+leg, and the other had been cast; but neither had another mark or wound
+or any disease upon him, but that both were lying dead upon Skiddaw; and
+the look in the dead eyes, they said, was fit to make a man forget his
+manhood."
+
+Anthony found the old man the most interesting companion possible, and he
+persuaded him to accompany him on several of the expeditions that he had
+to make to the hamlets and outlying cottages round, in his spiritual
+ministrations; and both he and Isabel were sincerely sorry when two
+Sundays had passed away, and they had to begin to move south again in
+their journeyings.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+And so the autumn passed and winter began, and Anthony was slowly moving
+down again, supplying the place of priests who had fallen sick or had
+died, visiting many almost inaccessible hamlets, and everywhere
+encouraging the waverers and seeking the wanderers, and rejoicing over
+the courageous, and bringing opportunities of grace to many who longed
+for them. He met many other well-known priests from time to time, and
+took counsel with them, but did not have time to become very intimate
+with any of them, so great were the demands upon his services. In this
+manner he met John Colleton, the canonist, who had returned from his
+banishment in '87, but found him a little dull and melancholy, though his
+devotion was beyond praise. He met, too, the Jesuit Fathers Edward
+Oldcorne and Richard Holtby, the former of whom had lately come from
+Hindlip.
+
+He spent Christmas near Cartmel-in-Furness, and after the new year had
+opened, crossed the Ken once more near Beetham, and began to return
+slowly down the coast. Everywhere he was deeply touched by the devotion
+of the people, who, in spite of long months without a priest, had yet
+clung to the observance of their religion so far as was possible, and now
+welcomed him like an angel of God; and he had the great happiness too of
+reconciling some who, yielding to loneliness and pressure, had conformed
+to the Establishment. In these latter cases he was almost startled by the
+depth of Catholic convictions that had survived.
+
+"I never believed it, father," said a young squire to him, near Garstang.
+"I knew that it was but a human invention, and not the Gospel that my
+fathers held, and that Christ our Saviour brought on earth; but I lost
+heart, for that no priest came near us, and I had not had the sacraments
+for nearly two years; and I thought that it were better to have some
+religion than none at all, so at last I went to church. But there is no
+need to talk to me, father, now I have made my confession, for I know
+with my whole soul that the Catholic Religion is the true one--and I have
+known it all the while, and I thank God and His Blessed Mother, and you,
+father, too, for helping me to say so again, and to come back to grace."
+
+At last, at the beginning of March, Anthony and Isabel found themselves
+back again at Speke Hall, warmly welcomed by Mr. Norreys.
+
+"You have done a good work for the Church, Mr. Capell," said his host,
+"and God will reward you and thank you for it Himself, for we cannot."
+
+"And I thank God," said Anthony, "for the encouragement to faith that the
+sight of the faithful North has given to me; and pray Him that I may
+carry something of her spirit back with me to the south."
+
+There were letters waiting for him at Speke Hall, one from Mr. Buxton,
+urging them to come back, at least for the present, to Stanfield Place,
+so soon as the winter work in the north was over; and another from the
+Rector of the College at Douai to the same effect. There was also one
+more, written from a little parish in Kent, from a Catholic lady who was
+altogether a stranger to him, but who plainly knew all about him,
+entreating him to call at her house when he was in the south again; her
+husband, she said, had met him once at Stanfield and had been strongly
+attracted by him to the Catholic Church, and she believed that if Anthony
+would but pay them a visit her husband's conversion would be brought
+about. Anthony could not remember the man's name, but Isabel thought that
+she did remember some such person at a small private conference that
+Anthony had given in Mr. Buxton's house, for the benefit of Catholics and
+those who were being drawn towards the Religion.
+
+The lady, too, gave him instructions as to how he should come from London
+to her house, recommending him to cross the Thames at a certain spot that
+she described near Greenhithe, and to come on southwards along a route
+that she marked for him, to the parish of Stanstead, where she lived.
+This, then, was soon arranged, and after letters had been sent off
+announcing Anthony's movements, he left Speke Hall with Isabel, about a
+fortnight later.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII
+
+                          IN STANSTEAD WOODS
+
+
+On the first day of June, Anthony and Isabel, with their three armed
+servants and the French maid behind them, were riding down through
+Thurrock to the north bank of the Thames opposite Greenhithe. As they
+went Anthony pulled out and studied the letter and the little map that
+Mrs. Kirke had sent to guide them.
+
+"On the right-hand side," she wrote, "when you come to the ferry, stands
+a little inn, the 'Sloop,' among trees, with a yard behind it. Mr.
+Bender, the host, is one of us; and he will get your horses on board, and
+do all things to forward you without attracting attention. Give him some
+sign that he may know you for a Catholic, and when you are alone with him
+tell him where you are bound."
+
+There were one or two houses standing near the bank, as they rode down
+the lane that led to the river, but they had little difficulty in
+identifying the "Sloop," and presently they rode into the yard, and,
+leaving their horses with the servants, stepped round into the little
+smoky front room of the inn.
+
+A man, dressed somewhat like a sailor, was sitting behind a table, who
+looked up with a dull kind of expectancy and whom Anthony took as the
+host; and, in order to identify him and show who he himself was, he took
+up a little cake of bread that was lying on a platter on the table, and
+broke it as if he would eat. This was one of Father Persons' devices, and
+was used among Catholics to signify their religion when they were with
+strangers, since it was an action that could rouse no suspicion among
+others. The man looked in an unintelligent way at Anthony, who turned
+away and rapped upon the door, and as a large heavily-built man came out,
+broke it again, and put a piece into his mouth. The man lifted his
+eyebrows slightly, and just smiled, and Anthony knew he had found his
+friend.
+
+"Come this way, sir," he said, "and your good lady, too."
+
+They followed him into the inner room of the house, a kind of little
+kitchen, with a fire burning and a pot over it, and one or two barrels of
+drink against the wall. A woman was stirring the pot, for it was near
+dinner-time, and turned round as the strangers came in. It was plainly an
+inn that was of the poorest kind, and that was used almost entirely by
+watermen or by travellers who were on their way to cross the ferry.
+
+"The less said the better," said the man, when he had shut the door. "How
+can I serve you, sir?"
+
+"We wish to take our horses and ourselves across to Greenhithe," said
+Anthony, "and Mrs. Kirke, to whom we are going, bade us make ourselves
+known to you."
+
+The man nodded and smiled.
+
+"Yes, sir, that can be managed directly. The ferry is at the other bank
+now, sir; and I will call it across. Shall we say in half an hour, sir;
+and, meanwhile, will you and your lady take something?"
+
+Anthony accepted gladly, as the time was getting on, and ordered dinner
+for the servants too, in the outer room. As the landlord was going to the
+door, he stopped him.
+
+"Who is that man in the other room?" he asked.
+
+The landlord gave a glance at the door, and came back towards Anthony.
+
+"To tell the truth, sir, I do not know. He is a sailor by appearance, and
+he knows the talk; but none of the watermen know him; and he seems to do
+nothing. However, sir, there's no harm in him that I can see."
+
+Anthony told him that he had broken the bread before him, thinking he was
+the landlord. The real landlord smiled broadly.
+
+"Thank God, I am somewhat more of a man than that," for the sailor was
+lean and sun-dried. Then once more Mr. Bender went to the door to call
+the servants in.
+
+"Why, the man's gone," he said, and disappeared. Then they heard his
+voice again. "But he's left his groat behind him for his drink, so all's
+well"; and presently his voice was heard singing as he got the table
+ready for the servants.
+
+In a little more than half an hour the party and the horses were safely
+on the broad bargelike ferry, and Mr. Bender was bowing on the bank and
+wishing them a prosperous journey, as they began to move out on to the
+wide river towards the chalk cliffs and red roofs of Greenhithe that
+nestled among the mass of trees on the opposite bank. In less than ten
+minutes they were at the pier, and after a little struggle to get the
+horses to land, they were mounted and riding up the straight little
+street that led up to the higher ground. Just before they turned the
+corner they heard far away across the river the horn blown to summon the
+ferry-boat once more.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There were two routes from Greenhithe to Stanstead, the one to the right
+through Longfield and Ash, the other to the left through Southfleet and
+Nursted. There was very little to choose between them as regards
+distance, and Mrs. Kirke had drawn a careful sketch-map with a few notes
+as to the characteristics of each route. There were besides, particularly
+through the thick woods about Stanstead itself, innumerable cross-paths
+intersecting one another in all directions. The travellers had decided at
+the inn to take the road through Longfield; since, in spite of other
+disadvantages, it was the less frequented of the two, and they were
+anxious above all things to avoid attention. Their horses were tired; and
+as they had plenty of time before them they proposed to go at a
+foot's-pace all the way, and to take between two and three hours to cover
+the nine or ten miles between Greenhithe and Stanstead.
+
+It was a hot afternoon as they passed through Fawkham, and it was
+delightful to pass from the white road in under the thick arching trees
+just beyond the village. There everything was cool shadow, the insects
+sang in the air about them, an early rabbit or two cantered across the
+road and disappeared into the thick undergrowth; once the song of the
+birds about them suddenly ceased, and through an opening in the green
+rustling vault overhead they saw a cruel shape with motionless wings
+glide steadily across.
+
+They did not talk much, but let the reins lie loose; and enjoyed the cool
+shadow and the green lights and the fragrant mellow scents of the woods
+about them; while their horses slouched along on the turf, switching
+their tails and even stopping sometimes for a second in a kind of
+desperate greediness to snatch a green juicy mouthful at the side.
+
+Isabel was thinking of Stanfield, and wondering how the situation would
+adjust itself; Mary Corbet would be there, she knew, to meet them; and it
+was a comfort to think she could consult her; but what, she asked
+herself, would be her relations with the master of the house?
+
+Suddenly Anthony's horse stepped off the turf on the opposite side of the
+road and began to come towards her, and she moved her beast a little to
+let him come on the turf beside her.
+
+"Isabel," said Anthony, "tell me if you hear anything."
+
+She looked at him, suddenly startled.
+
+"No, no," he said, "there is nothing to fear; it is probably my fancy;
+but listen and tell me."
+
+She listened intently. There was the creaking of her own saddle, the soft
+footfalls of the horses, the hum of the summer woods, and the sound of
+the servants' horses behind.
+
+"No," she said, "there is nothing beyond----"
+
+"There!" he said suddenly; "now do you hear it?"
+
+Then she heard plainly the sound either of a man running, or of a horse
+walking, somewhere behind them.
+
+"Yes," she said, "I hear something; but what of it?"
+
+"It is the third time I have heard it," he said: "once in the woods
+behind Longfield, and once just before the little village with the
+steepled church."
+
+The sound had ceased again.
+
+"It is some one who has come nearly all the way from Greenhithe behind
+us. Perhaps they are not following--but again----"
+
+"They?" she said; "there is only one."
+
+"There are three," he answered; "at least; the other two are on the turf
+at the side--but just before the village I heard all three of them--or
+rather certainly more than two--when they were between those two walls
+where there was no turf."
+
+Isabel was staring at him with great frightened eyes. He smiled back at
+her tranquilly.
+
+"Ah, Isabel!" he said, "there is nothing really to fear, in any case."
+
+"What shall you do?" she asked, making a great effort to control herself.
+
+"I think we must find out first of all whether they are after us. We must
+certainly not ride straight to the Manor Lodge if it is so."
+
+Then he explained his plan.
+
+"See here," he said, holding the map before her as he rode, "we shall
+come to Fawkham Green in five minutes. Then our proper road leads
+straight on to Ash, but we will take the right instead, towards Eynsford.
+Meanwhile, I will leave Robert here, hidden by the side of the road, to
+see who these men are, and what they look like; and we will ride on
+slowly. When they have passed, he will come out and take the road we
+should have taken, and he then will turn off to the right too before he
+reaches Ash; and by trotting he will easily come up with us at this
+corner," and he pointed to it on the map--"and so he will tell us what
+kind of men they are; and they will never know that they have been spied
+upon; for, by this plan, he will not have to pass them. Is that a good
+plot?" and he smiled at her.
+
+Isabel assented, feeling dazed and overwhelmed. She could hardly bring
+her thoughts to a focus, for the fears that had hovered about her ever
+since they had left Lancashire and come down to the treacherous south,
+had now darted upon her, tearing her heart with terror and blinding her
+eyes, and bewildering her with the beating of their wings.
+
+Anthony quietly called up Robert, and explained the plan. He was a lad of
+a Catholic family at Great Keynes, perfectly fearless and perfectly
+devoted to the Church and to the priest he served. He nodded his head
+briskly with approval as the plan was explained.
+
+"Of course it may all be nothing," ended Anthony, "and then you will
+think me a poor fool?"
+
+The lad grinned cheerfully.
+
+"No, sir," he said.
+
+All this while they had been riding slowly on together, and now the wood
+showed signs of coming to an end; so Anthony told the groom to ride fifty
+yards into the undergrowth at once, to bandage his horse's eyes, and to
+tie him to a tree; and then to creep back himself near the road, so as to
+see without being seen. The men who seemed to be following were at least
+half a mile behind, so he would have plenty of time.
+
+Then they all rode on together again, leaving Robert to find his way into
+the wood. As they went, Isabel began to question her brother, and Anthony
+gave her his views.
+
+"They have not come up with us, because they know we are four men to
+three--if, as I think, they are not more than three--that is one reason;
+and another is that they love to track us home before they take us; and
+thus take our hosts too as priests' harbourers. Now plainly these men do
+not know where we are bound, or they would not follow us so closely. Best
+of all, too, they love to catch us at mass for then they have no trouble
+in proving their case. I think then that they will not try to take us
+till we reach the Manor Lodge; and we must do our best to shake them off
+before that. Now the plot I have thought of is this, that--should it
+prove as I think it will--we should ride slower than ever, as if our
+horses were weary, down the road along which Robert will have come after
+he has joined us, and turn down as if to go to Kingsdown, and when we
+have gone half a mile, and are well round that sharp corner, double back
+to it, and hide all in the wood at the side. They will follow our tracks,
+and there are no houses at which they can ask, and there seem no
+travellers either on these by-roads, and when they have passed us we
+double back at the gallop, and down the next turning, which will bring us
+in a couple of miles to Stanstead. There is a maze of roads thereabouts,
+and it will be hard if we do not shake them off; for there is not a
+house, marked upon the map, at which they can ask after us."
+
+Isabel did her utmost to understand, but the horror of the pursuit had
+overwhelmed her. The quiet woods into which they had passed again after
+leaving Fawkham Green now seemed full of menace; the rough road, with the
+deep powdery ruts and the grass and fir-needles at the side, no longer
+seemed a pleasant path leading home, but a treacherous device to lead
+them deeper into danger. The creatures round them, the rabbits, the
+pigeons that flapped suddenly out of all the tall trees, the tits that
+fluttered on and chirped and fluttered again, all seemed united against
+Anthony in some dreadful league. Anthony himself felt all his powers of
+observation and device quickened and established. He had lived so long in
+the expectation of a time like this, and had rehearsed and mastered the
+emotions of terror and suspense so often, that he was ready to meet them;
+and gradually his entire self-control and the unmoved tones of his voice
+and his serene alert face prevailed upon Isabel; and by the time that
+they slowly turned the last curve and saw Robert on his black horse
+waiting for them at the corner, her sense of terror and bewilderment had
+passed, her heart had ceased that sick thumping, and she, too, was
+tranquil and capable.
+
+Robert wheeled his horse and rode beside Anthony round the sharp corner
+to the left up the road along which he had trotted just now.
+
+"There are three of them, sir," he said in an even, businesslike voice;
+"one of them, sir, on a brown mare, but I couldn't see aught of him, sir;
+he was on the far side of the track; the second is like a groom on a grey
+horse, and the third is dressed like a sailor, sir, on a brown horse."
+
+"A sailor?" said Anthony; "a lean man, and sunburnt, with a whistle?"
+
+"I did not see the whistle, sir; but he is as you say."
+
+This made it certain that it was the man they had seen in the inn
+opposite Greenhithe; and also practically certain that he was a spy; for
+nothing that Anthony had done could have roused his suspicions except the
+breaking of the bread; and that would only be known to one who was deep
+in the counsels of the Catholics. All this made the pursuit the more
+formidable.
+
+So Anthony meditated; and presently, calling up the servants behind,
+explained the situation and his plan. The French maid showed signs of
+hysteria and Isabel had to take her aside and quiet her, while the men
+consulted. Then it was arranged, and the servants presently dropped
+behind again a few yards, though the maid still rode with Isabel. Then
+they came to the road on the right that would have led them to Kingsdown,
+and down this they turned. As they went, Anthony kept a good look-out for
+a place to turn aside; and a hundred yards from the turning saw what he
+wanted. On the left-hand side a little path led into the wood; it was
+overgrown with brambles, and looked as if it were now disused. Anthony
+gave the word and turned his horse down the entrance, and was followed in
+single file by the others. There were thick trees about them on every
+side, and, what was far more important, the road they had left at this
+point ran higher than usual, and was hard and dry; so the horses' hoofs
+as they turned off left no mark that would be noticed.
+
+After riding thirty or forty yards, Anthony stopped, turned his horse
+again, and forced him through the hazels with some difficulty, and the
+others again followed in silence through the passage he had made.
+Presently Anthony stopped; the branches that had swished their faces as
+they rode through now seemed a little higher; and it was possible to sit
+here on horseback without any great discomfort.
+
+"I must see them myself," he whispered to Isabel; and slipped off his
+horse, giving the bridle to Robert.
+
+"Oh! mon Dieu!" moaned the maid; "mon Dieu! Ne partez pas!"
+
+Anthony looked at her severely.
+
+"You must be quiet and brave," he said sternly. "You are a Catholic too;
+pray, instead of crying."
+
+Then Isabel saw him slip noiselessly towards the road, which was some
+fifty yards away, through the thick growth.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was now a breathless afternoon. High overhead the sun blazed in a
+cloudless sky, but down here all was cool, green shadow. There was not a
+sound to be heard from the woods, beyond the mellow hum of the flies;
+Anthony's faint rustlings had ceased; now and then a saddle creaked, or a
+horse blew out his nostrils or tossed his head. One of the men wound his
+handkerchief silently round a piece of his horse's head-harness that
+jingled a little. The maid drew a soft sobbing breath now and then, but
+she dared not speak after the priest's rebuke.
+
+Then suddenly there came another sound to Isabel's ears; she could not
+distinguish at first what it was, but it grew nearer, and presently
+resolved itself into the fumbling noise of several horses' feet walking
+together, twice or three times a stirrup chinked, once she heard a
+muffled cough; but no word was spoken. Nearer and nearer it came, until
+she could not believe that it was not within five yards of her. Her heart
+began again that sick thumping; a fly that she had brushed away again and
+again now crawled unheeded over her face, and even on her white parted
+lips; but a sob of fear from the maid recalled her, and she turned a
+sharp look of warning on her. Then the fumbling noise began to die away:
+the men were passing. There was something in their silence that was more
+terrible than all else; it reminded her of hounds running on a hot scent.
+
+Then at last there was silence; then gentle rustlings again over last
+year's leaves; and Anthony came back through the hazels. He nodded at her
+sharply.
+
+"Now, quickly," he said, and took his horse by the bridle and began to
+lead him out again the way they had come. At the entrance he looked out
+first; the road was empty and silent. Then he led his horse clear, and
+mounted as the others came out one by one in single file.
+
+"Now follow close; and watch my hand," he said; and he put his horse to a
+quick walk on the soft wayside turf. As the distance widened between them
+and the men who were now riding away from them, the walk became a trot,
+and then quickly a canter, as the danger of the sound being carried to
+their pursuers decreased.
+
+It seemed to Isabel like some breathless dream as she followed Anthony's
+back, watching the motions of his hand as he signed in which direction he
+was going to turn next. What was happening, she half wondered to herself,
+that she should be riding like this on a spent horse, as if in some
+dreadful game, turning abruptly down lanes and rides, out across the high
+road, and down again another turn, with the breathing and creaking and
+jingling of others behind her? Years ago the two had played
+Follow-my-leader on horseback in the woods above Great Keynes. She
+remembered this now; and a flood of memories poured across her mind and
+diluted the bitterness of this shocking reality. Dear God, what a game!
+
+Anthony steered with skill and decision. He had been studying the map
+with great attention, and even now carried it loose in his hand and
+glanced at it from time to time. Above all else he wished to avoid
+passing a house, for fear that the searchers might afterwards inquire at
+it; and he succeeded perfectly in this, though once or twice he was
+obliged to retrace his steps. There was little danger, he knew now, of
+the noise of the horses' feet being any guide to those who were
+searching, for the high table-land on which they rode was a labyrinth of
+lanes and rides, and the trees too served to echo and confuse the noise
+they could not altogether avoid making. Twice they passed travellers, one
+a farmer on an old grey horse, who stared at this strange hurrying party;
+and once a pedlar, laden with his pack, who trudged past, head down.
+
+Isabel's horse was beginning to strain and pant, and she herself to grow
+giddy with heat and weariness, when she saw through the trees an old
+farmhouse with latticed windows and a great external chimney, standing in
+a square of cultivated ground; and in a moment more the path they were
+following turned a corner, and the party drew up at the back of the
+house.
+
+At the noise of the horses' footsteps a door at the back had opened, and
+a woman's face looked out and drew back again; and presently from the
+front Mrs. Kirke came quickly round. She was tall and slender and
+middle-aged, with a somewhat anxious face; but a look of great relief
+came over it as she saw Anthony.
+
+"Thank God you are come," she said; "I feared something had happened."
+
+Anthony explained the circumstances in a few words.
+
+"I will ride on gladly, madam, if you think right; but I will ask you in
+any case to take my sister in."
+
+"Why, how can you say that?" she said; "I am a Catholic. Come in, father.
+But I fear there is but poor accommodation for the servants."
+
+"And the horses?" asked Anthony.
+
+"The barn at the back is got ready for them," she said; "perhaps it would
+be well to take them there at once." She called a woman, and sent her to
+show the men where to stable the horses, while Anthony and Isabel and the
+maid dismounted and came in with her to the house.
+
+There, they talked over the situation and what was best to be done. Her
+husband had ridden over to Wrotham, and she expected him back for supper;
+nothing then could be finally settled till he came. In the meantime the
+Manor Lodge was probably the safest place in all the woods, Mrs. Kirke
+declared; the nearest house was half a mile away, and that was the
+Rectory; and the Rector himself was a personal friend and favourable to
+Catholics. The Manor Lodge, too, stood well off the road to Wrotham, and
+not five strangers appeared there in the year. Fifty men might hunt the
+woods for a month and not find it; in fact, Mr. Kirke had taken the house
+on account of its privacy, for he was weary, his wife said, of paying her
+fines for recusancy; and still more unwilling to pay his own, when that
+happy necessity should arrive; for he had now practically made up his
+mind to be a Catholic, and only needed a little instruction before being
+received.
+
+"He is a good man, father," she said to Anthony, "and will make a good
+Catholic."
+
+Then she explained about the accommodation. Isabel and the maid would
+have to sleep together in the spare room, and Anthony would have the
+little dressing-room opening out of it; and the men, she feared, would
+have to shake down as well as they could in the loft over the stable in
+the barn.
+
+At seven o'clock Mr. Kirke arrived; and when the situation had been
+explained to him, he acquiesced in the plan. He seemed confident that
+there was but little danger; and he and Anthony were soon deep in
+theological talk.
+
+Anthony found him excellently instructed already; he had, in fact, even
+prepared for his confession; his wife had taught him well; and it was the
+prospect of this one good opportunity of being reconciled to the Church
+that had precipitated matters and decided him to take the step. He was a
+delightful companion, too, intelligent, courageous, humorous and modest,
+and Anthony thought his own labour and danger well repaid when, a little
+after midnight, he heard his confession and received him into the Church.
+It was impossible for Mr. Kirke to receive communion, as he had wished,
+for there were wanting some of the necessaries for saying mass; so he
+promised to ride across to Stanfield in a week or so, stay the night and
+communicate in the morning.
+
+Then early the next morning a council was held as to the best way for the
+party to leave for Stanfield. The men were called up, and their opinions
+asked; and gradually step by step a plan was evolved.
+
+The first requirement was that, if possible, the party should not be
+recognisable; the second that they should keep together for mutual
+protection; for to separate would very possibly mean the apprehension of
+some one of them; the third was that they should avoid so far as was
+possible villages and houses and frequented roads.
+
+Then the first practical suggestion was made by Isabel that the maid
+should be left behind, and that Mr. Kirke should bring her on with him to
+Stanfield when he came a week later. This he eagerly accepted, and
+further offered to keep all the luggage they could spare, take charge of
+the men's liveries, and lend them old garments and hats of his own--to
+one a cloak, and to another a doublet. In this way, he said, it would
+appear to be a pleasure party rather than one of travellers, and, should
+they be followed, this would serve to cover their traces. The travelling
+by unfrequented roads was more difficult; for that in itself might
+attract attention should they actually meet any one.
+
+Anthony, who had been thinking in silence a moment or two, now broke in.
+
+"Have you any hawks, Mr. Kirke?" he asked.
+
+"Only one old peregrine," he said, "past sport."
+
+"She will do," said Anthony; "and can you borrow another?"
+
+"There is a merlin at the Rectory," said Mr. Kirke.
+
+Then Anthony explained his plan, that they should pose as a
+hawking-party. Isabel and Robert should each carry a hawk, while he
+himself would carry on his wrist an empty leash and hood as if a hawk had
+escaped; that they should then all ride together over the open country,
+avoiding every road, and that, if they should see any one on the way,
+they should inquire whether he had seen an escaped falcon or heard the
+tinkle of the bells; and this would enable them to ask the way, should it
+be necessary, without arousing suspicion.
+
+This plan was accepted, and the maid was informed to her great relief
+that she might remain behind for a week or so, and then return with Mr.
+Kirke after the searchers had left the woods.
+
+It was a twenty-mile ride to Stanfield; and it was thought safer on the
+whole not to remain any longer where they were, as it was impossible to
+know whether a shrewd man might not, with the help of a little luck,
+stumble upon the house; so, when dinner was over, and the servants had
+changed into Mr. Kirke's old suits, and the merlin had been borrowed from
+the Rectory for a week's hawking, the horses were brought round and the
+party mounted.
+
+Mr. Kirke and Anthony had spent a long morning together discussing the
+route, and it had been decided that it would be best to keep along the
+high ridge due west until they were a little beyond Kemsing, which they
+would be able to see below them in the valley; and then to strike across
+between that village and Otford, and keeping almost due south ride up
+through Knole Park; then straight down on the other side into the Weald,
+and so past Tonbridge home.
+
+Mr. Kirke himself insisted on accompanying them on his cob until he had
+seen them clear of the woods on the high ground. Both he and his wife
+were full of gratitude to Anthony for the risk and trouble he had
+undergone, and did their utmost to provide them with all that was
+necessary for their disguise. At last, about two o'clock, the five men
+and Isabel rode out of the little yard at the back of the Manor Lodge and
+plunged into the woods again.
+
+The afternoon hush rested on the country as they followed Mr. Kirke along
+a narrow seldom-used path that led almost straight to the point where it
+was decided that they should strike south. In half a dozen places it cut
+across lanes, and once across the great high road from Farningham to
+Wrotham. As they drew near this, Mr. Kirke, who was riding in front,
+checked them.
+
+"I will go first," he said, "and see if there is danger."
+
+In a minute he returned.
+
+"There is a man about a hundred yards up the road asleep on a bank; and
+there is a cart coming up from Wrotham: that is all I can see. Perhaps we
+had better wait till the cart is gone."
+
+"And what is the man like?" asked Anthony.
+
+"He is a beggar, I should say; but has his hat over his eyes."
+
+They waited till the cart had passed. Anthony dismounted and went to the
+entrance of the path and peered out at the man; he was lying, as Mr.
+Kirke had said, with his hat over his eyes, perfectly still. Anthony
+examined him a minute or two; he was in tattered clothes, and a great
+stick and a bundle lay beside him.
+
+"It is a vagabond," he said, "we can go on."
+
+The whole party crossed the road, pushing on towards the edge of the high
+downs over Kemsing; and presently came to the Ightam road where it began
+to run steeply down hill; here, too, Mr. Kirke looked this way and that,
+but no one was in sight, and then the whole party crossed; they kept
+inside the edge of the wood all the way along the downs for another mile
+or so, with the rich sunlit valley seen in glimpses through the trees
+here and there, and the Pilgrim's Way lying like a white ribbon a couple
+of hundred feet below them, until at last Kemsing Church, with St.
+Edith's Chantry at the side, lay below and behind them, and they came out
+on to the edge of a great scoop in the hill, like a theatre, and the blue
+woods and hills of Surrey showed opposite beyond Otford and Brasted.
+
+Here they stopped, a little back from the edge, and Mr. Kirke gave them
+their last instructions, pointing out Seal across the valley, which they
+must leave on their left, skirting the meadows to the west of the church,
+and passing up towards Knole beyond.
+
+"Let the sun be a little on your right," he said, "all the way; and you
+will strike the country above Tonbridge."
+
+Then they said good-bye to one another; Mr. Kirke kissed the priest's
+hand in gratitude for what he had done for him, and then turned back
+along the edge of the downs, riding this time outside the woods, while
+the party led their horses carefully down the steep slope, across the
+Pilgrim's Way, and then struck straight out over the meadows to Seal.
+
+Their plan seemed supremely successful; they met a few countrymen and
+lads at their work, who looked a little astonished at first at this great
+party riding across country, but more satisfied when Anthony had inquired
+of them whether they had seen a falcon or heard his bells. No, they had
+not, they said; and went on with their curiosity satisfied. Once, as they
+were passing down through a wood on to the Weald, Isabel, who had turned
+in her saddle, and was looking back, gave a low cry of alarm.
+
+"Ah! the man, the man!" she said.
+
+The others turned quickly, but there was nothing to be seen but the long
+straight ride stretching up to against the sky-line three or four hundred
+yards behind them. Isabel said she thought she saw a rider pass across
+this little opening at the end, framed in leaves; but there were stags
+everywhere in the woods here, and it would have been easy to mistake one
+for the other at that distance, and with such a momentary glance.
+
+Once again, nearer Tonbridge, they had a fright. They had followed up a
+grass ride into a copse, thinking it would bring them out somewhere, but
+it led only to the brink of a deep little stream, where the plank bridge
+had been removed, so they were obliged to retrace their steps. As they
+re-emerged into the field from the copse, a large heavily-built man on a
+brown mare almost rode into them. He was out of breath, and his horse
+seemed distressed. Anthony, as usual, immediately asked if he had seen or
+heard anything of a falcon.
+
+"No, indeed, gentlemen," he said, "and have you seen aught of a bitch who
+bolted after a hare some half mile back. A greyhound I should be loath to
+lose."
+
+They had not, and said so; and the man, still panting and mopping his
+head, thanked them, and asked whether he could be of any service in
+directing them, if they were strange to the country; but they thought it
+better not to give him any hint of where they were going, so he rode off
+presently up the slope across their route and disappeared, whistling for
+his dog.
+
+And so at last, about four o'clock in the afternoon, they saw the church
+spire of Stanfield above them on the hill, and knew that they were near
+the end of their troubles. Another hundred yards, and there were the
+roofs of the old house, and the great iron gates, and the vanes of the
+garden-house seen over the clipped limes; and then Mary Corbet and Mr.
+Buxton hurrying in from the garden, as they came through the low oak
+door, into the dear tapestried hall.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IX
+
+                             THE ALARM
+
+
+A very happy party sat down to supper that evening in Stanfield Place.
+
+Anthony had taken Mr. Buxton aside privately when the first greetings
+were over, and told him all that happened: the alarm at Stanstead; his
+device, and the entire peace they had enjoyed ever since.
+
+"Isabel," he ended, "certainly thought she saw a man behind us once; but
+we were among the deer, and it was dusky in the woods; and, for myself, I
+think it was but a stag. But, if you think there is danger anywhere, I
+will gladly ride on."
+
+Mr. Buxton clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"My dear friend," he said, "take care you do not offend me. I am a slow
+fellow, as you know; but even my coarse hide is pricked sometimes. Do not
+suggest again that I could permit any priest--and much less my own dear
+friend--to leave me when there was danger. But there is none in this
+case--you have shaken the rogues off, I make no doubt; and you will just
+stay here for the rest of the summer at the very least."
+
+Anthony said that he agreed with him as to the complete baffling of the
+pursuers, but added that Isabel was still a little shaken, and would Mr.
+Buxton say a word to her.
+
+"Why, I will take her round the hiding-holes myself after supper, and
+show her how strong and safe we are. We will all go round."
+
+In the withdrawing-room he said a word or two of reassurance to her
+before the others were down.
+
+"Anthony has told me everything, Mistress Isabel; and I warrant that the
+knaves are cursing their stars still on Stanstead hills, twenty miles
+from here. You are as safe here as in Greenwich palace. But after supper,
+to satisfy you, we will look to our defences. But, believe me, there is
+nothing to fear."
+
+He spoke with such confidence and cheerfulness that Isabel felt her fears
+melting, and before supper was over she was ashamed of them, and said so.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Mr. Buxton, "you shall not escape. You shall see every
+one of them for yourself. Mistress Corbet, do you not think that just?"
+
+"You need a little more honest worldliness, Isabel," said Mary. "I do not
+hesitate to say that I believe God saves the priests that have the best
+hiding-holes. Now that is not profane, so do not look at me like that."
+
+"It is the plainest sense," said Anthony, smiling at them both.
+
+They went the round of them all with candles, and Anthony refreshed his
+memory; they visited the little one in the chapel first, then the
+cupboard and portrait-door at the top of the corridor, the chamber over
+the fireplace in the hall, and lastly, in the wooden cellar-steps they
+lifted the edge of the fifth stair from the bottom, so that its front and
+the top of the stair below it turned on a hinge and dropped open, leaving
+a black space behind: this was the entrance to the passage that led
+beneath the garden to the garden-house on the far side of the avenue.
+
+Mistress Corbet wrinkled her nose at the damp earthy smell that breathed
+out of the dark.
+
+"I am glad I am not a priest," she said. "And I would sooner be buried
+dead than alive. And there is a rat there that sorely needs burying."
+
+"My dear lady!" cried the contriver of the passage indignantly, "her
+Grace might sleep there herself and take no harm. There is not even the
+whisker of a rat."
+
+"It is not the whisker that I mind," said Mary, "it is the rest of him."
+
+Mr. Buxton immediately set his taper down and climbed in.
+
+"You shall see," he said, "and I in my best satin too!"
+
+He was inside the stairs now and lying on his back on the smooth board
+that backed them. He sidled himself slowly along towards the wall.
+
+"Press the fourth brick of the fourth row," he said.
+
+"You remember, Father Anthony?"
+
+He had reached now what seemed to be the brick wall against which the
+ends of the stairs rested; and that closed that end of the cellars
+altogether. Anthony leaned in with a candle, and saw how that part of the
+wall against his friend's right side slowly turned into the dark as the
+fourth brick was pressed, and a little brick-lined passage appeared
+beyond. Mr. Buxton edged himself sideways into the passage, and then
+stood nearly upright. It was an excellent contrivance. Even if the
+searchers should find the chamber beneath the stairs, which was unlikely,
+they would never suspect that it was only a blind to a passage beyond.
+The door into the passage consisted of a strong oaken door disguised on
+the outside by a facing of brick-slabs; all the hinges were within.
+
+"As sweet as a flower," said the architect, looking about him. His voice
+rang muffled and hollow.
+
+"Then the friends have removed the corpse," said Mary, putting her head
+in, "while you were opening the door. There! come out; you will take
+cold. I believe you."
+
+"Are you satisfied?" said Mr. Buxton to Isabel, as they went upstairs
+again.
+
+"What are your outer defences?" asked Mary, before Isabel could answer.
+
+"You shall see the plan in the hall," said Mr. Buxton.
+
+He took down the frame that held the plan of the house, and showed them
+the outer doors. There was first the low oak front door on the north,
+opening on to the little court; this was immensely strong and would stand
+battering. Then on the same side farther east, within the stable-court,
+there was the servants' door, protected by chains, and an oak bolt that
+ran across. On the extreme east end of the house there was a door opening
+into the garden from the withdrawing-room, the least strong of all; there
+was another on the south side, opposite the front door--that gave on to
+the garden; and lastly there was an entrance into the priests' end of the
+house, at the extreme west, from the little walled garden where Anthony
+had meditated years ago. This walled garden had a very strong door of its
+own opening on to the lane between the church and the house.
+
+"But there are only three ways out, really," said Mr. Buxton, "for the
+garden walls are high and strong. There is the way of the walled garden;
+the iron-gates across the drive; and through the stable-yard on to the
+field-path to East Maskells. All the other gates are kept barred; and
+indeed I scarcely know where the keys are."
+
+"I am bewildered," said Mary.
+
+"Shall we go round?" he asked.
+
+"To-morrow," said Mary; "I am tired to-night, and so is this poor child.
+Come, we will go to bed."
+
+Anthony soon went too. Both he and Isabel were tired with the journey and
+the strain of anxiety, and it was a keen joy to him to be back again in
+his own dear room, with the tapestry of St. Thomas of Aquin and St. Clare
+opposite the bed, and the wide curtained bow-window which looked out on
+the little walled garden.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mr. Buxton was left alone in the great hall below with the two tapers
+burning, and the starlight with all the suffused glow of a summer night
+making the arms glimmer in the tall windows that looked south. Lower, the
+windows were open, and the mellow scents of the June roses, and of the
+sweet-satyrian and lavender poured in; the night was very still, but the
+faintest breath came from time to time across the meadows and rustled in
+the stiff leaves with the noise of a stealthy movement.
+
+"I will look round," said Mr. Buxton to himself.
+
+He stepped out immediately into the garden by the hall door, and turned
+to the east, passing along the lighted windows. His step sounded on the
+tiles, and a face looked out swiftly from Isabel's room overhead; but his
+figure was plain in the light from the windows as he came out round the
+corner; and the face drew back. He crossed the east end of the house, and
+went through a little door into the stable-yard, locking it after him. In
+the kennels in the corner came a movement, and a Danish hound came out
+silently into the cage before her house, and stood up, like a slender
+grey ghost, paws high up in the bars, and whimpered softly to her lord.
+He quieted her, and went to the door in the yard that opened on to the
+field-path to East Maskells, unbarred it and stepped through. There was a
+dry ditch on his left, where nettles quivered in the stirring air; and a
+heavy clump of bushes rose beyond, dark and impenetrable. Mr. Buxton
+stared straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East
+Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the cattle and horses secure and
+sleeping. Then he stepped back again; barred the door and walked up
+through the stable-yard into the front court. There the great iron gates
+rose before him, diaphanous-looking and flimsy in the starlight. He went
+up to them and shook them; and a loose shield jangled fiercely overhead.
+Then he peered through, holding the bars, and saw the familiar patch of
+grass beyond the gravel sweep, and the dark cottages over the way. Then
+he made his way back to the front door, unlocked it with his private key,
+passed through the hall, through a parlour or two into the lower floor of
+the priests' quarters; unlocked softly the little door into the walled
+garden, and went out on tip-toe once more. Even as he went, Anthony's
+light overhead went out. Mr. Buxton went to the garden door, unfastened
+it, and stepped out into the road. Above him on his left rose up the
+chancel of the parish church, the roofs crowded behind; and immediately
+in front was the high-raised churchyard, with the tall irregular wall and
+the trees above all, blotting out the stars.
+
+Then he came back the same way, fastening the doors as he passed, and
+reached the hall, where the tapers still burned. He blew out one and took
+the other.
+
+"I suppose I am a fool," he said; "the lad is as safe as in his mother's
+arms." And he went upstairs to bed.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary Corbet rose late next morning, and when she came down at last found
+the others in the garden. She joined them as they walked in the little
+avenue.
+
+"Have not the priest-hunters arrived?" she asked. "What are they about?
+And you, dear Isabel, how did you sleep?"
+
+Isabel looked a little heavy-eyed. "I did not sleep well," she said.
+
+"I fear I disturbed her," said Mr. Buxton. "She heard me as I went round
+the house."
+
+"Why did you go round the house?" asked Anthony.
+
+"I often do," he said shortly.
+
+"And there was no one?" asked Mary.
+
+"There was no one."
+
+"And what would you have done if there had been?"
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "what would you have done to warn us all?"
+
+Mr. Buxton considered.
+
+"I should have rung the alarm, I think," he said.
+
+"But I did not know you had one," said Mary.
+
+Mr. Buxton pointed to a turret peeping between two high gables, above his
+own room.
+
+"And what does it sound like?"
+
+"It is deep, and has a dash of sourness or shrillness in it. I cannot
+describe it. Above all, it is marvellous loud."
+
+"Then, if we hear it, we shall know the priest-hunters are on us?" asked
+Mary. Mr. Buxton bowed.
+
+"Or that the house is afire," he said, "or that the French or Spanish are
+landed."
+
+To tell the truth, he was just slightly uneasy. Isabel had been far more
+silent than he had ever known her, and her nerves were plainly at an
+acute tension; she started violently even now, when a servant came out
+between two yew-hedges to call Mr. Buxton in. Her alarm had affected him,
+and besides, he knew something of the extraordinary skill and patience of
+Walsingham's agents, and even the story of the ferry had startled him.
+Could it really be, he had wondered as he tossed to and fro in the hot
+night, that this innocent priest had thrown off his pursuers so
+completely as had appeared? In the morning he had sent down a servant to
+the inn to inquire whether anything had been seen or heard of a
+disquieting nature; now the servant had come to tell him, as he had
+ordered, privately. He went with the man in through the hall-door,
+leaving the others to walk in the avenue, and then faced him.
+
+"Well?" he said sharply.
+
+"No, sir, there is nothing. There is a party there travelling on to
+Brighthelmstone this afternoon, and four drovers who came in last night,
+sir; and two gentlemen travelling across country; but they left early
+this morning."
+
+"They left, you say?"
+
+"They left at eight o'clock, sir."
+
+Mr. Buxton's attention was attracted to these two gentlemen.
+
+"Go and find out where they came from," he said, "and let me know after
+dinner."
+
+The man bowed and left the room, and almost immediately the dinner-bell
+rang.
+
+Mary was frankly happy; she loved to be down here in this superb weather
+with her friends; she enjoyed this beautiful house with its furniture and
+pictures, and even took a certain pleasure in the hiding-holes
+themselves; although in this case she was satisfied they would not be
+needed. She had heard the tale of the Stanstead woods, and had no shadow
+of doubt but that the searchers, if, indeed, they were searchers at all,
+were baffled. So at dinner she talked exactly as usual; and the cloud of
+slight discomfort that still hung over Isabel grew lighter and lighter as
+she listened. The windows of the hall were flung wide, and the warm
+summer air poured from the garden into the cool room with its polished
+floor, and table decked with roses in silver bowls, with its grave
+tapestries stirring on the walls behind the grim visors and pikes that
+hung against them.
+
+The talk turned on music.
+
+"Ah! I would I had my lute," sighed Mary, "but my woman forgot to bring
+it. What a garden to sing in, in the shade of the yews, with the
+garden-house behind to make the voice sound better than it is!"
+
+Mr. Buxton made a complimentary murmur.
+
+"Thank you," she said, "Master Anthony, you are wool-gathering."
+
+"Indeed not," he said, "but I was thinking where I had seen a lute. Ah!
+it is in the little west parlour."
+
+"A lute!" cried Mary. "Ah! but I have no music; and I have not the
+courage to sing the only song I know, over and over again."
+
+"But there is music too," said Anthony.
+
+Mary clapped her hands.
+
+"When dinner is over," she said, "you and I will go to find it."
+
+Dinner was over at last, and the four rose.
+
+"Come," said Mary; while Isabel turned into the garden and Mr. Buxton
+went to his room. "We will be with you presently," she cried after
+Isabel.
+
+Then the two went together to the little west parlour, oak-panelled, with
+a wide fireplace with the logs in their places, and the latticed windows
+with their bottle-end glass, looking upon the walled garden. Anthony
+stood on a chair and opened the top window, letting a flood of summer
+noises into the room.
+
+They found the lute music, written over its six lines with the queer F's
+and double F's and numerals--all Hebrew to Anthony, but bursting and
+blossoming with delicate melodies to Mary's eyes. Then she took up the
+lute, and tuned it on her knee, still sitting in a deep lounging-chair,
+with her buckled feet before her; while Anthony sat opposite and watched
+her supple flashing fingers busy among the strings, and her grave
+abstracted look as she listened critically. Then she sounded the strings
+in little rippling chords.
+
+"Ah! it is a sweet old lute," she said. "Put the music before me."
+
+Anthony propped it on a chair.
+
+"Is that the right side up?" he asked.
+
+Mary smiled and nodded, still looking at the music.
+
+"Now then," she said, and began the prelude.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony threw himself back in his chair as the delicate tinkling began to
+pour out and overscore the soft cooing of a pigeon on the roofs somewhere
+and the murmur of bees through the open window. It was an old precise
+little love-song from Italy, with a long prelude, suggesting by its
+tender minor chords true and restrained love, not passionate but tender,
+not despairing but melancholy; it was a love that had for its symbols not
+the rose and the lily, but the lavender and thyme--acrid in its
+sweetness. The prelude had climbed up by melodious steps to the keynote,
+and was now rippling down again after its aspirations.
+
+Mary stirred herself.
+
+Ah! now the voice would come in the last chord----when all the music was
+first drowned and then ceased, as with crash after crash a great bell,
+sonorous and piercing, began to sound from overhead.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                   THE PASSAGE TO THE GARDEN-HOUSE
+
+
+The two looked at one another with parted lips, but without a word. Then
+both rose simultaneously. Then the bell jangled and ceased; and a crowd
+of other noises began; there were shouts, tramplings of hoofs in the
+court; shrill voices came over the wall; then a scream or two. Mary
+sprang to the door and opened it, and stood there listening.
+
+Then from the interior of the house came an indescribable din, tramplings
+of feet and shouts of anger; then violent blows on woodwork. It came
+nearer in a moment of time, as a tide comes in over flat sands,
+remorselessly swift. Then Mary with one movement was inside again, and
+had locked the door and drawn the bolt.
+
+"Up there," she said, "it is the only way--they are outside," and she
+pointed to the chimney.
+
+Anthony began to remonstrate. It was intolerable, he felt, to climb up
+the chimney like a hunted cat, and he began a word or two. But Mary
+seized his arm.
+
+"You must not be caught," she said, "there are others"; and there came a
+confused battering and trampling outside. She pushed him towards the
+chimney. Then decision came to him, and he bent his head and stepped upon
+the logs laid upon the ashes, crushing them down.
+
+"Ah! go," said Mary's voice behind him, as the door began to bulge and
+creak. There was plainly a tremendous struggle in the little passage
+outside.
+
+Anthony threw his hands up and felt a high ledge in the darkness, gripped
+it with his hands and made a huge effort combined of a tug and a spring;
+his feet rapped sharply for a moment or two on the iron fire-plate; and
+then his knee reached the ledge and he was up. He straightened himself on
+the ledge, stood upright and looked down; two white hands with rings on
+them were lifting the logs and drawing them out from the ashes, shaking
+them and replacing them by others from the wood-basket; and all
+deliberately, as if laying a fire. Then her voice came up to him, hushed
+but distinct.
+
+"Go up quickly. I will feign to be burning papers; there will be smoke,
+but no sparks. It is green wood."
+
+Anthony again felt above him, and found two iron half-rings in the
+chimney, one above the other; he was in semi-darkness here, but far above
+there was a patch of pale smoky light; and all the chimney seemed full of
+a murmurous sound. He tugged at the rings and found them secure, and drew
+himself up steadily by the higher one, until his knee struck the lower;
+then with a great effort he got his knee upon it, then his left foot, and
+again straightened himself. Then, as he felt in the darkness once more,
+he found a system of rings, one above the other, up the side of the
+chimney, by which it was not hard to climb. As he went up he began to
+perceive a sharp acrid smell, his eyes smarted and he closed them, but
+his throat burned; he climbed fiercely; and then suddenly saw immediately
+below him another hearth; he was looking over the fireplate of some other
+room. In a moment more he thrust his head over, and drew a long breath of
+clear air; then he listened intently. From below still came a murmur of
+confusion; but in this room all was quiet. He began to think frantically.
+He could not remain in the chimney, it was hopeless; they would soon
+light fires, he knew, in all the chimneys, and bring him down. What room
+was this? He was bewildered and could not remember. But at least he would
+climb into it and try to escape. In a moment more he had lifted himself
+over the fireplate and dropped safely on to the hearth of his own
+bedroom.
+
+The fresh air and the familiarity of the room, as he looked round, swept
+the confusion out of his brain like a breeze. The thundering and shouting
+continued below. Then he went on tip-toe to the door and opened it. Round
+to the right was the head of the stairs which led straight into the
+little passage where the struggle was going on. He could hear Robert's
+voice in the din; plainly there was no way down the stairs. To the left
+was the passage that ended in a window, with the chapel door at the left
+and the false shelves on the right. He hesitated a moment between the two
+hiding-places, and then decided for the cupboard; there was a clean
+doublet there; his own was one black smear of soot, and as he thought of
+it, he drew off his sooty shoes. His hose were fortunately dark. He
+stepped straight out of the door, leaving it just ajar. Even as he left
+it there was a thunder of footsteps on the stairs, and he was at the
+shelves in a moment, catching a glimpse through the window on his left of
+the front court crowded with men and horses. He had opened and shut the
+secret door three or four times the evening before, and his hands closed
+almost instinctively on the two springs that must be worked
+simultaneously. He made the necessary movement, and the shelves with the
+wall behind it softly slid open and he sprang in. But as he closed it he
+heard one of the two books drop, and an exclamation from the passage he
+had just left; then quick steps from the head of the stairs; the steps
+clattered past the door and into the chapel opposite and stopped.
+
+Anthony felt about him in the darkness, found the doublet and lifted it
+off the nail; slipped off his own, tearing his ruff as he did so; and
+then quickly put on the other. He had no shoes; but that would not be so
+noticeable. He had not seriously thought of the possibility of escaping
+through the portrait-door, as he felt sure the house would be overrun by
+now; but he put his eyes to the pinholes and looked out; and to his
+astonishment saw that the gallery was empty. There it lay, with its
+Flemish furniture on the right and its row of windows on the left, and
+all as tranquil as if there were no fierce tragedy of terror and wrath
+raging below. Again decision came to him; by a process of thought so
+swift that it was an intuition, he remembered that the fall of the book
+outside would concentrate attention on that corner; it could not be long
+before the shelves were broken in, and if he did not escape now there
+would be no possibility later. Then he unslid the inside bolt, and the
+portrait swung open; he closed it behind, and sped on silent shoeless
+feet down the polished floor of the gallery.
+
+Of course the great staircase was hopeless. The hall would be seething
+with men. But there was just a chance through the servants' quarters. He
+dashed past the head of the stairs, catching a glimpse of heads and
+sparkles of steel over the banisters, and through the half-opened door at
+the end, finding himself in the men's corridor that was a continuation of
+the gallery he had left. On his left rose the head of the back-stairs,
+that led first with a double flight to the offices, the pantry, the
+buttery and the kitchen, and than, lower still, a single third flight
+down to the cellar.
+
+He looked down the stairs; at the bottom of the first double flight were
+a couple of maids, screaming and white-faced, leaning and pressing
+against the door, immediately below the one he had just come through
+himself. The door was plainly barred as well, for it was now thudding and
+cracking with blows that were being showered upon it from the other side.
+The maids, it seemed to him, in a panic had locked the door; but that
+panic might be his salvation. He dashed down the stairs; the maids
+screamed louder than ever when they saw this man, whom they did not
+recognise, with blackened face and hands come in noiseless leaps down
+towards them; but Anthony put his finger on his lips as he flew past
+them; then he dashed open the little door that shut off the
+cellar-flight, closed it behind him, and was immediately in the dark.
+
+Then he groped his way down, feeling the rough brick wall as he went,
+till he reached the floor of the cellar. The air was cool and damp here,
+and it refreshed him, for he was pouring with sweat. The noise, too, and
+confusion which, during his flight, had been reverberating through the
+house with a formidable din, now only reached him as a far-away murmur.
+
+As he counted the four steps up, and then lifted the overhanging edge,
+there came upon him irresistibly the contrast between the serene party
+here last night, with their tapers and their delicate dresses and Mary's
+cool clear-clipped voice--and his own soot-stained person, his desperate
+energy and his quick panting and heart-beating. Then the steps dropped
+and he slid in; lifted them again as he lay on his back, and heard the
+spring catch as they closed. Then he was in silence, too, and comparative
+safety. But he dared not rest yet, and edged himself along as he had seen
+Mr. Buxton do last night. Which brick was it? "The fourth of the fourth,"
+he murmured, and counted, and pressed it. Again the door pushed back, and
+with a little struggle he was first on his knees, and then on his feet.
+Then he swung the door to again behind him.
+
+Then for the first time he rested; he leaned against the brick-lined side
+of the tunnel and passed his blackened hands over his face. Five minutes
+ago--yes--certainly not five minutes ago he was lounging in the west
+parlour, at the other end of the house, while Mary played the prelude to
+an Italian love-song.--What was she doing now? God bless her for her
+quick courage!--And Isabel and Buxton--where were they all? How deadly
+sick and tired he felt!--Again he passed his hands over his face in the
+pitch darkness.--Well, he must push on.
+
+He turned and began to grope patiently through the blackness--step by
+step--feeling the roughness of the bricks beneath with his shoeless feet
+before he set them down; once or twice he stepped into a little icy pool,
+which had collected through some crack in the vaulting overhead; once,
+too, he slipped on a lump of something wet and shapeless; and thought
+even then of Mary's suspicions the night before. He pushed on, shivering
+now with cold and excitement, through what seemed the interminable
+tunnel, until at last his outstretched hands touched wood before him. He
+had not seen this end of the passage for nearly two years, and he
+wondered if he could remember the method of opening, and gave a gulp of
+horror at the thought that he might not. But there had been no reason to
+make a secret of the inside of the door, and he presently found a button
+and drew it; it creaked rustily, but gave, and the door with another pull
+opened inwards, and there was a faint glimmer of light. Then he
+remembered that the entrances to the tunnel at either end were exactly on
+the same system; and putting out his hands felt the slope of the
+underside of the staircase, cutting diagonally across the opening of the
+passage. He slid himself on to the boarding sideways, and drew the
+brickwork towards him till the spring snapped, and lay there to consider
+before he went farther.
+
+First he ran over in his mind the construction of the garden-house.
+
+The basement in which he was lying corresponded to the cellar under the
+house from which he had come, and ran the whole length of the building,
+about forty feet by twenty. It was a large empty chamber, where nothing
+of any value was kept. He remembered last time he was here seeing a heap
+of tiles in one corner, with a pile of disused poles; pieces of rope, and
+old iron in another. The stairs led up through an ordinary trap-door into
+what was the ground-floor of the house. This, too, was one immense room,
+with four latticed windows looking on to the garden, and one with opaque
+glass on to the lane at the back; and a great door, generally kept
+locked, for rather more valuable things were kept here, such as the
+garden-roller, flower-pots, and the targets for archery. Then a light
+staircase led straight up from this room to the next floor, which was
+divided into two, both of which, so far as Anthony remembered, were
+empty. Mr. Buxton had thought of letting his gardeners sleep there when
+he had at first built this immense useless summer-house; but he had
+ultimately built a little gardener's cottage adjoining it. The two
+fantastic towers that flanked the building held nothing but staircases,
+which could be entered by either of the two floors, and which ascended to
+tiny rooms with windows on all four sides.
+
+When Anthony had run over these details as he lay on his back, he pushed
+up the stair over his face and let the front of it with the step of the
+next swing inwards; the light was stronger now, and poured in, though
+still dim, through three half-moon windows, glazed and wired, that just
+rose above the level of the ground outside. Then he extricated himself,
+closed the steps behind him, and went up the stairs.
+
+The trap-door at the top was a little stiff, but he soon raised it, and
+in a moment more was standing in the ground-floor room of the
+garden-house. All round him was much as he remembered it; he first went
+to the door and found it securely fastened, as it often was for days
+together; he glanced at the windows to assure himself that they were
+bottle-glass too, and then went to them to look out. He was fortunate
+enough to find the corner of one pane broken away; he put his eye to
+this, and there lay a little lawn, with a yew-hedge beyond blotting out
+all of the great house opposite except the chimneys,--the house which
+even across the whole space of garden hummed like a hive. On the lawn was
+a chair, and an orange-bound book lay face down on the grass beside it.
+Anthony stared at it; it was the book that he had seen in Isabel's hand
+not half an hour ago, as she had gone out into the garden from the hall
+to wait until he and Mary joined her with the lute.
+
+And at that the priest knelt down before the window, covered his face
+with his hands, and began to stammer and cry to God: "O God! God! God!"
+he said.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When Mary Corbet had seen Anthony's feet disappear, she already had the
+outline of a plan in her mind. To light a fire and pretend to be burning
+important papers would serve as an excuse for keeping the door fast; it
+would also suggest at least that no one was in the chimney. The ordinary
+wood, however, sent up sparks; but she had noticed before a little green
+wood in the basket, and knew that this did not do so to the same extent;
+so she pulled out the dry wood that Anthony had trodden into the ashes
+and substituted the other. Then she had looked round for paper;--the lute
+music, that was all. Meantime the door was giving; the noise outside was
+terrible; and it was evident that one or two of the servants were
+obstructing the passage of the pursuivants.
+
+When at last the door flew in, there was a fire cracking furiously on the
+hearth, and a magnificently dressed lady kneeling before it, crushing
+paper into the flames. Half a dozen men now streamed in and more began to
+follow, and stood irresolute for a moment, staring at her. From the
+resistance they had met with they had been certain that the priest was
+here, and this sight perplexed them. A big ruddy man, however, who led
+them, sprang across the room, seized Mary Corbet by the shoulders and
+whisked her away against the wall, and then dashed the half-burnt paper
+out of the grate and began to beat out the flames.
+
+Mary struggled violently for a moment; but the others were upon her and
+held her, and she presently stood quiet. Then she began upon them.
+
+"You insolent hounds!" she cried, "do you know who I am?" Her cheeks were
+scarlet and her eyes blazing; she seemed in a superb fury.
+
+"Burning treasonable papers," growled the big man from his knees on the
+hearth, "that is enough for me."
+
+"Who are you, sir, that dare to speak to me like that?"
+
+The man got up; the flames were out now, and he slipped the papers into a
+pocket. Mary went on immediately.
+
+"If I may not burn my own lute music, or keep my door locked, without a
+riotous mob of knaves breaking upon me---- Ah! how dare you?" and she
+stamped furiously.
+
+The pursuivant came up close to her, insolently.
+
+"See here, my lady----" he began.
+
+The men had fallen back from her a little now that the papers were safe,
+and she lifted her ringed hand and struck his ruddy face with all her
+might. There was a moment of confusion and laughter as he recoiled.
+
+"Now will you remember that her Grace's ladies are not to be trifled
+with?"
+
+There was a murmur from the crowded room, and a voice near the door
+cried:
+
+"She says truth, Mr. Nichol. It is Mistress Corbet."
+
+Nichol had recovered himself, but was furiously angry.
+
+"Very good, madam, but I have these papers now," he said, "they can still
+be read."
+
+"You blind idiot," hissed Mary, "do you not know lute music when you see
+it?"
+
+"I know that ladies do not burn lute music with locked doors," observed
+Nichol bitterly.
+
+"The more fool you!" screamed Mary, "when you have caught one at it."
+
+"That will be seen," sneered Mr. Nichol.
+
+"Not by a damned blind scarlet-faced porpoise!" screamed Mary, apparently
+more in a passion than ever, and a burst of laughter came from the men.
+
+This was too much for Mr. Nichol. This coarse abuse stung him cruelly.
+
+"God's blood," he bellowed at the room; "take this vixen out and search
+the place." And a torrent of oaths drove the crowd about the door out
+into the passage again.
+
+A couple of men took Mary by the fierce ringed hands of hers that still
+twitched and clenched, and led her out; she spat insults over her
+shoulders as she went. But she had held him in talk as she intended.
+
+"Now then," roared Nichol again, "search, you dogs!"
+
+He himself went outside too, and seeing the stairs stamped up them. He
+was just in time to see the Tacitus settle down with crumpled pages;
+stopped for a moment, bewildered, for it lay in the middle of the
+passage; and then rushed at the open door on the left, dashed it open,
+and found a little empty room, with a chair or two, and a table--but no
+sign of the priest. It was like magic.
+
+Then out he came once more, and went into Anthony's own room. The great
+bed was on his right, the window opposite, the fireplace to the left, and
+in the middle lay two sooty shoes. Instinctively he bent and touched
+them, and found them warm; then he sprang to the door, still keeping his
+face to the room, and shouted for help.
+
+"He is here, he is here!" he cried. And a thunder of footsteps on the
+stairs answered him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Meanwhile the men that held Mary followed the others along the passage,
+but while the leaders went on and round into the lower corridor, the two
+men-at-arms with their prisoner turned aside into the parlour that served
+as an ante-chamber to the hall beyond, where they released her. Here,
+though it was empty of people, all was in confusion; the table had been
+overturned in the struggle that had raged along here between Lackington's
+men, who had entered from the front door, and the servants of the house,
+who had rushed in from their quarters at the first alarm and intercepted
+them. One chair lay on its side, with its splintered carved arm beside
+it. As Mary stood a moment looking about her, the door from the hall that
+had been closed, again opened, and Isabel came through; and a man's voice
+said:
+
+"You must wait here, madam"; then the door closed behind her.
+
+"Isabel," said Mary.
+
+The two looked at one another a moment, but before either spoke again the
+door again half-opened, and a voice began to speak, as if its owner still
+held the handle.
+
+"Very well, Lackington, keep him in his room. I will go through here to
+Nichol."
+
+Isabel had drawn a sharp breath as the voice began, and as the door
+opened wider she turned and faced it. Then Hubert came in, and recoiled
+on the threshold. There fell a complete silence in the room.
+
+"Hubert," said Isabel after a moment, "what are you doing here?"
+
+Hubert shut the door abruptly and leaned against it, staring at her; his
+face had gone white under the tan. Isabel still looked at him steadily,
+and her eyes were eloquent. Then she spoke again, and something in her
+voice quickened the beating of Mary's heart as she listened.
+
+"Hubert, have you forgotten us?"
+
+Still Hubert stared; then he stood upright. The two men-at-arms were
+watching in astonishment.
+
+"I will see to the ladies," he said abruptly, and waved his hand. They
+still hesitated a moment.
+
+"Go," he said again sharply, and pointed to the door. He was a
+magistrate, and responsible; and they turned and went.
+
+Then Hubert looked at Isabel again.
+
+"Isabel," he said, "if I had known----"
+
+"Stay," she interrupted, "there is no time for explanations except mine.
+Anthony is in the house; I do not know where. You must save him."
+
+There was no entreaty or anxiety in her voice; nothing but a supreme
+dignity and an assurance that she would be obeyed.
+
+"But----" he began. The door was opened from the hall, and a little party
+of searchers appeared, but halted when the magistrate turned round.
+
+"Come with me," he said to the two women, "you must have a room kept for
+you upstairs," and he held back the door for them to pass.
+
+Isabel put out her hand to Mary, and the two went out together into the
+hall past the men, who stood back to let them through, and Hubert
+followed. They turned to the left to the stairs, looking as they went
+upon the wild confusion. Above them rose the carved ceiling, and in the
+centre of the floor, untouched, by a strange chance, stood the
+dinner-table, still laid with silver and fruit and flowers. But all else
+was in disarray. The leather screen that had stood by the door into the
+entrance hall had been overthrown, and had carried with it a tall
+flowering plant that now lay trampled and broken before the hearth. A
+couple of chairs lay on their backs between the windows; the rug under
+the window was huddled in a heap, and all over the polished boards were
+scratches and dents; a broken sword-hilt lay on the floor with a
+feathered cap beside it. There were half a dozen men guarding the four
+doors; but the rest were gone; and from overhead came tramplings and
+shouts as the hunt swept to and fro in the upper floors.
+
+At the top of the stairs was Mary's room; the two ladies, who had gone
+silently upstairs with Hubert behind them, stopped at the door of it.
+
+"Here, if you please," said Mary.
+
+Before Hubert could answer, Lackington came down the passage, hurrying
+with a drawn sword, and his hat on his head. Isabel did not recognise him
+as he stopped and tapped Hubert on the arm familiarly.
+
+"The prisoners must not be together," he said.
+
+Hubert drew back his arm and looked the man in the face.
+
+"They are not prisoners; and they shall be together. Take off your hat,
+sir."
+
+Then, as Lackington drew back astonished, he opened the door.
+
+"You shall not be disturbed here," he said, and the two went in, and the
+door closed behind them. There was a murmur of voices outside the door,
+and they heard a name called once or twice, and the sound of footsteps.
+Then came a tap, and Hubert stepped in quietly and closed the door.
+
+"I have placed my own man outside," he said, "and none shall trouble
+you--and--Mistress Isabel--I will do my best." Then he bowed and went
+out.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The long miserable afternoon began. They watched through the windows the
+sentries going up and down the broad paths between the glowing
+flower-beds; and out, over the high iron fence that separated the garden
+from the meadows, the crowd of villagers and children watching.
+
+But the real terror for them both lay in the sounds that came from the
+interior of the house. There was a continual tramp of the sentries placed
+in every corridor and lobby, and of the messengers that went to and fro.
+Then from room after room came the sounds of blows, the rending of
+woodwork, and once or twice the crash of glass, as the searchers went
+about their work; and at every shout the women shuddered or drew their
+breath sharply, for any one of the noises might be the sign of Anthony's
+arrest.
+
+The two had soon talked out every theory in low voices, but they both
+agreed that he was still in the house somewhere, and on the upper floor.
+It was impossible, they thought, for him to have made his way down. There
+were four possibilities, therefore: either he might still be in the
+chimney--in that case it was no use hoping; or he was in the chapel-hole;
+or in that behind the portrait; or in one last one, in the room next to
+their own. The searchers had been there early in the afternoon, but
+perhaps had not found it; its entrance was behind the window shutter, and
+was contrived in the thickness of the wall. So they talked, these two,
+and conjectured and prayed, as the evening drew on; and the sun began to
+sink behind the church, and the garden to lie in cool shadow.
+
+About eight there was a tap at the door, and Hubert came in with a tray
+of food in his hands, which he set down.
+
+"All is in confusion," he said, "but this is the best I can do."--He
+broke off.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said, coming nearer to the two as they sat together
+in the window-seat, "I can do little; they have found three hiding-holes;
+but so far he has escaped. I do what I can to draw them off, but they are
+too clever and zealous. If you can tell me more, perhaps I can do more."
+
+The two were looking at him with startled eyes.
+
+"Three?" Mary said.
+
+"Yes, three--and indeed----" He stopped as Isabel got up and came towards
+him.
+
+"Hubert," she said resolutely, "I must tell you. He must be still in the
+chimney of the little west parlour. Do what you can."
+
+"The west parlour!" he said. "That was where Mistress Corbet was burning
+the papers?"
+
+"Yes," said Mary.
+
+"He is not there," said Hubert; "we have sent a boy up and down it
+already."
+
+"Ah! dear God!" said Mary from the window-seat, "then he has escaped."
+
+Isabel looked from one to the other and shook her head.
+
+"It cannot be," she said. "The guards were all round the house before the
+alarm rang."
+
+Hubert nodded, and Mary's face fell.
+
+"Then is there no way out?" he asked.
+
+Mary sprang up with shining eyes.
+
+"He has done it," she said, and threw her arms round Isabel and kissed
+her.
+
+"Well," said Hubert, "what can I do?"
+
+"You must leave us," said Isabel; "come back later."
+
+"Then when we have searched the garden-house--why, what is it?"
+
+A look of such anguish had come into their faces that he stopped amazed.
+
+"The garden-house!" cried Mary; "no, no, no!"
+
+"No, no, Hubert, Hubert!" cried Isabel, "you must not go there."
+
+"Why," he said, "it was I that proposed it; to draw them from the house."
+
+There came from beneath the windows a sudden tramp of footsteps, and then
+Nichol's voice, distinctly heard through the open panes.
+
+"We cannot wait for him. Come, men."
+
+"They are going without me," said Hubert; and turned and ran through the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XI
+
+                           THE GARDEN-HOUSE
+
+
+During that long afternoon the master of the house had sat in his own
+room, before his table, hearing the ceaseless footsteps and the voices
+overhead, and the ring of feet on the tiles outside his window, knowing
+that his friend and priest was somewhere in the house, crouching in some
+dark little space, listening to the same footsteps and voices as they
+came and went by his hiding-place, and that he himself was absolutely
+powerless to help.
+
+He had been overpowered in the first rush as he pealed on the alarm-bell,
+to which he had rushed when the groom burst in from the stable-yard
+crying that the outer court was full of men. Lackington had then sent him
+under guard to his own room, where he had been locked in with an armed
+constable to prevent any possibility of escape. In the struggle he had
+received a blow on the head which had completely dazed him; all his
+resource left him; and he had no desire even to move from his chair.
+
+Now he sat, with his head on his breast, and his mind going the ceaseless
+round of all the possible places where Anthony might be. Little scenes,
+too, of startling vividness moved before him, as he sat there with
+half-closed eyes--scenes of the imagined arrest--the scuffle as the
+portrait was torn away and Anthony burst out in one last desperate
+attempt to escape. He saw him under every kind of circumstance--dashing
+up stairs and being met at the top by a man with a pike--running and
+crouching through the withdrawing-room itself next door--gliding with
+burning eyes past the yew-hedges in a rush for the iron gates, only to
+find them barred--on horseback with his hands bound and a despairing
+uplifted face with pike-heads about him.--So his friend dreamed miserably
+on, open-eyed, but between waking and the sleep of exhaustion, until the
+crowning vision flashed momentarily before his eyes of the scaffold and
+the cauldron with the fire burning and the low gallows over the heads of
+the crowd, and the butcher's block and knife; and then he moaned and sat
+up and stared about him, and the young pursuivant looked at him
+half-apprehensively.
+
+Towards evening the house grew quieter; once, about six o'clock, there
+were voices outside, the door from the hall was unlocked, and a
+heavily-built, ruddy man came in with two pikemen, locking the door
+behind him. They paid no attention to the prisoner, and he watched them
+mechanically as they went round the room, running their eyes up and down
+the panelling, and tapping here and there.
+
+"The room has been searched, sir, already," said the young constable to
+the ruddy-faced man, who glanced at him and nodded, and then continued
+the scrutiny. They reached the fireplace and the officer reached up and
+tapped the wood over the mantelpiece half-a-dozen times.
+
+"Here," he called, pointing to a spot.
+
+A pikeman came up, placed the end of his pike into the oak, and leaned
+suddenly and heavily upon it: the steel crashed in an inch, and stopped
+as it met the stonework behind. The officer made a motion, the pike was
+withdrawn, and he stood on tip-toe and put his finger into the splintered
+panel. Then he was satisfied and they passed on, still tapping the walls,
+and went out of the other door, locking it again behind them.
+
+An hour later there were voices and steps again, and a door was unlocked
+and opened, and Mr. Graves, the Tonbridge magistrate stepped in alone. He
+was a pale scholarly-looking man with large eyes, and a weak mouth only
+partly covered by his beard.
+
+"You can go," he said nervously to the constable, "but remain outside."
+The young man saluted him and passed out.
+
+The magistrate looked quickly and sideways at Mr. Buxton as he sat and
+looked at him.
+
+"I am come to tell you," he said, "that we cannot find the priest." He
+hesitated and stopped. "We have found several hiding-holes," he went on,
+"and they are all empty. I--I hope there is no mistake."
+
+A little thrill ran through the man who sat in the chair; the lethargy
+began to clear from his brain, like a morning mist when a breeze rises;
+he sat a little more upright and gripped the arms of his chair; he said
+nothing yet, but he felt power and resource flowing back to his brain,
+and the pulse in his temples quieted. Why, if the lad had not been taken
+yet, he must surely be out of the house.
+
+"I trust there is no mistake," said the magistrate again nervously.
+
+"You may well trust so," said the other; "it will be a grievous thing for
+you, sir, otherwise."
+
+"Indeed, Mr. Buxton, I think you know I am no bigot. I was sent for by
+Mr. Lackington last night. I could not refuse. It was not my wish----"
+
+"Yet you have issued your warrant, and are here in person to execute it.
+May I inquire how many of my cupboards you have broken into? And I hope
+your men are satisfied with my plate."
+
+"Indeed, sir," said the magistrate, "there has been nothing of that kind.
+And as for the cupboards, there were but three----"
+
+Three!--then the lad is out of the house, thought the other. But where?
+
+"And I trust you have not spared to break down my servants' rooms, and
+the stables as well as pierce all my panelling."
+
+"There was no need to search the stables, Mr. Buxton; our men were round
+the house before we entered. They have been watching the entrances since
+eight o'clock last night."
+
+Mr. Buxton felt bewildered. His instinct had been right, then, the night
+before.
+
+"The party was followed from near Wrotham," went on the magistrate. "The
+priest was with them then; and, we suppose, entered the house."
+
+"You suppose!" snapped the other. "What the devil do you mean by
+supposing? You have looked everywhere and cannot find him?"
+
+The magistrate shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly, as he stood and
+stared at the angry man.
+
+"And the roofs?" added Mr. Buxton sneeringly.
+
+"They have been thoroughly searched."
+
+Then there is but one possible theory, he reflected. The lad is in the
+garden-house. And what if they search that?
+
+"Then may I ask what you propose to destroy next, Mr. Graves?"
+
+He saw that this tone was having its effect on the magistrate, who was
+but a half-hearted persecutor, with but feeble convictions and will, as
+he knew of old.
+
+"I--I entreat you not to speak to me like that, sir," he said. "I have
+but done my duty."
+
+Then the other rose from his chair, and his eyes were stern and bright
+again and his lips tight.
+
+"Your duty, sir, seems a strange matter, when it leads you to break into
+a friend's house, assault him and his servants and his guests, and
+destroy his furniture, in search of a supposed priest whom you have never
+even seen. Now, sir, if this matter comes to her Grace's ears, I will not
+answer for the consequences; for you know Mistress Corbet, her
+lady-in-waiting, is one of my guests.--And, speaking of that, where are
+my guests?"
+
+"The two ladies, Mr. Buxton, are safe and sound upstairs, I assure you."
+
+The magistrate's voice was trembling.
+
+"Well, sir, I have one condition to offer you. Either you and your men
+withdraw within half an hour from my house and grounds, and leave me and
+my two guests to ourselves, or else I lay the whole matter, through
+Mistress Corbet, before her Grace." Mr. Buxton beat his hand once on the
+table as he ended, and looked with a contemptuous inquiry at the
+magistrate.
+
+But the worm writhed up at the heel.
+
+"How can you talk like this, sir," he burst out, "as if you had but two
+guests?"
+
+"Two guests? I do not understand you. How should there be more?"
+
+"Then for whom are the four places laid at table?" he answered
+indignantly.
+
+Mr. Buxton felt a sudden desperate sinking, and he could not answer for a
+moment. The magistrate passed his shaking hand over his mouth and beard
+once or twice; but the thrust had gone home, and there was no parry or
+riposte. He followed it up.
+
+"Now, sir, be reasonable. I came in here to make terms. We _know_ the
+priest has been here. It is certain beyond all question. All that is
+uncertain is whether he is here now or escaped. We have searched
+thoroughly; we must search again to-morrow; but in the meanwhile, while
+you yourself must be under restraint, your guests shall have what liberty
+they wish; and you yourself shall have all reasonable comfort and ease.
+So--so, if we do not find the priest, I trust that you and--and--Mistress
+Corbet will agree to overlook any rashness on my part--and--and let her
+Grace remain in ignorance."
+
+Mr. Buxton had been thinking furiously during this little speech. He saw
+the mistake he had made in taking the high line, and his wretched
+forgetfulness of the fourth place at table. He must make terms, though it
+tasted bitter.
+
+"Well, Mr. Graves," he said, "I have no wish to be hard upon you. All I
+ask is to be out of the house when the search is made, and that the
+ladies shall come and go as they please."
+
+The magistrate leapt at the lure like a trout.
+
+"Yes, yes, Mr. Buxton, it shall be as you say. And to what house will you
+retire?"
+
+Mr. Buxton appeared to reflect; he tapped on the table with a meditative
+finger and looked at the ceiling.
+
+"It must not be too far away," he said slowly, "and--and the Rector would
+scarce like to receive me. Perhaps in--or----Why not my summer-house?" he
+added suddenly.
+
+Mr. Graves' face was irradiated with smiles.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Buxton, certainly, it shall be as you say. And where is
+the summer-house?"
+
+"It is across the garden," said the other carelessly. "I wonder you have
+not searched it in your zeal."
+
+"Shall I send a man to prepare it?" asked the magistrate eagerly. "Will
+you go there to-night?"
+
+"Well, shall we go across there together now? I give you my parole," he
+added, smiling, and standing up.
+
+"Indeed,--as you wish. I cannot tell you, sir, how grateful I am. You
+have made my duty almost a pleasure, sir."
+
+They went out together into the hall, Mr. Buxton carrying the key of the
+garden-house that he had taken from the drawer of his table; he glanced
+ruefully at the wrecked furniture and floor, and his eyes twinkled for a
+moment as they rested on the four places at table still undisturbed, and
+then met the magistrate's sidelong look. The men were still at the doors,
+resting now on chairs or leaning against the wall, with their weapons
+beside them; it was weary work this mounting sentry and losing the hunt,
+and their faces showed it. The two passed out together into the garden,
+and began to walk up the path that led straight across the avenue to
+where the high vanes of the garden-house stood up grotesque and towering
+against the evening sky, above the black yew-hedges.
+
+All the while they went Mr. Buxton was thinking out his plan. It was
+still incoherent; but, at any rate, it was a step gained to be able to
+communicate with Anthony again; and at least the poor lad should have
+some supper. And then he smiled to himself with relief as he saw what an
+improvement there had been in the situation as it had appeared to him an
+hour ago. Why, they would search the house again next day; find no one,
+and retire apologising. His occupancy of the garden-house with the
+magistrate's full consent would surely secure it from search; and he was
+not so well satisfied with the disguised entrance to the passage at this
+end as with that in the cellar.
+
+They reached the door at last. There were three steps going up to it, and
+Mr. Buxton went up them, making a good deal of noise as he did so, to
+ensure Anthony's hearing him should he be above ground. Then, as if with
+great difficulty, he unlocked the door, rattling it, and clicking sharply
+with his tongue at its stiffness.
+
+"You see, Mr. Graves." he said, rather loud, as he opened the door a
+little, "my prison will not be a narrow one." He threw the door open,
+gave a glance round, and was satisfied. The targets leaned against one
+wall, and two rows of flower-pots stood in the corner near where the
+window opened into the lane, but there was no sign of occupation. Mr.
+Buxton went across, threw the window open and looked out. There was a
+steel cap three or four feet below, and a pike-head; and at the sound of
+the latch a bearded face looked up.
+
+"I see you have a sentry there," said Mr. Buxton carelessly.
+
+"Ah! that is one of Mr. Maxwell's men."
+
+"Mr. Maxwell's!" said the other, startled. "Is he in this affair too?"
+
+"Yes; have you not heard? He came from Great Keynes this morning. Mr.
+Lackington sent for him."
+
+Mr. Buxton's face grew dark.
+
+"Ah yes, I see--a pretty revenge."
+
+The magistrate was on the point of asking an explanation, for he felt on
+the best of terms again now with his prisoner, when there were footsteps
+outside and voices; and there stood four constables, with Nichol, Hubert
+Maxwell and Lackington in furious debate coming up the path behind.
+
+They looked up suddenly, and saw the door open and the magistrate and his
+prisoner standing in the opening. The four constables stood waiting for
+further orders while their three chiefs came up.
+
+"Now, now, now!" said Mr. Graves peevishly, "what is all this?"
+
+"We have come to search this house, sir," said Nichol cheerfully.
+
+"See here, sir," said Hubert, "have you given orders for this?"
+
+"Enough, enough," said Lackington coolly. "Search, men."
+
+The pursuivants advanced to the steps. Then Mr. Buxton turned fiercely on
+them all.
+
+"See here!" he cried, and his voice rang out across the garden. "You
+bring me here, Mr. Graves, promising me a little peace and quietness,
+after your violent and unwarranted attack upon my house to-day. I have
+been patient and submissive to all suggestions; I leave my entire house
+at your disposal; I promise to lay no complaints before her Grace, so
+long as you will let me retire here till it is over--and now your men
+persecute me even here. Have you no mind of your own, sir?" he shouted.
+
+"Really, sir----" began Hubert.
+
+"And as for you, Mr. Maxwell," went on the other fiercely, "are you not
+content with your triumph so far? Cannot you leave me one corner to
+myself, or would your revenge be not full enough for you, then?"
+
+"You mistake me, sir," said Hubert, making a violent effort to control
+himself; "I am on your side in this matter."
+
+"That is what I am beginning to think," said Lackington insolently.
+
+"You think!" roared Mr. Buxton; "and who the devil are you?"
+
+"See here, gentlemen," said Mr. Nichol, "what is the dispute? Here is an
+empty house, Mr. Buxton tells us; and Mr. Maxwell tells us the same.
+Well, then, let these honest fellows run through the empty house; it will
+not take ten minutes, and Mr. Buxton and his friend can take the air
+meanwhile. A-God's name, let us not dispute over a trifle."
+
+"Then, a-God's name, let me go to my own house," bellowed Mr. Buxton,
+"and these gentlemen can have the empty house to disport themselves in
+till doomsday--or till her Grace looks into the matter"; and he made a
+motion to run down the steps, but his heart sank. Mr. Graves put out a
+deprecating hand and touched his arm; and Mr. Buxton very readily turned
+at once with a choleric face!
+
+"No, no, no!" cried the magistrate. "These gentlemen are here on my
+warrant, and they shall not search the place. Mr. Buxton, I entreat you
+not to be hasty. Come back, sir."
+
+Mr. Buxton briskly reascended.
+
+"Well, then, Mr. Graves, I entreat you to give your orders, and let your
+will be known. I am getting hungry for my supper, too, sir. It is already
+an hour past my time."
+
+"Sup in the house, sir," said Mr. Nichol smoothly, "and we shall have
+done by then."
+
+Then Hubert blazed up; he took a step forward.
+
+"Now, you fellow," he said to Nichol, "hold your damned tongue. Mr.
+Graves and I are the magistrates here, and we say that this gentleman
+shall sup and sleep here in peace, so you may take your pursuivants
+elsewhere."
+
+Lackington looked up with a smile.
+
+"No, Mr. Maxwell, I cannot do that. These men are under my orders, and I
+shall leave two of them here and send another to keep your fellow company
+at the back, We will not disturb Mr. Buxton further to-night; but
+to-morrow we shall see."
+
+Mr. Buxton paid no sort of further attention to him, but turned to the
+magistrates.
+
+"Well, gentlemen, what is your decision?"
+
+"You shall sleep here in peace, sir," said Mr. Graves resolutely. "I can
+promise nothing for to-morrow."
+
+"Then will you kindly allow one of my men to bring me supper and a couch
+of some kind, and I shall be obliged if the ladies may sup with me."
+
+"That they shall," assented Mr. Graves. "Mr. Maxwell, will you escort
+them here?"
+
+Hubert, who was turning away, nodded and disappeared round the yew-hedge.
+Lackington, who had been talking in an undertone to the pursuivants, now
+went up another alley with one of them and Mr. Nichol, and disappeared
+too in the gathering gloom of the garden. The other two pursuivants
+separated and each moved a few steps off and remained just out of sight.
+Plainly they were to remain on guard. Mr. Buxton and the magistrate sat
+down on a couple of garden-chairs.
+
+"That is an obstinate fellow, sir," said Mr. Graves.
+
+"They are certainly both of them very offensive fellows, sir. I was
+astonished at your indulgence towards them."
+
+The magistrate was charmed by this view of the case, and remained talking
+with Mr. Buxton until footsteps again were heard, and the two ladies
+appeared, with Hubert with them, and a couple of men carrying each a tray
+and the other necessaries he had asked for.
+
+Mr. Buxton and the magistrate rose to meet the ladies and bowed.
+
+"I cannot tell you," began their host elaborately, "what distress all
+this affair has given me. I trust you will forgive any inconvenience you
+may have suffered."
+
+Both Isabel and Mary looked white and strained, but they responded
+gallantly; and as the table was being prepared the four talked almost as
+if there were no bitter suspense at three of their hearts at least. Mr.
+Graves was nervous and uneasy, but did his utmost to propitiate Mary. At
+last he was on the point of withdrawing, when Mr. Buxton entreated him to
+sup with them.
+
+"I must not," he said; "I am responsible for your property, Mr. Buxton."
+
+"Then I understand that these ladies may come and go as they please?" he
+asked carelessly.
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+"Then may I ask too the favour that you will place one of your own men at
+the door who can conduct them to the house when they wish to go, and who
+can remain and protect me too from any disturbance from either of the two
+officious persons who were here just now?"
+
+Mr. Graves, delighted at this restored confidence, promised to do so, and
+took an elaborate leave; and the three sat down to supper; the door was
+left open, and they could see through it the garden, over which veil
+after veil of darkness was beginning to fall. The servants had lighted
+two tapers, and the inside of the great room with its queer furniture of
+targets and flower-pots was plainly visible to any walking outside. Once
+or twice the figure of a man crossed the strip of light that lay across
+the gravel.
+
+It was a strange supper. They said innocent things to one another in a
+tone loud enough for any to hear who cared to be listening, about the
+annoyance of it all, the useless damage that had been done, the warmth of
+the summer night, and the like, and spoke in low soundless sentences of
+what was in all their hearts.
+
+"That red-faced fellow," said Mary, "would be the better of some manners.
+(He is in the passage below, I suppose.)"
+
+"It is scarce an ennobling life--that of a manhunter," said Mr. Buxton.
+("Yes. I am sure of it.")
+
+"They have broken your little cupboard, I fear." said Mary again. ("Tell
+me your plan, if you have one.")
+
+And so step by step a plan was built up. It had been maturing in Mr.
+Buxton's mind gradually after he had learnt the ladies might sup with
+him; and little by little he conveyed it to them. He managed to write
+down the outline of it as he sat at table, and then passed it to each to
+read, and commented on it and answered their questions about it, all in
+the same noiseless undertone, with his lips indeed scarcely moving. There
+were many additions and alterations made in it as the two ladies worked
+upon it too, but by the time supper was over it was tolerably complete.
+It seemed, indeed, almost desperate, but the case was desperate. It was
+certain that the garden-house would be searched next day; Lackington's
+suspicions were plainly roused, and it was too much to hope that
+searchers who had found three hiding-places in one afternoon would fail
+to find a fourth. It appeared then that it was this plan or none.
+
+They supped slowly, in order to give time to think out and work out the
+scheme, and to foresee any difficulties beyond those they had already
+counted on; and it was fully half-past nine before the two ladies rose.
+Their host went with them to the door, called up Mr. Graves' man, and
+watched them pass down the path out of sight. He stood a minute or two
+longer looking across towards the house at the dusky shapes in the garden
+and the strip of gravel, grass, and yew that was illuminated from his
+open door. Then he spoke to the men that he knew were just out of sight.
+
+"I am going to bed presently. Kindly do not disturb me." There was no
+answer; and he closed the two high doors and bolted them securely.
+
+He dared not yet do what he wished, for fear of arousing suspicion, so he
+went to the other window and looked out into the lane. He could just make
+out the glimmer of steel on the opposite bank.
+
+"Good-night, my man," he called out cheerfully.
+
+Again there was no answer. There was something sinister in these watching
+presences that would not speak, and his heart sank a little as he put-to
+the window without closing it. He went next to the pile of rugs and
+pillows that his men had brought across, and arranged them in the corner,
+just clear of the trap-door. Then he knelt and said his evening prayers,
+and here at least was no acting. Then he rose again and took off his
+doublet and ruff and shoes so that he was dressed only in a shirt, trunks
+and hose. Then he went across to the supper-table, where the tapers still
+burned, and blew them out, leaving the room in complete darkness. Then he
+went back to his bed, and sat and listened.
+
+Up to this point he had been aware that probably at least one pair of
+eyes had been watching him; for, although the windows were of bottle-end
+glass, yet it was exceedingly likely that there would be some clear glass
+in them; and, with the tapers burning inside, his movements would all
+have been visible to either of Lackington's men who cared to put his eye
+to the window. But now he was invisible. Yet, as he thought of it, he
+slipped on his doublet again to hide the possible glimmer of his white
+shirt. There was the silence of the summer night about him--the silence
+only emphasised by its faint sounds. The house was quiet across the
+garden, though once or twice he thought he heard a horse stamp. Once
+there came a little stifled cough from outside his window; there was the
+silky rustle of the faint breeze in the trees outside; and now and again
+came the snoring of a young owl in the ivy somewhere overhead.
+
+He counted five hundred deliberately, to compel himself to wait; and
+meanwhile his sub-conscious self laboured at the scheme. Then he glanced
+this way and that with wide eyes; his ears sang with intentness of
+listening. Then, very softly he shifted his position, and found with his
+fingers the ring that lifted the trap-door above the stairs.
+
+There was no concealment about this, and without any difficulty he lifted
+the door with his right hand and leaned it against the wall; then he
+looked round again and listened. From below came up the damp earthy
+breath of the basement, and he heard a rat scamper suddenly to shelter.
+Then he lifted his feet from the rugs and dropped them noiselessly on the
+stairs, and supporting himself by his hands on the floor went down a step
+or two. Then a stair creaked under his weight; and he stopped in an
+agony, hearing only the mad throbbing in his own ears. But all was silent
+outside. And so step by step he descended into the cool darkness. He
+hesitated as to whether he should close the trap-door or not, there was a
+risk either way; but he decided to do so, as he would be obliged to make
+some noise in opening the secret doors and communicating with Anthony. At
+last his feet touched the earth floor, and he turned as he sat and
+counted the steps--the fourth, the fifth, and tapped upon it. There was
+no answer; he put his lips to it and whispered sharply:
+
+"Anthony, Anthony, dear lad."
+
+Still there was no answer. Then he lifted the lid, and managed to hold
+the woodwork below, as he knelt on the third step, so that it descended
+noiselessly. He put out his other hand and felt the boards. Anthony had
+retired into the passage then, he told himself, as he found the space
+empty. He climbed into the hole, pushed himself along and counted the
+bricks--the fourth of the fourth--pressed it, and pushed at the door; and
+it was fast.
+
+For the first time a horrible spasm of terror seized him. Had he
+forgotten? or was it all a mistake, and Anthony not there? He turned in
+his place, put his shoulders against the door and his feet against the
+woodwork of the stairs, and pushed steadily; there were one or two loud
+creaks, and the door began to yield. Then he knew Anthony was there; a
+rush of relief came into his heart--and he turned and whispered again.
+
+"Anthony, dear lad, Anthony, open quickly; it is I."
+
+The brickwork slid back and a hand touched his face out of the pitch
+darkness of the tunnel.
+
+"Who is it? Is it you?" came a whisper.
+
+"It is I, yes. Thank God you are here. I feared----"
+
+"How could I tell?" came the whisper again. "But what is the news? Are
+you escaped?"
+
+"No, I am a prisoner, and on parole. But there is no time for that. You
+must escape--we have a plan--but there is not much time."
+
+"Why should I not remain here?"
+
+"They will search to-morrow--and--and this end of the tunnel is not so
+well concealed as the other. They would find you. They suspect you are
+here, and there are guards round this place."
+
+There was a movement in the dark.
+
+"Then why think----" began the whisper.
+
+"No, no, we have a plan. Mary and Isabel approve. Listen carefully. There
+is but one guard at the back here, in the lane. Mary has leave to come
+and go now as she pleases--they are afraid of her; she will leave the
+house in a few minutes now to ride to East Maskells, with two grooms and
+a maid behind one of them. She will ride her own horse. When she has
+passed the inn she will bid the groom who has the maid to wait for her,
+while she rides down the lane with the other, Robert, to speak to me
+through the window. The pursuivant, we suppose, will not forbid that, as
+he knows they have supped with me just now. As we talk, Robert will watch
+his chance and spring on the pursuivant. As soon as the struggle begins
+you will drop from the window; it is but eight feet; and help him to
+secure the man and gag him. However much din they make the others cannot
+reach the man in time to help, for they will have to come round from the
+house, and you will have mounted Robert's horse; and you and Mary
+together will gallop down the lane into the road, and then where you
+will. We advise East Maskells. I do not suppose there will be any
+pursuit. They will have no horses ready. Do you understand it?"
+
+There was silence a moment; Mr. Buxton could hear Anthony breathing in
+the darkness.
+
+"I do not like it," came the whisper at last; "it seems desperate. A
+hundred things may happen. And what of Isabel and you?"
+
+"Dear friend; I know it is desperate, but not so desperate as your
+remaining here would be for us all."
+
+Again there was silence.
+
+"What of Robert? How will he escape?"
+
+"If you escape they will have nothing against Robert; for they can prove
+nothing as to your priesthood. But if they catch you here--and they
+certainly will, if you remain here--they will probably hang him, for he
+fought for you gallantly in the house. And he too will have time to run.
+He can run through the door into the meadows. But they will not care for
+him if they know you are off."
+
+Again silence.
+
+"Well?" whispered Mr. Buxton.
+
+"Do you wish it?"
+
+"I think it is the only hope."
+
+"Then I will do it."
+
+"Thank God! And now you must come up with me. Put off your shoes."
+
+"I have none."
+
+"Then follow, and do not make a sound."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Very cautiously Mr. Buxton extricated himself; for he had been lying on
+his side while he whispered to Anthony; and presently was crouched on the
+stairs above, as he heard the stirrings of his friend in the dark below
+him. There came the click of the brickwork door; then slow shufflings;
+once a thump on the hollow boards that made his heart leap; then after
+what seemed an interminable while, came the sound of latching the fifth
+stair into its place; and he felt his foot grasped. Then he turned and
+ascended slowly on hands and knees, feeling now and again for the
+trap-door over him--touched it--raised it, and crawled out on to the
+rugs. The room seemed to him comparatively light after the heavy darkness
+of the basement, and passage below, and he could make out the
+supper-table and the outline of the targets on the opposite wall. Then he
+saw a head follow him; then shoulders and body; and Anthony crept out and
+sat on the rugs beside him. Their hands met in a trembling grip.
+
+"Supper, dear lad?" whispered Mr. Buxton, with his mouth to the other's
+ear.
+
+"Yes, I am hungry," came the faintest whisper back.
+
+Mr. Buxton rose and went on tip-toe to the table, took off some food and
+a glass of wine that he had left purposely filled and came back with
+them.
+
+There the two friends sat; Mr. Buxton could just hear the movement of
+Anthony's mouth as he ate. The four windows glimmered palely before them,
+and once or twice the tall doors rattled faintly as the breeze stirred
+them.
+
+Then suddenly came a sound that made Anthony's hand pause on the way to
+his mouth; Mr. Buxton drew a sharp breath; it was the noise of three or
+four horses on the road beyond the church. Then they both stood up
+without a word, and Mr. Buxton went noiselessly across to the window that
+looked on to the lane and remained there, listening. The horses were now
+passing down the street, and the noise of their hoofs grew fainter behind
+the houses.
+
+Anthony saw his friend in the twilight beckon, and he went across and
+stood by him. Suddenly the hoofs sounded loud and near; and they heard
+the pursuivant below stand up from the bank opposite. Then Mary's voice
+came distinct and cheerful.
+
+"How dark it is!"
+
+The horses were coming down the lane.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                            THE NIGHT-RIDE
+
+
+The sound of hoofs came nearer; Anthony's heart, as he crouched below the
+window, ready to spring up and over when the signal was given, beat in
+sick thumpings at the base of his throat, but with a fierce excitement
+and no fear. His hands clenched and unclenched. Mr. Buxton stood back a
+little, waiting; he must feign to be asleep at first.
+
+Then came suddenly a sharp challenge from the sentry.
+
+"It is Mistress Corbet," came Mary's cool high tones, "and I desire to
+speak with Mr. Buxton."
+
+The man hesitated.
+
+"You cannot," he said.
+
+"Cannot!" she cried; "why, fellow, do you know who I am? And I have just
+supped with him."
+
+There came a sudden sound from the other side of the summer-house, and
+both men in the room knew that the guards in the garden were listening.
+
+"I am sorry, madam, but I have no orders."
+
+"Then do not presume, you hound," came Mary's voice again, with a ring of
+anger. "Ho, there, Mr. Buxton, come to the window."
+
+"Be ready," he whispered to Anthony.
+
+"Stand back, madam," said the pursuivant, "or I shall call for help."
+
+Then Mr. Buxton threw back the window.
+
+"Who is there?" he asked coolly. ("Stand up Anthony.")
+
+"It is I, Mr. Buxton, but this insolent dog----"
+
+"Stand _back_, madam, I say," cried the voice of the guard. Then from the
+garden behind came running footsteps and voices; and a red light shone
+through the windows behind.
+
+"Now," whispered the voice over Anthony's head sharply.
+
+There came a loud shout from the guard, "Help there, help!"
+
+Anthony put his hands on to the sill and lifted himself easily. The groom
+had slipped from his horse while Mary held the bridle, and was advancing
+at the guard, and there was something in his hand. The sentry, who was
+standing immediately under the window, now dropped his pike point
+forward; and as a furious rattling began at the doors on the garden side,
+Anthony dropped, and came down astride of the man's neck, who crashed to
+the ground. Then the groom was on him too.
+
+"Leave him to me, sir. Mount."
+
+The groom's hands were busy with something about the struggling man's
+neck: the shouts choked and ceased.
+
+"You will strangle the man," said Anthony sharply.
+
+"Nonsense," said Mary; "mount, mount. They are coming."
+
+Anthony ran to the horse, that was beginning to scurry and plunge; threw
+himself across the saddle and caught the reins.
+
+"Up?" said Mary.
+
+"Up"; and he slung his right leg over the flank and sat up, as Mary
+released the bridle, and dashed off, scattering gravel.
+
+From the direction of the church came cries and the quick rattle of a
+galloping horse. Anthony dashed his shoeless heels into the horse's sides
+and leaned forward, and in a moment more was flying down the lane after
+Mary. From in front came a shout of warning, with one or two screams, and
+then Anthony turned the corner, checking his horse slightly at the angle,
+saw a torch somewhere to his right, a group of scared faces, a groom and
+woman clinging to him on a plunging horse, and the white road; and then
+found himself with loose reins, and flying stirrups, thundering down the
+village street, with Mary on her horse not two lengths in front. The roar
+of the hoofs behind, and of the little shouting crowd, with the screaming
+woman on the horse, died behind him as the wind began to boom in his
+ears. Mary was looking round now, and slightly checking her horse as they
+neared the bottom of the long village street. In half a dozen strides
+Anthony came up on her right. Then the pool gleamed before them just
+beyond the fork of the road.
+
+"Left!" screamed Mary through the roar of the racing air, and turned her
+horse off up the road that led round in a wide sweep of two miles to East
+Maskells and the woods beyond, and Anthony followed. He had settled down
+in the saddle now, and had brought his maddened horse under control; his
+feet were in the stirrups, but there was no lessening of the speed. They
+had left the last house now, and on either side the black bushes and
+heatherland streamed past, with the sudden gleam of water here and there
+under the starlight that showed the ditches and holes with which the
+ground on either side of the road was honeycombed.
+
+Then Mary turned her head again, and the words came detached and sharp.
+
+"They are after us--could not help--horses saddled."
+
+Anthony turned his head to release one ear from the roar of the air, and
+heard the thundering rattle of hoofs in the distance, but even as he
+listened it grew fainter.
+
+"We are gaining!" he shouted.
+
+Mary nodded, and her teeth gleamed white in a smile.
+
+"Ours are fresh," she screamed.
+
+Then there was silence between them again; they had reached a little hill
+and eased their horses up it; a heavy fringe of trees crowned it on their
+right, black against the stars, and a gleam of light showed the presence
+of a house among them. Farther and farther behind them sounded the hoofs;
+then they were swaying and rocking again down the slope that led to the
+long flat piece of road that ended in the slope up to East Maskells. It
+was softer going now and darker too, as there were trees overhead;
+pollared willows streamed past them as they went; and twice there was a
+snort and a hollow thunder of hoofs as a young sleeping horse awoke and
+raced them a few yards in the meadows at the side. Once Anthony's horse
+shied at a white post, and drew in front a yard or two; and he heard for
+a moment under the rattle the cool gush of the stream that flowed beneath
+the road and the scream of a water-fowl as she burst from the reeds.
+
+A great exultation began to fill Anthony's heart. What a ride this was,
+in the glorious summer night--reckless and intoxicating! What a contrast,
+this sweet night air streaming past him, this dear world of living
+things, his throbbing horse beneath him, the birds and beasts round him,
+and this gallant girl swaying and rejoicing too beside him! What a
+contrast was all this to that terrible afternoon, only a few hours
+away--of suspense and skulking like a rat in a sewer; in a dark, close
+passage underground breathing death and silence round him! An escape with
+the fresh air in the face and the glorious galloping music of hoofs is
+another matter to an escape contrived by holding the breath and fearing
+to move in a mean hiding-hole. And as all this flooded in upon him,
+incoherently but overpoweringly, he turned and laughed loud with joy.
+
+They had nearly come to an end of the flat by now. In front of them rose
+the high black mass of trees where safety lay; somewhere to the right,
+not a quarter of a mile in front, just off the road, lay East Maskells.
+They would draw rein, he reflected, when they reached the outer gates,
+and listen; and if all was quiet behind them, Mary at least should ask
+for shelter. For himself, perhaps it would be safer to ride on into the
+woods for the present. He began to move his head as he rode to see if
+there were any light in the house before him; it seemed dark; but perhaps
+he could not see the house from here. Gradually his horse slackened a
+little, as the rise in the ground began, and he tossed the reins once or
+twice.
+
+Then there was a sharp hiss and blow behind him; his horse snorted and
+leapt forward, almost unseating him, and then, still snorting with head
+raised and jerking, dashed at the slope. There was a cry and a loud
+report; he tugged at the reins, but the horse was beside himself, and he
+rode fifty yards before he could stop him. Even as he wrenched him into
+submission another horse with head up and flying stirrup and reins
+thundered past him and disappeared into the woods beyond the house.
+
+Then, trembling so that he could hardly hold the reins, he urged his
+horse back again at a stumbling trot towards what he knew lay at the foot
+of the slope, and to meet the tumult that grew in nearness and intensity
+up the road along which he had just galloped.
+
+There was a dark group on the pale road in front of him, twenty yards
+this side of the field-path that led from Stanfield Place; he took his
+feet from the stirrups as he got near, and in a moment more threw his
+right leg forward over the saddle and slipped to the ground.
+
+He said no word but pushed away the two men, and knelt by Mary, taking
+her head on his knee. The men rose and stood looking down at them.
+
+"Mary," he said, "can you hear me?"
+
+He bent close over the white face; her hand rose to her breast, and came
+away dark. She was shot through the body. Then she pushed him sharply.
+
+"Go," she whispered, "go."
+
+"Mary," he said again, "make your confession--quickly. Stand back, you
+men."
+
+They obeyed him; and he bent his ear towards the mouth he could so dimly
+see. There was a sob or two--a long moaning breath--and then the murmur
+of words, very faint and broken by gulps for breath. He noticed nothing
+of the hoofs that dashed up the road and stopped abruptly, and of the
+murmur of voices that grew round him; he only heard the gasping whisper,
+the words that rose one by one, with pauses and sighs, into his ear....
+
+"Is that all?" he said, and a silence fell on all who stood round, now a
+complete circle about the priest and the penitent. The pale face moved
+slightly in assent; he could see the lips were open, and the breath was
+coming short and agonised.
+
+"... _In nomine Patris_--his hand rose above her and moved cross-ways in
+the air--_et Filii et Spiritus Sancti_. _Amen._"
+
+Then he bent low again and looked; the bosom was still rising and
+falling, the shut eyes lifted once and looked at him. Then the lids fell
+again.
+
+"_Benedictio Dei omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et Spiritus sancti,
+descendat super te et maneat semper. Amen._"
+
+Then there fell a silence. A horse blew out its nostrils somewhere behind
+and stamped; then a man's voice cried brutally:
+
+"Now then, is that popish mummery done yet?"
+
+There was a murmur and stir in the group. But Anthony had risen.
+
+"That is all," he said.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII
+
+                              IN PRISON
+
+
+Anthony found several friends in the Clink prison in Southwark, whither
+he was brought up from Stanfield Place after his arrest.
+
+Life there was very strange, a combination of suffering and extraordinary
+relaxation. He had a tiny cell, nine feet by five, with one little window
+high up, and for the first month of his imprisonment wore irons; at the
+same time his gaoler was so much open to bribery that he always found his
+door open on Sunday morning, and was able to shuffle upstairs and say
+mass in the cell of Ralph Emerson, once the companion of Campion, and a
+lay-brother of the Society of Jesus. There he met a large number of
+Catholics--some of whom he had come across in his travels--and he even
+ministered the sacraments to others who managed to come in from the
+outside. His chief sorrow was that his friend and host had been taken to
+the Counter in Wood Street.
+
+It was a month before he heard all that had happened on the night of his
+arrest, and on the previous days: he had been separated at once from his
+friends; and although he had heard his guards talking both in the hall
+where he had been kept the rest of the night, and during the long hot
+ride to London the next day, yet at first he was so bewildered by Mary's
+death that what they said made little impression on him. But after he had
+been examined both by magistrates and the Commissioners, and very little
+evidence was forthcoming, his irons were struck off and he was allowed
+much more liberty than before; and at last, to his great joy, Isabel was
+admitted to see him. She herself had come straight up to the Marretts'
+house, both of whom still lived on in Wharf Street, though old and
+infirm; and day by day she attempted to get access to her brother; until
+at last, by dint of bribery, she was successful.
+
+Then she told him the whole story.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"When we left the garden-house," she said, "we went straight back, and
+Mary found Mr. Graves in the parlour off the hall. Oh, Anthony, how she
+ordered him about! And how frightened he was of her! The end was that he
+sent a message to the stables for her horses to be got ready, as she
+said. I went up with her to help her to make ready, and we kissed one
+another up there, for, you know, we dared not make as if we said good-bye
+downstairs. Then we came down for her to mount; and then we saw what we
+had not known before, that all the stable-yard was filled with the men's
+horses saddled and bridled. However, we said nothing, except that Mary
+asked a man what--what the devil he was looking at, when he stared up at
+her as she stood on the block drawing on her gloves before she mounted.
+There were one or two torches burning in cressets, and I saw her so
+plainly turn the corner down towards the church.
+
+"Then I went upstairs again, but I could not go to my room, but stood at
+the gallery window outside looking down at the court, for I knew that if
+there was any danger it would come from there.
+
+"Then presently I heard a noise, and a shouting, and a man ran in through
+the gates to the stable-yard; and, almost directly it seemed, three or
+four rode out, at full gallop across the court and down by the church.
+The window was open and I could hear the noise down towards the village.
+Then more and more came pouring out, and all turned the corner and
+galloped; all but one, whose horse slipped and came down with a crash.
+Oh, Anthony! how I prayed!
+
+"Then I saw Mr. Lackington"--Isabel stopped a moment at the name, and
+then went on again--"and he was on horseback too in the court; but he was
+shouting to two or three more who were just mounting. 'Across the
+field--across the field---cut them off!' I could hear it so plainly; and
+I saw the stable-gate was open, and they went through, and I could hear
+them galloping on the grass. And then I knew what was happening; and I
+went back to my room and shut the door."
+
+Isabel stopped again; and Anthony took her hand softly in his own and
+stroked it. Then she went on.
+
+"Well, I saw them bring you back, from the gallery window--and ran to the
+top of the stairs and saw you go through into the hall where the
+magistrates were waiting, and the door was shut; and then I went back to
+my place at the window--and then presently they brought in Mary. I
+reached the bottom of the stairs just as they set her down. And I told
+them to bring her upstairs; and they did, and laid her on the bed where
+we had sat together all the afternoon.... And I would let no one in: I
+did it all myself; and then I set the tapers round her, and put the
+crucifix that was round my neck into her fingers, which I had laid on her
+breast ... and there she lay on the great bed ... and her face was like a
+child's, fast asleep--smiling: and then I kissed her again, and
+whispered, 'Thank you, Mary'; for, though I did not know all, I knew
+enough, and that it was for you."
+
+Anthony had thrown his arms on the table and his face was buried in them.
+Isabel put out her hand and stroked his curly head gently as she went on,
+and told him in the same quiet voice of how Mary had tried to save him by
+lashing his horse, as she caught sight of the man waiting at the entrance
+of the field-path, and riding in between him and Anthony. The man had
+declared in his panic of fear before the magistrates that he had never
+dreamt of doing Mistress Corbet an injury, but that she had ridden across
+just as he drew the trigger to shoot the priest's horse and stop him that
+way.
+
+When Isabel had finished Anthony still lay with his head on his arms.
+
+"Why, Anthony, my darling," she said, "what could be more perfect? How
+proud I am of you both!"
+
+She told him, too, how they had been tracked to Stanfield--Lackington had
+let it out in his exultation.
+
+The sailor at Greenhithe was one of his agents--an apostate, like his
+master. He had recognised that the party consisted of Catholics by
+Anthony's breaking of the bread. He had been placed there to watch the
+ferry; and had sent messages at once to Nichol and Lackington. Then the
+party had been followed, but had been lost sight of, thanks to Anthony's
+ruse. Nichol had then flung out a cordon along the principal roads that
+bounded Stanstead Woods on the south; and Lackington, when he arrived a
+few hours later, had kept them there all night. The cordon consisted of
+idlers and children picked up at Wrotham; and the tramp who feigned to be
+asleep had been one of them. When they had passed, he had given the
+signal to his nearest neighbour, and had followed them up. Nichol was
+soon at the place, and after them; and had followed to Stanfield with
+Lackington behind. Then watchers had been set round the house; the
+magistrates communicated with; and as soon as Hubert and Mr. Graves had
+arrived the assault had been made. Hubert had not been told who the
+priest was; but he had leapt at an opportunity to harass Mr. Buxton: he
+had been given to understand that Anthony and Isabel were still in the
+north.
+
+"He did not know; indeed he did not," cried Isabel piteously.
+
+At another time, when she had gained admittance to him, she gave him
+messages from the Marretts, who had kept a great affection for the lad,
+who had told them tales of College that Christmas time; and she told him
+too of the coming of an old friend to see her there.
+
+"It was poor Mr. Dent," she said; "he looks so old now. His wife died
+three years ago; you know he has a city-living and does chaplain's work
+at the Tower sometimes; and he is coming to see you, Anthony, and talk to
+you."
+
+Three or four days later he came.
+
+Anthony was greatly touched at his kindness in coming. He looked
+considerably older than his age; his hair had grown thin and grey about
+his temples, and the sharp birdlike outline of his face and features
+seemed blurred and indeterminate. His creed too, and his whole manner of
+looking at things of faith, seemed to have undergone a similar process.
+The two had a long talk.
+
+"I am not going to argue with you, Mr. Norris," he said, "though I still
+think your religion wrong. But I have learnt this at least, that the
+greatest of all is charity, and if we love the same God, and His Blessed
+Son, and one another, I think that is best of all. I have learnt that
+from my wife--my dear wife," he added softly. "I used to hold much with
+doctrine at one time, and loved to chop arguments; but our Saviour did
+not, and so I will not."
+
+Anthony was delighted that he took this line, for he knew there are some
+minds that apparently cannot be loyal to both charity and truth at the
+same time, and Mr. Dent's seemed to be one of them; so the two talked of
+old times at Great Keynes, and of the folks there, and at last of Hubert.
+
+"I saw him in the City last week," said Mr. Dent, "and he is a changed
+man. He looks ten years older than this time last year; I scarcely know
+what has come to him. I know he has thrown up his magistracy, and the
+Lindfield parson tells me that the talk is that Mr. Maxwell is going on
+another voyage, and leaving his wife and children behind him again."
+
+Anthony told him gently of Hubert's share in the events at Stanfield,
+adding what real and earnest attempts he had made to repair the injury he
+had done as soon as he had learnt that it was his friend that was in
+hiding.
+
+"There was no treachery against me, Mr. Dent, you see," he added.
+
+Mr. Dent pecked a little in the air with pursed lips and eyes fixed on
+the ground; and a vision of the pulpit at Great Keynes moved before
+Anthony's eyes.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes," he said; "I understand--I quite understand."
+
+Before Mr. Dent took his leave he unburdened himself of what he had
+really come to say.
+
+"Master Anthony," he said, standing up and fingering his hat round and
+round, "I said I talked no doctrine now; but I must unsay that; and--you
+will not think me impertinent if I ask you something?"
+
+"My dear Mr. Dent----" began the other, standing and smiling too.
+
+"Thank you, thank you--I felt sure--then it is this: I do not know much
+about the Popish religion, though I used to once, and I may be very
+mistaken; but I would like you to satisfy me before I go on one point";
+and he fixed his anxious peering eyes on Anthony's face. "Can you say,
+Master Anthony, from a full heart, that you fix all your hope and
+confidence for salvation in Christ's merits alone?"
+
+Anthony smiled frankly in his face.
+
+"Indeed, in none other," he said, "and from a full heart."
+
+"Ah well," and the birdlike face began to beam and twitch, "and--and
+there is nothing of confidence in yourself and your works--and--and there
+is no talk of Holy Mary in the matter?"
+
+Anthony smiled again. He wished to avoid useless controversy.
+
+"Briefly," he said, "my belief is that I am a very great sinner, that I
+deserve eternal hell; but I humbly place all my trust in the Precious
+Blood of my Saviour, and in that alone. Does that satisfy you?"
+
+Mr. Dent's face was breaking into smiles, and at the end he took the
+priest's face in his hands and kissed him gently twice on the cheeks.
+
+"Then, my dear boy, I fear nothing for you. May that salvation you hope
+for be yours." And then without a word he was gone.
+
+Anthony's conscience reproached him a little that he had said nothing of
+the Church to the minister; but Mr. Dent had been so peremptory about
+doctrine that it was hard for the younger man to say what he would have
+wished. He told him, however, plainly on his next visit that he held
+whole-heartedly too that the Catholic Church was the treasury of Grace
+that Christ had instituted, and added a little speech about his longing
+to see his old friend a Catholic too; but Mr. Dent shook his head. The
+corners of his eyes wrinkled a little, and a shade of his old fretfulness
+passed over his face.
+
+"Nay, if you talk like that," he said, "I must be gone. I am no
+theologian. You must let me alone."
+
+He gave him news this time of Mr. Buxton.
+
+"He is in the Counter, as you know," he said, "and is a very bright and
+cheerful person, it seems to me. Mistress Isabel asked me to see him and
+give her news of him, for she cannot get admittance. He is in a cell,
+little and nasty; but he said to me that a Protestant prison was a
+Papist's pleasaunce--in fact he said it twice. And he asked very eagerly
+after you and Mistress Isabel. He tried, too, to inveigle me into talk of
+Peter his prerogative, but I would not have it. It was Lammas Day when I
+saw him, and he spoke much of it."
+
+Anthony asked whether there was anything said of what punishment Mr.
+Buxton would suffer.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Dent, "the Lieutenant of the Tower told me that her
+Grace was so sad at the death of Mistress Corbet that she was determined
+that no more blood should be shed than was obliged over this matter; and
+that Mr. Buxton, he thought, would be but deprived of his estates and
+banished; but I know not how that may be. But we shall soon know."
+
+These weeks of waiting were full of consolation and refreshment to
+Anthony: the nervous stress of the life of the seminary priest in
+England, full of apprehension and suspense, crowned, as it had been in
+his case, by the fierce excitement of the last days of his liberty--all
+this had strained and distracted his soul, and the peace of the prison
+life, with the certainty that no efforts of his own could help him now,
+quieted and strengthened him for the ordeal he foresaw. At this time,
+too, he used to spend two or three hours a day in meditation, and found
+the greatest benefit in following the tranquil method of prayer
+prescribed by Louis de Blois, with whose writings he had made
+acquaintance at Douai. Each morning, too, he said a "dry mass," and
+during the whole of his imprisonment at the Clink managed to make his
+confession at least once a week, and besides his communion at mass on
+Sundays, communicated occasionally from the Reserved Sacrament, which he
+was able to keep in a neighbouring cell, unknown to his gaoler.
+
+And so the days went by, as orderly as in a Religious House; he rose at a
+fixed hour, observed the greatest exactness in his devotions, and did his
+utmost to prevent any visitors being admitted to see him, or any from
+another cell coming into his own, until he had finished his first
+meditation and said his office. And there began to fall upon him a kind
+of mellow peace that rose at times of communion and prayer to a point so
+ravishing, that he began to understand that it would not be a light cross
+for which such preparatory graces were necessary.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Towards the middle of September he received intelligence that evidence
+had been gathering against him, and that one or two were come from
+Lancashire under guard; and that he would be brought before the
+Commissioners again immediately.
+
+Within two days this came about. He was sent for across the water to the
+Tower, and after waiting an hour or two with his gaoler downstairs in the
+basement of the White Tower, was taken up into the great Hall where the
+Council sat. There was a table at the farther end where they were
+sitting, and as Anthony looked round he saw through openings all round in
+the inner wall the little passage where the sentries walked, and heard
+their footfalls.
+
+The preliminaries of identification and the like had been disposed of at
+previous examinations before Mr. Young--a name full of sinister
+suggestiveness to the Catholics; and so, after he had been given a seat
+at a little distance from the table behind which the Commissioners sat,
+he was questioned minutely as to his journey in the North of England.
+
+"What were you there for, Mr. Norris?" inquired the Secretary of the
+Council.
+
+"I went to see friends, and to do my business."
+
+"Then that resolves itself into two heads: One, Who are your friends.
+Two, What was your business?"
+
+Now it had been established beyond a doubt at previous examinations that
+he was a priest; a student of Douai who had apostatised had positively
+identified him; so Anthony answered boldly:
+
+"My friends were Catholics; and my business was the reconciling of souls
+to their Creator."
+
+"And to the Pope of Rome," put in Wade.
+
+"Who is Christ's Vicar," continued Anthony.
+
+"And a pestilent knave," concluded a fiery-faced man whom Anthony did not
+know.
+
+But the Commissioners wanted more than that; it was true that Anthony was
+already convicted of high treason in having been ordained beyond the seas
+and in exercising his priestly functions in England; but the exacting of
+the penalty for religion alone was apt to raise popular resentment; and
+it was far preferable in the eyes of the authorities to entangle a priest
+in the political net before killing him. So they passed over for the
+present his priestly functions and first demanded a list of all the
+places where he had stayed in the north.
+
+"You ask what is impossible," said Anthony, with his eyes on the ground
+and his heart beating sharply, for he knew that now peril was near.
+
+"Well," said Wade, "let us put it another way. We know that you were at
+Speke Hall, Blainscow, and other places. I have a list here," and he
+tapped the table, "but we want your name to it."
+
+"Let me see the paper," said Anthony.
+
+"Nay, nay, tell us first."
+
+"I cannot sign the paper except I see it," said Anthony, smiling.
+
+"Give it him," said a voice from the end of the table.
+
+"Here then," said Wade unwillingly.
+
+Anthony got up and took the paper from him, and saw one or two places
+named where he had not been, and saw that it had been drawn up at any
+rate partly on guesswork.
+
+He put the paper down and went back to his chair and sat down.
+
+"It is not true," he said, looking steadily at the Secretary; "I cannot
+sign it."
+
+"Do you deny that you have been to any of these places?" inquired Wade
+indignantly.
+
+"The paper is not true," said Anthony again.
+
+"Well, then, show us what is not true upon it."
+
+"I cannot."
+
+"We will find means to persuade you," said the Secretary.
+
+"If God permits," said Anthony.
+
+Wade glanced round inquiringly and shrugged his shoulders; one or two
+shook their heads.
+
+"Well, then, we will turn to another point. There are known to have been
+certain Jesuit priests in Lancashire in November of last year--do you
+deny that, sir?"
+
+"You ask too much," said Anthony, smiling again; "they may have been
+there for aught I know, for I certainly did not see them elsewhere at the
+time you mention."
+
+Wade frowned, but the one at the end laughed loud.
+
+"He has you there, Wade," he said.
+
+"This is foolery," said the Secretary. "Well, these two, Father Edward
+Oldcorne and Father Holtby were in Lancashire in November; and you, Mr.
+Norris, spoke with them then. We wish to know where they are now, and you
+must tell us."
+
+"You have yet to prove that I spoke with them," said Anthony, for the
+trap was too transparent.
+
+"But we know that."
+
+"That may or may not be; but it is for you to prove it."
+
+"Nay, for you to tell us."
+
+"For you to prove it."
+
+Wade lost his temper.
+
+"Well, then," he cried, "take this paper and see which of us is in the
+right."
+
+Anthony rose again, wondering what the paper could be, and came towards
+the table. He saw it bore a name at the end, and as he advanced saw that
+it had an official appearance. Wade still held it; but Anthony took it in
+his hand too to steady it, and began to read; but as he read a mist rose
+before his eyes, and the paper shook violently. It was a warrant to put
+him to the torture.
+
+Wade laughed a little.
+
+"Why, see, Mr. Norris, how you tremble at the warrant; what will it be
+when you----"
+
+But a voice murmured "Shame!" and he stopped and stared.
+
+Anthony passed his hand over his eyes and went back to his chair and sat
+down; he saw his knees trembling as he sat, and hated himself for it; but
+he cried bravely:
+
+"The flesh is weak, but, please God, the spirit is willing."
+
+"Well, then," said Wade again, "must we execute this warrant, or will you
+tell us what we would know?"
+
+"You must do what God permits," said Anthony.
+
+Wade sat down, throwing the warrant on the table, and began to talk in a
+low voice to those who sat next him. Anthony fixed his eyes on the
+ground, and did his utmost to keep his thoughts steady.
+
+Now he realised where he was, and what it all meant. The little door to
+the left, behind him, that he had noticed as he came in, was the door of
+which he had heard other Catholics speak, that led down to the great
+crypt, where so many before him had screamed and fainted and called on
+God, from the rack that stood at the foot of the stairs, or from the
+pillar with the fixed ring at its summit.
+
+He had faced all this in his mind again and again, but it was a different
+thing to have the horror within arm's length; old phrases he had heard of
+the torture rang in his mind--a boast of Norton's, the rackmaster, who
+had racked Brian, and which had been repeated from mouth to mouth--that
+he had "made Brian a foot longer than God made him"; words of James
+Maxwell's that he had let drop at Douai; the remembrance of his limp; and
+of Campion's powerlessness to raise his hand when called upon to
+swear--all these things crowded on him now; and there seemed to rest on
+him a crushing swarm of fearful images and words. He made a great effort,
+and closed his eyes, and repeated the holy name of Jesus over and over
+again; but the struggle was still fierce when Wade's voice, harsh and
+dry, broke in and scattered the confusion of mind that bewildered him.
+
+"Take the prisoner to a cell; he is not to go back to the Clink."
+
+Anthony felt a hand on his arm, and the gaoler was looking at him with
+compassion.
+
+"Come, sir," he said.
+
+Anthony rose feeling heavy and exhausted; but remembered to bow to the
+Commissioners, one or two of whom returned it. Then he followed the
+gaoler out into the ante-room, who handed him over to one of the Tower
+officials.
+
+"I must leave you here, sir," he said; "but keep a good heart; it will
+not be for to-day."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When Anthony got to his new cell, which was in the Salt Tower, he was
+bitterly angry and disappointed with himself. Why, he had turned white
+and sick like a child, not at the pain of the rack, not even at the sight
+of it, but at the mere warrant! He threw himself on his knees, and bowed
+down till his head beat against the boards.
+
+"O Lord Jesus," he prayed, "give me of Thy Manhood."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He found that this prison was more rigorous than the Clink; no liberty to
+leave the cell could possibly be obtained, and no furniture was provided.
+The gaoler, when he had brought up his dinner, asked whether he could
+send any message for him for a bed. Anthony gave Isabel's address,
+knowing that the authorities were already aware that she was a Catholic,
+and indeed she had given bail to come up for trial if called upon, and
+that his information could injure neither her nor the Marretts, who were
+sound Church of England people; and in the afternoon a mattress and some
+clothes arrived for him.
+
+Anthony noticed at dinner that the knife provided was of a very
+inconvenient shape, having a round blunt point, and being sharp only at a
+lower part of the blade; and when the keeper came up with his supper he
+asked him to bring him another kind. The man looked at him with a queer
+expression.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Anthony; "cannot you oblige me?"
+
+The man shook his head.
+
+"They are the knives that are always given to prisoners under warrant for
+torture."
+
+Anthony did not understand him, and looked at him, puzzled.
+
+"For fear they should do themselves an injury," added the gaoler.
+
+Then the same shudder ran over his body again.
+
+"You mean--you mean...." he began. The gaoler nodded, still looking at
+him oddly, and went out; and Anthony sat, with his supper untasted,
+staring before him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+By a kind of violent reaction he had a long happy dream that night. The
+fierce emotions of that day had swept over his imagination and scoured it
+as with fire, and now the underlying peace rose up and flooded it with
+sweetness.
+
+He thought he was in the north again, high up on a moor, walking with one
+who was quite familiar to him, but whose person he could not remember
+when he woke; he did not even know whether it was man or woman. It was a
+perfect autumn day, he thought, like one of those he had spent there last
+year; the heather and the gorse were in flower, and the air was redolent
+from their blossoms; he commented on this to the person at his side, who
+told him it was always so there. Mile after mile the moor rose and
+dipped, and, although Skiddaw was on his right, purple and grey, yet to
+his left there was a long curved horizon of sparkling blue sea. It was a
+cloudless day overhead, and the air seemed kindling and fresh round him
+as it blew across the stretches of heather from the western sea. He
+himself felt full of an extraordinary vitality, and the mere movement of
+his limbs gave him joy as he went swiftly and easily forward over the
+heather. There was the sound of the wind in his ears, and again and again
+there came the gush of water from somewhere out of sight--as he had heard
+it in the church by Skiddaw. There was no house or building of any kind
+within sight, and he felt a great relief in these miles of heath and the
+sense of holiday that they gave him. But all the joy round him and in his
+heart found their point for him in the person that went with him; this
+presence was their centre, as a diamond in a gold ring, or as a throned
+figure in a Court circle. All else existed for the sake of this
+person;--the heather blossomed and the gorse incensed the air, and the
+sea sparkled, and the sky was blue, and the air kindled, and his own
+heart warmed and throbbed, for that only. When he tried to see who it
+was, there was nothing to see; the presence existed there as a centre in
+a sphere, immeasurable and indiscernible; sometimes he thought it was
+Mary, sometimes he thought it Henry Buxton, sometimes Isabel--once even
+he assured himself it was Mistress Margaret, and once James Maxwell--and
+with the very act of identification came indecision again. This
+uncertainty waxed into a torment, and yet a sweet torment, as of a lover
+who watches his mistress' shuttered house; and this torment swelled yet
+higher and deeper until it was so great that it had absorbed the whole
+radiant fragrant circle of the hills where he walked; and then came the
+blinding knowledge that the Presence was all these persons so dear to
+him, and far more; that every tenderness and grace that he had loved in
+them--Mary's gallantry and Isabel's serene silence and his friend's
+fellowship, and the rest--floated in the translucent depths of it,
+stained and irradiated by it, as motes in a sunbeam.
+
+And then he woke, and it was through tears of pure joy that he saw the
+rafters overhead, and the great barred door, and the discoloured wall
+above his bed.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When his gaoler brought him dinner that day it was half an hour earlier
+than usual; and when Anthony asked him the reason he said that he did not
+know, but that the orders had run so; but that Mr. Norris might take
+heart; it was not for the torture, for Mr. Topcliffe, who superintended
+it, had told the keeper of the rack-house that nothing would be wanted
+that day.
+
+He had hardly finished dinner when the gaoler came up again and said that
+the Lieutenant was waiting for him below, and that he must bring his hat
+and cloak.
+
+Since his arrest he had worn his priest's habit every day, so he now
+threw the cloak over his arm and took his hat, and followed the gaoler
+down.
+
+In passing through the court he went by a group of men that were talking
+together, and he noticed very especially a tall old man with a grey head,
+in a Court suit with a sword, and very lean about the throat, who looked
+at him hard as he passed. As he reached the archway where the Lieutenant
+was waiting, he turned again and saw the sunken eyes of the old man still
+looking after him; when he turned to the gaoler he saw the same odd look
+in his face that he had noticed before.
+
+"Why do you look like that?" he asked. "Who is that old man?"
+
+"That is Mr. Topcliffe," said the keeper.
+
+The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Richard Barkley, saluted him kindly at
+the gate, and begged him to follow him; the keeper still came after and
+another stepped out and joined them, and the group of four together
+passed out through the Lion's Tower and across the moat to a little
+doorway where a closed carriage was waiting. The Lieutenant and Anthony
+stepped inside; the two keepers mounted outside; and the carriage set
+off.
+
+Then the Lieutenant turned to the priest.
+
+"Do you know where you are going, Mr. Norris?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You are going to Whitehall to see the Queen's Grace."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIV
+
+                             AN OPEN DOOR
+
+
+When the carriage reached the palace they were told that the Queen was
+not yet come from Greenwich; and they were shown into a little ante-room
+next the gallery where the interview was to take place. The Queen, the
+Lieutenant told Anthony, was to come up that afternoon passing through
+London, and that she had desired to see him on her way through to
+Nonsuch; he could not tell him why he was sent for, though he conjectured
+it was because of Mistress Corbet's death, and that her Grace wished to
+know the details.
+
+"However," said the Lieutenant, "you now have your opportunity to speak
+for yourself, and I think you a very fortunate man, Mr. Norris. Few have
+had such a privilege, though I remember that Mr. Campion had it too,
+though he made poor use of it."
+
+Anthony said nothing. His mind was throbbing with memories and
+associations. The air of state and luxury in the corridors through which
+he had just come, the discreet guarded doors, the servants in the royal
+liveries standing here and there, the sense of expectancy that mingled
+with the solemn hush of the palace--all served to bring up the figure of
+Mary Corbet, whom he had seen so often in these circumstances; and the
+thought of her made the peril in which he stood and the hope of escape
+from it seem very secondary matters. He walked to the window presently
+and looked out upon the little court below, one of the innumerable yards
+of that vast palace, and stood staring down on the hound that was chained
+there near one of the entrances, and that yawned and blinked in the
+autumn sunshine.
+
+Even as he looked the dog paused in the middle of his stretch and stood
+expectant with his ears cocked, a servant dashed bareheaded down a couple
+of steps and out through the low archway; and simultaneously Anthony
+heard once more the sweet shrill trumpets that told of the Queen's
+approach; then there came the roll of drums and the thunder of horses'
+feet and the noise of wheels; the trumpets sang out again nearer, and the
+rumbling waxed louder as the Queen's cavalcade, out of sight, passed the
+entrance of the archway down upon which Anthony looked; and then stilled,
+and the palace itself began to hum and stir; a door or two banged in the
+distance, feet ran past the door of the ante-room, and the strain of the
+trumpets sounded once in the house itself. Then all grew quiet once more,
+and Anthony turned from the window and sat down again by the Lieutenant.
+
+There was silence for a few minutes. The Lieutenant stroked his beard
+gently and said a word or two under his breath now and again to Anthony;
+once or twice there came the swift rustle of a dress outside as a lady
+hurried past; then the sound of a door opening and shutting; then more
+silence; then the sound of low talking, and at last the sound of
+footsteps going slowly up and down the gallery which adjoined the
+ante-room.
+
+Still the minutes passed, but no summons came. Anthony rose and went to
+the window again, for, in spite of himself, this waiting told upon him.
+The dog had gone back to his kennel and was lying with his nose just
+outside the opening. Anthony wondered vacantly to himself what door it
+was that he was guarding, and who lived in the rooms that looked out
+beside it. Then suddenly the door from the gallery opened and a page
+appeared.
+
+"The Queen's Grace will see Mr. Norris alone."
+
+Anthony went towards him, and the page opened the door wide for him to go
+through, and then closed it noiselessly behind him, and Anthony was in
+the presence.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was with a sudden bewilderment that he recognised he was in the same
+gallery as that in which he had talked and sat with Mary Corbet. There
+were the long tapestries hanging opposite him, with the tall three
+windows dividing them, and the suits of steel armour that he remembered.
+He even recalled the pattern of the carpet across which Mary Corbet had
+come forward to meet him, and that still lay before the tall window at
+the end that looked on to the Tilt-yard. The sun was passing round to the
+west now, and shone again across the golden haze of the yard through this
+great window, with the fragments of stained glass at the top. The memory
+leapt into life even as he stepped out and stood for a moment, dazed in
+the sunshine, at the door that opened from the ante-room.
+
+But the figure that turned from the window and faced him was not like
+Mary's. It was the figure of an old woman, who looked tall with her
+towering head-dress and nodding plume; she was dressed in a great dark
+red mantle thrown back on her shoulders, and beneath it was a pale yellow
+dress sown all over with queer devices; on the puffed sleeve of the arm
+that held the stick was embroidered a great curling snake that shone with
+gold thread and jewels in the sunlight, and powdered over the skirt were
+representations of human eyes and other devices, embroidered with dark
+thread that showed up plainly on the pale ground. So much he saw down one
+side of the figure on which the light shone; the rest was to his dazzled
+eyes in dark shadow. He went down on his knees at once before this
+tremendous figure, seeing the buckled feet that twinkled below the skirt
+cut short in front, and remained there.
+
+There was complete silence for a moment, while he felt the Queen looking
+at him, and then the voice he remembered, only older and harsher, now
+said:
+
+"What is all this, Mr. Norris?"
+
+Anthony looked for a moment and saw the Queen's eyes fixed on him; but he
+said nothing, and looked down again.
+
+"Stand up," said the Queen, not unkindly, "and walk with me."
+
+Anthony stood up at once, and heard the stiff rustle of her dress and the
+tap of her heels and stick on the polished boards as she came towards
+him. Then he turned with her down the long gallery.
+
+Until this moment, ever since he had heard that he was to see the Queen,
+he had felt nervous and miserable; but now this had left him, and he felt
+at his ease. To be received in this way, in privacy, and to accompany her
+up and down the gallery as she took her afternoon exercise was less
+embarrassing than the formal interview he had expected. The two walked
+the whole length of the gallery without a word, and it was not until they
+turned and faced the end that looked on to the Tilt-yard that the Queen
+spoke; and her voice was almost tender.
+
+"I understand that you were with Minnie Corbet when she died," she said.
+
+"She died for me, your Grace," said Anthony.
+
+The Queen looked at him sharply.
+
+"Tell me the tale," she said.
+
+And Anthony told her the whole story of the escape and the ride; speaking
+too for his friend, Mr. Buxton, and of Mary's affection for him.
+
+"Your Grace," he ended, "it sounds a poor tale of a man that a woman
+should die for him so; but I can say with truth that with God's grace I
+would have died a hundred deaths to save her."
+
+The Queen was silent for a good while when the story was over, and
+Anthony thought that perhaps she could not speak; but he dared not look
+at her.
+
+Then she spoke very harshly:
+
+"And you, Mr. Norris, why did you not escape?"
+
+"Your Grace would not have done so."
+
+"When I saw that she was dying, I would."
+
+"Not if you had been a priest, your Grace."
+
+"What is that?" asked the Queen, suddenly facing him.
+
+"I am a priest, madam, and she was a Catholic, and my duty was beside
+her."
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"I shrived her, your Grace, before she died."
+
+"Why! they did not tell me that."
+
+Anthony was silent.
+
+They walked on a few steps, and the Queen stood silent too, looking down
+upon the Tilt-yard. Then she turned abruptly, and Anthony turned with
+her, and they began to go up and down again.
+
+"It was gallant of you both," she said shortly. "I love that my people
+should be of that sort." Then she paused. "Tell me," she went on, "did
+Mary love me?"
+
+Anthony was silent for a moment.
+
+"The truth, Mr. Norris," she said.
+
+"Mistress Corbet was loyalty itself," he answered.
+
+"Nay, nay, nay, not loyalty but love I asked you of. How did she speak of
+me?"
+
+"Well, your Grace, Mistress Corbet had a shrewd wit, and she used it
+freely on friend and foe, but her very sharpness on your Grace,
+sometimes, showed her love; for she hated to think you otherwise than
+what she deemed the best."
+
+The Queen stopped full in her walk.
+
+"That is very pleasantly put," she said; "I told Minnie you were a
+courtier."
+
+Again the two walked on.
+
+"Then she used her tongue on me?"
+
+"Your Grace, I have never met one on whom she did not: but her heart was
+true."
+
+"I know that, I know that, Mr. Norris. Tell me something she said."
+
+Anthony racked his brains for something not too severe.
+
+"Mistress Corbet once said that the Queen's most disobedient subject was
+herself."
+
+"Eh?" said Elizabeth, stopping in her walk.
+
+"'Because,' said Mistress Corbet, 'she can never command herself,'"
+finished Anthony.
+
+The Queen looked at Anthony, puzzled a moment; and then chuckled loudly
+in her throat.
+
+"The impertinent minx!" she said, "that was when I had clouted her, no
+doubt."
+
+Again they walked up and down in silence a little while. Anthony began to
+wonder whether this was all for which the Queen had sent for him. He was
+astonished at his own self-possession; all the trembling awe with which
+he had faced the Queen at Greenwich was gone; he had forgotten for the
+moment even his own peril; and he felt instead even something of pity for
+this passionate old woman, who had aged so quickly, whose favourites one
+by one were dropping off, or at the best giving her only an exaggerated
+and ridiculous devotion, at the absurdity of which all the world laughed.
+Here was this old creature at his side, surrounded by flatterers and
+adventurers, advancing through the world in splendid and jewelled
+raiment, with trumpets blowing before her, and poets singing her praises,
+and crowds applauding in the streets, and sneering in their own houses at
+the withered old virgin-Queen who still thought herself a Diana--and all
+the while this triumphal progress was at the expense of God's Church, her
+car rolled over the bodies of His servants, and her shrunken, gemmed
+fingers were red in their blood;--so she advanced, thought Anthony, day
+by day towards the black truth and the eternal loneliness of the darkness
+that lies outside the realm where Christ only is King.
+
+Elizabeth broke in suddenly on his thoughts.
+
+"Now," she said, "and what of you, Mr. Norris?"
+
+"I am your Grace's servant," he said.
+
+"I am not so sure of that," said Elizabeth. "If you are my servant, why
+are you a priest, contrary to my laws?"
+
+"Because I am Christ's servant too, your Grace."
+
+"But Christ's apostle said, 'Obey them that have the rule over you.'"
+
+"In indifferent matters, madam."
+
+The Queen frowned and made a little angry sound.
+
+"I cannot understand you Papists," said the Queen. "What a-God's name do
+you want? You have liberty of thought and faith; I desire to inquire into
+no man's private opinions. You may worship Ashtaroth if it please you, in
+your own hearts; and God looks to the heart, and not to the outer man.
+There is a Church with bishops like your own, and ministers; there are
+the old churches to worship in--nay, you may find the old ornaments still
+in use. We have sacraments as you have; you may seek shrift if you will;
+nay, in some manner we have the mass--though we do not call it so--but we
+follow Christ's ordinance in the matter, and you can do no more. We have
+the Word of God as you have, and we use the same creeds. What more can
+the rankest Papist ask? Tell me that, Mr. Norris; for I am a-weary of
+your folk."
+
+The Queen turned and faced him again a moment, and her eyes were peevish
+and resentful.
+
+Presently she went on again.
+
+"Mr. Campion told me it was the oath that troubled him. He could not take
+it, he said. I told the fool that I was not Head of the Church as Christ
+was, but only the supreme governor, as the Act declares, in all spiritual
+and ecclesiastical things:--I forget how it runs,--but I showed it him,
+and asked him whether it were not true; and I asked him too how it was
+that Margaret Roper could take the oath, and so many thousands of persons
+as full Christian as himself--and he could not answer me."
+
+The Queen was silent again. Then once more she went on indignantly:
+
+"It is yourselves that have brought all this trouble on your heads. See
+what the Papists have done against me; they have excommunicated me,
+deposed me--though in spite of it I still sit on the throne; they have
+sent an Armada against me; they have plotted against me, I know not how
+many times; and then, when I defend myself and hang a few of the wolves,
+lo! they are Christ's flock at once for whom he shed His precious blood,
+and His persecuted lambs, and I am Jezebel straightway and Athaliah and
+Beelzebub's wife--and I know not what."
+
+The Queen stopped, out of breath, and looked fiercely at Anthony, who
+said nothing.
+
+"Tell me how you answer that, Mr. Norris?" said the Queen.
+
+"I dare not deal with such great matters," said Anthony, "for your Grace
+knows well that I am but a poor priest that knows nought of state-craft;
+but I would like to ask your Highness two questions only. The first is:
+whether your Grace had aught to complain of in the conduct of your
+Catholic subjects when the Armada was here; and the second, whether there
+hath been one actual attempt upon your Grace's life by private persons?"
+
+"That is not to the purpose," said the Queen peevishly.
+
+"It was Catholics who fought against me in the Armada, and it was
+Catholics who plotted against me at Court."
+
+"Then there is a difference in Catholics, your Grace," said Anthony.
+
+"Ah! I see what you would be at."
+
+"Yes, your Highness; I would rather say, Although they be Catholics they
+do these things."
+
+There was silence again, which Anthony did not dare to break; and the two
+walked up the whole length of the gallery without speaking.
+
+"Well, well," said Elizabeth at last, "but this was not why I sent for
+you. We will speak of yourself now, Mr. Norris. I hope you are not an
+obstinate fellow. Eh?"
+
+Anthony said nothing, and the Queen went on.
+
+"Now, as I have told you, I judge no man's private opinions. You may
+believe what you will. Remember that. You may believe what you will; nay,
+you may practise your religion so long as it is private and unknown to
+me."
+
+Anthony began to wonder what was coming; but he still said nothing as the
+Queen paused. She stood a moment looking down into the empty Tilt-yard
+again, and then turned and sat suddenly in a chair that stood beside the
+window, and put up a jewelled hand to shield her face, with her elbow on
+the arm, while Anthony stood before her.
+
+"I remember you, Mr. Norris, very well at Greenwich; you spoke up sharply
+enough, and you looked me in the eyes now and then as I like a man to do;
+and then Minnie loved you, too. I wish to show you kindness for her
+sake."
+
+Anthony's heart began to fail him, for he guessed now what was coming and
+the bitter struggle that lay before him.
+
+"Now, I know well that the Commissioners have had you before them; they
+are tiresome busybodies. Walsingham started all that and set them
+a-spying and a-defending of my person and the rest of it; but they are
+loyal folk, and I suppose they asked you where you had been and with whom
+you had stayed, and so on?"
+
+"They did, your Grace."
+
+"And you would not tell them, I suppose?"
