Towers in the Mist Page 10

  5.

  At dinner time it was discovered by their family that the twins had disappeared. They had been last heard of in the loft, from which apparently they had vanished into thin air. Canon Leigh, Joyeuce, Grace, Dorothy and Diggory, gathered together in the hall after a fruitless search in house and garden, faced each other in growing concern while the roast beef, left unregarded on the table, wrapped itself in a gray blanket of congealing fat, and Diccon, also unregarded, helped himself and Tinker to a whole meat pie each.

  “Must we starve,” demanded Great-Aunt from above, “because two naughty little poppets are momentarily mislaid?” And she thumped upon her windowsill with the handle of her knife. . . . And at the same moment there came a thumping on the old front door that sent the whole household as one man to lift the latch.

  Outside upon the doorstep stood the twins and Faithful, in a great state of dirt and dishevelment; aprons awry, faces smeared, Bloody and Bess by no means as queenly as they had been; but beaming with the joy and pride of successful accomplishment.

  A perfect tornado of reunion now broke out; the twins were hugged and kissed, Faithful, hanging back in shamefaced uncertainty, was pulled over the threshold by Canon Leigh as though he were the returned prodigal son and had the door slammed behind him by Grace as though she meant him to stay forever, the dogs barked, Diccon shouted, everyone talked at once and Great Tom boomed forth eleven o’clock from the Cathedral tower.

  “And now,” ejaculated Great-Aunt icily into a sudden moment of silence, “may I request that I be served with my dinner?”

  Chapter 4: Ages Past

  As if, when after Phoebus is descended,

  And leaves a light much like the past day’s dawning,

  And, every toil and labour wholly ended,

  Each living creature draweth to his resting,

  We should begin by such a parting light

  To write the story of all ages past.

  And end the same before th’approaching night.

  WALTER RALEIGH.

  1.

  ALL day under the hot sun the citizens had celebrated May-Day with enthusiasm, clamor and heat, yet when evening came down through the woods of Shotover, passed under the East Gate and stole into the city, a hush fell; they were all tired; they trailed thankfully back to their houses, kindled log fires against the coming of night, loosened their doublets and waistbands and put their feet up on the hob.

  Under the Fair Gate of Christ Church Heather­thwayte the porter also loosened his doublet, stretched his legs and yawned, while at his feet his dog Satan, a black and woolly person with plumed heraldic legs, lay down to snatch a little slumber. They had had an exhausting day. Keeping the scholars in and the merrymakers out had taxed their powers to the uttermost and they felt themselves entitled to a little slumber.

  Heather­thwayte, his hands folded on his stomach, snored. His snore was one of the well-known noises of Christ Church, and only a little less impressive than his laugh, a loud, deep roar that reverberated under the Fair Gate like thunder. When Heather­thwayte was amused the whole College knew it. He had a figure like Falstaff’s through which his laugh rumbled and rolled for a long time before it emerged through his gigantic mouth. His large, bushy red beard, when laughed into, seemed to act like a megaphone and increased the noise tenfold.

  It was not often that Heather­thwayte slept, for he and Satan found their life an interesting one. Life flowed round them in full tide, all the many streams in their splendid variety running together into one rich flood of community life. Heather­thwayte, though one of the streams himself, was yet always conscious of a certain detachment. He watched and he listened. He scanned the faces that went in and out and heard the talk that flowed past him; they were his books and his lectures and he learned them well. These scholars might study their Latin and Greek, their Law, their Medicine and their Astronomy, but Heather­thwayte in his study of human nature thought he had the advantage of them. For amusement, for edification and for an Awful Warning, said Heather­thwayte, and Satan entirely agreed with him, give them Men as a branch of learning any day.

  Satan did not spend quite so much time in study as Heather­thwayte did for he had a good deal of work to do. He was a very important member of the community whose duty it was to keep the quadrangle clear of sheep and cattle and hogs; no easy task in high summer when these poor animals, driven into the city from the country for slaughter, and feeling hot and thirsty and afraid, saw through the Fair Gate the grass of the quadrangle waving high and tall and set with moon-daisies and golden lady’s-slippers.

