The King's Achievement, Robert Hugh Benson [beginner reading books for adults txt] 📗

one of them, and came down the steps to help them out of the boat.

"You have heard?" said Chris as he stepped out last.

"Yes, father," said the servant.

Chris looked at him; and his mask-like face too seemed strangely lighted up. There was still across his cheek the shadow of a mark as of an old whip-cut.

As they passed up the steps they became aware that the little crowd that had waited at the top was only the detached fringe of a multitude that had assembled further up the slope. It stretched under the trees as far as they could see to right and left, from the outer wall of the Tower on the one side, to where the rising ground on the left was hidden under the thick foliage in the foreground. There was a murmur of talking and laughter, the ringing of hand-bells, the cracking of whips and the cries of children. The backs of the crowd were turned to the steps: there was plainly something going on higher up the slope, and it seemed somewhat away to the left.

For a moment Chris did not understand, and he turned to Morris.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The scaffold," said the servant tersely.

At the same moment high above the murmur of the crowd came the sound of heavy resounding blows, as of wood on wood.

Then Chris remembered; and for one moment he sickened as he walked. His father turned and looked over his shoulder as he went with Beatrice in front, and his eyes were eloquent.

"I had forgotten," said Chris softly. "God help him!"

* * * * *


They turned in towards the right almost immediately to the low outer gate of the fortress; and those for the first time remembered that the order they carried was for four only.

Nicholas instantly offered to wait outside and let Morris go in. Morris flatly refused. There was a short consultation, and then Nicholas went up to the sentry on guard with the order in his hand.

The man looked at it, glanced at the party, and then turned and knocked with his halberd on the great door behind, and in a minute or two an officer came out in his buff and feathers. He took the order and ran his eyes over it.

Nicholas explained.

The officer looked at him a moment without answering.

"And the lady too?" he said.

"Why, yes," said Nicholas.

"The lady wishes--" then he broke off. "You will have to see the Lieutenant," he went on. "I can let you all through to his lodgings."

They passed in with a yeoman to conduct them under the low heavy vaulting and through to the open way beyond. On their right was the wall between them and the river, and on their left the enormous towers and battlements of the inner court.

Chris walked with Morris behind, remembering the last time he was here with the Prior all those years before. They had walked silently then, too, but for another reason.

They passed the low Traitor's Gate on their right; Chris glanced at the green lapping water beneath it as he went--Ralph had landed there--and turned up the steep slope to the left under the gateway of the inner court; and in a minute or two more were at the door of the Lieutenant's lodgings.

There seemed a strange suggestiveness in the silence and order of the wide ward that lay before them. The great White Tower dominated the whole place on the further side, huge and menacing, pierced by its narrow windows set at wide intervals; on the left, the row of towers used as prisons diminished in perspective down to where the wall turned at right angles and ran in behind the keep; and the great space enclosed by the whole was almost empty. There were soldiers on guard here and there at the doorways; a servant hurried across the wide sunlit ground, and once, as they waited, a doctor in his short gown came out of one door and disappeared into another.

And here they waited for an answer to their summons, silent and happy in their knowledge. The place held no terrors for them.

The soldier knocked again impatiently, and again stood aside.

Chris saw Nicholas sidle up to the man with something of the same awe on his face that had been there an hour ago.

"My Lord--Master Cromwell?" he heard him whisper, correcting himself.

The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

"There," he said.

There were three soldiers, Chris noticed, standing at the foot of one of the Towers a little distance off. It was there, then, that Thomas Cromwell, wool-carder, waited for death, hearing, perhaps, from his window the murmur of the crowd beyond the moat, and the blows of mallet on wood as his scaffold went up.

Then the door opened, and after a word or two the soldier motioned them in.

* * * * *


Again they had to wait.

The Lieutenant, they were told, had been called away. He was expected back presently.

They sat down, still in silence, in the little ground-floor parlour. It was a pleasant little room, with a wide hearth, and two windows looking on to the court.

But the suspense was not like that of the morning. Now they knew how it must end. There would be a few minutes more, long perhaps to Ralph, as he sat in his cell somewhere not far from them, knowing nothing of the pardon that was on its way; and then the door would open, where day by day for the last six weeks the gaoler had come and gone; and the faces he knew would be there, and it would be from their lips that he would hear the message.