+
+"I could not, madam; it would have been against justice and charity to do
+so."
+
+"Well, well, there is no need now, for I mean to take you out of their
+hands."
+
+A great leap of hope made itself felt in Anthony's heart; he did not know
+how heavy the apprehension lay on him till this light shone through.
+
+"They will be wrath with me, I know, and will tell me that they cannot
+defend me if I will not help them; but, when all is said, I am Queen. Now
+I do not ask you to be a minister of my Church, for that, I think, you
+would never be; but I think you would like to be near me--is it not so?
+And I wish you to have some post about the Court; I must see what it is
+to be."
+
+Anthony's heart began to sink again as he watched the Queen's face as she
+sat tapping a foot softly and looking on the floor as she talked. Those
+lines of self-will about the eyes and mouth surely meant something.
+
+Then she looked up, still with her cheek on her right hand.
+
+"You do not thank me, Mr. Norris."
+
+Anthony made a great effort; but he heard his own voice quiver a little.
+
+"I thank your Grace for your kindly intentions toward me, with all my
+heart."
+
+The Queen seemed satisfied, and looked down again.
+
+"As to the oath, I will not ask you to take it formally, if you will give
+me an assurance of your loyalty."
+
+"That, your Grace, I give most gladly."
+
+His heart was beating again in great irregular thumps in his throat; he
+had the sensation of swaying to and fro on the edge of a precipice, now
+towards safety and now towards death; it was the cruellest pain he had
+suffered yet. But how was it possible to have some post at Court without
+relinquishing the exercise of his priesthood? He must think it out; what
+did the Queen mean?
+
+"And, of course, you will not be able to say mass again; but I shall not
+hinder your hearing it at the Ambassador's whenever you please."
+
+Ah! it had come; his heart gave a leap and seemed to cease.
+
+"Your Grace must forgive me, but I cannot consent."
+
+There was a dead silence; when Anthony looked up, she was staring at him
+with the frankest astonishment.
+
+"Did you think, Mr. Norris, you could be at Court and say mass too
+whenever you wished?" Her voice rang harsh and shrill; her anger was
+rising.
+
+"I was not sure what your Grace intended for me."
+
+"The fellow is mad," she said, still staring at him. "Oh! take care, take
+care!"
+
+"Your Grace knows I intend no insolence."
+
+"You mean to say, Mr. Norris, that you will not take a pardon and a post
+at Court on those terms?"
+
+Anthony bowed; he could not trust himself to speak, so bitter was the
+reaction.
+
+"But, see man, you fool; if you die as a traitor you will never say mass
+again either."
+
+"But that will not be with my consent, your Grace."
+
+"And you refuse the pardon?"
+
+"On those terms, your Grace, I must."
+
+"Well----" and she was silent a moment, "you are a fool, sir."
+
+Anthony bowed again.
+
+"But I like courage.--Well, then, you will not be my servant?"
+
+"I have ever been that, your Grace; and ever will be."
+
+"Well, well,--but not at Court?"
+
+"Ah! your Grace knows I cannot," cried Anthony, and his voice rang
+sorrowfully.
+
+Again there was silence.
+
+"You must have your way, sir, for poor Minnie's sake; but it passes my
+understanding what you mean by it. And let me tell you that not many have
+their way with me, rather than mine."
+
+Again hope leapt up in his heart. The Queen then was not so ungracious.
+
+He looked up and smiled--and down again.
+
+"Why, the man's lips are all a-quiver. What ails him?"
+
+"It is your Grace's kindness."
+
+"I must say I marvel at it myself," observed Elizabeth. "You near angered
+me just now; take care you do not so quite."
+
+"I would not willingly, as your Grace knows."
+
+"Then we will end this matter. You give me your assurance of loyalty to
+my person."
+
+"With all my heart, madam," said Anthony eagerly.
+
+"Then you must get to France within the week. The other too--Buxton--he
+loses his estate, but has his life. I am doing much for Minnie's sake."
+
+"How can I thank your Grace?"
+
+"And I will cause Sir Richard to give it out that you have taken the
+oath. Call him in."
+
+There was a quick gasp from the priest; and then he cried with agony in
+his voice:
+
+"I cannot, your Grace, I cannot."
+
+"Cannot call Sir Richard! Why, you are mad, sir!"
+
+"Cannot consent; I have taken no oath."
+
+"I know you have not. I do not ask it."
+
+Elizabeth's voice came short and harsh; her patience was vanishing, and
+Anthony knew it and looked at her. She had dropped her hand, and it was
+clenching and unclenching on her knee. Her stick slipped on the polished
+boards and fell; but she paid it no attention. She was looking straight
+at the priest; her high eyebrows were coming down; her mouth was
+beginning to mumble a little; he could see in the clear sunlight that
+fell on her sideways through the tall window a thousand little wrinkles,
+and all seemed alive; the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth
+deepened as he watched.
+
+"What a-Christ's name do you want, sir?"
+
+It was like the first mutter of a storm on the horizon; but Anthony knew
+it must break. He did not answer.
+
+"Tell me, sir; what is it now?"
+
+Anthony drew a long breath and braced his will, but even as he spoke he
+knew he was pronouncing his own sentence.
+
+"I cannot consent to leave the country and let it be given out that I had
+taken the oath, your Grace. It would be an apostasy from my faith."
+
+Elizabeth sprang to her feet without her stick, took one step forward,
+and gave Anthony a fierce blow on the cheek with her ringed hand. He
+recoiled a step at the shock of it, and stood waiting with his eyes on
+the ground. Then the Queen's anger poured out in words. Her eyes burned
+with passion out of an ivory-coloured face, and her voice rang high and
+harsh, and her hands continually clenched and unclenched as she screamed
+at him.
+
+"God's Body! you are the ungratefullest hound that ever drew breath. I
+send for you to my presence, and talk and walk with you like a friend. I
+offer you a pardon and you fling it in my face. I offer you a post at
+Court and you mock it; you flaunt you in your treasonable livery in my
+very face, and laugh at my clemency. You think I am no Queen, but a weak
+woman whom you can turn and rule at your will. God's Son! I will show you
+which is sovereign. Call Sir Richard in, sir; I will have him in this
+instant. Sir Richard, Sir Richard!" she screamed, stamping with fury.
+
+The door into the ante-room behind opened, and Sir Richard Barkley
+appeared, with a face full of apprehension. He knelt at once.
+
+"Stand up, Sir Richard," she cried, "and look at this man. You know him,
+do you not? and I know him now, the insolent dog! But his own mother
+shall not in a week. Look at him shaking there, the knave; he will shake
+more before I have done with him. Take him back with you, Sir Richard,
+and let them have their will of him. His damned pride and insolence shall
+be broken. S' Body, I have never been so treated! Take him out, Sir
+Richard, take him out, I tell you!"
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XV
+
+                       THE ROLLING OF THE STONE
+
+
+It was a week later, and a little before dawn, that Isabel was kneeling
+by Anthony's bed in his room in the Tower. The Lieutenant had sent for
+her to his lodging the evening before, and she had spent the whole night
+with her brother. He had been racked four times in one week, and was
+dying.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The city and the prison were very quiet now; the carts had not yet begun
+to roll over the cobble-stones and the last night-wanderers had gone
+home. He lay, on the mattress that she had sent in to him, in the corner
+of his cell under the window, on his back and very still, covered from
+chin to feet with her own fur-lined cloak that she had thrown over him;
+his head was on a low pillow, for he could not bear to lie high; his feet
+made a little mound under the coverlet, and his arms lay straight at his
+side; but all that could be seen of him was his face, pinched and white
+now with hollows in his cheeks and dark patches and lines beneath his
+closed eyes, and his soft pointed brown beard that just rested on the fur
+edging of Isabel's cloak; his lips were drawn tight, but slightly parted,
+showing the rim of his white teeth, as if he snarled with pain.
+
+The only furniture in the room was a single table and chair; the table
+was drawn up not far from the bed, and a book or two, with a flask of
+cordial and some fragments of food on a plate lay upon it; his cloak and
+doublet and ruff lay across the chair and his shoes below it, and a
+little linen lay in a pile in another corner; but the clothes in which he
+had been tortured the evening before, his shirt and hose, could not be
+taken off him and he lay in them still. They had been so soaked with
+sweat, that Isabel had found him shivering, and laid her cloak over him,
+and now he lay quiet and warm.
+
+Earlier in the night she had been reading to him, and a taper still
+burned in a candlestick on the table; but for the last two hours he had
+lain either in a sleep or a swoon, and she had laid the book down and was
+watching him.
+
+He was so motionless that he would have seemed dead except for the steady
+rise and fall of a fold in the mantle, and for a sudden muscular twitch
+every few minutes. Isabel herself was scarcely less motionless; her face
+was clear and pale as it always was, but perfectly serene, and even her
+lips did not quiver. She was kneeling and leaning back now, and her hands
+were clasped in her lap. There was a proud content in her face; her dear
+brother had not uttered one name on the rack except those of the Saviour
+and of the Blessed Mother. So the Lieutenant had told her.
+
+Suddenly his eyes opened and there was nothing but peace in them; and his
+lips moved. Isabel leaned forward on her hands and bent her ear to his
+mouth till his breath was warm on it, and she could hear the whisper....
+
+Then she opened the book that lay face down on the table and began to
+read on, from the point at which she had laid it down two hours before.
+
+"'_Erat autem hora tertia: et crucifixerunt eum._ And it was the third
+hour and they crucified him ... And with him they crucify two thieves,
+the one on his right hand, and the other on his left. And the scripture
+was fulfilled which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors.'"
+
+Her voice was slow and steady as she read the unfamiliar Latin, still
+kneeling, with the book a little raised to catch the candlelight, and her
+grave tranquil eyes bent upon it. Only once did her voice falter, and
+then she commanded it again immediately; and that, as she read "_Erant
+autem et mulieres de longe aspicientes_." "There were also women looking
+on afar off."
+
+And so the tale crept on, minute by minute, and the priest lay with
+closed eyes to hear it; until the mocking was complete, and the darkness
+of the sixth hour had come and gone, and the Saviour had cried aloud on
+His Father, and given up the ghost; and the centurion that stood by had
+borne witness. And the great Criminal slept in the garden, in the
+sepulchre "wherein was never man yet laid."
+
+There was a listening silence as the voice ceased without another falter.
+Isabel laid the book down and looked at him again; and his eyes opened
+languidly.
+
+He had not yet said more than single words, and even now his voice was so
+faint that she had to put her ear close to his mouth. It seemed to her
+that his soul had gone into some inner secret chamber of profound peace,
+so deep that it was a long and difficult task to send a thought to the
+surface through his lips.
+
+She could just hear him, and she answered clearly and slowly as to a
+dazed child, pausing between every word.
+
+"I cannot get a priest; it is not allowed."
+
+Still his eyes bent on her; what was it he said? what was it?...
+
+Then she heard, and began to repeat short acts of contrition clearly and
+distinctly, pausing between the phrases, in English, and his eyes closed
+as she began:
+
+"O my Jesus--I am heartily sorry--that I have--crucified thee--by my
+sins--Wash my soul--in Thy Precious Blood. O my God--I am sorry--that I
+have--displeased Thee--because thou art All-good. I hate all the
+sins--that I have done--against Thy Divine Majesty."
+
+And so phrase after phrase she went on, giving him time to hear and to
+make an inner assent of the will; and repeating also other short vocal
+prayers that she knew by heart. And so the delicate skein of prayer rose
+from the altar where this morning sacrifice lay before God, waiting the
+consummation of His acceptance.
+
+Presently she ended, and he lay again with closed eyes and mute face.
+Then again they opened, and she bent down to listen....
+
+"It will all be well with me," she answered, raising her head again.
+"Mistress Margaret has written from Brussels. I shall go there for a
+while.... Yes, Mr. Buxton will take me; next week: he goes to Normandy,
+to his estate."
+
+Again his lips moved and she listened....
+
+A faint flush came over her face. She shook her head.
+
+"I do not know; I think not. I hope to enter Religion.... No, I have not
+yet determined.... The Dower House?... Yes, I will sell it.... Yes, to
+Hubert, if he wishes it."
+
+Every word he whispered was such an effort that she had to pause again
+and again before he could make her understand; and often she judged more
+by the movement of his lips than by any sound that came from him. Now and
+then too she lifted her handkerchief, soaked in a strong violet scent,
+and passed it over his forehead and lips. She motioned with the flask of
+cordial once or twice, but his eyes closed for a negative.
+
+As she knelt and watched him, her thoughts circled continually in little
+flights; to the walled garden of the Dower House in sunshine, and Anthony
+running across it in his brown suit, with the wallflowers behind him
+against the old red bricks and ivy, and the tall chestnut rising behind;
+to the wind-swept hills, with the thistles and the golden-rod, and the
+hazel thickets, and Anthony on his pony, sunburnt and voluble, hawk on
+wrist, with a light in his eyes; to the warm panelled hall in winter,
+with the tapers on the round table, and Anthony flat on his face, with
+his feet in the air before the hearth, that glowed and roared up the wide
+chimney behind, and his chin on his hands, and a book open before him;
+or, farther back even still, to Anthony's little room at the top of the
+house, his clothes on a chair, and the boy himself sitting up in bed with
+his arms round his knees as she came in to wish him good-night and talk
+to him a minute or two. And every time the circling thought came home and
+settled again on the sight of that still straight figure lying on the
+mattress, against the discoloured bricks, with the light of the taper
+glimmering on his thin face and brown hair and beard; and every time her
+heart consented that this was the best of all.
+
+A bird chirped suddenly from some hole in the Tower, once, and then three
+or four times; she glanced up at the window and the light of dawn was
+beginning. Then, as the minutes went by, the city began to stir itself
+from sleep. There came a hollow whine from the Lion-gate fifty yards
+away; up from the river came the shout of a waterman; two or three times
+a late cock crew; and still the light crept on and broadened. But Anthony
+still lay with his eyes closed.
+
+At last over the cobbles outside a cart rattled, turned a corner and was
+silent. Anthony had opened his eyes now and was looking at her again; and
+again she bent down to listen; ... and then opened and read again.
+
+"'_Et cum transisset sabbatum Maria Magdalene et Maria Jacobi et Salome
+emerunt aromata, ut venientes ungerent Jesum._'
+
+"'And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of
+James and Salome, had bought sweet spices that they might come and anoint
+him.'"
+
+A slight sound made her look up. Anthony's eyes were kindling and his
+lips moved; she bent again and listened.... What was it he said?...
+
+Yes, it was so, and she smiled and nodded at him: she was reading the
+Gospel for Easter Day, the Gospel of the first mass that they had heard
+together on that spring morning at Great Keynes, when their Lord had led
+them so far round by separate paths to meet one another at His altar. And
+now they were met again here. She read on:
+
+"'_Et valde mane una sabbatorum, veniunt ad monumentum, orto jam
+sole._'
+
+"'Very early they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun; and
+they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the
+door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was
+rolled away, for it was very great.'...
+
+"'... _magnus valde_,'" read Isabel; and looked up again;--and then
+closed the book. There was no need to read more.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+She walked across the court half an hour later, just as the sun came up;
+and passed out through the Lieutenant's lodging, and out by the narrow
+bridge on to the Tower wharf.
+
+To the left and behind her, as she looked eastwards down the river, lay
+the heavy masses of the prison she had left, and the high walls and
+turrets were gilded with glory. The broad river itself was one rolling
+glory too; the tide was coming in swift and strong and a barge or two
+moved upwards, only half seen in the bewildering path of the sun. The air
+was cool and keen, and a breeze from the water stirred Isabel's hair as
+she stood looking, with the light on her face. It was a cloudless October
+morning overhead. Even as she stood a flock of pigeons streamed across
+from the south side, swift-flying and bathed in light; and her eyes
+followed them a moment or two.
+
+As she stood there silent, a step came up the wharf from the direction of
+St. Katharine's street, and a man came walking quickly towards her. He
+did not see who she was until he was close, and then he started and took
+off his hat; it was Lackington on his way to some business at the Tower;
+but she did not seem to see him. She turned almost immediately and began
+to walk westwards, and the glory in her eyes was supreme. And as she went
+the day deepened above her.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's By What Authority?, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of By What Authority?, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: By What Authority?
+
+Author: Robert Hugh Benson
+
+Release Date: November 2, 2006 [EBook #19697]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY WHAT AUTHORITY? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geoff Horton and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           WHAT AUTHORITY?
+
+
+
+
+                                  By
+
+                          Robert Hugh Benson
+
+                             _Author of_
+
+           "The Light Invisible," "The King's Achievement,"
+                 "A Book of the Love of Jesus," etc.
+
+
+                           BENIZIGER BROS.
+                 PRINTERS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE,
+                    NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO.
+
+
+
+
+               _I wish to acknowledge a great debt of
+                 gratitude to the Reverend Dom Bede
+              Camm., O.S.B., who kindly read this book
+            in proof, and made many valuable corrections
+                          and suggestions._
+
+                                   ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+
+_Tremans
+  Horsted Keynes
+    October 27, 1904_
+
+
+
+
+                    PENATIBVS . FOCISQVE . CARIS
+
+                    NECNON . TRIBVS . CARIORIBVS
+
+                        APVD . QVAS . SCRIPSI
+
+                     IN . QVARVM . AVRES . LEGI
+
+                  A . QVIBVS . ADMONITVS . EMENDAVI
+
+                            HVNC . LIBRVM
+
+                                  D.
+
+
+
+
+                              CONTENTS
+
+
+                               PART I
+
+
+CHAP.                                                PAGE
+
+   I. The Situation                                     1
+
+  II. The Hall and the House                            8
+
+ III. London Town                                      21
+
+  IV. Mary Corbet                                      37
+
+   V. A Rider From London                              51
+
+  VI. Mr. Stewart                                      64
+
+ VII. The Door in the Garden Wall                      79
+
+VIII. The Taking of Mr. Stewart                        90
+
+  IX. Village Justice                                  99
+
+   X. A Confessor                                     108
+
+  XI. Master Calvin                                   124
+
+ XII. A Winding Up                                    140
+
+
+                               PART II
+
+   I. Anthony in London                               152
+
+  II. Some New Lessons                                168
+
+ III. Hubert's Return                                 183
+
+  IV. A Counter March                                 196
+
+   V. The Coming of the Jesuits                       213
+
+  VI. Some Contrasts                                  235
+
+ VII. A Message From the City                         252
+
+VIII. The Massing-House                               267
+
+  IX. From Fulham to Greenwich                        279
+
+   X. The Appeal to Caesar                             296
+
+  XI. A Station of the Cross                          313
+
+ XII. A Strife of Tongues                             334
+
+XIII. The Spiritual Exercises                         351
+
+ XIV. Easter Day                                      368
+
+
+                               PART III
+
+   I. The Coming of Spain                             384
+
+  II. Men of War and Peace                            390
+
+ III. Home-Coming                                     404
+
+  IV. Stanfield Place                                 421
+
+   V. Joseph Lackington                               429
+
+  VI. A Departure                                     439
+
+ VII. Northern Religion                               453
+
+VIII. In Stanstead Woods                              468
+
+  IX. The Alarm                                       484
+
+   X. The Passage To the Garden-house                 492
+
+  XI. The Garden-house                                505
+
+ XII. The Night Ride                                  521
+
+XIII. In Prison                                       526
+
+ XIV. An Open Door                                    541
+
+  XV. The Rolling of the Stone                        552
+
+
+
+
+                         BY WHAT AUTHORITY?
+
+
+
+
+                               PART I
+
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                            THE SITUATION
+
+
+To the casual Londoner who lounged, intolerant and impatient, at the
+blacksmith's door while a horse was shod, or a cracked spoke mended,
+Great Keynes seemed but a poor backwater of a place, compared with the
+rush of the Brighton road eight miles to the east from which he had
+turned off, or the whirling cauldron of London City, twenty miles to the
+north, towards which he was travelling.
+
+The triangular green, with its stocks and horse-pond, overlooked by the
+grey benignant church-tower, seemed a tame exchange for seething
+Cheapside and the crowded ways about the Temple or Whitehall; and it was
+strange to think that the solemn-faced rustics who stared respectfully at
+the gorgeous stranger were of the same human race as the quick-eyed,
+voluble townsmen who chattered and laughed and grimaced over the news
+that came up daily from the Continent or the North, and was tossed to and
+fro, embroidered and discredited alternately, all day long.
+
+And yet the great waves and movements that, rising in the hearts of kings
+and politicians, or in the sudden strokes of Divine Providence, swept
+over Europe and England, eventually always rippled up into this placid
+country village; and the lives of Master Musgrave, who had retired upon
+his earnings, and of old Martin, who cobbled the ploughmen's shoes, were
+definitely affected and changed by the plans of far-away Scottish
+gentlemen, and the hopes and fears of the inhabitants of South Europe.
+Through all the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, the menace of the
+Spanish Empire brooded low on the southern horizon, and a responsive
+mutter of storm sounded now and again from the north, where Mary Stuart
+reigned over men's hearts, if not their homes; and lovers of secular
+England shook their heads and were silent as they thought of their tiny
+country, so rent with internal strife, and ringed with danger.
+
+For Great Keynes, however, as for most English villages and towns at this
+time, secular affairs were so deeply and intricately interwoven with
+ecclesiastical matters that none dared decide on the one question without
+considering its relation to the other; and ecclesiastical affairs, too,
+touched them more personally than any other, since every religious change
+scored a record of itself presently within the church that was as
+familiar to them as their own cottages.
+
+On none had the religious changes fallen with more severity than on the
+Maxwell family that lived in the Hall, at the upper and southern end of
+the green. Old Sir Nicholas, though his convictions had survived the
+tempest of unrest and trouble that had swept over England, and he had
+remained a convinced and a stubborn Catholic, yet his spiritual system
+was sore and inflamed within him. To his simple and obstinate soul it was
+an irritating puzzle as to how any man could pass from the old to a new
+faith, and he had been known to lay his whip across the back of a servant
+who had professed a desire to try the new religion.
+
+His wife, a stately lady, a few years younger than himself, did what she
+could to keep her lord quiet, and to save him from incurring by his
+indiscretion any further penalties beyond the enforced journeys before
+the Commission, and the fines inflicted on all who refused to attend
+their parish church. So the old man devoted himself to his estates and
+the further improvement of the house and gardens, and to the inculcation
+of sound religious principles into the minds of his two sons who were
+living at home with their parents; and strove to hold his tongue, and his
+hand, in public.
+
+The elder of these two, Mr. James as he was commonly called, was rather a
+mysterious personage to the village, and to such neighbours as they had.
+He was often in town, and when at home, although extremely pleasant and
+courteous, never talked about himself and seemed to be only very
+moderately interested in the estate and the country-life generally. This,
+coupled with the fact that he would presumably succeed his father, gave
+rise to a good deal of gossip, and even some suspicion.
+
+His younger brother Hubert was very different; passionately attached to
+sport and to outdoor occupations, a fearless rider, and in every way a
+kindly, frank lad of about eighteen years old. The fifth member of the
+family, Lady Maxwell's sister, Mistress Margaret Torridon, was a
+quiet-faced old lady, seldom seen abroad, and round whom, as round her
+eldest nephew, hung a certain air of mystery.
+
+The difficulties of this Catholic family were considerable. Sir Nicholas'
+religious sympathies were, of course, wholly with the spiritual side of
+Spain, and all that that involved, while his intense love of England gave
+him a horror of the Southern Empire that the sturdiest patriot might have
+envied. And so with his attitude towards Mary Stuart and her French
+background. While his whole soul rose in loathing against the crime of
+Darnley's murder, to which many of her enemies proclaimed her accessory,
+it was kindled at the thought that in her or her child lately crowned as
+James VI. of Scotland, lay the hope of a future Catholic succession; and
+this religious sympathy was impassioned by the memory of an interview a
+few years ago, when he had kissed that gracious white hand, and looked
+into those alluring eyes, and, kneeling, stammered out in broken French
+his loyalty and his hopes. Whether it was by her devilish craft as her
+enemies said, or her serene and limpid innocence as her friends said, or
+by a maddening compound of the two, as later students have said--at least
+she had made the heart and confidence of old Sir Nicholas her own.
+
+But there were troubles more practical than these mental struggles; it
+was a misery, beyond describing, to this old man and his wife to see the
+church, where once they had worshipped and received the sacraments, given
+over to what was, in their opinion, a novel heresy, and the charge of a
+schismatic minister. There, in the Maxwell chapel within, lay the bones
+of their Catholic ancestors; and there they had knelt to adore and
+receive their Saviour; and now for them all was gone, and the light was
+gone out in the temple of the Lord. In the days of the previous Rector
+matters were not so desperate; it had been their custom to receive from
+his hands at the altar-rail of the Church hosts previously consecrated at
+the Rectory; for the incumbent had been an old Marian priest who had not
+scrupled so to relieve his Catholic sheep of the burden of recusancy,
+while he fed his Protestant charges with bread and wine from the
+Communion table. But now all that was past, and the entire family was
+compelled year by year to slip off into Hampshire shortly before Easter
+for their annual duties, and the parish church that their forefathers had
+built, endowed and decorated, knew them no more.
+
+But the present Rector, the Reverend George Dent, was far from a bigot;
+and the Papists were more fortunate than perhaps, in their bitterness,
+they recognised; for the minister was one of the rising Anglican school,
+then strange and unfamiliar, but which has now established itself as the
+main representative section of the Church of England. He welcomed the
+effect but not the rise of the Reformation, and rejoiced that the
+incrustations of error had been removed from the lantern of the faith.
+But he no less sincerely deplored the fanaticism of the Puritan and
+Genevan faction. He exulted to see England with a church truly her own at
+last, adapted to her character, and freed from the avarice and tyranny of
+a foreign despot who had assumed prerogatives to which he had no right.
+But he reverenced the Episcopate, he wore the prescribed dress, he used
+the thick singing-cakes for the Communion, and he longed for the time
+when nation and Church should again be one; when the nation should
+worship through a Church of her own shaping, and the Church share the
+glory and influence of her lusty partner and patron.
+
+But Mrs. Dent had little sympathy with her husband's views; she had
+assimilated the fiery doctrines of the Genevan refugees, and to her mind
+her husband was balancing himself to the loss of all dignity and
+consistency in an untenable position between the Popish priesthood on the
+one side and the Gospel ministry on the other. It was an unbearable
+thought to her that through her husband's weak disposition and principles
+his chief parishioners should continue to live within a stone's throw of
+the Rectory in an assured position of honour, and in personal
+friendliness to a minister whose ecclesiastical status and claims they
+disregarded. The Rector's position then was difficult and trying, no less
+in his own house than elsewhere.
+
+The third main family in the village was that of the Norrises, who lived
+in the Dower House, that stood in its own grounds and gardens a few
+hundred yards to the north-west of the village green. The house had
+originally been part of the Hall estate; but it had been sold some fifty
+years before. The present owner, Mr. Henry Norris, a widower, lived there
+with his two children, Isabel and Anthony, and did his best to bring them
+up in his own religious principles. He was a devout and cultivated
+Puritan, who had been affected by the New Learning in his youth, and had
+conformed joyfully to the religious changes that took place in Edward's
+reign. He had suffered both anxiety and hardships in Mary's reign, when
+he had travelled abroad in the Protestant countries, and made the
+acquaintance of many of the foreign reformers--Beza, Calvin, and even the
+great Melancthon himself. It was at this time, too, that he had lost his
+wife. It had been a great joy to him to hear of the accession of
+Elizabeth, and the re-establishment of a religion that was sincerely his
+own; and he had returned immediately to England with his two little
+children, and settled down once more at the Dower House. Here his whole
+time that he could spare from his children was divided between prayer and
+the writing of a book on the Eucharist; and as his children grew up he
+more and more retired into himself and silence and communing with God,
+and devoted himself to his book. It was beginning to be a great happiness
+to him to find that his daughter Isabel, now about seventeen years old,
+was growing up into active sympathy with his principles, and that the
+passion of her soul, as of his, was a tender deep-lying faith towards
+God, which could exist independently of outward symbols and ceremonies.
+But unlike others of his school he was happy too to notice and encourage
+friendly relations between Lady Maxwell and his daughter, since he
+recognised the sincere and loving spirit of the old lady beneath her
+superstitions, and knew very well that her friendship would do for the
+girl what his own love could not.
+
+The other passion of Isabel's life at present lay in her brother Anthony,
+who was about three years younger than herself, and who was just now more
+interested in his falcons and pony than in all the religious systems and
+human relationships in the world, except perhaps in his friendship for
+Hubert, who besides being three or four years older than himself, cared
+for the same things.
+
+And so relations between the Hall and the Dower House were all that they
+should be, and the path that ran through the gardens of the one and the
+yew hedge and orchard of the other was almost as well trodden as if all
+still formed one estate.
+
+As for the village itself, it was exceedingly difficult to gauge
+accurately the theological atmosphere. The Rector despaired of doing so.
+It was true that at Easter the entire population, except the Maxwells and
+their dependents, received communion in the parish church, or at least
+professed their willingness and intention to do so unless prevented by
+some accident of the preceding week; but it was impossible to be blind to
+the fact that many of the old beliefs lingered on, and that there was
+little enthusiasm for the new system. Rumours broke out now and again
+that the Catholics were rising in the north; that Elizabeth contemplated
+a Spanish or French marriage with a return to the old religion; that Mary
+Stuart would yet come to the throne; and with each such report there came
+occasionally a burst of joy in unsuspected quarters. Old Martin, for
+example, had been overheard, so a zealous neighbour reported, blessing
+Our Lady aloud for her mercies when a passing traveller had insisted that
+a religious league was in progress of formation between France and Spain,
+and that it was only a question of months as to when mass should be said
+again in every village church; but then on the following Sunday the
+cobbler's voice had been louder than all in the metrical psalm, and on
+the Monday he had paid a morning visit to the Rectory to satisfy himself
+on the doctrine of Justification, and had gone again, praising God and
+not Our Lady, for the godly advice received.
+
+But again, three years back, just before Mr. Dent had come to the place,
+there had been a solemn burning on the village-green of all such
+muniments of superstition as had not been previously hidden by the priest
+and Sir Nicholas; and in the rejoicings that accompanied this return to
+pure religion practically the whole agricultural population had joined.
+Some Justices had ridden over from East Grinsted to direct this rustic
+reformation, and had reported favourably to the new Rector on his arrival
+of the zeal of his flock. The great Rood, they told him, with SS. Mary
+and John, four great massy angels, the statue of St. Christopher, the
+Vernacle, a brocade set of mass vestments and a purple cope, had perished
+in the flames, and there had been no lack of hands to carry faggots; and
+now the Rector found it difficult to reconcile the zeal of his
+parishioners (which indeed he privately regretted) with the sudden and
+unexpected lapses into superstition, such as was Mr. Martin's gratitude
+to Our Lady, and others of which he had had experience.
+
+As regards the secular politics of the outside world, Great Keynes took
+but little interest. It was far more a matter of concern whether mass or
+morning prayer was performed on Sunday, than whether a German bridegroom
+could be found for Elizabeth, or whether she would marry the Duke of
+Anjou; and more important than either were the infinitesimal details of
+domestic life. Whether Mary was guilty or not, whether her supporters
+were rising, whether the shadow of Spain chilled the hearts of men in
+London whose affair it was to look after such things; yet the cows must
+be milked, and the children washed, and the falcons fed; and it was these
+things that formed the foreground of life, whether the sky were stormy or
+sunlit.
+
+And so, as the autumn of '69 crept over the woods in flame and russet,
+and the sound of the sickle was in folks' ears, the life at Great Keynes
+was far more tranquil than we should fancy who look back on those
+stirring days. The village, lying as it did out of the direct route
+between any larger towns, was not so much affected by the gallop of the
+couriers, or the slow creeping rumours from the Continent, as villages
+that lay on lines of frequent communication. So the simple life went on,
+and Isabel went about her business in Mrs. Carroll's still-room, and
+Anthony rode out with the harriers, and Sir Nicholas told his beads in
+his room--all with nearly as much serenity as if Scotland were fairyland
+and Spain a dream.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                        THE HALL AND THE HOUSE
+
+
+Anthony Norris, who was now about fourteen, went up to King's College,
+Cambridge, in October. He was closeted long with his father the night
+before he left, and received from him much sound religious advice and
+exhortation; and in the morning, after an almost broken-hearted good-bye
+from Isabel, he rode out with his servant following on another horse and
+leading a packhorse on the saddle of which the falcons swayed and
+staggered, and up the curving drive that led round into the village
+green. He was a good-hearted and wholesome-minded boy, and left a real
+ache behind him in the Dower House.
+
+Isabel indeed ran up to his room, after she had seen his feathered cap
+disappear at a trot through the gate, leaving her father in the hall; and
+after shutting and latching the door, threw herself on his bed, and
+sobbed her heart out. They had never been long separated before. For the
+last three years he had gone over to the Rectory morning by morning to be
+instructed by Mr. Dent; but now, although he would never make a great
+scholar, his father thought it well to send him up to Cambridge for two
+or three years, that he might learn to find his own level in the world.
+
+Anthony himself was eager to go. If the truth must be told, he fretted a
+little against the restraints of even such a moderate Puritan household
+as that of his father's. It was a considerable weariness to Anthony to
+kneel in the hall on a fresh morning while his father read, even though
+with fervour and sincerity, long extracts from "Christian Prayers and
+Holy Meditations," collected by the Reverend Henry Bull, when the real
+world, as Anthony knew it, laughed and rippled and twinkled outside in
+the humming summer air of the lawn and orchard; or to have to listen to
+godly discourses, however edifying to elder persons, just at the time
+when the ghost-moth was beginning to glimmer in the dusk, and the heavy
+trout to suck down his supper in the glooming pool in the meadow below
+the house.
+
+His very sports, too, which his father definitely encouraged, were
+obviously displeasing to the grave divines who haunted the house so often
+from Saturday to Monday, and spoke of high doctrinal matters at
+meal-times, when, so Anthony thought, lighter subjects should prevail.
+They were not interested in his horse, and Anthony never felt quite the
+same again towards one good minister who in a moment of severity called
+Eliza, the glorious peregrine that sat on the boy's wrist and shook her
+bells, a "vanity." And so Anthony trotted off happy enough on his way to
+Cambridge, of which he had heard much from Mr. Dent; and where, although
+there too were divines and theology, there were boys as well who acted
+plays, hunted with the hounds, and did not call high-bred hawks
+"vanities."
+
+Isabel was very different. While Anthony was cheerful and active like his
+mother who had died in giving him life, she, on the other hand, was quiet
+and deep like her father. She was growing up, if not into actual beauty,
+at least into grace and dignity: but there were some who thought her
+beautiful. She was pale with dark hair, and the great grey eyes of her
+father; and she loved and lived in Anthony from the very difference
+between them. She frankly could not understand the attraction of sport,
+and the things that pleased her brother; she was afraid of the hawks, and
+liked to stroke a horse and kiss his soft nose better than to ride him.
+But, after all, Anthony liked to watch the towering bird, and to hear and
+indeed increase the thunder of the hoofs across the meadows behind the
+stomping hawk; and so she did her best to like them too; and she was
+often torn two ways by her sympathy for the partridge on the one hand, as
+it sped low and swift across the standing corn with that dread shadow
+following, and her desire, on the other hand, that Anthony should not be
+disappointed.
+
+But in the deeper things of the spirit, too, there was a wide difference
+between them. As Anthony fidgeted and sighed through his chair-back
+morning and evening, Isabel's soul soared up to God on the wings of those
+sounding phrases. She had inherited all her father's tender piety, and
+lived, like him, on the most intimate terms with the spiritual world. And
+though, of course, by training she was Puritan, by character she was
+Puritan too. As a girl of fourteen she had gone with Anthony to see the
+cleansing of the village temple. They had stood together at the west end
+of the church a little timid at the sight of that noisy crowd in the
+quiet house of prayer; but she had felt no disapproval at that fierce
+vindication of truth. Her father had taught her of course that the purest
+worship was that which was only spiritual; and while since childhood she
+had seen Sunday by Sunday the Great Rood overhead, she had never paid it
+any but artistic attention. The men had the ropes round it now, and it
+was swaying violently to and fro; and then, even as the children watched,
+a tie had given, and the great cross with its pathetic wide-armed figure
+had toppled forward towards the nave, and then crashed down on the
+pavement. A fanatic ran out and furiously kicked the thorn-crowned head
+twice, splintering the hair and the features, and cried out on it as an
+idol; and yet Isabel, with all her tenderness, felt nothing more than a
+vague regret that a piece of carving so ancient and so delicate should be
+broken.
+
+But when the work was over, and the crowd and Anthony with them had
+stamped out, directed by the justices, dragging the figures and the old
+vestments with them to the green, she had seen something which touched
+her heart much more. She passed up alone under the screen, which they had
+spared, to see what had been done in the chancel; and as she went she
+heard a sobbing from the corner near the priest's door; and there,
+crouched forward on his face, crying and moaning quietly, was the old
+priest who had been rector of the church for nearly twenty years. He had
+somehow held on in Edward's time in spite of difficulties; had thanked
+God and the Court of Heaven with a full heart for the accession of Mary;
+had prayed and deprecated the divine wrath at the return of the
+Protestant religion with Elizabeth; but yet had somehow managed to keep
+the old faith alight for eight years more, sometimes evading, sometimes
+resisting, and sometimes conforming to the march of events, in hopes of
+better days. But now the blow had fallen, and the old man, too
+ill-instructed to hear the accents of new truth in the shouting of that
+noisy crowd and the crash of his images, was on his knees before the
+altar where he had daily offered the holy sacrifice through all those
+troublous years, faithful to what he believed to be God's truth, now
+bewailing and moaning the horrors of that day, and, it is to be feared,
+unchristianly calling down the vengeance of God upon his faithless flock.
+This shocked and touched Isabel far more than the destruction of the
+images; and she went forward timidly and said something; but the old man
+turned on her a face of such misery and anger that she had run straight
+out of the church, and joined Anthony as he danced on the green.
+
+On the following Sunday the old priest was not there, and a fervent young
+minister from London had taken his place, and preached a stirring sermon
+on the life and times of Josiah; and Isabel had thanked God on her knees
+after the sermon for that He had once more vindicated His awful Name and
+cleansed His House for a pure worship.
+
+But the very centre of Isabel's religion was the love of the Saviour. The
+Puritans of those early days were very far from holding a negative or
+colourless faith. Not only was their belief delicately dogmatic to
+excess; but it all centred round the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
+Isabel had drunk in this faith from her father's lips, and from
+devotional books which he gave her, as far back as she could remember
+anything. Her love for the Saviour was even romantic and passionate. It
+seemed to her that He was as much a part of her life, and of her actual
+experience, as Anthony or her father. Certain places in the lanes about,
+and certain spots in the garden, were sacred and fragrant to her because
+her Lord had met her there. It was indeed a trouble to her sometimes that
+she loved Anthony so much; and to her mind it was a less worthy kind of
+love altogether; it was kindled and quickened by such little external
+details, by the sight of his boyish hand brown with the sun, and scarred
+by small sporting accidents, such as the stroke of his bird's beak or
+talons, or by the very outline of the pillow where his curly head had
+rested only an hour or two ago. Whereas her love for Christ was a deep
+and solemn passion that seemed to well not out of His comeliness or even
+His marred Face or pierced Hands, but out of His wide encompassing love
+that sustained and clasped her at every moment of her conscious attention
+to Him, and that woke her soul to ecstasy at moments of high communion.
+These two loves, then, one so earthly, one so heavenly, but both so
+sweet, every now and then seemed to her to be in slight conflict in her
+heart. And lately a third seemed to be rising up out of the plane of
+sober and quiet affections such as she felt for her father, and still
+further complicating the apparently encountering claims of love to God
+and man.
+
+Isabel grew quieter in a few minutes and lay still, following Anthony
+with her imagination along the lane that led to the London road, and then
+presently she heard her father calling, and went to the door to listen.
+
+"Isabel," he said, "come down. Hubert is in the hall."
+
+She called out that she would be down in a moment; and then going across
+to her own room she washed her face and came downstairs. There was a
+tall, pleasant-faced lad of about her own age standing near the open door
+that led into the garden; and he came forward nervously as she entered.
+
+"I came back last night, Mistress Isabel," he said, "and heard that
+Anthony was going this morning: but I am afraid I am too late."
+
+She told him that Anthony had just gone.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I came to say good-bye; but I came by the orchard, and
+so we missed one another."
+
+Isabel asked a word or two about his visit to the North, and they talked
+for a few minutes about a rumour that Hubert had heard of a rising on
+behalf of Mary: but Hubert was shy and constrained, and Isabel was still
+a little tremulous. At last he said he must be going, and then suddenly
+remembered a message from his mother.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I was forgetting. My mother wants you to come up this
+evening, if you have time. Father is away, and my aunt is unwell and is
+upstairs."
+
+Isabel promised she would come.
+
+"Father is at Chichester," went on Hubert, "before the Commission, but we
+do not expect him back till to-morrow."
+
+A shadow passed across Isabel's face. "I am sorry," she said.
+
+The fact was that Sir Nicholas had again been summoned for recusancy. It
+was an expensive matter to refuse to attend church, and Sir Nicholas
+probably paid not less than L200 or L300 a year for the privilege of
+worshipping as his conscience bade.
+
+In the evening Isabel asked her father's leave to be absent after supper,
+and then drawing on her hood, walked across in the dusk to the Hall.
+Hubert was waiting for her at the boundary door between the two
+properties.
+
+"Father has come back," he said, "but my mother wants you still." They
+went on together, passed round the cloister wing to the south of the
+house: the bell turret over the inner hall and the crowded roofs stood up
+against the stars, as they came up the curving flight of shallow steps
+from the garden to the tall doorway that led into the hall.
+
+It was a pleasant, wide, high room, panelled with fresh oak, and hung
+with a little old tapestry here and there, and a few portraits. A
+staircase rose out of it to the upper story. It had a fret-ceiling, with
+flower-de-luce and rose pendants, and on the walls between the tapestries
+hung a few antlers and pieces of armour, morions and breast-plates, with
+a pair of pikes or halberds here and there. A fire had been lighted in
+the great hearth as the evenings were chilly; and Sir Nicholas was
+standing before it, still in his riding-dress, pouring out resentment and
+fury to his wife, who sat in a tall chair at her embroidery. She turned
+silently and held out a hand to Isabel, who came and stood beside her,
+while Hubert went and sat down near his father. Sir Nicholas scarcely
+seemed to notice their entrance, beyond glancing up for a moment under
+his fierce white eyebrows; but went on growling out his wrath. He was a
+fine rosy man, with grey moustache and pointed beard, and a thick head of
+hair, and he held in his hand his flat riding cap, and his whip with
+which from time to time he cut at his boot.
+
+"It was monstrous, I told the fellow, that a man should be haled from his
+home like this to pay a price for his conscience. The religion of my
+father and his father and all our fathers was good enough for me; and why
+in God's name should the Catholic have to pay who had never changed his
+faith, while every heretic went free? And then to that some stripling of
+a clerk told me that a religion that was good enough for the Queen's
+Grace should be good enough for her loyal subjects too; but my Lord
+silenced him quickly. And then I went at them again; and all my Lord
+would do was to nod his head and smile at me as if I were a child; and
+then he told me that it was a special Commission all for my sake, and Sir
+Arthur's, who was there too, my dear.... Well, well, the end was that I
+had to pay for their cursed religion."
+
+"Sweetheart, sweetheart," said Lady Maxwell, glancing at Isabel.
+
+"Well, I paid," went on Sir Nicholas, "but I showed them, thank God, what
+I was: for as we came out, Sir Arthur and I together, what should we see
+but another party coming in, pursuivant and all; and in the mid of them
+that priest who was with us last July.--Well, well, we'll leave his name
+alone--him that said he was a priest before them all in September; and I
+went down on my knees, thank God, and Sir Arthur went down on his, and we
+asked his blessing before them all, and he gave it us: and oh! my Lord
+was red and white with passion."
+
+"That was not wise, sweetheart," said Lady Maxwell tranquilly, "the
+priest will have suffered for it afterwards."
+
+"Well, well," grumbled Sir Nicholas, "a man cannot always think, but we
+showed them that Catholics were not ashamed of their religion--yes, and
+we got the blessing too."
+
+"Well, but here is supper waiting," said my lady, "and Isabel, too, whom
+you have not spoken to yet."
+
+Sir Nicholas paid no attention.
+
+"Ah! but that was not all," he went on, savagely striking his boot again,
+"at the end of all who should I see but that--that--damned rogue--whom
+God reward!"--and he turned and spat into the fire--"Topcliffe. There he
+was, bowing to my Lord and the Commissioners. When I think of that man,"
+he said, "when I think of that man--" and Sir Nicholas' kindly old
+passionate face grew pale and lowering with fury, and his eyebrows bent
+themselves forward, and his lower lip pushed itself out, and his hand
+closed tremblingly on his whip.
+
+His wife laid down her embroidery and came to him.
+
+"There, sweetheart," she said, taking his cap and whip. "Now sit down and
+have supper, and leave that man to God."
+
+Sir Nicholas grew quiet again; and after a saying a word or two of
+apology to Isabel, left the room to wash before he sat down to supper.
+
+"Mistress Isabel does not know who Topcliffe is," said Hubert.
+
+"Hush, my son," said his mother, "your father does not like his name to
+be spoken."
+
+Presently Sir Nicholas returned, and sat down to supper. Gradually his
+good nature returned, and he told them what he had seen in Chichester,
+and the talk he had heard. How it was reported to his lordship the Bishop
+that the old religion was still the religion of the people's hearts--how,
+for example, at Lindfield they had all the images and the altar furniture
+hidden underground, and at Battle, too; and that the mass could be set up
+again at a few hours' notice: and that the chalices had not been melted
+down into communion cups according to the orders issued, and so on. And
+that at West Grinsted, moreover, the Blessed Sacrament was there
+still--praise God--yes, and was going to remain there. He spoke freely
+before Isabel, and yet he remembered his courtesy too, and did not abuse
+the new-fangled religion, as he thought it, in her presence; or seek in
+any way to trouble her mind. If ever in an excess of anger he was carried
+away in his talk, his wife would always check him gently; and he would
+always respond and apologise to Isabel if he had transgressed good
+manners. In fact, he was just a fiery old man who could not change his
+religion even at the bidding of his monarch, and could not understand how
+what was right twenty years ago was wrong now.
+
+Isabel herself listened with patience and tenderness, and awe too;
+because she loved and honoured this old man in spite of the darkness in
+which he still walked. He also told them in lower tones of a rumour that
+was persistent at Chichester that the Duke of Norfolk had been imprisoned
+by the Queen's orders, and was to be charged with treason; and that he
+was at present at Burnham, in Mr. Wentworth's house, under the guard of
+Sir Henry Neville. If this was true, as indeed it turned out to be later,
+it was another blow to the Catholic cause in England; but Sir Nicholas
+was of a sanguine mind, and pooh-poohed the whole affair even while he
+related it.
+
+And so the evening passed in talk. When Sir Nicholas had finished supper,
+they all went upstairs to my lady's withdrawing-room on the first floor.
+This was always a strange and beautiful room to Isabel. It was panelled
+like the room below, but was more delicately furnished, and a tall harp
+stood near the window to which my lady sang sometimes in a sweet
+tremulous old voice, while Sir Nicholas nodded at the fire. Isabel, too,
+had had some lessons here from the old lady; but even this mild vanity
+troubled her puritan conscience a little sometimes. Then the room, too,
+had curious and attractive things in it. A high niche in the oak over the
+fireplace held a slender image of Mary and her Holy Child, and from the
+Child's fingers hung a pair of beads. Isabel had a strange sense
+sometimes as if this holy couple had taken refuge in that niche when they
+were driven from the church; but it seemed to her in her steadier moods
+that this was a superstitious fancy, and had the nature of sin.
+
+This evening the old lady went to her harp, while Isabel sat down near
+her in the wide window seat and looked out over the dark lawn, where the
+white dial glimmered like a phantom, and thought of Anthony again. Sir
+Nicholas went and stretched himself before the fire, and closed his eyes,
+for he was old, and tired with his long ride; and Hubert sat down in a
+dark corner near him whence he could watch Isabel. After a few rippling
+chords my lady began to sing a song by Sir Thomas Wyatt, whom she and Sir
+Nicholas had known in their youth; and which she had caused to be set to
+music by some foreign chapel master. It was a sorrowful little song, with
+the title, "He seeketh comfort in patience," and possibly she chose it on
+purpose for this evening.
+
+    "Patience! for I have wrong,
+    And dare not shew wherein;
+    Patience shall be my song;
+    Since truth can nothing win.
+    Patience then for this fit;
+    Hereafter comes not yet."
+
+While she sang, she thought no doubt of the foolish brave courtier who
+lacked patience in spite of his singing, and lost his head for it; her
+voice shook once or twice: and old Sir Nicholas shook his drowsy head
+when she had finished, and said "God rest him," and then fell fast
+asleep.
+
+Then he presently awoke as the others talked in whispers, and joined in
+too: and they talked of Anthony, and what he would find at Cambridge; and
+of Alderman Marrett, and his house off Cheapside, where Anthony would lie
+that night; and of such small and tranquil topics, and left fiercer
+questions alone. And so the evening came to an end; and Isabel said
+good-night, and went downstairs with Hubert, and out into the garden
+again.
+
+"I am sorry that Sir Nicholas has been so troubled," she said to Hubert,
+as they turned the corner of the house together. "Why cannot we leave one
+another alone, and each worship God as we think fit?"
+
+Hubert smiled in the darkness to himself.
+
+"I am afraid Queen Mary did not think it could be done, either," he said.
+"But then, Mistress Isabel," he went on, "I am glad that you feel that
+religion should not divide people."
+
+"Surely not," she said, "so long as they love God."
+
+"Then you think--" began Hubert, and then stopped. Isabel turned to him.
+
+"Yes?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing," said Hubert.
+
+They had reached the door in the boundary wall by now, and Isabel would
+not let him come further with her and bade him good-night. But Hubert
+still stood, with his hand on the door, and watched the white figure fade
+into the dusk, and listened to the faint rustle of her skirt over the dry
+leaves; and then, when he heard at last the door of the Dower House open
+and close, he sighed to himself and went home.
+
+Isabel heard her father call from his room as she passed through the
+hall; and went in to him as he sat at his table in his furred gown, with
+his books about him, to bid him good-night and receive his blessing. He
+lifted his hand for a moment to finish the sentence he was writing, and
+she stood watching the quill move and pause and move again over the
+paper, in the candlelight, until he laid the pen down, and rose and stood
+with his back to the fire, smiling down at her. He was a tall, slender
+man, surprisingly upright for his age, with a delicate, bearded,
+scholar's face; the little plain ruff round his neck helped to emphasise
+the fine sensitiveness of his features; and the hands which he stretched
+out to his daughter were thin and veined.
+
+"Well, my daughter," he said, looking down at her with his kindly grey
+eyes so like her own, and holding her hands.
+
+"Have you had a good evening, sir?" she asked.
+
+He nodded briskly.
+
+"And you, child?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir," she said, smiling up at him.
+
+"And was Sir Nicholas there?"
+
+She told him what had passed, and how Sir Nicholas had been fined again
+for his recusancy; and how Lady Maxwell had sung one of Sir Thomas
+Wyatt's songs.
+
+"And was no one else there?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, father, Hubert."
+
+"Ah! And did Hubert come home with you?"
+
+"Only as far as the gate, father. I would not let him come further."
+
+Her father said nothing, but still looked steadily down into her eyes for
+a moment, and then turned and looked away from her into the fire.
+
+"You must take care," he said gently. "Remember he is a Papist, born and
+bred; and that he has a heart to be broken too."
+
+She felt herself steadily flushing; and as he turned again towards her,
+dropped her eyes.
+
+"You will be prudent and tender, I know," he added. "I trust you wholly,
+Isabel."
+
+Then he kissed her on the forehead and laid his hand on her head, and
+looked up, as the Puritan manner was.
+
+"May the God of grace bless you, my daughter; and make you faithful to
+the end." And then he looked into her eyes again, smiled and nodded; and
+she went out, leaving him standing there.
+
+Mr. Norris had begun to fear that the boy loved Isabel, but as yet he did
+not know whether Isabel understood it or even was aware of it. The
+marriage difficulties of Catholics and Protestants were scarcely yet
+existing; and certainly there was no formulated rule of dealing with
+them. Changes of religion were so frequent in those days that
+difficulties, when they did arise, easily adjusted themselves. It was
+considered, for example, by politicians quite possible at one time that
+the Duke of Anjou should conform to the Church of England for the sake of
+marrying the Queen: or that he should attend public services with her,
+and at the same time have mass and the sacraments in his own private
+chapel. Or again, it was open to question whether England as a whole
+would not return to the old religion, and Catholicism be the only
+tolerated faith.
+
+But to really religious minds such solutions would not do. It would have
+been an intolerable thought to this sincere Puritan, with all his
+tolerance, that his daughter should marry a Catholic; such an arrangement
+would mean either that she was indifferent to vital religion, or that she
+was married to a man whose creed she was bound to abhor and anathematise:
+and however willing Mr. Norris might be to meet Papists on terms of
+social friendliness, and however much he might respect their personal
+characters, yet the thought that the life of any one dear to him should
+be irretrievably bound up with all that the Catholic creed involved, was
+simply an impossible one.
+
+Besides all this he had no great opinion of Hubert. He thought he
+detected in him a carelessness and want of principle that would make him
+hesitate to trust his daughter to him, even if the insuperable barrier of
+religion were surmounted. Mr. Norris liked a man to be consistent and
+zealous for his creed, even if that creed were dark and
+superstitious--and this zeal seemed to him lamentably lacking in Hubert.
+More than once he had heard the boy speak of his father with an air of
+easy indulgence, that his own opinion interpreted as contempt.
+
+"I believe my father thinks," he had once said, "that every penny he pays
+in fines goes to swell the accidental glory of God."
+
+And Hubert had been considerably startled and distressed when the elder
+man had told him to hold his tongue unless he could speak respectfully of
+one to whom he owed nothing but love and honour. This had happened,
+however, more than a year ago; and Hubert had forgotten it, no doubt,
+even if Mr. Norris had not.
+
+And as for Isabel.
+
+It is exceedingly difficult to say quite what place Hubert occupied in
+her mind. She certainly did not know herself much more than that she
+liked the boy to be near her; to hear his footsteps coming along the path
+from the Hall. This morning when her father had called up to her that
+Hubert was come, it was not so hard to dry her tears for Anthony's
+departure. The clouds had parted a little when she came and found this
+tall lad smiling shyly at her in the hall. As she had sat in the window
+seat, too, during Lady Maxwell's singing, she was far from unconscious
+that Hubert's face was looking at her from the dark corner. And as they
+walked back together her simplicity was not quite so transparent as the
+boy himself thought.
+
+Again when her father had begun to speak of him just now, although she
+was able to meet his eyes steadily and smilingly, yet it was just an
+effort. She had not mentioned Hubert herself, until her father had named
+him; and in fact it is probably safe to say that during Hubert's visit to
+the north, which had lasted three or four months, he had made greater
+progress towards his goal, and had begun to loom larger than ever in the
+heart of this serene grey-eyed girl, whom he longed for so irresistibly.
+
+And now, as Isabel sat on her bed before kneeling to say her prayers,
+Hubert was in her mind even more than Anthony. She tried to wonder what
+her father meant, and yet only too well she knew that she knew. She had
+forgotten to look into Anthony's room where she had cried so bitterly
+this morning, and now she sat wide-eyed, and self-questioning as to
+whether her heavenly love were as lucid and single as it had been; and
+when at last she went down on her knees she entreated the King of Love to
+bless not only her father, and her brother Anthony who lay under the
+Alderman's roof in far-away London; but Sir Nicholas and Lady Maxwell,
+and Mistress Margaret Hallam, and--and--Hubert--and James Maxwell, his
+brother; and to bring them out of the darkness of Papistry into the
+glorious liberty of the children of the Gospel.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                             LONDON TOWN
+
+
+Isabel's visit to London, which had been arranged to take place the
+Christmas after Anthony's departure to Cambridge, was full of bewildering
+experiences to her. Mr. Norris from time to time had references to look
+up in London, and divines to consult as to difficult points in his book
+on the Eucharist; and this was a favourable opportunity to see Mr.
+Dering, the St. Paul's lecturer; so the two took the opportunity, and
+with a couple of servants drove up to the City one day early in December
+to the house of Alderman Marrett, the wool merchant, and a friend of Mr.
+Norris' father; and for several days both before and after Anthony's
+arrival from Cambridge went every afternoon to see the sights. The maze
+of narrow streets of high black and white houses with their iron-work
+signs, leaning forward as if to whisper to one another, leaving strips of
+sky overhead; the strange play of lights and shades after nightfall; the
+fantastic groups; the incessant roar and rumble of the crowded
+alleys--all the commonplace life of London was like an enchanted picture
+to her, opening a glimpse into an existence of which she had known
+nothing.
+
+To live, too, in the whirl of news that poured in day after day borne by
+splashed riders and panting horses;--this was very different to the slow
+round of country life, with rumours and tales floating in, mellowed by
+doubt and lapse of time, like pensive echoes from another world. For
+example, morning by morning, as she came downstairs to dinner, there was
+the ruddy-faced Alderman with his fresh budget of news of the
+north;--Lords Northumberland and Westmoreland with a Catholic force of
+several thousands, among which were two cousins of Mrs. Marrett
+herself--and the old lady nodded her head dolorously in
+corroboration--had marched southwards under the Banner of the Five
+Wounds, and tramped through Durham City welcomed by hundreds of the
+citizens; the Cathedral had been entered, old Richard Norton with the
+banner leading; the new Communion table had been cast out of doors, the
+English Bible and Prayer-book torn to shreds, the old altar reverently
+carried in from the rubbish heap, the tapers rekindled, and amid
+hysterical enthusiasm Mass had been said once more in the old sanctuary.
+
+Then they had moved south; Lord Sussex was powerless in York; the Queen,
+terrified and irresolute, alternately storming and crying; Spain was
+about to send ships to Hartlepool to help the rebels; Mary Stuart would
+certainly be rescued from her prison at Tutbury. Then Mary had been moved
+to Coventry; then came a last flare of frightening tales: York had
+fallen; Mary had escaped; Elizabeth was preparing to flee.
+
+And then one morning the Alderman's face was brighter: it was all a lie,
+he said. The revolt had crumbled away; my Lord Sussex was impregnably
+fortified in York with guns from Hull; Lord Pembroke was gathering forces
+at Windsor; Lords Clinton, Hereford and Warwick were converging towards
+York to relieve the siege. And as if to show Isabel it was not a mere
+romance, she could see the actual train-bands go by up Cheapside with the
+gleam of steel caps and pike-heads, and the mighty tramp of disciplined
+feet, and the welcoming roar of the swarming crowds.
+
+Then as men's hearts grew lighter the tale of chastisement began to be
+told, and was not finished till long after Isabel was home again. Green
+after green of the windy northern villages was made hideous by the
+hanging bodies of the natives, and children hid their faces and ran by
+lest they should see what her Grace had done to their father.
+
+In spite of the Holy Sacrifice, and the piteous banner, and the call to
+fight for the faith, the Catholics had hung back and hesitated, and the
+catastrophe was complete.
+
+The religion of London, too, was a revelation to this country girl. She
+went one Sunday to St. Paul's Cathedral, pausing with her father before
+they went in to see the new restorations and the truncated steeple struck
+by lightning eight years before, which in spite of the Queen's angry
+urging the citizens had never been able to replace.
+
+There was a good congregation at the early morning prayer; and the organs
+and the singing were to Isabel as the harps and choirs of heaven. The
+canticles were sung to Shephard's setting by the men and children of St.
+Paul's all in surplices: and the dignitaries wore besides their grey fur
+almuces, which had not yet been abolished. The grace and dignity of the
+whole service, though to older people who remembered the unreformed
+worship a bare and miserable affair, and to Mr. Norris, with his sincere
+simplicity and spirituality, a somewhat elaborate and sensuous mode of
+honouring God, yet to Isabel was a first glimpse of what the mystery of
+worship meant. The dim towering arches, through which the dusty
+richly-stained sunbeams poured, the far-away murmurous melodies that
+floated down from the glimmering choir, the high thin pealing organ, all
+combined to give her a sense of the unfathomable depths of the Divine
+Majesty--an element that was lacking in the clear-cut personal Puritan
+creed, in spite of the tender associations that made it fragrant for her,
+and the love of the Saviour that enlightened and warmed it. The sight of
+the crowds outside, too, in the frosty sunlight, gathered round the grey
+stone pulpit on the north-east of the Cathedral, and streaming down every
+alley and lane, the packed galleries, the gesticulating black figure of
+the preacher--this impressed on her an idea of the power of corporate
+religion, that hours at her own prayer-desk, or solitary twilight walks
+under the Hall pines, or the uneventful divisions of the Rector's village
+sermons, had failed to give.
+
+It was this Sunday in London that awakened her quiet soul from the lonely
+companionship of God, to the knowledge of that vast spiritual world of
+men of which she was but one tiny cell. Her father observed her quietly
+and interestedly as they went home together, but said nothing beyond an
+indifferent word or two. He was beginning to realise the serious reality
+of her spiritual life, and to dread anything that would even approximate
+to coming between her soul and her Saviour. The father and daughter
+understood one another, and were content to be silent together.
+
+Her talks with Mrs. Marrett, too, left their traces on her mind. The
+Alderman's wife, for the first time in her life, found her views and
+reminiscences listened to as if they were oracles, and she needed little
+encouragement to pour them out in profusion. She was especially generous
+with her tales of portents and warnings; and the girl was more than once
+considerably alarmed by what she heard while the ladies were alone in the
+dim firelit parlour on the winter afternoons before the candles were
+brought in.
+
+"When you were a little child, my dear," began the old lady one day,
+"there was a great burning made everywhere of all the popish images and
+vestments; all but the copes and the altar-cloths that they made into
+dresses for the ministers' new wives, and bed-quilts to cover them; and
+there were books and banners and sepulchres and even relics. I went out
+to see the burning at Paul's, and though I knew it was proper that the
+old papistry should go, yet I was uneasy at the way it was done.
+
+"Well," went on the old lady, glancing about her, "I was sitting in this
+very room only a few days after, and the air began to grow dark and
+heavy, and all became still. There had been two or three cocks crowing
+and answering one another down by the river, and others at a distance;
+and they all ceased: and there had been birds chirping in the roof, and
+they ceased. And it grew so dark that I laid down my needle and went to
+the window, and there at the end of the street over the houses there was
+coming a great cloud, with wings like a hawk, I thought; but some said
+afterwards that, when they saw it, it had fingers like a man's hand, and
+others said it was like a great tower, with battlements. However that may
+be, it grew nearer and larger, and it was blue and dark like that curtain
+there; and there was no wind to stir it, for the windows had ceased
+rattling, and the dust was quiet in the streets; and still it came on
+quickly, growing as it came; and then there came a far-away sound, like a
+heavy waggon, or, some said, like a deep voice complaining. And I turned
+away from the window afraid; and there was the cat, that had been on a
+chair, down in the corner, with her back up, staring at the cloud: and
+then she began to run round the room like a mad thing, and presently
+whisked out of the door when I opened it. And I went to find Mr. Marrett,
+and he had not come in, and all the yard was quiet. I could only hear a
+horse stamp once or twice in the stable. And then as I saw calling out
+for some one to come, the storm broke, and the sky was all one dark cloud
+from side to side. For three hours it went on, rolling and clapping, and
+the lightning came in through the window that I had darkened and through
+the clothes over my head; for I had gone to my bed and rolled myself
+round under the clothes. And so it went on--and, my dear--" and Mrs.
+Marrett put her head close to Isabel's--"I prayed to our Lady and the
+saints, which I had not done since I was married; and asked them to pray
+God to keep me safe. And then at the end came a clap of thunder and a
+flash of lightning more fearful than all that had gone before; and at
+that very moment, so Mr. Marrett told me when he came in, two of the
+doors in St. Denys' Church in Fanshawe Street were broken in pieces by
+something that crushed them in, and the stone steeple of Allhallow Church
+in Bread Street was broken off short, and a part of it killed a dog that
+was beneath, and overthrew a man that played with the dog."
+
+Isabel could hardly restrain a shiver and a glance round the dark old
+room, so awful were Mrs. Marrett's face and gestures and loud whispering
+tone, as she told this.
+
+"Ah! but, my dear," she went on, "there was worse happened to poor King
+Hal, God rest him--him who began to reform the Church, as they say, and
+destroyed the monasteries. All the money that he left for masses for his
+soul was carried off with the rest at the change of religion; and that
+was bad enough, but this is worse. This is a tale, my dear, that I have
+heard my father tell many a time; and I was a young woman myself when it
+happened. The King's Grace was threatened by a friar, I think of
+Greenwich, that if he laid hands on the monasteries he should be as Ahab
+whose blood was licked by dogs in the very place which he took from a
+man. Well, the friar was hanged for his pains, and the King lived. And
+then at last he died, and was put in a great coffin, and carried through
+London; and they put the coffin in an open space in Sion Abbey, which the
+King had taken. And in the night there came one to view the coffin, and
+to see that all was well. And he came round the corner, and there stood
+the great coffin--(for his Grace was a great stout man, my dear)--on
+trestles in the moonlight, and beneath it a great black dog that lapped
+something: and the dog turned as the man came, and some say, but not my
+father, that the dog's eyes were red as coals, and that his mouth and
+nostrils smoked, and that he cast no shadow; but (however that may be)
+the dog turned and looked and then ran; and the man followed him into a
+yard, but when he reached there, there was no dog. And the man went back
+to the coffin afraid; and he found the coffin was burst open, and--and--"
+
+Mrs. Marrett stopped abruptly. Isabel was white and trembling.
+
+"There, there, my dear. I am a foolish old woman; and I'll tell you no
+more."
+
+Isabel was really terrified, and entreated Mrs. Marrett to tell her
+something pleasant to make her forget these horrors; and so she told her
+old tales of her youth, and the sights of the city, and the great doings
+in Mary's reign; and so the time passed pleasantly till the gentlemen
+came home.
+
+At other times she told her of Elizabeth and the great nobles, and
+Isabel's heart beat high at it, and at the promise that before she left
+she herself should see the Queen, even if she had to go to Greenwich or
+Nonsuch for it.
+
+"God bless her," said Mrs. Marrett loyally, "she's a woman like ourselves
+for all her majesty. And she likes the show and the music too, like us
+all. I declare when I see them all a-going down the water to Greenwich,
+or to the Tower for a bear-baiting, with the horns blowing and the guns
+firing and the banners and the barges and the music, I declare sometimes
+I think that heaven itself can be no better, God forgive me! Ah! but I
+wish her Grace 'd take a husband; there are many that want her; and then
+we could laugh at them all. There's so many against her Grace now who'd
+be for her if she had a son of her own. There's Duke Charles whose
+picture hangs in her bedroom, they say; and Lord Robert Dudley--there's a
+handsome spark, my dear, in his gay coat and his feathers and his ruff,
+and his hand on his hip, and his horse and all. I wish she'd take him and
+have done with it. And then we'd hear no more of the nasty Spaniards.
+There's Don de Silva, for all the world like a monkey with his brown face
+and mincing ways and his grand clothes. I declare when Captain Hawkins
+came home, just four years ago last Michaelmas, and came up to London
+with his men, all laughing and rolling along with the people cheering
+them, I could have kissed the man--to think how he had made the brown men
+dance and curse and show their white teeth! and to think that the Don had
+to ask him to dinner, and grin and chatter as if nought had happened."
+
+And Mrs. Marrett's good-humoured face broke into mirth at the thought of
+the Ambassador's impotence and duplicity.
+
+Anthony's arrival in London a few days before Christmas removed the one
+obstacle to Isabel's satisfaction--that he was not there to share it with
+her. The two went about together most of the day under their father's
+care, when he was not busy at his book, and saw all that was to be seen.
+
+One afternoon as they were just leaving the courtyard of the Tower, which
+they had been visiting with a special order, a slight reddish-haired man,
+who came suddenly out of a doorway of the White Tower, stopped a moment
+irresolutely, and then came towards them, bare-headed and bowing. He had
+sloping shoulders and a serious-looking mouth, with a reddish beard and
+moustache, and had an air of strangely mingled submissiveness and
+capability. His voice too, as he spoke, was at once deferential and
+decided.
+
+"I ask your pardon, Mr. Norris," he said. "Perhaps you do not remember
+me."
+
+"I have seen you before," said the other, puzzled for a moment.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the man, "down at Great Keynes; I was in service at the
+Hall, sir."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Norris, "I remember you perfectly. Lackington, is it
+not?"
+
+The man bowed again.
+
+"I left about eight years ago, sir; and by the blessing of God, have
+gained a little post under the Government. But I wished to tell you, sir,
+that I have been happily led to change my religion. I was a Papist, sir,
+you know."
+
+Mr. Norris congratulated him.
+
+"I thank you, sir," said Lackington.
+
+The two children were looking at him; and he turned to them and bowed
+again.
+
+"Mistress Isabel and Master Anthony, sir, is it not?"
+
+"I remember you," said Isabel a little shyly, "at least, I think so."
+
+Lackington bowed again as if gratified; and turned to their father.
+
+"If you are leaving, Mr. Norris, would you allow me to walk with you a
+few steps? I have much I would like to ask you of my old master and
+mistress."
+
+The four passed out together; the two children in front; and as they went
+Lackington asked most eagerly after the household at the Hall, and
+especially after Mr. James, for whom he seemed to have a special
+affection.
+
+"It is rumoured," said Mr. Norris, "that he is going abroad."
+
+"Indeed, sir," said the servant, with a look of great interest, "I had
+heard it too, sir; but did not know whether to believe it."
+
+Lackington also gave many messages of affection to others of the
+household, to Piers the bailiff, and a couple of the foresters: and
+finished by entreating Mr. Norris to use him as he would, telling him how
+anxious he was to be of service to his friends, and asking to be
+entrusted with any little errands or commissions in London that the
+country gentleman might wish performed.
+
+"I shall count it, sir, a privilege," said the servant, "and you shall
+find me prompt and discreet."
+
+One curious incident took place just as Lackington was taking his leave
+at the turning down into Wharf Street; a man hurrying eastwards almost
+ran against them, and seemed on the point of apologising, but his face
+changed suddenly, and he spat furiously on the ground, mumbling
+something, and hurried on. Lackington seemed to see nothing.
+
+"Why did he do that?" interrupted Mr. Norris, astonished.
+
+"I ask your pardon, sir?" said Lackington interrogatively.
+
+"That fellow! did you not see him spit at me?"
+
+"I did not observe it, sir," said the servant; and presently took his
+leave.
+
+"Why did that man spit at you, father?" asked Isabel, when they had come
+indoors.
+
+"I cannot think, my dear; I have never seen him in my life."
+
+"I think Lackington knew," said Anthony, with a shrewd air.
+
+"Lackington! Why, Lackington did not even see him."
+
+"That was just it," said Anthony.
+
+Anthony's talk about Cambridge during these first evenings in London was
+fascinating to Isabel, if not to their father, too. It concerned of
+course himself and his immediate friends, and dealt with such subjects as
+cock-fighting a good deal; but he spoke also of the public disputations
+and the theological champions who crowed and pecked, not unlike cocks
+themselves, while the theatre rang with applause and hooting. The sport
+was one of the most popular at the universities at this time. But above
+all his tales of the Queen's visit a few years before attracted the girl,
+for was she not to see the Queen with her own eyes?
+
+"Oh! father," said the lad, "I would I had been there five years ago
+when she came. Master Taylor told me of it. They acted the _Aulularia_,
+you know, in King's Chapel on the Sunday evening. Master Taylor took a
+part, I forget what; and he told me how she laughed and clapped. And
+then there was a great disputation before her, one day, in St. Mary's
+Church, and the doctors argued, I forget what about, but Master Taylor
+says that of course the Genevans had the best of it; and the Queen
+spoke, too, in Latin, though she did not wish to, but my lord of Ely
+persuaded her to it; so you see she could not have learned it by heart,
+as some said. And she said she would give some great gift to the
+University; but Master Taylor says they are still waiting for it; but it
+must come soon, you see, because it is the Queen's Grace who has
+promised it; but Master Taylor says he hopes she has forgotten it, but
+he laughs when I ask him what he means, and says it again."
+
+"Who is this Master Taylor?" asked his father.
+
+"Oh! he is a Fellow of King's," said Anthony, "and he told me about the
+Provost too. The Provost is half a Papist, they say: he is very old now,
+and he has buried all the vessels and the vestments of the Chapel, they
+say, somewhere where no one knows; and he hopes the old religion will
+come back again some day; and then he will dig them up. But that is
+Papistry, and no one wants that at Cambridge. And others say that he is
+a Papist altogether, and has a priest in his house sometimes. But I do
+not think he can be a Papist, because he was there when the Queen was
+there, bowing and smiling, says Master Taylor; and looking on the Queen
+so earnestly, as if he worshipped her, says Master Taylor, all the time
+the Chancellor was talking to her before they went into the chapel for
+the _Te Deum_. But they wished they had kept some of the things, like
+the Provost, says Master Taylor, because they were much put to it when
+her Grace came down for stuffs to cover the communion-tables and for
+surplices, for Cecil said she would be displeased if all was bare and
+poor. Is it true, father," asked Anthony, breaking off, "that the Queen
+likes popish things, and has a crucifix and tapers on the table in her
+chapel?"
+
+"Ah! my son," said Mr. Norris, smiling, "you must ask one who knows. And
+what else happened?"
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "the best is to come. They had plays, you know,
+the _Dido_, and one called _Ezechias_, before the Queen. Oh! and she
+sent for one of the boys, they say, and--and kissed him, they say; but I
+think that cannot be true."
+
+"Well, my son, go on!"
+
+"Oh! and some of them thought they would have one more play before she
+went; but she had to go a long journey and left Cambridge before they
+could do it, and they went after her to--to Audley End, I think, where
+she was to sleep, and a room was made ready, and when all was prepared,
+though her Grace was tired, she came in to see the play. Master Taylor
+was not there; he said he would rather not act in that one; but he had
+the story from one who acted, but no one knew, he said, who wrote the
+play. Well, when the Queen's Grace was seated, the actors came on,
+dressed, father, dressed"--and Anthony's eyes began to shine with
+amusement--"as the Catholic Bishops in the Tower. There was Bonner in his
+popish vestments--some they had from St. Benet's--with a staff and his
+tall mitre, and a lamb in his arms; and he stared at it and gnashed his
+teeth at it as he tramped in; and then came the others, all like bishops,
+all in mass-vestments or cloth cut to look like them; and then at the end
+came a dog that belonged to one of them, well-trained, with the Popish
+Host in his mouth, made large and white, so that all could see what it
+was. Well, they thought the Queen would laugh as she was a Protestant,
+but no one laughed; some one said something in the room, and a lady cried
+out; and then the Queen stood up and scolded the actors, and trounced
+them well with her tongue, she did, and said she was displeased; and then
+out she went with all her ladies and gentlemen after her, except one or
+two servants who put out the lights at once without waiting, and broke
+Bonner's staff, and took away the Host, and kicked the dog, and told them
+to be off, for the Queen's Grace was angered with them; and so they had
+to get back to Cambridge in the dark as well as they might."
+
+"Oh! the poor boys!" said Mrs. Marrett, "and they did it all to please
+her Grace, too."
+
+"Yes," said the Alderman, "but the Queen thought it enough, I dare say,
+to put the Bishops in prison, without allowing boys to make a mock of
+them and their faith before her."
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "I thought that was it."
+
+When the Alderman came in a day or two later with the news that Elizabeth
+was to come up from Nonsuch the next day, and to pass down Cheapside on
+her way to Greenwich, the excitement of Isabel and Anthony was
+indescribable.
+
+Cheapside was joyous to see, as the two, with their father behind them
+talking to a minister whose acquaintance he had made, sat at a
+first-floor window soon after mid-day, waiting to see the Queen go by.
+Many of the people had hung carpets or tapestries, some of taffetas and
+cloth-of-gold, out of their balconies and windows, and the very signs
+themselves,--fantastic ironwork, with here and there a grotesque beast
+rampant, or a bright painting, or an escutcheon;--with the gay,
+good-tempered crowds beneath and the strip of frosty blue sky, crossed
+by streamers from side to side, shining above the towering eaves and
+gables of the houses, all combined to make a scene so astonishing that
+it seemed scarcely real to these country children.
+
+It was yet some time before she was expected; but there came a sudden
+stir from the upper end of Cheapside, and then a burst of cheering and
+laughter and hoots. Anthony leaned out to see what was coming, but could
+make out nothing beyond the head of a horse, and a man driving it from
+the seat of a cart, coming slowly down the centre of the road. The
+laughter and noise grew louder as the crowds swayed this way and that to
+make room. Presently it was seen that behind the cart a little space was
+kept, and Anthony made out the grey head of a man at the tail of the
+cart, and the face of another a little way behind; then at last, as the
+cart jolted past, the two children saw a man stripped to the waist, his
+hands tied before him to the cart, his back one red wound; while a
+hangman walked behind whirling his thonged whip about his head and
+bringing it down now and again on the old man's back. At each lash the
+prisoner shrank away, and turned his piteous face, drawn with pain, from
+side to side, while the crowd yelled and laughed.
+
+"What's it for, what's it for?" inquired Anthony, eager and interested.
+
+A boy leaning from the next window answered him.
+
+"He said Jesus Christ was not in heaven."
+
+At that moment a humorist near the cart began to cry out:
+
+"Way for the King's Grace! Way for the King's Grace!" and the crowd took
+the idea instantly: a few men walking with the cart formed lines like
+gentlemen ushers, uncovering their heads and all crying out the same
+words; and one eager player tried to walk backwards until he was tripped
+up. And so the dismal pageant of this red-robed king of anguish went by;
+and the hoots and shouts of his heralds died away. Anthony turned to
+Isabel, exultant and interested.
+
+"Why, Isabel," he said, "you look all white. What is it? You know he's a
+blasphemer."
+
+"I know, I know," said Isabel.
+
+Then suddenly, far away, came the sound of trumpets, and gusts of distant
+cheering, like the sound of the wind in thick foliage. Anthony leaned out
+again, and an excited murmur broke out once more, as all faces turned
+westwards. A moment more, and Anthony caught a flash of colour from the
+corner near St. Paul's Churchyard; then the shrill trumpets sounded
+nearer, and the cheering broke out at the end, and ran down the street
+like a wave of noise. From every window faces leaned out; even on the
+roofs and between the high chimney pots were swaying figures.
+
+Masses of colour now began to emerge, with the glitter of steel, round
+the bend of the street, where the winter sunshine fell; and the crowds
+began to surge back, and against the houses. At first Anthony could make
+out little but two moving rippling lines of light, coming parallel,
+pressing the people back; and it was not until they had come opposite the
+window that he could make out the steel caps and pikeheads of men in
+half-armour, who, marching two and two with a space between them, led the
+procession and kept the crowds back. There they went, with immovable
+disciplined faces, grounding their pike-butts sharply now and again,
+caring nothing for the yelp of pain that sometimes followed. Immediately
+behind them came the aldermen in scarlet, on black horses that tossed
+their jingling heads as they walked. Anthony watched the solemn faces of
+the old gentlemen with a good deal of awe, and presently made out his
+friend, Mr. Marrett, who rode near the end, but who was too much
+engrossed in the management of his horse to notice the two children who
+cried out to him and waved. The serjeants-of-arms followed, and then two
+lines again of gentlemen-pensioners walking, bare-headed, carrying wands,
+in short cloaks and elaborate ruffs. But the lad saw little of them, for
+the splendour of the lords and knights that followed eclipsed them
+altogether. The knights came first, in steel armour with raised vizors,
+the horses too in armour, moving sedately with a splendid clash of steel,
+and twinkling fiercely in the sunshine; and then, after them (and Anthony
+drew his breath swiftly) came a blaze of colour and jewels as the great
+lords in their cloaks and feathered caps, metal-clasped and gemmed, came
+on their splendid long-maned horses; the crowd yelled and cheered, and
+great names were tossed to and fro, as the owners passed on, each talking
+to his fellow as if unconscious of the tumult and even of the presence of
+these shouting thousands. The cry of the trumpets rang out again high and
+shattering, as the trumpeters and heralds in rich coat-armour came next;
+and Anthony looked a moment, fascinated by the lions and lilies, and the
+brightness of the eloquent horns, before he turned his head to see the
+Lord Mayor himself, mounted on a great stately white horse, that needed
+no management, while his rider bore on a cushion the sceptre. Ah! she was
+coming near now. The two saw nothing of the next rider who carried aloft
+the glittering Sword of State, for their eyes were fixed on the six
+plumed heads of the horses, with grooms and footmen in cassock-coats and
+venetian hose, and the great gilt open carriage behind that swayed and
+jolted over the cobbles. She was here; she was here; and the loyal crowds
+yelled and surged to and fro, and cloths and handkerchiefs flapped and
+waved, and caps tossed up and down, as at last the great creaking
+carriage came under the window.
+
+This is what they saw in it.
+
+A figure of extraordinary dignity, sitting upright and stiff like a pagan
+idol, dressed in a magnificent and fantastic purple robe, with a great
+double ruff, like a huge collar, behind her head; a long taper waist,
+voluminous skirts spread all over the cushions, embroidered with curious
+figures and creatures. Over her shoulders, but opened in front so as to
+show the ropes of pearls and the blaze of jewels on the stomacher, was a
+purple velvet mantle lined with ermine, with pearls sewn into it here and
+there. Set far back on her head, over a pile of reddish-yellow hair drawn
+tightly back from the forehead, was a hat with curled brims, elaborately
+embroidered, with the jewelled outline of a little crown in front, and a
+high feather topping all.
+
+And her face--a long oval, pale and transparent in complexion, with a
+sharp chin, and a high forehead; high arched eyebrows, auburn, but a
+little darker than her hair; her mouth was small, rising at the corners,
+with thin curved lips tightly shut; and her eyes, which were clear in
+colour, looked incessantly about her with great liveliness and
+good-humour.
+
+There was something overpowering to these two children who looked, too
+awed to cheer, in this formidable figure in the barbaric dress, the
+gorgeous climax of a gorgeous pageant. Apart from the physical splendour,
+this solitary glittering creature represented so much--it was the
+incarnate genius of the laughing, brutal, wanton English nation, that sat
+here in the gilded carriage and smiled and glanced with tight lips and
+clear eyes. She was like some emblematic giant, moving in a processional
+car, as fantastic as itself, dominant and serene above the heads of the
+maddened crowds, on to some mysterious destiny. A sovereign, however
+personally inglorious, has such a dignity in some measure; and Elizabeth
+added to this an exceptional majesty of her own. Henry would not have
+been ashamed for this daughter of his. What wonder then that these crowds
+were delirious with love and loyalty and an exultant fear, as this
+overwhelming personality went by:--this pale-faced tranquil virgin Queen,
+passionate, wanton, outspoken and absolutely fearless; with a sufficient
+reserve of will to be fickle without weakness; and sufficient grasp of
+her aims to be indifferent to her policy; untouched by vital religion;
+financially shrewd; inordinately vain. And when this strange dominant
+creature, royal by character as by birth, as strong as her father and as
+wanton as her mother, sat in ermine and velvet and pearls in a royal
+carriage, with shrewd-faced wits, and bright-eyed lovers, and solemn
+statesmen, and great nobles, vacuous and gallant, glittering and jingling
+before her; and troops of tall ladies in ruff and crimson mantle riding
+on white horses behind; and when the fanfares went shattering down the
+street, vibrating through the continuous roar of the crowd and the shrill
+cries of children and the mellow thunder of church-bells rocking
+overhead, and the endless tramp of a thousand feet below; and when the
+whole was framed in this fantastic twisted street, blazing with
+tapestries and arched with gables and banners, all bathed in glory by the
+clear frosty sunshine--it is little wonder that for a few minutes at
+least this country boy felt that here at last was the incarnation of his
+dreams; and that his heart should exult, with an enthusiasm he could not
+interpret, for the cause of a people who could produce such a queen, and
+of a queen who could rule such a people; and that his imagination should
+be fired with a sudden sense that these were causes for which the
+sacrifice of a life would be counted cheap, if they might thereby be
+furthered.
+
+Yet, in this very moment, by one of those mysterious suggestions that
+rise from the depth of a soul, the image sprang into his mind, and poised
+itself there for an instant, of the grey-haired man who had passed half
+an hour ago, sobbing and shrinking at the cart's tail.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER IV
+
+                            MARY CORBET
+
+
+The spring that followed the visit to London passed uneventfully at Great
+Keynes to all outward appearances; and yet for Isabel they were
+significant months. In spite of herself and of the word of warning from
+her father, her relations with Hubert continued to draw closer. For one
+thing, he had been the first to awaken in her the consciousness that she
+was lovable in herself, and the mirror that first tells that to a soul
+always has something of the glow of the discovery resting upon it.
+
+Then again his deference and his chivalrous air had a strange charm. When
+Isabel rode out alone with Anthony, she often had to catch the swinging
+gate as he rode through after opening it, and do such little things for
+herself; but when Hubert was with them there was nothing of that kind.
+
+And, once more, he appealed to her pity; and this was the most subtle
+element of all. There was no doubt that Hubert's relations with his fiery
+old father became strained sometimes, and it was extraordinarily sweet to
+Isabel to be made a confidant. And yet Hubert never went beyond a certain
+point; his wooing was very skilful: and he seemed to be conscious of her
+uneasiness almost before she was conscious of it herself, and to relapse
+in a moment into frank and brotherly relations again.
+
+He came in one night after supper, flushed and bright-eyed, and found her
+alone in the hall: and broke out immediately, striding up and down as she
+sat and watched him.
+
+"I cannot bear it; there is Mr. Bailey who has been with us all Lent; he
+is always interfering in my affairs. And he has no charity. I know I am a
+Catholic and that; but when he and my father talk against the
+Protestants, Mistress Isabel, I cannot bear it. They were abusing the
+Queen to-night--at least," he added, for he had no intention to
+exaggerate, "they were saying she was a true daughter of her father; and
+sneers of that kind. And I am an Englishman, and her subject; and I said
+so; and Mr. Bailey snapped out, 'And you are also a Catholic, my son,'
+and then--and then I lost my temper, and said that the Catholic religion
+seemed no better than any other for the good it did people; and that the
+Rector and Mr. Norris seemed to me as good men as any one; and of course
+I meant him and he knew it; and then he told me, before the servants,
+that I was speaking against the faith; and then I said I would sooner
+speak against the faith than against good Christians; and then he flamed
+up scarlet, and I saw I had touched him; and then my father got scarlet
+too, and my mother looked at me, and my father told me to leave the table
+for an insolent puppy; and I knocked over my chair and stamped out--and
+oh! Mistress Isabel, I came straight here."
+
+And he flung down astride of a chair with his arms on the back, and
+dropped his head on to them.
+
+It would have been difficult for Hubert, even if he had been very clever
+indeed, to have made any speech which would have touched Isabel more than
+this. There was the subtle suggestion that he had defended the
+Protestants for her sake; and there was the open defence of her father,
+and defiance of the priests whom she feared and distrusted; there was a
+warm generosity and frankness running through it all; and lastly, there
+was the sweet flattering implication that he had come to her to be
+understood and quieted and comforted.
+
+Then, when she tried to show her disapproval of his quick temper, and had
+succeeded in showing a poorly disguised sympathy instead, he had flung
+away again, saying that she had brought him to his senses as usual, and
+that he would ask the priest's pardon for his insolence at once; and
+Isabel was left standing and looking at the fire, fearing that she was
+being wooed, and yet not certain, though she loved it. And then, too,
+there was the secret hope that it might be through her that he might
+escape from his superstitions, and--and then--and she closed her eyes and
+bit her lip for joy and terror.
+
+She did not know that a few weeks later Hubert had an interview with his
+father, of which she was the occasion. Lady Maxwell had gone to her
+husband after a good deal of thought and anxiety, and told him what she
+feared; asking him to say a word to Hubert. Sir Nicholas had been
+startled and furious. It was all the lad's conceit, he said; he had no
+real heart at all; he only flattered his vanity in making love; he had no
+love for his parents or his faith, and so on. She took his old hand in
+her own and held it while she spoke.
+
+"Sweetheart," she said, "how old were you when you used to come riding to
+Overfield? I forget." And there came peace into his angry, puzzled old
+eyes, and a gleam of humour.
+
+"Mistress," he said, "you have not forgotten." For he had been just
+eighteen, too. And he took her face in his hands delicately, and kissed
+her on the lips.
+
+"Well, well," he said, "it is hard on the boy; but it must not go on.
+Send him to me. Oh! I will be easy with him."
+
+But the interview was not as simple as he hoped; for Hubert was irritable
+and shamefaced; and spoke lightly of the Religion again.
+
+"After all," he burst out, "there are plenty of good men who have left
+the faith. It brings nothing but misery."
+
+Sir Nicholas' hands began to shake, and his fingers to clench themselves;
+but he remembered the lad was in love.
+
+"My son," he said, "you do not know what you say."
+
+"I know well enough," said Hubert, with his foot tapping sharply. "I say
+that the Catholic religion is a religion of misery and death everywhere.
+Look at the Low Countries, sir."
+
+"I cannot speak of that," said his father; and his son sneered visibly;
+"you and I are but laymen; but this I know, and have a right to say, that
+to threaten me like that is the act of a--is not worthy of my son. My
+dear boy," he said, coming nearer, "you are angry; and, God forgive me!
+so am I; but I promised your mother," and again he broke off, "and we
+cannot go on with this now. Come again this evening."
+
+Hubert stood turned away, with his head against the high oak mantelpiece;
+and there was silence.
+
+"Father," he said at last, turning round, "I ask your pardon."
+
+Sir Nicholas stepped nearer, his eyes suddenly bright with tears, and his
+mouth twitching, and held out his hand, which Hubert took.
+
+"And I was a coward to speak like that--but, but--I will try," went on
+the boy. "And I promise to say nothing to her yet, at any rate. Will that
+do? And I will go away for a while."
+
+The father threw his arms round him.
+
+As the summer drew on and began to fill the gardens and meadows with
+wealth, the little Italian garden to the south-west of the Hall was
+where my lady spent most of the day. Here she would cause chairs to be
+brought out for Mistress Margaret and herself, and a small selection of
+devotional books, an orange leather volume powdered all over with
+pierced hearts, filled with extracts in a clear brown ink, another book
+called _Le Chappellet de Jesus_, while from her girdle beside her
+pocket-mirror there always hung an olive-coloured "Hours of the Blessed
+Virgin," fastened by a long strip of leather prolonged from the binding.
+Here the two old sisters would sit, in the shadow of the yew hedge,
+taking it by turns to read and embroider, or talking a little now and
+then in quiet voices, with long silences broken only by the hum of
+insects in the hot air, or the quick flight of a bird in the tall trees
+behind the hedge.
+
+Here too Isabel often came, also bringing her embroidery; and sat and
+talked and watched the wrinkled tranquil faces of the two old ladies, and
+envied their peace. Hubert had gone, as he had promised his father, on a
+long visit, and was not expected home until at least the autumn.
+
+"James will be here to-morrow," said Lady Maxwell, suddenly, one hot
+afternoon. Isabel looked up in surprise; he had not been at home for so
+long; but the thought of his coming was very pleasant to her.
+
+"And Mary Corbet, too," went on the old lady, "will be here to-morrow or
+the day after."
+
+Isabel asked who this was.
+
+"She is one of the Queen's ladies, my dear; and a great talker."
+
+"She is very amusing sometimes," said Mistress Margaret's clear little
+voice.
+
+"And Mr. James will be here to-morrow?" said Isabel.
+
+"Yes, my child. They always suit one another; and we have known Mary for
+years."
+
+"And is Miss Corbet a Catholic?"
+
+"Yes, my dear; her Grace seems to like them about her."
+
+When Isabel went up again to the Hall in the evening, a couple of days
+later, she found Mr. James sitting with his mother and aunt in the same
+part of the garden. Mr. James, who rose as she came through the yew
+archway, and stood waiting to greet her, was a tall, pleasant,
+brown-faced man. Isabel noticed as she came up his strong friendly face,
+that had something of Hubert's look in it, and felt an immediate sense of
+relief from her timidity at meeting this man, whose name, it was said,
+was beginning to be known among the poets, and about whom the still more
+formidable fact was being repeated, that he was a rising man at Court and
+had attracted the Queen's favour.
+
+As they sat down again together, she noticed, too, his strong delicate
+hand in its snowy ruff, for he was always perfectly dressed, as it lay on
+his knee; and again thought of Hubert's browner and squarer hand.
+
+"We were talking, Mistress Isabel, about the play, and the new theatres.
+I was at the Blackfriars' only last week. Ah! and I met Buxton there," he
+went on, turning to his mother.
+
+"Dear Henry," said Lady Maxwell. "He told me when I last saw him that he
+could never go to London again; his religion was too expensive, he said."
+
+Mr. James' white teeth glimmered in a smile.
+
+"He told me he was going to prison next time, instead of paying the fine.
+It would be cheaper, he thought."
+
+"I hear her Grace loves the play," said Mistress Margaret.
+
+"Indeed she does. I saw her at Whitehall the other day, when the children
+of the Chapel Royal were acting; she clapped and called out with delight.
+But Mistress Corbet can tell you more than I can--Ah! here she is."
+
+Isabel looked up, and saw a wonderful figure coming briskly along the
+terrace and down the steps that led from the house. Miss Corbet was
+dressed with what she herself would have said was a milkmaid's plainness;
+but Isabel looked in astonishment at the elaborate ruff and wings of
+muslin and lace, the shining peacock gown, the high-piled coils of black
+hair, and the twinkling buckled feet. She had a lively bright face, a
+little pale, with a high forehead, and black arched brows and dancing
+eyes, and a little scarlet mouth that twitched humorously now and then
+after speaking. She rustled up, flicking her handkerchief, and exclaiming
+against the heat. Isabel was presented to her; she sat down on a settle
+Mr. James drew forward for her, with the handkerchief still whisking at
+the flies.
+
+"I am ashamed to come out like this," she began. "Mistress Plesse would
+break her heart at my lace. You country ladies have far more sense. I am
+the slave of my habits. What were you talking of, that you look so
+gravely at me?"
+
+Mr. James told her.
+
+"Oh, her Grace!" said Miss Corbet. "Indeed, I think sometimes she is
+never off the stage herself. Ah! and what art and passion she shows too!"
+
+"We are all loyal subjects here," said Mr. James; "tell us what you
+mean."
+
+"I mean what I say," she said. "Never was there one who loved play-acting
+more and to occupy the centre of the stage, too. And the throne too, if
+there be one," she added.
+
+Miss Corbet talked always at her audience; she hardly ever looked
+directly at any one, but up or down, or even shut her eyes and tilted her
+face forward while she talked; and all the while she kept an incessant
+movement of her lips or handkerchief, or tapped her foot, or shifted her
+position a little. Isabel thought she had never seen any one so restless.
+
+Then she went on to tell them of the Queen. She was so startlingly frank
+that Lady Maxwell again and again looked up as if to interrupt; but she
+always came off the thin ice in time. It was abominable gossip; but she
+talked with such a genial air of loyal good humour, that it was very
+difficult to find fault. Miss Corbet was plainly accustomed to act as
+Court Circular, or even as lecturer and show-woman on the most popular
+subject in England.
+
+"But her Grace surpassed herself in acting the tyrant last January; you
+would have sworn her really angry. This was how it fell out. I was in the
+anteroom one day, waiting for her Grace, when I thought I heard her call.
+So I tapped; I got no clear answer, but I heard her voice within, so I
+entered. And there was her Majesty, sitting a little apart in a chair by
+herself, with the Secretary--poor rat--white-faced at the table, writing
+what she bade him, and looking at her, quick and side-ways, like a child
+at a lifted rod; and there was her Grace: she had kicked her stool over,
+and one shoe had fallen; and she was striking the arm of her chair as she
+spoke, and her rings rapped as loud as a drunken watchman. And her face
+was all white, and her eyes glaring"--and Mary began to glare and raise
+her voice too--"and she was crying out, 'By God's Son, sir, I will have
+them hanged. Tell the----' (but I dare not say what she called my Lord
+Sussex, but few would have recognised him from what she said)--'tell him
+that I will have my will done. These--' (and she called the rebels a name
+I dare not tell you)--'these men have risen against me these two months;
+and yet they are not hanged. Hang them in their own villages, that their
+children may see what treason brings.' All this while I was standing at
+the open door, thinking she had called me; but she was as if she saw
+nought but the gallows and hell-fire beyond; and I spoke softly to her,
+asking what she wished; and she sprang up and ran at me, and struck
+me--yes; again and again across the face with her open hand, rings and
+all--and I ran out in tears. Yes," went on Miss Corbet in a moment,
+dropping her voice, and pensively looking up at nothing, "yes; you would
+have said she was really angry, so quick and natural were her movements
+and so loud her voice."
+
+Mr. James' face wrinkled up silently in amusement; and Lady Maxwell
+seemed on the point of speaking; but Miss Corbet began again:
+
+"And to see her Grace act the lover. It was a miracle. You would have
+said that our Artemis repented of her coldness; if you had not known it
+was but play-acting; or let us say perhaps a rehearsal--if you had seen
+what I once saw at Nonsuch. It was on a summer evening; and we were all
+on the bowling green, and her Grace was within doors, not to be
+disturbed. My Lord Leicester was to come, but we thought had not arrived.
+Then I had occasion to go to my room to get a little book I had promised
+to show to Caroline; and, thinking no harm, I ran through into the court,
+and there stood a horse, his legs apart, all steaming and blowing. Some
+courier, said I to myself, and never thought to look at the trappings;
+and so I ran upstairs to go to the gallery, across which lay my chamber;
+and I came up, and just began to push open the door, when I heard her
+Grace's voice beyond, and, by the mercy of God, I stopped; and dared not
+close the door again nor go downstairs for fear I should be heard. And
+there were two walking within the gallery, her Grace and my lord, and my
+lord was all disordered with hard riding, and nearly as spent as his poor
+beast below. And her Grace had her arm round his neck, for I saw them
+through the chink; and she fondled and pinched his ear, and said over and
+over again, 'Robin, my sweet Robin,' and then crooned and moaned at him;
+and he, whenever he could fetch a breath--and oh! I promise you he did
+blow--murmured back, calling her his queen, which indeed she was, and his
+sweetheart and his moon and his star--which she was not: but 'twas all in
+the play. Well, again by the favour of God, they did not see how the door
+was open and I couched behind it, for the sun was shining level through
+the west window in their eyes; but why they did not hear me as I ran
+upstairs and opened the door, He only knows--unless my lord was too
+sorely out of breath and her Grace too intent upon her play-acting. Well,
+I promise you, the acting was so good--he so spent and she so
+tender--that I nearly cried out Brava as I saw them; but that I
+remembered in time 'twas meant to be a private rehearsal. But I have seen
+her Grace act near as passionate a part before the whole company
+sometimes."
+
+The two old ladies seemed not greatly pleased with all this talk; and as
+for Isabel she sat silent and overwhelmed. Mary Corbet glanced quickly at
+their faces when she had done, and turned a little in her seat.
+
+"Ah! look at that peacock," she cried out, as a stately bird stepped
+delicately out of the shrubbery on to the low wall a little way off, and
+stood balancing himself. "He is loyal too, and has come to hear news of
+his Queen."
+
+"He has come to see his cousin from town," said Mr. James, looking at
+Miss Corbet's glowing dress, "and to learn of the London fashions."
+
+Mary got up and curtseyed to the astonished bird, who looked at her with
+his head lowered, as he took a high step or two, and then paused again,
+with his burnished breast swaying a little from side to side.
+
+"He invites you to a dance," went on Mr. James gravely, "a pavane."
+
+Miss Corbet sat down again.
+
+"I dare not dance a pavane," she said, "with a real peacock."
+
+"Surely," said Mr. James, with a courtier's air, "you are too pitiful for
+him, and too pitiless for us."
+
+"I dare not," she said again, "for he never ceases to practise."
+
+"In hopes," said Mr. James, "that one day you will dance it with him."
+
+And then the two went off into the splendid fantastic nonsense that the
+wits loved to talk; that grotesque, exaggerated phrasing made fashionable
+by Lyly. It was like a kind of impromptu sword-exercise in an assault of
+arms, where the rhythm and the flash and the graceful turns are of more
+importance than the actual thrusts received. The two old ladies
+embroidered on in silence, but their eyes twinkled, and little wrinkles
+flickered about the corners of their lips. But poor Isabel sat
+bewildered. It was so elaborate, so empty; she had almost said, so wicked
+to take the solemn gift of speech and make it dance this wild fandango;
+and as absurdity climbed and capered in a shower of sparks and gleams on
+the shoulders of absurdity, and was itself surmounted; and the names of
+heathen gods and nymphs and demi-gods and loose-living classical women
+whisked across the stage, and were tossed higher and higher, until the
+whole mad erection blazed up and went out in a shower of stars and gems
+of allusions and phrases, like a flight of rockets, bright and
+bewildering at the moment, but leaving a barren darkness and dazzled eyes
+behind--the poor little Puritan country child almost cried with
+perplexity and annoyance. If the two talkers had looked at one another
+and burst into laughter at the end, she would have understood it to be a
+joke, though, to her mind, but a poor one. But when they had ended, and
+Mary Corbet had risen and then swept down to the ground in a great silent
+curtsey, and Mr. James, the grave, sensible gentleman, had solemnly bowed
+with his hand on his heart, and his heels together like a Monsieur, and
+then she had rustled off in her peacock dress to the house, with her
+muslin wings bulging behind her; and no one had laughed or reproved or
+explained; it was almost too much, and she looked across to Lady Maxwell
+with an appeal in her eyes.
+
+Mr. James saw it and his face relaxed.
+
+"You must not take us too seriously, Mistress Isabel," he said in his
+kindly way. "It is all part of the game."
+
+"The game?" she said piteously.
+
+"Yes," said Mistress Margaret, intent on her embroidery, "the game of
+playing at kings and queens and courtiers and ruffs and high-stepping."
+
+Mr. James' face again broke into his silent laugh.
+
+"You are acid, dear aunt," he said.
+
+"But----" began Isabel again.
+
+"But it is wrong, you think," he interrupted, "to talk such nonsense.
+Well, Mistress Isabel, I am not sure you are not right." And the dancing
+light in his eyes went out.
+
+"No, no, no," she cried, distressed. "I did not mean that. Only I did not
+understand."
+
+"I know, I know; and please God you never will." And he looked at her
+with such a tender gravity that her eyes fell.
+
+"Isabel is right," went on Mistress Margaret, in her singularly sweet old
+voice; "and you know it, my nephew. It is very well as a pastime, but
+some folks make it their business; and that is nothing less than fooling
+with the gifts of the good God."
+
+"Well, aunt Margaret," said James softly, "I shall not have much more of
+it. You need not fear for me."
+
+Lady Maxwell looked quickly at her son for a moment, and down again. He
+made an almost imperceptible movement with his head, Mistress Margaret
+looked across at him with her tender eyes beaming love and sorrow; and
+there fell a little eloquent silence; while Isabel glanced shyly from one
+to the other, and wondered what it was all about.
+
+Miss Mary Corbet stayed a few weeks, as the custom was when travelling
+meant so much; but Isabel was scarcely nearer understanding her. She
+accepted her, as simple clean souls so often have to accept riddles in
+this world, as a mystery that no doubt had a significance, though she
+could not recognise it. So she did not exactly dislike or distrust her,
+but regarded her silently out of her own candid soul, as one would say a
+small fearless bird in a nest must regard the man who thrusts his strange
+hot face into her green pleasant world, and tries to make endearing
+sounds. For Isabel was very fascinating to Mary Corbet. She had scarcely
+ever before been thrown so close to any one so serenely pure. She would
+come down to the Dower House again and again at all hours of the day,
+rustling along in her silk, and seize upon Isabel in the little upstairs
+parlour, or her bedroom, and question her minutely about her ways and
+ideas; and she would look at her silently for a minute or two together;
+and then suddenly laugh and kiss her--Isabel's transparency was almost as
+great a riddle to her as her own obscurity to Isabel. And sometimes she
+would throw herself on Isabel's bed, and lie there with her arms behind
+her head, to the deplorable ruin of her ruff; with her buckled feet
+twitching and tapping; and go on and on talking like a running stream in
+the sun that runs for the sheer glitter and tinkle of it, and
+accomplishes nothing. But she was more respectful to Isabel's simplicity
+than at first, and avoided dangerous edges and treacherous ground in a
+manner that surprised herself, telling her of the pageants at Court and
+fair exterior of it all, and little about the poisonous conversations and
+jests and the corrupt souls that engaged in them.
+
+She was immensely interested in Isabel's religion.
+
+"Tell me, child," she said one day, "I cannot understand such a religion.
+It is not like the Protestant religion at Court at all. All that the
+Protestants do there is to hear sermons--it is all so dismal and noisy.
+But here, with you, you have a proper soul. It seems to me that you are
+like a little herb-garden, very prim and plain, but living and wholesome
+and pleasant to walk in at sunset. And these Protestants that I know are
+more like a paved court at noon--all hot and hard and glaring. They give
+me the headache. Tell me all about it."
+
+Of course Isabel could not, though she tried again and again. Her
+definitions were as barren as any others.
+
+"I see," said Mary Corbet one day, sitting up straight and looking at
+Isabel. "It is not your religion but you; your religion is as dull as all
+the rest. But your soul is sweet, my dear, and the wilderness blossoms
+where you set your feet. There is nothing to blush about. It's no credit
+to you, but to God."
+
+Isabel hated this sort of thing. It seemed to her as if her soul was
+being dragged out of a cool thicket from the green shadow and the
+flowers, and set, stripped, in the high road.
+
+Another time Miss Corbet spoke yet more plainly.
+
+"You are a Catholic at heart, my dear; or you would be if you knew what
+the Religion was. But your father, good man, has never understood it
+himself; and so you don't know it either. What you think about us, my
+dear, is as much like the truth as--as--I am like a saint, or you like a
+sinner. I'll be bound now that you think us all idolaters!"
+
+Isabel had to confess that she did think something of the sort.
+
+"There, now, what did I say? Why haven't either of those two old nuns at
+the Hall taught you any better?"
+
+"They--they don't talk to me about religion."
+
+"Ah! I see; or the Puritan father would withdraw his lamb from the
+wolves. But if they are wolves, my dear, you must confess that they have
+the decency to wear sheep's clothing, and that the disguise is
+excellent."
+
+And so it gradually came about that Isabel began to learn an immense deal
+about what the Catholics really believed--far more than she had ever
+learnt in all her life before from the ladies at the Hall, who were
+unwilling to teach her, and her father, who was unable.
+
+About half-way through Miss Corbet's visit, Anthony came home. At first
+he pronounced against her inexorably, dismissing her as nonsense, and as
+a fine lady--terms to him interchangeable. Then his condemnation began to
+falter, then ceased; then acquittal, and at last commendation succeeded.
+For Miss Corbet asked his advice about the dogs, and how to get that
+wonderful gloss on their coats that his had; and she asked his help, too,
+once or twice and praised his skill, and once asked to feel his muscle.
+
+And then she was so gallant in ways that appealed to him. She was not in
+the least afraid of Eliza. She kissed that ferocious head in spite of the
+glare of that steady yellow eye; and yet all with an air of trusting to
+Anthony's protection. She tore her silk stocking across the instep in a
+bramble and scratched her foot, without even drawing attention to it, as
+she followed him along one of his short cuts through the copse; and it
+was only by chance that he saw it. And then this gallant girl, so simple
+and ignorant as she seemed out of doors, was like a splendid queen
+indoors, and was able to hold her own, or rather to soar above all these
+elders who were so apt to look over Anthony's head on grave occasions;
+and they all had to listen while she talked. In fact, the first time he
+saw her at the Hall in all her splendour, he could hardly realise it was
+the same girl, till she laughed up at him, and nodded, and said how much
+she had enjoyed the afternoon's stroll, and how much she would have to
+tell when she got back to Court. In short, so incessant were her poses
+and so skilful her manner and tone, and so foolish this poor boy, that in
+a very few days, after he had pronounced her to be nonsense, Anthony was
+at her feet, hopelessly fascinated by the combination of the glitter and
+friendliness of this fine Court lady. To do her justice, she would have
+behaved exactly the same to a statue, or even to nothing at all, as a
+peacock dances and postures and vibrates his plumes to a kitten; and had
+no more deliberate intention of giving pain to anybody than a nightshade
+has of poisoning a silly sheep.
+
+The sublime conceit of a boy of fifteen made him of course think that she
+had detected in him a nobility that others overlooked, and so Anthony
+began a gorgeous course of day-dreaming, in which he moved as a kind of
+king, worshipped and reverenced by this splendid creature, who after a
+disillusionment from the empty vanities of a Court life and a Queen's
+favour, found at last the lord of her heart in a simple manly young
+countryman. These dreams, however, he had the grace and modesty to keep
+wholly to himself.
+
+Mary came down one day and found the two in the garden together.
+
+"Come, my child," she said, "and you too, Master Anthony, if you can
+spare time to escort us; and take me to the church. I want to see it."
+
+"The church!" said Isabel, "that is locked: we must go to the Rectory."
+
+"Locked!" exclaimed Mary, "and is that part of the blessed Reformation?
+Well, come, at any rate."
+
+They all went across to the village and down the green towards the
+Rectory, whose garden adjoined the churchyard on the south side of the
+church. Anthony walked with something of an air in front of the two
+ladies. Isabel told her as they went about the Rector and his views. Mary
+nodded and smiled and seemed to understand.
+
+"We will tap at the window," said Anthony, "it is the quickest way."
+
+They came up towards the study window that looked on to the drive; when
+Anthony, who was in front, suddenly recoiled and then laughed.
+
+"They are at it again," he said.
+
+The next moment Mary was looking through the window too. The Rector was
+sitting in his chair opposite, a small dark, clean-shaven man, but his
+face was set with a look of distressed determination, and his lower lip
+was sucked in; his eyes were fixed firmly on a tall, slender woman whose
+back was turned to the window and who seemed to be declaiming, with
+outstretched hand. The Rector suddenly saw the faces at the window.
+
+"We seem to be interrupting," said Mary coolly, as she turned away.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                         A RIDER FROM LONDON
+
+
+"We will walk on, Master Anthony," said Mistress Corbet. "Will you bring
+the keys when the Rector and his lady have done?"
+
+She spoke with a vehement bitterness that made Isabel look at her in
+amazement, as the two walked on by the private path to the churchyard
+gate. Mary's face was set in a kind of fury, and she went forward with
+her chin thrust disdainfully out, biting her lip. Isabel said nothing.
+
+As they reached the gate they heard steps behind them; and turning saw
+the minister and Anthony hastening together. Mr. Dent was in his cassock
+and gown and square cap, and carried the keys. His little scholarly face,
+with a sharp curved nose like a beak, and dark eyes set rather too close
+together, was not unlike a bird's; and a way he had of sudden sharp
+movements of his head increased the likeness. Mary looked at him with
+scarcely veiled contempt. He glanced at her sharply and uneasily.
+
+"Mistress Mary Corbet?" he said, interrogatively.
+
+Mary bowed to him.
+
+"May we see the church, sir; your church, I should say perhaps; that is,
+if we are not disturbing you."
+
+Mr. Dent made a polite inclination, and opened the gate for them to go
+through. Then Mary changed her tactics; and a genial, good-humoured look
+came over her face; but Isabel, who glanced at her now and again as they
+went round to the porch at the west-end, still felt uneasy.
+
+As the Rector was unlocking the porch door, Mary surveyed him with a
+pleased smile.
+
+"Why, you look quite like a priest," she said. "Do your bishops, or
+whatever you call them, allow that dress? I thought you had done away
+with it all."
+
+Mr. Dent looked at her, but seeing nothing but geniality and interest in
+her face, explained elaborately in the porch that he was a Catholic
+priest, practically; though the word minister was more commonly used; and
+that it was the old Church still, only cleansed from superstitions. Mary
+shook her head at him cheerfully, smiling like a happy, puzzled child.
+
+"It is all too difficult for me," she said. "It cannot be the same
+Church, or why should we poor Catholics be so much abused and persecuted?
+Besides, what of the Pope?"
+
+Mr. Dent explained that the Pope was one of the superstitions in
+question.
+
+"Ah! I see you are too sharp for me," said Mary, beaming at him.
+
+Then they entered the church; and Mary began immediately on a running
+comment.
+
+"How sad that little niche looks," she said. "I suppose Our Lady is in
+pieces somewhere on a dunghill. Surely, father--I beg your pardon, Mr.
+Dent--it cannot be the same religion if you have knocked Our Lady to
+pieces. But then I suppose you would say that she was a superstition,
+too. And where is the old altar? Is that broken, too? And is that a
+superstition, too? What a number there must have been! And the holy
+water, too, I see. But that looks a very nice table up there you have
+instead. Ah! And I see you read the new prayers from a new desk outside
+the screen, and not from the priest's stall. Was that a superstition too?
+And the mass vestments? Has your wife had any of them made up to be
+useful? The stoles are no good, I fear; but you could make charming
+stomachers out of the chasubles."
+
+They were walking slowly up the centre aisle now. Mr. Dent had to explain
+that the vestments had been burnt on the green.
+
+"Ah! yes; I see," she said, "and do you wear a surplice, or do you not
+like them? I see the chancel roof is all broken--were there angels there
+once? I suppose so. But how strange to break them all! Unless they are
+superstitions, too? I thought Protestants believed in them; but I see I
+was wrong. What _do_ you believe in, Mr. Dent?" she asked, turning large,
+bright, perplexed eyes upon him for a moment: but she gave him no time
+to answer.
+
+"Ah!" she cried suddenly, and her voice rang with pain, "there is the
+altar-stone." And she went down on her knees at the chancel entrance,
+bending down, it seemed, in an agony of devout sorrow and shame; and
+kissed with a gentle, lingering reverence the great slab with its five
+crosses, set in the ground at the destruction of the altar to show there
+was no sanctity attached to it.
+
+She knelt there a moment or two, her lips moving, and her black eyes cast
+up at the great east window, cracked and flawed with stones and poles.
+The Puritan boy and girl looked at her with astonishment; they had not
+seen this side of her before.
+
+When she rose from her knees, her eyes seemed bright with tears, and her
+voice was tender.
+
+"Forgive me, Mr. Dent," she said, with a kind of pathetic dignity,
+putting out a slender be-ringed hand to him, "but--but you know--for I
+think perhaps you have some sympathy for us poor Catholics--you know what
+all this means to me."
+
+She went up into the chancel and looked about her in silence.
+
+"This was the piscina, Mistress Corbet," said the Rector.
+
+She nodded her head regretfully, as at some relic of a dead friend; but
+said nothing. They came out again presently, and turned through the old
+iron gates into what had been the Maxwell chapel. The centre was occupied
+by an altar-tomb with Sir Nicholas' parents lying in black stone upon it.
+Old Sir James held his right gauntlet in his left hand, and with his
+right hand held the right hand of his wife, which was crossed over to
+meet it; and the two steady faces gazed upon the disfigured roof. The
+altar, where a weekly requiem had been said for them, was gone, and the
+footpace and piscina alone showed where it had stood.
+
+"This was a chantry, of course?" said Mistress Corbet.
+
+The Rector confessed that it had been so.
+
+"Ah!" she said mournfully, "the altar is cast out and the priest gone;
+but--but--forgive me, sir, the money is here still? But then," she added,
+"I suppose the money is not a superstition."
+
+When they reached the west entrance again she turned and looked up the
+aisle again.
+
+"And the Rood!" she said. "Even Christ crucified is gone. Then, in God's
+name what is left?" And her eyes turned fiercely for a moment on the
+Rector.
+
+"At least courtesy and Christian kindness is left, madam," he said
+sternly.
+
+She dropped her eyes and went out; and Isabel and Anthony followed,
+startled and ashamed. But Mary had recovered herself as she came on to
+the head of the stone stairs, beside which the stump of the churchyard
+cross stood; standing there was the same tall, slender woman whose back
+they had seen through the window, and who now stood eyeing Mary with
+half-dropped lids. Her face was very white, with hard lines from nose to
+mouth, and thin, tightly compressed lips. Mary swept her with one look,
+and then passed on and down the steps, followed by Isabel and Anthony, as
+the Rector came out, locking the church door again behind him.
+
+As they went up the green, a shrill thin voice began to scold from over
+the churchyard wall, and they heard the lower, determined voice of the
+minister answering.
+
+"They are at it again," said Anthony, once more.
+
+"And what do you mean by that, Master Anthony?" said Mistress Corbet, who
+seemed herself again now.
+
+"She is just a scold," said the lad, "the village-folk hate her."
+
+"You seem not to love her," said Mary, smiling.
+
+"Oh! Mistress Corbet, do you know what she said--" and then he broke off,
+crimson-faced.
+
+"She is no friend to Catholics, I suppose," said Mary, seeming to notice
+nothing.
+
+"She is always making mischief," he went on eagerly. "The Rector would be
+well enough but for her. He is a good fellow, really."
+
+"There, there," said Mary, "and you think me a scold, too, I daresay.
+Well, you know I cannot bear to see these old churches--well, perhaps I
+was--" and then she broke off again, and was silent.
+
+The brother and sister presently turned back to the Dower House; and Mary
+went on, and through the Hall straight into the Italian garden where
+Mistress Margaret was sitting alone at her embroidery.
+
+"My sister has been called away by the housekeeper," she explained, "but
+she will be back presently."
+
+Mary sat down and took up the little tawny book that lay by Lady
+Maxwell's chair, and began to turn it over idly while she talked. The old
+lady by her seemed to invite confidences.
+
+"I have been to see the church," said Mary. "The Rector showed it to me.
+What a beautiful place it must have been."
+
+"Ah!" said Mistress Margaret "I only came to live here a few years ago;
+so I have never known or loved it like my sister or her husband. They can
+hardly bear to enter it now. You know that Sir Nicholas' father and
+grandfather are buried in the Maxwell chapel; and it was his father who
+gave the furniture of the sanctuary, and the images of Our Lady and Saint
+Christopher that they burned on the green."
+
+"It is terrible," said Mary, a little absently, as she turned the pages
+of the book.
+
+Mistress Margaret looked up.
+
+"Ah! you have one of my books there," she said. "It is a little
+collection I made."
+
+Miss Corbet turned to the beginning, but only found a seal with an
+inscription.
+
+"But this belonged to a nunnery," she said.
+
+"Yes," said Mistress Margaret, tranquilly, "and I am a nun."
+
+Mary looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"But, but," she began.
+
+"Yes, Mistress Corbet; we were dispersed in '38; some entered the other
+nunneries; and some went to France; but, at last, under circumstances
+that I need not trouble you with, I came here under spiritual direction,
+and have observed my obligations ever since."
+
+"And have you always said your offices?" Mary asked astonished.
+
+"Yes, my dear; by the mercy of God I have never failed yet. I tell you
+this of course because you are one of us, and because you have a faithful
+heart." Mistress Margaret lifted her great eyes and looked at Mary
+tenderly and penetratingly.
+
+"And this is one of your books?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, my dear. I was allowed at least to take it away with me. My sister
+here is very fond of it."
+
+Mary opened it again, and began to turn the pages.
+
+"Is it all in your handwriting, Mistress Torridon?"
+
+"Yes, my child; I continued writing in it ever since I first entered
+religion in 1534; so you see the handwriting changes a little," and she
+smiled to herself.
+
+"Oh, but this is charming," cried Mary, intent on the book.
+
+"Read it, my dear, aloud."
+
+Mary read:
+
+    "Let me not rest, O Lord, nor have quiet,
+      But fill my soul with spiritual travail,
+    To sing and say, O mercy, Jesu sweet;
+      Thou my protection art in the battail.
+      Set thou aside all other apparail;
+        Let me in thee feel all my affiance.
+    Treasure of treasures, thou dost most avail.
+        Grant ere I die shrift, pardon, repentance."
+
+Her voice trembled a little and ceased.
+
+"That is from some verses of Dan John Lydgate, I think," said Mistress
+Margaret.
+
+"Here is another," said Mary in a moment or two.
+
+    "Jesu, at thy will, I pray that I may be,
+    All my heart fulfil with perfect love to thee:
+    That I have done ill, Jesu forgive thou me:
+    And suffer me never to spill, Jesu for thy pity."
+
+"The nuns of Hampole gave me that," said Mistress Margaret. "It is by
+Richard Rolle, the hermit."
+
+"Tell me a little," said Mary Corbet, suddenly laying down the book,
+"about the nunnery."
+
+"Oh, my dear, that is too much to ask; but how happy we were. All was so
+still; it used to seem sometimes as if earth were just a dream; and that
+we walked in Paradise. Sometimes in the Greater Silence, when we had
+spoken no word nor heard one except in God's praise, it used to seem that
+if we could but be silent a little longer, and a little more deeply, in
+our hearts as well, we should hear them talking in heaven, and the harps;
+and the Saviour's soft footsteps. But it was not always like that."
+
+"You mean," said Mary softly, "that, that--" and she stopped.
+
+"Oh, it was hard sometimes; but not often. God is so good. But He used
+to allow such trouble and darkness and noise to be in our hearts
+sometimes--at least in mine. But then of course I was always very wicked.
+But sitting in the nymph-hay sometimes on a day like this, as we were
+allowed to do; with just tall thin trees like poplars and cypresses round
+us: and the stream running through the long grass; and the birds, and the
+soft sky and the little breeze; and then peace in our hearts; and the
+love of the Saviour round us--it seemed, it seemed as if God had nothing
+more to give; or, I should say, as if our hearts had no more space."
+
+Mary was strangely subdued and quiet. Her little restless movements were
+still for once; and her quick, vivacious face was tranquil and a little
+awed.
+
+"Oh, Mistress Margaret, I love to hear you talk like that. Tell me more."
+
+"Well, my dear, we thought too much about ourselves, I think; and too
+little about God and His poor children who were not so happy as we were;
+so then the troubles began; and they got nearer and nearer; and at last
+the Visitor came. He--he was my brother, my dear, which made it harder;
+but he made a good end. I will tell you his story another time. He took
+away our great crucifix and our jewelled cope that old Mr. Wickham used
+to wear on the Great Festivals; and left us. He turned me out, too; and
+another who asked to go, but I went back for a while. And then, my dear,
+although we offered everything; our cows and our orchard and our hens,
+and all we had, you know how it ended; and one morning in May old Mr.
+Wickham said mass for us quite early, before the sun was risen, for the
+last time; and,--and he cried, my dear, at the elevation; and--and we
+were all crying too I think, and we all received communion together for
+the last time--and,--and, then we all went away, leaving just old Dame
+Agnes to keep the house until the Commissioner came. And oh, my dear, I
+don't think the house ever looked so dear as it did that morning, just as
+the sun rose over the roofs, and we were passing out through the meadow
+door where we had sat so often, to where the horses were waiting to take
+us away."
+
+Miss Corbet's own eyes were full of tears as the old lady finished: and
+she put out her white slender hand, which Mistress Torridon took and
+stroked for a moment.
+
+"Well," she said, "I haven't talked like this for a long while; but I
+knew you would understand. My dear, I have watched you while you have
+been here this time."
+
+Mary Corbet smiled a little uneasily.
+
+"And you have found me out?" she answered smiling.
+
+"No, no; but I think our Saviour has found you out--or at least He is
+drawing very near."
+
+A slight discomfort made itself felt in Mary's heart. This nun then was
+like all the rest, always trying to turn the whole world into monks and
+nuns by hints and pretended intuitions into the unseen.
+
+"And you think I should be a nun too?" she asked, with just a shade of
+coolness in her tone.
+
+"I should suppose not," said Mistress Margaret, tranquilly. "You do not
+seem to have a vocation for that, but I should think that our Lord means
+you to serve Him where you are. Who knows what you may not accomplish?"
+
+This was a little disconcerting to Mary Corbet; it was not at all what
+she had expected. She did not know what to say; and took up the leather
+book again and began to turn over the pages. Mistress Margaret went on
+serenely with her embroidery, which she had neglected during the last
+sentence or two; and there was silence.
+
+"Tell me a little more about the nunnery," said Mary in a minute or two,
+leaning back in her chair, with the book on her knees.
+
+"Well, my dear, I scarcely know what to say. It is all far off now like a
+childhood. We talked very little; not at all until recreation; except by
+signs, and we used to spend a good deal of our time in embroidery. That
+is where I learnt this," and she held out her work to Mary for a moment.
+It was an exquisite piece of needlework, representing a stag running
+open-mouthed through thickets of green twining branches that wrapped
+themselves about his horns and feet. Mary had never seen anything quite
+like it before.
+
+"What does it mean?" she asked, looking at it curiously.
+
+"_Quemadmodum cervus_,"--began Mistress Margaret; "as the hart brayeth
+after the waterbrooks,"--and she took the embroidery and began to go on
+with it.--"It is the soul, you see, desiring and fleeing to God, while
+the things of the world hold her back. Well, you see, it is difficult to
+talk about it; for it is the inner life that is the real history of a
+convent; the outer things are all plain and simple like all else."
+
+"Well," said Mary, "is it really true that you were happy?"
+
+The old lady stopped working a moment and looked up at her.
+
+"My dear, there is no happiness in the world like it," she said simply.
+"I dream sometimes that we are all back there together, and I wake crying
+for joy. The other night I dreamed that we were all in the chapel again,
+and that it was a spring morning, with the dawn beginning to show the
+painted windows, and that all the tapers were burning; and that mass was
+beginning. Not one stall was empty; not even old Dame Gertrude, who died
+when I was a novice, was lacking, and Mr. Wickham made us a sermon after
+the creed, and showed us the crucifix back in its place again; and told
+us that we were all good children, and that Our Lord had only sent us
+away to see if we would be patient; and that He was now pleased with us,
+and had let us come home again; and that we should never have to go away
+again; not even when we died; and then I understood that we were in
+heaven, and that it was all over; and I burst out into tears in my stall
+for happiness; and then I awoke and found myself in bed; but my cheeks
+were really wet.--Well, well, perhaps, by the mercy of God it may all
+come true some day."
+
+She spoke so simply that Mary Corbet was amazed; she had always fancied
+that the Religious Life was a bitter struggle, worth, indeed, living for
+those who could bear it, for the sake of the eternal reward; but it had
+scarcely even occurred to her that it was so full of joy in itself; and
+she looked up under her brows at the old lady, whose needle had stopped
+for a moment.
+
+A moment after and Lady Maxwell appeared coming down the steps into the
+garden; and at her side Anthony, who was dressed ready for riding.
+
+Old Mistress Margaret had, as she said, been watching Mary Corbet those
+last few weeks; and had determined to speak to her plainly. Her instinct
+had told her that beneath this flippancy and glitter there was something
+that would respond; and she was anxious to leave nothing undone by which
+Mary might be awakened to the inner world that was in such danger of
+extinction in her soul. It cost the old lady a great effort to break
+through her ordinary reserve, but she judged that Mary could only be
+reached on her human side, and that there were not many of her friends
+whose human sympathy would draw her in the right direction. It is
+strange, sometimes, to find that some silent old lady has a power for
+sounding human character, which far shrewder persons lack; and this quiet
+old nun, so ignorant, one would have said, of the world and of the
+motives from which ordinary people act, had managed somehow to touch
+springs in this girl's heart that had never been reached before.
+
+And now as Miss Corbet and Lady Maxwell talked, and Anthony lolled
+embarrassed beside them, attempting now and then to join in the
+conversation, Mistress Margaret, as she sat a little apart and worked
+away at the panting stag dreamed away, smiling quietly to herself, of all
+the old scenes that her own conversation had called up into clearer
+consciousness; of the pleasant little meadow of the Sussex priory, with
+the old apple-trees and the straight box-lined path called the nun's walk
+from time immemorial; all lighted with the pleasant afternoon glow, as it
+streamed from the west, throwing the slender poplar shadows across the
+grass; and of the quiet chatter of the brook as it over-flowed from the
+fish ponds at the end of the field and ran through the meadows beyond the
+hedge. The cooing of the pigeons as they sunned themselves round the dial
+in the centre of this Italian garden and on the roof of the hall helped
+on her reminiscences, for there had been a dovecote at the priory. Where
+were all her sisters now, those who had sat with her in the same sombre
+habits in the garth, with the same sunshine in their hearts? Some she
+knew, and thanked God for it, were safe in glory; others were old like
+her, but still safe in Holy Religion in France where as yet there was
+peace and sanctuary for the servants of the Most High; one or two--and
+for these she lifted up her heart in petition as she sat--one or two had
+gone back to the world, relinquished everything, and died to grace. Then
+the old faces one by one passed before her; old Dame Agnes with her
+mumbling lips and her rosy cheeks like wrinkled apples, looking so fresh
+and wholesome in the white linen about her face; and then the others one
+by one--that white-faced, large-eyed sister who had shown such passionate
+devotion at first that they all thought that God was going to raise up a
+saint amongst them--ah! God help her--she had sunk back at the
+dissolution, from those heights of sanctity towards whose summits she had
+set her face, down into the muddy torrent of the world that went roaring
+down to the abyss--and who was responsible? There was Dame Avice, the
+Sacristan, with her businesslike movements going about the garden,
+gathering flowers for the altar, with her queer pursed lips as she
+arranged them in her hands with her head a little on one side; how
+annoying she used to be sometimes; but how good and tender at heart--God
+rest her soul! And there was Mr. Wickham, the old priest who had been
+their chaplain for so many years, and who lived in the village parsonage,
+waited upon by Tom Downe, that served at the altar too--he who had got
+the horses ready when the nuns had to go at last on that far-off May
+morning, and had stood there, holding the bridles and trying to hide his
+wet face behind the horses; where was Tom now? And Mr. Wickham too--he
+had gone to France with some of the nuns; but he had never settled down
+there--he couldn't bear the French ways--and besides he had left his
+heart behind him buried in the little Sussex priory among the meadows.
+
+And so the old lady sat, musing; while the light and shadow of
+reminiscence moved across her face; and her lips quivered or her eyes
+wrinkled up with humour, at the thought of all those old folks with their
+faces and their movements and their ways of doing and speaking. Ah! well,
+please God, some day her dream would really come true; and they shall all
+be gathered again from France and England with their broken hearts mended
+and their tears wiped away, and Mr. Wickham himself shall minister to
+them and make them sermons, and Tom Downe too shall be there to minister
+to him--all in one of the many mansions of which the Saviour spoke.
+
+And so she heard nothing of the talk of the others; though her sister
+looked at her tenderly once or twice; and Mary Corbet chattered and
+twitched her buckles in the sun, and Anthony sat embarrassed in the midst
+of Paradise; and she knew nothing of where she was nor of what was
+happening round her, until Mary Corbet said that it was time for the
+horses to be round, and that she must go and get ready and not keep Mr.
+James and Mr. Anthony waiting. Then, as she and Anthony went towards the
+house, the old lady looked up from the braying stag and found herself
+alone with her sister.
+
+Mistress Margaret waited until the other two disappeared up the steps,
+and then spoke.
+
+"I have told her all, sister," she said, "she can be trusted."
+
+Lady Maxwell nodded gently.
+
+"She has a good heart," went on the other, "and our Lord no doubt will
+find some work for her to do at Court."
+
+There was silence again; broken by the gentle little sound of the silk
+being drawn through the stuff.
+
+"You know best, Margaret," said Lady Maxwell.
+
+Even as she spoke there was the sound of a door thrown violently open and
+old Sir Nicholas appeared on the top of the steps, hatless and plainly in
+a state of great agitation; beside him stood a courier, covered with the
+dust of the white roads, and his face crimson with hard riding. Sir
+Nicholas stood there as if dazed, and Lady Maxwell sprang up quickly to
+go to him. But a moment after there appeared behind him a little group,
+his son James, Miss Corbet and a servant or two; while Anthony hung back;
+and Mr. James came up quickly, and took his father by the arm; and
+together the little company came down the steps into the still and sunny
+garden.
+
+"What is it?" cried Lady Maxwell, trying to keep her voice under control;
+while Mistress Margaret laid her work quietly down, and stood up too.
+
+"Tell my lady," said Sir Nicholas to the courier, who stood a little
+apart.
+
+"If you please, my lady," he said, as if repeating a lesson, "a Bull of
+the Holy Father has been found nailed to the door of the Bishop of
+London's palace, deposing Elizabeth and releasing all her subjects from
+their allegiance."
+
+Lady Maxwell went to her husband and took him by the arm gently.
+
+"What does it mean, sweetheart?" she asked.
+
+"It means that Catholics must choose between their sovereign and their
+God."
+
+"God have mercy," said a servant behind.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VI
+
+                            MR. STEWART
+
+
+Sir Nicholas' exclamatory sentence was no exaggeration. That terrible
+choice of which he spoke, with his old eyes shining with the desire to
+make it, did not indeed come so immediately as he anticipated; but it
+came none the less. From every point of view the Bull was unfortunate,
+though it may have been a necessity; for it marked the declaration of war
+between England and the Catholic Church. A gentle appeal had been tried
+before; Elizabeth, who, it must be remembered had been crowned during
+mass with Catholic ceremonial, and had received the Blessed Sacrament,
+had been entreated by the Pope as his "dear daughter in Christ" to return
+to the Fold; and now there seemed to him no possibility left but this
+ultimatum.
+
+It is indeed difficult to see what else, from his point of view, he could
+have done. To continue to pretend that Elizabeth was his "dear daughter"
+would have discredited his fatherly authority in the eyes of the whole
+Christian world. He had patiently made an advance towards his wayward
+child; and she had repudiated and scorned him. Nothing was left but to
+recognise and treat her as an enemy of the Faith, an usurper of spiritual
+prerogatives, and an apostate spoiler of churches; to do this might
+certainly bring trouble upon others of his less distinguished but more
+obedient children, who were in her power; but to pretend that the
+suffering thus brought down upon Catholics was unnecessary, and that the
+Pope alone was responsible for their persecution, is to be blind to the
+fact that Elizabeth had already openly defied and repudiated his
+authority, and had begun to do her utmost to coax and compel his children
+to be disobedient to their father.
+
+The shock of the Bull to Elizabeth was considerable; she had not expected
+this extreme measure; and it was commonly reported too that France and
+Spain were likely now to unite on a religious basis against England; and
+that at least one of these Powers had sanctioned the issue of the Bull.
+This of course helped greatly to complicate further the already
+complicated political position. Steps were taken immediately to
+strengthen England's position against Scotland with whom it was now, more
+than ever, to be feared that France would co-operate; and the Channel
+Fleet was reinforced under Lord Clinton, and placed with respect to
+France in what was almost a state of war, while it was already in an
+informal state of war with Spain. There was fierce confusion in the Privy
+Council. Elizabeth, who at once began to vacillate under the combined
+threats of La Mothe, the French ambassador, and the arguments of the
+friend of Catholics, Lord Arundel, was counter-threatened with ruin by
+Lord Keeper Bacon unless she would throw in her lot finally with the
+Protestants and continue her hostility and resistance to the Catholic
+Scotch party. But in spite of Bacon Elizabeth's heart failed her, and if
+it had not been for the rashness of Mary Stuart's friends, Lord
+Southampton and the Bishop of Ross, the Queen might have been induced to
+substitute conciliation for severity towards Mary and the Catholic party
+generally. Southampton was arrested, and again there followed the further
+encouragement of the Protestant camp by the rising fortunes of the
+Huguenots and the temporary reverses to French Catholicism; so the
+pendulum swung this way and that. Elizabeth's policy changed almost from
+day to day. She was tormented with temporal fears of a continental
+crusade against her, and by the spiritual terrors of the Pope's Bull; and
+her unfathomable fickleness was the despair of her servants.
+
+Meanwhile in the religious world a furious paper war broke out; and
+volleys from both sides followed the solemn roar and crash of _Regnans
+in Excelsis_.
+
+But while the war of words went on, and the theological assaults and
+charges were given and received, repulsed or avoided, something practical
+must, it was felt, be done immediately; and search was made high and low
+for other copies of the Bull. The lawyers in the previous year had fallen
+under suspicion of religious unsoundness; judges could not be trusted to
+convict Catholics accused of their religion; and counsel was unwilling to
+prosecute them; therefore the first inquisition was made in the Inns of
+Court; and almost immediately a copy of the Bull was found in the room of
+a student in Lincoln's Inn, who upon the rack in the Tower confessed that
+he had received it from one John Felton, a Catholic gentleman who lived
+upon his property in Southwark. Upon Felton's arrest (for he had not
+attempted to escape) he confessed immediately, without pressure, that he
+had affixed the Bull to the Bishop of London's gate; but although he was
+racked repeatedly he would not incriminate a single person besides
+himself; but at his trial would only assert with a joyous confidence that
+he was not alone; and that twenty-five peers, six hundred gentlemen, and
+thirty thousand commoners were ready to die in the Holy Father's quarrel.
+He behaved with astonishing gallantry throughout, and after his
+condemnation had been pronounced upon the fourth of August at the
+Guildhall, on the charge of high-treason, he sent a diamond ring from his
+own finger, of the value of L400, to the Queen to show that he bore her
+no personal ill-will. He had been always a steadfast Catholic; his wife
+had been maid of honour to Mary and a friend of Elizabeth's. On August
+the eighth he suffered the abominable punishment prescribed; he was drawn
+on a hurdle to the gate of the Bishop's palace in S. Paul's Churchyard,
+where he had affixed the Bull, hanged upon a new gallows, cut down before
+he was unconscious, disembowelled and quartered. His name has since been
+placed on the roll of the Blessed by the Apostolic See in whose quarrel
+he so cheerfully laid down his life.
+
+News of these and such events continued of course to be eagerly sought
+after by the Papists all over the kingdom; and the Maxwells down at Great
+Keynes kept in as close touch with the heart of affairs as almost any
+private persons in the kingdom out of town. Sir Nicholas was one of those
+fiery natures to whom opposition or pressure is as oil to flame. He began
+at once to organise his forces and prepare for the struggle that was
+bound to come. He established first a kind of private post to London and
+to other Catholic houses round; for purposes however of defence rather
+than offence, so that if any steps were threatened, he and his friends
+might be aware of the danger in time. There was great sorrow at the news
+of John Felton's death; and mass was said for his soul almost immediately
+in the little oratory at Maxwell Court by one of the concealed priests
+who went chiefly between Hampshire and Sussex ministering to the
+Catholics of those districts. Mistress Margaret spent longer than ever at
+her prayers; Lady Maxwell had all she could do to keep her husband from
+some furious act of fanatical retaliation for John Felton's death--some
+useless provocation of the authorities; the children at the Dower House
+began to come to the Hall less often, not because they were less
+welcomed, but because there was a constraint in the air. All seemed
+preoccupied; conversations ceased abruptly on their entrance, and fits of
+abstraction would fall from time to time upon their kindly hosts. In the
+meanwhile, too, the preparations for James Maxwell's departure, which had
+already begun to show themselves, were now pushed forward rapidly; and
+one morning in the late summer, when Isabel came up to the Hall, she
+found that Lady Maxwell was confined to her room and could not be seen
+that day; she caught a glimpse of Sir Nicholas' face as he quickly
+crossed the entrance hall, that made her draw back from daring to intrude
+on such grief; and on inquiry found that Mr. James had ridden away that
+morning, and that the servants did not know when to expect him back, nor
+what was his destination.
+
+In other ways also at this time did Sir Nicholas actively help on his
+party. Great Keynes was in a convenient position and circumstances for
+agents who came across from the Continent. It was sufficiently near
+London, yet not so near to the highroad or to London itself as to make
+disturbance probable; and its very quietness under the spiritual care of
+a moderate minister like Mr. Dent, and its serenity, owing to the secret
+sympathy of many of the villagers and neighbours, as well as from the
+personal friendship between Sir Nicholas and the master of the Dower
+House--an undoubted Protestant--all these circumstances combined to make
+Maxwell Hall a favourite halting-place for priests and agents from the
+Continent. Strangers on horseback or in carriages, and sometimes even on
+foot, would arrive there after nightfall, and leave in a day or two for
+London. Its nearness to London enabled them to enter the city at any hour
+they thought best after ten or eleven in the forenoon. They came on very
+various businesses; some priests even stayed there and made the Hall a
+centre for their spiritual ministrations for miles round; others came
+with despatches from abroad, some of which were even addressed to great
+personages at Court and at the Embassies where much was being done by the
+Ambassadors at this time to aid their comrades in the Faith, and to other
+leading Catholics; and others again came with pamphlets printed abroad
+for distribution in England, some of them indeed seditious, but many of
+them purely controversial and hortatory, and with other devotional
+articles and books such as it was difficult to obtain in England, and
+might not be exposed for public sale in booksellers' shops: Agnus Deis,
+beads, hallowed incense and crosses were being sent in large numbers from
+abroad, and were eagerly sought after by the Papists in all directions.
+It was remarkable that while threatening clouds appeared to be gathering
+on all sides over the Catholic cause, yet the deepening peril was
+accompanied by a great outburst of religious zeal. It was reported to the
+Archbishop that "massing" was greatly on the increase in Kent; and was
+attributed, singularly enough, to the Northern Rebellion, which had ended
+in disaster for the Papists; but the very fact that such a movement could
+take place at all probably heartened many secret sympathisers, who had
+hitherto considered themselves almost alone in a heretic population.
+
+Sir Nicholas came in one day to dinner in a state of great fury. One of
+his couriers had just arrived with news from London; and the old man came
+in fuming and resentful.
+
+"What hypocrisy!" he cried out to Lady Maxwell and Mistress Margaret, who
+were seated at table. "Not content with persecuting Catholics, they will
+not even allow us to say we are persecuted for the faith. Here is the
+Lord Keeper declaring in the Star Chamber that no man is to be persecuted
+for his private faith, but only for his public acts, and that the Queen's
+Grace desires nothing so little as to meddle with any man's conscience.
+Then I suppose they would say that hearing mass was a public act and
+therefore unlawful; but then how if a man's private faith bids him to
+hear mass? Is not that meddling with his private conscience to forbid him
+to go to mass? What folly is this? And yet my Lord Keeper and her Grace
+are no fools! Then are they worse than fools?"
+
+Lady Maxwell tried to quiet the old man, for the servants were not out of
+the room; and it was terribly rash to speak like that before them; but he
+would not be still nor sit down, but raged up and down before the hearth,
+growling and breaking out now and again. What especially he could not get
+off his mind was that this was the Old Religion that was prescribed. That
+England for generations had held the Faith, and that then the Faith and
+all that it involved had been declared unlawful, was to him iniquity
+unfathomable. He could well understand some new upstart sect being
+persecuted, but not the old Religion. He kept on returning to this.
+
+"Have they so far forgotten the Old Faith as to think it can be held in a
+man's private conscience without appearing in his life, like their
+miserable damnable new fangled Justification by faith without works? Or
+that a man can believe in the blessed sacrament of the altar and yet not
+desire to receive it; or in penance and yet not be absolved; or in Peter
+and yet not say so, nor be reconciled. You may believe, say they, of
+their clemency, what you like; be justified by that; that is enough!