  Then he had to keep his eye upon human beings as well as animals. He knew quite well who had the right to canter his horse across the quadrangle and tie it to the iron ring in the east wall, and those who had not the right and yet presumed through ignorance or criminal cheek found themselves attacked under the Fair Gate by a satanic animal of great power and size, and the din of clattering hoofs and wild barking that echoed through the precincts was shattering if you were not used to it. Satan knew, too, that the laundresses might fetch the scholars’ dirty linen between eight and ten on Monday morning and return it between two and four on Saturday afternoon, but they might not come at any time and they might not venture inside the Fair Gate. The College servitors brought the linen to the Gate and received it again, and Satan kept a careful eye upon proceedings. The apple-women, too, might come no further than the Fair Gate, and Satan bit their ankles if they tried to. . . . So what with one thing and another he got quite tired sometimes, and was glad when the western sky was a sheet of gold behind Saint Aldate’s and in the quadrangle the shadows spread deep pools of quietness.

  “Heather­thwayte! Heatherthwayte!”

  The porter and his dog both opened a reluctant eye, then sat up in brisk attention. Joyeuce, her afternoon farthingale of peacock blue held well up on each side so that she looked like a winged creature, and her slender feet in their little red shoes poised tiptoe on the cobbles as though she had alighted on them for a moment only, was standing breathlessly before them. A little bunch of violets stuck in the bodice of her dress, that lay so flat over her still childish figure, rose and fell agitatedly and she was so pale that her face looked like ivory against the black velvet coif that curved about it. Heather­thwayte and Satan, expecting to hear some pitiful tale of death and disaster in the Leigh household, rose instantly to their feet, ready to fly off upon the instant to fetch the Physician, the Undertaker, the Constable of the Watch, or even the Vice Chancellor himself should the tragedy that had occurred prove too great for alleviation by the lesser brethren. . . . Heather­thwayte and Satan loved the Leigh children very dearly and there was absolutely nothing they were not prepared to do for them.

  “There now, mistress! Tell Heather­thwayte!” implored that worthy, his tenderness reverberating upwards through his vocal cords and booming out through his great beard very comfortingly. Satan, producing a long pink loving tongue from behind the fierce barricade of his teeth, passed it consolingly over Joyeuce’s hand and suggested with a circular motion of his tail that nothing was ever as bad as it seemed. . . . A little color crept into Joyeuce’s face and she found her voice.

  “At seven o’clock,” she whispered, “if you see a—a—gentleman waiting about please will you tell him that I—I—must not come?” And at that, with a light patter of feet and a swish of silk, she took flight and vanished, leaving behind her a little breath of scent from the bunch of violets that had tumbled out of her dress as she ran.

  Heather­thwayte lowered himself back on to his seat, flung back his head and laughed, showing all his strong white teeth and a cavernous expanse of throat, his merry little eyes disappearing among the rolls of fat into which his face folded itself in moments of mirth. . . . So she was growing up, was she? . . . He remembered the winter night six years ago when the Leighs had first come to Christ Church. It had been wild and wet and he had hurried o
ut from under the Fair Gate with his lantern when he heard the clatter of their horses’ hoofs. The little Joyeuce had been riding pillion behind her father and he had himself lifted her down. She had been so cold and stiff that when he tried to set her on the ground her legs had doubled up beneath her and he had picked her up, he remembered, and carried her into the house, and she had thanked him very prettily. A thin, white faced, good little waif she had been even then, though not quite so good and white faced as she had become after her mother died.

  Heatherthwayte suddenly ceased laughing and shook his head gravely. . . . These good, motherless little maidens were no judge of men. . . . He, Heather­thwayte, who reverenced the memory of Mistress Leigh, must keep his weather eye open.