The old man and the girl still sat together in the window-seat, silent now like the others. They had had their explanations in the boat, and each knew what was in the other's heart. Chris and Nicholas stood by the hearth, Mr. Morris by the door; and there was not the tremor of a doubt in any of them as to what the future held.

Chris looked tranquilly round the room, at the little square table in the centre, the four chairs drawn close to it, with their brocade panels stained and well-worn showing at the back, the dark ceiling, the piece of tapestry that hung over the side-table between the doors--it was a martial scene, faded and discoloured, with ghostly bare-legged knights on fat prancing horses all in inextricable conflict, a great battleaxe stood out against the dusky foliage of an autumn tree; and a stag with his fore feet in the air, ramped in the foreground, looking over his shoulder. It was a ludicrously bad piece of work, picked up no doubt by some former Lieutenant who knew more of military than artistic matters, and had hung there--how long? Chris wondered.

He found himself criticising it detail by detail, comparing it with his own designs in the antiphonary; he had that antiphonary still at home; he had carried it off from Lewes, when Ralph--Ralph!--had turned him out. He had put it up into a parcel on the afternoon of the spoilers' arrival. He would show it to Ralph again now--in a day or two at Overfield; they would laugh over it together; and he would take it with him abroad, and perhaps finish it there. God's work is not so easily hindered after all.

But all the while, the wandering stream of his thought was lighted and penetrated by the radiant joy of his heart. It was all true, not a dream!

He glanced again at the two in the window-seat.

His father was looking out of the lattice; but Beatrice raised her eyes to his, and smiled at him.

Sir James stood up.

"The Lieutenant is coming," he said.

A moment later there were steps in the flagged passage; and a murmur of voices. The soldier who had brought them to the lodgings was waiting there with the order of admission, and was no doubt explaining the circumstances.

Then the door opened suddenly; and a tall soldierly-looking man, grey-haired and clean-shaven, in an officer's dress, stood there, with the order in his hand, as the two in the window-seat rose to meet him.

"Master Torridon," he said abruptly.

Sir James stepped forward.

"Yes, sir."

"You have come to see Mr. Ralph Torridon whom we have here?"

"Yes, sir--my son."

Nicholas stepped forward, and the Lieutenant nodded at him.

"Yes, sir," said the officer to him, "I could not admit you before--" he stopped, as if embarrassed, and turned to Beatrice.

"And this lady too?"

"Yes, Master Lieutenant," said the old man.

"But--but--I do not understand--"

He looked at the radiant faces before him, and then dropped his eyes.

"I suppose--you have not heard then?"

Chris felt his heart leap, and then begin to throb furiously and insistently. What had happened? Why did the man look like that? Why did he not speak?

The Lieutenant came a step forward and put his hand on the table. He was looking strangely from face to face.

Outside the court was very still. The footstep that had passed on the flagstones a minute before had ceased; and there was no sound but the chirp of a bird under the eaves.

"You have not heard then?" said the Lieutenant again.

"Oh! for God's sake--" cried the old man suddenly.

"I have just come from your son," said the other steadily. "You are only just in time. He is at the point of death."


CHAPTER XIII


THE RELEASE

It was morning, and they still sat in Ralph's cell.

* * * * *


The attendant had brought in stools and a tall chair with a broken back, and these were grouped round the low wooden bed; the old man in the chair on one side, from where he could look down on his son's face, with Beatrice beside him, Chris and Nicholas on the other side. Mr. Morris was everywhere, sitting on a form by the door, in and out with food and medicine, at his old master's bedside, lifting his pillow, turning him in bed, holding his convulsive hands.

He had been ill six days, the Lieutenant told them. The doctor who had been called in from outside named the disease phrenitis. It was certain that he would not recover; and a message to that effect had been sent across on the morning before, with the usual reports to Greenwich.

They had supped as they sat--silently--on what the gaoler brought; and had slept by turns in the tall chair, wakening at a sound from the bed; at the movement of the light across the floor as Morris slipped to and fro noiselessly; at the chirp of the birds and the noises of the stirring City as