+Bah!"
+
+However mere declaiming against the Government was barren work, and Sir
+Nicholas soon saw that; and instead, threw himself with more vigour than
+ever into entertaining and forwarding the foreign emissaries.
+
+Mary Corbet had returned to London by the middle of July; and Hubert was
+not yet returned; so Sir Nicholas and the two ladies had the Hall to
+themselves. Now it must be confessed that the old man had neither the
+nature nor the training for the _role_ of a conspirator, even of the
+mildest description. He was so exceedingly impulsive, unsuspicious and
+passionate that it would have been the height of folly to entrust him
+with any weighty secret, if it was possible to dispense with him; but the
+Catholics over the water needed stationary agents so grievously; and Sir
+Nicholas' name commanded such respect, and his house such conveniences,
+that they overlooked the risk involved in making him their confidant,
+again and again; besides it need not be said that his honour and fidelity
+was beyond reproach; and those qualities after all balance favourably
+against a good deal of shrewdness and discretion. He, of course, was
+serenely unable to distinguish between sedition and religion; and
+entertained political meddlers and ordinary priests with an equal
+enthusiasm. It was pathetic to Lady Maxwell to see her simple old husband
+shuffling away his papers, and puzzling over cyphers and perpetually
+leaving the key of them lying about, and betraying again and again when
+he least intended it, by his mysterious becks and nods and glances and
+oracular sayings, that some scheme was afoot. She could have helped him
+considerably if he had allowed her; but he had an idea that the
+capacities of ladies in general went no further than their harps, their
+embroidery and their devotions; and besides, he was chivalrously
+unwilling that his wife should be in any way privy to business that
+involved such risks as this.
+
+One sunny morning in August he came into her room early just as she was
+finishing her prayers, and announced the arrival of an emissary from
+abroad.
+
+"Sweetheart," he said, "will you prepare the east chamber for a young man
+whom we will call Mr. Stewart, if you please, who will arrive to-night.
+He hopes to be with us until after dusk to-morrow when he will leave; and
+I shall be obliged if you will---- No, no, my dear. I will order the
+horses myself."
+
+The old man then bustled off to the stableyard and ordered a saddle-horse
+to be taken at once to Cuckfield, accompanied by a groom on another
+horse. These were to arrive at the inn and await orders from a stranger
+"whom you will call Mr. Stewart, if you please." Mr. Stewart was to
+change horses there, and ride on to Maxwell Hall, and Sir Nicholas
+further ordered the same two horses and the same groom to be ready the
+following evening at about nine o'clock, and to be at "Mr. Stewart's"
+orders again as before.
+
+This behaviour of Sir Nicholas' was of course most culpably indiscreet. A
+child could not but have suspected something, and the grooms, who were of
+course Catholics, winked merrily at one another when the conspirator's
+back was turned, and he had hastened in a transport of zeal and
+preoccupation back again to the house to interrupt his wife in her
+preparations for the guest.
+
+That evening "Mr. Stewart" arrived according to arrangements. He was a
+slim red-haired man, not above thirty years of age, the kind of man his
+enemies would call foxy, with a very courteous and deliberate manner, and
+he spoke with a slight Scotch accent. He had the air of doing everything
+on purpose. He let his riding-whip fall as he greeted Lady Maxwell in the
+entrance hall; but picked it up with such a dignified grace that you
+would have sworn he had let it fall for some wise reason of his own. He
+had a couple of saddle-bags with him, which he did not let out of his
+sight for a moment; even keeping his eye upon them as he met the ladies
+and saluted them. They were carried up to the east chamber directly,
+their owner following; where supper had been prepared. There was no real
+reason, since he arrived with such publicity, why he should not have
+supped downstairs, but Sir Nicholas had been peremptory. It was by his
+directions also that the arrival had been accomplished in the manner it
+had.
+
+After he had supped, Sir Nicholas receiving the dishes from the servants'
+hands at the door of the room with the same air of secrecy and despatch,
+his host suggested that he should come to Lady Maxwell's drawing-room, as
+the ladies were anxious to see him. Mr. Stewart asked leave to bring a
+little valise with him that had travelled in one of the bags, and then
+followed his host who preceded him with a shaded light along the gallery.
+
+When he entered he bowed again profoundly, with a slightly French air, to
+the ladies and to the image over the fire; and then seated himself, and
+asked leave to open his valise. He did so with their permission, and
+displayed to them the numerous devotional articles and books that it
+contained. The ladies and Sir Nicholas were delighted, and set aside at
+once some new books of devotion, and then they fell to talk. The
+Netherlands, from which Mr. Stewart had arrived two days before, on the
+east coast, were full at this time of Catholic refugees, under the Duke
+of Alva's protection. Here they had been living, some of them even from
+Elizabeth's accession, and Sir Nicholas and his ladies had many inquiries
+to make about their acquaintances, many of which Mr. Stewart was able to
+satisfy, for, from his conversation he was plainly one in the confidence
+of Catholics both at home and abroad. And so the evening passed away
+quietly. It was thought better by Sir Nicholas that Mr. Stewart should
+not be present at the evening devotions that he always conducted for the
+household in the dining-hall, unless indeed a priest were present to take
+his place; so Mr. Stewart was again conducted with the same secrecy to
+the East Chamber; and Sir Nicholas promised at his request to look in on
+him again after prayers. When prayers were over, Sir Nicholas went up to
+his guest's room, and found him awaiting him in a state of evident
+excitement, very unlike the quiet vivacity and good humour he had shown
+when with the ladies.
+
+"Sir Nicholas," he said, standing up, as his host came in, "I have not
+told you all my news." And when they were both seated he proceeded:
+
+"You spoke a few minutes ago, Sir Nicholas, of Dr. Storey; he has been
+caught."
+
+The old man exclaimed with dismay. Mr. Stewart went on:
+
+"When I left Antwerp, Sir Nicholas, Dr. Storey was in the town. I saw him
+myself in the street by the Cathedral only a few hours before I embarked.
+He is very old, you know, and lame, worn out with good works, and he was
+hobbling down the street on the arm of a young man. When I arrived at
+Yarmouth I went out into the streets about a little business I had with a
+bookseller, before taking horse. I heard a great commotion down near the
+docks, at the entrance of Bridge Street; and hastened down there; and
+there I saw pursuivants and seamen and officers all gathered about a
+carriage, and keeping back the crowd that was pressing and crying out to
+know who the man was; and presently the carriage drove by me, scattering
+the crowd, and I could see within; and there sat old Dr. Storey, very
+white and ill-looking, but steady and cheerful, whom I had seen the very
+day before in Antwerp. Now this is very grievous for Dr. Storey; and I
+pray God to deliver him; but surely the Duke and the King of Spain must
+move now. They cannot leave him in Cecil's hands; and then, Sir Nicholas,
+we must all be ready, for who knows what may happen."
+
+Sir Nicholas was greatly moved. There was one of the perplexities which
+so much harassed all the Papists at this time. It seemed certain that Mr.
+Stewart's prediction must be fulfilled. Dr. Storey was a naturalised
+subject of King Philip and in the employment of Alva, and he had been
+carried off forcibly by the English Government. It afterwards came out
+how it had been done. He had been lured away from Antwerp and enticed on
+board a trader at Bergen-op-Zoom, by Cecil's agents with the help of a
+traitor named Parker, on pretext of finding heretical books there
+arriving from England; and as soon as he had set foot on deck he was
+hurried below and carried straight off to Yarmouth. Here then was Sir
+Nicholas' perplexity. To welcome Spain when she intervened and to work
+actively for her, was treason against his country; to act against Spain
+was to delay the re-establishment of the Religion--something that
+appeared to him very like treason against his faith. Was the dreadful
+choice between his sovereign and his God, he wondered as he paced up and
+down and questioned Mr. Stewart, even now imminent?
+
+The whole affair, too, was so formidable and so mysterious that the
+hearts of these Catholics and of others in England when they heard the
+tale began to fail them. Had the Government then so long an arm and so
+keen an eye? And if it was able to hale a man from the shadow of the
+Cathedral at Antwerp and the protection of the Duke of Alva into the
+hands of pursuivants at Yarmouth within the space of a few hours, who
+then was safe?
+
+And so the two sat late that night in the East Chamber; and laid schemes
+and discussed movements and probabilities and the like, until the dawn
+began to glimmer through the cracks of the shutters and the birds to
+chirp in the eaves; and Sir Nicholas at last carried to bed with him an
+anxious and a heavy heart. Mr. Stewart, however, did not seem so greatly
+disturbed; possibly because on the one side he had not others dearer to
+him than his own life involved in these complex issues: and partly
+because he at any rate has not the weight of suspense and indecision that
+so drew his host two ways at once, for Mr. Stewart was whole-heartedly
+committed already, and knew well how he would act should the choice
+present itself between Elizabeth and Philip.
+
+The following morning Sir Nicholas still would not allow his guest to
+come downstairs, and insisted that all his meals should be served in the
+East Chamber, while he himself, as before, received the food at the door
+and set it before Mr. Stewart. Mr. Stewart was greatly impressed and
+touched by the kindness of the old man, although not by his capacity for
+conspiracy. He had intended indeed to tell his host far more than he had
+done of the movements of political and religious events, for he could not
+but believe, before his arrival, that a Catholic so prominent and
+influential as Sir Nicholas was becoming by reputation among the refugees
+abroad, was a proper person to be entrusted even with the highest
+secrets; but after a very little conversation with him the night before,
+he had seen how ingenuous the old man was, with his laughable attempts at
+secrecy and his lamentable lack of discretion; and so he had contented
+himself with general information and gossip, and had really told Sir
+Nicholas very little indeed of any importance.
+
+After dinner Sir Nicholas again conducted his guest to the drawing-room,
+where the ladies were ready to receive him. He had obtained Mr. Stewart's
+permission the night before to tell his wife and sister-in-law the news
+about Dr. Storey; and the four sat for several hours together discussing
+the situation. Mr. Stewart was able to tell them too, in greater detail,
+the story of Lord Sussex's punitive raid into Scotland in the preceding
+April. They had heard of course the main outline of the story with the
+kind of embroideries attached that were usual in those days of inaccurate
+reporting; but their guest was a Scotchman himself and had had the
+stories first-hand in some cases from those rendered homeless by the
+raid, who had fled to the Netherlands where he had met them. Briefly the
+raid was undertaken on the pretended plea of an invitation from the
+"King's men" or adherents of the infant James; but in reality to chastise
+Scotland and reduce it to servility. Sussex and Lord Hunsdon in the east,
+Lord Scrope on the west, had harried, burnt, and destroyed in the whole
+countryside about the Borders. Especially had Tiviotdale suffered.
+Altogether it was calculated that Sussex had burned three hundred
+villages and blown up fifty castles, and forty more "strong houses," some
+of these latter, however, being little more than border peels. Mr.
+Stewart's accounts were the more moving in that he spoke in a quiet
+delicate tone, and used little picturesque phrases in his speech.
+
+"Twelve years ago," said Mr. Stewart, "I was at Branxholme myself. It was
+a pleasant house, well furnished and appointed; fortified, too, as all
+need to be in that country, with sheaves of pikes in all the lower rooms,
+and Sir Walter Scott gave me a warm welcome, for I was there on a
+business that pleased him. He showed me the gardens and orchards, all
+green and sweet, like these of yours, Lady Maxwell. And it seemed to me a
+home where a man might be content to spend all his days. Well, my Lord
+Sussex has been a visitor there now; and what he has left of the house
+would not shelter a cow, nor what is left of the pleasant gardens sustain
+her. At least, so one of the Scots told me whom I met in the Netherlands
+in June."
+
+He talked, too, of the extraordinary scenes of romance and chivalry in
+which Mary Queen of Scots moved during her captivity under Lord Scrope's
+care at Bolton Castle in the previous year. He had met in his travels in
+France one of her undistinguished adherents who had managed to get a
+position in the castle during her detention there.
+
+"The country was alive with her worshippers," said Mr. Stewart. "They
+swarmed like bees round a hive. In the night voices would be heard crying
+out to her Grace out of the darkness round the castle; and when the
+guards rode out they would find no man but maybe hear just a laugh or
+two. Her men would lie out at night and watch her window (for she would
+never go to rest till late), and pray towards it as if it were a light
+before the blessed sacrament. When she rode out a-hunting, with her
+guards of course about her, and my Lord Scrope or Sir Francis Knollys
+never far away, a beggar maybe would be sitting out on the road and ask
+an alms; and cry out 'God save your Grace'; but he would be a beggar who
+was accustomed to wear silk next his skin except when he went a-begging.
+Many young gentlemen there were, yes and old ones too, who would thank
+God for a blow or a curse from some foul English trooper for his meat, if
+only he might have a look from the Queen's eyes for his grace before
+meat. Oh! they would plot too, and scheme and lie awake half the night
+spinning their webs, not to catch her Grace indeed, but to get her away
+from that old Spider Scrope; and many's the word and the scrap of paper
+that would go in to her Grace, right under the very noses of my Lord
+Scrope and Sir Francis themselves, as they sat at their chess in the
+Queen's chamber. It's a long game of chess that the two Queens are
+playing; but thank our Lady and the Saints it's not mate yet--not mate
+yet; and the White Queen will win, please God, before the board's
+over-turned."
+
+And he told them, too, of the failure of the Northern Rebellion, and the
+wretchedness of the fugitives.
+
+"They rode over the moors to Liddisdale," he said, "ladies and all, in
+bitter weather, wind and snow, day after day, with stories of Clinton's
+troopers all about them, and scarcely time for bite or sup or sleep. My
+lady Northumberland was so overcome with weariness and sickness that she
+could ride no more at last, and had to be left at John-of-the-Side's
+house, where she had a little chamber where the snow came in at one
+corner, and the rats ran over my lady's face as she lay. My Lords
+Northumberland and Westmoreland were in worse case, and spent their
+Christmas with no roof over them but what they could find out in the
+braes and woods about Harlaw, and no clothes but the foul rags that some
+beggar had thrown away, and no food but a bird or a rabbit that they
+could pick up here and there, or what their friends could get to them now
+and again privately. And then my Lord Northumberland's little daughters
+whom he was forced to leave behind at Topcliff--a sweet Christmas they
+had! Their money and food was soon spent; they could have scarcely a fire
+in that bitter hard season; and God who feeds the ravens alone knows how
+they were sustained; and for entertainment to make the time pass merrily,
+all they had was to see the hanging of their own servants in scores about
+the house, who had served them and their father well; and all their music
+at night was the howling of the wind in those heavily laden
+Christmas-trees, and the noise of the chains in which the men were
+hanged."
+
+Mr. Stewart's narratives were engrossing to the two ladies and Sir
+Nicholas. They had never come so close to the struggles of the Catholics
+in the north before; and although the Northern Rebellion had ended so
+disastrously, yet it was encouraging, although heartbreaking too, to hear
+that delicate women and children were ready gladly to suffer such
+miseries if the religious cause that was so dear to them could be thereby
+helped. Sir Nicholas, as has been said, was in two minds as to the
+lawfulness of rising against a temporal sovereign in defence of religious
+liberties. His whole English nature revolted against it, and yet so many
+spiritual persons seemed to favour it. His simple conscience was
+perplexed. But none the less he could listen with the most intense
+interest and sympathy to these tales of these co-religionists of his own,
+who were so clearly convinced of their right to rebel in defence of their
+faith.
+
+And so with such stories the August afternoon passed away. It was a
+thundery day, which it would have been pleasanter to spend in the garden,
+but that, Sir Nicholas said, under the circumstances was not to be
+thought of; so they threw the windows wide to catch the least breath of
+air; and the smell of the flower-garden came sweetly up and flooded the
+low cool room; and so they sat engrossed until the evening.
+
+Supper was ordered for Mr. Stewart at half-past seven o'clock; and this
+meal Sir Nicholas had consented should be laid downstairs in his own
+private room opening out of the hall, and that he and his ladies should
+sit down to table at the same time. Mr. Stewart went to his room an hour
+before to dress for riding, and to superintend the packing of his
+saddle-bags; and at half-past seven he was conducted downstairs by Sir
+Nicholas who insisted on carrying the saddle-bags with his own hands, and
+they found the two ladies waiting for them in the panelled study that had
+one window giving upon the terrace that ran along the south of the house
+above the garden. When supper had been brought in by Sir Nicholas' own
+body-servant, Mr. Boyd, they sat down to supper after a grace from Sir
+Nicholas. The horses were ordered for nine o'clock.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                     THE DOOR IN THE GARDEN-WALL
+
+
+On the morning of the day after Mr. Stewart's secret arrival at Maxwell
+Hall, the Rector was walking up and down the lawn that adjoined the
+churchyard.
+
+He had never yet wholly recovered from the sneers of Mistress Corbet; the
+wounds had healed but had not ceased to smart. How blind these Papists
+were, he thought! how prejudiced for the old trifling details of worship!
+how ignorant of the vital principles still retained! The old realities of
+God and the faith and the Church were with them still, in this village,
+he reminded himself; it was only the incrustations of error that had been
+removed. Of course the transition was difficult and hearts were sore; but
+the Eternal God can be patient. But then, if the discontent of the
+Papists smouldered on one side, the fanatical and irresponsible zeal of
+the Puritans flared on the other. How difficult, he thought, to steer the
+safe middle course! How much cool faith and clearsightedness it needed!
+He reminded himself of Archbishop Parker who now held the rudder, and
+comforted himself with the thought of his wise moderation in dealing with
+excesses, his patient pertinacity among the whirling gusts of passion,
+that enabled him to wait upon events to push his schemes, and his tender
+knowledge of human nature.
+
+But in spite of these reassuring facts Mr. Dent was anxious. What could
+even the Archbishop do when his suffragans were such poor creatures; and
+when Leicester, the strongest man at Court, was a violent Puritan
+partisan? The Rector would have been content to bear the troubles of his
+own flock and household if he had been confident of the larger cause; but
+the vagaries of the Puritans threatened all with ruin. That morning only
+he had received a long account from a Fellow of his own college of Corpus
+Christi, Cambridge, and a man of the same views as himself, of the
+violent controversy raging there at that time.
+
+"The Professor," wrote his friend, referring to Thomas Cartwright, "is
+plastering us all with his Genevan ways. We are all Papists, it seems!
+He would have neither bishop nor priest nor archbishop nor dean nor
+archdeacon, nor dignitaries at all, but just the plain Godly Minister, as
+he names it. Or if he has the bishop and the deacon they are to be the
+_Episcopos_ and the _Diaconos_ of the Scripture, and not the Papish
+counterfeits! Then it seems that the minister is to be made not by God
+but by man--that the people are to make him, not the bishop (as if the
+sheep should make the shepherd). Then it appears we are Papists too for
+kneeling at the Communion; this he names a 'feeble superstition.' Then he
+would have all men reside in their benefices or vacate them; and all that
+do not so, it appears, are no better than thieves or robbers.
+
+"And so he rages on, breathing out this smoky stuff, and all the young
+men do run after him, as if he were the very Pillar of Fire to lead them
+to Canaan. One day he says there shall be no bishop--and my Lord of Ely
+rides through Petty Cury with scarce a man found to doff cap and say 'my
+lord' save foolish 'Papists' like myself! Another day he will have no
+distinction of apparel; and the young sparks straight dress like
+ministers, and the ministers like young sparks. On another he likes not
+Saint Peter his day, and none will go to church. He would have us all to
+be little Master Calvins, if he could have his way with us. But the
+Master of Trinity has sent a complaint to the Council with charges
+against him, and has preached against him too. But no word hath yet come
+from the Council; and we fear nought will be done; to the sore injury of
+Christ His holy Church and the Protestant Religion; and the triumphing of
+their pestilent heresies."
+
+So the caustic divine wrote, and the Rector of Great Keynes was
+heavy-hearted as he walked up and down and read. Everywhere it was the
+same story; the extreme precisians openly flouted the religion of the
+Church of England; submitted to episcopal ordination as a legal necessity
+and then mocked at it; refused to wear the prescribed dress, and
+repudiated all other distinctions too in meats and days as Judaic
+remnants; denounced all forms of worship except those directly sanctioned
+by Scripture; in short, they remained in the Church of England and drew
+her pay while they scouted her orders and derided her claims. Further,
+they cried out as persecuted martyrs whenever it was proposed to insist
+that they should observe their obligations. But worse than all, for such
+conscientious clergymen as Mr. Dent, was the fact that bishops preferred
+such men to livings, and at the same time were energetic against the
+Papist party. It was not that there was not an abundance of disciplinary
+machinery ready at the bishop's disposal or that the Queen was opposed to
+coercion--rather she was always urging them to insist upon conformity;
+but it seemed rather to such sober men as the Rector that the principle
+of authority had been lost with the rejection of the Papacy, and that
+anarchy rather than liberty had prevailed in the National Church. In
+darker moments it seemed to him and his friends as if any wild fancy was
+tolerated, so long as it did not approximate too closely to the Old
+Religion; and they grew sick at heart.
+
+It was all the more difficult for the Rector, as he had so little
+sympathy in the place; his wife did all she could to destroy friendly
+relations between the Hall and the Rectory, and openly derided her
+husband's prelatical leanings; the Maxwells themselves disregarded his
+priestly claims, and the villagers thought of him as an official paid to
+promulgate the new State religion. The only house where he found sympathy
+and help was the Dower House; and as he paced up and down his garden now,
+his little perplexed determined face grew brighter as he made up his mind
+to see Mr. Norris again in the afternoon.
+
+During his meditations he heard, and saw indistinctly, through the
+shrubbery that fenced the lawn from the drive, a mounted man ride up to
+the Rectory door. He supposed it was some message, and held himself in
+readiness to be called into the house, but after a minute or two he heard
+the man ride off again down the drive into the village. At dinner he
+mentioned it to his wife, who answered rather shortly that it was a
+message for her; and he let the matter drop for fear of giving offence;
+he was terrified at the thought of provoking more quarrels than were
+absolutely necessary.
+
+Soon after dinner he put on his cap and gown, and to his wife's inquiries
+told her where he was going, and that after he had seen Mr. Norris he
+would step on down to Comber's, where was a sick body or two, and that
+she might expect him back not earlier than five o'clock. She nodded
+without speaking, and he went out. She watched him down the drive from
+the dining-room window and then went back to her business with an odd
+expression.
+
+Mr. Norris, whom he found already seated at his books again after dinner,
+took him out when he had heard his errand, and the two began to walk up
+and down together on the raised walk that ran along under a line of pines
+a little way from the house.
+
+The Rector had seldom found his friend more sympathetic and tender; he
+knew very well that their intellectual and doctrinal standpoints were
+different, but he had not come for anything less than spiritual help, and
+that he found. He told him all his heart, and then waited, while the
+other, with his thin hands clasped behind his back, and his great grey
+eyes cast up at the heavy pines and the tender sky beyond, began to
+comfort the minister.
+
+"You are troubled, my friend," he said, "and I do not wonder at it, by
+the turbulence of these times. On all sides are fightings and fears. Of
+course I cannot, as you know, regard these matters you have spoken
+of--episcopacy, ceremonies at the Communion and the like--in the grave
+light in which you see them; but I take it, if I understand you rightly,
+that it is the confusion and lack of any authority or respect for
+antiquity that is troubling you more. You feel yourself in a sad plight
+between these raging waves; tossed to and fro, battered upon by both
+sides, forsaken and despised and disregarded. Now, indeed, although I do
+not stand quite where you do, yet I see how great the stress must be;
+but, if I may say so to a minister, it is just what you regard as your
+shame that I regard as your glory. It is the mark of the cross that is on
+your life. When our Saviour went to his passion, he went in the same
+plight as that in which you go; both Jew and Gentile were against him on
+this side and that; his claims were disallowed, his royalty denied; he
+was despised and rejected of men. He did not go to his passion as to a
+splendid triumph, bearing his pain like some solemn and mysterious
+dignity at which the world wondered and was silent; but he went battered
+and spat upon, with the sweat and the blood and the spittle running down
+his face, contemned by the contemptible, hated by the hateful, rejected
+by the outcast, barked upon by the curs; and it was that that made his
+passion so bitter. To go to death, however painful, with honour and
+applause, or at least with the silence of respect, were easy; it is not
+hard to die upon a throne; but to live on a dunghill with Job, that is
+bitterness. Now again I must protest that I have no right to speak like
+this to a minister, but since you have come to me I must needs say what I
+think; and it is this that some wise man once said, 'Fear honour, for
+shame is not far off. Covet shame, for honour is surely to follow.' If
+that be true of the philosopher, how much more true is it of the
+Christian minister whose profession it is to follow the Saviour and to be
+made like unto him."
+
+He said much more of the same kind; and his soft balmy faith soothed the
+minister's wounds, and braced his will. The Rector could not help half
+envying his friend, living, as it seemed, in this still retreat, apart
+from wrangles and controversy, with the peaceful music and sweet
+fragrance of the pines, and the Love of God about him.
+
+When he had finished he asked the Rector to step indoors with him; and
+there in his own room took down and read to him a few extracts from the
+German mystics that he thought bore upon his case. Finally, to put him at
+his ease again, for it seemed an odd reversal that he should be coming
+for comfort to his parishioners, Mr. Norris told him about his two
+children, and in his turn asked his advice.
+
+"About Anthony," he said, "I am not at all anxious. I know that the boy
+fancies himself in love; and goes sighing about when he is at home; but
+he sleeps and eats heartily, for I have observed him; and I think
+Mistress Corbet has a good heart and means no harm to him. But about my
+daughter I am less satisfied, for I have been watching her closely. She
+is quiet and good, and, above all, she loves the Saviour; but how do I
+know that her heart is not bleeding within? She has been taught to hold
+herself in, and not to show her feelings; and that, I think, is as much a
+drawback sometimes as wearing the heart upon the sleeve."
+
+Mr. Dent suggested sending her away for a visit for a month or two. His
+host mused a moment and then said that he himself had thought of that;
+and now that his minister said so too, probably, under God, that was what
+was needed. The fact that Hubert was expected home soon was an additional
+reason; and he had friends in Northampton, he said, to whom he could send
+her. "They hold strongly by the Genevan theology there," he said smiling,
+"but I think that will do her no harm as a balance to the Popery at
+Maxwell Hall."
+
+They talked a few minutes more, and when the minister rose to take his
+leave, Mr. Norris slipped down on his knees as if it was the natural
+thing to do and as if the minister were expecting it; and asked his guest
+to engage in prayer. It was the first time he had ever done so; probably
+because this talk had brought them nearer together spiritually than ever
+before. The minister was taken aback, and repeated a collect or two from
+the Prayer-book; then they said the Lord's Prayer together, and then Mr.
+Norris without any affectation engaged in a short extempore prayer,
+asking for light in these dark times and peace in the storm; and begging
+the blessing of God upon the village and "upon their shepherd to whom
+Thou hast given to drink of the Cup of thy Passion," and upon his own
+children, and lastly upon himself, "the chief of sinners and the least of
+thy servants that is not worthy to be called thy friend." It touched Mr.
+Dent exceedingly, and he was yet more touched and reconciled to the
+incident when his host said simply, remaining on his knees, with eyes
+closed and his clear cut tranquil face upturned:
+
+"I ask your blessing, sir."
+
+The Rector's voice trembled a little as he gave it. And then with real
+gratitude and a good deal of sincere emotion he shook his friend's hand,
+and rustled out from the cool house into the sunlit garden, greeting
+Isabel who was walking up and down outside a little pensively, and took
+the field-path that led towards the hamlet where his sick folk were
+expecting him.
+
+As he walked back about five o'clock towards the village he noticed there
+was thunder in the air, and was aware of a physical oppression, but in
+his heart it was morning and the birds singing. The talk earlier in the
+afternoon had shown him how, in the midst of the bitterness of the Cup,
+to find the fragrance where the Saviour's lips had rested and that was
+joy to him. And again, his true pastor's heart had been gladdened by the
+way his ministrations had been received that afternoon. A sour old man
+who had always scowled at him for an upstart, in his foolish old desire
+to be loyal to the priest who had held the benefice before him, had
+melted at last and asked his pardon and God's for having treated him so
+ill; and he had prepared the old man for death with great contentment to
+them both, and had left him at peace with God and man. On looking back on
+it all afterwards he was convinced that God had thus strengthened him for
+the trouble that was awaiting him at home.
+
+He had hardly come into his study when his wife entered with a strange
+look, breathing quick and short; she closed the door, and stood near it,
+looking at him apprehensively.
+
+"George," she said, rather sharply and nervously, "you must not be vexed
+with me, but----"
+
+"Well?" he said heavily, and the warmth died out of his heart. He knew
+something terrible impended.
+
+"I have done it for the best," she said, and obstinacy and a kind of
+impatient tenderness strove in her eyes as she looked at him. "You must
+show yourself a man; it is not fitting that loose ladies of the Court
+should mock--" He got up; and his eyes were determined too.
+
+"Tell me what you have done, woman," he cried.
+
+She put out her hand as if to hold him still, and her voice rang hard and
+thin.
+
+"I will say my say," she said. "It is not for that that I have done it.
+But you are a Gospel-minister, and must be faithful. The Justice is here.
+I sent for him."
+
+"The Justice?" he said blankly; but his heart was beating heavily in his
+throat.
+
+"Mr. Frankland from East Grinsted, with a couple of pursuivants and a
+company of servants. There is a popish agent at the Hall, and they are
+come to take him."
+
+The Rector swallowed with difficulty once or twice, and then tried to
+speak, but she went on. "And I have promised that you shall take them in
+by the side door."
+
+"I will not!" he cried.
+
+She held up her hand again for silence, and glanced round at the door.
+
+"I have given him the key," she said.
+
+This was the private key, possessed by the incumbent for generations
+past, and Sir Nicholas had not withdrawn it from the Protestant Rector.
+
+"There is no choice," she said. "Oh! George, be a man!" Then she turned
+and slipped out.
+
+He stood perfectly still for a moment; his pulses were racing; he could
+not think. He sat down and buried his face in his hands; and gradually
+his brain cleared and quieted. Then he realised what it meant, and his
+soul rose in blind furious resentment. This was the last straw; it was
+the woman's devilish jealousy. But what could he do? The Justice was
+here. Could he warn his friends? He clenched his fingers into his hair as
+the situation came out clear and hard before his brain. Dear God, what
+could he do?
+
+There were footsteps in the flagged hall, and he raised his head as the
+door opened and a portly gentleman in riding-dress came in, followed by
+Mrs. Dent. The Rector rose confusedly, but could not speak, and his eyes
+wandered round to his wife again and again as she took a chair in the
+shadow and sat down. But the magistrate noticed nothing.
+
+"Aha!" he said, beaming, "You have a wife, sir, that is a jewel. Solomon
+never spoke a truer word; an ornament to her husband, he said, I think;
+but you as a minister should know better than I, a mere layman"; and his
+face creased with mirth.
+
+What did the red-faced fool mean? thought the Rector. If only he would
+not talk so loud! He must think, he must think. What could he do?
+
+"She was very brisk, sir," the magistrate went on, sitting down, and the
+Rector followed his example, sitting too with his back to the window and
+his hand to his head.
+
+Then Mr. Frankland went on with his talk; and the man sat there, still
+glancing from time to time mechanically towards his wife, who was there
+in the shadow with steady white face and hands in her lap, watching the
+two men. The magistrate's voice seemed to the bewildered man to roll on
+like a wheel over stones; interminable, grinding, stupefying. What was he
+saying? What was that about his wife? She had sent to him the day before,
+had she, and told him of the popish agent's coming?--Ah! A dangerous man
+was he, a spreader of seditious pamphlets? At least they supposed he was
+the man.--Yes, yes, he understood; these fly-by-nights were threateners
+of the whole commonwealth; they must be hunted out like vermin--just so;
+and he as a minister of the Gospel should be the first to assist.--Just
+so, he agreed with all his heart, as a minister of the Gospel. (Yes, but,
+dear Lord, what was he to do? This fat man with the face of a butcher
+must not be allowed to--) Ah! what was that? He had missed that. Would
+Mr. Frankland be so good as to say it again? Yes, yes, he understood now;
+the men were posted already. No one suspected anything; they had come by
+the bridle path.--Every door? Did he understand that every door of the
+Hall was watched? Ah! that was prudent; there was no chance then of any
+one sending a warning in? Oh, no, no, he did not dream for a moment that
+there was any concealed Catholic who would be likely to do such a thing.
+But he only wondered.--Yes, yes, the magistrate was right; one could not
+be too careful. Because--ah!--What was that about Sir Nicholas? Yes, yes,
+indeed he was a good landlord, and very popular in the village.--Ah! just
+so; it had better be done quietly, at the side door. Yes, that was the
+one which the key fitted. But, but, he thought perhaps, he had better not
+come in, because Sir Nicholas was his friend, and there was no use in
+making bad blood.--Oh! not to the house; very well, then, he would come
+as far as the yew hedge at--at what time did the magistrate say? At
+half-past eight; yes, that would be best as Mr. Frankland said, because
+Sir Nicholas had ordered the horses for nine o'clock; so they would come
+upon them just at the right time.--How many men, did Mr. Frankland say?
+Eight? Oh yes, eight and himself, and--he did not quite follow the plan.
+Ah! through the yew hedge on to the terrace and through the south door
+into the hall; then if they bolted--they? Surely he had understood the
+magistrate to say there was only one? Oh! he had not understood that. Sir
+Nicholas too? But why, why? Good God, as a harbourer of priests?--No, but
+this fellow was an agent, surely. Well, if the magistrate said so, of
+course he was right; but he would have thought himself that Sir Nicholas
+might have been left--ah! Well, he would say no more. He quite saw the
+magistrate's point now.--No, no, he was no favourer; God forbid! his wife
+would speak for him as to that; Marion would bear witness.--Well, well,
+he thanked the magistrate for his compliments, and would he proceed with
+the plan? By the south door, he was saying, yes, into the hall.--Yes, the
+East room was Sir Nicholas' study; or of course they might be supping
+upstairs. But it made no difference; no, the magistrate was right about
+that. So long as they held the main staircase, and had all the other
+doors watched, they were safe to have him.--No, no, the cloister wing
+would not be used; they might leave that out of their calculations.
+Besides, did not the magistrate say that Marion had seen the lights in
+the East wing last night? Yes, well, that settled it.--And the signal?
+Oh, he had not caught that; the church bell, was it to be? But what for?
+Why did they need a signal? Ah! he understood, for the advance at
+half-past eight.--Just so, he would send Thomas up to ring it. Would
+Marion kindly see to that?--Yes, indeed, his wife was a woman to be proud
+of; such a faithful Protestant; no patience with these seditious rogues
+at all. Well, was that all? Was there anything else?--Yes, how dark it
+was getting; it must be close on eight o'clock. Thomas had gone, had he?
+That was all right.--And had the men everything they wanted?--Well, yes;
+although the village did go to bed early it would perhaps be better to
+have no lights; because there was no need to rouse suspicion.--Oh! very
+well; perhaps it would be better for Mr. Frankland to go and sit with the
+men and keep them quiet. And his wife would go, too, just to make sure
+they had all they wanted.--Very well, yes; he would wait here in the dark
+until he was called. Not more than a quarter of an hour? Thank you,
+yes.--
+
+Then the door had closed; and the man, left alone, flung himself down in
+his chair, and buried his face again in his arms.
+
+Ah! what was to be done? Nothing, nothing, nothing. And there they were
+at the Hall, his neighbours and friends. The kind old Catholic and his
+ladies! How would he ever dare to meet their eyes again? But what could
+be done? Nothing!
+
+How far away the afternoon seems; that quiet sunny walk beneath the
+pines. His friend is at his books, no doubt, with the silver candles, and
+the open pages, and his own neat manuscript growing under his white
+scholarly fingers. And Isabel; at her needlework before the fire.--How
+peaceful and harmless and sweet it all is! And down there, not fifty
+yards away, is the village; every light out by now; and the children and
+parents, too, asleep.--Ah! what will the news be when they wake
+to-morrow?--And that strange talk this afternoon, of the Saviour and His
+Cup of pain, and the squalor and indignity of the Passion! Ah! yes, he
+could suffer with Jesus on the Cross, so gladly, on that Tree of
+Life--but not with Judas on the Tree of Death!
+
+And the minister dropped his face lower, over the edge of his desk; and
+the hot tears of misery and self-reproach and impotence began to run.
+There was no help, no help anywhere. All were against him--even his wife
+herself; and his Lord.
+
+Then with a moan he lifted his hot face into the dusk.
+
+"Jesus," he cried in his soul, "Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest
+that I love Thee."
+
+There came a tapping on the door; and the door opened an inch.
+
+"It is time," whispered his wife's voice.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VIII
+
+                      THE TAKING OF MR. STEWART
+
+
+They were still sitting over the supper-table at the Hall. The sun had
+set about the time they had begun, and the twilight had deepened into
+dark; but they had not cared to close the shutters as they were to move
+so soon. The four candles shone out through the windows, and there still
+hung a pale glimmer outside owing to the refraction of light from the
+white stones of the terrace. Beyond on the left there sloped away a high
+black wall of impenetrable darkness where the yew hedge stood; over that
+was the starless sky. Sir Nicholas' study was bright with candlelight,
+and the lace and jewels of Lady Maxwell (for her sister wore none) added
+a vague pleasant sense of beauty to Mr. Stewart's mind; for he was one
+who often fared coarsely and slept hard. He sighed a little to himself as
+he looked out over this shining supper-table past the genial smiling face
+of Sir Nicholas to the dark outside; and thought how in less than an hour
+he would have left the comfort of this house for the grey road and its
+hardships again. It was extraordinarily sweet to him (for he was a man of
+taste and a natural inclination to luxury) to stay a day or two now and
+again at a house like this and mix again with his own equals, instead of
+with the rough company of the village inn, or the curious foreign
+conspirators with their absence of educated perception and their doubtful
+cleanliness. He was a man of domestic instincts and good birth and
+breeding, and would have been perfectly at his ease as the master of some
+household such as this; with a chapel and a library and a pleasant garden
+and estate; spending his days in great leisure and good deeds. And
+instead of all this, scarcely by his own choice but by what he would have
+called his vocation, he was partly an exile living from hand to mouth in
+lodgings and inns, and when he was in his own fatherland, a hunted
+fugitive lurking about in unattractive disguises. He sighed again once or
+twice. There was silence a moment or two.
+
+There sounded one note from the church tower a couple of hundred yards
+away. Lady Maxwell heard it, and looked suddenly up; she scarcely knew
+why, and caught her sister's eyes glancing at her. There was a shade of
+uneasiness in them.
+
+"It is thundery to-night," said Sir Nicholas. Mr. Stewart did not speak.
+Lady Maxwell looked up quickly at him as he sat on her right facing the
+window; and saw an expression of slight disturbance cross his face. He
+was staring out on to the quickly darkening terrace, past Sir Nicholas,
+who with pursed lips and a little frown was stripping off his grapes from
+the stalk. The look of uneasiness deepened, and the young man half rose
+from his chair, and sat down again.
+
+"What is it, Mr. Stewart?" said Lady Maxwell, and her voice had a ring of
+terror in it. Sir Nicholas looked up quickly.
+
+"Eh, eh?"--he began.
+
+The young man rose up and recoiled a step, still staring out.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "but I have just seen several men pass the
+window."
+
+There was a rush of footsteps and a jangle of voices outside in the hall;
+and as the four rose up from table, looking at one another, there was a
+rattle at the handle outside, the door flew open, and a ruddy
+strongly-built man stood there, with a slightly apprehensive air, and
+holding a loaded cane a little ostentatiously in his hand; the faces of
+several men looked over his shoulder.
+
+Sir Nicholas' ruddy face had paled, his mouth was half open with dismay,
+and he stared almost unintelligently at the magistrate. Mr. Stewart's
+hand closed on the handle of a knife that lay beside his plate.
+
+"In the Queen's name," said Mr. Frankland, and looked from the knife to
+the young man's white determined face, and down again. A little sobbing
+broke from Lady Maxwell.
+
+"It is useless, sir," said the magistrate; "Sir Nicholas, persuade your
+guest not to make a useless resistance; we are ten to one; the house has
+been watched for hours."
+
+Sir Nicholas took a step forward, his mouth closed and opened again. Lady
+Maxwell took a swift rustling step from behind the table, and threw her
+arm round the old man's neck. Still none of them spoke.
+
+"Come in," said the magistrate, turning a little. The men outside filed
+in, to the number of half a dozen, and two or three more were left in the
+hall. All were armed. Mistress Margaret who had stood up with the rest,
+sat down again, and rested her head on her hand; apparently completely at
+her ease.
+
+"I must beg pardon, Lady Maxwell," he went on, "but my duty leaves me no
+choice." He turned to the young man, who, on seeing the officers had laid
+the knife down again, and now stood, with one hand on the table, rather
+pale, but apparently completely self-controlled, looking a little
+disdainfully at the magistrate.
+
+Then Sir Nicholas made a great effort; but his face twitched as he spoke,
+and the hand that he lifted to his wife's arm shook with nervousness, and
+his voice was cracked and unnatural.
+
+"Sit down, my dear, sit down.--What is all this?--I do not
+understand.--Mr. Frankland, sir, what do you want of me?--And who are all
+these gentlemen?--Won't you sit down, Mr. Frankland and take a glass of
+wine. Let me make Mr. Stewart known to you." And he lifted a shaking hand
+as if to introduce them.
+
+The magistrate smiled a little on one side of his mouth.
+
+"It is no use, Sir Nicholas," he said, "this gentleman, I fear, is well
+known to some of us already.--No, no, sir," he cried sharply, "the window
+is guarded."
+
+Mr. Stewart, who had looked swiftly and sideways across at the window,
+faced the magistrate again.
+
+"I do not know what you mean, sir," he said. "It was a lad who passed the
+window."
+
+There was a movement outside in the hall; and the magistrate stepped to
+the door.
+
+"Who is there?" he cried out sharply.
+
+There was a scuffle, and a cry of a boy's voice; and a man appeared,
+holding Anthony by the arm.
+
+Mistress Margaret turned round in her seat; and said in a perfectly
+natural voice, "Why, Anthony, my lad!"
+
+There was a murmur from one or two of the men.
+
+"Silence," called out the magistrate. "We will finish the other affair
+first," and he made a motion to hold Anthony for a moment.--"Now then, do
+any of you men know this gentleman?"
+
+A pursuivant stepped out.
+
+"Mr. Frankland, sir; I know him under two names--Mr. Chapman and Mr.
+Wode. He is a popish agent. I saw him in the company of Dr. Storey in
+Antwerp, four months ago."
+
+Mr. Stewart blew out his lips sharply and contemptuously.
+
+"Pooh," he said; and then turned to the man and bowed ironically.
+
+"I congratulate you, my man," he said, in a tone of bitter triumph. "In
+April I was in France. Kindly remember this man's words, Mr. Frankland;
+they will tell in my favour. For I presume you mean to take me."
+
+"I will remember them," said the magistrate.
+
+Mr. Stewart bowed to him; he had completely regained his composure. Then
+he turned to Sir Nicholas and Lady Maxwell, who had been watching in a
+bewildered silence.
+
+"I am exceedingly sorry," he said, "for having brought this annoyance on
+you, Lady Maxwell; but these men are so sharp that they see nothing but
+guilt everywhere. I do not know yet what my crime is. But that can wait.
+Sir Nicholas, we should have parted anyhow in half an hour. We shall only
+say good-bye here, instead of at the door."
+
+The magistrate smiled again as before; and half put up his hand to hide
+it.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Chapman; but you need not part from Sir Nicholas
+yet. I fear, Sir Nicholas, that I shall have to trouble you to come with
+us."
+
+Lady Maxwell drew a quick hissing breath; her sister got up swiftly and
+went to her, as she sat down in Sir Nicholas' chair, still holding the
+old man's hand.
+
+Sir Nicholas turned to his guest; and his voice broke again and again as
+he spoke.
+
+"Mr. Stewart," he said, "I am sorry that any guest of mine should be
+subject to these insults. However, I am glad that I shall have the
+pleasure of your company after all. I suppose we ride to East Grinsted,"
+he added harshly to the magistrate, who bowed to him.--"Then may I have
+my servant, sir?"
+
+"Presently," said Mr. Frankland, and then turned to Anthony, who had been
+staring wild-eyed at the scene, "Now who is this?"
+
+A man answered from the rank.
+
+"That is Master Anthony Norris, sir."
+
+"Ah! and who is Master Anthony Norris? A Papist, too?"
+
+"No, sir," said the man again, "a good Protestant; and the son of Mr.
+Norris at the Dower House."
+
+"Ah!" said the magistrate again, judicially. "And what might you be
+wanting here, Master Anthony Norris?"
+
+Anthony explained that he often came up in the evening, and that he
+wanted nothing. The magistrate eyed him a moment or two.
+
+"Well, I have nothing against you, young gentleman. But I cannot let you
+go, till I am safely set out. You might rouse the village. Take him out
+till we start," he added to the man who guarded him.
+
+"Come this way, sir," said the officer; and Anthony presently found
+himself sitting on the long oak bench that ran across the western end of
+the hall, at the foot of the stairs, and just opposite the door of Sir
+Nicholas' room where he had just witnessed that curious startling scene.
+
+The man who had charge of him stood a little distance off, and did not
+trouble him further, and Anthony watched in silence.
+
+The hall was still dark, except for one candle that had been lighted by
+the magistrate's party, and it looked sombre and suggestive of tragedy.
+Floor walls and ceiling were all dark oak, and the corners were full of
+shadows. A streak of light came out of the slightly opened door opposite,
+and a murmur of voices. The rest of the house was quiet; it had all been
+arranged and carried out without disturbance.
+
+Anthony had a very fair idea of what was going forward; he knew of course
+that the Catholics were always under suspicion, and now understood
+plainly enough from the conversation he had heard that the reddish-haired
+young man, standing so alert and cheerful by the table in there, had
+somehow precipitated matters. Anthony himself had come up on some
+trifling errand, and had run straight into this affair; and now he sat
+and wondered resentfully, with his eyes and ears wide open.
+
+There were men at all the inner doors now; they had slipped in from the
+outer entrances as soon as word had reached them that the prisoners were
+secured, and only a couple were left outside to prevent the alarm being
+raised in the village. These inner sentinels stood motionless at the foot
+of the stairs that rose up into the unlighted lobby overhead, at the door
+that led to the inner hall and the servants' quarters, and at those that
+led to the cloister wing and the garden respectively.
+
+The murmur of voices went on in the room opposite; and presently a man
+slipped out and passed through the sentinels to the door leading to the
+kitchens and pantry; he carried a pike in his hand, and was armed with a
+steel cap and breast-piece. In a minute he had returned followed by Mr.
+Boyd, Sir Nicholas' body-servant; the two passed into the study--and a
+moment later the dark inner hall was full of moving figures and rustlings
+and whisperings, as the alarmed servants poured up from downstairs.
+
+Then the study door opened again, and Anthony caught a glimpse of the
+lighted room; the two ladies with Sir Nicholas and his guest were seated
+at table; there was the figure of an armed man behind Mr. Stewart's
+chair, and another behind Lady Maxwell's; then the door closed again as
+Mr. Boyd with the magistrate and a constable carrying a candle came out.
+
+"This way, sir," said the servant; and the three crossed the hall, and
+passing close by Anthony, went up the broad oak staircase that led to the
+upper rooms. Then the minutes passed away; from upstairs came the noise
+of doors opening and shutting, and footsteps passing overhead; from the
+inner hall the sound of low talking, and a few sobs now and again from a
+frightened maid; from Sir Nicholas' room all was quiet except once when
+Mr. Stewart's laugh, high and natural, rang out. Anthony thought of that
+strong brisk face he had seen in the candlelight; and wondered how he
+could laugh, with death so imminent--and worse than death; and a warmth
+of admiration and respect glowed at the lad's heart. The man by Anthony
+sighed and shifted his feet.
+
+"What is it for?" whispered the lad at last.
+
+"I mustn't speak to you, sir," said the man.
+
+At last the footsteps overhead came to the top of the stairs. The
+magistrate's voice called out sharply and impatiently:
+
+"Come along, come along"; and the three, all carrying bags and valises
+came downstairs again and crossed the hall. Again the door opened as they
+went in, leaving the luggage on the floor; and Anthony caught another
+glimpse of the four still seated round the table; but Sir Nicholas' head
+was bowed upon his hands.
+
+Then again the door closed; and there was silence.
+
+Once more it was flung open, and Anthony saw the interior of the room
+plainly. The four were standing up, Mr. Stewart was bowing to Lady
+Maxwell; the magistrate stood close beside him; then a couple of men
+stepped up to the young man's side as he turned away, and the three came
+out into the hall and stood waiting by the little heap of luggage. Mr.
+Frankland came next, with the man-servant close beside him, and the rest
+of the men behind; and the last closed the door and stood by it. There
+was a dead silence; Anthony sprang to his feet in uncontrollable
+excitement. What was happening? Again the door opened, and the men made
+room as Mistress Margaret came out, and the door shut.
+
+She came swiftly across, with her little air of dignity and confidence,
+towards Anthony, who was standing forward.
+
+"Why, Master Anthony," she said, "dear lad; I did not know they had kept
+you," and she took his hand.
+
+"What is it, what is it?" he whispered sharply.
+
+"Hush," she said; and the two stood together in silence.
+
+The moments passed; Anthony could hear the quick thumping beat of his own
+heart, and the breathing of Mistress Margaret; but the hall was perfectly
+quiet, where the magistrate with the prisoner and his men stood in an
+irregular dark group with the candle behind them; and no sound came from
+the room beyond.
+
+Then the handle turned, and a crack of light showed; but no further
+sound; then the door opened wide, a flood of light poured out and Sir
+Nicholas tottered into the hall.
+
+"Margaret, Margaret," he cried. "Where are you? Go to her."
+
+There was a strange moaning sound from the brightly lighted room. The old
+lady dropped Anthony's hand and moved swiftly and unfalteringly across,
+and once more the door closed behind her.
+
+There was a sharp word of command from the magistrate, and the sentries
+from every door left their posts, and joined the group which, with Sir
+Nicholas and his guest and Mr. Boyd in the centre, now passed out through
+the garden door.
+
+The magistrate paused as he saw Anthony standing there alone.
+
+"I can trust you, young gentleman," he said, "not to give the alarm till
+we are gone?"
+
+Anthony nodded, and the magistrate passed briskly out on to the terrace,
+shutting the door behind him; there was a rush of footsteps and a murmur
+of voices and the hall was filled with the watching servants.
+
+As the chorus of exclamations and inquiries broke out, Anthony ran
+straight through the crowd to the garden door, and on to the terrace.
+They had gone to the left, he supposed, but he hesitated a moment to
+listen; then he heard the stamp of horses' feet and the jingle of
+saddlery, and saw the glare of torches through the yew hedge; and he
+turned quickly and ran along the terrace, past the flood of light that
+poured out from the supper room, and down the path that led to the
+side-door opposite the Rectory. It was very dark, and he stumbled once or
+twice; then he came to the two or three stairs that led down to the door
+in the wall, and turned off among the bushes, creeping on hands and feet
+till he reached the wall, low on this side, but deep on the other; and
+looked over.
+
+The pursuivants with their men had formed a circle round the two
+prisoners, who were already mounted and who sat looking about them as the
+luggage was being strapped to their saddles before and behind; the
+bridles were lifted forward over the horses' heads, and a couple of the
+guard held each rein. The groom who had brought round the two horses for
+Mr. Stewart and himself stood white-faced and staring, with his back to
+the Rectory wall. The magistrate was just mounting at a little distance
+his own horse, which was held by the Rectory boy. Mr. Boyd, it seemed,
+was to walk with the men. Two or three torches were burning by now, and
+every detail was distinct to Anthony, as he crouched among the dry leaves
+and peered down on to the group just beneath.
+
+Sir Nicholas' face was turned away from him; but his head was sunk on his
+breast, and he did not stir or lift it as his horse stamped at the
+strapping on of the valise Mr. Boyd had packed for him. Mr. Stewart sat
+erect and motionless, and his face as Anthony saw it was confident and
+fearless.
+
+Then suddenly the door in the Rectory wall opposite was flung open, and a
+figure in flying black skirts, but hatless, rushed out and through the
+guard straight up to the old man's knee. There was a shout from the men
+and a movement to pull him off, but the magistrate who was on his horse
+and just outside the circle spoke sharply, and the men fell back.
+
+"Oh, Sir Nicholas, Sir Nicholas," sobbed the minister, his face half
+buried in the saddle. Anthony saw his shoulders shaking, and his hands
+clutching at the old man's knee. "Forgive me, forgive me."
+
+There was no answer from Sir Nicholas; he still sat unmoved, his chin on
+his breast, as the Rector sobbed and moaned at his stirrup.
+
+"There, there," said the magistrate decidedly, over the heads of the
+guard, "that is enough, Mr. Dent"; and he made a motion with his hand.
+
+A couple of men took the minister by the shoulders and drew him, still
+crying out to Sir Nicholas, outside the group; and he stood there dazed
+and groping with his hands. There was a word of command; and the guard
+moved off at a sharp walk, with the horses in the centre, and as they
+turned, the lad saw in the torchlight the old man's face drawn and
+wrinkled with sorrow, and great tears running down it.
+
+The Rector leaned against his own wall, with his hands over his face; and
+Anthony looked at him with growing suspicion and terror as the flare of
+the torches on the trees faded, and the noise of the troop died away
+round the corner.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX
+
+                           VILLAGE JUSTICE
+
+
+The village had never known such an awakening as on the morning that
+followed Sir Nicholas' arrest. Before seven o'clock every house knew it,
+and children ran half-dressed to the outlying hamlets to tell the story.
+Very little work was done that day, for the estate was disorganised; and
+the men had little heart for work; and there were groups all day on the
+green, which formed and re-formed and drifted here and there and
+discussed and sifted the evidence. It was soon known that the Rectory
+household had had a foremost hand in the affair. The groom, who had been
+present at the actual departure of the prisoners had told the story of
+the black figure that ran out of the door, and of what was cried at the
+old man's knee; and how he had not moved nor spoken in answer; and
+Thomas, the Rectory boy, was stopped as he went across the green in the
+evening and threatened and encouraged until he told of the stroke on the
+church-bell, and the Rectory key, and the little company that had sat all
+the afternoon in the kitchen over their ale. He told too how a couple of
+hours ago he had been sent across with a note to Lady Maxwell, and that
+it had been returned immediately unopened.
+
+So as night fell, indignation had begun to smoulder fiercely against the
+minister, who had not been seen all day; and after dark had fallen the
+name "Judas" was cried in at the Rectory door half a dozen times, and a
+stone or two from the direction of the churchyard had crashed on the
+tiles of the house.
+
+Mr. Norris had been up all day at the Hall, but he was the only visitor
+admitted. All day long the gate-house was kept closed, and the same
+message was given to the few horsemen and carriages that came to inquire
+after the truth of the report from the Catholic houses round, to the
+effect that it was true that Sir Nicholas and a friend had been taken off
+to London by the Justice from East Grinsted; and that Lady Maxwell begged
+the prayers of her friends for her husband's safe return.
+
+Anthony had ridden off early with a servant, at his father's wish, to
+follow Sir Nicholas and learn any news of him that was possible, to do
+him any service he was able, and to return or send a message the next day
+down to Great Keynes; and early in the afternoon he returned with the
+information that Sir Nicholas was at the Marshalsea, that he was well and
+happy, that he sent his wife his dear love, and that she should have a
+letter from him before nightfall. He rode straight to the Hall with the
+news, full of chastened delight at his official importance, just pausing
+to tell a group that was gathered on the green that all was well so far,
+and was shown up to Lady Maxwell's own parlour, where he found her, very
+quiet and self-controlled, and extremely grateful for his kindness in
+riding up to London and back on her account. Anthony explained too that
+he had been able to get Sir Nicholas one or two comforts that the prison
+did not provide, a pillow and an extra coverlet and some fruit; and he
+left her full of gratitude.
+
+His father had been up to see the ladies two or three times, and in spite
+of the difference in religion had prayed with them, and talked a little;
+and Lady Maxwell had asked that Isabel might come up to supper and spend
+the evening. Mr. Norris promised to send her up, and then added:
+
+"I am a little anxious, Lady Maxwell, lest the people may show their
+anger against the Rector or his wife, about what has happened."
+
+Lady Maxwell looked startled.
+
+"They have been speaking of it all day long," he said, "they know
+everything; and it seems the Rector is not so much to blame as his wife.
+It was she who sent for the magistrate and gave him the key and arranged
+it all; he was only brought into it too late to interfere or refuse."
+
+"Have you seen him?" asked the old lady.
+
+"I have been both days," he said, "but he will not see me; he is in his
+study, locked in."
+
+"I may have treated him hardly," she said, "I would not open his note;
+but at least he consented to help them against his friend." And her old
+eyes filled with tears.
+
+"I fear that is so," said the other sadly.
+
+"But speak to the people," she said, "I think they love my husband, and
+would do nothing to grieve us; tell them that nothing would pain either
+of us more than that any should suffer for this. Tell them they must do
+nothing, but be patient and pray."
+
+There was a group still on the green near the pond as Isabel came up to
+supper that evening about six o'clock. Her father, who had given Lady
+Maxwell's message to the people an hour or two before, had asked her to
+go that way and send down a message to him immediately if there seemed to
+be any disturbance or threatening of it; but the men were very quiet. Mr.
+Musgrave was there, she saw, sitting with his pipe, on the stocks, and
+Piers, the young Irish bailiff, was standing near; they all were silent
+as the girl came up, and saluted her respectfully as usual; and she saw
+no signs of any dangerous element. There were one or two older women with
+the men, and others were standing at their open doors on all sides as she
+went up. The Rectory gate was locked, and no one was to be seen within.
+
+Supper was laid in Sir Nicholas' room, as it generally was, and as it had
+been two nights ago; and it was very strange to Isabel to know that it
+was here that the arrest had taken place; the floor, too, she noticed as
+she came in, all about the threshold was scratched and dented by rough
+boots.
+
+Lady Maxwell was very silent and distracted during supper; she made
+efforts to talk again and again, and her sister did her best to interest
+her and keep her talking; but she always relapsed after a minute or two
+into silence again, with long glances round the room, at the Vernacle
+over the fireplace, the prie-dieu with the shield of the Five Wounds
+above it, and all the things that spoke so keenly of her husband.
+
+What a strange room it was, too, thought Isabel, with its odd mingling of
+the two worlds, with the tapestry of the hawking scene and the stiff
+herons and ladies on horseback on one side, and the little shelf of
+devotional books on the other; and yet how characteristic of its owner
+who fingered his cross-bow or the reins of his horse all day, and his
+beads in the evening; and how strange that an old man like Sir Nicholas,
+who knew the world, and had as much sense apparently as any one else,
+should be willing to sacrifice home and property and even life itself,
+for these so plainly empty superstitious things that could not please a
+God that was Spirit and Truth! So Isabel thought to herself, with no
+bitterness or contempt, but just a simple wonder and amazement, as she
+looked at the painted tokens and trinkets.
+
+It was still daylight when they went upstairs to Lady Maxwell's room
+about seven, but the clear southern sky over the yew hedges and the tall
+elms where the rooks were circling, was beginning to be flushed with deep
+amber and rose. Isabel sat down in the window seat with the sweet air
+pouring in and looked out on to the garden with its tiled paths and its
+cool green squares of lawn, and the glowing beds at the sides. Over to
+her right the cloister court ran out, with its two rows of windows,
+bedrooms above with galleries beyond, as she knew, and parlours and
+cloisters below; the pleasant tinkle of the fountain in the court came
+faintly to her ears across the caw of the rooks about the elms and the
+low sounds from the stables and the kitchen behind the house. Otherwise
+the evening was very still; the two old ladies were sitting near the
+fireplace; Lady Maxwell had taken up her embroidery, and was looking at
+it listlessly, and Mistress Margaret had one of her devotional books and
+was turning the pages, pausing here and there as she did so.
+
+Presently she began to read, without a word of introduction, one of the
+musings of the old monk John Audeley in his sickness, and as the tender
+lines stepped on, that restless jewelled hand grew still.
+
+    "As I lay sick in my languor
+      In an abbey here by west;
+    This book I made with great dolour,
+      When I might not sleep nor rest.
+    Oft with my prayers my soul I blest,
+      And said aloud to Heaven's King,
+    'I know, O Lord, it is the best
+      Meekly to take thy visiting.
+    Else well I wot that I were lorn
+    (High above all lords be he blest!)
+      All that thou dost is for the best;
+    By fault of Thee was no man lost,
+      That is here of woman born.'"
+
+And then she read some of Rolle's verses to Jesus, the "friend of all
+sick and sorrowful souls," and a meditation of his on the Passion, and
+the tranquil thoughts and tender fragrant sorrows soothed the torn
+throbbing soul; and Isabel saw the old wrinkled hand rise to her
+forehead, and the embroidery, with the needle still in it slipped to the
+ground; as the holy Name "like ointment poured forth" gradually brought
+its endless miracle and made all sweet and healthful again.
+
+Outside the daylight was fading; the luminous vault overhead was
+deepening to a glowing blue as the sunset contracted on the western
+horizon to a few vivid streaks of glory; the room was growing darker
+every moment; and Mistress Margaret's voice began to stumble over words.
+
+The great gilt harp in the corner only gleamed here and there now in
+single lines of clear gold where the dying daylight fell on the strings.
+The room was full of shadows and the image of the Holy Mother and Child
+had darkened into obscurity in their niche. The world was silent now too;
+the rooks were gone home and the stir of the household below had ceased;
+and in a moment more Mistress Margaret's voice had ceased too, as she
+laid the book down.
+
+Then, as if the world outside had waited for silence before speaking,
+there came a murmur of sound from the further side of the house. Isabel
+started up; surely there was anger in that low roar from the village; was
+it this that her father had feared? Had she been remiss? Lady Maxwell too
+sprang up and faced the window with wide large eyes.
+
+"The letter!" she said; and took a quick step towards the door; but
+Mistress Margaret was with her instantly, with her arm about her.
+
+"Sit down, Mary," she said, "they will bring it at once"; and her sister
+obeyed; and she sat waiting and looking towards the door, clasping and
+unclasping her hands as they lay on her lap; and Mistress Margaret stood
+by her, waiting and watching too. Isabel still stood by the window
+listening. Had she been mistaken then? The roar had sunk into silence for
+a moment; and there came back the quick beat of a horse's hoofs outside
+on the short drive between the gatehouse and the Hall. They were right,
+then; and even as she thought it, and as the wife that waited for news of
+her husband drew a quick breath and half rose in her seat at the sound of
+that shod messenger that bore them, again the roar swelled up louder than
+ever; and Isabel sprang down from the low step of the window-seat into
+the dusky room where the two sisters waited.
+
+"What is that? What is that?" she whispered sharply.
+
+There was a sound of opening doors, and of feet that ran in the house
+below; and Lady Maxwell rose up and put out her hand, as a man-servant
+dashed in with a letter.
+
+"My lady," he said panting, and giving it to her, "they are attacking the
+Rectory."
+
+Lady Maxwell, who was half-way to the window now, for light to read her
+husband's letter, paused at that.
+
+"The Rectory?" she said. "Why--Margaret----" then she stopped, and Isabel
+close beside her, saw her turn resolutely from the great sealed letter in
+her hand to the door, and back again.
+
+"Jervis told us, my lady; none saw him as he rode through--they were
+breaking down the gate."
+
+Then Lady Maxwell, with a quick movement, lifted the letter to her lips
+and kissed it, and thrust it down somewhere out of sight in the folds of
+her dress.
+
+"Come, Margaret," she said.
+
+Isabel followed them down the stairs and out through the hall-door; and
+there, as they came out on to the steps that savage snarling roar swelled
+up from the green. There was laughter and hooting mixed with that growl
+of anger; but even the laughter was fierce. The gatehouse stood up black
+against the glare of torches, and the towers threw great swinging shadows
+on the ground and the steps of the Hall.
+
+Isabel followed the two grey glimmering figures, and was astonished at
+the speed with which she had to go. The hoofs of the courier's horse rang
+on the cobbles of the stable-yard as they came down towards the
+gatehouse, and the two wings of the door were wide-open through which he
+had passed just now; but the porter was gone.
+
+Ah! there was the crowd; but not at the Rectory. On the right the Rectory
+gate lay wide open, and a flood of light poured out from the house-door
+at the end of the drive. Before them lay the dark turf, swarming with
+black figures towards the lower end; and a ceaseless roar came from them.
+There were half a dozen torches down there, tossing to and fro; Isabel
+saw that the crowd was still moving down towards the stocks and the pond.
+
+Now the two ladies in front of her were just coming up with the skirts of
+the crowd; and there was an exclamation or two of astonishment as the
+women and children saw who it was that was coming. Then there came the
+furious scream of a man, and the crowd parted, as three men came reeling
+out together, two of them trying with all their power to restrain a
+fighting, kicking, plunging man in long black skirts, who tore and beat
+with his hands. The three ladies stopped for a moment, close together;
+and simultaneously the struggling man broke free and dashed back into the
+crowd, screaming with anger and misery.
+
+"Marion, Marion--I am coming--O God!"
+
+And Isabel saw with a shock of horror that sent her crouching and clinging
+close to Mistress Margaret, that it was the Rector. But the two men were
+after him and caught him by the shoulders as he disappeared; and as they
+turned they faced Lady Maxwell.
+
+"My lady, my lady," stammered one, "we mean him no harm. We----" But his
+voice stopped, as there came a sudden silence, rent by a high terrible
+shriek and a splash; followed in a moment by a yell of laughter and
+shouting; and Lady Maxwell threw herself into the crowd in front.
+
+There were a few moments of jostling in the dark, with the reek and press
+of the crowd about her; and Isabel found herself on the brink of the
+black pond, with Lady Maxwell on one side, and Piers on the other keeping
+the crowd back, and a dripping figure moaning and sobbing in the trampled
+mud at Lady Maxwell's feet. There was silence enough now, and the ring of
+faces opposite stared astonished and open-mouthed at the tall old lady
+with her grey veiled head upraised, as she stood there in the torchlight
+and rated them in her fearless indignant voice.
+
+"I am ashamed, ashamed!" cried Lady Maxwell. "I thought you were men. I
+thought you loved my husband; and--and me." Her voice broke, and then
+once more she cried again. "I am ashamed, ashamed of my village."
+
+And then she stooped to that heaving figure that had crawled up, and laid
+hold tenderly of the arms that were writhed about her feet.
+
+"Come home, my dear," Isabel heard her whisper.
+
+It was a strange procession homeward up the trampled turf. The crowd had
+broken into groups, and the people were awed and silent as they watched
+the four women go back together. Isabel walked a little behind with her
+father and Anthony, who had at last been able to come forward through the
+press and join them; and a couple of the torchbearers escorted them. In
+front went the three, on one side Lady Maxwell, her lace and silk
+splashed and spattered with mud, and her white hands black with it, and
+on the other the old nun, each with an arm thrown round the woman in the
+centre who staggered and sobbed and leaned against them as she went, with
+her long hair and her draggled clothes streaming with liquid mud every
+step she took. Once they stopped, at a group of three men. The Rector was
+sitting up, in his torn dusty cassock, and Isabel saw that one of his
+buckled shoes was gone, as he sat on the grass with his feet before him,
+but quiet now, with his hands before him, and a dazed stupid look in his
+little black eyes that blinked at the light of the torch that was held
+over him; he said nothing as he looked at his wife between the two
+ladies, but his lips moved, and his eyes wandered for a moment to Lady
+Maxwell's face, and then back to his wife.
+
+"Take him home presently," she said to the men who were with him--and
+then passed on again.
+
+As they got through the gatehouse, Isabel stepped forward to Mistress
+Margaret's side.
+
+"Shall I come?" she whispered; and the nun shook her head; so she with
+her father and brother stood there to watch, with the crowd silent and
+ashamed behind. The two torchbearers went on and stood by the steps as
+the three ladies ascended, leaving black footmarks as they went. The door
+was open and faces of servants peeped out, and hands were thrust out to
+take the burden from their mistress, but she shook her head, and the
+three came in together, and the door closed.
+
+As the Norrises went back silently, the Rector passed them, with a little
+group accompanying him too; he, too, could hardly walk alone, so
+exhausted was he with his furious struggles to rescue his wife.
+
+"Take your sister home," said Mr. Norris to Anthony; and they saw him
+slip off and pass his arm through the Rector's, and bend down his
+handsome kindly face to the minister's staring eyes and moving lips as he
+too led him homewards.
+
+Even Anthony was hushed and impressed, and hardly spoke a word until he
+and Isabel turned off down the little dark lane to the Dower House.
+
+"We could do nothing," he said, "father and I--until Lady Maxwell came."
+
+"No," said Isabel softly, "she only could have done it."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                             A CONFESSOR
+
+
+Sir Nicholas and the party were lodged at East Grinsted the night of
+their arrest, in the magistrate's house. Although he was allowed privacy
+in his room, after he had given his word of honour not to attempt an
+escape, yet he was allowed no conversation with Mr. Stewart or his own
+servant except in the presence of the magistrate or one of the
+pursuivants; and Mr. Stewart, since he was personally unknown to the
+magistrate, and since the charge against him was graver, was not on any
+account allowed to be alone for a moment, even in the room in which he
+slept. The following day they all rode on to London, and the two
+prisoners were lodged in the Marshalsea. This had been for a long while
+the place where Bishop Bonner was confined; and where Catholic prisoners
+were often sent immediately after their arrest; and Sir Nicholas at any
+rate found to his joy that he had several old friends among the
+prisoners. He was confined in a separate room; but by the kindness of his
+gaoler whom he bribed profusely as the custom was, through his servant,
+he had many opportunities of meeting the others; and even of approaching
+the sacraments and hearing mass now and then.
+
+He began a letter to his wife on the day of his arrival and finished it
+the next day which was Saturday, and it was taken down immediately by the
+courier who had heard the news and had called at the prison. In fact, he
+was allowed a good deal of liberty; although he was watched and his
+conversation listened to, a good deal more than he was aware. Mr.
+Stewart, however, as he still called himself, was in a much harder case.
+The saddle-bags had been opened on his arrival, and incriminating
+documents found. Besides the "popish trinkets" they were found to contain
+a number of "seditious pamphlets," printed abroad for distribution in
+England; for at this time the College at Douai, under its founder Dr.
+William Allen, late Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, was active in
+the production of literature; these were chiefly commentaries on the
+Bull; as well as exhortations to the Catholics to stand firm and to
+persevere in recusancy, and to the schismatic Catholics, as they were
+called, to give over attending the services in the parish churches. There
+were letters also from Dr. Storey himself, whom the authorities already
+had in person under lock and key at the Tower. These were quite
+sufficient to make Mr. Stewart a prize; and he also was very shortly
+afterwards removed to the Tower.
+
+Sir Nicholas wrote a letter at least once a week to his wife; but writing
+was something of a labour to him; it was exceedingly doubtful to his mind
+whether his letters were not opened and read before being handed to the
+courier, and as his seal was taken from him his wife could not tell
+either. However they seemed to arrive regularly; plainly therefore the
+authorities were either satisfied with their contents or else did not
+think them worth opening or suppressing. He was quite peremptory that his
+wife should not come up to London; it would only increase his distress,
+he said; and he liked to think of her at Maxwell Hall; there were other
+reasons too that he was prudent enough not to commit to paper, and which
+she was prudent enough to guess at, the principal of which was, of
+course, that she ought to be there for the entertaining and helping of
+other agents or priests who might be in need of shelter.
+
+The old man got into good spirits again very soon. It pleased him to
+think that God had honoured him by imprisonment; and he said as much once
+or twice in his letters to his wife. He was also pleased with a sense of
+the part he was playing in the _role_ of a conspirator; and he underlined
+and put signs and exclamation marks all over his letters of which he
+thought his wife would understand the significance, but no one else;
+whereas in reality the old lady was sorely puzzled by them, and the
+authorities who opened the letters generally read them of course like a
+printed book.
+
+One morning about ten days after his arrival the Governor of the prison
+looked in with the gaoler, and announced to Sir Nicholas, after greeting
+him, that he was to appear before the Council that very day. This, of
+course, was what Sir Nicholas desired, and he thanked the Governor
+cordially for his good news.
+
+"They will probably keep you at the Tower, Sir Nicholas," said the
+Governor, "and we shall lose you. However, sir, I hope you will be more
+comfortable there than we have been able to make you."
+
+The knight thanked the Governor again, and said good-day to him with
+great warmth; for they had been on the best of terms with one another
+during his short detention at the Marshalsea.
+
+The following day Sir Nicholas wrote a long letter to his wife describing
+his examination.
+
+"We are in _royal lodgings_ here at last, sweetheart; Mr. Boyd brought my
+luggage over yesterday; and I am settled _for the present_ in a room of
+my own in the White Tower; with a prospect over the Court. I was had
+before my lords yesterday in the Council-room; we drove hither from the
+Marshalsea. There was a bay window in the room. I promise you they got
+little enough from me. There was my namesake, Sir Nicholas Bacon, my
+lords Leicester and Pembroke, and Mr. Secretary Cecil; Sir James Crofts,
+the Controller of the Household, and one or two more; but these were the
+principal. I was set before the table on a chair alone with none to guard
+me; but with men at the doors I knew very well. My lords were very
+courteous to me; though they laughed more than was seemly at such grave
+times. They questioned me much as to my religion. Was I a papist? If they
+meant by that a _Catholic_, that I was, and thanked God for it every
+day--(those nicknames like me not). Was I then a recusant? If by that
+they meant, Did I go to their Genevan Hotch-Potch? That I did not nor
+never would. I thought to have said a word here about St. Cyprian his
+work _De Unitate Ecclesiae_, as F----r X. told me, but they would not let
+me speak. Did I know Mr. Chapman? If by that they meant Mr. Stewart, that
+I did, and for a courteous God-fearing gentleman too. Was he a Papist, or
+a Catholic if I would have it so? That I would not tell them; let them
+find that out with their pursuivants and that crew. Did I think
+Protestants to be fearers of God? That I did not; they feared nought but
+the Queen's Majesty, so it seemed to me. Then they all laughed at once--I
+know not why. Then they grew grave; and Mr. Secretary began to ask me
+questions, sharp and hard; but I would not be put upon, and answered him
+again as he asked. Did I know ought of Dr. Storey? Nothing, said I, save
+that he is a good Catholic, and that they had taken him. _He is a
+seditious rogue_, said my Lord Pembroke. _That he is not_, said I. Then
+they asked me what I thought of the Pope and his Bull, and whether he can
+depose princes. I said I thought him to be the Vicar of Christ; and as to
+his power to depose princes, that I supposed he could do, if he said so.
+Then two or three cried out on me that I had not answered honestly; and
+at that I got wrath; and then they laughed again, at least I saw Sir
+James Crofts at it. And Mr. Secretary, looking very hard at me asked
+whether if Philip sent an armament against Elizabeth to depose her, I
+would fight for him or her grace. For neither, said I: I am too old. _For
+which then would you pray?_ said they. _For the Queen's Grace_, said I,
+_for that she was my sovereign_. This seemed to content them; and they
+talked a little among themselves. They had asked me other questions too
+as to my way of living; whether I went to mass. They asked me too a
+little more about Mr. Stewart. Did I know him to be a seditious rascal?
+That I did not, said I. _Then how_, asked they, _did you come to receive
+him and his pamphlets?_ Of his pamphlets, said I, I know nothing; I saw
+nothing in his bags save beads and a few holy books and such things. (You
+see, sweetheart, I did him no injury by saying so, because I knew that
+they had his bags themselves.) And I said I had received him because he
+was recommended to me by some good friends of mine abroad, and I told
+them their names too; for they are safe in Flanders now.
+
+"And when they had done their questions they talked again for a while; and
+I was sent out to the antechamber to refresh myself; and Mr. Secretary
+sent a man with me to see that I had all I needed; and we talked together
+a little, and he said the Council were in good humour at the taking of
+Dr. Storey; and he had never seen them so merry. Then I was had back
+again presently; and Mr. Secretary said I was to stay in the Tower; and
+that Mr. Boyd was gone already to bring my things. And so after that I
+went by water to the Tower, and here I am, sweetheart, well and cheerful,
+praise God....
+
+"My dearest, I send you my heart's best love. God have you in his holy
+keeping."
+
+The Council treated the old knight very tenderly. They were shrewd enough
+to see his character very plainly; and that he was a simple man who knew
+nothing of sedition, but only had harboured agents thinking them to be as
+guileless as himself. As a matter of fact, Mr. Stewart was an agent of
+Dr. Storey's; and was therefore implicated in a number of very grave
+charges. This of course was a very serious matter; but both in the
+examination of the Council, and in papers in Mr. Stewart's bags, nothing
+could be found to implicate Sir Nicholas in any political intrigue at
+all. The authorities were unwilling too to put such a man to the torture.
+There was always a possibility of public resentment against the torture
+of a man for his religion alone; and they were desirous not to arouse
+this, since they had many prisoners who would be more productive subjects
+of the rack than a plainly simple and loyal old man whose only crime was
+his religion. They determined, however, to make an attempt to get a
+little more out of Sir Nicholas by a device which would excite no
+resentment if it ever transpired, and one which was more suited to the
+old man's nature and years.
+
+Sir Nicholas thus described it to his wife.
+
+"Last night, my dearest, I had a great honour and consolation. I was
+awakened suddenly towards two o'clock in the morning by the door of my
+room opening and a man coming in. It was somewhat dark, and I could not
+see the man plainly, but I could see that he limped and walked with a
+stick, and he breathed hard as he entered. I sat up and demanded of him
+who he was and what he wanted; and telling me to be still, he said that
+he was Dr. Storey. You may be sure, sweetheart, that I sprang up at that;
+but he would not let me rise; and himself sat down beside me. He said
+that by the _kindness_ of a gaoler he had been allowed to come; and that
+he must not stay with me long; that he had heard of me from his good
+friend Mr. Stewart. I asked him how he did, for I heard that he had been
+racked; and he said yes, it was true; but that by the mercy of God and
+the prayers of the saints he had held his peace and they knew nothing
+from him. Then he asked me a great number of questions about the _men I
+had entertained_, and where they were now; and he knew many of their
+names. Some of them were friends of his own, he said; especially the
+priests. We talked a good while, till the morning light began; and then
+he said he must be gone or the head gaoler would know of his visit, and
+so he went. I wish I could have seen his face, sweetheart, for I think
+him a great servant of God; but it was still too dark when he went, and
+we dared not have a light for fear it should be seen."
+
+This was as a matter of fact a ruse of the authorities. It was not Dr.
+Storey at all who was admitted to Sir Nicholas' prison, but Parker, who
+had betrayed him at Antwerp. It was so successful, for Sir Nicholas told
+him all that he knew (which was really nothing at all) that it was
+repeated a few months later with richer results; when the conspirator
+Baily, hysterical and almost beside himself with the pain of the rack,
+under similar circumstances gave up a cypher which was necessary to the
+Council in dealing with the correspondence of Mary Stuart. However, Sir
+Nicholas never knew the deception, and to the end of his days was proud
+that he had actually met the famous Dr. Storey, when they were both
+imprisoned in the Tower together, and told his friends of it with
+reverent pride when the doctor was hanged a year later.
+
+Hubert, who had been sent for to take charge of the estate, had come to
+London soon after his father's arrival at the Tower; and was allowed an
+interview with him in the presence of the Lieutenant. Hubert was greatly
+affected; though he could not look upon the imprisonment with the same
+solemn exultation as that which his father had; but it made a real
+impression upon him to find that he took so patiently this separation
+from home and family for the sake of religion. Hubert received
+instructions from Sir Nicholas as to the management of the estate, for it
+was becoming plain that his father would have to remain in the Tower for
+the present; not any longer on a really grave charge, but chiefly because
+he was an obstinate recusant and would promise nothing. The law and its
+administration at this time were very far apart; the authorities were not
+very anxious to search out and punish those who were merely recusants or
+refused to take the oath of supremacy; and so Hubert and Mr. Boyd and
+other Catholics were able to come and go under the very nose of justice
+without any real risk to themselves; but it was another matter to let a
+sturdy recusant go from prison who stoutly refused to give any sort of
+promise or understanding as to future behaviour.
+
+Sir Nicholas was had down more than once to further examination before
+the Lords Commissioners in the Lieutenant's house; but it was a very tame
+and even an amusing affair for all save Sir Nicholas. It was so easy to
+provoke him; he was so simple and passionate that they could get almost
+anything they wanted out of him by a little adroit baiting; and more than
+once his examination formed a welcome and humorous entr'acte between two
+real tragedies. Sir Nicholas, of course, never suspected for a moment
+that he was affording any amusement to any one. He thought their weary
+laughter to be sardonic and ironical, and he looked upon himself as a
+very desperate fellow indeed; and wrote glowing accounts of it all to his
+wife, full of apostrophic praises to God and the saints, in a hand that
+shook with excitement and awe at the thought of the important scenes in
+which he played so prominent a part.
+
+But there was no atmosphere of humour about Mr. Stewart. He had
+disappeared from Sir Nicholas' sight on their arrival at the Marshalsea,
+and they had not set eyes on one another since; nor could all the
+knight's persuasion and offer of bribes make his gaoler consent to take
+any message or scrap of paper between them. He would not even answer more
+than the simplest inquiries about him,--that he was alive and in the
+Tower, and so forth; and Sir Nicholas prayed often and earnestly for that
+deliberate and vivacious young man who had so charmed and interested them
+all down at Great Keynes, and who had been so mysteriously engulfed by
+the sombre majesty of the law.
+
+"I fear," he wrote to Lady Maxwell, "I fear that _our friend_ must be
+sick or dying. But I can hear no news of him; when I am allowed sometimes
+to walk in the court or on the leads he is never there. My _attendant_
+Mr. Jakes looks glum and says nothing when I ask him how my friend does.
+My dearest, do not forget him in your prayers nor your old loving husband
+either."
+
+One evening late in October Mr. Jakes did not come as usual to bring Sir
+Nicholas his supper at five o'clock; the time passed and still he did not
+come. This was very unusual. Presently Mrs. Jakes appeared instead,
+carrying the food which she set down at the door while she turned the key
+behind her. Sir Nicholas rallied her on having turned gaoler; but she
+turned on him a face with red eyes and lined with weeping.
+
+"O Sir Nicholas," she said, for these two were good friends, "what a
+wicked place this is! God forgive me for saying so; but they've had that
+young man down there since two o'clock; and Jakes is with them to help;
+and he told me to come up to you, Sir Nicholas, with your supper, if they
+weren't done by five; and if the young gentleman hadn't said what they
+wanted."
+
+Sir Nicholas felt sick.
+
+"Who is it?" he asked.
+
+"Why, who but Mr. Stewart?" she said; and then fell weeping again, and
+went out forgetting to lock the door behind her in her grief. Sir
+Nicholas sat still a moment, sick and shaken; he knew what it meant; but
+it had never come so close to him before. He got up presently and went to
+the door to listen for he knew not what. But there was no sound but the
+moan of the wind up the draughty staircase, and the sound of a prisoner
+singing somewhere above him a snatch of a song. He looked out presently,
+but there was nothing but the dark well of the staircase disappearing
+round to the left, and the glimmer of an oil lamp somewhere from the
+depths below him, with wavering shadows as the light was blown about by
+the gusts that came up from outside. There was nothing to be done of
+course; he closed the door, went back and prayed with all his might for
+the young man who was somewhere in this huge building, in his agony.
+
+Mr. Jakes came up himself within half an hour to see if all was well; but
+said nothing of his dreadful employment or of Mr. Stewart; and Sir
+Nicholas did not like to ask for fear of getting Mrs. Jakes into trouble.
+The gaoler took away the supper things, wished him good-night, went out
+and locked the door, apparently without noticing it had been left undone
+before. Possibly his mind was too much occupied with what he had been
+seeing and doing. And the faithful account of all this went down in due
+time to Great Keynes.
+
+The arrival of the courier at the Hall on Wednesday and Saturday was a
+great affair both to the household and to the village. Sir Nicholas sent
+his letter generally by the Saturday courier, and the other brought a
+kind of bulletin from Mr. Boyd, with sometimes a message or two from his
+master. These letters were taken by the ladies first to the study, as if
+to an oratory, and Lady Maxwell would read them slowly over to her
+sister. And in the evening, when Isabel generally came up for an hour or
+two, the girl would be asked to read them slowly all over again to the
+two ladies who sat over their embroidery on either side of her, and who
+interrupted for the sheer joy of prolonging it. And they would discuss
+together the exact significance of all his marks of emphasis and irony;
+and the girl would have all she could do sometimes not to feel a disloyal
+amusement at the transparency of the devices and the simplicity of the
+loving hearts that marvelled at the writer's depth and ingenuity. But she
+was none the less deeply impressed by his courageous cheerfulness, and by
+the power of a religion that in spite of its obvious weaknesses and
+improbabilities yet inspired an old man like Sir Nicholas with so much
+fortitude.
+
+At first, too, a kind of bulletin was always issued on the Sunday and
+Thursday mornings, and nailed upon the outside of the gatehouse, so that
+any who pleased could come there and get first-hand information; and an
+interpreter stood there sometimes, one of the educated younger sons of
+Mr. Piers, and read out to the groups from Lady Maxwell's sprawling old
+handwriting, news of the master.
+
+"Sir Nicholas has been had before the Council," he read out one day in a
+high complacent voice to the awed listeners, "and has been sent to the
+Tower of London." This caused consternation in the village, as it was
+supposed by the country-folk, not without excuse, that the Tower was the
+antechamber of death; but confidence was restored by the further
+announcement a few lines down that "he was well and cheerful."
+
+Great interest, too, was aroused by more domestic matters.
+
+"Sir Nicholas," it was proclaimed, "is in a little separate chamber of
+his own. Mr. Jakes, his gaoler, seems an honest fellow. Sir Nicholas hath
+a little mattress from a friend that Mr. Boyd fetched for him. He has
+dinner at eleven and supper at five. Sir Nicholas hopes that all are well
+in the village."
+
+But other changes had followed the old knight's arrest. The furious
+indignation in the village against the part that the Rectory had played
+in the matter, made it impossible for the Dents to remain there. That the
+minister's wife should have been publicly ducked, and that not by a few
+blackguards but by the solid fathers and sons with the applause of the
+wives and daughters, made her husband's position intolerable, and further
+evidence was forthcoming in the behaviour of the people towards the
+Rector himself; some boys had guffawed during his sermon on the following
+Sunday, when he had ventured on a word or two of penitence as to his
+share in the matter, and he was shouted after on his way home.
+
+Mrs. Dent seemed strangely changed and broken during her stay at the
+Hall. She had received a terrible shock, and it was not safe to move her
+back to her own house. For the first two or three nights, she would start
+from sleep again and again screaming for help and mercy and nothing would
+quiet her till she was wide awake and saw in the fire-light the curtained
+windows and the bolted door, and the kindly face of an old servant or
+Mistress Margaret with her beads in her hand. Isabel, who came up to see
+her two or three times, was both startled and affected by the change in
+her; and by the extraordinary mood of humility which seemed to have taken
+possession of the hard self-righteous Puritan.
+
+"I begged pardon," she whispered to the girl one evening, sitting up in
+bed and staring at her with wide, hard eyes, "I begged pardon of Lady
+Maxwell, though I am not fit to speak to her. Do you think she can ever
+forgive me? Do you think she can? It was I, you know, who wrought all the
+mischief, as I have wrought all the mischief in the village all these
+years. She said she did, and she kissed me, and said that our Saviour had
+forgiven her much more. But--but do you think she has forgiven me?" And
+then again, another night, a day or two before they left the place, she
+spoke to Isabel again.
+
+"Look after the poor bodies," she said, "teach them a little charity; I
+have taught them nought but bitterness and malice, so they have but given
+me my own back again. I have reaped what I have sown."
+
+So the Dents slipped off early one morning before the folk were up; and
+by the following Sunday, young Mr. Bodder, of whom the Bishop entertained
+a high opinion, occupied the little desk outside the chancel arch; and
+Great Keynes once more had to thank God and the diocesan that it
+possessed a proper minister of its own, and not a mere unordained reader,
+which was all that many parishes could obtain.
+
+Towards the end of September further hints began to arrive, very much
+underlined, in the knight's letters, of Mr. Stewart and his sufferings.
+
+"You remember _our friend_," Isabel read out one Saturday evening, "_not_
+Mr. Stewart." (This puzzled the old ladies sorely till Isabel explained
+their lord's artfulness.) "My dearest, I fear the worst for him. I do not
+mean apostacy, thank God. But I fear that these _wolves_ have torn him
+sadly, in their _dens_." Then followed the story of Mrs. Jakes, with all
+its horror, all the greater from the obscurity of the details.
+
+Isabel put the paper down trembling, as she sat on the rug before the
+fire in the parlour upstairs, and thought of the bright-eyed, red-haired
+man with his steady mouth and low laugh whom Anthony had described to
+her.
+
+Lady Maxwell posted upon the gatehouse:
+
+"Sir Nicholas fears that a _friend_ is in sore trouble; he hopes he may
+not _yield_."
+
+Then, after a few days more, a brief notice with a black-line drawn round
+it, that ran, in Mr. Bodder's despite:
+
+"Our _friend_ has passed away. Pray for his soul."
+
+Sir Nicholas had written in great agitation to this effect.
+
+"My sweetheart, I have heavy news to-day. There was a great company of
+folks below my window to-day, in the Inner Ward, where the road runs up
+below the Bloody Tower. It was about nine of the clock. And there was a
+horse there whose head I could see; and presently from the Beauchamp
+Tower came, as I thought, an old man between two warders; and then I
+could not very well see; the men were in my way; but soon the horse went
+off, and the men after him; and I could hear the groaning of the crowd
+that were waiting for them outside. And when Mr. Jakes brought me my
+dinner at eleven of the clock, he told me it was our friend--(think of
+it, my dearest--him whom I thought an old man!)--that had been taken off
+to Tyburn. And now I need say no more, but bid you pray for his soul."
+
+Isabel could hardly finish reading it; for she heard a quick sobbing
+breath behind her, and felt a wrinkled old hand caressing her hair and
+cheek as her voice faltered.
+
+Meanwhile Hubert was in town. Sir Nicholas had at first intended him to
+go down at once and take charge of the estate; but Piers was very
+competent, and so his father consented that he should remain in London
+until the beginning of October; and this too better suited Mr. Norris'
+plans who wished to send Isabel off about the same time to Northampton.
+
+When Hubert at last did arrive, he soon showed himself extremely capable
+and apt for the work. He was out on the estate from morning till night on
+his cob, and there was not a man under him from Piers downwards who had
+anything but praise for his insight and industry.
+
+There was in Hubert, too, as there so often is in country-boys who love
+and understand the life of the woods and fields, a balancing quality of a
+deep vein of sentiment; and this was now consecrated to Isabel Norris. He
+had pleasant dreams as he rode home in the autumn evening, under the
+sweet keen sky where the harvest moon rose large and yellow over the
+hills to his left and shed a strange mystical light that blended in a
+kind of chord with the dying daylight. It was at times like that, when
+the air was fragrant with the scent of dying leaves, with perhaps a touch
+of frost in it, and the cottages one by one opened red glowing eyes in
+the dusk, that the boy began to dream of a home of his own and pleasant
+domestic joys; of burning logs on the hearth and lighted candles, and a
+dear slender figure moving about the room. He used to rehearse to himself
+little meetings and partings; look at the roofs of the Dower House
+against the primrose sky as he rode up the fields homewards; identify her
+window, dark now as she was away; and long for Christmas when she would
+be back again. The only shadow over these delightful pictures was the
+uncertainty as to the future. Where after all would the home be? For he
+was a younger son. He thought about James very often. When he came back
+would he live at home? Would it all be James' at his father's death,
+these woods and fields and farms and stately house? Would it ever come to
+him? And, meanwhile where should he and Isabel live, when the religious
+difficulty had been surmounted, as he had no doubt that it would be
+sooner or later?
+
+When he thought of his father now, it was with a continually increasing
+respect. He had been inclined to despise him sometimes before, as one of
+a simple and uneventful life; but now the red shadow of the Law conferred
+dignity. To have been imprisoned in the Tower was a patent of nobility,
+adding distinction and gravity to the commonplace. Something of the glory
+even rested on Hubert himself as he rode and hawked with other Catholic
+boys, whose fathers maybe were equally zealous for the Faith, but less
+distinguished by suffering for it.
+
+Before Anthony went back to Cambridge, he and Hubert went out nearly
+every day together with or without their hawks. Anthony was about three
+years the younger, and Hubert's additional responsibility for the estate
+made the younger boy more in awe of him than the difference in their ages
+warranted. Besides, Hubert knew quite as much about sport, and had more
+opportunities for indulging his taste for it. There was no heronry at
+hand; besides, it was not the breeding time which is the proper season
+for this particular sport; so they did not trouble to ride out to one;
+but the partridges and hares and rabbits that abounded in the Maxwell
+estate gave them plenty of quarreys. They preferred to go out generally
+without the falconer, a Dutchman, who had been taken into the service of
+Sir Nicholas thirty years before when things had been more prosperous; it
+was less embarrassing so; but they would have a lad to carry the "cadge,"
+and a pony following them to carry the game. They added to the excitement
+of the sport by making it a competition between their birds; and flying
+them one after another, or sometimes at the same quarry, as in coursing;
+but this often led to the birds' crabbing.
+
+Anthony's peregrine Eliza was almost unapproachable; and the lad was the
+more proud of her as he had "made" her himself, as an "eyess" or young
+falcon captured as a nestling. But, on the other hand, Hubert's goshawk
+Margaret, a fiery little creature, named inappropriately enough after his
+tranquil aunt, as a rule did better than Anthony's Isabel, and brought
+the scores level again.
+
+There was one superb day that survived long in Anthony's memory and
+conversation; when he had done exceptionally well, when Eliza had
+surpassed herself, and even Isabel had acquitted herself with credit. It
+was one of those glorious days of wind and sun that occasionally fall in
+early October, with a pale turquoise sky overhead, and air that seems to
+sparkle and intoxicate like wine. They went out together after dinner
+about noon; their ponies and spaniels danced with the joy of life; Lady
+Maxwell cried to them from the north terrace to be careful, and pointed
+out to Mr. Norris who had dined with them what a graceful seat Hubert
+had; and then added politely, but as an obvious afterthought, that
+Anthony seemed to manage his pony with great address. The boys turned off
+through the village, and soon got on to high ground to the west of the
+village and all among the stubble and mustard, with tracts of rich sunlit
+country, of meadows and russet woodland below them on every side. Then
+the sport began. It seemed as if Eliza could not make a mistake. There
+rose a solitary partridge forty yards away with a whirl of wings; (the
+coveys were being well broken up by now) Anthony unhooded his bird and
+"cast off," with the falconer's cry "Hoo-ha, ha, ha, ha," and up soared
+Eliza with the tinkle of bells, on great strokes of those mighty wings,
+up, up, behind the partridge that fled low down the wind for his life.
+The two ponies were put to the gallop as the peregrine began to "stoop";
+and then down like a plummet she fell with closed wings, "raked" the
+quarry with her talons as she passed; recovered herself, and as Anthony
+came up holding out the _tabur-stycke_, returned to him and was hooded
+and leashed again; and sat there on his gloved wrist with wet claws, just
+shivering slightly from her nerves, like the aristocrat she was; while
+her master stroked her ashy back and the boy picked up the quarry,
+admiring the deep rent before he threw it into the pannier.
+
+Then Hubert had the next turn; but his falcon missed his first stoop, and
+did not strike the quarry till the second attempt, thus scoring one to
+Anthony's account. Then the peregrines were put back on the cadge as the
+boys got near to a wide meadow in a hollow where the rabbits used to
+feed; and the goshawks Margaret and Isabel were taken, each in turn
+sitting unhooded on her master's wrist, while they all watched the long
+thin grass for the quick movement that marked the passage of a
+rabbit;--and then in a moment the bird was cast off. The goshawk would
+rise just high enough to see the quarry in the grass, then fly straight
+with arched wings and pounces stretched out as she came over the quarry;
+then striking him between the shoulders would close with him; and her
+master would come up and take her off, throw the rabbit to the
+game-carrier; and the other would have the next attempt.
+
+And so they went on for three or four hours, encouraging their birds,
+whooping the death of the quarry, watching with all the sportsman's
+keenness the soaring and stooping of the peregrines, the raking off of
+the goshawks; listening to the thrilling tinkle of the bells, and taking
+back their birds to sit triumphant and complacent on their master's
+wrists, when the quarry had been fairly struck, and furious and sullen
+when it had eluded them two or three times till their breath left them in
+the dizzy rushes, and they "canceliered" or even returned disheartened
+and would fly no more till they had forgotten--till at last the shadows
+grew long, and the game more wary, and the hawks and ponies tired; and
+the boys put up the birds on the cadge, and leashed them to it securely;
+and jogged slowly homewards together up the valley road that led to the
+village, talking in technical terms of how the merlin's feather must be
+"imped" to-morrow; and of the relative merits of the "varvels" or little
+silver rings at the end of the jesses through which the leash ran, and
+the Dutch swivel that Squire Blackett always used.
+
+As they got nearer home and the red roofs of the Dower House began to
+glow in the ruddy sunlight above the meadows, Hubert began to shift the
+conversation round to Isabel, and inquire when she was coming home.
+Anthony was rather bored at this turn of the talk; but thought she would
+be back by Christmas at the latest; and said that she was at
+Northampton--and had Hubert ever seen such courage as Eliza's? But Hubert
+would not be put off; but led the talk back again to the girl; and at
+last told Anthony under promise of secrecy that he was fond of Isabel,
+and wished to make her his wife;--and oh! did Anthony think she cared
+really for him. Anthony stared and wondered and had no opinion at all on
+the subject; but presently fell in love with the idea that Hubert should
+be his brother-in-law and go hawking with him every day; and he added a
+private romance of his own in which he and Mary Corbet should be at the
+Dower House, with Hubert and Isabel at the Hall; while the elders, his
+own father, Sir Nicholas, Mr. James, Lady Maxwell, and Mistress Torridon
+had all taken up submissive and complacent attitudes in the middle
+distance.
+
+He was so pensive that evening that his father asked him at supper
+whether he had not had a good day; which diverted his thoughts from
+Mistress Corbet, and led him away from sentiment on a stream of his own
+talk with long backwaters of description of this and that stoop, and of
+exactly the points in which he thought the Maxwells' falconer had failed
+in the training of Hubert's Jane.
+
+Hubert found a long letter waiting from his father which Lady Maxwell
+gave him to read, with messages to himself in it about the estate, which
+brought him down again from the treading of rosy cloud-castles with a
+phantom Isabel whither his hawks and the shouting wind and the happy day
+had wafted him, down to questions of barns and farm-servants and the
+sober realities of harvest.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XI
+
+                            MASTER CALVIN
+
+
+Isabel reached Northampton a day or two before Hubert came back to Great
+Keynes. She travelled down with two combined parties going to Leicester
+and Nottingham, sleeping at Leighton Buzzard on the way; and on the
+evening of the second day reached the house of her father's friend Dr.
+Carrington, that stood in the Market Square.
+
+Her father's intention in sending her to this particular town and
+household was to show her how Puritanism, when carried to its extreme,
+was as orderly and disciplined a system, and was able to control the
+lives of its adherents, as well as the Catholicism whose influence on her
+character he found himself beginning to fear. But he wished also that she
+should be repelled to some extent by the merciless rigidity she would
+find at Northampton, and thus, after an oscillation or two come to rest
+in the quiet eclecticism of that middle position which he occupied
+himself.
+
+The town indeed was at this time a miniature Geneva. There was something
+in the temper of its inhabitants that made it especially susceptible to
+the wave of Puritanism that was sweeping over England. Lollardy had
+flourished among them so far back as the reign of Richard II; when the
+mayor, as folks told one another with pride, had plucked a mass-priest by
+the vestment on the way to the altar in All Saints' Church, and had made
+him give over his mummery till the preacher had finished his sermon.
+
+Dr. Carrington, too, a clean-shaven, blue-eyed, grey-haired man,
+churchwarden of Saint Sepulchre's, was a representative of the straitest
+views, and desperately in earnest. For him the world ranged itself into
+the redeemed and the damned; these two companies were the pivots of life
+for him; and every subject of mind or desire was significant only so far
+as it bore relations to be immutable decrees of God. But his fierce and
+merciless theological insistence was disguised by a real human tenderness
+and a marked courtesy of manner; and Isabel found him a kindly and
+thoughtful host.
+
+Yet the mechanical strictness of the household, and the overpowering
+sense of the weightiness of life that it conveyed, was a revelation to
+Isabel. Dr. Carrington at family prayers was a tremendous figure, as he
+kneeled upright at the head of the table in the sombre dining-room; and
+it seemed to Isabel in her place that the pitiless all-seeing Presence
+that kept such terrifying silence as the Doctor cried on Jehovah, was
+almost a different God to that whom she knew in the morning parlour at
+home, to whom her father prayed with more familiarity but no less
+romance, and who answered in the sunshine that lay on the carpet, and the
+shadows of boughs that moved across it, and the chirp of the birds under
+the eaves. And all day long she thought she noticed the same difference;
+at Great Keynes life was made up of many parts, the love of family, the
+country doings, the worship of God, the garden, and the company of the
+Hall ladies; and the Presence of God interpenetrated all like light or
+fragrance; but here life was lived under the glare of His eye, and
+absorption in any detail apart from the consciousness of that
+encompassing Presence had the nature of sin.
+
+On the Saturday after her arrival, as she was walking by the Nen with
+Kate Carrington, one of the two girls, she asked her about the crowd of
+ministers she had seen in the streets that morning.
+
+"They have been to the Prophesyings," said Kate. "My father says that
+there is no exercise that sanctifies a godly young minister so quickly."
+
+Kate went on to describe them further. The ministers assembled each
+Saturday at nine o'clock, and one of their number gave a short
+Bible-reading or lecture. Then all present were invited to join in the
+discussion; the less instructed would ask questions, the more experienced
+would answer, and debate would run high. Such a method Kate explained,
+who herself was a zealous and well instructed Calvinist, was the surest
+and swiftest road to truth, for every one held the open Scriptures in his
+hand, and interpreted and checked the speakers by the aid of that
+infallible guide.
+
+"But if a man's judgment lead him wrong?" asked Isabel, who professedly
+admitted authority to have some place in matters of faith.
+
+"All must hold the Apostles' Creed first of all," said Kate, "and must
+set his name to a paper declaring the Pope to be antichrist, with other
+truths upon it."
+
+Isabel was puzzled; for it seemed now as if Private Judgment were not
+supreme among its professors; but she did not care to question further.
+It began to dawn upon her presently, however, why the Queen was so fierce
+against Prophesyings; for she saw that they exercised that spirit of
+exclusiveness, the property of Papist and Puritan alike; which, since it
+was the antithesis of the tolerant comprehensiveness of the Church of
+England, was also the enemy of the theological peace that Elizabeth was
+seeking to impose upon the country; and that it was for that reason that
+Papist and Puritan, sundered so far in theology, were united in suffering
+for conscience' sake.
+
+On the Sunday morning Isabel went with Mrs. Carrington and the two girls
+to the round Templars' Church of Saint Sepulchre, for the Morning Prayer
+at eight o'clock, and then on to St. Peter's for the sermon. It was the
+latter function that was important in Puritan eyes; for the word preached
+was considered to have an almost sacramental force in the application of
+truth and grace to the soul; and crowds of people, with downcast eyes and
+in sombre dress, were pouring down the narrow streets from all the
+churches round, while the great bell beat out its summons from the Norman
+tower. The church was filled from end to end as they came in, meeting Dr.
+Carrington at the door, and they all passed up together to the pew
+reserved for the churchwarden, close beneath the pulpit.
+
+As Isabel looked round her, it came upon her very forcibly what she had
+begun to notice even at Great Keynes, that the religion preached there
+did not fit the church in which it was set forth; and that, though great
+efforts had been made to conform the building to the worship. There had
+been no half measures at Northampton, for the Puritans had a loathing of
+what they called a "mingle-mangle." Altars, footpaces, and piscinae had
+been swept away and all marks of them removed, as well as the rood-loft
+and every image in the building; the stained windows had been replaced by
+plain glass painted white; the walls had been whitewashed from roof to
+floor, and every suspicion of colour erased except where texts of
+Scripture ran rigidly across the open wall spaces: "We are not under the
+Law, but under Grace," Isabel read opposite her, beneath the clerestory
+windows. And, above all, the point to which all lines and eyes converged,
+was occupied no longer by the Table but by the tribunal of the Lord. Yet
+underneath the disguise the old religion triumphed still. Beneath the
+great plain orderly scheme, without depth of shadows, dominated by the
+towering place of Proclamation where the crimson-faced herald waited to
+begin, the round arches and the elaborate mouldings, and the cool depths
+beyond the pillars, all declared that in the God for whom that temple was
+built, there was mystery as well as revelation, Love as well as Justice,
+condescension as well as Majesty, beauty as well as awfulness,
+invitations as well as eternal decrees.
+
+Isabel looked up presently, as the people still streamed in, and watched
+the minister in his rustling Genevan gown, leaning with his elbows on the
+Bible that rested open on the great tasselled velvet cushion before him.
+Everything about him was on the grand scale; his great hands were clasped
+and protruded over the edge of the Book; and his heavy dark face looked
+menacingly round on the crowded church; he had the air of a melancholy
+giant about to engage in some tragic pleasure. But Isabel's instinctive
+dislike began to pass into positive terror so soon as he began to preach.
+
+When the last comers had found a place, and the talking had stopped, he
+presently gave out his text, in a slow thunderous voice, that silenced
+the last whispers:
+
+"What shall we then say to these things? If God be on our side, who can
+be against us?"
+
+There were a few slow sentences, in a deep resonant voice, uttering each
+syllable deliberately like the explosion of a far-off gun, and in a
+minute or two he was in the thick of Calvin's smoky gospel. Doctrine,
+voice, and man were alike terrible and overpowering.
+
+There lay the great scheme in a few minutes, seen by Isabel as though
+through the door of hell, illumined by the glare of the eternal embers.
+The huge merciless Will of God stood there before her, disclosed in all
+its awfulness, armed with thunders, moving on mighty wheels. The
+foreknowledge of God closed the question henceforth, and, if proof were
+needed, made predestination plain. There was man's destiny, irrevocably
+fixed, iron-bound, changeless and immovable as the laws of God's own
+being. Yet over the rigid and awful Face of God, flickered a faint light,
+named mercy; and this mercy vindicated its existence by demanding that
+some souls should escape the final and endless doom that was the due
+reward of every soul conceived and born in enmity against God and under
+the frown of His Justice.
+
+Then, heralded too by wrath, the figure of Jesus began to glimmer through
+the thunderclouds; and Isabel lifted her eyes, to look in hope. But He
+was not as she had known him in His graciousness, and as He had revealed
+Himself to her in tender communion, and among the flowers and under the
+clear skies of Sussex. Here, in this echoing world of wrath He stood,
+pale and rigid, with lightning in His eyes, and the grim and crimson
+Cross behind him; and as powerless as His own Father Himself to save one
+poor timid despairing hoping soul against whom the Eternal Decree had
+gone forth. Jesus was stern and forbidding here, with the red glare of
+wrath on His Face too, instead of the rosy crown of Love upon His
+forehead; His mouth was closed with compressed lips which surely would
+only open to condemn; not that mouth, quivering and human, that had
+smiled and trembled and bent down from the Cross to kiss poor souls that
+could not hope, nor help themselves, that had smiled upon Isabel ever
+since she had known Him. It was appalling to this gentle maiden soul that
+had bloomed and rejoiced so long in the shadow of His healing, to be torn
+out of her retreat and set thus under the consuming noonday of the
+Justice of this Sun of white-hot Righteousness.
+
+For, as she listened, it was all so miserably convincing; her own little
+essays of intellect and flights of hopeful imagination were caught up and
+whirled away in the strong rush of this man's argument; her timid
+expectancy that God was really Love, as she understood the word in the
+vision of her Saviour's Person,--this was dashed aside as a childish
+fancy; the vision of the Father of the Everlasting Arms receded into the
+realm of dreams; and instead there lowered overhead in this furious
+tempest of wrath a monstrous God with a stony Face and a stonier Heart,
+who was eternally either her torment or salvation; and Isabel thought,
+and trembled at the blasphemy, that if God were such as this, the one
+would be no less agony than the other. Was this man bearing false
+witness, not only against his neighbour, but far more awfully, against
+his God? But it was too convincing; it was built up on an iron hammered
+framework of a great man's intellect and made white hot with another
+great man's burning eloquence. But it seemed to Isabel now and again as
+if a thunder-voiced virile devil were proclaiming the Gospel of
+Everlasting shame. There he bent over the pulpit with flaming face and
+great compelling gestures that swayed the congregation, eliciting the
+emotions he desired, as the conductor's baton draws out the music (for
+the man was a great orator), and he stormed and roared and seemed to
+marshal the very powers of the world to come, compelling them by his nod,
+and interpreting them by his voice; and below him sat this poor child,
+tossed along on his eloquence, like a straw on a flood; and yet hating
+and resenting it and struggling to detach herself and disbelieve every
+word he spoke.
+
+As the last sands were running out in his hour-glass, he came to harbour
+from this raging sea; and in a few deep resonant sentences, like those
+with which he began, he pictured the peace of the ransomed soul, that
+knows itself safe in the arms of God; that rejoices, even in this world,
+in the Light of His Face and the ecstasy of His embrace; that dwells by
+waters of comfort and lies down in the green pastures of the Heavenly
+Love; while, round this little island of salvation in an ocean of terror,
+the thunders of wrath sound only as the noise of surge on a far-off reef.
+
+The effect on Isabel was very great. It was far more startling than her
+visit to London; there her quiet religion had received high sanction in
+the mystery of S. Paul's. But here it was the plainest Calvinism preached
+with immense power. The preacher's last words of peace were no peace to
+her. If it was necessary to pass those bellowing breakers of wrath to
+reach the Happy Country, then she had never reached it yet; she had lived
+so far in an illusion; her life had been spent in a fool's paradise,
+where the light and warmth and flowers were but artificial after all; and
+she knew that she had not the heart to set out again. Though she
+recognised dimly the compelling power of this religion, and that it was
+one which, if sincerely embraced, would make the smallest details of life
+momentous with eternal weight, yet she knew that her soul could never
+respond to it, and whether saved or damned that it could only cower in
+miserable despair under a Deity that was so sovereign as this.
+
+So her heart was low and her eyes sad as she followed Mrs. Carrington out
+of church. Was this then really the Revelation of the Love of God in the
+Person of Jesus Christ? Had all that she knew as the Gospel melted down
+into this fiery lump?
+
+The rest of the day did not alter the impression made on her mind. There
+was little talk, or evidence of any human fellowship, in the Carrington
+household on the Lord's Day; there was a word or two of grave
+commendation on the sermon during dinner; and in the afternoon there was
+the Evening Prayer to be attended in St. Sepulchre's followed by an
+exposition, and a public catechising on Calvin's questions and answers.
+Here the same awful doctrines reappeared, condensed with an icy reality,
+even more paralysing than the burning presentation of them in the
+morning's sermon. She was spared questions herself, as she was a
+stranger; and sat to hear girls of her own age and older men and women
+who looked as soft-hearted as herself, utter definitions of the method of
+salvation and the being and character of God that compelled the assent of
+her intellect, while they jarred with her spiritual experience as
+fiercely as brazen trumpets out of tune.
+
+In the evening there followed further religious exercises in the dark
+dining-room, at the close of which Dr. Carrington read one of Mr.
+Calvin's Genevan discourses, from his tall chair at the head of the
+table. She looked at him at first, and wondered in her heart whether that
+man, with his clear gentle voice, and his pleasant old face crowned with
+iron-grey hair seen in the mellow candlelight, really believed in the
+terrible gospel of the morning; for she heard nothing of the academic
+discourse that he was reading now, and presently her eyes wandered away
+out of the windows to the pale night sky. There still glimmered a faint
+streak of light in the west across the Market Square; it seemed to her as
+a kind of mirror of her soul at this moment; the tender daylight had
+faded, though she could still discern the token of its presence far away,
+and as from behind the bars of a cage; but the night of God's wrath was
+fast blotting out the last touch of radiance from her despairing soul.
+
+Dr. Carrington looked at her with courteous anxiety, but with approval
+too, as he held her hand for a moment as she said good-night to him.
+There were shadows of weariness and depression under her eyes, and the
+corners of her mouth drooped a little; and the doctor's heart stirred
+with hope that the Word of God had reached at last this lamb of His who
+had been fed too long on milk, and sheltered from the sun; but who was
+now coming out, driven it might be, and unhappy, but still on its way to
+the plain and wholesome pastures of the Word that lay in the glow of the
+unveiled glory of God.
+
+Isabel in her dark room upstairs was miserable; she stood long at her
+window her face pressed against the glass, and looked at the sky, from
+which the last streak of light had now died, and longed with all her
+might for her own oak room at home, with her prie-dieu and the familiar
+things about her; and the pines rustling outside in the sweet night-wind.
+It seemed to her as if an irresistible hand had plucked her out from
+those loved things and places, and that a penetrating eye were examining
+every corner of her soul. In one sense she believed herself nearer to God
+than ever before, but it was heartbreaking to find Him like this. She
+went to sleep with the same sense of a burdening Presence resting on her
+spirit.
+
+The next morning Dr. Carrington saw her privately and explained to her a
+notice that she had not understood when it had been given out in church
+the day before. It was to the effect that the quarterly communion would
+be administered on the following Sunday, having been transferred that
+year from the Sunday after Michaelmas Day, and that she must hold herself
+in readiness on the Wednesday afternoon to undergo the examination that
+was enforced in every household in Northampton, at the hands of the
+Minister and Churchwardens.
+
+"But you need not fear it, Mistress Norris," he said kindly, seeing her
+alarm. "My daughter Kate will tell you all that is needful."
+
+Kate too told her it would be little more than formal in her case.
+
+"The minister will not ask you much," she said, "for you are a stranger,
+and my father will vouch for you. He will ask you of irresistible grace,
+and of the Sacrament." And she gave her a couple of books from which she
+might summarise the answers; especially directing her attention to
+Calvin's Catechism, telling her that that was the book with which all the
+servants and apprentices were obliged to be familiar.
+
+When Wednesday afternoon came, one by one the members of the household
+went before the inquisition that held its court in the dining-room; and
+last of all Isabel's turn came. The three gentlemen who sat in the middle
+of the long side of the table, with their backs to the light, half rose
+and bowed to her as she entered; and requested her to sit opposite to
+them. To her relief it was the Minister of St. Sepulchre's who was to
+examine her--he who had read the service and discoursed on the Catechism,
+not the morning preacher. He was a man who seemed a little ill at ease
+himself; he had none of the superb confidence of the preacher; but
+appeared to be one to whose natural character this stern _role_ was not
+altogether congenial. He asked a few very simple questions; as to when
+she had last taken the Sacrament; how she would interpret the words,
+"This is my Body"; and looked almost grateful when she answered quietly
+and without heat. He asked her too three or four of the simpler questions
+which Kate had indicated to her; all of which she answered satisfactorily;
+and then desired to know whether she was in charity with all men; and
+whether she looked to Jesus Christ alone as her one Saviour. Finally he
+turned to Dr. Carrington, and wished to know whether Mistress Norris
+would come to the sacrament at five or nine o'clock, and Dr. Carrington
+answered that she would no doubt wish to come with his own wife and
+daughters at nine o'clock; which was the hour for the folks who were
+better to do. And so the inquisition ended much to Isabel's relief.
+
+But this was a very extraordinary experience to her; it gave her a first
+glimpse into the rigid discipline that the extreme Puritans wished to see
+enforced everywhere; and with it a sense of corporate responsibility that
+she had not appreciated before; the congregation meant something to her
+now; she was no longer alone with her Lord individually, but understood
+that she was part of a body with various functions, and that the care of
+her soul was not merely a personal matter for herself, but involved her
+minister and the officers of the Church as well. It astonished her to
+think that this process was carried out on every individual who lived in
+the town in preparation for the sacrament on the following Sunday.
+
+Isabel, and indeed the whole household, spent the Friday and Saturday in
+rigid and severe preparation. No flesh food was eaten on either of the
+days; and all the members of the family were supposed to spend several
+hours in their own rooms in prayer and meditation. She did not find this
+difficult, as she was well practised in solitude and prayer, and she
+scarcely left her room all Saturday except for meals.
+
+"O Lord," Isabel repeated each morning and evening at her bedside during
+this week, "the blind dulness of our corrupt nature will not suffer us
+sufficiently to weigh these thy most ample benefits, yet, nevertheless,
+at the commandment of Jesus Christ our Lord, we present ourselves to this
+His table, which He hath left to be used in remembrance of His death
+until His coming again, to declare and witness before the world, that by
+Him alone we have received liberty and life; that by Him alone dost thou
+acknowledge us to be thy children and heirs; that by Him alone we have
+entrance to the throne of thy grace; that by Him alone we are possessed
+in our spiritual kingdom, to eat and drink at His table, with whom we
+have our conversation presently in heaven, and by whom our bodies shall
+be raised up again from the dust, and shall be placed with Him in that
+endless joy, which Thou, O Father of mercy, hast prepared for thine
+elect, before the foundation of the world was laid."
+
+And so she prepared herself for that tryst with her Beloved in a foreign
+land where all was strange and unfamiliar about her: yet He was hourly
+drawing nearer, and she cried to Him day by day in these words so
+redolent to her with associations of past communions, and of moments of
+great spiritual elevation. The very use of the prayer this week was like
+a breeze of flowers to one in a wilderness.
+
+On the Saturday night she ceremoniously washed her feet as her father had
+taught her; and lay down happier than she had been for days past, for
+to-morrow would bring the Lover of her soul.
+
+On the Sunday all the household was astir early at their prayers, and
+about half-past eight o'clock all, including the servants who had just
+returned from the five o'clock service, assembled in the dining-room; the
+noise of the feet of those returning from church had ceased on the
+pavement of the square outside, and all was quiet except for the solemn
+sound of the bells, as Dr. Carrington offered extempore prayer for all
+who were fulfilling the Lord's ordinance on that day. And Isabel once
+more felt her heart yearn to a God who seemed Love after all.
+
+St. Sepulchre's was nearly full when they arrived. The mahogany table had
+been brought down from the eastern wall to beneath the cupola, and stood
+there with a large white cloth, descending almost to the ground on every
+side; and a row of silver vessels, flat plates and tall new Communion
+cups and flagons, shone upon it. Isabel buried her face in her hands, and
+tried to withdraw into the solitude of her own soul; but the noise of the
+feet coming and going, and the talking on all sides of her, were terribly
+distracting. Presently four ministers entered and Isabel was startled to
+see, as she raised her face at the sudden silence, that none of them wore
+the prescribed surplice; for she had not been accustomed to the views of
+the extreme Puritans to whom this was a remnant of Popery; an indifferent
+thing indeed in itself, as they so often maintained; but far from
+indifferent when it was imposed by authority. One entered the pulpit; the
+other three took their places at the Holy Table; and after a metrical
+Psalm sung in the Genevan fashion, the service began. At the proper place
+the minister in the pulpit delivered an hour's sermon of the type to
+which Isabel was being now introduced for the first time; but bearing
+again and again on the point that the sacrament was a confession to the
+world of faith in Christ; it was in no sense a sacrificial act towards
+God, "as the Papists vainly taught"; this part of the sermon was spoiled,
+to Isabel's ears at least, by a flood of disagreeable words poured out
+against the popish doctrine; and the end of the sermon consisted of a
+searching exhortation to those who contemplated sin, who bore malice, who
+were in any way holding aloof from God, "to cast themselves mightily upon
+the love of the Redeemer, bewailing their sinful lives, and purposing to
+amend them." This act, wrought out in the silence of the soul even now
+would transfer the sinner from death unto life; and turn what threatened
+to be poison into a "lively and healthful food." Then he turned to those
+who came prepared and repentant, hungering and thirsting after the Bread
+of Life and the Wine that the Lord had mingled; and congratulated them on
+their possession of grace, and on the rich access of sanctification that
+would be theirs by a faithful reception of this comfortable sacrament;
+and then in half a dozen concluding sentences he preached Christ, as
+"food to the hungry; a stream to the thirsty; a rest for the weary. It is
+He alone, our dear Redeemer, who openeth the Kingdom of Heaven, to which
+may He vouchsafe to bring us for His Name's sake."
+
+Isabel was astonished to see that the preacher did not descend from the
+pulpit after the sermon, but that as soon as he had announced that the
+mayor would sit at the Town Hall with the ministers and churchwardens on
+the following Thursday to inquire into the cases of all who had not
+presented themselves for Communion, he turned and began to busy himself
+with the great Bible that lay on the cushion. The service went on, and
+the conducting of it was shared among the three ministers standing, one
+at the centre of the table which was placed endways, and the others at
+the two ends. As the Prayer of Consecration was begun, Isabel hid her
+face as she was accustomed to do, for she believed it to be the principal
+part of the service, and waited for the silence that in her experience
+generally followed the Amen. But a voice immediately began from the
+pulpit, and she looked up, startled and distracted.
+
+"Then Jesus said unto them," pealed out the preacher's voice, "All ye
+shall be offended by me this night, for it is written, I will smite the
+shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered. But after I am risen, I will
+go into Galilee before you."
+
+Ah! why would not the man stop? Isabel did not want the past Saviour but
+the present now; not a dead record but a living experience; above all,
+not the minister but the great High Priest Himself.
+
+"He began to be troubled and in great heaviness, and said unto them, My
+soul is very heavy, even unto the death; tarry here and watch."
+
+The three ministers had communicated by now; and there was a rustle and
+clatter of feet as the empty seats in front, hung with houselling cloths,
+began to be filled. The murmur of the three voices below as the ministers
+passed along with the vessels were drowned by the tale of the Passion
+that rang out overhead.
+
+"Couldest thou not watch one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into
+temptation. The spirit indeed is ready, but the flesh is weak."
+
+It was coming near to Isabel's turn; the Carringtons already were
+beginning to move; and in a moment or two she rose and followed them out.
+The people were pressing up the aisles; and as she stood waiting her turn
+to pass into the white-hung seat, she could not help noticing the
+disorder that prevailed; some knelt devoutly, some stood, some sat to
+receive the sacred elements; and all the while louder and louder, above
+the rustling and the loud whispering of the ministers and the shuffling
+of feet, the tale rose and fell on the cadences of the preacher's voice.
+Now it was her turn; she was kneeling with palms outstretched and closed
+eyes. Ah! would he not be silent for one moment? Could not the reality
+speak for itself, and its interpreter be still? Surely the King of Love
+needed no herald when Himself was here.
+
+"And anon in the dawning, the high Priests held a Council with Elders and
+the Scribes and the whole Council, and bound Jesus and led Him away." ...
+
+And so it was over presently, and she was back again in her seat,
+distracted and miserable; trying to pray, forcing herself to attend now
+to the reader, now to her Saviour with whom she believed herself in
+intimate union, and finding nothing but dryness and distraction
+everywhere. How interminable it was! She opened her eyes, and what she
+saw amazed and absorbed her for a few moments; some were sitting back and
+talking; some looking cheerfully about them as if at a public
+entertainment; one man especially overwhelmed her imagination; with a
+great red face and neck like a butcher, animal and brutal, with a heavy
+hanging jowl and little narrow lack-lustre eyes--how bored and depressed
+he was by this long obligatory ceremony! Then once more she closed her
+eyes in self-reproach at her distractions; here were her lips still
+fragrant with the Wine of God, the pressure of her Beloved's arm still
+about her; and these were her thoughts, settling like flies, on
+everything....
+
+When she opened them again the last footsteps were passing down the
+aisle, the dripping Cups were being replaced by the ministers, and
+covered with napkins, and the tale of Easter was in telling from the
+pulpit like the promise of a brighter day.
+
+"And they said one to another, Who shall roll us away the stone from the
+door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was
+rolled away (for it was a very great one)."
+
+So read the minister and closed the book; and _Our Father_ began.
+
+In the evening, when all was over, and the prayers said and the
+expounding and catechising finished, in a kind of despair she slipped
+away alone, and walked a little by herself in the deepening twilight
+beside the river; and again she made effort after effort to catch some
+consciousness of grace from this Sacrament Sunday, so rare and so
+precious; but an oppression seemed to dwell in the very air. The low
+rain-clouds hung over the city, leaden and chill, the path where she
+walked was rank with the smell of dead leaves, and the trees and grass
+dripped with lifeless moisture. As she goaded and allured alternately her
+own fainting soul, it writhed and struggled but could not rise; there was
+no pungency of bitterness in her self-reproach, no thrill of joy in her
+aspiration; for the hand of Calvin's God lay heavy on the delicate
+languid thing.
+
+She walked back at last in despair over the wet cobblestones of the empty
+market square; but as she came near the house, she saw that the square
+was not quite empty. A horse stood blowing and steaming before Dr.
+Carrington's door, and her own maid and Kate were standing hatless in the
+doorway looking up and down the street. Isabel's heart began to beat, and
+she walked quicker. In a moment Kate saw her, and began to beckon and
+call; and the maid ran to meet her.
+
+"Mistress Isabel, Mistress Isabel," she cried, "make haste."
+
+"What is it?" asked the girl, in sick foreboding.
+
+"There is a man come from Great Keynes," began the maid, but Kate stopped
+her.
+
+"Come in, Mistress Isabel," she said, "my father is waiting for you."
+
+Dr. Carrington met her at the dining-room door; and his face was tender
+and full of emotion.
+
+"What is it?" whispered the girl sharply. "Anthony?"
+
+"Dear child," he said, "come in, and be brave."
+
+There was a man standing in the room with cap and whip in hand, spurred
+and splashed from head to foot; Isabel recognised one of the grooms from
+the Hall.
+
+"What is it?" she said again with a piteous sharpness.
+
+Dr. Carrington laid his hands gently on her shoulders, and looked into
+her eyes.
+
+"It is news of your father," he said, "from Lady Maxwell."
+
+He paused, and the steady gleam of his eyes strengthened and quieted her,
+then he went on deliberately, "The Lord hath given and the Lord hath
+taken it."
+
+He paused as if for an answer, but no answer came; Isabel was staring
+white-faced with parted lips into those strong blue eyes of his: and he
+finished:
+
+"Blessed be the name of the Lord."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                             A WINDING-UP
+
+
+The curtained windows on the ground-floor of the Dower House shone red
+from within as Isabel and Dr. Carrington, with three or four servants
+behind, rode round the curving drive in front late on the Monday evening.
+A face peeped from Mrs. Carroll's window as the horse's hoofs sounded on
+the gravel, and by the time that Isabel, pale, wet, and worn-out with her
+seventy miles' ride, was dismounted, Mistress Margaret herself was at the
+door, with Anthony's face at her shoulder, and Mrs. Carroll looking over
+the banisters.
+
+Isabel was not allowed to see her father's body that night, but after she
+was in bed, Lady Maxwell herself, who had been sent for when he lay
+dying, came down from the Hall, and told her what there was to tell;
+while Mistress Margaret and Anthony entertained Dr. Carrington below.
+
+"Dear child," said the old lady, leaning with her elbow on the bed, and
+holding the girl's hand tenderly as she talked, "it was all over in an
+hour or two. It was the heart, you know. Mrs. Carroll sent for me
+suddenly, on Saturday morning; and by the time I reached him he could not
+speak. They had carried him upstairs from his study, where they had found
+him; and laid him down on his bed, and--yes, yes--he was in pain, but he
+was conscious, and he was praying I think; his lips moved. And I knelt
+down by the bed and prayed aloud; he only spoke twice; and, my dear, it
+was your name the first time, and the name of His Saviour the second
+time. He looked at me, and I could see he was trying to speak; and then
+on a sudden he spoke 'Isabel.' And I think he was asking me to take care
+of you. And I nodded and said that I would do what I could, and he seemed
+satisfied and shut his eyes again. And then presently Mr. Bodder began a
+prayer--he had come in a moment before; they could not find him at
+first--and then, and then your dear father moved a little and raised his
+hand, and the minister stayed; and he was looking up as if he saw
+something; and then he said once, 'Jesus' clear and loud; and, and--that
+was all, dear child."
+
+The next morning she and Anthony, with the two old ladies, one of whom
+was always with them during these days, went into the darkened oak room
+on the first floor, where he had died and now rested. The red curtains
+made a pleasant rosy light, and it seemed to the children impossible to
+believe that that serene face, scarcely more serene than in life, with
+its wide closed lids under the delicate eyebrows, and contented clean-cut
+mouth, and the scholarly hands closed on the breast, all in a wealth of
+autumn flowers and dark copper-coloured beech leaves, were not the face
+and hands of a sleeping man.
+
+But Isabel did not utterly break down till she saw his study. She drew
+the curtains aside herself, and there stood his table; his chair was
+beside it, pushed back and sideways as if he had that moment left it; and
+on the table itself the books she knew so well.
+
+In the centre of the table stood his inlaid desk, with the papers lying
+upon it, and his quill beside them, as if just laid down; even the
+ink-pot was uncovered just as he had left it, as the agony began to lay
+its hand upon his heart. She stooped and read the last sentence.
+
+"This is the great fruit, that unspeakable benefit that they do eat and
+drink of that labour and are burden, and come--" and there it stopped;
+and the blinding tears rushed into the girl's eyes, as she stooped to
+kiss the curved knob of the chair-arm where his dear hand had last
+rested.
+
+When all was over a day or two later the two went up to stay at the Hall,
+while the housekeeper was left in charge of the Dower House. Lady Maxwell
+and Mistress Margaret had been present at the parish church on the
+occasion of the funeral, for the first time ever since the old Marian
+priest had left; and had assisted too at the opening of the will, which
+was found, tied up and docketed in one of the inner drawers of the inlaid
+desk; and before its instructions were complied with, Lady Maxwell wished
+to have a word or two with Isabel and Anthony.
+
+She made an opportunity on the morning of Anthony's departure for
+Cambridge, two days after the funeral, when Mistress Margaret was out of
+the room, and Hubert had ridden off as usual with Piers, on the affairs
+of the estate.
+
+"My child," said she to Isabel, who was lying back passive and listless
+on the window-seat. "What do you think your cousin will direct to be
+done? He will scarcely wish you to leave home altogether, to stay with
+him. And yet, you understand, he is your guardian."
+
+Isabel shook her head.
+
+"We know nothing of him," she said, wearily, "he has never been here."
+
+"If you have a suggestion to make to him you should decide at once," the
+other went on, "the courier is to go on Monday, is he not, Anthony?"
+
+The boy nodded.
+
+"But will he not allow us," he said, "to stay at home as usual?
+Surely----"
+
+Lady Maxwell shook her head.
+
+"And Isabel?" she asked, "who will look after her when you are away?"
+
+"Mrs. Carroll?" he said interrogatively.
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+"He would never consent," she said, "it would not be right."
+
+Isabel looked up suddenly, and her eyes brightened a little.
+
+"Lady Maxwell--" she began, and then stopped, embarrassed.
+
+"Well, my dear?"
+
+"What is it, Isabel?" asked Anthony.
+
+"If it were possible--but, but I could not ask it."
+
+"If you mean Margaret, my dear"; said the old lady serenely, drawing her
+needle carefully through, "it was what I thought myself; but I did not
+know if you would care for that. Is that what you meant?"
+
+"Oh, Lady Maxwell," said the girl, her face lighting up.
+
+Then the old lady explained that it was not possible to ask them to live
+permanently at the Hall, although of course Isabel must do so until an
+arrangement had been made; because their father would scarcely have
+wished them to be actually inmates of a Catholic house; but that he
+plainly had encouraged close relations between the two houses, and
+indeed, Lady Maxwell interpreted his mention of his daughter's name, and
+his look as he said it, in the sense that he wished those relations to
+continue. She thought therefore that there was no reason why their new
+guardian's consent should not be asked to Mistress Margaret's coming over
+to the Dower House to take charge of Isabel, if the girl wished it. He
+had no particular interest in them; he lived a couple of hundred miles
+away, and the arrangement would probably save him a great deal of trouble
+and inconvenience.
+
+"But you, Lady Maxwell," Isabel burst out, her face kindled with hope,
+for she had dreaded the removal terribly, "you will be lonely here."
+
+"Dear child," said the old lady, laying down her embroidery, "God has
+been gracious to me; and my husband is coming back to me; you need not
+fear for me." And she told them, with her old eyes full of happy tears,
+how she had had a private word, which they must not repeat, from a
+Catholic friend at Court, that all had been decided for Sir Nicholas'
+release, though he did not know it himself yet, and that he would be at
+home again for Advent. The prison fever was beginning to cause alarm, and
+it seemed that a good fine would meet the old knight's case better than
+any other execution of justice.
+
+So then, it was decided; and as Isabel walked out to the gatehouse after
+dinner beside Anthony, with her hand on his horse's neck, and as she
+watched him at last ride down the village green and disappear round
+behind the church, half her sorrow at losing him was swallowed up in the
+practical certainty that they would meet again before Christmas in their
+old home, and not in a stranger's house in the bleak North country.
+
+On the following Thursday, Sir Nicholas' weekly letter showed evidence
+that the good news of his release had begun to penetrate to him; his wife
+longed to tell him all she had heard, but so many jealous eyes were on
+the watch for favouritism that she had been strictly forbidden to pass on
+her information. However there was little need.
+
+"I am in hopes," he wrote, "of keeping Christmas in a merrier place than
+prison. I do not mean _heaven_," he hastened to add, for fear of alarming
+his wife. "Good Mr. Jakes tells me that Sir John is ill to-day, and that
+he fears the gaol-fever; and if it is the gaol-fever, sweetheart, which
+pray God it may not be _for Sir John's sake_, it will be the fourteenth
+case in the Tower; and folks say that we shall all be let home again; but
+with another good fine, they say, to keep us poor and humble, and mindful
+of the Queen's Majesty her laws. However, dearest, I would gladly pay a
+thousand pounds, if I had them, to be home again."
+
+But there was news at the end of the letter that caused consternation in
+one or two hearts, and sent Hubert across, storming and almost crying, to
+Isabel, who was taking a turn in the dusk at sunset. She heard his step
+beyond the hedge, quick and impatient, and stopped short, hesitating and
+wondering.
+
+He had behaved to her with extraordinary tact and consideration, and she
+was very conscious of it. Since her sudden return ten days before from
+the visit which had been meant to separate them, he had not spoken a word
+to her privately, except a shy sentence or two of condolence, stammered
+out with downcast eyes, but which from the simplicity and shortness of
+the words had brought up a sob from her heart. She guessed that he knew
+why she had been sent to Northampton, and had determined not to take
+advantage in any way of her sorrow. Every morning he had disappeared
+before she came down, and did not come back till supper, where he sat
+silent and apart, and yet, when an occasion offered itself, behaved with
+a quick attentive deference that showed her where his thoughts had been.
+
+Now she stood, wondering and timid, at that hurried insistent step on the
+other side of the hedge. As she hesitated, he came quickly through the
+doorway and stopped short.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said, with all his reserve gone, and looking at her
+imploringly, but with the old familiar air that she loved, "have you
+heard? I am to go as soon as my father comes back. Oh! it is a shame!"
+
+His voice was full of tears, and his eyes were bright and angry. Her
+heart leapt up once and then seemed to cease beating.
+
+"Go?" she said; and even as she spoke knew from her own dismay how dear
+that quiet chivalrous presence was to her.
+
+"Yes," he went on in the same voice. "Oh! I know I should not speak;
+and--and especially now at all times; but I could not bear it; nor that
+you should think it was my will to go."
+
+She stood still looking at him.
+
+"May I walk with you a little," he said, "but--I must not say much--I
+promised my father."
+
+And then as they walked he began to pour it out.
+
+"It is some old man in Durham," he said, "and I am to see to his estates.
+My father will not want me here when he comes back, and, and it is to be
+soon. He has had the offer for me; and has written to tell me. There is
+no choice."
+
+She had turned instinctively towards the house, and the high roofs and
+chimneys were before them, dark against the luminous sky.
+
+"No, no," said Hubert, laying his hand on her arm; and at the touch she
+thrilled so much that she knew she must not stay, and went forward
+resolutely up the steps of the terrace.
+
+"Ah! let me speak," he said; "I have not troubled you much, Mistress
+Isabel."
+
+She hesitated again a moment.
+
+"In my father's room," he went on, "and I will bring the letter."
+
+She nodded and passed into the hall without speaking, and turned to Sir
+Nicholas' study; while Hubert's steps dashed up the stairs to his
+mother's room. Isabel went in and stood on the hearth in the firelight
+that glowed and wavered round the room on the tapestry and the prie-dieu
+and the table where Hubert had been sitting and the tall shuttered
+windows, leaning her head against the mantelpiece, doubtful and
+miserable.
+
+"Listen," said Hubert, bursting into the room a moment later with the
+sheet open in his hand.
+
+"'Tell Hubert that Lord Arncliffe needs a gentleman to take charge of his
+estates; he is too old now himself, and has none to help him. I have had
+the offer for Hubert, and have accepted it; he must go as soon as I have
+returned. I am sorry to lose the lad, but since James----'" and Hubert
+broke off. "I must not read that," he said.
+
+Isabel still stood, stretching her hands out to the fire, turned a little
+away from him.
+
+"But what can I say?" went on the lad passionately, "I must go; and--and
+God knows for how long, five or six years maybe; and I shall come back
+and find you--and find you----" and a sob rose up and silenced him.
+
+"Hubert," she said, turning and looking with a kind of wavering
+steadiness into his shadowed eyes, and even then noticing the clean-cut
+features and the smooth curve of his jaw with the firelight on it, "you
+ought not----"
+
+"I know, I know; I promised my father; but there are some things I cannot
+bear. Of course I do not want you to promise anything; but I thought that
+if perhaps you could tell me that you thought--that you thought there
+would be no one else; and that when I came back----"
+
+"Hubert," she said again, resolutely, "it is impossible: our
+religions----"
+
+"But I would do anything, I think. Besides, in five years so much may
+happen. You might become a Catholic--or--or, I might come to see that the
+Protestant Religion was nearly the same, or as true at least--or--or--so
+much might happen.--Can you not tell me anything before I go?"
+
+A keen ray of hope had pierced her heart as he spoke; and she scarcely
+knew what she said.
+
+"But, Hubert, even if I were to say----"
+
+He seized her hands and kissed them again and again.
+
+"Oh! God bless you, Isabel! Now I can go so happily. And I will not speak
+of it again; you can trust me; it will not be hard for you."
+
+She tried to draw her hands away, but he still held them tightly in his
+own strong hands, and looked into her face. His eyes were shining.
+
+"Yes, yes, I know you have promised nothing. I hold you to nothing. You
+are as free as ever to do what you will with me. But,"--and he lifted her
+hands once more and kissed them, and dropped them; seized his cap and was
+gone.
+
+Isabel was left alone in a tumult of thought and emotion. He had taken
+her by storm; she had not guessed how desperately weak she was towards
+him, until he had come to her like this in a whirlwind of passion and
+stood trembling and almost crying, with the ruddy firelight on his face,
+and his eyes burning out of shadow. She felt fascinated still by that
+mingling of a boy's weakness and sentiment and of a man's fire and
+purpose; and she sank down on her knees before the hearth and looked
+wonderingly at her hands which he had kissed so ardently, now transparent
+and flaming against the light as if with love. Then as she looked at the
+red heart of the fire the sudden leaping of her heart quieted, and there
+crept on her a glow of steady desire to lean on the power of this tall
+young lover of hers; she was so utterly alone without him it seemed as if
+there were no choice left; he had come and claimed her in virtue of the
+master-law, and she--how much had she yielded? She had not promised; but
+she had shown evidently her real heart in those half dozen words; and he
+had interpreted them for her; and she dared not in honesty repudiate his
+interpretation. And so she knelt there, clasping and unclasping her
+hands, in a whirl of delight and trembling; all the bounds of that sober
+inner life seemed for the moment swept away; she almost began to despise
+its old coldnesses and limitations. How shadowy after all was the love of
+God, compared with this burning tide that was bearing her along on its
+bosom!...
+
+She sank lower and lower into herself among the black draperies, clasping
+those slender hands tightly across her breast.
+
+Suddenly a great log fell with a crash, the red glow turned into leaping
+flames; the whole dark room seemed alive with shadows that fled to and
+fro, and she knelt upright quickly and looked round her, terrified and
+ashamed.--What was she doing here? Was it so soon then that she was
+setting aside the will of her father, who trusted and loved her so well,
+and who lay out there in the chancel vault? Ah! she had no right here in
+this room--Hubert's room now, with his cap and whip lying across the
+papers and the estate-book, and his knife and the broken jesses on the
+seat of the chair beside her. There was his step overhead again. She must
+be gone before he came back.
+
+There was high excitement on the estate and in the village a week or two
+later when the rumour of Sir Nicholas' return was established, and the
+paper had been pinned up to the gatehouse stating, in Lady Maxwell's own
+handwriting, that he would be back sometime in the week before Advent
+Sunday. Reminiscences were exchanged of the glorious day when the old
+knight came of age, over forty years ago; of the sports on the green, of
+the quintain-tilting for the gentlefolks, and the archery in the meadow
+behind the church for the vulgar; of the high mass and the dinner that
+followed it. It was rumoured that Mr. Hubert and Mr. Piers had already
+selected the ox that was to be roasted whole, and that materials for the
+bonfire were in process of collection in the woodyard of the home farm.
+
+Sir Nicholas' letters became more and more emphatically underlined and
+incoherent as the days went on, and Lady Maxwell less and less willing
+for Isabel to read them; but the girl often found the old lady hastily
+putting away the thin sheets which she had just taken out to read to
+herself once again, on which her dear lord had scrawled down his very
+heart itself, as if his courting of her were all to do again.
+
+It was not until the Saturday morning that the courier rode in through
+the gatehouse with the news that Sir Nicholas was to be released that
+day, and would be down if possible before nightfall. All the men on the
+estate were immediately called in and sent home to dress themselves; and
+an escort of a dozen grooms and servants led by Hubert and Piers rode out
+at once on the north road, with torches ready for kindling, to meet the
+party and bring them home; and all other preparations were set forward at
+once.
+
+Towards eight o'clock Lady Maxwell was so anxious and restless that
+Isabel slipped out and went down to the gatehouse to look out for herself
+if there were any signs of the approach of the party. She went up to one
+of the little octagonal towers, and looked out towards the green.