  He began at once, rolling it this way and that as scholars and towns-people strolled by in the quadrangle or the street, and by the time seven o’clock boomed out from the Cathedral, and Nicolas appeared in a leaf-green doublet and a nut-brown cloak, he was in quite a perspiration of worry and fuss. . . . But it was relieved by the sight of Nicolas, for Heather­thwayte, possessed of some occult power by which he knew the ancestry, character and goings on of every man in College simply by sitting still on a bench under the Fair Gate, was particularly fond of Nicolas. It was true the young gentleman was over quick with a word or a blow, and had a much higher opinion of himself than there was really any need for, but he had a sense of humor and his generosity was unbounded. Many an escapade of Nicholas’s had Heather­thwayte hushed up and many a round gold piece had found its way from Nicholas’s pocket to Heather­thwayte’s ready palm, their affection for each growing with every secret shared and coin added to Heather­thwayte’s bank balance under his flock mattress. . . . It was his intention to retire one day, a wealthy man waxed fat upon the evil deeds of Christ Church scholars.

  “Ah!” he ejaculated sepulchrally, when after five minutes Nicolas was still there, stamping up and down and snorting, and he rolled one eye and closed the other. Satan, his head on one side, thumped his tail on the ground and made curious noises in his throat.

  “He’s talking,” said Heather­thwayte.

  “Who’s talking?” snapped Nicolas.

  “Satan,” said Heather­thwayte. “He has a fellow feeling, as you might say. His own fancy, a water spaniel up High Street, is very fanciful in her ways at times.”

  Nicolas swore loudly, though swearing was forbidden by the College regulations, and stamped up and down with increasing warmth, for he was not accustomed to being kept waiting by ladies on whom he had cast a favorable eye. He frequently kept them waiting—it was good for them—but such were his attractions that the reverse was seldom the case.

  “I was to tell you,” said Heather­thwayte, “that Mistress Joyeuce Leigh is kept at home. . . . And those,” he added, pointing a horny finger at the little bunch of violets on the cobbles, “are all the company of hers that she can give you.”

  “She left them for me?” asked Nicolas.

  “She did,” said Heather­thwayte, casting up his eyes to heaven and wiping a tear from his eye. “Kissed them and laid them there where they lie now, right in the middle of the Fair Gate where I’ve had all the trouble in the world to prevent the whole College trampling on ’em. . . . . But if you show yourself unworthy of them violets,” continued Heather­thwayte with some heat, “it’s me you’ll have to reckon with, young man; me, Thomas Elias Heather­thwayte.”

  “Mind your own business,” snapped Nicolas; but he picked up the violets and stuck them in his doublet.

  “It’ll be her father that’s kept her,” consoled Heather­thwayte, quite melted by this display of sensibility. “But if you was to turn to the left and stroll down Fish Street, sir, you could see her through the parlor window.”

  “I am not asking you for your advice, Heather­thwayte,” said Nicolas with dignity, and with his head thrown back and his lips pursed in a whistle he sauntered out of the Fair Gate, turned to the right and strolled up towards the town. . . . However, in another ten minutes Heather­thwayte saw him strolling down again on the other side of the road. . . . Heather­thwayte chortled into his beard and pushed Satan slyly with his feet, Satan responding with a thud of his tail and a glint in his eye.

  2.

  Nicolas crossed the road diagonally and glanced with a great assumption of carelessness through the Leigh parlor window. The fire danced gaily and a little mouse sat washing itself in the middle of the floor; but there was no one else there. Infuriated, Nicolas strolled on under South Gate and down the street towards the river and Folly Bridge. He felt sore and angry and tantalized. . . . Under the Fair Gate nothing but a bunch of violets and in the parlor nothing but a mouse. . . . Man cannot live by bread alone and neither do flowers and a mouse give any permanent satisfaction. He was aware of wanting something that was not being given to him and he was not used to not having what he wanted. He felt hot inside and his throat tickled. He kicked savagely at the refuse in the street and splashed noisily through the puddles; until it struck him that he was behaving like a six-year-old and he was obliged to laugh at himself, his eyes narrowed as he looked up at the quietness of the evening sky.

