The House of Arden, E. Nesbit [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

danced the white cloud funnel came down and closed about them, so that they danced, as it were, in a wrapping of white cotton-wool too soft for them even to feel it. And there was a sweet scent in the air. They did not know in that cloudy, soft whiteness, what flower bore that scent, but they knew that it smelt of the spring, and of fields and hedges far away from the ugliness of towns. The cloud thinned as the scent thickened, and green lights showed through it.

The green lights grew, the cloud funnel lifted. And Edred and Elfrida, still dancing, found themselves but two in a ring of some thirty children, dancing on a carpet of green turf between walls of green branches. And every child wore a wreath of white May-blossoms on its head. And that was the magic scene that had come to them through the white cloud of the white Mouldiwarp’s magic.

“What is it? Why are we dancing?” Edred incautiously asked of the little girl whose hand⁠—and not Elfrida’s⁠—he found that his left hand was holding. The child laughed⁠—just laughed, she did not answer. It was Elfrida who had his right hand, and her own right hand was clasped in that of a boy dressed in green.

“Oh!” she said, with a note of glad recognition. “It’s you! I’m so glad! What is it? Why are we dancing?”

“It’s May-day,” said Cousin Richard, “and the King is coming to look on at the revels.”

“What king?” she asked.

“Who but King Harry?” he said. “King Harry and his new Queen, that but of late was the Lady Anna Boleyn.”

“I say, Dick,” said Edred across his sister, “I am jolly glad to see you again. We⁠—”

“Not now,” said Dick earnestly; “not a word now. It is not safe. And besides⁠—here comes the King!”

XIII May-Blossom and Pearls

The King came slowly on a great black horse, riding between the green trees. He himself wore white and green like the May-bushes, and so did the gracious lady who rode beside him on a white horse, whose long tail almost swept the ground and whose long mane fluttered in the breeze like a tattered banner.

The lady had a fine face⁠—proud and smiling⁠—and as her brave eyes met the King’s even the children could see that, for the time at least, she and the King were all the world to each other. They saw that in the brief moment when, in the whirl of the ringed dance, their eyes were turned the way by which the King came with his Queen.

“I wish I didn’t know so much history,” gasped Elfrida through the quick music. “It’s dreadful to know that her head⁠—” She broke off in obedience to an imperative twitch of Richard’s hand on hers.

“Don’t!” he said. “I have not to think. And I’ve heard that history’s all lies. Perhaps they’ll always be happy like they are now. The only way to enjoy the past is not to think of the future⁠—the past’s future, I mean⁠—and I’ve got something else to say to you presently,” he added rather sternly.

The ring broke up into an elaborate figure. The children found themselves fingering the coloured ribbons that hung from the Maypole that was the centre of their dance, twining, intertwining, handing on the streamers to other small, competent fingers. In and out, in and out⁠—a most complicated dance. It was pleasant to find that one’s feet knew it, though one’s brain could not have foreseen, any more than it could have remembered, how the figures went. There were two rings round the Maypole⁠—the inner ring, where Edred and Elfrida were, of noble children in very fine clothes, and the outer ring, of village children in clothes less fine but quite as pretty. Music from a band of musicians on a raised platform decked with May-boughs and swinging cowslip balls inspired the dancers. The King and Queen had reined up their horses and watched the play, well pleased.

And suddenly the dance ended and the children, formed into line, were saluting the royal onlookers.

“A fair dance and footed right featly,” said the King in a great, jolly voice. “Now get you wind, my merry men all, and give us a song for the honour of the May Queen and of my dear lady here.”

There was whispering and discussion. Then Richard Arden stepped out in front of the group of green-clad noble children.

“With a willing heart, my liege,” he said, “but first a song of the King’s good Majesty.”

And with that all the children began to sing⁠—

“The hunt is up, the hunt is up,
And it is well-nigh day,
And Harry our King is gone a-hunting
To bring his deer to bay.”

It is a rousing tune, and it was only afterwards that Edred and Elfrida were surprised to find that they knew it quite well.

But even while they were singing Elfrida was turning over in her mind the old question, Could anything they did have any effect on the past? It seemed impossible that it should not be so. If one could get a word alone with that happy, stately lady on the white horse, if one could warn her, could help somehow! The thought of the bare scaffold and the black block came to Elfrida so strongly that she almost thought she saw them darkling among the swayed, sun-dappled leaves of the greenwood.

Somebody was pulling at her green skirt. An old woman in a cap that fitted tightly and hid all her hair⁠—an old woman who was saying, “Go to her! go!” and pushing her forward. Someone else put a big bunch of wild flowers into her hand, and this person also pushed her forward. And forward she had to go, quite alone, the nosegay in her hand, across the open space of greensward under the eyes of several hundreds of people, all in their best clothes and all watching her.

She went on till she came to the spot where the King and Queen were,