+
+It was a clear starlight night, but towards the village all was bathed in
+the dancing ruddy light of the bonfire. It was burning on a little mound
+at the upper end of the green, just below where Isabel stood, and a heavy
+curtain of smoke drifted westwards. As she looked down on it she saw
+against it the tall black posts of the gigantic jack and the slowly
+revolving carcass of the ox; and round about the stirring crowd of the
+village folk, their figures black on this side, luminous on that. She
+could even make out the cassock and square cap of Mr. Bodder as he moved
+among his flock. The rows of houses on either side, bright and clear at
+this end, melted away into darkness at the lower end of the green, where
+on the right the church tower rose up, blotting out the stars, itself
+just touched with ruddy light, and on the top of which, like a large star
+itself, burned the torch of the watcher who was looking out towards the
+north road. There was a ceaseless hum of noise from the green, pierced by
+the shrill cries of the children round the glowing mass of the bonfire,
+but there was no disorder, as the barrels that had been rolled out of the
+Hall cellars that afternoon still stood untouched beneath the Rectory
+garden-wall. Isabel contrasted in her mind this pleasant human tumult
+with the angry roaring she had heard from these same country-folk a few
+months before, when she had followed Lady Maxwell out to the rescue of
+the woman who had injured her; and she wondered at these strange souls,
+who attended a Protestant service, but were so fierce and so genial in
+their defence and welcome of a Catholic squire.
+
+As she thought, there was a sudden movement of the light on the church
+tower; it tossed violently up and down, and a moment later the jubilant
+clangour of the bells broke out. There was a sudden stir in the figures
+on the green, and a burst of cheering rose. Isabel strained her eyes
+northwards, but the road took a turn beyond the church and she could see
+nothing but darkness and low-hung stars and one glimmering window. She
+turned instinctively to the house behind her, and there was the door
+flung wide, and she could make out the figures of the two ladies against
+the brightly lit hall beyond, wrapped like herself, in cloak and hood,
+for the night was frosty and cold.
+
+As she turned once more she heard the clear rattle of trotting hoofs on
+the hard road, and a glow began to be visible at the lower dark end of
+the village. The cheering rose higher, and the bells were all clashing
+together in melodious discord, as in the angle of the road a group of
+tossing torches appeared. Then she could make out the horsemen; three
+riding together, and the others as escort round them. The crowd had
+poured off the grass on to the road by now, and the horses were coming up
+between two shouting gesticulating lines which closed after them as they
+went. Now she could make out the white hair of Sir Nicholas, as he bowed
+bare-headed right and left; and Hubert's feathered cap, on one side of
+him, and Mr. Boyd's black hat on the other. They had passed the bonfire
+now, and were coming up the avenue, the crowds still streaming after
+them, and the church tower bellowing rough music overhead. Isabel leaned
+out over the battlements, and saw beneath her the two old ladies waiting
+just outside the gate by the horse-block; and then she drew back, her
+eyes full of tears, for she saw Sir Nicholas' face as he caught sight of
+his wife.
+
+There was a sudden silence as the horses drew up; and the crowds ceased
+shouting, and when Isabel leaned over again Sir Nicholas was on the
+horse-block, the two ladies immediately behind him, and the people
+pressing forward to hear his voice. It was a very short speech; and
+Isabel overhead could not catch more than detached phrases of it, "for
+the faith"--"my wife and you all"--"home again"--"my son Hubert
+here"--"you and your families"--"the Catholic religion"--"the Queen's
+grace"--"God save her Majesty."
+
+Then again the cheering broke out; and Isabel crossed over to see them
+pass up to the house and to the bright door set wide for them, and even
+as she watched them go up the steps, and Hubert's figure close behind,
+she suddenly dropped her forehead on to the cold battlement, and drew a
+sharp breath or two, for she remembered again what it all meant to him
+and to herself.
+
+
+
+
+                               PART II
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                          ANTHONY IN LONDON
+
+
+The development of a nation is strangely paralleled by the development of
+an individual. There comes in both a period of adolescence, of the
+stirring of new powers, of an increase of strength, of the dawn of new
+ideals, of the awaking of self-consciousness; contours become defined and
+abrupt, awkward and hasty movements succeed to the grace of childhood;
+and there is a curious mingling of refinement and brutality, stupidity
+and tenderness; the will is subject to whims; it is easily roused and not
+so easily quieted. Yet in spite of the attendant discomforts the whole
+period is undeniably one of growth.
+
+The reign of Elizabeth coincided with this stage in the development of
+England. The young vigour was beginning to stir--and Hawkins and Drake
+taught the world that it was so, and that when England stretched herself
+catastrophe abroad must follow. She loved finery and feathers and velvet,
+and to see herself on the dramatic stage and to sing her love-songs
+there, as a growing maid dresses up and leans on her hand and looks into
+her own eyes in the mirror--and Marlowe and Greene and Shakespeare are
+witnesses to it. Yet she loved to hang over the arena too and watch the
+bear-baiting and see the blood and foam and listen to the snarl of the
+hounds, as a lad loves sport and things that minister death. Her policy,
+too, under Elizabeth as her genius, was awkward and ill-considered and
+capricious, and yet strong and successful in the end, as a growing lad,
+while he is clumsier, yet manages to leap higher than a year ago.
+
+And once more, to carry the parallel still further, during the middle
+period of the reign, while the balance of parties and powers remained
+much the same, principles and tendencies began to assert themselves more
+definitely, just as muscles and sinews begin to appear through the round
+contour of the limbs of a growing child.
+
+Thus, from 1571 to 1577, while there was no startling reversal of
+elements in the affairs of England, the entire situation became more
+defined. The various parties, though they scarcely changed in their
+mutual relations, yet continued to develop swiftly along their respective
+lines, growing more pronounced and less inclined to compromise; foreign
+enmities and expectations became more acute; plots against the Queen's
+life more frequent and serious, and the countermining of them under
+Walsingham more patient and skilful; competition and enterprise in trade
+more strenuous; Scottish affairs more complicated; movements of revolt
+and repression in Ireland more violent.
+
+What was true of politics was also true of religious matters, for the two
+were inextricably mingled. The Puritans daily became more clamorous and
+intolerant; their "Exercises" more turbulent, and their demands more
+unreasonable and one-sided. The Papists became at once more numerous and
+more strict; and the Government measures more stern in consequence. The
+act of '71 made it no less a crime than High Treason to reconcile or be
+reconciled to the Church of Rome, to give effect to a Papal Bull, to be
+in possession of any muniments of superstition, or to declare the Queen a
+heretic or schismatic. The Church of England, too, under the wise
+guidance of Parker, had begun to shape her course more and more
+resolutely along the lines of inclusiveness and moderation; to realise
+herself as representing the religious voice of a nation that was widely
+divided on matters of faith; and to attempt to include within her fold
+every individual that was not an absolute fanatic in the Papist or
+Puritan direction.
+
+Thus, in every department, in home and foreign politics, in art and
+literature, and in religious independence, England was rising and shaking
+herself free; the last threads that bound her to the Continent were
+snapped by the Reformation, and she was standing with her soul, as she
+thought, awake and free at last, conscious of her beauty and her
+strength, ready to step out at last before the world, as a dominant and
+imperious power.
+
+Anthony Norris had been arrested, like so many others, by the vision of
+this young country of his, his mother and mistress, who stood there,
+waiting to be served. He had left Cambridge in '73, and for three years
+had led a somewhat aimless life; for his guardian allowed him a generous
+income out of his father's fortune. He had stayed with Hubert in the
+north, had yawned and stretched himself at Great Keynes, had gone to and
+fro among friends' houses, and had at last come to the conclusion, to
+which he was aided by a chorus of advisers, that he was wasting his time.
+
+He had begun then to look round him for some occupation, and in the final
+choice of it his early religious training had formed a large element. It
+had kept alive in him a certain sense of the supernatural, that his
+exuberance of physical life might otherwise have crushed; and now as he
+looked about to see how he could serve his country, he became aware that
+her ecclesiastical character had a certain attraction for him; he had had
+indeed an idea of taking Orders; but he had relinquished this by now,
+though he still desired if he might to serve the National Church in some
+other capacity. There was much in the Church of England to appeal to her
+sons; if there was a lack of unity in her faith and policy, yet that was
+largely out of sight, and her bearing was gallant and impressive. She had
+great wealth, great power and great dignity. The ancient buildings and
+revenues were hers; the civil power was at her disposal, and the Queen
+was eager to further her influence, and to protect her bishops from the
+encroaching power of Parliament, claiming only for the crown the right to
+be the point of union for both the secular and ecclesiastical sections of
+the nation, and to stamp by her royal approval or annul by her veto the
+acts of Parliament and Convocation alike. It seemed then to Anthony's
+eyes that the Church of England had a tremendous destiny before her, as
+the religious voice of the nation that was beginning to make itself so
+dominant in the council of the world, and that there was no limit to the
+influence she might exercise by disciplining the exuberant strength of
+England, and counteracting by her soberness and self-restraint the
+passionate fanaticism of the Latin nations. So little by little in place
+of the shadowy individualism that was all that he knew of religion, there
+rose before him the vision of a living church, who came forth terrible as
+an army with banners, surrounded by all the loyalty that nationalism
+could give her, with the Queen herself as her guardian, and great princes
+and prelates as her supporters, while at the wheels of her splendid car
+walked her hot-blooded chivalrous sons, who served her and spread her
+glories by land and sea, not perhaps chiefly for the sake of her
+spiritual claims, but because she was bone of their bone; and was no less
+zealous than themselves for the name and character of England.
+
+When, therefore, towards the end of '76, Anthony received the offer of a
+position in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury, through the
+recommendation of the father of one of his Cambridge friends, he accepted
+it with real gratitude and enthusiasm.
+
+The post to which he was appointed was that of Gentleman of the Horse.
+His actual duties were not very arduous owing to the special
+circumstances of Archbishop Grindal; and he had a good deal of time to
+himself. Briefly, they were as follows--He had to superintend the Yeoman
+of the Horse, and see that he kept full accounts of all the horses in
+stable or at pasture, and of all the carriages and harness and the like.
+Every morning he had to present himself to the Archbishop and receive
+stable-orders for the day, and to receive from the yeoman accounts of the
+stables. Every month he examined the books of the yeoman before passing
+them on to the steward. His permission too was necessary before any
+guest's or stranger's horse might be cared for in the Lambeth stables.
+
+He was responsible also for all the men and boys connected with the
+stable; to engage them, watch their morals and even the performance of
+their religious duties, and if necessary report them for dismissal to the
+steward of the household. In Archbishop Parker's time this had been a
+busy post, as the state observed at Lambeth and Croydon was very
+considerable; but Grindal was of a more retiring nature, disliking as was
+said, "lordliness"; and although still the household was an immense
+affair, in its elaborateness and splendour beyond almost any but royal
+households of the present day, still Anthony's duties were far from
+heavy. The Archbishop indeed at first dispensed with this office
+altogether, and concentrated all the supervision of the stable on the
+yeoman, and Anthony was the first and only Gentleman of the Horse that
+Archbishop Grindal employed. The disgrace and punishment under which the
+Archbishop fell so early in his archiepiscopate made this particular post
+easier than it would even otherwise have been; as fewer equipages were
+required when the Archbishop was confined to his house, and the
+establishment was yet further reduced.
+
+Ordinarily then his duties were over by eleven o'clock, except when
+special arrangements were to be made. He rose early, waited upon the
+Archbishop by eight o'clock, and received his orders for the day; then
+interviewed the yeoman; sometimes visited the stables to receive
+complaints, and was ready by half-past ten to go to the chapel for the
+morning prayers with the rest of the household. At eleven he dined at the
+Steward's table in the great hall, with the other principal officers of
+the household, the chaplain, the secretaries, and the gentlemen ushers,
+with guests of lesser degree. This great hall with its two entrances at
+the lower end near the gateway, its magnificent hammer-beam roof, its
+dais, its stained glass, was a worthy place of entertainment, and had
+been the scene of many great feasts and royal visits in the times of
+previous archbishops in favour with the sovereign, and of a splendid
+banquet at the beginning of Grindal's occupancy of the see. Now, however,
+things were changed. There were seldom many distinguished persons to dine
+with the disgraced prelate; and he himself preferred too to entertain
+those who could not repay him again, after the precept of the gospel; and
+besides the provision for the numerous less important guests who dined
+daily at Lambeth, a great tub was set at the lower end of the hall as it
+had been in Parker's time, and every day after dinner under the steward's
+direction was filled with food from the tables, which was afterwards
+distributed at the gate to poor people of the neighbourhood.
+
+After dinner Anthony's time was often his own, until the evening prayers
+at six, followed by supper again spread in the hall. It was necessary for
+him always to sleep in the house, unless leave was obtained from the
+steward. This gentleman, Mr. John Scot, an Esquire, took a fancy to
+Anthony, and was indulgent to him in many ways; and Anthony had, as a
+matter of fact, little difficulty in coming and going as he pleased so
+soon as his morning duties were done.
+
+Lambeth House had been lately restored by Parker, and was now a very
+beautiful and well-kept place. Among other repairs and buildings he had
+re-roofed the great hall that stood just within Morton's gateway; he had
+built a long pier into the Thames where the barge could be entered easily
+even at low tide; he had rebuilt the famous summerhouse of Cranmer's in
+the garden, besides doing many sanitary alterations and repairs; and the
+house was well kept up in Grindal's time.
+
+Anthony soon added a great affection and tenderness to the awe that he
+felt for the Archbishop, who was almost from the first a pathetic and
+touching figure. When Anthony first entered on his duties in November
+'76, he found the Archbishop in his last days of freedom and good favour
+with the Queen. Elizabeth, he soon learnt from the gossip of the
+household, was as determined to put down the Puritan "prophesyings" as
+the popish services; for both alike tended to injure the peace she was
+resolved to maintain. Rumours were flying to and fro; the Archbishop was
+continually going across the water to confer with his friends and the
+Lords of the Council, and messengers came and went all day; and it was
+soon evident that the Archbishop did not mean to yield. It was said that
+his Grace had sent a letter to her Majesty bidding her not to meddle with
+what did not concern her, telling her that she, too, would one day have
+to render account before Christ's tribunal, and warning her of God's
+anger if she persisted.
+
+Her Majesty had sworn like a trooper, a royal page said one day as he
+lounged over the fire in the guard-room, and had declared that if she was
+like Ozeas and Ahab and the rest, as Grindal had said she was, she would
+take care that he, at least, should be like Micaiah the son of Imlah,
+before she had done with him. Then it began to leak out that Elizabeth
+was sending her commands to the bishops direct instead of through their
+Metropolitan; and, as the days went by, it became more and more evident
+that disgrace was beginning to shadow Lambeth. The barges that drew up at
+the watergate were fewer as summer went on, and the long tables in hall
+were more and more deserted; even the Archbishop himself seemed silent
+and cast down. Anthony used to watch him from his window going up and
+down the little walled garden that looked upon the river, with his hands
+clasped behind him and his black habit gathered up in them, and his chin
+on his breast. He would be longer than ever too in chapel after the
+morning prayer, and the company would wait and wonder in the anteroom
+till his Grace came in and gave the signal for dinner. And at last the
+blow fell.
+
+On one day in June, Anthony, who had been on a visit to Isabel at Great
+Keynes, returned to Lambeth in time for morning prayer and dinner just
+before the gates were shut by the porter, having ridden up early with a
+couple of grooms. There seemed to him to be an air of constraint abroad
+as the guests and members of the household gathered for dinner. There
+were no guests of high dignity that day, and the Archbishop sat at his
+own table silent and apart. Anthony, from his place at the steward's
+table, noticed that he ate very sparingly, and that he appeared even more
+preoccupied and distressed than usual. His short-sighted eyes, kind and
+brown, surrounded by wrinkles from his habit of peering closely at
+everything, seemed full of sadness and perplexity, and his hand fumbled
+with his bread continually. Anthony did not like to ask anything of his
+neighbours, as there were one or two strangers dining at the steward's
+table that day; and the moment dinner was over, and grace had been said
+and the Archbishop retired with his little procession preceded by a white
+wand, an usher came running back to tell Master Norris that his Grace
+desired to see him at once in the inner cloister.
+
+Anthony hastened round through the court between the hall and the river,
+and found the Archbishop walking up and down in his black habit with the
+round flapped cap, that, as a Puritan, he preferred to the square
+head-dress of the more ecclesiastically-minded clergy, still looking
+troubled and cast down, continually stroking his dark forked beard, and
+talking to one of his secretaries. Anthony stood at a little distance at
+the open side of the court near the river, cap in hand, waiting till the
+Archbishop should beckon him. The two went up and down in the shade in
+the open court outside the cloisters, where the pump stood, and where the
+pulpit had been erected for the Queen's famous visit to his predecessor;
+when she had sat in a gallery over the cloister and heard the chaplain's
+sermon. On the north rose up the roof of the chapel. The cloisters
+themselves were poor buildings--little more than passages with a
+continuous row of square windows running along them the height of a man's
+head.
+
+After a few minutes the secretary left the Archbishop with an obeisance,
+and hastened into the house through the cloister, and presently the
+Archbishop, after a turn or two more with the same grave air, peered
+towards Anthony and then called him.
+
+Anthony immediately came towards him and received orders that half a
+dozen horses with grooms should be ready as soon as possible, who were to
+receive orders from Mr. Richard Frampton, the secretary; and that three
+or four horses more were to be kept saddled till seven o'clock that
+evening in case further messages were wanted.
+
+"And I desire you, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop, "to let the men
+under your charge know that their master is in trouble with the Queen's
+Grace; and that they can serve him best by being prompt and obedient."
+
+Anthony bowed to the Archbishop, and was going to withdraw, but the
+Archbishop went on:
+
+"I will tell you," he said, "for your private ear only at present, that I
+have received an order this day from my Lords of the Council, bidding me
+to keep to my house for six months; and telling me that I am sequestered
+by the Queen's desire. I know not how this will end, but the cause is
+that I will not do her Grace's will in the matter of the Exercises, as I
+wrote to tell her so; and I am determined, by God's grace, not to yield
+in this thing; but to govern the charge committed to me as He gives me
+light. That is all, Mr. Norris."
+
+The whole household was cast into real sorrow by the blow that had fallen
+at last on the master; he was "loving and grateful to servants"; and was
+free and liberal in domestic matters, and it needed only a hint that he
+was in trouble, for his officers and servants to do their utmost for him.
+
+Anthony's sympathy was further aroused by the knowledge that the Papists,
+too, hated the old man, and longed to injure him. There had been a great
+increase of Catholics this year; the Archbishop of York had reported that
+"a more stiff-necked, wilful, or obstinate people did he never hear of";
+and from Hereford had come a lament that conformity itself was a mockery,
+as even the Papists that attended church were a distraction when they got
+there, and John Hareley was instanced as "reading so loud upon his Latin
+popish primer (that he understands not) that he troubles both minister
+and people." In November matters were so serious that the Archbishop felt
+himself obliged to take steps to chastise the recusants; and in December
+came the news of the execution of Cuthbert Maine at Launceston in
+Cornwall.
+
+How much the Catholics resented this against the Archbishop was brought
+to Anthony's notice a day or two later. He was riding back for morning
+prayer after an errand in Battersea, one frosty day, and had just come in
+sight of Morton's Gateway, when he observed a man standing by it, who
+turned and ran, on hearing the horse's footsteps, past Lambeth Church and
+disappeared in the direction of the meadows behind Essex House. Anthony
+checked his horse, doubtful whether to follow or not, but decided to see
+what it was that the man had left pinned to the door. He rode up and
+detached it, and found it was a violent and scurrilous attack upon the
+Archbishop for his supposed share in the death of the two Papists. It
+denounced him as a "bloody pseudo-minister," compared him to Pilate, and
+bade him "look to his congregation of lewd and profane persons that he
+named the Church of England," for that God would avenge the blood of his
+saints speedily upon their murderers.
+
+Anthony carried it into the hall, and after showing it to Mr. Scot, put
+it indignantly into the fire. The steward raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Why so, Master Norris?" he asked.
+
+"Why," said Anthony sharply, "you would not have me frame it, and show to
+my lord."
+
+"I am not sure," said the other, "if you desire to injure the Papists.
+Such foul nonsense is their best condemnation. It is best to keep
+evidence against a traitor, not destroy it. Besides, we might have caught
+the knave, and now we cannot," he added, looking at the black shrivelling
+sheet half regretfully.
+
+"It is a mystery to me," said Anthony, "how there can be Papists."
+
+"Why, they hate England," said the steward, briefly, as the bell rang for
+morning prayer. As Anthony followed him along the gallery, he thought
+half guiltily of Sir Nicholas and his lady, and wondered whether that was
+true of them. But he had no doubt that it was true of Catholics as a
+class; they had ceased to be English; the cause of the Pope and the Queen
+were irreconcilable; and so the whole incident added more fuel to the hot
+flame of patriotism and loyalty that burnt so bright in the lad's soul.
+
+But it was fanned yet higher by a glimpse he had of Court-life; and he
+owed it to Mary Corbet whom he had only seen momentarily in public once
+or twice, and never to speak to since her visit to Great Keynes over six
+years ago. He had blushed privately and bitten his lip a good many times
+in the interval, when he thought of his astonishing infatuation, and yet
+the glamour had never wholly faded; and his heart quickened perceptibly
+when he opened a note one day, brought by a royal groom, that asked him
+to come that very afternoon if he could, to Whitehall Palace, where
+Mistress Corbet would be delighted to see him and renew their
+acquaintance.
+
+As he came, punctual to the moment, into the gallery overlooking the
+tilt-yard, the afternoon sun was pouring in through the oriel window, and
+the yard beyond seemed all a haze of golden light and dust. He heard an
+exclamation, as he paused, dazzled, and the servant closed the door
+behind him; and there came forward to him in the flood of glory, the same
+resplendent figure, all muslin and jewels, that he remembered so well,
+with the radiant face, looking scarcely older, with the same dancing eyes
+and scarlet lips. All the old charm seemed to envelop him in a moment as
+he saluted her with all the courtesy of which he was capable.
+
+"Ah!" she cried, "how happy I am to see you again--those dear days at
+Great Keynes!" And she took both his hands with such ardour that poor
+Anthony was almost forced to think that he had never been out of her
+thoughts since.
+
+"How can I serve you, Mistress Corbet?" he asked.
+
+"Serve me? Why, by talking to me, and telling me of the country. What
+does the lad mean? Come and sit here," she said, and she drew him to the
+window seat.
+
+Anthony looked out into the shining haze of the tilt-yard. Some one with
+a long pole was struggling violently on the back of a horse, jerking the
+reins and cursing audibly.
+
+"Look at that fool," said Mary, "he thinks his horse as great a dolt as
+himself. Chris, Chris," she screamed through her hands--"you sodden ass;
+be quieter with the poor beast--soothe him, soothe him. He doesn't know
+what you want of him with your foul temper and your pole going like a
+windmill about his ears."
+
+The cursing and jerking ceased, and a red furious face with thick black
+beard and hair looked up. But before the rider could speak, Mary went on
+again:
+
+"There now, Chris, he is as quiet as a sheep again. Now take him at it."
+
+"What does he want?" asked Anthony. "I can scarcely see for the dust."
+
+"Why, he's practising at the quintain;--ah! ah!" she cried out again, as
+the quintain was missed and swung round with a hard buffet on the man's
+back as he tore past. "Going to market, Chris? You've got a sturdy
+shepherd behind you. Baa, baa, black sheep."
+
+"Who's that?" asked Anthony, as the tall horseman, as if driven by the
+storm of contumely from the window, disappeared towards the stable.
+
+"Why that's Chris Hatton--whom the Queen calls her sheep, and he's as
+silly as one, too, with his fool's face and his bleat and his great eyes.
+He trots about after her Grace, too, like a pet lamb. Bah! I'm sick of
+him. That's enough of the ass; tell me about Isabel."
+
+Then they fell to talking about Isabel; and Mary eyed him as he answered
+her questions.
+
+"Then she isn't a Papist, yet?" she asked.
+
+Anthony's face showed such consternation that she burst out laughing.
+
+"There, there, there!" she cried. "No harm's done. Then that tall lad,
+who was away last time I was there--well, I suppose he's not turned
+Protestant?"
+
+Anthony's face was still more bewildered.
+
+"Why, my dear lad," she said, "where are your eyes?"
+
+"Mistress Corbet," he burst out at last, "I do not know what you mean.
+Hubert has been in Durham for years. There is no talk----" and he
+stopped.
+
+Mary's face became sedate again.
+
+"Well, well," she said, "I always was a tattler. It seems I am wrong
+again. Forgive me, Master Anthony."
+
+Anthony was indeed astonished at her fantastic idea. Of course he knew
+that Hubert had once been fond of Isabel, but that was years ago, when
+they had been all children together. Why, he reflected, he too had been
+foolish once--and he blushed a little.
+
+Then they went on to talk of Great Keynes, Sir Nicholas, and Mr.
+Stewart's arrest and death; and Mary asked Anthony to excuse her interest
+in such matters, but Papistry had always been her religion, and what
+could a poor girl do but believe what she was taught? Then they went on
+to speak of more recent affairs, and Mary made him describe to her his
+life at Lambeth, and everything he did from the moment he got up to the
+moment he went to bed again; and whether the Archbishop was a kind
+master, and how long they spent at prayers, and how many courses they had
+at dinner; and Anthony grew more and more animated and confidential--she
+was so friendly and interested and pretty, as she leaned towards him and
+questioned and listened, and the faint scent of violet from her dress
+awakened his old memories of her.
+
+And then at last she approached the subject on which she had chiefly
+wished to see him--which was that he should speak to the steward at
+Lambeth on behalf of a young man who was to be dismissed, it seemed, from
+the Archbishop's service, because his sister had lately turned Papist and
+fled to a convent abroad. It was a small matter; and Anthony readily
+promised to do his best, and, if necessary, to approach the Archbishop
+himself: and Mistress Corbet was profusely grateful.
+
+They had hardly done talking of the matter, when a trumpet blew suddenly
+somewhere away behind the building they were in. Mary held up a white
+finger and put her head on one side.
+
+"That will be the Ambassador," she said.
+
+Anthony looked at her interrogatively.
+
+"Why, you country lad!" she said, "come and see."
+
+She jumped up, and he followed her down the gallery, and along through
+interminable corridors and ante-chambers, and up and down the stairs of
+this enormous palace; and Anthony grew bewildered and astonished as he
+went at the doors on all sides, and the roofs that ranged themselves
+every way as he looked out. And at last Mary stopped at a window, and
+pointed out.
+
+The courtyard beneath was alive with colour and movement. In front of the
+entrance opposite waited the great gilded state carriage, and another was
+just driving away. On one side a dozen ladies on grey horses were drawn
+up, to follow behind the Queen when she should come out; and a double row
+of liveried servants were standing bare-headed round the empty carriage.
+The rest of the court was filled with Spanish and English nobles,
+mounted, with their servants on foot; all alike in splendid costumes--the
+Spaniards with rich chains about their necks, and tall broad-brimmed hats
+decked with stones and pearls, and the Englishmen in feathered buckled
+caps and short cloaks thrown back. Two or three trumpeters stood on the
+steps of the porch. Anthony did not see much state at Lambeth, and the
+splendour and gaiety of this seething courtyard exhilarated him, and he
+stared down at it all, fascinated, while Mary Corbet poured out a caustic
+commentary:
+
+"There is the fat fool Chris again, all red with his tilting. I would
+like to baa at him again, but I dare not with all these foreign folk.
+There is Leicester, that tall man with a bald forehead in the cap with
+the red feather, on the white horse behind the carriage--he always keeps
+close to the Queen. He is the enemy of your prelate, Master Anthony, you
+know.... That is Oxford, just behind him on the chestnut. Yes, look well
+at him. He is the prince of the tilt-yard; none can stand against him.
+You would say he was at his nine-pins, when he rides against them all....
+And he can do more than tilt. These sweet-washed gloves"--and she flapped
+an embroidered pair before Anthony--"these he brought to England. God
+bless and reward him for it!" she added fervently.... "I do not see
+Burghley. Eh! but he is old and gouty these days; and loves a cushion and
+a chair and a bit of flannel better than to kneel before her Grace. You
+know, she allows him to sit when he confers with her. But then, she is
+ever prone to show mercy to bearded persons.... Ah! there is dear Sidney;
+that is a sweet soul. But what does he do here among the stones and
+mortar when he has the beeches of Penshurst to walk beneath. He is not so
+wise as I thought him.... But I must say I grow weary of his nymphs and
+his airs of Olympus. And for myself, I do not see that Flora and
+Phoebus and Maia and the rest are a great gain, instead of Our Lady and
+Saint Christopher and the court of heaven. But then I am a Papist and not
+a heathen, and therefore blind and superstitious. Is that not so, Master
+Anthony?... And there is Maitland beside him, with the black velvet cap
+and the white feather, and his cross eyes and mouth. Now I wish he were
+at Penshurst, or Bath--or better still, at Jericho, for it is further
+off. I cannot bear that fellow.... Why, Sussex is going on the water,
+too, I see. Now what brings him here? I should have thought his affairs
+gave him enough to think of.... There he is, with his groom behind him,
+on the other chestnut. I am astonished at him. He is all for this French
+marriage, you know. So you may figure to yourself Mendoza's love for him!
+They will be like two cats together on the barge; spitting and snarling
+softly at one another. Her Grace loves to balance folk like that; first
+one stretches his claws, and then the other; then one arches his back and
+snarls, and the other scratches his face for him; and then when all is
+flying fur and blasphemy, off slips her Grace and does what she will."
+
+It was an astonishing experience for Anthony. He had stepped out from his
+workaday life among the grooms and officers and occasional glimpses of
+his lonely old master, into an enchanted region, where great personages
+whose very names were luminous with fame, now lived and breathed and
+looked cheerful or sullen before his very eyes; and one who knew them in
+their daily life stood by him and commented and interpreted them for him.
+He listened and stared, dazed with the strangeness of it all.
+
+Mistress Corbet was proceeding to express her views upon the foreign
+element that formed half the pageant, when the shrill music broke out
+again in the palace, and the trumpeters on the steps took it up; and a
+stir and bustle began. Then out of the porch began to stream a
+procession, like a river of colour and jewels, pouring from the foot of
+the carved and windowed wall, and eddying in a tumbled pool about the
+great gilt carriage;--ushers and footmen and nobles and ladies and pages
+in bewildering succession. Anthony pressed his forehead to the glass as
+he watched, with little exclamations, and Mary watched him, amused and
+interested by his enthusiasm.
+
+And last moved the great canopy bending and swaying under the doorway,
+and beneath it, like two gorgeous butterflies, at the sight of whom all
+the standing world fell on its knees, came the pale Elizabeth with her
+auburn hair, and the brown-faced Mendoza, side by side; and entered the
+carriage with the five plumes atop and the caparisoned horses that
+stamped and tossed their jingling heads. The yard was already emptying
+fast, _en route_ for Chelsea Stairs; and as soon as the two were seated,
+the shrill trumpets blew again, and the halberdiers moved off with the
+carriage in the midst, the great nobles going before, and the ladies
+behind. The later comers mounted as quickly as possible, as their horses
+were brought in from the stable entrance, and clattered away, and in five
+minutes the yard was empty, except for a few sentries at their posts, and
+a servant or two lounging at the doorway; and as Anthony still stared at
+the empty pavement and the carpeted steps, far away from the direction of
+the Abbey came the clear call of the horns to tell the loyal folk that
+the Queen was coming.
+
+It was a great inspiration for Anthony. He had seen world-powers
+incarnate below him in the glittering rustling figure of the Queen, and
+the dark-eyed courtly Ambassador in his orders and jewels at her side.
+There they had sat together in one carriage; the huge fiery realm of the
+south, whose very name was redolent with passion and adventure and
+boundless wealth; and the little self-contained northern kingdom, now
+beginning to stretch its hands, and quiver all along its tingling sinews
+and veins with fresh adolescent life. And Anthony knew that he was one of
+the cells of this young organism; and that in him as well as in Elizabeth
+and this sparkling creature at his side ran the fresh red blood of
+England. They were all one in the possession of a common life; and his
+heart burned as he thought of it.
+
+After he had parted from Mary he rode back to Westminster, and crossed
+the river by the horse-ferry that plied there. And even as he landed and
+got his beast, with a deal of stamping and blowing, off the echoing
+boards on to the clean gravel again, there came down the reaches of the
+river the mellow sound of music across a mile of water, mingled with the
+deep rattle of oars, and sparkles of steel and colour glittered from the
+far-away royal barges in the autumn sunshine; and the lad thought with
+wonder how the two great powers so savagely at war upon the salt sea,
+were at peace here, sitting side by side on silken cushions and listening
+to the same trumpets of peace upon the flowing river.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER II
+
+                          SOME NEW LESSONS
+
+
+The six years that followed Sir Nicholas' return and Hubert's departure
+for the North had passed uneventfully at Great Keynes. The old knight had
+been profoundly shocked that any Catholic, especially an agent so
+valuable as Mr. Stewart, should have found his house a death-trap; and
+although he continued receiving his friends and succouring them, he did
+so with more real caution and less ostentation of it. His religious zeal
+and discretion were further increased by the secret return to the "Old
+Religion" of several of his villagers during the period; and a very fair
+congregation attended Mass so often as it was said in the cloister wing
+of the Hall. The new rector, like his predecessor, was content to let the
+squire alone; and unlike him had no wife to make trouble.
+
+Then, suddenly, in the summer of '77, catastrophes began, headed by the
+unexpected return of Hubert, impatient of waiting, and with new plans in
+his mind.
+
+Isabel had been out with Mistress Margaret walking in the dusk one August
+evening after supper, on the raised terrace beneath the yews. They had
+been listening to the loud snoring of the young owls in the ivy on the
+chimney-stack opposite, and had watched the fierce bird slide silently
+out of the gloom, white against the blackness, and disappear down among
+the meadows. Once Isabel had seen him pause, too, on one of his return
+journeys, suspicious of the dim figures beneath, silhouetted on a branch
+against the luminous green western sky, with the outline of a mouse with
+its hanging tail plain in his crooked claws, before he glided to his nest
+again. As Isabel waited she heard the bang of the garden-door, but gave
+it no thought, and a moment after Mistress Margaret asked her to fetch a
+couple of wraps from the house for them both, as the air had a touch of
+chill in it. She came down the lichened steps, crossed the lawn, and
+passed into the unlighted hall. As she entered, the door opposite opened,
+and for a moment she saw the silhouette of a man's figure against the
+bright passage beyond. Her heart suddenly leapt, and stood still.
+
+"Anthony!" she whispered, in a hush of suspense.
+
+There was a vibration and a step beside her.
+
+"Isabel!" said Hubert's voice. And then his arms closed round her for the
+first time in her life. She struggled and panted a moment as she felt his
+breath on her face; and he released her. She recoiled to the door, and
+stood there silent and panting.
+
+"Oh! Isabel!" he whispered; and again, "Isabel!"
+
+She put out her hand and grasped the door-post behind her.
+
+"Oh! Hubert! Why have you come?"
+
+He came a step nearer and she could see the faint whiteness of his face
+in the western glimmer.
+
+"I cannot wait," he said, "I have been nearly beside myself. I have left
+the north--and I cannot wait so long."
+
+"Well?" she said; and he heard the note of entreaty and anxiety in her
+voice.
+
+"I have my plans," he answered; "I will tell you to-morrow. Where is my
+aunt?"
+
+Isabel heard a step on the gravel outside.
+
+"She is coming," she said sharply. Hubert melted into the dark, and she
+saw the opposite door open and let him out.
+
+The next day Hubert announced his plans to Sir Nicholas, and a conflict
+followed.
+
+"I cannot go on, sir," he said, "I cannot wait for ever. I am treated
+like a servant, too; and you know how miserably I am paid, I have obeyed
+you for six years, sir; and now I have thrown up the post and told my
+lord to his face that I can bear with him no longer."
+
+Sir Nicholas' face, as he sat in his upright chair opposite the boy, grew
+flushed with passion.
+
+"It is your accursed temper, sir," he said violently. "I know you of old.
+Wait? For what? For the Protestant girl? I told you to put that from your
+mind, sir."
+
+Hubert did not propose as yet to let his father into all his plans.
+
+"I have not spoken her name, sir, I think. I say I cannot wait for my
+fortune; I may be impatient, sir--I do not deny it."
+
+"Then how do you propose to better it?" sneered his father.
+
+"In November," said Hubert steadily, looking his father in the eyes, "I
+sail with Mr. Drake."
+
+Sir Nicholas' face grew terrific. He rose, and struck the table twice
+with his clenched fist.
+
+"Then, by God, sir, Mr. Drake may have you now."
+
+Hubert's face grew white with anger; but he had his temper under control.
+
+"Then I wish you good-day, sir," and he left the room.
+
+When the boy had left the house again for London, as he did the same
+afternoon, Lady Maxwell tried to soothe the old man. It was impossible,
+even for her, to approach him before.
+
+"Sweetheart," she said tranquilly, as he sat and glowered at his plate
+when supper was over and the men had left the room, "sweetheart, we must
+have Hubert down here again. He must not sail with Mr. Drake."
+
+The old man's face flared up again in anger.
+
+"He may follow his own devices," he cried. "I care not what he does. He
+has given up the post that I asked for him; and he comes striding and
+ruffling home with his hat cocked and--and----"; his voice became
+inarticulate.
+
+"He is only a boy, sweetheart; with a boy's hot blood--you would sooner
+have him like that than a milk-sop. Besides--he is our boy."
+
+The old man growled. His wife went on:
+
+"And now that James cannot have the estate, he must have it, as you know,
+and carry on the old name."
+
+"He has disgraced it," burst out the angry old man, "and he is going now
+with that damned Protestant to harry Catholics. By the grace of God I
+love my country, and would serve her Grace with my heart's blood--but
+that my boy should go with Drake----!" and again his voice failed.
+
+It was a couple of days before she could obtain her husband's leave to
+write a conciliatory letter, giving leave to Hubert to go with Drake, if
+he had made any positive engagement (because, as she represented to Sir
+Nicholas, there was nothing actually wrong or disloyal to the Faith in
+it)--but entreating him with much pathos not to leave his old parents so
+bitterly.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"Oh, my dear son," the end of the letter ran, "your father is old; and
+God, in whose hand are our days, alone knows how long he will live; and
+I, too, my son, am old. So come back to us and be our dear child again.
+You must not think too hardly of your father's words to you; he is quick
+and hot, as you are, too--but indeed we love you dearly. Your room here
+is ready for you; and Piers wants a firm hand now over him, as your
+father is so old. So come back, my darling, and make our old hearts glad
+again."
+
+But the weeks passed by, and no answer came, and the old people's hearts
+grew sick with suspense; and then, at last, in September the courier
+brought a letter, written from Plymouth, which told the mother that it
+was too late; that he had in fact engaged himself to Mr. Drake in August
+before he had come to Great Keynes at all; and that in honour he must
+keep his engagement. He asked pardon of his father for his hastiness; but
+it seemed a cold and half-hearted sorrow; and the letter ended by
+announcing that the little fleet would sail in November; and that at
+present they were busy fitting the ships and engaging the men; and that
+there would be no opportunity for him to return to wish them good-bye
+before he sailed. It was plain that the lad was angry still.
+
+Sir Nicholas did not say much; but a silence fell on the house. Lady
+Maxwell sent for Isabel, and they had a long interview. The old lady was
+astonished at the girl's quietness and resignation.
+
+Yes, she said, she loved Hubert with all her heart. She had loved him for
+a long while. No, she was not angry, only startled. What would she do
+about the difference in religion? Could she marry him while one was a
+Catholic and the other a Protestant? No, they would never be happy like
+that; and she did not know what she would do. She supposed she would wait
+and see. Yes, she would wait and see; that was all that could be
+done.--And then had come a silent burst of tears, and the girl had sunk
+down on her knees and hidden her face in the old lady's lap, and the
+wrinkled jewelled old hand passed quietly over the girl's black hair; but
+no more had been said, and Isabel presently got up and went home to the
+Dower House.
+
+The autumn went by, and November came, and there was no further word from
+Hubert. Then towards the end of November a report reached them from
+Anthony at Lambeth that the fleet had sailed; but had put back into
+Falmouth after a terrible storm in the Channel. And hope just raised its
+head.
+
+Then one evening after supper Sir Nicholas complained of fever and
+restlessness, and went early to bed. In the night he was delirious.
+Mistress Margaret hastened up at midnight from the Dower House, and a
+groom galloped off to Lindfield before morning to fetch the doctor, and
+another to fetch Mr. Barnes, the priest, from Cuckfield. Sir Nicholas was
+bled to reduce the fever of the pneumonia that had attacked him. All day
+long he was sinking. About eleven o'clock that night he fell asleep,
+apparently, and Lady Maxwell, who had watched incessantly, was persuaded
+to lie down; but at three o'clock in the morning, on the first of
+December, Mistress Margaret awakened her, and together they knelt by the
+bedside of the old man. The priest, who had anointed him on the previous
+evening, knelt behind, repeating the prayers for the dying.
+
+Sir Nicholas lay on his back, supported by pillows, under the gloom of
+the black old four-posted bed. A wood-fire glowed on the hearth, and the
+air was fragrant with the scent of the burning cedar-logs. A crucifix was
+in the old man's hands; but his eyes were bright with fever, and his
+fingers every now and then relaxed, and then tightened their hold again
+on the cool silver of the figure of the crucified Saviour. His lips were
+moving tremulously, and his ruddy old face was pale now.
+
+The priest's voice went on steadily; the struggle was beginning.
+
+"_Proficiscere, anima christiana, de hoc mundo_.--Go forth, Christian
+soul, from this world in the name of God the Father Almighty, who created
+thee; in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who suffered
+for thee; in the name of the Holy Ghost, who was shed forth upon thee; In
+the name of Angels and Archangels; in the name of Thrones and Dominions;
+in the name of Principalities and Powers----"
+
+Suddenly the old man, whose head had been slowly turning from side to
+side, ceased his movement, and his open mouth closed; he was looking
+steadily at his wife, and a look of recognition came back to his eyes.
+
+"Sweetheart," he said; and smiled, and died.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Isabel did not see much of Mistress Margaret for the next few days; she
+was constantly with her sister, and when she came to the Dower House now
+and then, said little to the girl. There were curious rumours in the
+village; strangers came and went continually, and there was a vast
+congregation at the funeral, when the body of the old knight was laid to
+rest in the Maxwell chapel. The following day the air of mystery
+deepened; and young Mrs. Melton whispered to Isabel, with many glances
+and becks, that she and her man had seen lights through the chapel
+windows at three o'clock that morning. Isabel went into the chapel
+presently to visit the grave, and there was a new smear of black on the
+east wall as if a taper had been set too near.
+
+The courier who had been despatched to announce to Hubert that his father
+had died and left him master of the Hall and estate, with certain
+conditions, returned at the end of the month with the news that the fleet
+had sailed again on the thirteenth, and that Hubert was gone with it; so
+Lady Maxwell, now more silent and retired than ever, for the present
+retained her old position and Mr. Piers took charge of the estate.
+
+Although Isabel outwardly was very little changed in the last six years,
+great movements had been taking place in her soul, and if Hubert had only
+known the state of the case, possibly he would not have gone so hastily
+with Mr. Drake.
+
+The close companionship of such an one as Mistress Margaret was doing its
+almost inevitable work; and the girl had been learning that behind the
+brilliant and even crude surface of the Catholic practice, there lay
+still and beautiful depths of devotion which she had scarcely dreamed of.
+The old nun's life was a revelation to Isabel; she heard from her bed in
+the black winter mornings her footsteps in the next room, and soon learnt
+that Mistress Margaret spent at least two hours in prayer before she
+appeared at all. Two or three times in the day she knew that she retired
+again for the same purpose, and again an hour after she was in bed, there
+were the same gentle movements next door. She began to discover, too,
+that for the Catholic, as well as for the Puritan, the Person of the
+Saviour was the very heart of religion; that her own devotion to Christ
+was a very languid flame by the side of the ardent inarticulate passion
+of this soul who believed herself His wedded spouse; and that the worship
+of the saints and the Blessed Mother instead of distracting the love of
+the Christian soul rather seemed to augment it. The King of Love stood,
+as she fancied sometimes, to Catholic eyes, in a glow of ineffable
+splendour; and the faces of His adoring Court reflected the ruddy glory
+on all sides; thus refracting the light of their central Sun, instead of,
+as she had thought, obscuring it.
+
+Other difficulties, too, began to seem oddly unreal and intangible, when
+she had looked at them in the light of Mistress Margaret's clear old eyes
+and candid face. It was a real event in her inner life when she first
+began to understand what the rosary meant to Catholics. Mistress Corbet
+had told her what was the actual use of the beads; and how the mysteries
+of Christ's life and death were to be pondered over as the various
+prayers were said; but it had hitherto seemed to Isabel as if this method
+were an elaborate and superstitious substitute for reading the inspired
+record of the New Testament.
+
+She had been sitting out in the little walled garden in front of the
+Dower House one morning on an early summer day after her father's death,
+and Mistress Margaret had come out in her black dress and stood for a
+moment looking at her irresolutely, framed in the dark doorway. Then she
+had come slowly across the grass, and Isabel had seen for the first time
+in her fingers a string of ivory beads. Mistress Margaret sat down on a
+garden chair a little way from her, and let her hands sink into her lap,
+still holding the beads. Isabel said nothing, but went on reading.
+Presently she looked up again, and the old lady's eyes were half-closed,
+and her lips just moving; and the beads passing slowly through her
+fingers. She looked almost like a child dreaming, in spite of her
+wrinkles and her snowy hair; the pale light of a serene soul lay on her
+face. This did not look like the mechanical performance that Isabel had
+always associated with the idea of beads. So the minutes passed away;
+every time that Isabel looked up there was the little white face with the
+long lashes lying on the cheek, and the crown of snowy hair and lace, and
+the luminous look of a soul in conscious communion with the unseen.
+
+When the old lady had finished, she twisted the beads about her fingers
+and opened her eyes. Isabel had an impulse to speak.
+
+"Mistress Margaret," she said, "may I ask you something?"
+
+"Of course, my darling," the old lady said.
+
+"I have never seen you use those before--I cannot understand them."
+
+"What is it," asked the old lady, "that you don't understand?"
+
+"How can prayers said over and over again like that be any good?"
+
+Mistress Margaret was silent for a moment.
+
+"I saw young Mrs. Martin last week," she said, "with her little girl in
+her lap. Amy had her arms round her mother's neck, and was being rocked
+to and fro; and every time she rocked she said 'Oh, mother.'"
+
+"But then," said Isabel, after a moment's silence, "she was only a
+child."
+
+"'Except ye become like little children--'" quoted Mistress Margaret
+softly--"you see, my Isabel, we are nothing more than children with God
+and His Blessed Mother. To say 'Hail Mary, Hail Mary,' is the best way of
+telling her how much we love her. And then this string of beads is like
+Our Lady's girdle, and her children love to finger it, and whisper to
+her. And then we say our paternosters, too; and all the while we are
+talking she is shewing us pictures of her dear Child, and we look at all
+the great things He did for us, one by one; and then we turn the page and
+begin again."
+
+"I see," said Isabel; and after a moment or two's silence Mistress
+Margaret got up and went into the house.
+
+The girl sat still with her hands clasped round her knee. How strange and
+different this religion was to the fiery gospel she had heard last year
+at Northampton from the harsh stern preacher, at whose voice a veil
+seemed to rend and show a red-hot heaven behind! How tender and simple
+this was--like a blue summer's sky with drifting clouds! If only it was
+true! If only there were a great Mother whose girdle was of beads strung
+together, which dangled into every Christian's hands; whose face bent
+down over every Christian's bed; and whose mighty and tender arms that
+had held her Son and God were still stretched out beneath her other
+children. And Isabel, whose soul yearned for a mother, sighed as she
+reminded herself that there was but "one Mediator between God and
+man--the man, Christ Jesus."
+
+And so the time went by, like an outgoing tide, silent and steady. The
+old nun did not talk much to the girl about dogmatic religion, for she
+was in a difficult position. She was timid certainly of betraying her
+faith by silence, but she was also timid of betraying her trust by
+speech. Sometimes she felt she had gone too far, sometimes not far
+enough; but on the whole her practice was never to suggest questions, but
+only to answer them when Isabel asked; and to occupy herself with
+affirmative rather than with destructive criticism. More than this she
+hesitated to do out of honour for the dead; less than this she dared not
+do out of love for God and Isabel. But there were three or four
+conversations that she felt were worth waiting for; and the look on
+Isabel's face afterwards, and the sudden questions she would ask
+sometimes after a fit of silence, made her friend's heart quicken towards
+her, and her prayers more fervent.
+
+The two were sitting together one December day in Isabel's upstairs room
+and the girl, who had just come in from a solitary walk, was half
+kneeling on the window-seat and drumming her fingers softly on the panes
+as she looked out at the red western sky.
+
+"I used to think," she said, "that Catholics had no spiritual life; but
+now it seems to me that in comparison we Puritans have none. You know so
+much about the soul, as to what is from God and what from the Evil One;
+and we have to grope for ourselves. And yet our Saviour said that His
+sheep should know His voice. I do not understand it." And she turned
+towards Mistress Margaret who had laid down her work and was listening.
+
+"Dear child," she said, "if you mean our priests and spiritual writers,
+it is because they study it. We believe in the science of the soul; and
+we consult our spiritual guides for our soul's health, as the leech for
+our body's health."
+
+"But why must you ask the priest, if the Lord speaks to all alike?"
+
+"He speaks through the priest, my dear, as He does through the
+physician."
+
+"But why should the priest know better than the people?" pursued Isabel,
+intent on her point.
+
+"Because he tells us what the Church says," said the other smiling, "it
+is his business. He need not be any better or cleverer in other respects.
+The baker may be a thief or a foolish fellow; but his bread is good."
+
+"But how do you know," went on Isabel, who thought Mistress Margaret a
+little slow to see her point--"how do you know that the Church is right?"
+
+The old nun considered a moment, and then lifted her embroidery again.
+
+"Why do you think," she asked, beginning to sew, "that each single soul
+that asks God's guidance is right?"
+
+"Because the Holy Ghost is promised to such," said Isabel wondering.
+
+"Then is it not likely," went on the other still stitching, "that the
+millions of souls who form Holy Church are right, when they all agree
+together?" Isabel moved a little impatiently.
+
+"You see," went on Mistress Margaret, "that is what we Catholics believe
+our Saviour meant when He said that the gates of hell should not prevail
+against His Church."
+
+But Isabel was not content. She broke in:
+
+"But why are not the Scriptures sufficient? They are God's Word."
+
+The other put down her embroidery again, and smiled up into the girl's
+puzzled eyes.
+
+"Well, my child," she said, "do they seem sufficient, when you look at
+Christendom now? If they are so clear, how is it that you have the
+Lutherans, and the Anabaptists, and the Family of Love, and the
+Calvinists, and the Church of England, all saying they hold to the
+Scriptures alone. Nay, nay; the Scriptures are the grammar, and the
+Church is the dame that teaches out of it, and she knows so well much
+that is not in the grammar, and we name that tradition. But where there
+is no dame to teach, the children soon fall a-fighting about the book and
+the meaning of it."
+
+Isabel looked at Mistress Margaret a moment, and then turned back again
+to the window in silence.
+
+At another time they had a word or two about Peter's prerogatives.
+
+"Surely," said Isabel suddenly, as they walked together in the garden,
+"Christ is the one Foundation of the Church, St. Paul tells us so
+expressly."
+
+"Yes, my dear," said the nun, "but then Christ our Lord said: 'Thou art
+Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.' So he who is the only
+Good Shepherd, said to Peter, 'Feed My sheep'; and He that is _Clavis
+David_ and that openeth and none shutteth said to him, 'I will give
+thee the keys, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in
+heaven.' That is why we call Peter the Vicar of Christ."
+
+Isabel raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Surely, surely----" she began.
+
+"Yes, my child," said Mistress Margaret, "I know it is new and strange to
+you; but it was not to your grandfather or his forbears: to them, as to
+me, it is the plain meaning of the words. We Catholics are a simple folk.
+We hold that what our Saviour said simply He meant simply: as we do in
+the sacred mystery of His Body and Blood. To us, you know," she went on,
+smiling, with a hand on the girl's arm, "it seems as if you Protestants
+twisted the Word of God against all justice."
+
+Isabel smiled back at her; but she was puzzled. The point of view was new
+to her. And yet again in the garden, a few months later, as they sat out
+together on the lawn, the girl opened the same subject.
+
+"Mistress Margaret," she said, "I have been thinking a great deal; and it
+seems very plain when you talk. But you know our great divines could
+answer you, though I cannot. My father was no Papist; and Dr. Grindal and
+the Bishops are all wise men. How do you answer that?"
+
+The nun looked silently down at the grass a moment or two.
+
+"It is the old tale," she said at last, looking up; "we cannot believe
+that the babes and sucklings are as likely to be right in such matters as
+the wise and prudent--even more likely, if our Saviour's words are to be
+believed. Dear child, do you not see that our Lord came to save all men,
+and call all men into His Church; and that therefore He must have marked
+His Church in such a manner that the most ignorant may perceive it as
+easily as the most learned? Learning is very well, and it is the gift of
+God; but salvation and grace cannot depend upon it. It needs an architect
+to understand why Paul's Church is strong and beautiful, and what makes
+it so; but any child or foolish fellow can see that it is so."
+
+"I do not understand," said Isabel, wrinkling her forehead.
+
+"Why this--that you are as likely to know the Catholic Church when you
+see it, as Dr. Grindal or Dr. Freake, or your dear father himself. Only a
+divine can explain about it and understand it, but you and I are as fit
+to see it and walk into it, as any of them."
+
+"But then why are they not all Catholics?" asked Isabel, still
+bewildered.
+
+"Ah!" said the nun, softly, "God alone knows, who reads hearts and calls
+whom He will. But learning, at least, has nought to do with it."
+
+Conversations of this kind that took place now and then between the two
+were sufficient to show Mistress Margaret, like tiny bubbles on the
+surface of a clear stream, the swift movement of this limpid soul that
+she loved so well. But on the other hand, all the girl's past life, and
+most sacred and dear associations, were in conflict with this movement;
+the memory of her quiet, wise father rose and reproached her sometimes;
+Anthony's enthusiastic talk, when he came down from Lambeth, on the
+glorious destinies of the Church of England, of her gallant protest
+against the corruptions of the West, and of her future unique position in
+Christendom as the National Church of the most progressive country--all
+this caused her to shrink back terrified from the bourne to which she was
+drifting, and from the breach that must follow with her brother. But
+above all else that caused her pain was the shocking suspicion that her
+love for Hubert perhaps was influencing her, and that she was living in
+gross self-deception as to the sincerity of her motives.
+
+This culminated at last in a scene that seriously startled the old nun;
+it took place one summer night after Hubert's departure in Mr. Drake's
+expedition. Mistress Margaret had seen Isabel to her room, and an hour
+later had finished her night-office and was thinking of preparing herself
+to bed, when there was a hurried tap at the door, and Isabel came quickly
+in, her face pale and miserable, her great grey eyes full of trouble and
+distraction, and her hair on her shoulders.
+
+"My dear child," said the nun, "what is it?"
+
+Isabel closed the door and stood looking at her, with her lips parted.
+
+"How can I know, Mistress Margaret," she said, in the voice of a
+sleep-walker, "whether this is the voice of God or of my own wicked self?
+No, no," she went on, as the other came towards her, frightened, "let me
+tell you. I must speak."
+
+"Yes, my child, you shall; but come and sit down first," and she drew her
+to a chair and set her in it, and threw a wrap over her knees and feet;
+and sat down beside her, and took one of her hands, and held it between
+her own.
+
+"Now then, Isabel, what is it?"
+
+"I have been thinking over it all so long," began the girl, in the same
+tremulous voice, with her eyes fixed on the nun's face, "and to-night in
+bed I could not bear it any longer. You see, I love Hubert, and I used to
+think I loved our Saviour too; but now I do not know. It seems as if He
+was leading me to the Catholic Church; all is so much more plain and easy
+there--it seems--it seems--to make sense in the Catholic Church; and all
+the rest of us are wandering in the dark. But if I become a Catholic, you
+see, I can marry Hubert then; and I cannot help thinking of that; and
+wanting to marry him. But then perhaps that is the reason that I think I
+see it all so plainly; just because I want to see it plainly. And what am
+I to do? Why will not our Lord shew me my own heart and what is His
+Will?"
+
+Mistress Margaret shook her head gently.
+
+"Dear child," she said, "our Saviour loves you and wishes to make you
+happy. Do you not think that perhaps He is helping you and making it easy
+in this way, by drawing you to His Church through Hubert. Why should not
+both be His Will? that you should become a Catholic and marry Hubert as
+well?"
+
+"Yes," said Isabel, "but how can I tell?"
+
+"There is only one thing to be done," went on the old lady, "be quite
+simple and quiet. Whenever your soul begins to be disturbed and anxious,
+put yourself in His Hands, and refuse to decide for yourself. It is so
+easy, so easy."
+
+"But why should I be so anxious and disturbed, if it were not our Lord
+speaking and warning me?"
+
+"In the Catholic Church," said Mistress Margaret, "we know well about all
+those movements of the soul; and we call them scruples. You must resist
+them, dear child, like temptations. We are told that if a soul is in
+grace and desires to serve God, then whenever our Lord speaks it is to
+bring sweetness with Him; and when it is the evil one, he brings
+disturbance. And that is why I am sure that these questionings are not
+from God. You feel stifled, is it not so, when you try to pray? and all
+seems empty of God; the waves and storms are going over you. But lie
+still and be content; and refuse to be disturbed; and you will soon be at
+peace again and see the light clearly."
+
+Mistress Margaret found herself speaking simply in short words and
+sentences as to a child. She had seen that for a long while past the
+clouds had been gathering over Isabel, and that her soul was at present
+completely overcast and unable to perceive or decide anything clearly;
+and so she gave her this simple advice, and did her utmost to soothe her,
+knowing that such a clean soul would not be kept long in the dark.
+
+She knelt down with Isabel presently and prayed aloud with her, in a
+quiet even voice; a patch of moonlight lay on the floor, and something of
+its white serenity seemed to be in the old nun's tones as she entreated
+the merciful Lord to bid peace again to this anxious soul, and let her
+see light again through the dark.
+
+And when she had taken Isabel back again to her own room at last, and had
+seen her safely into bed, and kissed her good-night, already the girl's
+face was quieter as it lay on the pillow, and the lines were smoothed out
+of her forehead.
+
+"God bless you!" said Mistress Margaret.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                           HUBERT'S RETURN
+
+
+After the sailing of Mr. Drake's expedition, the friends of the adventurers
+had to wait in patience for several months before news arrived. Then the
+_Elizabeth_, under the command of Mr. Winter, which had been separated
+from Mr. Drake's _Pelican_ in a gale off the south-west coast of America,
+returned to England, bringing the news of Mr. Doughty's execution for
+desertion; but of the _Pelican_ herself there was no further news until
+complaints arrived from the Viceroy of New Spain of Mr. Drake's ravages
+up the west coast. Then silence again fell for eighteen months.
+
+Anthony had followed the fortunes of the _Pelican_, in which Hubert had
+sailed, with a great deal of interest: and it was with real relief that
+after the burst of joy in London at the news of her safe return to
+Plymouth with an incalculable amount of plunder, he had word from Lady
+Maxwell that she hoped he would come down at once to Great Keynes, and
+help to welcome Hubert home. He was not able to go at once, for his
+duties detained him; but a couple of days after the Hall had welcomed its
+new master, Anthony was at the Dower House again with Isabel. He found
+her extraordinarily bright and vivacious, and was delighted at the
+change, for he had been troubled the last time he had seen her a few
+months before, at her silence and listlessness; but her face was radiant
+now, as she threw herself into his arms at the door, and told him that
+they were all to go to supper that night at the Hall; and that Hubert had
+been keeping his best stories on purpose for his return. She showed him,
+when they got up to his room at last, little things Hubert had given
+her--carved nuts, a Spanish coin or two, and an ingot of gold--but of
+which she would say nothing, but only laugh and nod her head.
+
+Hubert, too, when he saw him that evening seemed full of the same sort of
+half-suppressed happiness that shone out now and again suddenly. There he
+sat, for hours after supper that night, broader and more sunburnt than
+ever, with his brilliant eyes glancing round as he talked, and his sinewy
+man's hand, in the delicate creamy ruff, making little explanatory
+movements, and drawing a map once or twice in spilled wine on the
+polished oak; the three ladies sat forward and watched him breathlessly,
+or leaned back and sighed as each tale ended, and Anthony found himself,
+too, carried away with enthusiasm again and again, as he looked at this
+gallant sea-dog in his gold chain and satin and jewels, and listened to
+his stories.
+
+"It was bitter cold," said Hubert in his strong voice, telling them of
+Mr. Doughty's death, "on the morning itself: and snow lay on the decks
+when we rose. Mr. Fletcher had prepared a table in the poop-cabin, with a
+white cloth and bread and wine; and at nine of the clock we were all
+assembled where we might see into the cabin: and Mr. Fletcher said the
+Communion service, and Mr. Drake and Mr. Doughty received the sacrament
+there at his hands. Some of Mr. Doughty's men had all they could do to
+keep back their tears; for you know, mother, they were good friends. And
+then when it was done, we made two lines down the deck to where the block
+stood by the main-mast; and the two came down together; and they kissed
+one another there. And Mr. Doughty spoke to the men, and bade them pray
+for the Queen's Grace with him; and they did. And then he and Mr. Drake
+put off their doublets, and Mr. Doughty knelt at the block, and said
+another prayer or two, and then laid his head down, and he was shivering
+a little with cold, and then, when he gave the sign, Mr. Drake----" and
+Hubert brought the edge of his hand down sharply, and the glasses rang,
+and the ladies drew quick hissing breaths; and Lady Maxwell put her hand
+on her son's arm, as he looked round on all their faces.
+
+Then he told them of the expedition up the west coast, and of the towns
+they sacked; and the opulent names rolled oddly off his tongue, and
+seemed to bring a whiff of southern scent into this panelled English
+room,--Valparaiso, Tarapaca, and Arica--; and of the capture of the
+_Cacafuego_ off Quibdo; and of the enormous treasure they took, the
+great golden crucifix with emeralds of the size of pigeon's eggs, and the
+chests of pearls, and the twenty-six tons of silver, and the wedges of
+pure gold from the Peruvian galleon, and of the golden falcon from the
+Chinese trader that they captured south of Guatulco. And he described the
+search up the coast for the passage eastwards that never existed; and of
+Drake's superb resolve to return westwards instead, by the Moluccas; and
+how they stayed at Ternate, south of Celebes, and coasted along Java
+seeking a passage, and found it in the Sunda straits, and broke out from
+the treacherous islands into the open sea; crossed to Africa, rounded the
+Cape of Good Hope; came up the west coast, touching at Sierra Leone, and
+so home again along the Spanish and French coasts, to Plymouth Sound and
+the pealing of Plymouth bells.
+
+And he broke out into something very like eloquence when he spoke of
+Drake.
+
+"Never was such a captain," he cried, "with his little stiff beard and
+his obstinate eyes. I have seen him stand on the poop, when the arrows
+were like hail on the deck, with one finger in the ring round his
+neck,--so": and Hubert thrust a tanned finger into a link of his chain,
+and lifted his chin, "just making little signs to the steersman, with his
+hand behind his back, to bring the ship nearer to the Spaniard; as cool,
+I tell you, as cool as if he were playing merelles. Oh! and then when we
+boarded, out came his finger from his ring; and there was none that
+struck so true and fierce; and all in silence too, without an oath or a
+cry or a word; except maybe to give an order. But he was very sharp with
+all that angered him. When we sighted the _Madre di Dios_, I ran into
+his cabin to tell him of it, without saluting, so full was my head of
+the chase. And he looked at me like ice; and then roared at me to know
+where my manners were, and bade me go out and enter again properly,
+before he would hear my news; and then I heard him rating the man that
+stood at his door for letting me pass in that state. At his dinner, too,
+which he took alone, there were always trumpets to blow, as when her
+Grace dines. When he laughed it seemed as if he did it with a grave face.
+There was a piece of grand fooling when we got out from among those weary
+Indian islands; where the great crabs be, and flies that burn in the
+dark, as I told you. Mr. Fletcher, the minister, played the coward one
+night when we ran aground; and bade us think of our sins and our immortal
+souls, instead of urging us to be smart about the ship; and he did it,
+too, not as Mr. Drake might do, but in such a melancholy voice as if we
+were all at our last hour; so when we were free of our trouble, and out
+on the main again, we were all called by the drum to the forecastle, and
+there Mr. Drake sat on a sea-chest as solemn as a judge, so that not a
+man durst laugh, with a pair of pantoufles in his hand; and Mr. Fletcher
+was brought before him, trying to smile as if 'twas a jest for him too,
+between two guards; and there he was arraigned; and the witnesses were
+called; and Tom Moore said how he was tapped on the shoulder by Mr.
+Fletcher as he was getting a pick from the hold; and how he was as white
+as a ghost and bade him think on Mr. Doughty, how there was no mercy for
+him when he needed it, and so there would be none for us--and then other
+witnesses came, and then Mr. Fletcher tried to make his defence, saying
+how it was the part of a minister to bid men think on their souls; but
+'twas no good. Mr. Drake declared him guilty; and sentenced him to be
+kept in irons till he repented of that his cowardice; and then, which was
+the cream of the joke, since the prisoner was a minister, Mr. Drake
+declared him excommunicate, and cut off from the Church of God, and given
+over to the devil. And he was put in irons, too, for a while; so 'twas
+not all a joke."
+
+"And what is Mr. Drake doing now?" asked Lady Maxwell.
+
+"Oh! Drake is in London," said Hubert. "Ah! yes, and you must all come to
+Deptford when her Grace is going to be there. Anthony, lad, you'll come?"
+
+Anthony said he would certainly do his best; and Isabel put out her hand
+to her brother, and beamed at him; and then turned to look at Hubert
+again.
+
+"And what are you to do next?" asked Mistress Margaret.
+
+"Well," he said, "I am to go to Plymouth again presently, to help to get
+the treasure out of the ships; and I must be there, too, for the spring
+and summer, for Drake wants me to help him with his new expedition."
+
+"But you are not going with him again, my son?" said his mother quickly.
+
+Hubert put out his hand to her.
+
+"No, no," he said, "I have written to tell him I cannot. I must take my
+father's place here. He will understand"; and he gave one swift glance at
+Isabel, and her eyes fell.
+
+Anthony was obliged to return to Lambeth after a day or two, and he
+carried with him a heart full of admiration and enthusiasm for his
+friend. He had wondered once or twice, too, as his eyes fell on Isabel,
+whether there was anything in what Mistress Corbet had said; but he dared
+not speak to her, and still less to Hubert, unless his confidence was
+first sought.
+
+The visit to Deptford, which took place a week or two later, gave an
+additional spurt to Anthony's nationalism. London was all on fire at the
+return of the buccaneers, and as Anthony rode down the south bank of the
+river from Lambeth to join the others at the inn, the three miles of
+river beyond London Bridge were an inspiriting sight in the bright winter
+sunshine, crowded with craft of all kinds, bright with bunting, that were
+making their way down to the naval triumph. The road, too, was thick with
+vehicles and pedestrians.
+
+It was still early when he met his party at the inn, and Hubert took them
+immediately to see the _Pelican_ that was drawn up in a little creek on
+the south bank. Mistress Margaret had not come, so the four went together
+all over the ship that had been for these years the perilous home of this
+sunburnt lad they all loved so well. Hubert pointed out Drake's own cabin
+at the poop, with its stern-windows, where the last sacrament of the two
+friends had been celebrated; and where Drake himself had eaten in royal
+fashion to the sound of trumpets and slept with all-night sentries at his
+door. He showed them too his own cabin, where he had lived with three
+more officers, and the upper poop-deck where Drake would sit hour after
+hour with his spy-glass, ranging the horizons for treasure-ships. And he
+showed them, too, the high forecastle, and the men's quarters; and Isabel
+fingered delicately the touch-holes of the very guns that had roared and
+snapped so fiercely at the Dons; and they peered down into the dark empty
+hold where the treasure-chests had lain, and up at the three masts and
+the rigging that had borne so long the swift wings of the _Pelican_. And
+they heard the hiss and rattle of the ropes as Hubert ordered a man to
+run up a flag to show them how it was done; and they smelled the strange
+tarry briny smell of a sea-going ship.
+
+"You are not tired?" Anthony said to his sister, as they walked back to
+the inn from which they were to see the spectacle. She shook her head
+happily; and Anthony, looking at her, once more questioned himself
+whether Mistress Corbet were right or not.
+
+When they had settled down at last to their window, the crowds were
+gathering thicker every moment about the entrance to the ship, which lay
+in the creek perhaps a hundred yards from the inn, and on the road along
+which the Queen was to come from Greenwich. Anthony felt his whole heart
+go out in sympathy to these joyous shouting folk beneath, who were here
+to celebrate the gallant pluck of a little bearded man and his followers,
+who for the moment stood for England, and in whose presence just now the
+Queen herself must take second place. Even the quacks and salesmen who
+were busy in their booths all round used patriotism to push their
+bargains.
+
+"Spanish ointment, Spanish ointment!" bellowed a red-faced herbalist in a
+doctor's gown, just below the window. "The Dons know what's best for
+wounds and knocks after Frankie Drake's visit"; and the crowd laughed and
+bought up his boxes. And another drove a roaring business in green glass
+beads, reported to be the exact size of the emeralds taken from the
+_Cacafuego_; and others sold little models of the _Pelican_, warranted to
+frighten away Dons and all other kinds of devils from the house that
+possessed one. Isabel laughed with pleasure, and sent Anthony down to buy
+one for her.
+
+But perhaps more than all else the sight of the seamen themselves stirred
+his heart. Most of them, officers as well as men, were dressed with
+absurd extravagance, for the prize-money, even after the deduction of the
+Queen's lion-share, had been immense, but beneath their plumed and
+jewel-buckled caps, brown faces looked out, alert and capable, with tight
+lips and bright, puckered eyes, with something of the terrier in their
+expression. There they swaggered along with a slight roll in their walk,
+by ones or twos, through the crowd that formed lanes to let them pass,
+and surged along in their wake, shouting after them and clapping them on
+the back. Anthony watched them eagerly as they made their way from all
+directions to where the _Pelican_ lay; for it was close on noon. Then
+from far away came the boom of the Tower guns, and then the nearer crash
+of those that guarded the dockyard; and last the deafening roar of the
+_Pelican_ broadside; and then the smoke rose and drifted in a heavy veil
+in the keen frosty air over the cheering crowds. When it lifted again,
+there was the flash of gold and colour from the Greenwich road, and the
+high braying of the trumpets pierced the roaring welcome of the people.
+But the watchers at the windows could see no more over the heads of the
+crowd than the plumes of the royal carriage, as the Queen dismounted, and
+a momentary glimpse of her figure and the group round her as she passed
+on to the deck of the _Pelican_ and went immediately below to the
+banquet, while the parish church bells pealed a welcome.
+
+Lady Maxwell insisted that Isabel should now dine, as there would be no
+more to be seen till the Queen should come up on deck again.
+
+Of the actual ceremony of the knighting of Mr. Drake they had a very fair
+view, though the figures were little and far away. The first intimation
+they had that the banquet was over was the sight of the scarlet-clad
+yeomen emerging one by one up the little hatchway that led below. The
+halberdiers lined the decks already, with their weapons flashing in long
+curved lines; and by the time that the trumpets began to sound to show
+that the Queen was on her way from below, the decks were one dense mass
+of colour and steel, with a lane left to the foot of the poop-stairs by
+which she would ascend. Then at last the two figures appeared, the Queen
+radiant in cloth of gold, and Mr. Drake, alert and brisk, in his Court
+suit and sword. There was silence from the crowd as the adventurer knelt
+before the Queen, and Anthony held his breath with excitement as he
+caught the flash of the slender sword that an officer had put into the
+Queen's hand; and then an inconceivable noise broke out as Sir Francis
+Drake stood up. The crowd was one open mouth, shouting, the church bells
+burst into peals overhead, answered by the roll of drums from the deck
+and the blare of trumpets; and then the whole din sank into nothingness
+for a moment under the heart-shaking crash of the ship's broadside,
+echoed instantly by the deeper roar of the dockyard guns, and answered
+after a moment or two from far away by the dull boom from the Tower. And
+Anthony leaned yet further from the window and added his voice to the
+tumult.
+
+As he rode back alone to Lambeth, after parting with the others at London
+Bridge, for they intended to go down home again that night, he was
+glowing with national zeal. He had seen not only royalty and magnificence
+but an apotheosis of character that day. There in the little trim figure
+with the curly hair kneeling before the Queen was England at its
+best--England that sent two ships against an empire; and it was the
+Church that claimed Sir Francis Drake as a son, and indeed a devoted one,
+in a sense, that Anthony himself was serving here at Lambeth, and for
+which he felt a real and fervent enthusiasm.
+
+He was surprised a couple of days later to receive a note in Lady
+Maxwell's handwriting, brought up by a special messenger from the Hall.
+
+"There is a friend of mine," she wrote, "to come to Lambeth House
+presently, he tells me, to be kept a day or two in ward before he is sent
+to Wisbeach. He is a Catholic, named Mr. Henry Buxton, who showed me
+great love during the sorrow of my dear husband's death; and I write to
+you to show kindness to him, and to get him a good bed, and all that may
+comfort him: for I know not whether Lambeth Prison is easy or hard; but I
+hope perhaps that since my Lord Archbishop is a prisoner himself he has
+pity on such as are so too; and so my pains be in vain. However, if you
+will see Mr. Buxton at least, and have some talk with him, and show him
+this letter, it will cheer him perhaps to see a friend's face."
+
+Anthony of course made inquiries at once, and found that Mr. Buxton was
+to arrive on the following afternoon. It was the custom to send prisoners
+occasionally to Lambeth, more particularly those more distinguished, or
+who, it was hoped, could be persuaded to friendly conference. Mr. Buxton,
+however, was thought to be incorrigible, and was only sent there because
+there was some delay in the preparations for his reception at Wisbeach,
+which since the previous year had been used as an overflow prison for
+Papists.
+
+On the evening of the next day, which was Friday, Anthony went straight
+out from the Hall after supper to the gateway prison, and found Mr.
+Buxton at a fish supper in the little prison in the outer part of the
+eastern tower. He introduced himself, but found it necessary to show Lady
+Maxwell's letter before the prisoner was satisfied as to his identity.
+
+"You must pardon me, Mr. Norris," he said, when he had read the letter
+and asked a question or two, "but we poor Papists are bound to be shy.
+Why, in this very room," he went on, pointing to the inner corner away
+from the door, and smiling, "for aught I know a man sits now to hear us."
+
+Anthony was considerably astonished to see this stranger point so
+confidently to the hiding-hole, where indeed the warder used to sit
+sometimes behind a brick partition, to listen to the talk of the
+prisoners; and showed his surprise.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Norris," the other said, "we Papists are bound to be well
+informed; or else where were our lives? But come, sir, let us sit down."
+
+Anthony apologised for interrupting him at his supper, and offered to
+come again, but Mr. Buxton begged him not to leave, as he had nearly
+finished. So Anthony sat down, and observed the prison and the prisoner.
+It was fairly well provided with necessaries: a good straw bed lay in one
+corner on trestles; and washing utensils stood at the further wall; and
+there was an oil lamp that hung high up from an iron pin. The prisoner's
+luggage lay still half unpacked on the floor, and a row of pegs held a
+hat and a cloak. Mr. Buxton himself was a dark-haired man with a short
+beard and merry bright eyes; and was dressed soberly as a gentleman; and
+behaved himself with courtesy and assurance. But it was a queer place
+with this flickering lamp, thought Anthony, for a gentleman to be eating
+his supper in. When Mr. Buxton had finished his dish of roach and a
+tankard of ale, he looked up at Anthony, smiling.
+
+"My lord knows the ways of Catholics, then," he said, pointing to the
+bones on his plate.
+
+Anthony explained that the Protestants observed the Friday abstinence,
+too.
+
+"Ah yes," said the other, "I was forgetting the Queen's late injunctions.
+Let us see; how did it run? 'The same is not required for any liking of
+Papish Superstitions or Ceremonies (is it?) hitherto used, which utterly
+are to be detested of all Christian folk'; (no, the last word or two is a
+gloss), 'but only to maintain the mariners in this land, and to set men
+a-fishing.' That is the sense of it, is it not, sir? You fast, that is,
+not for heavenly reasons, which were a foolish and Papish thing to do;
+but for earthly reasons, which is a reasonable and Protestant thing to
+do."
+
+Anthony might have taken this assault a little amiss, if he had not seen
+a laughing light in his companion's eyes; and remembered, too, that
+imprisonment is apt to breed a little bitterness. So he smiled back at
+him. Then soon they fell to talking of Lady Maxwell and Great Keynes,
+where it seemed that Mr. Buxton had stayed more than once.
+
+"I knew Sir Nicholas well," he said, "God rest his soul. It seems to me
+he is one of those whose life continually gave the lie to men who say
+that a Catholic can be no true Englishman. There never beat a more loyal
+heart than his."
+
+Anthony agreed; but asked if it were not true that Catholics were in
+difficulties sometimes as to the proper authority to be obeyed--the Pope
+or the Prince.
+
+"It is true," said the other, "or it might be. Yet the principle is
+clear, _Date Caesari quae sunt Caesaris_. The difficulty lies but in the
+application of the maxim."
+
+"But with us," said Anthony--"Church of England folk,--there hardly can
+be ever any such difficulty; for the Prince of the State is the Governor
+of the Church as well."
+
+"I take your point," said Mr. Buxton. "You mean that a National Church is
+better, for that spiritual and temporal authorities are then at one."
+
+"Just so," said Anthony, beginning to warm to his favourite theme. "The
+Church is the nation regarded as religious. When England wars on land it
+is through her army, which is herself under arms; when on sea she embarks
+in the navy; and in the warfare with spiritual powers, it is through her
+Church. And surely in this way the Church must always be the Church of
+the people. The Englishman and the Spaniard are like cat and dog; they
+like not the same food nor the same kind of coat; I hear that their
+buildings are not like ours; their language, nay, their faces and minds,
+are not like ours. Then why should be their prayers and their religion? I
+quarrel with no foreigner's faith; it is God who made us so."
+
+Anthony stopped, breathless with his unusual eloquence; but it was the
+subject that lay nearest to his heart at present, and he found no lack of
+words. The prisoner had watched him with twinkling eyes, nodding his head
+as if in agreement; and when he had finished his little speech, nodded
+again in meditative silence.
+
+"It is complete," he answered, "complete. And as a theory would be
+convincing; and I envy you, Master Norris, for you stand on the top of
+the wave. That is what England holds. But, my dear sir, Christ our Lord
+refused such a kingdom as that. My kingdom, He said, is not of this
+world--is not, that is, ruled by the world's divisions and systems. You
+have described Babel,--every nation with its own language. But it was to
+undo Babel and to build one spiritual city that our Saviour came down,
+and sent the Holy Ghost to make the Church at Pentecost out of Arabians
+and Medes and Elamites--to break down the partition-walls, as the apostle
+tells us,--that there be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor
+Scythian--and to establish one vast kingdom (which for that very reason
+we name Catholic), to destroy differences between nation and nation, by
+lifting each to be of the People of God--to pull down Babel, the City of
+Confusion, and build Jerusalem the City of Peace. Dear God!" cried Mr.
+Buxton, rising in his excitement, and standing over Anthony, who looked
+at him astonished and bewildered. "You and your England would parcel out
+the Kingdom of heaven into national Churches, as you name them--among all
+the kingdoms of the world; and yet you call yourselves the servants of
+Him who came to do just the opposite--yes, and who will do it, in spite
+of you, and make the kingdoms of this world, instead, the Kingdom of our
+Lord and of His Christ. Why, if each nation is to have her Church, why
+not each county and each town--yes, and each separate soul, too; for all
+are different! Nay, nay, Master Norris, you are blinded by the Prince of
+this world. He is shewing you even now from an high mountain the kingdoms
+of this world and the glory of them: lift your eyes, dear lad, to the
+hills from whence cometh your help; those hills higher than the mountain
+where you stand; and see the new Jerusalem, and the glory of her, coming
+down from God to dwell with men."
+
+Mr. Buxton stood, his eyes blazing, plainly carried away wholly by
+enthusiasm; and Anthony, in spite of himself, could not be angry. He
+moistened his lips once or twice.
+
+"Well, sir; of course I hold with what you say, in one sense; but it is
+not come yet; and never will, till our Lord comes back to make all
+plain."
+
+"Not come yet?" cried the other, "Not come yet! Why, what is the one Holy
+Catholic and Apostolic Church but that? There you have one visible
+kingdom, gathered out of every nation and tongue and people, as the
+apostle said. I have a little estate in France, Master Norris, where I go
+sometimes; and there are folk in their wooden shoes, talking a different
+human tongue to me, but, thank God! the same divine one--of contrition
+and adoration and prayer. There we have the same mass, the same
+priesthood, the same blessed sacrament and the same Faith, as in my own
+little oratory at Stanfield. Go to Spain, Africa, Rome, India; wherever
+Christ is preached; there is the Church as it is here--the City of Peace.
+And as for you and your Church! with whom do you hold communion?"
+
+This stung Anthony, and he answered impulsively.
+
+"In Geneva and Frankfort, at least, there are folk who speak the same
+divine tongue, as you call it, as we do; they and we are agreed in
+matters of faith."
+
+"Indeed," said Mr. Burton sharply, "then what becomes of your
+Nationalism, and the varied temperaments that you told me God had made?"
+
+Anthony bit his lip; he had overshot his mark. But the other swept on;
+and as he talked began to step up and down the little room, in a kind of
+rhapsody.
+
+"Is it possible?" he cried, "that men should be so blind as to prefer the
+little divided companies they name National Churches--all confusion and
+denial--to that glorious kingdom that Christ bought with his own dear
+blood, and has built upon Peter, against which the gates of hell shall
+not prevail. Yes, I know it is a flattering and a pleasant thought that
+this little nation should have her own Church; and it is humbling and
+bitter that England should be called to submit to a foreign potentate in
+the affairs of faith--Nay, cry they like the Jews of old, not Christ but
+Barabbas--we will not have this Man to reign over us. And yet this is
+God's will and not that. Mark me, Mr. Norris, what you hope will never
+come to be--the Liar will not keep his word--you shall not have that
+National Church that you desire: as you have dealt, so will it be dealt
+to you: as you have rejected, so will you be rejected. England herself
+will cast you off: your religious folk will break into a hundred
+divisions. Even now your Puritans mock at your prelates--so soon! And if
+they do thus now, what will they do hereafter? You have cast away
+Authority, and authority shall forsake you. Behold your house is left
+unto you desolate."
+
+"Forgive me, Mr. Norris," he added after a pause, "if I have been
+discourteous, and have forgotten my manners; but--but I would, as the
+apostle said, that you were altogether as I am, except these bonds."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IV
+
+                           A COUNTER-MARCH
+
+
+Isabel was sitting out alone in the Italian garden at the Hall, one
+afternoon in the summer following the visit to Deptford. Hubert was down
+at Plymouth, assisting in the preparations for the expedition that Drake
+hoped to conduct against Spain. The two countries were technically at
+peace, but the object with which he was going out, with the moral and
+financial support of the Queen, was a corporate demonstration against
+Spain, of French, Portuguese, and English ships under the main command of
+Don Antonio, the Portuguese pretender; it was proposed to occupy Terceira
+in the Azores; and Drake and Hawkins entertained the highest hopes of
+laying their hands on further plunder.
+
+She was leaning back in her seat, with her hands behind her head,
+thinking over her relations with Hubert. When he had been at home at the
+end of the previous year, he had apparently taken it for granted that the
+marriage would be celebrated; he had given her the gold nugget, that she
+had showed Anthony, telling her he had brought it home for the
+wedding-ring; and she understood that he was to come for his final answer
+as soon as his work at Plymouth was over. But not a word of explanation
+had passed between them on the religious difficulty. He had silenced her
+emphatically and kindly once when she had approached it; and she gathered
+from his manner that he suspected the direction in which her mind was
+turning and was generously unwilling for her to commit herself an inch
+further than she saw. Else whence came his assurance? And, for herself,
+things were indeed becoming plain: she wondered why she had hesitated so
+long, why she was still hesitating; the cup was brimming above the edge;
+it needed but a faint touch of stimulus to precipitate all.
+
+And so Isabel lay back and pondered, with a touch of happy impatience at
+the workings of her own soul; for she dared not act without the final
+touch of conviction. Mistress Margaret had taught her that the swiftest
+flight of the soul was when there was least movement, when the soul knew
+how to throw itself with that supreme effort of cessation into the Hands
+of God, that He might bear it along: when, after informing the intellect
+and seeking by prayer for God's bounty, the humble client of Heaven
+waited with uplifted eyes and ready heart until God should answer. And so
+she waited, knowing that the gift was at hand, yet not daring to snatch
+it. But, in the meanwhile, her imagination at least might act without
+restraint; so she sent it out, like a bird from the Ark, to bring her the
+earnest of peace. There, in the cloister-wing, somewhere, lay the chapel,
+where she and Hubert would kneel together;--somewhere beneath that grey
+roof. That was the terrace where she would walk one day as one who has a
+right there. Which of these windows would be hers? Not Lady Maxwell's, of
+course; she must keep that.... Ah! how good God was!
+
+The tall door on to the terrace opened, and Mistress Margaret peered out
+with a letter in her hand. Isabel called to her; and the old nun came
+down the steps into the garden. Why did she walk so falteringly, the girl
+wondered, as if she could not see? What was it? What was it?
+
+Isabel rose to her feet, startled, as the nun with bent head came up the
+path. "What is it, Mistress Margaret?"
+
+The other tried to smile at her, but her lips were trembling too much;
+and the girl saw that her eyes were brimming with tears. She put the
+letter into her hand.
+
+Isabel lifted it in an agony of suspense; and saw her name, in Hubert's
+handwriting.
+
+"What is it?" she said again, white to the lips.
+
+The old lady as she turned away glanced at her; and Isabel saw that her
+face was all twitching with the effort to keep back her tears. The girl
+had never seen her like that before, even at Sir Nicholas' death. Was
+there anything, she wondered as she looked, worse than death? But she was
+too dazed by the sight to speak, and Mistress Margaret went slowly back
+to the house unquestioned.
+
+Isabel turned the letter over once or twice; and then sat down and opened
+it. It was all in Hubert's sprawling handwriting, and was dated from
+Plymouth.
+
+It gave her news first about the squadron; saying how Don Antonio had
+left London for Plymouth, and was expected daily; and then followed this
+paragraph:
+
+"And now, dearest Isabel, I have such good news to give you. _I have
+turned Protestant_; and there is no reason why we should not be married
+as soon as I return. I know this will make you happy to think that our
+religions are no longer different. I have thought of this so long; but
+would not tell you before for fear of disappointing you. Sir Francis
+Drake's religion seems to me the best; it is the religion of all the
+'sea-dogs' as they name us; and of the Queen's Grace, and it will be soon
+of all England; and more than all it is the religion of my dearest
+mistress and love. I do not, of course, know very much of it as yet; but
+good Mr. Collins here has shown me the superstitions of Popery; and I
+hope now to be justified by faith without works as the gospel teaches. I
+fear that my mother and aunt will be much distressed by this news; I have
+written, too, to tell them of it. You must comfort them, dear love; and
+perhaps some day they, too, will see as we do." Then followed a few
+messages, and loving phrases, and the letter ended.
+
+Isabel laid it down beside her on the low stone wall; and looked round
+her with eyes that saw nothing. There was the grey old house before her,
+and the terrace, and the cloister-wing to the left, and the hot sunshine
+lay on it all, and drew out scents and colours from the flower-beds, and
+joy from the insects that danced in the trembling air; and it all meant
+nothing to her; like a picture when the page is turned over it. Five
+minutes ago she was regarding her life and seeing how the Grace of God
+was slowly sorting out its elements from chaos to order--the road was
+unwinding itself before her eyes as she trod on it day by day--now a hand
+had swept all back into disorder, and the path was hidden by the ruins.
+
+Then gradually one thought detached itself, and burned before her, vivid
+and startling; and in all its terrible reality slipped between her and
+the visible world on which she was staring. It was this: to embrace the
+Catholic Faith meant the renouncing of Hubert. As a Protestant she might
+conceivably have married a Catholic; as a Catholic it was inconceivable
+that she should marry an apostate.
+
+Then she read the letter through again carefully and slowly; and was
+astonished at the unreality of Hubert's words about Romish superstition
+and gospel simplicity. She tried hard to silence her thoughts; but two
+reasons for Hubert's change of religion rose up and insisted on making
+themselves felt; it was that he might be more in unity with the
+buccaneers whom he admired; second, that there might be no obstacle to
+their marriage. And what then, she asked, was the quality of the heart he
+had given her?
+
+Then, in a flash of intuition, she perceived that a struggle lay before
+her, compared with which all her previous spiritual conflicts were as
+child's play; and that there was no avoiding it. The vision passed, and
+she rose and went indoors to find the desolate mother whose boy had lost
+the Faith.
+
+A month or two of misery went by. For Lady Maxwell they passed with
+recurring gusts of heart-broken sorrow and of agonies of prayer for her
+apostate son. Mistress Margaret was at the Hall all day, soothing,
+encouraging, even distracting her sister by all the means in her power.
+The mother wrote one passionate wail to her son, appealing to all that
+she thought he held dear, even yet to return to the Faith for which his
+father had suffered and in which he had died; but a short answer only
+returned, saying it was impossible to make his defence in a letter, and
+expressing pious hopes that she, too, one day would be as he was; the
+same courier brought a letter to Isabel, in which he expressed his wonder
+that she had not answered his former one.
+
+And as for Isabel, she had to pass through this valley of darkness alone.
+Anthony was in London; and even if he had been with her could not have
+helped her under these circumstances; her father was dead--she thanked
+God for that now--and Mistress Margaret seemed absorbed in her sister's
+grief. And so the girl fought with devils alone. The arguments for
+Catholicism burned pitilessly clear now; every line and feature in them
+stood out distinct and hard. Catholicism, it appeared to her, alone had
+the marks of the Bride, visible unity, visible Catholicity, visible
+Apostolicity, visible Sanctity;--there they were, the seals of the most
+High God. She flung herself back furiously into the Protestantism from
+which she had been emerging; there burned in the dark before her the
+marks of the Beast, visible disunion, visible nationalism, visible
+Erastianism, visible gulfs where holiness should be: that system in which
+now she could never find rest again glared at her in all its unconvincing
+incoherence, its lack of spirituality, its adulterous union with the
+civil power instead of the pure wedlock of the Spouse of Christ. She
+wondered once more how she dared to have hesitated so long; or dared to
+hesitate still.
+
+On the theological side intellectual arguments of this kind started out,
+strong and irrefutable; her emotional drawings towards Catholicism for
+the present retired. Feelings might have been disregarded or discredited
+by a strong effort of the will; these apparently cold phenomena that
+presented themselves to her intellect, could not be thus dealt with. Yet,
+strangely enough, even now she would not throw herself resolutely into
+Catholicism: the fierce stimulus instead of precipitating the crisis,
+petrified it. More than once she started up from her knees in her own
+dark room, resolved to awaken the nun and tell her she would wait no
+longer, but would turn Catholic at once and have finished with the misery
+of suspense: and even as she moved to the door her will found itself
+against an impenetrable wall.
+
+And then on the other side all her human nature cried out for
+Hubert--Hubert--Hubert. There he stood by her in fancy, day and night,
+that chivalrous, courteous lad, who had been loyal to her so long; had
+waited so patiently; had run to her with such dear impatience; who was so
+wholesome, so strong, so humble to her; so quick to understand her wants,
+so eager to fulfil them; so bound to her by associations; so fit a mate
+for the very differences between them. And now these two claims were no
+longer compatible; in his very love for her he had ended that
+possibility. All those old dreams; the little scenes she had rehearsed,
+of their first mass, their first communion together; their walks in the
+twilight; their rides over the hills; the new ties that were to draw the
+old ladies at the Hall and herself so close together--all this was
+changed; some of those dreams were now for ever impossible, others only
+possible on terms that she trembled even to think of. Perhaps it was
+worst of all to reflect that she was in some measure responsible for his
+change of religion; she fancied that it was through her slowness to
+respond to light, her delaying to confide in him, that he had been driven
+through impatience to take this step. And so week after week went by and
+she dared not answer his letter.
+
+The old ladies, too, were sorely puzzled at her. It was impossible for
+them to know how far her religion was changing. She had kept up the same
+reserve towards them lately as towards Hubert, chiefly because she feared
+to disappoint them; and so after an attempt to tell each other a little
+of their mutual sympathy, the three women were silent on the subject of
+the lad who was so much to them all.
+
+She began to show her state a little in her movements and appearance. She
+was languid, soon tired and dispirited; she would go for short, lonely
+walks, and fall asleep in her chair worn out when she came in. Her grey
+eyes looked longer and darker; her eyelids and the corners of her mouth
+began to droop a little.
+
+Then in October he came home.
+
+Isabel had been out a long afternoon walk by herself through the
+reddening woods. They had never, since the first awakening of the
+consciousness of beauty in her, meant so little to her as now. It
+appeared as if that keen unity of a life common to her and all living
+things had been broken or obscured; and that she walked in an isolation
+all the more terrible in that she was surrounded by the dumb presence of
+what she loved. Last year the quick chattering cry of the blackbird, the
+evening mists over the meadows, the stir of the fading life of the woods,
+the rustling scamper of the rabbit over the dead leaves, the solemn call
+of the homing rooks--all this, only last year, went to make up the sweet
+natural atmosphere in which her spirit moved and breathed at ease. Now
+she was excommunicate from that pleasant friendship, banned by nature and
+forgotten by the God who made it and was immanent within it. Her
+relations to the Saviour, who only such a short time ago had been the
+Person round whom all the joys of life had centred, from whom they
+radiated, and to whom she referred them all--these relations had begun to
+be obscured by her love for Hubert, and now had vanished altogether. She
+had regarded her earthly and her heavenly lover as two persons, each of
+whom had certain claims upon her heart, and each of whom she had hoped to
+satisfy in different ways; instead of identifying the two, and serving
+each not apart from, but in the other. And it now seemed to her that she
+was making experience of a Divine jealousy that would suffer her to be
+satisfied neither with God nor man. Her soul was exhausted by internal
+conflict, by the swift alternations of attraction and repulsion between
+the poles of her supernatural and natural life; so that when it turned
+wearily from self to what lay outside, it was not even capable, as
+before, of making that supreme effort of cessation of effort which was
+necessary to its peace. It seemed to her that she was self-poised in
+emptiness, and could neither touch heaven or earth--crucified so high
+that she could not rest on earth, so low that she could not reach to
+heaven.
+
+She came in weary and dispirited as the candles were being lighted in her
+sitting-room upstairs; but she saw the gleam of them from the garden with
+no sense of a welcoming brightness. She passed from the garden into the
+door of the hall which was still dark, as the fire had nearly burned
+itself out. As she entered the door opposite opened, and once more she
+saw the silhouette of a man's figure against the lighted passage beyond;
+and again she stopped frightened, and whispered "Anthony."
+
+There was a momentary pause as the door closed and all was dark again;
+and then she heard Hubert's voice say her name; and felt herself wrapped
+once more in his arms. For a moment she clung to him with furious
+longing. Ah! this is a tangible thing, she felt, this clasp; the faint
+cleanly smell of his rough frieze dress refreshed her like wine, and she
+kissed his sleeve passionately. And the wide gulf between them yawned
+again; and her spirit sickened at the sight of it.
+
+"Oh! Hubert, Hubert!" she said.
+
+She felt herself half carried to a high chair beside the fire-place and
+set down there; then he re-arranged the logs on the hearth, so that the
+flames began to leap again, showing his strong hands and keen clear-cut
+face; then he turned on his knees, seized her two hands in his own, and
+lifted them to his lips; then laid them down again on her knee, still
+holding them; and so remained.
+
+"Oh! Isabel," he said, "why did you not write?"
+
+She was silent as one who stares fascinated down a precipice.
+
+"It is all over," he went on in a moment, "with the expedition. The
+Queen's Grace has finally refused us leave to go--and I have come back to
+you, Isabel."
+
+How strong and pleasant he looked in this leaping fire-light! how real!
+and she was hesitating between this warm human reality and the chilly
+possibilities of an invisible truth. Her hands tightened instinctively
+within his, and then relaxed.
+
+"I have been so wretched," she said piteously.
+
+"Ah! my dear," and he threw an arm round her neck and drew her face down
+to his, "but that is over now." She sat back again; and then an access of
+purpose poured into her and braced her will to an effort.
+
+"No, no," she began, "I must tell you. I was afraid to write. Hubert, I
+must wait a little longer. I--I do not know what I believe."
+
+He looked at her, puzzled.
+
+"What do you mean, dearest?'
+
+"I have been so much puzzled lately--thinking so much--and--and--I am
+sorry you have become a Protestant. It makes all so hard."
+
+"My dear, this is--I do not understand."
+
+"I have been thinking," went on Isabel bravely, "whether perhaps the
+Catholic Church is not right after all."
+
+Hubert loosed her hands and stood up. She crouched into the shadow of the
+interior of the high chair, and looked up at him, terrified. His cheek
+twitched a little.
+
+"Isabel, this is foolishness. I know what the Catholic faith is. It is
+not true; I have been through it all."
+
+He was speaking nervously and abruptly. She said nothing. Then he
+suddenly dropped on his knees himself.
+
+"My dearest, I understand. You were doing this for me. I quite
+understand. It is what I too----" and then he stopped.
+
+"I know, I know," she cried piteously. "It is just what I have feared so
+terribly--that--that our love has been blinding us both. And yet, what
+are we to do, what are we to do? Oh! God--Hubert, help me."
+
+Then he began to speak in a low emphatic voice, holding her hands,
+delicately stroking one of them now and again, and playing with her
+fingers. She watched his curly head in the firelight as he talked, and
+his keen face as he looked up.
+
+"It is all plain to me," he said, caressingly. "You have been living here
+with my aunt, a dear old saint; and she has been talking and telling you
+all about the Catholic religion, and making it seem all true and good.
+And you, my dear child, have been thinking of me sometimes, and loving me
+a little, is it not so? and longing that religion should not separate us;
+and so you began to wish it was true; and then to hope it was; and at
+last you have begun to think it is. But it is not your true sweet self
+that believes it. Ah! you know in your heart of hearts, as I have known
+so long, that it is not true; that it is made up by priests and nuns; and
+it is very beautiful, I know, my dearest, but it is only a lovely tale;
+and you must not spoil all for the sake of a tale. And I have been
+gradually led to the light; it was your--" and his voice faltered--"your
+prayers that helped me to it. I have longed to understand what it was
+that made you so sweet and so happy; and now I know; it is your own
+simple pure religion; and--and--it is so much more sensible, so much more
+likely to be true than the Catholic religion. It is all in the Bible you
+see; so plain, as Mr. Collins has showed me. And so, my dear love, I have
+come to believe it too; and you must put all these fancies out of your
+head, these dreams; though I love you, I love you," and he kissed her
+hand again, "for wishing to believe them for my sake--and--and we will be
+married before Christmas; and we will have our own fairy-tale, but it
+shall be a true one."
+
+This was terrible to Isabel. It seemed as if her own haunting thought
+that she was sacrificing a dream to reality had become incarnate in her
+lover and was speaking through his lips. And yet in its very incarnation,
+it seemed to reveal its weakness rather than its strength. As a dark
+suggestion the thought was mighty; embodied in actual language it seemed
+to shrink a little. But then, on the other hand--and so the interior
+conflict began to rage again.
+
+She made a movement as if to stand up; but he pressed her back into the
+chair.
+
+"No, my dearest, you shall be a prisoner until you give your parole."
+
+Twice Isabel made an effort to speak; but no sound came. It seemed as if
+the raging strife of thoughts deafened and paralysed her.
+
+"Now, Isabel," said Hubert.
+
+"I cannot, I cannot," she cried desperately, "you must give me time. It
+is too sudden, your returning like this. You must give me time. I do not
+know what I believe. Oh, dear God, help me."
+
+"Isabel, promise! promise! Before Christmas! I thought it was all to be
+so happy, when I came in through the garden just now. My mother will
+hardly speak to me; and I came to you, Isabel, as I always did; I felt so
+sure you would be good to me; and tell me that you would always love me,
+now that I had given up my religion for love of you. And now----" and
+Hubert's voice ended in a sob.
+
+Her heart seemed rent across, and she drew a sobbing sigh. Hubert heard
+it, and caught at her hands again as he knelt.
+
+"Isabel, promise, promise."
+
+Then there came that gust of purpose into her heart again; she made a
+determined effort and stood up; and Hubert rose and stood opposite her.
+
+"You must not ask me," she said, bravely. "It would be wicked to decide
+yet. I cannot see anything clearly. I do not know what I believe, nor
+where I stand. You must give me time."
+
+There was a dead silence. His face was so much in shadow that she could
+not tell what he was thinking. He was standing perfectly still.
+
+"Then that is all the answer you will give me?" he said, in a perfectly
+even voice.
+
+Isabel bowed her head.
+
+"Then--then I wish you good-night, Mistress Norris," and he bowed to her,
+caught up his cap and went out.
+
+She could not believe it for a moment, and caught her breath to cry out
+after him as the door closed; but she heard his step on the stone
+pavement outside, the crunch of the gravel, and he was gone. Then she
+went and leaned her head against the curved mantelshelf and stared into
+the logs that his hands had piled together.
+
+This, then, she thought, was the work of religion; the end of all her
+aspirations and efforts, that God should mock them by bringing love into
+their life, and then when they caught at it and thanked him for it, it
+was whisked away again, and left their hands empty. Was this the Father
+of Love in whom she had been taught to believe, who treated His children
+like this? And so the bitter thoughts went on; and yet she knew in her
+heart that she was powerless; that she could not go to the door and call
+Hubert and promise what he asked. A great Force had laid hold of her, it
+might be benevolent or not--at this moment she thought not--but it was
+irresistible; and she must bow her head and obey.
+
+And even as she thought that, the door opened again, and there was
+Hubert. He came in two quick steps across the room to her, and then
+stopped suddenly.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he asked, "can you forgive me? I was a brute just now.
+I do not ask for your promise. I leave it all in your hands. Do with me
+what you will. But--but, if you could tell me how long you think it will
+be before you know----"
+
+He had touched the right note. Isabel's heart gave a leap of sorrow and
+sympathy. "Oh, Hubert," she said brokenly, "I am so sorry; but I promise
+I will tell you--by Easter?" and her tone was interrogative.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Hubert. He looked at her in silence, and she saw strange
+lines quivering at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes large and
+brilliant in the firelight. Then the two drew together, and he took her
+in his arms strongly and passionately.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was a scene that night between the mother and son. Mistress
+Margaret had gone back to the Dower House for supper; and Lady Maxwell
+and Hubert were supping in Sir Nicholas' old study that would soon be
+arranged for Hubert now that he had returned for good. They had been very
+silent during the meal, while the servants were in the room, talking only
+of little village affairs and of the estate, and of the cancelling of the
+proposed expedition. Hubert had explained to his mother that it was
+generally believed that Elizabeth had never seriously intended the
+English ships to sail, but that she only wished to draw Spain's attention
+off herself by setting up complications between that country and France;
+and when she had succeeded in this by managing to get the French squadron
+safe at Terceira, she then withdrew her permission to Drake and Hawkins,
+and thus escaped from the quarrel altogether. But it was a poor makeshift
+for conversation.
+
+When the servants had withdrawn, a silence fell. Presently Hubert looked
+across the table between the silver branched candlesticks.
+
+"Mother," he said, "of course I know what you are thinking. But I cannot
+consent to go through all the arguments; I am weary of them. Neither will
+I see Mr. Barnes to-morrow at Cuckfield or here. I am satisfied with my
+position."
+
+"My son," said Lady Maxwell with dignity, "I do not think I have spoken
+that priest's name; or indeed any."
+
+"Well," said Hubert, impatiently, "at any rate I will not see him. But I
+wish to say a few words about this house. We must have our positions
+clear. My father left to your use, did he not, the whole of the
+cloister-wing? I am delighted, dear mother, that he did so. You will be
+happy there I know; and of course I need not say that I hope you will
+keep your old room overhead as well; and, indeed, use the whole house as
+you have always done. I shall be grateful if you will superintend it all,
+as before--at least, until a new mistress comes."
+
+"Thank you, my son."
+
+"I will speak of that in a moment," he went on, looking steadily at the
+table-cloth; "but there was a word I wished to say first. I am now a
+loyal subject of her Grace in all things; in religion as in all else.
+And--and I fear I cannot continue to entertain seminary priests as my
+father used to do. My--my conscience will not allow that. But of course,
+mother, I need not say that you are at perfect liberty to do what you
+will in the cloister-wing; I shall ask no questions; and I shall set no
+traps or spies. But I must ask that the priests do not come into this
+part of the house, nor walk in the garden. Fortunately you have a lawn in
+the cloister; so that they need not lack fresh air or exercise."
+
+"You need not fear, Hubert," said his mother, "I will not embarrass you.
+You shall be in no danger."
+
+"I think you need not have said that, mother; I am not usually thought a
+coward."
+
+Lady Maxwell flushed a little, and began to finger her silver knife.
+
+"However," Hubert went on, "I thought it best to say that. The chapel,
+you see, is in that wing; and you have that lawn; and--and I do not think
+I am treating you hardly."
+
+"And is your brother James not to come?" asked his mother.
+
+"I have thought much over that," said Hubert; "and although it is hard to
+say it, I think he had better not come to my part of the house--at least
+not when I am here; I must know nothing of it. You must do what you think
+well when I am away, about him and others too. It is very difficult for
+me, mother; please do not add to the difficulty."
+
+"You need not fear," said Lady Maxwell steadily; "you shall not be
+troubled with any Catholics besides ourselves."
+
+"Then that is arranged," said the lad. "And now there is a word more.
+What have you been doing to Isabel?" And he looked sharply across the
+table. His mother's eyes met his fearlessly.
+
+"I do not understand you," she said.
+
+"Mother, you must know what I mean. You have seen her continually."
+
+"I have told you, my son, that I do not know."
+
+"Why," burst out Hubert, "she is half a Catholic."
+
+"Thank God," said his mother.
+
+"Ah! yes; you thank God, I know; but whom am I to thank for it?"
+
+"I would that you could thank Him too."
+
+Hubert made a sharp sound of disgust.
+
+"Ah! yes," he said scornfully, "I knew it; _Non nobis Domine_, and the
+rest."
+
+"Hubert," said Lady Maxwell, "I do not think you mean to insult me in
+this house; but either that is an insult, or else I misunderstood you
+wholly, and must ask your pardon for it."
+
+"Well," he said, in a harsh voice, "I will make myself plain. I believe
+that it is through the influence of you and Aunt Margaret that this has
+been brought about."
+
+At the moment he spoke the door opened.
+
+"Come in, Margaret," said her sister, "this concerns you."
+
+The old nun came across to Hubert with her anxious sweet face; and put
+her old hand tenderly on his black satin sleeve as he sat and wrenched at
+a nut between his fingers.
+
+"Hubert, dear boy," she said, "what is all this? Will you tell me?"
+
+Hubert rose, a little ashamed of himself, and went to the door and closed
+it; and then drew out a chair for his aunt, and put a wine-glass for her.
+
+"Sit down, aunt," he said, and pushed the decanter towards her.
+
+"I have just left Isabel," she said, "she is very unhappy about
+something. You saw her this evening, dear lad?"
+
+"Yes," said Hubert, heavily, looking down at the table and taking up
+another nut, "and it is of that that I have been speaking. Who has made
+her unhappy?"
+
+"I had hoped you would tell us that," said Mistress Margaret; "I came up
+to ask you."
+
+"My son has done us--me--the honour----" began Lady Maxwell; but Hubert
+broke in:
+
+"I left Isabel here last Christmas happy and a Protestant. I have come
+back here now to find her unhappy and half a Catholic, if not
+more--and----"
+
+"Oh! are you sure?" asked Mistress Margaret, her eyes shining. "Thank
+God, if it be so!"
+
+"Sure?" said Hubert, "why she will not marry me; at least not yet."
+
+"Oh, poor lad," she said tenderly, "to have lost both God and Isabel."
+
+Hubert turned on her savagely. But the old nun's eyes were steady and
+serene.
+
+"Poor lad!" she said again.
+
+Hubert looked down again; his lip wrinkled up in a little sneer.
+
+"As far as I am concerned," he said, "I can understand your not caring,
+but I am astonished at this response of yours to her father's
+confidence!"
+
+Lady Maxwell grew white to the lips.
+
+"I have told you," she began--"but you do not seem to believe it--that I
+have had nothing to do, so far as I know, with her conversion,
+which"--and she raised her voice bravely--"I pray God to accomplish. She
+has, of course, asked me questions now and then; and I have answered
+them--that is all."
+
+"And I," said Mistress Margaret, "plead guilty to the same charge, and to
+no other. You are not yourself, dear boy, at present; and indeed I do not
+wonder at it; and I pray God to help you; but you are not yourself, or
+you would not speak like this to your mother."
+
+Hubert rose to his feet; his face was white under the tan, and the ruffle
+round his wrist trembled as he leaned heavily with his fingers on the
+table.
+
+"I am only a plain Protestant now," he said bitterly, "and I have been
+with Protestants so long that I have forgotten Catholic ways; but----"
+
+"Stay, Hubert," said his mother, "do not finish that. You will be sorry
+for it presently, if you do. Come, Margaret." And she moved towards the
+door; her son went quickly past and opened it.
+
+"Nay, nay," said the nun. "Do you be going, Mary. Let me stay with the
+lad, and we will come to you presently." Lady Maxwell bowed her head and
+passed out, and Hubert closed the door.
+
+Mistress Margaret looked down on the table.
+
+"You have given me a glass, dear boy; but no wine in it."
+
+Hubert took a couple of quick steps back, and faced her.
+
+"It is no use, it is no use," he burst out, and his voice was broken with
+emotion, "you cannot turn me like that. Oh, what have you done with my
+Isabel?" He put out his hand and seized her arm. "Give her back to me,
+Aunt Margaret; give her back to me."
+
+He dropped into his seat and hid his face on his arm; and there was a sob
+or two.
+
+"Sit up and be a man, Hubert," broke in Mistress Margaret's voice, clear
+and cool.
+
+He looked up in amazement with wet indignant eyes. She was looking at
+him, smiling tenderly.
+
+"And now, for the second time, give me half a glass of wine, dear boy."
+
+He poured it out, bewildered at her self-control.
+
+"For a man that has been round the world," she said, "you are but a
+foolish child."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Have you never thought of a way of yet winning Isabel," she asked.
+
+"What do you mean?" he repeated.
+
+"Why, come back to the Church, dear lad; and make your mother and me
+happy again, and marry Isabel, and save your own soul."
+
+"Aunt Margaret," he cried, "it is impossible. I have truly lost my faith
+in the Catholic religion; and--and--you would not have me a hypocrite."
+
+"Ah! ah!" said the nun, "you cannot tell yet. Please God it may come
+back. Oh! dear boy, in your heart you know it is true."
+
+"Before God, in my heart I know that it is not true."
+
+"No, no, no," she said; but the light died out of her eyes, and she
+stretched a tremulous hand.
+
+"Yes, Aunt Margaret, it is so. For years and years I have been doubting;
+but I kept on just because it seemed to me the best religion; and--and I
+would not be driven out of it by her Grace's laws against my will, like a
+dog stoned from his kennel."
+
+"But you are only a lad still," she said piteously. He laughed a little.
+
+"But I have had the gift of reason and discretion nearly twenty years, a
+priest would tell me. Besides, Aunt Margaret, I could not be such a--a
+cur--as to come back without believing. I could never look Isabel in the
+eyes again."
+
+"Well, well," said the old lady, "let us wait and see. Do you intend to
+be here now for a while?"
+
+"Not while Isabel is like this," he said. "I could not. I must go away
+for a while, and then come back and ask her again."
+
+"When will she decide?"
+
+"She told me by next Easter," said Hubert. "Oh, Aunt Margaret, pray for
+us both."
+
+The light began to glimmer again in her eyes.
+
+"There, dear boy," she said, "you see you believe in prayer still."
+
+"But, aunt," said Hubert, "why should I not? Protestants pray."
+
+"Well, well," said the old nun again. "Now you must come to your mother;
+and--and be good to her."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                      THE COMING OF THE JESUITS
+
+
+The effect on Anthony of Mr. Buxton's conversation was very considerable.
+He had managed to keep his temper very well during the actual interview;
+but he broke out alone afterwards, at first with an angry contempt. The
+absurd arrogance of the man made him furious--the arrogance that had
+puffed away England and its ambitions and its vigour--palpable evidences
+of life and reality, and further of God's blessing--in favour of a
+miserable Latin nation which had the presumption to claim the possession
+of Peter's Chair and of the person of the Vicar of Christ! Test it, said
+the young man to himself, by the ancient Fathers and Councils that Dr.
+Jewel quoted so learnedly, and the preposterous claim crumbled to dust.
+Test it, yet again, by the finger of Providence; and God Himself
+proclaimed that the pretensions of the spiritual kingdom, of which the
+prisoner in the cell had bragged, are but a blasphemous fable. And
+Anthony reminded himself of the events of the previous year.
+
+Three great assaults had been made by the Papists to win back England to
+the old Religion. Dr. William Allen, the founder of Douai College, had
+already for the last seven or eight years been pouring seminary priests
+into England, and over a hundred and twenty were at work among their
+countrymen, preparing the grand attack. This was made in three quarters
+at once.
+
+In Scotland it was chiefly political, and Anthony thought, with a bitter
+contempt, of the Count d'Aubigny, Esme Stuart, who was supposed to be an
+emissary of the Jesuits; how he had plotted with ecclesiastics and
+nobles, and professed Protestantism to further his ends; and of all the
+stories of his duplicity and evil-living, told round the guard-room fire.
+
+In Ireland the attempt was little else than ludicrous. Anthony laughed
+fiercely to himself as he pictured the landing of the treacherous fools
+at Dingle, of Sir James FitzMaurice and his lady, very wretched and giddy
+after their voyage, and the barefooted friars, and Dr. Sanders, and the
+banner so solemnly consecrated; and of the sands of Smerwick, when all
+was over a year later, and the six hundred bodies, men and women who had
+preferred Mr. Buxton's spiritual kingdom to Elizabeth's kindly rule,
+stripped and laid out in rows, like dead game, for Lord Grey de Wilton to
+reckon them by.
+
+But his heart sank a little as he remembered the third method of attack,
+and of the coming of the Jesuits. By last July all London knew that they
+were here, and men's hearts were shaken with apprehension. They reminded
+one another of the April earthquake that had tolled the great Westminster
+bell, and thrown down stones from the churches. One of the Lambeth
+guards, a native of Blunsdon, in Wiltshire, had told Anthony himself that
+a pack of hell-hounds had been heard there, in full cry after a ghostly
+quarry. Phantom ships had been seen from Bodmin attacking a phantom
+castle that rode over the waves off the Cornish coast. An old woman of
+Blasedon had given birth to a huge-headed monster with the mouth of a
+mouse, eight legs, and a tail; and, worse than all, it was whispered in
+the Somersetshire inns that three companies of black-robed men, sixty in
+number, had been seen, coming and going overhead in the gloom. These two
+strange emissaries, Fathers Persons and Campion--how they appealed to the
+imagination, lurking under a hundred disguises, now of servants, now of
+gentlemen of means and position! It was known that they were still in
+England, going about doing good, their friends said who knew them;
+stirring up the people, their enemies said who were searching for them.
+Anthony had seen with his own eyes some of the papers connected with
+their presence--that containing a statement of their objects in coming,
+namely, that they were spiritual not political agents, seeking recruits
+for Christ and for none else; Campion's "Challenge and Brag," offering to
+meet any English Divine on equal terms in a public disputation; besides
+one or two of the controversial pamphlets, purporting to be printed at
+Douai, but really emanating from a private printing-press in England, as
+the Government experts had discovered from an examination of the
+water-marks of the paper employed.
+
+Yet as the weeks went by, and his first resentment cooled, Mr. Buxton's
+arguments more and more sank home, for they had touched the very point
+where Anthony had reckoned that his own strength lay. He had never before
+heard Nationalism and Catholicism placed in such flat antithesis. In
+fact, he had never before really heard the statement of the Catholic
+position; and his fierce contempt gradually melted into respect. Both
+theories had a concrete air of reality about them; his own imaged itself
+under the symbols of England's power; the National Church appealed to him
+so far as it represented the spiritual side of the English people; and
+Mr. Buxton's conception appealed to him from its very audacity. This
+great spiritual kingdom, striding on its way, trampling down the barriers
+of temperament and nationality, disregarding all earthly limitations and
+artificial restraints, imperiously dominating the world in spite of the
+world's struggles and resentment--this, after all, as he thought over it,
+was--well--was a new aspect of affairs. The coming of the Jesuits, too,
+emphasised the appeal: here were two men, as the world itself confessed,
+of exceptional ability--for Campion had been a famous Oxford orator, and
+Persons a Fellow of Balliol--choosing, under a free-will obedience, first
+a life of exile, and then one of daily peril and apprehension, the very
+thought of which burdened the imagination with horror; hunted like
+vermin, sleeping and faring hard, their very names detested by the
+majority of their countrymen, with the shadow of the gallows moving with
+them, and the reek of the hangman's cauldron continually in their
+nostrils--and for what? For Mr. Buxton's spiritual kingdom! Well, Anthony
+thought to himself as the weeks went by and his new thoughts sank deeper,
+if it is all a superstitious dream, at least it is a noble one!
+
+What, too, was the answer, he asked himself, that England gave to Father
+Campion's challenge, and the defence that the Government was preparing
+against the spiritual weapons of the Jesuits? New prisons at Framingham
+and Battersea; new penalties enacted by Parliament; and, above all, the
+unanswerable argument of the rack, and the gallows finally to close the
+discussion. And what of the army that was being set in array against the
+priests, and that was even now beginning to scour the country round
+Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and London? Anthony had to confess to himself
+that they were queer allies for the servants of Christ; for traitors,
+liars, and informers were among the most trusted Government agents.
+
+In short, as the spring drew on, Anthony was not wholly happy. Again and
+again in his own room he studied a little manuscript translation of
+Father Campion's "Ten Reasons," that had been taken from a popish
+prisoner, and that a friend had given him; and as he read its exultant
+rhetoric, he wondered whether the writer was indeed as insincere and
+treacherous as Mr. Scot declared. There seemed in the paper a reckless
+outspokenness, calculated rather to irritate than deceive.
+
+"I turn to the Sacraments," he read, "none, none, not two, not one, O
+holy Christ, have they left. Their very bread is poison. Their baptism,
+though it be true, yet in their judgment is nothing. It is not the saving
+water! It is not the channel of Grace! It brings not Christ's merits to
+us! It is but a sign of salvation!" And again the writer cried to
+Elizabeth to return to the ancient Religion, and to be in truth what she
+was in name, the Defender of the Faith.
+
+"'Kings shall be thy nursing fathers,' thus Isaiah sang, 'and Queens thy
+nursing mothers.' Listen, Elizabeth, most Mighty Queen! To thee the great
+Prophet sings! He teaches thee thy part. Join then thyself to these
+princes!... O Elizabeth, a day, a day shall come that shall show thee
+clearly which have loved thee the better, the Society of Jesus or Luther's
+brood!"
+
+What arrogance, thought Anthony to himself, and what assurance too!
+
+Meanwhile in the outer world things were not reassuring to the friends of
+the Government: it was true that half a dozen priests had been captured
+and examined by torture, and that Sir George Peckham himself, who was
+known to have harboured Campion, had been committed to the Marshalsea;
+but yet the Jesuits' influence was steadily on the increase. More and
+more severe penalties had been lately enacted; it was now declared to be
+high treason to reconcile or be reconciled to the Church of Rome;
+overwhelming losses in fortune as well as liberty were threatened against
+all who said or heard Mass or refused to attend the services of the
+Establishment; but, as was discovered from papers that fell from time to
+time into the hands of the Government agents, the only answer of the
+priests was to inveigh more strenuously against even occasional
+conformity, declaring it to be the mortal sin of schism, if not of
+apostasy, to put in an appearance under any circumstances, except those
+of actual physical compulsion, at the worship in the parish churches.
+Worse than all, too, was the fact that this severe gospel began to
+prevail; recusancy was reported to be on the increase in all parts of the
+country; and many of the old aristocracy began to return to the faith of
+their fathers: Lords Arundel, Oxford, Vaux, Henry Howard, and Sir Francis
+Southwell were all beginning to fall under the suspicion of the shrewdest
+Government spies.
+
+The excitement at Lambeth ran higher day by day as the summer drew on;
+the net was being gradually contracted in the home counties; spies were
+reported to be everywhere, in inns, in the servants' quarters of
+gentlemen's houses, lounging at cross roads and on village greens.
+Campion's name was in every mouth. Now they were on his footsteps, it was
+said; now he was taken; now he was gone back to France; now he was in
+London; now in Lancashire; and each rumour in turn corrected its
+predecessor.
+
+Anthony shared to the full in the excitement; the figure of the quarry,
+after which so many hawks were abroad, appealed to his imagination. He
+dreamed of him at night, once as a crafty-looking man with narrow eyes
+and stooping shoulders, that skulked and ran from shadow to shadow across
+a moonlit country; once as a ruddy-faced middle-aged gentleman riding
+down a crowded street; and several times as a kind of double of Mr.
+Stewart, whom he had never forgotten, since he had watched him in the
+little room of Maxwell Hall, gallant and alert among his enemies.
+
+At last one day in July, as it drew on towards evening, and as Anthony
+was looking over the stable-accounts in his little office beyond the
+Presence Chamber, a buzz of talk and footsteps broke out in the court
+below; and a moment later the Archbishop's body-servant ran in to say
+that his Grace wished to see Mr. Norris at once in the gallery that
+opened out of the guard-room.
+
+"And I think it is about the Jesuits, sir," added the man, evidently
+excited.
+
+Anthony ran down at once and found his master pacing up and down, with a
+courier waiting near the steps at the lower end that led to Chichele's
+tower. The Archbishop stopped by a window, emblazoned with Cardinal
+Pole's emblem, and beckoned to him.
+
+"See here, Master Norris," he said, "I have received news that Campion is
+at last taken: it may well be false, as so often before; but take horse,
+if you please, and ride into the city and find the truth for me. I will
+not send a groom; they believe the maddest tales. You are at liberty?" he
+added courteously.
+
+"Yes, your Grace, I will ride immediately."
+
+As he rode down the river-bank towards London Bridge ten minutes later,
+he could not help feeling some dismay as well as excitement at the news
+he was to verify. And yet what other end was possible? But what a doom
+for the brilliant Oxford orator, even though he had counted the cost!
+
+Streams of excited people were pouring across the bridge into the city;
+Campion's name was on every tongue; and Anthony, as he passed under the
+high gate, noticed a man point up at the grim spiked heads above it, and
+laugh to his companion. There seemed little doubt, from the unanimity of
+those whom he questioned, that the rumour was true; and some even said
+that the Jesuit was actually passing down Cheapside on his way to the
+Tower. When at last Anthony came to the thoroughfare the crowd was as
+dense as for a royal progress. He checked his horse at the door of an
+inn-yard, and asked an ostler that stood there what it was all about.
+
+"It is Campion, the Jesuit, sir," said the man. "He has been taken at
+Lyford, and is passing here presently."
+
+The man had hardly finished speaking when a yell came from the end of the
+street, and groans and hoots ran down the crowd. Anthony turned in his
+saddle, and saw a great stir and movement, and then horses' and men's
+heads moving slowly down over the seething surface of the crowd, as if
+swimming in a rough sea. He could make little out, as the company came
+towards him, but the faces of the officers and pursuivants who rode in
+the front rank, four or five abreast; then followed the faces of three or
+four others, also riding between guards, and Anthony looked eagerly at
+them; but they were simple faces enough, a little pale and quiet; one was
+like a farmer's, ruddy and bearded;--surely Campion could not be among
+those! Then more and more, riding two and two, with a couple of armed
+guards with each pair; some looked like country-men or servants, some
+like gentlemen, and one or two might be priests; but the crowd seemed to
+pay them no attention beyond a glance or two. Ah! what was this coming
+behind?
+
+There was a space behind the last row of guards, and then came a separate
+troop riding all together, of half a dozen men at least, and one in the
+centre, with something white in his hat. The ferment round this group was
+tremendous; men were leaping up and yelling, like hounds round a carted
+stag; clubs shot up menacingly, and a storm of ceaseless execration raged
+outside the compact square of guards who sat alert and ready to beat off
+an attack. Once a horse kicked fiercely as a man sprang to his
+hind-quarters, and there was a scream of pain and a burst of laughing.
+
+Anthony sat trembling with excitement as the first group had passed, and
+this second began to come opposite the entrance where he sat. This then
+was the man!
+
+The rider in the centre sat his horse somewhat stiffly, and Anthony saw
+that his elbows were bound behind his back, and his hands in front; the
+reins were drawn over his horse's head and a pursuivant held them on
+either side. The man was dressed as a layman, in a plumed hat and a buff
+jerkin, such as soldiers or plain country-gentlemen might use; and in the
+hat was a great paper with an inscription. Anthony spelt it out.
+
+"Campion, the Seditious Jesuit."
+
+Then he looked at the man's face.
+
+It was a comely refined face, a little pale but perfectly serene: his
+pointed dark brown beard and moustache were carefully trimmed; and his
+large passionate eyes looked cheerfully about him. Anthony stared at him,
+wholly fascinated; for above the romance that hung about the hunted
+priest and the glamour of the dreaded Society which he represented, there
+was a chivalrous fearless look in his face that drew the heart of the
+young man almost irresistibly. At least he did not look like the skulking
+knave at whom all the world was sneering, and of whom Anthony had dreamt
+so vividly a few nights before.
+
+The storm of execration from the faces below, and the faces crowding at
+the windows, seemed to affect him not at all; and he looked from side to
+side as if they were cheering him rather than crying against him. Once
+his eyes met Anthony's and rested on them for a moment; and a strange
+thrill ran through him and he shivered sharply.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+And yet he felt, too, a distinct and irresistible movement of attraction
+towards this felon who was riding towards his agony and passion; and he
+was conscious at the same time of that curious touch of wonder that he
+had felt years before towards the man whipped at the cart's tail, as to
+whether the solitary criminal were not in the right, and the clamorous
+accusers in the wrong. Campion in a moment had passed on and turned his
+head.
+
+In that moment, too, Anthony caught a sudden clear instantaneous
+impression of a group of faces in the window opposite. There were a
+couple of men in front, stout city personages no doubt, with crimson
+faces and open mouths cursing the traitorous Papist and the crafty
+vagrant fox trapped at last; but between them, looking over their
+shoulders, was a woman's face in which Anthony saw the most intense
+struggle of emotions. The face was quite white, the lips parted, the eyes
+straining, and sorrow and compassion were in every line, as she watched
+the cheerful priest among his warders; and yet there rested on it, too, a
+strange light as of triumph. It was the face of one who sees victory even
+at the hour of supremest failure. In an instant more the face had
+withdrawn itself into the darkness of the room.
+
+When the crowds had surged down the street in the direction of the Tower,
+yelling in derision as Campion saluted the lately defaced Cheapside
+Cross, Anthony guided his horse out through the dispersing groups,
+realising as he did so, with a touch of astonishment at the coincidence,
+that he had been standing almost immediately under the window whence he
+and Isabel had leaned out so many years before.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The sun was going down behind the Abbey as he rode up towards Lambeth,
+and the sky above and the river beneath were as molten gold. The Abbey
+itself, with Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament below, stood
+up like mystical palaces against the sunset; and it seemed to Anthony as
+he rode, as if God Himself were illustrating in glorious illumination the
+closing pages of that human life of which a glimpse had opened to him in
+Cheapside. It did not appear to him as it had done in the days of his
+boyish love as if heaven and earth were a stage for himself to walk and
+pose upon; but he felt intensely now the dominating power of the
+personality of the priest; and that he himself was no more than a
+spectator of this act of a tragedy of which the priest was both hero and
+victim, and for which this evening glory formed so radiant a scene. The
+old intellectual arguments against the cause that the priest represented
+for the moment were drowned in this flood of splendour. When he arrived
+at Lambeth and had reached the Archbishop's presence, he told him the
+news briefly, and went to his room full of thought and perplexity.
+
+In a few days the story of Campion's arrest was known far and wide. It
+had been made possible by the folly of one Catholic and the treachery of
+another; and when Anthony heard it, he was stirred still more by the
+contrast between the Jesuit and his pursuers. The priest had returned to
+the moated grange at Lyford, after having already paid as long a visit
+there as was prudent, owing to the solicitations of a number of gentlemen
+who had ridden after him and his companion, and who wished to hear his
+eloquence. He had returned there again, said mass on the Sunday morning,
+and preached afterwards, from a chair set before the altar, a sermon on
+the tears of the Saviour over apostate Jerusalem. But a false disciple
+had been present who had come in search of one Payne; and this man, known
+afterwards by the Catholics as Judas Eliot or Eliot Iscariot, had
+gathered a number of constables and placed them about the manor-house;
+and before the sermon was over he went out quickly from the table of the
+Lord, the house was immediately surrounded, and the alarm was raised by a
+watcher placed in one of the turrets after Eliot's suspicious departure.
+The three priests present, Campion and two others, were hurried into a
+hiding-hole over the stairs. The officers entered, searched, and found
+nothing; and were actually retiring, when Eliot succeeded in persuading
+them to try again; they searched again till dark, and still found
+nothing. Mrs. Yate encouraged them to stay the night in the house, and
+entertained them with ale; and then when all was quiet, insisted on
+hearing some parting words from her eloquent guest. He came out into the
+room where she had chosen to spend the night until the officers were
+gone; and the rest of the Catholics, some Brigittine nuns and others, met
+there through private passages and listened to him for the last time. As
+the company was dispersing one of the priests stumbled and fell, making a
+noise that roused the sentry outside. Again the house was searched, and
+again with no success. In despair they were leaving it, when Jenkins,
+Eliot's companion, who was coming downstairs with a servant of the house,
+beat with his stick on the wall, saying that they had not searched there.
+It was noticed that the servant showed signs of agitation; and men were
+fetched to the spot; the wall was beaten in and the three priests were
+found together, having mutually shriven one another, and made themselves
+ready for death.
+
+Campion was taken out and sent first to the Sheriff of Berkshire, and
+then on towards London on the following day.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The summer days went by, and every day brought its fresh rumour about
+Campion. Sir Owen Hopton, Governor of the Tower, who at first had
+committed his prisoner to Little-Ease, now began to treat him with more
+honour; he talked, too, mysteriously, of secret interviews and promises
+and understandings; and gradually it began to get about that Campion was
+yielding to kindness; that he had seen the Queen; that he was to recant
+at Paul's Cross; and even that he was to have the See of Canterbury. This
+last rumour caused great indignation at Lambeth, and Anthony was more
+pressed than ever to get what authentic news he could of the Jesuit. Then
+at the beginning of August came a burst of new tales; he had been racked,
+it was said, and had given up a number of names; and as the month went by
+more and more details, authentic and otherwise, were published. Those
+favourably inclined to the Catholics were divided in opinion; some feared
+that he had indeed yielded to an excess of agony; others, and these
+proved to be in the right when the truth came out, that he had only given
+up names which were already known to the authorities; though even for
+this he asked public pardon on the scaffold.
+
+Towards the end of August the Archbishop again sent expressly for Anthony
+and bade him accompany his chaplain on the following day to the Tower, to
+be present at the public disputation that was to take place between
+English divines and the Jesuit.
+
+"Now he will have the chance he craved for," said Grindal. "He hath
+bragged that he would meet any and all in dispute, and now the Queen's
+clemency hath granted it him."
+
+On the following day in the early morning sunshine the minister and
+Anthony rode down together to the Tower, where they arrived a few minutes
+before eight o'clock, and were passed through up the stairs into St.
+John's chapel to the seats reserved for them.
+
+It was indeed true that the authorities had determined to give Campion
+his chance, but they had also determined to make it as small as possible.
+He was not even told that the discussion was to take place until the
+morning of its occasion, and he was allowed no opportunity for developing
+his own theological position; the entire conduct of the debate was in the
+hands of his adversaries; he might only parry, seldom riposte, and never
+attack.
+
+When Anthony found himself in his seat he looked round the chapel. Almost
+immediately opposite him, on a raised platform against a pillar, stood
+two high seats occupied by Deans Nowell and Day, who were to conduct the
+disputation, and who were now talking with their heads together while a
+secretary was arranging a great heap of books on the table before them.
+On either side, east and west, stretched chairs for the divines that were
+to support them in debate, should they need it; and the platform on which
+Anthony himself had a chair was filled with a crowd of clergy and
+courtiers laughing and chatting together. A little table, also heaped
+with books, with seats for the notaries, stood in the centre of the nave,
+and not far from it were a number of little wooden stools which the
+prisoners were to occupy. Plainly they were to be allowed no advisers and
+no books; even the physical support of table and chairs was denied to
+them in spite of their weary racked bodies. The chapel, bright with the
+morning sunlight that streamed in through the east windows of the bare
+Norman sanctuary, hummed with the talk and laughter of those who had come
+to see the priest-baiting and the vindication of the Protestant Religion;
+though, as Anthony looked round, he saw here and there an anxious or a
+downcast face of some unknown friend of the Papists.
+
+He himself was far from easy in his mind. He had been studying Campion's
+"Ten Reasons" more earnestly than ever, and was amazed to find that the
+very authorities to which Dr. Jewel deferred, namely, the Scriptures
+interpreted by Fathers and Councils and illustrated by History, were
+exactly Campion's authorities, too; and that the Jesuit's appeal to them
+was no less confident than the Protestant's. That fact had, of course,
+suggested the thought that if there were no further living authority in
+existence to decide between these two scholars, Christendom was in a poor
+position. When doctors differed, where was the layman to turn? To his own
+private judgment, said the Protestant. But then Campion's private
+judgment led him to submit to the Catholic claim! This then at present
+weighed heavily on Anthony's mind. Was there or was there not an
+authority on earth capable of declaring to him the Revelation of God? For
+the first time he was beginning to feel a logical and spiritual necessity
+for an infallible external Judge in matters of faith; and that the
+Catholic Church was the only system that professed to supply it. The
+question of the existence of such an authority was, with the doctrine of
+justification, one of those subjects continually in men's minds and
+conversations, and to Anthony, unlike others, it appeared more
+fundamental even than its companion. All else seemed secondary.
+Indulgences, the Mass, Absolution, the Worship of Mary and the
+Saints--all these must stand or fall on God's authority made known to
+man. The one question for him was, Where was that authority to be
+certainly found?
+
+There came the ringing tramp of footsteps; the buzz of talk ceased and
+then broke out again, as the prisoners, with all eyes bent upon them,
+surrounded by a strong guard of pikemen, were seen advancing up the
+chapel from the north-west door towards the stools set ready for them.
+Anthony had no eyes but for Campion who limped in front, supported on
+either side by a warder. He could scarcely believe at first that this was
+the same priest who had ridden so bravely down Cheapside. Now he was
+bent, and walked like an old broken man; his face was deathly pale, with
+shadows and lines about his eyes, and his head trembled a little. There
+were one or two exclamations of pity, for all knew what had caused the
+change; and Anthony heard an undertone moan of sorrow and anger from some
+one in a seat behind him.
+
+The prisoners sat down; and the guards went to their places. Campion took
+his seat in front, and turned immediately from side to side, running his
+dark eyes along the faces to see where were his adversaries; and once
+more Anthony met his eyes, and thrilled at it. Through the pallor and
+pain of his face, the same chivalrous spirit looked out and called for
+homage and love, that years ago at Oxford had made young men, mockingly
+nicknamed after their leader, to desire his praise more passionately than
+anything on earth, and even to imitate his manners and dress and gait,
+for very loyalty and devotion. Anthony could not take his eyes off him;
+he watched the clear-cut profile of his face thrown fearlessly forward,
+waited in tense expectation to hear him speak, and paid no attention to
+the whisperings of the chaplain beside him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Presently the debate began. It was opened by Dean Nowell from his high
+seat, who assured Father Campion of the disinterested motives of himself
+and his reverend friends in holding this disputation. It was, after all,
+only what the priest had demanded; and they trusted by God's grace that
+they would do him good and help him to see the truth. There was no
+unfairness, said the Dean, who seemed to think that some apology was
+needed, in taking him thus unprepared, since the subject of debate would
+be none other than Campion's own book. The Jesuit looked up, nodded his
+head, and smiled.
+
+"I thank you, Mr. Dean," he said, in his deep resonant voice, and there
+fell a dead hush as he spoke. "I thank you for desiring to do me good,
+and to take up my challenge; but I must say that I would I had understood
+of your coming, that I might have made myself ready."
+
+Campion's voice thrilled strangely through Anthony, as the glance from
+his eyes had done. It was so assured, so strong and delicate an
+instrument, and so supremely at its owner's command, that it was hardly
+less persuasive than his personality and his learning that made
+themselves apparent during the day. And Anthony was not alone in his
+impressions of the Jesuit. Lord Arundel afterwards attributed his
+conversion to Campion's share in the discussions. Again and again during
+the day a murmur of applause followed some of the priest's clean-cut
+speeches and arguments, and a murmur of disapproval the fierce thrusts
+and taunts of his opponents; and by the end of the day's debate, so
+marked was the change of attitude of the crowd that had come to triumph
+over the Papist, and so manifest their sympathy with the prisoners, that
+it was thought advisable to exclude the public from the subsequent
+discussions.
+
+On this first day, all manner of subjects were touched upon, such as the
+comparative leniency of Catholic and Protestant governments, the position
+of Luther with regard to the Epistle of St. James, and other matters
+comparatively unimportant, in the discussion of which a great deal of
+time was wasted. Campion entreated his opponents to leave such minor
+questions alone, and to come to doctrinal matters; but they preferred to
+keep to details rather than to principles, and the priest had scarcely
+any opportunity to state his positive position at all. The only doctrinal
+matter seriously touched upon was that of Justification by Faith; and
+texts were flung to and fro without any great result. "We are justified
+by faith," cried one side. "Though I have all faith and have not charity,
+I am nothing," cried the other. The effect on Anthony of this day's
+debate arose rather from the victorious personality of the priest than
+from his arguments. His gaiety, too, was in strange contrast to the
+solemn Puritanism of his enemies. For instance, he was on the point that
+Councils might err in matters of fact, but that the Scriptures could not.
+
+"As for example," he said, his eyes twinkling out of his drawn face, "I
+am bound under pain of damnation to believe that Toby's dog had a tail,
+because it is written, he wagged it."
+
+The Deans looked sternly at him, as the audience laughed.
+
+"Now, now," said one of them, "it becomes not to deal so triflingly with
+matters of weight."
+
+Campion dropped his eyes, demurely, as if reproved.
+
+"Why, then," he said, "if this example like you not, take another. I must
+believe that Saint Paul had a cloak, because he willeth Timothy to bring
+it with him."
+
+Again the crowd laughed; and Anthony laughed, too, with a strange sob in
+his throat at the gallant foolery, which, after all, was as much to the
+point as a deal that the Deans were saying.
+
+But the second day's debate, held in Hopton's Hall, was on more vital
+matters; and Anthony again and again found himself leaning forward
+breathlessly, as Drs. Goode and Fulke on the one side, and Campion on the
+other, respectively attacked and defended the Doctrine of the Visible
+Church; for this, for Anthony, was one of the crucial points of the
+dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism. Anthony believed already
+that the Church was one; and if it was visible, surely, he thought to
+himself, it must be visibly one; and in that case, it is evident where
+that Church is to be found. But if it is invisible, it may be invisibly
+one, and then as far as that matter is concerned, he may rest in the
+Church of England. If not--and then he recoiled from the gulf that
+opened.
+
+"It must be an essential mark of the Church," said Campion, "and such a
+quality as is inseparable. It must be visible, as fire is hot, and water
+moist."
+
+Goode answered that when Christ was taken and the Apostles fled, then at
+least the Church was invisible; and if then, why not always?
+
+"It was a Church inchoate," answered the priest, "beginning, not
+perfect."
+
+But Goode continued to insist that the true Church is known only to God,
+and therefore invisible.
+
+"There are many wolves within," he said, "and many sheep without."
+
+"I know not who is elect," retorted Campion, "but I know who is a
+Catholic."
+
+"Only the elect are of the Church," said Goode.
+
+"I say that both good and evil are of the visible Church," answered the
+other.
+
+"To be elect or true members of Christ is one thing," went on Goode, "and
+to be in the visible Church is another."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As the talk went on, Anthony began to see where the confusion lay. The
+Protestants were anxious to prove that membership in a visible body did
+not ensure salvation but then the Catholics never claimed that it did;
+the question was: Did or did not Christ intend there to be a visible
+Church, membership in which should be the normal though not the
+infallible means of salvation?
+
+They presently got on to the _a priori_ point as to whether a visible
+Church would seem to be a necessity.
+
+"There is a perpetual commandment," said the priest, "in Matthew
+eighteen--'Tell the Church'; but that cannot be unless the Church is
+visible; _ergo_, the visibility of the Church is continual."
+
+"When there is an established Church," said Goode, "this remedy is to be
+sought for. But this cannot be always had."
+
+"The disease is continual," answered Campion; "_ergo_ the remedy must be
+continual." Then he left the _a priori_ ground and entered theirs. "To
+whom should I have gone," he cried, "before Luther's time? What prelates
+should I have made my complaint unto in those days? Where was your Church
+nine hundred years ago? Whose were John Huss, Jerome of Prague, the
+Waldenses? Were they yours?" Then he turned scornfully to Fulke, "Help
+him, Master Doctor."
+
+And Fulke repeated Goode's assertion, that valuable as the remedy is, it
+cannot always be had.
+
+Anthony sat back, puzzled. Both sides seemed right. Persecution must
+often hinder the full privileges of Church membership and the exercise of
+discipline. Yet the question was, What was Christ's intention? Was it
+that the Church should be visible? It seemed that even the ministers
+allowed that, now. And if so, why then the Catholic's claim that Christ's
+intention had never been wholly frustrated, but that a visible unity was
+to be found amongst themselves--surely this was easier to believe than
+the Protestant theory that the Church which had been visible for fifteen
+centuries was not really the Church at all; but that the true Church had
+been invisible--in spite of Christ's intention--during all that period,
+and was now to be found only in small separated bodies scattered here and
+there. How of the prevailing of the gates of hell, if that were allowed
+to be true?
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+At two o'clock they reassembled for the afternoon conference; and now
+they got even closer to the heart of the matter, for the subject was to
+be, whether the Church could err?
+
+Fulke asserted that it could, and did; and made a syllogism:
+
+"Whatsoever error is incident to every member, is incident to the whole.
+But it is incident to every member to err; _ergo_, to the whole."
+
+"I deny both _major_ and _minor_," said Campion quietly. "Every man may
+err, but not the whole gathered together; for the whole hath a promise,
+but so hath not every particular man."
+
+Fulke denied this stoutly, and beat on the table.