  The wind had dropped but the clouds were still moving slowly, drifted by the memory of it; their creamy whiteness a little flushed, as though the memory was a good one. The trees in the Christ Church meadows, nearer to the peace of the earth and more easily stilled, were motionless, spreading their green shelter over the early fritillaries. From where he stood, leaning over Folly Bridge, Nicolas could not see the fritillaries, but he knew where they grew, in faint drifts of color between the brazen kingcups, the curve of their bell heads the most delicate thing on earth. In the far distance were the lovely shapes of low hills, blue and intensely quiet, resting against the sky. Under his feet the water slipped, running very quietly because it had been a dry spring, passing from Godstow to Iffley, and on through the meadows to the towers and spires of the city of London. There were not many buildings beyond South Gate, only Saint Michael’s at the South Gate and a few houses round it, and there was little to interrupt the view of Christ Church that showed the tower of the Cathedral rising superbly above the splendid stretch of the hall roof. . . . A bell was ringing in the town and in the trees by the river the blackbirds called, yet the bell and the bird song seemed more the voice of silence than of actual music. . . . A strange sound, harsh yet with a quality in its beating, rhythmical strength that made one’s heart leap up in delight, made him look up. Six swans were flying one behind the other, necks stretched out and great wings rising and falling, white against the blue of the sky. They flew right over the roofs of the city, calm, determined and unhurried, and when the sound of their passing had died away the silence seemed absolute.

  3.

  The processional passing had been like the passing of humanity itself, Nicolas thought, and he began to think dreamily of all the men and women who in their journey from birth to death had passed through this city.

  Nicolas, though he was generally too busy enjoying himself to pay much attention to it, had imagination, and on the rare occasions when he found himself with nothing better to do he would let it open its wings and carry him away. It was that rare brand of imaginative power that can leave self entirely out of the picture, so that Nicolas’s dream figures did not crowd about him playing a petty drama of which he was himself the hero, and completely obstructing the view, but passed distantly by in pomp and beauty like clouds across the sky. Standing well back from them he could see them without their surface imperfections; grand figures who had each his appointed place in the pageant of history.

  The road where Nicolas stood was the oldest road in Oxford and had been there before the city itself. It appeared out of the shadows of Bagley Forest, rolled across the meadows, humped itself to pass over the bridge and then disappeared under South Gate into the city; and down it came marching the figures that Nicolas dreamed of.

  I
n the vanguard came the handful of wild men who had first looked with favor upon this bit of earth, the hunters who had noticed a patch of dry ground between the rivers and marked it down as a place of security where a home could be made. The rivers were the city wall, a protection against possible enemies; within it rose a village of rough huts and thin spirals of blue smoke found their way through the mist of the willow trees and rose up into the air to tell the world that Oxford was born. . . . Not that there was anyone likely to pay much attention; only the wolves and the boars, the wild birds and the fishes, and the blue hills that stood around the valley where the rivers ran.

  The hunters thrived in their village. They took to themselves wives and their little children played among the willows, and picked armfuls of the water plants that grew everywhere like a thick carpet, and laughed to see the sunset and the sunrise reflected in the streams and pools that paved the valley. . . . Up in the blue hills the Roman legions passed and re-passed but if they saw the thin spirals of blue smoke they did not think them worthy of attention. . . . But if the legions neglected them the missionaries did not. Augustine the Roman had landed in England with the good news of Christianity and the knowledge of it came down the waterways to Oxford.

  The hunters were secure enough now to think of other things besides their daily food. They built a fine house for their king Didanus and on the spot where later the Cathedral stood they built a nunnery for his daughter Frideswide. This very road where Nicolas stood ran by it from the ford below to the rising ground above where four ways met, and round this nucleus of a nunnery, a street and a little hill, grew first churches and houses within a city wall, then a Norman castle, then a great Augustinian Abbey outside the city, then the royal palaces of Beaumont and Woodstock.