+
+"Every member hath the spirit of Christ," he said, "which is the spirit
+of truth; and therefore hath the same promise that the whole hath."
+
+"Why, then," said Campion, smiling, "there should be no heretics."
+
+"Yes," answered Fulke, "heretics may be within the Church, but not of the
+Church."
+
+And so they found themselves back again where they started from.
+
+Anthony sat back on the oak bench and sighed, and glanced round at the
+interested faces of the theologians and the yawns of the amateurs, as the
+debate rolled on over the old ground, and touched on free will, and
+grace, and infant baptism; until the Lieutenant interposed:
+
+"Master Doctors," he said, with a judicial air, "the question that was
+appointed before dinner was, whether the visible Church may err"--to
+which Goode retorted that the digressions were all Campion's fault.
+
+Then the debate took the form of contradictions.
+
+"Whatsoever congregation doth err in matters of faith," said Goode, "is
+not the true Church; but the Church of Rome erreth in matters of faith;
+_ergo_, it is not the true Church."
+
+"I deny your _minor_," said Campion, "the Church of Rome hath not erred."
+Then the same process was repeated over the Council of Trent; and the
+debate whirled off once more into details and irrelevancies about imputed
+righteousness, and the denial of the Cup to the laity.
+
+Again the audience grew restless. They had not come there, most of them,
+to listen to theological minutiae, but to see sport; and this interminable
+chopping of words that resulted in nothing bored them profoundly. A
+murmur of conversation began to buzz on all sides.
+
+Campion was in despair.
+
+"Thus shall we run into all questions," he cried hopelessly, "and then we
+shall have done this time twelve months."
+
+But Fulke would not let him be; but pressed on a question about the
+Council of Nice.
+
+"Now we shall have the matter of images," sighed Campion.
+
+"You are _nimis acutus_," retorted Fulke, "you will leap over the stile
+or ever you come to it. I mean not to speak of images."
+
+And so with a few more irrelevancies the debate ended.
+
+The third debate in September (on the twenty-third), at which Anthony was
+again present, was on the subject of the Real Presence in the Blessed
+Sacrament.
+
+Fulke was in an evil temper, since it was common talk that Campion had
+had the best of the argument on the eighteenth.
+
+"The other day," he said, "when we had some hope of your conversion, we
+forbare you much, and suffered you to discourse; but now that we see you
+are an obstinate heretic, and seek to cover the light of the truth with
+multitude of words, we mean not to allow you such large discourses as we
+did."
+
+"You are very imperious to-day," answered Campion serenely, "whatsoever
+the matter is. I am the Queen's prisoner, and none of yours."
+
+"Not a whit imperious," said Fulke angrily,--"though I will exact of you
+to keep the right order of disputation."
+
+Then the argument began. It soon became plain to Anthony that it was
+possible to take the Scripture in two senses, literally and
+metaphorically. The sacrament either was literally Christ's body, or it
+was not. Who then was to decide? Father Campion said it meant the one;
+Dr. Fulke the other. Could it be possible that Christ should leave His
+people in doubt as to such a thing? Surely not, thought Anthony. Well,
+then, where is the arbiter? Father Campion says, The Church; Dr. Fulke
+says, The Scripture. But that is a circular argument, for the question to
+be decided is: What does the Scripture mean? for it may mean at least two
+things, at least so it would seem. Here then he found himself face to
+face with the claims of the Church of Rome to be that arbiter; and his
+heart began to grow sick with apprehension as he saw how that Church
+supplied exactly what was demanded by the circumstances of the case--that
+is, an infallible living guide as to the meaning of God's Revelation. The
+simplicity of her claim appalled him.
+
+He did not follow the argument closely, since it seemed to him but a
+secondary question now; though he heard one or two sentences. At one
+point Campion was explaining what the Church meant by substance. It was
+that which transcended the senses.
+
+"Are you not Dr. Fulke?" he said. "And yet I see nothing but your colour
+and exterior form. The substance of Dr. Fulke cannot be seen."
+
+"I will not vouchsafe to reply upon this answer," snarled Fulke, whose
+temper had not been improved by the debate--"too childish for a
+sophister!"
+
+Then followed interminable syllogisms, of which Campion would not accept
+the premises; and no real progress was made. The Jesuit tried to explain
+the doctrine that the wicked may be said not to eat the Body in the
+Sacrament, because they receive not the virtue of It, though they receive
+the Thing; but Fulke would not hear him. The distinction was new to
+Anthony, with his puritan training, and he sat pondering it while the
+debate passed on.
+
+The afternoon discussion, too, was to little purpose. More and more
+Anthony, and others with him, began to see that the heart of the matter
+was the authority of the Church; and that unless that was settled, all
+other debate was beside the point; and the importance of this was brought
+out for him more clearly than ever on the 27th of the month, when the
+fourth and last debate took place, and on the subject of the sufficiency
+of the Scriptures unto salvation.
+
+Mr. Charke, who had now succeeded as disputant, began with extempore
+prayer, in which as usual the priest refused to join, praying and
+crossing himself apart.
+
+Mr. Walker then opened the disputation with a pompous and insolent speech
+about "one Campion," an "unnatural man to his country, degenerated from
+an Englishman, an apostate in religion, a fugitive from this realm,
+unloyal to his prince." Campion sat with his eyes cast down, until the
+minister had done.
+
+Then the discussion began. The priest pointed out that Protestants were
+not even decided as to what were Scriptures and what were not, since
+Luther rejected three epistles in the New Testament; therefore, he
+argued, the Church is necessary as a guide, first of all, to tell men
+what is Scripture. Walker evaded by saying he was not a Lutheran but a
+Christian; and then the talk turned on to apocryphal books. But it was
+not possible to evade long, and the Jesuit soon touched his opponent.
+
+"To leave a door to traditions," he said, "which the Holy Ghost may
+deliver to the true Church, is both manifest and seen: as in the Baptism
+of infants, the Holy Ghost proceeding from Father to Son, and such other
+things mentioned, which are delivered by tradition. Prove these directly
+by the Scripture if you can!"
+
+Charke answered by the analogy of circumcision which infants received,
+and by quoting Christ's words as to "sending" of the Comforter; and they
+were soon deep in detailed argument; but once more Anthony saw that it
+was all a question of the interpretation of Scripture; and, therefore,
+that it would seem that an authoritative interpreter was necessary--and
+where could such be found save in an infallible living Voice? And once
+more a question of Campion's drove the point home.
+
+"Was all Scripture written when the Apostles first taught?" And Charke
+dared not answer yes.
+
+The afternoon's debate concerned justification by faith, and this, more
+than ever, seemed to Anthony a secondary matter, now that he was
+realising what the claim of a living authority meant; and he sat back,
+only interested in watching the priest's face, so controlled yet so
+transparent in its simplicity and steadfastness, as he listened to the
+ministers' brutal taunts and insolence, and dealt his quiet skilful
+parries and ripostes to their incessant assaults. At last the Lieutenant
+struck the table with his hand, and intimated that the time was past, and
+after a long prayer by Mr. Walker, the prisoners were led back to their
+cells.
+
+As Anthony rode back alone in the evening sunlight, he was as one who
+was seeing a vision. There was indeed a vision before him, that had
+been taking shape gradually, detail by detail, during these last months,
+and ousting the old one; and which now, terribly emphasised by Campion's
+arguments and illuminated by the fire of his personality, towered up
+imperious, consistent, dominating--and across her brow her title, The
+Catholic Church. Far above all the melting cloudland of theory she
+moved, a stupendous fact; living, in contrast with the dead past to
+which her enemies cried in vain; eloquent when other systems were dumb;
+authoritative when they hesitated; steady when they reeled and fell.
+About her throne dwelt her children, from every race and age, secure in
+her protection, and wise with her knowledge, when other men faltered and
+questioned and doubted: and as Anthony looked up and saw her for the
+first time, he recognised her as the Mistress and Mother of his soul; and
+although the blinding clouds of argument and theory and self-distrust
+rushed down on him again and filled his eyes with dust, yet he knew he
+had seen her face in very truth, and that the memory of that vision could
+never again wholly leave him.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VI
+
+                           SOME CONTRASTS
+
+
+In the Lambeth household the autumn passed by uneventfully. The rigour of
+the Archbishop's confinement had been mitigated, and he had been allowed
+now and again to visit his palace at Croydon; but his inactivity still
+continued as the sequestration was not removed; Elizabeth had refused to
+listen to the petition of Convocation in '80 for his reinstatement.
+Anthony went down to the old palace once or twice with him; and was
+brought closer to him in many ways; and his affection and tenderness
+towards his master continually increased. Grindal was a pathetic figure
+at this time, with few friends, in poor health, out of favour with the
+Queen, who had disregarded his existence; and now his afflictions were
+rendered more heavy than ever by the blindness that was creeping over
+him. The Archbishop, too, in his loneliness and sorrow, was drawn closer
+to his young officer than ever before; and gradually got to rely upon him
+in many little ways. He would often walk with Anthony in the gardens at
+Lambeth, leaning upon his arm, talking to him of his beloved flowers and
+herbs which he was now almost too blind to see; telling him queer facts
+about the properties of plants; and even attempting to teach him a little
+irrelevant botany now and then.
+
+They were walking up and down together, soon after Campion's arrest, one
+August morning before prayers in a little walled garden on the river that
+Grindal had laid out with great care in earlier years.
+
+"Ah," said the old man, "I am too blind to see my flowers now, Mr.
+Norris; but I love them none the less; and I know their places. Now
+there," he went on, pointing with his stick, "there I think grows my
+mastick or marum; perhaps I smell it, however. What is that flower like,
+Mr. Norris?"
+
+Anthony looked at it, and described its little white flower and its
+leaves.
+
+"That is it," said the Archbishop, "I thought my memory served me. It is
+a kind of marjoram, and it has many virtues, against cramps, convulsions
+and venomous bites--so Galen tells us." Then he went on to talk of the
+simple old plants that he loved best; of the two kinds of basil that he
+always had in his garden; and how good it was mixed in sack against the
+headache; and the male penny-royal, and how well it had served him once
+when he had great internal trouble.
+
+"Mr. Gerrard was here a week or two ago, Mr. Norris, when you were down
+at Croydon for me. He is my Lord Burghley's man; he oversees his gardens
+at Wimbledon House, and in the country. He was telling me of a rascal he
+had seen at a fair, who burned henbane and made folks with the toothache
+breathe in the fumes; and then feigned to draw a worm forth from the
+aching tooth; but it was no worm at all, but a lute string that he held
+ready in his hand. There are sad rascals abroad, Mr. Norris."
+
+The old man waxed eloquent when they came to the iris bed.
+
+"Ah! Mr. Norris, the flowers-de-luce are over by now, I fear; but what
+wonderful creatures of God they are, with their great handsome heads and
+their cool flags. I love to hear a bed of them rustle all together and
+shake their spears and nod their banners like an army in array. And then
+they are not only for show. Apuleius says that they are good against the
+gout. I asked Mr. Gerrard whether my lord had tried them; but he said no,
+he would not."
+
+At the violet bed he was yet more emphatic.
+
+"I think, Mr. Norris, I love these the best of all. They are lowly
+creatures; but how sweet! and like other lowly creatures exalted by their
+Maker to do great things as his handmaidens. The leaves are good against
+inflammations, and the flowers against ague and hoarseness as well. And
+then there is oil-of-violets, as you know; and violet-syrup and
+sugar-violet; then they are good for blisters; garlands of them were an
+ancient cure for the headache, as I think Dioscorides tells us. And they
+are the best of all cures for some children's ailments."
+
+And so they walked up and down together; the Archbishop talking quietly
+on and on; and helping quite unknown to himself by his tender irrelevant
+old man's talk to soothe the fever of unrest and anxiety that was
+beginning to torment Anthony so much now. His conversation, like the very
+flowers he loved to speak of, was "good against inflammations."
+
+Anthony came to him one morning, thinking to please him, and brought him
+a root that he had bought from a travelling pedlar just outside the
+gateway.
+
+"This is a mandrake root, your Grace; I heard you speak of it the other
+day."
+
+The Archbishop took it, smiling, felt it carefully, peered at it a minute
+or two. "No, my son," he said, "I fear you have met a knave. This is
+briony-root carved like a mandrake into the shape of a man's legs. It is
+worthless, I fear; but I thank you for the kind thought, Mr. Norris," and
+he gave the root back to him. "And the stories we hear of the mandrake, I
+fear, are fables, too. Some say that they only grow beneath gallows from
+that which falls there; that the male grows from the corruption of a
+man's body; and the female from that of a woman's; but that is surely a
+lie, and a foul one, too. And then folks say that to draw it up means
+death; and that the mandrake screams terribly as it comes up; and so they
+bid us tie a dog to it, and then drive the dog from it so as to draw it
+up so. I asked Mr. Baker, the chirurgeon in the household of my Lord
+Oxford, the other day, about that; and he said that such tales be but
+doltish dreams and old wives' fables. But the true mandrake is a clean
+and wholesome plant. The true ointment Populeon should have the juice of
+the leaves in it; and the root boiled and strained causes drowsiness. It
+hath a predominate cold faculty, Galen saith; but its true home is not in
+England at all. It comes from Mount Garganus in Apulia."
+
+It was pathetic, Anthony thought sometimes, that this old prelate should
+be living so far from the movements of the time, owing to no fault of his
+own. During these months the great tragedy of Campion's passion was
+proceeding a couple of miles away; but the Archbishop thought less of it
+than of the death of an old tree. The only thing from the outside world
+that seemed to ruffle him was the behaviour of the Puritans. Anthony was
+passing through "le velvet-room" one afternoon when he heard voices in
+the Presence Chamber beyond; and almost immediately heard the Archbishop,
+who had recognised his step, call his name. He went in and found him with
+a stranger in a dark sober dress.
+
+"Take this gentleman to Mr. Scot," he said, "and ask him to give him some
+refreshment; for that he must be gone directly."
+
+When Anthony had taken the gentleman to the steward, he returned to the
+Archbishop for any further instructions about him.
+
+"No, Mr. Norris, my business is done with him. He comes from my lord of
+Norwich, and must be returning this evening. If you are not occupied, Mr.
+Norris, will you give me your arm into the garden?"
+
+They went out by the vestry-door into the little cloisters, and skirting
+the end of the creek that ran up by Chichele's water-tower began to pace
+up and down the part of the garden that looked over the river.
+
+"My lord has sent to know if I know aught of one Robert Browne, with whom
+he is having trouble. This Mr. Browne has lately come from Cambridge, and
+so my lord thought I might know something of him; but I do not. This
+gentleman has been saying some wild and foolish things, I fear; and
+desires that every church should be free of all others; and should
+appoint its own minister, and rule its own affairs without interference,
+and that prophesyings should be without restraint. Now, you know, Mr.
+Norris, I have always tried to serve that party, and support them in
+their gospel religion; but this goes too far. Where were any governance
+at all, if all this were to come about? where were the Rule of Faith? the
+power of discipline? Nay, where were the unity for which our Saviour
+prayed? It liketh me not. Good Dr. Freake, as his messenger tells me,
+feels as I do about this; and desires to restrain Mr. Browne, but he is
+so hot he will not be restrained; and besides, he is some kin to my Lord
+Burghley, so I fear his mouth will be hard to stop."
+
+Anthony could not help thinking of Mr. Buxton's prediction that the
+Church of England had so repudiated authority, that in turn her own would
+one day be repudiated.
+
+"A Papist prisoner, your Grace," he said, "said to me the other day that
+this would be sure to come: that the whole principle of Church authority
+had been destroyed in England; and that the Church of England would more
+and more be deserted by her children; for that there was no necessary
+centre of unity left, now that Peter was denied."
+
+"It is what a Papist is bound to say," replied the Archbishop; "but it is
+easy to prophesy, when fulfilment may be far away. Indeed, I think we
+shall have trouble with some of these zealous men; and the Queen's Grace
+was surely right in desiring some restraint to be put upon the Exercises.
+But it is mere angry raving to say that the Church of England will lose
+the allegiance of her children."
+
+Anthony could not feel convinced that events bore out the Archbishop's
+assertion. Everywhere the Puritans were becoming more outrageously
+disloyal. There were everywhere signs of disaffection and revolt against
+the authorities of the Establishment, even on the part of the most
+sincere and earnest men, many of whom were looking forward to the day
+when the last rags of popery should be cast away, and formal
+Presbyterianism inaugurated in the Church of England. Episcopal
+Ordination was more and more being regarded as a merely civil
+requirement, but conveying no ministerial commission; recognition by the
+congregation with the laying on of the hands of the presbyterate was the
+only ordination they allowed as apostolic.
+
+Anthony said a word to the Archbishop about this.
+
+"You must not be too strict," said the old man. "Both views can be
+supported by the Scriptures; and although the Church of England at
+present recognises only Episcopal Ordination within her own borders, she
+does not dare to deny, as the Papists fondly do, that other rites may not
+be as efficacious as her own. That, surely, Master Norris, is in
+accordance with the mind of Christ that hath the spirit of liberty."
+
+Much as Anthony loved the old man and his gentle charity, this doctrinal
+position as stated by the chief pastor of the Church of England scarcely
+served to establish his troubled allegiance.
+
+During these autumn months, too, both between and after the disputations
+in the Tower, the image of Campion had been much in his thoughts.
+Everywhere, except among the irreconcilables, the Jesuit was being well
+spoken of: his eloquence, his humour, and his apparent sincerity were
+being greatly commented on in London and elsewhere. Anthony, as has been
+seen, was being deeply affected on both sides of his nature; the shrewd
+wit of the other was in conflict with his own intellectual convictions,
+and this magnetic personality was laying siege to his heart. And now the
+last scene of the tragedy, more affecting than all, was close at hand.
+
+Anthony was present first at the trial in Westminster Hall, which took
+place during November, and was more than ever moved by what he saw and
+heard there. The priest, as even his opponents confessed, had by now "won
+a marvellously good report, to be such a man as his like was not to be
+found, either for life, learning, or any other quality which might
+beautify a man." And now here he stood at the bar, paler than ever, so
+numbed with racking that he could not lift his hand to plead--that supple
+musician's hand of his, once so skilful on the lute--so that Mr. Sherwin
+had to lift it for him out of the furred cuff in which he had wrapped it,
+kissing it tenderly as he did so, in reverence for its sufferings; and he
+saw, too, the sleek face of Eliot, in his red yeoman's coat, as he stood
+chatting at the back, like another Barabbas whom the people preferred to
+the servant of the Crucified. And, above all, he heard Campion's stirring
+defence, spoken in that same resonant sweet voice, though it broke now
+and then through weakness, in spite of the unconquerable purpose and
+cheerfulness that showed in his great brown eyes, and round his delicate
+humorous mouth. It was indeed an astonishing combination of sincerity and
+eloquence, and even humour, that was brought to bear on the jury, and all
+in vain, during those days.
+
+"If you want to dispute as though you were in the schools," cried one of
+the court, when he found himself out of his depth, "you are only proving
+yourself a fool."
+
+"I pray God," said Campion, while his eyes twinkled, "I pray God make us
+both sages." And, in spite of the tragedy of the day, a little hum of
+laughter ran round the audience.
+
+"If a sheep were stolen," he argued again, in answer to the presupposition
+that since some Catholics were traitors, therefore these were--"and a
+whole family called in question for the same, were it good manner of
+proceeding for the accusers to say 'Your great grandfathers and fathers
+and sisters and kinsfolk all loved mutton; _ergo_, you have stolen the
+sheep'?"
+
+Again, in answer to the charge that he and his companions had conspired
+abroad, he said,
+
+"As for the accusation that we plotted treason at Rheims, reflect, my
+lords, how just this charge is! For see! First we never met there at all;
+then, many of us have never been at Rheims at all; finally, we were never
+in our lives all together, except at this hour and in prison."
+
+Anthony heard, too, Campion expose the attempt that was made to shift the
+charge from religion to treason.
+
+"There was offer made to us," he cried indignantly, "that if we would
+come to the church to hear sermons and the word preached, we should be
+set at large and at liberty; so Pascall and Nicholls"--(two apostates)
+"otherwise as culpable in all offences as we, upon coming to church were
+received to grace and had their pardon granted; whereas, if they had been
+so happy as to have persevered to the end, they had been partakers of our
+calamities. So that our religion was cause of our imprisonment, and _ex
+consequenti_, of our condemnation."
+
+The Queen's Counsel tried to make out that certain secrets that Campion,
+in an intercepted letter, had sworn not to reveal, must be treasonable or
+he would not so greatly fear their publication. To this the priest made a
+stately defence of his office, and declaration of his staunchness. He
+showed how by his calling as a priest he was bound to secrecy in matters
+heard in confession, and that these secret matters were of this nature.
+
+"These were the hidden matters," he said, "these were the secrets, to the
+revealing whereof I cannot nor will not be brought, come rack, come
+rope!"
+
+And again, when Sergeant Anderson interpreted a phrase of Campion's
+referring to the great day to which he looked forward, as meaning the day
+of a foreign papal invasion, the prisoner cried in a loud voice:
+
+"O Judas, Judas! No other day was in my mind, I protest, than that
+wherein it should please God to make a restitution of faith and religion.
+Whereupon, as in every pulpit every Protestant doth, I pronounced a great
+day, not wherein any temporal potentate should minister, but wherein the
+terrible Judge should reveal all men's consciences, and try every man of
+each kind of religion. This is the day of change, this is the great day
+which I threatened; comfortable to the well-behaving, and terrible to all
+heretics. Any other day but this, God knows I meant not."
+
+Then, after the other prisoners had pleaded, Campion delivered a final
+defence to the jury, with a solemnity that seemed to belong to a judge
+rather than a criminal. The babble of tongues that had continued most of
+the day was hushed to a profound silence in court as he stood and spoke,
+for the sincerity and simplicity of the priest were evident to all, and
+combined with his eloquence and his strange attractive personality,
+dominated all but those whose minds were already made up before entering
+the court.
+
+"What charge this day you sustain," began the priest, in a steady low
+voice, with his searching eyes bent on the faces before him, "and what
+account you are to render at the dreadful Day of Judgment, whereof I
+could wish this also were a mirror, I trust there is not one of you but
+knoweth. I doubt not but in like manner you forecast how dear the
+innocent is to God, and at what price He holdeth man's blood. Here we are
+accused and impleaded to the death,"--he began to raise his voice a
+little--"here you do receive our lives into your custody; here must be
+your device, either to restore them or condemn them. We have no whither
+to appeal but to your consciences; we have no friends to make there but
+your heeds and discretions." Then he touched briefly on the evidence,
+showing how faulty and circumstantial it was, and urged them to remember
+that a man's life by the very constitution of the realm must not be
+sacrificed to mere probabilities or presumptions; then he showed the
+untrustworthiness of his accusers, how one had confessed himself a
+murderer, and how another was an atheist. Then he ended with a word or
+two of appeal.
+
+"God give you grace," he cried, "to weigh our causes aright, and have
+respect to your own consciences; and so I will keep the jury no longer. I
+commit the rest to God, and our convictions to your good discretions."
+
+When the jury had retired, and all the judges but one had left the bench
+until the jury should return, Anthony sat back in his place, his heart
+beating and his eyes looking restlessly now on the prisoners, now on the
+door where the jury had gone out, and now on Judge Ayloff, whom he knew a
+little, and who sat only a few feet away from him on one side. He could
+hear the lawyers sitting below the judge talking among themselves; and
+presently one of them leaned over to him.
+
+"Good-day, Mr. Norris," he said, "you have come to see an acquittal, I
+doubt not. No man can be in two minds after what we have heard; at least
+concerning Mr. Campion. We all think so, here, at any rate."
+
+The lawyer was going on to say a word or two more as to the priest's
+eloquence, when there was a sharp exclamation from the judge. Anthony
+looked up and saw Judge Ayloff staring at his hand, turning it over while
+he held his glove in the other; and Anthony saw to his surprise that the
+fingers were all blood-stained. One or two gentlemen near him turned and
+looked, too, as the judge, still staring and growing a little pale, wiped
+the blood quickly away with the glove; but the fingers grew crimson again
+immediately.
+
+"'S'Body!" said Ayloff, half to himself; "'tis strange, there is no
+wound." A moment later, looking up, he saw many of his neighbours
+glancing curiously at his hand and his pale face, and hastily thrust on
+his glove again; and immediately after the jury returned, and the judges
+filed in to take their places. Anthony's attention was drawn off again,
+and the buzz of talk in the court was followed again by a deep silence.
+
+The verdict of _Guilty_ was uttered, as had been pre-arranged, and the
+Queen's Counsel demanded sentence.
+
+"Campion and the rest," said Chief Justice Wray, "What can you say why
+you should not die?"
+
+Then Campion, still steady and resolute, made his last useless appeal.
+
+"It was not our death that ever we feared. But we knew that we were not
+lords of our own lives, and therefore for want of answer would not be
+guilty of our own deaths. The only thing that we have now to say is, that
+if our religion do make us traitors, we are worthy to be condemned; but
+otherwise are and have been true subjects as ever the Queen had. In
+condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors," and as he said this,
+his voice began to rise, and he glanced steadily and mournfully round at
+the staring faces about him, "all the ancient priests, bishops, and
+kings--all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and
+the most devoted child of the See of Peter." Then, as he went on, he
+flung out his wrenched hands, and his voice rang with indignant defiance.
+"For what have we taught," he cried, "however you may qualify it with the
+odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach? To be
+condemned with these old lights--not of England only, but of the
+world--by their degenerate descendants, is both gladness and glory to
+us." Then, with a superb gesture, he sent his voice pealing through the
+hall: "God lives, posterity will live; their judgment is not so liable to
+corruption as that of those who are now about to sentence us to death."
+
+There was a burst of murmurous applause as he ended, which stilled
+immediately, as the Chief Justice began to deliver sentence. But when the
+horrible details of his execution had been enumerated, and the formula
+had ended, it was the prisoner's turn to applaud:--
+
+"_Te Deum laudamus!_" cried Campion; "_Te Dominum confitemur._"
+
+"_Haec est dies_," shouted Sherwin, "_quam fecit Dominus; exultemus et
+laetemur in illa_": and so with the thanksgiving and joy of the condemned
+criminals, the mock-trial ended.
+
+When Anthony rode down silently and alone in the rain that December
+morning a few days later, to see the end, he found a vast silent crowd
+assembled on Tower Hill and round the gateway, where the four horses were
+waiting, each pair harnessed to a hurdle laid flat on the ground. He
+would not go in, for he could scarcely trust himself to speak, so great
+was his horror of the crime that was to be committed; so he backed his
+horse against the wall, and waited over an hour in silence, scarcely
+hearing the murmurs of impatience that rolled round the great crowd from
+time to time, absorbed in his own thoughts. Here was the climax of these
+days of misery and self-questioning that had passed since the trial in
+Westminster Hall. It was no use, he argued to himself, to pretend
+otherwise. These three men of God were to die for their religion--and a
+religion too which was gradually detaching itself to his view from the
+mists and clouds that hid it, as the one great reality and truth of God's
+Revelation to man. He had come, he knew, to see not an execution but a
+martyrdom.
+
+There was a trampling from within, the bolts creaked, and the gate rolled
+back; a company of halberdiers emerged, and in their midst the three
+priests in laymen's dress; behind followed a few men on horseback, with a
+little company of ministers, bible in hand; and then a rabble of officers
+and pursuivants. Anthony edged his horse in among the others, as the
+crowd fell back, and took up his place in the second rank of riders
+between a gentleman of his acquaintance who made room for him on the one
+side, and Sir Francis Knowles on the other, and behind the Tower
+officials.
+
+Then, once more he heard that ringing bass voice whose first sound
+silenced the murmurs of the surging excited crowd.
+
+"God save you all, gentlemen! God bless you and make you all good
+Catholics."
+
+Then, as the priest turned to kneel towards the east, he saw his face
+paler than ever now, after his long fast in preparation for death. The
+rain was still falling as Campion in his frieze gown knelt in the mud.
+There was silence as he prayed, and as he ended aloud by commending his
+soul to God.
+
+"_In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum._"
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The three were secured to the hurdles, Briant and Sherwin on the one,
+Campion on the other, all lying on their backs, with their feet towards
+the horse's heels. The word to start was given by Sir Owen Hopton who
+rode with Charke, the preacher of Gray's Inn, in the front rank; the
+lashed horses plunged forward, with the jolting hurdles spattering mud
+behind them; and the dismal pageant began to move forward through the
+crowd on that way of sorrows. There was a ceaseless roar and babble of
+voices as they went. Charke, in his minister's dress, able now to declaim
+without fear of reply, was hardly silent for a moment from mocking and
+rebuking the prisoners, and making pompous speeches to the people.
+
+"See here," he cried, "these rogueing popish priests, laid by the
+heels--aye, by the heels--at last; in spite of their tricks and turns.
+See this fellow in his frieze gown, dead to the world as he brags; and
+know how he skulked and hid in his disguises till her Majesty's servants
+plucked him forth! We will disguise him, we will disguise him, ere we
+have done with him, that his own mother should not know him. Ha, now!
+Campion, do you hear me?"
+
+And so the harsh voice rang out over the crowd that tramped alongside,
+and up to the faces that filled every window; while the ministers below
+kept up a ceaseless murmur of adjuration and entreaty and threatening,
+with a turning of leaves of their bibles, and bursts of prayer, over the
+three heads that jolted and rocked at their feet over the cobblestones
+and through the mud. The friends of the prisoners walked as near to them
+as they dared, and their lips moved continually in prayer.
+
+Every now and then as Anthony craned his head, he could see Campion's
+face, with closed eyes and moving lips that smiled again and again, all
+spattered and dripping with filth; and once he saw a gentleman walking
+beside him fearlessly stoop down and wipe the priest's face with a
+handkerchief. Presently they had passed up Cheapside and reached Newgate;
+in a niche in the archway itself stood a figure of the Mother of God
+looking compassionately down; and as Campion's hurdle passed beneath it,
+her servant wrenched himself a few inches up in his bonds and bowed to
+his glorious Queen; and then laid himself down quietly again, as a chorus
+of lament rose from the ministers over his superstition and obstinate
+idolatry that seemed as if it would last even to death; and Charke too,
+who had become somewhat more silent, broke out again into revilings.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The crowd at Tyburn was vast beyond all reckoning. Outside the gate it
+stretched on every side, under the elms, a few were even in the branches,
+along the sides of the stream; everywhere was a sea of heads, out of
+which, on a little eminence like another Calvary, rose up the tall posts
+of the three-cornered gallows, on which the martyrs were to suffer. As
+the hurdles came slowly under the gate, the sun broke out for the first
+time; and as the horses that drew the hurdles came round towards the
+carts that stood near the gallows and the platform on which the
+quartering block stood, a murmur began that ran through the crowd from
+those nearest the martyrs.--"But they are laughing, they are laughing!"
+
+The crowd gave a surge to and fro as the horses drew up, and Anthony
+reined his own beast back among the people, so that he was just opposite
+the beam on which the three new ropes were already hanging, and beneath
+which was standing a cart with the back taken out. In the cart waited a
+dreadful figure in a tight-fitting dress, sinewy arms bare to the
+shoulder, and a butcher's knife at his leather girdle. A little distance
+away stood the hateful cauldron, bubbling fiercely, with black smoke
+pouring from under it: the platform with the block and quartering-axe
+stood beneath the gallows; and round this now stood the officers, with
+Norton the rack-master, and Sir Owen Hopton and the rest, and the three
+priests, with the soldiers forming a circle to keep the crowd back.
+
+The hangman stooped as Anthony looked, and a moment later Campion stood
+beside him on the cart, pale, mud-splashed, but with the same serene
+smile; his great brown eyes shone as they looked out over the wide
+heaving sea of heads, from which a deep heart-shaking murmur rose as the
+famous priest appeared. Anthony could see every detail of what went on;
+the hangman took the noose that hung from above, and slipped it over the
+prisoner's head, and drew it close round his neck; and then himself
+slipped down from the cart, and stood with the others, still well above
+the heads of the crowd, but leaving the priest standing higher yet on the
+cart, silhouetted, rope and all, framed in the posts and cross-beam, from
+which two more ropes hung dangling against the driving clouds and blue
+sky over London city.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Campion waited perfectly motionless for the murmur of innumerable voices
+to die down; and Anthony, fascinated and afraid beneath that overpowering
+serenity, watched him turn his head slowly from side to side with a
+"majestical countenance," as his enemies confessed, as if he were on the
+point of speaking. Silence seemed to radiate out from him, spreading like
+a ripple, outwards, until the furthest outskirts of that huge crowd was
+motionless and quiet; and then without apparent effort, his voice began
+to peal out.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"'_Spectaculum facti sumus Deo, angelis et hominibus._' These are the
+words of Saint Paul, Englished thus, 'We are made a spectacle or sight
+unto God, unto His angels, and unto men';--verified this day in me, who
+am here a spectacle unto my Lord God, a spectacle unto His angels, and
+unto you men, satisfying myself to die as becometh a true Christian and
+Catholic man."
+
+He was interrupted by cries from the gentlemen beneath, and turned a
+little, looking down to see what they wished.
+
+"You are not here to preach to the people," said Sir Francis Knowles,
+angrily, "but to confess yourself a traitor."
+
+Campion smiled and shook his head.
+
+"No, no," he said: and then looking up and raising his voice,--"as to the
+treasons which have been laid to my charge, and for which I am come here
+to suffer, I desire you all to bear witness with me, that I am thereof
+altogether innocent."
+
+There was a chorus of anger from the gentlemen, and one of them called up
+something that Anthony could not hear. Campion raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Well, my lord," he cried aloud, and his voice instantly silenced again
+the noisy buzz of talk, "I am a Catholic man and a priest: in that faith
+have I lived, and in that faith do I intend to die. If you esteem my
+religion treason, then am I guilty; as for other treason, I never
+committed any, God is my judge. But you have now what you desire. I
+beseech you to have patience, and suffer me to speak a word or two for
+discharge of my conscience."
+
+There was a furious burst of refusals from the officers.
+
+"Well," said Campion, at last, looking straight out over the crowd, "it
+seems I may not speak; but this only will I say; that I am wholly
+innocent of all treason and conspiracy, as God is my judge; and I beseech
+you to credit me, for it is my last answer upon my death and soul. As for
+the jury I do not blame them, for they were ignorant men and easily
+deceived. I forgive all who have compassed my death or wronged me in any
+whit, as I hope to be forgiven; and I ask the forgiveness of all those
+whose names I spoke upon the rack."
+
+Then he said a word or two more of explanation, such as he had said
+during his trial, for the sake of those Catholics whom this a concession
+of his had scandalised, telling them that he had had the promise of the
+Council that no harm should come to those whose names he revealed; and
+then was silent again, closing his eyes; and Anthony, as he watched him,
+saw his lips moving once more in prayer.
+
+Then a harsh loud voice from behind the cart began to proclaim that the
+Queen punished no man for religion but only for treason. A fierce murmur
+of disagreement and protest began to rise from the crowd; and Anthony
+turning saw the faces of many near him frowning and pursing their lips,
+and there was a shout or two of denial here and there. The harsh voice
+ceased, and another began:
+
+"Now, Mr. Campion," it cried, "tell us, What of the Pope? Do you renounce
+him?"
+
+Campion opened his eyes and looked round.
+
+"I am a Catholic," he said simply; and closed his eyes again for prayer,
+as the voice cried brutally:
+
+"In your Catholicism all treason is contained."
+
+Again a murmur from the crowd.
+
+Then a new voice from the black group of ministers called out:
+
+"Mr. Campion, Mr. Campion, leave that popish stuff, and say, 'Christ have
+mercy on me.'"
+
+Again the priest opened his eyes.
+
+"You and I are not one in religion, sir, wherefore I pray you content
+yourself. I bar none of prayer, but I only desire them of the household
+of faith to pray with me; and in mine agony to say one creed."
+
+Again he closed his eyes.
+
+"_Pater noster qui es in caelis._"...
+
+"Pray in English, pray in English!" shouted a voice from the minister's
+group.
+
+Once more the priest opened his eyes; and, in spite of the badgering, his
+eyes shone with humour and his mouth broke into smiles, so that a great
+sob of pity and love broke from Anthony.
+
+"I will pray to God in a language that both He and I well understand."
+
+"Ask her Grace's forgiveness, Mr. Campion, and pray for her, if you be
+her true subject."
+
+"Wherein have I offended her? In this I am innocent. This is my last
+speech; in this give me credit--I have and do pray for her."
+
+"Aha! but which queen?--for Elizabeth?"
+
+"Ay, for Elizabeth, your queen and my queen, unto whom I wish a long
+quiet reign with all prosperity."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was the crack of a whip, the scuffle of a horse's feet, a rippling
+movement over the crowd, and a great murmured roar, like the roar of the
+waves on a pebbly beach, as the horse's head began to move forward; and
+the priest's figure to sway and stagger on the jolting cart. Anthony shut
+his eyes, and the murmur and cries of the crowd grew louder and louder.
+Once more the deep sweet voice rang out, loud and penetrating:
+
+"I die a true Catholic...."
+
+Anthony kept his eyes closed, and his head bent, as great sobs began to
+break up out of his heart....
+
+Ah! he was in his agony now! that sudden cry and silence from the crowd
+showed it. What was it he had asked? one creed?--
+
+"I believe in God the Father Almighty." ...
+
+The soft heavy murmur of the crowd rose and fell. Catholics were praying
+all round him, reckless with love and pity:
+
+"Jesu, Jesu, save him! Be to him a Jesus!"...
+
+"Mary pray! Mary pray!"...
+
+"_Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem._"...
+
+"_Passus sub Pontio Pilato._"...
+
+"Crucified dead and buried."...
+
+"The forgiveness of sins."...
+
+"And the Life Everlasting."...
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony dropped his face forward on to his horse's mane.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                       A MESSAGE FROM THE CITY
+
+
+Sir Francis Walsingham sat in his private room a month after Father
+Campion's death.
+
+He had settled down again now to his work which had been so grievously
+interrupted by his mission to France in connection with a new treaty
+between that country and England in the previous year. The secret
+detective service that he had inaugurated in England chiefly for the
+protection of the Queen's person was a vast and complicated business, and
+the superintendence of this, in addition to the other affairs of his
+office, made him an exceedingly busy man. England was honeycombed with
+mines and countermines both in the political and the religious world, and
+it needed all this man's brilliant and trained faculties to keep abreast
+with them. His spies and agents were everywhere; and not only in England:
+they circled round Mary of Scotland like flies round a wounded creature,
+seeking to settle and penetrate wherever an opening showed itself. These
+Scottish troubles would have been enough for any ordinary man; but
+Walsingham was indefatigable, and his agents were in every prison,
+lurking round corridors in private houses, found alike in thieves'
+kitchens and at gentlemen's tables.
+
+Just at present Walsingham was anxious to give all the attention he could
+to Scottish affairs; and on this wet dreary Thursday morning in January
+as he sat before his bureau, he was meditating how to deal with an affair
+that had come to him from the heart of London, and how if possible to
+shift the conduct of it on to other shoulders.
+
+He sat and drummed his fingers on the desk, and stared meditatively at
+the pigeon-holes before him. His was an interesting face, with large,
+melancholy, and almost fanatical eyes, and a poet's mouth and forehead;
+but it was probably exactly his imaginative faculties that enabled him to
+picture public affairs from the points of view of the very various
+persons concerned in them; and thereby to cope with the complications
+arising out of these conflicting interests.
+
+He stroked his pointed beard once or twice, and then struck a hand-bell
+at his side; and a servant entered.
+
+"If Mr. Lackington is below," he said, "show him here immediately," and
+the servant went out.
+
+Lackington, sometime servant to Sir Nicholas Maxwell, had entered Sir
+Francis' service instead, at the same time that he had exchanged the
+Catholic for the Protestant religion; and he was now one of his most
+trusted agents. But he had been in so many matters connected with
+recusancy, that a large number of the papists in London were beginning to
+know him by sight; and the affairs were becoming more and more scarce in
+which he could be employed among Catholics with any hope of success. It
+was his custom to call morning by morning at Sir Francis' office and
+receive his instructions; and just now he had returned from business in
+the country. Presently he entered, closing the door behind him, and bowed
+profoundly to his master.
+
+"I have a matter on hand, Lackington," said Sir Francis, without looking
+at him, and without any salutation beyond a glance and a nod as he
+entered,--"a matter which I have not leisure to look into, as it is not,
+I think, anything more than mere religion; but which might, I think,
+repay you for your trouble, if you can manage it in any way. But it is a
+troublesome business. These are the facts.
+
+"No. 3 Newman's Court, in the City, has been a suspected house for some
+while. I have had it watched, and there is no doubt that the papists use
+it. I thought at first that the Scots were mixed up with it; but that is
+not so. Yesterday, a boy of twelve years old, left the house in the
+afternoon, and was followed to a number of houses, of which I will give
+you the list presently; and was finally arrested in Paul's Churchyard and
+brought here. I frightened him with talk of the rack; and I think I have
+the truth out of him now; I have tested him in the usual ways--and all
+that I can find is that the house is used for mass now and then; and that
+he was going to the papists' houses yesterday to bid them come for next
+Sunday morning. But he was stopped too soon: he had not yet told the
+priest to come. Now unless the priest is told to-night by one whom he
+trusts, there will be no mass on Sunday, and the nest of papists will
+escape us. It is of no use to send the boy; as he will betray all by his
+behaviour, even if we frighten him into saying what we wish to the
+priest. I suppose it is of no use your going to the priest and feigning
+to be a Catholic messenger; and I cannot at this moment see what is to be
+done. If there were anything beyond mere religion in this, I would spare
+no pains to hunt them out; but it is not worth my while. Yet there is the
+reward; and if you think that you can do anything, you can have it for
+your pains. I can spare you till Monday, and of course you shall have
+what men you will to surround the house and take them at mass, if you can
+but get the priest there."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Lackington deferentially. "Have I your honour's
+leave to see the boy in your presence?"
+
+Walsingham struck the bell again.
+
+"Bring the lad that is locked in the steward's parlour," he said, when
+the servant appeared.--"Sit down, Lackington, and examine him when he
+comes."
+
+And Sir Francis took down some papers from a pigeon-hole, sorted out one
+or two, and saying, "Here are his statements," handed them to the agent;
+who began to glance through them at once. Walsingham then turned to his
+table again and began to go on with his letters.
+
+In a moment or two the door opened, and a little lad of twelve years old,
+came in, followed by the servant.
+
+"That will do," said Walsingham, without looking up; "You can leave him
+here," and the servant went out. The boy stood back against the wall by
+the door, his face was white and his eyes full of horror, and he looked
+in a dazed way at the two men.
+
+"What is your name, boy?" began Lackington in a sharp, judicial tone.
+
+"John Belton," said the lad in a tremulous voice.
+
+"And you are a little papist?" asked the agent.
+
+"No sir; a Protestant."
+
+"Then how is it that you go on errands for papists?"
+
+"I am a servant, sir," said the boy imploringly.
+
+Lackington turned the papers over for a moment or two.
+
+"Now you know," he began again in a threatening voice, "that this
+gentleman has power to put you on the rack; you know what that is?"
+
+The boy nodded in mute white-faced terror.
+
+"Well, now, he will hear all you say; and will know whether you say the
+truth or not. Now tell me if you still hold to what you said yesterday."
+
+And then Lackington with the aid of the papers ran quickly over the story
+that Sir Francis had related. "Now do you mean to tell me, John Belton,"
+he added, "that you, a Protestant, and a lad of twelve, are employed on
+this work by papists, to gather them for mass?"
+
+The boy looked at him with the same earnest horror.
+
+"Yes, sir, yes, sir," he said, and there was a piteous sob in his voice.
+"Indeed it is all true: but I do not often go on these messages for my
+master. Mr. Roger generally goes: but he is sick."
+
+"Oho!" said Lackington, "you did not say that yesterday."
+
+The boy was terrified.
+
+"No, sir," he cried out miserably, "the gentleman did not ask me."
+
+"Well, who is Mr. Roger? What is he like?"
+
+"He is my master's servant, sir; and he wears a patch over his eye; and
+stutters a little in his speech."
+
+These kinds of details were plainly beyond a frightened lad's power of
+invention, and Lackington was more satisfied.
+
+"And what was the message that you were to give to the folk and the
+priest?"
+
+"Please, sir, 'Come, for all things are now ready.'"
+
+This was such a queer answer that Lackington gave an incredulous
+exclamation.
+
+"It is probably true," said Sir Francis, without looking up from his
+letters; "I have come across the same kind of cypher, at least once
+before."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said the agent. "And now, my boy, tell me this. How did
+you know what it meant?"
+
+"Please, sir," said the lad, a little encouraged by the kinder tone, "I
+have noticed that twice before when Mr. Roger could not go, and I was
+sent with the same message, all the folks and the priest came on the next
+Sunday; and I think that it means that all is safe, and that they can
+come."
+
+"You are a sharp lad," said the spy approvingly. "I am satisfied with
+you."
+
+"Then, sir, may I go home?" asked the boy with hopeful entreaty in his
+voice.
+
+"Nay, nay," said the other, "I have not done with you yet. Answer me some
+more questions. Why did you not go to the priest first?"
+
+"Because I was bidden to go to him last," said the boy. "If I had been to
+all the other houses by five o'clock last night, then I was to meet the
+priest at Papists' Corner in Paul's Church. But if I had not done
+them--as I had not,--then I was to see the priest to-night at the same
+place."
+
+Lackington mused a moment.
+
+"What is the priest's name?" he asked.
+
+"Please, sir, Mr. Arthur Oldham."
+
+The agent gave a sudden start and a keen glance at the boy, and then
+smiled to himself; then he meditated, and bit his nails once or twice.
+
+"And when was Mr. Roger taken ill?"
+
+"He slipped down at the door of his lodging and hurt his foot, at
+dinner-time yesterday; and he could not walk."
+
+"His lodging? Then he does not sleep in the house?"
+
+"No sir; he sleeps in Stafford Alley, round the corner."
+
+"And where do you live?"
+
+"Please, sir, I go home to my mother nearly every night; but not always."
+
+"And where does your mother live?"
+
+"Please, sir, at 4 Bell's Lane."
+
+Lackington remained deep in thought, and looked at the boy steadily for a
+minute or two.
+
+"Now, sir; may I go?" he asked eagerly.
+
+Lackington paid no attention, and he repeated his question. The agent
+still did not seem to hear him, but turned to Sir Francis, who was still
+at his letters.
+
+"That is all, sir, for the present," he said. "May the boy be kept here
+till Monday?"
+
+The lad broke out into wailing; but Lackington turned on him a face so
+savage that his whimpers died away into horror-stricken silence.
+
+"As you will," said Sir Francis, pausing for a moment in his writing, and
+striking the bell again; and, on the servant's appearance, gave orders
+that John Belton should be taken again to the steward's parlour until
+further directions were received. The boy went sobbing out and down the
+passage again under the servant's charge, and the door closed.
+
+"And the mother?" asked Walsingham abruptly, pausing with pen upraised.
+
+"With your permission, sir, I will tell her that her boy is in trouble,
+and that if his master sends to inquire for him, she is to say he is sick
+upstairs."
+
+"And you will report to me on Monday?"
+
+"Yes, sir; by then I shall hope to have taken the crew."
+
+Sir Francis nodded his head sharply, and the pen began to fly over the
+paper again; as Lackington slipped out.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony Norris was passing through the court of Lambeth House in the
+afternoon of the same day, when the porter came to him and said there was
+a child waiting in the Lodge with a note for him; and would Master Norris
+kindly come to see her. He found a little girl on the bench by the gate,
+who stood up and curtseyed as the grand gentleman came striding in; and
+handed him a note which he opened at once and read.
+
+"For the love of God," the note ran, "come and aid one who can be of
+service to a friend: follow the little maid Master Norris, and she will
+bring you to me. If you have any friends at _Great Keynes_, for the love
+you bear to them, come quickly."
+
+Anthony turned the note over; it was unsigned, and undated. On his
+inquiry further from the little girl, she said she knew nothing about the
+writer; but that a gentleman had given her the note and told her to bring
+it to Master Anthony Norris at Lambeth House; and that she was to take
+him to a house that she knew in the city; she did not know the name of
+the house, she said.
+
+It was all very strange, thought Anthony, but evidently here was some one
+who knew about him; the reference to Great Keynes made him think uneasily
+of Isabel and wonder whether any harm had happened to her, or whether any
+danger threatened. He stood musing with the note between his fingers, and
+then told the child to go straight down to Paul's Cross and await him
+there, and he would follow immediately. The child ran off, and Anthony
+went round to the stables to get his horse. He rode straight down to the
+city and put up his horse in the Bishop's stables, and then went round
+with his riding-whip in his hand to Paul's Cross.
+
+It was a dull miserable afternoon, beginning to close in with a fine rain
+falling, and very few people were about; and he found the child crouched
+up against the pulpit in an attempt to keep dry.
+
+"Come," he said kindly, "I am ready; show me the way."
+
+The child led him along by the Cathedral through the churchyard, and then
+by winding passages, where Anthony kept a good look-out at the corners;
+for a stab in the back was no uncommon thing for a well-dressed gentleman
+off his guard. The houses overhead leaned so nearly together that the
+darkening sky disappeared altogether now and then; at one spot Anthony
+caught a glimpse high up of Bow Church spire; and after a corner or two
+the child stopped before a doorway in a little flagged court.
+
+"It is here," she said; and before Anthony could stop her she had slipped
+away and disappeared through a passage. He looked at the house. It was a
+tumble-down place; the door was heavily studded with nails, and gave a
+most respectable air to the house: the leaded windows were just over his
+head, and tightly closed. There was an air of mute discretion and silence
+about the place that roused a vague discomfort in Anthony's mind; he
+slipped his right hand into his belt and satisfied himself that the hilt
+of his knife was within reach. Overhead the hanging windows and eaves
+bulged out on all sides; but there was no one to be seen; it seemed a
+place that had slipped into a backwater of the humming stream of the
+city. The fine rain still falling added to the dismal aspect of the
+little court. He looked round once more; and then rapped sharply at the
+door to which the child had pointed.
+
+There was silence for at least a minute; then as he was about to knock
+again there was a faint sound overhead, and he looked up in time to see a
+face swiftly withdrawn from one of the windows. Evidently an occupant of
+the house had been examining the visitor. Then shuffling footsteps came
+along a passage within, and a light shone under the door. There was a
+noise of bolts being withdrawn, and the rattle of a chain; and then the
+handle turned and the door opened slowly inwards, and an old woman stood
+there holding an oil lamp over her head. This was not very formidable at
+any rate.
+
+"I have been bidden to come here," he said, "by a letter delivered to me
+an hour ago."
+
+"Ah," said the old woman, and looked at him peeringly, "then you are for
+Mr. Roger?"
+
+"I daresay," said Anthony, a little sharply. He was not accustomed to be
+treated like this. The old woman still looked at him suspiciously; and
+then, as Anthony made a movement of impatience, she stepped back.
+
+"Come in, sir," she said.
+
+He stepped in, and she closed and fastened the door again behind him; and
+then, holding the oil-lamp high over her head, she advanced in her
+slippers towards the staircase, and Anthony followed. On the stairs she
+turned once to see if he was coming, and beckoned him on with a movement
+of her head. Anthony looked about him as he went up: there was nothing
+remarkable or suspicious about the house in any way. It was cleaner than
+he had been led to expect by its outside aspect; wainscoted to the
+ceiling with oak; and the stairs were strong and well made. It was
+plainly a very tolerably respectable place; and Anthony began to think
+from its appearance that he had been admitted at the back door of some
+well-to-do house off Cheapside. The banisters were carved with some
+distinction; and there were the rudimentary elements of linen-pattern
+design on the panels that lined the opposite walls up to the height of
+the banisters. The woman went up and up, slowly, panting a little; at
+each landing she turned and glanced back to see that her companion was
+following: all the doors that they passed were discreetly shut; and the
+house was perfectly dark except for the flickering light of the woman's
+lamp, and silent except for the noise of the footsteps and the rush of a
+mouse now and then behind the woodwork.
+
+At the third landing she stopped, and came close up to Anthony.
+
+"That is the door," she whispered hoarsely; and pointed with her thumb
+towards a doorway that was opposite the staircase. "Ask for Master
+Roger."
+
+And then without saying any more, she set the lamp down on the flat head
+of the top banister and herself began to shuffle downstairs again into
+the dark house.
+
+Anthony stood still a moment, his heart beating a little. What was this
+strange errand? and Isabel! what had she to do with this house buried
+away in the courts of the great city? As he waited he heard a door close
+somewhere behind him, and the shuffling footsteps had ceased. He touched
+the hilt of his knife once again to give himself courage; and then walked
+slowly across and rapped on the door. Instantly a voice full of trembling
+expectancy, cried to him to come in; he turned the handle and stepped
+into the fire-lit room.
+
+It was extremely poorly furnished; a rickety table stood in the centre
+with a book or two and a basin with a plate, a saucepan hissed and
+bubbled on the fire; in the corner near the window stood a poor bed; and
+to this Anthony's attention was immediately directed by a voice that
+called out hoarsely:
+
+"Thank God, sir, thank God, sir, you have come! I feared you would not."
+
+Anthony stepped towards it wondering and expectant, but reassured. Lying
+in the bed, with clothes drawn up to the chin was the figure of a man.
+There was no light in the room, save that given by the leaping flames on
+the hearth; and Anthony could only make out the face of a man with a
+patch over one eye; the man stretched a hand over the bed clothes as he
+came near, and Anthony took it, a little astonished, and received a
+strong trembling grip of apparent excitement and relief: "Thank God,
+sir!" the man said again, "but there is not too much time."
+
+"How can I serve you?" said Anthony, sitting on a chair near the bedside.
+"Your letter spoke of friends at Great Keynes. What did you mean by
+that?"
+
+"Is the d-door closed, sir?" asked the man anxiously; stuttering a little
+as he spoke.
+
+Anthony stepped up and closed it firmly; and then came back and sat down
+again.
+
+"Well then, sir; I believe you are a friend of the priest Mr.
+M-Maxwell's."
+
+Anthony shook his head.
+
+"There is no priest of that name that I know."
+
+"Ah," cried the man, and his voice shook, "have I said too much? You are
+Mr. Anthony Norris of the Dower House, and of the Archbishop's
+household?"...
+
+"I am," said Anthony, "but yet----"
+
+"Well, well," said the man, "I must go forward now. He whom you know as
+Mr. James Maxwell is a Catholic p-priest, known to many under the name of
+Mr. Arthur Oldham. He is in sore d-danger."
+
+Anthony was silent through sheer astonishment. This then was the secret
+of the mystery that had hung round Mr. James so long. The few times he
+had met him in town since his return, it had been on the tip of his
+tongue to ask what he did there, and why Hubert was to be master of the
+Hall; but there was something in Mr. James' manner that made the asking
+of such a question appear an impossible liberty; and it had remained
+unasked.
+
+"Well," said the man in bed, in anxious terror, "there is no mistake, is
+there?"
+
+"I said nothing," said Anthony, "for astonishment; I had no idea that he
+was a priest. And how can I serve him?"
+
+"He is in sore danger," said the man, and again and again there came the
+stutter. "Now I am a Catholic: you see how much I t-trust you sir. I am
+the only one in this house. I was entrusted with a m-message to Mr.
+Maxwell to put him on his guard against a danger that threatens him. I
+was to meet him this very evening at five of the clock; and this
+afternoon as I left my room, I slipped and so hurt my foot that I cannot
+put it to the ground. I dared not send a l-letter to Mr. Maxwell, for
+fear the child should be followed; I dared not send to another Catholic;
+nor indeed did I know where to find one whom Mr. M-Maxwell would know and
+trust, as he is new to us here; but I had heard him speak of his friend
+Mr. Anthony Norris, who was at Lambeth House; and I determined, sir, to
+send the child to you; and ask you to do this service for your friend;
+for an officer of the Archbishop's household is beyond suspicion. N-now,
+sir, will you do this service? If you do it not, I know not where to turn
+for help."
+
+Anthony was silent. He felt a little uneasy. Supposing that there was
+sedition mixed up in this! How could he trust the man's story? How could
+he be certain in fact that he was a Catholic at all? He looked at him
+keenly in the fire-light. The man's one eye shone in deep anxiety, and
+his forehead was wrinkled; and he passed his hand nervously over his
+mouth again and again.
+
+"How can I tell," said Anthony, "that all this is true?"
+
+The man with an impatient movement unfastened his shirt at the neck and
+drew up on a string that was round his neck a little leather case.
+
+"Th-there, sir," he stammered, drawing the string over his head. "T-take
+that to the fire and see what it is."
+
+Anthony took it curiously, and holding it close to the fire drew off the
+little case; there was the wax medal stamped with the lamb, called
+_Agnus Dei_.
+
+"Th-there," cried the man from the bed, "now I have p-put myself in your
+hands--and if more is w-wanted----" and as Anthony came back holding the
+medal, the man fumbled beneath the pillow and drew out a rosary.
+
+"N-now, sir, do you believe me?"
+
+It was felony to possess these things and Anthony had no more doubts.
+
+"Yes," he said, "and I ask your pardon." And he gave back the _Agnus
+Dei_. "But there is no sedition in this?"
+
+"N-none, sir, I give you my word," said the man, apparently greatly
+relieved, and sinking back on his pillow. "I will tell you all, and you
+can judge for yourself; but you will promise to be secret." And when
+Anthony had given his word, he went on.
+
+"M-Mass was to have been said in Newman's Court on Sunday, at number 3,
+but that c-cursed spy Walsingham, hath had wind of it. His men have been
+lurking round there; and it is not safe. However, there is no need to say
+that to Mr. Maxwell; he will understand enough if you will give him a
+message of half a dozen words from me,--Mr. Roger. You can tell him that
+you saw me, if you wish to. But ah! sir, you give me your word to say no
+more to any one, not even to Mr. Maxwell himself, for it is in a public
+place. And then I will tell you the p-place and the m-message; but we
+must be swift, because the time is near; it is at five of the clock that
+he will look for a messenger."
+
+"I give you my word," said Anthony.
+
+"Well, sir, the place is Papists' Corner in the Cathedral, and the words
+are these, 'Come, for all things are now ready.' You know sir, that we
+Catholics go in fear of our lives, and like the poor hares have to double
+and turn if we would escape. If any overhears that message, he will never
+know it to be a warning. And it was for that that I asked your word to
+say no more than your message, with just the word that you had seen me
+yourself. You may tell him, of course sir, that Mr. Roger had a patch
+over his eye and st-stuttered a little in his speech; and he will know it
+is from me then. Now, sir, will you tell me what the message is, and the
+place, to be sure that you know them; and then, sir, it will be time to
+go; and God bless you, sir. God bless you for your kindness to us poor
+papists!"
+
+The man seized Anthony's gloved hand and kissed it fervently once or
+twice.
+
+Anthony repeated his instructions carefully. He was more touched than he
+cared to show by the evident gratitude and relief of this poor terrified
+Catholic.
+
+"Th-that is right, sir; that is right; and now, sir, if you please, be
+gone at once; or the Father will have left the Cathedral. The child will
+be in the court below to show you the way out to the churchyard. God
+bless you, sir; and reward you for your kindness!"
+
+And as Anthony went out of the room he heard benedictions mingled with
+sobs following him. The woman was nowhere to be seen; so he took the
+oil-lamp from the landing, and found his way downstairs again, unfastened
+the front door, and went out, leaving the lamp on the floor. The child
+was leaning against the wall opposite; he could just see the glimmer of
+her face in the heavy dusk.
+
+"Come, my child," he said, "show me the way to the churchyard."
+
+She came forward, and he began to follow her out of the little flagged
+court. He turned round as he left the court and saw high up against the
+blackness overhead a square of window lighted with a glow from within;
+and simultaneously there came the sound of bolts being shut in the door
+that he had just left. Evidently the old woman had been on the watch, and
+was now barring the door behind him.
+
+It wanted courage to do as Anthony was doing, but he was not lacking in
+that; it was not a small matter to go to Papists' Corner and give a
+warning to a Catholic priest: but firstly, James Maxwell was his friend,
+and in danger: secondly, Anthony had no sympathy with religious
+persecution; and thirdly, as has been seen, the last year had made a
+really deep impression upon him: he was more favourably inclined to the
+Catholic cause than he had ever imagined to be possible.
+
+As he followed the child through the labyrinth of passages, passing every
+now and then the lighted front of a house, or a little group of idlers
+(for the rain had now ceased) who stared to see this gentleman in such
+company, his head was whirling with questions and conjectures. Was it not
+after all a dishonourable act to the Archbishop in whose service he was,
+thus to take the side of the Papists? But that it was too late to
+consider now.--How strange that James Maxwell was a priest! That of
+course accounted at once for his long absence, no doubt in the seminary
+abroad, and his ultimate return, and for Hubert's inheriting the estates.
+And then he passed on to reflect as he had done a hundred times before on
+this wonderful Religion that allured men from home and wealth and
+friends, and sent them rejoicing to penury, suspicion, hatred, peril, and
+death itself, for the kingdom of heaven's sake.
+
+Suddenly he found himself in the open space opposite the Cathedral--the
+child had again disappeared.
+
+It was less dark here; the leaden sky overhead still glimmered with a
+pale sunset light; and many house-windows shone out from within. He
+passed round the south side of the Cathedral, and entered the western
+door. The building was full of deep gloom only pricked here and there by
+an oil-lamp or two that would presently be extinguished when the
+Cathedral was closed. The air was full of a faint sound, made up from
+echoes of the outside world and the footsteps of a few people who still
+lingered in groups here and there in the aisles, and talked among
+themselves. The columns rose up in slender bundles and faded into the
+pale gloom overhead; as he crossed the nave on the way to Papists' Corner
+far away to the east rose the dark carving of the stalls against the
+glimmering stone beyond. It was like some vast hall of the dead; the
+noise of the footsteps seemed like an insolent intrusion on this temple
+of silence; and the religious stillness had an active and sombre
+character of its own more eloquent and impressive than all the tumult
+that man could make.
+
+As Anthony came to Papists' Corner he saw a very tall solitary figure
+passing slowly from east to west; it was too dark to distinguish faces;
+so he went towards it, so that at the next turn they would meet face to
+face. When he was within two or three steps the man before him turned
+abruptly; and Anthony immediately put out his hand smiling.
+
+"Mr. Arthur Oldham," he said.
+
+The man started and peered curiously through the gloom at him.
+
+"Why Anthony!" he exclaimed, and took his hand, "what is your business
+here?" And they began slowly to walk westwards together.
+
+"I am come to meet Mr. Oldham," he said, "and to give him a message; and
+this is it, 'Come, for all things are now ready!'"
+
+"My dear boy," said James, stopping short, "you must forgive me; but what
+in the world do you mean by that?"
+
+"I come from Mr. Roger," said Anthony, "you need not be afraid. He has
+had an accident and sent for me."
+
+"Mr. Roger?" said James interrogatively.
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "he hath a patch over one eye; and stutters
+somewhat."
+
+James gave a sigh of relief.
+
+"My dear boy," he said, "I cannot thank you enough. You know what it
+means then?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Anthony.
+
+"And you a Protestant, and in the Archbishop's household?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Anthony, "and a Christian and your friend."
+
+"God bless you, Anthony," said the priest; and took his hand and pressed
+it.
+
+They were passing out now under the west door, and stood together for a
+moment looking at the lights down Ludgate Hill. The houses about Amen
+Court stood up against the sky to their right.
+
+"I must not stay," said Anthony, "I must fetch my horse and be back at
+Lambeth for evening prayers at six. He is stabled at the Palace here."
+
+"Well, well," said the priest, "I thank God that there are true hearts
+like yours. God bless you again my dear boy--and--and make you one of us
+some day!"
+
+Anthony smiled at him a little tremulously, for the gratitude and the
+blessing of this man was dear to him; and after another hand grasp, he
+turned away to the right, leaving the priest still half under the shadow
+of the door looking after him.
+
+He had done his errand promptly and discreetly.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII
+
+                          THE MASSING-HOUSE
+
+
+Newman's Court lay dark and silent under the stars on Sunday morning a
+little after four o'clock. The gloomy weather of the last three or four
+days had passed off in heavy battalions of sullen sunset clouds on the
+preceding evening, and the air was full of frost. By midnight thin ice
+was lying everywhere; pendants of it were beginning to form on the
+overhanging eaves; and streaks of it between the cobble-stones that paved
+the court. The great city lay in a frosty stillness as of death.
+
+The patrol passed along Cheapside forty yards away from the entrance of
+the court, a little after three o'clock; and a watchman had cried out
+half an hour later, that it was a clear night; and then he too had gone
+his way. The court itself was a little rectangular enclosure with two
+entrances, one to the north beneath the arch of a stable that gave on to
+Newman's Passage, which in its turn opened on to St. Giles' Lane that led
+to Cheapside; the other, at the further end of the long right-hand side,
+led by a labyrinth of passages down in the direction of the wharfs to the
+west of London Bridge. There were three houses to the left of the
+entrance from Newman's Passage; the back of a ware-house faced them on
+the other long side with the door beyond; and the other two sides were
+respectively formed by the archway of the stable with a loft over it, and
+a blank high wall at the opposite end.
+
+A few minutes after four o'clock the figure of a woman suddenly appeared
+soundlessly in the arch under the stables; and after standing there a
+moment advanced along the front of the houses till she reached the third
+door. She stood here a moment in silence, listening and looking towards
+the doorway opposite, and then rapped gently with her finger-nail eleven
+or twelve times. Almost immediately the door opened, showing only
+darkness within; she stepped in, and it closed silently behind her. Then
+the minutes slipped away again in undisturbed silence. At about twenty
+minutes to five the figure of a very tall man dressed as a layman slipped
+in through the door that led towards the river, and advanced to the door
+where he tapped in the same manner as the woman before him, and was
+admitted at once. After that people began to come more frequently, some
+hesitating and looking about them as they entered the court, some
+slipping straight through without a pause, and going to the door, which
+opened and shut noiselessly as each tapped and was admitted. Sometimes
+two or three would come together, sometimes singly; but by five o'clock
+about twenty or thirty persons had come and been engulfed by the
+blackness that showed each time the door opened; while no glimmer of
+light from any of the windows betrayed the presence of any living soul
+within. At five o'clock the stream stopped. The little court lay as
+silent under the stars again as an hour before. It was a night of
+breathless stillness; there was no dripping from the eaves; no sound of
+wheels or hoofs from the city; only once or twice came the long howl of a
+dog across the roofs.
+
+Ten minutes passed away.
+
+Then without a sound a face appeared like a pale floating patch in the
+dark door that opened on to the court. It remained hung like a mask in
+the darkness for at least a minute; and then a man stepped through on to
+the cobblestones. Something on his head glimmered sharply in the
+starlight; and there was the same sparkle at the end of a pole that he
+carried in his hand; he turned and nodded; and three or four men appeared
+behind him.
+
+Then out of the darkness of the archway at the other end of the court
+appeared a similar group. Once a man slipped on the frozen stones and
+cursed under his breath, and the leader turned on him with a fierce
+indrawing of his breath; but no word was spoken.
+
+Then through both entrances streamed dark figures, each with a steely
+glitter on head and breast, and with something that shone in their hands;
+till the little court seemed half full of armed men; but the silence was
+still formidable in its depth.
+
+The two leaders came together to the door of the third house, and their
+heads were together; and a few sibilant consonants escaped them. The
+breath of the men that stood out under the starlight went up like smoke
+in the air. It was now a quarter-past five.
+
+Three notes of a hand-bell sounded behind the house; and then, without
+any further attempt at silence, the man who had entered the court first
+advanced to the door and struck three or four thundering blows on it with
+a mace, and shouted in a resonant voice:
+
+"Open in the Queen's Name."
+
+The men relaxed their cautious attitudes, and some grounded their
+weapons; others began to talk in low voices; a small party advanced
+nearer their leaders with weapons, axes and halberds, uplifted.
+
+By now the blows were thundering on the door; and the same shattering
+voice cried again and again:
+
+"Open in the Queen's name; open in the Queen's name!"
+
+The middle house of the three was unoccupied; but the windows of the
+house next the stable, and the windows in the loft over the archway,
+where the stable-boys slept, suddenly were illuminated; latches were
+lifted, the windows thrust open and heads out of them.
+
+Then one or two more pursuivants came up the dark passage bearing flaming
+torches with them. A figure appeared on the top of the blank wall at the
+end, and pointed and shouted. The stable-boys in a moment more appeared
+in their archway, and one or two persons came out of the house next the
+stable, queerly habited in cloaks and hats over their night-attire.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The din was now tremendous; the questions and answers shouted to and fro
+were scarcely audible under the thunder that pealed from the battered
+door; a party had advanced to it and were raining blows upon the lock and
+hinges. The court was full of a ruddy glare that blazed on the
+half-armour and pikes of the men, and the bellowing and the crashes and
+the smoke together went up into the night air as from the infernal pit.
+It was a hellish transformation from the deathly stillness of a few
+minutes--a massacre of the sweet night silence. And yet the house where
+the little silent stream of dark figures had been swallowed up rose up
+high above the smoky cauldron, black, dark, and irresponsive.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There rose a shrill howling from behind the house, and the figure on the
+top of the wall capered and gesticulated again. Then footsteps came
+running up the passage, and a pursuivant thrust his way through to the
+leaders; and, in a moment or two, above the din a sharp word was given,
+and three or four men hurried out through the doorway by which the man
+had come. Almost at the same moment the hinges of the door gave way, the
+whole crashed inwards, and the attacking party poured into the dark
+entrance hall beyond. By this time the noise had wakened many in the
+houses round, and lights were beginning to shine from the high windows
+invisible before, and a concourse of people to press in from all sides.
+The approaches had all been guarded, but at the crash of the door some of
+the sentries round the nearer corners hurried into the court, and the
+crowd poured after them; and by the time that the officers and men had
+disappeared into the house, their places had been filled by the
+spectators, and the little court was again full of a swaying, seething,
+shouting mass of men, with a few women with hoods and cloaks among
+them--inquiries and information were yelled to and fro.
+
+"It was a nest of papists--a wasp's nest was being smoked out--what harm
+had they done?--It was a murder; two women had had their throats
+cut.--No, no; it was a papists' den--a massing-house.--Well, God save her
+Grace and rid her of her enemies. With these damned Spaniards everywhere,
+England was going to ruin.--They had escaped at the back. No; they tried
+that way, but it was guarded.--There were over fifty papists, some said,
+in that house.--It was a plot. Mary was mixed up in it. The Queen was to
+be blown up with powder, like poor Darnley. The barrels were all stored
+there.--No, no, no! it was nothing but a massing-house.--Who was the
+priest?--Well, they would see him at Tyburn on a hurdle; and serve him
+right with his treasonable mummery.--No, no! they had had enough of
+blood.--Campion had died like a man; and an Englishman too--praying for
+his Queen."--The incessant battle and roar went up.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Meanwhile lights were beginning to shine everywhere in the dark house. A
+man with a torch was standing in a smoky glare half way up the stairs
+seen through the door, and the interior of the plain hall was
+illuminated. Then the leaded panes overhead were beginning to shine out.
+Steel caps moved to and fro; gigantic shadows wavered; the shadow of a
+halberd head went across a curtain at one of the lower windows.
+
+A crimson-faced man threw open a window and shouted instructions to the
+sentry left at the door, who in answer shook his head and pointed to the
+bellowing crowd; the man at the window made a furious gesture and
+disappeared. The illumination began to climb higher and higher as the
+searchers mounted from floor to floor; thin smoke began to go up from one
+or two of the chimneys in the frosty air;--they were lighting straw to
+bring down any fugitives concealed in the chimneys. Then the sound of
+heavy blows began to ring out; they were testing the walls everywhere for
+hiding-holes; there was a sound of rending wood as the flooring was torn
+up. Then over the parapet against the stairs looked a steel-crowned face
+of a pursuivant. The crowd below yelled and pointed at first, thinking he
+was a fugitive; but he grinned down at them and disappeared.
+
+Then at last came an exultant shout; then a breathless silence; then the
+crowd began to question and answer again.
+
+"They had caught the priest!--No, the priest had escaped,--damn him!--It
+was half a dozen women. No, no! they had had the women ten minutes ago in
+a room at the back.--What fools these pursuivants were!--They had found
+the chapel and the altar.--What a show it would all make at the
+trial!--Ah! ah! it was the priest after all."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Those nearest the door saw the man with the torch on the stairs stand
+back a little; and then a dismal little procession began to appear round
+the turn.
+
+First came a couple of armed men, looking behind them every now and then;
+then a group of half a dozen women, whom they had found almost
+immediately, but had been keeping for the last few minutes in a room
+upstairs; then a couple more men. Then there was a little space; and then
+more constables and more prisoners. Each male prisoner was guarded by two
+men; the women were in groups. All these came out to the court. The crowd
+began to sway back against the walls, pointing and crying out; and a lane
+with living walls was formed towards the archway that opened into
+Newman's Passage.
+
+When the last pursuivants who brought up the rear had reached the door,
+an officer, who had been leaning from a first-floor window with the pale
+face of Lackington peering over his shoulder, gave a sharp order; and the
+procession halted. The women, numbering fourteen or fifteen, were placed
+in a group with some eight men in hollow square round them; then came a
+dozen men, each with a pursuivant on either side. But plainly they were
+not all come; they were still waiting for something; the officer and
+Lackington disappeared from the window; and for a moment too, the crowd
+was quiet.
+
+A murmur of excitement began to rise again, as another group was seen
+descending the stairs within. The officer came first, looking back and
+talking as he came; then followed two pursuivants with halberds, and
+immediately behind them, followed by yet two men, walked James Maxwell in
+crimson vestments all disordered, with his hands behind him, and his
+comely head towering above the heads of the guard. The crowd surged
+forward, yelling; and the men at the door grounded their halberds sharply
+on the feet of the front row of spectators. As the priest reached the
+door, a shrill cry either from a boy or a woman pierced the roaring of
+the mob. "God bless you, father," and as he heard it he turned and smiled
+serenely. His face was white, and there was a little trickle of blood run
+down across it from some wound in his head. The rest of the prisoners
+turned towards him as he came out; and again he smiled and nodded at
+them. And so the Catholics with their priest stood a moment in that
+deafening tumult of revilings, before the officer gave the word to
+advance.
+
+Then the procession set forward through the archway; the crowd pressing
+back before them, like the recoil of a wave, and surging after them again
+in the wake. High over the heads of all moved the steel halberds, shining
+like grim emblems of power; the torches tossed up and down and threw
+monstrous stalking shadows on the walls as they passed; the steel caps
+edged the procession like an impenetrable hedge; and last moved the
+crimson-clad priest, as if in some church function, but with a bristling
+barrier about him; then came the mob, pouring along the narrow passages,
+jostling, cursing, reviling, swelled every moment by new arrivals dashing
+down the alleys and courts that gave on the thoroughfare; and so with
+tramp and ring of steel the pageant went forward on its way of sorrows.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Before six o'clock Newman's Court was empty again, except for one armed
+figure that stood before the shattered door of No. 3 to guard it. Inside
+the house was dark again except in one room high up where the altar had
+stood. Here the thick curtains against the glass had been torn down, and
+the window was illuminated; every now and again the shadows on the
+ceiling stirred a little as if the candle was being moved; and once the
+window opened and a pale smooth face looked out for a moment, and then
+withdrew again. Then the light disappeared altogether; and presently
+shone out in another room on the same floor; then again after an half an
+hour or so it was darkened; and again reappeared on the floor below. And
+so it went on from room to room; until the noises of the waking city
+began, and the stars paled and expired. Over the smokeless town the sky
+began to glow clear and brilliant. The crowing of cocks awoke here and
+there; a church bell or two began to sound far away over the roofs. The
+pale blue overhead grew more and more luminous; the candle went out on
+the first floor; the steel-clad man stretched himself and looked at the
+growing dawn.
+
+A step was heard on the stairs, and Lackington came down, carrying a
+small valise apparently full to bursting. He looked paler than usual; and
+a little hollow-eyed for want of sleep. He came out and stood by the
+soldier, and looked about him. Everywhere the court showed signs of the
+night's tumult. Crumbled ice from broken icicles and trampled frozen
+pools lay powdered on the stones. Here and there on the walls were great
+smears of black from the torches, and even one or two torn bits of stuff
+and a crushed hat marked where the pressure had been fiercest. Most
+eloquent of all was the splintered door behind him, still held fast by
+one stout bolt, but leaning crookedly against the dinted wall of the
+interior.
+
+"A good night's work, friend," said Lackington to the man. "Another hive
+taken, and here"--and he tapped his valise--"here I bear the best of the
+honey."
+
+The soldier looked heavily at the bag. He was tired too; and he did not
+care for this kind of work.
+
+"Well," said Lackington again, "I must be getting home safe. Keep the
+door; you shall be relieved in one hour."
+
+The soldier nodded at him; but still said nothing; and Lackington lifted
+the valise and went off too under the archway.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+That same morning Lady Maxwell in her room in the Hall at Great Keynes
+awoke early before dawn with a start. She had had a dream but could not
+remember what it was, except that her son James was in it, and seemed to
+be in trouble. He was calling on her to save him, she thought, and awoke
+at the sound of his voice. She often dreamt of him at this time; for the
+life of a seminary priest was laid with snares and dangers. But this
+dream seemed worse than all.
+
+She struck a light, and looked timidly round the room; it seemed still
+ringing with his voice. A great tapestry in a frame hung over the
+mantelpiece, Actaeon followed by his hounds; the hunter panted as he ran,
+and was looking back over his shoulder; and the long-jawed dogs streamed
+behind him down a little hill.
+
+So strong was the dream upon the old lady that she felt restless, and
+presently got up and went to the window and opened a shutter to look out.
+A white statue or two beyond the terrace glimmered in the dusk, and the
+stars were bright in the clear frosty night overhead. She closed the
+shutter and went back again to bed; but could not sleep. Again and again
+as she was dozing off, something would startle her wide awake again:
+sometimes it was a glimpse of James' face; sometimes he seemed to be
+hurrying away from her down an endless passage with closed doors; he was
+dressed in something crimson. She tried to cry out, her voice would not
+rise above a whisper. Sometimes it was the dream of his voice; and once
+she started up crying out, "I am coming, my son." Then at last she awoke
+again at the sound of footsteps coming along the corridor outside; and
+stared fearfully at the door to see what would enter. But it was only the
+maid come to call her mistress. Lady Maxwell watched her as she opened
+the shutters that now glimmered through their cracks, and let a great
+flood of light into the room from the clear shining morning outside.
+
+"It is a frosty morning, my lady," said the maid.
+
+"Send one of the men down to Mistress Torridon," said Lady Maxwell, "and
+ask her to come here as soon as it is convenient. Say I am well; but
+would like to see her when she can come."
+
+There was no priest in the house that Sunday, so there could be no mass;
+and on these occasions Mistress Margaret usually stayed at the Dower
+House until after dinner; but this morning she came up within half an
+hour of receiving the message.
+
+She did not pretend to despise her sister's terror, or call it
+superstitious.
+
+"Mary," she said, taking her sister's jewelled old fingers into her own
+two hands, "we must leave all this to the good God. It may mean much, or
+little, or nothing. He only knows; but at least we may pray. Let me tell
+Isabel; a child's prayers are mighty with Him; and she has the soul of a
+little child still."
+
+So Isabel was told; and after church she came up to dine at the Hall and
+spend the day there; for Lady Maxwell was thoroughly nervous and upset:
+she trembled at the sound of footsteps, and cried out when one of the men
+came into the room suddenly.
+
+Isabel went again to evening prayer at three o'clock; but could not keep
+her thoughts off the strange nervous horror at the Hall, though it seemed
+to rest on no better foundation than the waking dreams of an old
+lady--and her mind strayed away continually from the darkening chapel in
+which she sat, so near where Sir Nicholas himself lay, to the upstairs
+parlour where the widow sat shaken and trembling at her own curious
+fancies about her dear son.
+
+Mr. Bodder's sermon came to an end at last; and Isabel was able to get
+away, and hurry back to the Hall. She found the old ladies as she had
+left them in the little drawing-room, Lady Maxwell sitting on the
+window-seat near the harp, preoccupied and apparently listening for
+something she knew not what. Mistress Margaret was sitting in a tall
+padded porter's chair reading aloud from an old English mystic, but her
+sister was paying no attention, and looked strangely at the girl as she
+came in. Isabel sat down near the fire and listened; and as she listened
+the memory of that other day, years ago, came to her when she sat once
+before with these two ladies in the same room, and Mistress Margaret read
+to them, and the letter came from Sir Nicholas; and then the sudden
+clamour from the village. So now she sat with terror darkening over her,
+glancing now and again at that white expectant face, and herself
+listening for the first far-away rumour of the dreadful interruption that
+she now knew must come.
+
+"The Goodness of God," read the old nun, "is the highest prayer, and it
+cometh down to the lowest part of our need. It quickeneth our soul and
+bringeth it on life, and maketh it for to waxen in grace and virtue. It
+is nearest in nature; and readiest in grace: for it is the same grace
+that the soul seeketh, and ever shall seek till we know verily that He
+hath us all in Himself enclosed. For he hath no despite of that He hath
+made, nor hath He any disdain to serve us at the simplest office that to
+our body belongeth in nature, for love of the soul that He hath made to
+His own likeness. For as the body is clad in the clothes, and the flesh
+in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so
+are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed. Yea,
+and more homely; for all these may waste and wear away, but the Goodness
+of God is ever whole; and more near to us without any likeness; for truly
+our Lover desireth that our soul cleave to Him with all its might, and
+that we be evermore cleaving to His goodness. For of all things that
+heart may think, this most pleaseth God, and soonest speedeth us. For our
+soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest, that it overpasseth
+the knowing of all creatures----"
+
+"Hush," said Lady Maxwell suddenly, on her feet, with a lifted hand.
+
+There was a breathless silence in the room; Isabel's heart beat thick and
+heavy and her eyes grew large with expectancy; it was a windless frosty
+night again, and the ivy outside on the wall, and the laurels in the
+garden seemed to be silently listening too.
+
+"Mary, Mary," began her sister, "you----;" but the old lady lifted her
+hand a little higher; and silence fell again.
+
+Then far away in the direction of the London road came the clear beat of
+the hoofs of a galloping horse.
+
+Lady Maxwell bowed her head, and her hand slowly sank to her side. The
+other two stood up and remained still while the beat of the hoofs grew
+and grew in intensity on the frozen road.
+
+"The front door," said Lady Maxwell.
+
+Mistress Margaret slipped from the room and went downstairs; Isabel took
+a step or two forward, but was checked by the old lady's uplifted hand
+again. And again there was a breathless silence, save for the beat of the
+hoofs now close and imminent.
+
+A moment later the front door was opened, and a great flood of cold air
+swept up the passages; the portrait of Sir Nicholas in the hall
+downstairs, lifted and rattled against the wall. Then came the clatter on
+the paved court; and the sound of a horse suddenly checked with the
+slipping up of hoofs and the jingle and rattle of chains and stirrups.
+There were voices in the hall below, and a man's deep tones; then came
+steps ascending.
+
+Lady Maxwell still stood perfectly rigid by the window, waiting, and
+Isabel stared with white face and great open eyes at the door; outside,
+the flame of a lamp on the wall was blowing about furiously in the
+draught.
+
+Then a stranger stepped into the room; evidently a gentleman; he bowed to
+the two ladies, and stood, with the rime on his boots and a whip in his
+hand, a little exhausted and disordered by hard riding.
+
+"Lady Maxwell?" he said.
+
+Lady Maxwell bowed a little.
+
+"I come with news of your son, madam, the priest; he is alive and well;
+but he is in trouble. He was taken this morning in his mass-vestments;
+and is in the Marshalsea."
+
+Lady Maxwell's lips moved a little; but no sound came.
+
+"He was betrayed, madam, by a friend. He and thirty other Catholics were
+taken all together at mass."
+
+Then Lady Maxwell spoke; and her voice was dead and hard.
+
+"The friend, sir! What was his name?"
+
+"The traitor's name, madam, is Anthony Norris."
+
+The room turned suddenly dark to Isabel's eyes; and she put up her hand
+and tore at the collar round her throat.
+
+"Oh no, no, no, no!" she cried, and tottered a step or two forward and
+stood swaying.
+
+Lady Maxwell looked from one to another with eyes that seemed to see
+nothing; and her lips stirred again.
+
+Mistress Margaret who had followed the stranger up, and who stood now
+behind him at the door, came forward to Isabel with a little cry, with
+her hands trembling before her. But before she could reach her, Lady
+Maxwell herself came swiftly forward, her head thrown back, and her arms
+stretched out towards the girl, who still stood dazed and swaying more
+and more.
+
+"My poor, poor child!" said Lady Maxwell; and caught her as she fell.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IX
+
+                      FROM FULHAM TO GREENWICH
+
+
+Anthony in London, strangely enough, heard nothing of the arrest on the
+Sunday, except a rumour at supper that some Papists had been taken. It
+had sufficient effect on his mind to make him congratulate himself that
+he had been able to warn his friend last week.
+
+At dinner on Monday there were a few guests; and among them, one Sir
+Richard Barkley, afterwards Lieutenant of the Tower. He sat at the
+Archbishop's table, but Anthony's place, on the steward's left hand,
+brought him very close to the end of the first table where Sir Richard
+sat. Dinner was half way through, when Mr. Scot who was talking to
+Anthony, was suddenly silent and lifted his hand as if to check the
+conversation a moment.
+
+"I saw them myself," said Sir Richard's voice just behind.
+
+"What is it?" whispered Anthony.
+
+"The Catholics," answered the steward.
+
+"They were taken in Newman's Court, off Cheapside," went on the voice,
+"nearly thirty, with one of their priests, at mass, in his trinkets
+too--Oldham his name is."
+
+There was a sudden crash of a chair fallen backwards, and Anthony was
+standing by the officer.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Sir Richard Barkley," he said;--and a dead silence
+fell in the hall.--"But is that the name of the priest that was taken
+yesterday?"
+
+Sir Richard looked astonished at the apparent insolence of this young
+official.
+
+"Yes, sir," he said shortly.
+
+"Then, then,----" began Anthony; but stopped; bowed low to the Archbishop
+and went straight out of the hall.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mr. Scot was waiting for him in the hall when he returned late that
+night. Anthony's face was white and distracted; he came in and stood by
+the fire, and stared at him with a dazed air.
+
+"You are to come to his Grace," said the steward, looking at him in
+silence.
+
+Anthony nodded without speaking, and turned away.
+
+"Then you cannot tell me anything?" said Mr. Scot. The other shook his
+head impatiently, and walked towards the inner door.
+
+The Archbishop was sincerely shocked at the sight of his young officer,
+as he came in and stood before the table, staring with bewildered eyes,
+with his dress splashed and disordered, and his hands still holding the
+whip and gloves. He made him sit down at once, and after Anthony had
+drunk a glass of wine, he made him tell his story and what he had done
+that day.
+
+He had been to the Marshalsea; it was true Mr. Oldham was there, and had
+been examined. Mr. Young had conducted it.--The house at Newman's Court
+was guarded: the house behind Bow Church was barred and shut up, and the
+people seemed gone away.--He could not get a word through to Mr. Oldham,
+though he had tried heavy bribery.--And that was all.
+
+Anthony spoke with the same dazed air, in short broken sentences; but
+became more himself as the wine and the fire warmed him; and by the time
+he had finished he had recovered himself enough to entreat the Archbishop
+to help him.
+
+"It is useless," said the old man. "What can I do? I have no power.
+And--and he is a popish priest! How can I interfere?"
+
+"My lord," cried Anthony desperately, flushed and entreating, "all has
+been done through treachery. Do you not see it? I have been a brainless
+fool. That man behind Bow Church was a spy. For Christ's sake help us,
+my lord!"
+
+Grindal looked into the lad's great bright eyes; sighed; and threw out
+his hands despairingly.
+
+"It is useless; indeed it is useless, Mr. Norris. But I will tell you all
+that I can do. I will give you to-morrow a letter to Sir Francis
+Walsingham. I was with him abroad as you know, in the popish times of
+Mary: and he is still in some sort a friend of mine--but you must
+remember that he is a strong Protestant; and I do not suppose that he
+will help you. Now go to bed, dear lad; you are worn out."
+
+Anthony knelt for the old man's blessing, and left the room.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The interview next day was more formidable than he had expected. He was
+at the Secretary's house by ten o'clock, and waited below while the
+Archbishop's letter was taken up. The servant came back in a few minutes,
+and asked him to follow; and in an agony of anxiety, but with a clear
+head again this morning, and every faculty tense, he went upstairs after
+him, and was ushered into the room where Walsingham sat at a table.
+
+There was silence as the two bowed, but Sir Francis did not offer to
+rise, but sat with the Archbishop's letter in his hand, glancing through
+it again, as the other stood and waited.
+
+"I understand," said the Secretary at last, and his voice was dry and
+unsympathetic,--"I understand, from his Grace's letter, that you desire
+to aid a popish priest called Oldham or Maxwell, arrested at mass on
+Sunday morning in Newman's Court. If you will be so good as to tell me in
+what way you desire to aid him, I can be more plain in my answer. You do
+not desire, I hope, Mr. Norris, anything but justice and a fair trial for
+your friend?"
+
+Anthony cleared his throat before answering.
+
+"I--he is my friend, as you say, Sir Francis; and--and he hath been
+caught by foul means. I myself was used, as I have little doubt, in his
+capture. Surely there is no justice, sir, in betraying a man by means of
+his friend." And Anthony described the ruse that had brought it all
+about.
+
+Sir Francis listened to him coldly; but there came the faintest spark of
+amusement into his large sad eyes.
+
+"Surely, Mr. Norris," he said, "it was somewhat simple; and I have no
+doubt at all that it all is as you say; and that the poor stuttering
+cripple with a patch was as sound and had as good sight and power of
+speech as you and I; but the plan was, it seems, if you will forgive me,
+not so simple as yourself. It would be passing strange, surely that the
+man, if a friend of the priest's, could find no Catholic to take his
+message; but not at all strange if he were his enemy. I do not think
+sincerely, sir, that it would have deceived me. But that is not now the
+point. He is taken now, fairly or foully, and--what was it you wished me
+to do?"
+
+"I hoped," said Anthony, in rising indignation at this insolence, "that
+you would help me in some way to undo this foul unjustice. Surely, sir,
+it cannot be right to take advantage of such knavish tricks."
+
+"Good Mr. Norris," said the Secretary, "we are not playing a game, with
+rules that must not be broken, but we are trying to serve justice"--his
+voice rose a little in sincere enthusiasm--"and to put down all false
+practices, whether in religion or state, against God or the prince.
+Surely the point for you and me is not, ought this gentleman to have been
+taken in the manner he was; but being taken, is he innocent or guilty?"
+
+"Then you will not help me?"
+
+"I will certainly not help you to defeat justice," said the other. "Mr.
+Norris, you are a young man; and while your friendship does your heart
+credit, your manner of forwarding its claims does not equally commend
+your head. I counsel you to be wary in your speech and actions; or they
+may bring you into trouble some day yourself. After all, as no doubt your
+friends have told you, you played what, as a minister of the Crown, I
+must call a knave's part in attempting to save this popish traitor,
+although by God's Providence, you were frustrated. But it is indeed going
+too far to beg me to assist you. I have never heard of such audacity!"
+
+Anthony left the house in a fury. It was true, as the Archbishop had
+said, that Sir Francis Walsingham was a convinced Protestant; but he had
+expected to find in him some indignation at the methods by which the
+priest had been captured; and some desire to make compensation for it.
+
+He went again to the Marshalsea; and now heard that James had been
+removed to the Tower, with one or two of the Catholics who had been in
+trouble before. This was serious news; for to be transferred to the Tower
+was often but the prelude to torture or death. He went on there, however,
+and tried again to gain admittance, but it was refused, and the
+doorkeeper would not even consent to take a message in. Mr. Oldham, he
+said, was being straitly kept, and it would be as much as his place was
+worth to admit any communication to him without an order from the
+Council.
+
+When Anthony got back to Lambeth after this fruitless day, he found an
+imploring note from Isabel awaiting him; and one of the grooms from the
+Hall to take his answer back.
+
+"Write back at once, dear Anthony," she wrote, "and explain this terrible
+thing, for I know well that you could not do what has been told us of
+you. But tell us what has happened, that we may know what to think. Poor
+Lady Maxwell is in the distress you may imagine; not knowing what will
+come to Mr. James. She will come to London, I think, this week. Write at
+once now, my Anthony, and tell us all."
+
+Anthony scribbled a few lines, saying how he had been deceived; and
+asking her to explain the circumstances to Lady Maxwell, who no doubt
+would communicate them to her son as soon as was possible; he added that
+he had so far failed to get a message through the gaoler. He gave the
+note himself to the groom; telling him to deliver it straight into
+Isabel's hands, and then went to bed.
+
+In the morning he reported to the Archbishop what had taken place.
+
+"I feared it would be so," Grindal said. "There is nothing to be done but
+to commit your friend into God's hands, and leave him there."
+
+"My Lord," said Anthony, "I cannot leave it like that. I will go and see
+my lord bishop to-day; and then, if he can do nothing to help, I will
+even see the Queen's Grace herself."
+
+Grindal threw up his hands with a gesture of dismay.
+
+"That will ruin all," he said. "An officer of mine could do nothing but
+anger her Grace."
+
+"I must do my best," said Anthony; "it was through my folly he is in
+prison, and I could never rest if I left one single thing undone."
+
+Just as Anthony was leaving the house, a servant in the royal livery
+dashed up to the gate; and the porter ran out after Anthony to call him
+back. The man delivered to him a letter which he opened then and there.
+It was from Mistress Corbet.
+
+"What can be done," the letter ran, "for poor Mr. James? I have heard a
+tale of you from a Catholic, which I know is a black lie. I am sure that
+even now you will be doing all you can to save your friend. I told the
+man that told me, that he lied and that I knew you for an honest
+gentleman. But come, dear Mr. Anthony; and we will do what we can between
+us. Her Grace noticed this morning that I had been weeping; I put her off
+with excuses that she knows to be excuses; and she is so curious that she
+will not rest till she knows the cause. Come after dinner to-day; we are
+at Greenwich now; and we will see what may be done. It may even be
+needful for you to see her Grace yourself, and tell her the story. Your
+loving friend, Mary Corbet."
+
+Anthony gave a message to the royal groom, to tell Mistress Corbet that
+he would do as she said, and then rode off immediately to the city. There
+was another disappointing delay as the Bishop was at Fulham; and thither
+he rode directly through the frosty streets under the keen morning
+sunshine, fretting at the further delay.
+
+He had often had occasion to see the Bishop before, and Aylmer had taken
+something of a liking to this staunch young churchman; and now as the
+young man came hurrying across the grass under the elms, the Bishop, who
+was walking in his garden in his furs and flapped cap, noticed his
+anxious eyes and troubled face, and smiled at him kindly, wondering what
+he had come about. The two began to walk up and down together. The
+sunshine was beginning to melt the surface of the ground, and the birds
+were busy with breakfast-hunting.
+
+"Look at that little fellow!" cried the Bishop, pointing to a thrush on
+the lawn, "he knows his craft."
+
+The thrush had just rapped several times with his beak at a worm's earth,
+and was waiting with his head sideways watching.
+
+"Aha!" cried the Bishop again, "he has him." The thrush had seized the
+worm who had come up to investigate the noise, and was now staggering
+backwards, bracing himself, and tugging at the poor worm, who, in a
+moment more was dragged out and swallowed.
+
+"My lord," said Anthony, "I came to ask your pity for one who was
+betrayed by like treachery."
+
+The Bishop looked astonished, and asked for the story; but when he heard
+who it was that had been taken, and under what circumstances, the
+kindliness died out of his eyes. He shook his head severely when Anthony
+had done.
+
+"It is useless coming to me, sir," he said. "You know what I think. To be
+ordained beyond the seas and to exercise priestly functions in England is
+now a crime. It is useless to pretend anything else. It is revolt against
+the Queen's Grace and the peace of the realm. And I must confess I am
+astonished at you, Mr. Norris, thinking that anything ought to be done to
+shield a criminal, and still more astonished that you should think I
+would aid you in that. I tell you plainly that I am glad that the fellow
+is caught, for that I think there will be presently one less fire-brand
+in England. I know it is easy to cry out against persecution and
+injustice; that is ever the shallow cry of the mob; but this is not a
+religious persecution, as you yourself very well know. It is because the
+Roman Church interferes with the peace of the realm and the Queen's
+authority that its ordinances are forbidden; we do not seek to touch a
+man's private opinions. However, you know all that as well as I."
+
+Anthony was raging now with anger.
+
+"I am not so sure, my lord, as I was," he said. "I had hoped from your
+lordship at any rate to find sympathy for the base trick whereby my
+friend was snared; and I find it now hard to trust the judgment of any
+who do not feel as I do about it."
+
+"That is insolence, Mr. Norris," said Aylmer, stopping in his walk and
+turning upon him his cold half-shut eyes, "and I will not suffer it."
+
+"Then, my lord, I had better begone to her Grace at once."
+
+"To her Grace!" exclaimed the Bishop.
+
+"_Appello Caesarem_," said Anthony, and was gone again.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As Anthony came into the courtyard of Greenwich Palace an hour or two
+later he found it humming with movement and noise. Cooks were going to
+and fro with dishes, as dinner was only just ending; servants in the
+royal livery were dashing across with messages; a few great hounds for
+the afternoon's baiting were in a group near one of the gateways,
+snuffing the smell of cookery, and howling hungrily now and again.
+
+Anthony stopped one of the men, and sent him with a message to Mistress
+Corbet; and the servant presently returned, saying that the Court was
+just rising from dinner, and Mistress Corbet would see him in a parlour
+directly, if the gentleman would kindly follow him. A groom took his
+horse off to the stable, and Anthony himself followed the servant to a
+little oak-parlour looking on to a lawn with a yew hedge and a dial. He
+felt as one moving in a dream, bewildered by the rush of interviews, and
+oppressed by the awful burden that he bore at his heart. Nothing any
+longer seemed strange; and he scarcely gave a thought to what it meant
+when he heard the sound of trumpets in the court, as the Queen left the
+Hall. In five minutes more Mistress Corbet burst into the room; and her
+anxious look broke into tenderness at the sight of the misery in the
+lad's face.
+
+"Oh, Master Anthony," she cried, seizing his hand, "thank God you are
+here. And now what is to be done for him?"
+
+They sat down together in the window-seat. Mary was dressed in an
+elaborate rose-coloured costume; but her pretty lips were pale, and her
+eyes looked distressed and heavy.
+
+"I have hardly slept," she said, "since Saturday night. Tell me all that
+you know."
+
+Anthony told her the whole story, mechanically and miserably.
+
+"Ah," she said, "that was how it was. I understand it now. And what can
+we do? You know, of course, that he has been questioned in the Tower."
+
+Anthony turned suddenly white and sick.
+
+"Not the--not the----" he began, falteringly.
+
+She nodded at him mutely with large eyes and compressed lips.
+
+"Oh, my God," said Anthony; and then again, "O God."
+
+She took up one of his brown young hands and pressed it gently between
+her white slender ones.
+
+"I know," she said, "I know; he is a gallant gentleman."
+
+Anthony stood up shaking; and sat down again. The horror had goaded him
+into clearer consciousness.
+
+"Ah! what can we do?" he said brokenly. "Let me see the Queen. She will
+be merciful."
+
+"You must trust to me in this," said Mary, "I know her; and I know that
+to go to her now would be madness. She is in a fury with Pinart to-day at
+something that has passed about the Duke. You know Monsieur is here; she
+kissed him the other day, and the Lord only knows whether she will marry
+him or not. You must wait a day or two; and be ready when I tell you."
+
+"But," stammered Anthony, "every hour we wait, he suffers."
+
+"Oh, you cannot tell that," said Mary, "they give them a long rest
+sometimes; and it was only yesterday that he was questioned."
+
+Anthony sat silently staring out on the fresh lawn; there was still a
+patch of frost under the shadow of the hedge he noticed.
+
+"Wait here a moment," said Mary, looking at him; and she got up and went
+out.
+
+Anthony still sat staring and thinking of the horror. Presently Mary was
+at his side again with a tall venetian wine-glass brimming with white
+wine.
+
+"Here," she said, "drink this,"--and then--"have you dined to-day?"
+
+"There was not time," said Anthony.
+
+She frowned at him almost fiercely.
+
+"And you come here fasting," she said, "to face the Queen! You foolish
+boy; you know nothing. Wait here," she added imperiously, and again she
+left the room.
+
+Anthony still stared out of doors, twisting the empty glass in his hand;
+until again came her step and the rustle of her dress. She took the glass
+from him and put it down. A servant had followed her back into the room
+in a minute or two with a dish of meat and some bread; he set it on the
+table, and went out.
+
+"Now," said Mary, "sit down and eat before you speak another word." And
+Anthony obeyed. The servant presently returned with some fruit, and again
+left them. All the while Anthony was eating, Mary sat by him and told him
+how she had heard the whole story from another Catholic at court; and how
+the Queen had questioned her closely the night before, as to what the
+marks of tears meant on her cheeks.
+
+"It was when I heard of the racking," explained Mary, "I could not help
+it. I went up to my room and cried and cried. But I would not tell her
+Grace that: it would have been of no use; so I said I had a headache;
+but I said it in such a way as to prepare her for more. She has not
+questioned me again to-day; she is too full of anger and of the
+bear-baiting; but she will--she will. She never forgets; and then Mr.
+Anthony, it must be you to tell her. You are a pleasant-faced young man,
+sir, and she likes such as that. And you must be both forward and modest
+with her. She loves boldness, but hates rudeness. That is why Chris is so
+beloved by her. He is a fool, but he is a handsome fool, and a forward
+fool, and withal a tender fool; and sighs and cries, and calls her his
+Goddess; and says how he takes to his bed when she is not there, which of
+course is true. The other day he came to her, white-faced, sobbing like
+a frightened child, about the ring she had given Monsieur _le petit
+grenouille_. And oh, she was so tender with him. And so, Mr. Anthony, you
+must not be just forward with her, and frown at her and call her Jezebel
+and tyrant, as you would like to do; but you must call her Cleopatra, and
+Diana as well. Forward and backward all in one; that is the way she loves
+to be wooed. She is a woman, remember that."
+
+"I must just let my heart speak," said Anthony, "I cannot twist and
+turn."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mary, "that is what I mean; but mind that it is your
+heart."
+
+They went on talking a little longer; when suddenly the trumpets pealed
+out again. Mary rose with a look of consternation.
+
+"I must fly," she said, "her Grace will be starting for the pit directly;
+and I must be there. Do you follow, Mr. Anthony; I will speak to a
+servant in the court about you." And in a moment she was gone.
+
+When Anthony had finished the fruit and wine, he felt considerably
+refreshed; and after waiting a few minutes, went out into the court
+again, which he found almost deserted, except for a servant or two. One
+of these came up to him, and said respectfully that Mistress Corbet had
+left instructions that Mr. Norris was to be taken to the bear-pit; so
+Anthony followed him through the palace to the back.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was a startlingly beautiful sight that his eyes fell upon when he came
+up the wooden stairs on to the stage that ran round the arena where the
+sport was just beginning. It was an amphitheatre, perhaps forty yards
+across; and the seats round it were filled with the most brilliant
+costumes, many of which blazed with jewels. Hanging over the top of the
+palisade were rich stuffs and tapestries. The Queen herself no doubt with
+Alencon was seated somewhere to the right, as Anthony could see by the
+canopy, with the arms of England and France embroidered upon its front;
+but he was too near to her to be able to catch even a glimpse of her face
+or figure. The awning overhead was furled, as the day was so fine, and
+the winter sunshine poured down on the dresses and jewels. All the Court
+was there; and Anthony recognised many great nobles here and there in the
+specially reserved seats. A ceaseless clangour of trumpets and cymbals
+filled the air, and drowned not only the conversation but the terrific
+noise from the arena where half a dozen great dogs, furious with hunger
+and excited as much by the crowds and the brazen music overhead as by the
+presence of their fierce adversary, were baiting a huge bear chained to a
+ring in the centre of the sand.
+
+Anthony's heart sank a little as he noticed the ladies of the Court
+applauding and laughing at the abominable scene below, no doubt in
+imitation of their mistress who loved this fierce sport; and as he
+thought of the kind of heart to which he would have to appeal presently.
+
+So through the winter afternoon the bouts went on; the band answered with
+harsh chords the death of the dogs one by one, and welcomed the collapse
+of the bear with a strident bellowing passage on the great horns and
+drums; and by the time it was over and the spectators rose to their feet,
+Anthony's hopes were lower than ever. Can there be any compassion left,
+he wondered, in a woman to whom such an afternoon was nothing more than a
+charming entertainment?
+
+By the time he was able to get out of his seat and return to the
+courtyard, the procession had again disappeared, but he was escorted by
+the same servant to the parlour again, where Mistress Corbet presently
+rustled in.
+
+"You must stay to-night," she said, "as late as possible. I wish you
+could sleep here; but we are so crowded with these Frenchmen and
+Hollanders that there is not a bed empty. The Queen is in better humour,
+and if the play goes well, it may be that a word said even to-night might
+reach her heart. I will tell you when it is over. You must be present. I
+will send you supper here directly."
+
+Anthony inquired as to his dress.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Mistress Corbet, "that will do very well; it is sober
+and quiet, and a little splashed: it will appear that you came in such
+haste that you could not change it. Her Grace likes to see a man hot and
+in a hurry sometimes; and not always like a peacock in the shade.--And,
+Master Anthony, it suits you very well."
+
+He asked what time the play would be over, and that his horse might be
+saddled ready for him when he should want it; and Mary promised to see to
+it.
+
+He felt much more himself as he supped alone in the parlour. The
+bewilderment had passed; the courage and spirit of Mary had infected his
+own, and the stirring strange life of the palace had distracted him from
+that dreadful brooding into which he had at first sunk.
+
+When he had finished supper he sat in the window seat, pondering and
+praying too that the fierce heart of the Queen might be melted, and that
+God would give him words to say.
+
+There was much else too that he thought over, as he sat and watched the
+illuminated windows round the little lawn on which his own looked, and
+heard the distant clash of music from the Hall where the Queen was
+supping in state. He thought of Mary and of her gay and tender nature;
+and of his own boyish love for her. That indeed had gone, or rather had
+been transfigured into a brotherly honour and respect. Both she and he,
+he was beginning to feel, had a more majestic task before them than
+marrying and giving in marriage. The religion which made this woman what
+she was, pure and upright in a luxurious and treacherous Court, tender
+among hard hearts, sympathetic in the midst of selfish lives--this
+Religion was beginning to draw this young man with almost irresistible
+power. Mary herself was doing her part bravely, witnessing in a
+Protestant Court to the power of the Catholic Faith in her own life; and
+he, what was he doing? These last three days were working miracles in
+him. The way he had been received by Walsingham and Aylmer, their
+apparent inability to see his point of view on this foul bit of
+treachery, the whole method of the Government of the day;--and above all
+the picture that was floating now before his eyes over the dark lawn, of
+the little cell in the Tower and the silent wrenched figure lying upon
+the straw--the "gallant gentleman" as Mary had called him, who had
+reckoned all this price up before he embarked on the life of a priest,
+and was even now paying it gladly and thankfully, no doubt--all this
+deepened the previous impressions that Anthony's mind had received; and
+as he sat here amid the stir of the royal palace, again and again a
+vision moved before him, of himself as a Catholic, and perhaps---- But
+Isabel! What of Isabel? And at the thought of her he rose and walked to
+and fro.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Presently the servant came again to take Anthony to the Presence Chamber,
+where the play was to take place.
+
+"I understand, sir, from Mistress Corbet," said the man, closing the door
+of the parlour a moment, "that you are come about Mr. Maxwell. I am a
+Catholic, too, sir, and may I say, sir, God bless and prosper you in
+this.--I--I beg your pardon, sir, will you follow me?"
+
+The room was full at the lower end where Anthony had to stand, as he was
+not in Court dress; and he could see really nothing of the play, and hear
+very little either. The children of Paul's were acting some classical
+play which he did not know: all he could do was to catch a glimpse now
+and again of the protruding stage, with the curtains at the back, and the
+glitter of the armour that the boys wore; and hear the songs that were
+accompanied by a little string band, and the clash of the brass at the
+more martial moments. The Queen and the Duke, he could see, sat together
+immediately opposite the stage, on raised seats under a canopy; a group
+of halberdiers guarded them, and another small company of them was ranged
+at the sides of the stage. Anthony could see little more than this, and
+could hear only isolated sentences here and there, so broken was the
+piece by the talking and laughing around him. But he did not like to move
+as Mistress Corbet had told him to be present, so he stood there
+listening to the undertone talk about him, and watching the faces. What
+he did see of the play did not rouse him to any great enthusiasm. His
+heart was too heavy with his errand, and it seemed to him that the
+occasional glimpses he caught of the stage showed him a very tiresome
+hero, dressed in velvet doubled and hose and steel cap, strangely
+unconvincing, who spoke his lines pompously, and was as unsatisfactory as
+the slender shrill-voiced boy who, representing a woman of marvellous
+beauty and allurement, was supposed to fire the conqueror's blood with
+passion.
+
+At last it ended; and an "orator" in apparel of cloth of gold, spoke a
+kind of special epilogue in rhyming metre in praise of the Virgin Queen,
+and then retired bowing.
+
+Immediately there was a general movement; the brass instruments began to
+blare out, and an usher at the door desired those who were blocking the
+way to step aside to make way for the Queen's procession, which would
+shortly pass out. Anthony himself went outside with one or two more, and
+then stood aside waiting.
+
+There was a pause and then a hush; and the sound of a high rating woman's
+voice, followed by a murmur of laughter.
+
+In a moment more the door was flung open again, and to Anthony's surprise
+Mistress Corbet came rustling out, as the people stepped back to make
+room. Her eyes fell on Anthony near the door, and she beckoned him to
+follow, and he went down the corridor after her, followed her silently
+along a passage or two, wondering why she did not speak, and then came
+after her into the same little oak parlour where he had supped. A servant
+followed them immediately with lighted candles which he set down and
+retired.
+
+Anthony looked at Mistress Corbet, and saw all across her pale cheek the
+fiery mark of the five fingers of a hand, and saw too that her eyes were
+full of tears, and that her breath came unevenly.
+
+"It is no use to-night," she said, with a sob in her voice; "her Grace is
+angry with me."
+
+"And, and----" began Anthony in amazement.
+
+"And she struck me," said Mary, struggling bravely to smile. "It was all
+my fault,"--and a bright tear or two ran down on to her delicate lace. "I
+was sitting near her Grace, and I could not keep my mind off poor James
+Maxwell; and I suppose I looked grave, because when the play was over,
+she beckoned me up, and--and asked how I liked it, and why I looked so
+solemn--for she would know--was it for _Scipio Africanus_, or some other
+man? And--and I was silent; and Alencon, that little frog-man burst out
+laughing and said to her Grace something--something shameful--in
+French--but I understood, and gave him a look; and her Grace saw it, and,
+and struck me here, before all the Court, and bade me begone."
+
+"Oh! it is shameful," said Anthony, furiously, his own eyes bright too,
+at the sight of this gallant girl and her humiliation.
+
+"You cannot stay here, Mistress Corbet. This is the second time at least,
+is it not?"
+
+"Ah! but I must stay," she said, "or who will speak for the Catholics?
+But now it is useless to think of seeing her Grace to-night. Yet
+to-morrow, maybe, she will be sorry,--she often is--and will want to make
+amends; and then will be our time, so you must be here to-morrow by
+dinner-time at least."
+
+"Oh, Mistress Corbet," said the boy, "I wish I could do something."
+
+"You dear lad!" said Mary, and then indeed the tears ran down.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony rode back to Lambeth under the stars, anxious and dispirited, and
+all night long dreamed of pageants and progresses that blocked the street
+down which he must ride to rescue James. The brazen trumpets rang out
+whenever he called for help or tried to explain his errand; and Elizabeth
+rode by, bowing and smiling to all save him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The next day he was at Greenwich again by dinner-time, and again dined by
+himself in the oak parlour, waited upon by the Catholic servant. He was
+just finishing his meal when in sailed Mary, beaming.
+
+"I told you so," she said delightedly, "the Queen is sorry. She pinched
+my ear just now, and smiled at me, and bade me come to her in her private
+parlour in half an hour; and I shall put my petition then; so be ready,
+Master Anthony, be ready and of a good courage; for, please God, we shall
+save him yet."
+
+Anthony looked at her, white and scared.
+
+"What shall I say?" he said.
+
+"Speak from your heart, sir, as you did to me yesterday. Be bold, yet not
+overbold. Tell her plainly that he is your friend; and that it was
+through your action he was betrayed. Say that you love the man. She likes
+loyalty.--Say he is a fine upstanding fellow, over six feet in height,
+with a good leg. She likes a good leg.--Say that he has not a wife, and
+will never have one. Wives and husbands like her not--in spite of _le
+petit grenouille_.--And look straight in her face, Master Anthony, as you
+looked in mine yesterday when I was a cry-baby. She likes men to do
+that.--And then look away as if dazzled by her radiancy. She likes that
+even more."
+
+Anthony looked so bewildered by these instructions that Mary laughed in
+his face.
+
+"Here then, poor lad," she said, "I will tell you in a word. Tell the
+truth and be a man;--a man! She likes that best of all; though she likes
+sheep too, such as Chris Hatton, and frogs like the Duke, and apes like
+the little Spaniard, and chattering dancing monkeys like the
+Frenchman--and--and devils, like Walshingham. But do you be a man and
+risk it. I know you can manage that." And Mary smiled at him so
+cheerfully, that Anthony felt heartened.
+
+"There," she said, "now you look like one. But you must have some more
+wine first, I will send it in as I go. And now I must go. Wait here for
+the message." She gave him her hand, and he kissed it, and she went out,
+nodding and smiling over her shoulder.
+
+Anthony sat miserably on the window-seat.
+
+Ah! so much depended on him now. The Queen was in a good humour, and such
+a chance might never occur again;--and meantime James Maxwell waited in
+the Tower.
+
+The minutes passed; steps came and went in the passage outside; and
+Anthony's heart leaped into his mouth at each sound. Once the door
+opened, and Anthony sprang to his feet trembling. But it was only the
+servant with the wine. Anthony took it--a fiery Italian wine, and drew a
+long draught that sent his blood coursing through his veins, and set his
+heart a-beating strongly again. And even as he set the cup down, the door
+was open again, and a bowing page was there.
+
+"May it please you, sir, the Queen's Grace has sent me for you."
+
+Anthony got up, swallowed in his throat once or twice, and motioned to
+go; the boy went out and Anthony followed.
+
+They went down a corridor or two, passing a sentry who let the well-known
+page and the gentleman pass without challenging; ascended a twisted oak
+staircase, went along a gallery, with stained glass of heraldic emblems
+in the windows, and paused before a door. The page, before knocking,
+turned and looked meaningly at Anthony, who stood with every pulse in his
+body racing; then the boy knocked, opened the door; Anthony entered, and
+the door closed behind him.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                         THE APPEAL TO CAESAR
+
+
+The room was full of sunshine that poured in through two tall windows
+opposite, upon a motionless figure that sat in a high carved chair by the
+table, and watched the door. This figure dominated the whole room: the
+lad as he dropped on his knees, was conscious of eyes watching him from
+behind the chair, of tapestried walls, and a lute that lay on the table,
+but all those things were but trifling accessories to that scarlet
+central figure with a burnished halo of auburn hair round a shadowed
+face.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was complete silence for a moment or two; a hound bayed in the
+court outside, and there came a far-away bang of a door somewhere in the
+palace. There was a rustle of silk that set every nerve of his body
+thrilling, and then a clear hard penetrating voice spoke two words.
+
+"Well, sir?"
+
+Anthony drew a breath, and swallowed in his throat.
+
+"Your Grace," he said, and lifted his eyes for a moment, and dropped them
+again. But in the glimpse every detail stamped itself clear on his
+imagination. There she sat in vivid scarlet and cloth of gold, radiating
+light; with high puffed sleeves; an immense ruff fringed with lace. The
+narrow eyes were fixed on him, and as he now waited again, he knew that
+they were running up and down his figure, his dark splashed hose and his
+tumbled doublet and ruff.
+
+"You come strangely dressed."
+
+Anthony drew a quick breath again.
+
+"My heart is sick," he said.
+
+There was another slight movement.
+
+"Well, sir," the voice said again, "you have not told us why you are
+here."
+
+"For justice from my queen," he said, and stopped. "And for mercy from a
+woman," he added, scarcely knowing what he said.
+
+Again Elizabeth stirred in her chair.
+
+"You taught him that, you wicked girl," she said.
+
+"No, madam," came Mary's voice from behind, subdued and entreating, "it
+is his heart that speaks."
+
+"Enough, sir," said Elizabeth; "now tell us plainly what you want of us."
+
+Then Anthony thought it time to be bold. He made a great effort, and the
+sense of constraint relaxed a little.
+
+"I have been, your Grace, to Sir Francis Walsingham, and my lord Bishop
+of London, and I can get neither justice nor mercy from either; and so I
+come to your Grace, who are their mistress, to teach them manners."
+
+"Stay," said Elizabeth, "that is insolence to my ministers."
+
+"So my lord said," answered Anthony frankly, looking into that hard clear
+face that was beginning to be lined with age. And he saw that Elizabeth
+smiled, and that the face behind the chair nodded at him encouragingly.
+
+"Well, insolence, go on."
+
+"It is on behalf of one who has been pronounced a felon and a traitor by
+your Grace's laws, that I am pleading; but one who is a very gallant
+Christian gentleman as well."
+
+"Your friend lacks not courage," interrupted Elizabeth to Mary.
+
+"No, your Grace," said the other, "that has never been considered his
+failing."
+
+Anthony waited, and then the voice spoke again harshly.
+
+"Go on with the tale, sir. I cannot be here all day."
+
+"He is a popish priest, your Majesty; and he was taken at mass in his
+vestments, and is now in the Tower; and he hath been questioned on the
+rack. And, madam, it is piteous to think of it. He is but a young man
+still, but passing strong and tall."
+
+"What has this to do with me, sir?" interrupted the Queen harshly. "I
+cannot pardon every proper young priest in the kingdom. What else is
+there to be said for him?"
+
+"He was taken through the foul treachery of a spy, who imposed upon me,
+his friend, and caused me all unknowing to say the very words that
+brought him into the net."
+
+And then, more and more, Anthony began to lose his self-consciousness,
+and poured out the story from the beginning; telling how he had been
+brought up in the same village with James Maxwell; and what a loyal
+gentleman he was; and then the story of the trick by which he had been
+deceived. As he spoke his whole appearance seemed to change; instead of
+the shy and rather clumsy manner with which he had begun, he was now
+natural and free; he moved his hands in slight gestures; his blue eyes
+looked the Queen fairly in the face; he moved a little forward on his
+knees as he pleaded, and he spoke with a passion that astonished both
+Mary and himself afterwards when he thought of it, in spite of his short
+and broken sentences. He was conscious all the while of an intense
+external strain and pressure, as if he were pleading for his life, and
+the time was short. Elizabeth relaxed her rigid attitude, and leaned her
+chin on her hand and her elbow on the table and watched him, her thin
+lips parted, the pearl rope and crown on her head, and the pearl pendants
+in her ears moving slightly as she nodded at points in his story.
+
+"Ah! your Grace," he cried, lifting his open hands towards her a little,
+"you have a woman's heart; all your people say so. You cannot allow this
+man to be so trapped to his death! Treachery never helped a cause yet. If
+your men cannot catch these priests fairly, then a-God's name, let them
+not catch them at all! But to use a friend, and make a Judas of him; to
+make the very lips that have spoken friendly, speak traitorously; to bait
+the trap like that--it is devilish. Let him go, let him go, madam! One
+priest more or less cannot overthrow the realm; but one more foul crime
+done in the name of justice can bring God's wrath down on the nation. I
+hold that a trick like that is far worse than all the disobedience in the
+world; nay--how can we cry out against the Jesuits and the plotters, if
+we do worse ourselves? Madam, madam, let him go! Oh! I know I cannot
+speak as well in this good cause, as some can in a bad cause, but let the
+cause speak for itself. I cannot speak, I know."
+
+"Nay, nay," said Elizabeth softly, "you wrong yourself. You have an
+honest face, sir; and that is the best recommendation to me.
+
+"And so, Minnie," she went on, turning to Mary, "this was your petition,
+was it; and this your advocate? Well, you have not chosen badly. Now, you
+speak yourself."
+
+Mary stood a moment silent, and then with a swift movement came round the
+arm of the Queen's chair, and threw herself on her knees, with her hands
+upon the Queen's left hand as it lay upon the carved boss, and her voice
+was as Anthony had never yet heard it, vibrant and full of tears.
+
+"Oh! madam, madam; this poor lad cannot speak, as he says; and yet his
+sad honest face, as your Grace said, is more eloquent than all words. And
+think of the silence of the little cell upstairs in the Tower; where a
+gallant gentleman lies, all rent and torn with the rack; and,--and how he
+listens for the footsteps outside of the tormentors who come to drag him
+down again, all aching and heavy with pain, down to that fierce engine in
+the dark. And think of his gallant heart, your Grace, how brave it is;
+and how he will not yield nor let one name escape him. Ah! not because he
+loves not your Grace nor desires to serve you; but because he serves your
+Grace best by serving and loving his God first of all.--And think how he
+cannot help a sob now and again; and whispers the name of his Saviour, as
+the pulleys begin to wrench and twist.--And,--and,--do not forget his
+mother, your Grace, down in the country; how she sits and listens and
+prays for her dear son; and cannot sleep, and dreams of him when at last
+she sleeps, and wakes screaming and crying at the thought of the boy she
+bore and nursed in the hands of those harsh devils. And--and, you can
+stop it all, your Grace, with one little word; and make that mother's
+heart bless your name and pray for you night and morning till she
+dies;--and let that gallant son go free, and save his racked body before
+it be torn asunder;--and you can make this honest lad's heart happy again
+with the thought that he has saved his friend instead of slaying him.
+Look you, madam, he has come confessing his fault; saying bravely to your
+Grace that he did try to do his friend a service in spite of the laws,
+for that he held love to be the highest law. Ah! how many happy souls you
+can make with a word; because you are a Queen.--What is it to be a
+Queen!--to be able to do all that!--Oh! madam, be pitiful then, and show
+mercy as one day you hope to find it."
+
+Mary spoke with an intense feeling; her voice was one long straining sob
+of appeal; and as she ended her tears were beginning to rain down on the
+hand she held between her own; she lifted it to her streaming face and
+kissed it again and again; and then dropped her forehead upon it, and so
+rested in dead silence.
+
+Elizabeth swallowed in her throat once or twice; and then spoke, and her
+voice was a little choked.
+
+"Well, well, you silly girl.--You plead too well."
+
+Anthony irresistibly threw his hands out as he knelt.
+
+"Oh! God bless your Grace!" he said; and then gave a sob or two himself.
+
+"There, there, you are a pair of children," she said; for Mary was
+kissing her hand again and again. "And you are a pretty pair, too," she
+added. "Now, now, that is enough, stand up."
+
+Anthony rose to his feet again and stood there; and Mary went round again
+behind the chair.
+
+"Now, now, you have put me in a sore strait," said Elizabeth; "between
+you I scarcely know how to keep my word. They call me fickle enough
+already. But Frank Walsingham shall do it for me. He is certainly at the
+back of it all, and he shall manage it. It shall be done at once. Call a
+page, Minnie."
+
+Mary Corbet went to the back of the room into the shadow, opened a door
+that Anthony had not noticed, and beckoned sharply; in a moment or two a
+page was bowing before Elizabeth.
+
+"Is Sir Francis Walsingham in the palace?" she asked,--"then bring him
+here," she ended, as the boy bowed again.
+
+"And you too," she went on, "shall hear that I keep my word,"--she
+pointed towards the door whence the page had come.--"Stand there," she
+said, "and leave the door ajar."
+
+Mary gave Anthony her hand and a radiant smile as they went together.
+
+"Aha!" said Elizabeth, "not in my presence."
+
+Anthony flushed with fury in spite of his joy.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+They went in through the door, and found themselves in a tiny panelled
+room with a little slit of a window; it was used to place a sentry or a
+page within it. There were a couple of chairs, and the two sat down to
+wait.
+
+"Oh, thank God!" whispered Anthony.
+
+Again the harsh voice rang out from the open door.
+
+"Now, now, no love-making within there!"
+
+Mary smiled and laid her finger on her lips. Then there came the ripple
+of a lute from the outer room, played not unskilfully. Mary smiled again
+and nodded at Anthony. Then, a metallic voice, but clear enough and
+tuneful, began to sing a verse of the little love-song of Harrington's,
+_Whence comes my love?_
+
+It suddenly ceased in the middle of the line, and the voice cried to some
+one to come in.
+
+Anthony could hear the door open and close again, and a movement or two,
+which doubtless represented Walsingham's obeisance. Then the Queen's
+voice began again, low, thin, and distinct. The two in the inner room
+listened breathlessly.
+
+"I wish a prisoner in the Tower to be released, Sir Francis; without any
+talk or to-do. And I desire you to do it for me."
+
+There was silence, and then Walsingham's deep tones.
+
+"Your Grace has but to command."
+
+"His name is James Maxwell, and he is a popish priest."
+
+A longer silence followed.
+
+"I do not know if your Grace knows all the circumstances."
+
+"I do, sir, or I should not interfere."
+
+"The feeling of the people was very strong."
+
+"Well, and what of that?"
+
+"It will be a risk of your Grace's favour with them."
+
+"Have I not said that my name was not to appear in the matter? And do you
+think I fear my people's wrath?"
+
+There was silence again.
+
+"Well, Sir Francis, why do you not speak?"
+
+"I have nothing to say, your Grace."
+
+"Then it will be done?"
+
+"I do not see at present how it can be done, but doubtless there is a
+way."
+
+"Then you will find it, sir, immediately," rang out the Queen's metallic
+tones.
+
+(Mary turned and nodded solemnly at Anthony, with pursed lips.)
+
+"He was questioned on the rack two days ago, your Grace."
+
+"Have I not said I know all the circumstances? Do you wish me to say it
+again?"
+
+The Queen was plainly getting angry.
+
+"I ask your pardon, madam; but I only meant that he could not travel
+probably, yet awhile. He was on the rack for four hours, I understand."
+
+(Anthony felt that strange sickness rise again; but Mary laid her cool
+hand on his and smiled at him.)
+
+"Well, well," rasped out Elizabeth, "I do not ask impossibilities."
+
+"They would cease to be so, madam, if you did."
+
+(Mary within the little room put her lips to Anthony's ear:
+
+"Butter!" she whispered.)
+
+"Well, sir," went on the Queen, "you shall see that he has a physician,
+and leave to travel as soon as he will."
+
+"It shall be done, your Grace."
+
+"Very well, see to it."
+
+"I beg your Grace's pardon; but what----"
+
+"Well, what is it now?"
+
+"I would wish to know your Grace's pleasure as to the future for Mr.
+Maxwell. Is no pledge of good behaviour to be exacted from him?"
+
+"Of course he says mass again at his peril. Either he must take the oath
+at once, or he shall be allowed forty-eight hours' safe-conduct with his
+papers for the Continent."
+
+"Your Grace, indeed I must remonstrate----"
+
+Then the Queen's wrath burst out; they heard a swift movement, and the
+rap of her high heels as she sprang to her feet.
+
+"By God's Son," she screamed, "am I Queen or not? I have had enough of
+your counsel. You presume, sir--" her ringed hand came heavily down on
+the table and they heard the lute leap and fall again.--"You presume on
+your position, sir. I made you, and I can unmake you, and by God I will,
+if I have another word of your counselling. Be gone, and see that it be
+done; I will not bid twice."
+
+There was silence again; and they heard the outer door open and close.
+
+Anthony's heart was beating wildly. He had sprung to his feet in a
+trembling excitement as the Queen had sprung to hers. The mere ring of
+that furious royal voice, even without the sight of her pale wrathful
+face and blazing eyes that Walsingham looked upon as he backed out from
+the presence, was enough to make this lad's whole frame shiver. Mary
+apparently was accustomed to this; for she looked up at Anthony, laughing
+silently, and shrugged her shoulders.
+
+Then they heard the Queen's silk draperies rustle and her pearls chink
+together as she sank down again and took up her lute and struck the
+strings. Then the metallic voice began again, with a little tremor in it,
+like the ground-swell after a storm; and she sang the verse through in
+which she had been interrupted:
+
+    "Why thus, my love, so kind bespeak
+    Sweet eye, sweet lip, sweet blushing cheek--
+    Yet not a heart to save my pain;
+    O Venus, take thy gifts again!
+    Make not so fair to cause our moan,
+    Or make a heart that's like your own."
+
+The lute rippled away into silence.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary rose quietly to her feet and nodded to Anthony.
+
+"Come back, you two!" cried the Queen.
+
+Mary stepped straight through, the lad behind her.
+
+"Well," said the Queen, turning to them and showing her black teeth in a
+smile. "Have I kept my word?"
+
+"Ah! your Grace," said Mary, curtseying to the ground, "you have made
+some simple loving hearts very happy to-day--I do not mean Sir Francis'."
+
+The Queen laughed.
+
+"Come here, child," she said, holding out her glittering hand, "down
+here," and Mary sank down on the Queen's footstool, and leaned against
+her knee like a child, smiling up into her face; while Elizabeth put her
+hand under her chin and kissed her twice on the forehead.
+
+"There, there," she said caressingly, "have I made amends? Am I a hard
+mistress?"
+
+And she threw her left hand round the girl's neck and began to play with
+the diamond pendant in her ear, and to stroke the smooth curve of her
+cheek with her flashing fingers.
+
+Anthony, a little on one side, stood watching and wondering at this silky
+tigress who raged so fiercely just now.
+
+Elizabeth looked up in a moment and saw him.
+
+"Why, here is the tall lad here still," she said, "eyeing us as if we
+were monsters. Have you never yet seen two maidens loving one another,
+that you stare so with your great eyes? Aha! Minnie; he would like to be
+sitting where I am--is it not so, sir?"
+
+"I would sooner stand where I am, madam," said Anthony, by a sudden
+inspiration, "and look upon your Grace."
+
+"Why, he is a courtier already," said the Queen. "You have been giving
+him lessons, Minnie, you sly girl."
+
+"A loyal heart makes the best courtier, madam," said Mary, taking the
+Queen's hand delicately in her own.
+
+"And next to looking upon my Grace, Mr. Norris," said Elizabeth, "what do
+you best love?"
+
+"Listening to your Grace," said Anthony, promptly.
+
+Mary turned and flashed all her teeth upon him in a smile, and her eyes
+danced in her head.
+
+Elizabeth laughed outright.
+
+"He is an apt pupil," she said to Mary.
+
+"--You mean the lute, sir?" she added.
+
+"I mean your Grace's voice, madam. I had forgotten the lute."
+
+"Ah, a little clumsy!" said the Queen; "not so true a thrust as the
+others."
+
+"It was not for lack of good-will," said poor Anthony blushing a little.
+He felt in a kind of dream, fencing in language with this strange mighty
+creature in scarlet and pearls, who sat up in her chair and darted
+remarks at him, as with a rapier.
+
+"Aha!" said the Queen, "he is blushing! Look, Minnie!" Mary looked at him
+deliberately. Anthony became scarlet at once; and tried a desperate
+escape.
+
+"It is your livery, madam," he said.
+
+Mary clapped her hands, and glanced at the Queen.
+
+"Yes, Minnie; he does his mistress credit."
+
+"Yes, your Grace; but he can do other things besides talk," explained
+Mary.
+
+Anthony felt like a horse being shown off by a skilful dealer, but he was
+more at his ease too after his blush.
+
+"Extend your mercy, madam," he said, "and bid Mistress Corbet hold her
+tongue and spare my shame."
+
+"Silence, sir!" said the Queen. "Go on, Minnie; what else can he do?"
+
+"Ah! your Grace, he can hawk. Oh! you should see his peregrine;--named
+after your Majesty. That shows his loyal heart."
+
+"I am not sure of the compliment," said the Queen; "hawks are fierce
+creatures."
+
+"It was not for her fierceness," put in Anthony, "that I named her after
+your Grace."
+
+"Why, then, Mr. Norris?"
+
+"For that she soars so high above all other creatures," said the lad,
+"and--and that she never stoops but to conquer."
+
+Mary gave a sudden triumphant laugh, and glanced up, and Elizabeth tapped
+her on the cheek sharply.
+
+"Be still, bad girl," she said. "You must not prompt during the lesson."
+
+And so the talk went on. Anthony really acquitted himself with great
+credit, considering the extreme strangeness of his position; but such an
+intense weight had been lifted off his mind by the Queen's pardon of
+James Maxwell, that his nature was alight with a kind of intoxication.
+
+All his sharpness, such as it was, rose to the surface; and Mary too was
+amazed at some of his replies. Elizabeth took it as a matter of course;
+she was accustomed to this kind of word-fencing; she did not do it very
+well herself: her royalty gave her many advantages which she often
+availed herself of; and her address was not to be compared for a moment
+with that of some of her courtiers and ladies. But still she was amused
+by this slender honest lad who stood there before her in his graceful
+splashed dress, and blushed and laughed and parried, and delivered his
+point with force, even if not with any extraordinary skill.
+
+But at last she began to show signs of weariness; and Mary managed to
+convey to Anthony that it was time to be off. So he began to make his
+adieux.
+
+"Well," said Elizabeth, "let us see you at supper to-night; and in the
+parlours afterwards.--Ah!" she cried, suddenly, "neither of you must say
+a word as to how your friend was released. It must remain the act of the
+Council. My name must not appear; Walsingham will see to that, and you
+must see to it too."
+
+They both promised sincerely.
+
+"Well, then, lad," said Elizabeth, and stretched out her hand; and Mary
+rose and stood by her. Anthony came up and knelt on the cushion and
+received the slender scented ringed hand on his own, and kissed it
+ardently in his gratitude. As he released it, it cuffed him gently on the
+cheek.
+
+"There, there!" said Elizabeth, "Minnie has taught you too much, it
+seems."
+
+Anthony backed out of the presence, smiling; and his last glimpse was
+once more of the great scarlet-clad figure with the slender waist, and
+the priceless pearls, and the haze of muslin behind that crowned auburn
+head, and the pale oval face smiling at him with narrow eyes--and all in
+a glory of sunshine.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He did not see Mary Corbet again until evening as she was with the Queen
+all the afternoon. Anthony would have wished to return to Lambeth; but it
+was impossible, after the command to remain to supper; so he wandered
+down along the river bank, rejoicing in the success of his petition; and
+wondering whether James had heard of his release yet.
+
+Of course it was just a fly in the ointment that his own agency in the
+matter could never be known. It would have been at least some sort of
+compensation for his innocent share in the whole matter of the arrest.
+However, he was too happy to feel the sting of it. He felt, of course,
+greatly drawn to the Queen for her ready clemency; and yet there was
+something repellent about her too in spite of it. He felt in his heart
+that it was just a caprice, like her blows and caresses; and then the
+assumption of youth sat very ill upon this lean middle-aged woman. He
+would have preferred less lute-playing and sprightly innuendo, and more
+tenderness and gravity.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary had arranged that a proper Court-suit should be at his disposal for
+supper, and a room to himself; so after he had returned at sunset, he
+changed his clothes. The white silk suit with the high hosen, the
+embroidered doublet with great puffed and slashed sleeves, the short
+green-lined cloak, the white cap and feather, and the slender sword with
+the jewelled hilt, all became him very well; and he found too that Mary
+had provided him with two great emerald brooches of her own, that he
+pinned on, one at the fastening of the crisp ruff and the other on his
+cap.
+
+He went to the private chapel for the evening prayer at half-past six;
+which was read by one of the chaplains; but there were very few persons
+present, and none of any distinction. Religion, except as a department of
+politics, was no integral part of Court life. The Queen only occasionally
+attended evening-prayer on week days; and just now she was too busy with
+the affair of the Duke of Alencon to spend unnecessary time in that
+manner.
+
+When the evening prayer was over he followed the little company into the
+long gallery that led towards the hall, through which the Queen's
+procession would pass to supper; and there he attached himself to a group
+of gentlemen, some of whom he had met at Lambeth. While they were
+talking, the clang of trumpets suddenly broke out from the direction of
+the Queen's apartments; and all threw themselves on their knees and
+remained there. The doors were flung open by servants stationed behind
+them; and the wands advanced leading the procession; then came the
+trumpeters blowing mightily, with a drum or two beating the step; and
+then in endless profusion, servants and guards; gentlemen pensioners
+magnificently habited, for they were continually about the Queen's
+person; and at last, after an official or two bearing swords, came the
+Queen and Alencon together; she in a superb purple toilet with brocaded
+underskirt and high-heeled twinkling shoes, and breathing out essences as
+she swept by smiling; and he, a pathetic little brown man, pockmarked,
+with an ill-shapen nose and a head too large for his undersized body, in
+a rich velvet suit sparkling all over with diamonds.
+
+As they passed Anthony he heard the Duke making some French compliment in
+his croaking harsh voice. Behind came the crowd of ladies, nodding,
+chattering, rustling; and Anthony had a swift glance of pleasure from
+Mistress Corbet as she went by, talking at the top of her voice.
+
+The company followed on to the hall, behind the distant trumpets, and
+Anthony found himself still with his friends somewhere at the lower
+end--away from the Queen's table, who sat with Alencon at her side on a
+dais, with the great folks about her. All through supper the most
+astonishing noise went on. Everyone was talking loudly; the servants ran
+to and fro over the paved floor; there was the loud clatter over the
+plates of four hundred persons; and, to crown all, a band in the
+musicians' gallery overhead made brazen music all supper-time. Anthony
+had enough entertainment himself in looking about the great
+banqueting-hall, so magnificently adorned with tapestries and armour and
+antlers from the park; and above all by the blaze of gold and silver
+plate both on the tables and on the sideboards; and by watching the army
+of liveried servants running to and fro incessantly; and the glowing
+colours of the dresses of the guests.
+
+Supper was over at last; and a Latin grace was exquisitely sung in four
+parts by boys and men stationed in the musicians' gallery; and then the
+Queen's procession went out with the same ceremony as that with which it
+had entered. Anthony followed behind, as he had been bidden by the Queen
+to the private parlours afterwards; but he presently found his way barred
+by a page at the foot of the stairs leading to the Queen's apartments.
+
+It was in vain that he pleaded his invitation; it was useless, as the
+young gentleman had not been informed of it. Anthony asked if he might
+see Mistress Corbet. No, that too was impossible; she was gone upstairs
+with the Queen's Grace and might not be disturbed. Anthony, in despair,
+not however unmixed with relief at escaping a further ordeal, was about
+to turn away, leaving the officious young gentleman swaggering on the
+stairs like a peacock, when down came Mistress Corbet herself, sailing
+down in her splendour, to see what was become of the gentleman of the
+Archbishop's house.
+
+"Why, here you are!" she cried from the landing as she came down, "and
+why have you not obeyed the Queen's command?"
+
+"This young gentleman," said Anthony, indicating the astonished page,
+"would not let me proceed."
+
+"It is unusual, Mistress Corbet," said the boy, "for her Grace's guests
+to come without my having received instructions, unless they are great
+folk."
+
+Mistress Corbet came down the last six steps like a stooping hawk, her
+wings bulged behind her; and she caught the boy one clean light cuff on
+the side of the head.
+
+"You imp!" she said, "daring to doubt the word of this gentleman. And the
+Queen's Grace's own special guest!"
+
+The boy tried still to stand on his dignity and bar the way, but it was
+difficult to be dignified with a ringing head and a scarlet ear.
+
+"Stand aside," said Mary, stamping her little buckled foot, "this
+instant; unless you would be dragged by your red ear before the Queen's
+Grace. Come, Master Anthony."
+
+So the two went upstairs together, and the lad called up after them
+bitterly:
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mistress; I did not recognise he was your gallant."
+
+"You shall pay for that," hissed Mary over the banisters.
+
+They went along a passage or two, and the sound of a voice singing to a
+virginal began to ring nearer as they went, followed by a burst of
+applause.
+
+"Lady Leicester," whispered Mary; and then she opened the door and they
+went in.
+
+There were three rooms opening on one another with wide entrances, so
+that really one long room was the result. They were all three fairly
+full; that into which they entered, the first in the row, was occupied by
+some gentlemen-pensioners and ladies talking and laughing; some playing
+shove-groat, and some of them still applauding the song that had just
+ended. The middle room was much the same; and the third, which was a step
+higher than the others, was that in which was the Queen, with Lady
+Leicester and a few more. Lady Leicester had just finished a song, and
+was laying her virginal down. There was a great fire burning in the
+middle room, with seats about it, and here Mary Corbet brought Anthony.
+Those near him eyed him a little; but his companion was sufficient
+warrant of his respectability; and they soon got into talk, which was
+suddenly interrupted by the Queen's voice from the next room.
+
+"Minnie, Minnie, if you can spare a moment from your lad, come and help
+us at a dance."
+
+The Queen was plainly in high good-humour; and Mary got up and went into
+the Queen's room. Those round the fire stood up and pushed the seats
+back, and the games ceased in the third room; as her Grace needed
+spectators and applause.
+
+Then there arose the rippling of lutes from the ladies in the next room,
+in slow swaying measure, with the gentle tap of a drum now and again; and
+the _pavane_ began--a stately dignified dance; and among all the ladies
+moved the great Queen herself, swaying and bending with much grace and
+dignity. It was the strangest thing for Anthony to find himself here, a
+raven among all these peacocks, and birds of paradise; and he wondered
+at himself and at the strange humour of Providence, as he watched the
+shimmer of the dresses and the sparkle of the shoes and jewels, and the
+soft clouds of muslin and lace that shivered and rustled as the ladies
+stepped; the firelight shone through the wide doorway on this glowing
+movement, and groups of candles in sconces within the room increased and
+steadied the soft intensity of the light. The soft tingling instruments,
+with the slow tap-tap marking the measure like a step, seemed a
+translation into chord and melody of this stately tender exercise. And so
+this glorious flower-bed, loaded too with a wealth of essences in the
+dresses and the sweet-washed gloves, swayed under the wind of the music,
+bending and rising together in slow waves and ripples. Then it ceased;
+and the silence was broken by a quick storm of applause; while the
+dancers waited for the lutes. Then all the instruments broke out together
+in quick triple time; the stringed instruments supplying a hasty
+throbbing accompaniment, while the shrill flutes began to whistle and the
+drums to gallop;--there was yet a pause in the dance, till the Queen made
+the first movement;--and then the whole whirled off on the wings of a
+_coranto_.
+
+It was bewildering to Anthony, who had never even dreamed of such a dance
+before. He watched first the lower line of the shoes; and the whole
+floor, in reality above, and in the mirror of the polished boards below,
+seemed scintillating in lines of diamond light; the heavy underskirts of
+brocade, puffed satin, and cloth of gold, with glimpses of foamy lace
+beneath, whirled and tossed above these flashing vibrations. Then he
+looked at the higher strata, and there was a tossing sea of faces and
+white throats, borne up as it seemed--now revealed, now hidden--on clouds
+of undulating muslin and lace, with sparkles of precious stones set in
+ruff and wings and on high piled hair.
+
+He watched, fascinated, the faces as they appeared and vanished; there
+was every imaginable expression; the serious looks of one who took
+dancing as a solemn task, and marked her position and considered her
+steps; the wild gaiety of another, all white teeth and dimples and eyes,
+intoxicated by movement and music and colour, as men are by wine, and
+guided and sustained by the furious genius of the dance, rather than by
+intention of any kind. There was the courtly self-restraint of one tall
+beauty, who danced as a pleasant duty and loved it, but never lost
+control of her own bending, slender grace; ah! and there was the oval
+face crowned with auburn hair and pearls, the lower lip drawn up under
+the black teeth with an effort, till it appeared to snarl, and the ropes
+of pearls leaping wildly on her lean purple stomacher. And over all the
+grave oak walls and the bright sconces and the taper flames blown about
+by the eddying gusts from the whirlpool beneath.
+
+As Anthony went down the square winding staircase, an hour later when the
+evening was over, and the keen winter air poured up to meet him, his
+brain was throbbing with the madness of dance and music and whirling
+colour. Here, it seemed to him, lay the secret of life. For a few minutes
+his old day-dreams came back but in more intoxicating dress. The figure
+of Mary Corbet in her rose-coloured silk and her clouds of black hair,
+and her jewels and her laughing eyes and scarlet mouth, and her violet
+fragrance and her fire--this dominated the boy. As he walked towards the
+stables across the starlit court, she seemed to move before him, to hold
+out her hands to him, to call him her own dear lad; to invite him out of
+the drab-coloured life that lay on all sides, behind and before, up into
+a mystic region of jewelled romance, where she and he would live and be
+one in the endless music of rippling strings and shrill flutes and the
+maddening tap of a little hidden drum.
+
+But the familiar touch of his own sober suit and the creaking saddle as
+he rode home to Lambeth, and the icy wind that sang in the river sedges,
+and the wholesome smell of the horse and the touch of the coarse hair at
+the shoulder, talked and breathed the old Puritan common sense back to
+him again. That warm-painted, melodious world he had left was gaudy
+nonsense; and dancing was not the same as living; and Mary Corbet was not
+just a rainbow on the foam that would die when the sun went in; but both
+she and he together were human souls, redeemed by the death of the
+Saviour, with His work to do and no time or energy for folly; and James
+Maxwell in the Tower--(thank God, however, not for long!)--James Maxwell
+with his wrenched joints and forehead and lips wet with agony, was in the
+right; and that lean bitter furious woman in the purple and pearls, who
+supped to the blare of trumpets, and danced to the ripple of lutes,
+wholly and utterly and eternally in the wrong.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI
+
+                        A STATION OF THE CROSS
+
+
+Philosophers tell us that the value of existence lies not in the objects
+perceived, but in the powers of perception. The tragedy of a child over a
+broken doll is not less poignant than the anguish of a worshipper over a
+broken idol, or of a king over a ruined realm. Thus the conflict of
+Isabel during those past autumn and winter months was no less august than
+the pain of the priest on the rack, or the struggle of his innocent
+betrayer to rescue him, or the misery of Lady Maxwell over the sorrows
+that came to her in such different ways through her two sons.
+
+Isabel's soul was tender above most souls; and the powers of feeling pain
+and of sustaining it were also respectively both acute and strong. The
+sense of pressure, or rather of disruption, became intolerable. She was
+indeed a soul on the rack; if she had been less conscientious she would
+have silenced the voice of Divine Love that seemed to call to her from
+the Catholic Church; if she had been less natural and feminine she would
+have trampled out of her soul the appeal of the human love of Hubert. As
+it was, she was wrenched both ways. Now the cords at one end or the other
+would relax a little, and the corresponding relief was almost a shock;
+but when she tried to stir and taste the freedom of decision that now
+seemed in her reach, they would tighten again with a snap; and she would
+find herself back on the torture. To herself she seemed powerless; it
+appeared to her, when she reflected on it consciously, that it was merely
+a question as to which part of her soul would tear first, as to which
+ultimately retained her. She began to be terrified at solitude; the
+thought of the coming night, with its long hours of questioning and
+torment until the dawn, haunted her during the day. She would read in her
+room, or remain at her prayers, in the hopes of distracting herself from
+the struggle, until sleep seemed the supreme necessity: then, when she
+lay down, sleep would flap its wings in mockery and flit away, leaving
+her wide-awake staring at the darkness of the room or of her own eyelids,
+until the windows began to glimmer and the cocks to crow from farm
+buildings.
+
+In spite of her first resolve to fight the battle alone, she soon found
+herself obliged to tell Mistress Margaret all that was possible; but she
+felt that to express her sheer need of Hubert, as she thought it, was
+beyond her altogether. How could a nun understand?
+
+"My darling," said the old lady, "it would not be Calvary without the
+darkness; and you cannot have Christ without Calvary. Remember that the
+Light of the World makes darkness His secret place; and so you see that
+if you were able to feel that any human soul really understood, it would
+mean that the darkness was over. I have suffered that Night twice myself;
+the third time I think, will be in the valley of death."
+
+Isabel only half understood her; but it was something to know that others
+had tasted the cup too; and that what was so bitter was not necessarily
+poisonous.
+
+At another time as the two were walking together under the pines one
+evening, and the girl had again tried to show to the nun the burning
+desolation of her soul, Mistress Margaret had suddenly turned.
+
+"Listen, dear child," she said, "I will tell you a secret. Over there,"
+and she pointed out to where the sunset glowed behind the tree trunks and
+the slope beyond, "over there, in West Grinsted, rests our dear Lord in
+the blessed sacrament. His Body lies lonely, neglected and forgotten by
+all but half a dozen souls; while twenty years ago all England reverenced
+It. Behold and see if there be any sorrow--" and then the nun stopped, as
+she saw Isabel's amazed eyes staring at her.
+
+But it haunted the girl and comforted her now and then. Yet in the
+fierceness of her pain she asked herself again and again, was it
+true--was it true? Was she sacrificing her life for a dream, a
+fairy-story? or was it true that there the body, that had hung on the
+cross fifteen hundred years ago, now rested alone, hidden in a silver
+pyx, within locked doors for fear of the Jews.--Oh! dear Lord, was it
+true?
+
+Hubert had kept his word, and left the place almost immediately after his
+last interview; and was to return at Easter for his final answer.
+Christmas had come and gone; and it seemed to her as if even the
+tenderest mysteries of the Christian Religion had no touch with her now.
+She walked once more in the realm of grace, as in the realm of nature, an
+exile from its spirit. All her sensitive powers seemed so absorbed in
+interior pain that there was nothing in her to respond to or appreciate
+the most keen external impressions. As she awoke and looked up on
+Christmas morning early, and saw the frosted panes and the snow lying
+like wool on the cross-bars, and heard the Christmas bells peal out in
+the listening air; as she came downstairs and the old pleasant acrid
+smell of the evergreens met her, and she saw the red berries over each
+picture, and the red heart of the wood-fire; nay, as she knelt at the
+chancel rails, and tried in her heart to adore the rosy Child in the
+manger, and received the sacred symbols of His Flesh and Blood, and
+entreated Him to remember His loving-kindness that brought Him down from
+heaven--yet the whole was far less real, less intimate to her, than the
+sound of Hubert's voice as he had said good-bye two months ago; less real
+than one of those darting pangs of thought that fell on her heart all day
+like a shower of arrows.
+
+And then, when the sensitive strings of her soul were stretched to
+anguish, a hand dashed across them, striking a wailing discord, and they
+did not break. The news of Anthony's treachery, and still more his
+silence, performed the incredible, and doubled her pain without breaking
+her heart.
+
+On the Tuesday morning early Lady Maxwell had sent her note by a courier;
+bidding him return at once with the answer. The evening had come, and he
+had not appeared. The night passed and the morning came; and it was not
+till noon that the man at last arrived, saying he had seen Mr. Norris on
+the previous evening, and that he had read the note through there and
+then, and had said there was no answer. Surely there could be but one
+explanation of that--that no answer was possible.
+
+It could not be said that Isabel actively considered the question and
+chose to doubt Anthony rather than to trust him. She was so nearly
+passive now, with the struggle she had gone through, that this blow came
+on her with the overwhelming effect of an hypnotic suggestion. Her will
+did not really accept it, any more than her intellect really weighed it;
+but she succumbed to it; and did not even write again, nor question the
+man further. Had she done this she might perhaps have found out the
+truth, that the man, a stupid rustic with enough shrewdness to lie, but
+not enough to lie cleverly, had had his foolish head turned by the buzz
+of London town and the splendour of Lambeth stables and the friendliness
+of the grooms there, and had got heavily drunk on leaving Anthony; that
+the answer which he had put into his hat had very naturally fallen out
+and been lost; and that when at last he returned to the country already
+eight hours after his time, and found the note was missing, he had
+stalwartly lied, hoping that the note was unimportant and that things
+would adjust themselves or be forgotten before a day of reckoning should
+arrive.
+
+And so Isabel's power of resistance collapsed under this last blow; and
+her soul lay still at last, almost too much tormented to feel. Her last
+hope was gone; Anthony had betrayed his friend.
+
+The week crept by, and Saturday came. She went out soon after dinner to
+see a sick body or two in an outlying hamlet; for she had never forgotten
+Mrs. Dent's charge, and, with the present minister's approval, still
+visited the sick one or two days a week at least. Then towards sunset she
+came homewards over some high ground on the outskirts of Ashdown Forest.
+The snow that had fallen before Christmas, had melted a week or two ago;
+and the frost had broken up; it was a heavy leaden evening, with an angry
+glow shining, as through chinks of a wall, from the west towards which
+she was going. The village lay before her in the gloom; and lights were
+beginning to glimmer here and there. She contrasted in a lifeless way
+that pleasant group of warm houses with their suggestions of love and
+homeliness with her own desolate self. She passed up through the village
+towards the Hall, whither she was going to report on the invalids to Lady
+Maxwell; and in the appearance of the houses on either side she thought
+there was an unaccustomed air. Several doors stood wide open with the
+brightness shining out into the twilight, as if the inhabitants had
+suddenly deserted their homes. Others were still dark and cold, although
+the evening was drawing on. There was not a moving creature to be seen.
+She passed up, wondering a little, through the gatehouse, and turned into
+the gravel sweep; and there stopped short at the sight of a great crowd
+of men and women and children, assembled in dead silence. Some one was
+standing at the entrance-steps, with his head bent as if he were talking
+to those nearest him in a low voice.
+
+As she came up there ran a whisper of her name; the people drew back to
+let her through, and she passed, sick with suspense, to the man on the
+steps, whom she now recognised as Mr. James' body-servant. His face
+looked odd and drawn, she thought.
+
+"What is it?" she asked in a sharp whisper.
+
+"Mr. James is here, madam; he is with Lady Maxwell in the cloister-wing.
+Will you please to go up?"
+
+"Mr. James! It is no news about Mr. Anthony--or--or Mr. Hubert!"
+
+"No, madam." The man hesitated. "Mr. James has been racked, madam."
+
+The man's voice broke in a great sob as he ended.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+She reeled against the post; a man behind caught her and steadied her;
+and there was a quick breath of pity from the crowd.
+
+"Ah, poor thing!" said a woman's voice behind her.
+
+"I beg your pardon, madam," said the servant. "I should not have----"
+
+"And--and he is upstairs?"
+
+"He and my lady are together, madam."
+
+She looked at him a moment, dazed with the horror of it; and then going
+past him, pushed open the door and went through into the inner hall. Here
+again she stopped suddenly: it was half full of people, silent and
+expectant--the men, the grooms, the maid-servants, and even two or three
+farm-men. She heard the rustle of her name from the white faces that
+looked at her from the gloom; but none moved; and she crossed the hall
+alone, and turned down the lower corridor that led to the cloister-wing.
+
+At the foot of the staircase she stopped again; her heart drummed in her
+ears, as she listened intently with parted lips. There was a profound
+silence; the lamp on the stairs had not been lighted, and the terrace
+window only let in a pale glimmer.
+
+It was horrible to her! this secret presence of incarnate pain that
+brooded somewhere in the house, this silence of living anguish, worse
+than death a thousand times!
+
+Where was he? What would it look like? Even a scream somewhere would have
+relieved her, and snapped the tension of the listening stillness that lay
+on her like a shocking nightmare. This lobby with its well-known
+doors--the banister on which her fingers rested--the well of the
+staircase up which she stared with dilated eyes--all was familiar; and
+yet, somewhere in the shadows overhead lurked this formidable Presence of
+pain, mute, anguished, terrifying....
+
+She longed to run back, to shriek for help; but she dared not: and stood
+panting. She went up a couple of steps--stopped, listened to the sick
+thumping of her heart--took another step and stopped again; and so,
+listening, peering, hesitating, came to the head of the stairs.
+
+Ah! there was the door, with a line of light beneath it. It was there
+that the horror dwelt. She stared at the thin bright line; waited and
+listened again for even a moan or a sigh from within, but none came.
+
+Then with a great effort she stepped forward and tapped.
+
+There was no answer; but as she listened she heard from within the gentle
+tinkle of some liquid running into a bowl, rhythmically, and with pauses.
+Then again she tapped, nervously and rapidly, and there was a murmur from
+the room; she opened the door softly, pushed it, and took a step into the
+room, half closing it behind her.
+
+There were two candles burning on a table in the middle of the room, and
+on the near side of it was a group of three persons....
+
+Isabel had seen in one of Mistress Margaret's prayer-books an engraving
+of an old Flemish Pieta--a group of the Blessed Mother holding in her
+arms the body of her Crucified Son, with the Magdalen on one side,
+supporting one of the dead Saviour's hands. Isabel now caught her breath
+in a sudden gasp; for here was the scene reproduced before her.
+
+Lady Maxwell was on a low seat bending forwards; the white cap and ruff
+seemed like a veil thrown all about her head and beneath her chin; she
+was holding in her arms the body of her son, who seemed to have fainted
+as he sat beside her; his head had fallen back against her breast, and
+his pointed beard and dark hair and her black dress beyond emphasised the
+deathly whiteness of his face on which the candlelight fell; his mouth
+was open, like a dead man's. Mistress Margaret was kneeling by his left
+hand, holding it over a basin and delicately sponging it; and the whole
+air was fragrant and aromatic with some ointment in the water; a long
+bandage or two lay on the ground beside the basin. The evening light over
+the opposite roofs through the window beyond mingled with the light of
+the tapers, throwing a strange radiance over the group. The table on
+which the tapers stood looked to Isabel like a stripped altar.
+
+She stood by the door, her lips parted, motionless; looking with great
+eyes from face to face. It was as if the door had given access to another
+world where the passion of Christ was being re-enacted.
+
+Then she sank on her knees, still watching. There was no sound but the
+faint ripple of the water into the basin and the quiet breathing of the
+three. Lady Maxwell now and then lifted a handkerchief in silence and
+passed it across her son's face. Isabel, still staring with great wide
+eyes, began to sigh gently to herself.
+
+"Anthony, Anthony, Anthony!" she whispered.
+
+"Oh, no, no, no!" she whispered again under her breath. "No, Anthony! you
+could not, you could not!"
+
+Then from the man there came one or two long sighs, ending in a moan that
+quavered into silence; he stirred slightly in his mother's arms; and then
+in a piteous high voice came the words "_Jesu ... Jesu ... esto mihi
+... Jesus_."
+
+Consciousness was coming back. He fancied himself still on the rack.
+
+Lady Maxwell said nothing, but gathered him a little closer, and bent her
+face lower over him.
+
+Then again came a long sobbing indrawn breath; James struggled for a
+moment; then opened his eyes and saw his mother's face.
+
+Mistress Margaret had finished with the water; and was now swiftly
+manipulating a long strip of white linen. Isabel still sunk on her knees
+watched the bandage winding in and out round his wrist, and between his
+thumb and forefinger.
+
+Then he turned his head sharply towards her with a gasp as if in pain;
+and his eyes fell on Isabel.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said; and his voice was broken and untuneful.
+
+Mistress Margaret turned; and smiled at her; and at the sight the
+intolerable compression on the girl's heart relaxed.
+
+"Come, child," she said, "come and help me with his hand. No, no, lie
+still," she added; for James was making a movement as if to rise.
+
+James smiled at her as she came forward; and she saw that his face had a
+strange look as if after a long illness.
+
+"You see, Mistress Isabel," he said, in the same cracked voice, and with
+an infinitely pathetic courtesy, "I may not rise."
+
+Isabel's eyes filled with sudden tears, his attempt at his old manner was
+more touching than all else; and she came and knelt beside the old nun.
+
+"Hold the fingers," she said; and the familiar old voice brought the girl
+a stage nearer her normal consciousness again.
+
+Isabel took the priest's fingers and saw that they were limp and swollen.
+The sleeve fell back a little as Mistress Margaret manipulated the
+bandage; and the girl saw that the forearm looked shapeless and
+discoloured.
+
+She glanced up in swift terror at his face, but he was looking at his
+mother, whose eyes were bent on his; Isabel looked quickly down again.
+
+"There," said Mistress Margaret, tying the last knot, "it is done."
+
+Mr. James looked his thanks over his shoulder at her, as she nodded and
+smiled before turning to leave the room.
+
+Isabel sat slowly down and watched them.
+
+"This is but a flying visit, Mistress Isabel," said James. "I must leave
+to-morrow again."
+
+He had sat up now, and settled himself in his seat, though his mother's
+arm was still round him. The voice and the pitiful attempt were terrible
+to Isabel. Slowly the consciousness was filtering into her mind of what
+all this implied; what it must have been that had turned this tall
+self-contained man into this weak creature who lay in his mother's arms,
+and fainted at a touch and sobbed. She could say nothing; but could only
+look, and breathe, and look.
+
+Then it suddenly came to her mind that Lady Maxwell had not spoken a
+word. She looked at her; that old wrinkled face with its white crown of
+hair and lace had a new and tremendous dignity. There was no anxiety in
+it; scarcely even grief; but only a still and awful anguish, towering
+above ordinary griefs like a mountain above the world; and there was the
+supreme peace too that can only accompany a supreme emotion--she seemed
+conscious of nothing but her son.
+
+Isabel could not answer James; and he seemed not to expect it; he had
+turned back to his mother again, and they were looking at one another.
+Then in a moment Mistress Margaret came back with a glass that she put to
+James' lips; and he drank it without a word. She stood looking at the
+group an instant or two, and then turned to Isabel.
+
+"Come downstairs with me, my darling; there is nothing more that we can
+do."
+
+They went out of the room together; the mother and son had not stirred
+again; and Mistress Margaret slipped her arm quickly round the girl's
+waist, as they went downstairs.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+In the cloister beneath was a pleasant little oak parlour looking out on
+to the garden and the long south side of the house. Mistress Margaret
+took the little hand-lamp that burned in the cloister itself as they
+passed along silently together, and guided the girl through into the
+parlour on the left-hand side. There was a tall chair standing before the
+hearth, and as Mistress Margaret sat down, drawing the girl with her,
+Isabel sank down on the footstool at her feet, and hid her face on the
+old nun's knees.
+
+There was silence for a minute or two. Mistress Margaret set down the
+lamp on the table beside her, and passed her hands caressingly over the
+girl's hands and hair; but said nothing, until Isabel's whole body heaved
+up convulsively once or twice, before she burst into a torrent of
+weeping.
+
+"My darling," said the old lady in a quiet steady voice, "we should thank
+God instead of grieving. To think that this house should have given two
+confessors to the Church, father and son! Yes, yes, dear child, I know
+what you are thinking of, the two dear lads we both love; well, well, we
+do not know, we must trust them both to God. It may not be true of
+Anthony; and even if it be true--well, he must have thought he was
+serving his Queen. And for Hubert----"
+
+Isabel lifted her face and looked with a dreadful questioning stare.
+
+"Dear child," said the nun, "do not look like that. Nothing is so bad as
+not trusting God."
+
+"Anthony, Anthony!"... whispered the girl.
+
+"James told us the same story as the gentleman on Sunday," went on the
+nun. "But he said no hard word, and he does not condemn. I know his
+heart. He does not know why he is released, nor by whose order: but an
+order came to let him go, and his papers with it: and he must be out of
+England by Monday morning: so he leaves here to-morrow in the litter in
+which he came. He is to say mass to-morrow, if he is able."
+
+"Mass? Here?" said the girl, in the same sharp whisper; and her sobbing
+ceased abruptly.
+
+"Yes, dear; if he is able to stand and use his hands enough. They have
+settled it upstairs."
+
+Isabel continued to look up in her face wildly.
+
+"Ah!" said the old nun again. "You must not look like that. Remember that
+he thinks those wounds the most precious things in the world--yes--and
+his mother too!"
+
+"I must be at mass," said Isabel; "God means it."
+
+"Now, now," said Mistress Margaret soothingly, "you do not know what you
+are saying."
+
+"I mean it," said Isabel, with sharp emphasis; "God means it."
+
+Mistress Margaret took the girl's face between her hands, and looked
+steadily down into her wet eyes. Isabel returned the look as steadily.
+
+"Yes, yes," she said, "as God sees us."
+
+Then she broke into talk, at first broken and incoherent in language, but
+definite and orderly in ideas, and in her interpretations of these last
+months.
+
+Kneeling beside her with her hands clasped on the nun's knee, Isabel told
+her all her struggles; disentangling at last in a way that she had never
+been able to do before, all the complicated strands of self-will and
+guidance and blindness that had so knotted and twisted themselves into
+her life. The nun was amazed at the spiritual instinct of this Puritan
+child, who ranged her motives so unerringly; dismissing this as of self,
+marking this as of God's inspiration, accepting this and rejecting that
+element of the circumstances of her life; steering confidently between
+the shoals of scrupulous judgment and conscience on the one side, and the
+hidden rocks of presumption and despair on the other--these very dangers
+that had baffled and perplexed her so long--and tracing out through them
+all the clear deep safe channel of God's intention, who had allowed her
+to emerge at last from the tortuous and baffling intricacies of character
+and circumstance into the wide open sea of His own sovereign Will.
+
+It seemed to the nun, as Isabel talked, as if it needed just a final
+touch of supreme tragedy to loosen and resolve all the complications; and
+that this had been supplied by the vision upstairs. There she had seen a
+triumphant trophy of another's sorrow and conquest. There was hardly an
+element in her own troubles that was not present in that human Pieta
+upstairs--treachery--loneliness--sympathy--bereavement--and above all the
+supreme sacrificial act of human love subordinated to divine--human love,
+purified and transfigured and rendered invincible and immortal by the
+very immolation of it at the feet of God--all this that the son and
+mother in their welcome of pain had accomplished in the crucifixion of
+one and the heart-piercing of the other--this was light opened to the
+perplexed, tormented soul of the girl--a radiance poured out of the
+darkness of their sorrow and made her way plain before her face.
+
+"My Isabel," said the old nun, when the girl had finished and was hiding
+her face again, "this is of God. Glory to His Name! I must ask James'
+leave; and then you must sleep here to-night, for the mass to-morrow."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The chapel at Maxwell Hall was in the cloister wing; but a stranger
+visiting the house would never have suspected it. Opening out of Lady
+Maxwell's new sitting-room was a little lobby or landing, about four
+yards square, lighted from above; at the further end of it was the door
+into her bedroom. This lobby was scarcely more than a broad passage; and
+would attract no attention from any passing through it. The only piece of
+furniture in it was a great tall old chest as high as a table, that stood
+against the inner wall beyond which was the long gallery that looked down
+upon the cloister garden. The lobby appeared to be practically as broad
+as the two rooms on either side of it; but this was effected by the outer
+wall being made to bulge a little; and the inner wall being thinner than
+inside the two living-rooms. The deception was further increased by the
+two living-rooms being first wainscoted and then hung with thick
+tapestry; while the lobby was bare. A curious person who should look in
+the chest would find there only an old dress and a few pieces of stuff.
+This lobby, however, was the chapel; and through the chest was the
+entrance to one of the priest's hiding holes, where also the altar-stone
+and the ornaments and the vestments were kept. The bottom of the chest
+was in reality hinged in such a way that it would fall, on the proper
+pressure being applied in two places at once, sufficiently to allow the
+side of the chest against the wall to be pushed aside, which in turn gave
+entrance to a little space some two yards long by a yard wide; and here
+were kept all the necessaries for divine worship; with room besides for a
+couple of men at least to be hidden away. There was also a way from this
+hole on to the roof, but it was a difficult and dangerous way; and was
+only to be used in case of extreme necessity.
+
+It was in this lobby that Isabel found herself the next morning kneeling
+and waiting for mass. She had been awakened by Mistress Margaret shortly
+before four o'clock and told in a whisper to dress herself in the dark;
+for it was impossible under the circumstances to tell whether the house
+was not watched; and a light seen from outside might conceivably cause
+trouble and disturbance. So she had dressed herself and come down from
+her room along the passages, so familiar during the day, so sombre and
+suggestive now in the black morning with but one shaded light placed at
+the angles. Other figures were stealing along too; but she could not tell
+who they were in the gloom. Then she had come through the little
+sitting-room where the scene of last night had taken place and into the
+lobby beyond.
+
+But the whole place was transformed.
+
+Over the old chest now hung a picture, that usually was in Lady Maxwell's
+room, of the Blessed Mother and her holy Child, in a great carved frame
+of some black wood. The chest had become an altar: Isabel could see the
+slight elevation in the middle of the long white linen cloth where the
+altar-stone lay, and upon that again, at the left corner, a pile of linen
+and silk. Upon the altar at the back stood two slender silver
+candlesticks with burning tapers in them; and a silver crucifix between
+them. The carved wooden panels, representing the sacrifice of Isaac on
+the one half and the offering of Melchisedech on the other, served
+instead of an embroidered altar-frontal. Against the side wall stood a
+little white-covered folding table with the cruets and other necessaries
+upon it.
+
+There were two or three benches across the rest of the lobby; and at
+these were kneeling a dozen or more persons, motionless, their faces
+downcast. There was a little wind such as blows before the dawn moaning
+gently outside; and within was a slight draught that made the taper
+flames lean over now and then.
+
+Isabel took her place beside Mistress Margaret at the front bench; and as
+she knelt forward she noticed a space left beyond her for Lady Maxwell. A
+moment later there came slow and painful steps through the sitting-room,
+and Lady Maxwell came in very slowly with her son leaning on her arm and
+on a stick. There was a silence so profound that it seemed to Isabel as
+if all had stopped breathing. She could only hear the slow plunging pulse
+of her own heart.
+
+James took his mother across the altar to her place, and left her there,
+bowing to her; and then went up to the altar to vest. As he reached it
+and paused, a servant slipped out and received the stick from him. The
+priest made the sign of the cross, and took up the amice from the
+vestments that lay folded on the altar. He was already in his cassock.
+
+Isabel watched each movement with a deep agonising interest; he was so
+frail and broken, so bent in his figure, so slow and feeble in his
+movements. He made an attempt to raise the amice but could not, and
+turned slightly; and the man from behind stepped up again and lifted it
+for him. Then he helped him with each of the vestments, lifted the alb
+over his head and tenderly drew the bandaged hands through the sleeves;
+knit the girdle round him; gave him the stole to kiss and then placed it
+over his neck and crossed the ends beneath the girdle and adjusted the
+amice; then he placed the maniple on his left arm, but so tenderly! and
+lastly, lifted the great red chasuble and dropped it over his head and
+straightened it--and there stood the priest as he had stood last Sunday,
+in crimson vestments again; but bowed and thin-faced now.
+
+Then he began the preparation with the servant who knelt beside him in
+his ordinary livery, as server; and Isabel heard the murmur of the Latin
+words for the first time. Then he stepped up to the altar, bent slowly
+and kissed it and the mass began.
+
+Isabel had a missal, lent to her by Mistress Margaret; but she hardly
+looked at it; so intent was she on that crimson figure and his strange
+movements and his low broken voice. It was unlike anything that she had
+ever imagined worship to be. Public worship to her had meant hitherto one
+of two things--either sitting under a minister and having the word
+applied to her soul in the sacrament of the pulpit; or else the saying of
+prayers by the minister aloud and distinctly and with expression, so that
+the intellect could follow the words, and assent with a hearty Amen. The
+minister was a minister to man of the Word of God, an interpreter of His
+gospel to man.
+
+But here was a worship unlike all this in almost every detail. The priest
+was addressing God, not man; therefore he did so in a low voice, and in a
+tongue as Campion had said on the scaffold "that they both understood."
+It was comparatively unimportant whether man followed it word for word,
+for (and here the second radical difference lay) the point of the worship
+for the people lay, not in an intellectual apprehension of the words, but
+in a voluntary assent to and participation in the supreme act to which
+the words were indeed necessary but subordinate. It was the thing that
+was done; not the words that were said, that was mighty with God. Here,
+as these Catholics round Isabel at any rate understood it, and as she too
+began to perceive it too, though dimly and obscurely, was the sublime
+mystery of the Cross presented to God. As He looked down well pleased
+into the silence and darkness of Calvary, and saw there the act
+accomplished by which the world was redeemed, so here (this handful of
+disciples believed), He looked down into the silence and twilight of this
+little lobby, and saw that same mystery accomplished at the hands of one
+who in virtue of his participation in the priesthood of the Son of God
+was empowered to pronounce these heart-shaking words by which the Body
+that hung on Calvary, and the Blood that dripped from it there, were
+again spread before His eyes, under the forms of bread and wine.
+
+Much of this faith of course was still dark to Isabel; but yet she
+understood enough; and when the murmur of the priest died to a throbbing
+silence, and the worshippers sank in yet more profound adoration, and
+then with terrible effort and a quick gasp or two of pain, those wrenched
+bandaged hands rose trembling in the air with Something that glimmered
+white between them; the Puritan girl too drooped her head, and lifted up
+her heart, and entreated the Most High and most Merciful to look down on
+the Mystery of Redemption accomplished on earth; and for the sake of the
+Well-Beloved to send down His Grace on the Catholic Church; to strengthen
+and save the living; to give rest and peace to the dead; and especially
+to remember her dear brother Anthony, and Hubert whom she loved; and
+Mistress Margaret and Lady Maxwell, and this faithful household: and the
+poor battered man before her, who, not only as a priest was made like to
+the Eternal Priest, but as a victim too had hung upon a prostrate cross,
+fastened by hands and feet; thus bearing on his body for all to see the
+marks of the Lord Jesus.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Lady Maxwell and Mistress Margaret both rose and stepped forward after
+the Priest's Communion, and received from those wounded hands the Broken
+Body of the Lord.
+
+And then the mass was presently over; and the server stepped forward
+again to assist the priest to unvest, himself lifting each vestment off,
+for Father Maxwell was terribly exhausted by now, and laying it on the
+altar. Then he helped him to a little footstool in front of him, for him
+to kneel and make his thanksgiving. Isabel looked with an odd wonder at
+the server; he was the man that she knew so well, who opened the door for
+her, and waited at table; but now a strange dignity rested on him as he
+moved confidently and reverently about the awful altar, and touched the
+vestments that even to her Puritan eyes shone with new sanctity. It
+startled her to think of the hidden Catholic life of this house--of these
+servants who loved and were familiar with mysteries that she had been
+taught to dread and distrust, but before which she too now was to bow her
+being in faith and adoration.
+
+After a minute or two, Mistress Margaret touched Isabel on the arm and
+beckoned to her to come up to the altar, which she began immediately to
+strip of its ornaments and cloth, having first lit another candle on one
+of the benches. Isabel helped her in this with a trembling dread, as all
+the others except Lady Maxwell and her son were now gone out silently;
+and presently the picture was down, and leaning against the wall; the
+ornaments and sacred vessels packed away in their box, with the vestments
+and linen in another. Then together they lifted off the heavy altar
+stone. Mistress Margaret next laid back the lid of the chest; and put her
+hands within, and presently Isabel saw the back of the chest fall back,
+apparently into the wall. Mistress Margaret then beckoned to Isabel to
+climb into the chest and go through; she did so without much difficulty,
+and found herself in the little room behind. There was a stool or two and
+some shelves against the wall, with a plate or two upon them and one or
+two tools. She received the boxes handed through, and followed Mistress
+Margaret's instructions as to where to place them; and when all was done,
+she slipped back again through the chest into the lobby.
+
+The priest and his mother were still in their places, motionless.
+Mistress Margaret closed the chest inside and out, beckoned Isabel into
+the sitting-room and closed the door behind them. Then she threw her arms
+round the girl and kissed her again and again.
+
+"My own darling," said the nun, with tears in her eyes. "God bless
+you--your first mass. Oh! I have prayed for this. And you know all our
+secrets now. Now go to your room, and to bed again. It is only a little
+after five. You shall see him--James--before he goes. God bless you, my
+dear!"
+
+She watched Isabel down the passage; and then turned back again to where
+the other two were still kneeling, to make her own thanksgiving.
+
+Isabel went to her room as one in a dream. She was soon in bed again, but
+could not sleep; the vision of that strange worship she had assisted at;
+the pictorial details of it, the glow of the two candles on the shoulders
+of the crimson chasuble as the priest bent to kiss the altar or to adore;
+the bowed head of the server at his side; the picture overhead with the
+Mother and her downcast eyes, and the radiant Child stepping from her
+knees to bless the world--all this burned on the darkness. With the least
+effort of imagination too she could recall the steady murmur of the
+unfamiliar words; hear the rustle of the silken vestment; the stirrings
+and breathings of the worshippers in the little room.
+
+Then in endless course the intellectual side of it all began to present
+itself. She had assisted at what the Government called a crime; it was
+for that--that collection of strange but surely at least innocent
+things--actions, words, material objects--that men and women of the same
+flesh and blood as herself were ready to die; and for which others
+equally of one nature with herself were ready to put them to death. It
+was the mass--the mass--she had seen--she repeated the word to herself,
+so sinister, so suggestive, so mighty. Then she began to think again--if
+indeed it is possible to say that she had ever ceased to think of him--of
+Anthony, who would be so much horrified if he knew; of Hubert, who had
+renounced this wonderful worship, and all, she feared, for love of
+her--and above all of her father, who had regarded it with such
+repugnance:--yes, thought Isabel, but he knows all now. Then she thought
+of Mistress Margaret again. After all, the nun had a spiritual life which
+in intensity and purity surpassed any she had ever experienced or even
+imagined; and yet the heart of it all was the mass. She thought of the
+old wrinkled quiet face when she came back to breakfast at the Dower
+House: she had soon learnt to read from that face whether mass had been
+said that morning or not at the Hall. And Mistress Margaret was only one
+of thousands to whom this little set of actions half seen and words half
+heard, wrought and said by a man in a curious dress, were more precious
+than all meditation and prayer put together. Could the vast
+superstructure of prayer and effort and aspiration rest upon a piece of
+empty folly such as children or savages might invent?
+
+Then very naturally, as she began now to get quieter and less excited,
+she passed on to the spiritual side of it.
+
+Had that indeed happened that Mistress Margaret believed--that the very
+Body and Blood of her own dear Saviour, Jesus Christ, had in virtue of
+His own clear promise--His own clear promise!--become present there under
+the hands of His priest? Was it, indeed,--this half-hour action,--the
+most august mystery of time, the Lamb eternally slain, presenting Himself
+and His Death before the Throne in a tremendous and bloodless
+Sacrifice--so august that the very angels can only worship it afar off
+and cannot perform it; or was it all a merely childish piece of
+blasphemous mummery, as she had been brought up to believe? And then this
+Puritan girl, who was beginning to taste the joys of release from her
+misery now that she had taken this step, and united a whole-hearted
+offering of herself to the perfect Offering of her Lord--now her soul
+made its first trembling movement towards a real external authority. "I
+believe," she rehearsed to herself, "not because my spiritual experience
+tells me that the Mass is true, for it does not; not because the Bible
+says so, because it is possible to interpret that in more than one way;
+but because that Society which I now propose to treat as Divine--the
+Representative of the Incarnate Word--nay, His very mystical Body--tells
+me so: and I rely upon that, and rest in her arms, which are the Arms of
+the Everlasting, and hang upon her lips, through which the Infallible
+Word speaks."
+
+And so Isabel, in a timid peace at last, from her first act of Catholic
+faith, fell asleep.
+
+She awoke to find the winter sun streaming into her room, and Mistress
+Margaret by her bedside.
+
+"Dear child," said the old lady, "I would not wake you earlier; you have
+had such a short night; but James leaves in an hour's time; and it is
+just nine o'clock, and I know you wish to see him."
+
+When she came down half an hour later she found Mistress Margaret waiting
+for her outside Lady Maxwell's room.
+
+"He is in there," she said. "I will tell Mary"; and she slipped in.
+Isabel outside heard the murmur of voices, and in a moment more was
+beckoned in by the nun.
+
+James Maxwell was sitting back in a great chair, looking exhausted and
+white. His mother, with something of the same look of supreme suffering
+and triumph, was standing behind his chair. She smiled gravely and
+sweetly at Isabel, as if to encourage her; and went out at the further
+door, followed by her sister.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," said the priest, without any introductory words, in
+his broken voice, and motioning her to a seat, "I cannot tell you what
+joy it was to see you at mass. Is it too much to hope that you will seek
+admission presently to the Catholic Church?"
+
+Isabel sat with downcast eyes. His tone was a little startling to her. It
+was as courteous as ever, but less courtly: there was just the faintest
+ring in it, in spite of its weakness, as of one who spoke with authority.
+
+"I--I thank you, Mr. James," she said. "I wish to hear more at any rate."
+
+"Yes, Mistress Isabel; and I thank God for it. Mr. Barnes will be the
+proper person. My mother will let him know; and I have no doubt that he
+will receive you by Easter, and that you can make your First Communion on
+that day."
+
+She bowed her head, wondering a little at his assurance.
+
+"You will forgive me, I know, if I seem discourteous," went on the
+priest, "but I trust you understand the terms on which you come. You come
+as a little child, to learn; is it not so? Simply that?"
+
+She bowed her head again.
+
+"Then I need not keep you. If you will kneel, I will give you my
+blessing."
+
+She knelt down at once before him, and he blessed her, lifting his
+wrenched hand with difficulty and letting it sink quickly down again.
+
+By an impulse she could not resist she leaned forward on her knees and
+took it gently into her two soft hands and kissed it.
+
+"Oh! forgive him, Mr. Maxwell; I am sure he did not know." And then her
+tears poured down.
+
+"My child," said his voice tenderly, "in any case I not only forgive him,
+but I thank him. How could I not? He has brought me love-tokens from my
+Lord."
+
+She kissed his hand again, and stood up; her eyes were blinded with
+tears; but they were not all for grief.
+
+Then Mistress Margaret came in from the inner room, and led the girl out;
+and the mother came in once more to her son for the ten minutes before he
+was to leave her.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                         A STRIFE OF TONGUES
+
+
+Anthony now settled down rather drearily to the study of religious
+controversy. The continual contrasts that seemed forced upon him by the
+rival systems of England and Rome (so far as England might be said to
+have a coherent system at this time), all tended to show him that there
+were these two sharply-divided schemes, each claiming to represent
+Christ's Institution, and each exclusive of the other. Was it of Christ's
+institution that His Church should be a department of the National Life;
+and that the civil prince should be its final arbiter and ruler, however
+little he might interfere in its ordinary administration? This was
+Elizabeth's idea. Or was the Church, as Mr. Buxton had explained it, a
+huge unnational Society, dependent, it must of course be, to some extent
+on local circumstances, but essentially unrestricted by limit of
+nationality or of racial tendencies? This was the claim of Rome. Of
+course an immense number of other arguments circled round this--in fact,
+most of the arguments that are familiar to controversialists at the
+present day; but the centre of all, to Anthony's mind, as indeed it was
+to the mind of the civil and religious authorities of the time, was the
+question of supremacy--Elizabeth or Gregory?
+
+He read a certain number of books; and it will be remembered that he had
+followed, with a good deal of intelligence, Campion's arguments. Anthony
+was no theologian, and therefore missed perhaps the deep, subtle
+arguments; but he had a normal mind, and was able to appreciate and
+remember some salient points.
+
+For example, he was impressed greatly by the negative character of
+Protestantism in such books as Nicholl's "Pilgrimage." In this work a man
+was held up as a type to be imitated whose whole religion to all
+appearances consisted of holding the Pope to be Antichrist, and his
+Church the synagogue of Satan, of disliking the doctrines of merit and of
+justification by works, of denying the Real Presence, and of holding
+nothing but what could be proved to his own satisfaction by the
+Scriptures.
+
+Then he read as much as he could of the great Jewell controversy. This
+Bishop of Salisbury, who had, however, recanted his Protestant opinions
+under Mary, and resumed them under Elizabeth, had published in 1562 his
+"Apology of the Church of England," a work of vast research and learning.
+Mr. Harding, who had also had the advantage of having been on both sides,
+had answered it; and then the battle was arrayed. It was of course mostly
+above Anthony's head; but he gained from what he was able to read of it a
+very fair estimate of the conflicting theses, though he probably could
+not have stated them intelligibly. He also made acquaintance with another
+writer against Jewell,--Rastall; and with one or two of Mr. Willet's
+books, the author of "Synopsis Papismi" and "Tretrastylon Papisticum."
+
+Even more than by paper controversy, however, he was influenced by
+history that was so rapidly forming before his eyes. The fact and the
+significance of the supremacy of the Queen in religion was impressed upon
+him more vividly by her suspension of Grindal than by all the books he
+ever read: here was the first ecclesiastic of the realm, a devout, humble
+and earnest man, restrained from exercising his great qualities as ruler
+and shepherd of his people, by a woman whose religious character
+certainly commanded no one's respect, even if her moral life were free
+from scandal; and that, not because the Archbishop had been guilty of any
+crime or heresy, or was obviously unfitted for his post, but because his
+conscientious judgment on a point of Church discipline and liberty
+differed from hers; and this state of things was made possible not by an
+usurpation of power, but by the deliberately ordered system of the Church
+of England. Anthony had at least sufficient penetration to see that this,
+as a fundamental principle of religion, however obscured it might be by
+subsequent developments, was yet fraught with dangers compared with which
+those of papal interference were comparatively trifling--dangers that is,
+not so much to earthly peace and prosperity, as to the whole spiritual
+nature of the nation's Christianity.
+
+Yet another argument had begun to suggest itself, bearing upon the same
+point, of the relative advantages and dangers of Nationalism. When he had
+first entered the Archbishop's service he had been inspired by the
+thought that the Church would share in the rising splendour of England;
+now he began to wonder whether she could have strength to resist the
+rising worldliness that was bound to accompany it. It is scarcely likely
+that men on fire with success, whether military or commercial, will be
+patient of the restraints of religion. If the Church is independent of
+the nation, she can protest and denounce freely; if she is knit closely
+to the nation, such rebuke is almost impossible.
+
+A conversation that Anthony had on this subject at the beginning of
+February helped somewhat to clear up this point.
+
+He was astonished after dinner one day to hear that Mr. Henry Buxton was
+at the porter's lodge desiring to see him, and on going out he found that
+it was indeed his old acquaintance, the prisoner.
+
+"Good-day, Master Norris," said the gentleman, with his eyes twinkling;
+"you see the mouse has escaped, and is come to call upon the cat."
+
+Anthony inquired further as to the details of his release.
+
+"Well, you see," said Mr. Buxton, "they grew a-weary of me. I talked so
+loud at them all for one thing; and then you see I was neither priest nor
+agent nor conspirator, but only a plain country gentleman: so they took
+some hundred or two pounds off me, to make me still plainer; and let me
+go. Now, Mr. Norris, will you come and dine with me, and resume our
+conversation that was so rudely interrupted by my journey last time? But
+then you see her Majesty would take no denial."
+
+"I have just dined," said Anthony, "but----"
+
+"Well, I will not ask you to see me dine again, as you did last time; but
+will you then sup with me? I am at the 'Running Horse,' Fleet Street,
+until to-morrow."
+
+Anthony accepted gladly; for he had been greatly taken with Mr. Buxton;
+and at six o'clock that evening presented himself at the "Running Horse,"
+and was shown up to a private parlour.
+
+He found Mr. Buxton in the highest good-humour; he was even now on his
+way from Wisbeach, home again to Tonbridge, and was only staying in
+London to finish a little business he had.
+
+Before supper was over, Anthony had laid his difficulties before him.
+
+"My dear friend," said the other, and his manner became at once sober and
+tender, "I thank you deeply for your confidence. After being thought
+midway between a knave and a fool for over a year, it is a comfort to be
+treated as an honest gentleman again. I hold very strongly with what you
+say; it is that, under God, that has kept me steady. As I said to you
+last time, Christ's Kingdom is not of this world. Can you imagine, for
+example, Saint Peter preaching religious obedience to Nero to be a
+Christian's duty? I do not say (God forbid) that her Grace is a Nero, or
+even a Poppaea; but there is no particular reason why some successor of
+hers should not be. However, Nero or not, the principle is the same. I do
+not deny that a National Church may be immensely powerful, may convert
+thousands, may number zealous and holy men among her ministers and
+adherents--but yet her foundation is insecure. What when the tempest of
+God's searching judgments begins to blow?
+
+"Or, to put it plainer, in a parable, you have seen, I doubt not, a
+gallant and his mistress together. So long as she is being wooed by him,
+she can command; he sighs and yearns and runs on errands--in short, she
+rules him. But when they are wedded--ah me! It is she--if he turns out a
+brute, that is--she that stands while my lord plucks off his boots--she
+who runs to fetch the tobacco-pipe and lights it and kneels by him. Now I
+hold that to wed the body spiritual to the body civil, is to wed a
+delicate dame to a brute. He may dress her well, give her jewels, clap
+her kindly on the head--but she is under him and no free woman. Ah!"--and
+then Mr. Buxton's eyes began to shine as Anthony remembered they had done
+before, and his voice to grow solemn,--"and when the spouse is the Bride
+of Christ, purchased by His death, what then would be the sin to wed her
+to a carnal nation, who shall favour her, it may be, while she looks
+young and fair; but when his mood changes, or her appearance, then she is
+his slave and his drudge! His will and his whims are her laws; as he
+changes, so must she. She has to do his foul work; as she had to do for
+King Henry, as she is doing it now for Queen Bess; and as she will always
+have to do, God help her, so long as she is wedded to the nation, instead
+of being free as the handmaiden and spouse of Christ alone. My faith
+would be lost, Mr. Norris, and my heart broken quite, if I were forced to
+think the Church of England to be the Church of Christ."
+
+They talked late that evening in the private baize-curtained parlour on
+the third floor. Anthony produced his difficulties one by one, and Mr.
+Buxton did his best to deal with them. For example, Anthony remarked on
+the fact that there had been no breach of succession as to the edifices
+and endowments of the Church; that the sees had been canonically filled,
+and even the benefices; and that therefore, like it or not, the Church of
+England now was identical with the Pre-Reformation Church.
+
+"_Distinguo_," said his friend. "Of course she is the successor in one
+sense: what you say is very true. It is impossible to put your finger
+all along the line of separation. It is a serrated line. The affairs of a
+Church and a nation are so vast that that is sure to be so; although if
+you insist, I will point to the Supremacy Act of 1559 and the Uniformity
+Act of the same year as very clear evidences of a breach with the ancient
+order; in the former the governance is shifted from its original owner,
+the Vicar of Christ, and placed on Elizabeth; it was that that the
+Carthusian Fathers and Sir Thomas More and many others died sooner than
+allow: and the latter Act sweeps away all the ancient forms of worship in
+favour of a modern one. But I am not careful to insist upon those points;
+if you deny or disprove them,--though I do not envy any who attempts
+that--yet even then my principle remains, that all that to which the
+Church of England has succeeded is the edifices and the endowments; but
+that her spirit is wholly new. If a highwayman knocks me down to-morrow,
+strips me, clothes himself with my clothes, and rides my horse, he is
+certainly my successor in one sense; yet he will be rash if he presents
+himself to my wife and sons--though I have none, by the way--as the
+proper owner of my house and name."
+
+"But there is no knocking down in the question," said Anthony. "The
+bishops and clergy, or the greater part of them, consented to the
+change."
+
+Mr. Buxton smiled.
+
+"Very well," he said; "yet the case is not greatly different if the
+gentleman threatens me with torture instead, if I do not voluntarily give
+him my clothes and my horse. If I were weak and yielded to him, yes, and
+made promises of all kinds in my cowardice--yet he would be no nearer
+being the true successor of my name and fortune. And if you read her
+Grace's Acts, and King Henry's too, you will find that that was precisely
+what took place. My dear sir," Mr. Buxton went on, "if you will pardon my
+saying it, I am astounded at the effrontery of your authorities who claim
+that there was no breach. Your Puritans are wiser; they at least frankly
+say that the old was Anti-Christian; that His Holiness (God forgive me
+for saying it!), was an usurper: and that the new Genevan theology is the
+old gospel brought to light again. That I can understand; and indeed most
+of your churchmen think so too; and that there was a new beginning made
+with Protestantism. But when her Grace calls herself a Catholic, and
+tells the poor Frenchmen that it is the old religion here still: and your
+bishops, or one or two of them rather, like Cheyney, I suppose, say so
+too--then I am rendered dumb--(if that were possible). If it is the same,
+then why, a-God's name, were the altars dragged down, and the screens
+burned, and the vestments and the images and the stoups and the pictures
+and the ornaments, all swept out? Why, a-God's name, was the old mass
+blotted out and this new mingle-mangle brought in, if it be all one? And
+for the last time, a-God's name, why is it death to say mass now, if it
+be all one? Go, go: Such talk is foolishness, and worse."
+
+Mr. Buxton was silent for a moment as Anthony eyed him; and then burst
+out again.
+
+"Ah! but worse than all are the folks that stand with one leg on either
+stool. We are the old Church, say they;--standing with the Protestant leg
+in the air,--therefore let us have the money and the buildings: they are
+our right. And then when a poor Catholic says, Then let us have the old
+mass, and the old penance and the old images: Nay, nay, nay, they say,
+lifting up the Catholic leg and standing on the other, those are Popery;
+and we are Protestants; we have made away with all such mummery and
+muniments of superstition. And so they go see-sawing to and fro. When you
+run at one leg they rest them on the other, and you know not where to
+take them."
+
+And so the talk went on. When the evening was over, and Anthony was
+rising to return to Lambeth, Mr. Buxton put his hand on his arm.
+
+"Good Mr. Norris," he said, "you have been very patient with me. I have
+clacked this night like an old wife, and you have borne with me: and now
+I ask your pardon again. But I do pray God that He may show you light and
+bring you to the true Church; for there is no rest elsewhere."
+
+Anthony thanked him for his good wishes.
+
+"Indeed," he said, too, "I am grateful for all that you have said. You
+have shown me light, I think, on some things, and I ask your prayers."
+
+"I go to Stanfield to-morrow," said Mr. Buxton; "it is a pleasant house,
+though its master says so, not far from Sir Philip Sidney's: if you would
+but come and see me there!"
+
+"I am getting greatly perplexed," said Anthony, "and I think that in good
+faith I cannot stay long with the Archbishop; and if I leave him how
+gladly will I come to you for a few days; but it must not be till then."
+
+"Ah! if you would but make the Spiritual Exercises in my house; I will
+provide a conductor; and there is nothing that would resolve your doubts
+so quickly."
+
+Anthony was interested in this; and asked further details as to what
+these were.
+
+"It is too late," said Mr. Buxton, "to tell you to-night. I will write
+from Stanfield."
+
+Mr. Buxton came downstairs with Anthony to see him on to his horse, and
+they parted with much good-will; and Anthony rode home with a heavy and
+perplexed heart to Lambeth.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He spent a few days more pondering; and then determined to lay his
+difficulties before the Archbishop; and resign his position if Grindal
+thought it well.
+
+He asked for an interview, and the Archbishop appointed an hour in the
+afternoon at which he would see him in Cranmer's parlour, the room above
+the vestry which formed part of the tower that Archbishop Cranmer had
+added to Lambeth House.
+
+Anthony, walking up and down in the little tiled cloisters by the creek,
+a few minutes before the hour fixed, heard organ-music rolling out of the
+chapel windows; and went in to see who was playing. He came in through
+the vestry, and looking to the west end gallery saw there the back of old
+Dr. Tallis, seated at the little positive organ that the late Archbishop
+had left in his chapel, and which the present Archbishop had gladly
+retained, for he was a great patron of music, and befriended many
+musicians when they needed help--Dr. Tallis, as well as Byrd, Morley and
+Tye. There were a few persons in the chapel listening, the Reverend Mr.
+Wilson, one of the chaplains, being among them; and Anthony thought that
+he could not do better than sit here a little and quiet his thoughts,
+which were nervous and distracted at the prospect of his coming
+interview. He heard voices from overhead, which showed that the
+Archbishop was engaged; so he spoke to an usher stationed in the vestry,
+telling him that he was ready as soon as the Archbishop could receive
+him, and that he would wait in the chapel; and then made his way down to
+one of the return stalls at the west end, against the screen, and took
+his seat there.
+
+This February afternoon was growing dark, and the only lights in the
+chapel were those in the organ loft; but there was still enough daylight
+outside to make the windows visible--those famous windows of Morton's,
+which, like those in King's Chapel, Cambridge, combined and interpreted
+the Old and New Testaments by an ingenious system of types and antitypes,
+in the manner of the "Biblia Pauperum." There was then only a single
+subject in each light; and Anthony let his eyes wander musingly to and
+fro in the east window from the central figure of the Crucified to the
+types on either side, especially to a touching group of the unconscious
+Isaac carrying the wood for his own death, as Christ His Cross. Beneath,
+instead of the old stately altar glowing with stuffs and precious metals
+and jewels which had once been the heart of this beautiful shrine, there
+stood now a plain solid wooden table that the Archbishop used for the
+Communion. Anthony looked at it, and sighed a little to himself. Did the
+altar and the table then mean the same thing?
+
+Meanwhile the glorious music was rolling overhead in the high vaulted
+roof. The old man was extemporising; but his manner was evident even in
+that; there was a simple solemn phrase that formed his theme, and round
+this adorning and enriching it moved the grave chords. On and on
+travelled the melody, like the flow of a broad river; now sliding
+steadily through a smiling land of simple harmonies, where dwelt a people
+of plain tastes and solid virtues; now passing over shallows where the
+sun glanced and played in the brown water among the stones, as light
+arpeggio chords rippled up and vanished round about the melody; now
+entering a land of mighty stones and caverns where the echoes rang hollow
+and resonant, as the counterpoint began to rumble and trip like boulders
+far down out of sight, in subaqueous gloom; now rolling out again and
+widening, fuller and deeper as it went, moving in great masses towards
+the edge of the cataract that lies like a line across the landscape: it
+is inevitable now, the crash must come;--a chord or two
+pausing,--pausing;--and then the crash, stupendous and sonorous.
+
+Then on again through elaborate cities where the wits and courtiers
+dwell, and stately palaces slide past upon the banks, and barges move
+upon its breast, on to the sea--that final full close that embraces and
+engulfs all music, all effort, all doubts and questionings, whether in
+art or theology, all life of intellect, heart or will--that fathomless
+eternal deep from which all comes and to which all returns, that men call
+the Love of God.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony stirred in his seat; he had been here ten minutes, proposing to
+take his restless thoughts in hand and quiet them; and, lo! it had been
+done for him by the master who sat overhead. Here he, for the moment,
+remained, ready for anything--glad to take up the wood and bear it to the
+Mount of Sacrifice--content to be carried on in that river of God's Will
+to the repose of God's Heart--content to dwell meantime in the echoing
+caverns of doubt--in the glancing shadows and lights of an active
+life--in his own simple sunlit life in the country--or even to plunge
+over the cataract down into the fierce tormented pools in the dark--for
+after all the sea lay beyond; and he who commits himself to the river is
+bound to reach it.
+
+He heard a step, and the usher stood by him.
+
+"His Grace is ready, Master Norris."
+
+Anthony rose and followed him.
+
+The Archbishop received him with the greatest kindness. As Anthony came
+in he half rose, peering with his half-blind eyes, and smiling and
+holding out his hands.
+
+"Come, Master Norris," he said, "you are always welcome. Sit down;" and
+he placed him in a chair at the table close by his own.
+
+"Now, what is it?" he said kindly; for the old man's heart was a little
+anxious at this formal interview that had been requested by this
+favourite young officer of his.
+
+Then Anthony, without any reserve, told him all; tracing out the long
+tale of doubt by landmarks that he remembered; mentioning the effect
+produced on his mind by the Queen's suspension of the Archbishop,
+especially dwelling on the arrest, the examination and the death of
+Campion, that had made such a profound impression upon him; upon his own
+reading and trains of thought, and the conversations with Mr. Buxton,
+though of course he did not mention his name; he ended by saying that he
+had little doubt that sooner or later he would be compelled to leave the
+communion of the Church of England for that of Rome; and by placing his
+resignation in the Archbishop's hands, with many expressions of gratitude
+for the unceasing kindness and consideration that he had always received
+at his hands.
+
+There was silence when he had finished. A sliding panel in the wall near
+the chapel had been pushed back, and the mellow music of Dr. Tallis
+pealed softly in, giving a sweet and melodious background, scarcely
+perceived consciously by either of them, and yet probably mellowing and
+softening their modes of expression during the whole of the interview.
+
+"Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop at last, "I first thank you for the
+generous confidence you have shown towards me: and I shall put myself
+under a further obligation to you by accepting your resignation: and this
+I do for both our sakes. For yours, because, as you confess, this action
+of the Queen's--(I neither condemn nor excuse it myself)--this action has
+influenced your thoughts: therefore you had best be removed from it to a
+place where you can judge more quietly. And I accept it for my own sake
+too; for several reasons that I need not trouble you with. But in doing
+this, I desire you, Mr. Norris, to continue to draw your salary until
+Midsummer:--nay, nay, you must let me have my say. You are at liberty to
+withdraw as soon as you have wound up your arrangements with Mr.
+Somerdine; he will now, as Yeoman of the Horse, have your duties as well
+as his own; for I do not intend to have another Gentleman of the Horse.
+As regards an increase of salary for him, that can wait until I see him
+myself. In any case, Mr. Norris, I think you had better withdraw before
+Mid-Lent Sunday.
+
+"And now for your trouble. I know very well that I cannot be of much
+service to you. I am no controversialist. But I must bear my witness.
+This Papist with whom you have had talk seems a very plausible fellow.
+His arguments sound very plain and good; and yet I think you could prove
+anything by them. They seem to me like that openwork embroidery such as
+you see on Communion linen sometimes, in which the pattern is formed by
+withdrawing certain threads. He has cleverly omitted just those points
+that would ruin his argument; and he has made a pretty design. But any
+skilful advocate could make any other design by the same methods. He has
+not thought fit to deal with such words of our Saviour as what He says on
+Tradition; with what the Scriptures say against the worshipping of
+angels; with what St. Paul says in his Epistle to the Colossians, in the
+second chapter, concerning all those carnal ordinances which were done
+away by Christ, but which have been restored by the Pope in his despite;
+he does not deal with those terrible words concerning the man of sin and
+the mystery of iniquity. In fact, he takes just one word that Christ let
+fall about His Kingdom, and builds this great edifice upon it. You might
+retort to him in a thousand ways such as these. Bishop Jewell, in his
+book, as you know, deals with these questions and many more; far more
+fully than it is possible for you and me even to dream of doing. Nay, Mr.
+Norris; the only argument I can lay before you is this. There are
+difficulties and troubles everywhere; that there are such in the Church
+of England, who would care to deny? that there are equally such, aye, and
+far more, in the Church of Rome, who would care to deny, either?
+Meanwhile, the Providence of God has set you here and not there. Whatever
+your difficulties are here, are not of your choosing; but if you fly
+there (and I pray God you will not) there they will be. Be content,
+Master Norris; indeed you have a goodly heritage; be content with it;
+lest losing that you lose all."
+
+Anthony was greatly touched by this moderate and courteous line that the
+Archbishop was taking. He knew well in his heart that the Church of Rome
+was, in the eyes of this old man, a false and deceitful body, for whom
+there was really nothing to be said. Grindal, in his travels abroad
+during the Marian troubles, had been deeply attracted by the Genevan
+theology, with whose professors he had never wholly lost touch; and
+Anthony guessed what an effort it was costing him, and what a strain it
+was on his conscience, thus to combine courtesy with faithfulness to what
+he believed to be true.
+
+Grindal apparently feared he had sacrificed his convictions, for he
+presently added: "You know, Mr. Norris, that I think very much worse of
+Papistry than I have expressed; but I have refrained because I think that
+would not help you; and I desire to do that more than to relieve myself."
+
+Anthony thanked him for his gentleness; saying that he quite understood
+his motives in speaking as he had done, and was deeply obliged to him for
+it.
+
+The Archbishop, however, as indeed were most of the English Divines of
+the time, was far more deeply versed in destructive than constructive
+theology; and, to Anthony's regret, was presently beginning in that
+direction.
+
+"It is beyond my imagination. Mr. Norris," he said, "that any who have
+known the simple Gospel should return to the darkness. See here," he went
+on, rising, and fumbling among his books, "I have somewhere here what
+they call an Indulgence."
+
+He searched for a few minutes, and presently shook out of the leaves of
+Jewell's book a paper which he peered at, and then pushed over to
+Anthony.
+
+It was a little rectangular paper, some four or five inches long; bearing
+a figure of Christ, wounded, with His hands bound together before Him,
+and the Cross with the superscription rising behind. In compartments on
+either side were instruments of the Passion, the spear, and the reed with
+the sponge, with other figures and emblems. Anthony spelt out the
+inscription.
+
+"Read it aloud, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop.
+
+"'To them,'" read Anthony, "'that before this image of pity devoutly say
+five paternosters, five aves and a credo, piteously beholding these arms
+of Christ's Passion, are granted thirty-two thousand seven hundred and
+fifty-five years of pardon.'"
+
+"Now, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop, "have you considered that it is
+to that kind of religion that you are attracted? I will not comment on
+it; there is no need."
+
+"Your Grace," said Anthony slowly, laying the paper down, "I need not
+say, I think, that this kind of thing is deeply distasteful to me too.
+Your Grace cannot dislike it more than I do. But then I do not understand
+it; I do not know what indulgences mean; I only know that were they as
+mad and foolish as we Protestants think them, no truthful or good man
+could remain a Papist for a day; but then there are many thoughtful and
+good men Papists; and I conclude from that that what we think the
+indulgences to be, cannot be what they really are. There must be some
+other explanation.
+
+"And again, my lord, may I add this? If I were a Turk I should find many
+things in the Christian religion quite as repellent to me; for example,
+how can it be just, I should ask, that the death of an innocent man, such
+as Christ was, should be my salvation? How, again, is it just that faith
+should save? Surely one who has sinned greatly ought to do something
+towards his forgiveness, and not merely trust to another. But you, my
+lord, would tell me that there are explanations of these difficulties,
+and of many more too, of which I should gradually understand more and
+more after I was a Christian. Or again, it appears to me even now,
+Christian as I am, judging as a plain man, that predestination
+contradicts free-will; and no explanation can make them both reasonable.
+Yet, by the grace of God, I believe all these doctrines and many more,
+not because I understand them, for I do not; but because I believe that
+they are part of the Revelation of God. It is just so, too, with the
+Roman Catholic Church. I must not take this or that doctrine by itself;
+but I must make up my mind whether or no it is the one only Catholic
+Church, and then I shall believe all that she teaches, because she
+teaches it, and not because I understand it. You must forgive my dulness,
+my lord; but I am but a layman, and can only say what I think in simple
+words."
+
+"But we must judge of a Christian body by what that body teaches," said
+the Archbishop. "On what other grounds are you drawn to the Papists,
+except by what they teach?"
+
+"Yes, your Grace," said Anthony, "I do judge of the general body of
+doctrine, and of the effect upon the soul as a whole; but that is not the
+same as taking each small part, and making all hang upon that."
+
+"Well, Mr. Norris," said the Archbishop, "I do not think we can talk much
+more now. It is new to me that these difficulties are upon you. But I
+entreat you to talk to me again as often as you will; and to others
+also--Dr. Redmayn, Mr. Chambers and others will be happy if they can be
+of any service to you in these matters: for few things indeed would
+grieve me more than that you should turn Papist."
+
+Anthony thanked the Archbishop very cordially for his kindness, and,
+after receiving his blessing, left his presence. He had two or three more
+talks with him before he left, but his difficulties were in no way
+resolved. The Archbishop had an essentially Puritan mind, and could not
+enter into Anthony's point of view at all. It may be roughly said that
+from Grindal's standpoint all turned on the position and responsibility
+of the individual towards the body to which he belonged: and that Anthony
+rather looked at the corporate side first and the individual second.
+Grindal considered, for example, the details of the Catholic religion in
+reference to the individual, asking whether he could accept this or that:
+Anthony's tendency was rather to consider the general question first, and
+to take the difficulties in his stride afterwards. Anthony also had
+interviews with the Archdeacon and chaplain whom Grindal had recommended;
+but these were of even less service to him, as Dr. Redmayn was so frankly
+contemptuous, and Mr. Chambers so ignorant, of the Romish religion that
+Anthony felt he could not trust their judgment at all.
+
+In the meanwhile, during this last fortnight of Anthony's Lambeth life,
+he received a letter from Mr. Buxton, explaining what were the Spiritual
+Exercises to which he had referred, and entreating Anthony to come and
+stay with him at Stanfield.
+
+"Now come, dear Mr. Norris," he wrote, "as soon as you leave the
+Archbishop's service; I will place three or four rooms at your disposal,
+if you wish for quiet; for I have more rooms than I know what to do with;
+and you shall make the Exercises if you will with some good priest. They
+are a wonderful method of meditation and prayer, designed by Ignatius
+Loyola (one day doubtless to be declared saint), for the bringing about a
+resolution of all doubts and scruples, and so clearing the eye of the
+soul that she discerns God's Will, and so strengthening her that she
+gladly embraces it. And that surely is what you need just now in your
+perplexity."
+
+The letter went on to describe briefly the method followed, and ended by
+entreating him again to come and see him. Anthony answered this by
+telling him of his resignation of his post at Lambeth, and accepting his
+invitation; and he arranged to spend the last three weeks before Easter
+at Stanfield, and to go down there immediately upon leaving Lambeth. He
+determined not to go to Great Keynes first, or to see Isabel, lest his
+resolution should be weakened. Already, he thought, his motives were
+sufficiently mixed and perverted without his further aggravating their
+earthly constituents.
+
+He wrote to his sister, however, telling her of his decision to leave
+Lambeth; and adding that he was going to stay with a friend until Easter,
+when he hoped to return to the Dower House, and take up his abode there
+for the present. He received what he thought a very strange letter in
+return, written apparently under excitement strongly restrained. He read
+in it a very real affection for himself, but a certain reserve in it too,
+and even something of compassion; and there was a sentence in it that
+above all others astonished him.
+
+"J. M. has been here, and is now gone to Douai. Oh! dear brother, some
+time no doubt you will tell us all. I feel so certain that there is much
+to explain."
+
+Had she then guessed his part in the priest's release? Anthony wondered;
+but at any rate he knew, after his promise to the Queen, that he must not
+give her any clue. He was also surprised to hear that James had been to
+Great Keynes. He had inquired for him at the Tower on the Monday after
+his visit to Greenwich, and had heard that Mr. Maxwell was already gone
+out of England. He had not then troubled to write again, as he had no
+doubt but that his message to Lady Maxwell, which he had sent in his note
+to Isabel, had reached her; and that certainly she, and probably James
+too, now knew that he had been an entirely unconscious and innocent
+instrument in the priest's arrest. But that note, as has been seen, never
+reached its destination. Lady Maxwell did not care to write to the
+betrayer of her son; and Isabel on the one hand hoped and believed now
+that there was some explanation, but on the other did not wish to ask for
+it again, since her first request had been met by silence.
+
+As the last days of his life at Lambeth were coming to an end, Anthony
+began to send off his belongings on pack-horses to Great Keynes; and by
+the time that the Saturday before Mid-Lent Sunday arrived, on which he
+was to leave, all had gone except his own couple of horses and the bags
+containing his personal luggage.
+
+His last interview with the Archbishop affected him very greatly.
+
+He found the old man waiting for him, walking up and down Cranmer's
+parlour in an empty part of the room, where there was no danger of his
+falling. He peered anxiously at Anthony as he entered.
+
+"Mr. Norris," he said, "you are greatly on my mind. I fear I have not
+done my duty to you. My God has taken away the great charge he called me
+to years ago, to see if I were fit or not for the smaller charge of mine
+own household, and not even that have I ruled well."
+
+Anthony was deeply moved.
+
+"My lord," he said, "if I may speak plainly to you, I would say that to
+my mind the strongest argument for the Church of England is that she
+brings forth piety and goodness such as I have seen here. If it were not
+for that, I should no longer be perplexed."
+
+Grindal held up a deprecating hand.
+
+"Do not speak so, Mr. Norris. That grieves me. However, I beseech you to
+forgive me for all my remissness towards you, and I wish to tell you
+that, whatever happens, you shall never cease to have an old man's
+prayers. You have been a good and courteous servant to me always--more
+than that, you have been my loving friend--I might almost say my son: and
+that, in a world that has cast me off and forgotten me, I shall not
+easily forget. God bless you, my dear son, and give you His light and
+grace."
+
+When Anthony rode out of the gateway half an hour later, with his servant
+and luggage behind him, it was only with the greatest difficulty that he
+could keep from tears as he thought of the blind old man, living in
+loneliness and undeserved disgrace, whom he was leaving behind him.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII
+
+                       THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
+
+
+Anthony found that Mr. Buxton had seriously underestimated himself in
+describing his position as that of a plain country gentleman. Stanfield
+was one of the most beautiful houses that he had ever seen. On the day
+after his arrival, his host took him all over the house, at his earnest
+request, and told him its story; and as they passed from room to room,
+again and again Anthony found himself involuntarily exclaiming at the new
+and extraordinary beauties of architecture and furniture that revealed
+themselves.
+
+The house itself had been all built in the present reign, before its
+owner had got into trouble; and had been fitted throughout on the most
+lavish scale, with furniture of German as well as of English manufacture.
+Mr. Buxton was a collector of pictures and other objects of art; and his
+house contained some of the very finest specimens of painting, bronzes,
+enamels, plate and woodwork procurable from the Continent.
+
+The house was divided into two sections; the chief living rooms were in a
+long suite looking to the south on to the gardens, with a corridor on the
+north side running the whole length of the house on the ground-floor,
+from which a staircase rose to a similar corridor or gallery on the first
+floor. The second section of the house was a block of some half-dozen
+smallish rooms, with a private staircase of their own, and a private
+entrance and little walled garden as well in front. The house was mostly
+panelled throughout, and here and there hung pieces of magnificent
+tapestry and cloth of arras. All was kept, too, with a care that was
+unusual in those days--the finest woodwork was brought to a high polish,
+as well as all the brass utensils and steel fire-plates and dogs and such
+things. No two rooms were alike; each possessed some marked
+characteristic of its own--one bedroom, for example, was distinguished by
+its fourpost bed with its paintings on the canopy and head--another, by
+its little two-light high window with Adam and Eve in stained glass;
+another with a little square-window containing a crucifix, which was
+generally concealed by a sliding panel; another by two secret cupboards
+over the fire-place, and its recess fitted as an oratory; another by a
+magnificent piece of tapestry representing Saint Clara and Saint Thomas
+of Aquin, each holding a monstrance, with a third great monstrance in the
+centre, supported by angels.
+
+Downstairs the rooms were on the same scale of magnificence. The
+drawing-room had an exquisite wooden ceiling with great pendants
+elaborately carved; the dining-room was distinguished by its glass,
+containing a collection of coats-of-arms of many of Mr. Buxton's friends
+who had paid him visits; the hall by its vast fire-place and the
+tapestries that hung round it.
+
+The exterior premises were scarcely less remarkable; a fine row of
+stables, and kennels where greyhounds were kept, stood to the north and
+the east of the house; but the wonder of the country was the gardens to
+the south. Anthony hardly knew what to say for admiration as he went
+slowly through these with his host, on the bright spring morning, after
+visiting the house. These were elaborately laid out, and under Mr.
+Buxton's personal direction, for he was one of the few people in England
+at this time who really understood or cared for the art. His avenue of
+small clipped limes running down the main walk of the garden, his
+yew-hedges fashioned with battlements and towers; his great garden house
+with its vane; his fantastic dial in the fashion of a tall striped pole
+surmounted by a dragon;--these were the astonishment of visitors; and it
+was freely said that had not Mr. Buxton been exceedingly adroit he would
+have paid the penalty of his magnificence and originality by being forced
+to receive a royal visit--a favour that would have gone far to
+impoverish, if not to ruin him. The chancel of the parish-church
+overlooked the west end of his lime-avenue, while the east end of the
+garden terminated in a great gateway, of stone posts and wrought iron
+gates that looked out to the meadows and farm buildings of the estate,
+and up to which some day no doubt a broad carriage drive would be laid
+down. But at present the sweep of the meadows was unbroken.
+
+It was to this beautiful place that Anthony found himself welcomed. His
+host took him at once on the evening of his arrival to the west block,
+and showed him his bedroom--that with the little cupboards and the
+oratory recess; and then, taking him downstairs again, showed him a
+charming little oak parlour, which he told him would be altogether at his
+private service.
+
+"And you see," added Mr. Buxton, "in this walled garden in front you can
+have complete privacy, and thus can take the air without ever coming to
+the rest of the house; to which there is this one entrance on the ground
+floor." And then he showed him how the lower end of the long corridor
+communicated with the block.
+
+"The only partners of this west block," he added, "will be the two
+priests--Mr. Blake, my chaplain, and Mr. Robert, who is staying with me a
+week or two; and who, I hope, will conduct you through the Exercises, as
+he is very familiar with them. You will meet them both at supper: of
+course they will be both dressed as laymen. The Protestants blamed poor
+Campion for that, you know; but had he not gone in disguise, they would
+only have hanged him all the sooner. I like not hypocrisy."
+
+Anthony was greatly impressed by Father Robert when he met him at supper.
+He was a tall and big man, who seemed about forty years of age, with a
+long square-jawed face, a pointed beard and moustache, and shrewd
+penetrating eyes. He seemed to be a man in advance of his time; he was
+full of reforms and schemes that seemed to Anthony remarkably to the
+point; and they were reforms too quite apart from ecclesiasticism, but
+rather such as would be classed in our days under the title of Christian
+Socialism.
+
+For example, he showed a great sympathy for the condition of the poor and
+outcast and criminals; and had a number of very practical schemes for
+their benefit.
+
+"Two things," he said, in answer to a question of Anthony's, "I would do
+to-morrow if I had the power. First I would allow of long leases for
+fifty and a hundred years. Everywhere the soil is becoming impoverished;
+each man squeezes out of it as much as he can, and troubles not to feed
+the land or to care for it beyond his time. Long leases, I hold, would
+remedy this. It would encourage the farmer to look before him and think
+of his sons and his sons' sons. And second, I would establish banks for
+poor men. There is many a man now a-begging who would be living still in
+his own house, if there had been some honest man whom he could have
+trusted to keep his money for him, and, maybe, give him something for the
+loan of it: for in these days, when there is so much enterprise, money
+has become, as it were, a living thing that grows; or at the least a tool
+that can be used; and therefore, when it is lent, it is right that the
+borrower should pay a little for it. This is not the same as the usury
+that Holy Church so rightly condemns: at least, I hold not, though some,
+I know, differ from me."
+
+After supper the talk turned on education: here, too, the priest had his
+views.
+
+"But you are weary of hearing me!" he said, in smiling apology. "You will
+think me a schoolmaster."
+
+"And I pray you to consider me your pupil," said Mr. Buxton. The priest
+made a little deprecating gesture.
+
+"First, then," he said, "I would have a great increase of grammar
+schools. It is grievous to think of England as she will be when this
+generation grows up: the schooling was not much before; but now she has
+lost first the schools that were kept by Religious, and now the teaching
+that the chantry-priests used to give. But this perhaps may turn to
+advantage; for when the Catholic Religion is re-established in these
+realms, she will find how sad her condition is; and, I hope, will remedy
+it by a better state of things than before--first, by a great number of
+grammar schools where the lads can be well taught for small fees, and
+where many scholarships will be endowed; and then, so great will be the
+increase of learning, as I hope, that we shall need to have a third
+university, to which I should join a third Archbishoprick, for the
+greater dignity of both; and all this I should set in the north
+somewhere, Durham or Newcastle, maybe."
+
+He spoke, too, with a good deal of shrewdness of the increase of highway
+robbery, and the remedies for it; remarking that, although in other
+respects the laws were too severe, in this matter their administration
+was too lax; since robbers of gentle birth could generally rely on
+pardon. He spoke of the Holy Brotherhood in Spain (with which country he
+seemed familiar), and its good results in the putting down of violence.
+
+Anthony grew more and more impressed by this man's practical sense and
+ability; but less drawn to him in consequence as his spiritual guide. He
+fancied that true spirituality could scarcely exist in this intensely
+practical nature. When supper was over, and the priests had gone back to
+their rooms, and his host and he were seated before a wide blazing hearth
+in Mr. Buxton's own little room downstairs, he hinted something of the
+sort. Mr. Buxton laughed outright.
+
+"My dear friend," he said, "you do not know these Jesuits (for of course
+you have guessed that he is one); their training and efficiency is beyond
+all imagining. In a week from now you will be considering how ever Father
+Robert can have the heart to eat his dinner or say 'good-day' with such a
+spiritual vision and insight as he has. You need not fear. Like the angel
+in the Revelation, he will call you up to heaven, hale you to the abyss
+and show you things to come. And, though you may not believe it, it is
+the man's intense and simple piety that makes him so clear-sighted and
+practical; he lives so close to God that God's works and methods, so
+perplexing to you and me, are plain to him."
+
+They went on talking together for a while. Mr. Buxton said that Father
+Robert had thought it best for Anthony not to enter Retreat until the
+Monday evening; by which time he could have sufficiently familiarised
+himself with his new surroundings, so as not to find them a distraction
+during his spiritual treatment. Anthony agreed to this. Then they talked
+of all kinds of things. His host told him of his neighbours; and
+explained how it was that he enjoyed such liberty as he did.
+
+"You noticed the church, Mr. Norris, did you not, at your arrival,
+overlooking the garden? It is a great advantage to me to have it so
+close. I can sit in my own garden and hear the Genevan thunders from
+within. He preaches so loud that I might, if I wished, hear sermons, and
+thus satisfy the law and his Reverence; and at the same time not go
+inside an heretical meeting-house, and thus satisfy my own conscience and
+His Holiness. But I fear that would not have saved me, had I not the ear
+of his Reverence. I will tell you how it was. When the laws began to be
+enforced hereabouts, his Reverence came to see me; and sat in that very
+chair that you now occupy.
+
+"'I hear,' said he, cocking his eye at me, 'that her Grace is becoming
+strict, and more careful for the souls of her subjects.'
+
+"I agreed with him, and said I had heard as much.
+
+"'The fine is twenty pounds a month,' says he, 'for recusancy,' and then
+he looks at me again."
+
+"At first I did not catch his meaning; for, as you have noticed, Mr.
+Norris, I am but a dull man in dealing with these sharp and subtle
+Protestants: and then all at once it flashed across me.
+
+"'Yes, your Reverence,' I said, 'and it will be the end of poor gentlemen
+like me, unless some kind friend has pity on them. How happy I am in
+having you!' I said, 'I have never yet shown my appreciation as I should:
+and I propose now to give you, to be applied to what purposes you will,
+whether the sustenance of the minister or anything else, the sum of ten
+pounds a month; so long as I am not troubled by the Council. Of course,
+if I should be fined by the Council, I shall have to drop my appreciation
+for six months or so.'
+
+"Well, Mr. Norris, you will hardly believe it, but the old doctor opened
+his mouth and gulped and rolled his eyes, like a trout taking a fly; and
+I was never troubled until fifteen months ago, when they got at me in
+spite of him. But he has lost, you see, a matter of one hundred and fifty
+pounds while I have been at Wisbeach; and I shall not begin to appreciate
+him again for another six months; so I do not think I shall be troubled
+again."
+
+Anthony was amazed, and said so.
+
+"Well," said the other, "I was astonished too; and should never have
+dreamt of appreciating him in such a manner unless he had proposed it. I
+had a little difficulty with Mr. Blake, who told me that it was a
+_libellum_, and that I should be ashamed to pay hush money. But I told
+him that he might call it what he pleased, but that I would sooner pay
+ten pounds a month and be in peace, than twenty pounds a month and be
+perpetually harassed: and Father Robert agrees with me, and so the other
+is content now."
+
+The next day, which was Sunday, passed quietly. Mass was no doubt said
+somewhere in the house; though Anthony saw no signs of it. He himself
+attended the reverend doctor's ministrations in the morning; and found
+him to be what he had been led to expect.
+
+In the afternoon he walked up and down the lime avenue with Father
+Robert, while the evening prayer and sermon rumbled forth through the
+broken chancel window; and they talked of the Retreat and the
+arrangements.
+
+"You no doubt think, Mr. Norris," said the priest, "that I shall preach
+at you in this Retreat, and endeavour to force you into the Catholic
+Church; but I shall do nothing of the kind. The whole object of the
+Exercises is to clear away the false motives that darken the soul; to
+place the Figure of our Redeemer before the soul as her dear and adorable
+Lover and King; and then to kindle and inspire the soul to choose her
+course through the grace of God, for the only true final motive of all
+perfect action,--that is, the pure Love of God. Of course I believe, with
+the consent of my whole being, that the Catholic Church is in the right;
+but I shall not for a moment attempt to compel you to accept her. The
+final choice, as indeed the Retreat too, must be your free action, not
+mine."
+
+They arranged too the details of the Retreat; and Anthony was shown the
+little room beyond Father Robert's bedroom, where the Exercises would be
+given; and informed that another gentleman who lived in the neighbourhood
+would come in every day for them too, but that he would have his meals
+separately, and that Anthony himself would have his own room and the room
+beneath entirely at his private disposal, as well as the little walled
+garden to walk in.
+
+The next day Mr. Buxton took Anthony a long ride, to invigorate him for
+the Retreat that would begin after supper. Anthony learned to his
+astonishment and delight that Mary Corbet was a great friend of Mr.
+Buxton's.
+
+"Why, of course I know her," he said. "I have known her since she was a
+tiny girl, and threw her mass-book at the minister's face the first time
+he read the morning prayer. God only knows why she was so wroth with the
+man for differing from herself on a point that has perplexed the wisest
+heads: but at any rate, wroth she was, and bang went her book. I had to
+take her out, and she was spitting like a kitten all down the aisle when
+the dog puts his head into the basket.
+
+"'What's that man doing here?' she screamed out; 'where's the altar and
+the priest?' And then at the door, as luck would have had it, she saw
+that Saint Christopher was gone; and she began bewailing and bemoaning
+him until you'd have thought he'd have been bound to come down from
+heaven, as he did once across the dark river, and see what in the world
+the crying child wanted with him."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+They came about half-way in their ride through the village of Penshurst;
+and on reaching the Park turned off under the beeches towards the house.
+
+"We have not time to go in," said Mr. Buxton, "but I hope you will see
+the house sometime; it is a pattern of what a house should be; and has a
+pattern master."
+
+As they came up to the Edwardine Gate-house, a pleasant-faced,
+quietly-dressed gentleman came riding out alone.
+
+"Why, here he is!" said Mr. Buxton, and greeted him with great warmth,
+and made Anthony known to him.
+
+"I am delighted to know Mr. Norris," said Sidney, with that keen friendly
+look that was so characteristic of him. "I have heard of him from many
+quarters."
+
+He entreated them to come in; but Mr. Buxton said they had not time; but
+would if they might just glance into the great court. So Sidney took them
+through the gate-house and pointed out one or two things of interest from
+the entrance, the roof of the Great Hall built by Sir John de Pulteney,
+the rare tracery in its windows and the fine living-rooms at one side.
+
+"I thank God for it every day," said Sidney gravely. "I cannot imagine
+why He should have given it me. I hope I am not fool enough to disparage
+His gifts, and pretend they are nothing: indeed, I love it with all my
+heart. I would as soon think of calling my wife ugly or a shrew."
+
+"That is a good man and a gentleman," said Mr. Buxton, as they rode away
+at last in the direction of Leigh after leaving Sidney to branch off
+towards Charket, "and I do not know why he is not a Catholic. And he is a
+critic and a poet, men say, too."
+
+"Have you read anything of his?" asked Anthony.
+
+"Well," said the other, "to tell the truth, I have tried to read some
+sheets of his that he wrote for his sister, Lady Pembroke. He calls it
+'Arcadia'; I do not know whether it is finished or ever will be. But it
+seemed to me wondrous dull. It was full of shepherds and swains and
+nymphs, who are perpetually eating collations which Phoebus or sunburnt
+Autumn, and the like, provides of his bounty; or any one but God
+Almighty; or else they are bathing and surprising one another all day
+long. It is all very sweet and exquisite, I know; and the Greece, where
+they all live and love one another, must be a very delightful country, as
+unlike this world as it is possible to imagine; but it wearies me. I like
+plain England and plain folk and plain religion and plain fare; but then
+I am a plain man, as I tell you so often."
+
+As the afternoon sun drew near setting, they came through Tonbridge.
+
+"Now, what can a man ask more," said Mr. Buxton, as they rode through it,
+"than a good town like this? It is not a great place, I know, with solemn
+buildings and wide streets; neither is it a glade or a dell; but it is a
+good clean English town; and I would not exchange it for Arcadia or
+Athens either."
+
+Stanfield lay about two miles to the west; and on their way out, Mr.
+Buxton talked on about the country and its joys and its usefulness.
+
+"Over there," he said, pointing towards Eridge, "was the first cannon
+made in England. I do not know if that is altogether to its credit, but
+it at least shows that we are not quite idle and loutish in the country.
+Then all about here is the iron; the very stirrups you ride in, Mr.
+Norris, most likely came from the ground beneath your feet; but it is sad
+to see all the woods cut down for the smelting of it. All these places
+for miles about here, and about Great Keynes too, are all named after the
+things of forestry and hunting. Buckhurst, Hartfield, Sevenoaks, Forest
+Row, and the like, all tell of the country, and will do so long after we
+are dead and gone."
+
+They reached Stanfield, rode past the green and the large piece of water
+there, and up the long village street, and turned into the iron gates
+beyond the church, just as the dusk fell.
+
+That evening after supper the Retreat began. The conduct of the Spiritual
+Exercises had not reached the elaboration to which they have been
+perfected since; nor, in Anthony's case, a layman and a young man, did
+Father Robert think fit to apply it even in all the details in which it
+would be used for a priest or for one far advanced in the spiritual life;
+but it was severe enough.
+
+Every evening Father Robert indicated the subject of the following day's
+meditation; and then after private prayer Anthony retired to his room. He
+rose about seven o'clock in the morning, and took a little food at eight;
+then shortly before nine the first meditation was given elaborately. The
+first examination of conscience was made at eleven; followed by dinner at
+half-past. From half-past twelve to half-past one Anthony rested in his
+room; then until three he was encouraged to walk in the garden; at three
+the meditation was to be recalled point by point in the chapel, followed
+by spiritual reading; at five o'clock supper was served; and at half-past
+six the meditation was repeated with tremendous emphasis and fervent acts
+of devotion; at half-past eight a slight collation was laid in his room;
+and at half-past nine the meditation for the following day was given.
+Father Robert in his previous talks with Anthony had given him
+instructions as to how to occupy his own time, to keep his thoughts fixed
+and so forth. He had thought it wise too not to extend the Retreat for
+longer than a fortnight; so that it was proposed to end it on Palm
+Sunday. Two or three times in the week Anthony rode out by himself; and
+Father Robert was always at his service, besides himself coming sometimes
+to talk to him when he thought the strain or the monotony was getting too
+heavy.
+
+As for the Exercises themselves, the effect of them on Anthony was beyond
+all description. First the circumstances under which they were given were
+of the greatest assistance to their effectiveness. There was every aid
+that romance and mystery could give. Then it was in a strange and
+beautiful house where everything tended to caress the mind out of all
+self-consciousness. The little panelled room in which the exercises were
+given looked out over the quiet garden, and no sound penetrated there but
+the far-off muffled noises of the peaceful village life, the rustle of
+the wind in the evergreens, and the occasional coo or soft flapping
+flight of a pigeon from the cote in the garden. The room itself was
+furnished with two or three faldstools and upright wooden arm-chairs of
+tolerable comfort; a table was placed at the further end, on which stood
+a realistic Spanish crucifix with two tapers always burning before it;
+and a little jar of fragrant herbs. Then there was the continual sense of
+slight personal danger that is such a spur to refined natures; here was a
+Catholic house, of which every member was strictly subject to penalties,
+and above all one of that mysterious Society of Jesus, the very vanguard
+of the Catholic army, and of which every member was a picked and trained
+champion. Then there was the amazing enthusiasm, experience, and skill of
+Father Robert, as he called himself; who knew human nature as an
+anatomist knows the structure of the human body; to whom the bewildering
+tangle of motives, good, bad and indifferent, in the soul, was as plain
+as paths in a garden; who knew what human nature needed, what it could
+dispense with, what was its power of resistance; and who had at his
+disposal for the storming of the soul an armoury of weapons and engines,
+every specimen of which he had tested and wielded over and over again.
+Little as Anthony knew it, Father Robert, during the first two days after
+his arrival, had occupied himself with sounding and probing the lad's
+soul, trying his intellect by questions that scarcely seemed to be so,
+taking the temperature of his emotional nature by tales and adroit
+remarks, and watching the effect of them; in short, with studying the
+soul who had come for his treatment as a careful doctor examines the
+health of a new patient before he issues his prescription. And then,
+lastly, there were the Exercises themselves, a mighty weapon in any
+hands; and all but irresistible when directed by the skill, and inspired
+by the enthusiasm and sincere piety of such a man as Father Robert.
+
+The Exercises fell into three parts, each averaging in Anthony's case
+about five days. First came the Purgative Exercises: the object of these
+was to cleanse and search out the very recesses of the soul; as fire
+separates gold from alloy.
+
+As Anthony knelt in the little room before the Crucifix day by day, it
+seemed to him as if the old conventional limitations and motives of
+action and control were rolling back, revealing the realities of the
+spiritual world. The Exercises began with an elaborate exposition of the
+End of man--which may be roughly defined as the Glory of God attained
+through the saving and sanctifying of the individual. Every creature of
+God, then, that the soul encounters must be tested by this rule, How far
+does the use of it serve for the final end? For it must be used so far,
+and no farther. Here then was a diagram of the Exercises, given in
+miniature at the beginning.
+
+Then the great facts that practically all men acknowledge, and upon which
+so few act, were brought into play. Hell, Judgment and Death in turn
+began to work upon the lad's soul--these monstrous elemental Truths that
+underlie all things. As Father Robert's deep vibrating voice spoke, it
+appeared to Anthony as if the room, the walls, the house, the world, all
+shrank to filmy nothingness before the appalling realities of these
+things. In that strange and profound "Exercise of the senses" he heard
+the moaning and the blasphemies of the damned, of those rebellious free
+wills that have enslaved themselves into eternal bondage by a deliberate
+rejection of God--he put out his finger and tasted the bitterness of
+their furious tears--the very reek of sin came to his nostrils, of that
+corruption that is in existence through sin; nay, he saw the very flaming
+hells red with man's wrath against his Maker.
+
+Then he traced back, under the priest's direction, the Judgment through
+which every soul must pass; he saw the dead, great and small, stand
+before God; the books, black with blotted shame, were borne forth by the
+recording angels and spread before the tribunal. His ears tingled with
+that condemning silence of the Judge beyond Whom there is no appeal, from
+whose sentence there is no respite, and from whose prison there is no
+discharge; and rang with that pealing death-sentence at which the angels
+hide their faces, but to which the conscience of the criminal assents
+that it is just. His soul looked out at those whirling hosts on either
+side, that black cloud going down to despair, that radiant company
+hastening to rise to the Uncreated Light in whom there is no darkness at
+all--and cried in piteous suspense to know on which side she herself one
+day would be.
+
+Then he came yet one step further back still, and told himself the story
+of his death. He saw the little room where he would lie, his bed in one
+corner; he saw Isabel beside the bed; he saw himself, white, gasping,
+convulsed, upon it--the shadows of the doctor and the priest were upon
+the wall--he heard his own quick sobbing breath, he put out his finger
+and touched his own forehead wet with the death-dew--he tasted and smelt
+the faint sickly atmosphere that hangs about a death chamber; and he
+watched the grey shadow of Azrael's wing creep across his face. Then he
+saw the sheet and the stiff form beneath it; and knew that they were his
+features that were hidden; and that they were his feet that stood up
+stark below the covering. Then he visited his own grave, and saw the
+month-old grass blowing upon it, and the little cross at the head; then
+he dug down through the soil, swept away the earth from his coffin-plate;
+drew the screws and lifted the lid....
+
+Then he placed sin beneath the white light; dissected it, analysed it,
+weighed it and calculated its worth, watched its development in the
+congenial surroundings of an innocent soul, that is rich in grace and
+leisure and gifts, and saw the astonishing reversal of God's primal law
+illustrated in the process of corruption--the fair, sweet, fragrant
+creature passing into foulness. He looked carefully at the stages and
+modes of sin--venial sins, those tiny ulcers that weaken, poison and
+spoil the soul, even if they do not slay it--lukewarmness, that deathly
+slumber that engulfs the living thing into gradual death--and, finally,
+mortal sin, that one and only wholly hideous thing. He saw the
+indescribable sight of a naked soul in mortal sin; he saw how the earth
+shrank from it, how nature grew silent at it, how the sun darkened at it,
+how hell yelled at it, and the Love of God sickened at it.
+
+And so, as the purgative days went by, these tempests poured over his
+soul, sifted through it, as the sea through a hanging weed, till all that
+was not organically part of his life was swept away, and he was left a
+simple soul alone with God. Then the second process began.
+
+To change the metaphor, the canvas was now prepared, scoured, bleached
+and stretched. What is the image to be painted upon it? It is the image
+of Christ.
+
+Now Father Robert laid aside his knives and his hammer, and took up his
+soft brushes, and began stroke by stroke, with colours beyond imagining,
+to lay upon the eager canvas the likeness of an adorable Lover and King.
+Anthony watched the portrait grow day by day with increasing wonder. Was
+this indeed the Jesus of Nazareth of whom he had read in the Gospels? he
+rubbed his eyes and looked; and yet there was no possibility of
+mistake,--line for line it was the same.
+
+But this portrait grew and breathed and moved, and passed through all the
+stages of man's life. First it was the Eternal Word in the bosom of the
+Father, the Beloved Son who looked in compassion upon the warring world
+beneath; and offered Himself to the Father who gave Him through the
+Energy of the Blessed Spirit.
+
+Then it was a silent Maid that he saw waiting upon God, offering herself
+with her lily beside her; and in answer on a sudden came the lightning of
+Gabriel's appearing, and, lo! the Eternal Word stole upon her down a ray
+of glory. And then at last he saw the dear Child born; and as he looked
+he was invited to enter the stable; and again he put out his hand and
+touched the coarse straw that lay in the manger, and fingered the rough
+brown cord that hung from Mary's waist, and smelled the sweet breath of
+the cattle, and the burning oil of Joseph's lantern hung against the
+wall, and shivered as the night wind shrilled under the ill-fitting door
+and awoke the tender Child.
+
+Then he watched Him grow to boyhood, increasing in wisdom and stature,
+Him who was uncreated Wisdom, and in whose Hands are the worlds--followed
+Him, loving Him more at every step, to and from the well at Nazareth with
+the pitcher on His head: saw Him with blistered hands and aching back in
+the carpenter's shop; then at last went south with Him to Jordan;
+listened with Him, hungering, to the jackals in the wilderness; rocked
+with Him on the high Temple spire; stared with Him at the Empires of all
+time, and refused them as a gift. Then he went with Him from miracle to
+miracle, laughed with joy at the leper's new skin; wept in sorrow and joy
+with the mother at Nain, and the two sisters at Bethany; knelt with Mary
+and kissed His feet; went home with Matthew and Zaccheus, and sat at meat
+with the merry sinners; and at last began to follow silent and amazed
+with face set towards Jerusalem, up the long lonely road from Jericho.
+
+Then, with love that almost burned his heart, he crouched at the moonlit
+door outside and watched the Supper begin. Judas pushed by him,
+muttering, and vanished in the shadows of the street. He heard the hush
+fall as the Bread was broken and the Red Wine uplifted; and he hid his
+face, for he dared not yet look with John upon a glory whose veils were
+so thin. Then he followed the silent company through the overhung streets
+to the Temple Courts, and down across the white bridge to the garden
+door. Then, bolder, he drew near, left the eight and the three and knelt
+close to the single Figure, who sobbed and trembled and sweated blood.
+Then he heard the clash of weapons and saw the glare of the torches, and
+longed to warn Him but could not; saw the bitter shame of the kiss and
+the arrest and the flight; and followed to Caiaphas' house; heard the
+stinging slap; ran to Pilate's house; saw that polished gentleman yawn
+and sneer; saw the clinging thongs and the splashed floor when the
+scourging was over; followed on to Calvary; saw the great Cross rise up
+at last over the heads of the crowd, and heard the storm of hoots and
+laughter and the dry sobs of the few women. Then over his head the sun
+grew dull, and the earth rocked and split, as the crosses reeled with
+their swinging burdens. Then, as the light came back, and the earth ended
+her long shudder, he saw in the evening glow that his Lord was dead. Then
+he followed to the tomb; saw the stone set and sealed and the watch
+appointed; and went home with Mary and John, and waited.
+
+Then on Easter morning, wherever his Lord was, he was there too; with
+Mary in that unrecorded visit; with the women, with the Apostles; on the
+road to Emmaus; on the lake of Galilee; and his heart burned with Christ
+at his side, on lake and road and mountain.
+
+Then at last he stood with the Twelve and saw that end that was so
+glorious a beginning; saw that tender sky overhead generate its strange
+cloud that was the door of heaven; heard far away the trumpets cry, and
+the harps begin to ripple for the new song that the harpers had learned
+at last; and then followed with his eyes the Lord whom he had now learned
+to know and love as never before, as He passed smiling and blessing into
+the heaven from which one day He will return....
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There, then, as Anthony looked on the canvas, was that living, moving
+face and figure. What more could He have done that He did not do? What
+perfection could be dreamed of that was not already a thousand times His?
+
+And when the likeness was finished, and Father Robert stepped aside from
+the portrait that he had painted with such tender skill and love, it is
+little wonder that this lad threw himself down before that eloquent
+vision and cried with Thomas, My Lord and my God!
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then, very gently, Father Robert led him through those last steps; up
+from the Illuminative to the Unitive; from the Incarnate Life with its
+warm human interests to that Ineffable Light that seems so chill and
+unreal to those who only see it through the clouds of earth, into that
+keen icy stillness, where only favoured and long-trained souls can
+breathe, up the piercing air of the slopes that lead to the Throne, and
+there in the listening silence of heaven, where the voice of adoration
+itself is silent through sheer intensity, where all colours return to
+whiteness and all sounds to stillness, all forms to essence and all
+creation to the Creator, there he let him fall in self-forgetting love
+and wonder, breathe out his soul in one ardent all-containing act, and
+make his choice.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIV
+
+                             EASTER DAY
+
+
+Holy Week passed for Anthony like one of those strange dreams in which
+the sleeper awakes to find tears on his face, and does not know whether
+they are for joy or sorrow. At the end of the Retreat that closed on Palm
+Sunday evening, Anthony had made his choice, and told Father Robert.
+
+It was not the Exercises themselves that were the direct agent, any more
+than were the books he had read: the books had cleared away intellectual
+difficulties, and the Retreat moral obstacles, and left his soul desiring
+the highest, keen to see it, and free to embrace it. The thought that he
+would have to tell Isabel appeared to him of course painful and
+difficult; but it was swallowed up in the joy of his conversion. He made
+an arrangement with Father Robert to be received at Cuckfield on Easter
+Eve; so that he might have an opportunity of telling Isabel before he
+took the actual step. The priest told him he would give him a letter to
+Mr. Barnes, so that he might be received immediately upon his arrival.
+
+Holy Week, then, was occupied for Anthony in receiving instruction each
+morning in the little oak parlour from Father Robert; and in attending
+the devotions in the evening with the rest of the household. He also
+heard mass each day.
+
+It was impossible, of course, to carry out the special devotions of the
+season with the splendour and elaboration that belonged to them; but
+Anthony was greatly impressed by what he saw. The tender reverence with
+which the Catholics loved to linger over the details of the Passion, and
+to set them like precious jewels in magnificent liturgical settings, and
+then to perform these stately heart-broken approaches to God with all the
+dignity and solemnity possible, appealed to him in strong contrast to the
+cold and loveless services, as he now thought them, of the Established
+Church that he had left.
+
+On the Good Friday evening he was long in the parlour with Father Robert.
+
+"I am deeply thankful, my son," he said kindly, "that you have been able
+to come to a decision. Of course I could have wished you to enter the
+Society; but God has not given you a vocation to that apparently.
+However, you can do great work for Him as a seminary priest; and I am
+exceedingly glad that you will be going to Douai so soon."
+
+"I must just put my affairs in order at home," he said, "and see what
+arrangements my sister will wish to make; and by Midsummer at the latest
+I shall hope to be gone."
+
+"I must be off early to-morrow," said the priest. "I have to be far from
+here by to-morrow night, in a house where I shall hope to stay until I,
+too, go abroad again. Possibly we may meet at Douai in the autumn. Well,
+my son, pray for me."
+
+Anthony knelt for his blessing, and the priest was gone.
+
+Presently Mr. Buxton came in and sat down. He was full of delight at the
+result of his scheme; and said so again and again.
+
+"Who could have predicted it?" he cried. "To think that you were visiting
+me in prison fifteen months ago; and now this has come about in my house!
+Truly the Gospel blessing on your action has not been long on the way!
+And that you will be a priest, too! You must come and be my chaplain some
+day; if we are both alive and escape the gallows so long. Old Mr. Blake
+is sore displeased with me. I am a trial to him, I know. He will hardly
+speak to me in my own house; I declare I tremble when I meet him in the
+gallery; for fear he will rate me before my servants. I forget what his
+last grievance is; but I think it is something to do with a saint that he
+wishes me to be devout to; and I do not like her. Of course I do not
+doubt her sanctity; but Mr. Blake always confuses veneration and liking.
+I yield to none in my veneration for Saint What's-her-name; but I do not
+like her; and that is an end of the matter."
+
+After a little more talk, Mr. Buxton looked at Anthony curiously a moment
+or two; and then said:
+
+"I wonder you have not guessed yet who Father Robert is; for I am sure
+you know that that cannot be his real name."
+
+Anthony looked at him wonderingly.
+
+"Well, he is in bed now; and will be off early to-morrow; and I have his
+leave to tell you. He is Father Persons, of whom you may have heard."
+
+Anthony stared.
+
+"Yes," said his host, "the companion of Campion. All the world supposes
+him to be in Rome; and I think that not half-a-dozen persons besides
+ourselves know where he is; but at this moment, I assure you, Father
+Robert Persons, of the Society of Jesus, is asleep (or awake, as the case
+may be) in the little tapestry chamber overhead."
+
+"Now," went on Mr. Buxton, "that you are one of us, I will tell you quite
+plainly that Father Robert, as we will continue to call him, is in my
+opinion one of the most devout priests that ever said mass; and also one
+of the most shrewd men that ever drew breath; but I cannot follow him
+everywhere. You will find, Mr. Anthony, that the Catholics in England are
+of two kinds: those who seem to have as their motto the text I quoted to
+you in Lambeth prison; and who count their duty to Caesar as scarcely less
+important than their direct duty to God. I am one of these: I sincerely
+desire above all things to serve her Grace, and I would not, for all the
+world, join in any confederacy to dethrone her, for I hold she is my
+lawful and true Prince. Then there is another party who would not
+hesitate for a moment to take part against their Prince, though I do not
+say to the slaying of her, if thereby the Catholic Religion could be
+established again in these realms. It is an exceedingly difficult point;
+and I understand well how honest and good men can hold that view: for
+they say, and rightly, that the Kingdom of God is the first thing in the
+world, and while they may not commit sin of course to further it, yet in
+things indifferent they must sacrifice all for it; and, they add, it is
+indifferent as to who sits on the throne of England; therefore one Prince
+may be pushed off it, so long as no crime is committed in the doing of
+it, and another seated there; if thereby the Religion may be so
+established again. You see the point, Mr. Anthony, no doubt; and how fine
+and delicate it is. Well, Father Robert is, I think, of that party; and
+so are many of the authorities abroad. Now I tell you all this, and on
+this sacred day too, because I may have no other opportunity; and I do
+not wish you to be startled or offended after you have become a Catholic.
+And I entreat you to be warm and kindly to those who take other views
+than your own; for I fear that many troubles lie in front of us of our
+own causing: for there are divisions amongst us already: although not at
+all of course (for which I thank God) on any of the saving truths of the
+Faith."
+
+Anthony's excitement on hearing Father Robert's real name was very great.
+As he lay in bed that night the thought of it all would hardly let him
+sleep. He turned to and fro, trying to realise that there, within a dozen
+yards of him, lay the famous Jesuit for whose blood all Protestant
+England was clamouring. The name of Persons was still sinister and
+terrible even to this convert; and he could scarcely associate in his
+thoughts all its suggestiveness with that kindly fervent lover of Jesus
+Christ who had led him with such skill and tenderness along the way of
+the Gospel. Others in England were similarly astonished in later years to
+learn that a famous Puritan book of devotions was scarcely other than a
+reprint of Father Persons' "Christian Directory."
+
+The following day about noon, after an affectionate good-bye to his host
+and Mr. Blake, Anthony rode out of the iron-wrought gates and down the
+village street in the direction of Great Keynes.
+
+It was a perfect spring-day. Overhead there was a soft blue sky with
+translucent clouds floating in it; underfoot and on all sides the mystery
+of life was beginning to stir and manifest itself. The last touch of
+bitterness had passed from the breeze, and all living growth was making
+haste out into the air. The hedges were green with open buds, and
+bubbling with the laughter and ecstasy of the birds; the high sloping
+overhung Sussex lanes were sweet with violets and primroses; and here and
+there under the boughs Anthony saw the blue carpet of bell-flowers
+spread. Rabbits whisked in and out of the roots, superintending and
+provisioning the crowded nurseries underground; and as Anthony came out,
+now and again on the higher and open spaces larks vanished up their airy
+spirals of song into the illimitable blue; or hung, visible musical
+specks against a fleecy cloud, pouring down their thin cataract of
+melody. And as he rode, for every note of music and every glimpse of
+colour round him, his own heart poured out pulse after pulse of that
+spiritual essence that lies beneath all beauty, and from which all beauty
+is formed, to the Maker of all this and the Saviour of himself. There
+were set wide before him now the gates of a kingdom, compared to which
+this realm of material life round about was but a cramped and wintry
+prison after all.
+
+How long he had lived in the cold and the dark! he thought; kept alive by
+the refracted light that stole down the steps to where he sat in the
+shadow of death; saved from freezing by the warmth of grace that managed
+to survive the chill about him; and all the while the Catholic Church was
+glowing and pulsating with grace, close to him and yet unseen; that great
+realm full of heavenly sunlight, that was the life of all its
+members--that sunlight that had poured down so steadily ever since the
+winter had rolled away on Calvary; and that ever since then had been
+elaborating and developing into a thousand intricate forms all that was
+capable of absorbing it. One by one the great arts had been drawn into
+that Kingdom, transformed and immortalised by the vital and miraculous
+sap of grace; philosophies, languages, sciences, all in turn were taken
+up and sanctified; and now this Puritan soul, thirsty for knowledge and
+grace, and so long starved and imprisoned, was entering at last into her
+heritage.
+
+All this was of course but dimly felt in the direct perceptions of
+Anthony; but Father Robert had said enough to open something of the
+vision, and he himself had sufficient apprehension to make him feel that
+the old meagre life was passing away, and a new life of unfathomed
+possibilities beginning. As he rode the wilderness appeared to rejoice
+and blossom like the rose, as the spring of nature and grace stirred
+about and within him; and only an hour or two's ride away lay the very
+hills and streams of the Promised Land.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+About half-past three he crossed the London road, and before four o'clock
+he rode round to the door of the Dower House, dismounted, telling the
+groom to keep his horse saddled.
+
+He went straight through the hall, calling Isabel as he went, and into
+the garden, carrying his flat cap and whip and gloves: and as he came out
+beneath the holly tree, there she stood before him on the top of the old
+stone garden steps, that rose up between earthen flower-jars to the
+yew-walk on the north of the house. He went across the grass smiling, and
+as he came saw her face grow whiter and whiter. She was in a dark serge
+dress with a plain ruff, and a hood behind it, and her hair was coiled in
+great masses on her head. She stood trembling, and he came up and took
+her in his arms tenderly and kissed her, for his news would be heavy
+presently.
+
+"Why, Isabel," he said, "you look astonished to see me. But I could not
+well send a man, as I had only Geoffrey with me."
+
+She tried to speak, but could not; and looked so overwhelmed and
+terrified that Anthony grew frightened; he saw he must be very gentle.
+
+"Sit down," he said, drawing her to a seat beside the path at the head of
+the steps: "and tell me the news."
+
+By a great effort she regained her self-control.
+
+"I did not know when you were coming," she said tremulously. "I was
+startled."
+
+He talked of his journey for a few minutes; and of the kindness of the
+friend with whom he had been staying, and the beauty of the house and
+grounds, and so on; until she seemed herself again; and the piteous
+startled look had died out of her eyes: and then he forced himself to
+approach his point; for the horse was waiting saddled; and he must get to
+Cuckfield and back by supper if possible.
+
+He took her hand and played with it gently as he spoke, turning over her
+rings.
+
+"Isabel," he said, "I have news to tell you. It is not bad news--at least
+I think not--it is the best thing that has ever come to me yet, by the
+grace of God, and so you need not be anxious or frightened. But I am
+afraid you may think it bad news. It--it is about religion, Isabel."
+
+He glanced at her, and saw that terrified look again in her face: she was
+staring at him, and her hand in his began to twitch and tremble.
+
+"Nay, nay," he said, "there is no need to look like that. I have not lost
+my faith in God. Rather, I have gained it. Isabel, I am going to be a
+Catholic."
+
+A curious sound broke from her lips; and a look so strange came into her
+face that he threw his arm round her, thinking she was going to faint:
+and he spoke sharply.
+
+"Isabel, Isabel, what is there to fear? Look at me!"
+
+Then a cry broke from her white lips, and she struggled to stand up.
+
+"No, no, no! you are mocking me. Oh! Anthony, what have I done, that you
+should treat me like this?"
+
+"Mocking!" he said, "before God I am not. My horse is waiting to take me
+to the priest."
+
+"But--but--" she began again. "Oh! then what have you done to James
+Maxwell?"
+
+"James Maxwell! Why? What do you mean? You got my note!"
+
+"No--no. There was no answer, he said."
+
+Anthony stared.
+
+"Why, I wrote--and then Lady Maxwell! Does she not know, and James
+himself?"
+
+Isabel shook her head and looked at him wildly.
+
+"Well, well, that must wait; one thing at a time," he said. "I _cannot_
+wait now. I must go to Cuckfield. Ah! Isabel, say you understand."
+
+Once or twice she began to speak, but failed; and sat panting and staring
+at him.
+
+"My darling," he said, "do not look like that: we are both Christians
+still: we at least serve the same God. Surely you will not cast me off
+for this?"
+
+"Cast you off?" she said; and she laughed piteously and sharply; and then
+was grave again. Then she suddenly cried,
+
+"Oh, Anthony, swear to me you are not mocking me."
+
+"My darling," he said, "why should I mock you? I have made the Exercises,
+and have been instructed; and I have here a letter to Mr. Barnes from the
+priest who has taught me; so that I may be received to-night, and make my
+Easter duties: and Geoffrey is still at the door holding Roland to take
+me to Cuckfield to-night."
+
+"To Cuckfield!" she said. "You will not find Mr. Barnes there."
+
+"Not there! why not? Where shall I find him? How do you know?"
+
+"Because he is here," she went on in the same strange voice, "at the
+Hall."
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "that saves me a journey. Why is he here?"
+
+"He is here to say mass to-morrow."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And--and----"
+
+"What is it, Isabel?"
+
+"And--to receive me into the Church to-night."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The brother and sister walked up and down that soft spring evening after
+supper, on the yew-walk; with the whispers and caresses of the scented
+breeze about them, the shy dewy eyes of the stars looking down at them
+between the tall spires of the evergreens overhead; and in their hearts
+the joy of lovers on a wedding-night.
+
+Anthony had soon told the tale of James Maxwell and Isabel had nearly
+knelt to ask her brother's pardon for having ever allowed even the shadow
+of a suspicion to darken her heart. Lady Maxwell, too, who had come down
+with her sister to see Isabel about some small arrangement, was told; and
+she too had been nearly overwhelmed with the joy of knowing that the lad
+was innocent, and the grief of having dreamed he could be otherwise, and
+at the wholly unexpected news of his conversion; but she had gone at last
+back to the Hall to make all ready for the double ceremony of that night,
+and the Paschal Feast on the next day. Mistress Margaret was in Isabel's
+room, moving about with a candle, and every time that the two reached the
+turn at the top of the steps they saw her light glimmering.
+
+Then Anthony, as they walked under the stars, told Isabel of his great
+hope that he, too, one day would be a priest, and serve God and his
+countrymen that way.
+
+"Oh, Anthony," she whispered, and clung to that dear arm that held her
+own; terrified for the moment at the memory of what had been the price of
+priesthood to James Maxwell.
+
+"And where shall you be trained for it?" she asked.
+
+"At Douai: and--Isabel--I think I must go this summer."
+
+"This summer!" she said. "Why----" and she was silent.
+
+"Anthony," she went on, "I would like to tell you about Hubert."
+
+And then the story of the past months came out; she turned away her face
+as she talked; and at last she told him how Hubert had come for his
+answer, a week before his time.
+
+"It was on Monday," she said. "I heard him on the stairs, and stood up as
+he came in; and he stopped at the door in silence, and I could not bear
+to look at him. I could hear him breathing quickly; and then I could not
+bear to--think of it all; and I dropped down into my chair again, and hid
+my face in my arm and burst into crying. And still he said nothing, but I
+felt him come close up to me and kneel down by me; and he put his hand
+over mine, and held them tight; and then he whispered in a kind of quick
+way:
+
+"'I will be what you please; Catholic or Protestant, or what you will';
+and I lifted my head and looked at him, because it was dreadful to hear
+him--Hubert--say that: and he was whiter than I had ever seen him; and
+then--then he began to wrinkle his mouth--you know the way he does when
+his horse is pulling or kicking: and then he began to say all kinds of
+things: and oh! I was so sorry; because he had behaved so well till
+then."
+
+"What did he say?" asked Anthony quickly.
+
+"Ah! I have tried to forget," said Isabel. "I do not want to think of him
+as he was when he was angry and disappointed. At last he flung out of the
+room and down the stairs, and I have not seen him since. But Lady Maxwell
+sent for me the same evening an hour later; and told me that she could
+not live there any longer. She said that Hubert had ridden off to London;
+and would not be down again till Whitsuntide; but that she must be gone
+before then. So I am afraid that he said things he ought not; but of
+course she did not tell me one word. And she asked me to go with her.
+And, and--Anthony, I did not know what to say; because I did not know
+what you would do when you heard that I was a Catholic; I was waiting to
+tell you when you came home--but now--but now----Oh, Anthony, my
+darling!"
+
+At last the two came indoors. Mistress Margaret met them in the hall. She
+looked for a moment at the two; at Anthony in his satin and lace and his
+smiling face over his ruff and his steady brown eyes; and Isabel on his
+arm, with her clear pale face and bosom and black high-piled hair, and
+her velvet and lace, and a rope of pearls.
+
+"Why," said the old nun, smiling, "you look a pair of lovers."
+
+Then presently the three went together up to the Hall.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+An hour or two passed away; the Paschal moon was rising high over the
+tall yew hedge behind the Italian garden; and the Hall lay beneath it
+with silver roofs and vane; and black shadows under the eaves and in the
+angles. The tall oriel window of the Hall looking on to the terrace shone
+out with candlelight; and the armorial coats of the Maxwells and the
+families they had married with glimmered in the upper panes. From the
+cloister wing there shone out above the curtains lines of light in Lady
+Maxwell's suite of rooms, and the little oak parlour beneath, as well as
+from one or two other rooms; but the rest of the house, with the
+exception of the great hall and the servants' quarters, was all dark. It
+was as if the interior life had shifted westwards, leaving the remainder
+desolate. The gardens to the south were silent, for the night breeze had
+dropped; and the faint ripple of the fountain within the cloister-court
+was the only sound that broke the stillness. And once or twice the sleepy
+chirp of a bird nestling by his mate in the deep shrubberies showed that
+the life of the spring was beating out of sight.
+
+And then at last the door in the west angle of the terrace, between the
+cloister wing and the front of the house, opened, and a flood of mellow
+light poured out on to the flat pavement. A group stood within the little
+oaken red-tiled lobby; Lady Maxwell and her sister, slender and dignified
+in their dark evening dresses and ruffs; Anthony holding his cap, and
+Isabel with a lace shawl over her head, and at the back the white hair
+and ruddy face of old Mr. Barnes in his cassock at the bottom of the
+stairs.
+
+As Mistress Margaret opened the door and looked out, Lady Maxwell took
+Isabel in her arms and kissed her again and again. Then Anthony took the
+old lady's hand and kissed it, but she threw her other hand round him and
+kissed him too on the forehead. Then without another word the brother and
+sister came out into the moonlight, passed down the side of the cloister
+wing, and turning once to salute the group who waited, framed and bathed
+in golden light, they turned the corner to the Dower House. Then the door
+closed; the oriel window suddenly darkened, and an hour after the lights
+in the wing went out, and Maxwell Hall lay silver and grey again in the
+moonlight.
+
+The night passed on. Once Isabel awoke, and saw her windows blue and
+mystical and her room full of a dim radiance from the bright night
+outside. It was irresistible, and she sprang out of bed and went to the
+window across the cool polished oak floor, and leaned with her elbows on
+the sill, looking out at the square of lawn and the low ivied wall
+beneath, and the tall trees rising beyond ashen-grey and olive-black in
+the brilliant glory that poured down from almost directly overhead, for
+the Paschal moon was at its height above the house.
+
+And then suddenly the breathing silence was broken by a ripple of melody,
+and another joined and another; and Isabel looked and wondered and
+listened, for she had never heard before the music of the mysterious
+night-flight of the larks all soaring and singing together when the rest
+of the world is asleep. And she listened and wondered as the stream of
+song poured down from the wonderful spaces of the sky, rising to far-off
+ecstasies as the wheeling world sank yet further with its sleeping
+meadows and woods beneath the whirling singers; and then the earth for a
+moment turned in its sleep as Isabel listened, and the trees stirred as
+one deep breath came across the woods, and a thrush murmured a note or
+two beside the drive, and a rabbit suddenly awoke in the field and ran on
+to the lawn and sat up and looked at the white figure at the window; and
+far away from the direction of Lindfield a stag brayed.
+
+"So longeth my soul," whispered Isabel to herself.
+
+Then all grew still again; the trees hushed; the torrent of music, more
+tumultuous as it neared the earth, suddenly ceased; and Isabel at the
+window leaned further out and held her hands in the bath of light; and
+spoke softly into the night:
+
+"Oh, Lord Jesus, how kind Thou art to me!"
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then at last the morning came, and Christ was risen beyond a doubt.
+
+Just before the sun came up, when all the sky was luminous to meet him,
+the two again passed up and round the corner, and into the little door in
+the angle. There was the same shaded candle or two, for the house was yet
+dark within; and they passed up and on together through the sitting-room
+into the chapel where each had made a First Confession the night before,
+and had together been received into the Catholic Church. Now it was all
+fragrant with flowers and herbs; a pair of tall lilies leaned their
+delicate heads towards the altar, as if to listen for the soundless
+Coming in the Name of the Lord; underfoot all about the altar lay sprigs
+of sweet herbs, rosemary, thyme, lavender, bay-leaves; with white
+blossoms scattered over them--a soft carpet for the Pierced Feet; not
+like those rustling palm-swords over which He rode to death last week.
+The black oak chest that supported the altar-stone was glorious in its
+vesture of cloth-of-gold; and against the white-hung wall at the back,
+behind the silver candlesticks, leaned the gold plate of the house, to do
+honour to the King. And presently there stood there the radiant rustling
+figure of the Priest, his personality sheathed and obliterated beneath
+the splendid symbolism of his vestments, stiff and chinking with jewels
+as he moved.
+
+The glorious Mass of Easter Day began.
+
+"_Immolatus est Christus. Itaque epulemur_," Saint Paul cried from the
+south corner of the altar to the two converts. "Christ our Passover is
+sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast, but not with the old
+leaven."
+
+"_Quis revolvet nobis lapidem?_" wailed the women. "Who shall roll us
+away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?"
+
+"And when they looked," cried the triumphant Evangelist, "they saw that
+the stone was rolled away; for it was very great"--"_erat quippe magnus
+valde_."
+
+Here then they knelt at last, these two come home together, these who had
+followed their several paths so resolutely in the dark, not knowing that
+the other was near, yet each seeking a hidden Lord, and finding both Him
+and one another now in the full and visible glory of His Face--_orto jam
+sole_--for the Sun of Righteousness had dawned, and there was healing for
+all sorrows in His Wings.
+
+"_Et credo in unam sanctam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam_"--their
+hearts cried all together. "I believe at last in a Catholic Church; one,
+for it is built on one and its faith is one; holy, for it is the Daughter
+of God and the Mother of Saints; Apostolic, for it is guided by the
+Prince of Apostles and very Vicar of Christ."
+
+"_Et exspecto vitam venturi saeculi._" "I look for the life of the world
+to come; and I count all things but loss, houses and brethren and sisters
+and father and mother and wife and children and lands, when I look to
+that everlasting life, and Him Who is the Way to it. _Amen._"
+
+So from step to step the liturgy moved on with its sonorous and exultant
+tramp, and the crowding thoughts forgot themselves, and watched as the
+splendid heralds went by; the triumphant trumpets of _Gloria in excelsis_
+had long died away; the proclamation of the names and titles of the Prince
+had been made. _Unum Dominum Jesum Christum_; _Filium Dei Unigenitum_;
+_Ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula_; _Deum de Deo_; _Lumen de Lumine_;
+_Deum Verum de Deo Vero_; _Genitum non factum_; _Consubstantialem Patri._
+
+Then His first achievement had been declared; "_Per quem omnia facta
+sunt._"
+
+Then his great and later triumphs; how He had ridden out alone from the
+Palace and come down the steep of heaven in quest of His Love; how He had
+disguised Himself for her sake; and by the crowning miracle of love, the
+mightiest work that Almighty God has ever wrought, He was made man; and
+the herald hushed his voice in awe as he declared it, and the people
+threw themselves prostrate in honour of this high and lowly Prince; then
+was recounted the tale of those victories that looked so bitterly like
+failures, and the people held their breath and whispered it too; then in
+rising step after step His last conquests were told; how the Black Knight
+was overthrown, his castle stormed and his prison burst; and the story of
+the triumph of the return and of the Coronation and the Enthronement at
+the Father's Right Hand on high.
+
+The heralds passed on; and mysterious figures came next, bearing
+Melchisedech's gifts; shadowing the tremendous event that follows on
+behind.
+
+After a space or two came the first lines of the bodyguard, the heavenly
+creatures dimly seen moving through clouds of glory, Angels, Dominations,
+Powers, Heavens, Virtues, and blessed Seraphim, all crying out together
+to heaven and earth to welcome Him Who comes after in the bright shadow
+of the Name of the Lord; and the trumpets peal out for the last time,
+"Hosanna in the highest."
+
+Then a hush fell, and presently in the stillness came riding the great
+Personages who stand in heaven about the Throne; first, the Queen Mother
+herself, glorious within and without, moving in clothing of wrought gold,
+high above all others; then, the great Princes of the Blood Royal, who
+are admitted to drink of the King's own Cup, and sit beside Him on their
+thrones, Peter and Paul and the rest, with rugged faces and scarred
+hands; and with them great mitred figures, Linus, Cletus and Clement,
+with their companions.
+
+And then another space and a tingling silence; the crowds bow down like
+corn before the wind, the far-off trumpets are silent; and He comes--He
+comes!
+
+On He moves, treading under foot the laws He has made, yet borne up by
+them as on the Sea of Galilee; He Who inhabits eternity at an instant is
+made present; He Who transcends space is immanent in material kind; He
+Who never leaves the Father's side rests on His white linen carpet, held
+yet unconfined; in the midst of the little gold things and embroidery and
+candle-flames and lilies, while the fragrance of the herbs rises about
+Him. There rests the gracious King, before this bending group; the rest
+of the pageant dies into silence and nothingness outside the radiant
+circle of His Presence. There is His immediate priest-herald, who has
+marked out this halting-place for the Prince, bowing before Him, striving
+by gestures to interpret and fulfil the silence that words must always
+leave empty; here behind are the adoring human hearts, each looking with
+closed eyes into the Face of the Fairest of the children of men, each
+crying silently words of adoration, welcome and utter love.
+
+The moments pass; the court ceremonies are performed. The Virgins that
+follow the Lamb, Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha and the rest step forward
+smiling, and take their part; the Eternal Father is invoked again in the
+Son's own words; and at length the King, descending yet one further step
+of infinite humility, flings back the last vesture of His outward Royalty
+and casts Himself in a passion of haste and desire into the still and
+invisible depths of these two quivering hearts, made in His own Image,
+that lift themselves in an agony of love to meet Him....
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Meanwhile the Easter morning is deepening outside; the sun is rising
+above the yew hedge, and the dew flashes drop by drop into a diamond and
+vanishes; the thrush that stirred and murmured last night is pouring out
+his song; and the larks that rose into the moonlight are running to and
+fro in the long meadow grass. The tall slender lilies that have not been
+chosen to grace the sacramental Presence-Chamber, are at least in the
+King's own garden, where He walks morning and evening in the cool of the
+day; and waiting for those who will have seen Him face to face....
+
+And presently they come, the tall lad and his sister, silent and
+together, out into the radiant sunlight; and the joy of the morning and
+the singing thrush and the jewels of dew and the sweet swaying lilies are
+shamed and put to silence by the joy upon their faces and in their
+hearts.
+
+
+
+
+                               PART III
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                         THE COMING OF SPAIN
+
+
+The conflict between the Old Faith and the lusty young Nation went
+steadily forward after the Jesuit invasion; more and more priests poured
+into England; more and more were banished, imprisoned and put to death.
+The advent of Father Holt, the Jesuit, to Scotland in 1583 was a signal
+for a new outburst of Catholic feeling, which manifested itself not only
+in greater devotion to Religion, but, among the ill-instructed and
+impatient, in very questionable proceedings. In fact, from this time
+onward the Catholic cause suffered greatly from the division of its
+supporters into two groups; the religious and the political, as they may
+be named. The former entirely repudiated any desire or willingness to
+meddle with civil matters; its members desired to be both Catholics and
+Englishmen; serving the Pope in matters of Faith and Elizabeth in matters
+of civil life; but they suffered greatly from the indiscretions and
+fanaticism of the political group. The members of that party frankly
+regarded themselves as at war with an usurper and an heretic; and used
+warlike methods to gain their ends; plots against the Queen's life were
+set on foot; and their promoters were willing enough to die in defence of
+the cause. But the civil Government made the fatal mistake of not
+distinguishing between the two groups; again and again loyal Englishmen
+were tortured and hanged as traitors, because they shared their faith
+with conspirators.
+
+There was one question, however, that was indeed on the borderline,
+exceedingly difficult to answer in words, especially for scrupulous
+consciences; and that was whether they believed in the Pope's deposing
+power; and this question was adroitly and deliberately used by the
+Government in doubtful cases to ensure a conviction. But whether or not
+it was possible to frame a satisfactory answer in words, yet the accused
+were plain enough in their deeds; and when the Armada at length was
+launched in '88, there were no more loyal defenders of England than the
+persecuted Catholics. Even before this, however, there had appeared signs
+of reaction among the Protestants, especially against the torture and
+death of Campion and his fellows; and Lord Burghley in '83 attempted to
+quiet the people's resentment by his anonymous pamphlet, "Execution of
+Justice in England," to which Cardinal Allen presently replied.
+
+Ireland, which had been profoundly stirred by the military expedition
+from the continent in '80, at length was beaten and slashed into
+submission again; and the torture and execution of Hurley by martial law,
+which Elizabeth directed on account of his appointment to the See of
+Cashel, when the judges had pronounced there to be no case against him;
+and a massacre on the banks of the Moy in '86 of Scots who had come
+across as reinforcements to the Irish;--these were incidents in the black
+list of barbarities by which at last a sort of temporary quiet was
+brought to Ireland.
+
+In Scottish affairs, the tangle, unravelled even still, of which Mary
+Stuart was the centre, led at last to her death. Walsingham, with
+extraordinary skill, managed to tempt her into a dangerous
+correspondence, all of which he tapped on the way: he supplied to her in
+fact the very instrument--an ingeniously made beer-barrel--through which
+the correspondence was made possible, and, after reading all the letters,
+forwarded them to their several destinations. When all was ripe he
+brought his hand down on a group of zealots, to whose designs Mary was
+supposed to be privy; and after their execution, finally succeeded, in
+'87, in obtaining Elizabeth's signature to her cousin's death-warrant.
+The storm already raging against Elizabeth on the Continent, but fanned
+to fury by this execution, ultimately broke in the Spanish Armada in the
+following year.
+
+Meanwhile, at home, the affairs of the Church of England were far from
+prosperous. Puritanism was rampant; and a wail of dismay was evoked by
+the new demands of a Commission under Whitgift's guidance, in '82,
+whereby the Puritan divines were now called upon to assent to the Queen's
+Supremacy, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Prayer Book. In spite of the
+opposition, however, of Burghley and the Commons, Whitgift, who had by
+this time succeeded to Canterbury upon Grindal's death, remained firm;
+and a long and dreary dispute began, embittered further by the execution
+of Mr. Copping and Mr. Thacker in '83 for issuing seditious books in the
+Puritan cause. A characteristic action in this campaign was the issuing
+of a Puritan manifesto in '84, consisting of a brief, well-written
+pamphlet of a hundred and fifty pages under the title "A Learned
+Discourse of Ecclesiastical Government," making the inconsistent claim of
+desiring a return to the Primitive and Scriptural model, and at the same
+time of advocating an original scheme, "one not yet handled." It was
+practically a demand for the Presbyterian system of pastorate and
+government. To this Dr. Bridges replies with a tremendous tome of over
+fourteen hundred pages, discharged after three years of laborious toil;
+and dealing, as the custom then was, line by line, with the Puritan
+attack. To this in the following year an anonymous Puritan, under the
+name of Martin Marprelate, retorts with a brilliant and sparkling riposte
+addressed to "The right puissant and terrible priests, my clergy-masters
+of the Convocation-house," in which he mocks bitterly at the prelates,
+accusing them of Sabbath-breaking, time-serving, and popery,--calling one
+"dumb and duncetical," another "the veriest coxcomb that ever wore velvet
+cap," and summing them up generally as "wainscot-faced bishops," "proud,
+popish, presumptuous, profane paltry, pestilent, and pernicious
+prelates."
+
+The Archbishop had indeed a difficult team to drive; especially as his
+coadjutors were not wholly proof against Martin's jibes. In '84 his
+brother of York had been mixed up in a shocking scandal; in '85 the
+Bishop of Lichfield was accused of simony; Bishop Aylmer was continually
+under suspicion of avarice, dishonesty, vanity and swearing; and the
+Bench as a whole was universally reprobated as covetous, stingy and weak.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+In civil matters, England's relation with Spain was her most important
+concern. Bitter feeling had been growing steadily between the two
+countries ever since Drake's piracies in the Spanish dominions in
+America; and a gradually increasing fleet at Cadiz was the outward sign
+of it. Now the bitterness was deepened by the arrest of English ships in
+the Spanish ports in the early summer of '85, and the swift reprisals of
+Drake in the autumn; who intimidated and robbed important towns on the
+coast, such as Vigo, where his men behaved with revolting irreverence in
+the churches, and Santiago; and then proceeded to visit and spoil S.
+Domingo and Carthagena in the Indies.
+
+Again in '87 Drake obtained the leave of the Queen to harass Spain once
+more, and after robbing and burning all the vessels in Cadiz harbour, he
+stormed the forts at Faro, destroyed Armada stores at Corunna, and
+captured the great treasure-ship _San Felipe_.
+
+Elizabeth was no doubt encouraged in her apparent recklessness by the
+belief that with the Netherlands, which she had been compelled at last to
+assist, in a state of revolt, Spain would have little energy for
+reprisals upon England; but she grew more and more uneasy when news
+continued to arrive in England of the growing preparations for the
+Armada; France, too, was now so much involved with internal struggles, as
+the Protestant Henry of Navarre was now the heir to her Catholic throne,
+that efficacious intervention could no longer be looked for from that
+quarter, and it seemed at last as if the gigantic Southern power was
+about to inflict punishment upon the little northern kingdom which had
+insulted her with impunity so long.
+
+In the October of '87 certain news arrived in England of the gigantic
+preparations being made in Spain and elsewhere: and hearts began to beat,
+and tongues to clack, and couriers to gallop. Then as the months went by,
+and tidings sifted in, there was something very like consternation in the
+country. Men told one another of the huge armament that was on its way,
+the vast ships and guns--all bearing down on tiny England, like a bull on
+a terrier. They spoke of the religious fervour, like that of a crusade,
+that inspired the invasion, and was bringing the flower of the Spanish
+nobility against them: the superstitious contrasted their own _Lion_,
+_Revenge_, and _Elizabeth Jonas_ with the Spanish _San Felipe_, _San
+Matteo_, and _Our Lady of the Rosary_: the more practical thought with
+even deeper gloom of the dismal parsimony of the Queen, who dribbled out
+stores and powder so reluctantly, and dismissed her seamen at the least
+hint of delay.
+
+Yet, little by little, as midsummer came and went, beacons were gathering
+on every hill, ships were approaching efficiency, and troops assembling
+at Tilbury under the supremely incompetent command of Lord Leicester.
+
+Among the smaller seaports on the south coast, Rye was one of the most
+active and enthusiastic; the broad shallow bay was alive with
+fishing-boats, and the steep cobbled streets of the town were filled all
+day with a chattering exultant crowd, cheering every group of seamen that
+passed, and that spent long hours at the quay watching the busy life of
+the ships, and predicting the great things that should fall when the
+Spaniards encountered the townsfolk, should the Armada survive Drake's
+onslaught further west.
+
+About July the twentieth more definite news began to arrive. At least
+once a day a courier dashed in through the south-west gate, with news
+that all must hold themselves ready to meet the enemy by the end of the
+month; labour grew more incessant and excitement more feverish.
+
+About six o'clock on the evening of the twenty-ninth, as a long row of
+powder barrels was in process of shipping down on the quay, the men who
+were rolling them suddenly stopped and listened; the line of onlookers
+paused in their comments, and turned round. From the town above came an
+outburst of cries, followed by the crash of the alarm from the
+church-tower. In two minutes the quay was empty. Out of every passage
+that gave on to the main street poured excited men and women, some
+hysterically laughing, some swearing, some silent and white as they ran.
+For across the bay westwards, on a point beyond Winchelsea, in the still
+evening air rose up a stream of smoke shaped like a pine-tree, with a red
+smouldering root; and immediately afterwards in answer the Ypres tower
+behind the town was pouring out a thick drifting cloud that told to the
+watchers on Folkestone cliffs that the dreaded and longed-for foe was in
+sight of England.
+
+Then the solemn hours of waiting began to pass. Every day and night there
+were watchers, straining their eyes westwards in case the Armada should
+attempt to coast along England to force a landing anywhere, and
+southwards in case they should pass nearer the French coast on their way
+to join the Prince of Parma; but there was little to be seen over that
+wide ring of blue sea except single vessels, or now and again
+half-a-dozen in company, appearing and fading again on some unknown
+quest. The couriers that came in daily could not tell them much; only
+that there had been indecisive engagements; that the Spaniards had not
+yet attempted a landing anywhere; and that it was supposed that they
+would not do so until a union with the force in Flanders had been
+effected.
+
+And so four days of the following week passed; then on Thursday, August
+the fourth, within an hour or two after sunrise, the solemn booming of
+guns began far away to the south-west; but the hours passed; and before
+nightfall all was silent again.
+
+The suspense was terrible; all night long there were groups parading the
+streets, anxiously conjecturing, now despondently, now cheerfully.
+
+Then once again on the Friday morning a sudden clamour broke out in the
+town, and almost simultaneously a pinnace slipped out, spreading her
+wings and making for the open sea. A squadron of English ships had been
+sighted flying eastwards; and the pinnace was gone to get news. The ships
+were watched anxiously by thousands of eyes, and boats put out all along
+the coast to inquire; and within two or three hours the pinnace was back
+again in Rye harbour, with news that set bells ringing and men shouting.
+On Wednesday, the skipper reported, there had been an indecisive
+engagement during the dead calm that had prevailed in the Channel; a
+couple of Spanish store-vessels had been taken on the following morning,
+and a general action had followed, which again had been indecisive; but
+in which the English had hardly suffered at all, while it was supposed
+that great havoc had been wrought upon the enemy.
+
+But the best of the news was that the Rye contingent was to set sail at
+once, and unite with the English fleet westward of Calais by mid-day on
+Saturday. The squadron that had passed was under the command of the
+Admiral himself, who was going to Dover for provisions and ammunition,
+and would return to his fleet before evening.
+
+Before many hours were passed, Rye harbour was almost empty, and hundreds
+of eyes were watching the ships that carried their husbands and sons and
+lovers out into the pale summer haze that hung over the coast of France;
+while a few sharp-eyed old mariners on points of vantage muttered to one
+another that in the haze there was a patch of white specks to be seen
+which betokened the presence of some vast fleet.
+
+That night the sun set yellow and stormy, and by morning the
+cobble-stones of Rye were wet and dripping with storm-showers, and a
+swell was beginning to lap and sob against the harbour walls.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                         MEN OF WAR AND PEACE
+
+
+The following days passed in terrible suspense for all left behind at
+Rye. Every morning all the points of vantage were crowded; the Ypres
+tower itself was never deserted day or night; and all the sharpest eyes
+in the town were bent continually out over that leaden rolling sea that
+faded into haze and storm-cloud in the direction of the French coast. But
+there was nothing to be seen on that waste of waters but the single boats
+that flew up channel or laboured down it against the squally west wind,
+far out at sea. Once or twice fishing-boats put in at Rye; but their
+reports were so contradictory and uncertain that they increased rather
+than allayed the suspense and misery. Now it was a French boat that
+reported the destruction of the _Triumph_; now an Englishman that swore
+to having seen Drake kill Medina-Sidonia with his own hand on his poop;
+but whatever the news might be, the unrest and excitement ran higher and
+higher. St. Clare's chapel in the old parish church of St. Nicholas was
+crowded every morning at five o'clock by an excited congregation of
+women, who came to beg God's protection on their dear ones struggling out
+there somewhere towards the dawn with those cruel Southern monsters.
+Especially great was the crowd on the Tuesday morning following the
+departure of the ships; for all day on Monday from time to time came a
+far-off rolling noise from the direction of Calais; which many declared
+to be thunder, with an angry emphasis that betrayed their real opinion.
+
+When they came out of church that morning, and were streaming down to the
+quay as usual to see if any news had come in during the night, a seaman
+called to them from a window that a French vessel was just entering the
+harbour.
+
+When the women arrived at the water's edge they found a good crowd
+already assembled on the quay, watching the ship beat in against the
+north-west wind, which had now set in; but she aroused no particular
+comment as she was a well-known boat plying between Boulogne and Rye; and
+by seven o'clock she was made fast to the quay.
+
+There were the usual formalities, stricter than usual during war, to be
+gone through before the few passengers were allowed to land: but all was
+in order; the officers left the boat, and the passengers came up the
+plank, the crowd pressing forward as they came, and questioning them
+eagerly. No, there was no certain news, said an Englishman at last, who
+looked like a lawyer; it was said at Boulogne the night before that there
+had been an engagement further up beyond the Straits; they had all heard
+guns; and it was reported by the last cruiser who came in before the boat
+left that a Spanish galleasse had run aground and had been claimed by M.
+Gourdain, the governor of Calais; but probably, added the shrewd-eyed
+man, that was just a piece of their dirty French pride. The crowd smiled
+ruefully; and a French officer of the boat who was standing by the
+gangway scowled savagely, as the lawyer passed on with a demure face.
+
+Then there was a pause in the little stream of passengers; and then, out
+of the tiny door that led below decks, walking swiftly, and carrying a
+long cloak over her arm, came Isabel Norris, in a grey travelling dress,
+followed by Anthony and a couple of servants. The crowd fell back for the
+lady, who passed straight up through them; but one or two of the men
+called out for news to Anthony. He shook his head cheerfully at them.
+
+"I know no more than that gentleman," he said, nodding towards the
+lawyer; and then followed Isabel; and together they made their way up to
+the inn.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony was a good deal changed in the last six years; his beard and
+moustache were well grown; and he had a new look of gravity in his brown
+eyes; when he had smiled and shaken his head at the eager crowd just now,
+showing his white regular teeth, he looked as young as ever; but the
+serious look fell on his face again, as he followed Isabel up the steep
+little cobbled slope in his buff dress and plumed hat.
+
+There was not so much apparent change in Isabel; she was a shade graver
+too, her walk a little slower and more dignified, and her lips, a little
+thinner, had a line of strength in them that was new; and even now as she
+was treading English ground again for the first time for six years, the
+look of slight abstraction in her eyes that is often the sign of a strong
+inner life, was just a touch deeper than it used to be.
+
+They went up together with scarcely a word; and asked for a private room
+and dinner in two hours' time; and a carriage and horses for the servants
+to be ready at noon. The landlord, who had met them at the door, shook
+his head.
+
+"The private room, sir, and the dinner--yes, sir--but the horses----" and
+he spread his hands out deprecatingly. "There is not one in the stall,"
+he added.
+
+Anthony considered a moment.
+
+"Well, what do you propose? We are willing to stay a day or two, if you
+think that by then----"
+
+"Ah," said the landlord, "to-morrow is another matter. I expect two of my
+carriages home to-night, sir, from London; but the horses will not be
+able to travel till noon to-morrow."
+
+"That will do," said Anthony; and he followed Isabel upstairs.
+
+It was very strange to them both to be back in England after so long.
+They had settled down at Douai with the Maxwells; but, almost immediately
+on their arrival, Mistress Margaret was sent for by her Superior to the
+house of her Order at Brussels; and Lady Maxwell was left alone with
+Isabel in a house in the town; for Anthony was in the seminary.
+
+Then, in '86 Lady Maxwell had died, quite suddenly. Isabel herself had
+found her at her prie-dieu in the morning, still in her evening dress;
+she was leaning partly against the wall; her wrinkled old hands were
+clasped tightly together on a little ivory crucifix, on the top of the
+desk; and her snow-white head, with the lace drooping from it like a
+bridal veil, was bowed below them. Isabel, who had not dared to move her,
+had sent instantly for a little French doctor, who had thrown up his
+hands in a kind of devout ecstasy at that wonderful old figure, rigid in
+an eternal prayer. The two tall tapers she had lighted eight hours before
+were still just alight beside her, and looked strange in the morning
+sunshine.
+
+"Pendant ses oraisons! pendant ses oraisons!" he murmured over and over
+again; and then had fallen on his knees and kissed the drooping lace of
+her sleeve.
+
+"Priez pour moi, madame," he whispered to the motionless figure.
+
+And so the old Catholic who had suffered so much had gone to her rest.
+The fact that her son James had been living in the College during her
+four years' stay at Douai had been perhaps the greatest possible
+consolation to her for being obliged to be out of England; for she saw
+him almost daily; and it was he who sang her Requiem. Isabel had then
+gone to live with other friends in Douai, until Anthony had been ordained
+priest in the June of '88, and was ready to take her to England; and now
+the two were bound for Stanfield, where Anthony was to act as chaplain
+for the present, as Mr. Buxton had predicted so long before. Old Mr.
+Blake had died in the spring of the year, still disapproving of his
+patron's liberal notions, and Mr. Buxton had immediately sent a special
+messenger all the way to Douai to secure Anthony's services; and had
+insisted moreover that Isabel should accompany her brother. They intended
+however to call at the Dower House on the way, which had been left under
+the charge of old Mrs. Carroll; and renew the memories of their own dear
+home.
+
+They talked little at dinner; and only of general matters, their journey,
+the Armada, their joy at getting home again; for they had been expressly
+warned by their friends abroad against any indiscreet talk even when they
+thought themselves alone, and especially in the seaports, where so
+constant a watch was kept for seminary priests. The presence of Isabel,
+however, was the greatest protection to Anthony; as it was almost unknown
+that a priest should travel with any but male companions.
+
+Then suddenly, as they were ending dinner, a great clamour broke out in
+the town below them; a gun was fired somewhere; and footsteps began to
+rush along the narrow street outside. Anthony ran to the window and
+called to know what was the matter; but no one paid any attention to him;
+and he presently sat down again in despair, and with one or two wistful
+looks.
+
+"I will go immediately," he said to Isabel, "and bring you word."
+
+A moment after a servant burst into the room.
+
+"It is a Spanish ship, sir," he said, "a prize--rounding Dungeness."
+
+In the afternoon, when the first fierce excitement was over, Anthony went
+down to the quay. He did not particularly wish to attract attention, and
+so he kept himself in the background somewhat; but he had a good view of
+her as she lay moored just off the quay, especially when one of the town
+guard who had charge of the ropes that kept the crowd back, seeing a
+gentleman in the crowd, beckoned him through.
+
+"Your honour will wish to see the prize?" he said, in hopes of a trifle
+for himself; "make way there for the gentleman."
+
+Anthony thought it better under these circumstances to accept the
+invitation, so he gave the man something, and slipped through. On the
+quay was a pile of plunder from the ship: a dozen chests carved and
+steel-clamped stood together; half-a-dozen barrels of powder; the ship's
+bell rested amid a heap of rich clothes and hangings; a silver crucifix
+and a couple of lamps with their chains lay tumbled on one side; and a
+parson was examining a finely carved mahogany table that stood near.
+
+He looked up at Anthony.
+
+"For the church, sir," he said cheerfully. "I shall make application to
+her Grace."
+
+Anthony smiled at him.
+
+"A holy revenge, sir," he said.
+
+The ship herself had once been a merchantman brig; so much Anthony could
+tell, though he knew little of seamanship; but she had been armed heavily
+with deep bulwarks of timber, pierced for a dozen guns on each broadside.
+Now, however, she was in a terrible condition. The solid bulwarks were
+rent and shattered, as indeed was her whole hull; near the waterline were
+nailed sheets of lead, plainly in order to keep the water from entering
+the shot-holes; she had only one mast; and that was splintered in more
+than one place; a spar had been rigged up on to the stump of the
+bowsprit. The high poop such as distinguished the Spanish vessels was in
+the same deplorable condition; as well as the figure-head, which
+represented a beardless man with a halo behind his head, and which bore
+the marks of fierce hacks as well as of shot.
+
+Anthony read the name,--the _San Juan da Cabellas_.
+
+From the high quay too he could see down on to the middle decks, and
+there was the most shocking sight of all, for the boards and the
+mast-stumps and the bulwarks and the ship's furniture were all alike
+splashed with blood, some of the deeper pools not even yet dry. It was
+evident that the _San Juan_ had not yielded easily.
+
+Presently Anthony saw an officer approaching, and not wishing to be led
+into conversation slipped away again through the crowd to take Isabel the
+news.
+
+The two remained quietly upstairs the rest of the afternoon, listening to
+the singing and the shouting in the streets, and watching from their
+window the groups that swung and danced to and fro in joy at Rye's
+contribution to the defeat of the invaders. When the dusk fell the noise
+was louder than ever as the men began to drink more deep, and torches
+were continually tossing up and down the steep cobbled streets; the din
+reached its climax about half-past nine, when the main body of the
+revellers passed up towards the inn, and, as Anthony saw from the window,
+finally entered through the archway below; and then all grew tolerably
+quiet. Presently Isabel said that she would go to bed, but just before
+she left the room, the servant again came in.
+
+"If you please, sir, Lieutenant Raxham, of the _Seahorse_, is telling the
+tale of the capture of the Spanish ship; and the landlord bid me come and
+tell you."
+
+Anthony glanced at Isabel, who nodded at him.
+
+"Yes; go," she said, "and come up and tell me the news afterwards, if it
+is not very late."
+
+When Anthony came downstairs he found to his annoyance that the place of
+honour had been reserved for him in a tall chair next to the landlord's
+at the head of the table. The landlord rose to meet his guest.
+
+"Sit here, sir," he said. "I am glad you have come. And now, Mr.
+Raxham----"
+
+Anthony looked about him with some dismay at this extreme publicity. The
+room was full from end to end. They were chiefly soldiers who sat at the
+table--heavy-looking rustics from Hawkhurst, Cranbrook and Appledore, in
+brigantines and steel caps, who had been sent in by the magistrates to
+the nearest seaport to assist in the defence of the coast--a few of them
+wore corselets with almain rivets and carried swords, while the
+pike-heads of the others rose up here and there above the crowd. The rest
+of the room was filled with the townsmen of Rye--those who had been
+retained for the defence of the coast, as well as others who for any
+physical reason could not serve by sea or land. There was an air of
+extraordinary excitement in the room. The faces of the most stolid were
+transfigured, for they were gathered to hear of the struggle their own
+dear England was making; the sickening pause of those months of waiting
+had ended at last; the huge southern monster had risen up over the edge
+of the sea, and the panting little country had flown at his throat and
+grappled him; and now they were hearing the tale of how deep her fangs
+had sunk.
+
+The crowd laughed and applauded and drew its breath sharply, as one man;
+and the silence now and then was startling as the young officer told his
+story; although he had few gifts of rhetoric, except a certain vivid
+vocabulary. He himself was a lad of eighteen or so, with a pleasant
+reckless face, now flushed with drink and excitement, and sparkling eyes;
+he was seated in a chair upon the further end of the table, so that all
+could hear his story; and he had a cup of huff-cup in his left hand as he
+talked, leaving his right hand free to emphasise his points and slap his
+leg in a clumsy sort of oratory. His tale was full of little similes, at
+which his audience nodded their heads now and then, approvingly. He had
+apparently already begun his story, for when Anthony had taken his seat
+and silence had been obtained, he went straight on without any further
+introduction.
+
+The landlord leaned over to Anthony. "The _San Juan_," he whispered
+behind his hot hairy hand, and nodded at him with meaning eyes.
+
+"And every time they fired over us," went on the lieutenant, "and we
+fired into them; and the only damage they did us was their muskets in the
+tops. They killed Tom Dane like that"--there was a swift hiss of breath
+from the room; but the officer went straight on--"shot him through the
+back as he bent over his gun; and wounded old Harry and a score more; but
+all the while, lads, we were a-pounding at them with the broadsides as we
+came round, and raking them with the demi-cannon in the poop,
+until--well; go you and see the craft as she lies at the quay if you
+would know what we did. I tell you, as we came at her once towards the
+end, I saw that she was bleeding through her scuppers like a pig, from
+the middle deck. They were all packed up there together--sailors and
+soldiers and a priest or two; and scarce a ball could pass between the
+poop and the forecastle without touching flesh."
+
+The lad stopped a moment and took a pull at his cup, and a murmur of talk
+broke out in the room. Anthony was surprised at his accent and manner of
+speaking, and heard afterwards that he was the son of the parson at one
+of the inland villages, and had had an education. In a moment he went on.
+
+"Well--it would be about noon, just before the Admiral came up from
+Calais, that the old _Seahorse_ was lost. We came at the dons again as we
+had done before, only closer than ever; and just as the captain gave the
+word to put her about, a ball from one of their guns which they had
+trained down on us, cut old Dick Kemp in half at the helm, and broke the
+tiller to splinters."
+
+"Old Dick?" said a man's voice out of the reeking crowd, "Old Dick?"
+
+There was a murmur round him, bidding him hold his tongue; and the lad
+went on.
+
+"Well, we drifted nearer and nearer. There was nought to do but to bang
+at them; and that we did, by God--and to board her if we touched. Well, I
+worked my saker, and saw little else--for the smoke was like a black
+sea-fog; and the noise fit to crack your ears. Mine sing yet with it; the
+captain was bawling from the poop, and there were a dozen pikemen ready
+below; and then on a sudden came the crash; and I looked up and there was
+the Spaniards' decks above us, and the poop like a tower, with a grinning
+don or two looking down; and there was I looking up the muzzle of a
+culverin. I skipped towards the poop, shouting to the men; and the dons
+fired their broadside as I went.--God save us from that din! But I knew
+the old _Seahorse_ was done this time--the old ship lurched and shook as
+the balls tore through her and broke her back; and there was such a yell
+as you'll never hear this side of hell. Well--I was on the poop by now,
+and the men after me; for you see the poop of the _Seahorse_ was as high
+as the middle deck of the Spaniard, and we must board from there or not
+at all. Well, lads, there was the captain before me. He had fought cool
+till then, as cool as a parson among his roses, with never an oath from
+his mouth--but now he was as scarlet as a poppy, and his eyes were like
+blue fire, and his mouth jabbered and foamed; he was so hot, you see, at
+the loss of his ship. He was dancing to and fro waiting while the poop
+swung round on the tide; and the old craft plunged deeper in every wave
+that lifted her, but he cared no more for that nor for the musket-balls
+from the tops, nor for the brown grinning devils who shook their pikes at
+him from the decks, than--than a mad dog cares for a shower of leaves;
+but he stamped there and cursed them and damned them as they laughed at
+him; and then in a moment the poop touched.
+
+"Well, lads--" and the lieutenant set his cup down on the table, clapped
+his hands on his knees, laughed shortly and nervously once or twice, and
+looked round. "Well, lads, I have never seen the like. The captain went
+for them like a wild cat; one step on the rail and the next among them;
+and was gone like a stone into water"--and the lad clapped his hand on
+his thigh. "I saw one face slit up from chin to eye; and another split
+across like an apple; and then we were after him. The men were mad,
+too--what was left of us; and we poured up on to the decks and left the
+old _Seahorse_ to die. Well, we had our work before us--but it was no
+good. The dons could do nothing; I was after the captain as he went
+through the pack and came out just behind him; there were half a dozen of
+them down now; and the noise and the foreign oaths went up like smoke;
+and the captain himself was bleeding down one side of his face and
+grunting as he cut and stabbed; and I had had a knife through the arm;
+but he went up on to the poop; and as I followed, the Spaniards broke and
+threw down their arms--they saw 'twas no use, you see. When we reached
+the poop-stairs an officer in a blue coat came forward jabbering some
+jargon; but the captain would have no parley with him, but flung his dag
+clean into the man's face, and over he went backwards--with his damned
+high heels in the air."
+
+There was a sudden murmur of laughter from the room; Anthony glanced off
+the lieutenant's grinning ruddy face for a moment, and saw the rows of
+listening faces all wrinkled with mirth.
+
+"Well," went on the lad, "up went the captain, and I after him. Then
+there came across the deck, very slow and stately, the Spanish captain
+himself, in a fine laced coat and a plumed hat, and he was holding out
+his sword by the blade and bowed as we ran towards him, and began some
+damned foreign nonsense, with his _Senor_--but the captain would have
+none o' that, I tell you he was like Tom o' Bedlam now--so as the Senor
+grinned at him with his monkey face and bowed and wagged, the captain
+fetched him a slash across the cheek with his sword that cut up into his
+head; and that don went spinning across the poop like a morris-man and
+brought up against the rail, and then down he came," and the lad dashed
+his hand on his thigh again--"as dead as mutton."
+
+Again came a louder gust of laughter from the room. Anthony half rose in
+his chair, and then sat down again.
+
+"Well," said the lad, "and that was not all. Down he raged again to the
+decks and I behind him--I tell you, it was like a butcher's shop--but it
+was quieter now--the fighting was over--and the Spaniards were all run
+below, except half-a-dozen in the tops; looking down like young rooks at
+an archer. There had been a popish priest too with his crucifix in one
+hand and his god-almighty in the other, over a dying man as we came up;
+but as we came down there he lay in his black gown with a hole through
+his heart and his crucifix gone. One of the lads had got it no doubt.
+Well, the captain brought up at the main mast. 'God's blood,' he bawled,
+'where are the brown devils got to?' Some one told him, and pointed down
+the hatch. Well, then I turned sick with my wound and the smell of the
+place and all; and I knew nothing more till I found myself sitting on a
+dead don, with the captain holding me up and pouring a cordial down my
+throat."
+
+Then talk and laughter broke out in the audience; but the landlord held
+up his hand for silence.
+
+"And what of the others?" he shouted.
+
+"Dead meat too," said the lad--"the captain went down with a dozen or
+more and hunted them out and finished them. There was one, Dick told me
+afterwards," and the lieutenant gave a cackle of mirth, "that they hunted
+twice round the ship before he jumped over yelling to some popish saint
+to help him; but it seems he was deaf, like the old Baal that parson
+tells of o' Sundays. The dirty swine to run like that! Well, he's got his
+bellyful now of the salt water that he came so far to see. And then the
+captain with his own hands trained a robinet that was on the poop on to
+the tops; and down the birds came, one by one; for their powder up there
+was all shot off."
+
+"And the _Seahorse_?" said the landlord again.
+
+There fell a dead silence: all in the room knew that the ship was lost,
+but it was terrible to hear it again. The lad's face broke into lines of
+grief, and he spoke huskily.
+
+"Gone down with the dead and wounded; and the rest of the fleet a mile
+away."
+
+Then the lieutenant went on to describe how he himself had been deputed
+to bring the _San Juan_ into port with the wounded on board, while the
+captain and the rest of the crew by Drake's orders attached themselves to
+various vessels that were short-handed, and how the English fleet had
+followed what was left of the Spaniards when the fight ended at sunset,
+up towards the North Sea.
+
+When he finished his story there was a tremendous outburst of cheering
+and hammering upon the table, and the feet and the pike-butts thundered
+on the floor, and a name was cried again and again as the cups were
+emptied.
+
+"God save her Grace and old England!" yelled a slim smooth-faced archer
+from Appledore.
+
+"God send the dons and all her foes to hell!" roared a burly pikeman with
+his cup in the air. Then the room shook again as the toasts were drunk
+with applauding feet and hands.
+
+Anthony turned to the landlord, who had just ceased thumping with his
+great red fists on the table.
+
+"What was the captain's name?" he asked, when a slight lull came.
+
+"Maxwell," said the crimson-faced man. "Hubert Maxwell--one of Drake's
+own men."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When Anthony came upstairs he heard his name called through the door, and
+went in to Isabel's room to find her sitting up in bed in the gloom of
+the summer night; the party below had broken up, and all was quiet except
+for the far-off shouts and hoots of cheerful laughter from the dispersing
+groups down among the narrow streets.
+
+"Well?" she said, as he came in and stood in the doorway.
+
+"It is just the story of the prize," he said, "and it seems that Hubert
+had the taking of it."
+
+There was silence a moment. Anthony could see her face, a motionless pale
+outline, and her arms clasped round her knees as she sat up in bed.
+
+"Hubert?" she asked in an even voice.
+
+"Yes, Hubert."
+
+There was silence a moment.
+
+"Well?" she said again.
+
+"He is safe," said Anthony, "and fought gallantly. I will tell you more
+to-morrow."
+
+"Ah!" said Isabel softly; and then lay down again.
+
+"Good-night, Anthony."
+
+"Good-night."
+
+But Anthony dared not tell her the details next day, after all.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There was still a difficulty about the horses; they had not arrived until
+the Wednesday morning, and were greatly exhausted by a long and
+troublesome journey; so the travellers consented to postpone their
+journey for yet one more day. The weather, which had been thickening,
+grew heavier still in the afternoon, and great banks of clouds were
+rising out of the west. Anthony started out about four o'clock for a walk
+along the coast; and, making a long round in the direction of Lydd, did
+not finally return until about seven. As he came in at the north-east of
+the town he noticed how empty the streets were, and passed on down in the
+direction of the quay. As he turned down the steep street into the
+harbour groups began to pour up past him, laughing and exclaiming; and in
+a moment more came Isabel walking alone. He looked at her anxiously, for
+he saw something had happened. Her quiet face was lit up with some
+interior emotion, and her mouth was trembling.
+
+"The Armada is routed," she said; "and I have seen Hubert."
+
+The two turned back together and walked silently up to the inn. There she
+told him the story. She had been told that Captain Maxwell was come in
+the _Elizabeth_, for provisions for Lord Howard Seymour's squadron, to
+which his new command was attached; and that he was even now in harbour.
+At that she had gone straight down alone.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" she cried, "you know how it is with me. I could not help
+it. I am not ashamed of it. God Almighty knows all, and is not wrath with
+me. So I went down and was in the crowd as he came down again with the
+mayor, Mr. Hamon; we all made way for them, and the men cheered
+themselves scarlet; but he came down cool and quiet; you know his
+way--with his eyes half shut; and--and--he was so brown; and he looks
+sad--and he had a great plaister on the left temple. And then he saw me."
+
+Isabel sprang up, and came up to Anthony and took his hands. "Oh!
+Anthony; I was very happy then; because he took off his cap and bowed;
+and his face was all lighted; and he took my hand and kissed it--and then
+made Mr. Hamon known to me. The crowd laughed and said things--but I did
+not care; and he soon silenced them, he looked round so fiercely; and
+then I went on board with him--he would have it so--and he showed us
+everything--and we sat a little in the cabin; and he told me of his wife
+and child. She is the daughter of a Plymouth minister; he knew her when
+he was with Drake; and he told me all about her, so you see----" Isabel
+broke off; and sat down in the high window seat. "And then he asked me
+about you; and I said you were here; and that we were going to stay a
+little while with Mr. Buxton of Stanfield--you see I knew we could trust
+him; and Mr. Hamon was in the passage just then looking at the guns; and
+then a sailor came in to say that all was ready; and so we came away. But
+it was so good to see him again; and to know that he was so happy."
+
+Anthony looked at his sister in astonishment; her quiet manner was gone,
+and she was talking again almost like an excited child; and so happily.
+It was very strange, he thought. He sat down beside her.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" she said, "do you understand? I love him dearly still; and
+his wife and child too. God bless them all and keep them!"
+
+The mystery was still deep to him; and he feared to say what he should
+not; so he kissed Isabel silently; and the two sat there together and
+looked out over the crowding red roofs to the glowing western sky across
+the bay below them.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                             HOME-COMING
+
+
+It was a stormy summer evening as the brother and sister rode up between
+the last long hills that led to Great Keynes. A south-west wind had been
+rising all day, that same wind that was now driving the ruined Armada up
+into the fierce North Sea, with the fiercer men behind to bar the return.
+But here, twenty miles inland, with the high south-downs to break the
+gale, the riders were in comparative quiet, though the great trees
+overhead tossed their heavy rustling heads as the gusts struck them now
+and again.
+
+The party had turned off, as the dusk was falling, from the main-road
+into bridle-paths that they knew well, and were now approaching the
+village through the water meadows on the south-east side along a ride
+that would bring them, round the village, direct to the Dower House. In
+the gloom Anthony could make out the tall reeds, and the loosestrife and
+willowherb against them, that marked the course of the stream where he
+had caught trout, as a boy; and against the western sky, as he turned in
+his saddle, rose up the high windy hills where he had hawked with Hubert
+so many years before. It was a strange thought to him as he rode along
+that his very presence here in his own country was an act of high treason
+by the law lately passed, and that every day he lived here must be a day
+of danger.
+
+For Isabel, too, it was strange to be riding up again towards the
+battlefield of her desires--that battlefield where she had lived for
+years in such childish faith and peace without a suspicion of the forces
+that were lurking beneath her own quiet nature. But to both of them the
+sense of home-coming was stronger than all else--that strange passion for
+a particular set of inanimate things--or, at the most, for an association
+of ideas--that has no parallel in human emotions; and as they rode up the
+darkening valley and the lights of the high windows of the Hall began to
+show over the trees on their right, Anthony forgot his treason and Isabel
+her conflicts, and both felt a lump rise in the throat, and their hearts
+begin to beat quicker with a strange pleasurable pulse, and to Isabel's
+eyes at least there rose up great tears of happiness and content; neither
+dared speak, but both looked eagerly about at the pool where the Mayflies
+used to dance, at the knoll where the pigeons nested, at the little low
+bridge beneath which their inch-long boats used to slide sideways into
+darkness, and the broad marshy flats where the gorgeous irises grew.
+
+"How the trees have grown!" said Anthony at last, with an effort; "I
+cannot see the lights from the house."
+
+"Mrs. Carroll will have made ready the first-floor rooms then, on the
+south."
+
+"I am sorry they are not our own," said Anthony.
+
+"Ah, look! there is the dovecote," cried Isabel.
+
+They were passing up now behind the farm buildings; and directly
+afterwards came round in front of the little walled garden to the west of
+the house.
+
+There was a sudden exclamation from Anthony; and Isabel stared in silent
+dismay. The old house rose up before them with its rows of square windows
+against the night sky, dark. There was not a glimmer anywhere; even Mrs.
+Carroll's own room on the south was dark. They reined their horses in and
+stood a moment.
+
+"Oh, Anthony, Anthony!" cried Isabel suddenly, "what is it? Is there no
+one there?"
+
+Anthony shook his head; and then put his tired beast to a shambling trot
+with Isabel silent again with weariness and disappointment behind him.
+They passed along outside the low wall, turned the corner of the house
+and drew up at the odd little doorway in the angle at the back of the
+house. The servants had drawn up behind them, and now pressed up to hold
+their horses; and the brother and sister slipped off and went towards the
+door. Anthony passed under the little open porch and put his hand out to
+the door; it was quite dark underneath the porch, and he felt further and
+further, and yet there was no door; his foot struck the step. He felt his
+way to the doorposts and groped for the door; but still there was none;
+he could feel the panelling of the lobby inside the doorway, and that was
+all. He drew back, as one would draw back from a dead face on which one
+had laid a hand in the dark.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" said Isabel again, "what is it?" She was still outside.
+
+"Have you a light?" said Anthony hoarsely to the servants.
+
+The man nearest him bent and fumbled in the saddle-bags, and after what
+seemed an interminable while kindled a little bent taper and handed it to
+him. As he went towards the porch shading it with his hand, Isabel sprang
+past him and went before; and then, as the light fell through the
+doorway, stopped in dead and bewildered silence.
+
+The door was lying on the floor within, shattered and splintered.
+
+Anthony stepped beside her, and she turned and clung to his arm, and a
+sob or two made itself heard. Then they looked about them. The banisters
+above them were smashed, and like a cataract, down the stairs lay a
+confused heap of crockery, torn embroidery and clothes, books, and broken
+furniture.
+
+Anthony's hand shook so much that the shadows of the broken banisters
+waved on the wall above like thin exulting dancers.
+
+Suddenly Anthony started.
+
+"Mrs. Carroll," he exclaimed, and he darted upstairs past the ruins into
+her two rooms halfway up the flight; and in a minute or two was back with
+Isabel.
+
+"She has escaped," he said in a low voice; and then the two stood looking
+about them silently again. The door leading to the cellars on the left
+was broken too; and fragments of casks and bottles lay about the steps;
+the white wall was splashed with drink, and there was a smell of spirits
+in the air. Evidently the stormers had thought themselves worthy of their
+hire.
+
+"Come," he said again; and leaving the entrance lobby, the two passed to
+the hall-door and pushed that open and looked. There was the same furious
+confusion there; the tapestry was lying tumbled and rent on the
+floor--the high oak mantelpiece was shattered, and doleful cracks and
+splinters in the panelling all round showed how mad the attack had been;
+one of the pillars of the further archway was broken clean off, and the
+brickwork showed behind; the pictures had been smashed and added to the
+heap of wrecked furniture and broken glass in the middle.
+
+"Come," he said once more; and the two passed silently through the broken
+archway, and going up the other flight of stairs, gradually made the
+round of the house. Everywhere it was the same, except in the servants'
+attics, where, apparently, the mob had not thought it worth while to go.
+
+Isabel's own room was the most pitiable of all; the windows had only the
+leaden frames left, and those bent and battered; the delicate panelling
+was scarred and split by the shower of stones that had poured in through
+the window and that now lay in all parts of the room. A painting of her
+mother that had hung over her bed was now lying face downwards on the
+floor. Isabel turned it over silently; a stone had gone through the face;
+and it had been apparently slit too by some sharp instrument. Even the
+slender oak bed was smashed in the centre, as if half a dozen men had
+jumped upon it at once; and the little prie-dieu near the window had been
+deliberately hacked in half. Isabel looked at it all with wide startled
+eyes and parted lips; and then suddenly sank down on the wrecked bed
+where she had hoped to sleep that night, and began to sob like a child.
+
+"Ah! I did think--I did think----" she began.
+
+Anthony stooped and tried to lift her.
+
+"Come, my darling," he said, "is not this a high honour? _Qui relinquit
+domos!_"
+
+"Oh! why have they done it?" sobbed Isabel. "What harm have we done
+them?" and she began to wail. She was thoroughly over-tired and
+over-wrought; and Anthony could not find it in his heart to blame her;
+but he spoke again bravely.
+
+"We are Catholics," he said; "that is why they have done it. Do not throw
+away this grace that our Lord has given us; embrace it and make it
+yours."
+
+It was the priest that was speaking now; and Isabel turned her face and
+looked at him; and then got up and hid her face on his shoulder.
+
+"Oh, Anthony, help me!" she said; and so stood there, quiet.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He came down presently to the servants, while Isabel went upstairs to
+prepare the rooms in the attics; for it was impossible for them to ride
+further that night; so they settled to sleep there, and stable the
+horses; and to ride on early the next day, and be out of the village
+before the folks were about. Anthony gave directions to the servants, who
+were Catholics too, and explained in a word or two what had happened; and
+bade them come up to the house as soon as they had fed and watered the
+beasts; meanwhile he took the saddle-bags indoors and spread out their
+remaining provisions in one of the downstairs rooms; and soon Isabel
+joined him.
+
+"I have made up five beds," she said, and her voice and lips were steady,
+and her eyes grave and serene again.
+
+The five supped together in the wrecked kitchen, a fine room on the east
+of the house, supported by a great oak pillar to which the horses of
+guests were sometimes attached when the stable was full.
+
+Isabel managed to make a fire and to boil some soup; but they hung thick
+curtains across the shattered windows, and quenched the fire as soon as
+the soup was made, for fear that either the light or the smoke from the
+chimney should arouse attention.
+
+When supper was over, and the two men-servants and Isabel's French maid
+were washing up in the scullery, Isabel suddenly turned to Anthony as
+they sat together near the fireplace.
+
+"I had forgotten," she said, "what we arranged as we rode up. I must go
+and tell her still."
+
+Anthony looked at her steadily a moment.
+
+"God keep you," he said.
+
+She kissed him and took her riding-cloak, drew the hood over her head,
+and went out into the dark.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was with the keenest relief that, half an hour later, Anthony heard
+her footstep again in the red-tiled hall outside. The servants were gone
+upstairs by now, and the house was quiet. She came in, and sat by him
+again and took his hand.
+
+"Thank God I went," she said. "I have left her so happy."
+
+"Tell me all," said Anthony.
+
+"I went through the garden," said Isabel, "but came round to the front of
+the house so that they might not think I came from here. When the servant
+came to the door--he was a stranger, and a Protestant no doubt--I said at
+once that I brought news of Mr. Maxwell from Rye; and he took me straight
+in and asked me to come in while he fetched her woman. Then her woman
+came out and took me upstairs, up into Lady Maxwell's old room; and there
+she was lying in bed under the great canopy. Oh, Anthony, she is so
+pretty! her golden hair was lying out all over the pillow, and her face
+is so sweet. She cried out when I came in, and lifted herself on her
+elbow; so I just said at once, 'He is safe and well'; and then she went
+off into sobs and laughter; so that I had to go and soothe her--her woman
+was so foolish and helpless; and very soon she was quiet: and then she
+called me her darling, and she kissed me again and again; and told the
+woman to go and leave us together; and then she lifted the sheet; and
+showed me the face of a little child. Oh Anthony; Hubert's child and
+hers, the second, born on Tuesday--only think of that. 'Mercy, I was
+going to call her,' she said, 'if I had not heard by to-morrow, but now I
+shall call her Victory.'"
+
+Anthony looked quickly at his sister, with a faint smile in his eyes.
+
+"And what did you say?" he asked.
+
+Isabel smiled outright; but her eyes were bright with tears too.
+
+"'You have guessed,' she said. 'Yes,' I said, 'call her Mercy all the
+same,' and she kissed me again, and cried, and said that she would. And
+then I told her all about Hubert; and about his little wound; and how
+well he looked; and how all the fighting was most likely over; and what
+his cabin looked like. And then she suddenly guessed who I was, and asked
+me; and I could not deny it, you know; but she promised not to tell. Then
+she told me all about the house here; and how she was afraid Hubert had
+said something impatient about people who go to foreign parts and leave
+their country to be attacked, 'But you know he did not really mean it,'
+she said; and of course he did not. Well, the people had remembered that,
+and it spread and spread; and when the news of the Armada came last week,
+a mob came over from East Grinsted, and they sat drinking and drinking in
+the village; and of course Grace could not go out to them; and all the
+old people are gone, and the Catholics on the estate--and so at last they
+all came out roaring and shouting down the drive, and Mrs. Carroll was
+warned and slipped out to the Hall; and she is now gone to Stanfield to
+wait for us--and then the crowd broke into the house--but, oh Anthony,
+Grace was so sorry, and cried sore to think of us here; and asked us to
+come and stay there; but of course I told her we could not: and then I
+said a prayer for her; and we kissed one another again; and then I came
+away."
+
+Anthony looked at his sister, and there was honour and pride of her in
+his eyes.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The ride to Stanfield next day was a long affair, at a foot's-pace all
+the way: the horses were thoroughly tired with their journey, and they
+were obliged to start soon after three o'clock in the morning after a
+very insufficient rest; they did not reach Groombridge till nearly ten
+o'clock, when they dined, and then rode on towards Tonbridge about noon.
+There were heavy hearts to be carried as well. The attempt to welcome the
+misery of their home-coming was a bitter effort; all the more bitter for
+that it was an entirely unexpected call upon them. During those six years
+abroad probably not a day had passed without visions of Great Keynes, and
+the pleasant and familiar rooms and garden of their own house, and mental
+rehearsals of their return. The shock of the night before too had been
+emphasised by the horror of the cold morning light creeping through the
+empty windows on to the cruel heaps within. The garden too, seen in the
+dim morning, with its trampled lawns and wrecked flower-beds heaped with
+withered sunflowers, bell-blossoms and all the rich August growth, with
+the earthen flower-bowls smashed, the stone balls on the gate overturned,
+and the laurels at the corner uprooted--all this was a horrible pain to
+Isabel, to whom the garden was very near as dear and familiar as her own
+room. So it was a silent and sorrowful ride; and Anthony's heart rose in
+relief as at last up the grey village-street he saw the crowded roofs of
+Stanfield Place rise over the churchyard wall.
+
+Their welcome from Mr. Buxton went far to compensate for all.
+
+"My dear boy," he said, "or, my dear father, as I should call you in
+private, you do not know what happiness is mine to-day. It is a great
+thing to have a priest again; but, if you will allow me to say so, it is
+a greater to have my friend--and what a sister you have upstairs!"
+
+They were in Mr. Buxton's own little room on the ground-floor, and Isabel
+had gone to rest until supper.
+
+Anthony told him of the grim surprise that had awaited them at Great
+Keynes. "So you must forgive my sister if she is a little sad."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Buxton, "I had heard from Mrs. Carroll last night
+when she arrived here. But there was no time to warn you. I had expected
+you to-day, though Mrs. Carroll did not."
+
+(Anthony had sent a man straight from Rye to Stanfield.)
+
+"But Mistress Isabel, as I shall venture to call her, must do what she
+can with this house and garden. I need not say how wholly it is hers. And
+I shall call you Anthony," he added--"in public, at least. And, for
+strangers, you are just here as my guest; and you shall be called
+Capell--a sound name; and you shall be Catholics too; though you are no
+priest, of course, in public--and you have returned from the Continent. I
+hold it is no use to lie when you can be found out. I do not know what
+your conscience is, Father Anthony; but, for myself, I count us Catholics
+to be _in statu belli_ now; and therefore I shall lie frankly and fully
+when there is need; and you may do as you please. Old Mr. Blake used to
+bid me prevaricate instead; but that always seemed to me two lies instead
+of one--one to the questioning party and the other to myself; and so I
+always said to him, but he would not have it so. I wondered he did not
+tell me that two negatives made an affirmative; but he was not clever
+enough, the good father. So my own custom is to tell one plain lie when
+needed, and shame the devil."
+
+It was pleasant to Anthony to hear his friend talk again, and he said so.
+His host's face softened into a great tenderness.
+
+"Dear lad, I know what you mean. Please God you may find this a happy
+home."
+
+A couple of hours later, when Anthony and Isabel came down together from
+their rooms in the old wing, they found Mr. Buxton in his black satin and
+lace in the beautiful withdrawing-room on the ground-floor. It was
+already past the supper-hour, but their host showed no signs of going
+into the hall. At last he apologised.
+
+"I ask your pardon, Mistress Isabel; but I have a guest come to stay with
+me, who only arrived an hour ago; and she is a great lady and must have
+her time. Ah! here she is."
+
+The door was flung open and a radiant vision appeared. The door was a
+little way off, and there were no candles near it; but there swelled and
+rustled into the room a figure all in blue and gold, with a white
+delicate ruff; and diamond buckles shone beneath the rich brocaded
+petticoat. Above rose a white bosom and throat scintillating with
+diamonds, and a flushed face with scarlet lips, all crowned by piles of
+black hair, with black dancing eyes beneath. Still a little in the shadow
+this splendid figure swept down with a great curtsey, which Isabel met by
+another, while the two gentlemen bowed low; and then, as the stranger
+swayed up again into the full light of the sconces, Anthony recognised
+Mary Corbet.
+
+He stood irresolute with happy hesitation; and she came up smiling
+brilliantly; and before he could stay her dropped down on one knee and
+took his hand and kissed it; just as the man left the room.
+
+"God bless you, Father Anthony!" she said; and as he looked at her, as
+she glanced up, he could not tell whether her eyes shone with tears or
+laughter.
+
+"This is very charming and proper, Mistress Corbet, and like a true
+daughter of the Church," put in Mr. Buxton, "but I shall be obliged to
+you if you will not in future kiss priests' hands nor call them Father in
+the presence of the servants--at least not in my house."
+
+"Ah!" she said, "you were always prudent. Have you seen his secret
+doors?" she went on to Anthony. "The entire Catholic Church might play
+hare and hounds with the Holy Father as huntsman and the Cardinals as the
+whips, through Mr. Buxton's secret labyrinths."
+
+"Wait until you are hare, and it is other than Holy Church that is
+a-hunting," said Mr. Buxton, "and you will thank God for my labyrinths,
+as you call them."
+
+Then she greeted Isabel with great warmth.
+
+"Why, my dear," she said, "you are not the little Puritan maiden any
+longer. We must have a long talk to-night; and you shall tell me
+everything."
+
+"Mistress Mary is not so greatly changed," said Isabel, smiling. "She
+always would be told everything."
+
+It was strange to Anthony to meet Mary again after so long, and to find
+her so little changed, as Isabel had said truly. He himself had passed
+through so much since they had last met at Greenwich over six years
+ago--his conversion, his foreign sojourn, and, above all, the bewildering
+and intoxicating sweetness of his ordination and priestly life. And yet
+he felt as close to Mary as ever, knit in a bond of wonderful good
+fellowship and brotherhood such as he had never felt to any other in just
+that kind and degree. He watched her, warm and content, as she talked
+across the polished oak and beneath the gleam of the candles; and
+listened, charmed by her air and her talk.
+
+"There is not so much news of her Grace," she said, "save that she is
+turning soldier in her old age. She rode out to Tilbury, you know, the
+other day, in steel cuirass and scarlet; out to see her dear Robin and
+the army; and her royal face was all smiles and becks, and lord! how the
+soldiers cheered! But if you had seen her as I did, in her room when she
+first buckled on her armour, and the joints did not fit--yes, and heard
+her! there were no smiles to spare then. She lodged at Mr. Rich's, you
+know, two nights; but he would be Mr. Poor, I should suppose, by the time
+her Grace left him; for he will not see the worth of a shoelace again of
+all that he expended on her."
+
+"You see," remarked Mr. Buxton to Isabel, "how fortunate we are in having
+such a friend of her Grace's with us. We hear all the cream of the news,
+even though it be a trifle sour sometimes."
+
+"A lover of her Grace," said Mary, "loves the truth about her, however
+bitter. But then I have no secret passages where I may hide from my
+sovereign!"
+
+"The cream can scarce be but sour," said Anthony, "near her Grace: there
+is so much thunder in the air."
+
+"Yes, but the sun came out when you were there, Anthony," put in Isabel,
+smiling.
+
+"But even the light of her glorious countenance is trying," said Mary.
+"She is overpowering in thunder and sunshine alike."
+
+"We have had enough of that metaphor," observed Mr. Buxton.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then Anthony had to talk, and tell all the foreign news of Douai and Rome
+and Cardinal Allen; and of Father Persons' scheme for a college at
+Valladolid.
+
+"Father Robert is a superb beggar--as he is superb in all things," said
+Mr. Buxton. "I dare not think how much he got from me for his college;
+and then I do not even approve of his college. His principles are too
+logical for me. I have ever had a weakness for the _non sequitur_."
+
+This led on to the Armada; Anthony told his experience of it; how he had
+seen at least the sails of Lord Howard's squadron far away against the
+dawn; and this led on again to a sharp discussion when the servants had
+left the room.
+
+"I do not know," said Mary at last; "it is difficult--is not the choice
+between God and Elizabeth? If I were a man, why should I not take up arms
+to defend my religion? Since I am a woman, why should I not pray for
+Philip's success? It is a bitter hard choice, I know; but why need I
+prefer my country to my faith? Tell me that, Father Anthony."
+
+"I can only tell you my private opinion," said Anthony, "and that is,
+that both duties may be done. As Mr. Buxton here used to tell me, the
+duty to Caesar is as real as the duty to God. A man is bound to both; for
+each has its proper bounds. When either oversteps them it must be
+resisted. When Elizabeth bids me deny my faith, I tell her I would sooner
+die. When a priest bids me deny my country, I tell him I would sooner be
+damned."
+
+Mary clapped her hands.
+
+"I like to hear a man talk like that," she cried. "But what of the Holy
+Father and his excommunication of her Grace?"
+
+Anthony looked up at her sharply, and then smiled; Isabel watched him
+with a troubled face.
+
+"Aquinas holds," he said, "that an excommunication of sovereign and
+people in a lump is invalid. And until the Holy Father tells me himself
+that Aquinas is wrong, I shall continue to think he is right."
+
+"God-a-mercy!" burst in Mr. Buxton, "what a to-do! Leave it alone until
+the choice must be made; and meanwhile say your prayers for Pope and
+Queen too, and hear mass and tell your beads and hold your tongue: that
+is what I say to myself. Mistress Mary, I will not have my chaplain
+heckled; here is his lady sister all a-tremble between heresy and
+treason."
+
+They sat long over the supper-table, talking over the last six years and
+the times generally. More than once Mary showed a strange bitterness
+against the Queen. At last Mr. Buxton showed his astonishment plainly.
+
+"I do not understand you," he said. "I know that at heart you are loyal;
+and yet one might say you meditated her murder."
+
+Mary's face grew white with passion and her eyes blazed.
+
+"Ah!" she hissed, "you do not understand, you say? Then where is your
+heart? But then you did not see Mary Stuart die."
+
+Anthony looked at her, amazed.
+
+"And you did, Mistress Mary?" he asked.
+
+Mary bowed, with her lips set tight to check their trembling.
+
+"I will tell you," she said, "if our host permits"; and she glanced at
+him.
+
+"Then come this way," he said, and they rose from table.
+
+They went back again to the withdrawing-room; a little cedar-fire had
+been kindled under the wide chimney; and the room was full of dancing
+shadows. The great plaster-pendants, the roses, the crowns, and the
+portcullises on the ceiling seemed to waver in the firelight, for Mr.
+Buxton at a sign from Mary blew out the four tapers that were burning in
+the sconces. They all sat down in the chairs that were set round the
+fire, Mary in a tall porter's chair with flaps that threw a shadow on her
+face when she leaned back; and she took a fan in her hand to keep the
+fire, or her friends' eyes, from her face should she need it.
+
+She first told them very briefly of the last months of Mary's life, of
+the web that was spun round her by Walsingham's tactics, and her own
+friends' efforts, until it was difficult for her to stir hand or foot
+without treason, real or pretended, being set in motion somewhere. Then
+she described how at Christmas '86 Elizabeth had sent her--Mary
+Corbet--as a Catholic, up to the Queen of the Scots at Fotheringay, on a
+private mission to attempt to win the prisoner's confidence, and to
+persuade her to confess to having been privy to Babington's conspiracy;
+and how the Scottish Queen had utterly denied it, even in the most
+intimate conversations. Sentence had been already passed, but the warrant
+had not been signed; and it never would have been signed, said Mistress
+Corbet, if Mary had owned to the crime of which she was accused.
+
+"Ah! how they insulted her!" cried Mary Corbet indignantly. "She showed
+me one day the room where her throne had stood. Now the cloth of state
+had been torn down by Sir Amyas Paulet's men, and he himself dared to sit
+with his hat on his head in the sovereign's presence! The insolence of
+the hound! But the Queen showed me how she had hung a crucifix where her
+royal arms used to hang. 'J'appelle,' she said to me, 'de la reine au roi
+des rois.'"
+
+Mistress Corbet went on to tell of the arrival of Walsingham's
+brother-in-law, Mr. Beale, with the death-warrant on that February Sunday
+evening.
+
+"I saw his foxy face look sideways up at the windows as he got off his
+horse in the courtyard; and I knew that our foes had triumphed. Then the
+other bloodhounds began to arrive; my lord of Kent on the Monday and
+Shrewsbury on the Tuesday. Then they came in to us after dinner; and they
+told her Grace it was to be for next day. I was behind her chair and saw
+her hand on the boss of the arm, and it did not stir nor clench; she said
+it could not be. She could not believe it of Elizabeth.
+
+"When she did at last believe it, there was no wild weeping or crying for
+mercy; but she set her affairs in order, queenly, and yet sedately too.
+She first thought of her soul, and desired that M. de Preau might come to
+her and hear her confession; but they would not permit it. They offered
+her Dr. Fletcher instead, 'a godly man,' as my lord of Kent called him.
+'Je ne m'en doute pas,' she said, smiling. But it was hard not to have a
+priest.
+
+"Then she set her earthly affairs in order when she had examined her soul
+and made confession to God without the Dean's assistance. We all supped
+together when it was growing late; and I thought, Father Anthony--indeed
+I did--of another Supper long ago. Then M. Gorion was sent for to arrange
+some messages and gifts; and until two of the clock in the morning we
+watched with her or served her as she wrote and gave orders. The court
+outside was full of comings and goings. As I passed down the passage I
+saw the torches of the visitors that were come to see the end; and once I
+heard a hammering from the great hall. Then she went to her bed; and I
+think few lay as quiet as she in the castle that night. I was with her
+ladies when they waked her before dawn; and it was hard to see that sweet
+face on the pillow open its eyes again to what was before her.
+
+"Then when she was dressed I went in again, and we all went to the
+oratory, where she received our Saviour from the golden pyx which the
+Holy Father had sent her; for, you see, they would allow no priest to
+come near her....
+
+"Presently the gentlemen knocked. When we tried to follow we were
+prevented; they wished her to die alone among her enemies; but at last
+two of the ladies were allowed to go with her.
+
+"I ran out another way, and sent a message to my Lord Shrewsbury, who
+knew me at court. As I waited in the courtyard, the musicians there were
+playing 'The Witches' Dirge,' as is done at the burnings--and all to mock
+at my queen! At last a halberdier was sent to bring me in."
+
+Mary Corbet was silent a moment or two and leaned back in her chair; and
+the others dared not speak. The strange emotion of her voice and the
+stillness of that sparkling figure in the porter's chair affected them
+profoundly. Her face was now completely shaded by a fan.
+
+"It was in the hall, where a great fire was burning on the hearth. The
+stage stood at the upper end; all was black. The crowd of gentlemen
+filled the hall and all were still and reverent except--except a devil
+who laughed as my queen came in, all in black. She was smiling and brave,
+and went up the steps and sat on her black throne and looked about her.
+The--the _things_ were just in front of her.
+
+"Then the warrant was read by Beale, and I saw the lords glance at her as
+it ended; but there was nought but joyous hope in her face. She looked
+now and again gently on the ivory crucifix in her hand, as she listened;
+and her lips moved to--to--Him who was delivered to death for her."
+
+Mary Corbet gave one quick sob, and was silent again for an instant. Then
+she went on in a yet lower voice.
+
+"Dr. Fletcher tried to address her, but he stammered and paused three or
+four times; and the queen smiled on him and bade him not trouble himself,
+for that she lived and died a Catholic. But they would not let her be; so
+she looked on her crucifix and was silent; and even then my lord of Kent
+badgered her and told her Christ crucified in her hand would not save
+her, except He was engraved on her heart.
+
+"Then she knelt at her chair and tried to pray softly to herself; but
+Fletcher would not have that, and prayed himself, aloud, and all the
+gentlemen in the hall began to pray aloud with him. But Mary prayed on in
+Latin and English aloud, and prevailed, for all were silent at the end
+but she.
+
+"And at last she kissed the crucifix and cried in a sweet piercing voice,
+'As thine arms, O Jesus, were spread upon the Cross, so receive me into
+Thy mercy and forgive me my sins!'"
+
+Again Mistress Corbet was silent; and Anthony drew a long sobbing breath
+of pure pity, and Isabel was crying quietly to herself.
+
+"When the headsmen offered to assist her," went on the low voice, "the
+queen smiled at the gentlemen and said that she had never had such grooms
+before; and then they let the ladies come up. When they began to help her
+with her dress I covered my face--I could not help it. There was such a
+stillness now that I could hear her beads chink at her girdle. When I
+looked again, she was ready, with her sweet neck uncovered: all round her
+was black but the headsman, who wore a white apron over his velvet, and
+she, in her beauty, and oh! her face was so fair and delicate and her
+eyes so tender and joyous. And as her ladies looked at her, they sobbed
+piteously. 'Ne criez vous,' said she.
+
+"Then she knelt down, and Mistress Mowbray bound her eyes. She smiled
+again under the handkerchief. 'Adieu,' she said, and then, 'Au revoir.'
+
+"Then she said once more a Latin psalm, and then laid her head down, as
+on a pillow.
+
+"'In manus tuas, Domine,' she said."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary Corbet stopped, and leaned forward a little, putting her hand into
+her bosom; Anthony looked at her as she drew up a thin silk cord with a
+ruby ring attached to it.
+
+"This was hers," she said simply, and held it out. Each of the Catholics
+took it and kissed it reverently, and Mary replaced it.
+
+"When they lifted her," she added, "a little dog sprang out from her
+clothes and yelped. And at that the man near me, who had laughed as she
+came in, wept."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then the four sat silent in the firelight.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IV
+
+                           STANFIELD PLACE
+
+
+Life at Stanfield Place was wonderfully sweet to Anthony and Isabel after
+their exile abroad, for both of them had an intense love of England and
+of English ways. The very sight of fair-faced children, and the noise of
+their shrill familiar voices from the village street, the depths of the
+August woods round them, the English manners of living--all this was
+alive with a full deliberate joy to these two. Besides, there was the
+unfailing tenderness and gaiety of Mr. Buxton; and at first there was the
+pleasant company of Mary Corbet as well.
+
+There was little or no anxiety resting on any of them. "God was served,"
+as the celebration of mass was called, each morning in the little room
+where Anthony had made the exercises, and the three others were always
+present. It was seldom that the room was not filled to over-flowing on
+Sundays and holy-days with the household and the neighbouring Catholics.
+
+Everything was, of course, perfection in the little chapel when it was
+furnished; as was all that Mr. Buxton possessed. There was a wonderful
+golden crucifix by an unknown artist, that he had picked up in his
+travels, that stood upon the altar, with the bird-types of the Saviour at
+each of the four ends; a pelican at the top, an eagle on the right
+supporting its young which were raising their wings for a flight, on the
+left a phoenix amid flames, and at the foot a hen gathering her
+chickens under her wings--all the birds had tiny emerald eyes; the figure
+on the cross was beautifully wrought, and had rubies in hands and feet
+and side. There were also two silver altar-candlesticks designed by
+Marrina for the Piccolomini chapel in the church of St. Francis in Siena;
+and two more, plainer, for the Elevation. The vestments were exquisite;
+those for high festivals were cloth of gold; and the other white ones
+were beautifully worked with seed pearls, and jewelled crosses on the
+stole and maniple. The other colours, too, were well represented, and
+were the work of a famous convent in the south of France. All the other
+articles, too, were of silver: the lavabo basin, the bell, the thurible,
+the boat and spoon, and the cruets. It was a joy to all the Catholics who
+came to see the worship of God carried on with such splendour, when in so
+many places even necessaries were scarcely forthcoming.
+
+There was a little hiding-hole between the chapel and the priest's room,
+just of a size to hold the altar furniture and the priests in case of a
+sudden alarm; and there were several others in the house too, which Mr.
+Buxton had showed to Anthony with a good deal of satisfaction, on the
+morning after his arrival.
+
+"I dared not show them to you the last time you were here," he said, "and
+there was no need; but now there must be no delay. I have lately made
+some more, too. Now here is one," he said, stopping before the great
+carved mantelpiece in the hall.
+
+He looked round to see that no servant was in the room, and then,
+standing on a settee before the fire, touched something above, and a
+circular hole large enough for a man to clamber through appeared in the
+midst of the tracery.
+
+"There," he said, "and you will find some cured ham and a candle, with a
+few dates within, should you ever have need to step up there--which, pray
+God, you may not."
+
+"What is the secret?" asked Anthony, as the tracery swung back into
+place, and his host stepped down.
+
+"Pull the third roebuck's ears in the coat of arms, or rather push them.
+It closes with a spring, and is provided with a bolt. But I do not
+recommend that refuge unless it is necessary. In winter it is too hot,
+for the chimney passes behind it; and in summer it is too oppressive, for
+there is not too much air."
+
+At the end of the corridor that led in the direction of the little old
+rooms where Anthony had slept in his visit, Mr. Buxton stopped before the
+portrait of a kindly-looking old gentleman that hung on the wall.
+
+"Now there is an upright old man you would say; and indeed he was, for he
+was my own uncle, and made a godly end of it last year. But now see what
+a liar I have made of him!"
+
+Mr. Buxton put his hand behind the frame, and the whole picture opened
+like a door showing a space within where three or four could stand.
+Anthony stepped inside and his friend followed him, and after showing him
+some clothes hanging against the wall closed the picture after them,
+leaving them in the dark.
+
+"Now see what a sharp-eyed old fellow he is too," whispered his host.
+Anthony looked where he was guided, and perceived two pinholes through
+which he could see the whole length of the corridor.
+
+"Through the centre of each eye," whispered his friend. "Is he not shrewd
+and secret? And now turn this way."
+
+Anthony turned round and saw the opposite wall slowly opening; and in a
+moment more he stepped out and found himself in the lobby outside the
+little room where he had made the exercises six years ago. He heard a
+door close softly as he looked about him in astonishment, and on turning
+round saw only an innocent-looking set of shelves with a couple of books
+and a little pile of paper and packet of quills upon them.
+
+"There," said Mr. Buxton, "who would suspect Tacitus his history and
+Juvenal his satires of guarding the passage of a Christian ecclesiastic
+fleeing for his life?"
+
+Then he showed him the secret, how one shelf had to be drawn out
+steadily, and the nail in another pressed simultaneously, and how then
+the entire set of shelves swung open.
+
+Then they went back and he showed him the spring behind the frame of the
+picture.
+
+"You see the advantage of this," he went on: "on the one side you may
+flee upstairs, a treasonable skulking cassocked jack-priest with the
+lords and the commons and the Queen's Majesty barking at your heels; and
+on the other side you may saunter down the gallery without your beard and
+in a murrey doublet, a friend of Mr. Buxton's, taking the air and
+wondering what the devil all the clamouring be about."
+
+Then he took him downstairs again and showed him finally the escape of
+which he was most proud--the entrance, designed in the cellar-staircase,
+to an underground passage from the cellars, which led, he told him,
+across to the garden-house beyond the lime-avenue.
+
+"That is the pride of my heart," he said, "and maybe will be useful some
+day; though I pray not. Ah! her Grace and her honest Council are right.
+We Papists are a crafty and deceitful folk, Father Anthony."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The four grew very intimate during those few weeks; they had many
+memories and associations in common on which to build up friendship, and
+the aid of a common faith and a common peril with which to cement it. The
+gracious beauty of the house and the life at Stanfield, too, gilded it
+all with a very charming romance. They were all astonished at the easy
+intimacy with which they behaved, one to another.
+
+Mary Corbet was obliged to return to her duties at Court at the beginning
+of September; and she had something of an ache at her heart as the time
+drew on; for she had fallen once more seriously in love with Isabel. She
+said a word of it to Mr. Buxton. They were walking in the lime-avenue
+together after dinner on the last day of Mary's visit.
+
+"You have a good chaplain," she said; "what an honest lad he is! and how
+serious and recollected! Please God he at least may escape their claws!"
+
+"It is often so," said Mr. Buxton, "with those wholesome out-of-door
+boys; they grow up into such simple men of God."
+
+"And Isabel!" said Mary, rustling round upon him as she walked. "What a
+great dame she is become! I used to lie on her bed and kick my heels and
+laugh at her; but now I would like to say my prayers to her. She is
+somewhat like our Lady herself, so grave and serious, and yet so warm and
+tender."
+
+Mr. Buxton nodded sharply.
+
+"I felt sure you would feel it," he said.
+
+"Ah! but I knew her when she was just a child; so simple that I loved to
+startle her. But now--but now--those two ladies have done wonders with
+her. She has all the splendour of Mary Maxwell, and all the softness of
+Margaret."
+
+"Yes," said the other meditatively; "the two ladies have done it--or, the
+grace of God."
+
+Mary looked at him sideways and her lips twitched a little.
+
+"Yes--or the grace of God, as you say."
+
+The two laughed into each other's eyes, for they understood one another
+well. Presently Mary went on:
+
+"When you and I fence together at table, she does not turn frigid like so
+many holy folk--or peevish and bewildered like stupid folk--but she just
+looks at us, and laughs far down in those deep grey eyes of hers. Oh! I
+love her!" ended Mary.
+
+They walked in silence a minute or two.
+
+"And I think I do," said Mr. Buxton softly.
+
+"Eh?" exclaimed Mary, "you do what?" She had quite forgotten her last
+sentence.
+
+"It is no matter," he said yet more softly; and would say no more.
+
+Presently the talk fell on the Maxwells; and came round to Hubert.
+
+"They say he would be a favourite at Court," said Mary, "had he not a
+wife. But her Grace likes not married men. She looked kindly upon him at
+Deptford, I know; and I have seen him at Greenwich. You know, of course,
+about Isabel?"
+
+Mr. Buxton shook his head.
+
+"Why, it was common talk that they would have been man and wife years
+ago, had not the fool apostatised."
+
+Her companion questioned her further, and soon had the whole story out of
+her. "But I am thankful," ended Mary, "that it has so ended."
+
+The next day she went back to Court; and it was with real grief that the
+three watched her wonderful plumed riding-hat trot along behind the top
+of the churchyard wall, with her woman beside her, and her little
+liveried troop of men following at a distance.
+
+The days passed by, bringing strange tidings to Stanfield. News continued
+to reach the Catholics of the good confessions witnessed here and there
+in England by priests and laity. At the end of July, three priests,
+Garlick, Ludlam and Sympson, had been executed at Derby, and at the end
+of August the defeat of the Armada seemed to encourage Elizabeth yet
+further, and Mr. Leigh, a priest, with four laymen and Mistress Margaret
+Ward, died for their religion at Tyburn.
+
+By the end of September the news of the hopeless defeat and disappearance
+of the Armada had by now been certified over and over again. Terrible
+stories had come in during August of that northward flight of all that
+was left of the fleet over the plunging North Sea up into the stormy
+coast of Scotland; then rumours began of the miseries that were falling
+on the Spaniards off Ireland--Catholic Ireland from which they had hoped
+so much. There was scarcely a bay or a cape along the west coast where
+some ship had not put in, with piteous entreaties for water and aid--and
+scarcely a bay or a cape that was not blood-guilty. Along the straight
+coast from Sligo Bay westwards, down the west coast, Clew Bay, Connemara,
+and haunted Dingle itself, where the Catholic religion under arms had
+been so grievously chastened eight years ago--everywhere half-drowned or
+half-starved Spaniards, piteously entreating, were stripped and put to
+the sword either by the Irish savages or the English gentlemen. The
+church-bells were rung in Stanfield and in every English village, and the
+flame of national pride and loyalty burned fiercer and higher than ever.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+On the last day of September Isabel, just before dinner in her room,
+heard the trot of a couple of horses coming up the short drive, and on
+going downstairs almost ran against Hubert as he came from the corridor
+into the hall, as the servant ushered him in.
+
+The two stopped and looked at one another in silence.
+
+Hubert was flushed with hard riding and looked excited; Isabel's face
+showed nothing but pleasure and surprise. The servant too stopped,
+hesitating.
+
+Then Isabel put out her hand, smiling; and her voice was natural and
+controlled.
+
+"Why, Mr. Hubert," she said, "it is you! Come through this way"; and she
+nodded to the servant, who went forward and opened the door of the little
+parlour and stood back, as Isabel swept by him.
+
+When the door was closed, and the servant's footsteps had died away,
+Hubert, as he stood facing Isabel, spoke at last.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said almost imploringly, "what can I say to you?
+Your home has been wrecked; and partly through those wild and foolish
+words of mine; and you repay it by that act of kindness to my wife! I am
+come to ask your pardon, and to thank you. I only reached home last
+night."
+
+"Ah! that was nothing," said Isabel gently; "and as for the house----"
+
+"As for the house," he said, "I was not master of myself when I said
+those words that Grace told you of; and I entreat you to let me repair
+the damage."
+
+"No, no," she said, "Anthony has given orders; that will all be done."
+
+"But what can I do then?" he cried passionately; "if you but knew my
+sorrow--and--and--more than that, my----"
+
+Isabel had raised her grave eyes and was looking him full in the face
+now; and he stopped abashed.
+
+"How is Grace, and Mercy?" she asked in perfectly even tones.
+
+"Oh! Isabel----" he began; and again she looked at him, and then went to
+the door.
+
+"I hear Mr. Buxton," she said; and steps came along through the hall; she
+opened the door as he came up. Mr. Buxton stopped abruptly, and the two
+men drew themselves up and seemed to stiffen, ever so slightly. A shade
+of aggressive contempt came on Hubert's keen brown face that towered up
+so near the low oak ceiling; while Mr. Buxton's eyelids just drooped, and
+his features seemed to sharpen. There was an unpleasant silence: Isabel
+broke it.
+
+"You remember Master Hubert Maxwell?" she said almost entreatingly. He
+smiled kindly at her, but his face hardened again as he turned once more
+to Hubert.
+
+"I remember the gentleman perfectly," he said, "and he no doubt knows me,
+and why I cannot ask him to remain and dine with us."
+
+Hubert smiled brutally.
+
+"It is the old story of course, the Faith! I must ask your pardon, sir,
+for intruding. The difficulty never came into my mind. The truth is that
+I have lived so long now among Protestants that I had quite forgotten
+what Catholic charity is like!"
+
+He said this with such extreme bitterness and fury that Isabel put out
+her hand instinctively to Mr. Buxton, who smiled at her once more, and
+pressed it in his own. Hubert laughed again sharply; his face grew white
+under the tan, and his lips wrinkled back once or twice.
+
+"So, if you can spare me room to pass," he went on in the same tone, "I
+will begone to the inn."
+
+Mr. Buxton stepped aside from the door, and Hubert bowed to Isabel so low
+that it was almost an insult in itself, and strode out, his spurs ringing
+on the oak boards.
+
+When he half turned outside the front door to beckon to his groom to
+bring up the horses, he became aware that Isabel was beside him.
+
+"Hubert," she said, "Hubert, I cannot bear this."
+
+There were tears in her voice, and he could not help turning and looking
+at her. Her face, more grave and transparent than ever, was raised to
+his; her red down-turned lips were trembling, and her eyes were full of a
+great emotion. He turned away again sharply.
+
+"Hubert," she said again, "I was not born a Catholic, and I do not feel
+like Mr. Buxton. And--and I do thank you for coming; and for your desire
+to repair the house; and--and will you give my love to Grace?"
+
+Then he suddenly turned to her with such passion in his eyes that she
+shrank back. At the same moment the groom brought up the horses; he
+turned and mounted without a word, but his eyes were dim with love and
+anger and jealousy. Then he drove his spurs into his great grey mare, and
+Isabel watched him dash between the iron gates, with his groom only half
+mounted holding back his own plunging horse. Then she went within doors
+again.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                          JOSEPH LACKINGTON
+
+
+It was a bitter ride back to Great Keynes for Hubert. He had just
+returned from watching the fifty vessels, which were all that were left
+of the Great Armada, pass the Blaskets, still under the nominal command
+of Medina Sidonia, on their miserable return to Spain; and he had come
+back as fast as sails could carry him, round the stormy Land's-End up
+along the south coast to Rye, where on his arrival he had been almost
+worshipped by the rejoicing townsfolk. Yet all through his voyage and
+adventures, at any rate since his interview with her at Rye, it had been
+the face of Isabel there, and not of Grace, that had glimmered to him in
+the dark, and led him from peril to peril. Then, at last, on his arrival
+at home, he had heard of the disaster to the Dower House, and his own
+unintended share in it; and of Isabel's generous visit to his wife; and
+at that he had ordered his horse abruptly over-night and ridden off
+without a word of explanation to Grace on the following morning. And he
+had been met by a sneering man who would not sit at table with him, and
+who was the protector and friend of Isabel.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He rode up through the village just after dark and in through the
+gatehouse up to the steps. A man ran to open the door, and as Hubert came
+through told him that a stranger had ridden down from London and had
+arrived at mid-day, and that he had been waiting ever since.
+
+"I gave the gentleman dinner in the cloister parlour, sir; and he is at
+supper now," added the man.
+
+Hubert nodded and pushed through the hall. He heard his name called
+timidly from upstairs, and looking up saw his wife's golden head over the
+banisters.
+
+"Well!" he said.
+
+"Ah, it is you. I am so glad."
+
+"Who else should it be?" said Hubert, and passed through towards the
+cloister wing, and opened the door of the little parlour where Isabel and
+Mistress Margaret had sat together years before, the night of Mr. James'
+return, and of the girl's decision.
+
+A stranger rose up hastily as he came in, and bowed with great deference.
+Hubert knew his face, but could not remember his name.
+
+"I ask your pardon, Mr. Maxwell; but your man would take no denial," and
+he indicated the supper-table with a steaming dish and a glass jug of
+wine ruddy in the candlelight. Hubert looked at him curiously.
+
+"I know you, sir," he said, "but I cannot put a name to your face."
+
+"Lackington," said the man with a half smile; "Joseph Lackington."
+
+Hubert still stared; and then suddenly burst into a short laugh.
+
+"Why, yes," he said; "I know now. My father's servant."
+
+The man bowed.
+
+"Formerly, sir; and now agent to Sir Francis Walsingham," he said, with
+something of dignity in his manner.
+
+Hubert saw the hint, but could not resist a small sneer.
+
+"Why, I am pleased to see you," he said. "You have come to see your
+old--home?" and he threw himself into a chair and stretched his legs to
+the blaze, for he was stiff with riding. Lackington instantly sat down
+too, for his pride was touched.
+
+"It was not for that, Mr. Maxwell," he said almost in the tone of an
+equal, "but on a mission for Sir Francis."
+
+Hubert looked at him a moment as he sat there in the candlelight, with
+his arm resting easily on the table. He was plainly prosperous, and was
+even dressed with some distinction; his reddish beard was trimmed to a
+point; his high forehead was respectably white and bald; and his seals
+hung from his belt beside his dagger with an air of ease and solidity.
+Perhaps he was of some importance; at any rate, Sir Francis Walsingham
+was. Hubert sat up a little.
+
+"A mission to me?" he said.
+
+Lackington nodded.
+
+"A few questions on a matter of state."
+
+He drew from his pouch a paper signed by Sir Francis authorising him as
+an agent, for one month, and dated three days back; and handed it to
+Hubert.
+
+"I obtained that from Sir Francis on Monday, as you will see. You can
+trust me implicitly."
+
+"Will the business take long?" asked Hubert, handing the paper back.
+
+"No, Mr. Maxwell; and I must be gone in an hour in any case. I have to be
+at Rye at noon to-morrow; and I must sleep at Mayfield to-night."
+
+"At Rye," said Hubert, "why I came from there yesterday."
+
+Lackington bowed again, as if he were quite aware of this; but said
+nothing.
+
+"Then I will sup here," went on Hubert, "and we will talk meantime."
+
+When a place had been laid for him, he drew his chair round to the table
+and began to eat.
+
+"May I begin at once?" asked Lackington, who had finished.
+
+Hubert nodded.
+
+"Then first I believe it to be a fact that you spoke with Mistress Isabel
+Morris on board the _Elizabeth_ at Rye on the tenth of August last."
+
+Hubert had started violently at her name; but did his utmost to gain
+outward command of himself again immediately.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+--"And with Master Anthony Norris, lately made a priest beyond the seas."
+
+"That is a lie," said Hubert.
+
+Lackington politely lifted his eyebrows.
+
+"Indeed?" he said. "That he was made a priest, or that you spoke with
+him?"
+
+"That I know aught of him," said Hubert. His heart was beating furiously.
+
+Lackington made a note rather ostentatiously; he could see that Hubert
+was frightened, and thought that it was because of a possible accusation
+of having dealings with a traitor.
+
+"And as regards Mistress Norris," he said judicially, with his pencil
+raised, "you deny having spoken with her?"
+
+Hubert was thinking furiously. Then he saw that Lackington knew too much
+for its being worth his own while to deny it.
+
+"No, I never denied that," he said, lifting his fork to his mouth; and he
+went on eating with a deliberate ease as Lackington again made a note.
+
+The next question was a home-thrust.
+
+"Where are they both now?" asked Lackington, looking at him. Hubert's
+mind laboured like a mill.
+
+"I do not know," he said.
+
+"You swear it?"
+
+"I swear it."
+
+"Then Mistress Norris has changed her plans?" said Lackington swiftly.
+
+"What do you mean by that?"
+
+"Why she told you where they were going when you met?" said the other in
+a remonstrating tone.
+
+Hubert suddenly saw the game. If the authorities really knew that, it
+would have been a useless question. He stared at Lackington with an
+admirable vacancy.
+
+"Indeed she did not," he said. "For aught I know, they--she is in France
+again."
+
+"They?" said Lackington shrewdly. "Then you do know somewhat of the
+priest?"
+
+But Hubert was again too sharp.
+
+"Only what you told me just now, when you said he was at Rye. I supposed
+you were telling the truth."
+
+Lackington passed his hand smoothly over his mouth and beard, and smiled.
+Either Hubert was very sharp or else he had told everything; and he did
+not believe him sharp.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Maxwell," he said, with a complete dropping of his
+judicial manner. "I will not pretend not to be disappointed; but I
+believe what you say about France is true; and that it is no use looking
+for him further."
+
+Hubert experienced an extraordinary relief. He had saved Isabel. He drank
+off a glass of claret. "Tell me everything," he said.
+
+"Well," said Lackington, "Mr. Thomas Hamon is my informant. He sent up to
+Sir Francis the message that a lady of the name of Norris had been
+introduced to him at Rye; because he thought he remembered some stir in
+the county several years ago about some reconciliations to Rome connected
+with that name. Of course we knew everything about that: and we have our
+agents at the seminaries too; so we concluded that she was one of our
+birds; the rest, of course, was guesswork. Mr. Norris has certainly left
+Douai for England; and he may possibly even now be in England; but from
+your information and others', I now believe that Mistress Isabel came
+across first, and that she found the country too hot, what with the
+Spaniards and all; and that she returned to France at once. Of course
+during that dreadful week, Mr. Maxwell, we could not be certain of all
+vessels that came and went; so I think she just slipped across again; and
+that they are both waiting in France. We shall keep good watch now at the
+ports, I can promise you."
+
+Hubert's emotions were varied during this speech. First shame at having
+entirely forgotten the mayor of Rye and his own introduction of Isabel to
+him; then astonishment at the methods of Walsingham's agents; and lastly
+intense triumph and relief at having put them off Isabel's track. For
+Anthony, too, he had nothing but kindly feelings; so, on the whole, he
+thought he had done well for his friends.
+
+The two talked a little longer; Lackington was a stimulating companion
+from both his personality and his position; and Hubert found himself
+almost sorry when his companion said he must be riding on to Mayfield. As
+he walked out with him to the front door, he suddenly thought of Mr.
+Buxton again and his reception in the afternoon. They had wandered in
+their conversation so far from the Norrises by now that he felt sure he
+could speak of him without doing them any harm. So, as they stood on the
+steps together, waiting for Lackington's horse to come round, he suddenly
+said:
+
+"Do you know aught of one Buxton, who lives somewhere near Tonbridge, I
+think?"
+
+"Buxton, Buxton?" said the other.
+
+"I met him in town once," went on Hubert smoothly; "a little man, dark,
+with large eyes, and looks somewhat like a Frenchman."
+
+"Buxton, Buxton?" said the other again. "A Papist, is he not?"
+
+"Yes," said Hubert, hoping to get some information against him.
+
+"A friend?" asked Lackington.
+
+"No," said Hubert with such vehemence that Lackington looked at him.
+
+"I remember him," he said in a moment; "he was imprisoned at Wisbeach six
+or seven years ago. But I do not think he has been in trouble since. You
+wish, you wish----?" he went on interrogatively.
+
+"Nothing," said Hubert; but Lackington saw the hatred in his eyes.
+
+The horses came round at this moment; and Lackington said good-bye to
+Hubert with a touch of the old deference again, and mounted. Hubert
+watched him out under the gatehouse-lamp into the night beyond, and then
+he went in again, pondering.
+
+His wife was waiting for him in the hall now--a delicate golden-haired
+figure, with pathetic blue eyes turned up to him. She ran to him and took
+his arm timidly in her two hands.
+
+"Oh! I am glad that man has gone, Hubert."
+
+He looked down at her almost contemptuously.
+
+"Why, you know nothing of him!" he said.
+
+"Not much," she said, "but he asked me so many questions."
+
+Hubert started and looked suddenly at her, in terror.
+
+"Oh, Hubert!" she said, shrinking back frightened.
+
+"Questions!" he said, seizing her hands. "Questions of whom?"
+
+"Of--of--Mistress Isabel Norris," she said, almost crying.
+
+"And--and--what did you say? Did you tell him?"
+
+"Oh, Hubert!--I am so sorry--ah! do not look like that."
+
+"What did you say? What did you say?" he said between his teeth.
+
+"I--I--told a lie, Hubert; I said I had never seen her."
+
+Hubert took his wife suddenly in his two arms and kissed her three or
+four times.
+
+"You darling, you darling!" he said; and then stooped and picked her up,
+and carried her upstairs, with her head against his cheek, and her tears
+running down because he was pleased with her, instead of angry.
+
+They went upstairs and he set her down softly outside the nursery door.
+
+"Hush," she said, smiling up at him; and then softly opened the door and
+listened, her finger on her lip; there was no sound from within; then she
+pushed the door open gently, and the wife and husband went in.
+
+There was a shaded taper still burning in a high bracket where an image
+of the Mother of God had stood in the Catholic days of the house. Hubert
+glanced up at it and remembered it, with just a touch at his heart.
+Beneath it was a little oak cot, where his four-year-old boy lay
+sleeping; the mother went across and bent over it, and Hubert leaned his
+brown sinewy hands on the end of the cot and watched him. There his son
+lay, with tangled curls on the pillow; his finger was on his lips as if
+he bade silence even to thought. Hubert looked up, and just above the
+bed, where the crucifix used to hang when he himself had slept in this
+nursery, probably on the very same nail, he thought to himself, was a
+rusty Spanish spur that he himself had found in a sea-chest of the _San
+Juan_. The boy had hung up with a tarry bit of string this emblem of his
+father's victory, as a protection while he slept.
+
+The child stirred in his sleep and murmured as the two watched him.
+
+"Father's home again," whispered the mother. "It is all well. Go to sleep
+again."
+
+When she looked up again to her husband, he was gone.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was not often that Hubert had regrets for the Faith he had lost; but
+to-night things had conspired to prick him. There was his rebuff from Mr.
+Buxton; there was the sight of Isabel in the dignified grace that he had
+noticed so plainly before; there had been the interview with the
+ex-Catholic servant, now a spy of the Government, and a remorseless enemy
+of all Catholics; and lastly there were the two little external reminders
+of the niche and the nail over his son's bed.
+
+He sat long before the fire in Sir Nicholas' old room, now his own study.
+As he lay back and looked about him, how different this all was, too! The
+mantelpiece was almost unaltered; the Maxwell devices, two-headed eagles,
+hurcheons and saltires, on crowded shields, interlaced with the motto
+_Reviresco_, all newly gilded since his own accession to the estate, rose
+up in deep shadow and relief; but over it, instead of the little old
+picture of the Vernacle that he remembered as a child, hung his own
+sword. Was that a sign of progress? he wondered. The tapestry on the east
+wall was the same, a hawking scene with herons and ladies in immense
+headdresses that he had marvelled at as a boy. But then the books on the
+shelves to the right of the door, they were different; there had been old
+devotional books in his father's time, mingled strangely with small works
+on country life and sports; now the latter only remained, and the nearest
+to a devotional book was a volume of a mystical herbalist who identified
+plants with virtues, strangely and ingeniously. Then the prie-dieu, where
+the beads had hung and the little wooden shield with the Five Wounds
+painted upon it--that was gone; and in its place hung a cupboard where he
+kept a crossbow and a few tools for it; and old hawk-lures and jesses and
+the like.
+
+Then he lay back again, and thought.
+
+Had he then behaved unworthily? This old Faith that had been handed down
+from father and son for generations; that had been handed to him too as
+the most precious heirloom of all--for which his father had so gladly
+suffered fines and imprisonment, and risked death--he had thrown it over,
+and for what? For Isabel, he confessed to himself; and then the--the
+Power that stands behind the visible had cheated him and withdrawn that
+for which he had paid over that great price. Was that a reckless and
+brutal bargain on his side--to throw over this strange delicate thing
+called the Faith for which so many millions had lived and died, all for a
+woman's love? A curious kind of family pride in the Faith began to prick
+him. After all, was not honour in a manner bound up with it too; and most
+of all when such heavy penalties attached themselves to the profession of
+it? Was that the moment when he should be the first of his line to
+abandon it?
+
+_Reviresco_--"I renew my springtide." But was not this a strange
+grafting--a spur for a crucifix, a crossbow for a place of prayer?
+_Reviresco_--There was sap indeed in the old tree; but from what soil did
+it draw its strength?
+
+His heart began to burn with something like shame, as it had burned now
+and again at intervals during these past years. Here he lay back in his
+father's chair, in his father's room, the first Protestant of the
+Maxwells. Then he passed on to a memory.
+
+As he closed his eyes, he could see even now the chapel upstairs, with
+the tapers alight and the stiff figure of the priest in the midst of the
+glow; he could smell the flowers on the altar, the June roses strewn on
+the floor in the old manner, and their fresh dewy scent mingled with the
+fragrance of the rich incense in an intoxicating chord; he could hear the
+rustle that emphasised the silence, as his mother rose from his side and
+went up for communion, and the breathing of the servants behind him.
+
+Then for contrast he remembered the whitewashed church where he attended
+now with his wife, Sunday by Sunday, the pulpit occupied by the black
+figure of the virtuous Mr. Bodder pronouncing his discourse, the great
+texts that stood out in their new paint from the walls, the table that
+stood out unashamed and sideways in the midst of the chancel. And which
+of the two worships was most like God?...
+
+Then he compared the worshippers in either mode. Well, Drake, his hero,
+was a convinced Protestant; the bravest man he had ever met or dreamed
+of--fiery, pertinacious, gloriously insolent. He thought of his sailors,
+on whom a portion of Drake's spirit fell, their gallantry, their
+fearlessness of death and of all that comes after; of Mr. Bodder, who was
+now growing middle-aged in the Vicarage--yes, indeed, they were all
+admirable in various ways, but were they like Christ?
+
+On the other hand, his father, in spite of his quick temper, his mother,
+brother, aunt, the priests who came and went by night, Isabel--and at
+that he stopped: and like a deep voice in his ear rose up the last
+tremendous question, What if the Catholic Religion be true after all? And
+at that the supernatural began to assert itself. It seemed as if the
+empty air were full of this question, rising in intensity and emphasis.
+What if it is true? What if it is true? _What if it is true?_
+
+He sat bolt upright and looked sharply round the room; the candles burned
+steadily in the sconce near the door. The tapestry lifted and dropped
+noiselessly in the draught; the dark corners beyond the press and in the
+window recesses suggested presences that waited; the wide chimney sighed
+suddenly once.
+
+Was that a voice in his ear just now, or only in his heart? But in either
+case----
+
+He made an effort to command himself, and looked again steadily round the
+room; but there seemed no one there. But what if the old tale be true? In
+that case he is not alone in this little oak room, for there is no such
+thing as loneliness. In that case he is sitting in full sight of Almighty
+God, whom he has insulted; and of the saints whose power he has
+repudiated; and of the angels good and bad who have---- Ah! what was
+that? There had seemed to come a long sigh somewhere behind him; on his
+left surely.--What was it? Some wandering soul? Was it, could it be the
+soul of one who had loved him and desired to warn him before it was too
+late? Could it have been----and then it came again; and the hair prickled
+on his head.
+
+How deathly still it is, and how cold! Ah! was that a rustle outside; a
+tap?... In God's name, who can that be?...
+
+And then Hubert licked his dry lips and brought them together and smiled
+at Grace, who had come down, opening the doors as she came, to see why he
+had not come to bed.
+
+Bah! what a superstitious fool he was, after all!
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VI
+
+                             A DEPARTURE
+
+
+The months went by happily at Stanfield; and, however ill went the
+fortunes of the Church elsewhere, here at least were peace and
+prosperity. Most discouraging news indeed did reach them from time to
+time. The severe penalties now enacted against the practice of the
+Catholic Religion were being enforced with great vigour, and the weak
+members of the body began to fail. Two priests had apostatised at
+Chichester earlier in the year, one of them actually at the scaffold on
+Broyle Heath; and then in December there were two more recantations at
+Paul's Cross. Those Catholics too who threw up the Faith generally became
+the most aggressive among the persecutors, to testify to their own
+consciences, as well to the Protestants, of the sincerity of their
+conversion.
+
+But in Stanfield the Church flourished, and Anthony had the great
+happiness of receiving his first convert in the person of Mr. Rowe, the
+young owner of a house called East Maskells, separated from Stanfield
+Place by a field-path of under a mile in length, though the road round
+was over two; and the comings and goings were frequent now between the
+two houses. Mr. Rowe was at present unmarried, and had his aunt to keep
+house for him, a tolerant old maiden lady who had conformed placidly to
+the Reformed Religion thirty years before, and was now grown content with
+it. Several "schismatics" too--as those Catholics were called who
+attended their parish church--had waxed bolder, and given up their
+conformity to the Establishment; so it was a happy and courageous flock
+that gathered Sunday by Sunday at Stanfield Place.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Just before Christmas, Anthony received a long and affectionate letter
+from James Maxwell, who was still at Douai.
+
+"The Rector will still have me here," he wrote, "and shows me to the
+young men as if I were a kind of warrior; which is bad for pride; but
+then he humbles me again by telling me I am of more use here as an
+example, than I should be in England; and that humbles me again. So I am
+content to stay. It is a humbling thing, too, to find young men who can
+tell me the history of my arms and legs better than I know it myself. But
+the truth is, I can never walk well again--yet _laudetur Jesus
+Christus_."
+
+Then James Maxwell wrote a little about his grief for Hubert; gave a
+little news of foreign movements among the Catholics; and finally ended
+as follows:
+
+"At last I understand who your friend was behind Bow Church, who
+stuttered and played the Catholic so well. It was our old servant
+Lackington; who turned Protestant and entered Walsingham's service. I
+hear all this from one P. lately in the same affairs, but now turned to
+Christ his service instead; and who has entered here as a student. So
+beware of him; he has a pointed beard now, and a bald forehead. I hear,
+too, from the same source that he was on your track when you landed, but
+now thinks you to be in France. However, he knows of you; so I counsel
+you not to abide over long in one place. Perhaps you may go to
+Lancashire; that is like heaven itself for Catholics. Their zeal and
+piety there are beyond praise; but I hear they somewhat lack priests. God
+keep you always, my dear Brother; and may the Queen of Heaven intercede
+for you. Pray for me."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Soon after the New Year, Mary Corbet was able to get away from Court and
+come down again to her friends for a month or two at Stanfield.
+
+During her stay they all had an adventure together at East Maskells. They
+had been out a long expedition into the woods one clear frosty day and
+rode in just at sunset for an early supper with Mr. Rowe and his aunt.
+
+They had left their horses at the stable and come in round the back of
+the house; so that they missed the servant Miss Rowe had placed at the
+front door to warn them, and came straight into the winter-parlour, where
+they found Miss Rowe in conversation with an ecclesiastic. There was no
+time to retreat; and Anthony in a moment more found himself being
+introduced to a minister he had met at Lambeth more than once--the
+Reverend Robert Carr, who had held the odd title of "Archbishop's Curate"
+and the position of minister in charge of the once collegiate church of
+All Saints', Maidstone, ever since the year '59. He had ridden up from
+Maidstone for supper and lodging, and was on his way to town.
+
+Anthony managed to interrupt Miss Rowe before she came to his assumed
+name Capell, and remarked rather loudly that he had met Mr. Carr before;
+who recognised him too, and greeted him by his real name.
+
+It was an uncomfortable situation, as Mr. Carr was quite unaware of the
+religion of five out of six of those present, and very soon began to give
+voice to his views on Papistry. He was an oldish man by now, and of some
+importance in Maidstone, where he had been appointed Jurat by the
+Corporation, and was a very popular and influential man.
+
+"The voice of the people," he said in the midst of a conversation on the
+national feeling towards Spain, "that is what we must hearken to. Even
+sovereigns themselves must come to that some day. They must rule by
+obeying; as man does with God's laws in nature."
+
+"Would you say that, sir, of her Grace?" asked Mary Corbet meekly.
+
+"I should, madam; though I fear she has injured her power by her
+behaviour this year. It was her people who saved her.--Hawkins, who is
+now ruined as he says; my lord Howard, who has paid from his own purse
+for the meat and drink of her Grace's soldiers, and those who fought with
+them; and not her Grace, who saved them; or Leicester, now gone to his
+account, who sat at Tilbury and did the bowing and the prancing and the
+talking while Hawkins and the rest did the fighting. No, madam, it is the
+voice of the people to which we must hearken."
+
+This was rather confused and dangerous talking too; but here was plainly
+a man to be humoured; he looked round him with a suffused face and the
+eye of a cock, and a little white plume on his forehead increased his
+appearance of pugnacity.
+
+"It is the same in religion," he said, when all preserved a deferential
+silence; "it is that that lies at the root of papist errors. As you know
+very well," he went on, turning suddenly on Anthony, "our bishops do
+nothing to guide men's minds; they only seem to: they ride atop like the
+figure on a cock-horse, but it is the legs beneath that do the work and
+the guiding too: now that is right and good; and the Church of England
+will prosper so long as she goes like that. But if the bishops try to
+rule they will find their mistake. Now the Popish Church is not like
+that; she holds that power comes from above, that the Pope guides the
+bishops, the bishops the priests, and the priests the people."
+
+"And the Holy Ghost the Pope; is it not so, sir?" asked Mr. Buxton.
+
+Mr. Carr turned an eye on him.
+
+"So they hold, sir," he said after a pause.
+
+"They think then, sir, that the shepherds guide the sheep?" asked Anthony
+humbly.
+
+Mary Corbet gave a yelp of laughter; but when Mr. Carr looked at her she
+was grave and deferential again. Miss Rowe looked entreatingly from face
+to face. The minister did not notice Anthony's remark; but swept on again
+on what was plainly his favourite theme,--the infallibility of the
+people. It was a doctrine that was hardly held yet by any; but the next
+century was to see its gradual rise until it reached its climax in the
+Puritanism of the Stuart times. It was true, as Mr. Carr said, that
+Elizabeth had ruled by obeying; and that the people of England,
+encouraged by success in resisting foreign domination, were about to pass
+on to the second position of resisting any domination at all.
+
+Presently he pulled out of his pocket a small printed sheet, and was soon
+declaiming from it. It was not very much to the point, except as
+illustrating the national spirit which he believed so divine. It was a
+ballad describing the tortures which the Spaniards had intended to
+inflict upon the heretic English, and began:
+
+    "All you that list to look and see
+      What profit comes from Spain,
+    And what the Pope and Spaniards both
+      Prepared for our gain.
+    Then turn your eyes and lend your ears
+      And you shall hear and see
+    What courteous minds, what gentle hearts,
+      They bear to thee and me!
+
+And it ended in the same spirit:
+
+    "Be these the men that are so mild
+      Whom some so holy call!
+    The Lord defend our noble Queen
+      And country from them all!"
+
+"There!" the minister cried when he had done, "that is what the Papists
+are like! Trust me; I know them. I should know one in a moment if he
+ventured into this room, by his crafty face. But the Lord will defend His
+own Englishmen; nay! He has done so. 'God blew and they were scattered,'"
+he ended, quoting from the Armada medal.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As the four rode home by pairs across the field-path in the frosty
+moonlight Mr. Buxton lamented to Anthony the effect of the Armada.
+
+"The national spirit is higher than ever," he said, "and it will be the
+death of Catholicism here for the present. Our country squires, I fear,
+faithful Catholics to this time, are beginning to wonder and question.
+When will our Catholic kings learn that Christ His Kingdom is not of this
+world? Philip has smitten the Faith in England with the weapon which he
+drew in its defence, as he thought."
+
+"I was once of that national spirit myself," said Anthony.
+
+"I remember you were," said Mr. Buxton, smiling; "and what grace has done
+to you it may do to others."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The spring went by, and in the week after Easter, James' news about
+Lancashire was verified by a letter from a friend of Mr. Buxton's, a Mr.
+Norreys, the owner of one of the staunch Catholic houses, Speke Hall, on
+the bank of the Mersey.
+
+"Here," he wrote, "by the mercy of God there is no lack of priests,
+though there be none to spare; my own chaplain says mass by dispensation
+thrice on Sunday; but on the moors the sheep look up and are not fed; and
+such patient sheep! I heard but last week of a church where the folk
+resort, priest or no, each Sunday to the number of two hundred, and are
+led by a lector in devotion, ending with an act of spiritual communion
+made all together. These damnable heresies of which the apostle wrote
+have not poisoned the springs of sound doctrine; some of us here know
+naught yet of Elizabeth and her supremacy, or even of seven-wived Harry
+his reformation. Send us then, dear friend, a priest, or at least the
+promise of one; lest we perish quite."
+
+Mr. Buxton had a sore struggle with himself over this letter; but at last
+he carried it to Anthony.
+
+"Read that," he said; and stood waiting.
+
+Anthony looked up when he had done.
+
+"I am your chaplain," he said, "but I am God's priest first."
+
+"Yes, dear lad," said his friend, "I feared you would say so; and I will
+say so to Norreys"; and he left the room at once.
+
+And so at last it came to be arranged that Anthony should leave for
+Lancashire at the end of July; and that after his departure Stanfield
+should be served occasionally by the priest who lived on the outskirts of
+Tonbridge; but the daily mass would have to cease, and that was a sore
+trouble to Mr. Buxton. No definite decision could be made as to when
+Anthony could return; that must wait until he saw the needs of
+Lancashire; but he hoped to be able at least to pay a visit to Stanfield
+again in the spring of the following year.
+
+It was arranged also, of course, that Isabel should accompany her
+brother. They were both of large independent means, and could travel in
+some dignity; and her presence would be under these circumstances a
+protection as well as a comfort to Anthony. It would need very great
+sharpness to detect the seminary priest under Anthony's disguise, and
+amid the surroundings of his cavalcade of four or five armed servants, a
+French maid, and a distinguished-looking lady.
+
+Yet, in spite of this, Mr. Buxton resolved to do his utmost to prevent
+Isabel from going to Lancashire; partly, of course, he disliked the
+thought of the dangers and hardships that she was certain to encounter;
+but the real motive was that he had fallen very deeply in love with her.
+It was her exceptional serenity that seemed to him her greatest charm;
+her movements, her face, her grey eyes, the very folds of her dress
+seemed to breathe with it; and to one of Mr. Buxton's temperament such a
+presence was cool and sweet and strangely fascinating.
+
+It was now April, and he resolved to devote the next month or two to
+preparing her for his proposal; and he wrote frankly to Mary Corbet
+telling her how matters stood, entreating her to come down for July and
+counsel him. Mary wrote back at once, rather briefly, promising to come;
+but not encouraging him greatly.
+
+"I would I could cheer you more," she wrote; "of course I have not seen
+Isabel since January; but, unless she has changed, I do not think she
+will marry you. I am writing plainly you see, as you ask in your letter.
+But I can still say, God prosper you."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+As the spring went by and the summer came on, Isabel grew yet more
+silent. As the evenings began to lengthen out she used to spend much time
+before and after supper in walking up and down the clipped lime avenue
+between the east end of the church and the great gates that looked over
+the meadows across which the stream and the field-path ran towards East
+Maskells. Mr. Buxton would watch her sometimes from an upstairs window,
+himself unseen, and occasionally would go out and talk with her; but he
+found it harder than he used to get on to intimate relations; and he
+began to suspect that he had displeased her in some way, and that Mary
+Corbet was right. In the afternoon she and Anthony would generally ride
+out together, once or twice going round by Penshurst, and their host
+would torture himself by his own indecision as regards accompanying them;
+sometimes doing so, sometimes refraining, and regretting whichever he
+did. More and more he began to look forward to Mary's coming and the
+benefit of her advice; and at last, at the end of June, she came.
+
+Their first evening together was delightful for them all. She was happy
+at her escape from Court; her host was happy at the prospect of her
+counsel; and all four were happy at being together again.
+
+They did not meet till supper, and even that was put off an hour, because
+Mary had not come, and when she did arrive she was full of excitement.
+
+"I will tell you all at supper," she said to her host, whom she met in
+the hall. "Oh! how late I am!" and she whirled past him and upstairs
+without another word.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"I will first give you the news in brief," she said, when Anthony had
+said grace and they were seated, all four of them as before; and the
+trumpet-flourish was silent that had announced the approach of the
+venison.
+
+"Mutton's new chaplain, Dr. Bancroft, will be in trouble soon; he hath
+been saying favourable things for some of us poor papists, and hath rated
+the Precisians soundly. Sir Francis Knollys is wroth with him; but that
+is no matter.--Her Grace played at cards till two of the clock this
+morning, and that is why I am so desperate sleepy to-night, for I had to
+sit up too; and that is a great matter.--Drake and Norris, 'tis said,
+have whipped the dons again at Corunna; and the Queen has sworn to pull
+my lord Essex his ears for going with them and adventuring his precious
+self; and that is no matter at all, but will do him good.--George
+Luttrell hath put up a coat of arms in his hall at Dunster, which is a
+great matter to him, but to none else;--and I have robbed a highwayman
+this day in the beech woods this side of Groombridge."
+
+"Dear lady," said Mr. Buxton resignedly, as the others looked up
+startled, "you are too swift for our dull rustic ears; we will begin at
+the end, if you please. Is it true you have robbed an highwayman?"
+
+"It is perfectly true," she said, and unlatched a ruby brooch, made
+heart-shape, from her dress. "There is the plunder," and she held it out
+for inspection.
+
+"Then tell us the tale," said Anthony.
+
+"It would be five of the clock," said Mary, "as we came through
+Groombridge, and then into the woods beyond. I had bidden my knaves ride
+on before with my woman; I came down into a dingle where there was a
+stream; and, to tell the truth, I had my head down and was a-nodding,
+when my horse stopped; and I looked up of a sudden and there was a man on
+a bay mare, with a mask to his mouth, a gay green suit, a brown beard
+turning grey, and this ruby brooch at his throat; and he had caught my
+bridle. I saw him start when I lifted my head, as if he were taken aback.
+I said nothing, but he led my horse off the road down among the trees
+with a deep little thicket where none could see us. As we went I was
+thinking like a windmill; for I knew I had seen the little red brooch
+before.
+
+"When we reached the little open space, I asked him what he wished with
+me.
+
+"'Your purse, madam,' said he.
+
+"'My woman hath it,' said I.
+
+"'Your jewels then, madam,' said he.
+
+"'My woman hath them,' said I, 'save this paste buckle in my hat, to
+which you are welcome.' It was diamonds, you know; but I knew he would
+not know that.
+
+"'What a mistake,' I said, 'to stop the mistress and let the maid go
+free!'
+
+"'Nay,' he said, 'I am glad of it; for at least I will have a dance with
+the mistress; and I could not with the maid.'
+
+"'You are welcome to that,' I said, and I slipped off my horse, to humour
+him, and even as I slipped off I knew who he was, for although many have
+red brooches, and many brown beards turning grey, few have both together;
+but I said nothing. And there--will you believe it?--we danced under the
+beech-trees like Phyllis and Corydon, or whoever they are that Sidney is
+always prating of; or like two fools, I would sooner say. Then when we
+had done, I made him a curtsey.
+
+"'Now you must help me up,' said I, and he mounted me without a word, for
+he was a stoutish gallant and somewhat out of breath. And then what did
+the fool do but try to kiss me, and as he lifted his arm I snatched the
+brooch and put spur to my horse, and as we went up the bank I screamed at
+him, 'Claude, you fool, go home to your wife and take shame to yourself.'
+And when I was near the road I looked back, and he still stood there all
+agape."
+
+"And what was his name?" asked Anthony.
+
+"Nay, nay, I have mocked him enough. And I know four Claudes, so you need
+not try to guess."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When supper was over, Mr. Buxton and Mary walked up and down the south
+path of the garden between the yews, while the other two sat just outside
+the hall window on a seat placed on the tiled terrace that ran round the
+house.
+
+"How I have longed for you to come, Mistress Mary," he said, "and counsel
+me of the matter we wrote about. Tell me what to do."
+
+Mary looked meditatively out to the strip of moon that was rising out to
+the east in the June sky. Then she looked tenderly at her friend.
+
+"I hate to pain you," she said, "but cannot you see that it is
+impossible? I may be wrong; but I think her heart is so given to our
+Saviour that there is no love of that sort left."
+
+"Ah, how can you say that?" he cried; "the love of the Saviour does not
+hinder earthly love; it purifies and transfigures it."
+
+"Yes," said Mary gravely, "it is often so--but the love of the true
+spouse of Christ is different. That leaves no room for an earthly
+bridegroom."
+
+Mr. Buxton was silent a moment or two.
+
+"You mean it is the love of the consecrated soul?"
+
+Mary bowed her head. "But I cannot be sure," she added.
+
+"Then what shall I do?" he said again, almost piteously; and Mary could
+see even in the faint moonlight that his pleasant face was all broken up
+and quivering. She laid her hand gently on his arm, and her rings
+flashed.
+
+"You must be very patient," she said, "very full of deference--and grave.
+You must not be ardent nor impetuous, but speak slowly and reverently to
+her, but at no great length; be plain with her; do not look in her face,
+and do not show anxiety or despair or hope. You need not fear that your
+love will not be plain to her. Indeed, I think she knows it already."
+
+"Why, I have not----" he began.
+
+"I know you have not spoken to her; but I saw that she only looked at you
+once during supper, and that was when your face was turned from her; she
+does not wish to look you in the eyes."
+
+"Ah, she hates me," he sighed.
+
+"Do not be foolish," said Mary, "she honours you, and loves you, and is
+grieved for your grief; but I do not think she will marry you."
+
+"And when shall I speak?" he asked.
+
+"You must wait; God will make the opportunity--in any case. You must not
+attempt to make it. That would terrify her."
+
+"And you will speak for me."
+
+Mary smiled at him.
+
+"Dear friend," she said, "sometimes I think you do not know us at all. Do
+you not see that Isabel is greater than all that? What she knows, she
+knows. I could tell her nothing."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The days passed on; the days of the last month of the Norrises' stay at
+Stanfield. Half-way through the month came the news of the Oxford
+executions.
+
+"Ah! listen to this," cried Mr. Buxton, coming out to them one evening in
+the garden with a letter in his hand. "'Humphrey Prichard,'" he read,
+"'made a good end. He protested he was condemned for the Catholic Faith;
+that he willingly died for it; that he was a Catholic. One of their
+ministers laughed at him, saying he was a poor ignorant fellow who knew
+not what it was to be a Catholic. 'I know very well;' said Humphrey,
+'though I cannot say it in proper divinity language.' There is the
+Religion for you!" went on Mr. Buxton; "all meet there, wise and simple
+alike. There is no difference; no scholarship is needed for faith. 'I
+know what it is,' cried Humphrey, 'though I cannot explain it!'"
+
+The news came to Anthony just when he needed it; he felt he had done so
+little to teach his flock now he was to leave them; but if he had only
+done something to keep alive the fire of faith, he had not lost his time;
+and so he went about his spiritual affairs with new heart, encouraging
+the wavering, whom he was to leave, warning the over-confident, urging
+the hesitating, and saying good-bye to them all. Isabel went with him
+sometimes; or sometimes walked or rode with Mary, and was silent for the
+most part in public. The master of the house himself did his affairs, and
+carried a heavier heart each day. And at last the opportunity came which
+Mary had predicted.
+
+He had come in one evening after a hot ride alone over to Tonbridge on
+some business with the priest there; and had dressed for supper
+immediately on coming in.
+
+As there was still nearly an hour before supper, he went out to walk up
+and down the same yew-alley near the garden-house where he had walked
+with Mary. Anthony and Isabel had returned a little later from East
+Maskells, and they too had dressed early. Isabel threw a lace shawl over
+her head, and betook herself too to the alley; and there she turned a
+corner and almost ran into her host.
+
+It was, as Mary had said, a God-made opportunity. Neither time nor place
+could have been improved. If externals were of any value to this
+courtship, all that could have helped was there. The setting of the
+picture was perfect; a tall yew-hedge ran down the northern side of the
+walk, cut, as Bacon recommended, not fantastically but "with some pretty
+pyramids"; a strip of turf separated it from the walk, giving a sense
+both of privacy and space; on the south side ran flower-beds in the turf,
+with yews and cypresses planted here and there, and an oak paling beyond;
+to the east lay the "fair mount," again recommended by the same
+authority, but not so high, and with but one ascent; to the west the path
+darkened under trees, and over all rose up against the sunset sky the
+tall grotesque towers and vanes of the garden-house. The flowers burned
+with that ember-like glow which may be seen on summer evenings, and
+poured out their scent; the air was sweet and cool, and white moths were
+beginning to poise and stir among the blossoms. The two actors on this
+scene too were not unworthy of it; his dark velvet and lace with the
+glimmer of diamonds here and there, and his delicate bearded clean-cut
+face, a little tanned, thrown into relief by the spotless crisp ruff
+beneath, and above all his air of strength and refinement and
+self-possession--all combined to make him a formidable stormer of a
+girl's heart. And as he looked on her--on her clear almost luminous face
+and great eyes, shrined in the drooping lace shawl, through which a jewel
+or two in her black hair glimmered, her upright slender figure in its
+dark sheath, and the hand, white and cool, that held her shawl together
+over her breast--he had a pang of hope and despair at once, at the sudden
+sense of need of this splendid creature of God to be one with him, and
+reign with him over these fair possessions; and of hopelessness at the
+thought that anything so perfect could be accomplished in this imperfect
+world.
+
+He turned immediately and walked beside her, and they both knew, in the
+silence that followed, that the crisis had come.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said, still looking down as he spoke, and his voice
+sounded odd to her ears, "I wonder if you know what I would say to you."
+
+There came no sound from her, but the rustle of her dress.
+
+"But I must say it," he went on, "follow what may. It is this. I love you
+dearly."
+
+Her walk faltered beside him, and it seemed as if she would stand still.
+
+"A moment," he said, and he lifted his white restrained face. "I ask you
+to be patient with me. Perhaps I need not say that I have never said this
+to any woman before; but more, I have never even thought it. I do not
+know how to speak, nor what I should say; beyond this, that since I first
+met you at the door across there, a year ago, you have taught me ever
+since what love means; and now I am come to you, as to my dear mistress,
+with my lesson learnt."
+
+They were standing together now; he was still turned a little away from
+her, and dared not lift his eyes to her face again. Then of a sudden he
+felt her hand on his arm for a moment, and he looked up, and saw her eyes
+all swimming with sorrow.
+
+"Dear friend," she said quite simply, "it is impossible--Ah! what can I
+say?"
+
+"Give me a moment more," he said; and they walked on slowly. "I know what
+presumption this is; but I will not spin phrases about that. Nor do I ask
+what is impossible; but I will only ask leave to teach you in my turn
+what love means."
+
+"Oh! that is the hardest of all to say," she said, "but I know already."
+
+He did not quite understand, and glanced at her a moment.
+
+"I once loved too," she whispered. He drew a sharp breath.
+
+"Forgive me," he said, "I forced that from you."
+
+"You are never anything but courteous and kind," she said, "and that
+makes this harder than all."
+
+They walked in silence half a dozen steps.
+
+"Have I distressed you?" he asked, glancing at her again.
+
+Then she looked full in his face, and her eyes were overflowing.
+
+"I am grieved for your sorrow," she said, "and at my own unworthiness,
+you know that?"
+
+"I know that you are now and always will be my dear mistress and queen."
+
+His voice broke altogether as he ended, and he bent and took her hand
+delicately in his own, as if it were royal, and kissed it. Then she gave
+a great sob and slipped away through the opening in the clipped hedge;
+and he was left alone with the dusk and his sorrow.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+A week later Anthony and Isabel were saying good-bye to him in the early
+summer morning: the pack-horses had started on before, and there were
+just the two saddle-horses at the low oak door, with the servants'
+behind. When Mr. Buxton had put Isabel into the saddle, he held her hand
+for a moment; Anthony was mounting behind.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he whispered; "forgive me; but I find I cannot take
+your answer; you will remember that."
+
+She shook her head without speaking, but dared not even look into his
+eyes; though she turned her head as she rode out of the gates for a last
+look at the peaked gables and low windows of the house where she had been
+so happy. There was still the dark figure motionless against the pale oak
+door.
+
+"Oh, Anthony!" she whispered brokenly, "our Lord asks very much."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                          NORTHERN RELIGION
+
+
+The Northern counties were distinguished among all in England for their
+loyalty to the old Faith; and this was owing, no doubt, to the characters
+of both the country and the inhabitants;--it was difficult for the
+officers of justice to penetrate to the high moorland and deep ravines,
+and yet more difficult to prevail with the persons who lived there.
+Twenty-two years before the famous Lancashire League had been formed,
+under the encouragement of Dr. Allen, afterwards the Cardinal, whose
+members pledged themselves to determined recusancy; with the result that
+here and there church-doors were closed, and the Book of Common Prayer
+utterly refused. Owing partly to Bishop Downman's laxity towards the
+recusants, the principles of the League had retained their hold
+throughout the county, ever since '68, when ten obstinate Lancastrians
+had been haled before the Council, of whom one, the famous Sir John
+Southworth himself, suffered imprisonment more than once.
+
+Anthony and Isabel then found their life in the North very different to
+that which they had been living at Stanfield. Near the towns, of course,
+precaution was as necessary as anywhere else in England, but once they
+had passed up on to the higher moorlands they were able to throw off all
+anxiety, as much as if the penal laws of England were not in force there.
+
+It was pleasant, too, to go, as they did, from great house to great
+house, and find the old pre-Reformation life of England in full vigour;
+the whole family present at mass so often as it was said, desirous of the
+sacraments, and thankful for the opportunities of grace that the arrival
+of the priest afforded. Isabel would often stay at such houses a week or
+two together, while Anthony made rounds into the valleys and to the
+moorland villages round-about; and then the two would travel on together
+with their servants to the next village. Anthony's ecclesiastical outfit
+was very simple. Among Isabel's dresses lay a brocade vestment that might
+easily pass notice if the luggage was searched; and Anthony carried in
+his own luggage a little altar-stone, a case with the holy oils, a tiny
+chalice and paten, singing-cakes, and a thin vellum-bound Missal and
+Ritual in one volume, containing the order of mass, a few votive masses,
+and the usual benedictions for holy-water, rue and the like, and the
+occasional offices.
+
+In this manner they first visited many of the famous old Lancashire
+houses, some of which still stand, Borwick Hall, Hall-i'-the-Wood,
+Lydiate Hall, Thurnham, Blainscow, where Campion had once been so nearly
+taken, and others, all of which were provided with secret hiding-places
+for the escape of the priest, should a sudden alarm be raised. In none of
+them, however, did he find the same elaboration of device as at Stanfield
+Place.
+
+First, however, they went to Speke Hall, the home of Mr. Norreys, on the
+banks of the Mersey, a beautiful house of magpie architecture, and
+furnished with a remarkable underground passage to the shore of the
+Mersey, the scene of Richard Brittain's escape.
+
+Here they received a very warm welcome.
+
+"It is as I wrote to Mr. Buxton," said his host on the evening of their
+arrival, "in many places in this country any religion other than the
+Catholic is unknown. The belief of the Protestant is as strange as that
+of the Turk, both utterly detested. I was in Cumberland a few months
+back; there in more than one village the old worship goes on as it has
+done since Christianity first came to this island. But I hope you will go
+up there, now that you have come so far. You would do a great work for
+Christ his Church."
+
+He told him, too, a number of stories of the zeal and constancy shown on
+behalf of the Religion; of small squires who were completely ruined by
+the fines laid upon them; of old halls that were falling to pieces
+through the ruin brought upon their staunch owners; and above all of the
+priests that Lancashire had added to the roll of the martyrs--Anderton,
+Marsden, and Thompson among others--and of the joy shown when the
+glorious news of their victory over death reached the place where they
+had been born or where they had ministered.
+
+"At Preston," he said, "when the news of Mr. Greenaway's death reached
+them, they tolled the bells for sorrow. But his old mother ran from her
+house to the street when they had broken the news to her: 'Peal them,
+peal them!' she cried, 'for I have borne a martyr to God.'"
+
+He talked, too, of Campion, of his sermons on "The King who went a
+journey," and the "Hail, Mary"; and told him of the escape at Blainscow
+Hall, where the servant-girl, seeing the pursuivants at hand, pushed the
+Jesuit, with quick wit and courage, into the duck-pond, so that he came
+out disguised indeed--in green mud--and was mocked at by the very
+officers as a clumsy suitor of maidens.
+
+Anthony's heart warmed within him as he sat and listened to these tales
+of patience and gallantry.
+
+"I would lay down my life to serve such folk," he said; and Isabel looked
+with deep-kindled eyes from the one to the other.
+
+They did not stay more than a day or two at Speke Hall, for, as Mr.
+Norreys said, the necessaries of salvation were to be had there already;
+but they moved on almost at once northwards, always arriving at some
+central point for Saturdays and Sundays, so that the Catholics round
+could come in for shrift and housel. In this manner they passed up
+through Lancashire, and pushed still northwards, hearing that a priest
+was sorely needed, through the corner of Westmoreland, up the Lake
+country, through into Cumberland itself. At Kendal, where they stayed two
+nights, Anthony received a message that determined him, after
+consultation with Isabel, to push on as far as Skiddaw, and to make that
+the extreme limit of his journey. He sent the messenger, a wild-looking
+North-countryman, back with a verbal answer to that effect, and named a
+date when they would arrive.
+
+It was already dark, two weeks later, when they arrived at the point
+where the guide was to meet them, as they had lost their way more than
+once already. Here were a couple of men with torches, waiting for them
+behind a rock, who had come down from the village, a mile farther on, to
+bring them up the difficult stony path that was the only means of access
+to it. The track went up a ravine, with a rock-wall rising on their left,
+on which the light of the torches shone, and tumbled ground, covered with
+heather, falling rapidly away on their right down to a gulf of darkness
+whence they could hear the sound of the torrent far below; the path was
+uneven, with great stones here and there, and sharp corners in it, and as
+they went it was all they could do to keep their tired horses from
+stumbling, for a slip would have been dangerous under the circumstances.
+The men who led them said little, as it was impossible for a horse and a
+man to walk abreast, but Anthony was astonished to see again and again,
+as they turned a corner, another man with a torch and some weapon, a
+pike, or a sword, start up and salute him, or sometimes a group, with
+barefooted boys, and then attach themselves to the procession either
+before or behind; until in a short while there was an escort of some
+thirty or forty accompanying the cavalcade. At last, as they turned a
+corner, the lighted windows of a belfry showed against the dark moor
+beyond, and in a moment more, as if there were a watcher set there to
+look out for the torches, a peal of five bells clashed out from the
+tower; then, as they rose yet higher, the path took a sudden turn and a
+dip between two towering rocks, and the whole village lay beneath them,
+with lights in every window to welcome the priest, the first that they
+had seen for eight months, when the old Marian rector, the elder brother
+of the squire, had died.
+
+It was now late, so Anthony and Isabel were conducted immediately to the
+Hall, an old house immediately adjoining the churchyard; and here, too,
+the windows were blazing with welcome, and the tall squire, Mr. Brian,
+with his wife and children behind, was standing before the bright
+hall-door at the top of the steps. The men and boys that had brought them
+so far, and were standing in the little court with their torches
+uplifted, now threw themselves on their knees to receive the priest's
+blessing, before they went home; and Anthony blessed them and thanked
+them, and went indoors with his sister, strangely moved and uplifted.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The two following days were full of hard work and delight for Anthony. He
+was to say mass at half-past six next morning, and came out of the house
+a little after six o'clock; the sun was just rising to his right over a
+shoulder of Skiddaw, which dominated the eastern horizon; and all round
+him, stretched against the sky in all directions, were the high purple
+moors in the strange dawn-light. Immediately in front of him, not thirty
+yards away, stood the church, with its tower, two aisles, and a chapel on
+a little promontory of rock which jutted out over the bed of the torrent
+along which he had climbed the night before; and to his left lay the
+straggling street of the village. All was perfectly still except for the
+dash of the stream over the rocks; but from one or two houses a thin
+skein of smoke was rising straight into the air. Anthony stood rapt in
+delight, and drew long breaths of the cool morning air, laden with
+freshness and fragrant with the mellow scent of the heather and the
+autumnal smells.
+
+He was completely taken by surprise when he entered the church, for, for
+the first time since he could remember, he saw an English church in its
+true glory. It had been built for a priory-church of Holm-Cultram, but
+for some reason had never been used as that, and had become simply the
+parish church of the village. Across the centre and the northern aisle
+ran an elaborate screen, painted in rich colours, and the southern
+chapel, which ran eastwards of the porch, was separated in a similar way
+from the rest of the church. Over the central screen was the great rood,
+with its attendant figures, exquisitely carved and painted; in every
+direction, as Anthony looked beyond the screens, gleamed rich windows,
+with figures and armorial bearings; here and there tattered banners hung
+on the walls; St. Christopher stood on the north wall opposite the door,
+to guard from violence all who looked upon him day by day; a little
+painting of the Baptist hung on a pillar over against the font, and a
+Vernacle by the pulpit; and all round the walls hung little pictures,
+that the poor and unlearned might read the story of redemption there. But
+the chief glory of all was the solemn high altar, with its riddells
+surmounted by taper-bearing gilded angels, with its brocade cloth, and
+its painted halpas behind; and above it, before the rich window which
+smouldered against the dawn, hung the awful pyx, covered by the white
+silk cloth, but empty; waiting for the priest to come and bid the
+Shechinah of the Lord to brood there again over this gorgeous throne
+beneath, against the brilliant halo of the painted glass behind.
+
+Anthony knelt a moment and thanked God for bringing him here, and then
+passed up into the north aisle, where the image of the Mother of God
+presided, as she had done for three hundred years, over her little altar
+against the wall. Anthony said his preparation and vested at the altar;
+and was astonished to find at least thirty people to hear mass: none, of
+course, made their communion, but Anthony, when he had ended, placed the
+Body of the Lord once more in the hanging pyx and lit the lamp before it.
+
+Then all day he sat in the north chapel, with the dash and loud thunder
+of the mountain stream entering through the opened panes of the east
+window, and the stained sunlight, in gorgeous colours, creeping across
+the red tiles at his feet, glowing and fading as the clouds moved over
+the sun, while the people came and were shriven; with the exception of an
+hour in the middle of the day and half an hour for supper in the evening,
+he was incessantly occupied until nine o'clock at night. From the upland
+dales all round they streamed in, at news of the priest, and those who
+had come from far and were fasting he communicated at once from the
+Reserved Sacrament. At last, tired out, but intensely happy, he went back
+to the Hall.
+
+But the next morning was yet more startling. Mass was at eight o'clock,
+and by the time Anthony entered the church he found a congregation of
+nearly two hundred souls; the village itself did not number above
+seventy, but many came in from the country round, and some had stayed all
+night in the church-porch. Then, too, he heard the North-country singing
+in the old way; all the mass music was sung in three parts, except the
+unchanging melody of the creed, which, like the tremendous and unchanging
+words themselves, at one time had united the whole of England; but what
+stirred Anthony more than all were the ancient hymns sung here and there
+during the service, some in Latin, which a few picked voices rendered,
+and some in English, to the old lilting tunes which were as much the
+growth of the north-country as the heather itself. The "Ave Verum Corpus"
+was sung after the Elevation, and Anthony felt that his heart would break
+for very joy; as he bent before the Body of his Lord, and the voices
+behind him rose and exulted up the aisles, the women's and children's
+voices soaring passionately up in the melody, the mellow men's voices
+establishing, as it seemed, these ecstatic pinnacles of song on mighty
+and immovable foundations.
+
+Vespers were said at three o'clock, after baptisms and more confessions;
+and Anthony was astonished at the number of folk who could answer the
+priest. After vespers he made a short sermon, and told the people
+something of what he had seen in the South, of the martyrdoms at Tyburn,
+and of the constancy of the confessors.
+
+"'Be thou faithful unto death,'" he said. "So our Saviour bids us, and He
+gives us a promise too: 'I will give thee a crown of life.' Beloved, some
+day the tide of heresy will creep up these valleys too; and it will bear
+many things with it, the scaffold and the gallows and the knife maybe.
+And then our Lord will see which are His; then will be the time that
+grace will triumph--that those who have used the sacraments with
+devotion; that have been careful and penitent with their sins, that have
+hungered for the Bread of Life--the Lord shall stand by them and save
+them, as He stood by Mr. Sherwin on the rack, and Father Campion on the
+scaffold, and Mistress Ward and many more, of whom I have not had time to
+tell you. He who bids us be faithful, Himself will be faithful; and He
+who wore the crown of thorns will bestow upon us the crown of life."
+
+Then they sang a hymn to our Lady:
+
+    "Hail be thou, Mary, the mother of Christ,"
+
+and the old swaying tune rocked like a cradle, and the people looked up
+towards their Mother's altar as they sang--their Mother who had ruled
+them so sweetly and so long--and entreated her in their hearts, who stood
+by her Son's Cross, to stand by theirs too should God ever call them to
+die upon one.
+
+The next day Mr. Brian took Anthony a long walk as soon as dinner was
+over, across the moors towards the north side of Skiddaw. Anthony found
+the old man a delightful and garrulous companion, full of tales of the
+countryside, historical, religious, naturalistic, and supernatural. As
+they stood on a little eminence and looked back to where the church-tower
+pricked out of the deep crack in the moors where it stood, he told him
+the tale of the coming of the pursuivants.
+
+"They first troubled us in '72," he said; "they had not thought it worth
+while before to disturb themselves for one old man like my brother, who
+was like to die soon; but in April of that year they first sent up their
+men. But it was only a pair of pursuivants, for they knew nothing of
+the people; they came up, the poor men, to take my brother down to
+Cockermouth to answer on his religion to some bench of ministers that sat
+there. Well, they met him, in his cassock and square cap, coming out of
+the church, where he had just replaced the Most Holy Sacrament after
+giving communion to a dying body. 'Heh! are you the minister?' say they.
+
+"'Heh! I am the priest, if that is what you mean,' he answers back. (He
+was a large man, like myself, was my brother.)
+
+"'Well, come, old man,' say they, 'we must help you down to Cockermouth.'
+
+"Well, a few words passed; and the end was that he called out to Tim, who
+lived just against the church; and told them what was forward.
+
+"Well, the pursuivants got back to Cockermouth with their lives, but not
+much else; and reported to the magistrates that the wild Irish themselves
+were little piminy maids compared to the folk they had visited that day.
+
+"So there was a great to-do, and a deal of talk; and in the next month
+they sent up thirty pikemen with an officer and a dozen pursuivants, and
+all to take one old priest and his brother. I had been in Kendal in April
+when they first came--but they put it all down to me.
+
+"Well, we were ready for them this time; the bells had been ringing to
+call in the folk since six of the clock in the morning; and by
+dinner-time, when the soldiers were expected, there was a matter of two
+hundred men, I should say, some with scythes and sickles, and some with
+staves or shepherds' crooks; the children had been sent down sooner to
+stone the men all the way up the path; and by the time that they had
+reached the churchyard gate there was not a man of them but had a cut or
+a bruise upon him. Then, when they turned the corner, black with wrath,
+there were the lads gathered about the church-porch each with his weapon,
+and each white and silent, waiting for what should fall.
+
+"Now you wonder where we were. We were in the church, my brother and I;
+for our people had put us there against our will, to keep us safe, they
+said. Eh! but I was wroth when Olroyd and the rest pushed me through the
+door. However, there we were, locked in; I was up in one window, and my
+brother was in the belfry as I thought, each trying to see what was
+forward. I saw the two crowds of them, silent and wrathful, with not
+twenty yards between them, and a few stones still sailing among the
+soldiers now and again; the pikes were being set in array, and our lads
+were opening out to let the scythes have free play, when on a sudden I
+heard the tinkle of a bell round the outside of the tower, and I climbed
+down from my place, and up again to one of the west windows; there was a
+fearsome hush outside now, and I could see some of the soldiers in front
+were uneasy; they had their eyes off the lads and round the side of the
+tower. And then I saw little Dickie Olroyd in his surplice ringing a bell
+and bearing a candle, and behind him came my brother, in a purple cope I
+had never set eyes on before, with his square cap and a great book, and
+his eyes shining out of his head, and his lips opening and mouthing out
+Latin; and then he stopped, laid the book reverently on a tombstone,
+lifted both hands, and brought them down with the fingers out, and his
+eyes larger than ever. I could see the soldiers were ready to break and
+scatter, for some were Catholics no doubt, and many more feared the
+priest; and then on a sudden my brother caught the candle out of Dickie's
+hand, blew it out with a great puff, while Dickie rattled upon the bell,
+and then he dashed the smoking candle among the soldiers. The soldiers
+broke and fled like hares, out of the churchyard, down the street and
+down the path to Cockermouth; the officer tried to stay them, but 'twas
+no use; the fear of the Church was upon them, and her Grace herself could
+not have prevailed with them. Well, when they let us out, the lads were
+all a-trembling too; for my brother's face, they said, was like the
+destroying angel; and I was somewhat queer myself, and I was astonished
+too; for he was kind-hearted, was my brother, and would not hurt a fly's
+body; much less damn his soul; and, after all, the poor soldiers were not
+to blame; and 'twas a queer cursing, I thought too, to be done like that;
+but maybe 'twas a new papal method. I went round to the north chapel, and
+there he was taking off his cope.
+
+"'Well,' he said to me, 'how did I do it?'
+
+"'Do it?' I said; 'do it? Why, you've damned those poor lads' souls
+eternally. The hand of the Lord was with you,' I said.
+
+"'Damned them?' said he; 'nonsense! 'Twas only your old herbal that I
+read at them; and the cope too, 'twas inside out.'"
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Then the old man told Anthony other stories of his earlier life, how he
+had been educated at the university and been at Court in King Henry's
+reign and Queen Mary's, but that he had lost heart at Elizabeth's
+accession, and retired to his hills, where he could serve God according
+to his conscience, and study God's works too, for he was a keen
+naturalist. He told Anthony many stories about the deer, and the herds of
+wild white hornless cattle that were now practically extinct on the
+hills, and of a curious breed of four-horned sheep, skulls of all of
+which species hung in his hall, and of the odd drinking-horns that
+Anthony had admired the day before. There was one especially that he
+talked much of, a buffalo horn on three silver feet fashioned like the
+legs of an armed man; round the centre was a filleting inscribed, "_Qui
+pugnat contra tres perdet duos_," and there was a cross patee on the
+horn, and two other inscriptions, "_Nolite extollere cornu in altu'_" and
+"_Qui bibat me adhuc siti'_." Mr. Brian told him it had been brought from
+Italy by his grandfather.
+
+They put up a quantity of grouse and several hares as they walked across
+the moor; one of the hares, which had a curious patch of white between
+his ears like a little night-cap, startled Mr. Brian so much that he
+exclaimed aloud, crossed himself, and stood, a little pale, watching the
+hare's head as it bobbed and swerved among the heather.
+
+"I like it not," he said to Anthony, who inquired what was the matter.
+"Satan hath appeared under some such form to many in history. Joachimus
+Camerarius, who wrote _de natura daemonum_, tells, I think, a story of
+a hare followed by a fox that ran across the path of a young man who
+was riding on a horse, and who started in pursuit. Up and down hills and
+dales they went, and soon the fox was no longer there, and the hare grew
+larger and blacker as it went; and the young man presently saw that he
+was in a country that he knew not; it was all barren and desolate round
+him, and the sky grew dark. Then he spurred his horse more furiously, and
+he drew nearer and nearer to the great hare that now skipped along like a
+stag before him; and then, as he put out his hand to cut the hare down,
+the creature sprang into the air and vanished, and the horse fell dead;
+and the man was found in his own meadow by his friends, in a swound, with
+his horse dead beside him, and trampled marks round and round the field,
+and the pug-marks of what seemed like a great tiger beside him, where the
+beast had sprung into the air."
+
+When Mr. Brian found that Anthony was interested in such stories, he told
+him plenty of them; especially tales that seemed to join in a strange
+unity of life, demons, beasts and men. It was partly, no doubt, his
+studies as a naturalist that led him to insist upon points that united
+rather than divided the orders of creation; and he told him stories first
+from such writers as Michael Verdunus and Petrus Burgottus, who relate
+among other marvels how there are ointments by the use of which shepherds
+have been known to change themselves into wolves and tear the sheep that
+they should have protected; and he quoted to him St. Augustine's own
+testimony, to the belief that in Italy certain women were able to change
+themselves into heifers through the power of witchcraft. Finally, he told
+him one or two tales of his own experience.
+
+"In the year '63," he said, "before my marriage, I was living alone in
+the Hall; I was a young man, and did my best to fear nought but deadly
+sin. I was coming back late from Threlkeld, round the south of Skiddaw
+that you see over there; and was going with a lantern, for it would be
+ten o'clock at night, and the time of year was autumn. I was still a mile
+or two from the house, and was saying my beads as I came, for I hold that
+is a great protection; when I heard a strange whistling noise, with a
+murmur in it, high up overhead in the night. 'It is the birds going
+south,' I said to myself, for you know that great flocks fly by night
+when the cold begins to set in; but the sound grew louder and more
+distinct, and at last I could hear the sound as of words gabbled in a
+foreign tongue; and I knew they were no birds, though maybe they had
+wings like them. But I knew that a Christened soul in grace has nought to
+fear from hell; so I crossed myself and said my beads, and kept my eyes
+on the ground, and presently I saw my lights burning in the house, and
+heard the roar of the stream, and the gabbling above me ceased, as the
+sound of the running water began. But that night I awoke again and again;
+and the night seemed hot and close each time, as if a storm was near, but
+there was no thunder. Each time I heard the roar of the stream below the
+house, and no more. At last, towards the morning, I set my window wide
+that looks towards the stream, and leaned out; and there beneath me,
+crowded against the wall of the house, as I could see in the growing
+light, was a great flock of sheep, with all their heads together towards
+the house, as close as a score of dogs could pack them, and they were all
+still as death, and their backs were dripping wet; for they had come down
+the hills and swum the stream, in order to be near a Christened man and
+away from what was abroad that night.
+
+"My shepherds told me the same that day, that everywhere the sheep had
+come down to the houses, as if terrified near to death; and at Keswick,
+whither I went the next market-day, they told me the same tale, and that
+two men had each found a sheep that could not travel; one had a broken
+leg, and the other had been cast; but neither had another mark or wound
+or any disease upon him, but that both were lying dead upon Skiddaw; and
+the look in the dead eyes, they said, was fit to make a man forget his
+manhood."
+
+Anthony found the old man the most interesting companion possible, and he
+persuaded him to accompany him on several of the expeditions that he had
+to make to the hamlets and outlying cottages round, in his spiritual
+ministrations; and both he and Isabel were sincerely sorry when two
+Sundays had passed away, and they had to begin to move south again in
+their journeyings.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+And so the autumn passed and winter began, and Anthony was slowly moving
+down again, supplying the place of priests who had fallen sick or had
+died, visiting many almost inaccessible hamlets, and everywhere
+encouraging the waverers and seeking the wanderers, and rejoicing over
+the courageous, and bringing opportunities of grace to many who longed
+for them. He met many other well-known priests from time to time, and
+took counsel with them, but did not have time to become very intimate
+with any of them, so great were the demands upon his services. In this
+manner he met John Colleton, the canonist, who had returned from his
+banishment in '87, but found him a little dull and melancholy, though his
+devotion was beyond praise. He met, too, the Jesuit Fathers Edward
+Oldcorne and Richard Holtby, the former of whom had lately come from
+Hindlip.
+
+He spent Christmas near Cartmel-in-Furness, and after the new year had
+opened, crossed the Ken once more near Beetham, and began to return
+slowly down the coast. Everywhere he was deeply touched by the devotion
+of the people, who, in spite of long months without a priest, had yet
+clung to the observance of their religion so far as was possible, and now
+welcomed him like an angel of God; and he had the great happiness too of
+reconciling some who, yielding to loneliness and pressure, had conformed
+to the Establishment. In these latter cases he was almost startled by the
+depth of Catholic convictions that had survived.
+
+"I never believed it, father," said a young squire to him, near Garstang.
+"I knew that it was but a human invention, and not the Gospel that my
+fathers held, and that Christ our Saviour brought on earth; but I lost
+heart, for that no priest came near us, and I had not had the sacraments
+for nearly two years; and I thought that it were better to have some
+religion than none at all, so at last I went to church. But there is no
+need to talk to me, father, now I have made my confession, for I know
+with my whole soul that the Catholic Religion is the true one--and I have
+known it all the while, and I thank God and His Blessed Mother, and you,
+father, too, for helping me to say so again, and to come back to grace."
+
+At last, at the beginning of March, Anthony and Isabel found themselves
+back again at Speke Hall, warmly welcomed by Mr. Norreys.
+
+"You have done a good work for the Church, Mr. Capell," said his host,
+"and God will reward you and thank you for it Himself, for we cannot."
+
+"And I thank God," said Anthony, "for the encouragement to faith that the
+sight of the faithful North has given to me; and pray Him that I may
+carry something of her spirit back with me to the south."
+
+There were letters waiting for him at Speke Hall, one from Mr. Buxton,
+urging them to come back, at least for the present, to Stanfield Place,
+so soon as the winter work in the north was over; and another from the
+Rector of the College at Douai to the same effect. There was also one
+more, written from a little parish in Kent, from a Catholic lady who was
+altogether a stranger to him, but who plainly knew all about him,
+entreating him to call at her house when he was in the south again; her
+husband, she said, had met him once at Stanfield and had been strongly
+attracted by him to the Catholic Church, and she believed that if Anthony
+would but pay them a visit her husband's conversion would be brought
+about. Anthony could not remember the man's name, but Isabel thought that
+she did remember some such person at a small private conference that
+Anthony had given in Mr. Buxton's house, for the benefit of Catholics and
+those who were being drawn towards the Religion.
+
+The lady, too, gave him instructions as to how he should come from London
+to her house, recommending him to cross the Thames at a certain spot that
+she described near Greenhithe, and to come on southwards along a route
+that she marked for him, to the parish of Stanstead, where she lived.
+This, then, was soon arranged, and after letters had been sent off
+announcing Anthony's movements, he left Speke Hall with Isabel, about a
+fortnight later.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII
+
+                          IN STANSTEAD WOODS
+
+
+On the first day of June, Anthony and Isabel, with their three armed
+servants and the French maid behind them, were riding down through
+Thurrock to the north bank of the Thames opposite Greenhithe. As they
+went Anthony pulled out and studied the letter and the little map that
+Mrs. Kirke had sent to guide them.
+
+"On the right-hand side," she wrote, "when you come to the ferry, stands
+a little inn, the 'Sloop,' among trees, with a yard behind it. Mr.
+Bender, the host, is one of us; and he will get your horses on board, and
+do all things to forward you without attracting attention. Give him some
+sign that he may know you for a Catholic, and when you are alone with him
+tell him where you are bound."
+
+There were one or two houses standing near the bank, as they rode down
+the lane that led to the river, but they had little difficulty in
+identifying the "Sloop," and presently they rode into the yard, and,
+leaving their horses with the servants, stepped round into the little
+smoky front room of the inn.
+
+A man, dressed somewhat like a sailor, was sitting behind a table, who
+looked up with a dull kind of expectancy and whom Anthony took as the
+host; and, in order to identify him and show who he himself was, he took
+up a little cake of bread that was lying on a platter on the table, and
+broke it as if he would eat. This was one of Father Persons' devices, and
+was used among Catholics to signify their religion when they were with
+strangers, since it was an action that could rouse no suspicion among
+others. The man looked in an unintelligent way at Anthony, who turned
+away and rapped upon the door, and as a large heavily-built man came out,
+broke it again, and put a piece into his mouth. The man lifted his
+eyebrows slightly, and just smiled, and Anthony knew he had found his
+friend.
+
+"Come this way, sir," he said, "and your good lady, too."
+
+They followed him into the inner room of the house, a kind of little
+kitchen, with a fire burning and a pot over it, and one or two barrels of
+drink against the wall. A woman was stirring the pot, for it was near
+dinner-time, and turned round as the strangers came in. It was plainly an
+inn that was of the poorest kind, and that was used almost entirely by
+watermen or by travellers who were on their way to cross the ferry.
+
+"The less said the better," said the man, when he had shut the door. "How
+can I serve you, sir?"
+
+"We wish to take our horses and ourselves across to Greenhithe," said
+Anthony, "and Mrs. Kirke, to whom we are going, bade us make ourselves
+known to you."
+
+The man nodded and smiled.
+
+"Yes, sir, that can be managed directly. The ferry is at the other bank
+now, sir; and I will call it across. Shall we say in half an hour, sir;
+and, meanwhile, will you and your lady take something?"
+
+Anthony accepted gladly, as the time was getting on, and ordered dinner
+for the servants too, in the outer room. As the landlord was going to the
+door, he stopped him.
+
+"Who is that man in the other room?" he asked.
+
+The landlord gave a glance at the door, and came back towards Anthony.
+
+"To tell the truth, sir, I do not know. He is a sailor by appearance, and
+he knows the talk; but none of the watermen know him; and he seems to do
+nothing. However, sir, there's no harm in him that I can see."
+
+Anthony told him that he had broken the bread before him, thinking he was
+the landlord. The real landlord smiled broadly.
+
+"Thank God, I am somewhat more of a man than that," for the sailor was
+lean and sun-dried. Then once more Mr. Bender went to the door to call
+the servants in.
+
+"Why, the man's gone," he said, and disappeared. Then they heard his
+voice again. "But he's left his groat behind him for his drink, so all's
+well"; and presently his voice was heard singing as he got the table
+ready for the servants.
+
+In a little more than half an hour the party and the horses were safely
+on the broad bargelike ferry, and Mr. Bender was bowing on the bank and
+wishing them a prosperous journey, as they began to move out on to the
+wide river towards the chalk cliffs and red roofs of Greenhithe that
+nestled among the mass of trees on the opposite bank. In less than ten
+minutes they were at the pier, and after a little struggle to get the
+horses to land, they were mounted and riding up the straight little
+street that led up to the higher ground. Just before they turned the
+corner they heard far away across the river the horn blown to summon the
+ferry-boat once more.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+There were two routes from Greenhithe to Stanstead, the one to the right
+through Longfield and Ash, the other to the left through Southfleet and
+Nursted. There was very little to choose between them as regards
+distance, and Mrs. Kirke had drawn a careful sketch-map with a few notes
+as to the characteristics of each route. There were besides, particularly
+through the thick woods about Stanstead itself, innumerable cross-paths
+intersecting one another in all directions. The travellers had decided at
+the inn to take the road through Longfield; since, in spite of other
+disadvantages, it was the less frequented of the two, and they were
+anxious above all things to avoid attention. Their horses were tired; and
+as they had plenty of time before them they proposed to go at a
+foot's-pace all the way, and to take between two and three hours to cover
+the nine or ten miles between Greenhithe and Stanstead.
+
+It was a hot afternoon as they passed through Fawkham, and it was
+delightful to pass from the white road in under the thick arching trees
+just beyond the village. There everything was cool shadow, the insects
+sang in the air about them, an early rabbit or two cantered across the
+road and disappeared into the thick undergrowth; once the song of the
+birds about them suddenly ceased, and through an opening in the green
+rustling vault overhead they saw a cruel shape with motionless wings
+glide steadily across.
+
+They did not talk much, but let the reins lie loose; and enjoyed the cool
+shadow and the green lights and the fragrant mellow scents of the woods
+about them; while their horses slouched along on the turf, switching
+their tails and even stopping sometimes for a second in a kind of
+desperate greediness to snatch a green juicy mouthful at the side.
+
+Isabel was thinking of Stanfield, and wondering how the situation would
+adjust itself; Mary Corbet would be there, she knew, to meet them; and it
+was a comfort to think she could consult her; but what, she asked
+herself, would be her relations with the master of the house?
+
+Suddenly Anthony's horse stepped off the turf on the opposite side of the
+road and began to come towards her, and she moved her beast a little to
+let him come on the turf beside her.
+
+"Isabel," said Anthony, "tell me if you hear anything."
+
+She looked at him, suddenly startled.
+
+"No, no," he said, "there is nothing to fear; it is probably my fancy;
+but listen and tell me."
+
+She listened intently. There was the creaking of her own saddle, the soft
+footfalls of the horses, the hum of the summer woods, and the sound of
+the servants' horses behind.
+
+"No," she said, "there is nothing beyond----"
+
+"There!" he said suddenly; "now do you hear it?"
+
+Then she heard plainly the sound either of a man running, or of a horse
+walking, somewhere behind them.
+
+"Yes," she said, "I hear something; but what of it?"
+
+"It is the third time I have heard it," he said: "once in the woods
+behind Longfield, and once just before the little village with the
+steepled church."
+
+The sound had ceased again.
+
+"It is some one who has come nearly all the way from Greenhithe behind
+us. Perhaps they are not following--but again----"
+
+"They?" she said; "there is only one."
+
+"There are three," he answered; "at least; the other two are on the turf
+at the side--but just before the village I heard all three of them--or
+rather certainly more than two--when they were between those two walls
+where there was no turf."
+
+Isabel was staring at him with great frightened eyes. He smiled back at
+her tranquilly.
+
+"Ah, Isabel!" he said, "there is nothing really to fear, in any case."
+
+"What shall you do?" she asked, making a great effort to control herself.
+
+"I think we must find out first of all whether they are after us. We must
+certainly not ride straight to the Manor Lodge if it is so."
+
+Then he explained his plan.
+
+"See here," he said, holding the map before her as he rode, "we shall
+come to Fawkham Green in five minutes. Then our proper road leads
+straight on to Ash, but we will take the right instead, towards Eynsford.
+Meanwhile, I will leave Robert here, hidden by the side of the road, to
+see who these men are, and what they look like; and we will ride on
+slowly. When they have passed, he will come out and take the road we
+should have taken, and he then will turn off to the right too before he
+reaches Ash; and by trotting he will easily come up with us at this
+corner," and he pointed to it on the map--"and so he will tell us what
+kind of men they are; and they will never know that they have been spied
+upon; for, by this plan, he will not have to pass them. Is that a good
+plot?" and he smiled at her.
+
+Isabel assented, feeling dazed and overwhelmed. She could hardly bring
+her thoughts to a focus, for the fears that had hovered about her ever
+since they had left Lancashire and come down to the treacherous south,
+had now darted upon her, tearing her heart with terror and blinding her
+eyes, and bewildering her with the beating of their wings.
+
+Anthony quietly called up Robert, and explained the plan. He was a lad of
+a Catholic family at Great Keynes, perfectly fearless and perfectly
+devoted to the Church and to the priest he served. He nodded his head
+briskly with approval as the plan was explained.
+
+"Of course it may all be nothing," ended Anthony, "and then you will
+think me a poor fool?"
+
+The lad grinned cheerfully.
+
+"No, sir," he said.
+
+All this while they had been riding slowly on together, and now the wood
+showed signs of coming to an end; so Anthony told the groom to ride fifty
+yards into the undergrowth at once, to bandage his horse's eyes, and to
+tie him to a tree; and then to creep back himself near the road, so as to
+see without being seen. The men who seemed to be following were at least
+half a mile behind, so he would have plenty of time.
+
+Then they all rode on together again, leaving Robert to find his way into
+the wood. As they went, Isabel began to question her brother, and Anthony
+gave her his views.
+
+"They have not come up with us, because they know we are four men to
+three--if, as I think, they are not more than three--that is one reason;
+and another is that they love to track us home before they take us; and
+thus take our hosts too as priests' harbourers. Now plainly these men do
+not know where we are bound, or they would not follow us so closely. Best
+of all, too, they love to catch us at mass for then they have no trouble
+in proving their case. I think then that they will not try to take us
+till we reach the Manor Lodge; and we must do our best to shake them off
+before that. Now the plot I have thought of is this, that--should it
+prove as I think it will--we should ride slower than ever, as if our
+horses were weary, down the road along which Robert will have come after
+he has joined us, and turn down as if to go to Kingsdown, and when we
+have gone half a mile, and are well round that sharp corner, double back
+to it, and hide all in the wood at the side. They will follow our tracks,
+and there are no houses at which they can ask, and there seem no
+travellers either on these by-roads, and when they have passed us we
+double back at the gallop, and down the next turning, which will bring us
+in a couple of miles to Stanstead. There is a maze of roads thereabouts,
+and it will be hard if we do not shake them off; for there is not a
+house, marked upon the map, at which they can ask after us."
+
+Isabel did her utmost to understand, but the horror of the pursuit had
+overwhelmed her. The quiet woods into which they had passed again after
+leaving Fawkham Green now seemed full of menace; the rough road, with the
+deep powdery ruts and the grass and fir-needles at the side, no longer
+seemed a pleasant path leading home, but a treacherous device to lead
+them deeper into danger. The creatures round them, the rabbits, the
+pigeons that flapped suddenly out of all the tall trees, the tits that
+fluttered on and chirped and fluttered again, all seemed united against
+Anthony in some dreadful league. Anthony himself felt all his powers of
+observation and device quickened and established. He had lived so long in
+the expectation of a time like this, and had rehearsed and mastered the
+emotions of terror and suspense so often, that he was ready to meet them;
+and gradually his entire self-control and the unmoved tones of his voice
+and his serene alert face prevailed upon Isabel; and by the time that
+they slowly turned the last curve and saw Robert on his black horse
+waiting for them at the corner, her sense of terror and bewilderment had
+passed, her heart had ceased that sick thumping, and she, too, was
+tranquil and capable.
+
+Robert wheeled his horse and rode beside Anthony round the sharp corner
+to the left up the road along which he had trotted just now.
+
+"There are three of them, sir," he said in an even, businesslike voice;
+"one of them, sir, on a brown mare, but I couldn't see aught of him, sir;
+he was on the far side of the track; the second is like a groom on a grey
+horse, and the third is dressed like a sailor, sir, on a brown horse."
+
+"A sailor?" said Anthony; "a lean man, and sunburnt, with a whistle?"
+
+"I did not see the whistle, sir; but he is as you say."
+
+This made it certain that it was the man they had seen in the inn
+opposite Greenhithe; and also practically certain that he was a spy; for
+nothing that Anthony had done could have roused his suspicions except the
+breaking of the bread; and that would only be known to one who was deep
+in the counsels of the Catholics. All this made the pursuit the more
+formidable.
+
+So Anthony meditated; and presently, calling up the servants behind,
+explained the situation and his plan. The French maid showed signs of
+hysteria and Isabel had to take her aside and quiet her, while the men
+consulted. Then it was arranged, and the servants presently dropped
+behind again a few yards, though the maid still rode with Isabel. Then
+they came to the road on the right that would have led them to Kingsdown,
+and down this they turned. As they went, Anthony kept a good look-out for
+a place to turn aside; and a hundred yards from the turning saw what he
+wanted. On the left-hand side a little path led into the wood; it was
+overgrown with brambles, and looked as if it were now disused. Anthony
+gave the word and turned his horse down the entrance, and was followed in
+single file by the others. There were thick trees about them on every
+side, and, what was far more important, the road they had left at this
+point ran higher than usual, and was hard and dry; so the horses' hoofs
+as they turned off left no mark that would be noticed.
+
+After riding thirty or forty yards, Anthony stopped, turned his horse
+again, and forced him through the hazels with some difficulty, and the
+others again followed in silence through the passage he had made.
+Presently Anthony stopped; the branches that had swished their faces as
+they rode through now seemed a little higher; and it was possible to sit
+here on horseback without any great discomfort.
+
+"I must see them myself," he whispered to Isabel; and slipped off his
+horse, giving the bridle to Robert.
+
+"Oh! mon Dieu!" moaned the maid; "mon Dieu! Ne partez pas!"
+
+Anthony looked at her severely.
+
+"You must be quiet and brave," he said sternly. "You are a Catholic too;
+pray, instead of crying."
+
+Then Isabel saw him slip noiselessly towards the road, which was some
+fifty yards away, through the thick growth.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was now a breathless afternoon. High overhead the sun blazed in a
+cloudless sky, but down here all was cool, green shadow. There was not a
+sound to be heard from the woods, beyond the mellow hum of the flies;
+Anthony's faint rustlings had ceased; now and then a saddle creaked, or a
+horse blew out his nostrils or tossed his head. One of the men wound his
+handkerchief silently round a piece of his horse's head-harness that
+jingled a little. The maid drew a soft sobbing breath now and then, but
+she dared not speak after the priest's rebuke.
+
+Then suddenly there came another sound to Isabel's ears; she could not
+distinguish at first what it was, but it grew nearer, and presently
+resolved itself into the fumbling noise of several horses' feet walking
+together, twice or three times a stirrup chinked, once she heard a
+muffled cough; but no word was spoken. Nearer and nearer it came, until
+she could not believe that it was not within five yards of her. Her heart
+began again that sick thumping; a fly that she had brushed away again and
+again now crawled unheeded over her face, and even on her white parted
+lips; but a sob of fear from the maid recalled her, and she turned a
+sharp look of warning on her. Then the fumbling noise began to die away:
+the men were passing. There was something in their silence that was more
+terrible than all else; it reminded her of hounds running on a hot scent.
+
+Then at last there was silence; then gentle rustlings again over last
+year's leaves; and Anthony came back through the hazels. He nodded at her
+sharply.
+
+"Now, quickly," he said, and took his horse by the bridle and began to
+lead him out again the way they had come. At the entrance he looked out
+first; the road was empty and silent. Then he led his horse clear, and
+mounted as the others came out one by one in single file.
+
+"Now follow close; and watch my hand," he said; and he put his horse to a
+quick walk on the soft wayside turf. As the distance widened between them
+and the men who were now riding away from them, the walk became a trot,
+and then quickly a canter, as the danger of the sound being carried to
+their pursuers decreased.
+
+It seemed to Isabel like some breathless dream as she followed Anthony's
+back, watching the motions of his hand as he signed in which direction he
+was going to turn next. What was happening, she half wondered to herself,
+that she should be riding like this on a spent horse, as if in some
+dreadful game, turning abruptly down lanes and rides, out across the high
+road, and down again another turn, with the breathing and creaking and
+jingling of others behind her? Years ago the two had played
+Follow-my-leader on horseback in the woods above Great Keynes. She
+remembered this now; and a flood of memories poured across her mind and
+diluted the bitterness of this shocking reality. Dear God, what a game!
+
+Anthony steered with skill and decision. He had been studying the map
+with great attention, and even now carried it loose in his hand and
+glanced at it from time to time. Above all else he wished to avoid
+passing a house, for fear that the searchers might afterwards inquire at
+it; and he succeeded perfectly in this, though once or twice he was
+obliged to retrace his steps. There was little danger, he knew now, of
+the noise of the horses' feet being any guide to those who were
+searching, for the high table-land on which they rode was a labyrinth of
+lanes and rides, and the trees too served to echo and confuse the noise
+they could not altogether avoid making. Twice they passed travellers, one
+a farmer on an old grey horse, who stared at this strange hurrying party;
+and once a pedlar, laden with his pack, who trudged past, head down.
+
+Isabel's horse was beginning to strain and pant, and she herself to grow
+giddy with heat and weariness, when she saw through the trees an old
+farmhouse with latticed windows and a great external chimney, standing in
+a square of cultivated ground; and in a moment more the path they were
+following turned a corner, and the party drew up at the back of the
+house.
+
+At the noise of the horses' footsteps a door at the back had opened, and
+a woman's face looked out and drew back again; and presently from the
+front Mrs. Kirke came quickly round. She was tall and slender and
+middle-aged, with a somewhat anxious face; but a look of great relief
+came over it as she saw Anthony.
+
+"Thank God you are come," she said; "I feared something had happened."
+
+Anthony explained the circumstances in a few words.
+
+"I will ride on gladly, madam, if you think right; but I will ask you in
+any case to take my sister in."
+
+"Why, how can you say that?" she said; "I am a Catholic. Come in, father.
+But I fear there is but poor accommodation for the servants."
+
+"And the horses?" asked Anthony.
+
+"The barn at the back is got ready for them," she said; "perhaps it would
+be well to take them there at once." She called a woman, and sent her to
+show the men where to stable the horses, while Anthony and Isabel and the
+maid dismounted and came in with her to the house.
+
+There, they talked over the situation and what was best to be done. Her
+husband had ridden over to Wrotham, and she expected him back for supper;
+nothing then could be finally settled till he came. In the meantime the
+Manor Lodge was probably the safest place in all the woods, Mrs. Kirke
+declared; the nearest house was half a mile away, and that was the
+Rectory; and the Rector himself was a personal friend and favourable to
+Catholics. The Manor Lodge, too, stood well off the road to Wrotham, and
+not five strangers appeared there in the year. Fifty men might hunt the
+woods for a month and not find it; in fact, Mr. Kirke had taken the house
+on account of its privacy, for he was weary, his wife said, of paying her
+fines for recusancy; and still more unwilling to pay his own, when that
+happy necessity should arrive; for he had now practically made up his
+mind to be a Catholic, and only needed a little instruction before being
+received.
+
+"He is a good man, father," she said to Anthony, "and will make a good
+Catholic."
+
+Then she explained about the accommodation. Isabel and the maid would
+have to sleep together in the spare room, and Anthony would have the
+little dressing-room opening out of it; and the men, she feared, would
+have to shake down as well as they could in the loft over the stable in
+the barn.
+
+At seven o'clock Mr. Kirke arrived; and when the situation had been
+explained to him, he acquiesced in the plan. He seemed confident that
+there was but little danger; and he and Anthony were soon deep in
+theological talk.
+
+Anthony found him excellently instructed already; he had, in fact, even
+prepared for his confession; his wife had taught him well; and it was the
+prospect of this one good opportunity of being reconciled to the Church
+that had precipitated matters and decided him to take the step. He was a
+delightful companion, too, intelligent, courageous, humorous and modest,
+and Anthony thought his own labour and danger well repaid when, a little
+after midnight, he heard his confession and received him into the Church.
+It was impossible for Mr. Kirke to receive communion, as he had wished,
+for there were wanting some of the necessaries for saying mass; so he
+promised to ride across to Stanfield in a week or so, stay the night and
+communicate in the morning.
+
+Then early the next morning a council was held as to the best way for the
+party to leave for Stanfield. The men were called up, and their opinions
+asked; and gradually step by step a plan was evolved.
+
+The first requirement was that, if possible, the party should not be
+recognisable; the second that they should keep together for mutual
+protection; for to separate would very possibly mean the apprehension of
+some one of them; the third was that they should avoid so far as was
+possible villages and houses and frequented roads.
+
+Then the first practical suggestion was made by Isabel that the maid
+should be left behind, and that Mr. Kirke should bring her on with him to
+Stanfield when he came a week later. This he eagerly accepted, and
+further offered to keep all the luggage they could spare, take charge of
+the men's liveries, and lend them old garments and hats of his own--to
+one a cloak, and to another a doublet. In this way, he said, it would
+appear to be a pleasure party rather than one of travellers, and, should
+they be followed, this would serve to cover their traces. The travelling
+by unfrequented roads was more difficult; for that in itself might
+attract attention should they actually meet any one.
+
+Anthony, who had been thinking in silence a moment or two, now broke in.
+
+"Have you any hawks, Mr. Kirke?" he asked.
+
+"Only one old peregrine," he said, "past sport."
+
+"She will do," said Anthony; "and can you borrow another?"
+
+"There is a merlin at the Rectory," said Mr. Kirke.
+
+Then Anthony explained his plan, that they should pose as a
+hawking-party. Isabel and Robert should each carry a hawk, while he
+himself would carry on his wrist an empty leash and hood as if a hawk had
+escaped; that they should then all ride together over the open country,
+avoiding every road, and that, if they should see any one on the way,
+they should inquire whether he had seen an escaped falcon or heard the
+tinkle of the bells; and this would enable them to ask the way, should it
+be necessary, without arousing suspicion.
+
+This plan was accepted, and the maid was informed to her great relief
+that she might remain behind for a week or so, and then return with Mr.
+Kirke after the searchers had left the woods.
+
+It was a twenty-mile ride to Stanfield; and it was thought safer on the
+whole not to remain any longer where they were, as it was impossible to
+know whether a shrewd man might not, with the help of a little luck,
+stumble upon the house; so, when dinner was over, and the servants had
+changed into Mr. Kirke's old suits, and the merlin had been borrowed from
+the Rectory for a week's hawking, the horses were brought round and the
+party mounted.
+
+Mr. Kirke and Anthony had spent a long morning together discussing the
+route, and it had been decided that it would be best to keep along the
+high ridge due west until they were a little beyond Kemsing, which they
+would be able to see below them in the valley; and then to strike across
+between that village and Otford, and keeping almost due south ride up
+through Knole Park; then straight down on the other side into the Weald,
+and so past Tonbridge home.
+
+Mr. Kirke himself insisted on accompanying them on his cob until he had
+seen them clear of the woods on the high ground. Both he and his wife
+were full of gratitude to Anthony for the risk and trouble he had
+undergone, and did their utmost to provide them with all that was
+necessary for their disguise. At last, about two o'clock, the five men
+and Isabel rode out of the little yard at the back of the Manor Lodge and
+plunged into the woods again.
+
+The afternoon hush rested on the country as they followed Mr. Kirke along
+a narrow seldom-used path that led almost straight to the point where it
+was decided that they should strike south. In half a dozen places it cut
+across lanes, and once across the great high road from Farningham to
+Wrotham. As they drew near this, Mr. Kirke, who was riding in front,
+checked them.
+
+"I will go first," he said, "and see if there is danger."
+
+In a minute he returned.
+
+"There is a man about a hundred yards up the road asleep on a bank; and
+there is a cart coming up from Wrotham: that is all I can see. Perhaps we
+had better wait till the cart is gone."
+
+"And what is the man like?" asked Anthony.
+
+"He is a beggar, I should say; but has his hat over his eyes."
+
+They waited till the cart had passed. Anthony dismounted and went to the
+entrance of the path and peered out at the man; he was lying, as Mr.
+Kirke had said, with his hat over his eyes, perfectly still. Anthony
+examined him a minute or two; he was in tattered clothes, and a great
+stick and a bundle lay beside him.
+
+"It is a vagabond," he said, "we can go on."
+
+The whole party crossed the road, pushing on towards the edge of the high
+downs over Kemsing; and presently came to the Ightam road where it began
+to run steeply down hill; here, too, Mr. Kirke looked this way and that,
+but no one was in sight, and then the whole party crossed; they kept
+inside the edge of the wood all the way along the downs for another mile
+or so, with the rich sunlit valley seen in glimpses through the trees
+here and there, and the Pilgrim's Way lying like a white ribbon a couple
+of hundred feet below them, until at last Kemsing Church, with St.
+Edith's Chantry at the side, lay below and behind them, and they came out
+on to the edge of a great scoop in the hill, like a theatre, and the blue
+woods and hills of Surrey showed opposite beyond Otford and Brasted.
+
+Here they stopped, a little back from the edge, and Mr. Kirke gave them
+their last instructions, pointing out Seal across the valley, which they
+must leave on their left, skirting the meadows to the west of the church,
+and passing up towards Knole beyond.
+
+"Let the sun be a little on your right," he said, "all the way; and you
+will strike the country above Tonbridge."
+
+Then they said good-bye to one another; Mr. Kirke kissed the priest's
+hand in gratitude for what he had done for him, and then turned back
+along the edge of the downs, riding this time outside the woods, while
+the party led their horses carefully down the steep slope, across the
+Pilgrim's Way, and then struck straight out over the meadows to Seal.
+
+Their plan seemed supremely successful; they met a few countrymen and
+lads at their work, who looked a little astonished at first at this great
+party riding across country, but more satisfied when Anthony had inquired
+of them whether they had seen a falcon or heard his bells. No, they had
+not, they said; and went on with their curiosity satisfied. Once, as they
+were passing down through a wood on to the Weald, Isabel, who had turned
+in her saddle, and was looking back, gave a low cry of alarm.
+
+"Ah! the man, the man!" she said.
+
+The others turned quickly, but there was nothing to be seen but the long
+straight ride stretching up to against the sky-line three or four hundred
+yards behind them. Isabel said she thought she saw a rider pass across
+this little opening at the end, framed in leaves; but there were stags
+everywhere in the woods here, and it would have been easy to mistake one
+for the other at that distance, and with such a momentary glance.
+
+Once again, nearer Tonbridge, they had a fright. They had followed up a
+grass ride into a copse, thinking it would bring them out somewhere, but
+it led only to the brink of a deep little stream, where the plank bridge
+had been removed, so they were obliged to retrace their steps. As they
+re-emerged into the field from the copse, a large heavily-built man on a
+brown mare almost rode into them. He was out of breath, and his horse
+seemed distressed. Anthony, as usual, immediately asked if he had seen or
+heard anything of a falcon.
+
+"No, indeed, gentlemen," he said, "and have you seen aught of a bitch who
+bolted after a hare some half mile back. A greyhound I should be loath to
+lose."
+
+They had not, and said so; and the man, still panting and mopping his
+head, thanked them, and asked whether he could be of any service in
+directing them, if they were strange to the country; but they thought it
+better not to give him any hint of where they were going, so he rode off
+presently up the slope across their route and disappeared, whistling for
+his dog.
+
+And so at last, about four o'clock in the afternoon, they saw the church
+spire of Stanfield above them on the hill, and knew that they were near
+the end of their troubles. Another hundred yards, and there were the
+roofs of the old house, and the great iron gates, and the vanes of the
+garden-house seen over the clipped limes; and then Mary Corbet and Mr.
+Buxton hurrying in from the garden, as they came through the low oak
+door, into the dear tapestried hall.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IX
+
+                             THE ALARM
+
+
+A very happy party sat down to supper that evening in Stanfield Place.
+
+Anthony had taken Mr. Buxton aside privately when the first greetings
+were over, and told him all that happened: the alarm at Stanstead; his
+device, and the entire peace they had enjoyed ever since.
+
+"Isabel," he ended, "certainly thought she saw a man behind us once; but
+we were among the deer, and it was dusky in the woods; and, for myself, I
+think it was but a stag. But, if you think there is danger anywhere, I
+will gladly ride on."
+
+Mr. Buxton clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"My dear friend," he said, "take care you do not offend me. I am a slow
+fellow, as you know; but even my coarse hide is pricked sometimes. Do not
+suggest again that I could permit any priest--and much less my own dear
+friend--to leave me when there was danger. But there is none in this
+case--you have shaken the rogues off, I make no doubt; and you will just
+stay here for the rest of the summer at the very least."
+
+Anthony said that he agreed with him as to the complete baffling of the
+pursuers, but added that Isabel was still a little shaken, and would Mr.
+Buxton say a word to her.
+
+"Why, I will take her round the hiding-holes myself after supper, and
+show her how strong and safe we are. We will all go round."
+
+In the withdrawing-room he said a word or two of reassurance to her
+before the others were down.
+
+"Anthony has told me everything, Mistress Isabel; and I warrant that the
+knaves are cursing their stars still on Stanstead hills, twenty miles
+from here. You are as safe here as in Greenwich palace. But after supper,
+to satisfy you, we will look to our defences. But, believe me, there is
+nothing to fear."
+
+He spoke with such confidence and cheerfulness that Isabel felt her fears
+melting, and before supper was over she was ashamed of them, and said so.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Mr. Buxton, "you shall not escape. You shall see every
+one of them for yourself. Mistress Corbet, do you not think that just?"
+
+"You need a little more honest worldliness, Isabel," said Mary. "I do not
+hesitate to say that I believe God saves the priests that have the best
+hiding-holes. Now that is not profane, so do not look at me like that."
+
+"It is the plainest sense," said Anthony, smiling at them both.
+
+They went the round of them all with candles, and Anthony refreshed his
+memory; they visited the little one in the chapel first, then the
+cupboard and portrait-door at the top of the corridor, the chamber over
+the fireplace in the hall, and lastly, in the wooden cellar-steps they
+lifted the edge of the fifth stair from the bottom, so that its front and
+the top of the stair below it turned on a hinge and dropped open, leaving
+a black space behind: this was the entrance to the passage that led
+beneath the garden to the garden-house on the far side of the avenue.
+
+Mistress Corbet wrinkled her nose at the damp earthy smell that breathed
+out of the dark.
+
+"I am glad I am not a priest," she said. "And I would sooner be buried
+dead than alive. And there is a rat there that sorely needs burying."
+
+"My dear lady!" cried the contriver of the passage indignantly, "her
+Grace might sleep there herself and take no harm. There is not even the
+whisker of a rat."
+
+"It is not the whisker that I mind," said Mary, "it is the rest of him."
+
+Mr. Buxton immediately set his taper down and climbed in.
+
+"You shall see," he said, "and I in my best satin too!"
+
+He was inside the stairs now and lying on his back on the smooth board
+that backed them. He sidled himself slowly along towards the wall.
+
+"Press the fourth brick of the fourth row," he said.
+
+"You remember, Father Anthony?"
+
+He had reached now what seemed to be the brick wall against which the
+ends of the stairs rested; and that closed that end of the cellars
+altogether. Anthony leaned in with a candle, and saw how that part of the
+wall against his friend's right side slowly turned into the dark as the
+fourth brick was pressed, and a little brick-lined passage appeared
+beyond. Mr. Buxton edged himself sideways into the passage, and then
+stood nearly upright. It was an excellent contrivance. Even if the
+searchers should find the chamber beneath the stairs, which was unlikely,
+they would never suspect that it was only a blind to a passage beyond.
+The door into the passage consisted of a strong oaken door disguised on
+the outside by a facing of brick-slabs; all the hinges were within.
+
+"As sweet as a flower," said the architect, looking about him. His voice
+rang muffled and hollow.
+
+"Then the friends have removed the corpse," said Mary, putting her head
+in, "while you were opening the door. There! come out; you will take
+cold. I believe you."
+
+"Are you satisfied?" said Mr. Buxton to Isabel, as they went upstairs
+again.
+
+"What are your outer defences?" asked Mary, before Isabel could answer.
+
+"You shall see the plan in the hall," said Mr. Buxton.
+
+He took down the frame that held the plan of the house, and showed them
+the outer doors. There was first the low oak front door on the north,
+opening on to the little court; this was immensely strong and would stand
+battering. Then on the same side farther east, within the stable-court,
+there was the servants' door, protected by chains, and an oak bolt that
+ran across. On the extreme east end of the house there was a door opening
+into the garden from the withdrawing-room, the least strong of all; there
+was another on the south side, opposite the front door--that gave on to
+the garden; and lastly there was an entrance into the priests' end of the
+house, at the extreme west, from the little walled garden where Anthony
+had meditated years ago. This walled garden had a very strong door of its
+own opening on to the lane between the church and the house.
+
+"But there are only three ways out, really," said Mr. Buxton, "for the
+garden walls are high and strong. There is the way of the walled garden;
+the iron-gates across the drive; and through the stable-yard on to the
+field-path to East Maskells. All the other gates are kept barred; and
+indeed I scarcely know where the keys are."
+
+"I am bewildered," said Mary.
+
+"Shall we go round?" he asked.
+
+"To-morrow," said Mary; "I am tired to-night, and so is this poor child.
+Come, we will go to bed."
+
+Anthony soon went too. Both he and Isabel were tired with the journey and
+the strain of anxiety, and it was a keen joy to him to be back again in
+his own dear room, with the tapestry of St. Thomas of Aquin and St. Clare
+opposite the bed, and the wide curtained bow-window which looked out on
+the little walled garden.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mr. Buxton was left alone in the great hall below with the two tapers
+burning, and the starlight with all the suffused glow of a summer night
+making the arms glimmer in the tall windows that looked south. Lower, the
+windows were open, and the mellow scents of the June roses, and of the
+sweet-satyrian and lavender poured in; the night was very still, but the
+faintest breath came from time to time across the meadows and rustled in
+the stiff leaves with the noise of a stealthy movement.
+
+"I will look round," said Mr. Buxton to himself.
+
+He stepped out immediately into the garden by the hall door, and turned
+to the east, passing along the lighted windows. His step sounded on the
+tiles, and a face looked out swiftly from Isabel's room overhead; but his
+figure was plain in the light from the windows as he came out round the
+corner; and the face drew back. He crossed the east end of the house, and
+went through a little door into the stable-yard, locking it after him. In
+the kennels in the corner came a movement, and a Danish hound came out
+silently into the cage before her house, and stood up, like a slender
+grey ghost, paws high up in the bars, and whimpered softly to her lord.
+He quieted her, and went to the door in the yard that opened on to the
+field-path to East Maskells, unbarred it and stepped through. There was a
+dry ditch on his left, where nettles quivered in the stirring air; and a
+heavy clump of bushes rose beyond, dark and impenetrable. Mr. Buxton
+stared straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East
+Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the cattle and horses secure and
+sleeping. Then he stepped back again; barred the door and walked up
+through the stable-yard into the front court. There the great iron gates
+rose before him, diaphanous-looking and flimsy in the starlight. He went
+up to them and shook them; and a loose shield jangled fiercely overhead.
+Then he peered through, holding the bars, and saw the familiar patch of
+grass beyond the gravel sweep, and the dark cottages over the way. Then
+he made his way back to the front door, unlocked it with his private key,
+passed through the hall, through a parlour or two into the lower floor of
+the priests' quarters; unlocked softly the little door into the walled
+garden, and went out on tip-toe once more. Even as he went, Anthony's
+light overhead went out. Mr. Buxton went to the garden door, unfastened
+it, and stepped out into the road. Above him on his left rose up the
+chancel of the parish church, the roofs crowded behind; and immediately
+in front was the high-raised churchyard, with the tall irregular wall and
+the trees above all, blotting out the stars.
+
+Then he came back the same way, fastening the doors as he passed, and
+reached the hall, where the tapers still burned. He blew out one and took
+the other.
+
+"I suppose I am a fool," he said; "the lad is as safe as in his mother's
+arms." And he went upstairs to bed.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Mary Corbet rose late next morning, and when she came down at last found
+the others in the garden. She joined them as they walked in the little
+avenue.
+
+"Have not the priest-hunters arrived?" she asked. "What are they about?
+And you, dear Isabel, how did you sleep?"
+
+Isabel looked a little heavy-eyed. "I did not sleep well," she said.
+
+"I fear I disturbed her," said Mr. Buxton. "She heard me as I went round
+the house."
+
+"Why did you go round the house?" asked Anthony.
+
+"I often do," he said shortly.
+
+"And there was no one?" asked Mary.
+
+"There was no one."
+
+"And what would you have done if there had been?"
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "what would you have done to warn us all?"
+
+Mr. Buxton considered.
+
+"I should have rung the alarm, I think," he said.
+
+"But I did not know you had one," said Mary.
+
+Mr. Buxton pointed to a turret peeping between two high gables, above his
+own room.
+
+"And what does it sound like?"
+
+"It is deep, and has a dash of sourness or shrillness in it. I cannot
+describe it. Above all, it is marvellous loud."
+
+"Then, if we hear it, we shall know the priest-hunters are on us?" asked
+Mary. Mr. Buxton bowed.
+
+"Or that the house is afire," he said, "or that the French or Spanish are
+landed."
+
+To tell the truth, he was just slightly uneasy. Isabel had been far more
+silent than he had ever known her, and her nerves were plainly at an
+acute tension; she started violently even now, when a servant came out
+between two yew-hedges to call Mr. Buxton in. Her alarm had affected him,
+and besides, he knew something of the extraordinary skill and patience of
+Walsingham's agents, and even the story of the ferry had startled him.
+Could it really be, he had wondered as he tossed to and fro in the hot
+night, that this innocent priest had thrown off his pursuers so
+completely as had appeared? In the morning he had sent down a servant to
+the inn to inquire whether anything had been seen or heard of a
+disquieting nature; now the servant had come to tell him, as he had
+ordered, privately. He went with the man in through the hall-door,
+leaving the others to walk in the avenue, and then faced him.
+
+"Well?" he said sharply.
+
+"No, sir, there is nothing. There is a party there travelling on to
+Brighthelmstone this afternoon, and four drovers who came in last night,
+sir; and two gentlemen travelling across country; but they left early
+this morning."
+
+"They left, you say?"
+
+"They left at eight o'clock, sir."
+
+Mr. Buxton's attention was attracted to these two gentlemen.
+
+"Go and find out where they came from," he said, "and let me know after
+dinner."
+
+The man bowed and left the room, and almost immediately the dinner-bell
+rang.
+
+Mary was frankly happy; she loved to be down here in this superb weather
+with her friends; she enjoyed this beautiful house with its furniture and
+pictures, and even took a certain pleasure in the hiding-holes
+themselves; although in this case she was satisfied they would not be
+needed. She had heard the tale of the Stanstead woods, and had no shadow
+of doubt but that the searchers, if, indeed, they were searchers at all,
+were baffled. So at dinner she talked exactly as usual; and the cloud of
+slight discomfort that still hung over Isabel grew lighter and lighter as
+she listened. The windows of the hall were flung wide, and the warm
+summer air poured from the garden into the cool room with its polished
+floor, and table decked with roses in silver bowls, with its grave
+tapestries stirring on the walls behind the grim visors and pikes that
+hung against them.
+
+The talk turned on music.
+
+"Ah! I would I had my lute," sighed Mary, "but my woman forgot to bring
+it. What a garden to sing in, in the shade of the yews, with the
+garden-house behind to make the voice sound better than it is!"
+
+Mr. Buxton made a complimentary murmur.
+
+"Thank you," she said, "Master Anthony, you are wool-gathering."
+
+"Indeed not," he said, "but I was thinking where I had seen a lute. Ah!
+it is in the little west parlour."
+
+"A lute!" cried Mary. "Ah! but I have no music; and I have not the
+courage to sing the only song I know, over and over again."
+
+"But there is music too," said Anthony.
+
+Mary clapped her hands.
+
+"When dinner is over," she said, "you and I will go to find it."
+
+Dinner was over at last, and the four rose.
+
+"Come," said Mary; while Isabel turned into the garden and Mr. Buxton
+went to his room. "We will be with you presently," she cried after
+Isabel.
+
+Then the two went together to the little west parlour, oak-panelled, with
+a wide fireplace with the logs in their places, and the latticed windows
+with their bottle-end glass, looking upon the walled garden. Anthony
+stood on a chair and opened the top window, letting a flood of summer
+noises into the room.
+
+They found the lute music, written over its six lines with the queer F's
+and double F's and numerals--all Hebrew to Anthony, but bursting and
+blossoming with delicate melodies to Mary's eyes. Then she took up the
+lute, and tuned it on her knee, still sitting in a deep lounging-chair,
+with her buckled feet before her; while Anthony sat opposite and watched
+her supple flashing fingers busy among the strings, and her grave
+abstracted look as she listened critically. Then she sounded the strings
+in little rippling chords.
+
+"Ah! it is a sweet old lute," she said. "Put the music before me."
+
+Anthony propped it on a chair.
+
+"Is that the right side up?" he asked.
+
+Mary smiled and nodded, still looking at the music.
+
+"Now then," she said, and began the prelude.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Anthony threw himself back in his chair as the delicate tinkling began to
+pour out and overscore the soft cooing of a pigeon on the roofs somewhere
+and the murmur of bees through the open window. It was an old precise
+little love-song from Italy, with a long prelude, suggesting by its
+tender minor chords true and restrained love, not passionate but tender,
+not despairing but melancholy; it was a love that had for its symbols not
+the rose and the lily, but the lavender and thyme--acrid in its
+sweetness. The prelude had climbed up by melodious steps to the keynote,
+and was now rippling down again after its aspirations.
+
+Mary stirred herself.
+
+Ah! now the voice would come in the last chord----when all the music was
+first drowned and then ceased, as with crash after crash a great bell,
+sonorous and piercing, began to sound from overhead.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                   THE PASSAGE TO THE GARDEN-HOUSE
+
+
+The two looked at one another with parted lips, but without a word. Then
+both rose simultaneously. Then the bell jangled and ceased; and a crowd
+of other noises began; there were shouts, tramplings of hoofs in the
+court; shrill voices came over the wall; then a scream or two. Mary
+sprang to the door and opened it, and stood there listening.
+
+Then from the interior of the house came an indescribable din, tramplings
+of feet and shouts of anger; then violent blows on woodwork. It came
+nearer in a moment of time, as a tide comes in over flat sands,
+remorselessly swift. Then Mary with one movement was inside again, and
+had locked the door and drawn the bolt.
+
+"Up there," she said, "it is the only way--they are outside," and she
+pointed to the chimney.
+
+Anthony began to remonstrate. It was intolerable, he felt, to climb up
+the chimney like a hunted cat, and he began a word or two. But Mary
+seized his arm.
+
+"You must not be caught," she said, "there are others"; and there came a
+confused battering and trampling outside. She pushed him towards the
+chimney. Then decision came to him, and he bent his head and stepped upon
+the logs laid upon the ashes, crushing them down.
+
+"Ah! go," said Mary's voice behind him, as the door began to bulge and
+creak. There was plainly a tremendous struggle in the little passage
+outside.
+
+Anthony threw his hands up and felt a high ledge in the darkness, gripped
+it with his hands and made a huge effort combined of a tug and a spring;
+his feet rapped sharply for a moment or two on the iron fire-plate; and
+then his knee reached the ledge and he was up. He straightened himself on
+the ledge, stood upright and looked down; two white hands with rings on
+them were lifting the logs and drawing them out from the ashes, shaking
+them and replacing them by others from the wood-basket; and all
+deliberately, as if laying a fire. Then her voice came up to him, hushed
+but distinct.
+
+"Go up quickly. I will feign to be burning papers; there will be smoke,
+but no sparks. It is green wood."
+
+Anthony again felt above him, and found two iron half-rings in the
+chimney, one above the other; he was in semi-darkness here, but far above
+there was a patch of pale smoky light; and all the chimney seemed full of
+a murmurous sound. He tugged at the rings and found them secure, and drew
+himself up steadily by the higher one, until his knee struck the lower;
+then with a great effort he got his knee upon it, then his left foot, and
+again straightened himself. Then, as he felt in the darkness once more,
+he found a system of rings, one above the other, up the side of the
+chimney, by which it was not hard to climb. As he went up he began to
+perceive a sharp acrid smell, his eyes smarted and he closed them, but
+his throat burned; he climbed fiercely; and then suddenly saw immediately
+below him another hearth; he was looking over the fireplate of some other
+room. In a moment more he thrust his head over, and drew a long breath of
+clear air; then he listened intently. From below still came a murmur of
+confusion; but in this room all was quiet. He began to think frantically.
+He could not remain in the chimney, it was hopeless; they would soon
+light fires, he knew, in all the chimneys, and bring him down. What room
+was this? He was bewildered and could not remember. But at least he would
+climb into it and try to escape. In a moment more he had lifted himself
+over the fireplate and dropped safely on to the hearth of his own
+bedroom.
+
+The fresh air and the familiarity of the room, as he looked round, swept
+the confusion out of his brain like a breeze. The thundering and shouting
+continued below. Then he went on tip-toe to the door and opened it. Round
+to the right was the head of the stairs which led straight into the
+little passage where the struggle was going on. He could hear Robert's
+voice in the din; plainly there was no way down the stairs. To the left
+was the passage that ended in a window, with the chapel door at the left
+and the false shelves on the right. He hesitated a moment between the two
+hiding-places, and then decided for the cupboard; there was a clean
+doublet there; his own was one black smear of soot, and as he thought of
+it, he drew off his sooty shoes. His hose were fortunately dark. He
+stepped straight out of the door, leaving it just ajar. Even as he left
+it there was a thunder of footsteps on the stairs, and he was at the
+shelves in a moment, catching a glimpse through the window on his left of
+the front court crowded with men and horses. He had opened and shut the
+secret door three or four times the evening before, and his hands closed
+almost instinctively on the two springs that must be worked
+simultaneously. He made the necessary movement, and the shelves with the
+wall behind it softly slid open and he sprang in. But as he closed it he
+heard one of the two books drop, and an exclamation from the passage he
+had just left; then quick steps from the head of the stairs; the steps
+clattered past the door and into the chapel opposite and stopped.
+
+Anthony felt about him in the darkness, found the doublet and lifted it
+off the nail; slipped off his own, tearing his ruff as he did so; and
+then quickly put on the other. He had no shoes; but that would not be so
+noticeable. He had not seriously thought of the possibility of escaping
+through the portrait-door, as he felt sure the house would be overrun by
+now; but he put his eyes to the pinholes and looked out; and to his
+astonishment saw that the gallery was empty. There it lay, with its
+Flemish furniture on the right and its row of windows on the left, and
+all as tranquil as if there were no fierce tragedy of terror and wrath
+raging below. Again decision came to him; by a process of thought so
+swift that it was an intuition, he remembered that the fall of the book
+outside would concentrate attention on that corner; it could not be long
+before the shelves were broken in, and if he did not escape now there
+would be no possibility later. Then he unslid the inside bolt, and the
+portrait swung open; he closed it behind, and sped on silent shoeless
+feet down the polished floor of the gallery.
+
+Of course the great staircase was hopeless. The hall would be seething
+with men. But there was just a chance through the servants' quarters. He
+dashed past the head of the stairs, catching a glimpse of heads and
+sparkles of steel over the banisters, and through the half-opened door at
+the end, finding himself in the men's corridor that was a continuation of
+the gallery he had left. On his left rose the head of the back-stairs,
+that led first with a double flight to the offices, the pantry, the
+buttery and the kitchen, and than, lower still, a single third flight
+down to the cellar.
+
+He looked down the stairs; at the bottom of the first double flight were
+a couple of maids, screaming and white-faced, leaning and pressing
+against the door, immediately below the one he had just come through
+himself. The door was plainly barred as well, for it was now thudding and
+cracking with blows that were being showered upon it from the other side.
+The maids, it seemed to him, in a panic had locked the door; but that
+panic might be his salvation. He dashed down the stairs; the maids
+screamed louder than ever when they saw this man, whom they did not
+recognise, with blackened face and hands come in noiseless leaps down
+towards them; but Anthony put his finger on his lips as he flew past
+them; then he dashed open the little door that shut off the
+cellar-flight, closed it behind him, and was immediately in the dark.
+
+Then he groped his way down, feeling the rough brick wall as he went,
+till he reached the floor of the cellar. The air was cool and damp here,
+and it refreshed him, for he was pouring with sweat. The noise, too, and
+confusion which, during his flight, had been reverberating through the
+house with a formidable din, now only reached him as a far-away murmur.
+
+As he counted the four steps up, and then lifted the overhanging edge,
+there came upon him irresistibly the contrast between the serene party
+here last night, with their tapers and their delicate dresses and Mary's
+cool clear-clipped voice--and his own soot-stained person, his desperate
+energy and his quick panting and heart-beating. Then the steps dropped
+and he slid in; lifted them again as he lay on his back, and heard the
+spring catch as they closed. Then he was in silence, too, and comparative
+safety. But he dared not rest yet, and edged himself along as he had seen
+Mr. Buxton do last night. Which brick was it? "The fourth of the fourth,"
+he murmured, and counted, and pressed it. Again the door pushed back, and
+with a little struggle he was first on his knees, and then on his feet.
+Then he swung the door to again behind him.
+
+Then for the first time he rested; he leaned against the brick-lined side
+of the tunnel and passed his blackened hands over his face. Five minutes
+ago--yes--certainly not five minutes ago he was lounging in the west
+parlour, at the other end of the house, while Mary played the prelude to
+an Italian love-song.--What was she doing now? God bless her for her
+quick courage!--And Isabel and Buxton--where were they all? How deadly
+sick and tired he felt!--Again he passed his hands over his face in the
+pitch darkness.--Well, he must push on.
+
+He turned and began to grope patiently through the blackness--step by
+step--feeling the roughness of the bricks beneath with his shoeless feet
+before he set them down; once or twice he stepped into a little icy pool,
+which had collected through some crack in the vaulting overhead; once,
+too, he slipped on a lump of something wet and shapeless; and thought
+even then of Mary's suspicions the night before. He pushed on, shivering
+now with cold and excitement, through what seemed the interminable
+tunnel, until at last his outstretched hands touched wood before him. He
+had not seen this end of the passage for nearly two years, and he
+wondered if he could remember the method of opening, and gave a gulp of
+horror at the thought that he might not. But there had been no reason to
+make a secret of the inside of the door, and he presently found a button
+and drew it; it creaked rustily, but gave, and the door with another pull
+opened inwards, and there was a faint glimmer of light. Then he
+remembered that the entrances to the tunnel at either end were exactly on
+the same system; and putting out his hands felt the slope of the
+underside of the staircase, cutting diagonally across the opening of the
+passage. He slid himself on to the boarding sideways, and drew the
+brickwork towards him till the spring snapped, and lay there to consider
+before he went farther.
+
+First he ran over in his mind the construction of the garden-house.
+
+The basement in which he was lying corresponded to the cellar under the
+house from which he had come, and ran the whole length of the building,
+about forty feet by twenty. It was a large empty chamber, where nothing
+of any value was kept. He remembered last time he was here seeing a heap
+of tiles in one corner, with a pile of disused poles; pieces of rope, and
+old iron in another. The stairs led up through an ordinary trap-door into
+what was the ground-floor of the house. This, too, was one immense room,
+with four latticed windows looking on to the garden, and one with opaque
+glass on to the lane at the back; and a great door, generally kept
+locked, for rather more valuable things were kept here, such as the
+garden-roller, flower-pots, and the targets for archery. Then a light
+staircase led straight up from this room to the next floor, which was
+divided into two, both of which, so far as Anthony remembered, were
+empty. Mr. Buxton had thought of letting his gardeners sleep there when
+he had at first built this immense useless summer-house; but he had
+ultimately built a little gardener's cottage adjoining it. The two
+fantastic towers that flanked the building held nothing but staircases,
+which could be entered by either of the two floors, and which ascended to
+tiny rooms with windows on all four sides.
+
+When Anthony had run over these details as he lay on his back, he pushed
+up the stair over his face and let the front of it with the step of the
+next swing inwards; the light was stronger now, and poured in, though
+still dim, through three half-moon windows, glazed and wired, that just
+rose above the level of the ground outside. Then he extricated himself,
+closed the steps behind him, and went up the stairs.
+
+The trap-door at the top was a little stiff, but he soon raised it, and
+in a moment more was standing in the ground-floor room of the
+garden-house. All round him was much as he remembered it; he first went
+to the door and found it securely fastened, as it often was for days
+together; he glanced at the windows to assure himself that they were
+bottle-glass too, and then went to them to look out. He was fortunate
+enough to find the corner of one pane broken away; he put his eye to
+this, and there lay a little lawn, with a yew-hedge beyond blotting out
+all of the great house opposite except the chimneys,--the house which
+even across the whole space of garden hummed like a hive. On the lawn was
+a chair, and an orange-bound book lay face down on the grass beside it.
+Anthony stared at it; it was the book that he had seen in Isabel's hand
+not half an hour ago, as she had gone out into the garden from the hall
+to wait until he and Mary joined her with the lute.
+
+And at that the priest knelt down before the window, covered his face
+with his hands, and began to stammer and cry to God: "O God! God! God!"
+he said.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When Mary Corbet had seen Anthony's feet disappear, she already had the
+outline of a plan in her mind. To light a fire and pretend to be burning
+important papers would serve as an excuse for keeping the door fast; it
+would also suggest at least that no one was in the chimney. The ordinary
+wood, however, sent up sparks; but she had noticed before a little green
+wood in the basket, and knew that this did not do so to the same extent;
+so she pulled out the dry wood that Anthony had trodden into the ashes
+and substituted the other. Then she had looked round for paper;--the lute
+music, that was all. Meantime the door was giving; the noise outside was
+terrible; and it was evident that one or two of the servants were
+obstructing the passage of the pursuivants.
+
+When at last the door flew in, there was a fire cracking furiously on the
+hearth, and a magnificently dressed lady kneeling before it, crushing
+paper into the flames. Half a dozen men now streamed in and more began to
+follow, and stood irresolute for a moment, staring at her. From the
+resistance they had met with they had been certain that the priest was
+here, and this sight perplexed them. A big ruddy man, however, who led
+them, sprang across the room, seized Mary Corbet by the shoulders and
+whisked her away against the wall, and then dashed the half-burnt paper
+out of the grate and began to beat out the flames.
+
+Mary struggled violently for a moment; but the others were upon her and
+held her, and she presently stood quiet. Then she began upon them.
+
+"You insolent hounds!" she cried, "do you know who I am?" Her cheeks were
+scarlet and her eyes blazing; she seemed in a superb fury.
+
+"Burning treasonable papers," growled the big man from his knees on the
+hearth, "that is enough for me."
+
+"Who are you, sir, that dare to speak to me like that?"
+
+The man got up; the flames were out now, and he slipped the papers into a
+pocket. Mary went on immediately.
+
+"If I may not burn my own lute music, or keep my door locked, without a
+riotous mob of knaves breaking upon me---- Ah! how dare you?" and she
+stamped furiously.
+
+The pursuivant came up close to her, insolently.
+
+"See here, my lady----" he began.
+
+The men had fallen back from her a little now that the papers were safe,
+and she lifted her ringed hand and struck his ruddy face with all her
+might. There was a moment of confusion and laughter as he recoiled.
+
+"Now will you remember that her Grace's ladies are not to be trifled
+with?"
+
+There was a murmur from the crowded room, and a voice near the door
+cried:
+
+"She says truth, Mr. Nichol. It is Mistress Corbet."
+
+Nichol had recovered himself, but was furiously angry.
+
+"Very good, madam, but I have these papers now," he said, "they can still
+be read."
+
+"You blind idiot," hissed Mary, "do you not know lute music when you see
+it?"
+
+"I know that ladies do not burn lute music with locked doors," observed
+Nichol bitterly.
+
+"The more fool you!" screamed Mary, "when you have caught one at it."
+
+"That will be seen," sneered Mr. Nichol.
+
+"Not by a damned blind scarlet-faced porpoise!" screamed Mary, apparently
+more in a passion than ever, and a burst of laughter came from the men.
+
+This was too much for Mr. Nichol. This coarse abuse stung him cruelly.
+
+"God's blood," he bellowed at the room; "take this vixen out and search
+the place." And a torrent of oaths drove the crowd about the door out
+into the passage again.
+
+A couple of men took Mary by the fierce ringed hands of hers that still
+twitched and clenched, and led her out; she spat insults over her
+shoulders as she went. But she had held him in talk as she intended.
+
+"Now then," roared Nichol again, "search, you dogs!"
+
+He himself went outside too, and seeing the stairs stamped up them. He
+was just in time to see the Tacitus settle down with crumpled pages;
+stopped for a moment, bewildered, for it lay in the middle of the
+passage; and then rushed at the open door on the left, dashed it open,
+and found a little empty room, with a chair or two, and a table--but no
+sign of the priest. It was like magic.
+
+Then out he came once more, and went into Anthony's own room. The great
+bed was on his right, the window opposite, the fireplace to the left, and
+in the middle lay two sooty shoes. Instinctively he bent and touched
+them, and found them warm; then he sprang to the door, still keeping his
+face to the room, and shouted for help.
+
+"He is here, he is here!" he cried. And a thunder of footsteps on the
+stairs answered him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Meanwhile the men that held Mary followed the others along the passage,
+but while the leaders went on and round into the lower corridor, the two
+men-at-arms with their prisoner turned aside into the parlour that served
+as an ante-chamber to the hall beyond, where they released her. Here,
+though it was empty of people, all was in confusion; the table had been
+overturned in the struggle that had raged along here between Lackington's
+men, who had entered from the front door, and the servants of the house,
+who had rushed in from their quarters at the first alarm and intercepted
+them. One chair lay on its side, with its splintered carved arm beside
+it. As Mary stood a moment looking about her, the door from the hall that
+had been closed, again opened, and Isabel came through; and a man's voice
+said:
+
+"You must wait here, madam"; then the door closed behind her.
+
+"Isabel," said Mary.
+
+The two looked at one another a moment, but before either spoke again the
+door again half-opened, and a voice began to speak, as if its owner still
+held the handle.
+
+"Very well, Lackington, keep him in his room. I will go through here to
+Nichol."
+
+Isabel had drawn a sharp breath as the voice began, and as the door
+opened wider she turned and faced it. Then Hubert came in, and recoiled
+on the threshold. There fell a complete silence in the room.
+
+"Hubert," said Isabel after a moment, "what are you doing here?"
+
+Hubert shut the door abruptly and leaned against it, staring at her; his
+face had gone white under the tan. Isabel still looked at him steadily,
+and her eyes were eloquent. Then she spoke again, and something in her
+voice quickened the beating of Mary's heart as she listened.
+
+"Hubert, have you forgotten us?"
+
+Still Hubert stared; then he stood upright. The two men-at-arms were
+watching in astonishment.
+
+"I will see to the ladies," he said abruptly, and waved his hand. They
+still hesitated a moment.
+
+"Go," he said again sharply, and pointed to the door. He was a
+magistrate, and responsible; and they turned and went.
+
+Then Hubert looked at Isabel again.
+
+"Isabel," he said, "if I had known----"
+
+"Stay," she interrupted, "there is no time for explanations except mine.
+Anthony is in the house; I do not know where. You must save him."
+
+There was no entreaty or anxiety in her voice; nothing but a supreme
+dignity and an assurance that she would be obeyed.
+
+"But----" he began. The door was opened from the hall, and a little party
+of searchers appeared, but halted when the magistrate turned round.
+
+"Come with me," he said to the two women, "you must have a room kept for
+you upstairs," and he held back the door for them to pass.
+
+Isabel put out her hand to Mary, and the two went out together into the
+hall past the men, who stood back to let them through, and Hubert
+followed. They turned to the left to the stairs, looking as they went
+upon the wild confusion. Above them rose the carved ceiling, and in the
+centre of the floor, untouched, by a strange chance, stood the
+dinner-table, still laid with silver and fruit and flowers. But all else
+was in disarray. The leather screen that had stood by the door into the
+entrance hall had been overthrown, and had carried with it a tall
+flowering plant that now lay trampled and broken before the hearth. A
+couple of chairs lay on their backs between the windows; the rug under
+the window was huddled in a heap, and all over the polished boards were
+scratches and dents; a broken sword-hilt lay on the floor with a
+feathered cap beside it. There were half a dozen men guarding the four
+doors; but the rest were gone; and from overhead came tramplings and
+shouts as the hunt swept to and fro in the upper floors.
+
+At the top of the stairs was Mary's room; the two ladies, who had gone
+silently upstairs with Hubert behind them, stopped at the door of it.
+
+"Here, if you please," said Mary.
+
+Before Hubert could answer, Lackington came down the passage, hurrying
+with a drawn sword, and his hat on his head. Isabel did not recognise him
+as he stopped and tapped Hubert on the arm familiarly.
+
+"The prisoners must not be together," he said.
+
+Hubert drew back his arm and looked the man in the face.
+
+"They are not prisoners; and they shall be together. Take off your hat,
+sir."
+
+Then, as Lackington drew back astonished, he opened the door.
+
+"You shall not be disturbed here," he said, and the two went in, and the
+door closed behind them. There was a murmur of voices outside the door,
+and they heard a name called once or twice, and the sound of footsteps.
+Then came a tap, and Hubert stepped in quietly and closed the door.
+
+"I have placed my own man outside," he said, "and none shall trouble
+you--and--Mistress Isabel--I will do my best." Then he bowed and went
+out.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The long miserable afternoon began. They watched through the windows the
+sentries going up and down the broad paths between the glowing
+flower-beds; and out, over the high iron fence that separated the garden
+from the meadows, the crowd of villagers and children watching.
+
+But the real terror for them both lay in the sounds that came from the
+interior of the house. There was a continual tramp of the sentries placed
+in every corridor and lobby, and of the messengers that went to and fro.
+Then from room after room came the sounds of blows, the rending of
+woodwork, and once or twice the crash of glass, as the searchers went
+about their work; and at every shout the women shuddered or drew their
+breath sharply, for any one of the noises might be the sign of Anthony's
+arrest.
+
+The two had soon talked out every theory in low voices, but they both
+agreed that he was still in the house somewhere, and on the upper floor.
+It was impossible, they thought, for him to have made his way down. There
+were four possibilities, therefore: either he might still be in the
+chimney--in that case it was no use hoping; or he was in the chapel-hole;
+or in that behind the portrait; or in one last one, in the room next to
+their own. The searchers had been there early in the afternoon, but
+perhaps had not found it; its entrance was behind the window shutter, and
+was contrived in the thickness of the wall. So they talked, these two,
+and conjectured and prayed, as the evening drew on; and the sun began to
+sink behind the church, and the garden to lie in cool shadow.
+
+About eight there was a tap at the door, and Hubert came in with a tray
+of food in his hands, which he set down.
+
+"All is in confusion," he said, "but this is the best I can do."--He
+broke off.
+
+"Mistress Isabel," he said, coming nearer to the two as they sat together
+in the window-seat, "I can do little; they have found three hiding-holes;
+but so far he has escaped. I do what I can to draw them off, but they are
+too clever and zealous. If you can tell me more, perhaps I can do more."
+
+The two were looking at him with startled eyes.
+
+"Three?" Mary said.
+
+"Yes, three--and indeed----" He stopped as Isabel got up and came towards
+him.
+
+"Hubert," she said resolutely, "I must tell you. He must be still in the
+chimney of the little west parlour. Do what you can."
+
+"The west parlour!" he said. "That was where Mistress Corbet was burning
+the papers?"
+
+"Yes," said Mary.
+
+"He is not there," said Hubert; "we have sent a boy up and down it
+already."
+
+"Ah! dear God!" said Mary from the window-seat, "then he has escaped."
+
+Isabel looked from one to the other and shook her head.
+
+"It cannot be," she said. "The guards were all round the house before the
+alarm rang."
+
+Hubert nodded, and Mary's face fell.
+
+"Then is there no way out?" he asked.
+
+Mary sprang up with shining eyes.
+
+"He has done it," she said, and threw her arms round Isabel and kissed
+her.
+
+"Well," said Hubert, "what can I do?"
+
+"You must leave us," said Isabel; "come back later."
+
+"Then when we have searched the garden-house--why, what is it?"
+
+A look of such anguish had come into their faces that he stopped amazed.
+
+"The garden-house!" cried Mary; "no, no, no!"
+
+"No, no, Hubert, Hubert!" cried Isabel, "you must not go there."
+
+"Why," he said, "it was I that proposed it; to draw them from the house."
+
+There came from beneath the windows a sudden tramp of footsteps, and then
+Nichol's voice, distinctly heard through the open panes.
+
+"We cannot wait for him. Come, men."
+
+"They are going without me," said Hubert; and turned and ran through the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XI
+
+                           THE GARDEN-HOUSE
+
+
+During that long afternoon the master of the house had sat in his own
+room, before his table, hearing the ceaseless footsteps and the voices
+overhead, and the ring of feet on the tiles outside his window, knowing
+that his friend and priest was somewhere in the house, crouching in some
+dark little space, listening to the same footsteps and voices as they
+came and went by his hiding-place, and that he himself was absolutely
+powerless to help.
+
+He had been overpowered in the first rush as he pealed on the alarm-bell,
+to which he had rushed when the groom burst in from the stable-yard
+crying that the outer court was full of men. Lackington had then sent him
+under guard to his own room, where he had been locked in with an armed
+constable to prevent any possibility of escape. In the struggle he had
+received a blow on the head which had completely dazed him; all his
+resource left him; and he had no desire even to move from his chair.
+
+Now he sat, with his head on his breast, and his mind going the ceaseless
+round of all the possible places where Anthony might be. Little scenes,
+too, of startling vividness moved before him, as he sat there with
+half-closed eyes--scenes of the imagined arrest--the scuffle as the
+portrait was torn away and Anthony burst out in one last desperate
+attempt to escape. He saw him under every kind of circumstance--dashing
+up stairs and being met at the top by a man with a pike--running and
+crouching through the withdrawing-room itself next door--gliding with
+burning eyes past the yew-hedges in a rush for the iron gates, only to
+find them barred--on horseback with his hands bound and a despairing
+uplifted face with pike-heads about him.--So his friend dreamed miserably
+on, open-eyed, but between waking and the sleep of exhaustion, until the
+crowning vision flashed momentarily before his eyes of the scaffold and
+the cauldron with the fire burning and the low gallows over the heads of
+the crowd, and the butcher's block and knife; and then he moaned and sat
+up and stared about him, and the young pursuivant looked at him
+half-apprehensively.
+
+Towards evening the house grew quieter; once, about six o'clock, there
+were voices outside, the door from the hall was unlocked, and a
+heavily-built, ruddy man came in with two pikemen, locking the door
+behind him. They paid no attention to the prisoner, and he watched them
+mechanically as they went round the room, running their eyes up and down
+the panelling, and tapping here and there.
+
+"The room has been searched, sir, already," said the young constable to
+the ruddy-faced man, who glanced at him and nodded, and then continued
+the scrutiny. They reached the fireplace and the officer reached up and
+tapped the wood over the mantelpiece half-a-dozen times.
+
+"Here," he called, pointing to a spot.
+
+A pikeman came up, placed the end of his pike into the oak, and leaned
+suddenly and heavily upon it: the steel crashed in an inch, and stopped
+as it met the stonework behind. The officer made a motion, the pike was
+withdrawn, and he stood on tip-toe and put his finger into the splintered
+panel. Then he was satisfied and they passed on, still tapping the walls,
+and went out of the other door, locking it again behind them.
+
+An hour later there were voices and steps again, and a door was unlocked
+and opened, and Mr. Graves, the Tonbridge magistrate stepped in alone. He
+was a pale scholarly-looking man with large eyes, and a weak mouth only
+partly covered by his beard.
+
+"You can go," he said nervously to the constable, "but remain outside."
+The young man saluted him and passed out.
+
+The magistrate looked quickly and sideways at Mr. Buxton as he sat and
+looked at him.
+
+"I am come to tell you," he said, "that we cannot find the priest." He
+hesitated and stopped. "We have found several hiding-holes," he went on,
+"and they are all empty. I--I hope there is no mistake."
+
+A little thrill ran through the man who sat in the chair; the lethargy
+began to clear from his brain, like a morning mist when a breeze rises;
+he sat a little more upright and gripped the arms of his chair; he said
+nothing yet, but he felt power and resource flowing back to his brain,
+and the pulse in his temples quieted. Why, if the lad had not been taken
+yet, he must surely be out of the house.
+
+"I trust there is no mistake," said the magistrate again nervously.
+
+"You may well trust so," said the other; "it will be a grievous thing for
+you, sir, otherwise."
+
+"Indeed, Mr. Buxton, I think you know I am no bigot. I was sent for by
+Mr. Lackington last night. I could not refuse. It was not my wish----"
+
+"Yet you have issued your warrant, and are here in person to execute it.
+May I inquire how many of my cupboards you have broken into? And I hope
+your men are satisfied with my plate."
+
+"Indeed, sir," said the magistrate, "there has been nothing of that kind.
+And as for the cupboards, there were but three----"
+
+Three!--then the lad is out of the house, thought the other. But where?
+
+"And I trust you have not spared to break down my servants' rooms, and
+the stables as well as pierce all my panelling."
+
+"There was no need to search the stables, Mr. Buxton; our men were round
+the house before we entered. They have been watching the entrances since
+eight o'clock last night."
+
+Mr. Buxton felt bewildered. His instinct had been right, then, the night
+before.
+
+"The party was followed from near Wrotham," went on the magistrate. "The
+priest was with them then; and, we suppose, entered the house."
+
+"You suppose!" snapped the other. "What the devil do you mean by
+supposing? You have looked everywhere and cannot find him?"
+
+The magistrate shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly, as he stood and
+stared at the angry man.
+
+"And the roofs?" added Mr. Buxton sneeringly.
+
+"They have been thoroughly searched."
+
+Then there is but one possible theory, he reflected. The lad is in the
+garden-house. And what if they search that?
+
+"Then may I ask what you propose to destroy next, Mr. Graves?"
+
+He saw that this tone was having its effect on the magistrate, who was
+but a half-hearted persecutor, with but feeble convictions and will, as
+he knew of old.
+
+"I--I entreat you not to speak to me like that, sir," he said. "I have
+but done my duty."
+
+Then the other rose from his chair, and his eyes were stern and bright
+again and his lips tight.
+
+"Your duty, sir, seems a strange matter, when it leads you to break into
+a friend's house, assault him and his servants and his guests, and
+destroy his furniture, in search of a supposed priest whom you have never
+even seen. Now, sir, if this matter comes to her Grace's ears, I will not
+answer for the consequences; for you know Mistress Corbet, her
+lady-in-waiting, is one of my guests.--And, speaking of that, where are
+my guests?"
+
+"The two ladies, Mr. Buxton, are safe and sound upstairs, I assure you."
+
+The magistrate's voice was trembling.
+
+"Well, sir, I have one condition to offer you. Either you and your men
+withdraw within half an hour from my house and grounds, and leave me and
+my two guests to ourselves, or else I lay the whole matter, through
+Mistress Corbet, before her Grace." Mr. Buxton beat his hand once on the
+table as he ended, and looked with a contemptuous inquiry at the
+magistrate.
+
+But the worm writhed up at the heel.
+
+"How can you talk like this, sir," he burst out, "as if you had but two
+guests?"
+
+"Two guests? I do not understand you. How should there be more?"
+
+"Then for whom are the four places laid at table?" he answered
+indignantly.
+
+Mr. Buxton felt a sudden desperate sinking, and he could not answer for a
+moment. The magistrate passed his shaking hand over his mouth and beard
+once or twice; but the thrust had gone home, and there was no parry or
+riposte. He followed it up.
+
+"Now, sir, be reasonable. I came in here to make terms. We _know_ the
+priest has been here. It is certain beyond all question. All that is
+uncertain is whether he is here now or escaped. We have searched
+thoroughly; we must search again to-morrow; but in the meanwhile, while
+you yourself must be under restraint, your guests shall have what liberty
+they wish; and you yourself shall have all reasonable comfort and ease.
+So--so, if we do not find the priest, I trust that you and--and--Mistress
+Corbet will agree to overlook any rashness on my part--and--and let her
+Grace remain in ignorance."
+
+Mr. Buxton had been thinking furiously during this little speech. He saw
+the mistake he had made in taking the high line, and his wretched
+forgetfulness of the fourth place at table. He must make terms, though it
+tasted bitter.
+
+"Well, Mr. Graves," he said, "I have no wish to be hard upon you. All I
+ask is to be out of the house when the search is made, and that the
+ladies shall come and go as they please."
+
+The magistrate leapt at the lure like a trout.
+
+"Yes, yes, Mr. Buxton, it shall be as you say. And to what house will you
+retire?"
+
+Mr. Buxton appeared to reflect; he tapped on the table with a meditative
+finger and looked at the ceiling.
+
+"It must not be too far away," he said slowly, "and--and the Rector would
+scarce like to receive me. Perhaps in--or----Why not my summer-house?" he
+added suddenly.
+
+Mr. Graves' face was irradiated with smiles.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Buxton, certainly, it shall be as you say. And where is
+the summer-house?"
+
+"It is across the garden," said the other carelessly. "I wonder you have
+not searched it in your zeal."
+
+"Shall I send a man to prepare it?" asked the magistrate eagerly. "Will
+you go there to-night?"
+
+"Well, shall we go across there together now? I give you my parole," he
+added, smiling, and standing up.
+
+"Indeed,--as you wish. I cannot tell you, sir, how grateful I am. You
+have made my duty almost a pleasure, sir."
+
+They went out together into the hall, Mr. Buxton carrying the key of the
+garden-house that he had taken from the drawer of his table; he glanced
+ruefully at the wrecked furniture and floor, and his eyes twinkled for a
+moment as they rested on the four places at table still undisturbed, and
+then met the magistrate's sidelong look. The men were still at the doors,
+resting now on chairs or leaning against the wall, with their weapons
+beside them; it was weary work this mounting sentry and losing the hunt,
+and their faces showed it. The two passed out together into the garden,
+and began to walk up the path that led straight across the avenue to
+where the high vanes of the garden-house stood up grotesque and towering
+against the evening sky, above the black yew-hedges.
+
+All the while they went Mr. Buxton was thinking out his plan. It was
+still incoherent; but, at any rate, it was a step gained to be able to
+communicate with Anthony again; and at least the poor lad should have
+some supper. And then he smiled to himself with relief as he saw what an
+improvement there had been in the situation as it had appeared to him an
+hour ago. Why, they would search the house again next day; find no one,
+and retire apologising. His occupancy of the garden-house with the
+magistrate's full consent would surely secure it from search; and he was
+not so well satisfied with the disguised entrance to the passage at this
+end as with that in the cellar.
+
+They reached the door at last. There were three steps going up to it, and
+Mr. Buxton went up them, making a good deal of noise as he did so, to
+ensure Anthony's hearing him should he be above ground. Then, as if with
+great difficulty, he unlocked the door, rattling it, and clicking sharply
+with his tongue at its stiffness.
+
+"You see, Mr. Graves." he said, rather loud, as he opened the door a
+little, "my prison will not be a narrow one." He threw the door open,
+gave a glance round, and was satisfied. The targets leaned against one
+wall, and two rows of flower-pots stood in the corner near where the
+window opened into the lane, but there was no sign of occupation. Mr.
+Buxton went across, threw the window open and looked out. There was a
+steel cap three or four feet below, and a pike-head; and at the sound of
+the latch a bearded face looked up.
+
+"I see you have a sentry there," said Mr. Buxton carelessly.
+
+"Ah! that is one of Mr. Maxwell's men."
+
+"Mr. Maxwell's!" said the other, startled. "Is he in this affair too?"
+
+"Yes; have you not heard? He came from Great Keynes this morning. Mr.
+Lackington sent for him."
+
+Mr. Buxton's face grew dark.
+
+"Ah yes, I see--a pretty revenge."
+
+The magistrate was on the point of asking an explanation, for he felt on
+the best of terms again now with his prisoner, when there were footsteps
+outside and voices; and there stood four constables, with Nichol, Hubert
+Maxwell and Lackington in furious debate coming up the path behind.
+
+They looked up suddenly, and saw the door open and the magistrate and his
+prisoner standing in the opening. The four constables stood waiting for
+further orders while their three chiefs came up.
+
+"Now, now, now!" said Mr. Graves peevishly, "what is all this?"
+
+"We have come to search this house, sir," said Nichol cheerfully.
+
+"See here, sir," said Hubert, "have you given orders for this?"
+
+"Enough, enough," said Lackington coolly. "Search, men."
+
+The pursuivants advanced to the steps. Then Mr. Buxton turned fiercely on
+them all.
+
+"See here!" he cried, and his voice rang out across the garden. "You
+bring me here, Mr. Graves, promising me a little peace and quietness,
+after your violent and unwarranted attack upon my house to-day. I have
+been patient and submissive to all suggestions; I leave my entire house
+at your disposal; I promise to lay no complaints before her Grace, so
+long as you will let me retire here till it is over--and now your men
+persecute me even here. Have you no mind of your own, sir?" he shouted.
+
+"Really, sir----" began Hubert.
+
+"And as for you, Mr. Maxwell," went on the other fiercely, "are you not
+content with your triumph so far? Cannot you leave me one corner to
+myself, or would your revenge be not full enough for you, then?"
+
+"You mistake me, sir," said Hubert, making a violent effort to control
+himself; "I am on your side in this matter."
+
+"That is what I am beginning to think," said Lackington insolently.
+
+"You think!" roared Mr. Buxton; "and who the devil are you?"
+
+"See here, gentlemen," said Mr. Nichol, "what is the dispute? Here is an
+empty house, Mr. Buxton tells us; and Mr. Maxwell tells us the same.
+Well, then, let these honest fellows run through the empty house; it will
+not take ten minutes, and Mr. Buxton and his friend can take the air
+meanwhile. A-God's name, let us not dispute over a trifle."
+
+"Then, a-God's name, let me go to my own house," bellowed Mr. Buxton,
+"and these gentlemen can have the empty house to disport themselves in
+till doomsday--or till her Grace looks into the matter"; and he made a
+motion to run down the steps, but his heart sank. Mr. Graves put out a
+deprecating hand and touched his arm; and Mr. Buxton very readily turned
+at once with a choleric face!
+
+"No, no, no!" cried the magistrate. "These gentlemen are here on my
+warrant, and they shall not search the place. Mr. Buxton, I entreat you
+not to be hasty. Come back, sir."
+
+Mr. Buxton briskly reascended.
+
+"Well, then, Mr. Graves, I entreat you to give your orders, and let your
+will be known. I am getting hungry for my supper, too, sir. It is already
+an hour past my time."
+
+"Sup in the house, sir," said Mr. Nichol smoothly, "and we shall have
+done by then."
+
+Then Hubert blazed up; he took a step forward.
+
+"Now, you fellow," he said to Nichol, "hold your damned tongue. Mr.
+Graves and I are the magistrates here, and we say that this gentleman
+shall sup and sleep here in peace, so you may take your pursuivants
+elsewhere."
+
+Lackington looked up with a smile.
+
+"No, Mr. Maxwell, I cannot do that. These men are under my orders, and I
+shall leave two of them here and send another to keep your fellow company
+at the back, We will not disturb Mr. Buxton further to-night; but
+to-morrow we shall see."
+
+Mr. Buxton paid no sort of further attention to him, but turned to the
+magistrates.
+
+"Well, gentlemen, what is your decision?"
+
+"You shall sleep here in peace, sir," said Mr. Graves resolutely. "I can
+promise nothing for to-morrow."
+
+"Then will you kindly allow one of my men to bring me supper and a couch
+of some kind, and I shall be obliged if the ladies may sup with me."
+
+"That they shall," assented Mr. Graves. "Mr. Maxwell, will you escort
+them here?"
+
+Hubert, who was turning away, nodded and disappeared round the yew-hedge.
+Lackington, who had been talking in an undertone to the pursuivants, now
+went up another alley with one of them and Mr. Nichol, and disappeared
+too in the gathering gloom of the garden. The other two pursuivants
+separated and each moved a few steps off and remained just out of sight.
+Plainly they were to remain on guard. Mr. Buxton and the magistrate sat
+down on a couple of garden-chairs.
+
+"That is an obstinate fellow, sir," said Mr. Graves.
+
+"They are certainly both of them very offensive fellows, sir. I was
+astonished at your indulgence towards them."
+
+The magistrate was charmed by this view of the case, and remained talking
+with Mr. Buxton until footsteps again were heard, and the two ladies
+appeared, with Hubert with them, and a couple of men carrying each a tray
+and the other necessaries he had asked for.
+
+Mr. Buxton and the magistrate rose to meet the ladies and bowed.
+
+"I cannot tell you," began their host elaborately, "what distress all
+this affair has given me. I trust you will forgive any inconvenience you
+may have suffered."
+
+Both Isabel and Mary looked white and strained, but they responded
+gallantly; and as the table was being prepared the four talked almost as
+if there were no bitter suspense at three of their hearts at least. Mr.
+Graves was nervous and uneasy, but did his utmost to propitiate Mary. At
+last he was on the point of withdrawing, when Mr. Buxton entreated him to
+sup with them.
+
+"I must not," he said; "I am responsible for your property, Mr. Buxton."
+
+"Then I understand that these ladies may come and go as they please?" he
+asked carelessly.
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+"Then may I ask too the favour that you will place one of your own men at
+the door who can conduct them to the house when they wish to go, and who
+can remain and protect me too from any disturbance from either of the two
+officious persons who were here just now?"
+
+Mr. Graves, delighted at this restored confidence, promised to do so, and
+took an elaborate leave; and the three sat down to supper; the door was
+left open, and they could see through it the garden, over which veil
+after veil of darkness was beginning to fall. The servants had lighted
+two tapers, and the inside of the great room with its queer furniture of
+targets and flower-pots was plainly visible to any walking outside. Once
+or twice the figure of a man crossed the strip of light that lay across
+the gravel.
+
+It was a strange supper. They said innocent things to one another in a
+tone loud enough for any to hear who cared to be listening, about the
+annoyance of it all, the useless damage that had been done, the warmth of
+the summer night, and the like, and spoke in low soundless sentences of
+what was in all their hearts.
+
+"That red-faced fellow," said Mary, "would be the better of some manners.
+(He is in the passage below, I suppose.)"
+
+"It is scarce an ennobling life--that of a manhunter," said Mr. Buxton.
+("Yes. I am sure of it.")
+
+"They have broken your little cupboard, I fear." said Mary again. ("Tell
+me your plan, if you have one.")
+
+And so step by step a plan was built up. It had been maturing in Mr.
+Buxton's mind gradually after he had learnt the ladies might sup with
+him; and little by little he conveyed it to them. He managed to write
+down the outline of it as he sat at table, and then passed it to each to
+read, and commented on it and answered their questions about it, all in
+the same noiseless undertone, with his lips indeed scarcely moving. There
+were many additions and alterations made in it as the two ladies worked
+upon it too, but by the time supper was over it was tolerably complete.
+It seemed, indeed, almost desperate, but the case was desperate. It was
+certain that the garden-house would be searched next day; Lackington's
+suspicions were plainly roused, and it was too much to hope that
+searchers who had found three hiding-places in one afternoon would fail
+to find a fourth. It appeared then that it was this plan or none.
+
+They supped slowly, in order to give time to think out and work out the
+scheme, and to foresee any difficulties beyond those they had already
+counted on; and it was fully half-past nine before the two ladies rose.
+Their host went with them to the door, called up Mr. Graves' man, and
+watched them pass down the path out of sight. He stood a minute or two
+longer looking across towards the house at the dusky shapes in the garden
+and the strip of gravel, grass, and yew that was illuminated from his
+open door. Then he spoke to the men that he knew were just out of sight.
+
+"I am going to bed presently. Kindly do not disturb me." There was no
+answer; and he closed the two high doors and bolted them securely.
+
+He dared not yet do what he wished, for fear of arousing suspicion, so he
+went to the other window and looked out into the lane. He could just make
+out the glimmer of steel on the opposite bank.
+
+"Good-night, my man," he called out cheerfully.
+
+Again there was no answer. There was something sinister in these watching
+presences that would not speak, and his heart sank a little as he put-to
+the window without closing it. He went next to the pile of rugs and
+pillows that his men had brought across, and arranged them in the corner,
+just clear of the trap-door. Then he knelt and said his evening prayers,
+and here at least was no acting. Then he rose again and took off his
+doublet and ruff and shoes so that he was dressed only in a shirt, trunks
+and hose. Then he went across to the supper-table, where the tapers still
+burned, and blew them out, leaving the room in complete darkness. Then he
+went back to his bed, and sat and listened.
+
+Up to this point he had been aware that probably at least one pair of
+eyes had been watching him; for, although the windows were of bottle-end
+glass, yet it was exceedingly likely that there would be some clear glass
+in them; and, with the tapers burning inside, his movements would all
+have been visible to either of Lackington's men who cared to put his eye
+to the window. But now he was invisible. Yet, as he thought of it, he
+slipped on his doublet again to hide the possible glimmer of his white
+shirt. There was the silence of the summer night about him--the silence
+only emphasised by its faint sounds. The house was quiet across the
+garden, though once or twice he thought he heard a horse stamp. Once
+there came a little stifled cough from outside his window; there was the
+silky rustle of the faint breeze in the trees outside; and now and again
+came the snoring of a young owl in the ivy somewhere overhead.
+
+He counted five hundred deliberately, to compel himself to wait; and
+meanwhile his sub-conscious self laboured at the scheme. Then he glanced
+this way and that with wide eyes; his ears sang with intentness of
+listening. Then, very softly he shifted his position, and found with his
+fingers the ring that lifted the trap-door above the stairs.
+
+There was no concealment about this, and without any difficulty he lifted
+the door with his right hand and leaned it against the wall; then he
+looked round again and listened. From below came up the damp earthy
+breath of the basement, and he heard a rat scamper suddenly to shelter.
+Then he lifted his feet from the rugs and dropped them noiselessly on the
+stairs, and supporting himself by his hands on the floor went down a step
+or two. Then a stair creaked under his weight; and he stopped in an
+agony, hearing only the mad throbbing in his own ears. But all was silent
+outside. And so step by step he descended into the cool darkness. He
+hesitated as to whether he should close the trap-door or not, there was a
+risk either way; but he decided to do so, as he would be obliged to make
+some noise in opening the secret doors and communicating with Anthony. At
+last his feet touched the earth floor, and he turned as he sat and
+counted the steps--the fourth, the fifth, and tapped upon it. There was
+no answer; he put his lips to it and whispered sharply:
+
+"Anthony, Anthony, dear lad."
+
+Still there was no answer. Then he lifted the lid, and managed to hold
+the woodwork below, as he knelt on the third step, so that it descended
+noiselessly. He put out his other hand and felt the boards. Anthony had
+retired into the passage then, he told himself, as he found the space
+empty. He climbed into the hole, pushed himself along and counted the
+bricks--the fourth of the fourth--pressed it, and pushed at the door; and
+it was fast.
+
+For the first time a horrible spasm of terror seized him. Had he
+forgotten? or was it all a mistake, and Anthony not there? He turned in
+his place, put his shoulders against the door and his feet against the
+woodwork of the stairs, and pushed steadily; there were one or two loud
+creaks, and the door began to yield. Then he knew Anthony was there; a
+rush of relief came into his heart--and he turned and whispered again.
+
+"Anthony, dear lad, Anthony, open quickly; it is I."
+
+The brickwork slid back and a hand touched his face out of the pitch
+darkness of the tunnel.
+
+"Who is it? Is it you?" came a whisper.
+
+"It is I, yes. Thank God you are here. I feared----"
+
+"How could I tell?" came the whisper again. "But what is the news? Are
+you escaped?"
+
+"No, I am a prisoner, and on parole. But there is no time for that. You
+must escape--we have a plan--but there is not much time."
+
+"Why should I not remain here?"
+
+"They will search to-morrow--and--and this end of the tunnel is not so
+well concealed as the other. They would find you. They suspect you are
+here, and there are guards round this place."
+
+There was a movement in the dark.
+
+"Then why think----" began the whisper.
+
+"No, no, we have a plan. Mary and Isabel approve. Listen carefully. There
+is but one guard at the back here, in the lane. Mary has leave to come
+and go now as she pleases--they are afraid of her; she will leave the
+house in a few minutes now to ride to East Maskells, with two grooms and
+a maid behind one of them. She will ride her own horse. When she has
+passed the inn she will bid the groom who has the maid to wait for her,
+while she rides down the lane with the other, Robert, to speak to me
+through the window. The pursuivant, we suppose, will not forbid that, as
+he knows they have supped with me just now. As we talk, Robert will watch
+his chance and spring on the pursuivant. As soon as the struggle begins
+you will drop from the window; it is but eight feet; and help him to
+secure the man and gag him. However much din they make the others cannot
+reach the man in time to help, for they will have to come round from the
+house, and you will have mounted Robert's horse; and you and Mary
+together will gallop down the lane into the road, and then where you
+will. We advise East Maskells. I do not suppose there will be any
+pursuit. They will have no horses ready. Do you understand it?"
+
+There was silence a moment; Mr. Buxton could hear Anthony breathing in
+the darkness.
+
+"I do not like it," came the whisper at last; "it seems desperate. A
+hundred things may happen. And what of Isabel and you?"
+
+"Dear friend; I know it is desperate, but not so desperate as your
+remaining here would be for us all."
+
+Again there was silence.
+
+"What of Robert? How will he escape?"
+
+"If you escape they will have nothing against Robert; for they can prove
+nothing as to your priesthood. But if they catch you here--and they
+certainly will, if you remain here--they will probably hang him, for he
+fought for you gallantly in the house. And he too will have time to run.
+He can run through the door into the meadows. But they will not care for
+him if they know you are off."
+
+Again silence.
+
+"Well?" whispered Mr. Buxton.
+
+"Do you wish it?"
+
+"I think it is the only hope."
+
+"Then I will do it."
+
+"Thank God! And now you must come up with me. Put off your shoes."
+
+"I have none."
+
+"Then follow, and do not make a sound."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Very cautiously Mr. Buxton extricated himself; for he had been lying on
+his side while he whispered to Anthony; and presently was crouched on the
+stairs above, as he heard the stirrings of his friend in the dark below
+him. There came the click of the brickwork door; then slow shufflings;
+once a thump on the hollow boards that made his heart leap; then after
+what seemed an interminable while, came the sound of latching the fifth
+stair into its place; and he felt his foot grasped. Then he turned and
+ascended slowly on hands and knees, feeling now and again for the
+trap-door over him--touched it--raised it, and crawled out on to the
+rugs. The room seemed to him comparatively light after the heavy darkness
+of the basement, and passage below, and he could make out the
+supper-table and the outline of the targets on the opposite wall. Then he
+saw a head follow him; then shoulders and body; and Anthony crept out and
+sat on the rugs beside him. Their hands met in a trembling grip.
+
+"Supper, dear lad?" whispered Mr. Buxton, with his mouth to the other's
+ear.
+
+"Yes, I am hungry," came the faintest whisper back.
+
+Mr. Buxton rose and went on tip-toe to the table, took off some food and
+a glass of wine that he had left purposely filled and came back with
+them.
+
+There the two friends sat; Mr. Buxton could just hear the movement of
+Anthony's mouth as he ate. The four windows glimmered palely before them,
+and once or twice the tall doors rattled faintly as the breeze stirred
+them.
+
+Then suddenly came a sound that made Anthony's hand pause on the way to
+his mouth; Mr. Buxton drew a sharp breath; it was the noise of three or
+four horses on the road beyond the church. Then they both stood up
+without a word, and Mr. Buxton went noiselessly across to the window that
+looked on to the lane and remained there, listening. The horses were now
+passing down the street, and the noise of their hoofs grew fainter behind
+the houses.
+
+Anthony saw his friend in the twilight beckon, and he went across and
+stood by him. Suddenly the hoofs sounded loud and near; and they heard
+the pursuivant below stand up from the bank opposite. Then Mary's voice
+came distinct and cheerful.
+
+"How dark it is!"
+
+The horses were coming down the lane.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                            THE NIGHT-RIDE
+
+
+The sound of hoofs came nearer; Anthony's heart, as he crouched below the
+window, ready to spring up and over when the signal was given, beat in
+sick thumpings at the base of his throat, but with a fierce excitement
+and no fear. His hands clenched and unclenched. Mr. Buxton stood back a
+little, waiting; he must feign to be asleep at first.
+
+Then came suddenly a sharp challenge from the sentry.
+
+"It is Mistress Corbet," came Mary's cool high tones, "and I desire to
+speak with Mr. Buxton."
+
+The man hesitated.
+
+"You cannot," he said.
+
+"Cannot!" she cried; "why, fellow, do you know who I am? And I have just
+supped with him."
+
+There came a sudden sound from the other side of the summer-house, and
+both men in the room knew that the guards in the garden were listening.
+
+"I am sorry, madam, but I have no orders."
+
+"Then do not presume, you hound," came Mary's voice again, with a ring of
+anger. "Ho, there, Mr. Buxton, come to the window."
+
+"Be ready," he whispered to Anthony.
+
+"Stand back, madam," said the pursuivant, "or I shall call for help."
+
+Then Mr. Buxton threw back the window.
+
+"Who is there?" he asked coolly. ("Stand up Anthony.")
+
+"It is I, Mr. Buxton, but this insolent dog----"
+
+"Stand _back_, madam, I say," cried the voice of the guard. Then from the
+garden behind came running footsteps and voices; and a red light shone
+through the windows behind.
+
+"Now," whispered the voice over Anthony's head sharply.
+
+There came a loud shout from the guard, "Help there, help!"
+
+Anthony put his hands on to the sill and lifted himself easily. The groom
+had slipped from his horse while Mary held the bridle, and was advancing
+at the guard, and there was something in his hand. The sentry, who was
+standing immediately under the window, now dropped his pike point
+forward; and as a furious rattling began at the doors on the garden side,
+Anthony dropped, and came down astride of the man's neck, who crashed to
+the ground. Then the groom was on him too.
+
+"Leave him to me, sir. Mount."
+
+The groom's hands were busy with something about the struggling man's
+neck: the shouts choked and ceased.
+
+"You will strangle the man," said Anthony sharply.
+
+"Nonsense," said Mary; "mount, mount. They are coming."
+
+Anthony ran to the horse, that was beginning to scurry and plunge; threw
+himself across the saddle and caught the reins.
+
+"Up?" said Mary.
+
+"Up"; and he slung his right leg over the flank and sat up, as Mary
+released the bridle, and dashed off, scattering gravel.
+
+From the direction of the church came cries and the quick rattle of a
+galloping horse. Anthony dashed his shoeless heels into the horse's sides
+and leaned forward, and in a moment more was flying down the lane after
+Mary. From in front came a shout of warning, with one or two screams, and
+then Anthony turned the corner, checking his horse slightly at the angle,
+saw a torch somewhere to his right, a group of scared faces, a groom and
+woman clinging to him on a plunging horse, and the white road; and then
+found himself with loose reins, and flying stirrups, thundering down the
+village street, with Mary on her horse not two lengths in front. The roar
+of the hoofs behind, and of the little shouting crowd, with the screaming
+woman on the horse, died behind him as the wind began to boom in his
+ears. Mary was looking round now, and slightly checking her horse as they
+neared the bottom of the long village street. In half a dozen strides
+Anthony came up on her right. Then the pool gleamed before them just
+beyond the fork of the road.
+
+"Left!" screamed Mary through the roar of the racing air, and turned her
+horse off up the road that led round in a wide sweep of two miles to East
+Maskells and the woods beyond, and Anthony followed. He had settled down
+in the saddle now, and had brought his maddened horse under control; his
+feet were in the stirrups, but there was no lessening of the speed. They
+had left the last house now, and on either side the black bushes and
+heatherland streamed past, with the sudden gleam of water here and there
+under the starlight that showed the ditches and holes with which the
+ground on either side of the road was honeycombed.
+
+Then Mary turned her head again, and the words came detached and sharp.
+
+"They are after us--could not help--horses saddled."
+
+Anthony turned his head to release one ear from the roar of the air, and
+heard the thundering rattle of hoofs in the distance, but even as he
+listened it grew fainter.
+
+"We are gaining!" he shouted.
+
+Mary nodded, and her teeth gleamed white in a smile.
+
+"Ours are fresh," she screamed.
+
+Then there was silence between them again; they had reached a little hill
+and eased their horses up it; a heavy fringe of trees crowned it on their
+right, black against the stars, and a gleam of light showed the presence
+of a house among them. Farther and farther behind them sounded the hoofs;
+then they were swaying and rocking again down the slope that led to the
+long flat piece of road that ended in the slope up to East Maskells. It
+was softer going now and darker too, as there were trees overhead;
+pollared willows streamed past them as they went; and twice there was a
+snort and a hollow thunder of hoofs as a young sleeping horse awoke and
+raced them a few yards in the meadows at the side. Once Anthony's horse
+shied at a white post, and drew in front a yard or two; and he heard for
+a moment under the rattle the cool gush of the stream that flowed beneath
+the road and the scream of a water-fowl as she burst from the reeds.
+
+A great exultation began to fill Anthony's heart. What a ride this was,
+in the glorious summer night--reckless and intoxicating! What a contrast,
+this sweet night air streaming past him, this dear world of living
+things, his throbbing horse beneath him, the birds and beasts round him,
+and this gallant girl swaying and rejoicing too beside him! What a
+contrast was all this to that terrible afternoon, only a few hours
+away--of suspense and skulking like a rat in a sewer; in a dark, close
+passage underground breathing death and silence round him! An escape with
+the fresh air in the face and the glorious galloping music of hoofs is
+another matter to an escape contrived by holding the breath and fearing
+to move in a mean hiding-hole. And as all this flooded in upon him,
+incoherently but overpoweringly, he turned and laughed loud with joy.
+
+They had nearly come to an end of the flat by now. In front of them rose
+the high black mass of trees where safety lay; somewhere to the right,
+not a quarter of a mile in front, just off the road, lay East Maskells.
+They would draw rein, he reflected, when they reached the outer gates,
+and listen; and if all was quiet behind them, Mary at least should ask
+for shelter. For himself, perhaps it would be safer to ride on into the
+woods for the present. He began to move his head as he rode to see if
+there were any light in the house before him; it seemed dark; but perhaps
+he could not see the house from here. Gradually his horse slackened a
+little, as the rise in the ground began, and he tossed the reins once or
+twice.
+
+Then there was a sharp hiss and blow behind him; his horse snorted and
+leapt forward, almost unseating him, and then, still snorting with head
+raised and jerking, dashed at the slope. There was a cry and a loud
+report; he tugged at the reins, but the horse was beside himself, and he
+rode fifty yards before he could stop him. Even as he wrenched him into
+submission another horse with head up and flying stirrup and reins
+thundered past him and disappeared into the woods beyond the house.
+
+Then, trembling so that he could hardly hold the reins, he urged his
+horse back again at a stumbling trot towards what he knew lay at the foot
+of the slope, and to meet the tumult that grew in nearness and intensity
+up the road along which he had just galloped.
+
+There was a dark group on the pale road in front of him, twenty yards
+this side of the field-path that led from Stanfield Place; he took his
+feet from the stirrups as he got near, and in a moment more threw his
+right leg forward over the saddle and slipped to the ground.
+
+He said no word but pushed away the two men, and knelt by Mary, taking
+her head on his knee. The men rose and stood looking down at them.
+
+"Mary," he said, "can you hear me?"
+
+He bent close over the white face; her hand rose to her breast, and came
+away dark. She was shot through the body. Then she pushed him sharply.
+
+"Go," she whispered, "go."
+
+"Mary," he said again, "make your confession--quickly. Stand back, you
+men."
+
+They obeyed him; and he bent his ear towards the mouth he could so dimly
+see. There was a sob or two--a long moaning breath--and then the murmur
+of words, very faint and broken by gulps for breath. He noticed nothing
+of the hoofs that dashed up the road and stopped abruptly, and of the
+murmur of voices that grew round him; he only heard the gasping whisper,
+the words that rose one by one, with pauses and sighs, into his ear....
+
+"Is that all?" he said, and a silence fell on all who stood round, now a
+complete circle about the priest and the penitent. The pale face moved
+slightly in assent; he could see the lips were open, and the breath was
+coming short and agonised.
+
+"... _In nomine Patris_--his hand rose above her and moved cross-ways in
+the air--_et Filii et Spiritus Sancti_. _Amen._"
+
+Then he bent low again and looked; the bosom was still rising and
+falling, the shut eyes lifted once and looked at him. Then the lids fell
+again.
+
+"_Benedictio Dei omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et Spiritus sancti,
+descendat super te et maneat semper. Amen._"
+
+Then there fell a silence. A horse blew out its nostrils somewhere behind
+and stamped; then a man's voice cried brutally:
+
+"Now then, is that popish mummery done yet?"
+
+There was a murmur and stir in the group. But Anthony had risen.
+
+"That is all," he said.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII
+
+                              IN PRISON
+
+
+Anthony found several friends in the Clink prison in Southwark, whither
+he was brought up from Stanfield Place after his arrest.
+
+Life there was very strange, a combination of suffering and extraordinary
+relaxation. He had a tiny cell, nine feet by five, with one little window
+high up, and for the first month of his imprisonment wore irons; at the
+same time his gaoler was so much open to bribery that he always found his
+door open on Sunday morning, and was able to shuffle upstairs and say
+mass in the cell of Ralph Emerson, once the companion of Campion, and a
+lay-brother of the Society of Jesus. There he met a large number of
+Catholics--some of whom he had come across in his travels--and he even
+ministered the sacraments to others who managed to come in from the
+outside. His chief sorrow was that his friend and host had been taken to
+the Counter in Wood Street.
+
+It was a month before he heard all that had happened on the night of his
+arrest, and on the previous days: he had been separated at once from his
+friends; and although he had heard his guards talking both in the hall
+where he had been kept the rest of the night, and during the long hot
+ride to London the next day, yet at first he was so bewildered by Mary's
+death that what they said made little impression on him. But after he had
+been examined both by magistrates and the Commissioners, and very little
+evidence was forthcoming, his irons were struck off and he was allowed
+much more liberty than before; and at last, to his great joy, Isabel was
+admitted to see him. She herself had come straight up to the Marretts'
+house, both of whom still lived on in Wharf Street, though old and
+infirm; and day by day she attempted to get access to her brother; until
+at last, by dint of bribery, she was successful.
+
+Then she told him the whole story.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+"When we left the garden-house," she said, "we went straight back, and
+Mary found Mr. Graves in the parlour off the hall. Oh, Anthony, how she
+ordered him about! And how frightened he was of her! The end was that he
+sent a message to the stables for her horses to be got ready, as she
+said. I went up with her to help her to make ready, and we kissed one
+another up there, for, you know, we dared not make as if we said good-bye
+downstairs. Then we came down for her to mount; and then we saw what we
+had not known before, that all the stable-yard was filled with the men's
+horses saddled and bridled. However, we said nothing, except that Mary
+asked a man what--what the devil he was looking at, when he stared up at
+her as she stood on the block drawing on her gloves before she mounted.
+There were one or two torches burning in cressets, and I saw her so
+plainly turn the corner down towards the church.
+
+"Then I went upstairs again, but I could not go to my room, but stood at
+the gallery window outside looking down at the court, for I knew that if
+there was any danger it would come from there.
+
+"Then presently I heard a noise, and a shouting, and a man ran in through
+the gates to the stable-yard; and, almost directly it seemed, three or
+four rode out, at full gallop across the court and down by the church.
+The window was open and I could hear the noise down towards the village.
+Then more and more came pouring out, and all turned the corner and
+galloped; all but one, whose horse slipped and came down with a crash.
+Oh, Anthony! how I prayed!
+
+"Then I saw Mr. Lackington"--Isabel stopped a moment at the name, and
+then went on again--"and he was on horseback too in the court; but he was
+shouting to two or three more who were just mounting. 'Across the
+field--across the field---cut them off!' I could hear it so plainly; and
+I saw the stable-gate was open, and they went through, and I could hear
+them galloping on the grass. And then I knew what was happening; and I
+went back to my room and shut the door."
+
+Isabel stopped again; and Anthony took her hand softly in his own and
+stroked it. Then she went on.
+
+"Well, I saw them bring you back, from the gallery window--and ran to the
+top of the stairs and saw you go through into the hall where the
+magistrates were waiting, and the door was shut; and then I went back to
+my place at the window--and then presently they brought in Mary. I
+reached the bottom of the stairs just as they set her down. And I told
+them to bring her upstairs; and they did, and laid her on the bed where
+we had sat together all the afternoon.... And I would let no one in: I
+did it all myself; and then I set the tapers round her, and put the
+crucifix that was round my neck into her fingers, which I had laid on her
+breast ... and there she lay on the great bed ... and her face was like a
+child's, fast asleep--smiling: and then I kissed her again, and
+whispered, 'Thank you, Mary'; for, though I did not know all, I knew
+enough, and that it was for you."
+
+Anthony had thrown his arms on the table and his face was buried in them.
+Isabel put out her hand and stroked his curly head gently as she went on,
+and told him in the same quiet voice of how Mary had tried to save him by
+lashing his horse, as she caught sight of the man waiting at the entrance
+of the field-path, and riding in between him and Anthony. The man had
+declared in his panic of fear before the magistrates that he had never
+dreamt of doing Mistress Corbet an injury, but that she had ridden across
+just as he drew the trigger to shoot the priest's horse and stop him that
+way.
+
+When Isabel had finished Anthony still lay with his head on his arms.
+
+"Why, Anthony, my darling," she said, "what could be more perfect? How
+proud I am of you both!"
+
+She told him, too, how they had been tracked to Stanfield--Lackington had
+let it out in his exultation.
+
+The sailor at Greenhithe was one of his agents--an apostate, like his
+master. He had recognised that the party consisted of Catholics by
+Anthony's breaking of the bread. He had been placed there to watch the
+ferry; and had sent messages at once to Nichol and Lackington. Then the
+party had been followed, but had been lost sight of, thanks to Anthony's
+ruse. Nichol had then flung out a cordon along the principal roads that
+bounded Stanstead Woods on the south; and Lackington, when he arrived a
+few hours later, had kept them there all night. The cordon consisted of
+idlers and children picked up at Wrotham; and the tramp who feigned to be
+asleep had been one of them. When they had passed, he had given the
+signal to his nearest neighbour, and had followed them up. Nichol was
+soon at the place, and after them; and had followed to Stanfield with
+Lackington behind. Then watchers had been set round the house; the
+magistrates communicated with; and as soon as Hubert and Mr. Graves had
+arrived the assault had been made. Hubert had not been told who the
+priest was; but he had leapt at an opportunity to harass Mr. Buxton: he
+had been given to understand that Anthony and Isabel were still in the
+north.
+
+"He did not know; indeed he did not," cried Isabel piteously.
+
+At another time, when she had gained admittance to him, she gave him
+messages from the Marretts, who had kept a great affection for the lad,
+who had told them tales of College that Christmas time; and she told him
+too of the coming of an old friend to see her there.
+
+"It was poor Mr. Dent," she said; "he looks so old now. His wife died
+three years ago; you know he has a city-living and does chaplain's work
+at the Tower sometimes; and he is coming to see you, Anthony, and talk to
+you."
+
+Three or four days later he came.
+
+Anthony was greatly touched at his kindness in coming. He looked
+considerably older than his age; his hair had grown thin and grey about
+his temples, and the sharp birdlike outline of his face and features
+seemed blurred and indeterminate. His creed too, and his whole manner of
+looking at things of faith, seemed to have undergone a similar process.
+The two had a long talk.
+
+"I am not going to argue with you, Mr. Norris," he said, "though I still
+think your religion wrong. But I have learnt this at least, that the
+greatest of all is charity, and if we love the same God, and His Blessed
+Son, and one another, I think that is best of all. I have learnt that
+from my wife--my dear wife," he added softly. "I used to hold much with
+doctrine at one time, and loved to chop arguments; but our Saviour did
+not, and so I will not."
+
+Anthony was delighted that he took this line, for he knew there are some
+minds that apparently cannot be loyal to both charity and truth at the
+same time, and Mr. Dent's seemed to be one of them; so the two talked of
+old times at Great Keynes, and of the folks there, and at last of Hubert.
+
+"I saw him in the City last week," said Mr. Dent, "and he is a changed
+man. He looks ten years older than this time last year; I scarcely know
+what has come to him. I know he has thrown up his magistracy, and the
+Lindfield parson tells me that the talk is that Mr. Maxwell is going on
+another voyage, and leaving his wife and children behind him again."
+
+Anthony told him gently of Hubert's share in the events at Stanfield,
+adding what real and earnest attempts he had made to repair the injury he
+had done as soon as he had learnt that it was his friend that was in
+hiding.
+
+"There was no treachery against me, Mr. Dent, you see," he added.
+
+Mr. Dent pecked a little in the air with pursed lips and eyes fixed on
+the ground; and a vision of the pulpit at Great Keynes moved before
+Anthony's eyes.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes," he said; "I understand--I quite understand."
+
+Before Mr. Dent took his leave he unburdened himself of what he had
+really come to say.
+
+"Master Anthony," he said, standing up and fingering his hat round and
+round, "I said I talked no doctrine now; but I must unsay that; and--you
+will not think me impertinent if I ask you something?"
+
+"My dear Mr. Dent----" began the other, standing and smiling too.
+
+"Thank you, thank you--I felt sure--then it is this: I do not know much
+about the Popish religion, though I used to once, and I may be very
+mistaken; but I would like you to satisfy me before I go on one point";
+and he fixed his anxious peering eyes on Anthony's face. "Can you say,
+Master Anthony, from a full heart, that you fix all your hope and
+confidence for salvation in Christ's merits alone?"
+
+Anthony smiled frankly in his face.
+
+"Indeed, in none other," he said, "and from a full heart."
+
+"Ah well," and the birdlike face began to beam and twitch, "and--and
+there is nothing of confidence in yourself and your works--and--and there
+is no talk of Holy Mary in the matter?"
+
+Anthony smiled again. He wished to avoid useless controversy.
+
+"Briefly," he said, "my belief is that I am a very great sinner, that I
+deserve eternal hell; but I humbly place all my trust in the Precious
+Blood of my Saviour, and in that alone. Does that satisfy you?"
+
+Mr. Dent's face was breaking into smiles, and at the end he took the
+priest's face in his hands and kissed him gently twice on the cheeks.
+
+"Then, my dear boy, I fear nothing for you. May that salvation you hope
+for be yours." And then without a word he was gone.
+
+Anthony's conscience reproached him a little that he had said nothing of
+the Church to the minister; but Mr. Dent had been so peremptory about
+doctrine that it was hard for the younger man to say what he would have
+wished. He told him, however, plainly on his next visit that he held
+whole-heartedly too that the Catholic Church was the treasury of Grace
+that Christ had instituted, and added a little speech about his longing
+to see his old friend a Catholic too; but Mr. Dent shook his head. The
+corners of his eyes wrinkled a little, and a shade of his old fretfulness
+passed over his face.
+
+"Nay, if you talk like that," he said, "I must be gone. I am no
+theologian. You must let me alone."
+
+He gave him news this time of Mr. Buxton.
+
+"He is in the Counter, as you know," he said, "and is a very bright and
+cheerful person, it seems to me. Mistress Isabel asked me to see him and
+give her news of him, for she cannot get admittance. He is in a cell,
+little and nasty; but he said to me that a Protestant prison was a
+Papist's pleasaunce--in fact he said it twice. And he asked very eagerly
+after you and Mistress Isabel. He tried, too, to inveigle me into talk of
+Peter his prerogative, but I would not have it. It was Lammas Day when I
+saw him, and he spoke much of it."
+
+Anthony asked whether there was anything said of what punishment Mr.
+Buxton would suffer.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Dent, "the Lieutenant of the Tower told me that her
+Grace was so sad at the death of Mistress Corbet that she was determined
+that no more blood should be shed than was obliged over this matter; and
+that Mr. Buxton, he thought, would be but deprived of his estates and
+banished; but I know not how that may be. But we shall soon know."
+
+These weeks of waiting were full of consolation and refreshment to
+Anthony: the nervous stress of the life of the seminary priest in
+England, full of apprehension and suspense, crowned, as it had been in
+his case, by the fierce excitement of the last days of his liberty--all
+this had strained and distracted his soul, and the peace of the prison
+life, with the certainty that no efforts of his own could help him now,
+quieted and strengthened him for the ordeal he foresaw. At this time,
+too, he used to spend two or three hours a day in meditation, and found
+the greatest benefit in following the tranquil method of prayer
+prescribed by Louis de Blois, with whose writings he had made
+acquaintance at Douai. Each morning, too, he said a "dry mass," and
+during the whole of his imprisonment at the Clink managed to make his
+confession at least once a week, and besides his communion at mass on
+Sundays, communicated occasionally from the Reserved Sacrament, which he
+was able to keep in a neighbouring cell, unknown to his gaoler.
+
+And so the days went by, as orderly as in a Religious House; he rose at a
+fixed hour, observed the greatest exactness in his devotions, and did his
+utmost to prevent any visitors being admitted to see him, or any from
+another cell coming into his own, until he had finished his first
+meditation and said his office. And there began to fall upon him a kind
+of mellow peace that rose at times of communion and prayer to a point so
+ravishing, that he began to understand that it would not be a light cross
+for which such preparatory graces were necessary.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+Towards the middle of September he received intelligence that evidence
+had been gathering against him, and that one or two were come from
+Lancashire under guard; and that he would be brought before the
+Commissioners again immediately.
+
+Within two days this came about. He was sent for across the water to the
+Tower, and after waiting an hour or two with his gaoler downstairs in the
+basement of the White Tower, was taken up into the great Hall where the
+Council sat. There was a table at the farther end where they were
+sitting, and as Anthony looked round he saw through openings all round in
+the inner wall the little passage where the sentries walked, and heard
+their footfalls.
+
+The preliminaries of identification and the like had been disposed of at
+previous examinations before Mr. Young--a name full of sinister
+suggestiveness to the Catholics; and so, after he had been given a seat
+at a little distance from the table behind which the Commissioners sat,
+he was questioned minutely as to his journey in the North of England.
+
+"What were you there for, Mr. Norris?" inquired the Secretary of the
+Council.
+
+"I went to see friends, and to do my business."
+
+"Then that resolves itself into two heads: One, Who are your friends.
+Two, What was your business?"
+
+Now it had been established beyond a doubt at previous examinations that
+he was a priest; a student of Douai who had apostatised had positively
+identified him; so Anthony answered boldly:
+
+"My friends were Catholics; and my business was the reconciling of souls
+to their Creator."
+
+"And to the Pope of Rome," put in Wade.
+
+"Who is Christ's Vicar," continued Anthony.
+
+"And a pestilent knave," concluded a fiery-faced man whom Anthony did not
+know.
+
+But the Commissioners wanted more than that; it was true that Anthony was
+already convicted of high treason in having been ordained beyond the seas
+and in exercising his priestly functions in England; but the exacting of
+the penalty for religion alone was apt to raise popular resentment; and
+it was far preferable in the eyes of the authorities to entangle a priest
+in the political net before killing him. So they passed over for the
+present his priestly functions and first demanded a list of all the
+places where he had stayed in the north.
+
+"You ask what is impossible," said Anthony, with his eyes on the ground
+and his heart beating sharply, for he knew that now peril was near.
+
+"Well," said Wade, "let us put it another way. We know that you were at
+Speke Hall, Blainscow, and other places. I have a list here," and he
+tapped the table, "but we want your name to it."
+
+"Let me see the paper," said Anthony.
+
+"Nay, nay, tell us first."
+
+"I cannot sign the paper except I see it," said Anthony, smiling.
+
+"Give it him," said a voice from the end of the table.
+
+"Here then," said Wade unwillingly.
+
+Anthony got up and took the paper from him, and saw one or two places
+named where he had not been, and saw that it had been drawn up at any
+rate partly on guesswork.
+
+He put the paper down and went back to his chair and sat down.
+
+"It is not true," he said, looking steadily at the Secretary; "I cannot
+sign it."
+
+"Do you deny that you have been to any of these places?" inquired Wade
+indignantly.
+
+"The paper is not true," said Anthony again.
+
+"Well, then, show us what is not true upon it."
+
+"I cannot."
+
+"We will find means to persuade you," said the Secretary.
+
+"If God permits," said Anthony.
+
+Wade glanced round inquiringly and shrugged his shoulders; one or two
+shook their heads.
+
+"Well, then, we will turn to another point. There are known to have been
+certain Jesuit priests in Lancashire in November of last year--do you
+deny that, sir?"
+
+"You ask too much," said Anthony, smiling again; "they may have been
+there for aught I know, for I certainly did not see them elsewhere at the
+time you mention."
+
+Wade frowned, but the one at the end laughed loud.
+
+"He has you there, Wade," he said.
+
+"This is foolery," said the Secretary. "Well, these two, Father Edward
+Oldcorne and Father Holtby were in Lancashire in November; and you, Mr.
+Norris, spoke with them then. We wish to know where they are now, and you
+must tell us."
+
+"You have yet to prove that I spoke with them," said Anthony, for the
+trap was too transparent.
+
+"But we know that."
+
+"That may or may not be; but it is for you to prove it."
+
+"Nay, for you to tell us."
+
+"For you to prove it."
+
+Wade lost his temper.
+
+"Well, then," he cried, "take this paper and see which of us is in the
+right."
+
+Anthony rose again, wondering what the paper could be, and came towards
+the table. He saw it bore a name at the end, and as he advanced saw that
+it had an official appearance. Wade still held it; but Anthony took it in
+his hand too to steady it, and began to read; but as he read a mist rose
+before his eyes, and the paper shook violently. It was a warrant to put
+him to the torture.
+
+Wade laughed a little.
+
+"Why, see, Mr. Norris, how you tremble at the warrant; what will it be
+when you----"
+
+But a voice murmured "Shame!" and he stopped and stared.
+
+Anthony passed his hand over his eyes and went back to his chair and sat
+down; he saw his knees trembling as he sat, and hated himself for it; but
+he cried bravely:
+
+"The flesh is weak, but, please God, the spirit is willing."
+
+"Well, then," said Wade again, "must we execute this warrant, or will you
+tell us what we would know?"
+
+"You must do what God permits," said Anthony.
+
+Wade sat down, throwing the warrant on the table, and began to talk in a
+low voice to those who sat next him. Anthony fixed his eyes on the
+ground, and did his utmost to keep his thoughts steady.
+
+Now he realised where he was, and what it all meant. The little door to
+the left, behind him, that he had noticed as he came in, was the door of
+which he had heard other Catholics speak, that led down to the great
+crypt, where so many before him had screamed and fainted and called on
+God, from the rack that stood at the foot of the stairs, or from the
+pillar with the fixed ring at its summit.
+
+He had faced all this in his mind again and again, but it was a different
+thing to have the horror within arm's length; old phrases he had heard of
+the torture rang in his mind--a boast of Norton's, the rackmaster, who
+had racked Brian, and which had been repeated from mouth to mouth--that
+he had "made Brian a foot longer than God made him"; words of James
+Maxwell's that he had let drop at Douai; the remembrance of his limp; and
+of Campion's powerlessness to raise his hand when called upon to
+swear--all these things crowded on him now; and there seemed to rest on
+him a crushing swarm of fearful images and words. He made a great effort,
+and closed his eyes, and repeated the holy name of Jesus over and over
+again; but the struggle was still fierce when Wade's voice, harsh and
+dry, broke in and scattered the confusion of mind that bewildered him.
+
+"Take the prisoner to a cell; he is not to go back to the Clink."
+
+Anthony felt a hand on his arm, and the gaoler was looking at him with
+compassion.
+
+"Come, sir," he said.
+
+Anthony rose feeling heavy and exhausted; but remembered to bow to the
+Commissioners, one or two of whom returned it. Then he followed the
+gaoler out into the ante-room, who handed him over to one of the Tower
+officials.
+
+"I must leave you here, sir," he said; "but keep a good heart; it will
+not be for to-day."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When Anthony got to his new cell, which was in the Salt Tower, he was
+bitterly angry and disappointed with himself. Why, he had turned white
+and sick like a child, not at the pain of the rack, not even at the sight
+of it, but at the mere warrant! He threw himself on his knees, and bowed
+down till his head beat against the boards.
+
+"O Lord Jesus," he prayed, "give me of Thy Manhood."
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+He found that this prison was more rigorous than the Clink; no liberty to
+leave the cell could possibly be obtained, and no furniture was provided.
+The gaoler, when he had brought up his dinner, asked whether he could
+send any message for him for a bed. Anthony gave Isabel's address,
+knowing that the authorities were already aware that she was a Catholic,
+and indeed she had given bail to come up for trial if called upon, and
+that his information could injure neither her nor the Marretts, who were
+sound Church of England people; and in the afternoon a mattress and some
+clothes arrived for him.
+
+Anthony noticed at dinner that the knife provided was of a very
+inconvenient shape, having a round blunt point, and being sharp only at a
+lower part of the blade; and when the keeper came up with his supper he
+asked him to bring him another kind. The man looked at him with a queer
+expression.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Anthony; "cannot you oblige me?"
+
+The man shook his head.
+
+"They are the knives that are always given to prisoners under warrant for
+torture."
+
+Anthony did not understand him, and looked at him, puzzled.
+
+"For fear they should do themselves an injury," added the gaoler.
+
+Then the same shudder ran over his body again.
+
+"You mean--you mean...." he began. The gaoler nodded, still looking at
+him oddly, and went out; and Anthony sat, with his supper untasted,
+staring before him.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+By a kind of violent reaction he had a long happy dream that night. The
+fierce emotions of that day had swept over his imagination and scoured it
+as with fire, and now the underlying peace rose up and flooded it with
+sweetness.
+
+He thought he was in the north again, high up on a moor, walking with one
+who was quite familiar to him, but whose person he could not remember
+when he woke; he did not even know whether it was man or woman. It was a
+perfect autumn day, he thought, like one of those he had spent there last
+year; the heather and the gorse were in flower, and the air was redolent
+from their blossoms; he commented on this to the person at his side, who
+told him it was always so there. Mile after mile the moor rose and
+dipped, and, although Skiddaw was on his right, purple and grey, yet to
+his left there was a long curved horizon of sparkling blue sea. It was a
+cloudless day overhead, and the air seemed kindling and fresh round him
+as it blew across the stretches of heather from the western sea. He
+himself felt full of an extraordinary vitality, and the mere movement of
+his limbs gave him joy as he went swiftly and easily forward over the
+heather. There was the sound of the wind in his ears, and again and again
+there came the gush of water from somewhere out of sight--as he had heard
+it in the church by Skiddaw. There was no house or building of any kind
+within sight, and he felt a great relief in these miles of heath and the
+sense of holiday that they gave him. But all the joy round him and in his
+heart found their point for him in the person that went with him; this
+presence was their centre, as a diamond in a gold ring, or as a throned
+figure in a Court circle. All else existed for the sake of this
+person;--the heather blossomed and the gorse incensed the air, and the
+sea sparkled, and the sky was blue, and the air kindled, and his own
+heart warmed and throbbed, for that only. When he tried to see who it
+was, there was nothing to see; the presence existed there as a centre in
+a sphere, immeasurable and indiscernible; sometimes he thought it was
+Mary, sometimes he thought it Henry Buxton, sometimes Isabel--once even
+he assured himself it was Mistress Margaret, and once James Maxwell--and
+with the very act of identification came indecision again. This
+uncertainty waxed into a torment, and yet a sweet torment, as of a lover
+who watches his mistress' shuttered house; and this torment swelled yet
+higher and deeper until it was so great that it had absorbed the whole
+radiant fragrant circle of the hills where he walked; and then came the
+blinding knowledge that the Presence was all these persons so dear to
+him, and far more; that every tenderness and grace that he had loved in
+them--Mary's gallantry and Isabel's serene silence and his friend's
+fellowship, and the rest--floated in the translucent depths of it,
+stained and irradiated by it, as motes in a sunbeam.
+
+And then he woke, and it was through tears of pure joy that he saw the
+rafters overhead, and the great barred door, and the discoloured wall
+above his bed.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+When his gaoler brought him dinner that day it was half an hour earlier
+than usual; and when Anthony asked him the reason he said that he did not
+know, but that the orders had run so; but that Mr. Norris might take
+heart; it was not for the torture, for Mr. Topcliffe, who superintended
+it, had told the keeper of the rack-house that nothing would be wanted
+that day.
+
+He had hardly finished dinner when the gaoler came up again and said that
+the Lieutenant was waiting for him below, and that he must bring his hat
+and cloak.
+
+Since his arrest he had worn his priest's habit every day, so he now
+threw the cloak over his arm and took his hat, and followed the gaoler
+down.
+
+In passing through the court he went by a group of men that were talking
+together, and he noticed very especially a tall old man with a grey head,
+in a Court suit with a sword, and very lean about the throat, who looked
+at him hard as he passed. As he reached the archway where the Lieutenant
+was waiting, he turned again and saw the sunken eyes of the old man still
+looking after him; when he turned to the gaoler he saw the same odd look
+in his face that he had noticed before.
+
+"Why do you look like that?" he asked. "Who is that old man?"
+
+"That is Mr. Topcliffe," said the keeper.
+
+The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Richard Barkley, saluted him kindly at
+the gate, and begged him to follow him; the keeper still came after and
+another stepped out and joined them, and the group of four together
+passed out through the Lion's Tower and across the moat to a little
+doorway where a closed carriage was waiting. The Lieutenant and Anthony
+stepped inside; the two keepers mounted outside; and the carriage set
+off.
+
+Then the Lieutenant turned to the priest.
+
+"Do you know where you are going, Mr. Norris?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You are going to Whitehall to see the Queen's Grace."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIV
+
+                             AN OPEN DOOR
+
+
+When the carriage reached the palace they were told that the Queen was
+not yet come from Greenwich; and they were shown into a little ante-room
+next the gallery where the interview was to take place. The Queen, the
+Lieutenant told Anthony, was to come up that afternoon passing through
+London, and that she had desired to see him on her way through to
+Nonsuch; he could not tell him why he was sent for, though he conjectured
+it was because of Mistress Corbet's death, and that her Grace wished to
+know the details.
+
+"However," said the Lieutenant, "you now have your opportunity to speak
+for yourself, and I think you a very fortunate man, Mr. Norris. Few have
+had such a privilege, though I remember that Mr. Campion had it too,
+though he made poor use of it."
+
+Anthony said nothing. His mind was throbbing with memories and
+associations. The air of state and luxury in the corridors through which
+he had just come, the discreet guarded doors, the servants in the royal
+liveries standing here and there, the sense of expectancy that mingled
+with the solemn hush of the palace--all served to bring up the figure of
+Mary Corbet, whom he had seen so often in these circumstances; and the
+thought of her made the peril in which he stood and the hope of escape
+from it seem very secondary matters. He walked to the window presently
+and looked out upon the little court below, one of the innumerable yards
+of that vast palace, and stood staring down on the hound that was chained
+there near one of the entrances, and that yawned and blinked in the
+autumn sunshine.
+
+Even as he looked the dog paused in the middle of his stretch and stood
+expectant with his ears cocked, a servant dashed bareheaded down a couple
+of steps and out through the low archway; and simultaneously Anthony
+heard once more the sweet shrill trumpets that told of the Queen's
+approach; then there came the roll of drums and the thunder of horses'
+feet and the noise of wheels; the trumpets sang out again nearer, and the
+rumbling waxed louder as the Queen's cavalcade, out of sight, passed the
+entrance of the archway down upon which Anthony looked; and then stilled,
+and the palace itself began to hum and stir; a door or two banged in the
+distance, feet ran past the door of the ante-room, and the strain of the
+trumpets sounded once in the house itself. Then all grew quiet once more,
+and Anthony turned from the window and sat down again by the Lieutenant.
+
+There was silence for a few minutes. The Lieutenant stroked his beard
+gently and said a word or two under his breath now and again to Anthony;
+once or twice there came the swift rustle of a dress outside as a lady
+hurried past; then the sound of a door opening and shutting; then more
+silence; then the sound of low talking, and at last the sound of
+footsteps going slowly up and down the gallery which adjoined the
+ante-room.
+
+Still the minutes passed, but no summons came. Anthony rose and went to
+the window again, for, in spite of himself, this waiting told upon him.
+The dog had gone back to his kennel and was lying with his nose just
+outside the opening. Anthony wondered vacantly to himself what door it
+was that he was guarding, and who lived in the rooms that looked out
+beside it. Then suddenly the door from the gallery opened and a page
+appeared.
+
+"The Queen's Grace will see Mr. Norris alone."
+
+Anthony went towards him, and the page opened the door wide for him to go
+through, and then closed it noiselessly behind him, and Anthony was in
+the presence.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+It was with a sudden bewilderment that he recognised he was in the same
+gallery as that in which he had talked and sat with Mary Corbet. There
+were the long tapestries hanging opposite him, with the tall three
+windows dividing them, and the suits of steel armour that he remembered.
+He even recalled the pattern of the carpet across which Mary Corbet had
+come forward to meet him, and that still lay before the tall window at
+the end that looked on to the Tilt-yard. The sun was passing round to the
+west now, and shone again across the golden haze of the yard through this
+great window, with the fragments of stained glass at the top. The memory
+leapt into life even as he stepped out and stood for a moment, dazed in
+the sunshine, at the door that opened from the ante-room.
+
+But the figure that turned from the window and faced him was not like
+Mary's. It was the figure of an old woman, who looked tall with her
+towering head-dress and nodding plume; she was dressed in a great dark
+red mantle thrown back on her shoulders, and beneath it was a pale yellow
+dress sown all over with queer devices; on the puffed sleeve of the arm
+that held the stick was embroidered a great curling snake that shone with
+gold thread and jewels in the sunlight, and powdered over the skirt were
+representations of human eyes and other devices, embroidered with dark
+thread that showed up plainly on the pale ground. So much he saw down one
+side of the figure on which the light shone; the rest was to his dazzled
+eyes in dark shadow. He went down on his knees at once before this
+tremendous figure, seeing the buckled feet that twinkled below the skirt
+cut short in front, and remained there.
+
+There was complete silence for a moment, while he felt the Queen looking
+at him, and then the voice he remembered, only older and harsher, now
+said:
+
+"What is all this, Mr. Norris?"
+
+Anthony looked for a moment and saw the Queen's eyes fixed on him; but he
+said nothing, and looked down again.
+
+"Stand up," said the Queen, not unkindly, "and walk with me."
+
+Anthony stood up at once, and heard the stiff rustle of her dress and the
+tap of her heels and stick on the polished boards as she came towards
+him. Then he turned with her down the long gallery.
+
+Until this moment, ever since he had heard that he was to see the Queen,
+he had felt nervous and miserable; but now this had left him, and he felt
+at his ease. To be received in this way, in privacy, and to accompany her
+up and down the gallery as she took her afternoon exercise was less
+embarrassing than the formal interview he had expected. The two walked
+the whole length of the gallery without a word, and it was not until they
+turned and faced the end that looked on to the Tilt-yard that the Queen
+spoke; and her voice was almost tender.
+
+"I understand that you were with Minnie Corbet when she died," she said.
+
+"She died for me, your Grace," said Anthony.
+
+The Queen looked at him sharply.
+
+"Tell me the tale," she said.
+
+And Anthony told her the whole story of the escape and the ride; speaking
+too for his friend, Mr. Buxton, and of Mary's affection for him.
+
+"Your Grace," he ended, "it sounds a poor tale of a man that a woman
+should die for him so; but I can say with truth that with God's grace I
+would have died a hundred deaths to save her."
+
+The Queen was silent for a good while when the story was over, and
+Anthony thought that perhaps she could not speak; but he dared not look
+at her.
+
+Then she spoke very harshly:
+
+"And you, Mr. Norris, why did you not escape?"
+
+"Your Grace would not have done so."
+
+"When I saw that she was dying, I would."
+
+"Not if you had been a priest, your Grace."
+
+"What is that?" asked the Queen, suddenly facing him.
+
+"I am a priest, madam, and she was a Catholic, and my duty was beside
+her."
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"I shrived her, your Grace, before she died."
+
+"Why! they did not tell me that."
+
+Anthony was silent.
+
+They walked on a few steps, and the Queen stood silent too, looking down
+upon the Tilt-yard. Then she turned abruptly, and Anthony turned with
+her, and they began to go up and down again.
+
+"It was gallant of you both," she said shortly. "I love that my people
+should be of that sort." Then she paused. "Tell me," she went on, "did
+Mary love me?"
+
+Anthony was silent for a moment.
+
+"The truth, Mr. Norris," she said.
+
+"Mistress Corbet was loyalty itself," he answered.
+
+"Nay, nay, nay, not loyalty but love I asked you of. How did she speak of
+me?"
+
+"Well, your Grace, Mistress Corbet had a shrewd wit, and she used it
+freely on friend and foe, but her very sharpness on your Grace,
+sometimes, showed her love; for she hated to think you otherwise than
+what she deemed the best."
+
+The Queen stopped full in her walk.
+
+"That is very pleasantly put," she said; "I told Minnie you were a
+courtier."
+
+Again the two walked on.
+
+"Then she used her tongue on me?"
+
+"Your Grace, I have never met one on whom she did not: but her heart was
+true."
+
+"I know that, I know that, Mr. Norris. Tell me something she said."
+
+Anthony racked his brains for something not too severe.
+
+"Mistress Corbet once said that the Queen's most disobedient subject was
+herself."
+
+"Eh?" said Elizabeth, stopping in her walk.
+
+"'Because,' said Mistress Corbet, 'she can never command herself,'"
+finished Anthony.
+
+The Queen looked at Anthony, puzzled a moment; and then chuckled loudly
+in her throat.
+
+"The impertinent minx!" she said, "that was when I had clouted her, no
+doubt."
+
+Again they walked up and down in silence a little while. Anthony began to
+wonder whether this was all for which the Queen had sent for him. He was
+astonished at his own self-possession; all the trembling awe with which
+he had faced the Queen at Greenwich was gone; he had forgotten for the
+moment even his own peril; and he felt instead even something of pity for
+this passionate old woman, who had aged so quickly, whose favourites one
+by one were dropping off, or at the best giving her only an exaggerated
+and ridiculous devotion, at the absurdity of which all the world laughed.
+Here was this old creature at his side, surrounded by flatterers and
+adventurers, advancing through the world in splendid and jewelled
+raiment, with trumpets blowing before her, and poets singing her praises,
+and crowds applauding in the streets, and sneering in their own houses at
+the withered old virgin-Queen who still thought herself a Diana--and all
+the while this triumphal progress was at the expense of God's Church, her
+car rolled over the bodies of His servants, and her shrunken, gemmed
+fingers were red in their blood;--so she advanced, thought Anthony, day
+by day towards the black truth and the eternal loneliness of the darkness
+that lies outside the realm where Christ only is King.
+
+Elizabeth broke in suddenly on his thoughts.
+
+"Now," she said, "and what of you, Mr. Norris?"
+
+"I am your Grace's servant," he said.
+
+"I am not so sure of that," said Elizabeth. "If you are my servant, why
+are you a priest, contrary to my laws?"
+
+"Because I am Christ's servant too, your Grace."
+
+"But Christ's apostle said, 'Obey them that have the rule over you.'"
+
+"In indifferent matters, madam."
+
+The Queen frowned and made a little angry sound.
+
+"I cannot understand you Papists," said the Queen. "What a-God's name do
+you want? You have liberty of thought and faith; I desire to inquire into
+no man's private opinions. You may worship Ashtaroth if it please you, in
+your own hearts; and God looks to the heart, and not to the outer man.
+There is a Church with bishops like your own, and ministers; there are
+the old churches to worship in--nay, you may find the old ornaments still
+in use. We have sacraments as you have; you may seek shrift if you will;
+nay, in some manner we have the mass--though we do not call it so--but we
+follow Christ's ordinance in the matter, and you can do no more. We have
+the Word of God as you have, and we use the same creeds. What more can
+the rankest Papist ask? Tell me that, Mr. Norris; for I am a-weary of
+your folk."
+
+The Queen turned and faced him again a moment, and her eyes were peevish
+and resentful.
+
+Presently she went on again.
+
+"Mr. Campion told me it was the oath that troubled him. He could not take
+it, he said. I told the fool that I was not Head of the Church as Christ
+was, but only the supreme governor, as the Act declares, in all spiritual
+and ecclesiastical things:--I forget how it runs,--but I showed it him,
+and asked him whether it were not true; and I asked him too how it was
+that Margaret Roper could take the oath, and so many thousands of persons
+as full Christian as himself--and he could not answer me."
+
+The Queen was silent again. Then once more she went on indignantly:
+
+"It is yourselves that have brought all this trouble on your heads. See
+what the Papists have done against me; they have excommunicated me,
+deposed me--though in spite of it I still sit on the throne; they have
+sent an Armada against me; they have plotted against me, I know not how
+many times; and then, when I defend myself and hang a few of the wolves,
+lo! they are Christ's flock at once for whom he shed His precious blood,
+and His persecuted lambs, and I am Jezebel straightway and Athaliah and
+Beelzebub's wife--and I know not what."
+
+The Queen stopped, out of breath, and looked fiercely at Anthony, who
+said nothing.
+
+"Tell me how you answer that, Mr. Norris?" said the Queen.
+
+"I dare not deal with such great matters," said Anthony, "for your Grace
+knows well that I am but a poor priest that knows nought of state-craft;
+but I would like to ask your Highness two questions only. The first is:
+whether your Grace had aught to complain of in the conduct of your
+Catholic subjects when the Armada was here; and the second, whether there
+hath been one actual attempt upon your Grace's life by private persons?"
+
+"That is not to the purpose," said the Queen peevishly.
+
+"It was Catholics who fought against me in the Armada, and it was
+Catholics who plotted against me at Court."
+
+"Then there is a difference in Catholics, your Grace," said Anthony.
+
+"Ah! I see what you would be at."
+
+"Yes, your Highness; I would rather say, Although they be Catholics they
+do these things."
+
+There was silence again, which Anthony did not dare to break; and the two
+walked up the whole length of the gallery without speaking.
+
+"Well, well," said Elizabeth at last, "but this was not why I sent for
+you. We will speak of yourself now, Mr. Norris. I hope you are not an
+obstinate fellow. Eh?"
+
+Anthony said nothing, and the Queen went on.
+
+"Now, as I have told you, I judge no man's private opinions. You may
+believe what you will. Remember that. You may believe what you will; nay,
+you may practise your religion so long as it is private and unknown to
+me."
+
+Anthony began to wonder what was coming; but he still said nothing as the
+Queen paused. She stood a moment looking down into the empty Tilt-yard
+again, and then turned and sat suddenly in a chair that stood beside the
+window, and put up a jewelled hand to shield her face, with her elbow on
+the arm, while Anthony stood before her.
+
+"I remember you, Mr. Norris, very well at Greenwich; you spoke up sharply
+enough, and you looked me in the eyes now and then as I like a man to do;
+and then Minnie loved you, too. I wish to show you kindness for her
+sake."
+
+Anthony's heart began to fail him, for he guessed now what was coming and
+the bitter struggle that lay before him.
+
+"Now, I know well that the Commissioners have had you before them; they
+are tiresome busybodies. Walsingham started all that and set them
+a-spying and a-defending of my person and the rest of it; but they are
+loyal folk, and I suppose they asked you where you had been and with whom
+you had stayed, and so on?"
+
+"They did, your Grace."
+
+"And you would not tell them, I suppose?"
+
+"I could not, madam; it would have been against justice and charity to do
+so."
+
+"Well, well, there is no need now, for I mean to take you out of their
+hands."
+
+A great leap of hope made itself felt in Anthony's heart; he did not know
+how heavy the apprehension lay on him till this light shone through.
+
+"They will be wrath with me, I know, and will tell me that they cannot
+defend me if I will not help them; but, when all is said, I am Queen. Now
+I do not ask you to be a minister of my Church, for that, I think, you
+would never be; but I think you would like to be near me--is it not so?
+And I wish you to have some post about the Court; I must see what it is
+to be."
+
+Anthony's heart began to sink again as he watched the Queen's face as she
+sat tapping a foot softly and looking on the floor as she talked. Those
+lines of self-will about the eyes and mouth surely meant something.
+
+Then she looked up, still with her cheek on her right hand.
+
+"You do not thank me, Mr. Norris."
+
+Anthony made a great effort; but he heard his own voice quiver a little.
+
+"I thank your Grace for your kindly intentions toward me, with all my
+heart."
+
+The Queen seemed satisfied, and looked down again.
+
+"As to the oath, I will not ask you to take it formally, if you will give
+me an assurance of your loyalty."
+
+"That, your Grace, I give most gladly."
+
+His heart was beating again in great irregular thumps in his throat; he
+had the sensation of swaying to and fro on the edge of a precipice, now
+towards safety and now towards death; it was the cruellest pain he had
+suffered yet. But how was it possible to have some post at Court without
+relinquishing the exercise of his priesthood? He must think it out; what
+did the Queen mean?
+
+"And, of course, you will not be able to say mass again; but I shall not
+hinder your hearing it at the Ambassador's whenever you please."
+
+Ah! it had come; his heart gave a leap and seemed to cease.
+
+"Your Grace must forgive me, but I cannot consent."
+
+There was a dead silence; when Anthony looked up, she was staring at him
+with the frankest astonishment.
+
+"Did you think, Mr. Norris, you could be at Court and say mass too
+whenever you wished?" Her voice rang harsh and shrill; her anger was
+rising.
+
+"I was not sure what your Grace intended for me."
+
+"The fellow is mad," she said, still staring at him. "Oh! take care, take
+care!"
+
+"Your Grace knows I intend no insolence."
+
+"You mean to say, Mr. Norris, that you will not take a pardon and a post
+at Court on those terms?"
+
+Anthony bowed; he could not trust himself to speak, so bitter was the
+reaction.
+
+"But, see man, you fool; if you die as a traitor you will never say mass
+again either."
+
+"But that will not be with my consent, your Grace."
+
+"And you refuse the pardon?"
+
+"On those terms, your Grace, I must."
+
+"Well----" and she was silent a moment, "you are a fool, sir."
+
+Anthony bowed again.
+
+"But I like courage.--Well, then, you will not be my servant?"
+
+"I have ever been that, your Grace; and ever will be."
+
+"Well, well,--but not at Court?"
+
+"Ah! your Grace knows I cannot," cried Anthony, and his voice rang
+sorrowfully.
+
+Again there was silence.
+
+"You must have your way, sir, for poor Minnie's sake; but it passes my
+understanding what you mean by it. And let me tell you that not many have
+their way with me, rather than mine."
+
+Again hope leapt up in his heart. The Queen then was not so ungracious.
+
+He looked up and smiled--and down again.
+
+"Why, the man's lips are all a-quiver. What ails him?"
+
+"It is your Grace's kindness."
+
+"I must say I marvel at it myself," observed Elizabeth. "You near angered
+me just now; take care you do not so quite."
+
+"I would not willingly, as your Grace knows."
+
+"Then we will end this matter. You give me your assurance of loyalty to
+my person."
+
+"With all my heart, madam," said Anthony eagerly.
+
+"Then you must get to France within the week. The other too--Buxton--he
+loses his estate, but has his life. I am doing much for Minnie's sake."
+
+"How can I thank your Grace?"
+
+"And I will cause Sir Richard to give it out that you have taken the
+oath. Call him in."
+
+There was a quick gasp from the priest; and then he cried with agony in
+his voice:
+
+"I cannot, your Grace, I cannot."
+
+"Cannot call Sir Richard! Why, you are mad, sir!"
+
+"Cannot consent; I have taken no oath."
+
+"I know you have not. I do not ask it."
+
+Elizabeth's voice came short and harsh; her patience was vanishing, and
+Anthony knew it and looked at her. She had dropped her hand, and it was
+clenching and unclenching on her knee. Her stick slipped on the polished
+boards and fell; but she paid it no attention. She was looking straight
+at the priest; her high eyebrows were coming down; her mouth was
+beginning to mumble a little; he could see in the clear sunlight that
+fell on her sideways through the tall window a thousand little wrinkles,
+and all seemed alive; the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth
+deepened as he watched.
+
+"What a-Christ's name do you want, sir?"
+
+It was like the first mutter of a storm on the horizon; but Anthony knew
+it must break. He did not answer.
+
+"Tell me, sir; what is it now?"
+
+Anthony drew a long breath and braced his will, but even as he spoke he
+knew he was pronouncing his own sentence.
+
+"I cannot consent to leave the country and let it be given out that I had
+taken the oath, your Grace. It would be an apostasy from my faith."
+
+Elizabeth sprang to her feet without her stick, took one step forward,
+and gave Anthony a fierce blow on the cheek with her ringed hand. He
+recoiled a step at the shock of it, and stood waiting with his eyes on
+the ground. Then the Queen's anger poured out in words. Her eyes burned
+with passion out of an ivory-coloured face, and her voice rang high and
+harsh, and her hands continually clenched and unclenched as she screamed
+at him.
+
+"God's Body! you are the ungratefullest hound that ever drew breath. I
+send for you to my presence, and talk and walk with you like a friend. I
+offer you a pardon and you fling it in my face. I offer you a post at
+Court and you mock it; you flaunt you in your treasonable livery in my
+very face, and laugh at my clemency. You think I am no Queen, but a weak
+woman whom you can turn and rule at your will. God's Son! I will show you
+which is sovereign. Call Sir Richard in, sir; I will have him in this
+instant. Sir Richard, Sir Richard!" she screamed, stamping with fury.
+
+The door into the ante-room behind opened, and Sir Richard Barkley
+appeared, with a face full of apprehension. He knelt at once.
+
+"Stand up, Sir Richard," she cried, "and look at this man. You know him,
+do you not? and I know him now, the insolent dog! But his own mother
+shall not in a week. Look at him shaking there, the knave; he will shake
+more before I have done with him. Take him back with you, Sir Richard,
+and let them have their will of him. His damned pride and insolence shall
+be broken. S' Body, I have never been so treated! Take him out, Sir
+Richard, take him out, I tell you!"
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XV
+
+                       THE ROLLING OF THE STONE
+
+
+It was a week later, and a little before dawn, that Isabel was kneeling
+by Anthony's bed in his room in the Tower. The Lieutenant had sent for
+her to his lodging the evening before, and she had spent the whole night
+with her brother. He had been racked four times in one week, and was
+dying.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+The city and the prison were very quiet now; the carts had not yet begun
+to roll over the cobble-stones and the last night-wanderers had gone
+home. He lay, on the mattress that she had sent in to him, in the corner
+of his cell under the window, on his back and very still, covered from
+chin to feet with her own fur-lined cloak that she had thrown over him;
+his head was on a low pillow, for he could not bear to lie high; his feet
+made a little mound under the coverlet, and his arms lay straight at his
+side; but all that could be seen of him was his face, pinched and white
+now with hollows in his cheeks and dark patches and lines beneath his
+closed eyes, and his soft pointed brown beard that just rested on the fur
+edging of Isabel's cloak; his lips were drawn tight, but slightly parted,
+showing the rim of his white teeth, as if he snarled with pain.
+
+The only furniture in the room was a single table and chair; the table
+was drawn up not far from the bed, and a book or two, with a flask of
+cordial and some fragments of food on a plate lay upon it; his cloak and
+doublet and ruff lay across the chair and his shoes below it, and a
+little linen lay in a pile in another corner; but the clothes in which he
+had been tortured the evening before, his shirt and hose, could not be
+taken off him and he lay in them still. They had been so soaked with
+sweat, that Isabel had found him shivering, and laid her cloak over him,
+and now he lay quiet and warm.
+
+Earlier in the night she had been reading to him, and a taper still
+burned in a candlestick on the table; but for the last two hours he had
+lain either in a sleep or a swoon, and she had laid the book down and was
+watching him.
+
+He was so motionless that he would have seemed dead except for the steady
+rise and fall of a fold in the mantle, and for a sudden muscular twitch
+every few minutes. Isabel herself was scarcely less motionless; her face
+was clear and pale as it always was, but perfectly serene, and even her
+lips did not quiver. She was kneeling and leaning back now, and her hands
+were clasped in her lap. There was a proud content in her face; her dear
+brother had not uttered one name on the rack except those of the Saviour
+and of the Blessed Mother. So the Lieutenant had told her.
+
+Suddenly his eyes opened and there was nothing but peace in them; and his
+lips moved. Isabel leaned forward on her hands and bent her ear to his
+mouth till his breath was warm on it, and she could hear the whisper....
+
+Then she opened the book that lay face down on the table and began to
+read on, from the point at which she had laid it down two hours before.
+
+"'_Erat autem hora tertia: et crucifixerunt eum._ And it was the third
+hour and they crucified him ... And with him they crucify two thieves,
+the one on his right hand, and the other on his left. And the scripture
+was fulfilled which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors.'"
+
+Her voice was slow and steady as she read the unfamiliar Latin, still
+kneeling, with the book a little raised to catch the candlelight, and her
+grave tranquil eyes bent upon it. Only once did her voice falter, and
+then she commanded it again immediately; and that, as she read "_Erant
+autem et mulieres de longe aspicientes_." "There were also women looking
+on afar off."
+
+And so the tale crept on, minute by minute, and the priest lay with
+closed eyes to hear it; until the mocking was complete, and the darkness
+of the sixth hour had come and gone, and the Saviour had cried aloud on
+His Father, and given up the ghost; and the centurion that stood by had
+borne witness. And the great Criminal slept in the garden, in the
+sepulchre "wherein was never man yet laid."
+
+There was a listening silence as the voice ceased without another falter.
+Isabel laid the book down and looked at him again; and his eyes opened
+languidly.
+
+He had not yet said more than single words, and even now his voice was so
+faint that she had to put her ear close to his mouth. It seemed to her
+that his soul had gone into some inner secret chamber of profound peace,
+so deep that it was a long and difficult task to send a thought to the
+surface through his lips.
+
+She could just hear him, and she answered clearly and slowly as to a
+dazed child, pausing between every word.
+
+"I cannot get a priest; it is not allowed."
+
+Still his eyes bent on her; what was it he said? what was it?...
+
+Then she heard, and began to repeat short acts of contrition clearly and
+distinctly, pausing between the phrases, in English, and his eyes closed
+as she began:
+
+"O my Jesus--I am heartily sorry--that I have--crucified thee--by my
+sins--Wash my soul--in Thy Precious Blood. O my God--I am sorry--that I
+have--displeased Thee--because thou art All-good. I hate all the
+sins--that I have done--against Thy Divine Majesty."
+
+And so phrase after phrase she went on, giving him time to hear and to
+make an inner assent of the will; and repeating also other short vocal
+prayers that she knew by heart. And so the delicate skein of prayer rose
+from the altar where this morning sacrifice lay before God, waiting the
+consummation of His acceptance.
+
+Presently she ended, and he lay again with closed eyes and mute face.
+Then again they opened, and she bent down to listen....
+
+"It will all be well with me," she answered, raising her head again.
+"Mistress Margaret has written from Brussels. I shall go there for a
+while.... Yes, Mr. Buxton will take me; next week: he goes to Normandy,
+to his estate."
+
+Again his lips moved and she listened....
+
+A faint flush came over her face. She shook her head.
+
+"I do not know; I think not. I hope to enter Religion.... No, I have not
+yet determined.... The Dower House?... Yes, I will sell it.... Yes, to
+Hubert, if he wishes it."
+
+Every word he whispered was such an effort that she had to pause again
+and again before he could make her understand; and often she judged more
+by the movement of his lips than by any sound that came from him. Now and
+then too she lifted her handkerchief, soaked in a strong violet scent,
+and passed it over his forehead and lips. She motioned with the flask of
+cordial once or twice, but his eyes closed for a negative.
+
+As she knelt and watched him, her thoughts circled continually in little
+flights; to the walled garden of the Dower House in sunshine, and Anthony
+running across it in his brown suit, with the wallflowers behind him
+against the old red bricks and ivy, and the tall chestnut rising behind;
+to the wind-swept hills, with the thistles and the golden-rod, and the
+hazel thickets, and Anthony on his pony, sunburnt and voluble, hawk on
+wrist, with a light in his eyes; to the warm panelled hall in winter,
+with the tapers on the round table, and Anthony flat on his face, with
+his feet in the air before the hearth, that glowed and roared up the wide
+chimney behind, and his chin on his hands, and a book open before him;
+or, farther back even still, to Anthony's little room at the top of the
+house, his clothes on a chair, and the boy himself sitting up in bed with
+his arms round his knees as she came in to wish him good-night and talk
+to him a minute or two. And every time the circling thought came home and
+settled again on the sight of that still straight figure lying on the
+mattress, against the discoloured bricks, with the light of the taper
+glimmering on his thin face and brown hair and beard; and every time her
+heart consented that this was the best of all.
+
+A bird chirped suddenly from some hole in the Tower, once, and then three
+or four times; she glanced up at the window and the light of dawn was
+beginning. Then, as the minutes went by, the city began to stir itself
+from sleep. There came a hollow whine from the Lion-gate fifty yards
+away; up from the river came the shout of a waterman; two or three times
+a late cock crew; and still the light crept on and broadened. But Anthony
+still lay with his eyes closed.
+
+At last over the cobbles outside a cart rattled, turned a corner and was
+silent. Anthony had opened his eyes now and was looking at her again; and
+again she bent down to listen; ... and then opened and read again.
+
+"'_Et cum transisset sabbatum Maria Magdalene et Maria Jacobi et Salome
+emerunt aromata, ut venientes ungerent Jesum._'
+
+"'And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of
+James and Salome, had bought sweet spices that they might come and anoint
+him.'"
+
+A slight sound made her look up. Anthony's eyes were kindling and his
+lips moved; she bent again and listened.... What was it he said?...
+
+Yes, it was so, and she smiled and nodded at him: she was reading the
+Gospel for Easter Day, the Gospel of the first mass that they had heard
+together on that spring morning at Great Keynes, when their Lord had led
+them so far round by separate paths to meet one another at His altar. And
+now they were met again here. She read on:
+
+"'_Et valde mane una sabbatorum, veniunt ad monumentum, orto jam
+sole._'
+
+"'Very early they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun; and
+they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the
+door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was
+rolled away, for it was very great.'...
+
+"'... _magnus valde_,'" read Isabel; and looked up again;--and then
+closed the book. There was no need to read more.
+
+                   *          *          *          *
+
+She walked across the court half an hour later, just as the sun came up;
+and passed out through the Lieutenant's lodging, and out by the narrow
+bridge on to the Tower wharf.
+
+To the left and behind her, as she looked eastwards down the river, lay
+the heavy masses of the prison she had left, and the high walls and
+turrets were gilded with glory. The broad river itself was one rolling
+glory too; the tide was coming in swift and strong and a barge or two
+moved upwards, only half seen in the bewildering path of the sun. The air
+was cool and keen, and a breeze from the water stirred Isabel's hair as
+she stood looking, with the light on her face. It was a cloudless October
+morning overhead. Even as she stood a flock of pigeons streamed across
+from the south side, swift-flying and bathed in light; and her eyes
+followed them a moment or two.
+
+As she stood there silent, a step came up the wharf from the direction of
+St. Katharine's street, and a man came walking quickly towards her. He
+did not see who she was until he was close, and then he started and took
+off his hat; it was Lackington on his way to some business at the Tower;
+but she did not seem to see him. She turned almost immediately and began
+to walk westwards, and the glory in her eyes was supreme. And as she went
+the day deepened above her.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's By What Authority?, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
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